Kids at our house

This past Monday and Tuesday we were able to help watch Karen & Michael's kids while they took a short but much-needed vacation by themselves.  If you check her blog you can see some of the things they did.  I'll just show a couple of pictures of the kids.  I did get a pretty good video of Emily emptying off our bookshelves too.

Andrew is wearing a pair of overalls that had belonged to Michael when he was little.

Emily had a pea on the end of her nose after eating dinner.  It looked funnier in person but unfortunately I couldn't invite you all over to see it.

Happy Birthday!!

Today is the twins' second birthday.  I wish I could post a cute picture of them both, but sadly it is not allowed.  I hope today and tomorrow are good celebrations for them.  We won't get up there until Tuesday.  Happy birthday, you little cuties!

Double Baby Shower

It has been almost a month since we threw this double baby shower in our branch.  It was the same weekend that all the "Barnard women" and one year olds met at Jeanette's house for a get-together.  I helped plan and put together what I could before I left the rest to my counselors.  I'm going to post a couple of pictures they took of the cupcakes and the fruit bouquet from the food table.  I found the cute cupcake papers at Wal-Mart in Rolla.  The fruit bouquet I found online; I readied the fruit and left directions with pictures and they put it together for me.  They did a very good job, didn't they?

RS Meeting

We had a Relief Society meeting last night and I forgot to take my camera along.  Grrrrr.....  Anyway, our subject was menu planning.  We asked the sisters to email me their favorite recipes for one breakfast, one lunch and one dinner.  Then I put them in the form of a recipe booklet which we distributed at the meeting.  Then we talked about menu planning, eating healthy and food shopping.  Each sister prepared one of her recipes and brought it along to share.  I think that was everyone's favorite part of the meeting.  Sorry I don't have a picture of our food table.  Here is a picture I took today of our recipe booklets.
I really love those little guys on the cover of the booklets.  I also loved coloring them with my colored pencils (the kind where the lead screws up rather than having to sharpen them.  They are great!)

Soup

I've been trying lately to make good use of the foods that I buy. Last week the grocery store had whole chickens for 99¢ per pound.  They were really big chickens too.  I bought a couple of 5 pound ones and froze one.  The other I put in the oven to roast while we were at church.  It really smelled good when we came in the door.  It was quick to make something to go with it too.  The next day I boiled the bones and made a nice savory broth, added lots of veggies, some of the extra meat and some noodles.  We had soup for a couple of meals.  Since there was still some chicken left and the drippings from roasting it, I made a casserole with chicken, gravy & dressing.  Thank Heaven for Stove Top!  We had the elders over for dinner and they liked it.  So my $5 chicken made four meals for us -- not bad.

Here were some of the yummy vegetables I used in my soup.

Have you ever tried this?  It's really good but kind of expensive.  I got mine at Carolyn's for only $1 for four of them.

Here's my soup.  It was very colorful; this picture doesn't really show that too much.

Here was our dessert.  It's Boston Cream Pie.  I still think I like Karen's recipe better though.  I copied it down and then couldn't find it.

Furry Furniture

We were gone a few days; when we got back I was looking at our new furniture and saw a little cat hair on the couch.  When I looked at Alan's chair I told him that it didn't look like there was very much -- that Pakamer must have spent most of her time on the couch.  Then I got the "furrinator" out and ran it across the chair.  Ugh, disgusting!! Look at what I got off the chair.  I think I need to sew up some throws to put on the furniture when we are not using it.  Why is it that people keep animals in their homes again??