Blood, Sweat, and...well...Curses

No power tools for this baby! Well, I intended to use them, but when I opened the garage door I was heartbroken to find that they were laying there lifeless and cold. **sniff** I'll be ok... someday.
In the meantime I'll have to build things manually, like this nesting box. The upside is that my arms will be perfectly toned from all the sawing and hammering! I am obviously not a carpenter, but I think I did a pretty darn good job on this thing, despite the fact that it has my blood streaked on it in several places.
You know what else is super cool? I didn't put out a penny to make it either! At Hubby's work they use a lot of wooden pallets. The nice man whose job it is to repair them gives Patrick huge boxes of the busted up, unusable ones for us to use as kindling in our wood stove. But occasionally there comes a board that is still intact, I've been saving them knowing they will be useful at some point. So when I realized that my chickens were laying their eggs in the mud, I decided to use the good boards to make a nesting box.
Voila! Happy chickens!

I'm An Auntie!!!

Isn't she beautiful!?!? Ava Marie Lord, daughter of Christina (my little sis) and Aaron. I've never been an Auntie before but I couldn't have picked a sweeter niece if I had tried!

Economical Wash?

You probably can't read the sign under the laundromat's name, but it's about 6 minutes of drying for a quarter. Just about long enough for the machine to get warmed up, and if you're not quick with the quarters, to cool off also. But alas, I had no choice. My dryer broke and the laundry was piling up. So I bit the bullet, called my sister for a ride (since my car had decided to die at the same time as the dryer), washed 5 loads of laundry at home (which didn't even make a dent in Mt. Washmore), then hauled it off to the laundromat to dry. Before leaving I gave the girls strict instructions to have the dishes done by time I got home, which, of course they had to do by hand since our dishwasher gave up the ghost, from which there is no coming back.
A couple days later the dryer repairman came, $180 to make our dryer functional. I tried to do the mental gymnastics to figure out how many loads I'd have to take to the Econo-Wash in order to equal the price to repair the dryer, but I hate math and I'm too lazy to waste brain power on the problem. I just figured that with 5 kids, and having to do 3 loads a day to keep up, I'd rather stay home to do laundry. Which was a good decision in the long run. It's now a couple weeks later and my car is still incapacitated, my sister just had her baby, and I'm stuck in my recliner with a back injury!
The cool thing is- I'm really not complaining! I don't mind all this at all. I could do without the pain, but I was able to see my niece (before I got hurt), I have daughters who are able to help do the housework and cook, and I have no choice but to sit still and catch up on schoolwork with the kids. So really, there's not much to gripe about. Even before I hurt my back I didn't really miss my car since I try to avoid going anywhere anyway. I think the older I get, the more I want to just stay home.

Imagination

Every year we usually do Santa Claus pics at the mall. But when Santa sees a flock of girls coming at him all at once he usually gets the deer-caught-in-the-headlights look on his face, so we thought we'd spare him this year! We found this Santa throne in the gym where our church meets, so I convinced Daddy he needed to play Santa this year.




























These girls crack me up! They love to play "office" or "school." I had to take a pic of their imaginations at work creating offices out of what they have available to them. Notice the old coffee cups, and later they even added a bowl of candy. Because you know, no secretary's desk is complete without coffee and candy!















This last one is my baby Hope. She has the greatest imagination of them all. Usually she's Shirley Temple, or Curly the Cowboy from Oklahoma. Lately she likes to be a baby named Chocolate Bar. Yep, she's my kid alright! In this pic she's doing what all kids have done at some point or other, turning a cardboard box into something useful. In this case it's a magical barn. (Please ignore the finger nail polish mural in the background!)
When my sister and I were kids we actually built an entire Barbie town in the front room made completely out of boxes. Even though we were desperately longing for the four story Barbie penthouse, I believe we actually had more fun designing a whole town on our own.
So this year for Christmas how about reducing the number of toys and increasing the number of plain old boxes? Sounds good to me!

Woo Hoo!!!

I won the November giveaway at shipfullofpirates.com! Thank you Mother Hen!

Thrift Store Decorations

Here's some pretty Christmas ornaments I found at a thrift store a couple years ago. When I found these red and green satiny balls they were stuffed into a couple of gallon sized zip lock bags, but they were in great condition. So I bought them, attached thin wires to the top, strung silver beads onto the wires, then hung them on a long red ribbon. Mahvelous dahling!

Picture Time

Hello there! It's been a while, again. After several calls to AT&T, and a repairman coming out to our house, we finally learned that it was our modem which was bad. Of course it was too old to be covered by warranty so we had to buy a new one. I'm not complaining though, we are actually able to get on the internet whenever we want now and it works fast! :))

What I've been wanting to share was our Christmas pictures I took of the kids in the park. I've never been a fan of professional picture taking places. #1- We could never afford them, they're too expensive! #2- They don't always come out great. And #3- I try to avoid dressing, polishing, then dragging my five kids through crowded stores, not just during holiday time, but ever!

Now, I've always used a 35mm which I LOVE. For years I steered clear of the digital cameras. Whenever my friends would give us pics of their families using a digital camera, the quality was never good and the picture would fade quickly. The problem with my 35mm though was that it was too big and bulky to carry around with me, you couldn't see the picture after it was taken to determine if you needed to redo the shot or not, the film is $5 a pop and to develop it was another $5. And when you have to develop the whole roll, you end up developing unwanted pictures which end up in the garbage. I take alot of pictures so it was getting way too costly.

So I finally broke down and bought a digital camera. I figured technology is better now than it was 10 years ago. I'm happy! I can throw it in my purse to always have on hand, don't have a drawer full of film that needs to be developed anymore, and I get to pick and choose the best pics that I want developed. I can store the pics on my computer and can e-mail them to family (as soon as I figure out how to do it!). But the best thing of all is that a photo editing program came with our computer that lets me crop and enhance the pictures I take, for free! Then I can e-mail the pics to a photo developing place and they'll send me the prints in the mail. I only have the good ones printed. This new way of doing pictures is WAY more time and money efficient than before! I have yet to get the prints in the mail, so we'll have to wait and see about quality, but the pics do look great on the computer (but NOT when on the yellow blog background, sorry). Have a look!