It's a Jungle Out There!

Last Thursday the Young Women in our ward has their annual New Beginnings/Young Women in Excellence night. The theme was "It's a Jungle Out There", a hodge podge of ideas my presidency got off the internet. It was FABULOUS, we got tons of great feedback and there were tears shed by many (always a good sign)!

To start, the girls had been working on learning the YW Theme in sign language, and it was a little rough around the edges, but they did it and it was really cute. The Mutual Theme is "'Be thou an example of the believers, in word, in conversation, in charity, in spirit, in faith, in purity' (1 Timothy 4:12)" - and we talked about how each girl's example is like their own light. Then each of the parents stood up with their daughter and told what kind of a light their daughters reminded them of. One was a lava lamp (bright, cheerful, full of energy and bouncing around), another was the light of the moon (gets her light from 'The Son', reflection of Christ), we had a sunflower (light like the sun), a beautiful candle painted by her grandmother, an energy saver bulb (she saves her light, and even after being switched off still has a little 'glow' about her), and many more. This was the time the most tears were shed.

Then the parents were taken on a "jungle tour" where they went around the church and the YW talked about the value experiences and projects they have been working on throughout the year. Then back to the "watering hole" for refreshments.

It was a very nice night and honestly the stress of planning, preparing, a fretting was very much worth the effort. Everyone had a great night!

Bread Dough Update

Just an FYI, you CAN freeze bread dough! I just let it rise once, punch it down, wrap in saran wrap and put in a bread pan and freeze until hard. Then wrap it again in tin foil and put in a freezer bag until later. When I notice I'm running low on bread I take the dough out of the freezer, leave it wrapped up and put in a bread pan to thaw in the fridge. I usually do this the night before, so the next morning I put the thawed dough into a greased bread pan and let it rise covered lightly with saran wrap. This is really good to do on Saturday evening, so when we head to church on Sunday morning, it's all ready to cook when we get home. Then we can have a warm loaf of bread with our "Sunday Meal", which is usually some good comfort food.

My kids are the cutest!

I think my kids are the funniest people on the planet. Isaac has preschool at the local YMCA, and often after I'm done working out, Keltsy and I will go play in the "Prime Time Center", which is a fancy indoor play place. The superivsor of that room is a good friend of ours. She is always authoritative in her bright red shirt, but super fun and knows all the kids names. The other day Kelsty and I were in the Center, and the supervisor came in with her kids. It was her day off, she just came to play, and Keltsy ran up to her and asked, "How come you're wearing clothes?" The little munchkin had noticed that she wasn't wearing the official red shirt...it actually took me a minute to figure out what she was talking about. She often says random things like that. Like the time she announced to the missionaries, "I HAVE SKIN!"

Isaac is equally hilarious. He likes to play tricks and tell jokes. His favorite is one he got from a TV show "What do you call a cow that cuts the grass?" "A lawn moooo-er!" Whenever he tells a joke, he asks, "Does that make sense?" He knows that the joke has to 'make sense', but isn't quite sure what makes sense and what doesn't.

Bread Dough Experiment

I've been trying to save some money by making our own bread. It actually has been coming out really yummy (you have to use bread flour for good bread dough - took me years to figure this part out), but the biggest hassle is always having the time to make it when we run out. I just searched online to find out exactly how to do it. There seems to be no one set way to do it, except the general consensus is to defrost overnight in the fridge before allowing to rise at room temp. Since school is still out today, I think I'll do the big bread dough experiment...I'll let you know how it turns out!

Snow Day...finally!

We've been waiting all winter for it and it finally came! We got about six inches of snow over the last 24 hours, closing schools all over Indianapolis. We had fun this morning, I shoveled the driveway and the kids played/cried in the snow. Keltsy is not a fan of cold, but she SO wanted to play. The snow came up to her waist and she couldn't really walk around in it and just got frustrated and cried. I showed her how to find snow that had already been stepped in to get around. Our neighbor friends were also outside shoveling, and they had kid sized shovels, making play time even more fun. Isaac climbed "the biggest snow mountain ever!". He wanted to have a snowball fight, me and him against Keltsy. Too bad the snow isn't sticky, it just falls apart, so we couldn't do snowballs or make a snowman. It was a lot of fun, though...and then hot chocolate tops off the day!

My Laptop DIED!

I am so bummed...our laptop went on the fritz about two weeks ago. We hurried and copied all our files to our desktop so we could reconfigure everything, but it's still not working. It sort of figures, on the heals of becoming re-energized about our budget something unexpected would come up. Jesse thinks if we get a new "ram" for it (whatever that is...) that it may fix it, and he thinks that's not too big of an expense, so we'll be trying that. Mostly, it's just such a pain, because I used to check our email 50 times a day, check people's blogs, work on my etsy shop, stop into some message boards, etc. throughout the day. It's really not very convenient having our desktop in our bedroom...in fact I can hear my kids screaming right now and I've got to go settle some battle...

Okay, battle settled. See, with a laptop I could just look over and yell much more convincingly than when I'm WAY up stairs and not within sight, sigh...hopefully we'll get our laptop back and I'll be more active in keeping up with all this again!

BUT, I have used this mini laptop break to learn how to knit! I'll post pics soon, the hat I made looks a little rough, I dropped a few stitches, but the booties turned out really cute! I'm excited to experiment with the different stitches. There's a lot more I can do with knitting than crochet. It's kind of fun to increase my "skills" (as Napolean Dynamite would say).

New Year...New Numbers...

That's it...it's final...our budget for 2008 is calculated and we definitly need to reevaluate our spending habits and make some cuts. I'm not complaining about our finances, we've been extremely blessed and I truly believe that we've been protected and blessed due to our tithing contributions. BUT, this is a wake up call to once again go through our finances and see that we have places where we can dramatically cut in our spending.

We have been good about a lot of things: we still live in the stone age of not having a cell phone, we're on basic cable (mainly for the internet), we don't have any debt except for our mortgage, we have eaten out maybe five times this year...really though, that just makes me more ashamed that we don't have better control of what's going out.

For 2009 we have a New Year and new goals! I am setting a goal for 2009 to sharply cut our spending. With Jesse's contract with Lilly running out in August, our future is a bit uncertain when it comes to employment and with the status of the economy I think it's prudent to be a little more urgent with our savings goals for this year. If I find any great money saving tips, I'll definitly be keeping you all posted...I'm all about cutting costs whenever possible.