Final tally

I checked my grades for this last semester and I got 2 A's, an A-,B+, and B, and it feels good :).

 Jared thought that he would help me catch up on the laundry yesterday, and now I have several loads of clean clothes waiting to be put away on my couch. If I could hire out any service in my home it would be laundry. I am so blessed that we have so much to wear, but man I hate trying to keep up on it.

My Christmas wrapping is all done, and I actually have my shopping for my in-laws and parents done, but I still don't know what to get Jared. He wants the starwars blueray set but my budget is about $50 short of that, he needs clothes and shoes but I don't know if I want to go shopping with the kids to pick those items up, and really where I could go to get the most of what little money I've got. Maybe tomorrow that will be put on the agenda. Its probably so boring for him to get clothes for Christmas, I'm just not feeling very creative with the gifts though. What I would really like for Christmas is a home depot gift card so I can rip off the ugly white tile that is my kitchens backsplash and replace it with something fancy and nice. I really want to get this home ready to sell, a friend from the ward came over yesterday to give us a bid on the fence and siding hopefully we can get enough to cover the cost of repairing everything ourselves. I still cant believe that the wind cracked my 4x4 pressure treated posts, but I guess it also cracked large evergreens so I shouldn't feel so surprised. The cheapest price for composite fencing I've seen is 3.37 per fence piece at Lowe's, it looks like its good quality, the normal price is 4.90 or something. I tried to dig out some carrots from my garden for stew the other day, and I couldn't even get past a 1/2 inch in the ground which means we wont be able to fix the fence till spring or when the ground thaws. I'm gonna need to have a professional fix the siding because the pieces took flight during the wind storm. I feel like I'm racing the clock but I haven't been given the green flag to go yet.
 Looking around in my ward today made me realize that its gonna be really hard to leave so many friends, Its just so comfortable there, everyone is in about our same financial situation and they are all so easy to talk to and get along with. Who knows we may be stuck in our home for much longer than planned, especially in this economy, but we won't know until we try!

11 days till christmas

This month is going by so fast, I did complete the shopping for the kids, but I haven't even started on anyone else. I'm kinda not in the spirt of it all, like I should be. I'm just tired.. and kinda lazy, I think I need to spend a week without the computer and then I would be far more productive. Hey I graduated! I don't remember if I told you that or not, but I did, now I have my associates, horray! So tomorrow I'm supposed to make 10 dozen cookies and so I will need to go out and buy yet another hand mixer cuz I killed my new $5 dollar one from walmart :(. I'm gonna be all cookied out tomorrow. I ordered my Christmas cards and i'm still waiting for them to arrive... it feels like it is taking forever. I got a letter from my little bro, more like a post it note but yet it had pictures so it brightened my day yesterday. My Christmas card this year just has the kids on it, its easier that way although we had some super cute pictures taken of our whole family I just dont have a copy of the one I like. Jared has been taking the van to work for the past 2 weeks, its been a nightmare trying to do anything in the truck with the two kids, my seat belt doesn't work in there so I just pull it over myself and sit on it so I don't get pulled over- its really doing me no good. It's seriously been such a good feeling to not have class at night, I love being home with my kids. I love the age they are at (except at church with konnor) I wish that they could just stay little forever cuz they're just so stinking cute, they think the lamest things are so cool and are so happy with whatever life gives them. Most of the time they like my cooking although, Makayla is really such a vegetarian she will eat sliced ham, and chicken nuggets but anything else gets picked around. Konnor is my best eater and he will usually dig in to whatever I put in front of him. I'm gonna try to wrap some gifts while I have the energy for it. I hope your all better prepared for Christmas than I am, good luck on the next 11 days.

Delta Blanket + diaper box = Barn

 So I said that I was working on a diaper box project and tonight I got to finish it. It cost zero dollars and it was pretty easy to make. Below is a picture of the boxes I started out with.

 Above is the box with most of the outside covering, and below is the finished product sorry its such a dark picture :(

 It has velcro in the top two corners to keep the barn closed when its being toted, but it should be easy for Konnor to open up the barn and add his cows to it, so we'll see.

If you want to see the whole process with pics I'm gonna be putting it on my search for simple blog -
searchforsimple.blogspot.com

November B-days (ps I'm random if you didn't know)

Today is Jareds birthday, last Sunday was Konnors birthday. All together it is kinda a crazy end of the month. Today was frustrating but its all okay now. The reason why it was frustrating is because our house was a mess and I needed to make dinner after church then make cake for Jared's b-day and have the house cleaned before family came over and you know when its your birthday you kinda don't have to do much.. like chores, so I felt like I had to be super woman doing alllllll of the everything so Jared could just have a day off (playing *DAMN* batman) and it wasn't that cool. ps I don't like the batman game, but that's another blog post that I'm gonna not write. So eventually he was a good husband and tried to help tidy up and even vacuumed on his birthday, poor jared... And we had family over and it all went smoothly except pearl running away and me chasing after her to Monroe, it was a nice night for a run. I put too much cocoa in the frosting so it was too chocolaty but the cake seemed to do well for substituting some oil for butter, and margarine spread for the other part of the butter.
 My emotions have been all over the landscape today if you haven't noticed. Today at church the husband of a lady in my ward let me know that his wife would be calling me for a haircut, and that the situation was that she has cancer and she wanted to donate her hair (its pretty long) because she would be starting chemo soon and would be loosing it. When I went to sit down by Jared I just lost it, I have no idea what cancer she has and what the circumstances are, but I could not stop crying. She is really one of the most selfless people I know, I can't even think of a time that she has said anything bad about anyone else, and I cut her hair so usually I hear about stuff like that. She really is completely a good, good person. I seems like all of the really great people who have done nothing to warrant any bad luck end up with cancer. Am I so weird for bawling? I'm really not sure.. I had an uncle die from cancer, another uncle is a survivor of brain cancer, a best friends dad die from cancer, an aunt survive breast cancer. I feel like I have a preview of what the months to come with chemo and everything that comes along with it (kind of) entails and it breaks my heart that her and her family will have to endure it. Don't I sound hopeless, good grief, all will go how its supposed to but I can still feel sorrow.

diaper box gifts

So this is gonna sound super cheap, thats because it literally is. I'm thinking and partway doing some gifts for the kids made out of diaper boxes. The one i'm working on right now is a fabric barn type of tote for konnor, I've been taking pictures so i'll show you the finnished product when its finnished. What I was thinking would be good for Makayla is a baby doll bed made from a diaper box, she doesn't have a bed for her dollys yet and I could really soup up a diaper box for that intended purpose. I may have to go buy some fabric for it but we'll see what I can come up with....

Dreaming of Christmas Toys

I do love Christmas, and I do think that it belongs in December but every December we don't seem to have much money for gifts and such. So this year I'm trying to be ahead of the game and get most of the kids gifts in order before our poorest month of the year arrives. I took the kids to Smith & Edwards yesterday to check out the toys there and see if any would truly entertain them. What I like about Smith & Edwards is that the toy section is really so different from other stores like Walmart, theres very little Dora, no barbie, no super hero action figures, they have lots of farm related toys, lots of Melissa & Doug toys (I love them). I'd like to cut back on the toy clutter and the thought of adding more toys to end up all over the house isn't a pleasant one, especially since I just put all of the kids stuffed animals into a large garbage bag to go downstairs till we someday move and have room for them (you can't imagine how much that helped with the clutter). Makayla liked a baby doll that cries until you give her a bottle and also liked the umbrella stroller for a little doll. Konnor liked everything, he is my tractor boy! Its his birthday in 12 days and I picked up some little metal airplanes, a hotwheel size tractor pulling a trailer and some plastic cows. He'll also be getting a hot wheel garage that I picked up for him a couple weeks ago.
I'd like keep the toys simple and to a minimum otherwise the kids seem to just toss them aside and it feels like such a waste. Have you seen any great toys for your kids/ nieces and nephews?

Emotions, the good the bad and the ugly

Hey so I'm at a calm tonight because I finished one of the 3 papers I need to write for my DANCE class... who writes papers for dance? Anyway, I just want to share my crazy emotions even though they are perfectly useless to anyone else :) This past Saturday Jared and I went for a drive looking at a couple of houses for sale in the clearfield/ Layton area, and we ran across one that I had told Jared about but he had completely dismissed because he thought it was in a bad part of town. So by complete accident we drove by it and I made him turn around to check it out and see if it really was the house I had thought was a pretty good deal (its 95,000), so we walked around the yard and looked in windows and he thought it was great especially in comparison with the 160,000 house we originally went out to look at. So we get ourselves excited about really nothing because we don't even have our house up for sale, Jared has yet to have a permanent job position at work and I really don't know if he will want to find a job (far away) drafting once he has his degree by July. But even though theres all these reasons why we should totally cool our jets and see how everything turns out come July, I really just want to deep clean the whole house and put it on the market. While checking out the pictures of the house I noticed another house just around the corner that is a rambler style with .8 of an acre of land for just 4,000 more and I also began scheming how I would fix it up and how great that would be... I think I'm a remodelaholic. So all this time I should be focused on school but instead I'm being a dreamer with a desire to put my children to bed in separate rooms and have my husband 20 minutes closer to work, let alone not be awakened after my husbands left to work (he leaves super early) by a crazy guy screaming profanities outside the house. All would be good, but yet were gonna be here through the holidays cause I imagine that would be a hard time to sell a home. 
On a good note school will be over in 5 weeks! Then I feel like I can devote more quality time with my children and focus on being a better mom.