Dinner Ideas Anyone?

Ok so one of the hardest parts of my weekly/monthly duties is coming up with dinner ideas. I usually plan out a whole month at a time so I need almost 30 ideas at a time (which is really alot)! I decided to add my weekly menu to the left of my blog and link any recipes I have gotten online so that anyone who wants to try them can do so. Hopefully friends and family will do the same and add some of their favorites to their blog so I can get some dinner ideas. That way we all don't re-invent the wheel! So if you're making something great at your house, please share!

Finally - Some Family in Idaho!

YEEAAAHHHHH! My sister is finally moving here! She is working on signing an offer right now on a house just 1/2 mile from where I live right now. I am so happy! We will finally have family closer than 4 hours away! Our kids start school on August 21st so they need to be here by then. Haley is absolutely dying with excitement because her very best cousin will be with her in school! They are 7 months apart and very bestest buddies!!

And they always think of the craziest things to do together!

I'm sure the little boys will want to come over lots to jump on the "jumpoline".

They are quite entertaining little guys too!!

We will need to work on getting Seth to cut his hair a little more (he SAYS he just cut 4" off - still has a way to go - unless I use him to mop my kitchen floor).

And the best news of all is that it means we will always have really good food! Julie is a great cook and James is the BBQ KING!!! Yeah I am so excited!

Death of a Volvo

So I guess Volvo's don't last FOREVER... I think mine has finally died. With almost 170,000 miles on it I really can't blame it. I have NEVER had a car with that many miles on it in my life. In fact, not even close. I think the highest mileage we have ever hit on a car we have had is about 75,000. It was however nice not having car payments. It's poor life ended on Thursday. Haley drove it up to Rigby to work (luckily it was fine the whole way there) and after she had been working for awhile, Dave got in the car to start it to move it somewhere else, and the computer said that basically EVERYTHING was wrong with it - Engine System Service Required, Transmission System Service Required, Brake System Failure, etc. Dave thinks the computer went bad (and we all know how much those are). So we went out on Thursday night and got a brand new car.

I wasn't all that excited at first cause it has been over 2 years since we have had any car payments and that has been really nice, but after driving in it for the past 2 days, I am loving it more everyday. The new car smell is the best. I wish I could make it stay like that forever!

It is a 2009 Toyota Camry SE - Charcoal paint and a black leather interior. We have never owned a Japanese car before so that is something really new to us. Hopefully what everyone says about reliability will hold true and it will last us forever.

It is the sport model, with traction control, sunroof, spoiler, JBL sound system, V6 engine, Blue tooth (which I tried out today and it was really cool), and it even has a direct IPOD input so we don't have to use the little converter thing which never tunes in quite right. The things I will miss that I have had on my last few cars that this does not have - heated seats, one touch up windows (it has one touch down but not up too) and dual zone climate control. Oh well I will be happy to trade it all for a warranty and better gas mileage!

So last night I stayed up til 11 reading the blog of a lady whom I have never met (she is the sister of a friend of a friend). Just over a month ago, she lost her 14 month old daughter who drown in their hot tub. She writes on her blog every single day. I cried the entire time I read it, woke up at 2:00 in the morning crying, and woke up this morning with huge puffy eyes and a migraine headache. I was crying for her loss, but more than that I was crying because her words have made a profound change in me. Her faith and perserverence are beyond levels that most of us can even begin to understand. But what I realized as I read, was that her Blog actually answered soome of my prayers.

Its a long story, but I have had somewhat of a rocky relationship with my younger daughter Reagan. I seem to loose my patience more easily with her, am quicker to punish her, and often the severity of the punishment does not match the action she was being punished for. This has been going on for quite sometime and has worsened as she has approached her teenage years. My relationship with my own mother was never the best and it still makes me sad to this day that it was never resolved prior to her death - and I still can't understand why she made me feel the way she did. I do not want the same thing for my daughter. Anyways, as far as Reagan goes, she is very different from Haley, and has her own way of doing things. I love that they are so different, but I have never felt that she bonded with me as well as Haley did. I have prayed alot lately for Heavenly Father to help me be a better parent to her and figure out how to create a closeness with her that I felt I was lacking.

So last night as I was reading this amazing blog, I was reminded that I came very closing to loosing Reagan in the exact same way. At the age of 17 months, Reagan got out the front door which was left open by some of Haleys friends who had come over to play. I was at work and David was in the bathroom. When he came into the living room and saw the front door open and no Reagan, he immediately ran outside to look for her. Our condo was surrounded by water features that were not in any way childproof. He ran around the building the way that we usually walked when we left the house, thinking she would naturally go that way. No Reagan. He circled back around, calling her name. No Reagan. Finally he crossed the bridge that ran over the water way to the condo building across the way from us. As he did this, he heard a man calling for help. He ran towards the voice and saw a stranger with our daughter soaking wet and completley ashen. His first reaction was that she was gone. As he took her from this man's arms, she looked at him and started to cry. Complete relief washed over him and he was able to listen to the man's story - which in itself was amazing. This man, a complete stranger to us, was out walking his dog when he saw what he thought was a doll floating in the pond. As he got closer he could see that it was a baby, with just her little nose and mouth above water. He ran and fished her out of the water. The amazing part is, he said he never walked his dog at that time of day. On that particular day, his pregnant wife had a miscarraige in the morning, and he had spent the day in the hospital with her and and missed walking the dog. When they finally got home, she took a nap and he was able to finally walk the dog. And by a miracle, he was right where we needed him to be to save our child. The water where she had fallen in was about 3 feet deep and dark green. In just a few more seconds she would have sunk out of sight and it would have been too late.

Our Hero came over later that afternoon after we had a chance to warm her up and make sure she was ok, and asked if he could take a picture with "the little angel" that he saved that day. To this day, I do not know his name. I feel like I did not thank him enough or do enough for him, but I was in shock. Needless to say we moved away from there within the month. The month after the accident, my mind kept going to the "what if", and it almost drove me crazy. But time heals mosts wounds, and my anxeity over the incident faded over the years.

Now, after reading the blog last night, I made a profound realization. My relationship with my daughter (or lack thereof) is my fault. I almost lost her and by the grace of my Heavenly Father was spared the agony of losing a child - but instead of living every day like it was a gift, I let myself be annoyed, or quick to anger, with anything she did that bothered me in the least bit. I had no patience and I am sure this caused her to not want to develop a close relationship with me. It's my fault, not hers, and I have to be the one to fix it. I realized that this poor woman would give anything to have her daughter back, and I was wasting the time I had with mine being annoyed.

So today is a new day and I am determined to make this work. I took her to the salon today and got her haircut (she has been begging me for weeks), I came up with a solution to a disagreement that we had been having for months (a solution that worked for both of us), and I have not lost my temper once today. Now I realize I can not fix this relationship in just one day, but one day is a good start.

If you want to partake of the faith of one amazing woman, you can read her blog here.

So I Turned 38 Last Week.....

Well, another birthday has gone by - the big 38. As I get closer to 40, I keep thinking I should have everything figured out.... Isn't that what you thought when you were 20 - that by the time you were 40 you would pretty much skate through the rest of your life??? Oh well, live and learn. I guess it is all a journey, and when I am 80 I will probably still be figuring stuff out. I do try to stay young though - and my husband knows just how to keep me feeling that way. For my birthday this year he bought me "Rock Band" for our Wii. (you may think that is funny but for my last anniversary I got the new Mario Galaxy game from Dave). My sister Julie and her family were here for the weekend so Julie, Seth and myself started a band and played for hours. Seth was on drums (he is very good), Julie was the lead singer, and I was on guitar. Now if that does not keep you young!

Are You Ever Really Too Old To Play Princess???

Last night we were watching some friends of ours 3 little girls - the oldest of which is 5. Her favorite thing to do is play princess, and do you think for a second that Haley was not up for getting in on the action?

Last year in Canada, the girls were told that they could each have 1 outfit as we were shopping at the huge mall there. The only thing Haley wanted was a "princess" dress. We found a wedding dress store there in the mall that happened to be selling all of their "try on" dresses for $99 - you would have thought she won the lottery! She got to go into the little dressing room with the lady that worked there and she helped her get into each dress. She brought about 4 in to try on, and when she put on the second one and walked out with the BIGGEST smile on her face, we knew she did not need to try on the others.

She has worn it to do her homework in, for halloween, just to take pictures of herself, and then of course to play princess last night with a 5 year old. So I guess you are never really to old to play princess!

My 90 Day Supply

So about 3 months ago, after hearing it from at least 6 people - I decided that I had better start getting my 3 month supply together. This has always been an issue for me - we got a few things during the Y2K scare (figured if worse came to worse the Wallaces would feed us :0) but have never had food storage. So I decided to finally get on board. For those of you who know me, you know I can't do anything halfway..... so I kinda over did it. Not with the actual purchasing of food (that is still a work in progress) but with the way I went about organizing it.

First off, I wasn't even sure what I was supposed to have for a 90 day supply. I really did not want to just buy a bunch of wheat and beans and stuff I would NEVER use. So I checked the church website, and it recommended just getting 90 days worth of stuff you use right now that you could rotate through easily. So this is where I got a little crazy. I put together a spreadsheet and figured out about 10-12 different dinners (less variety for breakfast and lunch) that we eat often. Then I figured out all of the ingredients for the meals and how much of each I would need to cover 90 days for my whole family. Then I made a separate sheet in my spreadsheet with a list of all of the items I needed to buy and the quantity I needed for each. Then I headed to Walmart (definitely the cheapest place for groceries here in Idaho - and our Walmarts are nice - not like what we saw in Vegas - I would not step foot in there!) and priced out every product on my list.

So then I set a budget of $100 a week to buy food storage items (separate from my grocery budget). Every week I check the sale ads for Smith's and Albertsons, and if an item on my Walmart list is cheaper there, I will go there and buy a bunch of it. I did not limit my storage to food either. I have everything we would need if we could not make it to the store for 3 months. So laundry detergent, shampoo, soap, toothpaste, cleaning supplies, garbage bags etc - it's all on the list.

After that I got a little bit crazy and went ahead and planned out my family's dinner menu for a month at a time making sure to include at least 6 dinners a month that I could make from food storage items. As far as rotation goes (my kids think I am crazy), I have the spreadsheet of everything that is supposed to be in storage posted down right next to the shelves where I store everything and every time we use something from food storage, we put an X in the box next to that item and then I add it to my grocery list for the next week. Since I have my entire menu for the month planned out, I try to only go to the grocery store once a week. I make a list of items I need for the weeks food, then add any used food storage from the week before. It has been working pretty well. I would say I have about 75% of my food storage items purchased. Just a few more weeks and I will be at a full 100%.

For the first time in my married life (that is almost 17 years) - I actually have a supply of food on hand! Feels pretty good.

My First Blog

Ok Larae. If this is yet ANOTHER thing you get me addicted to that is going to cost me a fortune, cause me to start a business, or take up all of my free time - YOU ARE IN BIG TROUBLE. After visiting your blog again to get the recipe for the salad dressing, I decided since I have not actually scrapbooked in 2 years that I should probably start a blog so I can at least get back to taking pictures of my children! Thanks for being a great friend!