Christmas Eve

I just wanted to take a moment to wish eveyone a very Merry Christmas. I doubt that I will be able to post much over the holiday break. Having Craig and the kids home will be very busy. I look forward to spending a lot of movie time and play time with them. have a great holiday everyone!!

Ashlei Ann Matthews

There are some people in our lives that have such a profound effect on us that we don't even realize that they are the reason for where we are today. That one person that enters your life in such and innocent way and completely redirects you towards your future and destinany that you didn't even know you had. Everyone has people like this in thier lives. Today, I celebrate one of my precious, wonderful and gracious people. My Ashlei. I didn't meet her until the summer of 1997. She and I were chosen randomly to become roommates our freshmen year in college. Little did I know that God would put us together to have her completely change my pathway in life. I owe my husband, children, and most everything that I have in my life now to this woman. She introduced me to Craig on sort of a whim. (Drew helped, but hey this isn't his day.) And within a 10 year time span we've accumulated 4 children, a warm home and a ton of other accomplishments that don't even need mentioning. She's been there for me through awful times, sad times, and the best of times. We've stood up for eachother at weddings and at funerals. We've been there for eachother through childbirth and raising the littel rascals. She' the reason I'm here today. Doing what I'm doing. Literally. I'm writing this because of her. See, it's Ashlei's birthday. And she deserves to be celebrated...have a blog written all about her. Happy birthday my dear sweet friend. I wish you the happiest and joyful day possible today and everyday!!

Pumpkin Bread

This is the sugar, shortening and pumpkin. I know that it doesn't look very pretty, but it's going to taste awesome!!



Here come the dry ingredients.



Now the eggs and water. Btw...I can't believe that Sadie has actually slept through all of this..so far!




I didn't mention this in the recipie. I always use a fluted pan greased with butter crisco and then floured. That way my pumpkin bread just slides right out of the pan after it's cooked.




On our way to the oven! See you in an hour after you bake at 350 degrees!!

Banana Bread

Here they are!!

I thought that it may be easier if I just added a new post for every item baked instaed of updating my original post. So, here we go! First off...banana bread. When I was putting everything together it occured to me that Sadie, the baby, has never had banana bread before. This will be wuite a treat for her!

Here are the 2 loaf pans all greased up and ready to go.



First off I creamed together the sugar and the butter.



Next are the eggs!




Now for the buttermilk, vanilla and mashed up bananas. These are bananas that I had previously frozen.



Adding the flour, salt and baking soda.




Divide the dough evenly between the 2 pans and bake it at 350 degrees for 1 hour.




I'll post pictures when they are done!!

Baking/Freezing Day

Alrighty! Here is the menu for the day and the recipies. I'll be updating with pictures and blurbs throughout the day. Right now I have the pumpkin, turkey and bananas thawing out.

BANANA BREAD
1 1/4 c. sugar
1/2 c. butter, softened
2 eggs
1 1/2 c. mashed very ripe bananas (about 3)
1/2 c. buttermilk
1 tsp. vanilla
2 1/2 c. flour
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. salt

1. Move oven racks to low position so that tops of pans will be in center of oven. Heat oven to 350. Grease bottoms only of 2 loaf pans with shortening.
2. Mix sugar and butter in large bowl. Stir in eggs until well blended. Stir in bananas, buttermilk and vanilla; beat until smooth. Stir in flour, baking soda and salt just until moistened. Divide batter evenly between pans.
3. Bake about 1 hour. Cool 10 minutes in pans on wire rack.
4. Loosen sides of loaves from pans; remove from pans and place top side up on wire rack. Cool completely, about 2 hours, before slicing. Wrap tightly and store at room temperature up to 4 hours, or refrigerate up to 10 days.

Pumpkin Bread
2 2/3 c. sugar
2/3 c. shortening
16 oz. pumpkin
2/3 c. water
1 tsp. clover
1/2 tsp. baking powder
4 eggs
3 1/3 c. flour
2 tsp. baking soda
1 1/2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. cinnamon

Mix sugar and shortening. Stir in pumpkin, water and eggs. Mix in flour, baking soda, salt, cimmamon, cloves and baking powder. Bake at 350 for 60 minutes.

Turkey Tetrazzini (I won't be baking this, just tossing ingredients together to freeze and bake later)
1 Tbsp. olive oil
8 oz. fresh mushrooms, sliced
2 Tbsp. non-fat dry milk
1 1/2 Tbsp. cornstarch
2 chicken bouillon cubes, crushed
1 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. pepper
1/2 tsp. onion powder
pinch of nutmeg
2 c. cold water
3 c. cooked turkey
6 oz. broad egg noodles, cooked tender
2 Tbsp. grated Parmesan cheeese
paprika

Heat olive oil in skillet; saute mushrooms just until tender. Combine dry milk, cornstarch, chicken bouillon cubes, salt, pepper, onion powder and nutmeg with cold water in a large saucepan. Cook over medium heat until mixture thickens and begins to bubble.

Arrange noodles in a 2-qt. baking dish. Spread mushrooms in a layer over the noodles; top with a layer of turkey. Pour sauce over all, then sprinkle with grated Parmesan cheese and paprika. Bake at 350 for 30 minutes, or until hot bubbling.

Turkey Noodles Casserole (I won't be adding the cheese until I am ready to bake this another day)
1 package (10 oz.) frozen peas, thawed under running water
2 c. diced cooked turkey
1 1/2 c. cooked noodles
butter
1/4 c. chopped onion
8 oz. sliced mushrooms
1 can cream of mushroom soup
1/2 c. milk
salt, to taste
1/4 tsp. curry powder
1/2 tsp. poultry seasoning
1 c. cheddar cheese

Combine turkey, noodles, and peas in a buttered 2-quart baking dish. Melt 2 tsp. butter in a saucepan. Saute onion and mushrooms until tender; blend in soup, milk and seasonings and cook, sitrring, until well blended and hot. Pour soup mixture over the turkey and noodle mixture; top with shredded cheese. Bake in a 350 degree oven for about 25-30 minutes.

Bake/Freeze Day

**UPDATE** Bake/Freeze day will me tomorrow instead of today. Today I'm grocery shopping for supplies.

Several of my blogging friends and other blogs that I follow have been doing the "bake/freeze day". So I thought I would give it a try. I love to cook, so it shouldn't be to bad. So far on the menu I have Banana Bread, Pumpkin Bread, Turkey Tetrazzini, Turkey Noodle Casserole and Cinnamon Rolls. I'm really hoping that Ms. Sadie will decide to cooperate tomorrow and maybe even help. All day tomorrow I'll be posting pictures and updating you on how it's going. Wish me luck! I may need it....

Christmas Shopping

How many of you are done with your Christmas shopping? I can finally, and proudly say, that I only have 1 gift left to pick up to complete this years exciting and long drawn out process of Christmas shopping. It is just me, or does eveyone else have those couple of people on your list that you NEVER know what to buy them. You know who I'm talking about. That person that just goes out and buys themself whatever it is that they want. Leaving nothing on the face of the earth for you to buy them. At least that's what it seems like when you are out shopping. And I hate just buying them a gift card. Ya, I know...they will use it. But a gift card isn't that exciting to open. And when people use a gift card they almost always spend more than what the card is worth. But then again, I don't want to buy them something completely useless. What to do....what to do!?!?

Happy Birthday Princess!!

I've been going over and over in my head December 9th of last year. Craig drove me to the birthing center to be induced at 7 in the morning. My mom met us there to help endure the long day ahead. None of us anticipated it to be so drawn out like it was. Sadie is our 4th child. We were imagining a quick and pretty simple delivery. Man were we wrong. When we arrived I was already having mild contractions. No big deal. They started me on my pitocin (not sure if I spelled that right or not) and monitored me as I went along. The nurse told me that she could turn my pitocin up every 15 minutes or so, depending on how well I handled my contractions. So I made up my mind right then and there that I would track her down at the nurses desk or walk the halls until I found her every 15 minutes. I was ready to get the show and the road and have this baby. The pitocin really wan't doing much for me in the beginning. The nurse thought I was crazy wanting her to turn in up as much as she could every 15 minutes. But I was ready...oh so ready. By 10:30 I was starting to feel the contractions. Not totally uncomfortable, but beginning to get there. At 12:00 my doctor came in to check on me. She said that she was surprised that she hadn't heard from me yet. At that time I was only at a 4. She broke my water and told me that there was an issue keeping me from progressing any further. A couple of years ago I had to have a procedure on my cervix that aparently left scare tissue. The scar tissue was preventing my cervix from dialating any quicker. Needless to say, my labor was very slow from there on out. To make matters worse, for some unknown reason, I like to have my children naturally. NO drugs. Totally crazy is what all of my friends say. Well, by 4 o'clock that afternoon I was begging for an epidural but the nurse wouldn't give me one. Around 5 or so they did finally give me some IV medicine to help me sleep a little. It was more like 3 pitchers of margaritas than anything. I was pretty loopy and exhausted all at the same time. My mom and Craig could have probably both used a dose of it too. =) Finally at 7:00 the nurses were able to remove the scar tissue. Within a couple of minutes I told them that they had beeter call my doctor because this baby was coming now. Sadie was born with 22 minutes. What a relief! Now look at our precious little girl!!

Sadie's 1st Birthday Party

It's the Birthday Princess enjoying her spaghetti lunch!


Here's that castle cake again. Sadie loved it and couldn't wait to get into it.


The little girl would not eat her cake with her hands. Just didn't want to get them all dirty I guess. She kept leaning over and taking bites. Yummy cake!!

There's my little frosting monster!

Thanks everyone for all of the fun presents!

She really didn't care about opening any presents. I'm glad we got this picture because her sitting there on my lap only lasted about 10 seconds.

This is Sadie with her cousin Delaney. They are 2 1/2 months apart. I'm sure that my sister-in-law Annie and I will have lots of "adventures" with them as they grow up together. Too cute!!

The little princess in her tutu. She really enjoyed her day. When we got home she was tuckered out and slept for a couple of hours. Thanks for sharing the day with us everyone!!

The Castle Cake

Sadie's favorite flavor (as far as we can tell) is strawberry. So I made her a strawberry castle cake for the big party Sunday. I actually ended up making 2 strawberry and 2 vanilla cake mixes and swirled them into the four cakes.


This was cake #1. Easy enough. Total time for this cake was 40 minutes from start to finish. Just 3 more to go!



This is the "cake" part trimmed up and glue together with icing. Easy enough. Now onto the castle pillars!





I glue ice cream cones together with white chocolate and then glued the sugar cones on top with white chocolate. Craig helped with the chocolate (of course!) and then put the pink sprinkles on for me. We actually had a lot of fun doing these.




Here is the final castle pillar after I finished the decorating on Sunday. The turned out pretty good I though. The pink was a lot brighter that I thought it would be.






The castle cake. I had a blast making this thing. Hopefully one of my girls will want another one in the future!

The Birthday Party

This weekend we are celebrating the baby's first birthday. Can you believe it? She will be one next week. Where did the time go? This weekend will be full of party prep, Hanah's first basketball game of the season and cake decorating. Sadie's party theme is "Princess". I'm excited to try my skills at another castle cake. It's been a few years since I tried to tackle this monster of a cake. Hopefully it will turn out better than the last one. I'll post pictures Monday morning. Everyone have a safe and wonderful weekend!

To My Dear Sweet Husband

Happy birthday to you!

Happy birthday to you!

Happy birthday dear Craig!

Happy birthday to you!

I wish you all the best today on your 33rd birthday sweeheart. May all of your dreams come true!

Black Friday...Cyber Monday...Christmas Is Here!!

It felt so good to get back into the groove of Black Friday this year. Last year I was unable to go due to being ready to pop at any moment with little Ms. Sadie. =) This year I went with one of my very best friends Ashlei. Man did we have a great time...and score some awesome deals. Ashlei has become a coupon queen and a deal pro at savings.com. With her help and wonderful ideas I was able to pricematch at Walmart (and purchase before anyone else could) and use a coupon that I didn't even have at Old Navy. LOVED IT!!! We did pretty good with the check out lines too. At Toys R Us we checked out at the electronics counter and only waited about 10 minutes. At Kohls I checked out at the jewelry counter where there was absolutely NO wait. And at Walmart when we cehcked out there was no line. The cashiers were standing there waiting for people to come to them. That in itself was a huge score.

No onto today. Cyber Monday. Last year was my first year to shop for Christmas online. I'll admit it...I was a little afriad of the whole process. Identity theft and all. But once I tried it, I was so hooked! Now I shop through ebates.com. Not only am I getting awesome deals today, but I'm earning back twice as much cash as I usually do. Ebates actually pays you to shop online! AWESOME!! I love saving money. Especially when it's that easy.

Have a great day everyone!

I've done it again!

See all of those groceries? That's $211 dollars worth of stuff. There's tons of stuff that you can't see because I had to stack others in front of it. Guess what I paid for it all. Come on...guess. $75!!!!! Yes, that's right. What a steal.





Now, look at this!





This is my Walgreens purchase. $75.76 is the total worth of everything you see. I only paid $14.28. That's $61.48 in savings!!! Here's how I did my Walgreens run:

The Airwick 6.10 oz. i-motion kits are regularly $14.99. They were on sale for $7.49. In this weeks Sunday paper there was a coupon for $5 off. I bought 2 and used 2 coupons. I only paid $2.50 a piece!!!! That's $5.00 for 2 of them.

The smaller Airwick freshner i-motion kits were on sale for $3.99. I bought 3 and used 3 $4 off coupons that I printed off the Airwick website. In case you didn't catch that...they ended up FREE!!

The All detergent waws on for $3.50 a piece with the Walgreens ad coupon. I bought 2 and used 2 coupons for $1.00 off that I printed off of couponmom.com. All together....$5.00 for 2 bottles of laundry detergent. That is cheaper than the cost of 1 at regular price!!!

Lat but not least, the Chex Mix. They were on sale 2/$3.00. I printed off 2 coupons for $.50 off at couponbug.com. Total for these was only $2.00.

Feet Picture

There it is. The feet picture. Many of you requested to see it, so here it is. I just LOVE it!!!!

Family Pictures

We FINALLY had new family pictures taken yesterday at JCPenney's. It has probably been a good 3 or 4 years since we've had this done. They did a really good job. I'm happy with the way everything turned out. I requested to have a "feet picture" taken with the kids. The photographer looked at me like I was crazy. But, they did it anyway. All of the photographers came in to watch because they had never seen it done before. It turned out pretty good. Little Sadie's feet just don't lay straight yet. I'll have to post a picture of it in the future. I hope that you all enjoy these.

Sadie Update

We are back! The did an EKG and sonogram on her heart. Everything looked great. Her left bottem ventricle (chamber of her heart) was on the big side of normal, but other than that everything looks good. They are sending her sono scans to Mercy Hospital in KC for a second opinion. Praise the Lord. Thank you for all of your prayers. They definately worked. Halie's big appointment is tomorrow. I'll let you all know what we find out. Hopefully it's good news like today.

Happy Halloween!!

This would be our little pumpkin Sadie. She did very well in her costume. Most of her night was spent eating goldfish and watching all of the other costumes in amazement.


Ms. Halie was a mummy bride this year. She's not wearing any shoes in this pictures, but I promise you that she had them on while she trick-or-treated.



And then there was Cody. His costume was officially titled "Mummy". But everywhere he went he told everyone that he was the dead Michael Jackson. They all laughed, but he didn't quite get the joke. He kept asking "Why does everyone laugh when I tell them what I am?"

I didn't get any pictures of Hanah this year. She went trick-or-treating with her friends for the first time. Too old to let mom get her ready I guess...

Busy week ahead..

This is the week of doctor appointments that we have been waiting for. Sadie has her appointment with the cardiologist on Wednesday. I'm guessing that he will probably schedule some tests and just go from there. Thursday Halie meets with the endocrinologist. I'm not sure that I spelled that right. lol... She has been taking her blood sugar and keeping a journal of what it is, what her symptoms are, and what she has been eating. I'll post as soon as I get back from that appointment too. Hope everyone has a great week!

The perfect pick!

It has become a tradition in our household to hit the pumpkin patch every year. This year we went to Klausmeyer's Dairy Farm. The pickings were a little slim, but we still had fun. Here are a few pictures of our adventure!

Hanah with her pumpkin. On the hayrack ride back to the car it fell of the wagon and broke. She had a pick another one from the front yard where they were selling the pumpkins.


For some reason every year Halie takes the same picture with her pumpkin. Leaning to the side and holding it out front.



This was Cody's first pumpkin. He probably picked up three or four. In the end he came home with a green pumpkin. Yes....green....

Sadie really enjoyed the hayrack ride. Craig picked her pumpkin out for her. She didn't want anything to do with it and could have cared less. All she wanted was a bottle and a nap. But, who could blame her.

Sadie Update

Sadie had her chest x-ray today. The spot is still there. The radiologist read it as a pulmonary artery in the wrong spot. That is the major artery that leads from the heart to the lungs. I don't know what that entails exactly. I do know that we are meeting with a cardiologist in 2 weeks to discuss the necessary tests and options. Hopefully this will turn out to be nothing. I've been hoping that since the first trip to immediate care that started all of this back in September. I'll keep you all posted and let you know what I find out.

Craig's Elk Hunt

As most of you know, Craig went to New Mexico on an elk hunt last week. He went with a couple of guys from work. They were gone for 8 days. All in all he had a really good time. Last year he went on the same trip, but didn't shoot an elk. This year was a different story!!


Great job babe! I'm so proud of you!!

Just say no to borders!!!

A few years back I decided (upon my son's request) to redecorate his room in a deer theme. Yes...I said deer theme. At that time in his small and simple life he idiolized his dad and anything that his dad loved. That included deer hunting. So, I found this deer border on oline, ordered it, and put it up. Simple. A great accomplishment. It looked so good. Then....Monday October 5, 2009 rolls around. The boy has changed his mind and wants to redecorate his room. Sure, no problem! I was excited to take on the project. New paint, new bedspread and wall decorations. Sounds fun! First step...take down the border. Simple, right? Just wet it down and it will come right off is what they told me. Guess what? They were WRONG!!! Those of you that know me best and talk to me every day....if I ever utter the words "I think I'll put up a border or wall paper" please stop me and remind me how awful it is to take it off the wall. For an hour last night I wet the border down and scrapped and scrapped and scrapped. Three feet is what I accomplished. All over the floor it went. I don't enjoy this. I do not enjoy this at all. At this rate it will take me a good week to get the whole thing off. For a brief moment I thought to myself.. "Jen, you could just paint over it with a couple of extra coats of paint." But reality raised it's ugly head and gave me the sense that covering it up never really works. So, I'm stuck with this glorious and stuborn border vowing to NEVER do this again!!

The Princess is never bored!

All I did was walk to my room to put laundry away and then walk back to the living room......


And this is what I found!

She is such a little stinker! :)

Time For Fall Maddness!!!

This is Hanah's volleyball team. They played thier first game last week in Argonia and won! They were so excited, happy and scared all at the same time. It's a great group of girls and we wish them the best to them for the rest of the season. Go Dragons!!


Last weekend Craig and I took the kids to their first OU game. Needless to say they had a blast! We didn't have the best seats, but just being in the stadium atmosphere made all the difference. Below is the view that we had of the field.


Hanah took this picture of Craig and I. We were standing in line at the concession stand.

Don't you just love the sea of crimson and cream!?!? It was a memory made that will NEVER be forgotten.