Bizzarro Supermom

Play Kitchen from an Entertainment Center

2009-12-30T22:00:00.007-06:00

BEFORE:scroll down to see the after pics, blogger photo is not working with me today.

What we did while mom wrapped presents in the other room...

We have 4 shopping carts now, my living room looks like a shopping center parking lot.

Piper, the reluctant princess.

Chloe loves the bling.

Chloe, Ava, Piper and Logan

This is what I used for the curtains, I love this fabric! I thought about using my Michael Miller "Dick and Jane" fabric but it has more reds and blues so I went with this one and it matches perfect.

Yummy cookies baking in the oven! (this pic was taken before we touched up the paint around the hinges)

AFTER:

So here are the pictures finally! We finished up the day after Christmas. Gary cut the holes for the sink and faucets and put on the door, moved the hinges from the side to the bottom for the oven door. Levi did 3 coats of the paint in record time, it's Cha-Cha Pink Dutch Boy. On Christmas day Grandpa Eissens helped cut out the knobs and burners. I painted the knobs and burners, sewed the curtains and gave instructions on how I wanted it done lol.

Cost: We already had the entertainment center in the basement and it was ready for the dump, we used scrap pieces of plywood to replace the back and for the knobs and burners, also to add the refrigerator door. We used the handles that were on the original but moved them to the new door and placed one on the top of the oven door. I bought 2 packages of hinges for around $2 each, 1 curtain rod $1.79, the sink is a bowl that we had, the faucet was on clearance for $6 (I would have preferred a kitchen faucet but would not pay full price), the paint was $13 minus a $5 rebate, the fabric came from my fabric stash so the whole thing only cost around $20.00! The picture on the oven door is an actual picture of gingersnaps baking in my oven, I just enlarged it and printed it off and slid it into a plastic sleeve before gluing it on. I am very happy with the way it turned out and I am sure that the girls will play with it for years to come. I plan on sewing them some aprons and a chef's hat for Logan soon and for the girl's birthday in August I want to sew up a bunch of play food. Right now they are mainly cooking and feeding the dollies but as they get older they will get into the play foods more. I hope you enjoyed this :) I'm going to blog a little less and craft a little more, I need to build up my inventory for my Etsy store so I can get it up and running full force. It's getting harder to do anything while the girls are awake, because the minute I'm not looking they are climbing or getting into something crazy, especially Piper. Right now she has on her brothers snow pants and is standing on top of the dog crate reaching for a shelf of Cherished Teddies! We are also making some progress in the area of potty training, Ava goes almost every time and Chloe is catching on too, Piper just says "no way" when I try to get her to go. We are far from cloth training pants but at least we are using less diapers ,Yay!! But as you can imagine the girls are really taking a lot of time and require lots of attention, this is nothing new but now that they are getting into more stuff I can't keep up as easily, so there may be fewer posts, we'll see. I can't wait until spring and playtime outside!!

4 Pounds of Cinnamon?

2009-12-21T16:08:00.007-06:00

Mom put the camera down and read to me!

Today's post is about a craft that I had planned that won't be happening and a Christmas project that I planned that isn't done (or started for that matter) but it better get done before Santa comes!! I am totally using this blog as a way to force Gary into helping with this one. He told me he would help days ago and that just hasn't happened so lets put a little more pressure on him eh? Yes I am really doing this honey. Smile it will be fun and you will get lots of fun out of watching the kids play with it. Oh yea I should tell you guys what the heck I'm talking about right.

First the one that won't get done, I have roughly 4 lbs of Cinnamon that I bought at the Amish bulk foods store a few months ago to make some great smelling clay that was supposed to be made into adorable ornaments. Upon revisiting the web site I had bookmarked with the recipe I discovered that I didn't have enough white school glue to make it happen and unfortunately not enough days left to let them dry anyway, crap. You can find the recipe here. I am going to buy a gallon of school glue next time I see some, I have looked at Walmart and they don't carry it in huge containers. I also want some for making some Oobleck, I bought some liquid starch for making that already too. Click that link and you see some lesson plans for using "Bartholomew and the Oobleck" by Dr. Seuss. I don't home school but I like to do things like that for summer or weekend activities, the more they learn the better right. Ok let's get down to the business of the project that we have to get done. Here is a picture of our old entertainment center that we are making into a kitchen center for the girls.

It's shoved into the corner so I didn't get the best picture but you get the idea. It is going to be a kitchen center with a sink, refrigerator and oven. I need Gary to cut the wood into the right size for the doors, it's already marked and I have the new hinges too so it should go quickly. I hope he gets it cut soon so I can get busy on the painting. He doesn't like to do "creative" things so he is avoiding it, I told him I will tell him exactly what to do and he doesn't like that either, lol. I saw a pink "retro" kitchen center and it was only $300! What? I would like to have $300 to refurbish my own kitchen, are you kidding, I could replace my counter tops or get a new oven for that. This entertainment center was in the basement. It has scuff marks all over the front of it from somebody putting their feet up on the front of it while they watched TV. I am only guessing that they were sitting so close to the TV because they were trying to keep the volume down so they wouldn't get caught watching it late at night. The drawer that was in the middle was broken and is no longer there and there are water marks and scratches on it so it was going to be taken to the dump soon, but now it's getting a second chance as a kitchen center. Reduce, Re-use, Recycle! Photos to come....soon I hope.

Oops it's not in a can!

2009-12-15T13:44:00.004-06:00

I woke up this morning extra tired. I think the late night grocery shopping from Sunday night has caught up with me. Not good considering it's going to be a very busy day. We are splitting up the kids tonight because we are supposed to be in two places at the same time "again". Daddy is taking 2 of the girls to the wrestling meet and I am taking Logan and 1 of the girls to the Christmas Program. If I get done in time I will go over to the wrestling meet when the program is over. Considering the program is at 7pm and that's what time Logan usually goes to bed on a school night this should be interesting. I will probably pay for it the rest of the week.
I cooked a turkey today, Levi brought it up from the freezer and put it in the fridge to thaw, we didn't get turkey on Thanksgiving so he was hungry for some. I put it in this morning and it was done around noon so the girls had some for lunch. For some reason the smell of the turkey in the oven made me want some pumpkin maple custard. I cracked the 4 eggs and added the maple syrup to the mixing bowl. After searching the small pantry and not finding the can of pumpkin that I was sure was in there, I moved the search to the hallway pantry. This pantry was originally a coat closet but Austin put up some shelves in it for me when we moved here because the kitchen is just too small for this big family. I had just cleaned the hallway pantry yesterday and didn't remember seeing a can of pumpkin but for some reason I was convinced that I had some pumpkin someplace. When I opened the door I realized my mistake, there sat a pie pumpkin but no canned pumpkin! Well I was not about to seed, bake and puree a pumpkin after baking a turkey all morning. After searching for recipes I decided to add some more eggs and some milk to the egg and syrup mixture pour it over some bread cubes and turn it into crockpot french toast. I had to crawl on my hands and knees to get out the small crockpot because it was about the last thing in the back of the cupboard underneath the picnic basket and the griddle. Why does it hurt so bad to crawl on my knees now? I don't understand that at all, my knees are fat now, why doesn't that work as a padding? So anyway I put the mixture into the crockpot and made room (crammed it in) in the fridge. I will plug it in tonight and we can have some French Toast for breakfast in the morning.

Snowed in and Sewing-How to Make Korkers- plus some coupon talk.

2009-12-14T00:32:00.001-06:00

Not a very good picture but it's really hard to even get everybody to look at the same time! These were from one of our "snow days". We had blizzard conditions and no school for 4 days, I think it was 4 days but it seemed like 2 weeks lol. I was trying to sew with all the kids home and that doesn't work very well! We are really missing our Expedition this year! We are without any 4x4 at all. Gary got stuck twice trying to get home from work last week. Thank God for wonderful neighbors! Our neighbor with a big tractor scooped a drift that was 4 or 5 feet high and about 40 feet long to get to our house and pull Gary out. The road had drifted completely shut on both ends by the time he got off work, ah country life in Iowa.

Yay, I finished the dresses in time for the work Christmas party. I had been planning them since summer but didn't start on them until a couple of weeks ago...I was going to try my own design and see if I could skip putting in 3 zippers. Well it worked out ok for Chloe's dress when I made the *yellow sample dress but unfortunately the "homemade" dressmaker's dummy I have doesn't have arms and I didn't take that into account when making that dress. What does that mean you ask? Well Chloe can wear the yellow dress because she is a little skinny mini, Piper or Ava cannot get their arms into it! the waist is too small so it would require a zipper to get it to fit them and that defeats the whole purpose of trying to make up my own pattern! Geesh! So the fabric sat and sat while I debated on what to do with it. I wasn't happy with the pattern I had and when I tried to buy one that I liked at 2 different stores they were both out of the one I wanted, so I took that as a sign that I wasn't supposed to make that one. So I ended up using a pattern I already had and just tweaking it a bit to my liking, I ended up putting in 3 zippers anyway ugh. I started cutting out the dresses on Monday for the party that was Saturday. I finished hemming them on Sat. morning and made some korkers that day too. I made little snowmen from polymer clay and made myself a little snowman pin so I could match. The gorgeous blue fabric was given to me through Freecycle. I used to be the moderator for our county but gave it up this past summer because I had too many irons in the fire. If I remember correctly the fabric was used for making bridesmaids dresses and there was quite a bit left over and I was the lucky duck who got it! By the way I know you've heard of Leigh Michaels and that's the pen name for the wonderful lady who gifted the fabric to me! Is that cool or what? Here is a link so you can check out some of her books, I really want to read her books on writing soon. http://home.mchsi.com/~leighmichaels/

Here are some tips on how to make your own korker bows.

To make the korker bows just wrap some ribbon around some dowels and secure with a clothespin. I used 1/4 inch ribbon and dowels on these. Cut them down to fit into your oven. Bake them on a cookie sheet at 250 degrees for about an hour or so. Take them out and let them cool before taking them off the dowel and they will be all curly when you are done. Cut them into strips about 4 inches long and just group them how you want as far as colors, I like to use 18 to 20 little strips for a full bow, you can use more or less as you wish. Just tie them together and glue onto an empty barrette of your choice. I bought the ribbon at Walmart and the barrettes in bulk from Ebay. The snowmen are made from Polymer clay, buy it when it's on sale for $1.00 per square otherwise you will be paying around $1.75 per square. I don't have a bunch of fancy tools for it either, I just use what I have around the house. The stores want you to buy a fancy little rolling pin and all these gadgets, whatever, I used an ink pin to roll out the blue clay for the scarves.

11:30pm Sunday: I just got back from a grocery trip, I saved over $60.00 all together tonight. Levi (14) went with me and was embarrassed about my big coupon binder! I started carrying it with me so I don't ever miss out on a good deal, if I see a product on clearance or a sale I didn't know about and I have the coupon in my binder where it's categorized and easy to find then I can just whip it out and use it. He threatened to take a picture of me and my binder and my fistful of coupons and send it to the "Hillbilly Corner" for the picture of the week in our local shopper. I pointed out that saving money isn't a Hillbilly thing to do, it's a smart thing to do. He responded with a comment about how every time I put an item in the cart I flipped through 50 coupons. Yea, well I used almost 50 coupons at Hy-Vee and my cart was so full they almost had to get a second cart for me for only $189.00 I have certainly done better but hey I saved a lot of money and I got everything on my list plus I got items that will qualify for another $20 back in mail in rebates. Most importantly I have enough things to put together for meals for a couple of weeks if not more and also snacks and even a lot of frozen foods that are easy to fix in a hurry! My favorites this trip were the Huggies for $4.99 from Walgreens (sale $8.99-$2 coupon and get a $2 Register Reward) and the 2 boxes of Special K/All Bran crackers for .22 cents each after $1.50 coupons. Here is a goofy picture of my receipt from Hy-Vee, it's almost 5 feet long!

*I can't find the picture of the yellow dress, I will look in the closet and try to get a good picture of it today if it's in there.

I'm Still Here!

2009-12-06T23:32:00.000-06:00

Sorry about the lack of posts lately! I have been so busy lately with the kids and trying to keep up with the housework. I have had 2 root canals since the last post, Piper and Chloe went through a stage of climbing out of bed about 20 times each at nap time and that really took a toll on my schedule! For about 2 weeks solid I got absolutely nothing done at nap time, ugh. Logan was sick and home from school for 3 days last week and having an extra one home all day means more bickering and when he is sick he can be so demanding and he was throwing up too, Piper had ear infection and then hives after 8 days on medicine. I have decided that she is allergic to the Target brand fabric softener. The bad news is that there are about 15 loads of "clean laundry" downstairs that needs to be folded and put away, and I have no idea which loads have the offending fabric softener in them. Piper is bigger in size but Chloe can usually wear most of the same things so I am separating the newest "clean" loads for Piper to wear with the old fabric softener in it and the other loads will be kept away from her, a pain in the butt yes but better than trying to sort and rinse/dry tons of laundry. Speaking of laundry I went down to fold some clothes and wash one last load for the day around 9pm after the 4 youngest were soundly sleeping, I had to round up some work clothes for Gary-there were lots of clean work clothes but they were mixed in with all the other clean laundry. I think there are about a dozen loads of dirty laundry at that point, and most of the sheets on the 6 beds are going to be added to that in a day or two and the blankets and comforters are going to need to be washed soon. I was sorting and matching socks when Levi yelled "Mom! Come here!" I looked over and he was pointing to the floor. The drain pipe from the washer was disconnected and all of the water draining from the machine was spraying out onto the floor and the piles of dirty laundry! Yikes! The water spread from one end of the basement to the other and soaked books, rugs, stuffed animals, coats and yes the whole pile of dirty laundry! It was a terrible mess, now I have to rush to get all of that soaking wet laundry washed before it gets moldy. Yuck. So I hope everybody can see some of the reasons that I haven't been posting as much lol. We also have 1 son in High School Wrestling and 1 son doing Saturday basketball, I usually do some of the grocery shopping on the weekends but may have to change that. I changed the bath time routine for the girls, I used to do it in the evening as part of the bedtime routine but Levi has to be picked up from practice about the time we normally put them in the bath. Daytime baths allow me to let them have more playtime in the tub, not just in and out assembly line bathing and dressing. I can let them play while I get some cleaning done in the bathroom. This means the bathroom will be cleaned more frequently and will stay better organized. The only thing bad was that they watched me clean the toilet and Piper did the "monkey see, monkey do" thing later that day. She got into the bathroom and dumped a whole bottle of shampoo all over the toilet and sink! Well I'm going to wrap this up now and head to bed, I'm so tired my eyes are crossing. The picture is of Libby our poor chubby little Jack-Rat, I forgot to feed her so she got into the trash and decided to get her own food. The other picture is of my Walgreens deal. The total before coupons was $63.00, after my coupons and register rewards it only cost me $10.00 for ALL of that stuff!! There are 2 boxes of Kleenex, 3 bags of floss piks, 6 Barbie and Spiderman toothbrushes and some kids mouthwash, 8 holiday pencils, 2 bottles of laundry soap, 2 rolls of scotch tape, a pkg of hair ties, Dawn dish soap and a Fusion razor. TEN bucks! I love doing that. I only bought the deoderant because they are black and gold and Levi wanted one, I didn't have a coupon but did get $2 back in register rewards, I could have kept my total down to around $5.00 if he didn't see those and want them lol.

Window markers and misc. stuff

2009-11-12T10:46:00.000-06:00

This is what those really cool Crayola Window Markers looks like. Those dots you see are beetles, the ones that appear suddenly in huge numbers each fall in the Midwest. I heard that they are released each year and that they have some purpose but I don't recall what it is, this isn't an informational blog so your on your own if you want to know more. They look like orange ladybugs and I vacuum them up daily because they actually get inside the house yuck. If you smash them they stink.This is what regular Crayons look like on the windows. It was an honest mistake so I didn't freak out about it. Piper saw us drawing on the windows with the markers so she thought she'd try it too. This was last week and I'm really behind on my blog, sorry.

This is a picture of Ava's plate. She was sitting there lining up each noodle so that they were side by side. She does things like this a lot, I was thinking she might have OCD but when I looked at the picture it bothered me that the corn was not together so maybe I am the one with issues!

The chair game

2009-11-03T09:27:00.000-06:00

The Chair Game. Directions: 1) Wait until supervising adult is cooking breakfast and is completely distracted because there is no pancake mix and she has to make them from scratch. Chant "cakies-cakies!" for at least 5 minutes prior to this so that there is no way she will try to serve oatmeal or eggs.

2) Flip up headrest of leather chair to reveal the zipper, unzip and proceed to pull out as much cotton candy as you can before supervising adult catches on to the game.

3) Flash the puppy dog eyes and big smiles when adult notices and pretend to play sweetly with the cotton candy by filling shopping cart and play cookware with it, only throw it wildly when adult is not looking.

4) Use teamwork to replace the cotton candy inside the chair or you won't get your "cakies".

A Princess, A Unicorn, A LoveBug and Spiderman

2009-11-02T14:55:00.000-06:00

Pictures of our Halloween adventure. It was our first time taking the triplets out without a stroller and they did great! Piper really enjoyed the candy and they all loved digging into the bags and dumping them to inspect all the treats. We spilled Nerds on Aunt Paula's carpet while visiting and we played with Grandma's kitten that she adopted from us. A big Thank you to Delaney C. for the Princess costume and to Josie R. for the Unicorn!

Our Marine is on his way back to North Carolina today, we had a nice visit but since he was on RA (Recruiter's Assistance) he wasn't really home that much. Of course he had Halloween parties to go to and friends to visit with too. We will get to see him at Christmas and since he will be on leave during that time he'll be home more :) I am starting to work on Christmas dresses and presents but with 2 early outs this week for the boys I don't know how much I will get done. Maybe If I decided what kind of dress I was making it would help. I will start the pettiskirts though and go from there.

Does this look like a potty to you?

2009-10-23T00:20:00.000-05:00

Does this look like a potty to you?

How about now, with the lid up?

I guess Ava thinks it does look like a potty because she totally peed in it today! I was changing them all before nap time and I guess she couldn't wait for me to open the bathroom door or something. I noticed she had something wet on her leg and I asked her where she peed at. She smiled and lifted the lid on the turtle. Oh, well at least it wasn't on the floor. And at least it wasn't poop.

By the way that is a Radio Flyer Turtle. I love it and I wish they made them in adult size. It has casters on it like an office chair, ya know the wheels turn all around so you can fly around all over and spin. Logan goes like a maniac on it all around the living room and up and down the hallway on the wood floors. I remember the riding toys we had as kids where the wheels didn't even turn, you ride up into a corner or something and had to stand up and carry it between your legs.

2009-10-19T23:52:00.000-05:00

I can't be the only one. The only person on the planet who can never remember passwords? Why do you have to have a password for a site that you print out coupons on or anything other than a bank website? No. I don't want you to answer that, I just want to complain right now. No I don't want some weirdo to go on some site that I frequent and pretend to be me and say a bunch of crazy stuff, I will do that on my own. No I don't want somebody to hack into my account and take my $9, I have to make that last another 2 weeks! I just don't think it's necessary to have a password for every stinking site that's out there. I used to write them down (pre-triplets) on a special piece of paper that I kept in a clear cover so that they were always handy when I needed them. Guess what, most of those sites required a password and filling out of gobs of information and then I only went back to that site rarely so it wasn't even worth the time it took. Some of them store your address etc...so that it's "faster" to purchase from them. Well lets see, I can type my address in a matter of seconds but it took me 6 guesses and checking my email to reset my password that was about 12 minutes of frustration so that it would be faster to checkout, no thanks you keep your convenience. While I'm complaining I would like to mention how irritated it makes me to shop online for clearance items that are "out of stock". I shop online just like I do in a brick and mortar store, I always check the clearance first. Some stores like one that starts with K and ends with ohl's are terrible about this. I get all pumped up thinking I'm toddler girl's shoes for $3 and I'm ready to order 6 of every size and color and when I hit the "checkout" button, suddenly there are no shoes available in any size but NB!

Ok enough complaining. I just had a long day and I'm extra tired, my husband is sick so he has a stuffy nose and that keeps us both awake. I'm going to add a little story here about his snoring, I wrote it a while back and forgot to publish it so here it is for all of you that can't breathe from the flu or just because you snore...or sleep with a snorer...is that a word?

Don’t sleep with a snorer!

I couldn't sleep last night. What’s new right? I never sleep, that explains why I’m so tired-it usually doesn’t hit me until about 3pm and then I feel like passing out. I just push through it and keep going, I have to. Sometime around 9pm after the 4 youngest are sound asleep I get my energy back and either log on to the computer for blog reading and Facebook or I work on a sewing project. I delay going to bed for as long as possible but not intentionally. I just love reading all of the wonderful things out there in the blogosphere that I can’t stop. Tutorials are by far my very favorite.
I also hate going to bed and listening to Gary snore like a lawn mower all night. I poke him in the arm about 3 times each night when I just can’t stand it any more. I read an article about snoring spouses the other day and it said that studies show that if you snore or sleep with a snorer you are woke up about 21 times PER HOUR!! I totally believe that, Gary and I are both tired a lot and it’s not because we have 5 kids running around here.
When I am lying in bed wishing he would stop snoring I get really frustrated and angry which in turn keeps me up even if he happens to stop snoring. I poke him and he gets mad telling me that he was not snoring. Yea, I just like to stay awake all night and pretend he is snoring so I can wake him, that makes sense right? Sometimes I get so mad that I just want to pinch his nose shut. I don’t though because I know that he would start swatting around in the air and I don’t want to get swatted. So last night I was thinking if I just had one of those chomper toys on a stick, you know like a dino head that “bites” when you squeeze the trigger and it’s on a stick. The kind that each one of the boys has had at one time or another and they all hid behind something and tried to take a chunk out of my butt with it. I think I took them all away and put them on top of the refrigerator. But over time they all were broken and thrown away, they are not typically top quality toys. Anyway if I had one of those I would keep it by the bed and pinch Gary’s nose shut with it each time he snored! He would either stop snoring or beat me to death with it-either way I could get some rest.

Kolcraft is a Wonderful Company!

2009-10-16T15:11:00.000-05:00

Here is a copy of a letter I emailed to the Customer Service Department of Kolcraft Enterprises Inc. about one of our baby bed mattresses:

Hi,
I am wondering if there is anything you can do to help me. We have 3 baby mattresses made by your company. The oldest one was made in 2004, purchased for our now 5 year old and is still going strong for one of our triplets. Another was made in 2008 and is in perfect condition. The last one is where we have a problem. It has no tag on it so I don't know when it was made it was given to us in great condition, but it has ripped and torn to the point where one side has no vinyl left on it (or whatever that material is). The baby who sleeps in that bed feels the tears and now has begun to pull up the sheet and pick at the inside stuffing material.

We have used duct tape on some of the rips but it's beyond repair now. First I would like to know what the content of the "insides" is, it's fluffy like cotton candy, it sticks to everything. Is it safe for babies to touch?? Is there any way to repair it or would this be covered under any warranty? Having triplets and a 5 yr old makes for a tight budget so we are not able to just go out and purchase a new mattress. Do you make a mattress replacement cover? Anything? Can you give me any suggestions?

I have included some pictures of the mattress to see if you could help us figure out how old it is or if it's under warranty. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you,
Amy

I received an email from an awesome lady named Lynn and she asked for a number and told me where it was located on the sticker. By the end of the week she told me to tear off the sticker and mail it to her, she would put in an order to replace the mattress! Well it's had been so crazy/busy around here watching my oldest son go off to boot camp and losing my mind and then going out to California and all that business I kinda forgot all about it. I found the papers last weekend when I cleaned the desk and Gary put the stamp on it and mailed it off. I honestly thought it had been too long (since the end of April) and that they might say forget it. But today the UPS guy came and brought a brand new mattress! You can buy one here http://www.sears.com/shc/s/ProductDisplay?partNumber=04988521000P&storeId=10153&sName=All&psid=FROOGLE01&vName=Gifts&cName=Baby&catalogId=12605&sid=IDx20070921x00003a

I'm really happy about it too because yesterday the girls were watching me change the sheets and thought they'd try it at nap time (they ripped off the sheets) so it will be nice to get that old fuzzy thing out of there for Piper. This picture of the old one looks really bad, Piper had really destroyed it more in the last few months. I swear when we started using it it looked decent, it just had a couple little tears in it. I was praying that they would send me a mattress cover/pad, like the kind the whole thing slides into and you zip it up. That was all I was hoping for and I just want to show everybody that there really are some great companies out there that really do care. Most Sealy/Kolcraft mattresses have a 10 year warranty and I know that the old one wasn't that old. ** Just a note for safety: The firmness of the mattress was never compromised or we would have immediately taken it out of the bed. Please remember that firm mattresses are safer for babies to sleep on and always put your baby to sleep on their back.

Hy-Vee - Helpful Ideas - Coupon Match-Ups 10/14/09

2009-10-14T15:03:00.001-05:00

Hy-Vee - Helpful Ideas - Coupon Match-Ups 10/14/09

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The Golden Tooth??

2009-10-12T10:14:00.000-05:00

I was talking to Logan this morning while brushing his teeth. He is 5 years old so he does brush on his own but when we are in a hurry like this morning for school I always brush for him to hurry the process along. When the girls brush it takes almost 10 minutes of brushing time before I can wrangle the tooth brushes away from them and Logan is usually brushing right along with them. I don't mind most of the time because it helps to erase some of the guilt that I have for ruining Logan's teeth. What kind of horrible mother would ruin her child's teeth you ask? Not Supermom, that's who. He had what most people call "bottle rot" on his front teeth. He never took a bottle-ever. None of my kids ever had a bottle past 12 months in fact. Logan nursed until he was 22 months and no that didn't cause it either silly. Somehow he got started taking a sippy cup to bed. It wasn't every night at first and I really think it had a lot to do with the fact that we had a 4 year old foster son at the time that routinely had screaming fits for up to 2 hours at a time, even at bedtime. He shared a room with Logan, yea. This child took a LOT of my time and energy and it was right at the time when I weaned Logan. Enter major "mommy guilt". By the time I realized it had became a habit it was too late, he was completely addicted. We tried switching to water and all the tricks and nothing worked. I cannot believe how fast it happened either, he got a black spot right between his 2 front teeth! The dentist used a grinder and ground away the black spot so now his 2 front teeth are shorter. I bet everybody up until now thought it was just natural but no it isn't. I can't wait for the day when his baby teeth come out and he can have some new shiny pearly whites! Which brings me to the conversation we had this morning. i was telling him about the Tooth Fairy Pillow that I will be making for him and we discussed the procedure of hanging it on the doorknob outside his room so she wouldn't have to wake him when she exchanges the tooth for money. I told him he would have to do a great job brushing those "new" teeth because they are going to have to last forever. Logan looked at me and said "yea, and they will be GOLD!" Um, what? "No, they will be white." "But xxxx's new tooth is gold." he said with a look of disappointment. Ok so some kid in his class got a new gold tooth. Why I'm not sure but I'm going to let myself think that the kid had bottle rot, it just makes me feel better. Here is a link to a site that has a FREE pattern for a Ballerina tooth fairy pillow as well as a monster one if you look around. http://mmmcrafts.blogspot.com/2009/02/tooth-pillow-revisited.html

The triplets are restless today. We all have colds and are not feeling the greatest. I think we will head downstairs to the playroom after they eat their pancakes. The playroom isn't quite ready yet but they will still have fun and I can do some laundry and watch them at the same time, that's the idea behind the basement playroom. Hey do you hate giving pancakes with syrup to your kids? I used to, I hated the sticky mess and they always needed a bath when they were done, especially with girls because they get it in their hair somehow. I started making pancakes and putting about a Tablespoon of powdered sugar on top of them instead of syrup and it's great. No mess, so they can eat them at the little table instead of the highchairs and they love them. By now you all know to cut up everything for kids with your pizza cutter right? Oh yea, they taste like funnel cakes and have half the calories of regular maple syrup and less carbs too so they are good for mommies and daddies too. I just use a store brand complete mix that you add water to and I find it's faster than scrambled eggs and you can add fresh fruit right into the batter if you want to. We like blueberry, strawberry and apple pancakes. If you add the fruit you don't need the powdered sugar. Pancakes are also a great place to hide some Flax oil. I'm not always super health conscious, sometimes I like to make some fresh whipped cream to add to the top of our pancakes-yet another reason to get a cow lol.

This is Logan last week, right as he got off the school bus. Evidently he got to pick a prize from the prize box. I opened the door and this is what I saw!

Dora Upcycle, Skirt and Organization Issues

2009-10-09T10:15:00.000-05:00

First is the Dora jacket remake before and afters. The skirt has no elastic yet because I can't decide who will wear it yet. It only takes a couple minutes to string some elastic in there so I will do it at the last minute I'm sure. Now all we need is some brown boots to complete the outfit. The little jacket was too short for anybody so adding the ruffle made it about an 1 1/2 inches longer. The top of the skirt is a light denim fabric that came from a pair of my old fat pants, I still have fat pants...they are just smaller. Then I added a couple of ruffles to match the jacket. I thought about going with tans and browns but the brown fabric I had on hand looked too old lady-ish so I took it in another direction. I had the lavender Dora fabric anyway. Oh, if you saw the guitar tee from yesterday's post it was just a black tee that was too short for Logan and I added a couple inches of red and blue striped tee shirt knit on the bottom.

So here is what's frustrating me today,any ideas are welcome and can be left in the comments section following this post. I have a whole storage tote filled with photographs from before we had our digital camera, school pictures and some are even my baby pictures. I don't know what to do with them. They are not organized or sorted in any fashion and it makes me crazy. I seriously cannot afford to go out and by 100 photo albums. I bought 2 and nobody (including me) wants to sort and put them in. I tried scanning a bunch to the computer so I could put them on a disc, it took half a day to scan a small pile of them! Besides the fact that I have so many pictures on my laptop that it's bogging down already and I need to clear them out and put those onto a disc too. I attempted to do it last week and I had too many pictures to fit on one disc so with my short attention span I ended up not continuing and now I have lost the blank discs in some clutter, hey don't judge. I have 8 people living in a 3 bedroom 1 bathroom house, you'd have clutter too.

My other frustration at the moment is that the basement is so filled with...well...garage sale stuff and stuff for storage. I wanted to clean it out and make a childproof area so the girls can come down with me and Levi's unfinished room is going to be converted to a sewing/craft room so that we can have our dining room back. We haven't had a table to eat on since the girls babies. The dining room table can come back upstairs and I can set up 2 long tables in the "new" sewing room for cutting out patterns etc...The basement currently has 2 unfinished rooms and an unfinished bathroom. When Austin moved out of his corner of the basement, Levi decided to drag all his stuff over there and take over. I finally got him to clear out the room he had been sleeping in so I need to start cleaning and moving down there. I'm keeping the bed in that room so that when Austin comes back to visit he has a place to sleep. "so I get to sleep in the sweatshop?" he asked. Yes. I hope that this weekend I get a chance to get down there and make some headway because there are so many other things to get done and this is the biggest obstacle in my plan to get organized. The picture of me with shelves of sewing stuff behind me is actually in our dining room and there is a full size dresser in there with girls clothes in it too! Aaahh the madness!

2009-10-08T08:10:00.000-05:00

I will add the rest of the Dora pics after I take them-oops. I added a ruffle to this and made a matching skirt. I thought I had already taken the pictures but nope.

Today I'm sharing some of my favorite places on the web. The first is a great site for anybody with kids called http://storylineonline.net/ by the Screen Actors Guild. It's an online streaming video program featuring SAG members reading books aloud. You can have Al Gore read a book to your kid lol. James Earl Jones and Amanda Bynes are a couple more and the books are all great too. Stellaluna and A Bad Case of Stripes are just a couple. My trio of 2 year olds even sat still for a story on this site and usually they have no interest in the computer unless its spouting Barney songs. The actor reads the book and you get to see the pictures too. Check it out, it might buy you 10 minutes of quiet.

I also love a blog called "Confessions of a Sewing Dork" I'd love for you to go check her out, she has lots of awesome free tutorials and is full of great ideas and great give aways! I recently won an adorable outfit from her blog and I never win anything lol. You can see the outfit here: http://sewingdork.blogspot.com/search/label/giveaways really it's worth a peek! She also does mama clothes too. She is a sweet lady from Canada and she's funny too.

I was going to add some more but it's going to be another day because the dog is scratching at the front door to get in and the cat is scratching at the back door for food and the girls are jumping around shouting "eat eggies!" so I gotta run. I will tack on some pics of things I have been working on here at the end real quick though :-)

Slippers x6 plus a Free tutorial link

2009-10-02T13:01:00.000-05:00

I finished 6 pair of slippers for the girls. I worked on them last night after the girls went to bed and again this morning while they ate breakfast. Not bad. I cut out everything and always sew in an assembly line fashion since I always make multiples of what I am sewing. Here are some pictures and if you want a FREE tutorial to make your own just hop on over to the Maked blog, like naked but craftier. 4 awesome ladies that do a little bit of everything crafty.http://baremaked.blogspot.com/2007/11/reversible-fabric-baby-shoes-tutorial.html

I made all of mine out of scraps including an old soft wooly sweater for some and the bottom was cut from an outgrown lavender suede top so they wouldn't slip and slide around the wood floors. Now the girls can have warm tootsies!

Getting ready for an Iowa Winter

2009-10-01T14:47:00.000-05:00

Chloe on the slide.

Piper inspecting an acorn! "What's that?"

Look at those curls!

Ava

Sorry the pictures are not in the right place again. Blogger isn't liking me much today.

It's getting colder here, the forecast is calling for 50 degrees tomorrow. Wow! I have been doing the typical winter preparations around home. I have a list of things for the guys to do like clean the chimney and put up plastic over the door we don't use in the kitchen-it lets in a lot of cold air, there is a window in the girls' room that also needs plastic. We need to eventually budget for new windows but not this year. We use wood heat and that saves us a lot of money but with Austin gone we are a little behind on our supply. Gary and Levi need to take a day for just going out and getting some more wood up. Last year we didn't use very much LP at all, we always leave the furnace off for as long as possible and then when we do give in and turn it on, it's mostly just for a back up for nights and when I can't get the wood stove started lol. I do pretty good but sometimes if we run out of fatwood I just can't get away long enough to sit there and mess with it(it's in the basement). I love to bake and the oven will heat the kitchen and living room pretty good so sometimes I just bake something in the morning and then when the girls lay down for nap I have time to go get the wood stove going. Normally this time of year we have a fully stocked pantry and freezer. Since having triplets though it's been rough getting ahead and this year I didn't even attempt a garden. In years past we have had huge gardens and shelves full of green beans, tomatoes, relish and lots of winter squash. Last year we had a freezer full of corn and apple slices but this year with a bunch of 2 yr olds running around it just didn't happen. We have some raspberry jam that Randy helped with but that's about it. I did get over to the Amish stores to get my winter supply of dry goods in bulk. I forgot about getting pictures until I was almost done putting it away so there is only one picture. I think I will dig out some of our older pictures of our big gardens and fun harvest pictures so I can post them in the next day or two just for fun (fun for me :-).

I'm sewing up some winter slippers for everybody and adding sleeves or lengthening some shirts to get some more wear out of them. Adding some ruffles to the bottom of some of the girls pants too, they are so cute and if I can get 6 more months out of them why not? I want to get these done so I can start on the Holiday outfits. I am also planning some adorable coats for the girls so I have a lot to do as usual.

I'm also adding a few park pictures from our last outing.

It's Snowing Yellow Pee Pellets!

2009-09-25T00:10:00.000-05:00

If I had a quarter for every mess I've had to clean up...........

Today I was thrilled to be able to take my shower before noon. I waited for the elementary bus and then the high school bus to come and pick up the boys. The girls were still sleeping at 7:40 am. It was a miracle. I dashed to get clean mom uniform out of the closet, a big tee shirt and flannel lounge pants of course. I jumped in the shower and tried really hard not to listen for babies and not to worry that a madman would break into the house and take all my kids while I was in there. About 8 minutes later I received 10 bonus energy points for getting a shower done before nap time! I felt great and when I came out the girls were awake singing and “counting” like they do each morning. I knew they were ok in the cribs, they haven’t been climbing out for a while so I ran in and set up for snack. I already made the sippies the night before and put them in the fridge so I just broke a banana into 3 pieces and set everything out on the little picnic table that now sits in the living room for them. I always give them a small snack to buy myself some time while I get coffee and make breakfast.
I also knew they would still have their pajamas on. I started putting the zip up footy kind on them backwards several months ago. That is the only way that they stay dressed in the cribs. I also put the pajamas on for nap and if one of them just won’t keep the clothes on, they get to wear backwards pajamas during the day too. In the beginning I cut the feet off but soon realized that if they were large enough it was not necessary because there is room to just twist the feet around comfortably. Before the backwards pajamas started I used to walk into the room after nap or in the morning to unspeakable messes that involved naked babies and poop.
Now that the girls are 2 years old I let them dress themselves. I just unzip the pjs and pass out pull ups and clothes and they do the rest as long as I leave them in the cribs. Ava needs some help but Chloe and Piper can do it on their own. If I let them out they would just strip and stay naked until I caught them to dress them. Chasing a 22 lb toddler may not sound hard but doing it 3 times is really exhausting and takes about 40 minutes-I timed myself one day.
Today is rainy and chilly here in Iowa and the house is cold. I had to go into the other room to get long sleeved shirts for them. I left for 5 seconds and when I came back Piper was naked, swinging a very wet disposable diaper around her head like a lasso. Just as I told her to give it to me the diaper hit the side of the crib and literally exploded. If this was a sitcom they would have played out this scene in slow motion as the pee soaked gel beads flew all around the room. like yellow snow. They were all over the pile of blankets, pillows and babies that the girls had tossed out of the beds. All over 2 of the cribs and some of them were in Piper’s hair. Everyone screamed. I don’t know if they screamed because they were pelted with pee pellets or because of my reaction of horror. I spent the next 30 minutes brushing the gel off every surface and changing sheets. Then I had to get out the dreaded vacuum. It’s a little Dirt Devil, kinda like the old Dustbuster but it’s on a stick. We only have 2 rooms in the house with carpet (and this is a great example of why) so when the last vac gave out I just bought this little one. For reasons unknown to me, Piper and Chloe are terrified of it. They don’t run away from it though they stand and scream at the edge of the room and won’t leave. Nobody else is home to pick them up and protect them I suppose that’s why, or else they think it’s going to eat me and they don’t want to leave me alone with it. This is strange because when they were about 4 months old Piper went through a stage where she wouldn’t fall asleep in the swings like the others. She would only fall asleep while nursing or if I put her in the sling and ran the vacuum. That worked out ok because that was before we tore out the carpet and put in the wood laminate floors. I have some cute pictures of Austin wearing a sling and running the vacuum with Piper but he probably wouldn’t want those pictures floating around the internet. So I got the mess cleaned up and it just goes to show you that if you have triplets you can’t ever get ahead in this game.

10 minute Repurposing craft-Go Rockets!!

2009-09-23T21:38:00.000-05:00

This is Homecoming week at Eddyville Blakesburg so at the BAC they are celebrating with "Hat Day" Thursday and Friday will be "Black and Gold" day. We didn't have any school shirts yet for Logan this year so I dug out an old EBHS State Wrestling 2006 tee shirt that used to be Austin's.

I pulled out my trusty sewing scissors and cut out a Rocket from the part of the shirt that said Eddyville Blakesburg. Got the iron out and pressed it onto a plain black tee shirt with fusible webbing. You can buy fusible webbing from Walmart or any fabric store and it's cheap. I always buy the plain shirts from the Dollar Tree when they have them in my kids' sizes so I can make fun things like this. Tee shirt fabric won't ravel so you don't have to sew anything. I will let him wear it Friday and then I might go ahead and sew around it with a zig zag or satin stitch, I think it looks a little plain. Logan loved it though. I really need to get crackin' on the EBHS stuff before Wrestling starts. I plan on making bows for the girls and some dresses or something in black and gold, maybe some cute little leg warmers and skirts?

Eggrolls are easy!

2009-09-22T14:29:00.000-05:00

When I get a craving for Chinese food I don't like to fork over $50 for a single meal for all of us so I make my own. I tend to do that with all kinds of though because I hate to pay somebody 4 times (or more) than actual cost to make or do something I can easily do myself. It makes no sense to me. Besides if I go out to eat anywhere I am usually wondering how many times the people touching my food actually wiped snot on their hands or if they actually washed their hands after going to the bathroom before touching my food. Grossed out yet?

Egg rolls are very easy to make and you can use whatever you like in them for filling. I usually buy the egg roll wrappers once or twice a month and they will keep in the fridge for over a week. That way I have them on hand when I get a craving.

The ingredients I use most often are ground pork, coleslaw mix, soy sauce and garlic. To make enough filling to use up the whole package of wrappers I use:

1 lb ground pork
1/2 bag of coleslaw mix
3T Soy sauce
1T minced garlic

I put a couple T. of water into a hot skillet and throw in the garlic (from a jar) and coleslaw mix. Just stir it around and cook on medium heat until the cabbage softens a little. If you cook it too long you are on your way to Sauer Kraut-you will smell it and know right away. Even if you get it too soft it's still usable don't worry. Line a mixing bowl with a paper towel and dump the mixture in the bowl to drain, you don't want any extra liquid in the filling or your egg rolls will get soggy. Using the same skillet brown the ground pork until done and then drain it in it's own paper towel lined dish. Some people actually rinse the meat but I don't, I just let it sit while I lay out the wrappers on the counter. Lay them out in rows so you can put the filling in and roll them. I plug in the fryer now and get a small dish with a little bit of water for sealing the egg rolls as you roll them. Some people use an egg mixture or some cornstarch and water mix but it's not at all necessary-plain water works just fine. If you don't have a deep fryer you can use a couple of inches of your favorite cooking oil in a pan.

Now take the paper towel out of the cabbage mixture bowl-the cabbage should be well drained now. Dump in your cooked pork, Soy sauce to taste and stir it all up-that's your filling.

Put 2 T. of filling in the middle of your wrapper. Now fold one corner in and then the 2 sides. Make it pretty tight so you don't lose any filling. Dab bit of water on the last corner and then roll it up tight. Smooth that last corner down so it sticks. Fry them for a couple minutes until they start to turn light golden brown. It's the secret to keeping them from getting greasy. I had a toddler emergency so the ones in my picture are a bit darker on the back side but hey this is real life not the Food Network right. Drain them on end in that dish lined with a new paper towel. If you lay them on their side the grease or oil will not drain out and that's gross.

Now if you have some left over wrappers you can use pie filling or do like I did. I had 2 left so I put a tiny bit of the filling I had made and I added a couple of chunks of apple to fill them out. The apples were left from snack time and since they were just sitting there in the dish already cut and peeled I stuck them in and they were yummy! The girls really like to eat these and I find it easy to get lots of veggies in their diet this way. I like broccoli slaw and zucchini, onion and ground turkey or ground beef with fresh baby spinach. Just use what you have on hand and experiment with leftovers too.

These freeze well both ways, cooked or uncooked. I freeze them uncooked and then drop them in the fryer frozen like you would some boxed store bought ones. I have a lid on my fryer though because there is a lot of splatter with the frozen ones. You could thaw them and fry too.

Got a minute?

2009-09-19T08:21:00.000-05:00

Hi everyone it's a busy Saturday morning here so I'm making this a quick post. I am gearing up to do a lot of redecorating and moving rooms here at home and I will be keeping you up to date with lots of pictures of that and I'm also going to start adding my cooking on a budget advice lol. I keep getting requests for that. People want to know how I feed this big family and I'm going to start sharing that information soon. I have lots of great tips and recipes.

Take a minute to vote for Austin and me in the Mom and Marine photo contest please. We are on page 9, the 1st pic in the 3rd row. http://photocontest.grunt.com/Default.aspx Although it's not my best looking picture it's truly my favorite one. It's in San Diego at the Marine Recruit Training Depot on Family day. It was the very first time we got to see him for 13 long weeks. I swear I thought the last 13 weeks of carrying triplets was hard but this was harder! Anyway we had just picked him up and we were sitting down to eat in the shade, he was starving and in the picture I think he had food in his mouth lol. I had been crying tears of joy so my eye make up was washed away and I was still in that moment of staring at him and being thrilled to death to see him! That's why it's my favorite, because it captured that moment in time. Thanks for voting and feel free to forward the link to vote or the link to my blog so your friends can vote too.Voting ends on 9/29. Have a great Saturday! Take time to teach your children something today and hug your loved ones.

We play with milk jugs!

2009-09-16T13:56:00.000-05:00

The triplets are really into playing with doll babies and doing things like Mommy. It's so cute to see them rocking and singing to the dolls, changing the clothes and diapers and feeding them. They talk to them in a sweet little soothing voice and I just love it. They have strollers to push the dolls in but we didn't have any beds, investing in 3 isn't something I can do right now with our 1 income budget. I love to make things out of recycled items or re purpose something that isn't being used. So I dug into my scrap stash and whipped up 3 sets of blankies and mattresses and sliced some plastic milk jugs in half being careful not to leave any sharp edges. Taa-Daa baby doll beds! They were so thrilled and they played with them all morning. Piper liked her little mattress so much she took it to nap with her. I stuffed them with cut up fleece off of a sweatshirt that was in my stash, not too full, I wanted it to be flat like a mattress. If you have time you could decorate the jugs, I did not. An older child may want to paint or decoupage them. If you are going to decoupage don't buy that expensive stuff, just use school glue mixed with water and cut up some old catalogs or ripped picture books. Remember it's not material things that make great childhood memories it's the experiences-so if you have a preschooler this might be a fun craft.

WHAT was in that diaper??

2009-09-12T22:23:00.000-05:00

Yet another post about poo. Sorry but when so much of my day is devoted to changing diapers, potty training, cleaning messes of all kinds and mostly all of my social time involves counting and ABC's, singing and pretending to cook when I'm not in the kitchen cooking for real. Well I can't remember the point and I'm sure my grammar was incorrect in that last sentence but it's late so you'll have to forgive me. I'm not even going to change it lol.

So anyway...I finally got out of the house today to interact with some real adults and what did they have me doing? Looking into diapers filled with melted candy bars made to look like POO!! The blonde in the picture (who answers to Rachel the Beautiful) is responsible for this fun filled game. I digress, this day was not for me so I will let it slide this time. This day was Trisha's special day, she is going to have a sweet little baby girl soon. This will make 2 sweet little girls now. I didn't get everybody's picture at the Baby shower simply because I didn't want to have to ask permission to put them in my blog, no littles in the pics either, same reason. I will add a pic of my present just cuz I made it myself. I also have a baby blankie and some booties but new baby doesn't have a name yet so I will wait until she arrives and gift those then since there is a large blank space on the blankie for her name. I had fun today even if it involved pseudo poo.

Just an interesting note, well I thought it was anyway, Piper has been picking the sequins off of a little purse that the girls play with and well. I found out yesterday that she ate a few of the red ones, you can guess how I knew.

40 Cups of Coffee, Thank you Ella Mae

2009-09-10T23:27:00.000-05:00

I took Logan to his Kindergarten physical appointment today. He did really well. He is in the 25th percentile for weight following his own curve and at 43 inches tall he is pretty small but growing well. No shots, just a finger poke. He told the nurse he was in 2nd grade when she asked. Next we went to Walmart to get some groceries. For some reason I was stressed out during most of the trip. I think it's because I had left my list at home, so I worried about forgetting something and spending too much money. Could it have been Logan moving at a snail's pace directly in front of my cart the whole way or maybe that he was doing helicopter arms and knocking things off the shelves or that he was throwing items into the cart and getting in and out of the cart repeatedly? I don't know why, it should have been easier than dragging 4 under 5 year olds but it wasn't. I almost lost it when he took 2 styrofoam craft balls the size of softballs and shoved them up inside his shirt...yes they look like boobs and the other 3 ladies in the isle at the time thought it was funny, I wanted to crawl under the shelf and hide. My response was to tell him that we don't pick up things we are not going to purchase-I completely ignored the whole booby thing. We got through the check out line and went in to "pretend" to play the video games for about 10 minutes before going to the van and packing 2 carts full of groceries in there. We still had to go to another store because Wm was out of chocolate milk and plantains. I bought the plantains for making making a new recipe. We went to the drive thru and got a Happy Meal on the way home. We laughed and had some deep conversations about snacks and puppies and music class, I need to make more days like this minus the Walmart trip-or at least bring my list.
Here is a link to a Youtube song, I like the oldies sometimes. This one is called 40 Cups of Coffee and talks about her man not coming home until almost 5, she watches the clock etc...I think she means a.m. but when I listen to it I relate to it better when I think p.m. Gary where are you it's almost 4:30 pm, I'll drink more coffee and hope you come home soon...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMcdzc1TkO4 Thank you Ella Mae Morse

The Tightwad Goes to an Amusement Park

2009-09-09T12:32:00.000-05:00

The music has temporarily changed in honor of this post or shall I say because of the stroller? When we were there we heard so many comments about it, I stopped counting after about 30 people said "Wow, that's cool" or " Aww that's so adorable". I also heard lots of the typical comments: "you have your hands full, oh look triplets, a blonde-brunette-and a redhead!, are they twins, they aren't triplets are they-but that one is smaller etc..." so all in all the day was wonderful only 1 crappy "oh, I'd kill myself" and the rest was all positive.

We didn't get loaded up and ready to go until almost lunch time but I had planned it that way so we could eat our picnic lunch before we entered the park. Full kids=less whining for overpriced junk foods and drinks. We parked as far away from the other cars as possible so I wasn't worrying about them darting out in front of cars or a freak picking them up and taking them away. We were a good 100ft from the nearest car and there was a nice strip of grass and a big bush for shade. I brought the large cooler filled with foods I had cooked up the night before, I made 2 meals at supper time so we would have food to take. I made home made chicken nuggets from chicken breast, we like them dipped in egg and then cracker crumbs. They were yummy cold. We also had some very plain pasta salad, I left it a little on the dry side (to cut down on the messy hands of toddlers) and added some diced ham and that's about it, the pasta was little wagon wheels so the girls could fork them really easily. A big bowl of grapes and some of the meatloaf from the night before, and a big bowl of jello salad with oranges. Everyone ate the lunch and got full while Daddy set up the strollers and Mommy packed up the diaper bag and filled sippies. We took crackers and dry cereal into the park as well as bottled water.

We had discussed the rides, looked online at them and we all knew our way around so each of the boys picked a couple rides that they really wanted to ride, we did those first so that if things went south we could make a run for it and still be ok with heading home. We managed to get in all the rides and let the girls ride some kiddy rides, we watched the Circus (kinda lame this year) and the kids all did wonderful. The girls ran around but stayed close to us and the area by the Raging River ride was nice and shady and they couldn't go too far. When it was time to get back in the stroller and move on they did it without fussing as long as we were moving. Piper spotted a seeing eye dog and spent a lot of time petting it and she also made friends with a little girl and a lady working at the tee shirt stand. We played no games-we bought nothing but a small bag of chips and a slush, 1 slush for Levi. The train ride that we went on is set up by a master mind. To get off the train and exit the ride you must go through a candy store! Guess what? Bizzarro Supermom just happened to have non-sticky sweet tart suckers in the diaper bag for everyone! They cost me a quarter on sale at the grocery store and I didn't have to hear anybody whine about not getting to buy that overpriced candy that we were forced to walk by. * (A side note here: Logan is 5 years old and just learned how to use a gumball machine at the store if that tells you anything about how I feel about my kids spending money on junk/trinkets and candy.) We had the tickets from Gary's wonderful employer Ajinomoto for FREE, it would have cost us over $100 just to get in the gate.

After the park we stopped off at Hobby Lobby for a quick supply run and we ate at a buffet restaurant. The girls got more food on the table than in their tummies and the waitress gave us 4 helium balloons to take home. The van was packed full anyway but the added bonus of 4 balloons being squeezed and swatted made the trip home extra special. After 30 min. I had 3 of them on my lap, 1 with no string, trying to keep them out of Gary's face so he could drive. Our trip home was just under 2 hours and we arrived home around 10pm, changed sleeping kids into pajamas and put them to bed. It was lots of fun for all of us.

For the Birds

2009-09-03T12:10:00.000-05:00

We had a bad day earlier this week when Logan found a little baby bird and fell in love. Long story short, the dogs got it and we had to have a funeral. So in honor of his little friend we made some pine cone feeders to hang out in hopes the the mama bird would get a treat. We used up some old salad toppings that were getting stale and we had the pine cones from the other day when we gathered them from the yard.

Blog Party Giveaway!

2009-09-03T08:31:00.000-05:00

Go here http://www.pyjammy.com/?p=2040 to check out a great give away! Mom's of multiples usually have a shortage of cool clothing...well I do so an awesome new shirt would be well, awesome!

Pamela has a cool blog called Pyjammy.com and is the mama to Triplet boys born December of 2007. They are Linus, Oliver and Miles. Super cutie patooties too, check out her blog if you want to see some triplet "boy" antics.

I will be updating later this afternoon because the girls are waiting for me to get breakfast right now. They must be out of Cheerios and they are standing at the gate waiting patiently. I have tons of pics to add. See ya later.

Flarp On The Sheets

2009-08-29T00:55:00.000-05:00

I said I wanted a break from potty training and I guess I'm out voted 3 to 1. Yesterday I dressed them in the typical 1 piece outfits and disposable diapers hoping that they would just stay dressed. It didn't work out that way at all, they were stripping left and right every time they peed or pooped the diapers were a flyin'! They went so far as to remove their diapers and place them on the baby dolls. Then Ava started bossing her sisters, "Chloe dipah, now...come here!" She was ordering them to come to her and let her put the diaper back on them after they ripped it off. Chloe actually went over and laid down and let her attempt to put it on her! I was thinking maybe I should just let Ava change everybody and forget the potty training.

Today I just put cotton training pants and tee shirts on them all. I was mopping up pee most of the day and they were entirely naked most of the day too, don't worry there is no carpet. I'm wondering when my days will stop revolving around messes. If I'm not cleaning up after somebody else I'm cooking for them. When I get the dishes unloaded from the dishwasher there is usually another load waiting to go in or I'm cooking/baking again so there will soon be another load. The dishwasher runs on average 4 times a day at our house. I try to wash the big pans by hand to save room and run it less but it doesn't help much. When the kitchen is clean the rest of the house is a wreck. It's like shoveling the sidewalk in a blizzard. Now that school has started I am trying to keep up with the laundry better. I put away about 11 baskets of clean laundry last weekend and I don't want to let it get that bad again!! I am able to do 3 loads easily each day but that doesn't keep me ahead of the pile when you add in sheets, blankets and pillows with pee, sheets and comforters with "flarp" on them and regular bedding.

If you don't know what "Flarp" is...you probably don't have any little boys. It comes in a container and you can get it at the Dollar store. It's a putty sort of substance but a bit wetter and slimier than silly putty. You push your fingers into it and it forces air into it making loud and super obnoxious fart sounds. The best laughs around for a buck! This is especially hilarious when mom is on the phone talking to the Dr.'s office or the Mortgage company. Gary went in to shut off Logan's TV and found him sleeping with his hand covered in Flarp. He had apparently molded it around his hand like a glove and then he fell asleep like that and it stuck to the sheet and dried out so it's like silly putty on the sheet.

Oh yea, the white cat from my post in May...well she has taken up permanent residence here. We found out from the neighbors that she was dumped about a mile down the road and kept getting ran off until she ended up here. Wonderful. And to add to the joy I'm feeling she has given birth to 4 chubby little kittens in the playhouse. I'm not sure where to move them to where the big dogs won't get to them but they are about 3 weeks old. We need to move them though before they start pooping on the deck. It's not a poop deck and I refuse to clean up after them too. Enough I say!

Spiders Sir!

2009-08-26T21:10:00.000-05:00

I haven't blogged since Memorial Day or something like that. It's been bothering me so I am finally back. I promise I am not turning this into a Military Blog. :)I guess the reason I haven't bothered to post is that I really didn't have much to say that wasn't depressing. I wasn't feeling very funny. Knowing that Austin was off at boot camp was really hard for me. It might sound silly to some of you that have never done it, it isn't the same as sending them off to college or getting a first apartment. It isn't simply the physical separation of being in another time zone that got to me. It wasn't thinking of the physical and mental challenges that he would have to endure or the yelling and screaming of Drill Instructors while spit flies and being IT'd (Intense Training) to the point of nearly collapsing because somebody in his platoon screwed up. I know my son better than anybody on this earth and I knew he could handle all that. Although I missed him terribly and getting a letter from him was like Christmas morning, it wasn't missing him that bothered me either.

I was having a really hard time thinking of him being sent to war. I know that he will be deployed, it's just a matter of when and where he will go. I was terrified. I cannot honestly say that I am not still afraid but it is getting easier. I am so proud of him and his willingness to make a commitment to something greater than self. I am proud of him to have the courage to actually do something about his desire to make a difference. This whole thing has caused me a lot of stress, as some of you know enough to make my hair fall out, I want to laugh about it but it hasn't stopped yet. I am totally going to get one of those Dolly Parton wigs though if needed! But anyway I did some research and found out that the total number of fatal casualties from this war is something like 4,334. That's a lot. That scares me. But to put it in perspective the death toll on US Highways in recent years has been well over 30,000 on average. That's per year.

My oldest stepson has been to Iraq and came back in one piece so I know it's not a death sentence. It's just hard, but maybe I should be more worried that Levi is getting ready to get his learners permit to drive. Eeek.

To end this on a silly note...well first I have to say Support our Troops, google it and there are tons of ways to help them even if you are anti war, nobody hates war more than the men an women who are there fighting it, they still need help from the home front. Thank a Veteran too, most of them still see terrible things when they close their eyes at night and they need to know that what they have been through was not "for nothing".

OK, on with the silliness. Austin told me in a letter about swim week. They have to swim with full gear and heavy packs, helmets and boots etc... and they have to jump into the water simulating jumping out of a helicopter and other scary stuff. Some of the Recruits cannot swim or are not strong swimmers. The DIs are there to make sure nobody drowns but lets just say it ain't summer camp. So one day they are all getting screamed at beside the pool and one of the Recruits is looking nervous. The DI picks up on this of course and goes over to ask him what he is afraid of and he says he is afraid of drowning. The DI tells him he is safe and he will not let him drown. The Recruit does not look any more confident so the DI gets mad, "What else are you afraid of?" The Recruit responds "Spiders, Sir!". They all had to bite their lips on that one.

Memorial Day 2009

2009-05-25T16:06:00.000-05:00

The girls are so funny to watch while they play. Ava was pushing the Fisher Price lawn mower down the hall and Piper was sitting on a little booster seat right in her path. Piper started to fake scream as if to say "don't run over me." Chloe ran up to her and stood in the path, then she proceeded to give hand signals as if she were a little traffic cop! It was the funniest thing, I have no idea how she knew to do something like that.

10 minutes later I draped a blanket from the couch to the recliner to make a tunnel for them to crawl under. As soon as I was done straightening it out, Chloe tried to do a belly flop right on top of it. Splat! Then she looked at me like what'd ya do that for?

Praying for the boys in Alpha Company at MCRD, San Diego and also our fallen heroes today.

A Marine news story clip

2009-05-23T11:39:00.000-05:00

http://www.kten.com/Global/story.asp?S=5309421 Click on this link and find the video of this news story. I found it interesting. It shows a bit about Marines.

Summer is here! When does school start?

2009-05-22T13:27:00.000-05:00

It's been a busy week. Logan is done with pre-K now and so I don't have free time during the day anymore :( Levi is getting a hair cut this weekend! The Disney kid look has gotta go. The cat is gone already, it couldn't handle the stress! We fed her good and nobody pulled her tail, it was just the noise and all the commotion I think. I have lost another 8 pounds putting my total loss in the last 8 weeks at 30lbs!! Yay, it's amazing how much more active a person can be with stomach muscles. If you count my preggo weight I could say I have lost 78 lbs! Wow thats sounds better huh?

Today I am wondering if my house will still be standing after the littles are bigger. I had problems with teens tearing up stuff-mostly punching holes in walls, some foster kids that destroyed things like tvs, and now we are losing blinds and screens out of the windows!! One screen in the living room where the girls watch for the bus ;has popped out at the corner and of course WE didn't notice it but THEY did and it is now pulled and tugged out really far. We can't open that window now until we fix the screen because they could fall out and heaven knows that they would throw out every toy in the house! And let all the flies in, the girls run after flies and shout NO! at them and wave their arms to shoo them away,lol. The sliding screen in the dining room has a rip in it where everyone holds on to open and shut it. Yesterday Logan rammed the Cozy Coupe into the sliding screen door and made 2 more holes where the wheels hit it. He is lucky he knocked the door off the track because I couldn't get the door open far enough to get at him! BUT-trying to help, Levi jammed on the screen door and when it came loose--it smacked me right in the face!! I started yelling and the boys scattered pretty fast at that point. I have a knot the size of a marble on my eyebrow. Whoever thought of installing that dumb door like that is stupid. It isn't a sliding door; but the screen is. The "door" part is a regular glass door on one side and a solid non-opening door on the other. Duh? It's in the dining area where you are supposed to have a table. How can you have a table when the door opens up into the room and the room is so tiny anyway and there is another regular door right on the other wall. I would love to be able to extend the kitchen/dining room out farther. There's no hope of that happening until the girls start school though. One income isn't enough for luxuries like a kitchen/dining area big enough for a table for 8, haha.

Snowy in May and ginger monkey antics

2009-05-18T22:47:00.000-05:00

We have a new family member. She is a white cat with blue eyes, she came out of the woods and I went out and snatched her up before the dogs chased her away. She is really thin but really lovable, we fed her and she has been here for 2 days now. She doesn't belong to any neighbors so she was most likely dumped off. We had to put our kitty Fluff a.k.a. Fluffernutter to sleep a couple of months ago because of health issues. She was almost 14 years old. I had decided to wait and not get a kitten until the girls were older, I have enough messes to clean up for now. But when this kitty came I guess we just decided she chose us and for now she is just staying outside in the play house.

I checked her out and made sure she wasn't sickly or mangy before I called for Logan to see her. I told him come out on the deck, he won't believe what's out there. He smartly said "what it's snowing?" He's 5 and just getting the hang of sarcasm. He ran out and saw the pure white cat and shouted "It's a snowy cat!" So that's when she became Snowy. Logan wanted her to come inside just as badly as she wanted to and I told him "No, she might not be potty trained." He said I should just teach her. Well that's just what I need, another potty training mess maker. NOT.

Here is a clip of what it's like to potty train triplets. They are 21 months now and all about becoming independant just like any almost 2 year old, but when there are 3 of them it makes for a circus. In the clip you can see my ginger monkey on the big potty (it's ok she's covered) and the other 2 are right in there getting in on the action, Piper keeps flushing the toilet and Chloe keeps saying "kankoo" that's monkey talk for Thank you. Chloe also is shouting No! when I ask her to get off the potty. Normally I just pick her up and remover her and she lays on the floor throwing a tantrum for a couple minutes but for the movie I thought we'd leave that part out. :) I will also put in a pic of the little potties that I bought for them. They are used for scooters on the hardwood floors and also make great dolly chairs. Nobody has an interest in peeing in them at the present time.

2009-05-14T14:58:00.000-05:00

Logan only has 2 more days of Pre-K next week and then he is off for the summer! Levi has a couple more weeks or so. The girls enjoy watching the bus come to drop them off every day. Ava is still tiny enough that she needs help up onto the couch.

I love summer and love having my kids at home but at the same time it's hard because I run out of things to entertain them. Maybe this summer will be easier because the girls are old enough to "play" and go outside. I can dream can't I?

My babies are growing up! Waaah!

2009-05-13T14:07:00.000-05:00

He is still considered a Recruit, not yet a Marine :) I am going to be obnoxiously proud of him, well , I already am!

I took my oldest son to MEPS on Mother's Day, he spent the night and got up at 4am to get going and be shipped to MCRD in San Diego. I am worried about him, even though I know he is tough and strong and he will do well, he is still my baby.

If you have little ones, please hold them longer and kiss them more and take lots of pictures because they will grow up sooo fast that it's hard to believe when it happens.

When I came home that day with my red, swollen eyes from crying the whole 2 hour drive home, Logan was in the drive way riding his bike WITH NO TRAINING WHEELS!!

Levi said "oh, we are ALL growing up." "Stop it!" I said, I really meant it but I don't think they will stop growing up. I of course started to cry again and when Gary tried to console me I said some things about how I'm worried and won't get to see "him" for so long etc... Logan spoke up and said "It's just cuz I was going so fast mom." He thought I was crying about him riding his bike. So sweet. Levi is a teenager now and the girls are going to start potty training soon. They went to the preschool room with Logan and his teacher yesterday and they sat there and listened to stories and played right along with the other big kids.

Some days feel like I am so busy doing the daily tasks just to keep the house from falling apart that I can't even really spend much time with the kids. I try by doing the routines for bedtime and things like that but man, it goes so fast. We should all try to slow down and enjoy life a little more.

2009-05-06T12:18:00.000-05:00

Hi, Short entries this week. We have been sick all week including me. :( I shouldn't have made that crack about the swine flu from the pediatricians office huh? Well I'm certainly not going to get us tested, for cryin' out loud they'd shut down the school! We don't want that now do we. Don't tell Levi that he'll run to the office and tell everyone we have the plague.

We have ticks to watch out for now and weed poison as well. I posted this sign after finding a tick attached to my butt cheek while showering, I haven't been out in the woods or even the yard so somebody brought it in with them and it somehow found it's way to latch onto my butt!

Tomorrow's post will be about some awesome re purposed clothing, I'm getting the pics ready later. See ya.

What happened to the Panda scrub jacket?

2009-05-04T23:32:00.000-05:00

I finally finished this project! Mom and one of her friends found this really cute scrub jacket with panda print fabric that was being recycled. I love to repurpose and recycle anything but especially fabrics. I forgot to take a picture of the jacket as a whole before I got so into chopping it all up and making stuff out of it. I ended up with 2 toddler sized halter tops and a pair of toddler pants. I made my own bias tape to match the pink pants I think it looks a lot nicer than the white trim on the other top. To get all of that I had to use a piece with a pocket on it for the front of one of the halter tops, it just wouldn't work out to be in the center so I put a strip of pink beside it so it wouldn't look so off center. The model in the pics wearing one of the tops and a pair of pink pants is Piper. Ava is modeling the panda pants and wanting Daddy to pick her up, she is not in the mood for pictures The pants are a better fit on the taller girls, they look like genie pants on Ava :). I'm happy to get this project finished, I have lots of summer clothes and dolly dresses to make.

Walk and park outing, Logan was sick

2009-05-03T13:01:00.000-05:00

Ava-not at the park but so cute.

We went for a walk by the river and then tried out the new playground by the Beach. Logan liked the slides but the place was not toddler friendly. The platforms that you slide from are very high off the ground for little ones and there are openings in the railings for kids to slide down poles and other things. Not safe for toddlers. I was nervous the whole time afraid that one of them would get too far ahead of me and plummet to their death by falling over the edge or Chloe might even just jump and try to get on the pole. She is the dare devil of the group. Here are some pics. Notice Logan was sitting down a lot and walking ahead trying to get to a spot to sit. When we got home he had a fever! Poor kid, I thought it was allergies and when we left home he had no fever, he did say he was cold while we were at the playground-I was too though but I haven't felt the greatest either. I am adding lots of pics, I love taking them and can't wait until I can get a better camera. Enjoy.

Well baby check up, only 2 months late

2009-05-01T14:59:00.000-05:00

Ava and Chloe are both in the 8th percentile for weight. Piper is in the 75th percentile for weight. Everyone is healthy and strong. We just had 1 shot each today. Ava's muscle tone is great! She has always been a little "floppy" but that is all gone. She is just as strong as her sisters now. Ava is a puffalump-she looks heavier than she is! Logan went with us and everybody was well behaved the whole time. The girls sat in the chairs in the waiting room, as you can see by the empty chairs behind us, we got in first and the room was almost empty. Our ped's office is great about keeping us away from germs, yay! Love Ottumwa Ped.'s!

Me alone in a sea of bras

2009-04-30T22:43:00.001-05:00

I went out of town today for my 5wk post op check up. Everything is healing well and I have permission to resume all activity and exercise. "Does that mean I can run too?" I asked. "Yes, anything." Dr. says. "Great- I couldn't run before the surgery, but that's great!" badup, bump. Yes I really said that, somebody slap me.
There is a part of my incision that is still scabbing, a kind of oblong shaped section right in the front where there is the most tension in the skin. This is normal. The Dr. picks off the scab each time-this is gross. It's supposed to help it heal faster. Ok...I think it looks like a piece of Terriaki Beef Jerky, the kind that my kids want me to pay $12 for at the gas station.................nah.
So after my appointment I went to Kohls to buy another pair of Spanx, hoping to find a pair on sale. Yup, found a knock off but it was a step up from the chaps from Target I am currently wearing. While I was there I started looking at the bras and panties just because I don't have anything in my drawer that doesn't look like something your grandma would wear. I thought to myself, hmm, I might like a push up bra, a little better cleavage wouldn't be bad for summer. So I walked through the endless sea of bras bumping one here and there and knocking 3 or 4 off of each rack, what the heck? I tried to put them back and apparently they are spring loaded racks, they had 37 bras jammed on a rod meant for 12! I finally found the push up bras.
What, have you seen these things? They felt like the old knee pads I used to wear for Jr. High basketball with some straps attached to them! No thanks. I saw so many bras- big, little, padded, air filled, gel filled, pink, black, red, leopard print you name it I saw it. Even a bra that claims to hide back fat, OMG. Come on ladies, you all must be putting too much effort into your boobs, well obviously somebody is because those things are all selling. You know a boobie lover is a boobie lover however it is presented. For now I'm keeping my beige bra with the elastic hanging out, I think it came from a rummage sale. I ended up buying a pair of cool sun glasses. It took a while to find some that would work with my chipmunk cheeks but they do exist. I will post a pic of them later. We are taking the girls to get their 18 month check ups (2 months late) tomorrow and I hope we don't all pick up the swine flu at the ped's office. Don't worry about the pandemic-just wash your hands and stop picking your nose and it will be ok.

Sheepdogs in the creek

2009-04-29T14:18:00.000-05:00

The 1st one is named Cowboy. We wanted to name him Rooster Cogburn but it just didn't feel right. The second one is just a pup, his name is Buckshot or Bucky for short. These used to be sheepdogs. Now they are mud dogs. Yuck! They have been in the creek behind our house.This would be a good time to take them to get their spring hair cuts, muhwahahah!

Tummy Tuck Before and Afters so far............

2009-04-28T22:58:00.003-05:00

Ok......I am guessing that not everybody reading this blog really wants to see my super fat belly in the raw (just the belly) so I am going to post a link at the bottom of the page to my pics. That way nobody gets totally grossed out by my flab!

My Stats:
Height 5'3"

Weights Normal 115 to 120lbs
While pg with triplets over 240lbs~
Pre Surgery 196lbs
4 weeks post op 176lbs

Waist before surgery 48 inches!!!!!
4 weeks after 34 inches

I am not going for Barbie, just healthy. I am very happy with my results so far and it's improving every day. In the "after" pics I was only 3 weeks post op so there is a lot of swelling still, in the tummy and hip area where the drains came out.

I need to update with some 5 weeks po pics next week. I am losing weight every week without even trying. My ab muscles had to be pulled in together a whopping 7 inches. There was nothing holding my insides back, it was gravity making me look pregnant. I felt weak and exercise seemed impossible, having no core strength at all is a really bad way to live. I am not even talking about a person who needs to do crunches here, my Plastic Surgeon told me I could do crunches all day every day and never get a flat stomach with my muscles split that far apart.

I have lost my double chin and that is so cool, who wants two chins? I only wish I could have had the Liposuction done on my butt and hips but we didn't win the lottery so I have to work it off the old fashioned way,lol the most awesome part of this is that I can wear all of my old shirts and most of my old shorts. The shorts i have were from when we were doing IVF cycles and I was bloated from all the injected hormones so they fit me now and are already starting to get loose.

You should be able to go down the page to a link with the pics, I am warning you it's not pretty.

Make Your Own No Spill Snack Containers

2009-04-28T22:43:00.000-05:00

I have wanted to buy those Snack Traps for a few months and can't force myself to spend the money on them. So I did what I always do, I made my own. This test set was made with baby food containers from Walmart. I suggest using a larger container because the only the smaller babies can get into these. I will try a couple Coolwhip containers next time. Make sure that when you cut the lids that you are trimming off the pointy edges so nobody feels like they are sticking their hand into a sharks mouth to get their snacks. If you make the holes "loose" only use larger snacks. You can't expect some Cheerios to stay in there if your toddler is shaking them about-and they will shake them. Shaped crackers or things of that nature work better. If you get a smarty pants that figures out how to pull the lid of with her teeth (Piper did it) just put some duct tape around it, heck it was free so if you have to throw it out into the Recycle bin after a few uses no big deal.

Dancing at Breakfast

2009-04-28T10:42:00.000-05:00

This is one of my favorite clips of the girls so far. I know-Ava looks as if she is chewing her cud while she is dancing. It is a blueberry pancake, being chewed for the first time. 2nd on the clip is Piper who stops dancing and then starts again and the last little girl would be Chloe. Chloe was sick that morning, therefore no dancing or eating, just a sweet little smile and a shake of the finger. She was saying "hey don't film me when I don't feel well."

A Bit of Crafty Repurposing, Is That a Word?

2009-04-28T09:41:00.000-05:00

Last Christmas Grandma and Grandpa gave Logan a bag of blocks, that were foam with a wood look. Awesome because they looked like wood but the kids couldn't use them for weapons and they wouldn't cause injury from being thrown, not that any body here would throw toys-yea right. So anyway, the zipper broke on the plastic bag pretty quickly. Bummer.

Logan has a fleece half zip Spiderman sweatshirt that he really likes and it's too small for him. Wha-La make a block bag from it. EZ PZ! Chop off the sleeves and make a handle with the Spiderman from the sleeve placed on the top of the handle. Sew up the bottom and sleeve holes. The zipper is there to open up for piling in the blocks and then zip up so they don't fall out. I left the neck open so it's kinda like a "bag". He loves it and the blocks are not spilling out all over any more.

Mother's Day Give Away!!

2009-04-26T10:49:00.000-05:00

I am adding a link for a super Mother's Day give away. Just go to The Moran Family Blog and leave a comment to be entered. The drawing is for a mommy Sterling Stamped necklace, go and leave a comment to get yourself entered. Thank you Emmy-Lou Designs and Moran Family Blog!

Toys all over the floor because...........

2009-04-24T10:48:00.000-05:00

People who don't live in my home don't understand why we don't just pick up the toys.

WE DO. But every time we put a toy box or laundry basket in the "baby pit" area this is what happens. So just deal with the toys on the floor .

Hey I just found out that the leather chair we have in the living room has a zipper on the back of the head rest if you flip it up. Super! And the stuffing can be pulled out and thrown all over the house!

Please note the duct tape around Chloe's legs, and the pants under the onsie. This was Levi's solution to the stripping yesterday, hey, it worked.

The Oatmeal Stand, The Turd and my PMS

2009-04-24T09:59:00.000-05:00

First off when I say the "turd" I'm not talking about one of my kids-this time. There was actually a real piece of poop. I know the anticipation is killing you, where was it you are wondering?! Well, it was on the shelf by the changing table. I found it there this morning when I was laying out the baby outfits. It was all covered in baby powder and kinda looked like a Mexican Wedding cookie. But no it was poop, had it been a cookie I would have eaten it. I can only assume that somebody(not me) changed a diaper and lay the diaper on the shelf, this happens a lot and when it's a diaper changer of the male species they often leave the diaper there for me to come along and dispose of. So I probably picked up the diaper last night and the cookie-poop rolled out and lay on the shelf overnight. What a wonderful way to start to my morning.

I don't feel well today, I have PMS or PMDD or whatever. I just want to put a sign on my neck that says "leave the alone or else". I used to think it was really lame when the girls in gym class got a note to skip p.e. because of cramps. What? Just deal with it and take some Tylenol like I do. Well, 25 years later I want my note!!! I want excused for the day, and tomorrow too. I want to go to bed and eat ice cream and sleep! Tylenol doesn't work for what I have. I eat Midol like it's candy just to stay awake and keep from ripping somebody's head off. I can feel it on my face, it must look like I am pissed. I am smiling while I sing and play with the babies and pretend that things like poop don't bother me. I crave chocolate. I am bloated. I am exhausted. I asked my Dr. about it and he gave me Lexapro last year. I couldn't remember to take it so I quit. I need something that I can take on these few days before my period-no I won't drink while I am in charge of the littles, any other suggestions?

The picture you see might look like a smashed up empty diaper wipes container. Don't be fooled. It's clearly an oatmeal stand. Considering my previously mentioned mood and the fact that I am really not supposed to be lifting all the babies yet. I decided to make instant oatmeal and feed it to them from the living room chair. No messy hands/no lifting and no cleaning of the highchair trays! It worked out pretty good except for the brawl over the "oatmeal stand" apparently oatmeal tastes much better if you eat it while elevated on a stand and smoosh yourself in the armpit of the person spooning it out. Who knew?

I think I smell a batch of Mexican wedding cookies brewing so I better go for now.

The Wagon Ride Part TWO

2009-04-22T21:39:00.000-05:00

Gary came home from work and I'm not sure what the deal was but he hooked up the trailer/wagon that was full of non burnable junk from the chicken shed to the mini van. He has an old truck but the 4 wheel drive doesn't work in it, so he uses the van. I think he just wanted to move it out of the back yard, planning to take it to the landfill on Saturday morning.

He and Austin decided to pick up a pile of wood from the other side of the yard from a tree they had cut down last fall. (We burn wood for heat). Gary backed up too far and they had trouble getting the wagon pulled out because our dumb yard is full of hills, there is not a level spot in the whole back yard. Here is a pic of some smoke from the tires as he tried to pull it out, the 2 bigger boys were also pushing from behind. I was on the deck with the girls yelling at him to stop before he burned up the motor in my van. I was of course taunting him and making fun. Then he decided to back up FARTHER DOWN THE HILL!!! He wanted to get a run for it. DUH. Ok so there they go and I snap the pic, smoke and all. Well I wish I was a little quicker with the camera because next thing I know, everyone is yelling and I looked up and there goes the wagon all by itself backwards down the hill! It went all the way down and was only stopped by a bunch of brush. Another few feet and it would have been down the wash out and in the creek! I snapped some shots of the end result but totally missed the action shots. Darn.

I had no idea that Gary had called a neighbor that owns a "real truck" to pull the stupid wagon out. So we were in the front yard pulling the girls in the wagon and trying to get a picture of them when he pulled up. I was out there in my old maternity shorts with my spanx showing under them. Think "Mama's Family" support hose. Gee thanks for telling me to expect somebody. Not that he gave a crap what I looked like at all but you know what that feels like to look so stupid and have somebody see you? Also the last time I saw him was 20 years ago and I was dating one of his best buddies! I am older and about 75lbs heavier so I doubt if he has made the connection of who I am, at least I hope not. That is the kind of anti social person I have become, eek. This neighbor is a really nice guy and has pulled Gary and Austin out a few times. I can't help it-my husband is like a Clark Griswold! He is always doing crap like that. I added a picture of my leg so you can see my awesome spanx showing under the old shorts-cool.

Big and Little

2009-04-22T21:16:00.001-05:00

Mama with Chloe

Chloe is in the middle for height.

Piper is the tallest and Ava is the shortest. This may all change as they get older of course. When they were born Piper was the teeny little one at 3lbs. 13 oz.

Just cute

2009-04-22T18:02:00.000-05:00

Libby Lou and Buckshot

Piper

Ava and Chloe

Piper

Ava

Ava with a runny nose (oops)

Chloe

The Wagon Ride Part ONE

2009-04-22T17:43:00.000-05:00

This is the sweet part of the day, the simple cuteness of a wagon full of bows, piggy tails and sundresses. This is the way I dream my life is, but in reality this only lasted about 10 minutes. I hope that my little cuties bring a smile to your face and then you can go on to part TWO of the wagon ride and probably be shocked. Again my blog is called Bizzarro Supermom and I live in Bizzarro World. Now for the cuteness.

Boys are gross........

2009-04-22T14:13:00.000-05:00

I had my first son 19 years ago. I have had a houseful of boys for the last 15 or so years including stepsons and some foster sons. See a theme here? All boys. Gary and I had a combination of 6 boys and 3 foster sons when we decided to try for a girl. As the saying goes, be careful what you wish for. We got 3 girls.
Nothing scares me or shocks me anymore- when it comes to children anyway, and boys are gross. I actually figured that out in elementary school when a class mate who shall remain nameless ate paste in Kindergarten, another boy ate boogars, one swallowed a live fly and yet another smashed some guppies with his thumb. That last one still grosses me out to think about it. I have to add that the guppy killer is a very successful business man today and as far as I know has not became a serial killer.
My little darling Austin gather some pigs tails and shoved them into his coat pocket when he was about 2yrs old. He was with my dad who was docking the tails of the baby pigs. This is a common practice, if the tails are left long-the other pigs will chew them and they will become infected or whatever. I have never again stuck my hand into the pockets of anybody elses clothing. I will wash your gum, wallet, ink pen or any other thing you may forget to take out because my rule is empty your own pockets. THE PICS ARE FROM TODAY, I COULD ADD COUNTLESS PICS OF FROGS AND OTHER BOYISH THINGS BUT THEY ARE ON THE OTHER COMPUTER, ANOTHER DAY I GUESS. AUSTIN WAS SHOWING OFF HIS FRESH SUNBURN AND DOESN'T KNOW MOM IS ADDING IT TO THE BLOG. :)

Child proofing for triplets is impossible!

2009-04-22T13:42:00.000-05:00

If you leave them for a moment there is trouble. You have to though-how else will they get fed, how would I go to the bathroom or at least keep a path to walk through in the house? So the solution is to baby proof the entire house right? HOW? So far we have went through every style and brand of drawer latches and none of them are triplet proof, at least not for these 3! We have a dresser in the living room because of the lack of space in the too small house we live in-you do what ya gotta do, ya know? So anyway, we had to turn the dresser around to face the wall because they just would not stop dumping the drawers. Here are some pics of the dresser facing the wall and you can see the first set of dumb things that did not work. They were adhesive straps, they ripped them off within minutes and then proceeded to pick and pull until the sticky part was completely off.

I recall watching one of those multiples shows years ago on TLC or something, (I'm thinking it was the Dilley 6 but I'm not sure) the parents had put the baby gates on the door 2 high and then greased the bars so they couldn't climb them. I used to think that was a bit extreme but now I completely understand. I see the wreck that 3 can make I can't stand to think about 6 at one time. But then again I do this by myself with the 3 all day.

Spanx update: target knock offs are crappy

2009-04-22T13:39:00.000-05:00

You have to read the first post about my Spanx to fully understand this one :) I still hate the Target brand ones I bought and now the hole I created has run. Now they look a lot like a freaky pair of chaps! Sorry no pics for this post!

The chicken outhouse is coming down!

2009-04-22T13:02:00.000-05:00

I like chickens. More than chickens, I love having and endless supply of fresh eggs, I know what the birds are eating and how they are treated, I like the darker color of the yolks from them getting to run around and eat grass. I love to watch them chase bugs and it's fun to throw out some popcorn or scraps to them.
A couple of weeks ago we had a bad week with the coyotes. There happens to be a large pack of them that live in the timber that surrounds our home. They had been staying away because of our 2 sheepdogs, but this year the pack is bigger and braver. I lost my Easter egger a couple of months ago, she was one of my favorite hens, she laid blue-green eggs. They recently wiped out my male goose and all 11 hens in a matter of 8 nights. We gave away the female goose this weekend because she was lonely and really needed to go to a farm with other geese. So now we have no poultry at all. SO, the hillbilly chicken coop has got to go. It really served it's purpose well but it looked like an outhouse. Austin worked hard on it last summer and really utilized the scrap lumber we had along with whatever else was free. What can I say, we are on such a tight budget with so many kids and one income and besides I tend to lean toward the green side, I am the moderator of our county Freecycle group.
The yard looks like a trash heap right now and needs a lot of work. Austin is taking care of a lot of that and Levi is jumping in when he can, it's his nature to be destructive so tearing down things is fun for him. Gary really wants to get out there a lot too but I am usually begging for help with the girls when he comes home from work.

My goal is to take the yard from Hillbillyville to a great fenced in play area for the littles. It will be done soon I hope. Here are a few pics of the progress. I plan on starting up with chickens and a huge garden when the girls are a little bit older and require less of my undivided attention, when will that be?

I will not let them win!

2009-04-22T12:28:00.000-05:00

I woke up before the girls and loaded my bloodstream with caffeine before I heard the first chatters coming from the bedroom. I had the sippies full and set out I had some Fruit Loops sitting out for them and already took some Advil. I was pumped and ready to take them on.

As soon as the bus drove away with the 2 older boys on board, I heard the monkey talk beginning. As oldest ds lay in bed NOT helping me lift and chase I went to let them out of their cribs. I swiftly changed and dressed all 3 without a fuss. 5 min. later Chloe was completely naked. Great, I learned yesterday that after 2 weeks of containing her in turtle neck onesies that she had figured out how to slither out of them too. She does not unsnap them she goes out the neck hole. That's whey I had to go from regular onesies to the turtle necks. She is like the Houdini of clothing. So after chasing her down and taping her diaper up (we are still using disposables until I can safely carry the bucket up and down the stairs by myself to wash the cloth) and re-dressing her about 3 times I found a pair of bib overalls to put on her. I had them cinched up to the max so she couldn't easily slide her arms out. Don't get me wrong they were not uncomfortable but the strap wasn't about to slide down her arm. Boy was she pissed! She has stayed dressed the rest of the day so far but when she figures those out I am prepared to turn them around and let her wear them backwards. She and Piper already wear their zip up jammies turned around so the zipper is in the back, the feet had to be cut off to do that but that's better than finding out that they slept naked half the night because they woke up and took off all their jammies and diaper. Yea, that happened. I don't know why they like to strip all of their clothes off, or where they get that from. I haven't done that since I stopped drinking Tequila.

Coming soon before and after pics!

2009-04-18T00:33:00.000-05:00

I will post the pics in a couple of weeks. I will not post befores until I feel comfortable with the afters,lol. I still have some swelling and have just started walking so I want to lose a little more. I won't be a Barbie-at this point I still weigh 180lbs. I feel ok saying that because if you think that's fat well, go suck it. I don't care, I weighed over 240lbs while pregnant with the triplets and I'm only 5'2" so I figure I'm doing damn good. Granted most of my life I weighed around 110lbs but I think more of you reading this are probably closer to my currant weight and situation, I think a size 14 is average and well it's my blog so that's what it will be in my world. I just want to lose enough to fit into clothes easily. I still have boobs at this point so I actually kinda like everything except my butt, it needs lots of work and that's ok. I am happy and that's what counts. Besides if you weigh 110lbs you probably are at the gym or off someplace not eating instead of reading this blog. I traded my cute butt for 3 beautiful little girls!

Easter Bunny purses and bean bag

2009-04-18T00:12:00.000-05:00

I stayed up waaay too late on Sat before Easter sewing some bunny purses for the girls and a bean bag for Logan. They turned out sweet but Logan thought the bean bag was dumb because it didn't "do" anything. I said if the Easter bunny heard him say that he would leave bunny poops in his basket next year.

20 days post op

2009-04-18T00:02:00.000-05:00

I had an appt. today and the doc says I'm doing great. I can ditch the binder in a week and start a more vigorous exercise program then too. Tonight I walked in the park, no idea how far but my husband complained that his little bird legs hurt so it must be a good distance. I didn't feel bad at all. The nurse had told me at my appointment that some people come in at 20 days in a wheel chair so she was impressed to see me bouncin' around and doing great. We talked about pain tolerance. If you don't have a very high tolerance for pain than you don't push yourself and it just takes longer to heal. I feel no pain from the surgery at all, the first 3 days I was sore but not bad. I am also hyper so I don't like to sit still for long and the pain medicine made me sleepy, I hate that so I stopped taking it after about 4 or 5 days. I also got permission to lift the babies! Yay! We are all happier now. Oh yea, I had a fluid pocket behind my new belly button so the dr. dug in behind it and drained it and he found the tail of a stitch that they could not get last time so he pulled it out too.

I love/hate my Spanx!

2009-04-17T23:40:00.001-05:00

Because of the recent surgery, I have to wear the Spanx 24/7. Only to be removed to shower. I love them because they hold me in and make me feel supported around the incision sites. I love them because they make me feel thinner. I hate them because sometimes they make me itch. I think it's kinda weird but very convenient that there is a seam in the crotch that you can pee out of without peeling them down every time. I have the kind that go up to your boobies and down like bicycle shorts too. I had a black pair on and only a tee shirt and was up really late sewing last week. Austin my 19 yr old son walked in and said I looked like Lance Armstrong in them. I said "o geez, does is show that I only have 1 testicle?!" "or do you mean I look lean and thin like a cyclist?" He said "yea, whatever you want to think." I paid $36 for them at Lane Bryant and the sales girl was super cool, helped me get the right size, I think they are a D or also known as short/tubby.
Side note- I also bought a pair of Target knock offs. Saved $16 in the process too. I had to have a spare pair because you don't wear panties with them and well duh. Besides my incision still bleeds from time to time. BUT- After putting on the Target brand for the first time, right out of the shower, I realize something. Keep in mind that putting these suckers on is not easy, think what it would be like to try to squeeze yourself into a really long tube sock. It's a pain in the pattooty. Well I got the suckers on and then went about my business. A couple of hours later I had to pee, (think Gomer Pyle) SURPRIZE-SURPRIZE!!! WELL GAAAALLLLLYY! There is no freakin' seam in the crotch area! Still being on some pain meds at that point and a Valium here and there, my reaction was quite simple. I took the scissors and made a slice in the crotch area, yes while wearing them and all is well. I tried to contain it to the part where the cotton crotch was so it wouldn't run but it is quite a bit larger than it needed to be. Oh well, at least I can pee.

I might get my stitches out tomorrow. RATED PG for TMI

2009-04-08T22:55:00.000-05:00

Ok I should really be sleeping right now. I have to make a 2 hour drive to go see the plastic surgeon about getting my stitches and maybe one of these annoying drains out. I asked my mom to go and she has an another appointment that she couldn't change. My friends work during the day or only talk to me online and are not "real" friends. I am lame, have no social life. That's why I am telling my blog about my anxiety about tomorrow's appointment.

I am super happy with the results of the tummy tuck and all the wonderful flatness of my tummy. I am concerned about one thing. I have to undress down to the undies and the nurse will take out my stitches. Since the surgery-everything was pulled up and pulled down to meet in the middle where the massive row of stitches meets and goes from hip to hip. Well guess what? My pubes are right up there in the row of stitches! Why didn't they shave them first? Was I supposed to shave them? Am I supposed to shave them now? I tried to trim them with the scissors and that wasn't so easy. Geesh they shave you if you have a c-section for crying out loud. Oh yea and I don't have any matching bra and panties. Not that the dr. is going to give a crap but I feel kinda stupid wearing my old lady beige bra and my old underwear with the worn out elastic. I should go buy some new but if I keep losing weight I don't want to waste the money on a big size. At least when I go to the gyno I can hide my underwear under my other clothes so they don't see them, come on I know you all do it too. Even your nice underwear you hide them under your other clothes, why I don't know the gyno is going to see it all anyway, why not the underduds?

The evolution of the cake pop.

2009-04-08T18:56:00.000-05:00

Last night after the little ones went to bed I stayed up to dip the cake pops. I will never make them again. Bakerella has an addiction to them but then again I don't recall her having 6 kids including almost 2 yr old triplets, she must have more time on her hands. I am all for creative activities but this one sucked for me. I baked the cakes the day before, rolled them into balls and put in the freezer for a short time just like I was supposed to and when I dipped them that's when bunny hell broke loose.

First I had to use "good n plenty" candies for the ears because there was no store withing a 20 mile radius that had any pastel candy corn. So right away they were "off" Levi tells me that they looked more like gerbils than rabbits. Gee thanks. So Levi my 13 yr old smart mouth son is helping. Anything to stay up past his bed time. He is holding them after I coat them and he starts freaking out saying "I think it's going to fall off in to the dip! What if it does?" I calmly say, "I will punch you in the head if you drop it into the almond bark." He replies "yea, but then I will drop the other one too." At that point he starts laughing like a hyena. As he laughs the rabbits on sticks he is holding over the dipping chocolate start shaking violently as his laughter is out of control. He is tired and when he gets tired he does like me, and gets really loopy. So I am begging my husband to come in and replace him because once he starts to laugh it's just over. Gary says no he has no interest in decorating Easter Gerbils on stick and wants to know why I just don't send some crackers to school or something. ! What! just send crackers on Logan's special snack day? That would be so lame. Not like I could pull some special magical crackers out of the pantry anyway but I'd rather die than send some saltines on my poor little boys snack day. He gets ripped off a lot because of the whole troop of little sisters thing happening. The poor kid-he was so great about it too. I really tried to include him as much as possible in every single thing I did when the girls were little. We have some pics of him asleep on my lap with all the babies too.

But anyway back to the cake pops, they were too heavy and about half of them were falling off the sticks, I guess I made them too big. So I ended up putting them all in cupcake papers and pulling the ones off the sticks that had survived. I wanted them to all be the same so that's how they went to school the next morning. Logan said all his friends at them so I guess they were OK. The left over ones were made into cake ball kabobs by Levi and snarfed up almost immediately. Next time I'm sticking to cupcakes or some wonderful store bought treat.

It's Crazy Time-

2009-04-07T19:40:00.000-05:00

The triplets are running up and down the hall each saying their own version of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. Logan and Levi are outside trying to play and use up every last minute of daylight. Austin is on his way out the door to go see a girl, which one I don't know. It is 7:43 pm and I am propped up with pillows in bed typing and listening to all of this. Here come the boys inside, it's going to get loud. Normally when i am 100% Logan would be in his room either reading or watching a calm cartoon or movie, already bathed and in his pj's. The girls should have had baths by now or at least be getting out of the bath. Levi sometimes helps with this routine but since I am off of lifting duty for now he gets to really pitch in. Austin is leaving because he did the lifting all day. I don't stay in bed all day but I am resting for a few minutes because my back hurts from being up for a long stretch, making cake pops and all, lol. I still have to dip them after the kiddos go to bed.

I love the sounds of my kids playing and giggling. It makes me happy. I really love to see them happy. Last night after all of the little ones were snug in bed, Austin came home and I was the only one up. I was working on the laptop and he sat down to chat. I let him listen to a song that I thought was funny and we ended up listening to Jim Gaffigan audios. The one about email and how if you hand wrote a letter you'd have to go outside. And then take it to the po, than I'd have to put pants on! Well, than that's gonna have to wait until next week. Of course Jim's version is so much funnier, I almost peed my pants. I had to shut the laptop because I was afraid to rip out all my abdominal stitches laughing so hard.

Making cake pops today

2009-04-07T12:11:00.000-05:00

Logan's snack day is Wed. so I'm making Easter cake pops this afternoon. I am still recovering from my ab surgery so I am going to take a nap while the babies nap. The cakes are already baked and just have to be crumbled and mixed with frosting. Rolled into balls and put on a stick and dipped. I also have to fight with my camera so I can get some good pics of it all. See ya soon.

2009-03-23T13:13:00.000-05:00

So here it is, the first official glimpse into my world. I started out my day getting the kids off to school. W is in 8th grade and L is in PK, they ride the same bus. The bus was exactly 2 minutes early today which completely screwed up W, he waits until the last minute to put on his shoes and get out the door. He was in his sock feet and had not yet taken his medicine (he has ADHD) so the bus driver had to wait for him. Sometimes it's L that's running behind but today it wasn't.

I then checked my email and searched for a clean glass to have a morning Mt. Dew. Making coffee is too much work. I love coffee but it annoys me to have to pour the water, my coffee machine has no carafe (I think that's the word) and the part you are supposed to fill and measure the water with really sucks. The pour spout is too tiny so the water usually goes all over the counter. Anyway...I had to take 2 glasses out of the cupboard before I had one that didn't have crud in it. "What" you say, "crud in your glasses?" Yea, the dishwasher doesn't do a very good job sometimes. I think when little helpers load dishes that still have food on them, that's when it happens. The crumbs fly around in the dishwasher and redistribute on my glasses. Now I 'm not saying I rinse everything either but my dishwasher can't handle a cup of baked beans left in the bottom of a pan.

By this time the girls (triplets) are waking up so I scurry around to get some sippies and grapes ready for them. I set them free in the safety zone and they play and eat while I change and dress them one at a time. We did breakfast and more playtime/story time another diaper change and then its nap time. It's not nearly as easy as that sounds, I am just condensing for today.

Today I colored my hair and took a shower during nap time. I have not colored my hair in over 9 months and it was looking pretty sad. I put the color on my hair and the phone rang twice during the process. Is it me or is the phone really annoying? I set the timer, and began to unload the dishwasher. I didn't get very far though because I discovered that somebody had opened it last night and failed to set the timer again. It is set on a timer at night in an effort to reduce the noise in the evenings. It's noisy enough.

When I finally made it to the shower-my first one in 2 days- I took the baby monitor in the bathroom with me so I could hear the babies if they woke up. I hurried to get in before my hair fell out from the color treatment being left in too long. I rinsed and then I was supposed to put this conditioning treatment in my hair. It was in a stupid envelope that is impossible to open while your hands are wet. How are you supposed to have dry hands if you are washing your hair? I hate things like that. I also hate the Hillshire Farms airplane lunch meat weirdo commercial that is on TV right now. But anyway, the phone rang 2 more times while I was drying off. Is it just me or is it normal for your blood pressure to raise because the phone rings? I would shut it off but I know that shutting it off would cause an accident or one of my kids would fall and break their arm at school or I would never know that I won a million dollar prize.

Part of my stress about the phone is that I never get time alone for more than a few minutes and when I am alone I don't want to be bothered! The other part is that I am waiting on news about my mammogram, I had to get my first one done at age 38 because I had some swelling and pain in my under arm area. I have a family history of breast cancer so better safe than sorry. I am also waiting on news from the insurance company about getting my pre-cert for surgery. I am going against the clock here on this one. I have to have the surgery done before the end of the month or we will have to pay deductibles on the insurance. It all starts over in April and our deductible is $6,000. So if it's not done in March it won't get done until we have paid the deductible or saved up some money. My surgery (thank you for asking) is to repair a severe muscle separation, hernia and a tummy tuck. Having triplets wreaks havoc on the body. I appear to be 8 months pregnant at this time 19 months later. How are you supposed to find pants that fit when your stomach measurements are a size 16 and the rest of you is about a 10? Oh yea, the maternity section of your local Wal-Mart. Do you know how sick I am of wearing my maternity clothes and pajama pants? Not all women have this problem just from having triplets, but I had been pregnant 4 times before this one and I am only 5' 2", so with the weight gain required to have 3 healthy babies, my muscles just gave out on me. I used to be thin and I used to exercise every day. When you have 3 infants 3 older kids and a husband to take care of with no help-exercise is put on the back burner. No time and no energy. The monkeys are wakin' up and I have to put together some lunch.

UPDATE: I had my surgery almost 2 weeks ago. It went great. There was no hernia but the muscle separation was bad. The plastic surgeon had to pull my muscles in a whopping 7 inches and sew them up layer by layer. The lovely slab that he cut off that included my ugly vertical scar and belly button weighed 8 pounds! Wow. The first thing I said when I wok up was wow I can see the top of my thighs. :) So there is very little pain and I would do it again in a heartbeat, I highly recommend it and if you live in Iowa send me a note and I will let you know who my ps is, he is awesome! My mamo came out normal too by the way.

Bizzarro Supermom

Play Kitchen from an Entertainment Center

4 Pounds of Cinnamon?

Oops it's not in a can!

Snowed in and Sewing-How to Make Korkers- plus some coupon talk.

I'm Still Here!

Window markers and misc. stuff

The chair game

A Princess, A Unicorn, A LoveBug and Spiderman

Does this look like a potty to you?

Kolcraft is a Wonderful Company!

Hy-Vee - Helpful Ideas - Coupon Match-Ups 10/14/09

The Golden Tooth??

Dora Upcycle, Skirt and Organization Issues

Slippers x6 plus a Free tutorial link

Getting ready for an Iowa Winter

It's Snowing Yellow Pee Pellets!

10 minute Repurposing craft-Go Rockets!!

Eggrolls are easy!

Got a minute?

We play with milk jugs!

*WHAT* was in that diaper??

40 Cups of Coffee, Thank you Ella Mae

The Tightwad Goes to an Amusement Park

For the Birds

Blog Party Giveaway!

Flarp On The Sheets

Spiders Sir!

Memorial Day 2009

A Marine news story clip

Summer is here! When does school start?

Snowy in May and ginger monkey antics

My babies are growing up! Waaah!

What happened to the Panda scrub jacket?

Walk and park outing, Logan was sick

Well baby check up, only 2 months late

Me alone in a sea of bras

Sheepdogs in the creek

Tummy Tuck Before and Afters so far............

Make Your Own No Spill Snack Containers

Dancing at Breakfast

A Bit of Crafty Repurposing, Is That a Word?

Mother's Day Give Away!!

Toys all over the floor because...........

The Oatmeal Stand, The Turd and my PMS

The Wagon Ride Part TWO

Big and Little

Just cute

The Wagon Ride Part ONE

Boys are gross........

Child proofing for triplets is impossible!

Spanx update: target knock offs are crappy

The chicken outhouse is coming down!

I will not let them win!

Coming soon before and after pics!

Easter Bunny purses and bean bag

20 days post op

I love/hate my Spanx!

I might get my stitches out tomorrow. RATED PG for TMI

The evolution of the cake pop.

It's Crazy Time-

Making cake pops today

WHAT was in that diaper??