Randomly Rambling and Bargainy Bloginess!

I'm soooo behind. I never even blogged about the holidays, ha! Well, all in all we had a wonderful Thanksgiving and Christmas, spent with family. We enjoyed Christmas at home this year (we alternate between Christmas here in OK with my family and Christmas in MO with Mike's family). This year my parents came to our house and spent the day, we had a lovely Christmas dinner, relaxed, played games (on the new Wii, ha!) and Mom and I went to see The Curious Case of Benjamin Button on Christmas night. She and I used to go to the movies on Christmas or New Years night when I was a teenager and we hadn't gone in years. I really enjoyed it.

News Years Eve weekend was a ton of fun, my mom and brothers secretly plotted crashing the big party at Stan and Nan's (my in-laws) and invited the kids and I along. So we showed up and surprised everyone. It was a blast!

Isaac, Nan and Mom. We were playing "Imaginiff". It was fun!



Oh, here's our new calf. She's demented, but cute. Here she is actually at the front of the pasture instead of running up and down the fenceline at the creek from sunup 'til sundown.



Isaac cooking dinner last week. Southwest Chicken Soup. Mmm! He's been helping me cook ever since. He even mixed up my birthday cake this year!


We've even had a ton of cousin fun since my Sis-in-law and nephew have been in town. Here are all the monkey babies.

Yesterday was such a nice day and Mike was off work, so we decided to get out and about. We drove over to Talequah and stopped at Lake Tenkiller and let the kids play. The lake was beautiful, even in the dead of January.

He was a little nervous on the bridge to the dock

Such a sweet pic

Isabel and her daddy

Mommy and Izzy

Our sweet, precious little mack truck :-D

After the lake, we decided to drive 20 miles more over to Muskogee and hit the mall and go out to eat. Isaac spotted the indoor blacklight mini-golf course. We took the kids in to play and the older lady running the desk insisted on letting the kids play for free. Mike and I offered to pay to play along with them, but she would have none of it. It was so sweet and generous of her. Isaac and Izzy had a blast. Isaac looks like a ghost in this pic! He loved counting the holes, from one all the way to 18. For anyone who doesn't know Isaac, he's obsessed with letters and numbers.

Cool aquarium at the mall! Awesome!

Oh, and I am obsessed with the Twilight series. Only one more to go. Just thought you'd like to know while I was thinking of it.

I found some awesome bargains this week! I.am.a.die.hard.bargain.hunter. I refuse to pay full price for anything. If there is a bargain to be found, I will find it. I had some birthday money (I love that my birthday falls with the BEST clearance sales of the year, HA!) so I was so happy to find my little items at the mall. Everything in the pic was $3-$4 each, with the exception of the cute pants. They were $6.25 ;-D Is it tacky for me to tell how much I pay for my clothes? Probably. Do I care? No. I love finding a good bargain. It gives me the warm fuzzies (as my mom says)

More bargainy fun! I L.O.V.E. surplus stores. One of my fav places to go is OOPS in Tontitown. I love all the home decor stuff and the food section. They actually have a great health food/organic selection, dirt cheap. So I got quite a stash last Saturday!! Then, as we were running errands today we decided to stop at the little surplus place that opened up here in town. I was so excited! Here in our dinky little podunk town, I found all this stuff!!! Organic stuff, people. Whole grain stuff. Yummy stuff.

Today is inaguration day and I've been mindful and prayerful of our nation. It doesn't matter which way we voted, we have a responsibility as believers to pray for our nation and our leaders. Romans 13:1 reminds us:

Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established.

I'm so thankful that we have a God who is in control.

I'll admit that I didn't spend anywhere near enough time praying for President Bush over the past eight years. I'm determined to set aside some time each week to pray specifically for our government.

Hmm . . . . I guess that's all I'm thinking of today. Could I be more random?

Meeting Jeremy Camp!

I never win anything. Anything. So I could hardly believe it when I was caller 10 and won a pair of tickets to the Jeremy Camp concert to take place in Fayetteville on November 14th. Mike and I LOVE Jeremy Camp's music, so we were stoked! Needless to say, I was shocked when KLRC called about 10 days later to tell us we'd won the Grand Prize . . . . front row seats, a Nintendo Wii, and the opportunity to play Guitar Hero with Jeremy Camp before the concert. I was totally not expecting that!

Mike and I had been looking forward to this for weeks, so my day kind of crumbled when he came home from work Friday morning terribly sick with a cold. He felt like he'd been run over by a Mack truck and said he wouldn't be able to go with me. So I was totally bummed. :-( Thankfully, my sweetheart cousin Alisha was free Friday night, so we had quite an awesome girls' night out! We had such a great time. Jeremy Camp was truly a super-nice guy. The concert was fantastic. Our seats were A1 and A2. Front and center. Wow.

Playing Wii Bowling with Jeremy Camp. Thankfully we did not play Guitar Hero, because I was totally clueless. LOL




Alisha, Jeremy Camp, Me!

Some JBU students were there filming for a documentary project so they got footage of us playing the Wii. (And now you all will learn an interesting factoid about me -- I am a gum-chomping madwoman when I am nervous) ;-P

I Love Fall

You Might Be a Redneck If . . . . . .

You put Halloween decorations on your pokeweed.

Seriously, I haven't had such a goofy case of the giggles in a long time. Mike and I were in our hometown over the weekend, and were driving past a former neighbor's house. These particular neighbors have always had an unkempt lawn to say the least, and, well . . . . just strange ways in general. Mike was reminiscing (ranting) about the fact that growing up he always got jipped into mowing their side of the property line which they neglected. Mid-sentence he blurted, "Oh. I like how they decorated their pokeweed."

WHA!!!??? I burst out laughing. That had to be the most random and absurd thing I'd heard in I don't know how long. Decorated their pokeweed?

For those who may not know, this is pokeweed:




It's very common in rural areas. Rampant, in fact. It's just a big ugly weed and it gets pretty tall if you don't chop it down.


I looked and there it was. Two stark stalks of pokeweed standing in the front yard . . . . . with that fake green spiderweb stuff strung in between them. I don't know why it was so hilarious. I guess you just had to be there.

Yup, redneck. So.stinkin.funny.

A Tribute . . . . .

In Memorium . . . . . .

T-bone, we knew the day we brought you to our home that you would bring fulfillment to our lives.

You grew up gracefully . . . . . (sort of).

And then you met your fate.

T-bone, we love you more today than we did yesterday. You will live on in our freezer and there will always be a special place for you on our plates.

;-P

My Baby Einsteins

OK, can I just brag on my kiddos for a minute before my buttons bust? :-)

Isabel, at 21 months, can finish a peg puzzle in no time flat. We keep ALL our puzzle pieces in one basket. She can dig through and figure out which pieces go to which board. I think she might be ready for a 100 piece puzzle by Christmas. (Kidding!) She is also starting to recognize a few colors. She definitely knows "yeh-wo" , "ohnge" and "pank" (yes, she's an okie girl). :-) To top all that off, she can sing her ABCs -- er, something that sounds extremely close, anyway.

Isaac, 3 1/2, is beginning to read!! He is starting to sound out short words. He's been able to do his letter sounds for a while, but didn't understand how to put them together and I hadn't planned to push him on it for a while yet. It clicked for him this week when Isabel checked out a library book called "Quack Shack". It has 3 sections, words with the "ack", "ock" and "ick" families. Each section has several words with different letters in front. We were reading it together, and all the sudden he started spouting off some of the words before I read them!

This morning we were all 3 doing puzzles together and he started playing with his letter magnets. We did the same concept -- ack, at, og combinations, putting different letters in front of each one -- and he was able to read several words by himself!!! It's a great start! :-)

We've All Gone Nutty!

This week we enjoyed one of our favorite fall traditions -- picking up black walnuts. Mike has done this every other year since he was around 12 years old. This was the kids' first time going with Mike (and mine as well). We had a great time and filled two truckloads! I think Mike has met his match and partner for the next several walnut seasons . . . . . Isabel is quite a pro :-)

Isaac's favorite part was knocking walnuts from the tree. The one that fell in this picture conked his sister on the noggin. Double the fun. :-)


Little Miss Izzy showed us up! She filled her bucket five times over!



Isaac and Daddy picking up


These are stains from the hulls, they won't fade for several days

2.5 hours and 56 five-gallon buckets later . . . . . .

Filling the hopper and watching the walnuts go up the conveyer

Isaac and Isabel watching the hulling machine

Giving our weight receipt to Ms. Gail to calculate how much we made! Isaac and Izzy are excited to get a little candy money :-)