Good bye 2011

Can you believe it? 2011 will be over in a couple of hours! Where did it go? Since our church service was canceled tonight due to a snow storm, I thought I'd use the time to do an end of year update here on the blog, but I don't want to spend my last few hours of the year doing this, so I'm going to try and make it quick. In fact, I think I'll just post our Christmas letter since it pretty much summed up our year and it's already thought out. This was the front of our cards. I'm having fun playing with my camera. :o)

Merry Christmas!

     Hello there. This time of year always seems to drive my family crazy. Everyone is always busy with something. There's paper and ribbons everywhere, the kitchen has been smelling especially nice and they put a tree in the living room again. They won't let me near it though. :o(

     Anyway, I thought I'd take a minute and let you know what's going on around here since everyone else is so busy. I've heard the family talking about Nick coming home soon to visit. I can't wait. there's always interesting things on his floor for me to check out. They also keep talking about Angel driving a long way every day. Something about a cosmetology school starting in January. I have no idea what that is, or when that is for that matter, but it seems like she will be pretty busy for a while. 

     Daddy still leaves almost every day which makes me sad, but I love when he comes home and we get to play together. Except a couple of weeks ago when he brought HER home. They call her Layla, boy does she get in trouble a lot. She still doesn't know not to "go" on the carpet. Sheesh, I learned that a long time ago. Oh well, although she can be annoying, I guess she's OK. We do have fun chasing each other around the house. :o)

     Michelle and Mommy and I spend most of our days together. I love to snuggle in Mommy's lap when she reads books to Michelle and I'm great at helping her clean the floor while she's baking those yummy cakes.

     Oh, I almost forgot about Princess. I don't see her much since she spends most of her time out in the garage. Mom tries to get her to come in, but she told me she prefers to be outside. I don't think the mice or chipmunks like her out there though. 

     Well, that's what we've been up to. How about you and your family? We'd love to hear from you and you can see some more pictures of us if you check out Mom's blog tammyjapan.blogspot.com. I guess I better go, Layla just took off with my sock!

     Lots of love,

     Coco

Coco sporting his Christmas scarf and Lalya in her pretty bow. 

Princess wasn't too happy about having her picture taken. 

Well, the letter says to check out this blog for more pictures, so I guess I should post a few. I'm afraid I've not been very good at taking candid shots, in fact, I didn't even get the camera out on Christmas day so I don't have many to choose from.

Angel sang a solo with her choir class at the Mall of America. I didn't get any pictures of Michelle's piano recital that night, but I did take a video that I may post later.

I tried to get a picture of all my "kids" together. That didn't work out. It started with the big kids making faces and ended with the dogs fighting over who was going to get to be in whose lap. This is the best shot. Sigh. At least the kids are all smiling.

Michelle had to get out a sled a bit, even if we don't have much snow yet this year. Although, looking out the window right now, it seems that has changed. I guess it's a good thing church was canceled this evening. I think we're going to wake up to a white 2012. I better go make sure the camera is charged for the morning. :o)

Till next year...God's love and blessings!

Tasty Tuesday-Guest post

It's Tasty Tuesday here and I have two "firsts" for you today. I have ventured into the world of vlogging (video blogging) and today I have the first ever vlog for this blog. :o) Actually, I didn't make this cute little video, so there you have the other "first" for today--a guest blogger, or I guess I should say vlogger.

So, without further ado here's our first ever vlog.

I was quite surprised after going back to the kitchen to get my hot chocolate to find Michelle with the camera making this little video. Too funny!

I saw some ghost marshmallows made on another blog and although I didn't want to do ghosts, I thought this would be a cute way to make someone smile. How can you not smile when your marshmallows are smiling at you. I simply used food writers to draw the faces and plopped them into her mug. Easy, peasy, lemon squeezy.

Well, I'd like to thank my guest vlogger for today. Great job, Michelle. It's time for us to do spelling, and it's pretty much impossible for me to help her with that and type at the same time so, I better close this here.


Till next time...God's love and blessings!

Misc. Monday

Although I haven't taken much time to blog the last few weeks, I have kept my camera busy. The leaves were so beautiful and the weather was so warm that we skipped out of school a little early a couple of times and got outside. I'm glad we did 'cause it's getting cold out now and a lot of our autumn color is gone. Here's just a few miscellaneous shots taken over the last couple of weeks.

We had pretty yellow leaves outside my bedroom window.

 And red/orange leaves outside the kitchen windows.

Michelle loves her zip line and I love that she's getting some exercise while having fun.

One of the fun things about homeschooling--getting hot chocolate and cookies while working on spelling--or math, or science, or whenever we feel the need. :o)

 Mom gets home made white chocolate. Yum! And yes, those cookies are pretty crumbly. Angel brought them home from work the night before and they didn't transport well in the plastic bag. They were still yummy though.

 Looking out the kitchen window it looked like someone threw a huge confetti party in the yard. Such pretty colors against the bright green of the grass. I love fall. 

Michelle is multi-tasking here. She's both the model and photographer at the same time. :o)

And here's one of her photos. Love the starburst!

I also took Senior Pictures with Angel this week. See.

Sorry, couldn't resist.  Actually, this was from Senior Day at school for Home Coming Week. I did take some real Senior Pictures as well, but I will post some of them later this week.

There you have it, a couple of snapshots of life here in WI. I hope you're getting a chance to get out and enjoy this time of year. I'm going to close this here and do some scrapbooking.

Till next time...God's love and blessings!

Through the House Thursday-Laundry Room Part 2

Last week I promised some close-ups of my folding table. I LOVE it. It's the perfect size for the girls piles of folded laundry and it hides all those necessary, but ugly, pipes under the window.

Here's the table by itself. There are so many pipes back there I couldn't even get in there to paint the wall all the way. That alone would have driven me crazy to see every day.

Because we have to  access the softener (and probably the well pump sometime), Mike made the table so it could lift up and out of the way. (He's so smart! :o)

The hook hanging here is used to hold the table in the up position.

The adhesive on my velcro didn't want to stick to the paint so I used some tacky glue and a staple gun to make sure it wasn't going anywhere. I simply hot glued the other side of the velcro to the skirt I made out of a drop cloth. Yup, that's right, a cloth drop cloth. It was cheaper than any of the fabric I could find around here and seemed heavy duty enough to do the job.

So, there it is. I wish I had a better "before" picture to show you the difference, but I am totally loving this. Now if I could just figure out a good storage solution for all the coats and shoes on the other two walls of this room. :o)

It is late here so I will close for now. Till next time...God's love and blessings!

Through the House Thursday-Laundry Room Part 1

 Yes, I realize this is a Through the House Thursday on a Friday, but I didn't have "after" photos of the laundry room so I needed to wait till today to get better lighting for them. Anyway, here is a couple of "before" shots taken when we first moved into the house.

 

This was taken when we were first looking at the place. The water softener by the window wasn't winterized properly and had a huge crack in it. That turned out to be a blessing because we were able to get a much smaller unit that doesn't block the window. 

  

I took this one just before we started to paint. You can see how yucky the walls were.

 

Here's the cabinets above the washer and dryer. They are nice cabinets, but I wanted to paint all the trim work and cabinets in here to help cut down on the visual clutter.

Now here's a couple of "after" shots. I had several different cans of leftover paint from various rooms in the house and decided to mix them to get enough of one color to paint the walls. I really like the shade of blue that we got.

 I painted the ceiling and all the trim a cream color and used the blue on all the walls. I found some wall paper that had the exact blue in it and covered some boxes for storage on the open shelves.

I still don't like the area above the washer and sink, but it's a work in progress.

 I hot glued clothes pins to the front of the boxes to hold labels. This way if I need to rearrange what's in the boxes, it will be easy to redo the labels as well.

Do you see the table below the window? I use it for folding clothes, but more importantly, it hides the water pump, softener and various pipes. My handy-dandy hubby built that for me. (insert really big grin here!) Next week I'll show you more details and how I made the skirt for it.

Well, I've gotta go get dinner going. Till next time...God's love and blessings!!

Wednesday's Walk-A Visitor

These are some pictures I took of a visitor to our yard a couple of weeks ago. Coco kept up this annoying bark, and when I stepped out to get him to come in and be quiet, I noticed what I thought was a sweater or something Michelle left in the yard. She has a habit of leaving the house dressed warm and coming in stripped down. I quickly realized it was not a piece of clothing, but this little guy.

 I guess he's not really so little, is he? Coco didn't know what to think of this guy (girl?) He's so used to the animals running away from him when he comes barking them, but this thing didn't move. We had to keep Coco in the house for a bit so the poor little guy could go on his merry way in peace.

Michelle enjoyed watching him. She would come in the house every few minutes and give me updates as to his movements. He eventually disappeared down the creek bank. We're not sure where he was heading, but it would be pretty cool if "he" turned out to be a "she" and she laid her eggs along our creek bank somewhere close by. Looks like we may have to do some research on what time of year they lay eggs and when they hatch.

I think Michelle's quiet reading time is almost over, so I better close this here. Hopefully tomorrow I'll be able to post some pictures of laundry room renovation.

Till next time...God's love and blessings!

Tasty Tuesday-Yogurt Parfait

Last week I showed a picture of what has become a favorite snack around here-a home-made yogurt parfait.

Sorry about the poor quality picture, I was in a hurry to eat this thing!

And by home-made, I mean home-made--well, about as home-made as you can get without owning your own cow and oat fields. We made the yogurt, granola and berry sauce, then just assembled them parfait style. These are so yummy!

Here are the links to the websites where I found the recipes in case you'd like to give them a try. I found the yogurt recipe at A Year of Slow Cooking website. There are some yummy recipes there and this one intrigued me so we had to give it a try. I have a granola recipe that I use quite a bit, but I wanted to try something different this time. I found this one from Alton Brown and decided to give it a try. We like that it stays crunchy for quite a while. My previous recipe would get chewy after a day or so. The berry sauce came from the Arctic Garden Studio. I used a mixture of blackberries, raspberries, and black caps in mine since that's what grows on our property. I think I may have to try her Caramel Apple Cake one of these days.

Well, as much as I would like to keep this blog updated and share more of the fun stuff we're doing, it seems as soon as I sit down here, my little 8 year old insists on sharing all the secrets of her day with me so I shall close here and give her my full attention, instead of the 10% she's getting right now.

So, till next time...God's love and blessings!

Misc. Monday-leftover summer

For those of you in the south, summer may still be hanging on, but for those of us here in WI, it is quickly fading away. The temperatures average in the 60's during the day and we've had to have the heater on a couple of times. One evening I even turned the electric blanket on. There's nothing like warm sheets on a cold evening. :o)

I love fall. I love cooler weather, wearing sweaters, warm soups, snuggling, hot chocolate, watching the leaves fall (which I get to do from every window in our house :o). And while my veggie garden gave up a couple of weeks ago, it seems like my flower beds don't want to let summer go. I transplanted a couple dozen daisy plants from our pasture into my flower bed this year. While most of these, and all the ones in the pasture have long since given up their flowers (I think sometime back in July), I have one plant that keeps on blooming. I checked today and not only are there several flowers still blooming, there are a couple more buds that haven't even opened yet.

 A friend gave me a couple different types of flowers last year. I don't remember the names of them, and wasn't sure what they would look like till they bloomed this year. These are some of them. They were the last flowers in my garden to bloom. I think next spring I will transplant a couple of these to other parts of the garden so they are spread around. Right now it looks kind of funny with this huge patch of purple in one corner and everything else is just green.

Anyway, I say all this to show you the pretty arrangement I decided to make this weekend with these two pretty flowers. I had picked the gladiolas a couple of days ago and these are the last of them (although I found another plant out in the garden that hasn't bloomed yet). Even though it's fall outside, this arrangement reminds me of summer-well, spring, actually.

And here's another bit of summer that I plan on enjoying all winter long.

I picked close to 10 gallons of berries this year! I froze them right away, and right now I'm in the process of processing them. :o) Yesterday I made a batch of jam, and today I started a batch of syrup, but I think I will finish it off tomorrow. Right now, I'm sitting down enjoying this:

Home made yogurt, granola, and raspberry sauce...YUM!!! I know what's for breakfast tomorrow. :o)

Well, I will close this for now, enjoy my dessert, and get some snuggle time in with the little one before she heads off to bed. Till next time...

God's love and blessings!

Family Friday

So I've been missing in action for a couple of weeks. As you may have imagined, once we started our home schooling year, my free time kind of dwindled a bit. It didn't help that I had a birthday party to plan and several intense cakes to do. I will post more about most of the cakes over on my craft website later, but I will show one of them here because it was for a special little 8 year old's birthday-namely, Michelle's. Here is the cake I made for her. I'm posting a lot of pictures because there were so many cute details on it.

This was a fun theme to play with.

LOVE the little caterpillars!

The ladybugs and bees were cute too. :o)

I think this little guy was my favorite. :o)

 I took these as the party was getting started, but then I got so busy with the girls and the activities that I forgot to take pictures of any of the girls! Next year I'm going to hire someone to take pictures for me. 

Here are a couple of birthday pictures I did get of Michelle before and after her party. I woke her up with breakfast in bed (she talked about this to anyone who would listen for about a week after).

She loved the happy face I made with blackberries.

 And here she is in the birthday shirt. I made this shirt when Nick was little and each year they pose with it on for me to get pictures and see how big they've grown. If I could do it again, I would have bought a large men's shirt instead of a medium. Nick outgrew this one sometime in his teen years.

I guess I should get off of here now. Mike took Michelle to a football game, and Angel went to another football game with some friends so I'm home alone. I think I will take advantage of the quiet and either get some reading done, or see about processing some of those berries stashed away in my freezer. :o)

Till next time...

God's love and blessings

Through the house Thursday-Michelle's room

It's been a crazy few days, but I have a couple of minutes to sit down and thought I'd share some of the progress we've made in Michelle's room. If you remember this post,you know that we had to rip out a wall and repaint due to a mold issue. We did get the walls all painted, and she's all moved back in, but I'm still working on the decorative mural. I just haven't been in a painting kind of mood, so it keeps getting put on the bottom of the to-do list. Hopefully I'll get it done soon.

Here's a couple of shots of the only finished part. I turned her light switch into a bird house. She picked out the type of butterfly she wanted me to paint.

 

Here she was pretending to hold the lady bug on her hand, but I didn't notice the butterfly antennae on her head until the picture was on the computer. :o)

 

That's a quick look at our house this week. Hopefully next week I'll have some pictures of our newly painted a organized laundry room. :o) Just need to make a few tweaks here and there and snap some pictures in the daylight. 

How about you? What new things are going on in your life? Have you got some unfinished projects? I'm going to do my best to get this one done soon so I can check it off the list. (I LOVE checking things off the to-do list :o)

Till next time...
God's love and blessings!

Tasty Tuesday-Cinnamon Roll Pancakes

I like pancakes, and I like cinnamon rolls, so when I saw a recipe for Cinnamon Roll Pancakes I thought this was a recipe that was worth trying out. Yum! I found the recipe for these pancakes from Recipe Girl. We tried them out a couple of weeks ago for Sunday breakfast and they were pretty good. There were a couple of things that didn't work very well for me, though. I tried her recipe exactly, but my pancakes came out super thin and I ended up with twice as much of the cinnamon filling as I needed. So, the next weekend I played around with it using good old Bisquick for my pancakes and halved the amount of filling. They were just as yummy, but with less mess and less waste.

Here's my version:

CINNAMON FILLING:
1/4 cup butter
slightly less than 1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 tablespoon cinnamon

CREAM CHEESE GLAZE:
4 Tablespoons butter, softened
2 ounces cream cheese, softened
3/4 cup powdered sugar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla

PANCAKE BATTER:
2 cups Bisquick
1 cup milk
2 eggs

Mix together Cinnamon filling ingredients and spoon into piping bag or sandwich bag. I cut a hole in my bag, folded over the end, and kept it closed with a clothespin. Set aside.

Mix together ingredients for Cream Cheese Glaze. Set aside.

Mix together pancake ingredients. Spoon batter onto hot griddle. Wait about 30 seconds and then pipe the Cinnamon Filling in a spiral onto each pancake. Wait till bubbles appear and then flip. I warn you that this will be messy on your griddle. The butter and sugar will cook and smear all over the place, but it makes this yummy, crunchy, sweet coating on the pancakes. Yum! When that side is finished, remove the pancakes and spoon some Cream Cheese Glaze over. You do NOT need syrup with these pancakes.

These were really yummy, messy, but yummy! If you're in the mood for something sweet, I recommend you check out Recipe Girl's site and try out her recipe. She has some awesome pictures of the cooking in action so you can get an idea of what these are supposed to look like.

Well, I've got a lot to do today. Still trying to finish up the laundry room and I realized I have several cakes and other projects to finish up this week before we start school on Monday.

Till next time...
God's love and blessings! :o)

Misc. Monday-New Roof

Wow, I'm going on three weeks in a row of consistent blogging. Yay me! Although we will be starting school up next week, so my consistency will probably take a nose dive then.

A week or so ago we realized that the summer was quickly getting away from us and there were still several projects on our to-do list that really need to get done before winter hits. The most important of which was the new roof. So, last weekend we tackled that. Viktor, one of the teens from church, came over along with Angel's boyfriend, Tyler. We are SOOO grateful for their help.

I got this shot of the shingles while Mike was cleaning things up and getting ready. They aren't in too bad a shape, but they are definitely starting to show some wear and tear.

My silly husband is holding up the moon!

Once everything was cleaned up on the roof, a roll of paper was nailed down over the shingles. This is so the asphalt on the shingles doesn't rub the metal and cause it to rust.

We had all of our supplies stored in the building across the creek, so Angel and Tyler had to carry them over to us one-by-one.

Thankfully we have a deck on the second floor, so we were able to hand the metal sheets up to the roof from there.

Once the trim was put up, each sheet just needed to be screwed down. Once we got the hang of it, it went pretty quick. We finished just in time--about 30 minutes before the rain started!

Here it is all finished. Boy, this makes it look easy and quick! Actually, it really wasn't that difficult. The store provided us with a manual that wasn't too technical to figure out, but there was a lot of going up and down stairs, lifting, and kneeling, which Mike and I were both feeling the next day.


We can check that project off the list! Now, with a metal roof, we won't have to shovel the snow off of it, and we shouldn't get any ice dams. YAY! Now I'm off to finish the next project on the list-painting the laundry room. :o)

Till next time...
God's love and blessings!