JustaBlog

Heard from Frankie

Quickly before I forget. So the other night when Frankie went to bed, to read a bit in the Bible. He was to read a Psalm, a Proverb and whatever else he wanted. Honestly he's been really into the Bible lately. It rocks. And his behavior is changing before our eyes. God's Word, combined with prayer, conversations with him all the time about the things of the Lord, and diligent training and he is truly becoming an amazing and wonderful, obedient, cheerful boy.

Anyways.... so he wrote on a piece of paper the Psalm he read, wrote out a Proverb he read (which happened to be about nagging wives LOL. I think he thought that was funny, uh huh. Real funny dude). So then the next morning I was up early and I sat on his bed looking at his Bible. I opened to a Psalm randomly and started reading it. He got excited telling me that that was the Psalm he had read the night before. So I read the Psalm and it was about God's people living in peace and how the Lord blesses those of His who live in peace. We talked about how we are children of God and about bickering with his siblings. So he gets all giddy and loud and has the biggest grin and says:

"So MOM!! God knows what we need to learn and has us open to the place where they are and shows us the verses in the Bible so we can learn them? And he knew when he WROTE the Bible that we would need to learn these things. WOOOOWWW!!!"

And my life was made in that moment. I couldn't be a happier Mom. Yes Frankie dear, our great and wonderful Lord knew YOU before the foundations of the world and thought of you, the simple yet complex 8 year old who was struggling with bickering with his brother and sister. And He smiled as your heart was opened to His truth. I smiled with Him.

Quick little ramble

Hey! I'm not on my big computer so I have no pictures to share. Just a moment to ramble.

I'm unsure about blogging these days.  I'm not sure that I will continue blogging in the way that I have been, well how I have been wanting to. I've always had this dream of being someone who rambled on about things that interest me, a regular blogger that has something to SAY. I have long lists of ideas of things I want to write about, but that's the problem! With all the amazing blogs out there in blogland, I end up feeling the pressure to be interesting, have loads of pictures, and in the end, catering to everyone out there instead of the people I want to talk to in this blog, ME, my family, and my friends. So I think I'm going to move towards mostly things about the family. When I take the time to blog I think of my long list of the things I want to talk about and I end up not blogging at all because I don't really have the time to talk about all those great interesting things. So be prepared hopefully for more short blogging, more talk of the children and really boring everyday goings on around here.

And to prove my point, the baby is crying now and I need to get him back to sleep so I can finish getting ready for tomorrow. No long interesting posts tonight. :)

Snow & babies or was it Snow Baby?

Well won't talk long. More pictures than anything. So not last night but the night before... twenty-four robbers came knocking at my door. Sorry got sidetracked. Not last night but the night before, it snowed. It snowed a fair amount. Of course the children were ecstatic and ran outside to play. Unfortunately for them it was about an hour before it got dark, but they didn't care. Funny how everyone whines about being scared of the dark when we need them to take the trash out at nighttime but when there's a snowman to be made, a simple pair of light up spy goggles is all they need and they'll stay outside until we make them come in. For them, luck was on their side though in their snowman making adventure. First, they made the snowman on the tailgate of the truck. So when the ground was melting in the morning, Chilly was not. Secondly it stayed cold for until 9 or 10, so there was enough snow to finish Chilly. And without further ado, the star of this show, Chilly.

Doesn't he look like Animal from the Muppets? I don't think the littles would like me saying that so don't tell them. And Cassie didn't take to me telling her a carrot would be way too big for poor Chilly.
Here are the proud builders. Well not Adric but God forbid we take the picture without him. I'd be in trooouubbllllee!

Doesn't Frankie look cold? Don't ask me why everyone else has snow coats on but he's in a tshirt. Man his hands are red. He really had to have been cold.

Anyways on to baby pictures. Now these aren't the best. I did everything wrong. It was late at night, no natural light at all. I have no external flash (*cry*) and in order to get pictures with no flash that weren't totally blurry I raised the ISO and they're grainy as can be. And color's off. And..... anything you can think of that's wrong with them I have an excuse for. I do, really. I'm quite a talented excuse maker. Years of practice under my belt. If I were to use a flash, look...

Aahhh crazy baby!! And no one wants to see that.

So here's a couple of him just, well, looking. He just looks adorable when he looks. :) Shows off his cute baby cheeks. Lookin at Dad:
 
Lookin' at Mom:

Told he looked cute when he was looking. And of course since just looking at mom inspired laughing, here's a "Mom you are just hilarious" picture:

And the second right after he stopped laughing, the "I love you Mom" look:

Now this sweet and wonderful person and I need to go to bed. The alarm's supposed to go off at 6 and it's 1 AM! Darn that new schedule we're supposed to start tomorrow. And darn to me telling Frankie that he needed to wake me up if I wasn't up. Well accountability is good, I guess. Night.

For Clay

Well my sweet hubby is going to download and print my new family schedule at work since we ran out of ink. LOVE YOU HONEY. Here's the link. It's a Word file. And I suppose if anyone out there had a wild hair about them and wanted to download my schedule to see what we are doing every minute of every day, go ahead :)

Family Schedule Link

Can't wait til you get home. Love you.

Okay Christmas wrap-up.

I know it's way past Christmas but for the family peeps out there, I really should do a Christmas wrap-up. Then I can get back to real life. Honestly I think it was feeling the need to do this post that made it take so long to do it. Yeah that dreaded Procrastination monster rearing it's ugly head. And tomorrow we'll slay it and get the Thank-You Notes done. Off with its head.

So.. where to begin?

Oh yeah, that amazing thing I was going to mention. So, Christmas Eve, we planned on reading the birth story, watching the movie The Nativity and making haystacks. So Clay reads the Bible story and talks about the huge sacrifice the Lord made and Cassie tells him that she's ready to give her life to the Lord. So we talk about what that means (now she has been talking about it with me for weeks up until this point, she and I had prayed about it some and discussed different things about salvation, etc.) so we talk about what that means, and she says she is ready to give her life to the Lord. So she gets on her knees with Daddy who prays for her and helps her to pray to the Lord, asking forgiveness for her sins and she professed her faith, and gave her life to the Lord Jesus. The angels rejoiced on the Eve of our Savior's birth as this little girl prayed her prayer. We got the best Christmas gift that night. We serve a great and wonderful Lord.

So we watched the movie and while we did I made haystacks. Few things say Christmas to me like haystacks. I love them. I adore them. I could eat thousands of them. So I made thousands. Yeah no comments about the whole weight thing. It was Christmas.

Anyways so I made half a table's worth of those and it turned out it was great since we had a lot of company the next couple weeks and everyone ate them.

Okay so every year I make something really unhealthy but incredibly yummy. In the past we have had pecan sticky buns, cinnamon rolls, homemade donuts, and this year? Monkey bread. I have never made it before but seen it done and LOVE it. Love love love it. I looked online and found what seemed like perfect recipes. I wanted to try two recipes - one that used vanilla pudding and one with butterscotch since those seemed to be the basis of all monkey bread recipes. I needed to do a comparison test of course. So I went to Walmart, got a bundt pan (they only had these slightly expensive ones so I only got one lol) and followed the recipes to a "t". You leave them in the fridge to rise overnight. So I went to bed dreaming of my yummy Monkey bread and when I awoke I found.....

The Incredible Exploding Monkey Bread

Honestly there were more than that that just spilled right out of the pans. I mean I even used the exact brand of frozen rolls I was supposed to. Was my bundt pan too small?  Oh I don't know. But those brown chunks of butter, brown sugar and pudding mix was a tasty treat to nibble on. Anyways.. they got even bigger in the oven spilling stuff all over the pan I put underneath and it was smoky and crazy and since it was so big and dough-y they would never cook in the middle and half of them were dough. It was sad really considering my vivid dreams about eating amazing monkey all night.

We opened stockings before we ate. Gotta LOVE that about stockings, and after monkey bread moved on to presents. My Grandmother, Aunt, Uncle and Cousins sent presents for everyone all the way from CA. It was amazing. We were and are very VERY blessed. I love watching children open presents and this year was no exception. The hard part is that I don't want to be behind the camera, end up getting caught up in the moment of watching them and being happy with them that I miss the picture. But here's a few:

Backpacks were a big hit this year. I missed Cassie getting hers, but here's Adric when he saw his

Gotta love when 4yos are in total shock! And he was SO proud he made me take a picture of him looking like a big boy.

Cuter than cute eh?  And Frank getting his. I was surprised by just how much he did love this. It made me happy. He's growing up. He was so excited and said "MOM! It doesn't have any Spiderman, or any characters on it. It's not a little kid's backpack, it's a big boy backpack. It's AWESOME!" He loved loved it.

Aww that Frank. He's growing up WAY too fast. It was nice to see him get all giddy like the littles.
Another big hit with EVERYONE (funny how you never really know what is going to be a fan favorite. But this was with ALL the children. Even big Frank still plays with this weeks later) here is Adric getting his Mr. PotatoHead set LOL! Who would have thought Cassie and Frankie would love it so much?

The little dude feeling oh so proud in his new Power Ranger jammies.

This picture makes me laugh cause it looks like he's seconds away from kissing his muscle like his Daddy does. Frankie has been doing that. It cracks me up.
Uh oh Baby's waking up.. must hurry.
Cassie looking gorgeous in her new cool hoodie. She LOVES It and wears it every night. She told me the other night that it was perfect because she could wear it inside the house when she gets a "chill" she said lol. Okay Cass.

Ain't she a beaute?

Another big hit. The SPY glasses. He LOVESSSSS these and wears them when he puts the chickens away at night. He wears them all the time really.

This is what you get when an 8yo opens a huge Star Wars LEGO set.

And this is what you get 2 hours later:

And last but not least, Clay's new pride and joy that we almost squabbled (cause we rarely actually argue anymore) well we ALMOST squabbled cause that thing was NOT going in my living room on the big blank wall waiting to be filled. But he LOVES it. Yes it says a lot about him LOL.

Okay just got the baby back to sleep. We had a GREAT Christmas. Clay's parents came the day after so more about that later. Off to sleeep.

Darn this blogging.

Darn blogging. It can be such a source of guilt for me. I want this blog to be so much more. Now I don't have grand visions of this blog being more than where a handful of people read, mostly my family. But I do love when I am in the habit of blogging. But like everything else, a habit needs to be formed. And when I go long periods without doing it, it's SO hard to get back into doing it regularly. I feel guilty for NOT doing it and paralyzed at the thought of how to restart. I mean I have all sorts of pictures from all the way back when we still had that dreaded Christmas tree, so what to post? Where to begin? And of course I always tend to blog late at night and I feel so tired that I never end up doing the post I plan on. Anyways... I'm whining and complaining. Enough of all that. So I'll post a few pictures, go to bed and feel satisfied that despite it being a lame post there was a blog post done this evening.

So things around here are back to normal. Well sorta but... nothing ever is just normal with 4 littles is it? So let's go back.... back to December..... I vaguely remember the madness that was Christmas and the weeks thereafter. The best gift of all?

This gorgeous girl who I love SOOO much.

Uh oh, baby's waking up. Off to bed. So much for this grand blog plan!!

1000 Actions

Have you checked out SparkPeople? It's very cool. It is really easy and is a great resource. It has an insane amount of information of nutrition, exercise, general wellness, everything. You set up your account and can track all your eating, exercising, water and general wellness and life goals. You can earn points for doing different things that support your journey to getting healthy. So you get points for logging in, drinking 8 glasses of water, tracking food and exercise, for reading health articles, for posting on the SP board, and loads more. So over on the Sparkpeople boards I read a great and wonderful post that has inspired me. There's a whole challenge section there. This is a challenge I'm taking up.

The idea is that every goal can be and has to be done in small parts. So often we look at the big picture, we look at our messy bathroom or our 2 lb weight gain as a failure, and suddenly forget all the many many steps we have taken towards our goal. So I am challenging myself and whoever wants to join to start tracking our actions, the little things we do everyday that are positive, that support us, our goals, our happiness. The goal? 1000 actions. It seems like a lot but it's only a few at a time. And one day you will look back and see the number is in the 100s, then one day 1000. Whenever I add some I will just go up from my last number.

My goals go beyond weight loss for this challenge. I want to take control of my life. I am striving to bring all the areas of my life more and more under control. That includes the house, time management, weight, devotions, work, loads of things.

Today? SO far?
1. Rejoined Sparkpeople
2. Started this challenge
3. Ate a great healthy breakfast
4. Drank a quart of water
5. Tracked my food for the last two days
6. Started doing my weekly projects on the HK time management challenge I'm doing
7. Blogged :)

A little numbers business
Weight:
Yesterday 206.4
Today 202.4 (see? One day of great eating and my body is super happy!)

And yes the New Year has begun. Like many other it has inspired in me a newfound optimism, hope and desire to get things done. And of course it's 3 weeks til I have to run that 5K and I haven't been training the last few weeks. ACKKK! Scary. But I still think I can do it. More than anything just the getting my number, figuring out where to go, running the track and not screwing up, those are the biggest challenges for me. The running will be hard, but the doing harder.

Okay off to clean the house and earn some more actions. :)

Just for me

Okay I really have loads to blog about, pictures to post, great stories to tell, but I don't have time for any of that now. So this post is just for ME to take the time to sit and think about the food for tomorrow.

I must say quickly that I got a swift kick in the rear while chatting with Di for a few minutes. I start my official Biggest Loser challenge on a message board on the 7th. And of course in true me fashion I used that the last few days as an excuse to eat whatever I want and not workout. Us overweighters have a whole special book of excuses don't we? Anyways so talking to Di I was considering whether to wait to really get on the ball until the 7th. I mean I'd lose more water weight, lose that initial big chunk and it'd count more towards the "contest". Anyways there was that moment where discussing it where I realized that God wants me to do my best in every moment. That it is about me, NOW. ANyways more about that later, I have a baby with a fever, me with a shirt to iron, food to figure out. I really need to get going. This was supposed to be all for me remember Kim? Anways

Food for Wednesday, a day after I should have started eating better, exercising and changing my life. Yeah that day.

B - 1egg, 2 egg white scrambled eggs with a bit of salsa and a little parmesan cheese, also half an apple sliced
S - Orange
L - Shredded chicken with steamed carrots and broccoli
S - 6 walnuts and one medjool date
D - ginger glazed chicken with steamed green beans (everyone else will have brown rice with that)
S - other half of apple

Okay slllleeeepppp......... I mean honestly I carried many insanely heavy rocks outside today, I'm tired.