Welcome to our World

  When I receive bad news it can be struggle to keep looking for the light but I feel like sunrises and field trips you have to dress up for, Natalie's first college basketball game, and beginning softball practice can help keep me going.  There may be a lot of hard that we are dealing with right now but there is a lot of good too.  And don't worry, I am trying to let myself feel those negative feelings too.  Just trying to give as much thought time to the good as the bad. One thing I really liked celebrating even though Kate said I didn't have to anymore was her half birthday.  I tried out a new copycat recipe of Starbuck's Lemon Pound Cake. It deflated but I heard it was "pretty good" and "good but strong."  (The Little Caesar's Crazy Bread copycat went over much better.) Kate said no song or photos were necessary either but little did she know I had snuck a photo of her and Hubby working on a very difficult puzzle together a couple days before...

 Kate teased us by saying she was going to turn 18 next year and oh my goodness, she was right! Gasp!  It has been so much fun to see her driving and babysitting. This freedom seems to have brought her a lot of joy. Kate made my day when she texted to let me know she and H were going ice skating and I told her I had just dropped off Michelle to go with L and Kate sent me this. How fun! I should have taken more before photos but it is great to get things off the to do list. I added film to the transom window above the door to the back yard and painted the bare strip of wood, touched up the green paint in the living room while Michelle touched up the paint on her bedroom’s accent wall, mended some clothes for the first time in ages, and Hubby ended up replacing our basement toilet after a couple attempts to fix the thing. It only lasted 8 years!   Half of us spent a few days feeling sick but for fun Natalie went to Crackpots after she was feeling better, Hubby and I taught ...

Between Christmas and New Year's Michelle, Natalie, and I went ice skating and ate at a Chinese restaurant we had never tried before while Hubby and Danny went to a really good college basketball game and Kate hung out with friends.  Michelle finished both of the puzzles I bought her for Christmas and I was mortified to see the one I special ordered had 999 pieces instead of 1,000.  Luckily there was a simple process to get the puzzle replaced and they even let me pick out a new one.  I chose "Central Park" to remind her of the trip she took to New York City with the middle school music program last summer. Everything wasn't all sunshine and rainbows while we had off work and school.  When I went to get seconds on my breakfast smoothie one morning and the entire remainder of smoothie suddenly fell out in a giant blob, it just felt fitting.  I suppose this is a good time to remind myself that life is 50/50. Our big outing of the week was to visit "Ice! A Christma...

What do you do the first day of winter break?  We baked and decorated sugar cookies this year.  Between the sugar cookies and the gingerbread men I had baked on Wednesday we had dozens of cookies to eat but the last of them barely made it to Christmas.  Funny story about the frosting this year.  All these cookies were gluten free and dairy free and they are great thanks to King Arthur Flour's recipes but I was lacking in the frosting department.  So when the B family brought over sugar cookies and my family informed me that their cookies were better but their frosting was better, I eventually broke down and texted J (the mom) to please share her frosting recipe with me.  At first she texted back that it was a family secret and then she told me it was just Philsbury vanilla out of a can.  lol.  So away I went to buy that stuff (which is GF/DF) and it was so much easier + turned out better.  The B family really has been saving my hide lately. W...