Let's Catch Up!

I haven't posted on here in a ridiculous amount of time.  So let's catch up, shall we?

I'm just gonna give you the main bullet points and a few pictures of what's happened in our world since my last post TWO MONTHS ago.

Nolan, my firstborn baby, turned 10!  I struggled with moving into double digits.

He had a friend party with basketball as the theme.

Then he had a family party with basketball as the theme.  I let him choose anything he wanted as the family meal, and he chose cereal. :)  He wanted strawberry shortcake for dessert, so I made two types of shortcake from scratch.

Nora lost two more teeth.

I got bit by a mystery bug and had to track the swelling/spreading with markers.

I did a lot of puzzles.  Like, a really lot of puzzles.  This is only a sample.

I planted a garden.  It started to grow.  Peter Cottontail ate said garden.  So Jared put a chicken wire fence around the garden to see if anything could be saved.  Since putting in the fence, the garden has gone from this:

To this:

Jared's oldest brother and his two boys came to visit.  We had some fun cousins time at Wildlife Prairie Park.

Griffin became obsessed with our family history and he read every page of a book my dad made about our family.

Then he took and edited this picture of himself to look like the old pictures in our book:

Griffin kept up with piano lessons this summer.  That was our only kid activity.

We went strawberry picking with some friends.

They were the best strawberries I have ever tasted!  We ate so many of them just straight up.  Then I made strawberry rhubarb jam.

We made "The Blob" that I've seen over and over on Pinterest.

Nolan hurt his shoulder playing basketball.

My brother and I met my dad for lunch on Father's Day.  Our kids had so much fun together at the restaurant!

We watched every single game of the entire NBA Finals.  Jared was out of the country during the very last game so Nolan and I stayed up late to watch it together.

My niece Layla flew here from Florida to visit.  We were so happy to see her!

We went to Kansas so Jared could attend some meetings for work and I could spend time with my college roommate Angela and her two adorable boys.

I helped a friend paint a couch.  Yes, I do mean we painted the fabric cushions and all.  It was an experience.

My sister and her husband and son arrived from Florida and were reunited with Layla.  They all stayed at my house for half of their visit and I so enjoyed my time with them! 

They were here for the 4th of July.

I bought lipstick.  Yes, this is newsworthy.  Lipstick scares me.

After driving some distance to an appointment for Nolan, I took the kids to a nearby museum called the Wheels O Time Museum.  It was so cool!

We had a dinner to celebrate my brother-in-law's 40th birthday, and Nora fell asleep on me at the dinner.

One of the most exciting updates of all:  My brother and sister-in-law had their fourth baby!  Little Lyle is so tiny and perfect.

Finally, my sister and I had pictures taken with three very close friends.  I'm still working on editing the pictures, but here's what I have done so far.

Did you recognize the couch in the pictures? :)

Whew!  I don't know about you, but I feel MUCH better now that we are up to date!  I have been avoiding blogging because there was just too much to share.  Also, the one topic I didn't address is Nolan.  He continues to struggle with daily headaches and nausea.  I had so hoped that this summer would bring great relief for him, but this dark cloud seems to follow us wherever we go.  That's a discussion for a different day.  For today, I wanted to tell you about the rest of life that's been going on around here.  Until next time!

Jessica

St. Patrick's Day Fun

Blogger, my pictures, and my new computer were once best friends.  There was a falling out.  The details aren’t important.  We’re slowly working to patch things up.  In the meantime, my tech nerd husband has worked tirelessly to come up with a solution to let me *try* to blog again.  We will get through this difficult time together.

Here’s the blog post I tried to write when everything fell apart.  Now I’m just trying to publish my post about St. Patrick’s Day before Easter gets here!

St. Patrick's Day brings out my inner Fun Mom.  It's not the actual holiday that gets me excited; it's the chance to do fun stuff with food.  Just part of who I am.

I tend to stick with "green" as the theme rather than Irish.  So I browsed Pinterest (of course) and gathered some ideas for this year's Green Day.

When the kids came out to the kitchen for breakfast, they found Trix cereal and Lucky Charms (a rare treat in our house) along with some cute notes.

The Trix free printable is from Smart School House, and the Lucky Charms free printable is from Blue Skies Ahead.  I found that Lucky Charms idea on a roundup on the blog Happy Home Fairy.  I got lost for HOURS reading posts on Happy Home Fairy.  Seriously, I got sucked into her stories of everything her family has gone through with a very ill baby.  I wish we were friends in real life.

We didn't really do anything special for lunch on St. Patrick's Day.  Nolan couldn't even eat lunch because he had to have a tooth extracted.  That wasn't in my original St. Patrick's Day plan.

I tried to fill our dinner with as many green foods as possible.  And of course there were multiple desserts.

The kids have fun polka dot plates, and mine is boring blue.

Our main dish was Zucchini Bites (using zucchini I had frozen from my garden last year!), and our sides were sugar snap peas and kiwis. 

After the kids ate their dinners, they got TWO mystery desserts.  I made them eat them to guess what they were.

Are you curious?  One was pistachio pudding (first time any of us had ever tried it), and the other was Jolly Ranchers Green Apple Jello.  The kids were expecting lime, so it took them a bit to identify the flavor.  Nora kept calling the pistachios "acorns," and Nolan liked the flavor but got totally creeped out by the texture of the pudding.  It actually made me laugh nearly to the point of peeing.

I even made the kids a special drink.  I froze Lemon Lime Koolaid in ice cube trays.  I put a few green ice cubes in each glass and poured Sierra Mist (one of the only Nolan-safe sodas) over the ice.

After dinner we went to watch Jared's basketball game.  I bribed told the kids that if they behaved well at the game, I had extra desserts back at home.  It's clearly overkill, but I just can't help myself.

I had made key lime bars and green Rice Krispies treats with Lucky Charms marshmallows.

Boy those photos are not good quality!  But I don't want to push anything since I JUST got Blogger to upload my pictures at all.

I used the Creamy Lime Bars recipe from Eat, Live, Run.  I saw a bag of key limes at the grocery store and decided to use those.  Unfortunately, we do not have a citrus juicer.  I squeezed an entire bag of teeny limes by hand.

I used the St. Patrick's Day Rice Krispies Treats recipe on Classy Clutter.  I opened a box of Lucky Charms and separated a bunch of marshmallows from the cereal.

I was using an opened box of Rice Krispies for this recipe, and I didn't have quite enough.  Then I had a bright idea--I used the Lucky Charms cereal!  I actually really liked the crunch the Lucky Charms cereal added to the final treats.

See?  I told ya I'm a sucker for holiday food fun.

Aaaannd, I finally completed a whole blog post without my pictures disappearing, losing all my progress--twice, or the website crashing.  Yes, all those things previously happened just while I was trying to write this post.

I hope to see you back here again sometime before the seasons change!

Jessica