Who’s been playing with my camera?!

Believe it or not, Kristen took ALL of these photos this past week! She wanted to play with my camera and when she showed me the pictures she had taken, I just had to laugh out loud . . .

I bought this soft ‘beer bottle’ toy for Boo at Christmas.. urmm, I mean ‘Santa Paws’ left it in his stocking for him! When you squeeze it, it makes a sound like a can of beer cracking open! and then it sounds like it’s being poured :-)

What made me laugh even more was Kristen giving me a running commentary as I looked at the photos, saying something about a new beer for dogs . . .

“your dog will love it so much he’ll want to sleep with it” she said

“and he’ll even bring you one too!”

What can I say?!

Definitely in need of a hair cut… but you gotta admit, he’s cute!

they BOTH are :-)

CSN Winner!

Thank you to everyone who entered the CSN Giveaway. The lucky winner of the $40 gift card is

ERIN from Little Texas Love Nest

 

 

Congratulations Erin, I will email you with your gift card info.

The Winner. . .

that would be ME!!!  Not for the CSN giveaway – I’ll post the winner for that tomorrow:-)  I was the lucky winner of Debbie’s ‘personal’ giveaway a couple of weeks ago, and last week a lovely parcel arrived from Debbie. I just didn’t get a chance to post pictures because of having Kristen home sick every day.

When I opened the box, this pretty bag was inside.

And these were the pretty little goodies inside!

I just love the cheese platter and knife, can’t wait to use this at our next wine and cheese night :-)

here’s a close up of the pretty necklace, it’s so ‘feminine’ I just love it.

   Can you tell I like the word ‘pretty’ ;-)   Thank you Debbie for your generosity, and for sharing your life with us on your great blog.

You still have time to enter to win $40 to spend at the CSN online stores. CLICK HERE if you haven’t already left a comment.

Back to Normal!

Kristen has been off school sick since last Tuesday, today is the first day back at school! I don’t like that she was off for so long, but she was running a fever so I couldn’t send her in. Monday she was fine, I went to her Valentine’s Day party at school, then I took her to see the Justin Bieber movie (which I thought was really good, and which she absolutely loved). Monday night she came in to my room and said she couldn’t get to sleep? We got up as usual on Tuesday morning at 6.30 but she seemed so weary and just flopped on the sofa. She didn’t look too good either, so I took her temperature. It was over 100! I decided to keep her off incase she was starting to get really sick, and I was praying she wasn’t getting flu. Her friend Emily’s little brother had it the week before and had been hospitalized for two days with pneumonia :-(

So, we had a quiet Monday, she watched tv on the sofa, didn’t eat much, had Tylenol and slept with me again that night. The next day …. same thing! Still a fever but no other symptoms. This went on all week. We are told not to send the kids to school until they have been fever free (without meds) for 24 hours. Friday morning was the first day her temp went down to 98 without any meds! I’m just glad she didn’t get anything worse than a fever and a little tired. Her appetite still isn’t that good either, but she’s been ok over the weekend so I’ve taken her to school today.

I’m saying all this because that is why I haven’t posted anything since last Wednesday! I’m about to make my menu plan for this week and head up to the grocery store. I have a lot to catch up with around the house too.

I’ll be back tomorrow with pictures and a brighter post!

CSN $40 Giveaway!

I was contacted recently by CSN Stores and asked if I would like to do a review or giveaway on my blog. If I did a review I would get a $40 gift certificate to spend at their online store. If I did a giveaway YOU would get the chance to win a $40 gift certificate to spend at their store! It wasn’t a difficult decision – I chose the giveaway!

I’ve seen other giveaways for CSN Shopping and have looked around their site and entered. With over 200 online stores, they have everything from Modern Office Furniture to cute shoes and stylish picnic baskets!

These ones in particular caught my eye!

 

Modern technology never ceases to amaze me – to think that we can sit at our computers  in our pj’s no less and shop for desks and chairs and anything else we need without leaving the comfort of our own homes – yes, Amazing!

One lucky reader will be chosen at random one week from today (Feb 23).  

To enter for this giveaway,

1) leave me a comment  on THIS post. 

2) mention this giveaway on your blog .

3) become a follower of my blog (if you already follow, mention that in your comment for an extra entry).

That’s 3 chances of winning!  Good Luck.

Hungry Girl!

I’m so excited… I’ve just discovered something REALLY wonderful, and I just had to share with you all! OK, if I’m honest some of you will not think this is wonderful at all, BUT some of you might just, like me, be rather thrilled about it!

I’ve mentioned before how a good cookbook to me should be filled with wonderful photos. To be honest I’m not happy unless there’s a picture with EVERY dish in the book. That’s why I like those little mini cookbooks you can get usually at the checkouts at your grocery store, they state quite clearly on the front ‘A Photo with Every Recipe’ :-) Most other cookbooks I’m usually rather disappointed in, the one exception is The Pioneer Woman’s Cookbook which is my ALL TIME favorite, and something I’m trying to cook my way through (but I’m following WW points system right now so that is on hold for a while!)

Anyway, the other day I picked up this book from the library…

I picked it up after watching her show the past couple of weeks that just started airing on the Cooking Channel. Now, at first glance I thought it was like any other cookbook – it has lots of great sounding recipes, but only a handful of pictures grouped together at two different sections of the books. Her website says that now her books are showing the new Weight Watcher points + values for all of the recipes, so I clicked on over today and guess what? Not only can you get the points + info BUT there is a picture of EVERY RECIPE :-)

This is a screen shot of one of the pages. Oh my! I will be browsing this site all day now. Now of course there isn’t the actual recipes on the website, you’d have to buy the book for that, OR do like I did and borrow one for free from your local library. But wow! it is so much nicer glancing at a picture and seeing instantly how many points the recipe has. I’m so excited, I want to try ALL of the recipes now!

She even has a ‘Happy Hour’ book all about cocktails and party food . . . this one is in at my library too, so I’ll have to try and check it out sometime this week!

Are you like me? Do you have to see a picture of a recipe before you feel like trying it? I wish I wasn’t like that, but I’m such a visual person, the pictures are what get me interested, not the list of ingredients!

Well, anyway, I just HAD to share that with you all. If you’re like me and get excited about stuff like this, hop on over to the HUNGRY GIRL website and have fun surfing around it today. And if you haven’t seen her tv cooking show yet, check it out. It usually airs on Saturday afternoons at 3pm.

Happy Valentine’s Day

Hi everyone, hope you all have a LOVEly day today. We don’t have any special plans today, well other than me going up to Kristen’s school in a few hours while they have their ‘valentine’s Party’, then I’m taking Kristen to see the Justin Bieber movie later this afternoon.

Yesterday I helped Kristen bake a giant heart shaped cookie . . .

She actually piped the decoration on all by herself :-)

Then we sprinkled on pink sugar! She’ll be eating this all week! Jason and I won’t be sharing. . . Jason has come on board and is going to start counting WW points! I am so excited :-) Well, actually I’ll probably be counting his points for him! but I don’t mind that at all. I’ve sent him off to work today with a full lunch bag, including a Jimmy Dean ‘lite’ breakfast sandwich to get his day started right (he never usually eats any breakfast!).

Thanks to my sweet friend Cheryl, THIS was my dinner last night :) Jason does not like seafood at all, so I had lobster tail with salad and a glass of ‘organic’ white wine! I am trying organic wine to see if less sulfites helps my nose not get so stuffy. It seemed to work. I had 3 glasses of this on Saturday night and could still breath through my nose!

Well, this is just a quicky post, must get on and do some housework before heading up to the school. Hope you all have a wonderful day.

x x x x x

The Winner!

 

Hi everyone, Thank you all for leaving a comment on my Yoplait smoothie giveaway. I used the Random Number Generator to pick a number for the Yoplait Giveaway.

The Winner is #4   JEN. S

  

Congratulations Jen, email me your address and I’ll pass it on to MyBlogSpark :-)

If you haven’t tried one of these smoothies yet go out and buy one, Kristen has asked for one just about every day since we tried it. We like the strawberry and banana one best :-)

WIWW

What I Wore Wednesday – Kiki Style! I hate to say it but I’m still in my sweats and shirts with my big ole grey cardigan wrapped round me – it is really cold here.  A couple of days ago though we were up in the 60’s again. Kristen wore her new ‘Major Cutie’ t-shirt and matching hat that we bought from Justice the other week.

 

Actually I don’t think I posted about our ‘girly trip’ to Justice! I posted pics on my FB page after Cheryl took them on her phone. Kristen is quite the tom boy (for those of you who don’t know!)  but the weekend before last she asked if I’d take her to Justice for Girls. I thought she might want to shop for cool girly clothes ;-) but she said she just wanted a ‘mood bracelet’ like one of her friends at school had! Well I took her anyway and my friend Cheryl said she’ d love to come too – she has 2 boys so she doesn’t get to girly shop very often. Just as we were walking out the door , Kristen’s friend Emily knocks! Emily asked her Dad (her mom was out) if she could come with us, and off the 4 of us went for some retail therapy. It turned out to be a really fun morning. Kristen and Emily were trying on all kinds of cute outfits, and I went a little crazy and bought Kristen a ton of stuff!

We bought this blue outfit too, including the hat and purse, but later I took the leggings back (just a tad too tight) and also the top. Kristen said that she could feel the ‘bling’ sticking in her chest. I’ve since learned that we need to get her some cami’s so she can wear tops like this without them irritating her skin. I’m waiting on the 40% voucher from Justice before I go in there shopping again… maaaan their prices are way high!

Cheryl took a few pictures on her phone. The girls looked so cute together. The above pic is the only one Cheryl has put on my FB page so far so I can’t share more yet!  The others were what I took the other day when Kristen got ready to go to the store.

The little Chihuahua and purse she got a while ago from Daddy after he got back from a trip away for work. Rather appropriate though as Beverley Hills Chihuahua II is out on dvd, (which we tried to get out from Blockbuster yesterday but they had none on the shelf, so hopefully we’ll see it this weekend).

  (we’re still waiting for that second ‘big tooth’ to grow in to even up that pretty smile) :-)

One of these days you might see ‘what I wore for Wednesday’ – but I wouldn’t hold ya breath! ;-)

Going strong . . .

Hi guys, another Monday, don’t they come around fast?! This one is great because there is NO school today :-) or tomorrow for that matter, or the next day either. Yup, we’re having a 6 day weekend (started last Friday when school was canceled because of ALL THE SNOW we got) ;-)

I’m still going strong with my healthy eating plan (boy I sure do hope I can keep this up for a very long time)! One thing that will make it easy I’m sure are these . . . .

I love smoothies and I’ve often made them in the past myself. Generally with a combination of fresh and frozen fruit, most often by using frozen strawberries, fresh bananas, yogurt, milk and sometimes I’d use protein powder if I had it. They’re not difficult to make but making sure I have all the ingredients on hand is the what takes the planning. I’ll often have the yogurt in the fridge, but no fresh bananas in the house (which I love in the smoothie cos it thickens it up like a milkshake)

I was contacted recently by MyBlogSpark and offered the chance to try the Yoplait Frozen Smoothies. I am so glad I did. I just made this today and wow, how simple it was. . . and delicious.

I didn’t have to wonder if I had the ingredients in to make a yummy smoothie, I just grabbed a packet from the freezer, added one cup of milk and voila, I got two large smoothies (Kristen enjoyed the other one). I think these will become a regular afternoon snack for me and Kristen.

Each package of Yoplait Frozen Smoothies contains one full serving of fruit (1/2 cup) and 110 to 120 calories per serving. Not only does Yoplait yogurt contain live and active cultures, but when prepared with skim milk and made according to package directions, Yoplait Frozen Smoothies are a good source of calcium.

Yoplait provided me with this product, and information through MyBlogSpark And they have an extra prize pack for one of my readers. If you’d like the chance to win, just leave a comment on this post. The goodies you’ll receive are shown below. (US residents only).

Kristen has already taken the cute water bottle! I love the diet and fitness journal and the carryall/backpack bag is ideal for when I get back to my walking! I’ll be able to put my water bottle and camera in while I’m out walking around the neighborhood :-) I think you’ll love it too!

I’ll draw a winner on Friday.

We got snow afterall!

Yup, we got some snow finally here in TX and NO SCHOOL TODAY!

What a way to start the weekend :-)  And what’s even better is, we have no school on Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday, we were already scheduled for those 3 days off for teacher/staff development! That means it’s a SIX day weekend!

I woke up at 5am this morning and decided to look out the window to see if the forecast was right, they said it might snow during the night! Sure enough we had about an inch out there, no more. I checked the school website and saw that school was canceled for the day so I slid back in to my nice warm cozy bed.  But I couldn’t go back to sleep so I got up at 6am as usual and made a lovely hot pot of coffee. I figured I’d wake Kristen up when it was light enough to see the snow, but she beat me to it and was awake by 6.30am! She’d looked out the window but it was so dark she couldn’t see the snow. She was thrilled when I told her though, and as you can see from the above pictures she couldn’t wait to go out and see it for real.

 

An hour later the whole cul-de-sac was out there :-)

 

 

Including Boo!

        

Sad to say the sun is out now and the snow is melting fast. That may be it for this year. . .  but ya never know!

Brrrrrr!!!

When I say it’s cold here right now, everything is relative… I mean COLD for Central TX! I know many of you get these temps (and colder) all the time during the winter, but I can’t remember it ever being 17 degrees in the 6 years I’ve lived here.

Yesterday our power went out as we were getting ready for school in the morning. I thought it was just because of the high winds we were getting, but it turns out that it was deliberate! A ‘rolling blackout’ they call it, because the power grid can’t keep up with the demand. After the first 20 minutes it came back on but then for the next 2 hours or so it would go off every 7 minutes just for like 2 seconds then come back on again! I’m not sure if that is what it was supposed to be doing or if, as Jason said, there is something wrong with the ‘transformer box outside in the cul-de-sac? Either way, it meant I couldn’t turn on the tv (Tivo has to reboot every time the power goes out, so it would only just say reboot then the power would turn it off again – not worth putting on!) we turned the computers off too because the backup battery kept beeping… and all this was making poor Boo freak out. He was trembling so much I felt so sorry for him.  Not to mention that the house was freezing. I had the thermostat set to 73 but the temp in the house was only 64! I called in to the store after taking Kristen to school and picked up some packs of wood, and lit a fire yesterday. 

School was delayed 2 hours this morning because they were expecting more power cuts, but so far it hasn’t gone off. I took Kristen to school at 9.15am and now I’m back doing laundry.

I have no photos to share with todays post (would love to show you a nice snowy scene but we have none here in TX) so I thought I’d show you some pictures of ‘snow days gone by’ :-)

This was probably Kristen’s first snow day (that she could walk in). . . taken in MD, Jan 2002 (she was 14mths old).

I love that little hat and glove set. I bought it in England when we took her to visit when she was 8mths old.

The following year (Feb 2003, 2 yrs,3mths) she learned to make snow angels. . . .

. . . . and snowmen!

A few days after this picture was taken we got more snow… we woke up one morning to this . . . . !!!!!

So you see, we’ve had our share of snow, but ya know what? I still miss it!  And I know Kristen would love to see more of it too – what kid doesn’t love to play in the snow :-)

I hope all of you that have a lot of it right now can either have fun in it (with your kiddies) or stay inside and stay warm. Make a hot cup of chocolate, snuggle beside the fire . . . embrace the joy in Winter, for soon it will be Spring again ( and I know you’re all looking forward to that!).

 

Denise

This and That!

I thought I better post here before another week has gone by! Speaking of which, can you believe a MONTH has already gone by – hello February!

I wondered what to write about? Melissa requested pictures of my cupboards! I never did post any, so here they are. . .  the rest of the kitchen is still a work in progress!

As you can see (above) this side of the cupboards is all bowls and plates, and glasses next to them.

 

The left side looks a little less organized, but it’s the best I can do. Top left shelf is a bit of a mixture, middle shelf houses my electric knife, bread cutter, electric hand whisk and scales, bottom shelf is all vitamins and allergy meds! The right hand side is cups/mugs, measuring cups and jugs and a set of casserole dishes. Exciting stuff eh!

What else have I been up to? Card making! I want to get back in to making my own cards with my Stampin Up stuff. I have a few stamps and supplies, paper, pens etc so I want to put them to good use. I’ve been making ‘Thank You’ cards this week, still got a few to send out after Christmas, so these should work nicely. I want to try and make some Christmas themed ones ready for next year, well actually this year – Christmas 2011 :-)  I also want to try and make my own gift tags for my knitted gifts. You can order personalized ‘knitting’ rubber stamps from Etsy, so I will be doing that soon too.

Once I get in the swing of making these I think they’d make a nice little gift set too – half a dozen cards  w/envelopes and a ribbon wrapped around them would be a lovely stocking stuffer, don’t you think?

Biscuits for Boo!

 

We’ve been meaning to bake these biscuits for Boo every since ‘Santa Paws’ left them in his stocking ;-) We finally got round to doing that last weekend.

Kristen loves baking with me in the kitchen :-) And every time we do it, I can’t help but think back to the days my Mam would teach me how to roll out dough and bake pies and make pastry. I have such sweet memories of it, I hope Kristen will have too.

 

Denise