Final Thanks

My final thing I am thankful for this month, is the person who I am so very thankful for on a daily basis. My fabulous hubby, Tom. He is such a great husband and father and we are 3 very lucky girls to have him in our lives. I appreciate how hard he works at his job and that I am able to stay home with the girls while he goes to the office everyday. I am thankful for all the wonderful projects he does at home, from building the fence, making the girls their treehouse and doing the dishes almost every night after dinner!! He is my best friend and has been for 13+ years. We have grown alot from the very young people we were when we got married and I am glad I have made this journey with him.

So thank you Tom! And Happy Birthday!!!!

Gobble Gobble

Happy Thanksgiving to All!! Hope you are able to celebrate the day in a way that is special and meaningful for YOU, whatever that may be. This will be the first Thanksgiving in the 13 years that I have been married, that I will spend it with my mom. So that is very special for us.

It will still be a very quiet and peaceful day with our little group of 5. But we will have a feast that could serve triple that amount. Perfect for leftovers!

I have truely enjoyed my daily photo challenge and am pleased to say that I have been able to take a photo for every day! And I have enjoyed it so much, I will be torturing you some more with a December photo challenge that I have planned. I still have a few more days and have been saving some of my most thankful things for the end. Here is a sampling of some of my thankful photos that I haven't shared yet.

ONLINE CHRISTMAS SHOPPING

HOME SWEET HOME

SHARING WITH THE FOOD BANK

SWEET SISTERS

Extra Space

Back behind my scrapcave and over the garage we have a huge storage room. When we viewed the house for the first time I knew this space was a huge find. You just don't find this type of easily-accesible extra space in most homes. It is HUGE and has so many fabulous uses. To list a few:

1. A room for the cat's litter box that never has to be viewed by company.

2. The girls' official clubhouse, they have decked it out in animal posters, flags, chairs and more. They keep a supply of water bottles and snacks in the space for emergency situations. Often you will find signs and maps all over the house pointing out the club house location.

3. A place to store my 15+ teacher boxes that I can't part with, even though I doubt I will ever use most of it again.

4. Places to hide the Christmas gifts, though I may have to rethink this with the clubhouse status. They like to rearrange all the boxes and I can just imagine "Santa's Stash" being found.

5. And somewhere to store all the extras like holiday decorations, camping gear, extra boxes, the play kitchen that I can't quite get rid of even though the girls never play with it, the 2 trombones and saxaphone and so much more!!!!

So today, as I start to dig out the Christmas boxes, I am thankful for this room. A space I can just walk into and locate what I need without climbing down into the dark crawl space or up into the attic. A spot where I can put some extra toys while they are not being played with, but the girls can pull out at a moments notice when they want to use them. A place to store sentimental items without worrying about water damage or no space to store it.

Easy Yummies

Have you tried these amazing treats? They are so easy and so addictive. Of course the chocolate is the important part (and I AM thankful for chocolate every day!) but then add the saltiness of the pretzels and it is scrumptious. BUT the best part?? The girls can make them almost completely by themselves.

Step One - lay waffle pretzels onto a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper

Step Two - unwrap Hershey's Kisses and Hugs and put one on each pretzel (This is a great time killer on a rainy day! Just think how long it takes a 3 and 6 year to unwrap 30+ kisses!)

Step Three - bake in 250 degree oven for 8-10 minutes

Step Four - take out of oven and I slip the parchment paper off the hot cookie sheet onto the counter so the girls can then place the m & m's on top of the kiss. You can see the top photo (courtesy of familyfun.com) of how nice they look if you do it carefully. You can choose to do it like that, or let the kids be creative on their own and see what turns out!

Step Five - Have girls go to bed, taking 2 each for their dessert and devour the rest as they peacefully sleep.

Step Six - REPEAT the next day! We are on day # 3's batch! Do you think they will really want to make more tomorrow? I can't wait until they can make a chocolate cake while I sit and chat on Facebook!

Art Docent Fun

I am involved in numerous projects and programs at Madison's school but by-far the most enjoyable is the art docent program. Click here to find out the complicated version for how the program works. But the simple explanation is that parents volunteer to be an art teacher for the classroom. We are given large copies of art prints and each month we teach about one of the prints and artists and then create an art lesson to go with it. The main hallways in the school are lined with the students' fabulous artwork. It is such a joy to walk down the halls and see what they have created.

It is a wonderful way to keep art alive in the schools and ensure that REAL art is being taught instead of fun little cut and paste craft projects (nothing wrong with those, I did plenty as a teacher, but that is NOT art!). And I get play teacher for an hour a month, which I LOVE! It makes me realize how very much I miss teaching a class and also how much I could not handle it right now, as planning one lesson a month is plenty!

This year I am teaching Madison's class and one of the kindergarten classes too. So I get to do 2 lessons a month. FUN FUN! For October we had the artist Paul Klee so we focused on abstract art. It was really amazing what the students see in the artwork. They are so much more observant than I am and can comment on all sorts of things in the art that I would never notice.

We did a fun lesson where we "took a line for a walk". Using one crayon on watercolor paper we drew a continuous line, talking about zig-zag, curvey, straight........ Once the line was drawn we used BLEEDING tissue paper and painted small sections of the paper with water, overlapped tissue paper on top and then painted more water on top of that. When the entire paper was covered with tissue paper we peeled off all the tissue to get a great mosaic effect.

I go in tomorrow to teach the first grade our November lesson. We will be focusing on fore-ground and background in a landscape drawing. Hoping it turns out well! I was mentioning to Madison that tomorrow would be my art lesson, which got her very excited. Nora got upset and said that she wanted to be a first grader so I would teach her art ('um what do we do on a daily basis at home?????). I am looking forward to many more years of teaching the girls' classes, though I am going to have to do more studying as we go up in grade levels.

Weekend Wrap-Up

What a wonderful weekend I have had! So good I thought I would write a post all about it! It started out on Friday, when we were hosting Tom's old work group for dinner. I spent almost the entire day in the kitchen and loved every minute of that.

While doing that, my amazingly, fantastic and superb husband did what he does best (or at least, alot better than me!), CLEAN! So a double win for me, I get a fantastically clean house and I got to cook all day. I spent alot of my time on this:

A tiramasu cake. I have to say, it turned out quite well (though it doesn't look as fancy as it tasted!) and I will be saving that recipe for future use! Just listen to some of the ingredients: espresso syrup, kahlua, whipping cream, marscapone cheese...... How could it be bad? The only problem with it is that it served 14 people PERFECTLY with no left-overs. BUMMER! I don't think I can justify the time and effort just for me to eat on my own! The dinner was lots of fun and a big success. And best of all, the house was still clean when the company left! Well, except for the many dirty dishes that needed dealing with.

Then Saturday was so great! A friend came over to scrap all day while the dads took the kids to the Pacific Science Center and then back to their house for dinner. Tom brought the girls home to throw them into bed while we scrapped for 12 hours straight! I haven't had much time to focus on my scrapping lately and this helped me to get my scrapcave cleaned out and organized and now I feel ready to get back on track. I will post layout pictures later this week. Oh, and I may get to scrap again next weekend with more friends! Did I mention how amazing and fabulous my husband is?????

Sunday was a gorgeous fall day so the girls and I gave daddy a break and took the dog on a nice walk on Soos Creek Trail. The girls had a great time picking the last dandelions of the year, playing Pooh-Sticks on the bridge, finding bunnies at the playground and this highlight:

What an amazing weekend and so much to be thankful for! I am one lucky lady!

With Love to Luxembourg

Sent this package to my friend Katy who just started an amazing 2 year adventure to Luxembourg! Check out her always fabulous blog, sycamore stirrings, to get an idea of all the experiences they are having!

I am hoping that this package can help entertain the girls for at least a small piece of time while waiting for all their shipments to arrive. I raided my arts and craft supply space for all sorts of fun goodies for the girls. I was hoping it could reach them quicker but am being optimistic that it will arrive closer to the 5 day estimate of the 5-10 day quote!