February Recap

We were pretty busy in February but that was overshadowed by the never ending winter we are experiencing.   We had lots of snow, freezing temperatures and even more days of cancelled school.  It's really beginning to wear on everyone.  I'm particularly sick of all the muddy black snow in my garage.  Basically, the cars track in all this snow sludge and it just sits on our garage floor.  It's too cold to melt all the way so we've had to shovel it out a couple of times or else everyone steps in it and tracks it into the house.  Yuck!

Everydaybefore school, we shovel, bundle up with boots, hats, etc.
It's never ending!

Anwyay, here's a quick rundown of how we survived February:

1-Ashley auditioned and was cast in the school musical.  They are doing Oliver!  She was uncertain if she could try out because it's during the same time as soccer season and would have rehearsals and soccer practice at the same time.  The director told her to tryout anyway and just note on her audition sheet she would have a conflict with soccer.  He said, this would mean she might just be in the ensemble, but she still wanted to go for it.

This was her first audition for a high school production and she probably didn't prepare enough as she came home and said it was pretty bad.  Apparently, it wasn't too bad because she was cast as an orphan - a better part than she expected.  She has pretty much had rehearsals every day after school, but is really enjoying it.  So far it has been manageable for her schedule because bowling is over and soccer doesn't start until March, but once soccer starts who knows how she is going to make this all work?

2-  The Superbowl.  We watched at home in our awesome basement and ordered food from Portillos.  We picked it up the day before and just heated it up on Sunday.  We had Italian Beef Sandwiches and Chopped Salad.  Yummy.

3- The Olympics!  Thank goodness we had the Olympics to enjoy while we were cooped up inside.

This is the Olympic cake we had to celebrate during the opening ceremonies

We even had our own Olympics with the Young Women at church.  Here is our version of the "two-man luge"  We also did curling and ice dancing.  Ashley is in the background with the striped shirt and red belt.  She was representing the country Italy and dressed up like a Gondola guide.

4-  Girl Scout Cookies.  I'm pretty sure this is the last year Paige is doing Girl Scouts.  She has fun doing it, but it really is becoming burdensome to our schedule.  This also means the last time we have to sell Girl Scout Cookies.  I'm not a salesman and hence don't make an all out effort to sell cookies, but thanks to some kind friends she sold a decent amount.

5-  Valentine's Day.  Nothing special this year.  In fact, I don't feel like I'm on the top of my game right now.  We didn't even do our traditional love notes to each other.  Honestly, I just forgot.  We didn't exchange any gifts or have a special dinner and really no one seemed to care.  I did get up at 5 am and go to Dunkin Donuts to get everyone a heart shaped donut and then packed lunches of all red and pink foods.  We did get one surprise, a gift card from Grandma and Grandpa Smith for Oberweis Dairy.  How fun!  We loved that!

Valentine's Day breakfast

The day before Valentine's Day, Ashley and I went on temple trip with the youth at church.  It was a great trip, but does pretty much take up the whole afternoon and evening.  As a result, I knew that I had to have Paige's school valentine's ready in advance.  So earlier in the week we got her valentine's candy ready and made her box.  Her box had to be based on an invention that she had written a report about.  Her report was on the Xbox360.  That was easy to make with a cereal box and some black wrapping paper.  In fact it was a little too simple so we made a grass block from the game Minecraft to go on it.

6- Church service.  Ashley tied and donated this fleece blanket for a Personal Progress experience.  She made this blanket to help another boy at our church complete his Eagle Scout Project.  The blanket is going to South Africa to be given as part of a care package to young man from South Africa who wants to service a mission.  The package contains clothing and supplies that he can use while he is on a mission.  

I'm sure I'll be blogging about this some more, but I have also been super busy getting ready for the Girl's Camp Fundraiser for the Young Women at church.  Instead of a spaghetti dinner, we are doing Chinese Food!  This may sound ambitious and it probably is, but I've got a secret weapon---MY DAD!  yep, he is flying in to help and do the cooking.  So grateful to have his help and so excited to have him come visit.  The dinner is towards the end of March, but there is always so much background work….

And just to make sure that there is never a dull moment around here.  We also had New Beginnings at the end of the month.  It's a special program we do every year in Young Women's.  This year the theme was Come Unto Christ and based around the theme of diamonds.

7- School spirit and dress up days.  This is always and will always be a mom project and lucky me, both Ashley and Paige had them on the same days.  Of course, they had different themes and of course, they often forget to mention it until late at night right before bedtime.  I actually, had to send Paige to bed and tell her I needed time to think about it and hopefully I would have something ready for her in the morning.

Ashley - 80s day
She has shredded leather pants on.  I bought those two years ago.
I knew that one day Kim Kardashian faux leather pants would
come in handy!

Paige - Dress like your favorite book character
Seriously, this is a hard one, especially when you
have to pull it together last minute.
Paige is Pinkalicious

8- Best for last, we have a new member of the family, born to Dave's sister Kelley and her husband David.  Quinton David Gee was born on February 24th and not a moment too soon.  This guy weighed in at 10 lbs. 3 oz.! (Originally, I listed 9 lbs, but it was actually more!)  Since I didn't have to deliver him, I think it's great that he comes with such chubby cheeks!  I'm a sucker for chubby cheeks and fat thighs!

Bowling Party

The bowling team has a tradition of meeting each Friday night for a pizza party throughout the season.  The girls take turns hosting at their homes.  It's actually a great team building activity and helps the girls to get to know each other better.

Not every girl has to host but Ashley offered to do it during the last week of the season AND thank goodness she has awesome parents who put out a great spread for her.

All the girls came over, ate pizza/snacks, chatted, played Just Dance and other games.  I think they had a good time.  Sure was nice to have the basement for them to hang out in.  What a great end to the season!

I hit the grocery store jackpot

One of the major grocery store chains in our area has closed all it's stores and left town.  This isn't just a small number of stores.  This chain, Dominick's, has been here in some form or another for 100 years.  Ownership has changed over the years, but the current owners - Safeway are finished with Chicagoland.

The timing for the closing was the end of 2013.  They tried to sell most of the stores, but there are so many that a good number were unsold when the closing deadline arrived.  Dominick's had to liquidate as much of it's supply as possible so in stages that started marking everything down.  It started with 50% off health and beauty, 50% grocery, then 50% meats and diary, and finally 75% off everything.  I scored some pretty good health and beauty deals and did okay with grocery discounts.  The grocery marked down was on the same day as Dave's hernia surgery so I didn't get in on it until the day after.  I'll tell you these stores were attacked and just left barren.  People filled their carts to overflowing and then had to wait hours in line to checkout.  It was pretty intense.  I had a friend who went over to the store right as they opened on the day all groceries were marked down to 50% and she sent me a message saying, "this is what I think the zombie apocalypse will be like."  Yikes!

Since I'm always looking for a good grocery deal, I was a little disappointed I didn't do better at the Dominick's sales.  BUT….I had a bit of luck.

I follow a lady who blogs all kinds of coupons and groceries deals and she gave a heads up in the middle of January that a few of the Dominick's stores that were bought by other companies and had remained open were going to start liquidating.  There were only 6 stores in all of Chicagoland and lucky me, there happened to be one in our town.  Not as many people knew about this one so I went over on the first day and scored!  There were other shoppers but it wasn't too busy.

Here is my grocery cart.  I don't think I've every filled a cart like this.  I bought all kinds of everything from drinks, to canned goods, to crackers, paper plates, toilet paper, apple sauce, frozen food, etc.  This definitely helped me get over my disappointment about missing the earlier sale.  I even scored later in the week when meat went 50% off.

Here's my haul from the butcher, what you see are beef roasts, porterhouse steaks, NY strip steaks, a couple of rib roasts, deli cheeses and turkey--all this for less than $70.  It was a pretty interesting experience, basically the customers stood by the butcher case while the butchers were in the back cutting and packaging meat.  Every 15 minutes they would bring out a cart of meat and people would just grab them and fill their carts.  As you can see I happened to be there during the "beef" phase.  You couldn't make a request for anything, you just had to wait and see what they would bring out.

Anyways, we are definitely set for a while.  My freezers are bursting full.  Did I mention that one of the Young Women in our ward works for Panera and they have allowed her to bring home the bread they would normally throw away at the end of each day.  Panera does not serve day-old bread so rather than watch it go to waste, she brings it home, wraps it up and shares it with the ward.  This past week, I brought home two full loaves of bread and a bunch of bread bowls.  Everything freezes and reheats so well, what a great blessing.

(I wonder why I am having such a hard time getting a diet going?…..)

Surviving the Polar Vortex

THE POLAR VORTEX!!  It's brutal.  This winter has been relentless.  We have record amounts of snow and record low temperatures, and when I say record low temperatures I'm talking 50 degrees below zero.

The Chicago area got hit with the polar vortex right as the kids were supposed to return to school after winter break.  The air temperatures were -15 and with wind chill it was -50.  Way too cold to go outside, I mean you could literally get frostbite within minutes.  We also got a little snow along with the cold temperatures which pretty much iced the roads.  School was cancelled for two days and we basically just hunkered down in our warm house.

The day before the actual polar vortex hit, was Sunday and we got so much snow that church was cancelled.  Paige helped Dave shovel, but it was hard work.  When I opened to door to check on them, Paige had been reduced to shoveling while sitting down.

This was day one of being frozen/snowed in.  By the next day we were frozen, even Dave's company advised it's employees to work from home.  I was so grateful for a working heater and pipes that didn't freeze.

So what did we do?  Well, we got to sleep in!  We watched tv, movies, and read some books.  I also had everyone work on a family project, tying fleece blankets.

We made blankets for each of the girls and a baby blanket for Debby.  These sure have been handy this winter considering how cold it's been.

We also ate lots of comfort food, including Thai Sukiyaki.  I even made my own sauce from scratch, it was yummy and I've found another use for my fondue pot.

It was so cold Ashley wanted to do an experiment that everyone was doing which was to throw boiling water outside and watch it freeze/vaporize in mid-air.  I told her she could do it.  So she boiled the water in a pan, opened the door and threw the water into the air and right back onto herself, earning a pretty good burn on her arm.  Honestly, I didn't even think about safety, I figured she was old enough to throw hot water out of a pan, but obviously not.  Anyway, she had a pretty good blister on her forearm for a few days, but she is okay now.

One of the things Paige did to keep busy was to make us all lots of rainbow loom bands.

Fortunately, before we went too crazy with cabin fever, it warmed up to -10 wind chills which was downright balmy and good enough to return to school.

Bundled up and ready to step outside and catch the school bus

I wish that I could say these few days were the end of our harsh winter, but honestly it was more like the beginning.  We have had several snow storms since then and many days of harsh, subzero temperatures.  Two more days of school were cancelled and the forecast is still pretty grim if you're hoping for spring.  Just this past week we got about 10 more inches of snow and the temperatures were -32 wind chills this morning and we aren't even canceling school anymore.  We just get calls warning us about poor road conditions and late running buses.

It's good times around here.  Everyone is officially done with winter.  Here is some of the commentary about winter this year:

"die winter, die"
"this is reverse hell"
"Chiberia"
"definitely buying a snowblower next year"
"time to hibernate"

Sledding

For the past few years we have had the mildest winters with hardly any snow.  Three Christmas' ago I bought the girls an awesome new sled and they have NEVER used it.  This year we were finally able to break the sled in.  We have had a good amount of snow already and it has also been pretty cold too.

Paige had been asking to go sledding during the whole winter break, but anytime we were free it was FREEZING outside.  Paige wanted to go on a day that it was 11 degrees outside, luckily, I was able to convince her to wait two days until it was 28 degrees.

Even then it was pretty cold, but being the awesome mom I am, I took Ashley, Paige and our neighbor/friend Samantha.  I will admit however, that I wasn't awesome enough to stand outside with them.  I sat in the warm car and watched them go up and down the hill.

I'm just grateful we have a hill to sled on; Illinois is pretty flat.  In fact, the sledding hill is right near our house and it's man-made.  A local church created the hill when they dug the foundation for their building, hence the huge cross in the picture.  On the top of the hill, they have instilled a fire pit so parents can keep warm and at the bottom of the hill are a bunch of hay bales to safely stop the sledders.  Maybe if there are some warmer days ahead, I'll get out of the car next time.

New Years Eve

Happy New Year!  This year, everyone in our family was healthy.  Hurray!  I swear the last few years we have had to cancel our plans because someone had the flu, a cold, or some kind of illness.

Our family went over to our friends' the Thompsons with a few other families to ring in the new year.  All the teens left about 9:30 to go to their own party, but the rest of us stayed at snacks, played board games and watched a little of Shaolin Soccer.  We love that movie!

We rang in the new year, hopped in the car and went over to pick up Ashley from her party.  We had another pretty significant snowstorm that night, but fortunately we all made it home safe and sound.

Here are our first pictures of 2014:

Christmas Vacation Recap

We had over two full weeks off of school for Christmas vacation!  It was a great time of relaxation, sleeping in, few obligations and fun.  For a blogger, I pretty shamefully did not document much with photos, so I will just give a short recap.

1.  MOVIES, MOVIES, MOVIES!  Our family loves movies and we watched a lot of them.  We got an awesome amount of movie theater gift cards for Christmas so we were all set.   We saw the Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug, Frozen, Saving Mr. Banks, and Anchorman 2 (just Jen and Dave.)  Plus we ate lots of popcorn!

At home we watched Elf, A Christmas Story, White Christmas, RIPD, and Lord of the Rings.

2.  Double feature movie night with friends.  We also had our friends the Griffins over for a double feature and pizza party.  We watched the new Superman movie and Wolverine along with eating some yummy Jet's pizza.

3.  Midnight bowling.  Ashley didn't want to go the whole break without a little bowling practice, so we decided to go to the "all you can bowl" from 10pm-12am.  I mean, it's not like we had to wake up early the next day.  Ashley bowled her personal best so far 190!  That girl is getting close to 200!

4.  Hanging with friends.  Both girls went to parties at friends houses and spent other time with friends. Paige went to play with friends - American Girl and Minecraft were favorite past times.  Ashley went on mall shopping trips and to the movies with her friends.

5.  Friends and family parties.  We are so very fortunate to have good friends here.  We were on the receiving end of some great holiday invitations.  We spent Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and New Year's Eve with friends at family dinner parties.  Besides delicious food and awesome company, we played games, chatted, went caroling, and had all sorts of fun.

6.  Binge-watched "Once Upon a Time."  For the past 6 plus months, the girls and I have been watching the tv show "Once Upon a Time" on Netfix.  Currently, season 3 is running on tv, so we have had to watch two seasons to catch up.  It hasn't been easy because the three of us can never sit down at the same time to watch tv, so it's definitely taken longer than expected.  Well we are now all caught up thanks to binge-watching over Christmas break.  Of course, the down side is that now we have to wait every week like everyone else for each episode.

7.  Eating lots of junk.  My sister Debby and her husband, Sam, sent us one of those gift towers of fruit and candy.  9 levels to be exact.  That along with other treats, gifts, and candy left us with a counter full of food.  At the beginning of the break, I thought there would be no way we could get through it all.  Update - we pretty much were able to eat our way through it.  It has been junk food city around here.  I've hardly cooked any regular meals because we've been eating out or eating so much other crap no one was ever hungry at dinner time.

The tower of treats - pears, apples, candy, chocolate,
cookies, nuts, crackers, oh my!

A fun gift we received, homemade vanilla extract

8.  Candy-making.  I know that it is kind of ironic to follow number 7 above with a story about making lots of Christmas candy, but it's just not Christmas to me without making some candy.  I will report that we did gift over 75% of it.  I made fudge, English toffee and sugar cookies.  I didn't have to make caramels because a family friend makes the best caramels and gave us a huge tin.  LUCKY.

9.  Games.  Each girl got a board game for Christmas.  Ashley got a chess board.  The girls are just beginners but they have been playing a lot and honing their strategies.  Paige got the game Hedbandz which is always good for a laugh.