Tuesday, February 4, 2014

Catch Up


(I was unable to find the source of this cute photo. If it is yours, please email me and I will give the proper credit with apologies.)


Hello friends! I kept telling myself that I would blog at Christmas (ha!), then I would do an “end of year” post around New Year’s (double ha!), and here it is February. So I’m just going to call a spade a spade and do a “catch up” post, with a comment (not a promise!) that I miss blogging and hope to come back more regularly. I truly do miss this little world but carving out the time to post is another story. So here I am…

I won’t do a full detailed holiday post, but I do want to say that we had a wonderful end to 2013. Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, and this year was wonderful as we spent time with family and friends. Christmas was also a good holiday for us. We took the girls down to Opryland to see the Rockettes and stayed at the Opryland Hotel for one night. The girls were thrilled and had a wonderful time. It was definitely a pink Christmas at our house; both girls got Barbie houses from Santa. Big A got the Barbie Dream House and Little A got the Malibu Barbie House, along with toys, clothes, and anything else you can imagine! We are so blessed with big, wonderful families and I am always so grateful for the wonderful times that we have with them each Christmas. We basically do Christmas from the 24th through the 26th, and it is always such a good time.

2014 started off with us organizing and reorganizing the house. Both girls’ rooms got a thorough clean-out, and we bought shelves and tubs for them to keep everything organized. Part of the dis-organization was our fault-we got the girls so quickly and unexpectedly that we didn’t have the rooms ready for them, and we were picking up things randomly and not being very organized about things as we got them.  Now the old/unused toys are gone, and all of their new stuff has a place to go. I’ve been so proud of the girls since we got our new system in place; they are doing a fantastic job of keeping their rooms neat and organized. Mr. P and I cleaned out and reorganized our closet also, and I’m embarrassed at the amount of bags that we filled up to donate to Goodwill. We’ve also done some work on the garage and basement, and some rearranging in the great room and kitchen. I love, love, love my clean and organized house! So far, we’ve done well with keeping everything organized now that we are back in school/work mode.

Like most of the rest of the country, we’ve had a challenging winter weather-wise. We’ve missed 6 days of school so far, but until this week we didn’t have much snow on any of the days. But Sunday night we got a good dose of snow, so we made the most of our snow day yesterday by sledding, making snowmen and snow angels, and eating snow cream. We’re out again today, so the girls are outside playing in the snow right now as I type. 

After Christmas, I dusted off my old bread baker, and we have been experimenting with making different types of bread. I’ve really enjoyed playing around with it, so if you have any good bread recipes be sure to send them my way!

I can’t post much about our situation with the girls, but I do want to say that we are at a point where we are a little frustrated with our case and I have been praying hard about our situation lately. A friend sent me this the other day, and it is one of the many verses that I have been drawn to lately for comfort.



As I have said before, we are so blessed to have incredible support from our family and friends.

I hope that everyone is off to a wonderful start in 2014. It's time for the girls to come in and warm up, which means that it's time for me to make hot chocolate and popcorn! Hope to "see" you again soon!

Blessings,

MB