About Me

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I am mom to an 18 year old boy and identical twin 9 year old boys. I am the wife of a wonderful man. I have had celiac disease for 18 years, and love to share recipes I find or create!

Oct 24, 2010

Rite Aid Rocks!!

Got 2 pks Pull Ups, 1 Garnier Nutritioniste ultra lift night cream, 1 24roll pk Charmin TP, and 10 king sized snickers/twix/3 musketeers for $15 today! I used a ton of coupons, and I am at the wellness card level to get 10% off everything I buy in the store. Awesome!!! My total was $75 before coupons and my card savings came off... wow. This is what will help us get ahead!!!!

Almost Halloween!!! EEEEE!

Tonight I am learning how to roast a pork loin. Pork loin roast is very different from pork tenderloin, which I cook on a regular basis. We rubbed it with seasoned olive oil, and baked it on a high temp, then low temp, then high temp again. We'll see how it comes out, I am excited! *it was amazing*

Our halloween party is next weekend, I am so excited! This is my favorite holiday, and I always love having parties. I enjoy being the hostess, but most of all I enjoy spending time with our friends! Ok, and I love the halloween decorations, costumes, and freaky foods ;)

The twins are doing well potty training, and thing one spelled his name phonetically for the first time ever!! He spelled it while thing two spelled the word "boy" but spelled it "boi". I was so excited I was jumping up and down, this is so early to be spelling words, even if they are only doing it phonetically!! My husband looked at me like I was nuts, I meanwhile had called my mother to tell her so she could yell and jump up and down with me! Such smart kiddos!

Homeschooling is still going really well for us, we are working on skills as well as academics. Test taking is a joke at public school, the only thing my kid learned was how to ace a multiple choice test without knowing the actual material. Studying was nonexistant, so I am working on studying skills as well as giving him tests that have little to no multiple choice questions. He has to actually know the materials!! It's going well, he seems to be retaining a ton of what I am teaching him. I review months past on a regular basis, to make sure we aren't losing good information.

Next month we'll crunch to pull Christmas together. The twins are easy, they have everything... so we'll most likely put the word out that they need new coloring books and maybe a few prs of jeans. Big kid has a list a mile long, I ask for that so he won't know exactly what he's getting. My mom and hubby are easy, they want a lot! I can only think of four things I want, but once you reach adulthood it's harder to make a long list of wants that aren't super expensive!! We are definitely low on money, this year has been very expensive - but I'm working as much as I can, and we'll make it happen as we always do. It is Christmas after all!

Oct 6, 2010

Happy and Sad Day

Last night the twins started peeing in the pot! YAY! We are so happy!! I have been waiting for this day for months, and am so proud of the twins for taking this step.

Today I found out that a very dear friend and relative has pulmonary hypertension and will need surgery right away to insert catheters to relieve the high blood pressure between her lungs and heart. I am now at that age where so many of my parents' generation are starting to experience health problems. I hate this part of growing up, learning to cope with the fact that bad things happen to good people. It's bad enough to lose grandparents, I was very close to mine, but to even consider losing a parent just feels wrong! You grow up knowing your parents are your world, that they will always be there, and it's just horrible to think that someday they won't be. I have many parental figures, I can't imagine losing even one. I have already been dealing with a number of health scares with my "other mother", now it's one of my very best friends. The hardest part for me is that I can't just drop what I'm doing and go to them - I have too many responsibilities here to be with them. Sucks getting old! My only comfort is that my kiddos will hopefully be old by the time they have to deal with me aging, I started at a young age. Small comfort today.

Oct 4, 2010

Professional Photos

A friend of ours is practicing to become a professional family photographer. Her camera is awesome, she has a great understanding of how to use it, and her photos are awesome! She chose a great outdoor park for us to try first, and we had a good time hanging out and letting the kids play. The pictures she took are really nice, she agreed she needs to work on getting into the kids more, learning what style of composition she likes, and we need to get there earlier to play with lighting. Overall I was very impressed, and can't wait for us to do it again!

We had another "professional" last year take outdoor family photos of the kids and I, and while she took good photos, she played with them too much. They were too bright, our skin looked super white, and she never sent me the log in info to see our gallery on her site. I fussed after five or six months of not hearing from her, emails going unanswered, and she acted like it was my fault that she didn't send me an email. Whatever. I have no clue what her photos looked like, but the four she sent me in the apology email were just about head shots, and if I were to blow them up to hang on the wall anything bigger than 8x10 would make my children look like huge monsters! Not the type of photography I expected from a "pro". We have gone to the picture people before, but didn't like having to spend a fortune for prints. Photography is so overrated!

Photographic memory?

We cleaned out big kid's closet today, and found a pile of puzzles he had put up for the twins. They are 25 piece puzzles, marked 3yr and up. The twins were of course excited and wanted to take them downstairs and do them! Thing one started the cars and truck puzzle, and first try fit most of the pieces in. Thing two had no clue what he was doing, but slowly figured out the shapes and started fitting puzzle pieces together, with my help. Thing one came over and tried to help thing two with his puzzle, but had no luck. I think thing one has a photographic memory and could picture his puzzle while he was building it! Thing one uses letters in the bathtub to make words like cat, dog, and, the, too, but he can't read them. Thing two sits behind him sounding them out slowly! Their speech therapist is convinced thing one remembered the words from the books we read together, that he has a photographic memory. I have to say after today I agree! The twins no longer need speech therapy, they test out of the program. Yay! I am so thankful for the help, they are spouting out sentences left and right now. I love communicating with them! Don't get me wrong, I still want to be anyone but "Ma" when it's said six thousand times in a minute, I just love hearing "my car is under table" instead of crying and pointing! I love hearing "food pease mommy" instead of screaming at the pantry door! SUCCESS!

Big kid is still doing wonderfully at school, we took a five day weekend to take a break and are back on schedule now. He went to the History Museum this weekend with nahnah, and had a great time. Amazingly he remembered a lot about President Lincoln! He is having fun learning about the precolumbian civilizations in South America, watching some movies about them to help visualize what was going on back then. He can't get over the sacrificing of people to please the gods, that one eludes him still. I'm working on it, but maybe that's a good thing?

We ordered a copy of Journey to the Stars, a "free for educators" show about the solar system. We ordered it in June, and have received an email stating apologies and we'll have it in November. Thanks. In the meantime we received a complimentary copy of America: The History of Us, done by the History Channel. Wow is that an amazing series! We watched the first two segments, stopping at the revolutionary war, and even though we just spent two months learning about that I still sat there amazed at how much I learned! The series is captivating, and so well put together even big kid wants to watch the next episode on westward expansion. Now you know it must be amazing if an 11yr old boy is enthused! I wish everyone in America could watch this series, it makes you feel so patriotic. It evokes all sorts of feelings of pride, of amazement, and gives a true understanding of what was going on back then. I am a bit nervous to watch the segments on the world wars, I may watch them first before showing kiddo. He gets emotional about certain things that are scars on humanity's face, like genocide and that whole WW2 Hitler story may be too much for him now. In a few years maybe!