Hi friends!

Sorry I’ve been MIA for so long!  It’s not that I haven’t thought about you – oh no. I have two or three projects that are all done, pictures taken, I’ve just been to lazy to write about them!
But that’s for later.  To celebrate me coming back on line . . .

WHO WANTS A FREE BOOK!

check out her site here
Yup, it’s giveaway time!  Book 9 in the Sadie Hoffmiller culinary mystery series is here!
This time, Sadie heads off on a cruise with her two kids and her awesome significant other. Of course, even at sea, she can’t seem to stay out of trouble!

My thoughts: this book reads different than the others. Usually there’s one big mystery that takes the whole book to figure out. This is set up a bit more like several short stories all about the same people at the same time. I thought I knew what mystery needed to be figured out, but then it’s done by page 50. A few more pages twiddling my thumbs, and then I find a new mystery! But actually, that was great! My least favorite thing about a short story is it’s always just long enough to make me ticked when it ends. This way, it’s like it keeps on going. 

And the end. Oh be still my twitterpaited heart the end! There are awesome nuggets throughout the book

“You breath energy into my world,” he whispered, so close she could feel his breath move over her face. She felt the words down to her toes. He pulled her to her feet and smiled at her. “Come look a the starts with me. There is nothing better we can do right now that be together.”

Aww. But that’s not as fun as the end!

Anyway, it rocked. Another quick, fun, clean read.

Want your own autographed copy?  Just leave a comment on this post by Sunday March 3, 8 pm central time.  What’s your fantasy vacation? I'll draw a winner at random and you can at least escape mentally!

Read with me

I am a reader.

Seriously.

Just ask my mom.

When I was 16 I got my own room.  It was awesome.  After several months, I realized I was right next to the work room - which had its own exit.  I could sneak out and my mom would NEVER KNOW.

It took a few nights to work up the courage. Then I carefully placed my sneakers on my too wide feet, eased open that work room door, and tiptoed up the cement stairs. The whole world was at my fingertips.

What did I do with all that freedom?

I sat on the swing set and read. 

I was such a rebel.

Reading is my escape.  It lets me turn off reality for a short time and explore another world. A place where all my problems will be solved in 400 pages. 

Even in my busiest times, I have a book I'm reading.  All through college, or testing, or potty training, I find time to read - even just 15 minutes during lunch.

I also love Good Reads. It lets me keep track of just how many books I love, and helps me remember what those books actually are. 

With all that in mind, I'm going to start something new here. I am NOT turning this into an actual book blog. But I am planning on putting a few thoughts once and a while on what I'm reading.

And I actually set a reading goal this year.  75 books. Should be easy (I've done 10 in 3 weeks). And you guys can keep me on task too -there's a widget over on the side there that shows my progress.

Want to join me?

A personal before and after

While I wish this was me saying I’m now a size 6, this personal improvement is a bit quicker to achieve.

 

Guys, it’s been almost 14 months since I had a haircut.   It’s just sad.  My hair has been bugging me for at least 9 of those months.  And I still put it off and off and off.

So here I am.  I wanted to look nice, so I even put on some make up.  Make up on a Wednesday, I must love you guys!

But I apparently drew the line at actually doing my hair. Which is one of the huge reasons I needed a hair cut.  See, I am actually capable of making hair look ok. But I’ve learned, if my hair gets past my shoulders, 97% of the time it will look like this:

Always. I just throw it back in a claw or pony tail.  I was DONE!

 

There is an awesome beauty school fairly close to me. They do incredibly professional work, and a hair cut is only $5.  I also really wanted something new. I’ve had the same style for 3 years now, and I was ready for a change.  So I got brave. 

When the girl asked me what I wanted, I said something new, what would you suggest!  She thought I’d look good with a swing bob.  I was clueless what that was! After the description, I agreed, as long as it wasn’t too crazy choppy in the back. 

 

And we also did a longer than normal version of it.

 

So after, 5 inches cut off the back and 3 1/2 in the front, here I am:

I can’t believe how much better it feels! It’s not so heavy, so yucky, so in my face.  I’m loving it!

 

Now I just have to see if I can style it like she did!

 

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Ready for some outtakes? Did you know just how hard it is to take a good picture of yourself in the mirror?  I liked the coloring better that way, but oh dear, it was hard!

And very quickly you feel like every picture looks like this :

And you feel like this:

 

 

Oh well!

Crickets

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I've been feeling like I should blog for 2 weeks now.



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All I've got is crickets.  It's not like things aren't happening around here. They are - Christmas joys, first baby tooths, massive colds, strange fevers, turning every single toy in the house into a swaddled baby, IEPs, assembling bunkbeds, finally teaching 'Lil the joys of the toilet.

But nothing earth shattering. Nothing gripping.  Just life.

And all my creative juices are being sucked up into that just life.  I don't have the words to type.  just more crickets.


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And maybe that's enough.

It’s Great To be EIGHT

One reason for doing a friend birthday every 4 years is it hits all the “big” ones – 8, 12, and 16.  In our church, 8 is the age you get baptized, and we wanted to make everything special.

It’s become tradition in our building that the family serves a dessert after the service.  Everyone always does a sheet cake from costco – yummy, but a little pricy and then someone needs to dish it up and you have to get all the supplies and the clean up and – I didn’t want that!

I was excited when I saw this:

but then bummed when I realized she didn’t offer it as a printable!  But it’s so cute! The doughnuts make an 8, it’s self contained, no one needs to dish it up. Perfect! I figured I could make my own.

I found the bags at Joanns – wilton brand, mini size, in a package of 100. The are about 4 inches wide.

Then, using this tutorial, I spent a ridiculous amount of time making chalkboard looking toppers:

And printed and cut them out at fedex   *TIP: it was cheaper to print them black and white, and the looked almost the same.
Then the assembling began – 1.5 movies later and I was done!  in all, I spent about 5 hours working on this.  Want to save yourself 3 hours of time? Download this picture and your toppers are ready!

The day was wonderful – and the treats adorable!

 *check out places I link up to tab on top.

A Very Harry Party: Lunch and our ride

Whew – typing all this up is reminding me just how much thought went into this whole thing! But these last few things were really simple to do .

 

We ate lunch at the Leaky Cauldron:

 

Lunch was just simple with hot dogs and string cheese and apples.

 

I did do color changing drinks - you add a couple of drops of food coloring to the glasses before and so even though it’s all just sprite, they are all different colors.

 

We also had “Hagrid’s Cake”, which is a SUPER easy one, since it requires no skill to make it look like Hagrid decorated it!

We planned on going to a local children’s museum, so we of course had to travel by Knight Bus

(If you can’t read the writing, the first one says “Knight Bus” ; the second “just 11 sickles”; the third, “Just stick out your wand hand . . . .”;  and the last “Knight Bus *hot chocolate and toothbrushes extra.” The party was on a Saturday. We didn’t wash it off, and we had several kids at church the next day VERY excited about our car!)

 

Girly-Lou thought she had the COOLEST birthday ever!

A Very Harry Party: Spell Books

I was super excited when I found THIS link for these spell books. I  love it when the hard work is done for me!  But hers were formatted to be full page – I didn’t want to use that much paper. So I ended up reformatting them be half page size.
I had fun wandering around Joann’s looking for the perfect “book” fabric, and ended up with this fun stiff velvety stuff on clearance – so the whole lot only cost me $1.50 to make. The outside page I did with blank cardstock to add some structure, but the whole thing is just sewed together.  It’s a lot of sewing, but to make 8 books only took about an hour.

One trick that I learned back in my high school sewing class will help: don’t take the fabric out of the machine. Just backstitch, and shove the next book right up next to it. You’ll end up with a big string of books that you then cut apart later.


She also has a Magical Creature book, which I just added to the back of mine. I took my own pictures of “creatures” and just used descriptions from JK Rowling’s book “Magical Beasts and Where to Find Them.” and changed them a bit to fit.



We used these for our game later.
The day of the party, I gave the kids a few minutes to study the spell book for their favorite spells.

 

Then we headed outside to play the game.

Our Game: I hid the “creatures” from the book around all around – 1/2 in the front and 1/2 in the back.
The kids were split up into houses, and got to race to find their creatures first. To capture a creature, they had to locate it, read the description from the book, and cast a spell on it. Then they had to bring it back and put it in their bin.



Ravenclaw was the winner.  They had so much fun they decided to hide the creatures for each other while I got lunch ready.