Chocolate Mint Day

Happy Chocolate Mint Day!

We are celebrating simply & deliciously around here.

Chinese New Year

Happy New Year!

It's the middle of Chinese New Year.

Did you know?

It's not too late to celebrate; it's a few more days until it's over.

On the first night of the new year,

we had chinese food for dinner.  Fried rice, pot stickers,

& spring rolls.

And I hung some paper lanterns over the table.

 And since it's the Year of the Horse,

I found this neat cut out online.

The kids and I made and colored some dragon masks.

Here they are, although one didn't really like his so he wouldn't put it up to his face.

I tried to get him to put his up by putting mine up in front of the camera.

Here's the result:

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!

Valentine's Craft

My friend has been hosting craft nights every couple

months or so.  Sometimes I do the craft

she's got going on, and other times I have brought my own thing

or simply shown up to have some girls time.

Last week, we made these cutie Valentine's boards.

When I put all of my Valentine decorations out, I didn't really like the combination

on the mantle because I had chosen a pale background and there

was too much red.  So I decided to paint my board pink.

Everyone else followed my friend's example & made theirs red.

And my board was from the scrap pile in the garage, 

(and our second vehicle is taking up the whole garage because the 

engine is spread out all over as Kidney Bean tries to figure out

why it doesn't run well, so no saws available)

so it ended up a little longer than all of the other ones, too.

And I love it.

100 Days of Games, post 2

We are making our way through our

100 Days of Games.

It's going pretty well.

We've mainly played Scrabble.

I won on day two, and we both had one letter left over.

That's pretty unusual for us; we typically play 

every letter or just one person has a leftover.

 I won on day three, as well.

But we started to clean up before a picture was taken.

Here's Mr MPP's guilty look, even though I'm pretty sure it was me that

messed up the board.

The next day we broke our routine and played Connect Four.

Mr MPP bought me Connect Four for Christmas

when we were dating because he knew that I didn't like it because I've never been

very good at it.  Well, apparently my analytical skills or whatever

it is you need to win Connect Four THREE OUT OF THREE GAMES have

improved, cuz I won again and again.

Last night, we missed out on the game.  Things were crazy for bedtime for the

kids & then Mr MPP got caught up with work stuff & went to 

two different places.

Neither one of us realized we missed out on a game until it was too late.

To make up for missing out yesterday, we played two games today.

He beat me in Scrabble by A LOT - 39 points!

And he broke 300, so he's feeling pretty good about it.

After that, we played Phase 10 & I won by 3 phases.

It's been fun & I'm glad he came up with it.

100 Day of Games

We've been feeling a little disconnected lately, even though

my husband and I spend almost all evening together for most days of the week.

But we've been involved in different activities around the house.

And since we were starting to notice it making a difference,

we talked about it the other night when we were getting ready for bed.

And my husband came up with a suggestion that he said he'd been thinking about

for quite a while.

And he called it 100 Days of Scrabble.

But since we decided that we probably won't play Scrabble every night,

I thought I'd call it

100 Days of Games

 And won't it be fun?

Well, I'm excited.  And I think he's looking forward to it, 

especially since he won the first game last night.

It was back and forth, and then I just couldn't play at the end 

and he kept coming up with words worth a lot of points.

We'll let you know how the next few go soon.

Camera Strap

It's a little difficult keeping up with the blogs now

that I've got four kids, but I'm trying to get better again.

Please bear with me.

I was thinking about quitting this blog and putting all my crafts and things up

on my family blog again, but really, I do much better with two even

though I haven't been that great lately.

But life's a work in progress, right?

And a balancing act, especially trying to fit all the stuff I want

to do into a day.  One thing that has 

been helping me is adding some organic apple cider vinegar

to each glass of water that I drink.

At first, it's not that good.  But now I'm to the point

where water doesn't taste quite right if it's not in there.

It's helping with my energy, and a bunch of other things....look it up.

Anyway, the purpose of this post is to show my cutie camera strap that I made yesterday.

I followed the tutorial here,

and then followed her advice and tried adding a strip of jumbo rickrack, which I liked.

And then I added three yo yos with button middles to make it 

a little more cutie.

Her tutorial is really good and I thought it was pretty easy to follow,

so definitely head over there if you want to make yourself a new camera strap.

Go Idaho!

I love it!

I know it's kind of an awkward picture, but the hardware isn't very easy to get on and off,

and since I had attached it before I took the picture, I wanted to

keep it on the camera instead of dealing with that hassle.

And I just used scraps, which is even better.

I have an old SLR camera that stopped working right a few years ago, which is

when I started saving up for the fancy DSLR that I was finally

able to buy last year when it went on sale before Christmas.

I used the hardware from the camera strap from my old camera...I just cut off the 

seatbelt material, then sewed this new one right onto the hardware.

Chasin' Cheeky Houseparty

Have I ever mentioned that I am a member of Houseparty?

It's awesome.

They offer different parties all year that you apply for to be a host,

and if you're selected, they send you a party pack with stuff to

host a party so your friends and family can try new products.

I've done it for several years now, and I've been able to host around 6 parties.

The last one was last week.

It was a Chasin' Cheeky party, for the new Hasbro game.

The kids loved it!

Even my 18-month-old got in on the fun and was able to put rings on the monkey.

We played Chasin' Cheeky, Hi-Ho Cherry-O!, and Memory.

We were also given some new Cheetos to try, and everyone thought

they were delicious.

If you're not a member of Houseparty, I highly recommend heading over to the

website and signing up.  There are some great parties coming up!