Randomness

No matter how ahead of the game I feel with my Christmas shopping, I always find myself scrambling at the end. Anyone else??

I’m making broccoli cheese soup in the crock pot for dinner tonight. I sure hope it turns out well, cause it could easily become my new favorite winter recipe! 🙂 Gonna have it with some crusty French bread, oo-la-la!

We didn’t get to go to church today because they had canceled the kids church for today. One of us would have had to stay in the kids room with the kids, and the pastor was likely to be gone as well, so we’re having a family day at home instead.

I bought 2 strings of lights yesterday for our tree. I knew we needed lights, and in my opinion you just can’t have too many. Apparently I underestimated though. I thought I could make do with the 400 lights on those two strings, but it’s obvious I need at least one more string, cause the top half of our tree is much less “lit” than the bottom. Oh well… next year I’ll get it perfect for sure. 😉

The weather is turning coldish, and gray. I kidna hope, for the kids sake, that it actually does snow. They’ve been peeking out the windows every morning to “check” if there is snow yet. Ha ha! Poor kids! I know the disappointment of a “green” Christmas too, but when you’re an Arizona kid, it’s just the way things are.

Confession: I ordered a 6lb can of boiled peanuts from Amazon this week!! It’s supposed to be here by Tuesday. I know I know, totally random. BUT I have not had a boiled peanut since we left the south 5.5 years ago!! And really, that’s way too long. I just hope that I actually like them enough to do justice to the 6 pounds of them! I wonder if I can freeze some??

Ella head-butted Stuart this morning, and immediately told him her version of “sorry” which sounds like “yu-you” (almost like Love You). Stu and Ella both have a nice red bump on their heads.

The boys spent over 2 hours “cleaning” their room last night and eventually had to go to bed with it unfinished. ??? Why do kids do that? I did as a kid too, and I still don’t know why.

I ordered our Christmas cards. I never did get around to doing AMAZING family Christmas photos (oh well) and so I was actually just going to skip the cards this year, but then I got to feeling guilty about it and decided to go ahead and just use snapshots. Hey, it’s what most people do, right?

Today, perhaps, I’m going to try my hand at making Poppycock. A friend posted an old family recipe for it and it looked so good, even though I’m not typically a popcorn person, that I think I need to try it. It sounds so good in fact that after I had explained what it was to Stuart, who hadn’t heard of poppycock as being an edible thing, ten minutes later he asked me if I had made it yet. 😉

Recently I got some suet for the wild birds. See, we have these blue jays, that are amazing birds but they terrorize the yard. They fight over the whole peanuts I put out, they eat any food the dog and cat leave in their dishes (occasionally “paying” for it by depositing some of the seeds they don’t like in the dish) and they shovel the birdseed out of the feeder in order to get to the corn kernels and sunflower seeds that they like. The seeds, well some of them, still get eaten as some of the smaller birds prefer to be ground feeders, but still. I’d rather the feeder stay full longer than 30 min. So I thought the suet might be a good middle ground, and sure enough it seems to! It’s not something that the Jays can come and carry off to bury somewhere else, which is what they do with the seeds, peanuts and dog food. They can come get a couple beak fulls but then they have to just eat it. The smaller birds have their chance at it as well, and it lasts for several days instead of several minutes. So it helps to stretch out the regular seed as well. 🙂 Nice little compromise there.

Well, I could go on and on randomly, but I suppose I should stop for now and fix some lunch for the munchkins who always feel like they never have enough to eat, unless it’s something like vegetables. 😉