The Great Toy Shuffle of 2018

When I take pics of these teeny little home improvement things, I should remember to take BEFORE pics.

Let me just tell you that all of Dorothy and Cooper's new toys were pretty much piled on their floor and Cooper had 2 toy boxes in his room even though there was only really room for one and they were both so full of toys that he couldn't play with anything in them.  That sets the scene.

Also, I took some "in the middle" shots.

Stuff we moved downstairs:

 Stuff we're moving

 Same stuff, different angle

 TA DA!  Those IKEA shelves have been superstars since we moved into this house.  We now have 6-- one in each of the kid rooms and 3 in the family room.

 Dorothy generally hates change, but she is semi-ok with this arrangement.

 So many mid-sized doll houses!

 There is really no good place for Barbie's camper

 And one giant doll house!  This has lived downstairs for 2 years, and it almost never gets played with (by Dorothy-- Jack actually uses it for his Star Wars guys, but there's a giant bat cave down there he can use instead). We'll see if it gets more action up here.

 So many doll beds, you guys.  I cannot even.

 Cooper's room got cleaned up, and I took out a toy box.

 Still crowded, but much more reasonable.  Aldo, I left the vacuum cord AND the Pledge in these pics.

 No place for this thing:

 Still full, but at least he can actually reach in and grab stuff.

 See!  The castle is getting some play already!

 Oh!  And I moved some stuff into her closet, like this nightstand that holds American Girl clothes and accessories.

 A pink bin full of Barbies and Barbie-sized princesses, and a giant bin of dress up clothes that used to be a giant bin of American Girls (The Girls are now stacked like corpses on her shelf).

Basically, what happened was this: 6 years ago we bought a perfectly reasonably sized house AND THEN WE STUFFED IT TO THE GILLS WITH PLASTIC and now we need a bigger house.

What We're Eating This Week 3/52

I felt like I was doing complicated math looking at our menu ideas and our hockey schedule.  I think I figured it out, but when you have hockey every night and a tournament over the weekend, dinners get hairy.

Sunday:  It's just me and Dorothy for this one because she and I have a birthday party in the afternoon, and Ben is taking the boys to Harry's hockey game.  They'll eat on the road on the way back, and we'll have my current obsession spinach and cheese quesadillas with tons of salsa and chipotle ranch dressing from Aldi.  Also a million cuties. (Ben will spend around $30 at Culvers, and we have all of our ingredients already.  So that's $5/person)

Monday:  Hockey from 5-6 and then again from 7-8.  So, I think I will make chicken noodle soup in the slow-cooker with French bread, apples, and brownies.  This is cheap and easy and can be eaten whenever ($29 because I am low on chicken stock and brownie ingredients again, about $5/person)

Tuesday: Ben works until 5-ish and the kids have hockey at 7:20, so we have an actual dinner window! Oven BBQ chicken, green beans, rice pilaf, apple crisp with vanilla ice cream ($24, or about $4/person)

Wednesday: Chili and hot dogs, veggies and dip, all eaten at 6:30 AFTER hockey, which guarantees and afternoon of sullen children.  CAN'T WAIT. (about $30 or $5/person)

Thursday: We have hockey from 6-7 and then again from 8-9.  I think grilled cheese and tomato soup will be easy, with peas and peaches from a can. ($15, or  $2.5/person-- can't beat that!)

Friday:  FAMILY MOVIE NIGHT-- we'll deplete our frozen pizza stash, but I will probably buy one for Ben and me (for $8, also candy, about $5-- $13 or just a little over $2/person)

Saturday:  Breakfast for dinner ($20 for blueberries, buttermilk, bacon, OJ, tube cinnamon rolls, and syrup, but we'll have everything else-- around $5/person because there's only 4 of us).

Speaking of food!

These PW stuffed bell peppers look good, but nobody liked them but the dog.  Probably will NOT make them again.

 I don;t know what happened, but I had the bread machine fail making a loaf of whit bread.   threw the stuff in there super fast on my way to dance, so maybe that was it but when I tried to cut it, this happened.

 I didn't buy and chocolate chips this week, so I was forced to make alternate cookies.  Peanut butter were a huge hit with m kids, and brown sugar brown butter cookies were a huge hit with the neighbor kids. Everybody loves iced brownies because duh.

 I added so much pureed spinach and zucchini (bright green) to my spaghetti sauce that the whole thing turned brown.  SO GROSS.  But it tasted great!  If you closed your eyes!

How can I sum up 2017 in 5 minutes or less?

I am so glad you asked.  The answer is, obviously, 1 Second Everyday.

This is my first time using it, so next year, I know I will do things a little differently.  But still! It makes me smile every time.

Family Movie Friday!!

At our New Year's Eve lunch, we talked about our favorites from the year.  It was very fun and wholesome.  We took turns suggesting categories, and then we went around the table and supplied answers.  Things like favorite trip of 2017 or favorite thing that we did in Washington DC.  Family movie Friday came up a couple times as a favorite-- a favorite activity, a favorite part of the weekend, a favorite thing we all did together.  I thought that was especially awesome because we only started doing it in September.

As we talked about FMF, we decided to revamp it a little to make movie selection more fun.  We decided to give everyone 3 slips of paper to write movie choices on.  Then we put all of the paper in a bag.  each week, we will draw out a movie.  If your movie is picked, you get to write down a new one and throw it in, so you always have the same chance of getting your movie selected. We also decided to talk about the pizza for the week BEFORE I go to the grocery store, which seems like common sense, but you would be surprised.

Everyone was super into the whole project, and I don;t know about you, but I am waiting with bated breath to see what movie we'll pick next!

(Not really.  We will probably just have to watch Dorothy's movie because she'll cry).

I loved this happy movie-prep breakfast chaos so much that I took 2 pictures of it.

 You'd never know that people punched each other over sticker placement

 Dorothy left this here the other day, and I called it Fluffy Detritus, and then wished that was its name.

 New rule in our house:  IF YOU ARE HUNGRY, EAT A CITRUS FRUIT

Our first revamped move night was a smashing success.  The homemade pizzas were better than the ones from our favorite bar, and the movie was a YUGE HIT.

Hockey ate My Weekend, But We Still Had Fun

Dorothy was playing with her toys, and I was minding my own business eating hot snickerdoodles when she was all, are we having dinner after gymnastics?  And I was like OH MY GOD YOU HAVE GYMNASTICS because I am awesome like that. This was actually QUITE the scramble because we were balancing 3 hockey practices Friday night (who says our social life isn't en fuego?).  We figured it out with some juggling and some dinner in shifts (my favorite **eye roll**)

But!  Before we left, Dorothy spent the last few quiet minutes before the boys got home from school playing Hillary Clinton as the mayor of her room and wearing her cute little leotard.

 Beatrix kicked off her weekend with a major couch party, natch.

 Saturday morning, Ben and I cleaned the house like crazy while the boys snuggled up in our room (Jack was in my bed) and watched Krampus.

 Dorothy continued making large messes, as is her custom.

 The Krampus crew post-movie.

 Beatrix is a huge fan of sheet0changing day.

 And of Dorothy.

 Harry's team won their Saturday afternoon game, against the other team in their division from our club.  I reminded Harry before the game that these were our friends and neighbors and he could not hurt them.  He didn't!  And he scored a goal!  I took zero pictures.

But don't worry!  We were back on the damn ice at SEVEN IN THE MORNING on Sunday.  Ben drove Harry all the way to the ice arena and then realized Harry's gear was in the other car, the one in our garage.  So then he drove all the way back to the ice area and realized when he got there that he had ALL OF THE CAR KEYS WE OWN.  So, he came back a third time to pick the rest of us up and take us through the Dunkin Donuts drive through.  We made it mid- second period, in time to see Harry's team win again!

 I even used my new hockey mom blanket.

 Penalty. (A good one, though-- like, a necessary one, not just a beat-the-snot-out-of-someone penalty).

 Oh, no bog deal  I JUST MARRIED SCOTT FARKAS is all.

 Healthy breakfast.

 Jack is playing rec hockey after a year-long hiatus, and he had his first game right after Harry's.  Look how handsome in his gear!

 So cute!

 GOAL!!!

 Harry broke his laces, so I bought him a new pair,  (Also, the $4 on laces and the $3.50 on Blow Pops so everyone would stop screaming at me and the $2.99 to rent Krampus on Amazon?  The only un-budgeted cash I spent ALL WEEK.  It would have been better if I was able to cram these things into my already accounted for random spending money that I spent on even more random stuff, like a Pinewood Derby kit, for example, but still.  Major progress)

 ANOTHER GOAL!

 Then-- you are not even going to believe this-- we left the rink to drive 90 minutes to ANOTHER RINK for one more game for Harry.  He scored, but the team lost, and Dorothy played an adorable bleachers game:

 Which she continued at home:

 Zumbo's Just Desserts!  Watch it!  Jack likes it so much that he was searching for a Zumbo cookbook for his birthday or Easter basket WHLE watching the show.

 Beatrix, ending her weekend the same way she started it.

No Routine Routine

My Mac startup disk was full, so I assumed, of course, that it was full because of all my pictures.  So, I thought maybe I should back it up-- because it keeps telling me that it has been like 800 days since my last backup-- and then delete some stuff.  

The reason, though, that it had been two years since my last back up was that I hate all things associated with backing up my computer and my pictures.  Which is so strange, you guys, because I love my pictures and have them in the cloud, on my hard drive, on another hard drive, at Walgreens.com, on my blog, and on Google.  I mean.  

Anyway, it just wouldn't work, and I tried and tried and tried.  The computer didn't recognize my backup disk, and I couldn't figure out why but was pretty sure the disk was corrupt and all my pictures were gone forever. 

Finally, I emailed the computer guy in my office, and sent him a screen shot of the error message I was getting.  And the screen shot was blank.  He emailed back right away to tell me that.  

I told him I ran a scan of the hard drive to make sure it still worked (of course I did!) and that it had plenty of room.  He said I should turn Time Machine on and off try to re-select the disk. I emailed back right away to tell him I tried that, but it was grayed out and that turning Time Machine on and off did nothing.  I included actual screen shots that time.  And then he wrote back to tell me that I had to UNLOCK Time Machine to make changes to it.  (Which I did to turn it off and on but didn't do to select the disk). So I did that and it worked and I wondered if there is anyone in my office who is worse at this stuff than I am.  I bet not. But seriously.  One click of a button, a password, and another click of a button and my problem was completely solved.  SO ANNOYING.

And then!  I looked at my computer storage and found it was all "other" that was taking up all the room, so I deleted a bunch of cache folders and emptied my trash and bam!

That was literally what I did with my only free time of the day yesterday.  I didn't read a book or work on my novel or think about answering course emails or dust anything.  And you know what? It was SO STRESSFUL.  And I was also stressed about the time wasting.

Because!  I am not working yet, but the kids are back to school and Ben is doing his online adjunct work, and I just sort of walk around and clean up everybody's stuff and get interrupted a million times a day every time I try to do something for myself and have to be OK with it because I am not really doing anything anyway.  

I know as soon as I figure it out and get into a routine, it will time for me to start the semester, and I will go into another tailspin.  So, I am FOR SURE looking forward to that.

 Made brownies and used this icing, and you should, too.  The kids ate all the edges, and then I had big plans to devour the rest with a fork and The Crown, but I just didn't.  WHAT'S WRONG WITH ME?  (I did eat a giant one at dinner, though).

 Pooping dog calendar IN THE KITCHEN.  Perfect.

 I needed to corral Dorothy before school, so I painted her nails, and she was SO STILL waiting for them to dry. ** insert evil laugh here**

 Then after school, I asked her what she wanted to do, and she said eat M&Ms out of her fancy bowl (my Pioneer Woman measuring cups) and watch Sing  again and again and make cookies.

We used this snickerdoodle recipe, and it was amazeballs.

One More Lazy Day

I am not going to lie to you.  I mean, I actually NEVER lie to you.  I was excited to send the kids back to school last Wednesday.

But!  I rallied my winter break spirit and had one more fun day.

Since that fun day coincided with $5 Tuesday, we saw Ferdinand, which I had ZERO desire to see.  I t was pretty OK, though.  I initially forgot to buy myself a ticket, but then when I did, I had to get one in another row, and Jack begged to sit by himself.  Ha!

 I looked over at Dorothy to discover she had her coat on and Uggs off.  Erm.

 You know, we should just have Cooper wear a helmet all of the time.

 I am late to the party, but Ben finally convinced me to watch the first season of The Crown, and he is re-watching it with me so we can enjoy season 2 together, and I lurve it.  We watch it ALL THE TIME.

 I was so excited about back to school that I packed everybody up on back-to-school eve.

 And then I drove Dorothy to preschool in my jammies.  WINNING.