Videos

I love how the kids have played since Shad and I took their toys away.

Cinderella put on a play for Leonardo:
https://youtu.be/apQJhFhWALw

Cinderella sings about getting married to Leonardo:
https://youtu.be/XDfrMOM3e_Y

Leonardo put on a play for Cinderella:
http://youtu.be/NOZ48NEQwv0

Thora likes to sing on the floor:
http://youtu.be/zSrByEnhuuQ

Dancy makes this weird, "Oooooohhhhwaaaaahhhhhh!" sound, much like a Despicable Me minion. I turned the camera on to try and catch it, and then I just let the camera continue rolling.

http://youtu.be/96EKhVzIP5Y


Dancy, August 2014:
http://youtu.be/zeKRC8m6zMk

Dancy September 2014:
http://youtu.be/gI4AOtaxTT0

March Madness

*I started writing this in March, and I'm not going to change any of the time references. Just know that it all happened in March.*

This post is not about basketball.

We've been busy this month! The first weekend, Shad put up a fence for our side yard. I bought two rolls of 4'x40' fencing for $20 at a Treasure Hunt garage sale. Shad got some free posts and wire fencing from a neighbor, and bought more posts from another neighbor for $20.

Not bad for $40! Now the kids can play outside whenever they want to. Shad was going to build a gate from pallets he got at work, but then another neighbor noticed our fence and offered us a metal gate that he wasn't using. We like having good relationships with our neighbors!

The second weekend, we spontaneously drove to Kearney to buy flooring. We've been wanting to replace the dining room carpet with something more appropriate since we moved in, and in the past month, that want increased to a need until we just couldn't take it anymore. Not being able to eat all together as a family at our kitchen table was suddenly just too disruptive to our lives and the carpet had to go. We had already shopped around a lot to know that we didn't want laminate, and that there was no way we were going to pay a $1000 installation fee for a 14'x15' space for vinyl sheeting. In fact, our main bathroom and laundry room floors need redone as well, and to do the full kitchen/dining/laundry/bathroom space would have cost $3500! That's ridiculous. We bought enough vinyl planks for the kitchen and dining room, for roughly $600. And we somehow measured wrong and ended up with enough left over to cover the laundry room.

Last Tuesday, Cathie and I cut up 20 heads of cabbage for sauerkraut. When cabbage goes on sale for $0.28 a pound for St. Patrick's Day, how can I resist? The sister missionaries came over to help, too. That night, Shad bought a truck. He's been shopping around for several months and finally caught one for $2000. It's been extremely difficult for him to get rides to work all winter, and it's hard for me to take him when he leaves at 5:45 and my sleep is interrupted all night for Thora to eat. He's happy to finally have it, even though he'll still bike in the warm weather. Dancy never stops talking about Dad's, "Boo. Tuck. Cool!" (Blue truck cool)

Last weekend we installed our floor. We ripped up the carpet Thursday night.

Carpet is gross. Look at all the dirt that vacuums don't suck up!

I think I emptied the vacuum canister 3 times.

We spent all day Friday and half of Saturday installing the vinyl planks.

Dancy is sooo proud of being strong!

Kate helped a bit, too.

Ta Da!

What better way to celebrate the new floor than with dancing?

The AFTER shots:

We still need to get the trim on, but we're enjoying the floor the way it is anyway.

Then the weekend after we installed the floor, we went BACK to Kearney to buy a water softener, and enough flooring to cover two bathroom floors. Our bathroom floor is in good enough condition that it doesn't need redone yet. The others are quite beat up. 

And to cap off the month, my online Grammar Lab class started for my copyediting certificate program from the University of California at San Diego. My parents arrived the night before to visit for four days. April hasn't proved to be any less chaotic and busy:)

An Experiment With Cabbage

I've had psoriasis on my hand since Tommy was born. It has been inconvenient, unsightly, and painful. Sometimes it gets so bad that my fingers lock up and can hardly move because the skin gets so dry, tight, and cracked. I wet my hands so many times throughout the day--doing dishes; washing faces and hands after meals; washing my hands after changing diapers and wiping butts; cooking; bath time; etc, etc, etc--I've never been able to keep up with lotions or creams. Prescription creams are even more inconvenient. They're greasy and never really absorb, and they only seem to work so long as I strictly use them 3 times daily, keep my hands dry, and use lotion 50 times a day. Impossible! For my lifestyle, anyway. I've gone through my own extensive series of holistic experiments and they've seemed to help...a little, anyway. After all, this has been nearly FIVE years of my life.

Enter CABBAGE.

I credit President Harry S. Truman for this. Seriously, if I could thank the guy, I would. Last summer I was listening to the biography, Truman, by David McCullough, and it mentioned that Harry studied the medicinal properties of cabbage. That piqued my interest, so I did my own little bit of research. Something I read stated that cabbage has healing properties for skin. When I mentioned that to my mother-in-law, Pris, she said that when her husband, Vern, was growing up on a farm, they worked a lot with cabbage and his dad told him that the reason they always had soft hands was from all the cabbage juice. My first thought was to try to make a lotion with juiced cabbage, but the juice didn't mix with the oil and wax. I have yet to try a goat milk lotion with cabbage juice. I was also making an effort to eat more cabbage, but all the salad in the world didn't seem to be making any difference.

Shad started cooking what we call Cabbage Fry. It's a stir-fry with a bunch of veggies and meat, whatever sauce and seasonings he wants to use that day, and a whole head of cabbage. It started in February, I think, and earlier this month, I noticed that I hadn't had any issues. I wasn't sure if it was a direct cause and effect, or simply a correlation. Then in the past 3 weeks with my parents visiting, and then Shad and I were sick, and then being out of town for 10 days, I developed a rash last week. So I'm pretty sure that cabbage has been saving my hands, and we're going to continue our weekly Cabbage Fry dinners. I also try once a week to cook cabbage for a side dish with dinner.