I enjoyed the sunset over the Willamette River while I was with the kids at my sister’s house.

The girls and I were treated to lunch with my sister, Rosalie, her friend, Harnet and little Dinuite.  We went to Bob’s Red Mill and little Dinuite loved climbing up and down the stairs.  The big girls took turns reading to her, helping her up and down safely, and we all loved lunch. Then, I did a little shopping since I love their products and I was there.  I especially love using the gluten-free one-to-one flour so got some more of that.  I was able to finish using up a gift card I’ve had for some time, so that was a nice bonus.   Then, we took the little cutie to McDonald’s to play on the toys.

We got a drink and one package of french fries because we think it’s only fair that if we are going to use the toys, we buy something, but since we were full from lunch, we didn’t need much. (Didn’t need food at all, really, but we were there to spend time together and for the toys!)  It was so great to visit and that we could let the little girl loose to run and play, with the big girls climbing up and down the play structure when needed.

We stayed home for several days during the snow storm.  I took one big walk with Patsy, and she played in it for a while the first day.  Rob doesn’t mind driving in it, so he went and got Jake for 1 night, so we were not lonely.  We ran off coloring pages from the internet for him to color.  He also enjoyed working on a Perler bead snowman, but Patsy needed to finish it for him.  He also played with our train set, Legos, Transformers, stories and the Wii.  I was pleased with the fact that he found so many other things to do, since the Wii is so attractive to him.  I actually severely limit his time on it, but I love having it for him to enjoy for short periods of time.

I had a ball and cooked lots of meals, including  2 kinds of soup, spaghetti, chicken, pizza, and more.  I also spent time sewing on Michaela’s Christmas p.j.’s. and took a big nap and went to bed early.  Absolutely free and amazing to get a nap!  I also cleaned the house a bunch and Lovana spent several hours organizing the food storage in the garage/family room.  We saved money by not shopping after the first day when I stopped for milk, bread, etc.   It’s so important that I use up leftovers and make sure food items are not getting overlooked in the storage area.  Both are important kitchen management skills that I try to implement.

We went swimming at the YMCA using our membership.  I hope to use that several times this week.

We are entering a week where we are going to spend quite a bit of time watching the cousins.  We are going to do several kid-friendly activities throughout the week to keep all of the kids busy.  We will see what gets done, but so far I have sugar cookie dough chilling in the fridge to bake cookies tomorrow.  Rob is off for 2 weeks because he works for the school system, so he is taking one of our kids to an appointment in the morning, plus doing some errands.  Then, we will spend time with the kids together.  It will be more fun that way for everyone.

We made some more caramel corn for gifts, and included some in the gifts Rob took to his co-workers.  They loved the gifts and said the caramel corn smelled just like the beach (candy shop) and ate it up before they left for the day, for the most part.  We also made another big batch we will give away soon.  We are mostly finished with our Christmas shopping.  We kept it simple.