I am very blessed to have a rather large extended family. We get together for all the holidays. Easter is such a sight for sore eyes after a long winter here in Ohio. Last year we did something new with an adult egg hunt. This year we decided to take it up a notch and give bigger prizes in the hunt!! It was a huge success!!
How do you spend your Easter? I’d love to hear about it!!
Birthdays!!! How I love them so!!! Here’s pictures from Edyths fourth birthday festivities!!!
She loves staying at hotels so we kicked off her birthday with a night at a hotel about 40 minutes from home. Enough of a drive it felt like we were going on a trip almost, yet not far from home. All at the same time, not a town we often go to, so it added to the experience.
The next day we went to the two local goodwill stores and found some treasures and made our way back home. Then, on her birthday we threw a small party for her which was just delightful!! 
Happy Birthday my sweet angel!! Here’s to many many more!!
I’m that girl, that girl that loves tomato anything pretty much! Tomatoes by themselves, tomato sauce, juice, salsa, it’s tomatoes, I love it! So, as I have mentioned before, when I can tomatoes I save the skins for drying. Typically they are used for ketchup or tomato paste but I decided to try it in my pasta making. I got out my handy dandy Kitchen Aid attachment and rolled out some tomato infused spaghetti noodles!!
So fun looking and extra nutritious!!!
I’m that girl, that girl that’ll try anything to help make life better and easier for her family. So when an opportunity arose for 25 meat birds of course I had to try canning chicken! I’ve heard about it, even eaten some growing up but had never done it myself. I called in reinforcements (mom) and for three days we canned chicken meat, broth and bone broth. First we boiled the chickens in water, as many as we could at a time, we had two pots going in my little kitchen.
Then we deboned the chickens and canned the meat and broth.
Isn’t that gorgeous!!! Homemade canned chicken, yum!! The best part is that we saved all the chicken bones, which we cooked for two days and then canned homemade bone broth!!
What a great experience and a delicious one too!!!
Somehow New Years Eve night in this household brought on haircuts. I don’t know why, but it did! Peyton has had long hair basically most of his life. I have cut it short two times, but that was when he was younger. There have been times we have cut a lot off, but not short. It was a hard but tough thing to do but he decided he wanted a change and so a change I gave him!! 
What a difference!!! He loves it! I’m happy he is happy! So then of course Edyth needed a haircut, so of course I give her a trim. Happy New Year!!!!
Christmas time!!!! Such a magical time of year! I love all things Christmas!!! While we don’t do Santa in our house, (we know his story, but we also know what the season is actually about) I absolutely love the idea of Elf on the Shelf!! His mischievous smile and fun little antics seemed like a great addition to our holiday! Boy was he!! It was so much fun every night coming up with a new place to put him and waking up to see the kids faces when they saw what he got into that night as they slept. 
We named ours Frank, which Edyth then nicknamed him, Frankie Baby Elf!! Here’s pictures of some of his shenanigans.
Can’t wait till next year Frank! It was fun while it lasted!!
When you make as much food at home as I do, you tend to need lots of supplies. Buying bulk is my favorite and it’s also sensible! This time I took mom and the kids out to Shipshewana, Indiana. Mom had never been and I couldn’t wait to show her this adorable little town! We came back with lots of great stuff! 50lb. bags of sugar and popcorn, 25lbs. of flour, 10lb. bags of cornmeal and cocoa powder and so much more!!
We had an amazing time!! Happy adventuring all!!!
We live in a rental where I am very limited to what I can do with the house. Which is very hard for me, when I have the skills and ambition to make things new again or better than they were. As much as I would love to remodel our upstairs bathroom, it’s yucky, I can’t. Sad face. So I did what I could to improve our bathtub. Here’s what it looked like before.
Yuck right?! With a lot of scraping and elbow grease, it looks much better!
Now if only I could figure out how to get rid of the yucky rust stains on the textured walls. Do you have any tips on rust removal in the shower? Please share.
A few years ago my husband took me on a trip to the Kitchen Aid store, where I found a pasta press attachment!
This pasta press and I have been best friends ever since!! I love pasta and so do my kids! Making my own is such a rewarding feeling and so much fun at the same time!! It’s like playing with play doh but you are making food instead of something you smoosh back down in the can when your done. Anyway, I have a very small kitchen, probably would be fine for someone who doesn’t do nearly what I do in my kitchen, but I do A LOT! Every time I make pasta I make multiple batches so I have some on hand at all times. I was spending all day making pasta and laying it out all over my kitchen to then have no where left to prepare supper….
Then came, take out, an awful feeling to spend all day making food but then eat take out for supper. Finally my husband came up with the perfect solution! A pasta drying rack!! So off to the hardware store we went for supplies. With the help of our daughter he built me a drying rack that is perfect and just what I needed!!!
It holds 5 batches of pasta and frees up all of my counter space. I let my pasta dry for two days usually so this really is a life saver!!
Here’s to kitchen gadgets that make life easier and more fun!!!!
yeaimthatgirl 
