A Princess Castle

The girls were thrilled when Keith built them a princess castle one night.  It survived about 12 hours...if you include the 8 hrs spent sleeping.  :)

Cuddles

A few cuddles and sisterly love to start the day off right...

Two is Better than One

Carli has not returned my red teddy bear to me, which is perfectly okay.  She is enjoying having her "twins" with her.  This is how I found her sleeping one night, a bear in each arm.  :)

Joy Riding

We met Naggy & Pappy in Ft Worth at Uncle Kevin's house a couple wkds ago to celebrate Naggy's bday and pick up the rest of our Christmas gifts we had left in Amarillo.  The girls were so excited to get their 4-wheelers and bring them home!  Carli is a speed demon and Ava is a little more cautious. 

The girls have had a blast with their new rides at home.  Now if the weather would warm up so they could take them out a little more often they would be in heaven!  :)

Thank You's

We searched the internet for handprint art to do for our thank you notes this year.  Carli saw the ballerina handprint card and decided that was the one we should do! 

Both girls did an awesome job making their cards.  This is the first year I could not get both their hand prints on one card.  :(  They are growing up to fast. 


Carli did an amazing job with her cards.  She painted, cut, glued and wrote with minimal help from me.

Ava tolerated our creativity and was a good sport to at least write her name and add some hearts and drawings on her cards.

Carli even wrote a few words on some of her cards.  She did a good job managing to write everyone's name.

Carli's finished cards....

Ava's finished cards...

And to top it off, we actually got these in the mail before the end of January!  Woohoo!

The Annual Grandkid Pictures

 Every Christmas we try to get a Grandkid picture taken for Grammy & Pa.  (2012, 2011, 2010, plus two other yrs not documented on here)  This year our crew grew by one when Ms. Eady arrived around Thanksgiving.  She did such a wonderful job on her first cousin photo shoot!  Grammy made the girls' outfits and Logan looked handsome as always surrounded by all his girls. 

Our friend, Mrs. Arrington took their pictures for us at her home.  She did an absolutely wonderful job!

 

OAMC Saturday Take Two

My friend Sarah and I with the help of another friend, Diana, conquered another OAMC day on Saturday.  We wore ourselves out!  We actually quadrupled all the recipes below.  We put a total 23 bags of food in our freezers each, plus one extra set for my Mom. 

When I made the shopping list and called Sam's to inquire about the chicken availability.  The wonderful man helping me mistakenly informed me that there were 4 breast per pack and in fact there were eight.  I bought them all and going by the four per pack assumption should have needed more...but it was a ton of chicken already, so I opened the box he gave me and there were eight per pack.  So, I bought way too much chicken.  We called everyone we could think of to see if they wanted in on the cooking party but with such late notice we came up dry.  My mom offered to pay for the extra meals but she wasn't able to come help.  Worked out anyway b/c I am not sure four ppl would have fit in my kitchen! 

We started at about 9:30 and finished up at 6 pm with a clean kitchen.  Long day, but our freezers are stocked for well over a month.  Most of these meals we will easily get 2-3 dinners from easily.  We repeated four recipes from our last batch that we really liked and are trying new ones now. 

Below is our menu with links to where we got our recipes.  Also, here is our shopping list based on having 3 ppl cooking with you and taking meals home:  Shopping List.

We spent just a little under $200 each.  Next time we will spend even less b/c we found a coop we can buy the chicken through that is $2 less per lb than what we paid at Sam's.  We are chicken snobs and prefer the steroid free, free range, natural chicken breast so we paid a pretty penny for those.

And finally, here are the recipes we used:

Breakfast:
- Whole Wheat Waffles - 2 bags
- Sante Fe Breakfast Pockets
- Baked Oatmeal Muffins (we used a very similar recipe, it used less splenda and no oil)

Dinners:
- Savory Chicken - 2 meals
- Slow Cooker Pork Carnitas
- Meatballs
- Sloppy Tamale Pie
- Crock Pot Greek Chicken Pitas - 2 bags; 1 bag pita pockets
- Sausage and Peppers - 2 bags
- Chicken Teriyaki
- White Chicken Chili
- Hawaiian Chicken Sandwich - 2 bags
- Slow Cooker Chicken Enchilada Stackers - corn tortillas
- Enchilada Wraps
- Slow Cooker Creamy Italian Chicken
- Cilantro Lime Chicken
- Chicken Salsa Verde
- Pesto Ranch Chicken
- Crock Pot Spaghetti Sauce
- Crock Pot SW Flank Steak

New Years

We didn't have any big plans for New Years, so when Grammy, Pa, Uncle Tone and Deborah asked if we wanted to join them at the lake we were free to go!  The girls have thoroughly enjoyed getting to know Deborah.  They have so much fun with her!  They spent much of the night playing with pool noodles.

We had some very good burgers and enjoyed a fire outside while Uncle Tone put on a fireworks show for us all.  Carli LOVED it.  Ava was so exhausted, she somehow managed to fall sound asleep mid show - booming sounds and all.  :)

A very simple and fun New Years.  Loved it!

King Christmas

We celebrated Christmas with the King side of the family the wkd after Christmas.  The girls were so excited to have everyone over to their house this year!  We enjoyed a yummy steak dinner with baked potatoes and pies for dessert! 

The Annual Pic in front of the Christmas Tree

Pa with all his "Pumpkins"

Baby Eady was so much fun to have this year!  The girls were thoroughly enthralled with her!

To say the girls were a bit spoiled would be an understatement!  They LOVED it!

Thankfully, Grammy & Pa got Carli & Ava live sized baby dolls which they immediately took to and loved on.  I'm sure Eady was thankful for them to be a bit distracted!

Isn't she precious?!

We had a lot of fun Christmas shopping this year.  Some of my favorite gifts we gave were some special Japanese two toed socks for Mom.  She bought a pair in Japan while we were there and LOVED them.  She couldn't find them here in the right kind of fabric.  So with the help of our partners in Japan and Eric's wife Yuki, we ordered them and got her four new pairs.  And we bought Uncle Tone six boxes of Alpha Bits.  I think it was his favorite gift.  :)  In return, Uncle Tone bought the girls Furby's.  I would have been a little annoyed at the girls getting such a wonderfully loud toy except for Ava's constant giggles every time her's talks to her.  :)

It was a wonderful Christmas season and we loved spending time with each side of our family.  We are blessed.