Let it snow!!

We got our first Oklahoma snow on Tuesday!! We miss Idaho so much, this was a welcome sight. All of our neighbors were horrified LOL and the cold and white seemed put everyone into a frenzy...but I just loved seeing the little flutters outside. We only got a dusting that "stuck" as you can see in the pictures (the top is the view from my front porch across the street and the bottom is my front door...you can see the eensy weensy accumulation we got). But hey some is more than none!!!!!

Just had to share two cute pics of Em and Carter from tonight. He's very recently VERY into Dora the Explorer (and Diego too) and we as a family are VERY grateful for the reprieve from Curious George...Curious George...Curious George. Emilee sat down to read him the only Dora book we have. Aparently he needed to climb into the toy box to listen LOL but he was quite the captive audience for about 20 minutes (knowing Carter this is no small feat to focus for that long).

Last pic I have time to share tonight...Joshua's Christmas light masterpiece! He decorated all of the roof lines with white-white-red C7 lights on clips (so they stand up pretty and straight and evenly spaced...he's never done that before and it looks NICE) and he *built* a Christmas tree out of lights on the front lawn. The tree was quite the project. When I've seen them in pictures or in neighbor's yards I never thought they were difficult or complicated...but they are LOL. Mom and Dad and my brother, David, were here for Thanksgiving and the guys all tackled the project and had alot of fun. When it was done, I was pretty impressed and we admittedly have the coolest light display on our block!

Carter says...

Wanted to share what's coming out of the mouth of our littlest monkey lately. He has taken a good six month off of really worrying about talking to us in English (except for "Daddy") because there are 4 of us constantly around and he's quickly trained us to his needs in baby talk and hand motions and grunting. And don't get me wrong, he's not silent, he constantly babbles and chatters, but we really haven't had much clue as to the context. Josh and I have joked that when he decided he was ready, he words would come out in paragraph form. So the last couple of weeks he's gotten back on the English bandwagon and most of it is in sentence form. Here's a few...

"that way"...this would be him pointing to the left, copying Daddy who has told the dog to get out of the kitchen while we eat and since there's three exits Josh says "that way"...so now Carter points at all sorts of things, including the dog, telling them which way to go

"I did it!"...we've been encouraging him with "you did it!" when he stacked blocks or took a bite with his fork...and now he's praising himself

"wow wow wow!"...this goes for all of the Christmas lights, Christmas trees and most preferably to the Christmas displays that move in some way

Now what??

So Thanksgiving was yummy and your fridge is now plumb full of all the leftovers...now what??

Make soup!

Not being much of a "from scratch without a recipe" kind of cook, I'm rather proud of myself that I have a pot of soup simmering away on the stove, "getting happy" as Emeril would put it, that will be tonight's dinner.

I sauteed some fresh carrots, celery, onion and garlic that we had extra from Josh's holiday cooking and added 10 cups of water and some chicken base. Then I pulled apart all of the "hard to get" meat (yanno, the meat on the bones...again I'm rather proud of myself as I was VERY tempted to use the nicely sliced white breast meat that is in there...it looked sooo easy to just dice that...but I was a good frugal girl) and added it to the pot of veggies and broth. Then salt, pepper, 1c of rice and 1 can of white beans jumped in to round out my leftover soup. Very basic soup, but for me it's a pretty marvelous feat!! And we have a bunch of salad and Josh's family recipe of cheese braid bread to round out the rest of dinner. Perfect cold winter day dinner if I do say so myself!!

I'm sure hoping it turns out tasting yummy cuz the house is smelling very homey...wonder if the big monkeys will be proud when they walk in the door here in a minute or two?

More on Thanksgiving and Christmas later, just had to share about my soup while I had a free minute!!

Ooops!

For those of you enjoying Love The Monkey Life thru google reader, please hop back to today's CVS post via the blog. I made a couple of math mistakes that are now corrected but your reader only has the first copy.

Ohhhhh CVS...I'm BAAAAAACK!!!!

I went to CVS today for the first time in about two months and ooooh it felt GOOD! There was a diaper deal and a battery deal that I'd seen coming a couple of weeks ago that there was NO WAY I was going to pass up as we desperately needed both. So here's the scoop!

Transaction #1

6pks of Duracell batteries at $5.99ea

1pk of Duracell batteries at $5.29

4 pks of Duracell hearing aid batteries on BOGOF at $9.59ea

subtotal $60.41 (needed $60 to qualify for ECBs)

tax $4.68

total OOP $65.09

PLUS $45.oo in ECBs!!!

Transaction #2

6pks of diapers on BOGO1/2off at $9.49ea

1 gallon of milk at $3.99

total with tax $46.81

minus $45.00 ECB from transaction #1

total OOP $1.81

To sum up the day...

$94.59 of batteries

$56.94 of diapers

$3.99 of milk (sorry, milk is missing from pic)

($155.52 worth of stuff)

for $66.90!!!

By CVS standards this is pretty horrific, but by the normal shopping standards I've been having to deal with since the hurricane I would have paid $10/pk of diapers so all of those batteries and milk were FREE! It was a nice way to get back on the CVS horse. I'm even thinking of braving Walgreens here in the near future as I have one close by.

The LAST Move

Quick update...today we finished moving into our brand new home, hopefully the LAST move we make for a VERY long time. I'll add pictures and such later once we have a our cable and internet back up so I have a decent connection.

BTW...39 days til Christmas...how did THAT happen??

Halloween 2008

We had a very nice Halloween this year! Carter was old enough to enjoy it and Emilee isn't too old yet either...and of course Trevor is always up for some fun! I have a bunch of pictures to share and instead of toying with blogger to get them up here one by one I did a quick upload to my photobucket account (click on the link at the bottom of my post). There are a few pictures of Carter a week or so ago, trying to get cute poses with the pumpkins before they were carved...catching a very wiggly toddler remains a difficult feat lol. Cathy...Josh says the expression on one of those Carter pics reminds him EXACTLY of a pic that exists of him when he was about that age?? Carter has LOVED "playing" with the pumpkins on the front porch all week, trying to lift them (with a distict "oooffff!" as he strains with the weight) and sitting on them and doing laps around them. We carved our pumpkins Wednesday night and Carter was intrigued with what we were doing with his favorite orange "balls". Emilee designed her own carving this year, Trevor branched out to something new (the bat) and Carter's pumpkin is the "oooooo" face. The big monkeys had their school parade and parties on Thursday and then last night we headed out with a very tired toddler for trick or treating in some absolutely gorgeous weather! Luckily, Carter has a blast "outside" and he quickly learned that it was pretty cool to walk up to people's doors. He can't say "trick or treat" or "thank you" yet...but he started saying "BYE!" after they dropped a treat in his bucket...it was soooo cute and not only tickled us but all of the homeowners too! Emilee and Trevor came home delighted that they had FULL buckets and they are busy trying to figure out how to hide their treasure from Daddy!

Hope everyone had a wonderful Halloween!!!

Click here for the pictures...

http://s222.photobucket.com/albums/dd112/doolsmurf/Halloween%202008/?albumview=slideshow

password is "seethemonkeys"

and then click on "slideshow" in the upper right corner