My new Hobby!!! Quilting!! :)

I have always wanted to learn to quilt and so when some ladies from church were offering to teach people how to quilt I took them up on it. So here is my first quilt started early 2011 finished mid May 2011.

I call it Caleb's quilt because I made it for my son's 7th birthday. I used 5 different fabrics for this quilt and two of them are Mickey Mouse themed. It fits perfectly on his bed and he loves it.

The main reason I am blogging about my quilt today is so I can enter in a contest to win some quilting things!! I am close to finishing my second quilt for my oldest son and I have a middle son that will get one on his birthday. Plus I have a dozen other quilts in my head that I plan to make. Check out the Summer Quilt fair and enter a quilt you made or just look at the cool quilts other's have made. The link is below!!!

You can also find some recipes at the summer fair. My recipe is the chicken fried chicken. I tweaked it a little from a couple of recipes I found on the internet. My family likes it.

Ingredients

4 boneless skinless chicken breast cut in halves

2 teaspoons of orginal Mrs. Dash

2 teaspoons of garlic and herb Mrs. Dash

1 cup of flour

1 sleeve of saltine crackers

2 Wasa hearty crispbread Whole Grain Crackers

1/2 cup of veg. oil.

2 eggs

I use two skillets but you can use 1 if you prefer. I put 1/4 cup of veg. oil in each skillet turn on heat.

Place the flour in one plastic bag. Put the crackers in a different bag and smash into crumbs. Add 1 teaspoon or more of each seasoning to each bag.

Put two eggs in a bowl and beat.

Rinse and cut chicken breast into halves. Place the chicken breast in the flour/seasoning mixture and coat. Take chicken breast out of bag and coat with egg. Take chicken breast out and put in cracker mixture to coat. Then put in hot skillet. Cook for 30 minutes turning frequently.

update......

The days are running together. The last week was a long week. I'll try to go back and recap

Day3: Andrew was able to get most of the adhesive off the floor with the floor polisher. We had to scrap under the cabinets and corners where the polisher wouldn't reach. That evening the floor in bathroom #1 was down!!! Yea!!

Day 4: We are slow moving.... We tiled the wall behind the toilet and made a tile baseboard. The old white painted baseboards kept chipping the paint off of it. So the tile baseboard looks so much better!!! We also grouted the bathroom that day!!! :) :) I believe we started cutting the tile for the floor in the entryway. We didn't get far.

Day 5: Toilet is put back into bathroom and I like the way it looks now!!!! :) :)






We continued to cut and piece the tile together and got most of the entryway.

Day 6: We finished cutting pieces for the entry way and got it all stuck to the floor. We started cutting tile for the kitchen.

Day7, 8 and 9: We cut tile for the floor in the kitchen and laundry room.
Day 9 was a long day. We put the thinset on the floor and set the tiles on it. It was all set and ready to grout!!!
Day 10: Andrew went back to work!!! Waaah!!! I still don't have my stove or fridge in the kitchen. We thought we would grout the floor this night. It didn't happen. We had to take a tile up and reset it. It wasn't level. This is how my floor looks currently.....

Entryway

Breakfast nook
Kitchen
It looks nice but isn't grouted yet.

So hopefully we can get the majority of it grouted tonight. It has been a long week. We still have to tile the master bath. Andrew wants to put radiant heat under the tile. I am not sure I want to spend the money on that. I can't think of that now though. I told him to just finish what we have now and then we will decide the master bath.

Hopefully we will be finished sometimes this week. My laundry is starting to look like that ball of dirty laundry on that tv commercial. LOL

Day 3---October 13th

It has been awhile since I blogged so I am picking up here and blogging on our progress.





We are on a mission to tile our floor in the kitchen, entryway, laundry room, near the back door and two bathrooms.





Day 1: We pulled up the carpet in the entry way and bathroom. A small section of both were tiled. So we chipped away at the tile. We had a bunch of helpers......
When we got that up we had a lot of thinset left on the concrete! It looked like this....
It wasn't coming up easy at all. So we after much googling I found where someone had rented an electric chisel from Homedepot to get the thinset up. So off to Homedepot we went to rent the tool. It worked great and we got the stuff off the entry floor and bathroom #1 in no time!


Day 2 We already had bathroom #1 torn apart and the toilet was in the tub. So Andrew had to work around the toilet in bathroom #2 w/ the tool. He got most of it up. We will have to work on the thinset under and near the toilet when we get bathroom #1 put back together. It will have to be done by hand but at least we got the majority of it up.

As you can tell by the second picture above the linoleum came up without a problem. It was the adhesive stuck to floor that was the problem. I was using an iron to melt and chisel it away. It was working but my progress was slow, around one square foot in one hour!! It would take forever to do my whole kitchen and laundry room!!!

When we took the chisel back to Homedepot Andrew asked the tool man if he knew what we could use to get the glue off the floor. He suggested a floor polisher. They had one but the attachement that we needed was still rented out. Off to Homedepot #2. They had one but it was missing two bits--not sure what that means except a no go for us. So they called Homedepot #3--ding ding ding! They had it!! :)

Day 3 Andrew got up not so early to get the floor polisher. I hope it works!!! He took the whole week off to tile the floors. I hope we can get it done this week. I was hoping to sneak in painting the laundry room and bedroom. I don't see that happening though. We have a ton of things going on this week.

6 parent teachers conferences
2 basketballs sign up.
1 ortho appointment
1 children's musical practice(finished this one already)
1 employee party
2 youth hunt days(fri & sat)
3 school days where the boys are of of school
1 birthday for the lady of the house :) :)---That is today!!:) What a present I get!! Two boys that are home from school due to sickness!!! LOL The youngest son gave me his present early. He threw up on me yesterday at the birthday dinner my mom made for us.

I hope to show some after pics real soon!!!!

Sleep over????

Question of the day....Why in the world do they call it a sleep over when no one goes to sleep??!!?

I agreed to a "sleep over" for my son's 14th birthday. We had a total of 7 neighborhood boys ages 8 or 9 to 15 at our house.

I am not new to slumber parties. I had several slumber parties when I was a younger and we did stay up late but not all night!!!

I thought for sure they would get a few hours of sleep. I didn't think these boys could stay up all night. They played video games, card games and watched movies. Oh-- and they ate everything up in the kitchen!!! Okay maybe I exaggerated a little but they did eat a lot!! I told dh that I felt like we were invaded by locust! LOL

The party was a success. The boys had a great time! :)

Sleep over is not the name for it though..... It is more like "Party All Night"!! LOL

Thankful Sunday and other things.....

Today I am so thankful for the electricians out there.

Last night was a crazy night. Around midnight I was getting ready for bed. I was in the bathroom and the energy lights in there were flickering. I was thinking...."great- it is about to go out!!" So I kept flicking the switch thinking one of them wouldn't come back on but it just kept flickering and I felt like I was in one of those movies were the person is washing their face in some weird bathroom and the lights are flickering above them. So I turn the light out and get into bed to watch a little tv in our room(dh was still in the living room). I noticed while I was sitting there the light in the closet was flickering too. So then I was thinking...hmmm, maybe we have a ghost haunting us. LOL I am such a wimp.

At this time dh comes into the room and tells me that the new surge protector connected to our new(not even a month old) XBR Sony 52 inch LCD tv isn't working anymore. He said it was making a lot of popping noise and then went off. So I ask him if he thinks there is something wrong with our electricity. LOL Then we heard a really strange noise outside. It went something like rrrrrRRRRrrrrrrr..rrrrRRRRrrrr... Dh went out side and said the box is popping. I thought he meant the one on the house and was about to freak out since I thought we might have a house fire soon. It was the transformer box in the neighbors backyard. So we proceeded to call the Electric Co. and after what seemed like several minutes of waiting to speak to someone......................boom.................darkness................and finally a real live voice on the other end of the line!!! After reporting our outage and the whole blocks outage we go to bed only to lie awake listening for them to come. I am not sure what time they finally came but I awoke around 4:30am to the loud noise of busy electricians fixing our outage!!!! :) Then our electricity came back on around 5:30 or 6:00am. I was so glad!!! We have been having triple digit temps and I was afraid our food would go bad in the fridge!!!

I am so thankful we have electricians that are willing to come at any hour of the day or night to fix our electricity. It isn't even the local electricians either but electricians from all over the U.S. When we had our huge outage in Dec. of last year they came from several states away to help all of us get hooked back up!!! It was such a site to see them coming down the expressway with a long line of bucket trucks from several states just to help us out!!! Anyway a big thanks to all of them!!!

The good thing is our new tv is working and we were able to exchange the surge protector for a new one. Everything in our house is now working fine and no more flickering lights!!! :)

Caleb--isms

Caleb is a little ham. He just cracks me up all the time. His new thing is acting like a puppy. I swear he is SO good at it too!!! He comes up to me with a cute little yelp, sticks his tongue out, pants and looks at me with little puppy dog eyes. lol It is so funny. I play along and pat him on the head. He loves it and will follow me around acting like a little excited puppy. He totally cracked me up the other day when I was on the computer he was on the floor behind me playing and watching tv. I heard him say "I am going to chase my tail." So I check him out and he on all fours going in circles. LOL It was the funniest thing ever.

another one.... I always make Caleb sit in the buggy when we go shopping. He is only 4 and has a tendency to get carried away and try to do his own little thing when we are out and about. Anyway- dh was with me and told him he could walk if he wanted to but he had to stay beside us. I was really impressed and he was doing a great job of staying next to us. Then as we were leaving the store I told him we needed to hold hands. So he told me he would hold his own hand and proceeded to grab his hand and hold it right in front of him---the crazy boy. LOL He wasn't too happy when he found out he had to hold my hand. LOL

We have a lot happening here in our little world. Cody, won an Ipod touch at church camp!!! Not being tech savvy I wasn't sure exactly what it was. Now that I've seen it I want one too!! LOL He was so happy to win it and that is all he talks about now. Poor Christopher can't take it when his older brother gets something and he can't.

One thing that Christopher will probably get that his older brother won't is braces. He has a consult with an orthodontist schedule in a couple of weeks!! Ack!!! I hope it isn't too expensive!!! Christopher is also my most dramatic kid so I am nervous about how he might take the whole procedure!

Summer break is almost over!! Waaaah!! I love the lazy days of summer!! We will start back to school shopping this week---I think. I can't believe how big my guys are getting. Cody will be going into H.S!!!!!!!!!!! OMG!! I am not old enough to have a son in H.S. Christopher will start his last year in elementary school. This will also be the last year I will have Caleb at home with me all day!! It sure seems like my guys are growing up way to fast!!!

Lazy Days of Summer...

I love summer. It is usually a time to sit back and be a little lazy. This summer has been busy so far. My next to oldest guy is at church camp right now. My middle guy has been attending a cultural enrichment class this whole month. The littlest guy has been hanging out with me. Hopefully next month we will see things slow down around here.

My flowers are a blooming! I love to see beautiful flowers out in my yard. I didn't plant as much as I have in the past. I am going to plant more perennials when ever I get a chance. Plus my Celosias didn't come back like they have in the past. I planted them a few years ago and the came back each year nearly taking over my big flower bed. This year I only have a handful!!!! :(

My veggie/fruit/herb garden is looking good. I have my first set of grapes growing on my grapevine! I was sad to see the black spots on them though. I am not sure what that is. I also have watermelon plants growing out of control in my garden. They just sprang up right on top of some corn and onions we planted. I will have to pull them out or they will over take the whole garden! It looks good though.
Other than being lazy, gardening, and driving my guys around this is what I have been doing this summer----making snow cones!! My guys like to feed the neighborhood boys. So in order to save some $$ I got a snow cone machine and some snow cone syrup. I have been making them snow cones everday! I didn't realize I would have to make so many!! I am up to around 10 snow cones a day right now. It seems like there is one new face everyday!

I am excited because we just order an ice cream maker and I can't wait to try it out!! I do know I am not making ice cream for all the neighborhood boys. LOL

I am bzzing something new. It is the Aveeno Positively Ageless line. I got it in the mail not long ago. It is supposed to firm and lift the skin. AVEENO® Skin Care Products I have the night cream and it smells nice.

I should have something new to bzz about soon. I am waiting for it to arrive!! :)

New blogger

I just thought I would move my blog over here from myspace. I would type long blogs on my space only to lose them before they post due to some error. I'll see how this one works out for me. :)