Winner, Dinner, and Funny Things.

 

Ding ding ding! Joe picked #13 out of 15... (omit my sister Julina's comment, since she said she doesn't need a set of squirrel ears [why ever not?? Don't 30-somethings need squirrel ears sometimes?] and omit the second comment of Amelia's) which gives us..... 

KELLY! 

Winner, Miss Kelly!

I happen to know your mailing address, Kelly, since we've worked together before, so I'll get this ready to mail to you, and you'll have a treat for your kiddos to play with. Maybe we can even use them in your upcoming session in April! :)

Thanks, guys, for playing. It was just as fun this time around to get the blog comment pings. I still have one more giveaway to do before February ends, so keep an eye out. 

And a few of you mentioned you'd actually use a tutorial on the squirrel ears (bear ears, beaver ears-- you can make them be whatever you want. Heck, you could make them pointy and/or use different furs and make all KINDS of animals!  So I'll whip up a tutorial for you guys soon. 

Ramblings for the moment:

I am TERRIBLE at consistently making dinners for my family. TERRRRRIBLE. It just hasn't yet become a habit to plan far enough ahead in my life to be PREPARED to get to work come 4:30pm or so. So 4:30pm hits and I'm like:

 It's bad news, y'all.

But this week, I made myself sit down and explore my Pinterest board of savory foods and find a few new recipes to try, then I got a few of my staple recipes and added them in, and I MADE A PLAN. A two-week menu. And I created a new board, my "Current Menu" board, where I pinned the few new recipes I want to try in the next two weeks. It'll be handy to go right there to find the recipes again, and as I use them , I'll delete them and then refill the board again in my next two-week plan.

So. I feel like I'm on top of it, for once. I am even a little excited to actually get to work on some of the million amazing recipes I've seen cross my boards on Pinterest. Tonight? Gonna make Martha Stewart's 30-minute chicken gumbo in honor of Mardi Gras. It's a bit pricey (for me), because it involves a full rotisserie chicken ($7) and precooked Andouille sausage (I could only find it in a 14oz pkg for $4, when I only need 8 oz.) and some frozen okra ($2), all of which are NOT staples in my pantry.... But heck-- for the complete easiness of this recipe, I'll trade some financial cost. 

In other news, I am excited that I still have:

a new episode of Vampire Diaries to watch

the last episode of Downton Abbey II to watch

But not excited that I really need to edit two sessions in a completely different room than my DVR this week, so both those episodes I'm so excited for will have to wait. Waa.

Two hilarious moments in my parenting adventures today:

1. Noah was having a blast today, in the 55-degree weather, tossing his toys straight up in the air so they'd "blast off into space". Until:

 Oops. 

After contemplating the situation for awhile, Noah said, "Maybe you can throw me like a bullet" to get it down. 

I laughed and laughed. And then I used the rake Noah found on the side of our house to knock Bumblebee loose from his precarious perch. No harm, no foul. and no throwing Noah like a bullet, despite the cleverness of that suggested solution.

2. Lucy has has the Snotty Nose to End All Snotty Noses... So when I plopped her down in our yard today and she went to work eating dry leaves (such a good mama am I), I looked over and saw this:

 LucyHitler. 

My gosh, having kids is funny crap sometimes. 

Okay. I have barely any time left before the kiddos wake from naps, so I'm going to try to get maybe 10-15 minutes of Downton Abbey watched. It's better than nothing. 

Here's to lovely temperatures outside, good friends who leave sweet blog comments, TV shows I can look forward to, consistent work coming to me, ridiculously cute, hilarious kids, (who happen to nap at the same time most afternoons, hooray!) and GUMBO for dinner, made by me. Life's not too shabby, eh?