Time to Unpack the Snow Boots

I was having breakfast with Katie this morning and could hardly believe my eyes when I looked out the window.  Snow!  It's not coming down very hard or collecting very fast, but it's there.  See...

Also, today is my last NaBloPoMo post.  I did it!  Yay!  I probably won't be back tomorrow, but soon.  Happy last day of November.

Trimming the Tree or How Not to Decorate a Tree with a 1 Year Old

I don't know about all you other working moms out there, but I feel compelled to do everything with Katie.  I want to cook with her, craft with her, shop with her, etc.  I don't want her to miss one single experience.  She handles it fairly well, and it's usually Momma that ends up tired and cranky at the end of it.  Such was the case last night when I pushed us to get the tree decorated.  Keep in mind we'd been at a family get together for most of the afternoon, Doug had a cold, and Katie didn't take an afternoon nap.

I started off by changing into my Christmas jammies and giving Katie hers to open.  I want to start a tradition that Mrs. Claus leaves her Christmas jammies (all wrapped up in special packaging) right after Thanksgiving so she has the whole month to wear them.  Yeah that didn't work so well.  Maybe in a year or two when she might understand the whole Santa/presents thing.

After we were in our jammies and had our eggnog we started opening the boxes.  In past years Doug would lay out ornaments and I would find the perfect place on the tree.  We typically don't have a big tree/many ornaments so it took us maybe 20 minutes to do all of this if the tree was already set up.  I think it took us an hour last night!  Katie loved going through the ornaments and she handled everything very delicately.

Then it was time to hang the first ornament, and we thought we'd have Katie do it.  I pulled out her first Christmas ornament, went over to the tree with her and helped her carefully hang it on a low branch.  We stepped back and she reached out to it and snatched it back off the tree.  That was apparently not the right spot.  We tried again with the same results.  Finally I took the ornament and hung it up where she couldn't reach it.  We tried letting her hang one again with Doug, but we had similar results.  Again, maybe this will go better next year.

The rest of trimming went about the same way.  Katie pulling off the ornaments as fast as we could put them on and us putting them up higher and higher.  We had a good time though.

As you can see, it all worked out in the end.  A beautiful Christmas tree for our beautiful daughter.

Not As Planned

This holiday weekend has not quite gone as planned.  We've had colds, time conflicts & work schedules all messing things up.  Somehow, we've managed to fit just about everything in though.  Thanksgiving was spent with my mom's family at my parents' house.  We visited with Doug's mom on Thanksgiving night and Katie had her first taste of eggnog.  She loved it-just like her daddy!  We got to hang out with super-cool Nick on Friday.  That was so much fun.  :)  Last night we finally found some time to hang out with Doug's brother's family.  We watched Polar Express (Doug had never seen it!) and had pizza and pumpkin pie concretes-YUM!  Today will be another family dinner (my dad's family) and tonight is for decorating the tree.  I can't wait!

Running Out of Steam

Only 4 more days to post and I'm just about out of things to talk about.  So I'll leave you with this completely adorable picture of Katie & my godson from yesterday afternoon.  Happy Saturday!

Christmas!!

According to Doug, Christmas can officially begin.  We got our tree out this morning and put it up.  So far we have lights & tinsel on it (after we got it back from Katie.)  We didn't get a chance to do ornaments today, but we'll get to it this weekend.  Be looking for our tree picture soon!

Thankful

I try to be thankful every day, but today especially I want to remember to share my thanks.  Right now, it's all about the little things.  Good cold medicine, soft tissues and Doug & Katie letting me get the rest I needed the last few days. 

I'm thankful for my family.  My beautiful daughter who loves to dance and laugh and play.  She makes me smile.  My helpful husband who stayed up with me last night making food for today.  He also mopped the kitchen & bathroom floors and helped me with dishes & laundry yesterday.  It was so nice getting up this morning and knowing that we just have to get ourselves ready and nothing else.  Thank you Doug, for talking me into staying up last night.  Thanks to my mom & dad for organizing and preparing the better part of 2 family dinners this week.  My brother & sister for being a loving uncle & aunt to Katie.  My in-laws for hosting a low-key movie night for us to wind down with tonight.  And I'm thankful for all the rest of our family and friends.  We love you all and wish you the best on this Thanksgiving day.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Craft Time

Today I made a book wreath.  It turned out really neat and it was so simple.  Unfortunately I made this one for a fund raiser at work, but I forsee one of these hanging on my own door very soon.  Here are the instructions I followed, in case you want to make your own.  By the way, this is not the completely finished product.  I ran out of pages (I used a 12 in. wreath) and so I need to get another book to fill in the holes.  I also have to make the hanger, because the wreath holder on my door doesn't really work.

Poor Me

I have a cold.  I caught it from Katie and today has definitely been the worst day.  Fortunately for me, my lovely husband made me some soup for dinner and is now on his way to the store to get me some of the good cold medicine, you know the behind the counter stuff.  Also, boogie wipes burn after you've blown your nose all day.  I am now using Katie's old flannel burp cloths as a handkerchief.  Here's hoping I feel better tomorrow.

Holiday Traditions

One of the things I love best about the holidays are the movies!  Give me a cutesy Christmas special or something sappy and I love it!  I can't wait to share these with Katie.  In fact, I shared the first one of the season with her last night.  I checked out Frosty the Snowman and we watched it last night after dinner.  She really liked it.  I must admit, I didn't remember watching the Frosty Returns special ever, and was very disappointed.  I was confusing it with Frosty's Winter Wonderland.  I was kind of sad about that.  I'll have to hunt that one down for us soon.  It's the one I really remember watching from when I was a kid and I loved it!

Katie enjoying Frosty the Snowman

This is just the start of my holiday movie list, up next will be Elf!  We'll watch that one the night after Thanksgiving after putting up our tree.

Dream Job

Inspired by a post on my brother's blog (I'll link to it if he says it's okay...), I thought I'd write a little about my dream job. 

Let's face it, work is work these days.  I work because my family needs the income.  There are parts of my job I enjoy.  Helping people find books and answers to off the wall questions can be interesting, but my favorite part is storytime!  Some days I am very glad that I have storytime on Monday mornings.  Because more often than not after I drop off Katie at the sitter's I get a major case of the Mondays.  I love reading stories to the kids, hearing their answers when I ask what they think will happen next or listening to them tell me about what's going on in their lives.  Preschoolers are pretty cool!  Even when they won't sit still or are interrupting your story, it is hard to keep up the Monday blues after 45 minutes of that!  Then Tuesday comes and the blues start all over and I start thinking about what I really want to do...

If our finances allowed, I'd love to stay home and take care of Katie and our house.  Most days, I feel like I am only doing things halfway.  Work only gets half my attention because I'm thinking about Katie, Katie only gets half my attention because I'm thinking about housework, housework doesn't even get half my attention because working and Katie wear me out so much that I just don't care anymore.  I don't even know that I give Doug half the attention he needs.  We are so busy  and when we're not, we're just plain tired.  Not exactly the basis of a good relationship, right?  But, life won't always be this way, or at least that's what I tell myself on those days that I start worrying that I just can't keep up.

Well Check

Katie had her 15 month well check today.  Everything was great!  Very healthy, despite the slight cold she is starting to get.  Here's her stats:

Weight:  25 pounds 8 oz. (80%)
Height:  31 inches (78%)
Head Circumference 19 inches (97%!)

Grocery Shopping Fail

Katie laid down for an unexpected early nap this morning and since tomorrow morning is her well-check, I took that as a sign that I should hurry and go to the store while Doug was here and I could go by myself.  I barely had a list and knew that I just didn't feel like cooking anything for the next 6-7 days.  So, I bought frozen junk galore, pizza, ravioli, fish sticks, and hot pockets.  With a couple of cans of soup & some spaghettios thrown in for good measure.  I did get the stuff to make cabbage rolls, so at least one meal we eat in the next week will be decent.

What do you make when you just don't want to cook?

Momma's Little Helper

These days, Katie loves to help.  Or "hellllp," as she likes to say it.  So lately we've been trying to include her in little chores as suggested by our parent educator.  She especially loves taking the little bags of trash to the back door.  I wish I had taken the picture from the other direction so you could see the big proud smile on her face.  Other favorite activities include vacuuming, sweeping and opening up all the dresser drawers.  She's really good at that one!  Now if only we could convince her that putting away her toys is a good idea...

Halfway There!

Day 15 of 30 days of posting.  I think it's gone pretty well so far, but if I've bored you already, I'm sorry.  I'll just go ahead and admit that today's post is going to be boring.  I have alot of thoughts spinning around in my head, but none of them want to come out and become a cohesive piece of writing.

I volunteered to make a wreath for a fundraiser at work.  I'm going to attempt to do something like this.  I hope it turns out well.  I've never actually crafted anything that someone might purchase and it makes me nervous.

Katie peed all over the place tonight while I was getting her ready for bed.  I took her diaper off and before I had a chance to get the other one under her, she started to giggle and sure enough there was the wet spot.  I have no idea why she thought it was funny, but I didn't quite feel the same way.  Changing sheets at 8:30 p.m. is not my idea of a good time.

Doug didn't feel well tonight and somehow that made me want to not feel well too.  That's not quite true.  It just made me feel really tired.  I still feel really tired.  In fact, I wish I had finished this post about an hour ago and were already in bed reading my book

Goodnight.

Not Cooperating

I found the cutest video of Katie on the flash drive I thought I lost last night. I was going to post it here, but blogger is not cooperating with me, sorry.

Another weekend at home. We didn't do much of anything except hang out around the house, but we had a great time playing with Katie. We discovered  that it is nearly impossible to watch a movie with her now. Last night we tried watching Alice in Wonderland and Katie went crazy when Alice fell down the rabbit hole. She ran up to the screen and yelled and shook her fists and then turned back to us as if to say, "did you see that??" Too funny! Tonight we had a similar reaction during Clash of the Titans while watching a battle scene. On both occasions the movies were started too late and she needed to be put in bed before the end, so we still haven't finished them.

Speaking of movies, I watched The Time Traveler's Wife Friday night while Doug studied (Katie was with her grandma.)  I was so disappointed!  Seriously, the worst movie I've ever seen based on a book.  I'm not even sure that I would have liked it if I hadn't read the book.  The book was so good, no better than good, it was great!  Definitely on my list for one of the best I've ever read.  And I'm always claiming that the book is better than the movie anyhow, but I was thinking that if this story was even half as good on screen, it would be pretty good.  The worst part of it all for me, is that now when I think of the book, I am imagining the characters as they were in the movie and that is not working for me at all.  Bottom line:  read the book, don't watch the movie!

The Seasons of a Katie-bug

Winter

Spring

Summer

Fall

Christmas is Coming!

As I was grocery shopping this morning, I couldn't help but be reminded that Christmas is coming everywhere I turned.  And you know what?  I liked it!  Of course, I'm also excited when the Christmas music starts playing on the radio in November (if you don't like it, listen to something else!) and when I saw Christmas lights & decorations already up on people's houses this week that made me happy too.  This morning though, I experienced my biggest Christmas thrill thus far.  As Katie & I walked into Wal-Mart she spotted the big Christmas tree and her eyes lit up and she said "Ooohhh..."  Made my heart melt and I was ready to come home and put my tree up right then and there!  We'll wait though.  We have to give Daddy time to get into the Christmas spirit or at least be okay with  getting out the Christmas stuff.  This year, I plan to start decorating the day after Thanksgiving.  Tree & all since we're planning to use our fake one this year.  I can't wait to see Katie's reaction to having a tree right here in our house!  I think she's going to love it.  :)

YUM!

Today was a looong day at work.  So it was especially nice to come home to leftover casserole that my MIL brought over.  I really wasn't planning to eat any, but I wanted to try just a little bite.  Mmm...yeah, I ate a whole bowl and am seriously trying to restrain myself from having another.  It was that good.  Here's the recipe that she left for me.  It's going to have to go into our rotation.

Sour Cream Noodle Bake

1 1/2 pounds ground turkey
1 tbsp oil/fat
1 tsp salt
1/4 tsp pepper
1/4 tsp garlic salt
1/2 cup chopped onion
1 cup tomato sauce or puree
1 cup sour cream
1 cup cottage cheese
1 pkg medium wide noodles (10 to 12 oz.), cooked & drained
1 cup sharp cheddar cheese, grated

1.  Brown meat in oil, add salt, pepper, garlic salt, onion & tomato sauce.  Simmer 10 minutes.

2.  Combine sour cream, cottage cheese & noodles.  Mix well.

3.  Put meat, sauce & noodles in casserole in alternate layers, top with grated cheese.

4.  Bake at 350 degrees for 25 to 30 minutes.

She made a few substitutions, instead of ground turkey she used shredded turkey.  I think you could easily substitute chicken, but I also think a version with ground turkey/beef would be yummy too.  I'm thinking it would be super easy if you bought a rotisserie chicken at the store and shredded it.  She also used lasagna noodles (if I were making the recipe without having seen hers, I probably would have thought it meant egg noodles or whatever), but I think any kind of noodle would work well here.

Unsettled

There was another shooting in my city today.  This makes 5, I think, in the last several weeks.  This is not typical for where I live and even more concerning is that it seems to be creeping closer and closer to my neighborhood.  Today, it was about a block away from my hair dresser's shop.  I wasn't there today, but all three of us were there less than 2 weeks ago.  Scary.

200 Posts!

I can't believe I have posted 200 times here at Three Sniders.  I will post more later today, I just wanted to mark this occasion.