Life's Whirlwind Adventures

Every Year I seem to be working on the same goal, and for six months I do well then it all goes to hell in a hand basket and I do not know what to do. So I spent some time and decided that weight loss for me to be skinny, really wasn't a goal that motivated me.  I mean I know that I am not the skinniest chick around but I am not...... I don't I don't feel like I am that fat, I'll just say it. I have one of those crazy body types and shapes that allows me to gain weight all over and not just in one specific area, although my boobs and booty do seem to get more than their fair share.  Which maybe isn't such a bad thing, but I have an ideal body shape for me in mind and I need to work a little harder to get things where I want them to be. I decided that I wanted to lose two sizes. I am not as concerned with the number on the scale, but I would like them to be lower than what they are.  But it's the size and my clothes, I just want them to fit better so I can we...

It is the 25th Year for Fifth Avenue Collection!!! It's an exciting time for all of us in the business and there are many rewards and contests and Head Office is giving our hostesses great rewards to celebrate them. So I've been thinking I would put my Fifth Avenue business on the shelf for a bit, I had so much going on in my life and I didn't want to be so busy that I missed things with my kids, I already felt stretched to the limit.  But then things changed, unexpectedly, and I am back at looking at what I can have Fifth Avenue can do to help me reach my goals.  So I have decided to take advantage of the promotions offered by Fifth Avenue to explode my business and I am going to be hosting a Mystery Hostess Event. What is a Mystery Hostess Event?  Well it's an event I host and invite my customers to, at the end of the event I take all the customers who came and purchased and add their names to a draw.  I then pick one person's name and award them the hostess c...

Lil Man has  a lot of friends born in January, I guess people drank a lot around St. Patrick's Day and Easter... but we had fun. Lil Man went to another birthday party, for a friend of mine's little girl.  She is nine months older than Lil Man but like half a foot taller.  Lil Man was enthralled with her, he followed her around and they played.  He had a really good time, I wish they still lived in town but now they live in Leduc so we don't get as many playdates as we would like.  Lil man ate snacks, played with the piano, played dress up and threw a temper tantrum when it was time to go.  I didn't get many pictures and the ones I did get are very blurry. The funniest moment though was when I saw Lil Man and his friend heading into the bathroom.  I was curious, his friend was carrying around some lip gloss stuff so I asked what was going on.  They said they were getting beautiful.  Lil Man climbed on the toilet to check himself out in th...

In September of 2011 I began working for Parkland CLASS as a front line worker.  It was something I did part time while I was subbing but felt that I needed to be making some kind of guaranteed income, so it was a new venture. My friend Stacey was a supervisor with the company and said I should try it.  I was really very hesitant about it, I mean it took me three months or more to finally get all signed up.   I started working every other weekend in one of the children's homes.  I was very green but the supervisor and staffing team were very good to me.  I pulled my weight and I worked to do whatever was needed of me. I was not a fan of personal care, I don't like changing my own kids diapers so changing diapers or toileting people was not the draw to the job, and really the pay wasn't the draw either, but I always left feeling I had made a contribution to someone's life that left them better than when I had come.   As this was going on I became disi...

Last weekend, the whole family headed out to Eckville to celebrate Lil Man's friend's birthday. His friend is our friends little guy.  So we all bundled up in our outer wear to head to a skating party on their acreage. It was a great afternoon, we got to catch up with so many friends, and both boys enjoyed spending time outside.  Lil Man played hockey and went for a sleigh ride.  Chan was able to play with his RC truck. Hubby had a couple beers with a bunch of other boymen, and I got some girl talk in with friends and made new friends. The kids were the cutest though. Half actually put on skates and skated on the rink, the other half had boots on and "played" hockey.  The hockey mostly looked like kids shooting pucks into the snow banks.  My little guy kept looking for mine or hubby's attention to tell us he "scored". During the present opening portion all the kids wanted to open the presents but Chris was able to manage them all, if she lived c...

So week three came and I thought I might have to give up, I mean I had ideas but well I couldn't find a way to photograph those ideas safely.  But I am getting ahead of myself so let me start at the beginning. Week three's theme was Find the Beauty. Which essentially meant take something ugly and use light and make it look beautiful.  So I began to think of things that are ugly, in my mind and opinion only, and well graffiti came to mind, as well as snow, garbage, clutter, but I really wanted to get some photos of some graffiti. Now on my drive to work I pass by this area by the river where the runoff from the streets is put into the river, you know where the street water ends up going down the drain and draining too.  I am at a total loss for what that is truly called but I think you understand.  Anyways, in the summer when we go rafting on river we always go by this spot and my hubby and his buddy call it shit rocks, because in the summer it's covered in graff...

Running Ok so I started a bucket list on Pinterest, there isn't much on it yet, but I have been staying off pinterest lately so that I can accomplish more of my goals, but one of the things on my Pinterest board is the Nike Women's Only Marathon (might be half marathon) in San Francisco.   So because this is on my Pinterest Board I thought I should try to find a running program for me to start conditioning my body to.  I am not saying I am going to run any marathon and come in first, but if I can even complete a marathon that would be awesome.  And by completing I do mean within a reasonable time.  So thanks to a couple of girlfriends from Saskatchewan who are also on Pinterest I found a couple really neat running programs.  One is for beginners and that is where I started.   The first program I am going to follow is a 12 week program.  The first week has a two minute walk warm up, with 1 min run and 3 min walk repeat 5 times for a total 22 ...

It's not often that I will willingly go outside in the winter.  It's just not my thing, to be perfectly honest, it's too damn cold out most of the time for me to even enjoy the activity.  So I don't do it, but I have a Lil Man who loves to be outside, he is very outdoorsy, even my other oldest was the same way but he got out lot's at Daycare so he didn't bug me to go out as much. Last Sunday it was quite tolerable outside so I agreed to take Lil Man out into the front yard to play. He trekked through the snow and made all kinds of paths, then he tried to kick the snow around for awhile but that was not enough for him. He began to waddle, and I do mean waddle, he even told me he was moving like a penguin. "Waddle, waddle just like a penguin." He made it to the neighbours when I called him back and he looked up at me with his baby blue eyes and asked to go for a walk. I couldn't say no, so I grabbed one dog, because we may as well kill ...

So with having kids and all that their schedules demand on our time sometimes it is very difficult for my hubby and I to get out and be adults and date.  Sometimes we go months without doing anything, simply because we are balancing soccer, swimming lessons, work, work out classes, friends etc, etc.  It can be hard to find the time or energy to want to go out.  And in my opinion the movies that have been released recently are not date movies, so we have to come up with something else to do. So on January 12, 2013, Hubby and I went on a double date with our friends Nicki and Joel.  It was so much fun to get out of the house and just hang out with adults.  We headed out on the town and went to Cities for supper.  I had been the only one who had been there  previously, so Hubby and our friends were experiencing Cities for the first time. I think we all enjoyed it and Joel even tried the Pizza Beer. After we finished our supper we headed down to Rive...

On Sunday we were given the next weeks challenge, the theme or motif was daily.  It was to be a picture of something daily.  Now this can be interpretted many different ways, and I struggled with finding my daily shot.  There are so many things that come to mind, the view of the river from my drive to work, the view outside my house of something I see daily (it's not a pleasant sight so I turfed that idea), my kids, but I am sure they will be feature plenty this year.  My hubby, but he's not really one for taking photos.  Then I thought what about photographing something from my daily routine.  Something I do daily.  Then that became a, "well what do I do daily?" Finally, I settled my mind, and I photographed my facial cleaning supplies. It's something I do daily, and I thought it fit the bill.  So here is the picture I submitted for this week. Here are a couple other photos I take that sort of fit in this category.  Walking the do...

One of my favorite meals to eat is soup, and it can be a wide variety of soups, but really anything homemade is good by me. I also like stews and chilli. So I have pinned a few new soups on Pinterest and in the interest of keeping my pinterest a useful tool I had picked a recipe to attempt awhile ago.  Cheeseburger soup!!!  Let's be honest I have posted about Hamburger Soup previously, so this was just the next step in burger soups and IT WAS FANTASTIC!!!!! I followed the pin to this website .  It seemed pretty easy and I was in a trying mood I noticed on the recipe that it called for Velveeta, and well I am not a big fan of Velveeta so I used Cream Cheese instead.  It turned out phenomenal!!! And everybody who has tried it loves it and has requested the recipe so I must have done something right.  So aside from adding cream cheese instead of velveeta I also added in some extra veggies like asparagus and broccoli. That day I also made some wild meat soup. ...

So my lil man enjoys being photographed and video taped, as long as he is the center of attention.  Here are three short videos of him from the past year. This is from his family birthday celebration, he is "singing" Happy birthday. There is a Looney Tunes show where Bugs Bunny is at a saloon and Yosemite Sam comes in and they play a game of 21 for Bugs' Gold nuggets.  Bugs asks Sam if he can stand on one card and Sam is like oh Sure sure.  Uncle Nelson taught Lil man to do this routine and this is him doing it.  Lol. This last video is Halloween night, it was cold and Lil man doesn't really like chocolate so we stayed home doing something he wanted to do!!!

This year I was a tornado in my kitchen. I made some family favorite recipes and I tried some new recipes(that became family favorites).  It was a busy few weekends when I got to baking.  Here is a list of things I made for Christmas baking; bread, crescent cream cheese puffs, oatmeal muffins, pumpkin cookies, butter tarts, thimble cookies, rolo snickerdoodles, shortbread cookies, and cheese cake thumbprint cookies. Our family favorites are the shortbread, butter tarts and thimble cookies.  The new favourites are the rolo snickerdoodles, and cheesecake thumbprint cookies.  The pumpkin cookies went over pretty well, but I don't know if I would put them in the favorites category.  The oatmeal muffins, were a breakfast muffin but they weren't very good at all, I may try the recipe one more time, but I will do some things differently for sure.  And the pastry puffs were ok, but I am the only one who likes those and well with trying to lose weight and st...

Oh Dear Pinterest, how you come up with some very interesting ideas for us to try. Chandler came to me before Christmas, on the day we were decorating the house actually and asked if it would be possible for us to fill balloons with water and food colouring and let them freeze.  Being the loving and supportive mom that I am, I said for sure we could. Out I ventured, into the blizzard I might add, to get to the store to buy balloons.  I also bought some other Chirstmas decorating things as well, but balloons were the main reason I went out.  With the way the snow was coming down, I may have been a bit nuts to go out, but my child wanted to be creative so I was all about supporting that. Now filling the balloons was an interesting experiment, we couldn't just fill them from the tap because then they would just be clear balls of ice, so how did we get the balloons to fill with water from a pitcher that had been coloured with food colouring???  It was a bit of a co...

The premise for the challenge that I have entered is not from my own head, but from another photo blog that my friend Alicia found, here is the link .  It is going to be a serious amount of learning for me this next year.  Sometimes Alicia explains things she wants to do and I just stare at her with a blank look because I don't know how to do any of that yet, but I am anxious to learn.   So the rule of thirds states that you divide your picture into 9 equal sections, and that the most eye catching pictures have the focal point in one of the center intersections.  Here is a picture that demonstrates this better than I can explain it. If you took a marker and drew two equally spaced horizontal lines and two equally spaced vertical lines you would see that Chan's eye is right in the intersection point of two of the lines.  Which means this photo follows the rule of thirds.   So in breaking the rule of thirds, you would try to not have your foca...

I am always impressed with people that take photos every day and post them on blogs, and I am sure I see things every day that I would like to capture but finding the time to take the picture everyday and to post it is just not in my realm of possibilities right now.  So a friend, Alicia from Triple Ten Photography , suggested doing a picture a week for the year, where each picture has a different challenge or motif to follow.  I thought this was a great idea and a great way for me to practice my blooming photography skills. So each week I will submit my photos to the group and I will post them on my blog and share the challenge and how I came to the final picture that I have submitted.  I think it will be fun and if you want to join me on this endeavor let me know.  I am going to have to do research to be part of this challenge though as some of the concepts are photography concepts that I only vaguely understand.  I hope Alicia is ready to tutor me!!!

I am so far behind in my blogging, but the my excuse is that the Christmas Season was incredibly busy and things got crazy.  But I did want to share my Christmas decorations with everyone. I am still not really back into the Christmas spirit as it were, I am more grinch than Santa, but I do love decorating the house.  We did it one weekend at the beginning of December after we bought our tree from Costco.  I got into the decorating spirit for one day then the Christmas spirit seemed to go dormant. Truth be told, all the decorations are already down, on one hand this makes me sad on another, I am glad I don't have to do it. This year for Christmas I did more of the window decorations and built up my Christmas Village again. I love my Christmas village and I add a new item each year. Here are some of our Pictures from the Christmas Decorating night!!!