1 car = a pain in the neck

Dh's Suburban needed a manifold gasket replacement (like I have ANY idea what that means . . . ) so Wednesday we took it to a guy we know who does that kind of thing out of his own family garage. I naively thought we'd pick up the car that night.
(Someone else's Suburban, but dh's looks like this.)

Nope. Looks like Saturday at the earliest. Today that meant driving the girls to the bus stop, then running dh to work so I could have the car to drive Mom to the doctor and pick up some origami paper at the craft store for Activity Day in the early evening. Dh got a ride home with someone.

I called the bus company here in town this morning to see if dh could take a bus home. Possible, but not easy. We live on the eastern outskirts of town and his office is on the northern outskirts. It takes three buses and over an hour, plus some walking.

Tomorrow I'll have dh drop the girls at the bus stop, then drop me at the dentist for an 8:00 appointment. Luckily it's only about a mile from home so I'll walk home afterward.

Saturday one of the girls is having . . . what did the woman call it? . . . not "IQ testing," but something like "cognitive ability testing." Whatever. I also have Stake choir practice for our Stake Christmas program, so I'll get dd settled for the test, run to choir practice, then back to pick her up when it's done, then home.

I'm hoping by then the Suburban will be done and we can get back to two cars again. If not, we're going to have a problem on Sunday because my car holds only five people and our family is six. Two trips to Church?

It's making me realize how lucky we are to have two cars on a regular basis!

A couple of pictures to share

My twins' teacher is super-patriotic and we are enjoying all the ways the girls have benefitted from that. She has taught them the national anthem (The Star-Spangled Banner), they get an extra point on their charts for wearing red/white/blue to school, they memorized the preamble to the US Constitution, and for Veterans Day, they did a profile on a friend or family member who is in the armed forces. One of my twins profiled her oldest brother who is in the US Marine Corp and the other profiled her uncle who is in the US Navy. This picture is from the weekly newsletter:

A couple of Saturdays ago we went to a wonderful "Day in the Park" near the zoo here in town. It's an annual event with lots of games and activities for the children and music and such on stage for the families to enjoy. There are also displays and a few commercial booths. One of the booths offered a free family portrait and since we hadn't had a picture taken of the five of us in quite awhile, we decided to do that. It was just a quick photo by the park lake, but we were happy with it. Here we are on a busy Saturday in November:

Tonight's dinner is Baked Potato Soup. I just couldn't bring myself to use the full amount of fat, so I cut that down by a little more than half. Here's the picture from the recipe website:

2010 IRA=FUNDED

Yippee! This is the first time I've fully funded my IRA (retirement account into which I can put $5,000/yr). It only took until November 30th do that. ;-) I hope to be done with it much earlier in 2011. Honestly, I don't know why I've been so lackadaisical about it in the past. I make only a very small salary, but we don't depend on that salary, so I should have been putting the $5,000 in there EVERY year.

You know that old saying about the best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago and the second best time is today? I guess it applies. Anyway, I'm pretty happy about this accomplishment.

Some volunteer activities

I've gotten involved with several volunteer activities and thought I'd list them here:

Box Tops for Education coordinator for the girls' elementary school. The kids collect and turn in the printed coupons from General Mills packaging and the school gets 10 cents for each one. This involves sending out flyers promoting the project, collecting the coupons from each classroom, counting them, and submitting them on schedule at least twice a year.

Family History consultant for my ward in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I help church members with their family history and genealogy. Depending on need, I may go to their house or help them on Sundays at church. I use Ancestry.com a lot. I have fun teasing apart my family history puzzles using that site.

I'm a co-leader for a semi-monthly activity day for 8-11 year old girls (and their friends) at my church. My church has Cub Scouts for the boys, and a church-grown program for the girls.

I'm a moderator for a parenting site. I moderate a sewing board, a home and garden board, and a Mormon board.

I'm a moderator for a couponing site called A Full Cup. Every week I enter data on the sales at a local grocery store and promote discussion of the best deals available. I love this site because it helps me feed my family for less.

I sing in my church choir. I wish it were a little more rigorous because although I'm not a great singer, I like to sing things that are a little more complicated. However, I'm grateful to the conductor and the time and enthusiasm he brings to the choir.

I think that's it for volunteering. I just started an ASL class that meets once a week. I used to know a bit of ASL and am hoping to remember it again.

In with the new and out with the old

I have a new car! It's a silver 2011 Honda Accord with black leather seats and it's really nice. The old car was a white 2000 Ford Windstar that looked like this except it had a sliding door behind the driver's door:The minivan was sold today, so we had about three weeks of being a three-car household. That's one more than we need, so we were glad to say good bye to the van.

I've driven a minivan for 21 years. Yes, 21. I had a 1989 Dodge Caravan for 14 years and this one for 7. After three weeks I'm getting accustomed to being so much lower on the road and having great maneuverability (sp?), but it was very, very strange at first.

The girls' three booster seats just baaaaaaaaaaaaarely fit in the rear seat. It's a squeeze and it's going to be a hassle until one of them is big enough to not need a booster. That should be about the time they graduate from high school, they are such slender little things. :-)

As you can see by the number of cars I've had in the past 21 years, I'm a buy-and-hold kind of gal and having this new car has thrown me for a loop. A pleasant one, but a loop nevertheless.

The chickens are getting bigger and Bountiful Baskets came around this morning

I'm in love with this picture because it shows how beautiful my dd is. Cute bird too, huh? You can see by dd's clothes the weather is still really warm although I hear it is finally going to get only into the 70s for the highs late next week. I'm using the air cooler every day. The chickens are very cute. My favorite thing they do is to huddle together and give themselves dust baths. They scratch around, push each other around, and get very cozy together. Funny chicks!

As usual for every other Saturday, I got up early and was over at the local park to help with the Bountiful Baskets distribution. I was home again by 6:15 so that will give you a clue. :-) Today for my $16.50 I received:
1 cantaloupe
2 bags of green grapes--about 4-5 lbs, I'd say
3 lbs carrots
6 bananas
3 Mexican Grey squash
2 bunches Spring onions
1 bunch broccoli
4 tomatoes
2 cucumbers
3 pomegranites
9 apples
7 oranges
1 head Romaine lettuce, not pictured

I'm not really sure what to do with all the Spring onions, although I do have a delicious egg/cheese/green onion recipe that I'll definitely be making. I'll probably do some kind of saute with the squash, onions, and tomatoes. The oranges are Valencias so they aren't great eating out of hand, but will make nice juice. The apples are Galas, one of my favorites, so good eating there. I'm getting into the Fall thing and apples sure are a part of that.

Last night my girls had their very-first-in-their-entire-lives visit to Chuck E. Cheese's. Do you think they were happy about it?

Sister Wives

TLC network has a new show called Sister Wives. Yes, it's about a polygamous family. Right at the beginning the husband makes it clear they are not part of the LDS Mormons and points out that the relationship between their group and the LDS Church is like that of Catholics and Protestants. What I'm finding interesting is how some of their practices ARE like LDS Mormon practices. When they say prayers together as a family at night or before meals, they sound exactly like the prayers my own family says. I saw on the wall of one of the wives' apartment The Family: A Proclamation to the World, which was written and is distributed by my LDS Church.

A number of years ago when I was going to the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, one of my classmates belonged to the same group the Sister Wives belong to. She told me they had most of the same programs our church did, and in fact, bought many of the church instruction manuals they used from MY church. I was really surprised! The FLDS Church you see on TV has a different doctrine all together and really has no connection at all to my church, and that was what I was more familiar with.

So it was weird to have this other polygamous church actually share some of our doctrine with us--but definitely NOT the doctrine on polygamy! No polygamy now or in the future, thank you very much! And dh agrees with that 1000%!

Bountiful Baskets

Due to a snafu two weeks ago, this is my first fruit and veggie co-op basket in nearly a month. I actually had to buy produce at the store last week!

From back to front and left to right, this is what I got for $16.50:
5 lbs Idaho Russet Burbank potatoes
2 cantaloupes
2 1 lb boxes of strawberries
1 head of cauliflower
5 red peppers
3 artichokes
6 bananas
2.5 lbs of green grapes
5 tomatoes
8 Gala apples
7 plums
1 head of lettuce, not shown

I added up what these items would have cost had I bought them at the store this week, based on what I saw in the sale ads and in the produce department and the value of the fruits and veggies I picked up today would be about $44.35. Two items, one cantaloupe and one artichoke were extra because I helped with the distribution. See why I was a bit annoyed with myself last time when I missed the distribution?

Oh, and no offense to any Australian or Canadian readers ;-) but I'm delighted that with the exception of the bananas, every.single.item was grown in the United States of America!!! Just as an aside, did you know the USA has 5% of the world's population, but 20% of the arable land? No wonder we have such great food production and spend less on food as a percentage of our income as compared to citizens of almost every other country.

Our family addition x 4

Here are half our new family members. To tell the truth, I'm scared to death to have them! I've never really had a pet (only a dog for a couple of teenage years that I didn't have to take care of) and although I have lots of children, I know how to care for them. I don't know how to care for pets, chickens specifically.

I don't know if these are pets or food-producers. Probably both, as I hear the hens will be friendly and have their own little personalities as they get older. I can already see the Rhode Island Red (the one here, which belongs to E) is kind of a bossy one and likes to hog the food bowl. The Barred Rocks are supposed to be friendly and accomodating, so I hope they get their share.
The gray Barred Rocks are about three weeks old and the RIR and the one I'm not sure about (C's, pictured here) are about a week old. They have to grow quite a bit before we can expect to see any eggs. They say 18-20 weeks is about average. If so, that means we should be starting to see eggs around the first day of Spring.
S's chick is the same variety as mine--Barred Rock. She went to see a stage production of Charlotte's Web today, so her chick is named Charlotte. I'm going to find out how to say "chicken" in Korean, and if it is pronounceable to me, that's going to be my chick's name.Here are all the ladies eating dinner.

Oh what shall we do in the morning time?

I took these pictures of S at 7:00 am today. I knew she had gone out to ride her bike, but I was alerted by her loud singing as she cycled up and down the street. I felt like I had my own little cheerful, twittering song bird.