Officially 3!

Today was Leilani's birthday. We had a blast yesterday, but she went to bed with a fever and continued with one today, hopefully it will break tonight!

I still can't believe that she is 3! It makes me sad, but happy to see how grown up she is. She is such a little lady and turning into quite the little mother with her baby brother, Carter. She is always there to help and comfort.

Her year in development:
Mastered her tricyle, enough to ride the "Big One" around the yard.
Officially potty-trained, and even at night, wahoo!!!
She can write her "L", most of the time.
Count to 10, with a little help.
Knows her shapes and colors.
She is learning how to use her scissors, on paper only!
Her language skills surprise me everyday!

This darling girl is one of the many lights of my life. I have a cousin that call her kids sunshines and I love that. She sure is one of mine! I love her so much and feel blessed to have a daughter. We have our moments with each other, because she is so independent. I have to love her for that, because I think she will be so much stronger for it as she gets older.

A few days old, what a darling baby she was!

First birthday, still my favorite picture to date!

Her new found love of horses, oh she loves them! Hope to get her riding someday?

Happy Birthday my sweet Leilani! I love you so much and here's to another wonderful year with my baby girl!

Leilani's Birthday Party

We celebrated Leilani's birthday today, since her birthday is on Sunday this year. She wanted a princess party so that is what we did. There were not a lot of princess details just the castle cake, some princess foam stickers and the girls got a glow in the dark wand and the boys chose an ax or a sword, Carter got a big foam hammer, quite cute!

We stuck with a luau theme with delicious huli huli chicken, prepared and cooked by my wonderful husband, macaroni salad (courtesy of L&L Hawaiian BBQ), rice (of course) and some Hawaiian sweet rolls, recipe to come later.

It was fun, the kids had a blast and the parents/adults were able to socialize, which is always a good thing.

Leilani was very adamant that she is still 2 and will not be 3 until tomorrow, her actual birthday! She makes me laugh! I love this little girl, happy birthday party!

Here is the castle cake. It is hard to frost when your frosting is melting! It was fun to make though.

Desert Adventure

Like always, here is another long awaited post, not for most of you but it has been here waiting for me to post.

Sometime in January, it was a beautiful day and I just wanted to get out and explore. Where we live there are red hills and mesas surrounding us and I never have much of a desire to explore, well let's think about this . . . there are a lot of critters crawling and slithering all over them so I stay away! In the winter I feel comfortable that they are still in hibernation or somewhere much warmer.

I loaded the kids up and Brady rode his bike and off we went on a desert adventure, ok, maybe only about 5 minutes down the road. It was so much fun. Brady and Leilani were all over the hills and Carter and I sat on the blanket and watched. Carter did for a minute and he didn't mind crawling all over the dry mudcracks.

Here are some pics for your viewing pleasure!

Loving the tracks, they love trains.

Isn't this a great pic? I love the face, bring it on!

I love this pic, with the snow on the mountain.

Using his biking skills

YUCK!

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

I love this day, isn't it crazy? I always have, since I was a little girl. It must be the Irish blood in me and all of the green, it just makes me happy!

Today we had a busy day with preschool, which I am teaching this week. We did "boring number stuff," that is what Brady called it. Some shamrock foamies to glue on paper, shamrock sugar cookies and green milk, painting shamrocks using heart shapes and then each of the kids took home their own grow-your-own pots of clovers. It was fun to teach.

Afterward, we hopped in the car to use a free redbox code, because I became a fan on facebook of redbox. We got The Princess and the Frog, very excited about this one.

Once we got home I made lunch: Heart shaped four-leaf clovers, because they are lucky, right? Ants-on-a-log stem and kiwi, because it is green, and of course it had to be served on green plates!

Leilani's new bow, finished just before school.

Carter, after he ate his cookie, too cute!

In the car, after we got our movie.

Lunch, cute huh?


Green, green, green, everything green! Love it, so much fun all the way down to my shamrock socks that I wait to wear just for this day!

Happy St. Paddy's!

Wheels

Like always, this will be something that happened a couple of months ago!
Sometime in January, we decided to teach Brady how to ride his bike without training wheels and it happened to be on a Sunday afternoon before our 1 o'clock church, gotta love it!

Well, it wasn't that simple! One day I picked Brady up from school and when I put his bike in the back of the truck, one of his training wheels broke, forcing us to teach him!

It took him no time at all for him to do it and by the time I went inside to get the camera, he was off and going. He wasn't perfect, obviously and needed help for a couple of days to get started, but he is a master of the bike! He loves riding and I apologize to some of my friends for the domino effect of their kids wanting to ride without their training wheels too!

Here is Leilani riding her tricycle and Carter enjoying his new car he got for his birthday, from Moma and Papa.

Walking

I feel lately that I am copying my sister-in-law, unintentionally. I have been meaning to post videos about Carter, but I hadn't gotten a good shot, until today. She just posted her son walking, who is a couple of weeks younger then Carter and now here I am!

Carter is not walking as well as him, but it sure is cute! It was been fun to watch these little guys grow, together in a crazy way. I can't wait to have them together this summer, it will be so much fun!
Here is a video of Carter and a big brother, sharing his math skills with us.

Homeade Laundry Detergent

Lately, along with other people that I know, should I say Courtney, have been trying to spend less money and finding better ways to save. My other sister-in-law does the same thing, it must be in the blood? the air? Anyway, cheaper is good.

After thinking about actually making my own, it took some time to do the research in finding these ingredients. I looked all over the major cities around me and could not find any of the items needed to make this. As I was looking on the internet it said that I could order them online at Ace Hardware. I thought to myself, if I can order them online, let's go down there and see if they have any of the items in the store, they didn't. I proceeded to order them through the store, on a Friday and they arrived Monday. The downfall is that I had to order some of them in bulk.

So excited to save so much money, I believe it is around 6 to 8 cents a load, I got right to work putting the Fels-Naptha in my food processor and got it all ready. I have been using it for a couple of weeks now and I like it okay. I may be with Courtney on the extra soap thing, it works without it, but I think the soap may add a fresher smell. The test was diapers and it works great, I just think my next batch I will add some ivory or something, just for the smell.

Okay, so after doing all of this research and ordering in bulk, I decided to take a look at our local grocery store, which is only 1 mind you. I walked down the laundry aisle and there were all of the items! Can you believe it, all here in my small little town. I haven't looked into it, but I think it may be slightly cheaper to buy in bulk then the grocery store, oh well.

Here is the recipe that I use:

1 Fels-Naptha bar*

1 Cup Arm & Hammer Super Washing Soda**

1/2 Cup Borax

*Grate soap or break into pieces and process in a food processor until powdered. Mix all ingredients. For light load, use 1 Tbsp. For heavy or heavily soiled load, use 2 Tbsp.

Yields: 3 Cups detergent (Approx. 40 loads).

**Baking Soda will not work, nor will Arm & Hammer Detergent - it must be a sodium carbonate.

I have seen a lot of recipes, but I completely trust the source of the Duggar's, you know the 19 kids and counting family? They recommend not using heavily perfumed soaps, if you wanted to replace the Fels-Naptha and it costs about $2 a batch! Wow!

They have a liquid recipe as well and some ideas for fabric softener.

Good luck!