hooray for smoothies

My kids and I drink this smoothie every morning. It's great! The girls love it before school and I love it after running and yoga. Charlie chugs a whole cupful and wants more. Try it!

1 cup Dole kiwi strawberry juice
1 cup plain yogurt
1/2 cup frozen blueberries
1 1/2 cups frozen strawberries
1 ripen banana'
2-3 tbsp protein powder
Throw it all in the blender and Voila!! Yum! Yum!

Share your favorite smoothie/protein drink with me!!

it's a great day for "miss boots"

When you live in Arizona, rainy days are a welcome surprise especially for a three year old. The joy on Eliza face while she jumped on the trampoline in the rain was priceless today. In her words..."I was soakin' wet". She was drenched after a half hour of jumping and I had a great time watching her and taking pictures.
Yahoo for rain(every once in a while)!! I'm a true Arizona girl now. I love my predictable sunshine and blue skies.

my little guy

Charlie is my sweet little guy!! And this is his favorite spot...on my lap with a book. And he is very serious about it too. If he wants to read a book, he lets you know right away and he wants you to sit right down. He then plops himself right down after manuevering just the right way with the book in hand. Of course, most books only last for a second and he's on to another book. Unless it's one of his favorites like "Brown Bear, Brown Bear", one of the baby alphabet books or "Ten In The Bed". Then he'll sit for the entire thing.

The best is when he looks at chapter books by himself. He opens it up and starts looking at it as if he's really reading. It's so cute!!

I'm so glad Todd caught this picture of him on my lap! Now I need to catch one of Charlie reading the chapter books.

"miss boots"

About two weeks ago, Eliza discovered these boots in our garage. She put them on and they have become her everyday fashion statement. I think today is actually the first day she has worn her "real" shoes to preschool again. She gets compliments on them everywhere we go. And...lets be honest...they go with everything. Don't they? For fun, I've started calling her "Miss Boots". She responds without complaint so she must like it.

my three girls...

This morning my three girls went with me to take pictures for a friend for their Christmas card. I took some cute shots of them too!!

I love being a mom so much! Of course, I'm so blessed to be a mom to the best kids in the world. So that makes my job a little easier.

Here are a few cute things they've said or done lately to make me smile(or laugh!):

Brenna: The night of Thanksgiving Brenna came to me with her pad of paper. Because she didn't have school the next day, she made a "schedule" of what she was going to do the next day. It included things like "getting ready, cleaning room, playing with webkinz, helping mom(I only got 5 minutes on the schedule". The next day when I asked her to help with something, she said, "It's not 10:40 yet, remember...I have a schedule?" So cute!

And, by the way, don't tell her I put this on my blog...she'll kill me.



Emma Grace: Emma Grace is my little social butterfly. A couple of months ago she got a tiny little phone book out of the treasure box at school. She asked if I would help her to write people's names and phone numbers in the little book. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. Lately she has been calling people. It is so funny! All of the sudden she is on the phone with someone. The other day she called my brother in Utah(he has a local cell phone number). He was happy to hear from her and fortunately he knew about the little phone book. She calls friends or her babysitter. It's cute right now but what are we going to do when she's a teenager?!




Eliza: When I picked her up from Preschool the other day, out of the blue she said, "Michael lub(translation:love) me". What? I was a little surprised since this is the first time I've heard of Michael. So I asked her, "How do you know Michael loves you?" She simply said, "I no know...Michael lub(love) me!" I later asked her teacher who told me that, in fact, Michael puts his arm around her and tells her that he loves her. That's how she knows I guess!

Charlie: Charlie will give us a big wet kiss when asked. But not Dad! He'll act like he is going to give Todd a kiss but then back off before he gets too close to his whiskers.

Eco bags

If you are not using reusable shopping bags for groceries, you've got to start right now. When I was carrying my groceries in the other day, I thought that I needed to take a picture of these and share them on my blog.
I've been using these bags for about 6 months now and I LOVE THEM! They are so durable and easy to carry. I can carry them over my shoulders when I'm lugging everything(including kids) into the house. And, I don't have a million plastic bags in my kitchen!! They are the greatest!! It took me a while to get into the habit of taking them into the grocery store and, in fact, I was a little embarrassed the first time I used them. But now I always remember to take them in.
I got these online at http://ecobags.com/ . They are the Everyday Cotton Canvas Tote (Size: 19" wide x 15.5"tall with full 5" flat bottom gusset and 22" length carry handles/straps). I got five of them and it seems to be a great number to have. They fit a lot more then those yucky plastic bags.

Cute Paper Toys!

I was looking at someone elses blog today and found a link to a website called http://www.thetoymaker.com . Because it's Christmas and I'm on the lookout for great gifts, I went to the website thinking it was a toy store. Uh, kind of!! You print out designs and cut, fold and paste into a toy. So cute!! I immediately printed out this rocking horse and elf and started cutting. My girls thought it was really cute but were happy to let me do the cutting. Soon they lost all attention in the activity and went right on singing little songs and performing for each other with their little toys. (Girls are so funny!) I teased the girls that this was so great that I found this fun website. Now the only toys they will get for Christmas will be printed out and folded up.
Check it out! It's a cute website and your kids might like it!