Whoa! You ARE reading.

So, I got a pretty amazing response to my last post on feeding your family in healthy, yet budget friendly ways. I was so excited to get your responses back and learned so much about how you do what you do. If I haven't replied back to you it's not because I didn't like what you sent. I've just been going through everything with a fine toothed comb so I don't miss anything you've suggested. I'll plan on trying to talk more about meal planning and budgeting in the near future. It's so important for our families to eat well, and doing it on a well organized and working budget makes it oh so easy!

SO, this last weekend was a rough one for us. I was in a terrible funk, which usually means that EVERYONE is in a terrible funk. =) I'm not sure what happened, but it was just a rough weekend and I am so glad it's over. There were several things that made me laugh about the weekend, though, so I thought I'd share a bit of the GOOD things that happened instead of filling you with a negative post about how BAD our weekend was. Hey, sometimes, with a large family, there are just going to be rough patches! Today has been a GREAT day and I'm looking forward to the rest of the week. Now, on with the show!

• While we were sitting in our family worship time Isaiah had a stinky wet diaper(I'm sure you know the kind or maybe you don't, but can imagine). It smells a lot like maple syrup to me, and I can always tell when he's peed through a diaper even if I can't feel it in the morning if he smells "syrupy". I wanted to wait the 10 minutes to change him until it was time for bed, so he was just stinking it up in the living room while we were having family worship time(which just means family devotional time, but we like to label it Family Worship Time for training our kids to sit quietly and calmly as they would in a church worship service. More on that another time). Scotty was trying to keep us on track with prayer time and we were both trying to keep Addison and Isaiah from tearing up Bibles and crawling and rolling around on the others when all of the sudden Emma Claire(who's mind is always on food!) shouted, "WAIT A MINUTE! I SMELL SYRUP! ARE WE HAVING PANCAKES?" Now, at any other time this statement probably would have been looked over, because seriously she is always talking about food, but in the moment, and after the rough day we'd had and were having it made me start laughing and I laughed until I cried. Scotty didn't know what to do and I'm pretty sure the kids were a little scared of me in the beginning, but they all ended up laughing with me by the end of it. We had to apologize to God for interrupted prayer time, but I'm sure that he didn't mind the little distraction. We ended up putting the kids to bed on a happy note instead of the dreaded way we'd spent most of the day.=)
• Scotty and I have been playing games a lot recently. I LOVE it. He somewhat HATES games, but puts up with it for his lady. We got a few games for Christmas, so we'd been playing those, but they were all number games(which he hates) like Farkle, dominoes, and uno. SO, he said, "Let's get scrabble! That's a word game! I can win at that!!" He'd been loosing pretty terribly at all the other games, so when I saw scrabble at goodwill with all tiles for $2 I snatched it up and brought it home for us to play. After we'd gotten the kids to bed we sat down with coffee(or in my case cocoa) and got everything set up. It was fun for both of us, but sadly, I slaughtered him! He was so mad I didn't think he'd play with me again (not in a sore looser way. In Scotty's sweet anger way.) I talked him into a rematch yesterday while the kids were taking a nap and let's just say the tables were turned and  did NOT win that game...
• We give each of the kids their own Bible for family worship time so that they can "look" at the passage while we read it. Olivia actually looks it up and reads it for us, but the others just pretend. The girls and I got down to get sat up before Scotty and Isaiah. Addi was sitting on the couch thumbing through her little New Testament when she announced that she'd be reading from "Frank chapter 6" tonight and that's where we needed to turn in our Bibles. I don't know what was better: Her making me laugh, or Olivia's confused face soon followed by erupted laughter when she realized pretty quickly that Addison "did NOT know what she was talking about!" because there wasn't a FRANK in the Bible.=)
• My husband has been looking for us a new van(a larger one) since we can't really fit into the one we have now once Amelia is here. He found us one alright. He drove me by it later to show me. It's a 1990s YELLOW party van complete with disco ball and laser light. He actually called about buying it! I told him he was CRAZY, but he said with a little work it'd be in great shape. Not to worry. We won't be buying the party van. A girl's got to put her foot down sometimes!