Jodi’s World of Motherhood

- Lexi poured bubble water all over my piano bench
- Mikey thought it would be fun to use the bench as a slip n slide … OUCH
- Items 1 and 2 occurred a second time while I was throwing away the paper towels from cleaning up item 1
- Lexi got her first time-out for smacking Mikey because he wouldn’t let her play the piano beside him, this was a VERY traumatizing event for her
- Mikey retaliated later in the day by attempting to cut Lexi’s pony-tail off, luckily he was using toy scissors

Thank goodness Daddy came home today. And on a good note Lexi learned to sing Happy Birthday just in time for Daddy’s birthday which we will be celebrating on Saturday. Check back for a video because it is so stinking cute. You’d think I love my kids or something

Here are a few of the highlights:

• 1 Mommy + 2 Kids + 4 hour car ride = Thank you “Horton Hears a Who” and Mommy’s laptop
• Attempted to go through a cave, discovered there was a 2 1/2 hour wait so we went on a miniature hike instead
• During said hike, Mikey does a small poop in his pants. I see him grabbing his rear-end and think he has a wedgie, so I try to help him, sticking my hands in there to examine the situation. I realize it’s a poop and he proceeds to show me the finger that HE had already stuck down there …
• Immediately head back to the car which happens to be UPHILL. Conversation the whole way up: “Mommy I’m tired, will you carry me?” “NOOOO” “But WHY?” “Because you pooped your pants and I don’t want it to touch me!” “That’s not FAIR”.
• Insert cute moment here - While we were waiting for some people outside the cave, Mikey started hand-feeding some chipmunks. They would come right up to him and grab his finger with their hands and he’d shove the cracker in their mouths. It was the cutest thing I’ve ever seen and of course I didn’t have a camera.
• Get home, get Mikey cleaned up and put on a show for him. Not 15 minutes into the show he decided it would be a good idea to pee his pants right on the futon, after having just gone to the bathroom before the show started. You would think an almost 4 year old would figure this out by now!
• Later that night, Lexi is in her bed and kind of fussing. I figure she will go to sleep soon and head downstairs to do some clean-up. About an hour later she was still crying hysterically so my mom decides to rescue her. It ended up literally being a rescue. Her crib had collapsed and she was stuck curled up in a little ball in one corner. The mattress was slanted at a horrible angle. She was TRAUMATIZED and wouldn’t stop crying for an hour.
• After a day and night like that you would think the kids would sleep in … 6:30 am wake-up call for Mommy
• Decided to attempt the cave again. This time I made Mikey go potty TWICE before we went in, and explained that there is no potty and we’d have to leave if he needed to go in the cave. Apparently this didn’t sink in and he cried for the first 30 minutes of the tour complaining that he needed to pee. Everyone around us could hear him and he would not give it up. I kept telling him he just had to wet his pants because there was nothing else I could do, but he REALLY didn’t want to. Finally he gave in but then he complained the rest of the time because he was so cold in his wet pants. What I don’t understand is why he was so willing to wet his pants the night before, but when we are in front of 30 strangers he has to make a huge stink out of it …
• To top off the trip, 10 minutes after we got home I had to drive Mike to the airport for his 4 day stint in Houston. He stayed home from the reunion to work on our sprinklers. We still haven’t decided who got the bum end of that deal

Are your family reunions any better than that???

1. Mikey tells Grandpa that Spongebob is his favorite show … Grandpa believes him and lets him watch it (this show is not allowed at our house and Mikey knows it)
2. Lexi falls headfirst into the pond (when I got there she was still soaking wet)
3. Mikey sprays Grandpa’s suit and dress shoes with the hose (Grandpa was NOT happy)
4. Lexi stands in an ant nest and gets ants crawling all over her (she was so traumatized by this that when I asked her about it when I got home she got all hysterical again and kept twitching and screaming every time she thought she felt an ant on her again)

Grandpa was quite proud of himself for the great job he did tending And he didn’t even have to change a poopy diaper.

I did a huge harvest out of my vegetable garden today including 9 garlic bulbs! I decided I better start using the garlic, so I created my most “garlic-y” recipe for dinner tonight. It was absolutely delicious with my home-grown garlic and I always feel so proud (and thrifty) when I use my own vegetables. To see some pics of my other garden adventures this summer check out my Flickr pics. Here is the recipe from “Saving Dinner” by Leanne Ely (awesome book by the way!). You know it’s good when your three-year-old says “Mommy, this is delicious, sugary, honey chicken! I just LOVE it!”

Caramelized Garlic Chicken

Ingredients:
1 ½ lb. boneless skinless chicken breasts
1/4 c. olive oil
6 large cloves garlic, pressed
1/2 c. brown sugar

Directions:

Preheat oven to 500 degrees. Lightly grease a shallow roasting pan (or cookie sheet with sides) with a little oil. Heat 1/4 c. of oil in a small skillet over medium-low heat until hot. Add garlic and cook 1-2 minutes or until garlic begins to soften. (Don’t let garlic get brown!) Remove from heat and stir in brown sugar until well mixed. Set aside. Place chicken breasts on greased pan, spread the garlic mixture evenly over chicken. Bake for 10-12 minutes or until chicken is fork tender. When serving, spoon up the caramel sauce that is in the bottom of the pan and pour it over the chicken.

Warning: This post is LDS-based so you can ignore it if you’re not Mormon

We had a talk in church last Sunday that TOTALLY made me feel guilty about family scriptures and family home evening. It talked about how when your kids are so young it is easy to say “we will start it when they are older”. But the problem is you NEVER end up starting it. I have totally had this attitude because whenever I’ve tried to do stuff I feel like it is never worth it. Well in the talk he really hammered on the fact that you just need to DO IT because there is never going to be a magical moment when all of a sudden they will get it. You just need to get in the habit now

He also talked about how it is the Priesthood holder’s responsibility to make sure that this happens in the home. I nudged Mike at that part to see if he was listening but he was actually asleep. So I decided I better take things into control myself I searched around the Internet and using a combination of resources I found a pretty darn good program to start doing with my kids. I wanted to post it here for any of you other young mom’s who might want to get started but don’t know what to do.

Book of Mormon Study Guide (Age of Innocence)
This guide is AWESOME! It has split the Book of Mormon into 104 story-based sections. For toddlers you do one story per week so this will be good for 2 years. Each day you re-read the story and do some sort of activity or discussion around it. I printed out the schedule and leave it sitting on my kitchen table. We have been doing it at breakfast every day this week. Most times Mikey asks me to read it 3 times and wants to do it again at lunch. I am amazed at how interested he is in it.

Book of Mormon Picture Stories
Instead of just reading the stories from the scriptures, I found the Book of Mormon Stories book online and printed out the appropriate section. This is the book that we had as kids with a tape that goes along with it. The scripture stories are written in regular terminology and have accompanying pictures. Both kids LOVE this! Lexi always tries to grab the page with the pictures.

Activities
The activities include a lot of coloring pictures. I just search online for an appropriate picture and then we hang it on the fridge for the week. The church website has a lot of good resources for pictures and I also search on preschool sites for printable pages.

Results
Just for fun I took a video of Mikey during our first week of this new plan to see how much he is getting. We’ve been doing the Lehi story of where he sees a vision of the destruction of Jerusalem and tries to warn the people and they try to kill him. Here is Mikey’s interpretation of the story!

How do you do family scriptures with YOUR toddlers? I’m always looking for new ideas!

I was attempting to make a video for our food storage blog, but the children decided to make it very difficult for me. You can view the final result of the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8zrkENy9QM

For all you moms out there I KNOW that you have wished you could make a few extra bucks from home while your kids are napping. When I first heard about ChaCha I thought it was too good to be true, but I’ve been doing it for 2 months now and it ROCKS! If you have a cell phone text any question you want to the number 242242 (CHACHA). Within a few minutes you will receive a personal response. There are thousands of real people sitting at home answering the questions from their home computers! I applied to be one of those people (a guide) and got hired.

Here is the scoop, it pays $0.20 per question answered and you can do it WHENEVER you want. There are no set hours, no minimums, etc. Then once a month if you have earned over $100 they will direct deposit to your checking account. SAWEET! I’ve managed to get between $5 and $10 per hour depending on how busy it is, what else I’m doing, and how hard the questions are. But if you are just watching a movie or dinking around on Facebook why not be making a few bucks in the background. I love it! I even got Mike (my husband) to sign up too. So when he is stuck in a hotel or airport (he’s a pilot) he can be making a few extra bucks since he has nothing else to do.

Seriously, if you are looking for just a little bonus money each month you will LOVE ChaCha! Check out their website at chacha.com or click here to just learn about becoming a guide right away. And if you sign up make sure to put in my email address jodi321@hotmail.com as a referral because then I earn $.02 for every search you do. Oh ya! Hehe. You can get 10 people as referrals and I figure every little bit helps. So go sign up, then go spread the word. This is really such an awesome thing for stay-at-home moms. And it is pretty fun too. You get to learn new things every day as you research the answers to people’s questions. If you have any questions email me or comment here.

Yesterday’s big event was the wedding of Mike’s sister Teresa. Mike walked her down the aisle (their dad passed away when they were little kids), I was a bridesmaid, Lexi was the flower girl, and Mikey was the cute nephew Since we were all decked out in our fancy clothes we decided it would be a great chance to take some adorable family photos. I’m so happy how they turned out. The only problem is Lexi was really tired that day so she wouldn’t smile very much. She walked down the aisle very solemnly and cute, but then she got to the end of the aisle and sat down on the floor. Haha. It was adorable though. Everyone couldn’t believe how adorable she was. Here is my favorite pic. To see all of them you can check out my flickr photo album.

2 days of fun and festivities. We went down to the Weiss grandparent’s house Thursday night and did fireworks there. Then got up Friday for the Provo parade. Friday evening we headed up to a Moore party at Teresa’s house and the Sandy Center festivities.

Those are just a few of my favorites. To view more pics visit my facebook photo album

My sister-in-law Julie and I have decided to start getting our food storage together - a very daunting task I have been putting off forever. To make it more fun and give ourselves more accountability, we decided to do a blog about it. Go check out our blog and spread the word about it. We figure the more people we can get on board with us the more likely we will be to keep on doing it! Visit http://foodstoragemadeeasy.net today