Where did you find that?

Conversation in our house this afternoon:

Hailey (age 4): Lauryn, pick up.

(Hailey turns and looks at me, nodding her head reassuringly.)

Hailey: I can tell her what to do, because it says you have to obey your olders and I'm older.

Tami (bursting out laughing): What says that?

Hailey: The Bible. It says you have to obey your olders.

I still don't think I have her convinced that is not what the Bible says.

Up to my eyeballs in meat

For the last couple of days I have been cooking alot of ground beef. About every 7 months or so, I go to our local Sam's Club and pick up a case of ground beef, which is eight 10 pound rolls of 91% lean ground beef. These are available to any member, you just have to ask a butcher for it - no need to call ahead.
Since I can't fit all 8 rolld in my fridge, I cut up some of the rolls into 1.5 and 2 pound sections when I get home. I freeze those in quart freezer bags for use in things like meatloaf that require raw meat.
Then I use my new food processor to cut up several onions. Then I brown the meat (seasoned with onions, salt, pepper, and Worcester sauce), either 3 or 4 pounds at a time, and bag them in quart size freezer bags in either 1 pound or 1.5 pound amounts for all sorts of casseroles, tacos, burritos, etc. Storing them flat helps with space conservation and quick thawing. (Thank you to Aubrey R. for telling me about how to store them and season them!)
One of these days I'd like to do a Mega Cooking - like cookathon with the meat and actually put together the meatloaves, the casseroles, the spaghetti sauces, etc. and freeze them, thus cutting down even more on my time later on. However, at this stage in my life with so many little ones around, I just don't have the nerve to try it yet. But for now I am perfectly happy with my freezer full of ground meat ready to go at any time.

Updates

Well, you can tell I have had a busy week with the lack of posts. But I did want to post a couple of updates.

Brynna: She had a follow up appointment this week with the pediatric orthopedist. As many of you know, Brynna has always had a problem with toe walking. In other words, she used to walk on her tip toes all the time. The family doc became concerned when she didn't outgrow it, because her tendons down the back of her calves were tight. In extreme cases of this, they actually go in and surgically lengthen the tendons. But Brynna fortunately wasn't this bad. When several months of stretching exercises didn't help, she was put into double leg casts for a month in 2005. This helped but not enough. So we repeated with another month of leg casts in October of 2006. The appointment this week was the first follow up since having the casts removed.

And the doctor was very pleased. We had noticed that she very rarely tip toes, and she can stretch that tendon out quite nicely. She's been wearing braces to sleep in ever since the casts came off, and now she can even stop doing that unless she starts tightening back up. We'll go back in another 3 months to see how she's doing then.

My MIL: My mother-in-law has finished the first round of chemo and started the second round yesterday. She had an MRI on Thursday, and the tumor is basically gone. The cancer is still there of course, but the doctors compared it to melting - the block isn't there anymore, the cancer has melted into smaller puddles. So this is great news. Plus this second round of chemo seems to not be so hard on her body. Big praise there! Thank you to all those who have been praying for her.

Skancing

The girls' friend Zachary had a birthday party today at a local ice rink, which ironically had been delayed for a week due to icy conditions (!!!) here in town. But it was held today, and the girls had been looking forward to it all week. Brynna and Hailey, who had never been on ice skates before, had especially been looking forward to dancing on the ice, like in one of their Barbie movies:

Hailey: "I can't wait to go skating and dancing at the party!"

Brynna: "Yeah! Only, I think that's called skancing."



Well, after stuffing themselves with pizza, cake, and ice cream, we strapped on the skates. Hailey went about 3 yards, fell twice, and was done. Brynna held onto the side rail and basically walked around the sides several times before she went in to play as well.
Kora stayed out the longest. She was quite exhausted by the time it was over.
And last, but not least, Lauryn learned the proper way to eat a slice of pizza, which is crust first in case you can't tell from the picture.
Thank you Stephanie for a great time!

Mission: the filing cabinet

This week while our town was virtually shut down during a winter front blew in, I tackled a project that has been weighing me down for at least 2-3 years. (BTW, if you need a good laugh, listen to the San Antonio news during one of these "arctic blast" times. Everyone from anywhere north of SA laughs their heads off at us. It got down to freezing for 2 days straight and we had a little bit of ice. If everyone from Oklahoma north shut down like we did this week every time they had the same weather, they'd be shut down for 5 months every year. You'd think we had had a true ice age!)

I know most of you think that I have, in true type-A personality form, every part of my life organized, categorized, and indexed. However, even type-A's have some little area of their lives that aren't up to code. One of mine has been my filing cabinet. It is about 10 years old, rusted metal, and the filing system hopelessly outdated. For the past few years I've used the excuse, "Well, there's no reason to re-organize this until we get a new filing cabinet upstairs." It took us a little longer to get that than we thought, but last month we finally bought Kelly a new office desk that has two filing drawers built in.

So I hoed in this week while we were shut in the house, and cleaned it out. I was downright embarrassed at what was in there. Auto insurance policies from cars we no longer own, home owner's insurance policies from a house we no longer own, health insurance stuff from two fiscal years ago, every privacy policy ever sent to us by the bank, receipts for furniture long since donated to charity, discharge orders from hospital and ER visits from years ago ... Well, I think you get the picture.

So then I started shredding. And shredding. I overheated the shredder twice and had to stop for a while. I filled THREE big kitchen bags full - each bag representing about 4 emptyings of the shredder. This doesn't count another full bag of owner's manuals (many for things we no longer own) and envelopes.

So my organizational lesson learned: go through papers at least once a year, to keep it from becoming a behemoth. Learn what to keep - many owners manuals are online now. Many bills can be emailed, meaning less paperwork to keep up with. (And always shred things to keep any bad guys from stealing your stuff.)

Now our paperwork is neatly re-organized into TWO drawers, and a much more workable system is in place. I used to be bad about letting the "things to be filed" stack get way too high before I filed stuff. Then I rearranged things and I don't have a place to put that stack, so I have to file them immediately. This has worked so well, that my next step is to make myself go through our drawers twice a year: once in January and once in July (Kelly's company's fiscal year begins on July 1, so all insurance stuff begins then).

I know it doesn't seem like much, but it gives me a wonderful fuzzy feeling to get something like this accomplished. And I thought it might give some of you that same feeling to know that not everything in my house is as orderly as you would think. :)

Let it ICE, let it ICE, let it ICE!

Since we had no snow yesterday to play in, the girls begged to outside and touch the icicles. So we pulled out the barely used coats and gloves and out they went. But after a while touching and breaking off the icicles wasn't enough. By the time they were done, the entire swing set had been nearly de-iced.
Kelly (who was home because his office was shut down due to ice) even took Lauryn out so she could join in the fun.
The girls couldn't believe the ice on everything - even the soccer ball left out.
They came in cold but happy.

Look Mama, it's icing!

No, no one made a cake at our house today. But as south Texas is being hit with a taste of REAL winter, the girls saw sleet today for the first time in their memory. When it first began, Aubrey looked out the window and exclaims, "Look Mama, its icing!" Not only that, but we actually had icicles hanging off the swing set and roof. The girls were so excited just to see icicles, with wonder in their voices usually reserved for a winter wonderland of unspoiled snow.

There is actually a chance of snow here overnight and the girls are so excited. The younger 3 have never even seen snow and the older two were so little when they last saw it that they don't remember. While all the schools around here are closed, Homeschool ISD does not. However, if it snows today, you can bet your mittens that we'll be taking a real snow day. How often do San Antonio kids get to make snow balls, snow angels, or snow men?

UPDATE: Alas, alack, when we awoke this morning, there was of course no snow. There are some pretty wicked icicles hanging off everything, but no snow. (This is still South Texas, recent weather not withstanding.) The girls are ready to move north, convinced they will never see snow any other way. :)