Giveaway Winner Announced

I finally got a chance to play with my Cricut Expression today, and boy, was it fun! Since I am giving away a Tulah Clothing Co. custom, I decided that I would try out something else designed by Tamara.... she is a lady of many talents... so I made her Valentine's box project found here. She has recently joined the design team at SVGcuts and gets to show off her flair for papercrafting! I also decorated my hutch for Valentine's day, so here are some pictures of that along with the finished little boxes I made.

And finally for the winner for the giveaway! There were 16 entries all together, and I drew a number from Random.org.

True Random Number Generator

Min: 1
Max: 16
Result: 1
Powered by RANDOM.ORG


The winner is: Sarah! Please email me at queenbeegymboree@yahoo.com with your address and I will mail you your outfit!

Thanks for playing everyone!

Badger goes to school... and so do I!

I am super excited!! I just signed up for a course on Clickin Moms called Rock Your Camera 101. It is a 4 week course done online with tutorials, lessons, assignments and constructive criticism. It starts on Monday, can't wait to get started!

Also, in other news, Badger went to school today. Laina was les élèves de la semaine (student of the week) at school which means that they get to do a bunch of special things throughout the week, one of which is bring in a special show and tell. Most kids seem to bring their pet in for the last 15 minutes of the school day, but Laina wanted to bring her sisters in. So I arranged it with her teacher for today, but when it was almost time to go, Evelyn was napping. I woke her up but she was really cranky, so I thought she wouldn't perform very well for the students. I lured Badger into the pet crate (which by the way is WAY too small for Badger) and took the kids and the cat off to school!

My little dancer

I feel like I have been really boring lately, so I apologize! I haven't done any fun or cute projects or taken any good pictures in the last little while, I have just been too busy! I hate that. I like to stay busy, but I like it best when the reason I am busy is because I am doing things I love, instead of doing things that are just the daily grind! Hopefully as Adam recovers, I will get a bit more free time to do something interesting.

In the meantime, today was a day of dressup! We woke up to a ton of snow (for us), and my first little dressup involved suiting Laina up in her snow gear for school. Ugg, the whole process makes me tired just thinking about it! I don't know how the teachers manage when they have 20 kids to oversee getting into snow gear!

Here is Laina NOT in her snow gear... it warmed up in the afternoon quite considerably.

The second set of dressup was Evelyn donning a whole bunch of costume jewlery. She had so much fun putting all of this on, then suddenly she wanted it all off. Right now! She started pulling on it and screaming and I had to quickly rescue her before she choked herself.

And finally, my little dancer. Mylie got her costume today for her jazz dance routine, and it is stinkin' adorable! Maybe the cutest costume one of my kids has had for dance yet. Their song has a Brazilian beat to it, and here is my little Samba queen.

I officially sound like my mother

After another extremely busy day of ferrying kids around to schools and activites, I finally lost it and yelled at my kids and waved my arms around and just generally acted like a madwoman. Actually, I acted and sounded just like my mother.

My boiling point was reached after spending all day catering to the needs of my children, sitting down only long enough to feed myself a couple of times, and then them having the nerve to give me attitude and fight with each other. (That was a run-on sentence if I ever wrote one, but I am too exhausted to try and fix it. So imagine there is at least one more period in there. And make it flow better while you are at it!)

So after much rudeness on Laina's part, and more bickering (and some hitting) than you can imagine coming from two sweet looking little girls, I snapped. I spouted off all kinds of those phrases that mothers say when they are feeling sorry for themselves. You know, like "Is this behavior the thanks I get for (insert whatever here... "giving birth to you" is a good one). Or "Where did I go wrong that would make you disrespect me like this?" Those kind of things. Basically, I threw a mommy tantrum. And I am not proud of it. And I have learned from personal experience, that asking questions like that really has no effect on children because they REALLY can't understand all of the sacrifices that you may have made for them until they have kids of their own. My mom used to always cry to my sister and I that we never appreciated anything she did for us. And we would roll our eyes at each other because we really thought that saying thank you was enough. But now that I have kids of my own, I understand completely what she was talking about. It was our actions that spoke louder than our words. I need to learn how to teach my kids to make their actions thankful and compassionate if I expect to feel any less frustration at the way that my children treat me than my mother felt at the way we treated her.

I will leave you with my photos of the day. This 365 day thing is HARD! And the pictures are gross. Sorry about that! Evelyn had bow-tie pasta with meat sauce for dinner. She liked it, can you tell?

It's a Giveaway Post! (Plus bad photos)

My photos for the day are appallingly bad.  My excuses for said photos are also poor.  Basically, all I can blame it on is a busy, busy day (and some incompetence in the night-photo department)!

I was the reading mom for Laina's class this morning and then accompanied them on an ice skating field trip.  At the end of the school day, I had to gather up my troops (including my still very feeble husband) and take a family trip to the doctor's office where we ended up spending an hour and half.  I felt sorry for our family doctor when he walked into the room to find our whole family of 5 waiting expectantly for him!  Sore ears, snotty noses and surgery sites were looked at before we finally took our big gongshow off to the next stop, which happened to be Laina's jazz dance class.

One horrible picture from that stop:

It was snowing fairly heavily by the time we got home, so I decided to attempt some night photos of the snowfall.

And finally for the giveaway! It is a GORGEOUS 3 piece outfit Little Darling outfit custom made by Tamara of Tulah Clothing Co. for my baby Evelyn. It is sized 6-12 months, and it consists of a corsage top, bloomers and a little corsage headband. I will keep this open until Friday evening when I will use random.org to pick a comment number (hopefully I will even get an entry? This outfit is just TDF cute!) I will pay for the shipping to wherever the winner is. If you don't have a little one who can wear it, let your friends who do know about my blog! All you have to do to enter is post a comment on this post, and then check back on Friday to see who the winner is. Here are some pictures of Evelyn wearing it (unfortunately, this was the only time she wore it because she had a big growth spurt after I ordered it and it was pretty small by the time I got it.) One comment entry per person please :)







And here is Tamara's photo that she posted on her facebook page when she made it.

And a link here
to her shop, and one here
to her facebook site.

Thanks for reading!

The Fabric Store

Swoon.... I love a trip to the fabric store.  I love it EVEN more than I love a trip to Gap or Gymboree.  Does that mean I am cured?  Or does that merely mean I have transferred my addiction from one outlet to another?

Anyways, Adam is still pretty helpless right now, but I needed to go to the fabric store to buy materials for the tutus I am making for a ballet class, so my in-laws kindly agreed to come over and babysit all of my babies (husband included) while I went to the store.  While I was there, I picked up a gorgeous book, I can't wait to dive into it!  Check it out, right up my alley, don't you think? Beside the book are some fabrics I picked up today also.

The book comes with 4 patterns that can make 23 different projects by altering pieces. Here is a link to the book on Amazon.

And now for some random pictures...

This is Badger wearing a neck pillow that the girls placed on her. She doesn't look impressed does she?

And here is Laina reading to Evelyn this morning in their matching footie jammies and matching messy hair.

A Home Day

Well, we spent the day at home today with my husband resting up from his surgery. He is super sore and everytime he moves he feels immense pain. The prescription painkillers made him feel nauseous (which is never good with an emet wife!) and he didn't want to take them anymore after the first time.

I just concentrated on keeping the kids out of his hair, and managed to get my sewing/ crafting room better organized (which was desperately needed!) and that was about it! Late this afternoon I took the girls for a walk up to the cute little village that is 5 minutes away from where we live. We hit up Starbucks for a coffee for Adam and got him some magazines to keep him entertained. Some photos from the walk, notice that Laina always has to put her hat on sideways... she thinks it looks "cooler" that way. Also, her long giraffe like legs must be on the grow again because now size 7 pants look like she is waiting for a flood!

Oh, and we couldn't leave home without her DSi... she wanted to take pictures of the neighborhood like mommy!

Evelyn is giving two thumbs up here... not because she wanted to though.... because I shoved a pair of her big sister's gloves on here to keep her little hands warm!  Also, this is one of my many strollers (seriously, I have had more strollers than I can count).  This is a Fisher Price Sit and Stand, and it is by far superior in sturdiness to the other brands of sit and stands I have come across.  They don't make these anymore, so I had to hunt this one down off of Craigslist!

Tell me what y'all think of the bigger photos?  Do you like them better or does it just take longer to load etc?