Merry Christmas!!!

Wow - it has been a FULL month!!!! Hope you've been following me on Instagram or Facebook for my December Daily posts. If not, here's a recap of the past couple days.

Celebrating Miss S 12th birthday on the 23rd, dinner and fun with my brother, his fiancé, her three girls and her parents on the 24th and a wonderful, quiet, mostly relaxing Christmas Day.

I have so much love in my hear today. For my family, my friends, for you. For phone calls and skyping with family near and far, for beautiful presents to open, for the bounty of cards received...but most of all for the birth of our Savior. Merry Merry Christmas!!!!

December!!!

I've been so MIA here lately -I'm having too much fun on Facebook and on Instagram!!! I'm documenting my December Daily on Instagram and absolutely love it. So this little blog will be quiet probably until after the new year. I need to find a good balance of my social media outlets:) To keep you occupied through the holidays - enjoy this little meme:):) I'd love to see you post it on your blog too - if you do leave me a comment so I can go check out your answers too:)

I found this fun little meme here....

1. Egg Nog or Hot Chocolate?

Hot Chocolate 

2. Does Santa wrap presents or just sit them under the tree?

A little of both

3. Colored lights on tree/house or white?

White

4. Do you hang mistletoe?

Never

5. When do you put your decorations up? 

The day after Thanksgiving - it's my personal Black Friday tradition:) We don't go shopping - we decorate the house instead:)

6. What is your favorite holiday dish?
Posole and tamales. I don't know what I'll do if we ever leave New Mexico.

7. Favorite Holiday memory as a child?

Big Christmas Eve dinners with extended family and lots and lots of cousins.

8. When and how did you learn the truth about Santa? 

 What? I still believe in Santa. He lives in our hearts and will always be real to me:)

9. Do you open a gift on Christmas Eve?

 Yes - just one.

10. How do you decorate your Christmas tree?

Total modge podge. Lots of homemade ornaments and ornaments we've collected throughout the year. I've always wanted to do a themed Christmas tree but have never done it - I love our mis match stuff:)

11. Snow! Love it or Dread it?

 I love it, love it, love it.

12. Can you ice skate?

 Not really.

13. Do you remember your favorite gift?

The rolodex my dad bought for me when I was maybe 16 or 17? It was the first Christmas my dad did some secret shopping of his own in addition to all the presents my mom bought.

14. What’s the most important thing about the Holidays for you?

Being with family!!!!

15. What is your favorite Holiday Dessert?

Pie - any kind.

16. What is your favorite holiday tradition?

Sending a TON of Christmas cards!! I usually send out about 125 - if not more.Christmas Eve we always open one present and have tamales and posole for dinner. Christmas Day we have cinnamon rolls and OJ and then a big dinner that night. Usually it's just the three of us but now that more family has been moving back to NM I'm looking forward to working on some new traditions.

17. What tops your tree?

A gold star.

18. Which do you prefer giving or receiving?

I love both but I think I prefer giving.

19. Candy Canes: Yuck or Yum?

YUM!

20. Favorite Christmas movie?

Elf

21. Saddest Christmas Song?

I'll be Home for Christmas - mostly cause I  haven't been "home" (aka my mom's house) for Christmas in probably 20 years.

22. What is your favorite Christmas song?

I have so many - 
We Three Kings
God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman
Angels We Have Heard on High

Gratitude: Day 15

 For our beautiful earth. For Mother Nature. For the warmth, the cold, the beautiful seasons that come and go. 

I'm enjoying my daily Gratitude postings on Instagram - are you playing along? Follow me #raeshadrz

 

PS This picture was taken about an hour from our house - in the beautiful canyon we drive through to get to the Girl Scout Camp.

Thank You

Gratitude: Day 2

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"Gratitude: Day 2: For my awesome Subaru. 

For listening to the promptings to pull 

off the freeway just before my clutch gave out. 

For sweet tow truck boys and

for hardworking honest mechanics."

Follow along with me on Instagram - @raeshadrz

Gratitude: Day 1

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"Gratitude: Day 1: My rock. Not the one
on my finger but what it represents.
My husband - my rock, my foundation, my love. "

Holiday Mail for Heroes

My darling Cub Scouts and I will be working on a fabulous service project for the next month -  we will be collecting Holiday Cards for Heroes for the American Red Cross which will be distributed to military installations, veterans hospitals, and other locations. 

There are TWO ways for you to take part in our Holiday Mail for Heroes service project. First - you can collect BLANK holiday cards for us. Second - you can get together with your family and sign holiday cards and then send them to us.

Card Guidelines:

• Ensure that all cards are signed.
• Use generic salutations such as “Dear Service Member.” Cards addressed to specific individuals can not be delivered through this program.
• Only cards are being accepted. Do not send or include letters.
• Do not include email or home addresses on the cards: the program is not meant to foster pen pal relationships.
• Do not include inserts of any kind, including photos: these items will be removed during the reviewing process.
• Please refrain from choosing cards with glitter or using loose glitter as it can aggravate health issues of ill and injured warriors.
• Each card does not need its own envelope, as envelopes will be removed from all cards before distribution.

CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFORMATION

We will be collecting cards through NOVEMBER 15, 2012. We have a goal of collecting 250 cards. If you would like to participate please email me privately at raeshadrz at yahoo dot com for my mailing address.

 

Sacred Sunday

We started our Thanksgiving piece in choir yesterday -Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing - what a beautiful hymn. I love the words, the music and the message.

COME THOU FOUNT OF EVERY BLESSING

Come thou fount of every blessing
Tune my heart to sing thy grace
Streams of mercy never ceasing
Call for songs of loudest praise
Teach me some melodious sonnet
Sung by flaming tongues above
I'll praise the mount I'm fixed upon it
Mount of thy redeeming love

Here I raise my Ebenezer
Hither by thy help I come
And I hope by thy good pleasure
Safely to arrive at home
Jesus sought me when a stranger
Wondering from the fold of God
He, to rescue me from danger
Interposed His precious blood

O to grace how great a debtor daily I'm constrained to be!
Let thy goodness like a fetter, bind my wandering heart to thee
Prone to wander Lord I feel it, prone to leave the God I love
Here's my heart, O take and seal it, seal it for thy courts above

Sandals

It's officially too cold to wear sandals in NM but I just couldn't resist this pair of dansko sandals. They are in my closet waiting for the first warm spring day of 2013. I love danskos and I always get a thrill when I find them at the thrift store. I paid $7.99 for these beauties.

Halloween

Holiday decorations have become pretty sparse around our house as of late. I'm tired of everything we have and I'm slowly slowly slowly purging down to the holiday decorations that I love the most. In fact I haven't even pulled down the Halloween box from the garage. Guess I should get on that. For now this is the one Halloween decoration in our house and it's hanging on the inside of the front door. And it's a beaut!! I used the tutorial found HERE. Don't you love it?? Only change I made was I used a green foam wreath instead of a straw wreath and I didn't cover it before I started tying my ribbons on. Any little peeks of green showing match the green ribbon I used. All supplies came from Hobby Lobby and I think my total was about $10 - both the ribbon and the wreath were 50% off. And I have plenty of extra ribbon to add to other Halloween projects.

Balloons

October brings Balloon Fiesta - this year Rick and Ryalin came with two of their kiddos. We never made it to a mass ascension this year but spent two nights at the field for balloon glows. It was beautiful!!!

Rick and Ryalin:

San Antonio

Miss S and I flew to San Antonio for a quick trip two weeks ago for my sweet nephew Logan's baptism. What a great fun weekend. My mom and my granny were both there. Granny told us lots of stories of her childhood. Ryalin typed them up and we plan to continue to add to it and eventually print them in book format for the family.

Funny

This was on my car when I left work last night. Gave me a good laugh cause there was no one parked next to me when I got to work or when I left work. So what was I parked "too close" to? Guess I'll never know :)

WWII

May of you know that I'm slightly obsessed with WWII, okay actually I'm extremely obsessed with it. So imagine how excited I was to meet Albert Smith, one of the Navajo code talkers. He was absolutely darling!! We bought a book about the code talkers and he signed it for us. All proceeds go to the preservation of the code talkers history - they are so few of them left.

And you also get to see a rare picture of my hubby actually smiling :)

Addictions

Family

Me, my momma and my three brothers. I love those three guys so much. We had a great weekend with them all in town to see my brother in The Hobbit. And guess what? He proposed to his girlfriend during curtain call!!!! Miss S declared it "the best proposal ever".

My Man

Now that Hubby is done with school he is getting back in to mountain biking. Last week he sold his motorcycle and ordered a new Yeti. The bike shop had a loaner that he took out last weekend and had an awesome time! I came home to find him laying on the chair all banged and scraped up from a monumental crash but he had a HUGE smile on his face and said it was a blast!!!

PS he'd kill me if he knew I blogged this photo:)

19 Years

19 years ago today Hubby and I were married.just look at us - two young kids, barely 21.

We celebrated with a wonderful dinner Saturday night at Farm and Table - a local restaurant we'd been dying to try that specializes in local foods. Here's a peek at our meal:

Glazed duck breast for Hubby and Salmon for me

 

Almond Pound Cake with peach ice cream

Still handsome as ever - just a little less hair.

Mushroom and Kale Empanadas

Easiest Skirt in the World

So we realized at 8:30 on Wednesday night that Miss S only has two pairs of pants for school - both of which she had already worn. I didn't quite realize that nothing else fit her!! Bad Mom. I promised to take her shopping for pants this weekend. I narrowly avoided a complete fashion emergency by letting her pick out some fabric from my stash and whipped her up a little skirt in about 30 minutes. Seriously - the easiest skirt ever. I used 3/4 yard of material - sewed the raw edges together (so it was like a big tube), elastic waist at the top, tried it on her to fit the elastic and to mark the hem, hemmed it up, ironed it and it was good to go!! Crisis averted and she loved it so much she couldn't wait to tell her friends at school that her mom made it:) I want to make her some more cause they look so cute with the polo tops that she has to wear to school.

Easiest Skirt EVER!

Sixth Grade

Yesterday was Miss S's first day of middle school!! She was so excited and hopped right out of bed at 6:15 to get ready. She is so stinking cute. She is NOT happy about having to wear polls everyday but she is making the best of it. She's pretending to be a butterfly in that one pose - I told her to do whatever she wanted when I snapped the pic. My little butterfly - stretching her wings and soaring in to the unknown.

We celebrated with our traditional First Day of School dinner out - Miss S chose Five Guys for some yummy burgers.

Pin-spiration

My darling little Miss S is just about addicted to Pinterest as much as I am:) She has been begging to make this recipe that she found all week and I finally got her some Cream of Tarter at the store so that she could whip it up. I've linked to the actual recipe below but I also had to take a photo of her recipe that she wrote out and brought in to the kitchen with her while she mixed up her creation:) I love her little handwriting and her little misspelled words:)

For this batch she used Strawberry Banana jello, which was the only kind we had in the cupboard - and it turned out a beautiful shade of pink. She wants to use Lime jello for her next batch:)

Jello Play Dough recipe

31 July 2012

OK!! It's the end of July and time to report on my {Operation Reduce} for this month. My goal was to declutter 310 items from our house this month - I ended up decluttering 296 items!! And that only includes the items that I took to the thrift store - not the stuff that just got thrown away. When I factor in those items I'm sure I had well over 310!! WOOHOO!!!While I still have a LONG way to go - this has helped so much to motivate me.

30 July 2012

Is it Friday quitting time yet? This is gonna be a long week - I just want to be home watching the Olympics:) And I noticed I missed posting one day last week - that REALLY bums me out. Completely slipped my mind. GRR!!!! Oh well - only missing one day out of 31 isn't bad. And HAPPY BIRTHDAY today to my handsome Dad!! I love you Dad!

29 July 2012

Hubby is itching for a new mountain bike. We stopped by the bike shop yesterday for him to drool for a while. Miss S found a great way to amuse herself while we waited.

28 July 2012

Hubby has been waiting a whole year for this to come around again - the NM brewers guild IPA challenge. Miss S and I dropped him off at the brewery and did some shopping. Now we are back to pick up tipsy Hubby. :)

27 July 2012

It's official!!! Wednesday night this sexy man of mine finished his master's degree!!!!! Woohoo!!! I am so proud of him. He said he won't fully relax til he gets his grade but he was seriously all smiles when he walked in the door after his final.