He crossed the line!

Liam has finally crossed the line between a crawler and a walker! He is, as the peditrician said, the most cautious baby ever. He has had the balance and coordination to walk for months but has lacked the motivation and confidence! He has just started to take off and now he is walking almost everywhere. The only time he really crawls is if he is in a new environment that is making him nervous or if he needs to go as fast as he can so he can do something he knows is naughty!

Nah Nan

Thats how Liam says "all done". He waves his hand in front of him (usually throwing the food on his tray across the room) and yells "Nah Nan!". It is pretty cute but up until tonight he has only done it when he has finished eating. We were shopping today and he was pretty cranky. He started waving his hands around and yelling "Nah Nan, Nah Nan!". He did that pretty much constantly until we walked out of the store.

Skype-ing

So my sister, Tiff and her husband, Rick are living in Russia for the semester. There is a website called Skype that lets you do video calls for free. It just so happened that Tiff and I were online at the same time! We talked for over an hour for free with a video feed. It was pretty darn cool to be able to see/talk to her for free for so long! Thank you Skype!!!

Will they last? Probably Not.

My goal: To keep these from breaking at least until Christmas.

I found these cute wooden model kits at Joann's yesterday. They were like $2! Justin building Liam a toybox for Christmas so I thought- what good is a homemade toybox without homemade toys? I spent all day yesterday sanding and painting and glueing. We will see if they even last until Christmas. Even if they do he probably wont get to play with the pirate ship. I am sure he will impale himself.

Reaching New Heights...and dangers

Liam has figured out how to get on the kitchen table! He is so proud of himself and it is a constant fight to keep him off. I am not sure how he is always getting up. We move the chairs and somehow he is up again! We have only had two falls from the table top to the tile floor but that is 2 to many! He fell before church this morning and has a nice bruise in the middle of his forehead and a huge bottom lip. Now if only he would put that climbing energy into his walking...

Time to Grow Up

So Justin and I decided that maybe it was time to grow up alittle bit. We have been married for just over two years and have never had a budget! Thats horrible I know- especially with his Sam's Club income! I have worked really hard organizing our finances to begin debt payoff and starting a retirement fund as he now has that benefit at work! We are super excited to have finances in order and actually start living within our income instead of on credit!

I decided to make a visual reminder for us of our frugality so I decorated a pickle jar. Any extras will go in our jar and that will be our trip/ big date fund!

fall food storage!

I love the fall!

Out of all the seasons of the year fall is definitly the best season to be living with my mother! We have been working non-stop for the past 6 weeks on food storage! We have canned dozens of jars of salsa and marinara sauce, made about 150lbs of apples into yummy applesauce and applepie filling. Both my mom and I had a huge zuchinni harvest this year. We made over 50 loaves of zuchinni bread and have well over 100lbs shredded and frozen for more bread! I also made 8 jars of pumpkin pie filling from our giganitc miracle pumpkin (I thought my pumpkin plant died and then one day there was a huge pumpkin in the tomato plants). We are having alot of fun with the dehydrator too! I discovered that 16 bell peppers is about 1 quart dried. We also dried at least 16lbs carrots and a bunch of bananas for banana bread. She also had the dry pack canner from the stake for a while so we canned a few hundred #10 cans of flours, sugar, noodles, rice, powdered milk, popcorn but no wheat : ) ! I am finally proud of my food storage even though it is still small at least it is growing alittle! We are almost done with everything- finally! There is not much room left for everything. Her freezers (yes plural) in the garage are busting at the seam and we can't even close the door to the food storage room! Her house is a disaster because we always have something going on in the kitchen! I have learned so much from her and almost feel like I might be able to can on my own next year!

We are using the Wendy DeWitt food storage program!

Check out her blog at everythingunderthesun.blogspot.com

Scroll to her first post and it will explain her program!