Posting Blog Entries To Facebook

So, when Tony started this blog for us he also set up a service so that people could sign up to be notified via email when we would put a new blog post up. This was back before he and I, or many of our family were on Facebook. Now that we are on Facebook, many of the people that keep track of us are not signed up with that service so they aren't aware when we put something new up. Tony found a new service that we are testing out for the first time with this post. Hopefully if it works, anytime I post a new entry, this service will automatically put a brief post on my Facebook timeline letting people know that there is a new blog entry and should give a link for it as well.

The service he is using for this is called IFTTT. It stands for If This Then That. So he's set it up that essentially IF there is a new blog post THEN post a brief message and link on Facebook. Well, enough typing....here it goes! Cross your fingers!

Time for Family

Austin and I took our 4 day weekend to surprise Aroa for her birthday and also to visit the Mimms/Strange Clans.

I sure miss being close to them and the kids ALWAYS have fun together!

We arrived in STL around 3pm and surprised Aroa, when we walked in she was not very surprised. I think it was more shock than anything. Anna seemed a little confused too :)

We soon headed off to get Build-a-Bear birthday presents (Aroa-Feb and Anna- Apr)and Austin's Build-a-Bear Valentine.

 It was a cold weekend (to Georgia standards) but playing outside was a must for the Strange girls and Austin loved playing with his cousins. I enjoyed relaxing, watching and listening to the kids, and spending time with Kim. I also enjoyed some yummy cooking by Jeff and delicious cake by Carol.

Of course Kim and I HAD to go to Target :) Where Austin got to pick his birthday present from Aunt Kim and Uncle Jeff. (Always acting silly!)

  and when we got back the Legos got built. 

On Sunday Aroa had her family birthday party and Aunt Katie had the winning present of a mini build-a-stuffed animal kit. All three kids love it. It was fun watching them build their animals and then get the sewing supplies Carol gave her and proceed to make clothes for them. 

 

(yes, Aroa is younger then Austin but she is taller) 

 

 Carol made a BEAUTIFUL cake for Aroa and it was yummy too!

The night before we left Kim and I could hear the the two big kids talking in the bedroom about being grown up, driver licenses, girl/boyfriends, and college. It was soo cute to hear them be best buds and hang out together. That is time they will always cherish!

I really enjoyed my weekend with my family, I couldn't have prayed for better family-in-law's and I am looking forward to seeing them all again this summer!

Happy Valentine's Day!

I hope you enjoy Valentines Day as much as I do. Really any holiday that I can celebrate, I like :)

 Tony was soo sweet to surprise me with flower on Wednesday at work. I had no clue but they couldn't have come at a better time. Stressed by my work load, meetings and deadlines along with an approaching trip. It was just what I needed. He is the best!

Austin and I looked at Valentine ideas on Pinterest this year and he really loved these. I Photoshopped hearts and text on the pictures before I sent it to Walgreens for printing. So much fun!

 Austin woke up to his Valentine friend waiting with a VERY special present. This Love Bug is sooo cute! He has a backpack on so any presents can go in the backpack and his hand has a clip so he can even hold things too. The bug was from last years Valentines Day, great time to recycle!
Since we were going to see Aroa and Anna. I knew that we would be going to Build-a-Bear as our gift to them for their birthdays, sooo for Austins valenine present I also gave him a gift card to Build-a-Bear. It was a little more expensive of a gift than I would normally give him but this year was special. Hopefully he will forget about it for next year :)

 For school I made Austin a cute shirt, originally the heart was 'scarlet' which I always thought meant 'red' but apparently it is a hue of pink. Eventually the heart became green and the alien blue, it turned out super cute and he loves it- which is what matters!

Austin and Sarah showing off their loot bags, Austin sure had a lot of fun decorating his.

For Valentine's evening we all went to Panera. It was my last day of work for the week and I was not leaving until the yearbook was finally submitted, so around 5pm Austin and I finally left school and headed to meet Tony for dinner.  Austin took this pictures of us. :)

Austin wanted to have a 'dinner-party of one' night so he sat down the bench from us. :)

I hope you had a wonderful day full of love, surprises and joy.

The yearbook is finally done!

My days have been consumed by the school yearbook. Busy days and busy nights! I am soo glad that it is done! I have never been happier to have completed a project!
I kept thinking about how I wanted to post to the blog but the yearbook had a deadline and this didn't :(

In the mean time we have enjoyed some fun around our house.
I am finished crocheting Emily a beret and made some cute winter hats for two newborn babies. I can't wait to see them on them!

We watched the Superbowl over Tom and Gretchen's the kids watched most of the game with the help of the Viggle App we all had fun answering trivia and watching the commercials.

We went and saw my dad and his wife Darcie at an SCA Arts and Science Event. My Dad has been participating in SCA since as long as I can remember.

We also had a fun date at the Studio Movie Grill and had dinner in front of  the movie. Fun, not for every date night but fun.

 Made a trip to the library to get more books, this boy can read so many books so quickly. He finished the Heroes in Training in 3 days!

Don't forget about Valentines day (more pictures to come)! Austin and Tony did a great job assembling them!

Austin is doing may jobs/chores to earn money these days one of them this week is to fill the dish washer. 

Other posts to come but soo happy to not be exaused by this yearbook projects, a least for a year :)

Austin's Pinewood Derby Race

Jen asked me to post something about Austin's first experience in the Cub Scout Pinewood Derby. I have to admit, when the time came to start getting ready for the pinewood derby I'm not sure who was more excited, me or Austin. I remember being in a couple pinewood derby's when I was a kid. I still have both my cars. I don't remember too much about making the first one but I do remember some things about the second one.  I remember that I went through ALL of my Hot Wheels cars to pick out one that I wanted to have turned into a Pinewood Derby car. Once selected, my dad did a great job of transferring the essence of that Hot Wheel car design to my small rectangular block of wood.

So this year, once Austin had his car kit, we started searching the web for car designs. I didn't bring up having him check his Hot Wheels cars because I am NO WHERE NEAR skilled enough to try and transfer one of those to wood like my dad did. We searched and, honestly, all on his own Austin picked a car that was kind of a combination of a crayon box and a crayon all in one. So we printed out the design and on one of the 'build days' that one of the pack leaders hosted we went and got the design cut out. Austin helped me sand the car down to get ready for paint. We set up in the garage and Austin and I got to painting.

In the end, I actually screwed up the paint job and on the next build day we had to go so I could use a power sander and sand off the paint and try again. Anyone who knows me knows that I can be somewhat of a perfectionist and the thought of trying to repaint this car as a crayon box in the dwindling time we had left was stressing me out. (A perfectionist with very minimal artistic skills doesn't mix very well) So my amazing wife came up with the idea of printing out the crayon box design and attaching it to the car with Modge Podge.

This was an awesome idea! Some of you may know or have heard of actual cars being 'wrapped'.  It's a process where a design is essentially printed out on a type of vinyl and then the car is literally wrapped with it. If done right, it looks like a really elaborate paint job on a car. A lot of service businesses do this to company cars that potential customers will see. Anyway, we printed the crayon box design out with the color modifications that Austin wanted and Austin and I 'modge podged' the design onto the car. Once it all dried, it looked amazing and you almost couldn't tell that it wasn't an actual paint job. In the picture below, the blue tip and the black section are actually paint. Austin did the white squiggle with a paint marker. The yellow section with the writing and blue stripes at the bottom is the modge podged wrap. The 2 and the 4 are actually stickers meant to represent 24 crayons in a box. 

Next was getting the wheels and axles ready and on the car. I remembered from building my pinewood derby cars that my dad had put graphite lubricant on the axles and wheel hubs. A friend that I work with whose son had been in scouts had some other advice about also polishing the axles. He gave me some tools that they had used on his son's cars. I also bought 7 different grits of wet/dry sand paper and Austin and I got to polishing. We'd put an axle into the end of my drill and while Austin would pull the trigger of the drill, I would file and sand/polish the axle. He wanted to try some of the filing as well so he did that on a couple of the axles. Once all 4 'nail' axles were polished we put the graphite lubricant into the wheel hubs, slid the wheels onto the axles and then hammered the axles into the slots for them on the car. Once that was done, we had our Cubola Crayons #24 Pinewood Derby racer!  We went into the race weigh in/registration and had to add just a little bit of weight to get it as close as possible to the 5oz weight limit. 

Then came race day!

Austin was up for the first race of the Tiger scouts. A quick explanation, the Tiger scouts raced against each other in their own grouping and then the Wolf, Bear, and Weblo scouts all raced in a separate grouping. So in the first race, Austin was pitted against 2 other scouts from our den. The race started and Austin's Cubola car shot down the track and won the race.....except that the race software was showing that lane 3 had won. (Austin was in lane 1). The software was flipping the results of the race. So we retried the race...and again it was showing the opposite lane as winning. This time, we swapped Austin's car and the car in lane 3 (so now Austin is in lane 3 and the other car is in lane 1) and raced it again. Again it swapped, showing that lane 1 had won the race this time instead of lane 3. We then took the finish line sensor and flipped it around and still had problems. Finally it was discovered that for some reason, the software wasn't resetting the results after the race and this was causing it to incorrectly accumulate time and speed results. So got that figured out and raced Austin's heat one more time and this time (queue singing angels) HALLELUJAH! the results were correct and Austin won his heat (not to mention the 4 or 5 other 'races' that didn't count ;-)). Each car raced three times. each time in a different lane. Then all of their time and speed results were averaged. Once all the cars had raced the results came back that Austin's car won with the overall best average time and speed!

The top 3 finishers go on to race in the Boy Scout district races in April. Austin and the #2 finisher are both in the same den so our den took 2 of the top 3 spots! We'll have both boys in the district race. All the boys did really well and all the car designs were really cool.

Later in the evening during the Wolf, Bear, and Weblo races the computer running the software locked up. Due to the delay at the beginning of the race with the results being reported wrong, we were already running WAY behind so at this point Jen decided that she and Austin would go home (we did not know yet that there even was a district race). So they left...a little while later is when I discovered that there was a district race and that Austin would be in it. I sent a text message to Jen to let her know and to tell Austin that he couldn't play with his car, we'd need to put it away until districts. She text me back..."He is upset." I had been afraid of that since he couldn't wait to be able to play with his pinewood derby car alongside of mine that I'd let him have. Part of it was that it was late and he was just tired. By the next day, knowing that he and Arav would both be racing in the district races he was fine with it.

Overall it was a really awesome time. It brought back some cool memories of working on my pinewood derby cars with my dad. It was really fun (other than stressing about the paint job) working with Austin on his car and seeing him really want to try some of the different parts of building it, i.e. filing the rough parts of the axle, try spray painting, sanding the car, drawing the squiggle with the paint marker. This first pinewood derby for Austin was a really cool experience for him I think and a another good learning experience for me. As much as I stressed out about certain parts...those things didn't phase him at all. Was just another reminder that as a person...I still need to work on not being as much of a perfectionist about certain things and that as a parent....I have to be careful not to transfer that perfectionism to Austin. I want him to strive to do and be his best but that doesn't mean it has to be perfect and that if it's not, it wasn't his best effort. I fall short there sometimes and it's something I continue to struggle with and try to do better at.

Actually there is still one part of the competition we don't know the results of yet. The cars were judged by the former mayor of Snellville (I believe) as to 'best in show'. So maybe we'll win again...who knows. 

Good Bye Annie

Annie has passed away. It was very difficult to let her go but seeing her on her last day I knew it was time. Austin found her in the morning not able to walk and she was whining. He got me, and I put her in her bed thinking she must have hurt herself in the night and thought she could rest better in her bed. She seemed fine. We left about an hour later and she was still in bed. When we came home much later in the afternoon, she had again fallen and was unable to stand. After much discussion and tears, Tony took her to the vet for evaluation. The vet said there wasn't much quality of life and the only viable option was to get an MRI, which he wouldn't recommend at her age, to see what was going on. We decided that it wasn't in her best interest to do that.

Austin took the situation very well, as he had for Max's death. We explained that the Dr. couldn't do anything for Annie and that she had died. He didn't have any questions and we told him that if he did we would answer them. So far he hasn't had any.

It feels weird not to have a pet. This is the first time in my life that I haven't had one. We have talked about eventually getting another pet, but we are going to wait until at least August.

This is one of my most favorite pictures of my precious dogs. Max passed away last April and almost a year later Annie joined him. They are both about 2 or 3 in this picture. They were both such beautiful dogs! 

It is a miracle that I even got this shot! That's a whole other story!

February! Really!?!

I find that each week I am wishing for Friday and then Friday after Friday I wonder where the week went! Am I the only one?

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Recently I have made my MOST FAVORITE cookie recipe and the best part.... NO ONE in my house except me likes them :) YUM! Bad part- I eat them all :(
If you want the recipe for Cranberry Walnut Drop cookies leave a message! 

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Austin had a trip to Krispie Kreme and he LOVED it !

(Despite my Father-in-Law and Husbands, love for Dunkin Donuts)

I tried to get him to tell Tony that he liked Krispy Kreme better than Dunkin Donuts but I think that he knows we are a house divided and there was no forcing him to make a choice (even with the promise of another donuts!)  Its ok, Im just glad the Dunkin Donuts is closer to us, that way I wont eat nearly as many as I would if it was Krispy Kreme! Boy to I LOVE them hot and they melt in my mouth!

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Tony helped Austin create his first Pinewood Derby car. (Tony will tell you more about that later) And they had fun!

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We have visited an indoor pool to take some of the cold out of our weekends. Lots of fun except for he 15 minute breaks which Austin dreads. Austin's friend Ethan hung out the afternoon and even went to church with us. One the way home they were so excited to make paper airplanes they had to have the light on. :) Ethan is such good friend and I always love it when he comes to hang out with us.

 

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We even got to see Emily play indoor soccer. I haven't seen an indoor soccer game since her dad played in Columbus Ohio. I like that it is a fast paced game.

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For Christmas Tony bought me a Zoku pop maker it is a lot of fun! The really cool thing about this pop maker is that the pops are ready in less than 5 min! I finally bought the ingredients to make a chocolate whopper pop and boy were they good! Austin and I had one right away!

If you look closely you can see the candy pieces in the pop.

 Before           and               After

 

 I think he thought they were good; what do you think? :)

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Sunday is always a day of regeneration and renewal. Every Sunday is a 12Stone day and when rare day that I cant go to church if feels like I missed a big part of my week. This week was open baptism and it is amazing to see how God move us. I have vivid memories of my public acceptance of Christ and how he had changed my world forever. That is my prayer for all these who step into the baptismal waters (in street clothes!) and publicly proclaim their love and devotion to Jesus Christ.

 

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Each nice day we really try to get Austin outside to practice bike riding. This week we had one of those days. Tony, being the AWESOME father that he is, decided Austin needed some momentum so they started going down the hills rather than the sidewalk. Now our road looks just as it does in this picture, down hill. But the yards have these mini hills that if you fall, no big deal. Austin and Elijah, who knows how to ride a bike, had a great time riding down the grassy hills and Austin was actually having fun (What!?! having fun while LEARNING!?!?) He built up his confidence a lot and pretty soon what soaring to the curb using a borrowed balance bike. So progress but he is learning that bike riding can be LOTS of fun! I cant wait for him to get good enough that he and Elijah can ride there bikes around the neighborhood like I did as a kid.

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Homemade Taquitos again!

Austin is still asking for store bought ones but this time he said they we almost as good at the store bought ones :) I'll take it! 

I am really trying to cook more 'clean' and less processed, if I can. This batch I got 15 taquitos rather than 12. I am calling them my skinnier Taquitos because I dropped about 70 calories by making them with less filling than the first time around!

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Well that's it for the Mimms' crew, for a while.

I have asked Tony to write an article on the Pinewood derby and include more pictures so be looking for that in the near future.

Jen

New Adventures in Scrapbooking

I am so excited this weekend to have started on my project Life Album. It is a great way to captures images from everyday life and allow you to put them into an album. ( I love this little video about what project life is on Beckys blog) Many people have taken to this type of scrapbook and there are many products out there that make it easy, but the very wonderful part is that you can use what you have. I chose to buy a kit from Becky Higgins line called SeaFoam and I LOVE it!

 

I am excited to see our everyday life show up more in my scrapbook than just special events and holidays. I enjoy looking back and remembering what life was like, the good, the bad, and the ugly. Which is exactly the reasons why I started back on this blog.

Still learning

Today as I sit and pray on Gods word I have a visual that in first thought is to keep to myself ( don't show them how crazy you really are, Jennifer) then second thought, what if no one has thought of this in the same way, so I'll share- I was reading John 17 and I realize Jesus is a teacher, I know nothing new but not just any teacher he is more like an aerobic teacher or workout teacher. What, you ask... Well I started thinking Jesus knows ALL this stuff, how to talk with God, how to show mercy, love and kindness and yet he does it all. Like an aerobic instructor leading a class, I'm supposed to have my eyes on him and mimic all his moves, it's really hard to do this when I only show up for my 'workout' once a month, but if I'm a regular attendee it gets easier and I feel more comfortable and more connected with the moves. Have you ever tried to workout by yourself? It can be okay once in a while but day in and day out, at least for me is very unmotivating, this is where fellowship, belonging to a church, small group really helps. Combine daily and weekly workouts and it becomes easier to become spiritually fit. (Trust me I know this is easier said than done, I do struggle each day).

So this year I am going to make Jesus my workout instructor not just someone I read about and pray to. I will fail at times and I will wonder about the big picture when trials and disappointment come my way. But, as PK said yesterday at church, God's disappointment doesn't come when we fall it comes when we don't get up and try again.

I have made you known to them, and will continue to make you known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them.” (John 17:26 NIV)

Practice makes perfect

Austin is loathing practicing to start riding a two wheel bike. It is a chore to get him outside and practice on a borrowed balance bike. Once I get him outside he is all about making goals and trying to beat his own records. He has even told me 'It's not as bad as I thought', but the next day we go out he fusses again. So don't let the smile fool you :)

Busy Weekend!

Well as weekends go this was a very busy one but the most beautiful in a while! I think it is crazy that it was a high of 72 today! Can you believe it? I still compare January with the blizzard of 2010. And here I am fighting to stay in jeans and long sleeve shirts. It will be in the 50s by Monday so go figure!

Friday we celebrated with Austin during his school awards ceremony where he receive an award for all E's! We are so proud of what he has done in school and he is growing and learning so much.

Then today after celebrating our little friend Jackson's 4th birthday at Bounce-a-Rama, Austin and Tony went to begin building Austin's first Pinewood Derby Car. I think that Tony was as excited to start this project as Austin was. Tony still has his cars from when he was in Boy Scouts and Austin has been playing with them for years and now, he gets to make his own. They made great progress on it and now to the painting process. We will reveal the final car soon, so stay tuned.

I have also been getting into experimenting with some new recipes. I have made it a goal to try and eat as little processed foods as possible, knowing this can be a big task I am taking it slow and picking certain foods that I feel I can replicate with out a lot of extra purchases. I have found two recipes that I really like and plan to make again. Thanks to Pinterest for making it easy to find many choices!

Double Chocolate Zucchini Muffins (with optional Nutella Swirl) 

Recipe here {in our house we ALWAYS opt for Nutella!}

They were soooo good, I have to warn you thought- I got about 30 regular size muffins out of this recipe! So plan on eating them a lot or giving them away :)

We love taquitos and we usually buy them by the 30 pack. I thought I might mix up some homemade ones. 

Creamy Chicken Taquitos Recipe here

I was concerned about them being too spicy for me (not a spicy eater) or Austin so I cut back on the spices and left out the jalapeno. In the end they were a little bland, so next time Ill add all spices and no jalapenos and we will see what that version tastes like. These came out about 2x the size of the frozen store bought ones, so even though the recipe didn't make 30 we will actually eat less per serving than normally. But over all very delicious!