BUSY December!

Goodness, December is CRAZY!  Seriously!  I fit in a Beth Moore book club tonight and I'm pretty proud of myself for going in the midst of craziness.  I haven't wrapped a single present but at least my house is decorated quite nicely, as is our outside.  Jordan worked hard and all I have to do is flip one switch on a remote control and everything magically turns on!

We are having a fun but fast December, so there is no time to blog.  I'm hoping to catch up sometime.  Isn't that the philosophy of every mom?!  I thought I'd catch up on just a bit of what's been going on:

We took the boys to the Polar Express when Mom and Dad came to visit.  Sadly, Mom's knee totally went out while she was here, so she didn't get to go with us.  We had a fun time and wonderful memories were made.

 

We celebrated Matthew's second birthday with a joint birthday party with his friend Luke.  It was a great idea since they're so little and the holidays are so crazy anyway!  Everyone had a great time at Gymboree.  They love that place!

Noah started rice cereal, pears, and sweet potatoes as well.  He doesn't like the sweet potatoes as much.  He's still warming up to food and I think it's helping him sleep a little better at night.  Thank you, Lord.  I'm not sure how much longer I could have gone in a downward spiral of exhaustion and sleeplessness.

Basically, we've just been messing around!

I really want to blog about our Advent calendar and the activities I came up with this year to help us remember that Jesus is the reason for the season!  We've been doing some Bible verses mixed with fun Christmas art activities.  If you follow me on Twitter you've probably seen a lot of the fun little art projects we've been doing as well as some of the Christmas decorations around here.  I may not have time to link up with a Christmas Open House on another blog, but I want to put up some pictures of the house fully decorated so our family back home can see as well!

Slow Cooker Mac!

A few people have asked me about this slow cooker mac and cheese recipe so I thought I'd share.

This is most definitely my go-to mac 'n cheese recipe.  I found it in the Trisha Yearwood cookbook that Jordan got me for Christmas.  It's really a good cookbook and I've found a few great go-to recipes.  I also love her roast beef recipe.  It smells wonderful!

Here's how to make this wonderful (and SUPER easy) Mac!

8 ounces elbow macaroni, cooked
1 12-ounce can evaporated milk
1 1/2 cups whole milk
2 large eggs, beaten
1/4 cup (1/2 stick) butter, melted
1 teaspoon salt
Dash of pepper
2 10-ounce bricks sharp Cheddar cheese, grated (about 5 cups)
Dash of paprika

In a large 4-quart crockpot sprayed with cooking spray, mix the macaroni, milks, eggs, butter, salt, pepper and all but ½ cup of the grated cheese. Sprinkle the reserved cheese over the top of the mixture and then sprinkle with paprika. Cook on low heat for 3 hours and 15 minutes. Turn off the crockpot, stir the mixture, and serve hot.

If you don't have a crockpot, grease a 9x13x2-inch pan with butter, add the mixture, and bake at 350 degrees for 50 minutes.

**If you'll take just the little bit of extra time to shred a block of cheese (I've found that a 16 oz. block works just fine) instead of buying the pre-shredded cheese, you'll see a big difference!  It will be so worth it!

Crock-TASTIC! Apple Butter

I cannot believe I have never made homemade apple butter before!  My friend, Bethany, made some in her slow cooker and it got me thinking about a recipe I saw about a year ago that I never made.  Now, I have to say, I liked hers better.  We ate it up super fast at breakfast time! 

This one was good and I can't believe how EASY it was.  I can truthfully say I've never smelled anything as good as this cooking for hours on end in your house!  It smells unreal.  You have to make it!  Seriously, go on!

I got my recipe from the Southern Plate cookbook.  I believe there's a blog but I haven't been to it as much.  I really like my Southern Plate book though because there are beautiful pictures and stories with most of the recipes.

We ate some, I gave some to friends, and I froze what was left.  I figured it was no different making baby apple sauce and freezing it to eat later, so I've got some waiting for me in the freezer!

It makes a lot so you're going to want to give it to friends, or package it up with a cute bow to give for a homemade Christmas gift!

Ingredients

• 2- 3 lb (50 oz) jars unsweetened apple sauce


• 3 lbs granny smith apples


• 4 cups sugar


• 1 1/2 cups apple juice


• 2 tsp cinnamon


• 1 tsp cloves


• 1 tsp allspice

Instructions

1. Peel and cut apples into small chips. Place all ingredients in the crock pot and stir.


2. Cover and cook on low overnight (eight to ten hours). Remove cover, stir and taste. Add more spices or sugar if desired.


3. Continue cooking for a few more hours, uncovered, until some of the liquid has gone and butter has cooked down a bit.


4. Pour into jars and refrigerate (unless it is canned properly).


5. Serve over hot biscuits, toast, scones

And P.S. You WILL have to pulse this in the blender for just a few seconds after it's totally baked.  It was still lumpy and it needed that soft apple butter texture!

Room Re-Do

I decided a fun, quick way to make our room feel like we redecorated was to simply change up our comforter.  You'll be shocked to find out that I found this comforter at a thrift store.  Weird, right?  But, I will say, it's a really, really nice thrift store!  Of course I cleaned it and it's all nice and fresh now.  All I had to buy were 2 red pillows and viola!!

 

And here's Jack mid-jump!  I used all the other pillows that I already had. It has a matching fabric on the other side, so techinically I could have 2 comforters throughout the winter.

For under $50, I totally changed the look of our room for a cold, dark dreary winter coming our way!  I think the dark colors really feel like fall and winter!

Where to begin...I guess at Thanksgiving!

We have had a crazy few weeks around here.  Children are not sleeping, I'm tired (exhausted really), the Holiday rush is here and we are flat-out ready for a break!  A tropical vacation would be nice...

Anyway, I haven't blogged in forever and so I thought I'd start at Thanksgiving...and it was a doozy!

So here's the story of Thanksgiving 2011...Enjoy!

So of course Noah isn't sleeping well lately.  Did I mention that?  So basically, I had gotten a little sick, run-down and Thanksgiving was right around the corner.  Jordan's mom and sister were here and they helped out SO much with the boys, but I was still so tired from not sleeping.  We were up late the night before Thanksgiving getting everything prepped for Matthew's birthday on Thanksgiving Day. I wanted to make sure his bowling decoations were up and ready to greet him when he woke up.

Around 3 am Jordan's mom ran into our room and said an alarm was going off.  We rolled out of bed and tried to go see what it was.  It was 4 slow beeps and we had NO idea what it was.  I have a horrible fear of fire so I was running outside to see if I could see smoke coming from the top of the house or anything.  By this time BOTH alarms are going off and so I got on the phone with the fire station.  About that time Jordan figured out it was carbon monoxide.  He flipped out and he brought Noah to me (I was still in the garage searching for fire???!!)  Jordan's Mom and Sister got the big boys and we all went and sat in the car while we waited for the fire department.

First off, some volunteer firemen arrived and then we all waited while more polilce and firetrucks (WITH sirens blaring at 3 am Thanksgiving morning) showed up at our house.  The whole time I'm yelling at Jordan to PICK UP THE HOUSE!  PICK UP!  He didn't.  So here we wait in the car while they check everything out.  It took a while but they eventually came up with nothing at all.  All their detectors said 0, so no carbon monoxide, thankfully!

Jordan took some pictures of us waiting in the car, but there's no way I'm sharing those.  So, we finally got everyone inside, got the boys back down to sleep again, rolled into bed and just as we were shutting our eyes the alarms went off AGAIN!!!  I just kept thinking how we're all going to die in our sleep and no one will know!  By this point it's like 5 am.  Jordan unhooked the alarms and we just said a prayer that there was no carbon monoxide and we went back to sleep for a bit.

To say that I am (was) sleep deprived is an understatement.  We had to get up bright and early to get Matthew up for his big birthday and to start our Thanksgiving day as well.  It was an adventure for sure.

Here's John Michael looking at all of the firetrucks!  He was pretty excited!  The worst part of all of this was that the house was a WRECK.  With me being so tired and having company, there were dishes everywhere, loads of clean laundry everywhere and the house was a general mess.  I was so embarrassed for all of those people to be roaming through my house in the middle of the night.  At least we're all safe though!  A few nights later the one last detector went off again and Jordan ran out around 5am to Walmart to get a new detector to make sure there wasn't any carbon monoxide.  There wasn't.  What a crazy series of events. 

Here's the rest of our Thanksgiving in pictures!  As always, we have so much to be thankful for.

Noah is almost sitting up by himself!

The only contribution I made was this super-yummy crock pot mac n cheese.  It is SO good!

Jordan's mom slaved ALL day making our Thanksgiving.  I was way too tired, so I took a nap with Noah!

Did we not have a wonderful meal?!

 

The boys played a new game on iPhones while we ate dinner!

And although Noah couldn't eat with us this year, he'll be eating Thanksgiving dinner with us next year and maybe we'll be in Alabama with our family!