Birthday Stash

Yesterday was my birthday and armed with a gift certificate and some birthday cash I headed to Barnes & Noble and Michaels. I spent an hour in Barnes & Noble, the second week in a row I've done that, and it is pure heaven to just wander around. If it wasn't so far away I'd be there everyday I think. I ended up with four books for myself (could have easily bought 40) and one for each of the girls. Becca has been reading the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series. She got the first one for her birthday and is already on the third. I think I want to read these too. Kenzie is quickly becoming a little bookworm too. She is currently enjoying the Jigsaw Jones series.

Next I headed to Michaels and enjoyed wandering around there too. I had been holding off getting into the whole clear stamp thing as part of my scrapbooking but just before Christmas I used some of my sister-in-laws and really liked them so I wanted to get some for myself. As luck would have it there were several on clearance. So I got some.... or a lot actually. I only got one set that wasn't on sale and that was the Valentine's set and because I thought it was really cute. So it was fun and I even have some money left over!

Now that the holidays are over and most of the birthdays, I am ready to jump back into crafting and blogging again. I've got lots of cute Valentine ideas bookmarked and plan on sharing them here but for now I have to sign off and go clean up the house. I took the day off from housework in honor of my birthday and boy does it show!

Sled 'n Slumber Party

Today is Rebecca's 10th birthday, but we had a party on Friday. She decided she just wanted to invite her two best friends (and of course her little sister) for a sleepover. So Friday afternoon her BFF's came over. We celebrated with pizza and cupcakes and made tie-dye t-shirts. The following morning they all headed outside for some sledding in the backyard. We have a big tube with three seats that all four girls fit on. The weather was in the 40s and beautiful for sledding!



Here are the girls showing off their t-shirts!


I made little "sleepover" cupcakes one for each of the girls and some extras of course!


Piling onto the tube!

Cute Critters

We've recently added two new critters to our little menagerie of pets. Two 8 week old gerbils.

They are really fun and entertaining to watch. The girls have named them peaches and fluffanutter, though Dom and I like to refer to them as peaches and cream.

I didn't really intend to add anymore pets but Kenzie kept asking even though I had hoped that the zhu-zhu pets she got for Christmas would satisfy her.

They did.

For approximately 2 days.

Dom had insisted he didn't want any rodents for pets other then the rabbits, so that was good. Then while he was at the pet store picking out a new fish for the tank with Becca they were looking at the gerbils and he thought they were cute. Sooo... he said he wouldn't mind getting them since they were active during the day and fun to watch. But it was up to me since I, of course, would become the primary caregiver. And I, of course, being a sucker for cute and fuzzy animals said okay which made the girls very happy. So we now have 2 gerbils, 2 rabbits, 1 dog,

1 cat, and 4 fish!