Blog Award

My daughters Sweet Friend Moriah gave me a blog award this morning. Thank you Moriah! Here are the rules:

1. Say thanks and link to the person that gave you the award.
2. Tell 10 "honest" things about yourself.
3. Award this to 7 people who's blog design you like or have received encouragement from. Inform them of their win and the rules of this award.

Ten Honest Things About Myself:
1. I drink coffee everyday and get a terrible headache if I don't!
2. I'm baking bread this morning.
3. I'm very annal about my floors.
4. I love to scrapbook but don't do it very often.
5. I love Jesus!
6. I think I have the best children in the world.
7. I would marry my husband again and again and again.
8. I love the smell of clean babies.
9. I painted my finger nails red--I haven't done that in years!
10. I think this is very hard! :o)

7 people I give the award to:
Laura L.
Mom
Dad
Josiah
Jessica H.
Any other little girls that read my blog...

Can't wait to read what you write!

Joyfully,
Mrs. Taffy

TOT School

We've had a GREAT TOT School week! Lots of fun things to do and experience! These aren't in order and that fact that he wore the same shirt twice this week, just confused me even more, but they are all from this week, I KNOW that for sure!

Here's Laffy playing with his little Leap Pad toy. He prefers the music setting. He just pushes the letters, gets a new song and dances and bounces!

Throwing around chicken beanbags that my mom gave him for his birthday!

BLOCKS! We bought ours at a local store, they were fairly inexpensive and they were his "big" gift for his birthday. He's been having so much fun with these all week!

I don't know what these are called, but I found them at Goodwill for .50. It's made by Fisher-Price and it's so fun! The little people stack and balance on that organce thing and each other.

Starting to figure out how it works. My 4 year old really enjoyed this game too, she could get those things stacked in all sorts of configurations and get VERY high!He pulled out his shape sorter again.

I was sitting at my scrapbook table when he brought it over to me to open, that's why there are stamps on the floor. (I am a really messy scrapbooker!)

We even got in an impromtu field trip to a park on the Mississippi River. It had a nice big park and it was completely empty, except for this abandoned bike that Laffy Taffy was happy to try out.

I would have to say that this was probably the highlight of the week for Laffy Taffy. We played with play-doh on Thursday. This child sat playing with play-doh for an hour and a half!! I couldn't believe it! He didn't even make that big of a mess! He just loved cutting and pressing and squishing and rolling the orange play dough. Even Daddy played with him for a little while.

Blue-Raspberry and Bubble Gum were playing as well, but they got tired of it before this newly turned 2 year old! It took me almost 20 minutes to get the area cleaned up, but it was well worth it!

I'm not sure how much TOT School we'll do next week with Thanksgiving and all, but I'm sure there will be something picture worthy! Have a Happy Thanksgiving with your Tot!

Joyfully,

Mrs. Taffy

Harriet Island Park

This is the St. Paul skyline from this little island known as Harriet Island, named after Harriet Tubman I believe. It's such a neat park, right on the mighty Mississippi River. There were barges moving slowly along in the river and you can see the paddle boats in the picture there, those are running in the warmer months, one of them is named the Snelling after Josiah Snelling. The reason we were here is because Mr. Taffy had a meeting in St.Paul and we decided to tag along, while he was at the meeting, we enjoyed the sunshine and mild weather and completely vacant park (with amazing bathrooms I might add).

Somebody abandoned this toy at the park and Laffy had fun trying it out. I got my wonderful children to pose for this crazy picture and it turned out so nice! Can you see the bridge in the background, that one goes over the Mississippi and over the island. There are two other bridges that go onto the island from St. Paul and they are both really beautiful.

After the meeting we did a little grocery shopping. We had so much fun buying turkeys! We bought 5!!! They were .37 a pound, so a 20lb bird was about 8.00! What a deal! I will be able to make so many dinners out of these turkeys! I already put one in the fridge to start thawing for Thanksgiving and the rest are in the freezer, we'll probably eat one a month until they are all gone! I am so Thankful!

Have a happy weekend!

Mrs. Taffy

Thrifty Friday

A couple things to share...Sunday we are going to an orchestra preformance, my sister-in-law won free tickets so Strawberry and I get a girl's day out! We thought it would be wonderful for Strawberry to have something new to wear so we stopped at our local Goodwill. We were so blessed because they had all green tags marked down to $1.49. This is what we found for her! It was sold as an outfit so the whole thing was $1.49!! What a deal! I also found some nice sweaters for my teens that they will be able to wear for our Christmas pictures and special occasions, also $1.49 each!

I want to share one of my favorite frugal recipes with you. I make these once a week, either for breakfast or a snack. The orginal recipe comes from a book called Miserly Meals by Jonni McCoy. I've changed the recipe and renamed it: Chocolate Banana Muffins.

3 cups pastry flour-not packed (you can use regular white flour too)

1 cup evaporated cane juice (organic sugar)

1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder

2 tsp. baking soda

1 tsp. salt

1 cup apple juice (I've juiced my own and also used a couple juice boxes)

1/2 cup water (or use more apple juice for more flavor)

1/2 cup melted butter

2 T. vinegar (any type)

2 tsp. Vanilla extract

2-3 mashed bananas ( I'm thinking shredded zuchinni would probably work too)

handful of chocolate chips-just enough to make the children think there's chocolate in there.

Chopped up dates-(sneaky food)

In a large mixing bowl, combine dry ingredients. Stir until well mixed. In a seperate bowl, mix the wet ingredients. Mix well. Add the wet ingredients to the dry, add bananas, chocolate chips and dates. Mix until blended, but be careful not to overmix.

Pour into greased or paper-lined muffins tins. Bake at 375 for 18 minutes. Makes 2 dozen.

If you've been reading my blog for a while you might recognize this recipe. It was on my old blog and I copied the picture off of it. I'm about to delete my old blog so I'm going to start transferring some recipes over to this one!

Happy Friday!

Mrs. Taffy

Laffy Taffy Turns 2

Yesterday was Laffy Taffy's birthday. Oh, where does the time go?! My little baby boy...I'll never get tired of little boys! We didn't celebrate his birthday until today though, because Mr. Taffy and the big boys were off hunting. They came home last night, so we celebrated pretty much all day today! When Laffy got up this morning this is what he found. Chocolate built the castle, Strawberry and I put blocks together. He loved them! And has been playing with them all day!

Here's his little pile of presents. I found the Arc at Once Upon a Child, it's full of wooden animals--so cute!

Here's the cupcakes I made for the "other" children.

Here's Laffy Taffy's very own cake, it wasn't supposed to turn out peach colored, but he didn't mind! He actually blew out the candles himself!

We just let him open gifts throughout the day. This was after dinner, he's opening the adorable gift my mom sent:

Chicken beanbags!!

It's been a wonderful day! Besides celebrating the birth of our 6th child we also processed a buck. This was more disgusting than I care to blog about, but boy do I have respect for my husband and sons, what a nasty job! For their first kill ever they did great! After checking on them periodically I decided I would rather change a million poopy diapers than have to clean a deer! I did help with the freezing of the meat though, bagging up roasts and grinding up meat for tacos and chili. We have a ton of meat now and I am so thankful!

Joyfully,

Mrs. Taffy

More engineering

He's still at it...only resurfacing to eat, use the bathroom or show me something "awesome" he made! He decided to use the dining room table today because the flat boards work so much better on a hard surface. And it's really fine, because while the men are away, we eat at the small table anyway.

He said this is a restaraunt.

Soldiers.

Most of these legos we bought when Banana and Chocolate were babies...at a garage sale! We were so poor and it felt like such a splurge...but I'm so happy we bought them! They have paid for themselves time and time again!

Joyfully,

Mrs. Taffy

Coats and Shoes

Here in MN we have all four seasons. And with each of those seasons comes various outerwear. It can be overwhelming with a big family...so many coats, shoes, hats, etc. Here's how I keep these needful things under control.

This is a picture of our familyroo coat and shoe shelf. This area is pretty much the first place we unload when we come home from anywhere. We orginally bought these IKEA pieces thinking they would fit by our front door to use for guests, but they didn't, so they ended up in the family room instead. The plan was to have half of the coat rack for the grown-ups and half for the children. That was kind of working, but it was really overloaded and the big problem was that Blue-Raspberry and Bubble Gum couldn't reach to hang up their coats AND these things have been moved so many times that they are starting to fall apart--so we didn't want them climbling up there. As a result these little people would just leave their coats laying on the floor, and of course no one could hang them up but me...SO... I hung these hooks up today. These hooks used to hold hand towels in the bathroom of our last house. I put them at the different heights for the different little ones, one hook per little person. This is in our back hallway, right off the garage and I don't think Mr. Taffy is going to like it very much...but he pretty much let's me do what I want regarding the organization of our house. Actually, he probably will think it's a good idea, but he might think it feels a little crowded in the hallway.

The inside shoe shelf is for our nice shoes. But all the other shoes, boots included, stay in the garage. This cool shoe shelf used to be some sort of mail sorting shelf, maybe from an old hotel or something. It's a great shoe shelf! Even size 17 shoes fit in the slots relatively well! On top of the shoe shelf is a basket for the warm hats and gloves. Normally the rest of the top is empty, but that's Laffy's birthday present there and I have to start putting together blocks tonight! On the floor, you can't see it, is a place for all the boots.

On the same wall, but on the other side of the door, are all these hooks. This is where the dirty work jackets and smelly things go. My boys are hunting, so this area looks pretty empty, but this is where they would normally put their hunting jackets and hats.

We have a coat closet by our front door too, it's not very big and I refuse to load it up with coats on hangers--too tedious. My goal for the coat closet it to keep it fairly empty to hang up guest's coats in and to keep some of our "fancy" coats, since we don't wear those very often.

Mr. Taffy does not always like to hang up his coat or put his shoes on the shoe shelf. Since this is HIS house, instead of nagging him about it, I try to make it easy for him. Here in his office, which is where he normally unloads everything, I put a simple hook on the door, for his jacket, or belt. He likes to keep his shoes on the floor in there, and that's fine by me, because I'm rarely in there to see them or trip over them anyway! :o)

In my laundry room, I also have a closet, probably the biggest one in my whole house, that is where I store the out of season jackets. I find it works better for me to have them hanging up where I can see them because I often forget who has what coat and and who needs a new one.

My favorite thing to use in keeping my house organized is hooks. Each bed room has a row of hooks for all the weird things that need to be hung up: bathrobes, purses, backpacks, belts, hats, camera bags, Walmart bags with a return in them, etc. This really helps to keep closets uncluttered and floors cleared off!

Happy Homemaking!

Mrs. Taffy