Lately...

 So I found this really cool cardigan at the mall! I love Dr. Who stuff! If it actually fit me and wasn't gigantic I totally would have bought it because it is so cool!

We had so much fun overnight babysitting Connor. Tyler and Jessica spent the night away for their anniversary and we got to play house with this crazy, cute kid! My favorite part was how confused this kid was in the morning. He wasn't quiet awake and neither were we since we're not use to an early alarm on Saturday mornings, so we put him in bed with us for a bit. It took him like 5 minutes to realize that we weren't his parents. As soon as he figured that out he got all shy and with a tiny giggle waved good morning at Taylor. It was pretty cute!     

Totally reminds me of Emilee and salsa!!!

I love this silly kid and am glad I get to live so close.

 So, my car got hit by a flying object on the way to work. It scared the living daylights out of me! The first thing I did was call my husband while balling my brains out. Yeah, he got freaked out because I couldn't really explain things well between sobs! What happened was a landscape company was working along the side of the road and right as I passed them something hit my passenger window HARD! It sounded like a gunshot! Glass ended up on my seat and in my driver's side door panel. Luckily I didn't get cut! It was possibly the worst day to be late to work but I felt so blessed by the way things worked out.

 The guys edging and mowing were big, fat JERKS! I couldn't believe how rude they were to me. They acted like it was my fault the window broke and there was not possible way they could have caused it. Luckily their manager was a little more reasonable and was willing to pay for it to be fixed. AND it actually was able to be fixed later that day which was amazing. You know, crap happens sometimes but the Lord is always looking out for us!

Clementine Poppy Seed Muffins

don't mind my terrible picture taking abilities lol

So when my in-laws were here last weekend, they bought us a large Costco-sized bag of clementines.  While I love clementines, there are quite a lot and they weren't all that sweet, but they were juicy and pretty good. I wanted to make some type of baked good, and I came across a clementine poppy seed muffin recipe. Sounded delicious, but had terrible reviews, so I sort of combined it with a lemon poppy seed muffin recipe and omitted some spices I don't like and this is what I came up with. The muffins were moist and delicious and I will be making more today to freeze a bunch :). Anyways, here's the recipe I ended up with:

Clementine Poppyseed Muffins:

1/2 cup butter, softened
2/3 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 cup plain yogurt
3 clementines
2 1/4 cups flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
2 heaping Tbsp poppy seeds

Preheat oven to 350º.

First mix the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt and poppy seeds in a bowl. Zest 2 of the clementines and add the zest into the flour mixture.  Now you get to decide how to use the rest of your clementine in the muffins.  I peeled and diced mine into small chunks and added them to the dry ingredients, but make sure you cut them somewhere you can reserve the juice that escapes while dicing (I used my cutting board that has a groove on the outer edge), you will want that juice for the wet ingredients. If you don't want chunks in your muffins you can skip the dicing and just juice them for the wet ingredients. I liked the chunks okay, but because some of the clementines were a little bitter, it made for some not so great bites of muffin here and there. When I make them today I'm going to skip the chunks and just add the juice. But the chunks would be nice if the clementines were sweet.

I just used my mixer with the whisk for this... Cream butter and sugar together for about 2 minutes until light and fluffy. Add in eggs and yogurt until combined. Either juice your clementines at this point and add the juice, or add the reserved juice from when you diced the clementines.

Add the dry ingredients to the mixer, and stir just until combined. Scoop the batter into greased muffin tins, filling them 3/4 of the way. Bake for 15-20 minutes until lightly browned.  Dump out on a wire rack immediately to cool. I made about 15 muffins with one batch.  I'll let you know how the ones I make today turn out ;).


Update: Okay so the muffins i made today with just the juice were AWESOME. it also added to the awesomeness that i made a little glaze with the juice of one clementine whisked with about 1/2 cup of powdered sugar and poured it on top of the muffins. mmmmm...

Disney 2015

Who is excited for Disney 2015?! I am! I am!!! I made this little jar to help us start saving up. It's nothing fancy whatsoever but I promised Erika I'd post it. :)

Family Year Book

I have loved creating these cute picture scrapbooks! They are so easy and pretty well priced when I find groupons for them. This is the third book I've made of mine and Taylor's experiences. I made one for our dating and engaged experiences, one for our wedding, and now this one for our first year of marriage. I'm also creating our 2014 book as the year is going on so January and February are finished. I love reliving our adventures through these awesome books and can't wait to continue making them :) We loved all of our fun experience with all of you during 2013 and I thought I would show off some of those fun time!

Day of Love

I know this is a little late but I figured it was still ok to post. Also, mom told me to get a picture of my curled hair so you guys could see. I figured this accomplishes that as well so why not!

To start things off we had a crazy, messy, but fun party at school. I was in charge of the mustache station. You should have seen the poses my students had with the mustaches, they thought they were SO cool! It was cute! (here you see my none lazyness because I curl my hair quite often, at least once a week)

All of the yummy ingredients for our Valentines Day dinner. I love our bread maker! 

Our yummy pizza after cooking. Don't judge the bite mark
looking piece, there was too much dough and when I pulled
it off it looked like a bite mark!

Our yummy pizza before it went into the oven!










Now onto enjoying what we made! Yes we are
silly and take lots of food pictures but I think
it is so much fun! I'm lucky to have this sweet
boy in my life!

Birthdays at School are Fun!!!

A few cards, a purple pixie stick, 2 rubber band bracelets (those popular
things that don't fit me), a giant Hershey's Kiss, a Hershey's bar, a manicure
kit, cook book, chocolates taped to a card, Hawaiian Punch drink mix ins, a
hostess ding dong, a car piggy bank (left at school), and lotion (left at school).

 When students find out its your birthday (or almost your birthday) they can't help but want to bring you something. Anything. Even if its just a pixie stick.   :) They are hilarious! Well today I got a bundle of cute little....and not so little gifts!

OH, and I can't forget this giant heart cut from plywood and spray painted white and hot pink! I must totally rock if he made me this and wrote right in the middle, "Mrs. Moore You rock" Yeah...I am that cool! Can I just say, I LOVE MY JOB! They make turning 26 not so bad!!!

Shopping ... and making memories

So yesterday I took all the kids to the mall for some shopping. Yeah, I have a death wish. But we had some Old Navy coupons and gift cards expiring so it was now or never. The boys were their typical bored selves in Old Navy, running around like banshees and making loud/crazy noises at themselves whenever they passed by a mirror. But we got Cailyn some cute clothes (turquoise skinny jeans, woot woot!) and the boys some flip flops.  Then we went and had some pretzel bites. We got cinnamon ones and salted ones. It's funny how Jacob and Cailyn hovered over the cinnamon ones (little sweet tooths) and Owen & Landon ate all the salted ones. After just one or two more stores we were done. But at the exit there was one of those little photo booth things and I thought, why not? So we all crammed into the tiny little booth and the boys really had no idea what was going on. Between that and us not all being able to fit, the pictures weren't the greatest but my kids just thought that was the coolest thing ever. We got 4 pics so they each got one and they were so excited. Ahhh, it's the little things in life. :)

 So after that we went to Barnes & Noble to spend a gift card Cailyn had. They had this huge kids area we pretty much hung out in and the boys loved getting books off the shelves and plopping down to read them. At one point I guess Owen lost track of me cuz I heard him calling for me. He started walking out of the children's area, a stack of books under his arm, shouting, "Mooom. Oh Moooom! You're missing somebody!" And yes, he attracted a lot of stares. Funny kid.

All in all my kids had a really good time. More and more I'm realizing that it's seizing the little moments that really matter most in life. There, that's my life lesson for the day. :P

 

Some pillows .... And a tough kid!

So my kids kinda love all the pillow cases I've made them. And it's been good sewing practice for me, too. :) After the Halloween & Christmas ones, we decided to make some they could use year-round. So I put on my brave pants and took all four kids to Joann's to pick out some material. Not gonna lie, I wanted to pull my hair out once or twice, but overall it wasn't too traumatic.

Landon was very adamant about having a soft flannel material for his. The Angry Birds Star Wars was just a bonus. ;)

Owen really wanted a space one but other than that didn't care too much what else there was.

Jacob was insistent that he have brown in his trim. I'd originally picked out navy and orange but he would NOT let that happen!

Cailyn was the easiest. She picked all her stuff out on her own.

 And now on to some other business.  It's probably no shock that Owen is turning into my most difficult child EVER! He is stubborn and vocal and independent and quick to anger and does not play well with the other kids. Or at least not when they try to boss him around. ;) I seriously need to get him this shirt because it is Owen to a tee!

 

So more and more lately I've had to remove him from playing with the other kids for a while till he can calm down. Sometimes he's happy to spend some one-on-one time with me.

 Other times, not so much. :P

But even though he may give me a serious eye twitch at the end of each day, he still never fails to crack me up! His latest thing is changing clothes many times throughout the day, usually putting on multiple shirts and pants at once. (Reminds me of the Friends episode -- Could I BE wearing any more clothes?) 

The other day I was making some grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner and the next thing I knew Owen was spreading his blanket on the floor and had gotten himself a plate and sippy cup of water and asked if he could have a picnic with his grilled cheese. I thought the glasses -- indoors, at night -- was a great touch. :)

Oh man, this kid is giving me a run for my money!

Lately...

So it's been quite sometime since I posted anything, and I wanted to let you all know that we are alive :).  We had a great Christmas and New Years! (though we did miss out on all the fun you guys had in Utah...)  Wes and I actually stayed up till midnight on New Year's Eve, and then got up at 6 with the kids the next morning- yup, I don't miss staying up late at all haha! For New Year's Day we took both the kids and saw Frozen which we all LOVED.  Mckay and Lyla were both soo good throughout the entire movie; I just cannot believe how grown up both of them are.  We then set a record for movies seen at the movie theater in one year because Wes and I got to go see Catching Fire for our anniversary and it was AWESOME!

Anyways, here are some of the other things we've been up to of late...

My little stud the first day of sunbeams. I cannot believe he's old enough to be a sunbeam already! He also told me he was going to grow up to be a princess after class. There are 7 girls in his class and then him...he got confused lol 

Mckay started swim lessons in December and he will resume them in february. Despite his face in this picture, he absolutely LOVES swimming and is doing super well! He'll swim by himself the 3 feet to the edge of the pool when his teacher asks him too :) We are blessed to have our community rec center so close by.  Their classes are so cheap!

Mom requested some Christmas pictures...we didn't take very many. Sorry mom :)

So I've never really had someplace to hang up clothes I didn't want to dry besides my door frames (sooo annoying), so when we found this adjustable flag pole holder at Home Depot for $6 I was pretty excited :). We just stuck a wooden dowel in it, mounted it opposite my washer and dryer, and...

voila! A disappearing drying rack haha. I am pretty excited about this dumb thing, I won't lie.

My new throw pillows made from cutting a king pillow in half...get on yours Marie!

I've been wanting to do this ever since I saw it on pinterest. Snow painting with hot water mixed with food coloring. We had a lot of fun playing in the snow.  We haven't had too much of it yet this winter :)

New Job Deets!

Hello everyone,

I first of all, want to say that I am SO glad that Mom, Dad, Colby, Marie, and the kids came up to Utah for Christmas.  It was so much fun!  I really enjoyed spending time with everyone.  Connor has been so irritated that he has no one but Mommy to play with when he wakes up in the morning.  I think he really liked seeing his Gramma first thing in the morning.  :)

So yesterday I had my first REAL day on the job.  I worked my first 12 hour shift.  It was AWESOME!  I get to do all of the dirty work (yes, I change diapers and have to give sponge baths) but I also get to do glucose readings, and help settle the patients that come back from having surgery.  I will do blood draws from the lines that they already have in their arms. I will also do some clerical work.  It should be pretty great.

I am super excited to get more experience and do things on my own.  Right now I have a trainer with me at all times, I'm grateful for that.  My boss is probably the nicest person that I have ever met.  She practically never goes home.  She stays as long as the unit needs her, which is pretty much 24-7.  It's a new unit, so they are still working out all the kinks.  She told me while I am training that I can just let her know what days I want to work and to just come in on those days.  So for right now it's super flexible.   A lot of the other HCA's go to school, so I will get to have my schedule for the whole semester, which is great because I sign up for what I want.

I'm hoping that with time, they will feel that they can give me more responsibilities.  It was so difficult to be away from Connor for that long and this job will be a sacrifice, but I felt like I was meant to be there yesterday.

Here are a few things I learned yesterday:
1) GET YOUR FLU SHOT- Just get it.  Get it for yourself, make your kids get it, make your spouse get it.  People die because of it.  I always knew people die from the flu, but it all of a sudden became real for me yesterday. (no, no one died when I was there)
2) DONT GET DIABETES - Please, please, please don't let yourself get diabetes. It is totally preventable and totally manageable (with exercise, not overeating, and watching your sugar intake- I really need to work on this)  Patients who have diabetes have a harder time recovering and getting back to normal.
3) DONT COME TO THE ICU!!- if you can avoid it (generally, you can with preventable measures)  take care of them before it's too late.  Sounds kind of negative, but you seriously don't want to have to be there- chest tubes and being intubated are not a fun time - from what I understand, you only go to the ICU if you are REALLY REALLY sick or if you are recovering from a major surgery, so don't come in.

That's that.  Love you all! Make healthy choices!