Congrats!

I want to send out a special congratulations to my little brother and his wife who are pregnant with their first baby and due June 1st! I am so excited to be an aunt again and cannot wait to meet the newest member of our family! Congrats again Jenny and Kevin, I know you will be great parents!

Successful hunting weekend!

Chris,my brother, my cousin, and my little cousin all headed up to our farm for another weekend of hunting. It turned out to be quite successful for Chris. He shot an 8 point buck early Sat. morning and a doe on Sunday morning. My little cousin, Colton, also shot a very nice 8 point buck that he was getting mounted.
Chris was able to come home early on Sunday to process up his meat (he does it himself and saves us lots of money!). I told him he had to do it at his parents house because I can't stand the site of the deer being cut up. So of course Andrew had to go with him and Chris said he stood by him the whole time helping him cut up the meat. I guess I will have another generation of hunters in my family!
It was funny too on Sat. listening to Adriana explain to my parents why it is important for Daddy to go deer hunting. I guess he has been working on her awhile ;-)
So we have lots of meat to get us through the winter. I'm not a big fan of deer meat, but I do have lots of recipes I make where I can't taste the deer meat. Plus I remember how very low fat deer meat is compared to other meat and that helps out! So if you come over to my house this winter and eat any meat, you may want to ask what it is first.......just kidding!

Another good shopping trip!

I knew I had to go back to my thyroid doctor for a checkup and I would get a new prescription so I saved the $10 gift card for a new prescription coupon. Well I went in today and filled my 3 month supply for $10 and used the $10 gift card coupon. I don't usually buy my kids movies as we rent them from the library for free, but I happened to have a $10 off coupon for the movie up so I decided to go ahead and get it. Well the combo set came with the blu ray disk, the regular disk, and a journal (which Adriana has been wanting so she can start writing in it) for $19.99. So I decided to get it. I brought the movie up and gave them the $10 off coupon then used the $10 gift card I just got from my other coupon. The final price was $.73! Man I love coupon shopping!

Awesome shopping trip!

I always do my shopping after I get off work on Wednesday night so I can get a head start on the $10 off coupon Thursday at Shop n Save. This week was the best trip I have had. I went in very tired at 1:30am but armed with lots of coupons. So my lack of sleep made up for it all when I saved $75.76 and only spend a whopping $.85! I saved 99%!!!!!! This is what makes coupons all worth it! I had to take a picture to prove it as I wouldn't believe it if I didn't see it! So here is the picture to prove my awesome trip! Now if it worked this good every week we would be doing awesome!

Happy Halloween!

I'm finally getting caught up on my Halloween pictures. We started Halloween getting dressed up and heading down to New Town St. Charles for a parade and trick or treating a little early.
Here is the three kids before heading out.

Adriana picked Tinkerbell to be this year. I think her blond hair made her the perfect fairy!
Andrew wanted to be Bumblebee Transformer. Not sure how he even knows about this guy since we have never seen a transformer movie before.

Joey was Mickey Mouse which has been a hand me down for several kids. He'll have to wait for next year to pick out his own costume, but he was very excited to be "me mouse" as he calls it.Here are the boys riding through New Town on the wagon. This is much easier than carrying them.That night we went trick or treating through the neigborhood. All the kids were super excited but the boys were really shy when the people would talk to them so they would never say trick or treat but Adriana was very into it and would tell jokes and everything.

Here is a picture of the kids walking up to a neighbors house.They only lasted about a half hour trick or treating then we headed home to hand out candy. I think the kids enjoyed this a lot more and were so excited every time someone came to our house.

After the kids spent the whole day eating nothing but candy, it came time to set all the candy out for the Halloween fairy to make into a special toy for each of the kids. This is the best way to get rid of all the extra candy that mamma would eat up ;-)

Halloween party at Andrew's school!

Thursday before Halloween Andrew's class had a Halloween party at school. Andrew was so excited about this that we left vacation early to make sure he made it to the party. All the moms came and helped out and we had a great party for the kids!
Here is Andrew and his buddy, Andrew, making each other into mummies.

Andrew and Andrew patiently waiting in line for their turn at the game.Andrew making his cookie.Andrew eating all the yummy food the moms brought!Here is the whole class eating their snack.Adriana got to come along too and help out with the kids. She really enjoyed being the big helper plus she got to dress up too!

Vacation at Branson

The week before Halloween my parents took us down to Branson for vacation while Adriana was on fall break from school. My parents rented a two bedroom condo right on Table Rock Lake and it worked out perfect for all of us. We came down on Saturday after Adriana's soccer game and went grocery shopping when we got there then just hung around the condo that night. Sunday morning we got up early and went to Silver Dollar City.
Here is my parents with the kids when we first got there. At the kids request, we headed straight for the rides. Here is Adriana riding the frog ride.

Adriana and Chris on the swings.Andrew said he was going to wait until his cousin Jacob came with us over Thanksgiving to ride the rides so he didn't ride any.
Next we headed to the giant ball area to play. This place is huge and full of fun things for the kids to play.
Here is Andrew climbing through the tunnels.Chris even joined in helping the kids make it through.Then it was lunch time. They had an area set off where they had food from all different places to eat. Although I didn't get a picture of that, I did get one of Joey's favorite spot which of course was the desert spot.Then we headed for the boys favorite, the train ride. This is my all time favorite train ride because not only do they show you the park but they have robbers robbing the train. My kids think this is so fun and grab up all my change to hand to the robbers as they come by.
Here's Joey enjoying the train ride, thinking he is a big boy sitting on the seat by himself.Uh Oh! Here comes the robbers!
The kids handing over the change.
I had to get a picture of the squirrels here. They are not afraid of anything and we were practically hand feeding them peanuts.

On Monday and Tuesday it was raining off and on so I didn't bring my camera out. But we spent Monday visiting the dam and the egg hatchery.

Tuesday we went shopping and we got Adriana's halloween costume at the Disney store since all the stores in St. Louis are gone. Then we went to the Imax and saw a movie and the kids really enjoyed that.

On Wednesday we headed back to Silver Dollar City and the weather was perfect.

Of course we headed back to the rides first again.

Look, wait who is that? Thats me Wow I made it into a picture!

Me and Adriana riding the dumbo ride.Then we went to watch the saloon show, which has been a favorite of mine since I was a little girl.

Adriana posing with one of the saloon girls.
Andrew getting kissed by the saloon girl, although from the look on his face I don't think he likes girls yet.As you can tell my husband was taking pictures of all the saloon girls, which most were close up.

Andrew getting his picture taken after the show, of course had to bring his gun in the picture with him.Then after the show he had to run around shooting all the bad guys because he was the sheriff (hum, wonder where he gets that from?).Before we left we had to head to the petting zoo, a very favorite spot for the kids.

Joey telling the goats "hello"!
Andrew was backed into the corner and the goat was saying "just hand over all your food and no one gets hurt!"

Then our future veterinarian decides she is going to try to feed the goats some leaves since she saw one eating one earlier. (And you can notice her change of clothes because Chris, Adriana, and I thought it would be great fun to ride the water ride and yes, we got soaked! So I had to go and buy Adriana some dry clothes to wear because we are not the smartest family around!)We had to head back home after Silver Dollar City that night because Andrew had his school halloween party Thurs afternoon and you know we can't miss that! Special thank you for my mom and dad for giving us such a wonderful vacation yet again! If it wasn't for you we would never leave our house!

More lost teeth

I tell you Adriana is soon to be without any teeth left if she keeps loosing them at this rate. Last night her and Andrew were wrestling around and she came up with her hand over her mouth crying. Well I pulled her hand down and saw a mouth of missing teeth. She has now lost her two front teeth. But it wasn't all from Andrew because they were already loose. So now she has lost her four bottom teeth and two front teeth and two more front teeth are loose. She's not even half way through kindergarten! So the toothfairy had to make a double stop last night. I will post a picture after I take one today.

Carving the pumpkin

On yet another rainy day, we decided to make the best of it and carve out big pumpkin we got and make some yummy pumpkin seeds. So I cut open the pumpkin and gave each of the kids a bucket of "guts" to hunt out the seeds.
Adriana and Andrew got right to work finding the seeds.Joey, not so much. He didn't like making his hands all messy so he decided to just watch his siblings.Yummy......guts!

And yes I know I am not very creative at all when it comes to making my pumpkins but hey I tried! So here is mommy's masterpiece!And the kids loved gobbling up all the pumpkin seeds!

Pumpking patch #2

Because of the very, very rainy month of October this year we didn't get to do most of the things we do every year. This year we had to cut out Boo at the Zoo and Grants Farm plus a couple of pumpkin patches because it was always raining when we planned on going. But we did get a couple of more pumpkin patches in. Adriana got to go back to Theis Farms with her school but was unable to take pictures because of the school rules about taking pictures of the kids during school hours. I was also able to take the boys to Daniels Farms with my MOPS group while Adriana was in school. The boys had a great time even though it was once again a very rainy day. This pumpkin patch had most of its activities inside.
So we first stopped off and saw the petting zoo. Andrew got to pet a sheep and told me he felt like carpet and he didn't like that. Joey wasn't brave enough to touch the pets but he sure thought they were pretty funny!Next we went out and checked out all the riding tractors they had. If you know my boys at all then you know they were in heaven as they LOVE tractors (can you tell they come from a farming family).Andrew and his tractor. He's testing it out to see what it can do.The pumpkin patch also had a great area where the kids could play in corn. My boys loved this area too and spent most of the time playing here. It was great because there was hardly anyone else here so they had a box they got to play in by themselves and they thought that was great.Not sure what they are talking about here but I'm sure it probably has something to do with getting mommy full of corn!Joey, where did Andrew go?

There he is! This was Andrew's favorite place! He played in here for a good 30 minutes while Joey and I picked out some pumpkins. I didn't think I would ever get him out of there.So while Andrew was playing in the maze, Joey got to help mommy pick out a few pumpkins.
"There mommy, I think that is a good pumpkin!"

I'll call Daddy and tell him we found a great pumpkin!So despite the rain we were still able to enjoy the pumpkin patch!