Weekend in GR

This past weekend we spent it at my mom's in GR. It was her birthday last Thursday so we headed there for the weekend to celebrate and my sister and Kaite came too. So my mom had a houseful of all of us there! She had foot surgery again about five weeks ago so while she can start driving again, she's supposed to take it easy and not drive too much. So instead of her usually coming here, we headed there. It was a fairly relaxing weekend. The kids made Christmas cookies with Kaite which they loved. Kaite's been designated the cookie maker over the past few years so she and the kids make the cut out cookies. The kids love making cookies with cousing Kaite! They all did an excellent job this year! The cookies turned out perfectly. I just love these cookies which my mom used to make over the years. The kids have grown quite fond of them too. They're sour cream cookies. I know, it sounds weird... sour cream in cookies, but they are sooooo good! We don't even frost them they're that good! I will post the recipe soon!

Here's some pics of my little bakers and cousin Kaite!

This was at the end of making the second batch of dough. They were being silly playing with the flour! They thought it was funny that Kaite put flour all over their noses.

Thanks to Kaite for making the cookies and to my mom for making not one, but two batches of dough! While we were at my mom's the kids discovered the cabinet of games my mom still has from when we lived at home. They were all into checking out as many games as they could. One they discovered was Monopoly. I couldn't believe how well they picked up on playing the game, and how much they enjoyed it. Evan was bummed when we left on Sunday that he wasn't going to be able to play Monopoly with Kaite. Looks like there will be game night on Christmas when we see Kaite again! Here's the cousins having game night!

Saturday night we went to the mall for a little bit. It had been a long time since I had been to Rivertown Crossings so I wanted to stroll around for a bit. Even though it had been awhile since we had been to the mall, the kids surely did not forget about the carousel! They wanted to go with Katie over mom & dad of course. They had a fun time and were being silly on the carousel every time they passed us.


It was a nice weekend. It's too bad cousin Kaite doesn't live closer to us because the kids sure do love spending time with her. Up next I need to tell you about our Elf on the Shelf and Emmaline's Christmas play at school! Slowly but surely I'll get caught up... thanks for hanging in there with me!

Preschool Bake Sale

Yes, I'm still playing catch up on here. Let's just face it... I think it will be that way until the end of the year. The fact that Christmas is now less than two weeks away, the kids are done with school this week, and I've still got shopping, baking, and teacher gifts to make, and a school Christmas party to get ready for means I don't have a lot of extra time for blogging. I'm trying to get a lot of this stuff done this week. Some of the things need to be done this week, but I also want to get as much done as I can before the kids are out of school for winter break.

I had to take a break from everything to share with you the bake sale that Em's preschool did last Thursday. Let me remind you that Em's preschool is at her teacher's house. It's not a huge preschool. Her teacher Miss Shirley is a certified preschool teacher and has her whole basement converted into a classroom. There are two other ladies that assist Shirley with the teaching. It's a very welcoming environment for the children and with only 12 kids in Em's class and three teachers it makes for a perfect learning environment. I believe Shirley has three different classes (divided by age groups). Anyways, Shirley organizes a bake sale every year with Okemos High School students to raise money to buy gifts for needy children in the area. This year the money raised would be given to the Meridian Township Police Dept. to buy gifts such as coats, boots, hats, and toys for Christmas.

Parents were asked to donate something like cookies, cupcakes, party mix, puppy chow, etc. to be sold at the bake sale. I made these coconut chocolate chip cookies that I recently discovered when my friend Brenda brought some over. Super easy and yummy! I'll have to post the recipe. I also made some of my pretzel buttons. Some of the high school students also made stuff to sell. Each preschool student was paired up with a high school student to sell the baked goods. Each child got a baker's hat to wear and a balloon tied around their wrist so they could be spotted easily among the "big kids" as Em calls them, a.k.a. high school students.

Back to the bake sale in a minute so I can give you a little side note. Em had a make up dance class to do last Monday and since it was at a different time than her regular class she had different teachers. One was Kate, my neighbor and the other was Tess a high school student at Okemos High School. Em sees Tess often at the dance studio, and on Monday Tess told her she was going to be at the bake sale. Em was pretty excited. So now back to the bake sale. When we got to the high school the preschool kids had to find their high school buddy. Right away Tess saw Em and since Tess did a lot of the organizing she paired up with Em which made her really happy. Emmaline quickly forgot I was there and went about her duties helping with the bake sale. She was so darn cute! Check her out with Tess!


They took turns with the other kids working at the tables of desserts as well as walking throughout the cafeteria taking trays of goodies around to sell. Here's a few pics I thought you'd like to see. It's just too adorable for words!

Helping set up the goodies!

Working at one of the tables!

Going around to all the tables of students at lunch time to see if they want to buy anything.

The sale went from 11-12:45pm and each item was $1. For example one cupcake, a bag of 2-3 cookies, a cake pop, a baggie of puppy chow, etc. each a dollar. The amount of desserts was phenomenal! Just look at this!

I just received an email from Miss Shirley last night with the total amount of money raised from the bake sale. Drum roll please...... $1,976! Isn't that amazing? I'm just floored by that amount and so proud of all the preschool and high school students! Lots of needy children will be getting some much needed items this Christmas! This event went above and beyond my expectations, and kudos to Shirley for organizing this!

Speechless

Today has been a very low key day for us around here. I spent the last three days cleaning, putting out all my Christmas decorations, cleaning, decorating the tree, and yes more cleaning. Friday night Evan had a friend come over for pizza/movie night. His good friend Gavin from kindergarten isn't in his class this year so they don't get to see each other often. We finally had a free Friday night so he was glad Gavin could come over. I wanted to get the house decorated and everything done before the weekend so that was good motivation. I love the house at Christmastime, it looks beautiful in here! I've had candles burning, the tree on almost all the time when we're home, and the house is clean (well the downstairs)! Love it!

Saturday morning we went and had breakfast with Santa at Bravo. They had a breakfast buffet, a coloring & cookie decorating station, and Santa was there! This was the first year Bravo has done this so we thought we'd check it out. The kids had fun. Here they are with Santa!


After we got home from breakfast I pretty much cleaned all day and prepped some food for our football get together with friends last night. Our neighbors Jim and Kate, and friend Brenda & her daughter Keyera came over to watch MSU play in the inaugural Big Ten Championship game. A rematch against Wisconsin after MSU beat them in the final seconds earlier in the season. I wanted to go to the game really bad, but it just wasn't gonna happen. So the next best thing... invite some friends over, eat yummy food, drink some beer, and cheer on the Spartans! I was hoping for a great performance by the Spartans. I did not want a let down like the Nebraska game. If the Spartans were going to win they had to play a full 60 minutes of football. Well, the game was great! Everything you want in a championship game! The Spartans had some trick plays up their sleeve, Cousins didn't choke under pressure. The big guys, B.J. Cunningham, Keith Nichol, Keyshawn Martin, LeVeon Bell, and Edwin Baker all played their hearts out. As did the rest of the team.

MSU lead most of the game, and then it all changed with about 3 minutes left in the game. I'm really not being a poor sport when I say this, but MSU was robbed of the Big 10 Championship and a trip to the Rose Bowl. MSU did what they needed to do to win that game, and because of two huge plays called back, the officials cost MSU the game. One was a long reception by Keyshawn Martin which he clearly caught with one foot in bounds, but they ruled differently after replay. Then with about 1 min 45 sec left Keyshawn again came up huge for the Spartans and returned a punt all the way to the Wisconsin three yard line. It was clear MSU would score and win the game (they were down by three at this point). However, the Big Ten clearly wanted Wisconsin in the Rose Bowl and called roughing the kicker to give the ball back to Wisconsin. The Badger kicker is a former soccer player, and you can clearly see on the replay how he held his leg up (a popular soccer move) until the MSU player got close enough to him to bring it down on him and thus getting the roughing the kicker call. With no timeouts left there was nothing MSU could do. At this point I was totally speechless, I still am. I hate sometimes that I get so wrapped up in football, but I do. I am that true diehard Spartan fan. I'm literally sick over how this game ended. It's one thing to lose, but to lose a deciding game for a trip to the Rose Bowl like this is horrible. Once again MSU gets shit on, and the Big Ten won't have their best team in the Rose Bowl for the second year in a row. I feel so bad for the team, especially the seniors, as well as Coach D. They really are deserving to be playing in Pasadena this year.

It was hard to get up this morning, and with the gloomy weather it just sort of went with the mood. Not much motivation to do anything. It's been nice to be lazy. We did go out for a little bit and went to the Arts and Crafts fair at MSU. It was pretty much picked over by this afternoon. I really wanted to go yesterday, but didn't have time. Tonight isn't going to be much different than today. Sitting by the tree and fireplace and waiting to see if MSU gets any respect for their bowl selection. Doubtful, but I guess there's always a little hope.

Hello Again!

I'm back!!!! Wow, I've been neglecting this blog for the last couple weeks. Ugh! It's been a busy couple of weeks for me, and unfortunately life just gets in the way of blogging sometimes. As much as I love blogging, even if I have some down time at the end of the day, sometimes blogging just isn't what I want to do. I don't even know if I remember what I've done over the past couple weeks. It seems like everything has all run together. A lot of it has been with my Uppercase Living. Unfortunately UL sort of took a back seat over the past six months or so (especially over the summer). I had been trying an trying to promote it, and just wasn't getting anywhere. Such a bummer because I really love the stuff and think UL makes beautiful expressions. Then our new catalog came out and in September UL launched their new jewelry line Blume. There were lots of changes in the company, and with all that I decided I was going to try to get my UL going again. I created my own UL Facebook page. Slowly, but surely it's picked up a little. Because of my UL Facebook page I got two parties booked. One gal searched Facebook for UL and she found my page and emailed me. Yay! I was so excited! I got the two parties booked, but had to wait patiently because they weren't until November. Those parties finally took place over the last couple weeks, and I thoroughly enjoyed getting back into UL! I had two fantastic parties and even got three parties booked from them. Yay again! I'm still not where I want to be with UL, but I'm not giving up and still working hard to promote it. It's not widely known around Michigan as it is in some other parts of the country, but I think if people just "check it out" they will fall in love with it too. There's so much you can do with UL, the possibilities are endless. I encourage you to visit my website sometime and just take a peek and see what UL offers if you're not familiar. http://lisakohuth.uppercaseliving.net Also, check out my UL Facebook page and if you're not a fan, "like" my page to keep up to date on UL. Sometimes I even do giveaways on there! Invite your friends, family, co-workers to "like" my page as well and to visit my website. If you ever decide you want to order anything you can always order from my website or contact me and I will help you. I'm always looking for hostesses to have a party. I'd love to share UL with you. I even travel within about an hour so don't let distance keep you from hostessing. With all that said, on top of my two UL parties I decided to try out a vendor fair. Other UL demonstrators say it's a way to "get your name out there." We'll see if anything comes of it.

In other news over the last couple weeks, it's been day to day "stuff" around here. Dance continues to keep us busy a couple nights a week, as does homework, housework, laundry, and kids, all the time! I can't even believe Thanksgiving came and went as fast as it did. The fact that Christmas is less than a month away is a little scary! We ended up staying around here for Thanksgiving this year. I really didn't feel like being on the road. It was nice to have a low key long weekend and sort of relax. We went to Greg's mom's for Thanksgiving dinner. Everything was delicious, and of course we ate too much turkey and fixings. I made my sweet potato casserole which Em requested and loved! I also made green bean casserole which Evan fell in love with, and is already asking me to make again soon! I skipped late night/early morning black Friday shopping this year. I ended up going out about 7:30am to Target & Ulta. Picked up a couple things and that was about it. Eastwood Towne Center (the mall right by us) was passing out 100 grab bags at 10am with free gift cards in them ranging from $10-$50. I wanted to go there, but didn't want to stand in line forever. I ended up getting there about 8:45am. The line was only about 30 deep so that wasn't bad. I got in line and then awhile later Greg and the kids, and his mom met me over there. I ended up getting a $25 gift card, Greg, $15, and his mom $20 so that wasn't too bad. We did pretty good! We saw the Muppet movie on Friday which we enjoyed. Saturday was football day, and then I finally decided it was time to tackle the basement mess. I spent a good chunk of the day down there, reorganizing, cleaning, and getting rid of stuff. It's time some of the toys go! What a project! It's a lot better down there, but still not completely done. Sunday we had a birthday party to go to for my friend Marie's kids. It was nice to see them and hang out for awhile. I did manage to get the tree up yesterday morning as well. It still needs to be decorated, but at least it's up. That's my project for this week.

That pretty much brings us to today. Time to get back into a routine after a long holiday weekend. I'm gonna really work hard to try and not neglect this blog again. I'm gonna be more realistic and shoot for three posts a week for now instead of trying to get to it everyday. I've still got a few "old news" items I want to share with you so bare with me as I try to get caught up here over the next week or so.

Iceman 2011 Traverse City

Last Friday we headed to Traverse City for the Iceman bike race. It was a short trip only staying one night and coming back Saturday because Evan had his last football game on Sunday. We lucked out again this year, and the weather was pretty decent. The morning was chilly, but by mid-day the sun was out and it was almost 60. I'll take it! Greg did the 30 mile trek from Kalkaska to Traverse City. It was his eighth year racing in the Iceman. He wasn't well prepared this year, as he had been sick with cough & cold for two weeks prior. Plus he didn't ride much before the race. He was quite congested on Saturday for the race, but he still managed to finish. It's more than I could ever do. We're still proud of him. Riding through the woods, with big hills, and mud for 30 miles isn't my idea of a fun time. He enjoys it though. He's determined to be well trained for next years race. Here he is nearing the finish line.
This year both kids wanted to race! This was Em's first year racing, and Evan's third year racing. Emmaline was so excited to get the chance to race finally. She couldn't wait to get on the bike. She did the little kids short version, about a half mile. She did such a great job. That little girl of mine pedaled that bike until the finish line, and then still didn't stop. She didn't get off her bike at all and she finished with a big smile on her face. She was so proud of herself, as were we. She was wearing her medal all night long. She even tried to wear it to bed. Silly girl. Here is Em crossing the finish line! Such a great moment!
Evan did the longer version which was like a mile and a half. Because both races started one right after the other, I wasn't able to watch either take off at the starting line. Greg ran along side Emme in case she were to fall over or something, but she didn't really need daddy. I had to get over to the finish line so I could get both kids coming in. Evan was a big boy and handled it well that neither of us could see his take off. He said he could handle it by himself. It definitely was a proud momma moment when I saw him cross that finish line. He climbed the big hill at the end still on his bike. He didn't get off once to walk the bike up hills. He was pretty excited that as he was finishing he was racing with some of the "big" guys who were also finishing. (These were the first timers that took extra long riding the 30 mile big race & finished 4 hours later from their start time. Hey, at least they finished!) Here's my not so little guy anymore crossing the finish line!
It was a fun afternoon, and I even ran into my old college roommate who I haven't seen in probably 10 years. What a nice surprise it was to run into Becky and her husband Phil. It was nice to catch up and we're hoping to meet up again next year in Traverse City (she lives in Cadillac) or maybe she and her family will come to E.Lansing for a visit. Here's a few more pics from our day at the bike race!

My two little bike racers!

With their medals after the race!

Sunday Funday

Before I tell you about this past weekend I have to back up and get you caught up on the previous weekend. If you remember we had the hockey game on Saturday and Evan's football game on Sunday. We also went to the MSU basketball game on Sunday. Every now and then Greg's office gets tickets to sit in the president's box at Breslin. Unfortunately only employees get a ticket and there's not any for spouses. There's usually a drawing among the employees to see who gets the tickets. His name got drawn so he asked if we had plans for Sunday. We didn't so he was planning to go. Then he found out that not everybody in his office that were offered tickets could go. So there were a few extra and they drew names to see who would get the extras. He got picked for one so lucky me I got to go!!! It was only an exhibition game, but since we don't have season b-ball tickets and rarely ever go to a game, it was still fun! It was nice to have a little "date" kid free and be able to actually enjoy a full sporting event!

Let me tell you folks, this is definitely the way to go to a sporting event. The "Royal" treatment all the way. Nice seats for the game, and whatever food and drinks you wanted. They give you a menu and you order the items you want and when you want them- start of game or halftime. It really was a nice experience. I could totally get used to it, but the likely hood of it happening again anytime again soon probably is slim to none so I'm thankful for the experience. Mark it off the bucket list! Here's some photos from our afternoon.

The view from the door inside the president's box!

Another view

A few munchies pre-game

The MSU basketball team

The one and only "Dancing Bear," Draymond Green at the free throw line! He's our favorite player!

Looking up into the president's box from the "regular" seats. LOL

School Halloween Parties & More

I'm gonna try to give you the quick overview of the kids' school Halloween parties. Evan's party was on Friday. I'm not sure why. I guess they didn't want the kids all hyped up on Monday, but c'mon it's Halloween. The kids are bound to be hyped up. Anyhow, I had volunteered to make cupcakes for the party. I went with some that I had seen on Pinterest. I just used a box mix because well it's 1st grade and they really don't appreciate made from scratch. LOL. I thought they turned out pretty cute with the pumpkins on top!

Evan's party was only for about an hour. Not the whole morning like last year in kindergarten. They had Halloween themed centers to go to. The kids had a good time. Here's a couple pics from the party. The whole class was cute in their orange & black and Halloween shirts.

Here's Evan working on his "Dem Bones" graphing.

Emmaline's party was on Monday. She got to wear her costume to school. It was cute to see all the little one's in their costumes. Here's her class all dressed up. Even her teachers wore costumes! Here they all are.

They all got to parade around the neighborhood by her school and show off their costumes. It was too cute. Em's teacher Miss Shirley had her dog lead the kids. Too funny!

I was the party planner mom for Em's class, and I had volunteered to bring snack. I found these adorable Pumpkin Rice Krispie treats on Pinterest and thought they'd be perfect for her party. These were pretty sticky to make into pumpkin shapes, but with the help of my wonderful husband, we got them done. They turned out pretty cute!

And, one more Halloween thing to share. Saturday we took the kids to their first hockey game. I got an email that the Jr. Spartan Club kids got two free tickets to the game with their membership card. I figured this was a great opportunity to take them to a game. Ev's been saying he wanted to go to a hockey game. So we went, and it was also trick-or-treat night with Sparty there so the kids got to wear their costumes. Here they are with Sparty.

Hey Sparty, "Trick-or-Treat" Sparty has such big hands that he gave big handfuls of candy!