Skipping the Cleaning



I think one of the best days in February ended up being the day I skipped cleaning the house and made cookies for Primetime Family Reading Time. Primetime is a family reading program where we go to the school, have dinner, have books read to us and then have discussions on them, take the books home and read them all week, plus there are "door prize" drawing each week. Last fall we won a Dominos gift card, the game scrabble, a Halloween gift pack with books/stickers/candy, and a crate of building blocks.

Our family at Primetime Family Reading Time at John Dibert School

Last week we brought home Alexander and the Wind-up Mouse and when I was looking at the pictures I thought, "I could easily make a cookie mouse that looks like Alexander!" And so I did. I really wanted gray mice, like the artwork, but when I stopped at Rouse's on my way home from work they did not have any black coloring, so I thought "Mice can be brown!" and good thing because the chocolate frosting made them. I used a sixlet for the eye and a gum drop cut in half for the ear. The tail is made of pull-apart Twizzlers that I found in the Easter candy section. I also made two kinds of purple pebbles (from the book): cookies with gum drops and some with food coloring.

The cookies turned out to be a big hit and I was told I was the first parent to ever bring a snack. Of course I'm already working on ideas for next week's snack! Another side effect was that the kids wanted to make their own cut-out cookies and that made for a nice Saturday project.

Updates on our budget (New Year's resolution). Month 2 was good. I am happy we can stay on budget with food - that is the hardest part! We saw we needed to add a category for "housewares." Just things we need around the house. Our shower was redone and the seat/shelf was taken out, so we needed to buy a new shelf and there was no category for that!  We are hoping that congress can work things out so that Alex isn't furloughed one day a week starting in April. That will take some serious paring of our budget if it happens.

Alex won the weight contest losing 4lbs. I lost 1/2lb, but at least I was consistent! My goal for March will be to double that and lose an entire pound ;) Now Alex gets to plan date night as his reward.

I missed 4 days of my devotion book, so I guess that means I missed about once a week. I'm going to try and keep that up for March also.

I didn't have a goal of running in February, but I ran 72 miles over the month! I've been averaging around 50 miles a month since I started keeping track in October. I'm chalking the increase up to no visitors/no visiting! I also ran a 5k for church yesterday, the Skeeter Run, benefiting Image No Malaria. My time was 30:20. I haven't run any 5ks since 2009 and I don't think I've ever had a time under 35 minutes! So all those miles must have paid off. I am looking forward to running the Color Me Rad race in May with my sister-in-law Alison.