You do what you gotta do

I was doing dinner on my own tonight. I wanted a simple cook and clean-up experience, so I went with my "stand-by" of cheese-eggs in wheat tortillas and sliced fruit. Since I completely wanted to avoid the CHA-OS that has been a reoccurring dinner event, I found myself doing the following:

I made some cinnamon rolls (the pop-up kind---eeekk---HATE opening them) and proclaimed that ANY bad behavior, complaining or lack of eating dinner would result in NO cinnamon roll. Nada. Not even a smidgen of icing.

It worked.

As parents, we try not to give sweets as a reward, but I had a feeling this would be the golden ticket.

After dinner, my daughter and I cleaned up the table while my oldest son helped his brother get into his pyjamas. I then told the boys that they could watch 10-15 minutes of SB (the square, yellow guy), while I folded laundry.

Yep. Used it as a babysitter.

A book was read and bedtime was a breeze.

Chaos contained.
Success.
No guilt.whatsoever.

Cleaning out the old blog posts

Easter 2009

I saw this draft in my posting list.

I have no idea why it is still sitting there, un-posted.

I guess things have been super busy lately! These are some of those "jiggler" eggs that we made and some egg nest cookies that I found in a German store. For the record, the cookies are super cute but have a strange coconut flavor and very hard candies. Needless to say, they just looked pretty. Even the kids wouldn't eat them-and that's saying a lot!
Lauren just had to find a caterpillar while she was in her nice dress.

I love the girls in these dresses!! You just might see Ashlyn's dress again for her "moving up" 6th-grade graduation ceremony. We'll see.

Nicholas loves hanging out with his dad! They are either getting along or egging each other on....
This is the only basket photo that I could manage before they were opened!!
Logan had a fuzzy monkey in his basket. This kid climbs on everything and figures out any type of gadget~hence the name "Monkey".
When you are one of five kids in a competition such as an egg hunt where a golden egg and candy are involved, you need to move fast!

Bwhahahaha! That Easter Bunny even placed an egg high on the tree branch! Ryan jumped for a little while until someone finally shook the branch.
Logan must sample all chocolate before he can continue his searching.

Lauren found some treat eggs among our egg tree in the back garden. You see these plastic eggs hung on trees and bushes all around our German town. This is actually a living tree that we had several Christmas' ago. It seems to be doing well, despite the fact that we neglected to water it after Christmas and Allen let it fall from the third floor window so we wouldn't have needles on four flights of stairs!

Okay, I saw another old blog post that I need to add soon. So embarrassing-I can't believe it.

Picture perfect

http://shaunamaness.squarespace.com/shauna-maness-photography/2009/5/7/miles-kiddos.html

I love seeing these pictures of the kids! We tempted fate last week on a rainy day and had a photo shoot near a local field. Shauna spent so much time getting to know the kids and took tons of shots! She is so talented and fun. We have been blessed to know her. Maybe our paths will cross again some day in Texas. I can't wait to see the rest. This is just a preview.



Now we return to regularly scheduled baseball games and practices, softball games and practices, appointments, school activities, laundry, hip-hop dance class, youth group...........be back soon.