A Huge Praise!

I wanted to let you know that our dear friends the Brosius' have accepted a referral for their adoption. Check out their story HERE. It is amazing to see God working in their lives. Please keep the Brosius family and their new little one in your prayers. THANK YOU!

I DID IT!

I did it! I made an apron for Ellen. I cut it out, pieced it together, and sewed it up! : ) I won't dare take all the credit because I had some wonderful help from the ladies at church. I was so afraid of even trying this project, but my friend Erin took me to Wal-Mart and helped me get everything I needed. I spent 4 hours at church today working on the apron and brought it home to add the ribbon straps. Ellen LOVES the apron. I had to keep it a secret...in case I butchered it. But everything worked out well. It really is cute, and believe it or not, I just might try something else again soon!

10 months

I know I'm late posting this, but Sophia is now 10 months old. She has accomplished so many things this month.
*She's pulling up and slowly cruising on the coffee table.
*She has started using the signs we are teaching her. She can do "more" "all done" and "milk" on a pretty regular basis.
*She definitely knows who we are. If I ask her where Ellen is, she starts crawling to her room! *She has stolen Tim's heart by saying DA DA DA! Can you believe it? For how attached she was to me she won't say MA MA! I know that developmentally they say da da first, but I was really holding out for this.
*She has her 2 bottom teeth and 1 of her top teeth with the second top one breaking the skin the past couple of days. It totally changes her look. She's not a baby anymore!
*She is learning how to play peek-a-boo and how to talk on her telephone.
*She's also doing some "walking" behind her walker. I use the term loosely, but she sure is trying hard.
I'm sure there are a few things that I've left out and when I remember them I'll leave a post.

STUCK

Sophia was stuck and she couldn't get up. We heard her fussing and found her like this. I guess she was at such an angle that she didn't have the ab strength to sit up.

Valentine's Day Lasagna

Every year for Valentine's Day, Tim and I make dinner together. We ship the girls off to some friends and enjoy a meal together full of adult conversation. Last year I came across this amazing lasagna recipe, I wanted to share the site with you but I can't find it anymore. It was so good, we decided to do it again this year. I think it's going to be a tradition for us.

1 pound of sweet Italian sausage
1 pound of ground beef
1/2 cup of chopped onions
2 cloves of garlic chopped

Brown the ground beef, Italian sausage, onions and garlic in a pot until they start to cook. It takes about 6 to 9 minutes to brown the meat. I like to use a Dutch oven to cook this portion of the recipe. I use a medium low temperature to brown the meat.


1 (28 ounce) can of crushed tomatoes
2 (8 ounce) cans of tomato sauce
2 (6 ounce) cans of tomato paste
1/2 cup of water
Gently stir this into the cooking meat.


2 tablespoons white sugar
2 teaspoons fresh Basil leaves chopped (I used dried)
2 tablespoons fresh Italian parsley chopped (I used dried)
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon Italian Seasoning
1/2 teaspoon ground pepper
Gently stir these seasoning into the sauce.

Cover the pot and let the meat sauce simmer. Simmer on low heat for 1 hour and 30 minutes This is the ideal simmer time but not mandatory. If you don’t have time it will still be great after one hour of simmering.
I will sometimes make this sauce and refrigerate it after it finishes simmering. I will use the meat sauce the next day to put the rest of this recipe together. For some reason Italian meat sauce taste even better the next day. But that’s up to you. (I think this is the key!)


Soak 12 lasagna noodles.
The lasagna noodles need to be soaked in hot tap water for 15 minutes.
While the noodles are soaking you can make the cheese filling. (For me, this leaves the noodles too chewy...next time I'll probably boil them)

Put the following in a mixing bowl:
23 ounces of ricotta cheese.

1/2 teaspoon fresh grated nutmeg
Grate fresh nutmeg over the Ricotta cheese.

Add the following:
1 egg2 tablespoons fresh Italian parsley chopped (I used dried)
Mix these ingredients together with a spoon

Now we start building the lasagna layers.
Use a 9×13 inch baking pan. Spread 2 Cups of meat sauce on the bottom of the pan.

Remove your lasagna noodles out of the water bath. Shake water off wet noodles.
Lay 6 noodles across the layer of sauce.

Spread half of the ricotta cheese mixture over the layer of noodles.

Spread 1/2 of the mozzarella cheese over the ricotta layer. Sprinkle half of the Parmesan cheese over the mozzarella layer.

Spread 2 cups of meat sauce over the cheese layer

Lay down the next layer of noodles. Spread the remaining ricotta mixture over noodles. Spread the mozzarella and Parmesan cheeses saving some cheese for the top of the lasagna. Put the last layer of meat sauce on the cheeses. Sprinkle the remaining cheese on top.
It should look similar to the picture above.

Cover with foil. Bake in preheated oven at 350 F (177 C) for 25 minutes. Remove foil and bake uncovered for another 25 minutes.

Remove from oven and allow to cool for approximately 15 minutes.

DELICIOUS!

Mr. Fix-it

My husband is so amazing! He has such a gift of fixing things around the house. Well, I gave him another thing to work on a few weeks ago. I know many of you remember my snowball story and how I broke the window last winter...well, that didn't happen again, but I did break something else. This time it was a total accident. I was showering in the hall bath before Tim got up one morning. The shampoo was in a holder over the shower head and somehow it slipped out. On its way down it fell on the water spout and broke it right off! I couldn't believe what had just happened. I quickly turned the water off and examined the damage myself. All I could think about was what was Tim going to say this time? As always he was very understanding and took it as a challenge to fix it himself.

He did a great job of fixing the spout and it's as good as new! Thanks babe!

Valentine's Day Cookies

Ellen and I made some sugar cookies for Valentine's Day. Before we got started Ellen ran to her
room and came back with her goggles. I asked her what the goggles were for and she told me she was wearing them to keep the flour out of her eyes! I LOVE THIS KID : )


We made heart cookies to take to Tim's school. It's hard to tell, but we did red, pink and purple.

Ellen worked really hard on icing her cookies...and yes, she ate every crumb of them!

Finished product...the look pretty and taste good too!

Too fast!

My baby is growing up!

Sophia is pulling up on everything. She's figuring out how to walk behind her push toy.

Huge Snowflakes

We had a beautiful snow last week. Here are a few pictures...the snowflakes were HUGE!

This is a picture looking up into the sky. It was so amazing to see the snowflakes falling. Ellen thought it was pretty cool to see them coming right at her face.

God is so good!

This post isn't like most of my posts. I don't usually write about myself, but I feel God calling me to do it...so here it goes.
I've been praying about some things for our family and I wasn't feeling like I was getting any direction.
(Let's back up a little bit) I am part of a women's bible study that meets every Wednesday, and in our prayer group I mentioned that I was struggling with my daily quiet time. I was filling my day with "stuff" that I thought needed to be done. Well, that afternoon I had some time to myself (which is rare) and I saw my bible on the kitchen table. I knew that the Lord wasn't going to answer my questions about my family when I wasn't doing my part of being in the word.
So, I said, "Lord, where do I even start? Do I pick a book and start reading? What book do I pick?" No sooner had that thought come to my mind did the Lord say, "I want you to study all of the Godly women of the bible." I was in shock that the Lord spoke to me that quickly! Obviously he didn't want me to waste anymore time so he gave me what I was looking for!
I remembered that I had a book about Godly women of the bible and started making a list of all the names I could find. I googled Godly women of the bible and came up with several more. (Isn't the Internet amazing?) I alphabetized my list and started from there. Every day I take a new woman and find out all I can about her. I feel like the Lord wants me to take what I find and implement it into my life.
So far I've read about Abigail, Anna, Deborah, Dinah & Tamar, & Dorcas. I'm not sure if I'll keep posting about this or not. I'll leave that up to Him!
Thanks for reading this unconventional post for garbergang3.

Recycled Valentines

Ellen and I made some recycled valentines this week. I've made them before, when I was a teacher, and I came across the idea again while surfing the blog-word.

We made rainbow crayons! It's an easy thing to do with little ones and they get so excited to see the end result.
Here's how you do it.

Step 1: Find all the broken/old crayons and peel the paper off. (Good for those little fingers)



Step 2: Break the crayons into pea-sized pieces. I used an old knife.



Step 3: Put the crayon pieces into an OLD muffin tin. I have read that if you spray them with non-stick cooking spray it helps. I forgot this step, so they didn't pop right out, but I found another way. (see step 4) Make sure the tins a full with crayons and bake in the oven at 275 degrees for 7-8 minutes.

Step 4: After the crayons melt, let them cool. This is where I fixed my non-stick problem. I put the tin into the freezer. They cooled a lot quicker and the wax pulled away from the sides of the tin. Just like if you put a glass candle holder full of hardened wax in the freezer it will "shrink" and pop right out of the holder.

Step 5: Now you have beautiful rainbow crayons. As you can see, we used a heart shaped tin. Ellen is giving them to her friends with her Valentine's Day cards.

This was super easy and lots of fun.

Daddy's Girls

Tim and his girls!

Tim is such a great dad to Ellen and Sophia.

Winter in Desloge

The girls and I made trip to Desloge a couple of weekends ago. We went to see my mom after she came home from her mission trip to Africa. We had a great visit with lots of snow (and sickness) but we'll forget the sickness part and focus on the fun times in the snow)

Ellen and Dustin hanging out on the couch. It's so funny to catch her mimicking someone else.



Ellen and Papa trying to build a snowman. There was so much snow, but it was very powdery, so it wouldn't stick. That didn't really matter to her because all she wanted to do was play in it anyway.

Kate came out to see what was going on. She got to try out her new snow boots, but they didn't take her very far. She wasn't too sure about the uneven ground so she just stood there until someone picked her up. She's so cute! (even if she doesn't want anything to do with me)

We couldn't find any sleds so my dad made one out of a trash can lid. They took off and made some tracks. Ellen had a blast! Even when she fell off and snow covered her face.

Ellen is a little worker! Dad and Dustin were shoveling the snow off the drive way and Ellen wanted to help so bad. Dad gave her a push broom and she went right to work. Thank you Lord for giving Ellen such a strong desire to help others.

The view of my parents back yard. Snow covered trees are one of my favorite things!

Cousins, Kate and Ellen. I believe Ellen was reading a book to Kate. I love watching them play together. One of these days I hope they are as close as I am with my cousins!