Christmas Pumpkins

Merry Christmas everyone! Here are some fun photo's of our some of our pumpkins! Just today I finally carved Gabriella's pumpkin for her. A little late maybe? Well I hope she is surprised when she gets home form school. She drew the pictures and I did the carving. Better late than never. . .

Oh NO! What is this!?

When a baby sleeps through the night because she was sucking her fingers. . . Do you stop her?

Colorful Fun!

oh baby! Our Evangeline is 3 months old now! Here are some photo's from this week. She is beginning to be on a more predictable schedule and sleeping quite well at night! The colic is lessening as well. Yeah for everyone!









































Smashing pumpkins. We didn't carve pumpkins this year. But we did have some fun with one!




















And on a green note! Our new car gets 45-55 miles to the gallon (depending on who is driving)! It is a RED Toyota Prius and we are so blessed to have two vehicles and such nice ones at that!

Baby picture

It is too dark to take a picture of our new car that we bought today. . . I will post more about that later.

Here is a cute photo to prove Evangeline isn't ALWAYS sad or serious. Enjoy

New Entertainment. . .

Coupon / Q-pon. I am having WAY to much fun saving $$$ at the grocery store. I went to 3 stores in 4 hours with my list and my huge stack of coupons. I bought things that I needed and that I wanted and we have more food in the house than ever before!

In the photo that I am posting here, I spent $80.00 for all of this food and saved more than $125.00 with store sale and coupon matching (mostly found on line!). I bought nuts, and produce and dairy that wasn't on sale and I even shopped at Trader Joes (an expensive healthy store)! Here in Dayton there are a lot of stores that double coupons and there are a lot of stores that take manufacture coupons and store coupons for the same item (even Target does this!) So this is my second week of sucess. I don't know if I could devote this much time always, but I am having fun. Now I have to buy a storage shelf with our left over budget money for the overflow of food! Notice the healthy food I usually avoid because of the price like the no preservative lunch meets and the fiber juice and yogurt?

I learned about how to do this at happyhomemakercindy.com and a class I took by Cindy. I wonder what will be in the flyers next week!

Do you like my loveley assistant Gabriella!? I am pretty sure she was glad to be at school and didn't need to "assist" me for four hours of shopping!!!

Halloween

For Halloween, we checked out two neighborhoods; ours and another slightly fancier neighborhood. Our neighborhood had more candy per city block, and the other one gave WHOLE candy bars! What did we learn from this? That kids don't care where they get their candy as long as it isn't too cold outside and they don't have to share too much with Mom and Dad!

I'm morning my sweet tooth a little. I find I am a candy snob and only like a select few candy's now. I like 70+ % cocoa dark chocolate and no one gave that out! If only that was the key to my weight loss predicament. . .

Photo update

There is some wonderful significance to these first two photo's of Evangeline. The bassinet was my grand-mothers, and then my Mom and her siblings used it, and then I got to use it (and some of my cousins), and now we have it for Evangeline. It is so nice to have a useful piece of sentimental history. (Yes, The slats are safe & it does not have lead paint.) Isn't it beautiful!








Can you tell what these photo's are all about? Gabriella got her ears pierecd! After I had told her I was ready whenever she was, she bet a friend on the bus she would do it over the weekend just so she had more incentive to do it. "I was screaming inside my head!" she said.





















How could I resist including this photo. I think that counts as smiling for the camera! Do you?

I had a post all set up (photo's and all) and I clicked the wrong thing and now it is GONE! I am trying to hold it together here, but it isn't exactly easy to listen to you baby yell for 20 minutes while you work and then have it all go "up in flames!"
I will be brief. Evangeline cries a lot in the afternoon, although she sleeps pretty well and naps a lot in the morning. I suspect she will be my first morning napper which might work well with sisters getting home SO early at 2pm.
I have posted here two photo's of sweet peaceful Evangeline and two photo's to show how we went to a nice performance of Daddy's Dayton Mandolin Orchestra. I was such a nice concert and all went well except when I tried to discreetly nurse my hungry girl and some horrified male guests spotted me. I was embarrassed, but I don't think Evangeline was!

What is wrong with this picture?

Here is a fun photo of Evangeline. Can you tell what is wrong with this picture? Why so many pacifiers and not one in her mouth!? Sometimes she wants it, but you can really tell when she does not. -Enjoy

quick update

Just for fun, I thought I would send you our most recent photo of the kids together. Hmmm I don't envy the photographer when we try to get professionals taken!

Cry Baby

Some little someone is screaming at me as I try to type. I suppose she doesn't understand that Mommy's trying to get something done. Don't worry I'm not complaining. But I do have a photo of what she looks like crying. She is still cute even if she is LOUD. No baby monitors needed around here! Good thing she sleeps more often than she howlers!

I thought I would also include a more peaceful photo of Evangeline looking at Annelise. We were having a peaceful afternoon with Dad at the Arboretum.

The day before that the kids and I checked out some museums in Cincinnati. I thought this candid photo did the day justice.

Settling in

The big kids went back to school last week and Grandmommy came to visit. We had a wonderful time. We did a lot of little things around the house. We surprised the girls on the first day of school and decorated and cleaned their rooms before they got home. I am very pleased with how they turned out. We even did the living room before Mom left and it feels like a living room now instead of the storage room!

We got a lot of packages that week too. Thank you everyone for your patience as I haven't sent any Thank You notes out yet. I haven't done a baby announcement either. Maybe next week.

In this post I have included photo's of the kids rooms at thier best (don't expect them to look like this if you don't warn me you are coming for a visit!) And a wonderful photo of Evangeline with her eyes open and in here quiet mode.

We are enjoying having a schedule with something to do during the weekdays. The kids all seem to be taking to the baby. I think Gabriella is a little bit sad about giving up her place as the baby, but she is keeping it to herself.

Gift

Evangeline looks like she is trying to make herself into a package just for you!

Happy Birthday Mimi!

And Baby makes 4

What a blessed day! Evangeline Miranda Stauffer decided Mommy and Daddy's 13 wedding anniversary was the perfect day to be born and we all agree. She is 6lbs 1.4 oz and 18 inches born. She was born at 9:47 pm just 3.5 hours after mom's water broke durring dinner!!! All went well and looks good! More words and news to come, but right now she wants to eat. We love you all and miss you very much!

Stauffer kids 1,2 &3

Humming

Here is an amazing photo captured by Hans!

The family is enamored by the humming birds at the wonderful feeder that Hans bought for me. We saw them at least ten times today. It was rainy and overcast, maybe they like it that way. They brightened our day.

Another type of growing!

So here is a wonderful shot of my belly and my home improving. (Taken by Tim). I am painting the kitchen here. Goodbye Forest green! I Love how much brighter the kitchen is now! I totally outdid it that day and had a whole hour of consistent contractions that night. But they stopped and we are still waiting. The Dr. checked me yesterday and I am 3 cm and 50% effaced so I may or may not make it to induction day (Aug 23rd) but if I do it should be relatively easy!

Growing

I wanted to show you this fun picture that we have of Tim, Hans and Hans' Mom checking out their height. The ground was slopped in Hans' favor, I am not sure if the results would be the same one month later. Tim has been a great help lately. He is happy to have his bunnies back and really happy about how well Mom and Papa took care of them. Papa brought us a hutch that will make taking care of them much easier. We are glad they came all the way out to visit us. It is a longer drive now than Ames was. Bummer.

feeling domestic or what!? (or is this nesting?)

Last Friday the kids and I had a garage sale. Although it was not a complete failure because in the end the garage was quite clean, the poor hard working kids only sold 2 lemon aids and NO cookies all day! They made amazing signs for me and Tim moved lots of stuff around whenever I asked as well.



Overall we didn't do well at the sale, but while we waited for the customers that hardly came, we finished painting the side table I picked up at a garage sale a week earlier. I quite like the finished product!



This week I made both homemade yogurt and fermented bean paste! I got the recipes from a new friend named Glory who has a little farm here. (I seems that I find the company farm girls fascinating I guess.) I hadn't tried making yogurt since we lived in Ithaca. I even added jello and made Popsicle. (That was the one way I got the girls to try it.) I like it with honey and blueberries. Notice in the last picture the slow progress of painting the kitchen too. The bean paste goes amazingly well in tacos and is at least a fourth of the price of canned high sodium black beans.



I finally had the heart to go through the baby stuff and get it all organized and pack a diaperbag for Stauffer baby #4. It was hard to hold little Levi's outfits, but I am getting better. It looks like he will be moving to family members soon so we wouldn't have gotten to keep him anyway. He is laughing and rolling and scooting around now.


The Dr. has scheduled an induction for Aug 24th if baby doesn't come before that. I pray the baby decides to arrive before that. I would like a little less medical delivery, but God knows what is best for all of us. I bought two going home from the hospitol outfits (one for each gender) so now I am set except packing a hospitol bag. (about 4 weeks to go!!!) I'll keep you posted as best as I can.