This Is Us

  It’s been a very long time, but we did it! We had a date night away from home! Nicolas and I went to the movies (they just opened on Friday). The tickets were only $5 a piece and the snacks were discounted. We had to wear masks unless we were eating or drinking. We saw  Inception . Yes, it’s not a new movie. They were showing it for the 10th Anniversary. There wasn’t any other movie we wanted to see, but we wanted a date night. Plus we never saw it on the big screen, and it was great! When we picked our seats, they had every other row blocked off. We chose the top row right in the middle. Once we chose our seats, two seats on my side and two seats on Nick’s side were blocked out. We discussed how cool it would be to have the whole theater to ourselves... we walked inside and there wasn’t anyone there. We knew we were a little early and figured at least one other person would come. No one ever did. We had that whole theater to ourselves! It was great! I could laugh and jump without di

Nick built two rooms in the basement. Along with the storage, bathroom, and shelves. Xander's room was done in 2015, and we got Brichette's done in 2017. We wanted to do something more grown-up for her, so we decided to go with a Paris theme. We painted the walls to match her bedding.  She is using my old daybed.  We bought her a night stand and matching dresser.  Nick's younger sister gave us two desks that they were getting rid of.  We changed Xander's to a dark color, and changed Brichette's to white to match the rest of her furniture in her room. My friend from high school printed of the vinyl's. I bought the wood B's from Michaels and painted them myself.

  Lydia started cheerleading this summer. She loves it so much! She loves to do gymnastic 🤸🏻‍♀️ type things all the time, but gymnastics is expensive and we couldn’t really find anything close to our house. When we found out she could do cheer and it wasn’t that expensive, we were so happy. She has to have her hair up for practices. So here is one of the hair-do’s I did. I did an off set part. French braided the two sides a little. Put an elastic at the end of the braids to hold them. Pulled all her hair up into a ponytail. Made a hole in the ponytail and pulled her hair from the bottom up through the hole. It looked so cute!  

  Well, it’s that time of year again... First day of school! It’s so weird to have the house so quiet since the kids have been home 24/7 since March! Yes, it is different this year. They have to wear masks Some activities are different, or can’t be done. Our elementary closed and Zain, Lydia, and Tyler have to go to a new school. Brichette is driving her and Xander to school. But we are brave and strong! As long as we have each other, have Heavenly Father helping us, and we do our best, we can do hard things! These kids are so smart. They have such caring hearts and worry about each other. They are amazing and I am so blessed and honored to be their mom! I can’t wait to see the amazing wonderful things they do! Brichette is a senior this year! I can’t believe she’s graduating and will be an adult in January! Xander is a sophomore. He gets to drive this school year! Zain is in 5th grade. In January he gets the priesthood. Lydia is in 2nd grade. She gets to be baptized and is so excited

  It’s a weird feeling to have as many masks for our kids, as they do underwear... These are our kid’s masks drying on top of the dryer.  I didn’t want any masks to get misplaced, or the clean ones getting mixed with the dirty ones (they are wearing a clean mask every day). So I bought a basket from  Target  for the laundry room so they can put their dirty masks in. I also bought hooks from  Target  to put in their rooms to hang up their clean masks. This year has been challenging, hard, different, exciting, and scary; but I’m grateful to Heavenly Father and Jesus for helping us through whatever comes our way and for blessing my life with a wonderful husband and kids! I don’t know what I’d do without them!

In order to effectively grow plants, flowers, etc. you need to know what your growing zone is. Ours is 7a. If you google growing zones, there are lots of websites to help you. The website we use is  The Old Farmer’s Almanac It has so much helpful information! If you know your growing zone, then you can find out when your last and first frost dates are, then you will know when you can start seeds in doors, you’ll know how many days you have for a growing season, and so much more!

I hated how we were storing our spices. It felt so disorganized and chaotic with them all being different sizes and shapes. So  I decided to change that. I bought glass jars from a .99 and more store by our house. We bought labels and wrote the name of the spices on them. We bought the baskets from Family Dollar. Nick installed a shelf in the cabinet above the stove. It’s so nice. I can pull the baskets out... it’s all organized and the same. I love it. The little baskets have the food coloring and flavoring (vanilla, almond, etc.) in them. It’s nice because we can buy our spices in bulk or grow them and dry them ourselves (from our little urban farm!).

  When I was little my mom would braid mine and my sisters hair before bed. This kept it from getting tangled while we slept. It also made our hair “crimped”. Yes, I have naturally curly hair 👩🏻‍🦱, but it wasn’t curly until I was in I think about kindergarten and then it went curly and was so hard to keep from getting tangled. So when Brichette was younger, and even sometimes now, I would braid her hair after her bath or shower and it wouldn’t be so hard to brush in the mornings. Now with Lydia, even though her hair is curly, I braid it every night before bed. In the mornings we take the braid (or braids) out and just run my fingers through it. If she wants it curly, we get it wet and put a little coconut oil in it. It helps so much with brushing their hair in the mornings, especially before school.  Most nights we just do one braid, but sometimes we do two or three, which makes the “crimp” smaller. This is what it looks like from one braid.

  In our daily scripture reading we came across this scripture: There are lots and lots of powerful scriptures, but at this time this scripture really stuck out to me. Let’s break it down some... “If all men (meaning everyone) had been, and were, and ever would be (so everyone from the time Adam and Eve left the garden to the time Jesus comes again), like unto Moroni, behold, the very powers of hell would have been shaken FOREVER (I capitalized this); yea, the devil (satan) would NEVER (I capitalized this) have power (so he can’t persuade, influence, seduce, etc.) over the hearts of the children of men (everyone on earth). WOW!!! Can you imagine this? How wonderful would that be? Think of all the love, caring, help, ministering, charity, kindness, peace, etc. there would be in the world!!! No one thinking they were better than anyone else. No violence, rage, anger, hatred, cruelty, etc.  So please, as you go about your days, weeks, months, years, think about this scripture! Think about

  Tonight I made individual pizzas. I used pre-made biscuits (you know, in the tube that you keep in the fridge), my homemade pizza sauce, shredded mozzarella cheese, and pepperonis. I gently smooshed and pulled the biscuits so they were bigger. Then I put the pizza sauce on it. I added about a handful of mozzarella cheese on top of the sauce and put pepperonis on half of them (4 biscuits). I cooked them at 350° for about 15 minutes (we have a convection oven). Once the cheese was a golden brown I pulled them out and put them on plates. I didn’t cut them, but I should have. Here is the ingredients. 1 can pre-made jumbo biscuits (8 count) Shredded Mozzarella Cheese Pepperonis  Pizza Sauce I used tin foil lined cookie sheets to cook them on Here are some pictures: The biscuit before I made it bigger After I made it bigger Add the pizza sauce Add the cheese Add pepperonis (I only did half since we have kids that just like cheese). All done! Obviously you can add whatever toppings you want

  I have always had a hard time deciding on what to make for dinner. When I would finally decide, then it would either take to long to make, or we didn’t have everything we needed. So then I’d have to make something out of what there was, or go to the store and end up spending more money because we would grab lots more things.  So several years ago I decided to make a dinner calendar. I found a template in Excel, you can change the year and the days automatically change, and the squares are blank so you can type in the meals. Then once a week we would go to the store and get everything we needed for that week of dinner meals (and anything else we needed). It helps out so if the dinner takes time to make (crockpot, make bread, etc.) then I can start in the morning. Also, we are only going to the store once a week so we spend less money. We are all picky eaters (in one way or another) and some of us have allergies (shellfish and garlic) so it limits our choices. When we find a meal we al

  I can’t even remember what year we bought our trailer, but it was like 2015 or 2016... Maybe even 2017. Haha! Anyway, we bought it for $500. Yep! That’s it. It is a 1978 camper, and boy can you tell! It’s 70’s green everywhere! But hey, it’s okay! It’s a great trailer and we’ve used it a lot. We haven’t changed anything in it, until this year. We bought outdoor fabric for the cushions and curtains. Two different, but matching, styles for the cushions and a different style, but again matching, for the curtains. Then we bought the peel-n-stick flooring. We also changed out the lights for LED ones. I sewed the new covers to be like pillow cases, so I didn’t have to worry about zippers. We bought the sticky Velcro to hold the opening shut. Although because I was in a hurry, I didn’t buy the fabric kind, and it does NOT work very well. I am going to find the fabric kind! We bought the fabric from JoAnn’s. It was on sale for 60-70% off, which is really nice! Outdoor fabric is expensive! I