love love love pintrest

I owe pintrest a lot. Because of that fabulous blogland database, I have made some DELICIOUS food. Here is a new favorite of ours.

Crockpot Pork Chops
5-6 pork chops, thawed
2 cans cream of chicken soup
1 envelope either ranch or italian dressing mix

Throw the chops in the pot with soup and dressing sprinkled on top. Set your pot on high for 4 hours and let it cook and tease your nose with the awesome smell.

Make a batch of mashed potatoes any way you like and serve drizzle the soupy sauce all over. We drizzled it over the chops again on our plates too.

All 3 of my boys - yes I am including my picky 5 year old and the 11 month old too - ate. every. bite. And they ALL had seconds!!!!! Um.......that never happens.

Bread

First batch of dough, made December 26th, 2011. It's still shiny even with flour dust. That's pretty cool!

This post pays homeage to my AMAZING, AWESOME, WONDERFUL, LOVING parents. They gave me a new Kitchenaid mixer for Christmas. Yes, one with enough flour capacity to make 3 large gigantic loafs of bread dough at the same time. It has guts, it has power, and it's really clean......unlike my old Kitchenaid mixer that has been around since 1980 and had the motor replaced 2 or 3 times. THANK YOU DAD AND MOM!!!!!!!!!!! And my family thanks you because this is, by far, the best wheat bread recipe ever. How do I know? It actually raises!

Picture review of November

Thanksgiving skit Ammon's class did for the parents

Hiking in Red Rock Canyon with my parents and sisters 

Laundry day means they play in the buckets 

Eating a bag, tryng to get to the crackers inside. He discovered he can open the cabinet doors. I now have pony tail holders on all the ones I can "lock."

Sitting in Santa's chair

Seeing the lights at the Cactus Garden at Ethel M. Chocolate Factory



Ammon made up a story and drew this transformer, Roadbuster. He did such a good job!

"Helping" do the laundry

From us to you

I didn't get my pictures ordered in time to make cards to send in the mail this year. So we emailed this card I made and a newsletter type review of our year. If you didn't get an email from us, just leave a comment wih your email address, and I'll send it out right away. Merry Christmas everyone!!!!!!

Music

My boys LOVE my christmas Trans Siberian Orchestra CD. We listen to it in the car all the time. Last night we were listening to the radio, and Zenock's favorite song Carol of the Bells came on, but not by TSO. He said, "Hey, this isn't the right song. They are using the wrong instruments, and I like the other one better." And then he preceeded to insist we change the song to the right one. This morning on the way to take Ammon to school, we were listening to the TSO CD and both of them were immitating the sounds of the guitars and drums and totally rocking out in the car. I think you would have had to be there to get the full effect, but it really was super cute. I hope my kids keep up their intrest in music and want learn and instrument when they are in middle school.

On a side note, currently Gideon is in the hallway making very loud sounds because he is listening to the sound of his voice bounce off the walls. He loves to hear himself, and he loves it even more when we immitate the sounds with him. I can't believe he will be a year old in a month.

Love my boys even if they are a little weird

Now it's time for something amusing from Ammon. He came out of his room this morning holding the gun he build out of blocks last night. Both boys seem to be really attached to toys they make themselves. I think they may even sleep with them so they won't get lost or "stolen" during the night. I just think it is really funny that he woke up ready to play today. Perhaps it's a good thing he's out of school today for parent teacher conference. He has more time to play!

Sewing project

This is Gideon's stocking. I made it last night.

I also made another one for the new baby for next year. Now I just have to hem some pants for my friend and then I can put away my sewing machine for a while. It's been hogging the end of the kitchen table since the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Someday I'm going to have a sewing room so I can leave my machine up all the time and sew whenever I want.

something cool

last night we were on the way home from seeing the festival of lights at the speedway, and we hear this really loud airplane engine. even though it was dark outside, brady and i could both tell one of these puppies had taken off and was flying right over our car. we stopped to watch it for a minute, and then another one took off. it was so so so awesome. when we started driving away, we saw a third bomber take off and we could see the afterburn of the engines really well in the dark. i can't even tell you how cool it was to see those planes flying in the sky. this one of the things i really do love about living here, so close to an air force base. their planes rock!!!

wingers recipe

both shift keys on my laptop have been yanked off, so there are no properly written sentences in this post....sorry.
ok, so i saw a super good looking recipe on pintrest the other day. we went and got all the stuff to make it tonight for dinner. holy crap. super good stuff. are ya ready - pretend there was a question mark there.

wingers sticky fingers
1 bag tyson breaded chicken fingers
6 tbls franks hot sauce - has to be franks or it won't taste like wingers
4 tbls water
1 1/2 cups brown sugar

cook your fingers in the oven like the directions say. while that's cooking, make the sauce. combine all ingredients in a pan and cook on medium heat until sugar is dissolved. when the chicken is done, dip the fingers in the sauce. eat promptly, or at least right after the food is blessed.

seriously this stuff is really really good. the blogger lady who posted this recipe said she thought it was better homemade than in the restaurant. i think i might agree with her. and even with buying the chicken and the bottle of sauce, and the bag of frozen fries not on sale it was still less than 10 bucks to feed all of us for dinner. i think i might have a new pregnant lady food. click on this button right HERE to go to the recipe link directly if you want to see a picture of the sticky goodness.

Good news and bad news

Last night Zenock came up to me and said, "Hey mom, do you want the good news or the bad news?" I said bad news first. "Well, the bad news is I don't want to fold my laundry." Okay, so what's the good news? "I still want to feed Fred so do you have any other jobs I can do instead?" I love that boy!

Fred is a paper man in Primary, and when the kids do a good deed during the week they get to write it down and feed it to Fred. At the end of the year the box is being given to our Bishop. I just thought it was sooooo funny that he was thinking of ways to get out of folding his clothes. Honestly, I don't blame him at all. I hate folding my clothes too. But fear not, he had to fold his clothes anyway.....we all did. It was a laundry folding party over here.