More sledding

Last night Aaron spent the night with Bryson. We dropped Rachel off at Daniel and Becky's and enjoyed a nice dinner out. When we went to pick up Rachel she came tearing down the stairs and declared, "I want to sleep here!" Becky said that was fine with her if it was fine with us. You don't have to ask me twice. :) Rachel gave us a quick hug and ran back up upstairs with David and Madelyn to get back to their playtime. Dusty and I took off wondering how we had managed to get so lucky! We enjoyed dessert and a hot drink at Starbucks and headed home with a movie. Thanks Uncle Daniel and Aunt Becky!!! Today they came by and grabbed Rachel's snow gear and we headed out to go sledding. Here's what 3 cousins on a sled having a great time look like.

Our little fairy

From misc winter

I recently purchased some vinyl wall lettering for Rachel's room. It says, "All you need if faith, trust, and a little pixie dust" I wanted a photo of her in her fairy costume to hang above it. Since I had the equipment set up for Jake on Tuesday, I snapped off a few of Rachel. I think I'll frame this one for her room.

From misc winter

Who are we kidding - I'll print all of them. :)

From misc winter

From Snow

From Snow

From Snow

The view this morning

The phone rang at 7 AM with the automated message that school was closed. I found Dusty outside trying to shovel his truck out of the driveway.

I told him to take the car instead. It was in the garage and has front-wheel drive. And since they don't bother to plow the cul-de-sac, he was going to need it.

The view out the back. Word is there's about 10 inches out there. Now that I think about it, we should have put the grill in the shed a couple months ago.

Sneak Peek - Jake

This is Jake. He just turned 3. He's sporting his dad's suit.
You are rockin' with the 70's flair Jake!

Someone's tired of winter

After lunch Rachel disappeared off to her room and emerged with this ensemble on. She had tried to put on her swimsuit with her dress still on.

Noticed the bunched up dress coming out the back

When she woke up this morning she asked if she could go swimming. I guess someone really wants Summer to get here. After her nap and I had changed her clothes she gave it another try!

Attack of the Giant Snowman

There really hasn't been anything noteworthy going on here this week. School, work, laundry, dishes...you get the picture. So here is a photo from 6 years ago when my brother and his friend built a 9 foot snowman.

Ahhh memories...back when we were still the Hackney 3, when my hair had blonde highlights, back when I still let Dusty wear pleated pants. Some things are better left in the past. :)

Be Back Soon - Hopefully!

The Hackney 4 is on hiatus until my housework is done!! Who am I kidding, it's been on hiatus for 3 days now. Now much exciting going on. Anyway.....I'm off to tackle the house. If I'm not back soon send a rescue squad....or a Diet Dr. Pepper and some dark chocolate!

Sledding

Snow + school holiday + friend visiting = child begging to go sledding

So off we went to the sledding hill. It was getting a little patchy in places but no one seemed to mind. Rachel wanted to go down a little hill first. That went OK. Then she went shooting down the big hill...screaming! But in no time she was going down the hill with the best of them.

Then she would grab the rope to her sled and trudge up the hill all by herself.

Aaron had no such reservations

There were quite a few races between Aaron and his friend Bryson

Yes, even I got in on the action. Aaron challenged me to a race and I proceeded to beat him down the hill. There was great protesting...something about a false start. I think he just couldn't take that his momma had beat him.

In the warmtub

Dusty got Rachel started with her bath tonight. After he let her play a while I came in to wash her hair and I found this.

She had her Little Mermaid doll sitting in a bucket also filled with water. I said, "Look your mermaid is in a hottub." "No Mommy, she's in a warm tub. Mermaid wants to get warm. She's in the warm tub." I slipped a couple times and called it a hot tub and Rachel corrected me every time.

Aaron - well he watched some Zach & Cody and iCarly and was ready to take on any living room attackers with his Nerf dart gun.

Tonight's activity - somersaults

Oh yeah, it's a bit dry in our house!

Dress up

What do you do when Memaw is staying for a visit. Prance around the house and play pretty, pretty princess of course!

Rachael Ray ain't got nothing on me!

Our dinners around here are usually a simple affair. Hamburgers, tacos, spaghetti, chicken - you get the picture. After deciding that I needed to plan our meals out better to avoid so much eating out, I started looking for some new recipes to try. I found a recipe for Cashew Chicken Curry that looked pretty good to me. However it contained no less than 16 different ingredients and called for stuff that I normally don't cook with such as coconut milk, plain yogurt, and this.

I have never cooked with fresh ginger in my life, but let me say that it smells wonderful when minced up! So I started cutting, dicing, and chopping. Soon after the curry powder hit the pan the kids come through the kitchen holding their noses saying, "What's that SMELL?" Not looking good for the home team at this point!

After I got to this point I was thinking "Good grief! I could feed the entire cul-de-sac with this huge pan of stuff. I think it was growing!

Look at all those veggies! I figured that the kids wouldn't touch it and I would be eating curry for days.

Mercifully it started to cook down at this point and started to resemble a vegetable stew. Still not looking good as a hit with the kiddos.

After 45 minutes of cooking and some coconut milk, yogurt, and cashews it was looking yummy to me

Served up hot on some rice! I thought it tasted wonderful! Just enough curry, full of veggies and flavor. Tasty and healthy! Now the real test.....

Aaron took one cautious bite and then declared that it was pretty good. "Hey healthy food can taste good" was his reply. Who knew! The 3-year old...not so much. Oh well, you can't win them all. She was content to eat some of the yogurt that was left.

Hey Food Network - Eat your heart out!

Better?

Earlier this week a certain blogger who shall remain nameless included Rachel's closet in a list of rooms that homeowners never let their guest see. Therefore I took it upon myself to straighten it up the next day. Thanks for the motivation; it needed to be done.

Not bad considering this closet holds some of Rachel's larger toys, hanging clothes, some off season clothes, books, photo albums, office supplies, scrapbooking stuff, and all of my photo backdrops, lights, and stands. Oh and I also straightened up the laundry room before that certain blogger saw it as well! :)

Brrr...

It's Cold! Accuweather.com says it's going to get colder. My furnace is working overtime as it is.

Snow Angels

We got a small amount of snow this morning; nothing big. I mean if you were down in Georgia it would be a catastrophic amount, but for Indiana - just a dusting! :) Rachel really wanted to make snow angels. We found that the deck provided the perfect place.

A recipe that I may never make again!

Since things are fairly routine around here and there hasn't been much to share, I thought I would post the recipe for the Caramel French Toast that I made for mom's group today. It is quite tasty and has been a hit both times I have made it. Then I decided to figure the points value for it....BIG MISTAKE!! I should know better by now. For the entire pan it was 78 points. You can get around 8 servings out of the dish and that means you're staring down close to 10 points per serving. Taking into consideration that today I watched Dr. Oz on Oprah talking about health and then watched 2 hours of the Biggest Loser, you can probably figure that I won't be cooking again any time soon. But here it is anyway!

Overnight Caramel French Toast
1 c. packed brown sugar
1/2 c. butter
2 Tbs. light corn syrup
12 slices white or whole wheat bread
1/4 c. sugar
1 tsp. cinnamon, divided
6 eggs, beaten
1 1/2 c. milk
1 tsp. vanilla

Lightly grease a 13x9 baking dish and set aside. Bring brown sugar, butter, and corn syrup to a boil. Remove from heat and pour into baking dish. Top with 6 slices bread and sprinkle with combined sugar and 1/2 tsp. cinnamon. Top with remaining bread. Beat eggs, milk, vanilla and remaining cinnamon; pour over bread. Cover and refrigerate overnight. Remove dish from refrigerator. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Bake 30 to 35 minutes.

Blog Silence

3 days without a post! Terrible....actually I'm depressed by the Colts blowing another playoff opportunity! That's not really the reason for the blogging silence, but it's frustrating nonetheless. We've really just been laying low the past several days enjoying not having a schedule. Aaron heads back to school tomorrow and Dusty back to work, so things will kick back to normal soon. What I really need to be doing is working on a household budget. Eeeeks! And since Dusty has dubbed 2009 the Year of Discipline he will be chucking all of his Christmas snacking habits and be eating bread and water tomorrow. There's no middle ground with that guy! Cue Rocky theme music...

Happy New Year!!