What do you do when your kids go back to school?    My big debate all day has been should I get up and do some housework that has been neglected while the girls were home, or be lazy and catch up on some TV shows?     Want to guess what won out?     Lets just say that the housework will be there tomorrow!!   

It is super quiet in my house today.   The kids have gone back to school and it is just my hubby, myself and our oldest daughter (until she goes to work anyway).  I can actually watch a program on TV and not have to turn the volume up so loud it deafens the neighbors.   read more

Today was one of my favorite Christmas traditions that I do with the granddaughters.   We all bundled up in warm clothes, because of course our high today was only 32 degrees!   Then we piled in the car and headed out to go visit Santa and Mrs. Claus!!    

The cool part about our yearly visit to go see Santa, is that my granddaughters have been going to see the same Santa since they were 7 and 8 months old.   Each year we will track down where he is going to be and we make sure that we go see him.   There have been a couple of years in the past 10 that we have been doing this, that we almost missed him.   Thankfully, that hasn’t happened and we have pictures with the same Santa and same pose, since the girls were babies.   My youngest granddaughter is going to join in on the tradition this year, her mommy is taking her to see him next weekend.      read more

Well it is almost time for our little Elf to come visit the Brandon household again. I have to admit, I am probably more excited than the kids are!! I have such fun with her! My two granddaughters named her Gingerbread when she arrived at our home. She was quite mischevious last year, she roasted marshmallows over my favorite candle, got herself caught up in ribbon in our tree, made a snowman out of marshamllows, played tic tac toe , I even found her reading her bible one morning.

This Christmas will be our  2nd year with Gingerbread.  I am so excited I get to play each night and set her up with all her little mischievous comings and goings. I have been doing some researching on what we will be doing with our Elf this year, and I have included those below for you. I will be creating our return letter for Gingerbread this week… that she will be bringing to our home when she arrives on Friday , the 25th. read more

As Halloween approaches us this year, I am sitting here wondering…..how many people do a home made costume for the kids, how many do a store bought Costume and how many do one , somewhere in between?  You know what I mean, where you put the black shirt on them, and some leggings, buy  a cat tail and ears, and call them a cat.    Those are some of the cutest costumes I see!!  In fact, we did something similar to that last year with our granddaughter!

In our family, I can only remember one year that my kids had a store bought costume, and that was the year that I had surgeries.  Other than that, we almost always made the costumes from scratch, or some years we had most of it we made, and then we would buy some accessories.  I would always buy the face paint, and accessories the year before when they go on clearance on Nov. 1st, and put it in a box for the following year.   That is how we figured out what we were doing for costumes at Halloween.  I would pull out the box and we would put something together.   For the most part, we started doing them homemade, because store bought costumes are so ridiculously priced!   We simply couldn’t afford to buy costumes, and it was cheaper to throw something together from whatever we had around the house or I could find at a thrift store.   To me it is crazy to go spend $20-30 for a costume your child wears for one night!! read more