Bountiful Baskets Are Great

My sister in law told me about Bountifulbaskets.org. It is a Co-op that does vegetables, fruit, and bread. Here is a standard basket with a Mexican pack. The 9 grain bread is good, but we don't eat wheat as often as I would like. My sister in law says the Italian Round Loaf is wonderful.

So a standard basket is $15.00. The Mexican pack was $7.50. I did a rough estimate on how much it would cost if I just bought it at Walmart. My estimate came to $35.00+. I don't have a scale at home so I had to estimate the pounds for the fruit. Anyhow, it has been great for us because it makes us change our menu to use up what came in our basket and we always have fresh fruit on hand. I have found that we eat less cookies and crackers when apples and oranges are available.

Ben's View

Ben is training to run a race. This race gains and loses extreme levels of elevation during it's course. So for his training he runs up and down the mountains in our back yard and this is his view.

Joe has won.

Joe has won this month for "best picture". It seems that he keeps providing opportunities to capture him in the act or with an attitude. In those moments I create pictures that I will show to him when he is teen and he will see how wonderful he was and what a handful kids are. Hopefully in showing him the pictures there will be a subliminal message of abstinence till after you are married. We shall see. And yes those are boogers mixed with tooth paste.

Yummy Yummy!

For one of our big Saturday breakfasts we made German Pancakes. This one grew so tall that it was burning on on the top stove element. The kids thought that it was so funny. I thawed some black berries we had picked last summer from Grams's bush and made black berry syrup. YUM YUM! And of course there was whipped cream.

Joe being Joe

If you are looking for toilet paper it is on the top shelf. Joe tends to unroll EVERY roll of toilet paper that I put on the roll. So now I don't. In the second picture Joe is a "monster" courtesy of Max and some left over ketchup.

Sledding

It snows and then it melts. It snows and then it melts. Before it all melted away for the year we slipped in a sledding day. Amy, John, Abran and Brandt all came down for the day. It was a little wet, but I think we timed it right. All of the runs were well packed and ready. So all we had to do was sit and go. Max and Joe had a hard time. Abran had a BLAST. While Max and Joe sat in the car with Brewer; Abran, Amy and I kept on sledding. One day Max will like the snow...hopefully.

The Day After Christmas

Ben got home around 8:00am. Max and Joe thankfully slept in. Santa left all of our presents on the front porch and dropped his hat on the steps. (Ben wanted to see his reaction so we delayed Santa's arrival til after Ben got home.) Max loved all of the books and cars that he opened. Joe just loved the paper and had fun shredding it. After we had breakfast we made up some of Ben's salsa and headed over to his parents house to go sledding with all of his brothers and sister. We decided that there was not enough snow to sled and ended up eating and talking. It was a great day. I like the picture where Abran is looking over all of the food deciding what he wants to stick his fingers in.