We have been working hard on the kids’ playroom. It has been painted and carpeted. I moved in the furniture, got some shelves. It is looking good and the kids are loving it already. I only have ONE thing I want to do. I want to hang rain gutter bookshelves. I am going to buy them today! I’ll post some pictures after the room is done. I lost all the “before” pictures when my computer crashed. But, trust me, this room was a mess. It was just a storage room full of crap. Wait until you see it now!

Success!  My mom did an awesome job with decorating this cake. As an added bonus, I was able to get a better picture of the inside colors too.

It was so  yummy and there was plenty left over for everyone to take some home. I even have some left here!

I am baking Madison’s birthday cake and then my mom (a professional cake decorator) is going to help me decorate it. We are doing a Princess Cake from DecoPac.  Here is what it should like like when all done:

Now, for the REALLY fun part. I am making the cake itself striped with pink, white, and purple and then I’m going to freeze it until Sunday.

How am I making it striped?  Well, I’m glad you asked! I made a rainbow cake with pastel colors for Easter. The I saw zebra cake and thought that it would be cool to do the thin stripes of colors. So, I gave it a go.

I ended up using cake mix, Pillsbury with the pudding in the mix (it’s the ONLY box white cake I like). I started with 3 boxes, one for each color, but ended up having to make a fourth since I was using white twice as much as the other colors.

First, I put down three spoon fulls of white:

Then three spoons of purple right in the middle of that (well, kinda in the middle-it’s hard to take a pic and scoop batter):

Then it was three more scoops of white, then three of pink:

And on and on it went. White, purple, white, pink, white . . .

But see how it is kinda leaning to one side?  I had to tilt it and shake it a bit to get it to fill the pan evenly. So it ended up looking like this:

Unfortunately, I should have made the dye  much brighter. The colors in the cake are so light you can hardly see them. They DID come out in cool stripes though!  Just very very light cool stripes.  See if you can see them:

Now, do I use this cake or bake another?  Try to get the colors to show better?

That does NOT:

1. Get Reposssesed

2. Catch on fire

3. Break down at the worst times

Also I ask that it:

4. Have a/c AND heat

5. Have windows that roll down

6. Is free from spray paint

Now, is that really so much to ask?  I have 1 and half of 4 now (at least it is the a/c half since I’m in FL)!  Well, and (so far) it has not caught on fire. Close. But no actual fire yet.  Oh, and it would be nice if I had a key to unlock the doors. But really, that would just be a perk at this point.

Looks like Obama’s address to students will not be shown in the schools here. At least not right away. The message will be reviewed first. Then each teacher will get to decide to show it or not. Also, permission slips will be sent home. That all sounds reasonable to me! It also sounds like the way it should have been from the start. You can’t expect parents to just blindly have their children watch something with almost no knowledge of what it is about. I like to see what my children watch first, or read books first, etc. It’s really not to much to ask to get to see it first. And I will. It’s being aired online and also on a bunch different TV stations, such as Nickelodeon and MTV, Tuesday night at 8. This thing will be unavoidable so I’d like to be there with my kids when they see it.

Please, everyone, visit Help Horner and help us end the mistreatment of our US troops!

According to this article the army is pressuring military doctors NOT to diagnose PTSD.

I think it is horrible that soldier who fight for our freedom do not get the proper care they deserve. This video shows what can happen when a troop slips through the cracks. That man did EVERYTHING he could to ask for help and was repeatedly mistreated by the same army who promised him the moon to join.

I won (and already spent) a $50 gift certificate to Walmart.com. It was perfect timing!  I got a few things the kiddos want for Christmas that you can only get online anyway. The top prize was $300. Man, wouldn’t that have been nice? But anything helps right now.

I’m also plugging away at ChaCha to earn some Christmas cash. Luckily the kids don’t really want anything too expensive this year. And they already know that Santa only brings three gifts (tradition started last year). Plus, little things in there stocking and usually one gift for the whole family to enjoy. Last year was a Nintendo DS plus games that we managed to score (used) for only $50!

I have als been having an email marathon over some rebates I should have got months ago. Supposedly they will be here by mid Dec. now. So that is another $100 I can add to Christmas!

Rebates +  ChaCha money + the $50 I won + the things I snagged already = a rocking Christmas!

Let’s hope it all falls into place that way now!  I don’t want to give Dennis a train table with no train or tracks lol. Not that he would care. He’d just jump off of it.

What?  Where did I win the $50? Right here on the Totally Her message boards. Don’t worry, there are tons more awesome prizes to win. There are actually some gift cards, a printer, some movies, and other things up for grabs right now. Just in time for the holidays!

Every year we decorate the Christmas tree with cookies!

I start with a good sugar cookie recipe. We use a straw to poke a whole in the top of each cookie before we bake it. After they are cooled, we decorate them with a yummy glaze that we make in all different colors. Once the glaze has set, we put a hook through each cookie and hang them on the tree.

They look good and taste good. Also, the kids have a blast decorating them.

The only drawback is that the tree starts to look a little bare by Christmas!

Here is an example from a few years ago.

My goal is to make scrapbooks of the kids for everyone for Christmas. By everyone I mean the grandparents, my sister, and one for daddy too.

Scrapbooking is new to me, something I have never done before. So it is one of my personal challenges too!

I ordered a tiny scrapbook kit from my daughter through her school fundraiser and played with that first. Here are some pictures of what I did. Just a sample of the pictures. Any and all advice is welcome! I need to know what is good, what sucks, what I can do better. That kind of thing. I’m going to be making bigger ones for everyone else, the 8.5 x 11 size.

The flash got the picture here, but that is not really important. It’s the page I want you all to see.

Notice the difference in the writing here?  I was trying out a calligraphy set that I had on hand. I’m not so good at it, as evidenced by all the other pictures. But this one here was done by  my husband. All these years and I never knew he had a knack for calligraphy. Guess who’s going to be doing the rest?