My Super Sweet Birthdy Gift

I recently celebrated my 31st birthday. Man I love birthdays! I love spending time with my family, and eating cake. This year on my Birthday my parents were out of town so we celebrated a couple of days early. We had an awesome steak dinner and my favorite cake in the entire world. I was also given a Joann's gift card and an Olive Garden gift card. Neither of these gifts were in my possession for more than 24 hours. The photo above is what I purchased with that wonderful Joann's gift card. These things are so awesome, and they even make the same noise that scissors make in scary movies. They cut through fabric like a warm knife cutting through butter!

Beach Trip

For those of you who read this blog regularly, you know breaks and gaps in my postings are nothing unusual. Usually these breaks come with no warning or explanation. However, this time I thought I would share. We took the kids to the beach for our first family vacation. We went to Galveston, Texas, and met up with family. My Aunt Rondia and DJ's brother Buddy both live outside of Houston, and we thought it was be a great opportunity to gather members from both of our families.

DJ, the kids, my parents, and myself decided to drive. It took us about 16 hours, and was an experience! WOW!

It was fun to spend time at the beach, and with family. The week was spent relaxing, eating yummy food, and sight seeing. It was hot in Texas and the humidity was ridiculous! We had a great time, but it feels so good to be back home and back to our routine. Miss O is excited about school and seeing her friends today.



On My Needles: A Knitting Update

I know, I know. This is the same project I was working on when I did my last knitting update. I must be the slowest knitter in the world! However, I have made a lot of progress. I was super excited when I reached the half way point and could start decreasing my stitches. The baby who is going to receive this pretty blanket is now three months old! I am only a little behind. My goal is to have it finished before her first birthday, but I hope it does not take that long. I have a bunch of projects waiting in line. Ok off to knit some more.

Sausage

 

Back in August my family and two others slaughtered a few pigs. DJ and the other dads went out to the farm to "take care" of the pigs. The pigs were then brought back to the house where they were skinned and butchered. I really wanted to share pictures of this with you guys, but was concerned they might be a little to much for some of my readers. If you guys are interested in a blog post about this let me know.
So now we have a freezer full of pork, and we decided our first project with it would be sausage. DJ and I started this kinda late in the evening, so we only ground it instead of using casings. We made about 15 pounds of sausage total. We now have sweet Italian, spicy Italian, and garlic sausage. We are a little afraid to try the spicy sausage, because when measuring out the meat, I misread the scale!! OOPS! I thought I had 10 pound but it was really only 5 pounds, so the seasoning is going to be a little heavy!
We waited to start this project until the kiddos were in bed, but Miss O kept coming up with excuses to get out of her room. She really wanted to help us, so I promised that she could have some of the sausage for breakfast the next morning. She liked that idea.
The next morning I cooked up some of the garlic sausage an sprinkled it in with our scrambled eggs and then I chopped up some tomatoes from our garden and added those as well. It was so yummy.