Sunset on the Holiday Season

As I have mentioned, I love the holiday season. We had a wonderful Christmas, loaded with family and wayyy too many gifts. As much as I love it, the minute we rang in the New Year, I was ready to pack up the decorations and reclaim our living room!

We ain't exactly fancy round these parts, almost all of our decorations are plastic. Plastic makes for easy clean up, can you say garbage bags? Yep, we throw everything in big black garbage bags and chuck it in the closet. We did have a little problem with the 9 foot inflatable carousel,someone...me? may have thrown the box away. It is in a pile in the garage awaiting a giant container.
We had another issue, my boys were given enough toys to fill a toy store x 3 and already had too much. Each boy got a large tubberware box with their name on it to store their new toys and favorite old ones, the rest went??? You guessed it, big black garbage bags im another closet.
Like I said, we ain't fancy, lol.
It was an amazing Chirstmas, but I think I will need the next 344 days to recover.

This post was written for a contest sponsored by the new SC Johnson website Right@Home on the Parent Bloggers Network

My Oven Exploded!

Two days before Christmas with a big ol turkey half done inside of it, my kids ran outside and said, "the oven went BOOM and now there is fire." By the time we ran in the "fire" was just smoke. But the heating element in the oven was TOAST. Stinking thing was in lots of pieces. I instantly burst into tears over my turkey! Our neighbor was kind enough to stick it in his oven. Initially we were told it wouldn't be fixed until mid January, but found out today it will be repaired next Tuesday. My dad was nice enough to get me a counter top roaster for Christmas so I was able to bake my ham on Christmas Day.

Making Ornaments

I had a slightly freezer burned bag of flour, I just couldn't bring myself to throw out and I figured making dough ornaments would be a messy but fun way to use the flour! And it was...both lol.
Recipe is easy.
2 cups flour
1 cup salt
little oil (i would guess 2 tsp not needed though I saw plenty recipes w/o it)
1 cup water
I had to add a dash of vanilla to mine because it smelled freezer burned

Slowly add water to other ingredients until you have a nice dough.
Not sticky and doesnt crumble.
I sprinkled a little flour on the table and gave each boy a ball of dough and a bunch of cookie cutters. We didnt have rolling pins so we improvised a bit and used cans (paging Martha Stewart). They boys had sooo much fun punching out the shapes.
I lined the pan with wax paper and placed them in a 250 degree oven for 1 hour.
After they cooled we painted them. I used kids paint because Noah tends to get things in his mouth but it made them a little wet. So I put them back in the oven for about 20 mins. Tonight I get to paint some glaze on them and VIOLA homemade ornaments!
All in all this took a while. But I was so surprised how much fun my tough guys had making them!
(please ignore the dates on the last 2 pics I need new batteries and didnt reset date.)