Friday Tim and I had a day long date in Minneapolis while waiting for Hannah and my mom to fly in for the week. We ended our date with a trip to an ice cream shop recommended by Tim’s friend. They had special cones covered in chocolate rolled in candy bars, which were delicious! We told mom about it and she said she’s never seen cones done like that, so when Tim and I went grocery shopping I decided to pick up stuff to make some special cones for our ice cream. I think we may have one cone left in our freezer, they sure went fast, and were fun to make!

Here’s what you do:

Buy waffle cones, chocolate dipping sauce that you would use for making chocolate covered strawberries or whatever, and whatever candy bars or nuts, or whatever you’d like to roll your cones in.

Go ahead and crush whatever treats you want before melting your chocolate, then dip the cone in your chocolate, covering about half the cone, roll the cone in your candy, then sit it on a wax paper covered pan to put in your freezer to harden the cones. Eat and enjoy!

A while ago I signed up to receive a free toy through Ebeanstalk if I would blog about it. It arrived at a busy time to test it out with Hannah, so I waited to use it with her and then life has continued to be busy. I guess that’s the life of a mom huh?

Ebeanstalk is a website dedicated to selecting great baby toys and toddler toys. They rely on the opinions and feedback of bloggers and moms around the country to continue selecting great toys to sell. Their team of child experts also helps them pick out learning toys to make sure your child gets the most out of his or her playtime!

I was so excited to receive Hannah’s free toy in the mail. I opened it immediately and let her play a little with it before we headed out of town. Here are some of my initial thoughts on the Home Sweet Home Book:

This is a very cute book style pop up house.

The colors are bright and very inviting.

I like how the house opens all the way into a circle and even includes a little floor for each room of the house (living room, bathroom, and bedroom).

There are fun little objects in each room to tuck away into the story plot. And they’re attached to a string so you can’t loose them!

Then Hannah started to play with the Home Sweet Home Book:

First thing I noticed is that this isn’t a great toy for Hannah at this time. She can’t crawl yet, so she sits stationary and tries to play with the house like it is a book, so the floors in the room got in her way of trying to play with the objects she could remove from their pockets in their rooms. Most of the time while Hannah sat and played she could only see the bottoms of the floors and hardly anything of the adorable rooms in the house.

Then I noticed Hannah got a little frustrated trying to look at the different objects (she loves the bright yellow ducky in the bathtub) since the strings keeping them attached are pretty short. When she would try to bring the toy close to her the whole book came with it and got in the way of her little fingers trying to learn how to work.

The Home Sweet Home Book is geared towards 6 month olds.  Maybe if I tuck this away and bring it out when she is more mobile she will enjoy playing with it more and can leave the house open and move to each room.

My last suggestion I would add to the book would be to add velcro on the other side of the tab that keeps the house closed, and make it so it can also keep the house open. It stays open well on it’s own sitting there, but I could see when a child is playing with the objects that it could end up closing a room or two.

On the way to work I forgot a book I needed to make copies of, so I turned around to get it. On the way back to the house I took the turn into our neighborhood a little too fast and mad a 180 on our icy street. I was glad I did that instead of getting stuck in the snow bank on the side of the road. As I was turning around to once again face the direction I wanted, I saw the neighbor’s dog run out super excited. The dog followed me all the way back to our front step as I got my book from Tim. Luckily the dog is friendly ’cause it’s huge, and I am not fond of big dogs.

I was so super stressed because of this dog. To start off, when I got headed in the right direction again towards our house this dog ran in to the side of the car. And I couldn’t go fast enough on our road to stay infront of him because it was pretty much like driving on an ice skating rink, it’s so slick. If I got any speed I knew I’d be sliding around like crazy if I had to put on the breaks. I would slow down to let the dog hopefully stop trying to run infront of the car, but as soon as I stopped the dog stopped running and waited to see where I’d go next.

If trying to get back home didn’t stress me out enough, it took at least 5 minutes to drive like a quarter mile to the end of our street on to the main road. As soon as I started moving this dog would run up ahead and infront of the car. So I’d try to slowly put on the breaks to avoid sliding. Some how I avoided hitting the dog again, or he hitting me, whatever happened. This happened about 10 times all the way down the road. As soon as I’d get traction he was back infront of the car, and then I’d have to stop, hope the dog would move out of the way and then try to get traction again to move a couple more feet before the dog was back in front. I really want to know what the person was thinking who was driving behind me trying to get out of our neighborhood too. Oh, and honking at him did nothing but make him sit there looking around wondering where the noise was coming from.

And this would explain why I never want a dog of my own. (Sorry Mom and Dad for ever asking for one when I was younger!) By the time I was near the end of the road I started thinking, “Maybe it would be better if I just hit the dog and he couldn’t run infront of the car any more and I could be on my way to work.” But slowly I inched my way and made it on to the main road (which the dog followed). When he moved to the side of the road I gunned it in first and drove away before he could follow any further. So it took me 5 minutes to drive down our street, and another 5 to go 3.5 miles to the church. That’s ridiculous!

Hannah had her 4 month check-up today! She is 25 inches tall now and weighs 14 pounds and 9 ounces. Hannah is in the 75-85 percentile for her height, weight and head circumference, which was 16 and 3/4. She checked out great and did much better with her shots than last time. Hannah didn’t even notice that she got the first one, and then cried for the 2nd, but it wasn’t a screaming fit like she had for her 2 month appointment.

While we were waiting to go in for Hannah’s check-up the tv playing in the waiting room had some trashy news show that updates people on all the Hollywood gossip. Today they were talking about Tiger Woods and whatever is going on in his life. I first heard that something is going on with him from someone in our church last week, and it annoyed me that someone was talking to me about it, because it is not my business, nor theirs. And so today when this show came on and was talking about all the drama I really felt like I needed to change it, but there were 2 men sitting there looking at the screen off and on, so I wasn’t sure if they were interested in the show or not. After sitting there for a couple more minutes fighting with the thought that I really shouldn’t be listening to the garbage, and really neither should anyone else because it’s just gossip. It wasn’t uplifting in any way. I asked the men around me if they were watching and if they minded if I changed the channel. Luckily they weren’t interested in it, and it sparked a quick conversation about unnecessary gossip, which all gossip is unnecessary. It caught a few people’s eyes that I got up and changed the channel vocalizing why I didn’t want to watch it. It’s been a while since I have boldly stood up about my morals, and I was hesitant to do so, but am glad I did.

A blog I follow is doing a fun online scavenger hunt, and the winner gets a southern style cookbook. If you are married to the ministry join in on the fun! Go to The Preacher’s Wife blog and follow the rules.

For those of you who don’t qualify, I hope you enjoy learning a little about me.

1.  First Name. Dana

2.  State and Country of Residence. Minnesota, USA for almost 3 years now, but born and raised Texan.

3.  Husband’s Ministry Title. Youth Pastor and blogger of Life in Student Ministry

4.  Length of time in Current Ministry Location. {IMPORTANT:  There are several of you who may not be in a current ‘official’ pastorate/ministry, etc.  That makes you no less a minister’s wife!  You play along, girlfriends, and let us pray for you!} 2 years, 9 months

5.  Children?  If yes, give gender and ages. yes! One adorable 3 month old baby girl.

6.  Number of unique homes in which you’ve lived during your marriage. 2. First was my husband’s one bedroom apartment that he lived in before we got married and we lived cramped for 7 months before moving to Minnesota where we rent an amazing 4 story lake house with the 4th floor being a tower that you can see the whole lake from. Perfect for quiet times with God.

7.  Cook Sunday lunch or eat out? Cook, unfortunately most of the time we end up eating something simple due to busy Sunday schedules, sometimes I think ahead and have something in the crock-pot.

8.  Typically on time for Sunday School or not? Surprisingly on time since we have to show up early anyways for Tim to teach Jr. High SS. Of course we do get up 2 hours before we need to leave the house since Hannah was born.

9.  Favorite TV Show. Do I have to choose one? Biggest Loser, Survivor, Amazing Race and 18 Kids And Counting

10.  Something you watch/like/do that you would never tell the church people. (Except now you just did…lol) I recently started watching the Country Music Channel, getting hooked on World’s Strictest Parents, Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader and Cowboys Cheerleaders. I’ve really been missing my Southern roots since Hannah was born.

11.  Most annoying church-related pet peeve. When people say that Tim and I are the youth pastors/leaders (plural), meaning that I am it too. The church hired Tim, not me. I am Tim’s biggest fan/helper, but not one of the youth pastors.

12.  One thing you need to throw away but can’t bring yourself to do it. Old shoes. I have many from college still sitting my closet that have made many moves with me already.

13.  The one food you can not live without. Chick-fil-a. There aren’t any in MN, which is frustrating, so any time we travel I always look for the closest one to where we’re going. Looking forward to our next trip over Christmas!

14.  Parsonage or have your own home? neither, we rent

15.  Freak when the doorbell rings or always ready for a visitor? Freak! With both Tim and I despising any kind of chores, our house is usually a mess. We do enjoy having visitors over so we will clean, only if we have a heads up though!

Well, my MacBook was fried. Tim and I had a joint hand in doing it. Tim was handing Hannah over to me to feed, and while laying her on the pillow in my lap she started rolling off and we both went to catch her, and in the process my water cup got knocked over and into the keyboard in my MacBook. Hopefully Apple will start making them waterproof, that would be nice! We don’t have the money to buy another one, we got mine for free from the money Tim made on the referral website he does. So now we’re attempting to be a one computer family. Tim has his MacBook for church, so that helps if we both want/need to be on the computer at the same time, like now. We went down to visit Tim’s brother and family this weekend and went to a mall near Minneapolis to take my MacBook and get the Apple store people to look at it. We didn’t know you have to set an appointment, so we left my MacBook there to get looked at and they called Tim yesterday letting him know it’d cost about $700 to fix it, but for just a couple hundred more we could get a brand new one. We still need to go pick it up, probably this next weekend, and I’m not sure what we’ll do with it, maybe sell it for the parts? I don’t know. I guess we just will have to learn how to share a computer. This will probably be good practice for when Tim’s car dies. We’ve talked about trying to see how we can get by with just one car, and I think we’re in the ideal town to do it because our town is so small. It’ll be more inconvenient, but doable.

I have been pretty good at updating pictures of Hannah on Facebook, but for those of you not on Facebook, I will be updating our online photo album, so you can click on the photo link at the top of my blog and see the pictures. Check back soon for pictures!

Over a year ago the discount store in town got a lot of fabric in and I let my landlord know because we had talked about putting new curtains in the house. She went ahead and bought some fabric for new curtains in the living room and in the office, which will now soon be the nursery. I got the fabric from our landlord about a month ago to start working on the curtains, and started working yesterday. In the picture the curtain I made is the red one, and those are different boats you see on it. I’m not sure if it’ll go with the nursery bedding we have for Baby Schmoyer, but at least if we have a boy, he wont have pink curtains. I like the bright red better anyways.

A few months ago I was given a sewing machine for free that someone was going to just throw out because they haven’t used it in years. Luckily my friend Amanda thought of me and asked if I wanted it. Of course I did! I’ve been wanting a sewing machine of my own for a while now. So yesterday I got the fabric cut for the curtains in the office/soon to be nursery, and today I got the sewing machine working. I figured it wouldn’t be smart to start in the living room because I have never made curtains before and the ones in the living room will been seen by others a whole lot more.

I did some research on curtains last month, but didn’t find any help on how to make the curtains I need to go on the runners we have. We’ve got the kind of curtains that you see at a hotel, that you just pull the cord on the side and they all move together. I really wasn’t wanting to put the extra time in to make the pleats like these store bought curtains have, but after a few trial and errors I found out that it’s actually easier to put the pins in the curtains if I have the pleats. I was hoping I could’ve just made simple curtains with the fabric loops to hang it from, but that would’ve cost extra money to change out the hardware.

So far I have 1 of the 4 panels done for the curtains in the office. I started getting pretty frustrated with trying to figure out how they would hang best on the runners, but wanted to get one panel knocked out today before going to bed so I know what to do when I get to work on the rest. Hopefully I’ll be pretty skilled at making these curtains by the time I have to tackle the living room. I may have to take a break between the two rooms though if I get stressed out again like I did tonight. This project was supposed to help the pregnancy go by faster, but when it comes to projects I like to just get them done as soon as I start. So that strategy isn’t working out too well so far.

Yesterday was wonderful, and tiring. Tim and I relaxed for the evening on the couch watching tv, well at least he did. I ended up falling asleep. Today I was planning on relaxing and doing some work around the house, but ended up getting a call from a school practically begging for me to come in for the afternoon. For the most part the day was good. But the very end of the day tough.

I had a student rip another student’s homework for no reason at all (the other student wasn’t even in the room) and assumed that the other student would just keep the ripped page. Instead I used natural consequences for his actions and had him keep the ripped homework and gave the other student the whole page. The student who ripped the homework did not like that idea at all, but didn’t have a choice. The natural consequence didn’t go over well, and I had to get another teacher in on it. But it was nice to be backed up with the natural consequence.

I feel like I still have a lot to learn with classroom discipline, but was glad I was able to use part of the Love and Logic philosphy today. Yesterday went so well teaching all day, and then today in a different classroom for only the afternoon didn’t. I felt much more drained walking out of the school today than I did yesterday. It’s so hit or miss with subbing. Some days I get classes that are very well behaved, and some days I don’t. And some days I get the class that should’ve been rowdy, but is perfect, and surprises the rest of the school. There’s only 11 more days of school left and I’m not eager to get subbing jobs this late in the school year ’cause students are ready for the summer and behaviors aren’t the best. But on the other hand I feel guilty if I pass up a chance to work and make money.

While living in Texas, Fall was my favorite season because I always enjoyed it when the long hot summer was coming to an end. Now with living in Minnesota, Spring is my favorite season because after such a long cold winter I am ready for a little warmth.

Tim and I went down to see our neice, Addison Kate last weekend and everything only an hour and a half away from us was in full bloom Spring. It looked like a whole other part of the country ’cause we hadn’t had anything start to bloom in our town. Today though, I got to see blossoms on trees, and that made me very happy! Yesterday actually got up to the 80s which was nice and hot after our winter. Tim and I got to watch 2 softball games in the sun. We knew girls on both teams from our youth group, so we didn’t cheer for anyone, but sat back and enjoyed watching the girls play. Today was another gorgeous day. After subbing all day Tim had dinner planned and then we went on a walk. It was so nice outside and I was so excited about our blossoms on the trees that I grabbed our pruning shears and went to work on our four apple trees. Half way through Tim ended up joining me after he realized I was missing from the house. It was so nice to be outside and feel productive. I noticed the plum bushes on our rental property need some work too, so maybe I’ll tackle that tomorrow. I really wanted to get our apple trees done though because last year we didn’t make out too well on the apples, only one tree did okay, and the rest weren’t worth picking except to keep the bees away.

God has really blessed us with gorgeous weather lately. It was supposed to thunderstorm yesterday during the softball game, then they backed it up to storming today, which didn’t happen again. Now the forcast says tomorrow will get the storms. We’ll see what happens.

I have come to realize how much I really dislike garage sales. For the past couple weeks I have looked at our local newspaper to see when and where garage sales are and what kind of stuff people are selling. I would love to find a great deal on a crib and bassinet, so figured dealing with garage sales would be worth it. But now I’m starting to change my mind. I have gone to a few in the past couple weeks, but only come home frustrated feeling like I’m wasting my time.

Here’s why I don’t like garage sales in no certain order:

1. I think I am spoiled by freecycle.org and craigslist where I can ask questions about items, get pictures, and know what I am getting before I have to leave my house to get it, and I know what price I will be paying ahead of time too.

2. I like to sleep in on the weekends, and trying to wake up to get to a sale is a struggle.

3. I showed up 5 minutes after a garage sale supposedly opened, and what I was looking for was already sold, and I’m left wondering if it was a piece of junk, or if it would’ve been worth it to stake out their house early in the morning to be the first one there.

4. I don’t like driving around looking for a deal, I feel like it’s a waste of time and waste of gas money.

5. If I don’t need something I’m not going to buy it, even if it’s a great deal I’m not saving money by buying unnecessary items. And for some reason I feel awkward walking away from a garage sale empty handed, although I started to get use to it.

6. I don’t like showing up to a place to find out the item I would’ve potentially been interested in is completely dirty, not the color/style I want, and I don’t know what kind of home it’s been in. No one has a nice smelling garage to make me think it’s coming from a great place.

7. I am turned off by someone having so many things in their house that they can fill an entire garage of junk that has been sitting around collecting dust. I don’t like clutter, which is probably why I like freecycle so much. I get excited when I have something in the house that I can give away!

Obviously I’m not an expert at shopping garage sales. I know a lot of people who put time and effort into it, I would just rather sit on the computer, find a deal, and know where to get it and for what price, and not have to drive from place to place hoping to find what I’m looking for. Plus I don’t think I want to start my day off by stressing myself out trying to find something at a garage sale. I’d rather enjoy my Saturday, so this is possibly my last day of doing that…hopefully!