SIPRESS SCOOP

  Have you heard of “the Elf on the Shelf? Well around the beginning of November I started to see pictures of a little elf in mischievous positions all over Pinterest and I did some investigating (code for Google).   Turns out it is a book and elf combo set you “adopt” for your family.   The elf is sent to your family from Santa’s toy shop located at the North Pole.   Each night while the children sleep, the elf does something naughty or nice based upon how your children behaved.   Now it also didn’t take me long to find a bunch of blogs written about “overachieving elf on the shelf Moms”.   I quickly realized that I would be falling in to this category and from here on out will except that title with PRIDE! Adoptions fees for these elves can add up to almost $40. As I pondered the idea, I shared my thoughts with the people around me (Tyler & my Mom). After a little of her own investigating (a phone call, followed by a trip to Barnes & Noble), Grandma Melanie cov

Hello November!!! As Thanksgiving approached each day on facebook, I shared something I'm grateful for in my life. As Americans we are the world’s largest consumers of products and waste.   It can be easy to focus on what we want or what we don’t have and I find it refreshing each day to remind myself of all the fabulous things I do have in life. 1- I'm grateful for having an amazing & loving Great Aunt who is now said to be cancer free!!! 2- I am grateful that my husband has a good Union job that gives him paid vacation. This has been a nice relaxing week with Tyler at home. 3- Today I'm grateful for my cousin Erin . We never spent much time together as children but I have truly enjoyed getting to know her the last two years & I consider myself a lucky lady to have her as a friend. 4- Today I am grateful for L-A-Z-Y Sundays that include a big breakfast made by Tyler & a few rounds of hide-n-seek... 5- Today I am grateful to be an American &

Maybe it is just me but this year I got extremely stressed out over Halloween costumes.   I know, shake your heads at me but I really like my kids to match to some extent.   I also realize that I only get control over what exactly their costumes are for a couple of years.   Everyone around me kept telling us to just take the kids to the store and let them choose, but what if they choose something weird or random?   Tyler wanted the kids to be Mike Rozoski & boo from Monsters inc.   Someone from his work even lent us a Mike costume.   However, the mike was too big & needed dry cleaning and to purchase a Boo costume was over a hundred dollars!!!   A friend & I did contemplate making a Boo costume but then the amount of the materials was going to be more than I was comfortable spending on a children’s Halloween costume.   I also secretly really wanted them to be Cookie Monster & Elmo, but those costumes were also out of our budget.   I drove around and shopped at six di

Have you ever thought about the Holidays? HA, of course you have.   Not the usual way but I mean, have you ever thought about how one day suddenly becomes a week or “twelve days” of holiday?   Well, it is not just the twelve days of Christmas and Thanksgiving weekend, Halloween is the same.   Besides the usual Trick or treating there are other fun Fall activates families can do to “get in the spirit’.   We choose to take a family trip to the Pumpkin Patch, carve pumpkins, visit the Woodland Park Zoo Pumpkin Smash and decorated spooky cookies.   We went a record number of days without rainfall this year in Seattle.   As we entered the second week of October, I started to ponder wither or not there would be any mud at the Pumpkin Patch this year.   As it turned out the weekend we had planned to go, the rain finally started to fall.   There was defiantly a short of puddles for jumping but we did manage to find some dirt and get dirty as we adventured around the Pumpkin patch with

The first weekend in October we traveled south to visit Tyler’s brother Jayson and his wife Andalyn in their new home in Camas, Washington.   They recently moved from Spokane so that Jayson can attend Chiropractor school in Portland.   Knowing that his mandatory credit load is between 22-28 credits each quarter we knew that once his classes started he would have little free time for visitors so we planned our trip for the weekend before his classes began.   We arrived Friday night after dark.   However, we were still able to get in some play time & brownies and ice cream before bed. Saturday Jayson made us breakfast and Andalyn packed us a picnic lunch and we all loaded up and adventured to Fort Vancouver, a United States National Historic Site.   It was AMAZING.   I bet we didn’t even get to see half of the place, it was so huge.   When we first arrived we were in two-hour parking.   We walked down to the airplane museum and went inside to check it out.   It was beyond