Get On The Shelf contest

Some (probably most) of you reading this might already know about this, but in case anyone else stumbles on it, I wanted to put the information in as many places as possible.

Walmart is having a contest right now called Get On The Shelf where anyone who has a product can submit it for consideration. The winning product (determined by # of votes) wins a spot on walmart's shelves and on walmart.com. I entered my countdown boxes for consideration. Here is the link to the page where you can watch the video and vote. You can vote either through your facebook account or a text message, and you can vote once a day. I would love it if everyone I knew could vote once a day. Thanks in advance for helping with this!

Museums galore

We have visited 2 Indiana museums in the past few weeks. First we went with Meg, Lilly, and Zach to the Center for History in South Bend. What a fun place! It was set up like a little old-fashioned town with a school, store, barn, house, etc... and the kids could play with anything they wanted. Here are some pictures:

All 4 cousins in the canoe:

In the store:

Playing school:

Fishing:

Becca and Lilly in the covered wagon:

The second museum we went to was the Indianapolis Children's Museum for a spur-of-the-moment meet up with some of the Evansville Jacksons. It was a free day at the museum, so it was absolutely packed with people. But we still had fun visiting with Gran and Papa Michael and some of the kids. It was so nuts at the museum that I wasn't really able to take many pictures. Here is the one I took that turned out well - Becca and Papa Michael on the merry-go-round. It was by far her favorite part of the day:

Pizza Hut

Becca and I go to a playgroup that meets every other week. We usually just meet at someone's house and play, but last week we had a field trip to Pizza Hut to see how they make pizza.

Putting cheese on her pizza:

Becca's pizza going into the oven:

Becca and her finished pizza (of which she ate none, choosing rather to take bites, chew them partially and then spit them into my hand. Yum. Don't you wish you were on this field trip with us? Normally she loves pizza, so I'm not really sure what that was about):

100th Day of School

Last week Samuel had his 100th day of Kindergarten. His class had a big party and did lots of fun things around the number 100. He went around to different stations and did things like 100 exercises, stacked 100 cups, helped put 100 stamps in a book, etc... Each person in his class had to bring in 100 of something from home that would fit in a quart-sized ziplock bag. We counted out 100 Lite Brite pegs and sent those in.

Here he is with his most favorite person in his class (well, probably his most favorite person in the world right now).  I'm not going to post her name since our blog is public, but oh does he love this little girl. He even spent some time this past weekend cutting out and coloring a special valentine heart for her.

You've got mail

Last summer I saw a blurb in Family Fun magazine for something called Postcrossing. It's a website for people to send and receive postcards from all over the world. I love to get things in the mail so I signed us up right away.

In the past 6 months, we have received about 50 postcards from every country imaginable:

Some of our cards are from the USA, but most are from other countries.

Postcrossing has some sort of automated system where you write an ID # on each card you send. When it gets where it is supposed to go, the recipient enters that ID # into postcrossing's website, and then your name goes to the top of the list to get a postcard from someone else. So the more you send, the more you receive. It's not like the old chain letters where you sent things to people and then never got anything.

I love finding a postcard in our mailbox when it's our turn to get one. It's so much nicer than just junk mail or bills. And I love reading what people write on the back - they tell about life in their county, or what they did that day, or what books they like to read. It's all so interesting!

If anyone is interested in signing up, the website is www.postcrossing.com and it's free to join. Your only costs are the postcards and stamps (most of the cards we have sent have been to countries overseas, which need a 98 cent stamp).

Catching Up

Wow, it looks like I haven't posted anything on our blog in almost 2 months. That's a long time! Since I last updated, we have had:

Thanksgiving:






















Christmas baking:

Bringing cookies to the local firestation on Christmas Eve:































Christmas:

And we even had a little bit of snow:

 

More frequent posting to (hopefully) come in 2012...

Living up to her name

There's a reason we call her Becca the wrecker.

Exhibit A: While most people put the silverware away when emptying the dishwasher, it's apparently much more fun to take it all out of the drawer and put it on the counter:

Exhibit B: Helping to make Ernie's coffee in the morning:

Exhibit C: Yes, this would be the wallpaper in our dining room. However, as luck would have it, we have never liked that wallpaper and have been planning to take it down since we moved in 4 years ago. Thanks to Becca, this project will be moved up on the to-do list.