Coffee Syrups

Saturday, June 30, 2012

Today we decided to make some of the coffee syrups since i got my ingredients in the mail. We made some for our church since i make gourmet coffee there and since i can make my own syrups i thought i would make them some to help the church save some money.


After making the church some and some for ourselves, we decided to make up some extras and can them, that way they would be ready once we need them for our church. We decided to can them since we are unsure exactly when we will need them and canning them will prolong their life considerably.


I also did some research today and found out that an open bottle of syrup should last at least 3 weeks if not longer. Also that if you use distilled water (which we did) that it would prolong the shelf life even longer and on top of that if you stick it in the refrigerator it might even prolong it further. It was interesting to find all this information. 

All in all i believe canning the extra syrups was the way to go. That way when we empty the bottles we have open, we can refill them with the canned syrup.

They don't look as colorful as store bought syrups because
they don't have all the artificial food coloring in them.



And if we decided to continue to keep canning the syrups and sell them that way at the farmers market we found these that maybe we could sell on the side:
Mason jar pour spouts with cap to keep freshness.

We also found these nifty things:
Mason jar travel mug lids.

We love everything mason... i collect glass jars because there is so many uses for them. It's just so fun to find items for sell that help convert the jars into new things :) My hubby really wants one of these travel mug lids. They are pretty sweet!

Garden Is Paying Off

Wednesday, June 27, 2012

What we did today :)


 Cherry tomatoes only filled 3 jars and really they should have been put into only 2.
And then 10 jars of the big tomatoes which we peeled and just cut into large chunks.
It was rather nice to be able to can stuff that you grew yourself. Satisfying ^_^

Got The Call

So Bobby got the call from the bed people. They say that the bed will be delivered on Tuesday between 12-3pm. So excited! Wish i didn't have to wait that long though... i'm impatient.


Also Tuesday is our at home photo shoot in the morning so sounds like the making of a busy but fun day :) I'm looking forward to getting our pictures taken. Need to get our grass cut and watered and the weed eating done so the yard looks nice for our photo shoot. Should make for some cute pics i'm hoping :)

More Toms ^_^

Monday, June 25, 2012


I might be overly tickled with my garden this year and you might think i am silly, but you have to understand, i have tried growing tomatoes before and would only get 1 to 2 tomatoes out of the whole year... or maybe none. So this is like incredible to me! Things are actually growing in my garden and i am tickled pink! We love tomatoes!

Our climbing grape tomato plants are probably about 8ft tall maybe? Huge! And we are getting more then we can use. I am going to look up some recipes on canning them. I've canned before but with premade sauces so i need to learn how to do it from scratch. Bobby wants me to can some grape tomatoes whole, that sounds fun. :)

Yesterday i had Bobby grill up some chicken and i had a salad. Used my homegrown grape tomatoes and my lettuce, mushrooms, green pepper, cheese, croutons (all that i got great deals on by price matching).... added some bacon bits...OMGosh! It was amazing!

Disjointed

Friday, June 22, 2012

So this week has been different then most. I was babysitting a little boy so all of my normal routine has been all jumbled. Today was the last day for the sitting, Bob is off to an elders meeting tonight and won't be back till late.


So tonight my thought is to clean like crazy down here but i might need some help of caffeine cause gosh am i tired these days! I hope i can get a lot done!


Tomorrow morning Bob is off early, probably before i am awake because the school is doing a fundraiser where they serve breakfast and some different things. Luckily breakfast is free to our little family since Bob is a coach. So the plan is to go to the breakfast (can't say no to a free breakfast you don't have to cook right?) then i will leave the girls with him and me and my friend will head off to do some garage saling since this weekend is the city wide garage sales. Should be fun!


Then i will have to do some grocery shopping and pick up a few things because we signed up this Sunday to do our churches regular morning breakfast. So we... or probably more like I will then spend most of Saturday night prepping and backing things for Sunday morning breakfast.


Sunday should be interesting since we will be serving the food and the coffee lol. Then after church at 4pm with be our life group bible study.


Talk about a busy weekend! But hopefully there will be a lot of fun parts as well :)

Sheets Arrival!

Our sheets arrived today just like amazon said it would. So far very pleased, they look just like the picture and the color is exactly like they showed it. Hope they feel great!

I've continued to have terrible sleep. I wake up about 4am and toss and turn from pain and think 'Gosh darn when will our bed get here!'.... but i'm being terribly impatient since we only purchased them two days ago and they have to be shipped from the warehouse to the store and then put on a delivery order.... but i don't want to wait! LOL

Anyways i made my two lovely girls model the sheet for you:


 Hehehe.... then i let them play with all the shipping goods.


 Abby wasn't to sure when i put the bubble wrap on her head :)




 Abby was dancing with the bubble wrap.



 Jumping up and down acting crazy! Yelling "El-o Governor!" in an accent. And she came up with that on her own, i didn't tell her to say that LOL


I watched Anabel climb into the box as Sissy helped her.
Anabel once inside "Ok sissy! I'm ready to go to the mountains!"
Abby "Umm... ok bye!"
Then Anabel would bear hug Abby around the neck and they would lean over on purpose and fall to the ground and laugh and laugh. They did this many many times.

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Investing In Our Sleep

Wednesday, June 20, 2012

So we made a big decision the other day. Bob had heard a commercial on the radio about a mattress sale going on in Wichita were you could get 3 years of 0% interest.

We had recently been talking about our mattress situation. Bob doesn't sleep good and i have been complaining for over a month now about how mad i sleep and how my arms and back hurt in the mornings. We rarely get restful sleep in less we stay up to late and crash. I also toss and turn all night and wake up countless times in pain.

So we did some figures and decided what me might be able to afford to pay and then we headed up there to see if we could get anything good.

I think it was a year ago (if not longer) when me and Bob where talking about beds, we had decided that when we went to go buy a bed, we would try not to skimp as much as possible.

So we went and tried a tempurpedic bed. Boy were they nice! But we had several people tell us that Sleep Number was better so we decided to go try them out before we chose anything.
For our price range the Sleep Number sucked! It was basically an air mattress. Now i'm sure that if you could afford the nicer sleep numbers that it might be really nice... i don't know but the one in our range (that was still more then the tempurpedic) only had 1in of padding and the rest was the air mattress.... so not impressed.

So we talked it out and decided to go back and go with the tempurpedic beds. Which i am so excited about! We went with the split king ergo adjustable base:


We didn't like the more expensive base with massage and wireless controls... it was unneeded for us so we went with the regular one which had a 20yr warranty on it.


Nice thing was we were able to get different mattress for each of us. I went with soft and bob went with medium. Our beds have a 10yr warranty and 1yr comfort guaranty which means if we aren't comfortable and we want to switch out our bed for something else, we can. The sleep number bed only had a 30day sleep guaranty.


And we picked out some amazing pillows to go with the beds. The bed will be delivered for free sometime in a week he thought (they had to get the beds shipped to them).
All with 3yr 0% interest and our monthly payments are about $100.


We made sure there was no early pay off penalty because we play on paying it off quicker then that.


I'm so excited especially after just having another terrible night of sleep on our old bed. So now we can use our old bed for another guest bed, that will be so nice!


And on top of that we are thinking about having another baby soon. After we bought the beds Bob was like 'no recliner for you'. See when i am pregnant i end up spending about half of the pregnancy sleeping on the couch or the recliner because i am in so much pain at night.... had terrible back issues with the both girls. So now with the ergo bed i should be able to stay up in bed with him. So nice cause i hate sleeping apart from him!


And then because we were going to need sheets obviously (and i wasn't going to spend $150-$200 on sheets at the bed store) i hopped online i went searching for some. I found 1500 Thread count Split King Egyptian Quality Bed sheet set on Amazon for $39.49ea with free shipping (normally $120ea) and got these:




Now it needs to hurry and get here!

Garden/Lawn

Saturday, June 9, 2012

Some garden/lawn pics

 Climbing cherry tomato plant

 Plot #1 tomato plants




 Plot #2 tomato plants

 Potato plants

 Nice thick lawn ^_^

Those candles i mentioned :)

Harvested cherry tomatoes... they are almost all gone now lol

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Sandbox Filled!

Friday, June 8, 2012

Finally got the sand box filled! They had so much fun! Abby was not sure about sitting in it or standing in it for the longest time, then she got use to it.



































It was quite warm and they played for over an hour out there... then Anabel had a accident in her pants, luckily not in the sand!


So we went in for a luke warm bath and they played in that for maybe another hour LOL I wanted them to get tired because tonight we are going with some church people to the drive in movie theater to watch Madagascar 3.





My silly girls!


It was fun :)

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