Rich & I participated in Straight Up Weekend this weekend & are still trying to recooperate.  It’s an amazing weekend for 7-12th grade students who come on Friday night, hear an awesome guest speaker, Brent Crowe, worship with The Zack Olsen Band and have “family time” in a small group setting.  We also had “Late Night” with HGA (His Glory Alone) before heading back to our host homes (I hosted my group at our house & Rich stayed with another family with his kids).  Saturday morning we start all over again.  Breakfast, praise & worship, teaching, small group, lunch, service project out in the community, home to shower, back to church for dinner, praise & worship, teaching, small group & ended with a MMA sparring match!  Saturday night our grade (11th) had a bon fire at one of the host homes…  Sleepover again Saturday night & then back to church in the morning for breakfast, big church & our last session with the Zack Olsen Band and Brent Crowe.

We had great kids in our groups and really saw God working in their lives.  SUW was incredible. Sooo, if you have a 7-12th grader next year, send then to SUW at Bells Shoals!  Haley & Lorin will be in 7th next year (AHH!!) and can not wait to go!

Here are a few pictures of my team

Our service project was to wash the inside & outside of 5 vans at A Kid’s Place.

Our girls were very hard workers & used a lot of team work

Here we are at our “family time”, where we discussed the teaching & worked on some letters to send to a local nursing home.

There is a set up called “The Point Beyond”, this is an incredible display of 12 different charities which the kids are able to donate to.  We collected rice for Metropolitan Ministries, $ for various local organizations, such as A Kid’s Place & Good Samaritan Mission.  We also helped raise funds for KGEA and their water projects worldwide, World Vision, wrote notes to the elderly in local nursing homes & encouraging notes to the widows of our church.  We also got a chance to write the names and pray for lost friends and family members.  There were a lot of awesome displays and we raised over $4,000!!!

I’ve got a lot of LINKS on here, so click away & learn more!!

]]> http://lazzaralife.com/2012/02/07/suw-2012/feed/ 0 lazzaralife NewSUWWebGraphic IMG_0028 IMG_0032 IMG_0033 IMG_0034 IMG_0036 IMG_0043 http://lazzaralife.com/2012/01/31/january-30-what-when/ http://lazzaralife.com/2012/01/31/january-30-what-when/#comments Tue, 31 Jan 2012 02:01:17 +0000 lazzaralife http://lazzaralife.com/?p=4087 ]]> So I am doing horrible at my New Years’ resolution to try to be a better blogger.  My last post was about 2 weeks ago on the how to’s on the menu board and I do have to tell you that my menu board has been life changing!  It’s really awesome, we’ve tried a lot of new things, which is great because 2 of the 4 kids are terribly picky eaters & our rule is you have to try it and give it a thumbs up or a thumbs down, so that’s a great way to get them to try things!  If more than 2 people dislike the recipe we won’t use it again.  The only thing banned from the list so far is brocoli slaw.

Here’s a recap of our January highlights.  I literally downloaded pictures off of my Facebook page to make this post.  So sad!  At least you know if you are my Facebook Friend, you aren’t missing anything

Avery had a homework assignment to compare & contrast 2 family members using a Venn diagram.  This was too good NOT to take a picture of!  A friend commented, “Give that boy some money!”  HA!

   Loli & Tanny showing some love during car line

Haley’s newest trick  ouch!

Santana had his frist date a few weeks ago!  We and our wonderful friends have arranged the marriage of Santana and their daughter, Jane.  We know it’s old-fashioned, but these two belong together

They had eggs, bacon and a muffin together, drew some pictures, made silly faces and told on each other when misbehaving.

Last Saturday was Loving God’s Children’s 2nd annual walk for orphans, “The Walk Home”.  We gathered at a local park and raised funds for our upcoming trip to an orphanage in Kazakhstan!  We walked, talked, laughed and scootered for orphans!

So, as I’ve stated before, I’m now with the “in crowd” and have joined and become obsessed with Pinterest.  At least it’s helping me with my addictions to FaceBook and Words With Friends!  I have also “invited” Haley & Lorin to join me in the pinterest craze & they love it just as much as I do.  It’s nice because they will find recipes they want to try!  Haley looked super cute for school the other day & told me she got her outfit inspiration from pinterest…  Proud moment!!  Lorin has become slightly obsessed with hair tutorials.  She watches youtube videos on how to do hair braids and hairstyles ALL THE TIME!!  Then she practices on Avery.

Last Wednesday was “Craft Day”!!!!  With some of my besties.  We were doing Valentines Day projects, but I opted for a more “Spring” project, since I don’t have a ton of spring stuff.  I made this super cute front door wreath!

I got an inexpensive wide rim 8×10 wooden frame from walmart- I think it was $3.50

Bought these adorable tiny flowers from the $$ store.  I got 10 bunches for $1 each

Hot glued all the little flowers on the wooden frame (and burned the heck out of my fingers)

I hung it on my plain black door hanger & added a little bow.  It was looking REALLY plain to me, so I went back out to Joann’s & got a “L” wooden letter & some glitter paper.  Traced the “L” and cut out the paper & ModPodged the glittery paper on.  More hot glue & there you go!  The frame did not want to balance, so I used some double-sided foam tape on the back of each corner to get it to stay in place.  THAT SIMPLE!!!!

You can visit my friend Amy’s blog, AKA, the PolkaDotDiva for some inspiration…  She hosts our craft day’s at her house, which is pretty exclusive (hehe!), but guess what???  She will plan a party for you!!

So, at craft day, we obviously craft, but we also (obviously) eat!  Here’s what I made.  Sticky Biscuits.  Yes I got the recipe on Pinterest.

random…..   OH!!!!  This kid, UUHHH- MAAAA- ZZINGGG!!!!  I’ve watched this video at least 20 times and it never gets old.

Back on track now.  Last night, the girls were playing “pageant”.  Yes, we watch “Toddlers & Tiara’s”, “Dance Mom’s” and all of the other crazy kid shows.  Some people think it’s awful and for the most part, the kiddie pageant, I agree, are awful.  I started competing in pageants and talent competitions when I was 11.  I had no interests in sports, partly because I am very uncoordinated and was legally blind by age 10.  Thank the Lord for contact lenses!!  I had friends at school who did pageants and we had a wonderful music teacher who taught voice lessons after school as well as a lady (one of my oldest, dearest friends), who came in after school and taught modeling lessons.  Somehow, Cynthia (my modeling coach extraordinaire) saw some potential in me & began giving me lessons and preparing me for my first ever beauty pageant.  This turned out to be a wonderful mother/daughter bonding time for my mother and I and we enjoyed pageantry very much!  It was not crazy back in 1990, like you see it on TV today.  I was allowed 1, maybe 2 competitions in the summertime.  I did well & by the time I was a teenager, I was extremely well-known in the Teen pageant circuit.  Not to toot my own horn, but I won a lot, ahh, the “glory days” as my husband would put it  I won my first national teen title in 1995, Miss Teen All American, followed by 2 other teen pageants in the years following & then was Miss Florida USA in 1999.  Anyway, I had to give back up to the interest in playing pageant & the reasons why I’m cool with my girls watching these shows with kids.  Sooo, I busted out my old crowns & sashes for the girls to play with as they won their titles.

Here’s the idea and How To.

What I love about this particular design—
1) It’s weekly. I shop weekly and plan my dinners weekly.
2) Meal cards have ingredients listed on the back, so I just gather my cards for the week, flip them over, and jot down the ingredients I need on my shopping list.
3) Using the two pockets I can store all of my meal cards right on the board. With a rotating system, I start with all the cards in the lower box and then after we have that meal, I place the card into the upper box until we go through the majority of the cards. Then, I start over choosing from all of them again.
4) It uses clothespins so no slipping and no holes. I was afraid that after I laminated my meal cards that they would get too thick/heavy for magnets.
5) The base is a picture frame—easy to hang and by using two nails I can keep it from tilting under the lopsided weight.

HOW TO MAKE THE ULTIMATE MENU BOARD

You will need-
11×14 picture frame
2 sheets of decorative 12 x 12 scrapbook paper
2-3 additional coordinating decorative papers
several sheets of solid colored card stock (for meal cards and pockets)
7 clothespins
the boxes from two 16 ct crayon packs
Elmers glue
Hot glue gun and glue
Mod Podge

Meal cards—
Before using your board, gather several meal ideas and their recipes. I have about 30, some are new recipes that I can’t wait to try & some are things that I make all of the time.  Make a 2 column word document- typing your menu on one side of the page and the ingredients in the column next to it. One thing I messed up on the first time was on the side of the card that says what you’re having.  Make sure you have that column centered to the RIGHT hand side, otherwise the clothespins will cover the words=not fun when you have to reprint them all!  You should have room to print about 5 menus/ingredients per piece of printer paper. After printing, cut the meals/ingredients out into strips and fold each strip in half, giving you a front and back. Laminate the cards. I used self-laminating paper which worked okay but not perfectly, I have a love/hate relationship with the self laminating papers!  My cards measure around 1 ½ inches tall (some are wider because the recipe calls for more ingredients) and then half of the width of an average size paper (4.25 inches) across.

This picture was taken with my FIRST batch of meal cards BEFORE I decided the left column needed to be all the way to the right, so the clothes pin wouldn’t cover the words.

Frame Background
Trim the decorative scrapbook paper to fill your frame. You will use one full sheet and just need a couple of inches of a second piece of paper in order to fill the entire frame. Where the two sheets overlap, you can place a thin piece of coordinating paper across the width to hide the seams (I didn’t think mine needed it). Put the title above that line using scrapbooking letter stickers OR, what I did was just print the word “menu” on my fancy paper.  Make sure you practice on plain paper first. Place in the frame. Secure the background into the frame. Everything else will be done on top of the glass.

This is another BEFORE picture.  I printed out “menu” and then realized it needed to be more to the RIGHT, so the menu cards wouldn’t overlap and then not be able to see that it says menu.  **learn from my mistakes!!  Always reference my TOP photo of the completed board.  I made several mistakes, until I got it right.

Clothespins
Trim strips of paper to fit on top of your clothespins (I traced my clothespins and cut them out). I printed out the days on white cardstock and put them on top.  You could do a variation of things , like M, T, W, Th, F, etc with stickers or whatever, but I like to print things out & use girly fonts, so….  Using a mixture of 1 part elmers glue to one part water (homemade mod podge, or Mod Podge, if you already have it,) brush the glue onto the clothes pin, place the paper on top and add more of the glue mixture. I think I did about 3 layers of the glue. When the clothespins are dry.

Pockets-
I used 16 count crayon boxes as the base for my pockets. Turning the box horizontally, cut out one long side- this will be the opening of your pocket. Lay the box out flat onto a piece of card stock and trace it. Cut the card stock out and glue it on top of the crayon box—making folds to match the boxes folds as you go. Reassemble the box, gluing or taping together the open sides. I left just about a half-inch extra along the long sides so I could wrap my paper over the top edges of the box for a smoother look. After assembling your boxes, cut a strip of coordinating paper to use as an accent and glue around the pocket. Hot glue the pockets directly onto the glass of your frame.  One of mine stuck fine with the hot glue and one fell off.  I think I waited too long to figure out where to line it up.  IF this happens to you, instead of going out & getting another crayon box and re-doing it, do what I did.  take the hot glue of the back and just use some heavy-duty tape.  Packing tape did the job!

Here’s my finished project after all the re-dos and mess ups.  It turned out SOOO cute! (it’s the same as the top photo)

And…  here are my girls, excited to pick out what we’re having for dinner next week

*I posted most of our menu recipes HERE.

Here’s the link to the blog where I found it & I couldn’t be more excited about a project!

Meal planning is not one of my strong suits, but this menu board will certainly help me out a ton.  Last week I started back on my “healthier diet”, so after coming home from the store, I knew what we were going to eat.  Isn’t that what everyone does?  PLAN a diet.  Why not PLAN every dinner ALL the time?  My week went by so smoothly and WAY less chaotic at meal time because I knew what I was going to make.  The kids even comments on how good dinners were, because I’d actually thought about it before 5:30pm!

I’ll post a photo and maybe a few recipes after I complete it, SO EXCITED!!

One of my new years’ resolutions should be to blog more.  I used to be on top of things, but adding a 4th child has really made things a LOT busier

We are very low key for New Years Eve.  We have pizza and the kids do fireworks at my parents house with my parnets, brother, nephew & aunt & uncle.

New years day we spent most of our day at a local park with great nature trails and had a picnic.

The girls has scooter races

Played scooter tag

And had “Survivor” type balancing contests.

Poppe and Billy were nearby, so they stopped by to play for a little bit

Santana was content to play with sticks and water

Happy 2012!!

That face!  Don’t you just want to eat him up!!??

We enjoy time with family, EAT, and play games.  This years’ game was to divide into 3 teams and reenact a popular Christmas story while using random household items.  This was a hoot!  It’s hard to explain how it all went down, but we had a blast!

Christmas morning finally came and we opened all of our gifts at home, Poppe & Tracey came to our house to exchange gifts, we went over to my parents house for gifts and lunch, then headed to Rich’s mom’s for gifts & dinner!  It’s a long, exhausting, wonderful day.

Serafina was excited about all of the craziness in gift sorting, can’t you tell?

Avery helped Santana with his first few gifts, then he was an old pro at unwrapping at lightning speed

Avery modeling her new Justing Bieber gear.

Poppe and Daddy were putting Tanny’s new big wheels together, when a small part fell through some cracks,

so the engineer Poppe, made a contraption with tape and a metal hanger to retrieve the little part.

Lorin loves the new big wheels

Avery and Santana enjoying some play time…

Harley & Haley

Lorin got a unicycle from Mimi!

Avery got a singing Justin Bieber toothbrush

Santana got a talking Woody doll

and Santana took Ava for a wild ride in her convertible

Lastly, but MOST importantly, we sang Happy Birthday to Jesus, our risen Savior!

HIS cupcakes were not near as awesome as HIS gift of salvation.

Haley & Lorin are in 6th grade, and are part of an awesome 6th grade ministry at our church!  Each month (on or really close to the 6th), there are special outings, called the “6th Grade Serendipity”. The 6th graders get togeher and do an assortment of things like, family game night, going to nearby fast food restaurants and having an appetizer at one,dinner at another, dessert at another…, well, December’s event was really great.  I was able to chaparone (yay!)… we met at the church, went to the mall, had dinner and shopped for local needy children in the “Sincerely Santa” program.  We had 2 hours a budget of $24 and a list from an 8 year old girl to “Santa”.  We bargain shopped most of her list and then the girls wanted to use some of their own money to help get EVERYTHING on her list!  This is something I think we will do as a family each year!  The girls overwhelm me with the heart and compassion for others (tear).

The Nutcracker was the second weekend of December.  Haley LOVES ballet and loves her ballet sisters in the company.  I served as a “quick change” backstage mom for the 2nd year and I really love being a part of all of the backstage action, plus it’s extra time with my Haley girl

Woohoo!  Nutcracker is over!  Yay for mommy who drives all around town, sad for Haley who will miss seeing her friends ALL THE TIME!

The 3rd week was really crazy with parties at school performances at school, etc.  The girls already have dance classes every day except Wednesday, but this week, we had a school dance performance as well as an orchestra performance in addition!!!  Little Santana is just along for the ride, but he LOVES seeing his big sisters on the stage and was perfectly behaved!!

Yay!  Christmas break = No school, no alarm, no bedtime for 2 weeks!!!!!!

The first Monday of Christmas Break, we headed over to cousin Marie’s house to do our annual “Cookies with Grandma Day”.  Grandma Lazzara “supervises” as Marie and Gina do most of the work, the kids have a blast and it seems like I just hang out and eat

One of my very favorite Christmas traditionas is piling in the car in our jammies and bringing lots of blankets (because it’s usually cold) and going out to see Christmas LIGHTS!!!  We heard of a nearby place that sets up an amazing display that’s about 1/2 mily long.  You stay in your car and drive to see the most beautiful colorful light display!  It’s called Night of Shimmering Lights off of highway 60 and Dover Road.  It’s $20 per car and you can drive it twice.  There’s a 1/2 way point where they sell HOT donuts and hot chocolate

Rich has some video on his phone.  If I can think to remmeber to ask him to eamil it to me, I’ll add it to the blog later

Next up, Register family (my mother’s side) Christmas party at my cousin Jennifer & Mike’s house!!  THE BEST FOOD EVER!!!!  Uncle Kenneth’s collards are to DIE FOR!  Mike makes a roast, we have a ham, everyone brings sides & desserts…  I did Paula Deen’s Mac & Cheese, there was my Mama’s candied yams (best thing I’ve ever eaten) and much much more!!

The kids had a blast, especially Avery with her cousin Carley (who is 18 &  #1 Babysitter).  Our nephew, Christian is quite the ladies man.  The girls absolutely adore him

Santana is a horrible eater when we are at parties, so we just give him a cup and put crackers, bread, pieces of ham, cookies and m&m’s in it when he comes around

One of the kids Christmas gifts (mainly for Santana) was a trip to Disney World on the Wednesday before Christmas.  Uncle Tony joined us and we had a blast taking Santana for his first time!!  a 3 year old whole LOVES Mickey and anything Disney, at Disney World for the 1st time is truly magical

Here are a few of my favorite pictures!

We stayed very busy all of December, and had a wonderful time making new memories!  My next post will catch you up on Christmas Eve & Christmas Day & New Years…

We went to pick out our Christmas tree last week and Santana was not sure about it.  Come to find out that he had never had a Christmas tree in the house!  He has seen Christmas trees before and LOVES them, but he didn’t believe us that we were going to bring it in the house!

We had such a fun time decorating the tree, remembering old ornaments and adding special new ones

Thanksgiving was wonderful, as usual, but this year we have even more to be thankful for.  We are so thankful for Santana, his birth mother and his foster family (our new extended family)…

I love the Thanksgiving day parade and none of the children like to watch it, but this year Lorin sat and watched it with me & Santana.  He LOVED it!

We had prepared the few desserts & dishes that I am responsible for and then headed to my aunt & uncles house for lunch!  I LOVE having our family food traditions & getting to spend quality time together

thankful

Lorin loving baby Wyatt

Santana & Jake

Mom, me & Anthony

Silly girl

After lunch, we headed over to Rich’s moms house for more family & dinner.  When we arrived, we decided to get the kids dressed with cousin Ava to take Mimi’s Christmas card picture.  They turned out so great!!!

Then it was time to help finish dinner preparations & eat.  Again.  :)

Mimi always has the kids make a turkey hand & each year it’s so much fun to look at their hands all displayed from previous years.

Another tradition is to go around the room & name 3 things you are thankful for this year & one of the things has to begin with the first letter of your first name.

After dinner the ladies chat, the boys relax, we play a game and are treated with a fashion show.

We usually spend the night after Thanksgiving dinner, so the next morning we went to breakfast and over to a local park to play.

Click to view slideshow.

We had a wonderful, thankful thanksgiving & give God the glory & honor for all He has blessed our family with!!

Anyway, we packed up the kids and drove 3 hours to the east coast where we arrived at our home for the next few days.

Even though it was a little chilly (overcast), the kids made a bee-line for the swimming pool.

The next day, we made a day of seeing the sights in St Augustine.  We visited the old historic fort and then walked around downtown & saw the Ripley’s Believe it or not museum.

Next up, the Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum…

After we returned, some kids needed a nap, some wanted to swim, so I took Haley down to the beach & she did some dance jumps, so pretty!

In the eveneing we had dinner & went to a smaller car show.  It was Santana’s actual birthday, so we had cupcakes at the restaurant for him

We came back home Tuesday night and got ready for Thanksgiving…

Here’s a cute video Rich made of our trip to the fort.    Enjoy!