My secret sister revealed herself to me today in a heartwarming way!  Go here to see who she is and what she did!

I have never gotten a blog award before...I have a BIG smile on my face right now!  Renee has awarded me with the Egel Nest Blog Award and I am honored to pass this along to some really great blogs. 

Susie  I really like reading whats going on in her life.  I always leave with a smile.

Angela  She always has great pictures of things her kids are doing.

Katy She has a very eye appealing blog and I always leave there with something to think about.

Take the time to visit them, you will be glad you did!

My grandmother called me this morning and said "I was able to pick up 5 lbs. of pecans today, so go out and see if you can pick up some pecans".  Now I will give you a little background on why pecans are such a big deal to us.

My grandparents own a pecan farm and when they and us were younger, we could spend a weekend at their pecan farm and harvest hundreds, dare I say thousands of pounds of pecans.  Anyone that bakes knows how expensive pecans are, well we had them coming out of our ears and so we used them in everything.  We even used them in things that you might say "why in the world would you put pecans in that?"  Well, the last few years there has been no pecans to harvest and so we have gone through all the reserve pecans we had frozen.

The last time I went to my grandmothers house and asked for some more pecans she informed me that the tineny, tiny sandwich bag she handed me was the last of the pecans...WHAT!!!!  We are coming up and the baking time of the year and NO PECANS!! I found a vacant property that had a pecan tree on it and often see people pulled over at the picking time of the year getting all of the pecans from this tree.  I decided some time ago that I was getting those pecans this year.  So when my grandmother called me this morning telling me that the pecans were falling at her house, I threw clothes on, grabed my youngest child and went tearing out of the house.  I broke the speed limit and several other small driving infractions getting there so that I could be the first.

As we pulled up, I was excited to see no other cars around.  This was going to be it!  I could imagine myself picking up bags and bags of pecans.  I could almost taste the choc. chip cookies with pecans or the spiced pecans or maybe even the pecan pie.  I got out of the car and me and my youngest proceeded, bags in hand towards the golden tree.  About 10 steps into our journey toward the golden tree, I felt something all over my face.  I pulled back with my hand a MASSIVE spider web.  Yikes!!  I just knew the proud owner of that web was in my hair or on my clothes.  I was jumping and dancing all over that yard (in front of many cars as this is a major road in our city).  I begin to recover and proceed another two or three steps and come just inches from repeating the same exact mistake!  I look up to be eyeball to eyeballs with a HUGE spider.  It was an orb weaver.  If you are unfamiliar with these, just look a few posts down and you will see some pictures.  Again, I am just sure I feel the other spider crawling all over my neck and hair.  Creeeeeepy!  I decided it was time to take a detour to avoid another confrontation.  My daughter (who is in complete laughter now due to my dancing around) and I take a few steps to the left and find ourselves knee deep in stickers....please NO!  I can't take it anymore, I am only moments from the golden tree that is taunting me from just steps away!  We spend about 10 minutes pulling out all of the stickers and finding another route to the tree.  Finally, we are there!  The moment I have been waiting for.  We look, and look, and look, and look.  It can't be so...I can't find any pecans.  How can this be.  I have been denied?  I look up to find that they are all still nicely nestled in there pod, not quite ready to drop.

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!  I am now quite close to hesterics when I look up and what do I see?  One, one little pecan ready to drop.  VICTORY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!   Now, how do I get out of hear?

As I type this I am sitting at my computer with my prize pecan next to me.  I am going to look online and see if I can have it bronzed! :)

My 5 year old daughter has an obsession with spiders!  We try to take every opportunity to observe nature...however, this is one part of nature I could skip right over!  Yes, I will admit it, I am not fond of spiders.  They are soooo creepy to me.  However, for the sake of my daughter I act like they are my best friends.  We have several spider friends that weave their webs nightly around 7:15pm.  We have made a habit of taking time to go outside and watch how they weave their web.  Last night we took pictures of our spider friends.  After researching, we found that these are "Orb Weaver Spiders."

The assignment this week is to use your blog name (or your own pen/real name) to create signs.

I had a lot of fun with this one, I have never done anything like this and I had fun looking at the different options!

Here is my assignment:

  This one was my favorite...perfect for my blog name!

I like this one as the color is for breast cancer and my mom is a recent survivor!

Thank you Tamara!  I learned something new today and had fun doing it!

Last week was very scattered and unorganized.  The result of this would be that almost nothing below got done, including a lot of my menus.  My mission this week is to be back on track.  With a few exceptions, most of my list is the same.

1.  Bible Study/Devotions -I didn't get this started last week and WILL do it this week! The name of the study is "Desiring Gods Own Heart" and involves looking into I and II Samuel and I Chronicals.

2.  "Must Do"

      1.  Doggie Baths

        2.  Take books back to the library and make sure we have the books we need for school this week.

        3.  Mow yard (not my favorite thing to do)

        4.  Daily prayer

        5.  Start putting together a cleaning schedule to help me keep up around the house.

3.  Train them up - Continue with bible and character training in Konos curriculum.  I will be working on being more consistant with discipline as we are noticing the results of lack of consistancy with our dd 5.

4.  Menu Planning

Monday - Using left over teryaki sticky chicken from weekend, make stir fry, rice.

Tuesday - Chicken Manhattan-(recipe can be found at Melissa's site here) mashed potatoes, green beans and crescent rolls

Wednesday - Sliders, chips and baked beans

Thursday - Swedish Meatballs in crockpot, egg noodles, green beans and crescent rolls

Friday - Lasagne, green salad, garlic bread

Saturday - Leftover lasagne, green salad, garlic bread

Sunday - Chicken sandwiches (recipe found here)

Tracey from The Homeschool Boutique is giving away some free homeschool t-shirts.

You can go here to find out all of the info.  Also make sure you go to The Homeschool Boutique and check out her store.  She has a lot of GREAT stuff there.  The t-shirts on the front page are really cute.