Making Grandma Jennie's Fruitcake-Christmas Begins

It is getting close to Christmas and it is funny how one begins to be nostalgic and think back to their childhood. I remember my mother making fruitcake from her mom's recipe. When I was young, I probably was like most of my kids and did not like fruitcake too much, but in later years I began to acquire a taste for it. I liked her fruitcake because it was a dark and spicy one with just the right amount of fruit. Not too much and not too little. "Claxton Fruitcake" is good but too much fruit. My Uncle Leonard started making it in his later years and sending it to family members. He did a good job too. Soooo.... I got the idea that it would be nice to pass this tradition on to Lindsay. I bought and gathered up the ingredients and on Saturday, we took on the task. I just had to document it for postserity as you can see in these pictures. I do not know how it turned out yet because it is better to wrap it up tightly and store it for a few weeks so the flavors mingle before you eat it. I have them stored away now and closer to Christmas will let everyone know how they turned out. Today, I even bought more ingredients for another batch I hope to bake in a few days. In these pictures you can see that I had Grandma Jennie sitting nearby as her grandaughter and great-great-grandaughter baked her special recipe.

Happy Birthday Kendra, Jon and Matt

We celebrated Kendra, Jon and Matt's birthday last night at the #1 China. Dad, Mom, Kelly, Allison, Gatlin and the three birthday kids all had a delicious buffet to celebrate their special day. Jon and Matt were born on the same date, one year apart, the 20th of November and Kendra's birthday is the 21st. Jon is 17, Matt 16, and Kendra is 21 now. Hard to believe! Happy birthday kids! Layout Kit by Simple Girls
from Digi Scraps website.

Annual Fall Trip

Every year, Kelly and I (and anyone else that is handy) go on an fall trip up the mountain to Boone and Blowing Rock. We take 221 north through Avery County tree farm country to Watauga County, where the towns of Boone and Blowing Rock are. We love to see the fall foliage on the mountains and feel the crisp air of autumn. This year we took Gatlin with us. He was a good little traveler and seemed to enjoy the day too. We stopped at Boone Walmart to get a few things and as we were leaving the parking lot we came upon the campaign bus of Elizabeth Dole. She was there with Richard Burr campaigning. That was exciting as it was just before the election. We were then to Blowing Rock, about 8 miles away. It was a beautiful fall day there. Such a quaint town with lots of shops and places to eat. We ate at the Knights Cafe. They have really good food and we usually eat there when we visit. Then we took Gatlin to the city park in the center of Blowing Rock. This park has been a traditional place for us to visit since Kelly, himself, was a little boy. Many of our little ones have had fun in this park through the years. Gatlin had fun on the slides, but was a bit reluctant on the swings. He also saw his first snow while we were there. We got in our car and traveled the Blue Ridge Parkway to Linville and then onto 221 to Marion. It was a lovely and fun day for all three of us.

Tom and Jerry "ZZZZZZZ"

Gatlin has gotten to where he likes to watch cartoons some. I have to admit it does help a little when I am busy. Today he got one of Chloe's baby dolls and went into the bedroom, climbed up on the chair and was watching "Tom and Jerry". Before long I looked in and found him sound asleep in the chair with the dolly in his lap. I moved him over to the bed and he had a good long nap. "Tom and Jerry" is an old cartoon, but compared to some of the kids stuff today, it seems to me to be more entertaining. At least it was for Gatlin today!

Out of the Wild Blue!

Ok, everyone knows my sob story about how awful my slooooow dial-up internet is. Verizon has decided to stop it's DSL lines at my friends house and she only lives 1.7 miles down the road from me. They cannot give any time frame for coming further so "out of the blue" the other night, I was surfing around and came across the website for Wild Blue, a satellite internet service much like Hughes Net. After reading all about the company, I talked to Briggs and we decided to go ahead and sign up. I found out you have to have a two year contract with verizon if you sign up for DSL anyway and so this sounded pretty good. They claim to have a more up to date system than Hughes Net and also 24 hour technical help that is not outsourced to another country, if you know what I mean. They are now offering a leasing agreement for 149.00 for equipment. I will cancel my second phone line that I pay 30.00 a month for and MSN which is 22.00 and it should be just about enough to cover the monthly fee. We are hoping it will work well way out here in the country with all the trees and hills. It should-as we have Direct TV and it works really well.

"A clear view of the Southern sky" is all we need to be online at a speed that we have been waiting for. I am soooo looking forward to having a lot more fun on the internet and saving loads of time that I can use in other ways. I am almost ashamed to tell you that I offered up a little prayer once in a while, that we would soon get faster internet. Well, I guess the answer to my prayer came "out of the blue" the Wild Blue!

Frantic Saturday Morning

This morning I got up and had plans in my mind to make a scrapbook display of Chloe's swim team pics for her talent display at the church activity tonight, clean house, help Lindsay make a baked spaghetti casserole for the church cook off tonight, mow the lawn, paint the bench outside and maybe a few small other tasks. Well, I did not keep in mind that we have a little resident at our house that takes almost minute by minute supervision to keep him out of anything and everything around the house. This little boy is on the move! As my day started so did he. I no sooner got him his breakfast and he was on the prowl for whatever he could find to get into. I started on the scrapbook pages ( My first mistake was to procrastinate this job until this morning). It seemed that nothing went just right with my creative powers today. I ran into one problem after another with what I was trying to do. I finally settled on digital pages to speed the process. As I was working on the computer with that, Briggs was boiling up bushels of apples to make applesauce with. Between us both our little resident, who by the way is called Gatlin, was busy climbing on top of the counter, getting into the printer, pulling out pots and pans, crumbling bread on the floor and a whole lot more. I was beginning to have an anxiety attack because we wanted to leave at 1:30 so we could attend Ian's football game and then Lindsay's swim practice and on to the church talent show at 5:00. If everything was going right with my project, things would not have been so tense, but it seemed that today was not my day for creating something with smooth going. I finally had to let Adam know we were going to have to catch Ian's game another weekend. That helped to ease the tension all the while little Gatlin was still moving into anything he could see or do to occupy his curious little brain. Around 12:30 Briggs said he would take him into the bedroom and try to get him to sleep for a nap. Yippee! In a few minutes he was asleep as sound as can be. We were able to finish the applesauce, help Lindsay with her casserole for the cook off and get Chloe's Swim Talent posters finished. The house is not cleaned, the bench not painted or lawn mowed, but we survived another busy Saturday. But....you can't help love the face on this little fellow. You know? I think I like Mondays best.

First time post.

Blogging is a new word to me, but I think that it could be a theraputic thing, along with being of service to others in that your experiences in life could help someone or perhaps make them laugh, or even make them glad because they don't have YOUR life! Raising 12 children has been busy, hectic, satisfying, worrisome, expensive, happy, sad, rough, funny, loving, disappointing, wild, unbelieveable, and almost any positive or negative emotion you could use to describe raising kids. Just give it a double, triple, or quadruple dose compared to other moms. We are certainly not the Dugger family from TV. Perfection is not our label as a family but our children have been raised in a Christian home and all the seeds of a Christian upbringing are apparent in each of their personalities and lives. I have to say that each of them has made us proud in many ways. They are good, loving, generous and accomplished people and growing more so each year. I am proud of each of them and how they are turning out. They each have qualities that I could want to emmulate. Some day I will tell you about them individually. This is a picture of a few us us at Thanksgiving. I took the picture so I am not in it, as usual. Later I will post a better picture we had taken two years ago.