Catching up

We are loving life these days! The kids have been on their best behavior--phrases out of my kids' mouth that I dream of hearing lately. For example, yesterday Caleb began flinging toys around our living room as I finished up my sandwhich I was having for lunch. So I said that when I was done, I was going to go upstairs and he could not come until the living room was picked up. Without hesitation Caleb said,"OKay, mom, I'll pick them up right now." (what??? did my ears deceive me? did he really answer me the first time and then also with something positive?? Praise the LORD!). Then I was laying the kids down for bed and Kylie did not want to go to bed, so I asked her if I should sing her Jesus love me. Yes, that was good. But she cried through the entire song (probably due to the quality of the voice. . ) and then she said tearfully, "bye, bye." I said, "I love you, sleep good." as I was walking out and after I had shut the door, I hear a little girls voice, "I WOVE you too, mommy. I WOVE you too!" It was precious!

Life has been busy (as usual), but quite manageable. In fact Dan and I are convinced that sticker charts are the way to go when it comes to getting our kids to sleep through the night! Caleb and Bennet love sticker charts and it is worth 1 dollar a week for prizes (like french fries and stick balloons) if they sleep through the night:) Another helpful thing is swimming. We have been swimming several times and the kids love it! Not to mention sleep until 8 ish o'clock the next morning--unbelievable here at the Beckering house. We are planning on having 4 church friends come swim with us at the community center on Monday for their "birthday party." They want to have a transformer party, so we picked up some today to put on top of their cake! They are very excited about it.

Last weekend was another weekend of cooking for me and my neighbor Melissa. We did put in the hours--6 planning our grocery list and getting groceries (3 of that was with kids, so perhaps faster without), about 4-5 cooking the meats (with kids) and perhaps 14 hours of cooking (some with kids) (11 or so on Saturday and a few on Sunday afternoon) But we think we got about 78 meals made (some of which will have leftovers for other meals, some of which will just be enough for each of our families). So we each have 39 meals frozen! Hippee! (That's Kylies version of Yipee). We are also pleased that each meal comes down to 5.60 a piece. We got ourselves in a little over our heads perhaps this time with the amount of food, so next time we might not do quite as much. But it was helpful to have a fridge outside this time to cool foods down and freeze:) Now that we have all this food, we would love to have some company! Hint, Hint!