Friday's Fabulous Five

How many one-year-olds can open up mascara?? Seriously.

Okay, dudes and dudettes. I'm feeling it today. We're going to get caught up. I KNOW it. It might take a little while, but I'm going to start and well . . . that's something.

But first. First, we must have a fabulous five. It's been way too long. And after that, there will hopefully be some more goodness - after I see if my hard drive with all the pictures from the past year and a half can be saved . . .

1. It's been a good week. I could leave it at that, but here's the skinny. Monday was Valentine's. {sigh} Just kidding, I don't sigh about Valentine's day. It's a nice holiday and we had a good time - but it's always overshadowed by a much better day. Nels brought home flowers and potato wedges and corndogs and chicken strips. It was a simple dinner (that I didn't have to make) and the girls and I all loved our roses. Nels is quite the man to be enough for five ladies. :)

Both the older girls made it to their parties that day and were so happy. Elsie felt very left out. However when I asked her if she'd be my valentine, she was not impressed. She looked at me funny and kind of scoffed saying, "NO! I'm a human!" (The girls had been making valentines all weekend, apparently it was confusing. :) Love that kid. So, instead of turning her into a valentine, we gave her a fancy hair-do and took her to have a lunch-Valentine's-party with daddy at work.

Cool effect on this picture, huh? That's what happens when your camera is on the fritz -
'cause it got dropped on its eyeball.

2. The much better day I referred to in #1 is NELS' 31st BIRTHDAY - which, every year, seems to fall the day after Valentine's. :) And this year, I was home for it (and V-Day) -- for the first time in two years. :) Both of the previous TWO years I'd been attending weddings. :) So it was extra special.

Nels took most of the day off of work and came home to be with us and keep it simple. He decided to take his ladies out to a movie for his birthday and then we went out to get Chinese food afterward. It was very nice to be together and PERFECTLY low-key. Just how Nels likes things. I also made him an awesome raspberry cream pie that everyone reading this MUST try. SO, SO good. And so easy. :)

Oh, how I love good food.

3. I just realized that most of the pictures that I need to catch up on my blog are not, in fact on my haywire hard drive. They're still on my SD card. Awesome. Hooray for being lazy. :)

4. In the past few months of doing occasional transcription work for Melaleuca, I've gone from earning about minimum wage - which is, in all honesty, hardly worth my time - to, on a really good day with no interruptions and an awesome speaker, about 5 times that amount. Of course it also takes about 1/5 of the time as well. :) But all in all, I'm pretty much an awesome transcriber . . . transcriptionist? Yeah. Transcriptionist. :) It's only about once a month, but totally worth a few hours of my time. Nice.

5. I think the worst of the "winter blues" are behind me. Hooray for change. I know that winter in Idaho could still quite possibly last for another 2 (or even FOUR!) months, but I'm feeling much better and that, my friends, is a happy, happy thing. Fabulous, even. :)

P.S. Oh! happy to report, the pancake was successfully removed from my carpet this week! :)