My Life as a Mom

I seriously had the most amazing birthday weekend this year! My birthday fell on a Sunday, so we celebrated all weekend long! Michael bought me a laptop!! He was too excited to give it to me, so I actually got it on Friday. I pretty much haven't stopped using it since. Michael and I were supposed to go play games at a friend's house on Friday night. Luckily, I decided I had extra time and wanted to dress a little nicely, because it was actually a SURPRISE PARTY!! I was shocked! I had no idea until we pulled up to their house and it was all dark, then I kinda wondered!  I had a lot of fun at the party, there was fantastic food, great friends and some awesome games with just the right level of competitiveness! On my actual birthday, I had a calm laidback day. I got to hang out and play games on my new laptop, and then at 10:30pm, my mom brought over an icecream cake for me. I was born at 10:30pm and she thought it would make me happy, which it did. Such a good day. Thanks mo

Ok, so you may have noticed that in the post about my mom's birthday, there were some neat (or weird, depending on your perspective!) blocks sitting on the table. That was her actual gift. I enlisted the help of my brother-in-law and my sister-in-laws, and got pictures of all the grandchildren holding the letters to spell out Schindler. Then I cropped the pictures, used mod podge to attach them to the blocks. I decorated the blocks with ribbon, and ended up with a nice craft for my mom to put on her mantle. She loves them and I'm pretty excited with the result!

When it was time for William's birthday, I had been looking at a lot of blogs and finally started checking out pinterest, and I decided that I wanted to do a theme party. I found a cake that I wanted to make first, and from there I drew my inspiration. Almost everything that I did is an idea from one blog or another, but I don't really remember where I got the ideas, so I'm sorry, but I can't give them credit!! The theme that I went with is "CANDY!" It was such a blast. Here is a picture of the cake: Yep! That's a cake! I know it looks like a candy bowl, but there is cake in there! William kept eating the M&Ms out of it, 'cause I couldn't convince him it was a cake! I must say though, this is definitely the MOST SUGARY CAKE EVER!!! Not that that is necessarily a bad thing. But you have to realize, when you cut a piece of this cake, you get a full kitkat bar, plus a pile of M&Ms (peanut butter, 'cause they are the best!) AND a bunch of

Birthday season has come to the Yanos household once again! Our January birthdays aren't too bad...There is my mom on January 13, Michael's dad on January 23, my brother on January 25 and then we also have a couple of friends with birthday's in January. We got to spend my mom and my brother's birthdays with them, but for Michael's Dad we weren't able to work anything out. Just had to be happy with a phone call! So I'll blog about mom's birthday today, my brother's tomorrow, and try to get in one or two about friends after that! Here goes! My mom turned 61 this year! So cool! Michael and I decided that it January was our last chance to get away together before September, so we planned a trip to Edmonton for the two of us (well, and Zac tagged along - we let them do that until they are 1!). It just so happened that the only weekend that worked was the weekend of my mom's birthday! Bummer! She said that it would still be fine for her to watch o

okay, so this is really far overdue! So because of that, I'm going to make it quick! We had a great Christmas. All of our kids were home, which was really nice (It did take some convincing though - G & G Yanos wanted to take Natasha for Christmas, but they settled for Boxing Day!) Michael was able to be home from Dec 23-28 so we got to have him for Christmas as well. I tried to keep gifts a little simpler this year, we didn't go overboard like I so often tend to do! It was nice to have things a little smaller that way. Apparently, I also took it easy on Christmas pictures!! Haha! I have hardly any! I'll have to check and see what my mom has! Living in Cardston means that we always get my Mom and Dad for Christmas, (YAY) but we also got to have my brother and my Grandma this year. Also, we were at my brother's house for Christmas Eve, and while we were already in Lethbridge, we swung over to Michael's house where his parents were visiting. So we

I've been having a lazy month. It's been too cold to want to do anything. Anything at all. Which really sucks since I was doing SO GOOD at my running, and although I'm still running far more than I have EVER run before, it's less than it was for the first two weeks of January, which makes me feel like a failure. But that's a whole other post for another day! So, we've been having lazy days. Me and my two little boys. The older three kids go to school and work and learn and the little boys and I stay at home and stay in pyjamas. We aren't following much of a routine (other than bedtime routine-which is a must!!) We've been watching movies, playing computer games and taking it easy. I have been getting some scrapbooking done, and I finally decided that laundry really does need to be completed, not just a few loads here and there so that we have a few things, but I need to actually get my laundry done! The problem with all this lazieness (lets call it r