odds and ends

I uploaded a bunch of pictures from the little camera that I hadn't posted yet so here they are. They are pretty random and old but I thought I should share them none the less.This was our St Patricks day activity. I made a green cake (Joel supervised).

How funny is this, my mom's build a bear's glasses fit Hayden perfectly. He looks all grown up. what a cutie.

If you have a weak stomach I suggest that you skip this next one........it's pretty sick......

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Can anyone guess what this pile of gross-ness is?..............well it should have been hash browns..... I'm probably the only one who didnt know this, but I guess you're supposed to pre-cook the potatoes before you shred them or else they turn a weird pink color, and then this greyish bluish color. I don't think the potatoes were in their peak of freshness in the first place so that probably didn't help. Joel was brave and ate a few bites. Thanks for the help mom....I will call you before I cook next time ;o)
(the yellow pile on the left was eggs and sausage, they actually turned out alright)


and last but not least, we recently discovered that Joel has the ability to walk on walls.

Mad TV video

Watch this video to understand our "pass or fail" basis for the following post about food.
This is also one of our favorite YouTube videos.

Gettin our blog on

We are always learning new ways to pinch pennies. One way we discovered is to buy store brand items. We have also discovered that not all store brand items are created equal, so in an attempt to keep track of which ones we want to keep on our grocery list and which ones to forget about, we've decided to keep track of them on our blog. Hopefully this will be useful to our many readers as well. Our research is biased towards Kroger which is the "Smith's" store brand. We'll be adding any new items we test out to this same post. "This has passed"
We have found these Fruit and Grain bars to be equally delicious to the brand name bars.

"This has failed"
This apple sauce was really sour and didnt seem to have a very good flavor. It needed sugar.
"This has passed"
We've gone through like ten bottles of this stuff and still like it. We just read the label tonight and found out that it has about 26g of sugar though....figures.
"This has failed"
We found this cheese to be really dry and lacking flavor. We're not sure if all pre-grated chesses are like this, but we also tried Walmart's store brand and it was pretty nasty as well.

"This has passed"
It was nice and buttery, although nothing compares to movie theater popcorn.

"This has passed"
We thought these were really good! I liked these better than the name brand.

IOU

Dear Blog,
I'm so sorry I've neglected you for so long! I'm just not the dedicated blogger I thought I'd be. There are so many things I want to blog about, but then I either forget about them by the time I get home or Joel is doing his homework on the computer (I'm not complaining about that, homework definitely takes precedence over blogging). I have decided to give you an IOU for some quality time together in the near future. In the mean time, here are some pictures of my cute nephew Brayden.