i just won a free lunch at fred's mexican restaurant!
yay! i entered a contest a long time ago and i actually won.
now i'm going to try to win TLC's home sweep, where one winner will get their whole mortgage paid off--yeah!!!

i had an insane day of cleaning and laundry. one nice thing about having kids is that someday they will be old enough to have chores and they can help me...

matt and i went to the beach today to relax and read. we do that all the time but hardly ever end up reading. we just start chatting and looking at people and watching the ocean. the ocean never gets old! no matter how many times i've seen it, it still draws me in.

we also ended up looking at all the pups at dog beach, like we usually do when we're down that way. i get pumped up for when we have a dog someday and can take him there to swim and play. we saw a dog who looked like reeces but was black and had a little more of a beard! we always see bo bear dogs there (and i'm now noticing them in a ton of commercials, too!). someday. me. doggie. happy.

we're going to rancho's tonight (my favorite: lentil, avacado, and cheese burrito) with some friends and then back to our house to play some games. we may try to bust out catan, but we'll see what the mood is like. if everyone is horsing around, it's not really the game to be learning or explaining, eh?

matt has an interview on monday, so that's good news. he had a phone interview last week and now they want him for a face-to-face. everyone keep him in your prayers!!! it's a temporary position but temporary $ is better than unemployment $. plus, scantron started out as just contract work as well, and that turned to permanent. apparently a normal practice of hiring in the tech writing field.

it's march on monday--how did that happen??? march is not my favorite month, mostly because we have zero school holidays during those 4 1/2 weeks. today i found an old calendar (2002) and was laughing because it was when i worked at wauseon and i had recorded every day that we had a 2-hour delay or snow day! so fun, waking up in the morning and turning on that TV to see wauseon and evergreen (for mare!) were cancelled! this past week we had quite a bit of rain for several days in a row. one morning it was particularly heavy rain and one of the teachers said to the secretaries, "shouldn't school be cancelled by now?" ha! she was joking, but i was thinking the same thing as i was driving in...

welp, i've got to get ready for our night out on the town!

yes, i know i love little people, but that guy who was the littlest groom was, in true form to all other reality tv bachelors, not the brightest penny in the bank. oh well. matt explained that those are the only kind of people they can get to do those shows, anyways...

well, we had our first "winter storm" of the year! we went to bed sat night and it was pouring and it continued off and on through monday afternoon. so of course, it has been all over the news. but now everything is nice and green and pretty! always amazing how that happens!

here's the so simple recipe for fruit pizza:
1. get a pkg of pillsbury sugar cookie dough and roll it out to about 1/4 inch thickness on a cookie sheet (sprinkle flour on the cookie sheet and the dough, so it doesn't stick to the rolling pin--or sometimes, i just push it out with a big spoon or my hands). it will most likely take the shape of a large oval or tapered rectangle, so don't stress if it doesn't look like a perfectly squared off rectangle.
2. bake as directed
3. stir together 8 oz of cream cheese (softened) and 1/2 cup of sugar. then spread it evenly on the cooled cookie.
4. top with any kind of fruit you want.
5. snarf it down wildly!

have a great day everyone!!!

just a quick one to vote on my favorite pics of hannah for the contest:
i like the one of her in the basket and the one of her on the counter the best (where she has that little toy in her hand). (but it's hard to choose, they're all so cute!)

have a great day everyone!!!