You know you are addicted to blogging when......

*You look at the blog more than anyone else combined. (I had 14 views yesterday where 8 of the views was myself. I know I am pathetic.)

*You have a couple of posts saved in your draft to be ready to post in a couple of days. You don't want to post too many at a time. :)

*You carry a camera around with you just for the sake of posting pictures to your blog. (Not a bad thing, but I never did this before.)

*You change the look of your blog 3 times in one week. (I think I will stick with my layout for a couple of weeks.)

*You have two blogs because one is not enough.

*You are constantly wondering about what things you can post about.

And last but not least:

*Your daughter starts crying hysterically when she does something wrong because she thinks that you are going to write about it on your blog. (I actually was going to. Isn't that sad?)

I think that I need therapy!

A Day in the Life Of.......Us

One of the things that I told myself before I had children is that I will never let them plop themselves down in front of the television. Well, I guess I learned that keeping three girls busy is not an easy task. I do not like to hear the words, "I am bored." There is always something that can be done. Here are a few things that we like to do.

IMAGINATION

My girls have a wonderful imagination. They can play house or dress ups for hours. They are great little pretend cooks and my do they have a wonderful setup in thier fancy restaurant. I am so glad that they enjoy pretending. Albert Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”

"Can I please make reservations for a table for two?."

I love this picture. She loves talking on the phone. My cell phone died and now she pretends that it is hers. She is going to constantly be on the phone when she is older.

COMPUTER TIME

When my girls were little I let them play toddler or preschool games on the computer. This is something that they still love to do. For Christmas their Nana gave each of them a Webkinz. It is a stuffed animal that has a code on a tag and you put that code into http://www.webkinz.com/ and you can play with your stuffed animal. They get to buy little gifts for their animal and play games to earn money. They can also send a letter to their friend if they have a webkinz account. There are so many fun sites that they can play at like: starfall.com, nickjr.com, barbie.com, playhousedisney.com, and pbskids.com.

SNACKS

The first thing that is said when the girls come through the door is, "Can I have a snack?" I try to always have something on hand. Today we made ice cream sundaes. YUM!

PLAYING OUTSIDE
If the weather is nice we like to play outside. We live on an end street so the only cars that drive down it are the ones that live here and they are good at looking out for kids. Our girls love to play hopscotch, baseball, jump rope, ride their bikes or scooters, write with chalk on the driveway just to name a few. They also love to go to our park. It is so nice that it is three houses away. There are about 20 kids that live in our community and all of the kids are pretty close.

YARD WORK

It seems like Mitchell is always working either away from home or not. There is always something for him to do. The weather has been gorgeous so he was able to mow this past weekend. I also thought it would be fun to make a flowerbed in the front of our home so that our girls can learn how to take care of a flower garden and be proud of it. They are so excited to do this. We are also expanding our garden and will let them plant their own little area that they have to weed and take care of. Hopefully it will be a great learning experience for them and it will also be a lot of fun.

Homework and an Eclipse

Did you get to see the Eclipse last night? It was beautiful. We went across the street to an open field so that we could view the eclipse without homes in the way. We ended up sitting in the car most of the time because there were bats flying over our heads and they sounded like they were coming pretty close to us. We still had a great time together though.

Look at that blue sky!

This is a closeup of the eclipse.
You can see the moon at the top of the picture.

HOMEWORK....UGH
Homework is a never ending battle in our home. I can not complain about how much work they have because I have heard some teachers give a TON of homework, but my girls would rather come home and relax, not do more work. So, I had to take a video of our normal ritual during spelling tests.

As for the spelling tests, Lindsay is in third grade and one of her spelling words is "anemometer." WHAT IN THE WORLD IS THAT! I am 29 years old and have NEVER needed to know how to spell that word let alone use it in a sentence. I asked her what it meant and she said she had no idea. I guess I should find out what the meaning is and then use it like five times today to make people think that I am smarter than I really am. :)

How Weird Would This Be?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwMj3PJDxuo

Meet the New Accountants

Since we own our own business we thought that it would be easier to go to an Accountant to have our taxes done then to do them ourselves. There are some pros and cons in doing this:

Pros:
*It gets done and hopefully, they know what they are doing more than you do.
*They have all of your info from the last year already saved into their computers and so it is pretty fast.

Cons:
*Last year we paid $270.00.
*We had to make an appt and it takes forever to get an appt.
*Our accountant does not e-file so we had to wait 6 weeks to get our refund! Who is an accountant without efile access?

So, since we thought that our cons outweighed the pros we decided to do our own taxes this year. We went to turbotax.com and got to work. It gave us step by step instructions, was very user friendly and hey we will get our refund in 9 days instead of six weeks! We learned a lot about accounting and about what records we will do better at saving for next year. But for now we can sit back and relax because our TAXES ARE DONE!!!!!!!!!!!!! HORRAY!

3 Totally Different Personalities

Having three girls is so much fun. If you would ask me when I was younger what I thought my family would consist of I would have said a boy and a girl. Hopefully, one of these days we will be able to have that son.

Our weather has been perfect to play outside at the park. After being cooped up for a couple of months, it has been so nice. I noticed while taking these pictures how different my girls are.

Hailey is, for the most part, always happy. She is very independant but she still loves to be a cuddle bug. She is very content playing alone or with a huge group of kids. She also loves to be the center of attention.

Ashley loves being around people and playing with friends. She is constantly asking if someone could come over to play. She is also very stubborn but then can be very sweet. Her teachers have all told me what a great friend she is especially to the new kids at the school. She is constantly telling me about a new friend that she made either at "kids club" (at the gym) or school or church.

Lindsay, as you can see in this picture, would rather help her mother than play with the 10 kids that are at the park. She is always one that I can count on if I have to scramble to either get the younger two ready, to clean up the house, to get her room clean or to just sit and have a fun conversation. She has a lot of friends, but she tends to stick with one at a time. This was the way that I was growing up.

As I said before, it is so much fun having three totally different personalities in home. It makes our life pretty interesting.

Just So You Know

Recently our computer has been running extremely slow. We were running our virus scanner and our anti spyware scanner and it was not detecting anything. We looked online to see what are the signs if someone hacked into our computer and this is what we found:

Exceptionally slow network activity, disconnection from network service or unusual network traffic.

Unsuccessful logon attempts New user accounts of unknown origin

Poor system performance - System appears to be slower than normal and less responsive than expected. (Note: Unexplained disk activity might be due to disk-related system maintenance such as disk file clean-up while the system is idle, this is completely normal.)

Since all of this was happening to our computer I thought I would download a free virus and spyware scanner and check my computer just incase my scanner missed anything. I ran it and we had a virus and 4 spyware. The reason for this email is to say that my four spyware are from something that I placed onto my blog called "PLAYLIST". It was the music that you heard when you pulled up my blog. I deleted it and for now we do not have any problems. I know that many of you have PLAYLIST on your computers and I just wanted to let you know about this.

Science Fair, A Duh Moment, A Haircut and Valentines Tag

I love when it is time to go to the school to view all of the fun science projects that the kids prepared. It gives me so many ideas of what not to do next year or how to help the girls make their projects better. I know that we will never be doing the experiment that you find out what cleans a penny better, alcohol, coca cola, water, coffee and something else. I would say that at least 30 of the projects that I saw did something like this and they all came to the conclusion that coca cola cleans it better. This was a project that the kids did in kindergarten so I wonder why parents allow their kids to do it. Anyways, they are a lot of fun.

Hailey and Ashley with some school friends. Hailey loves being with her sisters while they are at school. She is so excited for kindergarted in one and a half years. WOW, that is coming up. What will I do with my time?

The kids loved this science project. She demonstrated what would happen if coke came in contact with a mentos.

Ashley displaying her project.

Lindsay displaying her project.
Today I made Mitchell a cherry cheesecake for Valentines Day. This is my first time attempting to make a cheesecake so I was pretty nervous. When I took it out of the oven I noticed that I put in too much cheesecake and it grew about an inch over the pan. I had NO idea this would happen. It ended shrinking a little bit so I could put cherries on it, but it was not the perfect cheesecake that you buy in the store.

This is his personal sized cheesecake. I hope that he will be nice enough to share with me. :)

Our cute little Toy Poodle "Peaches" went to the groomer today. I had to take a picture of her pretty bows that they put in her hair. Right after I took this picture she took the bows off. Having a poodle is hard work because they have quite a bit of maintenance, but she is such a fun dog to have!

Valentines Tag - My Man

What is his name? Mitchell Lee Couch
How long have you been married? Almost TEN years
Who long did you date? Met in October, went on our first date in January and we were married the following April
How old is he? 31
Who eats more sweets? He eats more. I know about portion control, he doesn't. Who said I love you first? He did - on Prom night
Who is taller? Mitchell by about 7 inches
Who can sing better? He has a great voice, when he sings. I sing more, but who knows who sings better. You have to ask someone else.
Who is smarter? He is! He corrects my grammer for me on my blog because I am SOOOO bad! He was also salutatorian of his school.
Who does the laundry? I do. No one folds though, the clean clothes end up on the couch, to the bed, to the top of the chest of drawers until someone wears them. I hate folding laundry.
Who pays the bills? He pays his bills for the business and I pay our personal bills.
Who sleeps on the right side of the bed? Mitchell does - I think it is my turn again!
Who mows the lawn? Since we are the managers here he ends up mowing about two acres of grass every week so I make sure our lawn is mowed to give him a break.
Who cooks dinner? McDonalds, Burger King, Taco Bell, Sonic, Little Ceasers, Red Robin...actually I cook dinner.
Who drives? When we are in the car together he drives, unless we are on a long trip then we take turns driving.
Who is more stubborn? I am really stubborn, but so is he.
Who kissed who first? He kissed me.
Who asked who out first? Mitchell asked me out first, but I was the one who constantly called him on the phone!
Who proposed? Mitchell, it was very romantic
Who has more siblings? He has a twin brother and I have 3 sisters and 4 brothers.
Who wears the pants? It should be even but since I am so stubborn, I do. I like things to be done my way. :) Ha

My Latest Indulgences

Warning: If you are dieting you may not want to look any further.

Do not say that I did not warn you.

My mind has been playing tricks on me lately. It says that if I work out 6 days a week, I can eat whatever I feel like eating, so this is exactly what I have been doing. Here are a few of my favorite indulgences:

My all time favorite "indulgence" is licorice. I absolutely hate black licorice but I love red vine soft licorice (it has to be soft, not the hard stuff that has been sitting on the store shelf for months). There is something about sitting down after a long day in a bubble bath with a piece of licorice in my hand. AHHHHH!

My newest "indulgence" is Nutella. I have heard a couple of people say that it is wonderful so I had to try it for myself. Can I say WOW! It is like eating icing out of the jar. I spread it on either bread or a graham cracker. This is definately something that I will hide in the cupboard and get it out when I feel like a snack. :)

I am not sure if they sell Tillamook IceCream in California or Utah, if not you have to take a trip to Oregon just for their wonderful ice cream and cheese. My all time favorite is Tillamook Mudslide. Here is the description of it that is posted on their website, "Rich and robust chocolate ice cream underscored by chocolate fudge pieces and a thick and creamy fudge ripple." Chocolate fudge pieces is an understatement. They are HUGE chocolate fudge chunks. I had a bowl the other night and a piece was so big that it covered the bottom of my bowl! They also make an amazing Peanut Butter IceCream.

Gardetto's are one of my kids favorite car snacks. You can buy them in just about every gas station and they are not messy. I have tried the flavored Gardetto's but my favorite is Original.

Last but not least, Roasted Garlic Salsa with Creme Cheese. I bought this at Costco. I am a huge creme cheese fan so this was right up my alley. This is a must have at our next get together.

I think that it is time for me go and get a snack.

YIPPEE

The long awaited science project is complete. I am so glad that we started working on this quite some time ago. Lindsay and Ashley collected leaves (Lindsay) and flowers (Ashley) and they dried them. They then found the common name and the scientific name for each of them. Their Science Fair is on Wednesday so I will post pictures then.

I also had to make the invitations for our upcoming New Beginnings Program. We have 36 Young Women so it took quite some time. Our theme is "Back to the Future" so this is the invitation that I made.

Sorry that the picture is so blurry. If you can not tell, it is a record.

I had a fun girls night out this weekend. I took my friend is 38 weeks pregnant to see the play "Grease" that our local High School was putting on. She was timing contractions during the play and at one time they were 4 minutes apart. I just knew that she was going to go into labor or her water would break, but luckily it didn't.

My husband and I went to the temple for our ward chapel session. There is no other place in this world that I would rather be with my husband than in the temple. The Portland Temple is absolutely gorgeous and we are so lucky to live so close to it. President Hinckley said, "You'll leave the temple better than you arrived. I promise." This is so true!

Just as a side note, I had to post these songs that you are listening to for my husband. If you have the priveledge of knowing him you will know that he is hilarious, handsome, a hard worker, a dreamer (ha ha he thinks he is going to build an airplane) which leads me to a pilot, a realist, a wonderful father, a protector, has great character, accountable, committed, a visionary, a leader and best of all the greatest husband on the face of this earth. I love you so much and Happy Valentines Day!

Numbers

For some reason numbers tend to run our life. You see numbers everywhere you go. Depending upon the number that you might get on something it could make you happy, sad, depressed, scared, shocked and so on. If you are buying a home you want a high number, if you are standing on the scale you want a low number, my children always want to be a higher number than they are, I want to be a lower number (age) than I am, when you take a test you usually want a high number. It is crazy that numbers do this to us.

Yesterday I stood on the scale and my "number" was not making me very happy. I had actually GAINED 4 pounds since the last time that I weighed myself. I could not see how this was possible. I am serisously going to the gym 6 times a week and sometimes even more. I am trying so hard to get healthy since diabetes and heart problems run in my family. I wanted my number to go DOWN not UP!

Today I got my fat content calculated. I had lost 3 percentage points since I started working out December 17th! This number makes me soooooooooooo happy! I can see that even though I am gaining weight, it is muscle and this proves it. My hard work has paid off and it will continue to pay off as I keep watching how many calories (numbers again) that go into my mouth and how many calories that I burn. This number sure does make me happy!

Horace: Rule your mind or it will rule you.

Jim Eason: If you want to look young and thin, hang around old fat people.

Great Company and a Superbowl Game

This is how the guys watch the superbowl....

my brother and his family came over to watch the superbowl with us. We have watched it together the last three years. My sister gave us CTR (Choose The Right) shirts for Christmas and we had to wear them during the game to make ourselves feel better about watching it on Sunday.

This is how the girls watch the superbowl....

Danielle and Jade decided to take a nap.

This is how the kids watch the superbowl....

Tavis decided to get into the licorice while mom and dad were sleeping. Who knows how much he ate. I think we are going to have sick kids!

Isn't she just a doll?

What beautiful girls!

My girls LOVE Jade and Tavis. They are so much fun.

Tavis and Hailey always have a blast. I wish that this video was brighter so you can see it better. Tavis was giving Hailey zerberts and pretending to take a bite out of her hand. Priceless Memories thats for sure.