Playing Catch up

This was our Mother's Day gifts to pass out in church for Mother's Day. We made cute little purses decorated with flowers and added a gift tag and of course filled them with chocolate!! Sorry I don't have a pic of one of the final products, but the YW/YM decorated them and they turned out really cute (and even the guys had fun putting together and decorating them!!).Avery's new favorite thing to do is help vaccumn....and how could it be complete without playing dress up in dress, shoes, and crown! Oh, and that is her vaccumn cleaner with stickers on it.

Bryan let me sleep in one morning and when I woke up he said....'you don't want to know what Avery did'....dreaded words, right?! Well, after guessing a few things he told me how he went out of the room and when he came back there was a handful of hair in the trashcan. Yup, she had cut her own hair........Thank Goodness for culy hair!!! She grabbed a handful of hair on her right side (btw, she has a right sided mullet!)(enough hair to fill a sandwich sized ziplock baggie) and cut away! It was hard to keep a straight face b/c as you can see from the pic she was so proud of herself and I think she just wanted bangs! Of course, she had school pictures the following week!!

Well, one right of passage down....I wonder what the next one will be............

Family Time

Sherri snuggling with Daddy

The original crew....Bob, Alice, Rex, Neil, Julie, and Steven

some add ons....Emma, Kelsey, Joeli, Cole, Ty, Ian, TJ and Avery

brothers and sister...Neil, Rex, Steven and me

me and Rex

me and Avery

Rex, Joeli and Cole

Emma, Avery and Ian

Joeli, Avery, Cole, Ian and Emma

Steven, Julie, Ian and Emma

Sorry this is long, but this is my journal and I definitely wanted to document this family time we had yesterday before Steven goes back to Afghanistan. We were missing Tommy, who just joined the Army and is in boot camp, Karen, Jace and baby McRae!! We saw all the pics and can't wait to meet the newest baby in the family!! She is too cute! Bryan was working so we missed him too. For our family, getting this many together at one time is amazing!! The cousins had a blast playing with each other!! Good food and good times...can't beat that!

M.I.A.

Ok, so I've been missing in action for quite a while now. I have a ton of excuses ready, but the truth is I'm kinda lazy and this keeps getting pushed down to the bottom of my 'to do' pile! I found a draft that I had saved after my Savannah trip and finally posted that. I've really had a bunch of stuff that I kept saying I was gonna post about, but I realize now that I should have written them down!!
Here's a quick rundown (of what I can remember) of the going on's with the Schock family. At the end of March we went to Hibbing, Minnesota where my husband is from and helped celebrate birthdays. Heidi and Detlef came from Germany and Corey and Christian came from Australia for the parties. Christian turned 5 and grandpa Os turned 70! The parties were fun and we had a great time visiting family. Oh, did I forget to mention that Bryan and Avery had pink eye. I had an ear infection. The 3 of us spent a day in isolation in hopes of no one else getting sick. I think we succeeded there, but sickness aside we really did have a great trip!
I've started a new project......I'm quilting a baby blanket for my new niece. I still can't believe that I am now a great aunt. Baby McRae Elizabeth Mecham joined us on May 4 and she is the cutest baby girl!!! I hope to finish this quilt before she graduates High School....j/k....I'm almost done now. I will post pictures of it soon.
Well, I will think of more things to blog about and post them with pictures. Even though I haven't updated mine in a while, I still love reading all the happenings in all my friends lives!!

My pre-St. Patrick's Day trip to Savannah!!

My friend Tina came to town to visit for a few days last week and we had so much fun!! We decided we wanted to go to Savannah. I didn't even think too much about St Patricks day coming up but we made it out of there by Friday night. Savannah has either the 2nd or 3rd biggest Pattie day celebrations in the US. It was cool to see the water in all the fountains green....I'm just glad I don't have to clean that!! Of course, what trip to Savannah would be complete without going to The Lady and Sons. Yummy!!! I had the shrimp and pecan pie and my friend had a bbq sandwich and key lime pie. After eating we went to the gift shop and her single son (I can't remember if he is Bobby or Jamie) was there and we got our pics taken with him! We went all touristy and took a trolley tour. I can't wait to go back and take a Haunted Ghost tour. I guess there have been studies and Savannah is the most haunted city in the U.S., who knew?? Tina and I had a great time although it was short.

Has it really been over a month??

Well, all I can say is that I have a few new addictions!! My latest play toy is a cricut expression. I'm having so much fun seeing what this thing can do. It all started with an info commercial I got sucked into watching and a couple months later and my share of our tax return 'mad money' I got my new toy!! This thing can do vinyl lettering, cut through chip board, make rubber stamps and cut fabric for appliques(sp??). I'm excited to try some of these projects. I'm not a scrapbooker, but I do enjoy cards. My problem is the creative gene passed me over! I'm a great copy-catter (as I copied this card from the manual!) but this will not stop me from trying!! My favorite part is that this cuts out the envelopes for the cards too (I will never buy another envelope ever again! It's way super easy) and there are cartridges for super cute boxes and stuff. Well, now that I sound like the infomercial I will stop talking about this fun machine. I will host play dates at my place if anybody wants to come over and play!

That being said. I can't believe its been over a month since I posted anything on here. I'm such a slacker! This is my journaling/scrapbooking attempt here and I'm not doing that great! I'll try to catch up on whats been going on.

Snow days!! As I just uploaded the pics for this I see that it added them up at the top of the post...sorry! I still don't know how to navigate too well on here. Oh well....we had a blast on our weekend of snow. As the ruler indicated we had over 4 1/2 inches at one point and I'm sure it was probably more because it kept snowing after Bryan measured that. Our snowman lasted for about 20 minutes and it just toppled over! Avery was sad but made up for it in throwing snow balls. Max loved being out in the snow. He tried to play catch with the snow balls which was quite funny!!

I'm sure I will remember a bunch more to blog on later to catch everybody up on the Schock happenings!!

Girls Weekend

I have the sweetest husband in the world!!! He saw from his new addiction (facebook) that my best friend was in desperate need for a girls night. Unbeknownest (is that even a word??) to me he planned it all with Mandy and then called me to tell me he was sending me to Ohio. We had the best time and of course I didn't bring my camera so no pics, but we had a blast! Well, we always have fun no matter what. We shopped and found some great deals (cute Kate Spade purse for $10 at a thrift store!!!). The best night was Friday we went to the Melting Pot and then to see Bride Wars. Thanks Bryan for all your hardwork and for letting me have a fab girls weekend!! Love you!!

Our Fixed Fence

Well this post is a couple of weeks past due, but what can I say?? I've been busy. We have our fence fixed now!! We called the company who did the fence to see if we could get some boards to match the rest of it and they asked what happened and after telling them they offered to come and fix it for us...for free!! Whew, that was a relief. Even though it would have only cost us probably around $100 but now I can put that money to better use........shopping!! Anyway, we are happy to have it all done!

New Beginnings

The live taping of the 'Virtue Deli'

The cake that never made it!!

Avery helping me make the cake...yummm

Well, I'll start out as saying those of you who know me know that I am a procrastinator and well not so proud of it, but I am. The new year came and having only been in my calling for not quite a month I realized 'oh, crap' (and I'm sure I said that :) !) I needed to help 2 beehives plan New Beginnings. We pulled it off in under a week and a half and it was alot of fun. As you can see we decided to spotlight the new value that was added this year and we taped a cooking show for the 'Virtue Deli' and everything was great. The girls made their sandwich and afterwards we had it for refreshments.

Speaking of refreshments.....well, I decided it would be fun for me to make a cake for this event. I've never made anything bigger than a normal cake size or one of the kids cakes (I like to call it cake by numbers!) so I was excited to try for a 1/2 sheet cake. The cake came out great. My cooling rack is regular sized so the cake hung off the edges about an inch all around. Trust me, I've made cakes before where I've decorated them and I've got to say they turned out pretty good, but this time I had a bimbo moment! I had the cake all smoothed out and put on the top border and proceeded to take out the parchment paper and realized I had it ALL the way under the cake. Yeah, I know you're laughing now b/c I had this huge cake and could not get the parchment paper out from under it. The pic was taken after many attempts to remove it and you can see the cracks in the frosting. At one point I actually took hold of both sides and just pulled and the cake started to literally crack down the middle. Thank goodness for lots of frosting b/c it glued itself back together. Well I thought I could trim the paper all around and still use it, but the crazy cake kept sliding all around. I hadn't even got to the point of truly decorating it but I was getting sick of it (and mad at myself!) At this point it was midnight and I decided to go to Publix first thing the next morning and ordered a cake. So much for my good intentions!

Needless to say...Avery did not mind having cake around the house for the next week!! She's been on a sugar high since!!!

Oh, what crummy luck

I should have posted this yesterday, but as usual I'm a day late and now I'll be a few dollars short.... Our big Christmas present (well for Bryan and I) was to get a fence to go around our back yard. Bryan and Avery finally wore me down and we adopted a dog about 4 months ago from the animal shelter and one condition of that was we were to get a fence and soon! So after moving things around and prioritizing we ordered our fence and it was installed less than 2 weeks ago. In fact they began the day right after Christmas. So we've enjoyed our nice fence for a week and a half and now a tree has blown into it :( We had very strong winds yesterday and while I was gone to get Avery from school a tree from our neighbors yard fell over. Those lovely pine trees are not my friend! Luckily it fell on one panel (and a smaller one at that) so we think we can fix it for about $100. Our neighbors haven't even noticed that one of their trees had fallen over yet. We just think it will be too much of a hassle to get insurance involved so we're gonna suck it up. Pictures will follow soon.

Jingle Bell shoes

This morning Avery almost did not go to school because I was the meanest mom and would not let her keep jingle bells on her shoes. Last month at our ward Christmas Brunch some of the YW put on cute little jingle bells on her shoes and she loved it. It was very cute during the holidays....but seeing as it is now January I foolishly tried to take them off in front of her...wrong move!! She was crying so hard and I tried to get her to wear other shoes, but she wanted her jingle bells on all her shoes. This was a tragedy in her young 4 year old life! She loves school so the threat of staying home was the only thing to convince her to wear jinglebell-less shoes. Pictures of the said famous shoes to follow!

Finally, we joined the bloggers

Well, this is our first foray into the blogging community. If you are reading this, it just proves you are really bored and nothing is on TV! My friends have been bugging me to join their world of blogging, but I've been hesitating because I don't think anyone will really want to ready what goes on in our lives......but, you asked for it so here it goes!
We are a small family, but are excited about lies in wait for us just around the corner. We have learned that life is precious and you never know how much time you have in this world, so try to make everything count. Bryan has beaten cancer twice and had a bone marrow transplant. Yes, he is doing great and everything has been clean for almost 2 years now. We are very blessed! Avery turned 4 in Sept. and keeps us busy with her first year of preschool. She loves it! It is amazing to see her come out of her shy shell (although she still hides sometimes, it is getting better!). I'm kept busy running her around and I have just been called 2nd Counselor in YW. Boy, that really takes me back. We just had our New Years Eve dance and it was so funny to see that in the 17 years since I've been in YW the dances are exactly the same! Even most of the songs were the same....somebody really needs to help the DJ's with an updated playlist! Anyway, the Beehives are a ton of fun and I'm looking forward to being in YW (remind me that I said that, ok!!)!
Well I am a rambler and I'm sure all my posts will be long and have a ton of grammatical errors. Its sad that I'm so bad grammatically because I love to read and always have a book on me, but commas and correct punctuation always gets me....speaking of which...I love exclamation points and I use them all the time, so sorry if it bugs anybody!!!!!! And I love run on sentences and paragraphs!!!!! Anyway, enough about my bad education (I did grow up in middle GA!) j/k....we are very modernized down that way. Well, this is enough for my first post. I'll probably have to call on some of my more experienced blogger friends to figure out how to put up pics, but they will follow soon!! Oh, and Happy New Year everyone!