I just thought you might need a smile this dreary, gray Sunday afternoon...This a picture of Cooper at about a month old....Enjoy!

Coca Cola Pork Chops and Baked Beans

I love easy cooking! Especially on days when we are busy at school and busy in the evening like Mondays with track practice for Chad and dance class for Molly and I. When I was making my grocery list yesterday I found this recipe in a Crock Pot Cookbook and we made them tonight and they were yummy! Several friends on FB prompted me to share:

2 (28 oz) cans baked beans, undrained (I only used one can b/c I am not a HUGE fan of beans)

4 boneless porkchops

1/2 cup brown sugar

1 cup Coca Cola

1 cup BBQ sauce (any flavor - I used Food City brand)

Place beans in slow coocker, Pork chops on top and sprinkle with brown sugar.

Mix Coca Cola and BBQ sauce, pour over the chops

Cook 8 hours on low OR 4 hours on high

Enjoy! My house smelled heavenly when we came home from school!

My Twins

Lord, thank you for my blessings times two! They are two/too sweet!!

YouTube - Visa Go World "Dan Jansen" Commercial

YouTube - Visa Go World "Dan Jansen" Commercial

I love the Olympics - doesn't matter if its Winter games or Summer. I love the competition, the pagentry and each athelete and their stories. This year is no exception. I watch the Today show for a glimpse at the U.S. stars telling their stories and reliving their medal winnings. I watch each afternoon and evening to each sport - I really do not have a favorite. I teach my kids to chant U.S.A, U.S.A. when we compete and win!

I also love the awe-inspiring commercials. I had a favorite from the Summer Olypics in 2008. It was the VISA commercial about Derek Redmond finishing his race with his biggest fan by his side - his dad. I am pretty sure I posted about that during that summer and last night realized I had another favorite - Dan Jansen. Just watch. Gives me chills. I love stuff like this.

God Love It

Last night Baby Brody just COULD NOT get comfy on the couch to watch "American Idol" and he is usually the easiest to put to sleep. Bless his heart, he is just a little God love it!!

God is So Good!

I don't normally take the time to read stories from Yahoo but this one caught my eye and I couldn't help but be drawn to the sweet pictures of these Haitian children.

Betsy Sathers wears the glow of a new mother as she perches on the couch in her family room, smiling and chatting with visitors while still managing to keep an eye on the 2-year-old twins burbling and cavorting at her feet.

Sathers — whose husband was killed when a Minneapolis freeway bridge collapsed into the Mississippi River in 2007 — is realizing her dreams of being a mother with the adoption of Ross and Alyse from Haiti.
the twins, brought to Sathers' home just days after the earthquake in Haiti, suck from baby bottles and drag toys across the floor. On the wall hangs a framed wedding day photo of Sathers and her late husband, Scott. "I wasn't sure if I would ever be a wife again, and I was really all right with that. But I knew that I wanted to be a mom and I thought about it and I prayed about it a long, long time," Sathers said.

Betsy and Scott Sathers had been married just 10 months when the Interstate 35W bridge fell apart in August 2007, killing 13 people and injuring 145. The young couple had talked about starting a family. At the time of the collapse, Betsy Sathers had thought she might even be pregnant. She later found she was not, adding to her pain: "I was grieving the loss of my husband and the family we had hoped to have together."

Now the children she hoped to have are finally here. "I don't think I rescued them," Sathers, 33, said of the twins. "I feel like if anything, they've rescued me." Sathers started the paperwork to adopt from Haiti last January. On Aug. 17, she received the referral — boy-girl twins. She made three trips to Haiti to visit her children, the last one over New Year's Day. The quake hit Jan. 12, killing at least 150,000 people. Sathers, back home in her northern Minneapolis suburb, didn't know if her children were alive or dead. The answer came in a phone call from a stranger — Rob Kramer, chairman and co-founder of Global Water Trust, which works to bring clean water to developing nations, and CEO of PopRule, an Internet technology company. Kramer had flown to Haiti after the quake and was helping legally process children who already had been adopted when he got an e-mail from a friend of Sathers' who told him about the twins.

Kramer was in a car leaving an orphanage when he received the e-mail. He asked the driver to stop in the middle of traffic and went to the van behind him to talk to Lucy Armistead, the founder and head of Kentucky Adoption Services. Armistead had just been at the same orphanage, picking up children eligible to be adopted out of the country. Kramer said he asked Armistead if she knew "the boy and girl twins, Schneider and Schneidine" — Ross and Alyse's Haitian names — and explained the story. Armistead figured the twins were back at the orphanage. Still, she and her co-worker looked around the van, which was carrying about nine children, and found the twins in the back seat. "I said, `You've got to be kidding me,'" Kramer recalls. "I said, `Let's just dash to the (U.S.) Embassy.'" Ross and Alyse had survived the quake along with the 45 or so other children at the orphanage. The building in the Port-au-Prince suburb of Carrefour, at the epicenter of the quake, was destroyed, and the children were sleeping in tents and under tarps on a concrete slab across the street. By Jan. 22, Kramer was on a private jet to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., with the twins. Sathers and her mother rushed to get on a flight to pick up her children. The twins arrived a little dehydrated and, at 22 pounds each, a bit underweight, Sathers said. But she said the children are gaining weight and taking to American food.

Sathers, a consultant who plans to take a year's leave to be home with the twins, said she hopes people will continue to support Haitians through prayer and donations or volunteer work for relief organizations. "It's a happy ending for my family, but there's still so much devastation there. There's so many other kids that it's not a happy ending there."

Brody's New Patch!

Tonight Chad and I made Brody a new patch to wear that fits over his glasses, isn't sticky to his face and didn't cost at least $10 plus shipping! I found a tutorial online at http://lucykatecrafts.blogspot.com/2008/02/eye-patch-tutorial.html and we made it work for us! I thought it turned out pretty good!

Red Velvet Cookies

Good Saturday Evening! I wanted to share a new recipe I have recently been turned on to: Red Velvet Cookies. Nothing could ever beat my grandmother Parris's homemade Red Velvet Cake (Chad's favorite thing) but these simple cookies were pretty yummy!

1 box Red Velvet Cake mix

2 eggs

1/3 c oil

Mix all ingredients to form cookie dough. Pinch off dough and roll into balls of desired size and press onto a greased baking sheet. Bake for 8 minutes at 375. When cookies have cooled, smear on Cream Cheese Icing (or make your own - tons of recipes online - just wasn't worth it to me). You can make these into single cookies or sandwich them together! Please enjoy!

*Disclaimer: Pictures are posted funny - still trying to get used to this type of blog style!*

Charlotte's Web

For a couple of weeks now, Molly and I have been reading a few pages from Charlotte's Web and it has a CRAZY power over her to make her fall asleep just about EVERYTIME! I love it! We are just to the part where the Zuckerman's and Arable's are leaving for the fair and I will probably have to read a few pages over b/c she was fading so fast. It's precious and priceless time with my sweet baby girl. Please Lord do not ever let me forget this special time with my firstborn. I cannot wait to finish the book so I can show her the movie. She doesn't even know it exists so I know she will be super excited. This picture was taken a couple of nights ago....and as I posted on FB, isn't it a miracle that a spider can spin a web? Let alone write words in it?

Brody's Eye Appointment

Hi Friends! I wanted to update you on the status of Brody's recent eye appointment on Tuesday. We got wonderful news! Brody's right eye has improved from 20/80 in December to 20/40! And his left eye is at 20/32 - we are almost to the same vision in the two eyes which means hopefully when we go back in May we can stop patching for three hours a day! We will see the doctor and decide about the crossing of the right eye and what needs to be done. We were told the last time (December) that sometimes when you correct the vision, the eyes will send a message to the brain and they will begin to work together and correct themselves! That's our prayer, NO SURGERY - EYES CORRECTING THEMSELVES! Please pray with us!