Pajamas, Pop-Tarts & Prayers

To kick off a new year in GC Kids, today was a special fun day, Pajamas, Pop-Tarts & Prayers! All the kids and most of the leaders, including Pastor Bo, all wore their jammies to church this morning.

Then we had a Pop-Tart buffet, and a whole case of juice boxes for breakfast for everyone. It was my turn to serve in GC Kids, so I was in there with them this morning. I did check-in with Megan (which is always so chaotic, with two check-in stations, getting about 50 kids checked in and split into two teams, plus awarding special kids bucks to everyone who brings their own Bibles, all within about 30 minutes), and then I’m always in charge of capturing photos and videos for the GC Kids Instagram, plus a few extra photos for the church socials.

Plus, I got to sit in worship and the Bible lesson with my little buddy, and it was so sweet watching her sing the worship song, and take notes during the lesson.

Got this cute little picture from Addie’s teacher in pre-school this morning.

Quick family photo in the jammies after church. You can see Emmie was very proud and excited to hold baby Hayden, but you can also tell Hayden was like, “Why do these people always let these little children hold me?!” 😂

We went through the drive-thru at Zaxby’s after church, and brought it back home to eat. And since the girls were both wearing Lion King jammies, we put the original Lion King movie on while we ate. Neither of them had seen it actually! We had to skip through the scary song Scar sings, and they were both sad when Mufasa died, but they were very into it.

ALL of us took a nice little afternoon nap post-lunch, for about two hours or a little more for Addie & Jeff. Emmie wanted to try riding her old tiny bike with no training wheels in the front yard, like she did a few days last week, so I sat on the little brick wall with her for a few minutes.

Then we finally started taking all the ornaments off the Christmas tree, and I had two very cute tiny helpers for the job.

All my little Harry Potter ornaments just looked so cute laying there side-by-side together.

The other night after dinner Nana’s house, she sent us home with basically a gallon of leftover rice. So I decided to use that in this weeks’ meal plan, and planned to make fried rice. I already had literally everything else I needed, just had to add this 98-cent bag of frozen veggies, and we were ready to go. And it turned out so good! I kinda loosely used this recipe, from my favorite food bloggers website, but substituted the oyster sauce for hoisin sauce, cuz I don’t like oyster sauce and already had the hoisin sauce anyways.

And even measuring out the 4 cups of leftover rice the recipe said, plus about another cup or so when I just wanted to add more, we still have more rice leftover! I’m making chili tomorrow night, and I know some people eat their chili over rice, so I’m thinking maybe we’ll try that out. Can’t be bad, plus, it stretches the chili even further for more meals, so we’ll have plenty to take to work for lunches this week.

The girls ran around playing and being silly after we ate, while Jeff and I worked on a few chores like taking out the trash and cleaning up after dinner. We finished watching the end of the Lion King tonight (we watched part with lunch, part while I cooked, and the end at bedtime), and then started on bedtime.

Emerson and I haven’t been reading much at bedtime the last week or so, with all the chaos, but we got back into the next installment of Boxcar Children books tonight.

We also started trying out a new bedtime routine with Addison tonight, in hopes of better nights for all of us. I don’t write about it much here, but for like a year and a half now, she’s been waking up every single night, sometime between like 10pm – 2am, and coming into our bed with us. So for Christmas, I got her this new stars & moon nightlight, and Jeff read her a bedtime story from a new book. Then I went in and did prayers and lullabies with her, and got her to sleep in her bed, instead of in the living room. Hoping and praying we can get settled in with this new routine, and that she’ll stay settled in her bed all night. Pray for that with us please!

Now, even though the boys aren’t here with us anymore, we’re going to finish watching the Lord of the Rings movies because we were overdue for our own re-watch anyways. They have the HBO app too, so they plan on finishing it themselves as well. We still have lots of hours left to go, which will probably take us a few more days this week to get through all of the movies.