Josh and Becca Thrap and Family

I know that I have quite a reputation for eating out. It’s true, I am no domestic goddess. Even though my cooking is often praised by those fortunate enough to get a rare taste of it, I seldom have the desire or the energy to put forth in preparing an actual meal. And on occasion I am even willing to drop the $60 it may take to feed the family a nice meal and not have to mess with the preparation and clean-up. However, obviously we could not afford to eat out nearly as often as we do if it cost $60 every time! And I have often been asked how we do it, how do we manage to eat out and keep the costs down? So, here is how I do it.

We had a lot planned for this past weekend, and it didn’t all go exactly as planned, but overall I believe we had a good weekend. Friday evening was my big fancy feast/scrapbooking party. I spent ALL day preparing! We had cleaned the house the night before and so Friday morning I went to the store to get all my ingredients (and Honeycrisp apples were only $1.99/lb @ Hy-Vee!!!), then I spent all afternoon cooking! I came up with several ideas and worked loosely from one or two recipes and finally had created 5 healthy dishes! I was nervous about all of them, but they turned out! (some better than others, but all edible!) And my new favorite recipe is one that I didn’t make at all! Melissa brought easy apple dumplings, SOOO good! Thank you Melissa! The party went well–I had a good turn out and everyone seemed to enjoy themselves. I spent so much time hostessing and gabbing, that I only finished one layout! But it was worth it. And I can’t wait to do it again! Cameron got to spend the night with his best friend Grant at Grant’s birthday pool party, and Jacob had an overnighter with his friend, so Josh and the girls went over to Jenny’s and watched movies with Jenny and JoAnne–who had come to town to see the boys’ soccer games on Saturday. Jacob’s game was at 10 am and I don’t know exactly how late he’d stayed up the night before, but he looked tired on the field! But after the first quarter I had a little talk with him and he got to sit out most of the second quarter and after that he did much better! Overall though, his team was having problems. Their coach was out of town and the other team was playing dirty–fair, but dirty, and the boys just seemed lost. A few boys really stood out to me as the stars of the game and after the first quarter, I was proud that Jacob was one of them. Still, it was hard to see them lose. No score is officially kept, but you know the boys keep track. But as painful as Jacob’s game was, it was nothing compared to Cameron’s! Wow. It started out bad and just got worse. We were running late and were already frustrated with Cameron because he’d been arguing with me about his shorts and with Josh about his shoes and we were almost late to the game–we arrived just as they were putting the teams on the field and the coach threw Cameron in the goal. Big mistake. Cameron has played goal before and done just fine, but he was in rare form this Saturday morning. He laid down and the ball zipped past him. That was the first play of the game, and it just continued that way. At one point the coach went out to the goal and tied Cameron’s shoes for him! While the ball was in play! The other defender kid tried to grab the ball as it came by and got called for using hands and the coach had to try to convince the refs that he was the keeper since Cameron was sitting on the ground getting his shoes tied! You know its bad when the crowd is laughing and making jokes about their own kids and just wishing that the coach would pull him out! Cameron played about half the game, and when he wasn’t sitting on the ground, he was running around holding his pants up (because I was right about them not being his, they were Jacob’s!!!) Anyway, I spent the last quarter of the game with my head turned and my hand in my face just so I wouldn’t get mad. I did not take a single picture at either game. I did however take several pictures after the game when Josh’s mom took us all out to a place called Pumpkinville. But I’m still not sure how to put pictures on the blog since the security update, so I’ll have to add them later. Sorry.

To address your comment Angie, and to further explain my previous post I will now write about our reasons for adding extra security. I will not use any names at this time, and I will tell you right up front that our children know nothing of this and for now at least we’d like to keep it that way, so please don’t say anything to or around them. Thanks. I have always really liked the idea of having our blog out there for anyone to find because there are so many people that have passed in and out of our lives that I would like to think we could keep in touch with, and once again, I do hope this added security step will not keep away those of you who have been loyal readers and friends. But here it is. I received a call from my parents earlier this week. They didn’t want me to worry, but they thought that we should know that they had been receiving somewhat harrassing phone calls from a woman there in Muscatine who had seen my kids on the trolley in a parade and was convinvced that MY Jacob is her son. Apparently her sons had been taken away from her (assumably by the state? DHS?) and she has fixated on Jacob and thinks that he must surely be her son (despite all facts to the contrary–including the fact that her son would be a teenager right now)! Anyway, apparently these phone calls had been going on for a while and my parents didn’t want to worry us about it, but then last week this woman showed up at my parents house. My dad said that she appeared to be very drunk and wasn’t sure how she’d gotten there, but she talked with my dad and then my mom also for almost an hour and although she occassionally seemed to understand that the facts about her son did not match Jacob, she did not seem to believe that it meant that Jacob was not her son. So, for right now we are just trying to be better safe than sorry. We do have some information on this woman like her name and address, but I don’t know just how delusional or out of her own control she may be and so we’re just taking a few extra precautionary steps toward keeping Jacob, all of our children, and our family safe. So, thanks for your help and understanding with this matter.
Also, we are still in the process of trying to get all of our newly secured blog stuff back the way we had it so you may notice that the tv and movie quotes are missing, and I may not be able to post pictures for a bit, but we should have that all worked out fairly soon, so please just be patient with us as we pull ourselves back together. Thanks.