Today is Middle's 4th birthday!! We made monkey bread for her birthday breakfast this morning and then the heavens opened up and dumped about 5 inches of lovely, fluffy snow on us! Of course, the girls begged to go out and I had the foresight to make sure the girls visited the toilet before dressing them in layers and layers of winter outfits!

Here's the lovely birthday girl posing as a popiscle!

As a special treat, we made snow ice cream with the fresh fallen snow and it was SO good! I'd never made it before, but I found plenty of recipes on the internet and the girls were just tickled with eating snow ice cream! What a perfect day for a birthday! I promised the recipe and pictures of the monkey bread... The monkey bread was gobbled up too quick for pictures, but here's the recipe:

1 can Pillsbury's grands biscuits

1/2 c sugar

1 tsp cinnamon

1/4 c butter

1 c brown sugar

Mix together sugar and cinnamon in a bowl. Cut biscuits into fifths and roll in sugar and cinnamon. Drop sugared pieces into a greased loaf or bundt pan. (I like using a bundt pan cuz then there's more crispy edges!) Melt butter in a small saucepan and add the brown sugar. Stir until sugar dissolves and pour over dough pieces. Bake about 20-25 minutes at 375 or until lightly browned. Flip upside down onto a plate while still hot. Serve when warm and watch the "monkeys" grab for the pieces and gobble them up!

On a serious note, it has been a frustrating week... I check my bank balances online and noticed some charges on there that couldn't have been made by myself or my husband. After making some calls, it turns out someone has gotten ahold of my credit card number and has been spending on my behalf. Arghh! After several calls to the bank and then a personal visit to the bank, we have gotten it straightened out and my card has been cancelled, a new card will be sent to me, the money has been put back into our account and the bank will now take over the investigation. I had to sign papers stating that it wasn't me that spent at those times, that the card has never left my possession, that I have never given out my card number to anyone and my pin number is not known by anyone else but me. Then because of someone using my card, my balance went into the negative digits and I got charged for insufficient funds! So more calls to the bank was made and that was reversed and the charge was deposited back into my account.

It really burns me when there is someone out there who has the skills or the capabilities to do this kind of thing and uses their power for bad instead of good. I wish they would take those skills and apply them in a positive way instead of taking advantage of innocent, hard-working people. If I had never checked my account, I would have never caught that in time and the checks I have written would have bounced and caused me even more charges from both the bank and the people I wrote the checks to. I have enough money problems without someone out there stealing and making things worse for me. I have enough things to do and do not need to add to my busy schedule by running to the bank and making endless phone calls.

I hope this will be the end of that but now I worry about other things like how in the hell did this person get my card number and is there anything else of mine floating around out there? Like my social security number? Am I going to have to worry about identity theft now? For my own peace of mind, I'm afraid I am going to have to go to one of those background check places and do a search on myself to make sure there is no new credit cards popping up in my name that I didn't apply for. What a friggin' pain in the you-know-what!