'Round Here

Annalise has always wanted a battery powered car to drive around.  We have always tried to help her understand that we just don't have room to store it.  Well, last week, my neighbor was cleaning things out and brought out his (12 year old) daughter's Barbie Jeep and asked if our kids wanted it.  (They were standing right there.)  So suddenly we had a Barbie Jeep and oh the joy!

However, we truly don't have room to store it.  So we left it on the front lawn patch of earth while we deliberated what to do with it.

By the way, it is battery powered, but it doesn't have a battery, you have find someone willing to push it.  

After we had the car for about 4 days we got a letter of "friendly intent" from our HOA asking us to "remove the children's toys" from our yard.  So the Barbie Jeep has moved on.

Brian's wedding is only a month away!  After living in Miami for (ack!)14 years, I only have one dress that isn't a summer dress.  Actually I don't have many summer dresses either.  And I really don't want to wear that dress.  We get 90lbs of hand-me-downs a year and I am a huge fan of thrift shopping, so my kids hardly know what the inside of a retail clothing store looks like.  We happened to be in the Dadeland area today and I took the opportunity to do some dress shopping.  I picked out a significantly discounted dress to try on and herded everyone to the dressing room.  Just as the attendant shut the door, Caleb roared out, "This dressing room is a LOT nicer than the one at Goodwill!"

Well, it was!

 That dress, and the 3 other ones I tried on in another store, left me feeling really bewildered about what kind of dress to get because I did not like the way any of them fit.  Style is not something that comes naturally for me.

Birthday train - note the frog passengers.

We went to a birthday party at Chuck-E-Cheese on Saturday.  The kids decided to pool their tickets to get a "big" prize.  Even after pooling their tickets, there were only about 200 tickets, so they ended up splitting them anyway.  Annalise picked some glow in the dark Dracula teeth, Natalie got a box Nerds and that left enough tickets for Caleb to get 9 plastic frogs.

The other day, I looked out my front window and saw this huge crane casually walking down the road.  I thought it was funny :) 

Otherwise, we are building a paper mache tunnel for Caleb's train set and we got quite a bit of schoolwork done this week.

Dress Like a Pirate - Get Free Doughnuts

Because of VBS, we missed Chick-fil-a's Dress Like a Cow day this year. I am still a little disappointed at that!  I had planned on going, but that day was so busy I forgot until the next day and then it was too late!    Fortunately, today made up for it slightly.   To humor Caleb I signed up for email updates from Krispy Kreme and discovered that today they were handing out a dozen doughnuts to anyone dressed like a pirate.

Like Annalise's peg leg?

Well I didn't make them dress up alone!

The tricorn hats are really easy to make. Maybe I'll make a blog post out of it if I find another reason to make one! 

The booty - 48 doughnuts!

Thanks to our efforts most of our street had doughnuts this morning!

8!

Caleb turned 8 today!   He had a wonderful day :)  He always seems to have a wonderful birthday - I think it's because everywhere he goes, he tells everyone he sees that it's his birthday!

I'd like to describe his cake request as having multiple adjectives.  It's an eight-shaped, Polar Express, ice cream cake with sparkler candles.  The frosting is whipped cream and the train is made of rice crispy treat and fondant.  And this is the best picture I have of it.

I have two cameras - one that works and one that fits my computer cord.  The one that won't take pictures is the nicer camera.  They take the same memory card, so I just switch cameras when I want to put pictures on the computer.  Sounds kind of archaic I know.  The broken camera has not worked for at least 3 years and very suddenly began working again last week.  (One of the kids picked it up by mistake.)  It just as suddenly quit working during his birthday dinner.

Annalise took this for us :)

So I switched back to the other camera.

Opening Natalie's gift.

Annalise's gift.

Train-joy!

I am so thankful for my big boy!

Youtube to the Rescue.

Do you use YouTube as how to manual?  We do.  Anytime we need to fix something or try something new, we seem to end up on YouTube.  For example, once Rob needed to fix the washer.  He found a YouTube post of a mother fixing her washer (you could hear yelling kids in the background).  I usually use YouTube to check out cooking things.

Most recently however, Caleb had a loose tooth.  Normally our treatment of a loose tooth is to let time take its course, but for some reason this tooth hurt a lot.  My theory was that there was a piece of it hitting a nerve.  So seeing that this loose tooth was causing more than average discomfort, I went to the experts - I searched YouTube.  We watched two - both claiming painless tooth removal.   The first one was a girl pushing her tooth forward with her tongue, which worked for her, but wasn't working for Caleb.  The second one showed a preteen boy with a loose molar.  His technique was to put your finger where the gum meets the tooth and push inward.  He didn't get his out that way, so it pushed out from the other side and the tooth popped out.  Caleb watched, found the spot and in second, with no drama popped the tooth out.

After he (the YouTube kid) pulled his tooth, he brought out his very cute chihuahua, which the girls appreciated very much!

A Signature Post

We made it to capital A today!  And for the record, cursive is the only subject Annalise finds even remotely challenging right now.

Bread Crowns

Annalise brought home a Sunday School paper that had an extension activity to make crowns out of bread dough.  (The lesson was about King David.)  It sounded like fun and qualified as our weekly art project and a hot lunch all in one.


I made regular roll dough (which is a half batch to begin with) and divided it into four portions that I patted into rectangles.  I snipped them twice to make points.  It turned out that the two side pieces sort of leaned out and looked pointy on their own, but I had to shape the middle point.  After the proofing, I brushed them with an egg wash and the kids and I decorated them with bits of cheese, raisins, poppy seeds, and caraway seeds.

Ready for the oven.

Caleb's Crown

Queen Annalise

Yours truly :)

They were royally delicious!