Snow Day

Before February is over, I thought I should post these pictures of our fun in the snow. Sadly, it took Cleveland until February to produce a day which had a wind chill of higher than 20 degrees so we could actually play outside. February has been a blessed month in that it has at least provided us with a variety of weather instead of the consistent sub-twenties gray days which lasted all of December and January. I will take the crazy snow storm, ice storm, and ridiculous thunder and lightning storm which happened this month because we also had several days in the 40s and even saw 50 plus degrees once or twice.
It seems as though, since Punxsatawney Phil declared it an early Spring, Spring has really been fighting hard but just can't quite stamp out old man Winter. Keep at it Spring, we're all pulling for ya. In the meantime, here are the pictures that remind us that winter can be fun.


Pictured here are Elijah and Gabe the snowman builders. They were actually very helpful this year in making our little snowman. They did most of the work, I just had to reshape a little and make sure the face stayed on. They were appalled that our snowman did not have mittens. We seem to have a shortage at present and I couldn't spare any for our poor snow friend.


This is David John the anti-snowman. He primarily spent his time trying to eat chunks off of Frosty and periodically made a dash for the street so that I had to leave our snowman project and chase him down.


We tried sledding down the small hill in our backyard with moderate success. The boys really loved it when I pulled them around on the sled. It was quite the workout for me. The three boys together total 90 pounds not to mention the 20+ extra pounds I'm already hauling around. Phew!


Here is Gabe in outside timeout. Just teasing- he called it his snow house and showed off how skinny he is by slipping in and out of the small gap between the gate and fence.


Finally, here is the evidence of the slave labor we get out of the boys. After David John shoveled the entire driveway (pay no attention to that suspicious snow-blower parked in the garage), I had him mop all the floors in our house.

Thus Saith Elijah

Every night we read some scriptures from the illustrated scripture books with the boys. We always ask a question afterward to make sure that the boys were listening and understood. Lately we've been reading from the illustrated Doctrine and Covenants. We recently read about a revelation given for Emma Smith. We asked the boys, "What was one thing Jesus told Emma she should do?"
Appropriate responses would have included be happy, teach the people, read the scriptures, learn and write, etc. Elijah's response?

"Jesus told her she needs to make dinner!"

We obviously have some work to do before he starts dating.

Domestic

I've had a few successful cooking ventures lately so I thought I'd share.
Last month, I started making pizzas from scratch with the awesome pizza stone and peel I got for Christmas (thanks Mom and Dad!) and a little advice from my friend Holly who is a homemade pizza pro. I am still working out how to get the dough into pizza shape. My first attempt turned into a rectangle which conveniently fit exactly on my cutting board.

The second was more or less pizza-shaped, if a little lumpy.

It was this second, roundish, delicious pizza which caused Marc to exclaim, "Wow honey! You're so domestic." I guess I have the rest of my life to work my way up to Domestic Diva and then eventually Domestic Goddess, right?

My second big cooking triumph happened on Saturday. I decided that Marc and I would have our Valentine's dinner then since Sunday was the only day in a two week span that he would not have to get up at 5 am and go to work. I chose the signature Philippine dish chicken adobo. I have attempted this before, and Marc was always kind about it but it was never right. This time I started with all whole ingredients including a whole chicken that I butchered myself (I mean, it was dead and plucked but I cut it up using a cookbook diagram and a really big knife.) and according to Marc it's the closest thing to his mission adobo that he's ever had. Success! Here it is on a plate with some strawberries I dipped and some edamame.

My final cooking challenge was more of an issue of help than of a difficult recipe. I let the boys help me make sugar cookies for our friends and neighbors on Valentine's Day. Here is the "helpful" trio.

It was an adventure in repeated sanitization as the boys would inevitably touch their nose, the floor or the trashcan and have to be rescrubbed. David John also really loved to throw the cookie cutters on the floor so that they had to be washed over and over as well. Using the hand mixer to make the dough was a big hit and they all had a great time decorating. Unfortunately, I forgot to take a picture of all the cookies before they were given out. This is the plate that stayed home with us, but most of these are cookies that I decorated under direction from the boys. I don't have any photos of the hilarious and adorable lopsided multi-topping cookies they did themselves.

Anyway, the cookies tasted good and it only took me one hour to clean the kitchen afterward. I guess I really am becoming domestic.

Cookie Caper

On Sunday I made some no-bake cookies.

Someone was clearly trying to get those cookies via any means possible. Apparently the tipped-over chair, deflated inflatable chair, cushion and potty had failed.

Aha! Caught in the act! He was trying to bring in more chairs but couldn't get them around the corner to the cookie counter.

After more attempts and many sad faces we finally gave in and let the poor guy have a cookie. As soon as he figures out how to right our tipped over chairs we'll be in trouble. Watch out cookies!

Adventures in Potty Training

As my friend Sarah Smith is fond of saying, "Potty training is a Special Time."
It seems like such a simple concept. When something comes out of the lower half of your body, please go to this room and sit on this special chair. However, there is nothing simple about it unless you happen to be one of those lucky parents whose children just potty train themselves. In other words, you are the parent of only very well-behaved girls.
For us this potty training adventure began shortly after we moved to Cleveland and we are only now seeing success. Let me just say that despite potty books and logic stating that children can be trained at 18 months, despite your desperate want to use all the money you are spending on diapers to vacation in Europe, despite the fact that all of your friends seem to have potty-trained children do not be discouraged if your child is not. It will happen, seemingly by magic. One day your child will just get it and you will step out of the world of diapers and into the world of underwear, accidents, and potty etiquette.
Potty-training is a Special Time. It is a time when all of the subjects you've been taught to politely avoid will be the main focus of your dinner conversation. It is a time when you will ooh and aah over things that are smelly and more than slightly disgusting. It is a time when your children will start conversations with strangers with phrases like, "Hi! Today I made a really big poop in the potty!" It is a time when your children will give each other potty-themed nicknames. "I'm the poop one, you're the pee one and he's the toot one."
It is a time when you will come to dread hearing "Uh-oh." What this phrase really means is "Mom, I left a puddle on the library carpet." It is a time when you might hear "Mom, the whole thing won't go down!" which means that your child has unrolled the entirety of a brand new jumbo roll of toilet paper and attempted to flush it down the toilet. The toilet will be completely clogged while a mound of dry toilet paper is still sticking out the top.
It is a time when "Mom, I made a mistake. I missed." means that there is pee on his underwear, pants, socks, footstool, bathroom floor, trashcan, hand towel and bathmat but none actually in the toilet. It is a time when your child might stand up during his church children's singing time in the very front row and moon everyone so he can scratch his bum. When you hurriedly try to pull his pants back up he will yell, "Stop, Mom! There's something wrong with my underwear!"
Yes, potty training is a Special Time. It's a good thing we are saving so much money on diapers because when all the adventures are over, and I know we're just getting started, I'm really going to need a vacation. If you need me, I'll be somewhere in Europe.