Library Day

Tikki Tikki Tembo was a book that I took out of the library over and over again as a child. I was thrilled when Miss M found it on the shelf a few years ago and we have been enjoying it together ever since. At the Langhorne branch of the library they even have a big book version...you know the kind teachers use ;)

Now, I'm pretty sure some will argue this book is politically incorrect. In fact, I'm slightly surprised it's not on some banned book list. I mean no harm from this book. We really just love the silliness of having such a looooong name...Tikki Tikki Tembo Nosa Rembo Bari Bari Ruchi Pip Perry Pembo...or something like that. Miss M has had it committed to memory since she was about two, we're working on JB now :)

We took it out this week and were enjoying the story for 1,000th time when Miss M made a connection (the teacher pride/mommy pride value is high here). "Is this story in China?" "Yes, why?" "Is it Chinese?" "well, kind of...what are you thinking about honey?" "I'm thinking about Sierra, she knows Chinese, does she know this story?"

We had a nice little talk about China, learning Chinese, Sierra's family, and then God reminded me of our friends in China that are there to bring the good news of Jesus to those they encounter. I told her all about my friends there, why they went, how difficult it is for them to be away. It was a sweet conversation, we ended by praying for our friends there and then she spouted some 'phrase' that she is convinced is Chinese...Sierra taught her ;)

Teachable moments. Prayer. Missionaries. Good books. Lot's of sprinkles :)

A winter list!

I'm really into making "bucket lists" for each season...things we want to do. The kids have fun with helping me think of things and it really motivates me to plan fun things instead of sit home in our jammies watching Octonauts (oops, that's what we're doing today, Happy MLK day :) )

Our Winter List for 2012
1. build snowman
2. go sledding
3. go to "the gym" (meaning gymnastics gym)
4. ice skate
5. make a birdfeeder
6. go to the Please Touch Museum
7. make moonsand
8. have a living room sleepover
9. drink hot chocolate
10. visit Aunt Barb
11. make cinnamon buns
12. go to the Academy of Natural Science Museum
13. get bunkbeds
14. potty train JB
15. snuggle often
16. make ice lanterns

We've already done numbers 3, 9, and 10, not to say we won't do all three of those things again! One good snow would be fine for me, we can build a snowman and sled all on one storm. The ice skating can be inside, no need for low temps!! The sleepover will occur sometime in March, as each kid is getting a sleepbag for their birthday. So that actually might not happen until spring. I've had number 6 and 12 on the last three bucket lists...can I cross them off this time?!?!?!?

If anyone would like to volunteer to accomplish number 14 for me, I'd pay you...

The week of Yum

I posted, maybe too proudly, that I was going to try new recipes every day this week. My friends did a pretty good job of keeping me accountable on this one, I got comments, fb messages, phone calls and direct questions. I'm in trouble if everyone gets this involved in all the projects I propose on this blog! Because to be honest, my blogging is very visionary but the reality is sometimes less fabulous :)

Between all the nagging, I mean encouragment, and the fact that I actually went food shopping and bought all necessary ingredients (and nothing else) the week of Yum actually occured and it went better than expected. Here are the results:

Recipe One: Poppyseed Chicken...Prince Charming and I loved it, the kids ate what they were given without complaining. Neither of my kids are big fans of things that are 'saucy or gooey or wet' but they did okay with this. It's a total casserole, so if those aren't your thing, don't ask me for the recipe. Otherwise I'd be happy to share it!
Recipe Two: Sausage, Peppers and Potatoes...LOVED it! We all did. Miss M won't eat the peppers but they were easy to avoid. This was so easy, and it felt warm and hardy...comfort food for sure!
Recipe Three: Anne's Sweet and Sour Chicken...okay, disclaimer here, she gave me this recipe on fb and it was really just a list of ingredients. I thought I could handle it, I mean it's three things plus chicken...c'mon. Well, it smelled great, cooked up easy and looked pretty. But I made it too spicy and the kids and I were down for the count. We ate the rice and some fruit that night, but Prince Charming loved it. Clearly I need to reconnect with Anne and figure this out, because the idea of it is yummy AND I have half a jar of apricot preserves left over :)
Recipe Four: Stuffed Shells...YUMM-O (to coin a Rachael Ray phrase). I have been making stuffed shells for years but I always do cheese filled. JB has a bit of a dairy issue and so he can't eat mine at all, which is sad because we all love them. This is a meat-filled version from my friend Ghazelle (it's in the MOPS cookbook) and they were so great! Mind you, in the recipe it says makes 20...I have 48 of them...but I happen to love that. Some in the freezer, some off to a friend and some in my belly!

Overall a great week of cooking and eating, all of these recipes will make it into my monthly, if not weekly, mix. I'm trying a few more this week from Deb, Kim and MOPS...but I don't want the hounding so I'm saying no more :)

Desperate Times...

I have been in a cooking funk since Christmas. I'm tired of the battle at dinner with the kids almost every night. I'm tired of eating the same old food all the time. The problem with these two statements is that if I don't cook the normal food they eat than the battles will be more frequent and quite possibly more painful. But if I just keep making the same things over and over, just exactly the way they like it, they'll never learn to like new foods and to try new things.

So I'm taking the bull by the horns and I'm going crazy this week. I'm trying a new recipe every night, except for the built in leftover nights, which are still new recipes, kinda'. I sent out a desperate plea on facebook for new recipes then I got this crazy email chain letter (which I never do and hate getting) about recipes. I apologize now if you got that chain letter from me, feel free to ignore it, and you don't need to notify me. I really don't care, I've already gotten a few new recipes to try so I'm happy. I also finally got my new MOPS cookbook so this weeks menu looks like this:

Monday: Kim's Poppyseed Chicken, noodles and a veggie
Tuesday: Kim's Sauasage, Peppers and Potatoes
Wednesday: Leftovers (this is our normal routine, cook twice...get a break)
Thursday: Anne's Sweet and Sour Chicken, yellow rice and a veggie
Friday: Ghazelle's Stuffed Shells, raw veggies
Saturday: Leftovers (see how this works...cook twice...get a break)
Sunday: Mexican Mac and Cheese from pinterest

We'll see how this goes. I'm trying to at least add a side to each meal that I know the kids will eat (ie noodles, yellow rice, sliced cucumbers, etc) I may resort to hot dogs and meatloaf by Thursday if these first few days don't go well! I have another whole weeks worth of ideas/recipes to try if this experiment goes well! Wish me luck!

Friday Fun

Today's fun is slightly sad and totally a chore, not a fun activity. Well it wasn't a fun activity, until I opened my big yapper!!!

We have to take the Christmas tree down today. It is a fire hazard, has been for about a week now, but I didn't want to take it down. If the branches weren't so brittle I'd probably leave it up until the end of January (I guess this is an advantage to fake trees...they don't die). Last night, when I mentioned to JB that we were taking the tree down he burst into tears. I remember last year, after we disposed of the fire hazard, one of them kept asking "Christmas over?". Too sweet!

So in the middle of the outburst of tears over the dead tree I heard myself say, "Oh buddy, don't cry, taking the tree down in a fun game". Really??? Did I just say that??? Am I brainless??? Of course this comment did not go by unnoticed by bionic eared Miss M! She squealed with delight at the prospect of a fun game (the squeals of delight will turn into squeals of horror if she doesn't perceive herself as the "winner" of whatever the game is...that's a whole different post though).

So today after nap we are playing the "Christmas Tree" game. I'm going to take down all important, breakable ornaments while they are napping (I'm not completely brainless). Then we are going to have some fun! We'll start in the dining room, I'll give a command like "go find an ornament with a mouse on it" and they will run to the tree, get the ornament and run back to me in the dining room. Then I will lovingly put the ornament back in it's box while the kids run to get "one that looks like a candy cane" and so on...

Dumb? Sort of! Time consuming? Yup! A memory with my kids that will probably have us all giggling and possibly the tree falling over? Absolutely :)

When we're done I'll have hot chocolate with whipped cream and sprinkles all ready!!

Library Day

My friend Cheryl cleans out her closets/garage/attic every once in a while and passes along all kinds of treasures for my kids. She has been chief supplier of board games, floor puzzles and hardcover children's literature. This book, "Dog's Colorful Day," was passed on to me over a year ago and for some reason we never really got to it. I found it a few months back and both kids love it! JB in particular, the themes of colors and counting are a little simple for Miss M anymore.

Today feels like the first day back to reality, after all the holiday hoopla! Prince Charming had yesterday off and it was wonderful to have him home for a day that had no real purpose. We cleaned the house and had some family fun in the evening. However, for the last few days we have been noticing that our kids are just out of sorts. Their schedule is totally off from the combination of mommy getting sick, Christmas, the week between that mommy declared "I'm not doing anything week", and then New Years. Thier behavior has been poor, they're extra cranky, they won't eat and they keep thinking there should be something incredible to do every minute of the day! WRONG!!!

So today we are working at getting back to the basics. We started our routine this morning with our regular two shows (yes, we've been watching more TV than could possibly be healthy for about two weeks now), breakfast at the table (yes, we've been eating in front of the TV for a bit now too) then play time while mommy gets some work done. It went well, although we had a couple of time-outs and other assorted consequences as I slowly tackled some of the backslidden behavior!

I decided we would need a little activity for when they get up from nap, we're not going anywhere and that will make them mad. So...I got "Dog's Colorful Day" out and I traced, on white paper, a big picture of dog. We're going to read the story and add the spots to his coat as they come (the story is about his day of getting messy, each mess leaving him with a different colored spot). We got markers in our stockings at Christmas and this will be the perfect activity to break them out for!! I figure when the spots are done JB can work on counting them, he could us a little practice from about 7-10. That's a little too easy for Miss M so I'm hoping she can retell the messes in the correct sequence. I think she'll be great at it since she'll have made herself a visual clue with the markers!

I checked out amazon and found that "Dog" has quite a few other adventures, we might have to check them out of the library next week. It's a simple story but it's fun and the pictures are really great, again simple but sweet.

Happy reading!

2012!

A random pet peeve of mine about facebook is the month of November. The month is fine, it's the activity that many participate in that sort of irks me. You see, for the last three years or so, every November regular facebook users decide they are going to say something they are thankful for each day...a month of thankfulness. What's so bad about that you might ask??? Well, nothing, except that some of the people that participate in this activity then use the other 11 months to whine and complain about every little thing in their lives. I do have some good friends that do this thankful activity that live very thankful lives year round, and to those friends I say, excellent idea...keep it up!

One day this past November I was giving Prince Charming an earful about this very tradition on fb and he responded with (and I hate when he is right about something I'm about to mount my soap box about) "isn't that the same as you doing the thankful tree with the kids...just in November". Swallow, gulp, swallow. Well yes, Prince Charming, I suppose it is, thanks for mentioning it!!!!

Thus began my quest to live a more thankful lifestyle for my own sake, but also to model it for my kids. There is nothing worse than ungrateful children, they irk me and I don't like it! So I began my task of trying to think of things we could do more regularly to foster this character trait of being thankful.

I think I'll post another time about some of the day-to-day things we're working on, but I really enjoyed our New Year's Eve efforts the other day! I got our calendar down off the wall and we started back in January 2011 and read all the things we did/saw/visitied/experienced, etc. I had Miss M and JB (lets be realistic here, mostly Miss M and by the time we got to August it was very mommy directed) listen to all the things on the calendar and pick something we could turn into a phrase of thankfulness. January was easy, my mom had some eye surgery and it went perfectly. February is Miss M's birthday so she wanted to be thankful for her party and the presents she got, sounded good to me. And on it went, some months we had to be creative but it was fun to look back at the whole year and do it with our thankful glasses on (hey, I should make little sunglasses to wear next time and we can "look" for things to be thankful for...). Others that made the list were baby Trey arriving safely to some good friends, a visit with Keerstin and Heather, Daddy's new position at work and of course, Jesus' birthday!

Our list is hanging up so we can see it. Then we made a teachery "web" of things we are looking forward to in 2012. The beach, vacation, more birthdays, Miss M going to kindergarten and JB going to Cubbies plus much more made that list.

I think I might have started a new tradition, if I keep these two lists each year we'll have some great memories to look back on. Happy New Year everyone!!