Thanksgiving

Our Thanksgiving during the three week "pause" for Covid was not drastically different from our Thanksgiving last year.  After our years and years of trying to stop and see everyone at three or sometimes even four different Thanksgiving dinners, we have embraced the fact that we don't mind having a relaxed, quieter day.  

Hailey made our traditional turkey cupcakes and made plates to drop off to her besties and their families. 

A recent tradition we did miss was going to the YMCA for their annual Turkey Trot that we have participated in the last several years.  The boys were still asleep so Hailey, Trent and I bundled up and did our own Turkey Trot in our favorite woods. 

My mom came over to eat with us but that was it.  Just the six of us.  Trent and I had done much of the cooking the day before so on Thanksgiving day we only had to roast the turkey and make the potatoes. 

Trent has become an expert at cooking turkeys.  I was also thankful that Hailey got one more year out of the the turkey shirt I made her. 

Due to Covid, we sat the boys in the kitchen just because they have been around other people and we didn't want to risk them sharing germs with my mom. 

Later that night after we had driven Grama home with plates of leftovers, we sat down to play an escape room game that we had purchased in Manistee over the summer.  

It was fun.  Not as challenging as a "real" escape room but some of the clue elements were the same.  

Hailey decided to play a little beauty shop and pull Daddy's hair back into a man pony tail. 

Since it was our first escape room game we had a bit of a learning curve to figure out.  We didn't "escape" in the hour they gave us but we managed to get out about ten minutes later.  We will definitely try one again.  The only downside to it is that it is a one and done thing.  You have to write on the cards and cut stuff up so once you finish it has to basically be thrown away.   It's hard because it's a quality game and you feel like you are being a bit wasteful. 

All in all it was a good day.  I am continuously amazed at how blessed I am to be able to live my life with my favorite people. 

Bounty

We picked some beans from our garden today. Ten beans. Ten beans is all we have to show for all of our work so far. I had to put up more netting today because now I think the rabbits are getting in and nibbling on the budding vegetables. I think we have managed to keep the deer away with our net system, but the whole thing looks like some complex fish trap and it is extremely hard to get near the plants and weed and do whatever else we have to do on a daily basis. Inspect for remains of what critters ate the night before is what it seems like we do mostly.

I keep reminding myself that this is the first year we have tried this and eventually we will figure out what we are doing. I hope we get more than our ten beans out of this garden or I am not so sure.

The beans were really good. The kids and I each devoured our two and a half beans a piece. I guess that makes it seem pretty worth it.

Cupid would be proud

Hailey is the snack helper at school tomorrow. The class theme for the day is "I'm a little Valentine". I was wracking my brain trying to think of something "heart-y" to bring into school. Something "heart-y" yet still healthy - I was drawing a blank.

What would I do in my life without the Google? Seriously. I have no idea what I did with myself before the internet. Leave it to all the smarties out in cyberspace to solve my dilemma.

So this morning my little snack helper and I made some cupid arrows. They are made from a watermelon heart cookie cuttered out and orange slices on the end to represent the tip and quiver. Quill? What is that end piece called? The feather part?

They were a little more challenging to make than they looked. Isn't that always the case? First of all, watermelon was a bit hard to come by at the store. I had to buy two "personal" size seedless watermelons at three ninety nine a piece. Yikes! I guess it isn't really the season for a big daddy watermelon. My knives are atrocious so I had a hard time cutting consistent slices. They turned out pretty cute though.

I still have some reservations about them. If the kids in her class don't like fruit the way my kids like fruit, they won't be much of a hit. And if they do like fruit, I don't know if the amount on the skewer will be enough to fill them. Hailey ate the equivalent of three pieces of watermelon and a whole orange while we were making them. Then again, she eats all day long without ever being full.

I guess we will see tomorrow!

Eat your vegetables

One of the gifts I received this Christmas was the cookbook Double Delicious! by Jessica Seinfeld. I love to look at recipes and cookbooks. I love to cook if I have all the ingredients. That is where my weekly meal plan is essential.

What I was most excited about in this new cookbook was the fact that the recipes are not very complicated and she tries to incorporate better ingredients. For example, whole grain pasta instead of plain old regular pasta. Another thing that I love is that every recipe includes a vegetable puree for a little extra boost of nutrition. There are pureed vegetables in them and you don't even taste them!

So before you start to cook up any of her yummy recipes - first you have to whip up your purees. I was a bit nervous, but it was so easy! And if I can do it, anyone can do it. All I have is a cheap, little, in pot steamer basket and a sketchy food processor at best.

Trent was my kitchen assistant (he was just as excited as I was about this) and we tackled three purees on our first try. It took about an hour from start to finish for all three.

Broccoli - which we have already tried in a chicken balsamic sandwich that was out of this world!


Cauliflower - We had this in a baked ziti and bacon and egg cups that Trent and Spencer made.

Carrots - We had these in the ziti, chocolate chip waffles, tuna casserole and in homemade granola. Can you believe granola? You can't even taste it. I swear I could have eaten the carrot puree with a spoon. It was so sweet and yum.

You portion them into half cup servings which is what most of the recipes call for and when you need them, just thaw and add them in.

Tonight I am going to make a batch of sweet potato puree. I am making honey mustard chicken fingers tomorrow and that is the secret ingredient.

Can you tell I am excited about this? So fun, easy and healthy. If I had known how easy it was to make these veggie purees I would have saved myself a fortune in baby food costs!

Everything's better with Blue Bonnet on it.

Sometime over Christmas break - I can't remember the exact festive occasion that I was cooking for - Christmas, Christmas Eve, New Years Eve or one of the many other days that we had family over or went somewhere with a dish to pass, I took out a stick of butter to let it soften on the counter.

Later that day, I started to make whatever it was I was making and could not find the butter that I set out anywhere. I checked the fridge to see if I absentmindedly put it back in there. I asked Trent if he put it away. I asked the kids if they had seen it or taken it or put it away. The butter was nowhere to be found. I went on a quick search of the house and all of the usual hiding spots and had no luck. It was like it vanished into thin air.

This weekend we continued with our Mission of Organization (or what I like to call MOO) and look what I discovered in a corner of Evan's room packed into a dinosaur bin.


Evan still claims that he never took the butter and doesn't know how it got there. I can't see Hailey taking it and putting it in Evan's room without wiping it all over herself and everything in her path. Maybe I was going to make butter cream frosting to put on cookies or something and wasn't moving fast enough for Evan's liking, so he took the butter to get back at me? I guess I will never know.

The funny thing is that I grabbed the butter expecting it to be totally soft and mushy, but since Evan's room is so cold (we jokingly call it the refrigerator), it felt like we had in fact just taken it out of the refrigerator. Don't worry, we threw it away regardless.

A Spook-tacular week of activity!

We had an extremely busy week last week. I had so much to blog and not a minute of time to do it. This week looks to be close to the same. I figured I better get some pictures on here, so here are the highlights of our busy Halloween week.

Carving pumpkins - Spencer carved the face on his pumpkin this year without any help. Evan wanted to, but was not quite strong enough to maneuver the knife through the body of the gourd. Hailey just liked looking at the pumpkin guts and wielding the knife in her hand whenever she could manage to grab it.

The first time I have ever attempted a photo like this. Love it.

Making yummy treats - We made Witchy pretzel fingers, pumpkin bars and the traditional Ghost in the Graveyard cake. On Saturday morning while I was mixing up the pudding for the graveyard cake, Spencer walked by and asked me if that was what I was making. When I told him it was, he started to sing "Best Day Ever...." his made up happy song.

Earlier in the week, Evan made up some treats of his own. A fine batch of Spider Cider. He made up the name all by himself and I was very impressed.

Dressing up for Halloween- I LOVED my kid's costumes this year. They were fairly simple to put together ( despite some minor sewing headaches) and they turned out so cute. They all had so many compliments on how great and creative they looked.

I also love how the pictures of them in their costumes turned out. The best tip that I can give anyone photographing a kid in a Halloween costume is to NOT do it on Halloween. Have the kid do a "dress rehearsal" the day or days before. The kids LOVE to have the costume on and are not chomping at the bit to get to the first house for candy, so they are totally natural and will pose for you all day long. I have done that the past two years and have been so happy with the outcome. It makes for a very stress free Halloween. Especially when the Mom is a photomaniac!

Little Red Riding Hood

Knight in Shining Armor

Mad Scientist

Trent dressed up as the Big, Bad Wolf and I was Little Red's Grandma for a Halloween party that we went to.

It was a fun filled, chaotic, amazing and crazy week! I think Spencer was on to something. Best. Day. EVER!

Belated birthday blowout!

Evan's request for his birthday was to go to dinner at the MAC and then play mini golf. We had dinner at the MAC, but eating out with a big group always seems to take longer than you think it will. When we got to the mini golf place around eight o' clock, we were devastated to find out that they were closing for the night. Evan was pretty bummed out, but took it like a trooper. The lady at the ticket counter felt bad for him so she gave him a coupon for a free game that he could use on a different day.

It only took us over a month to get back there, but yesterday we had Evan's fake birthday mini golf extravaganza! In our defense, this week has been the first week that it has actually started to warm up around here. Yesterday was a real summer day. It was gorgeous out. On a side note, don't neglect to check out Hailey's little purple skort set. She got to wear three brand new outfits yesterday - a dress to church, her bathing suit and this little number for golf. She has so many adorable warm weather clothes and this is the first chance she has had to wear any. Seriously, I am so in love with her summer wardrobe options I would change her four times a day if I could avoid the laundry!

Hailey actually got to "play" golf for the first time. In the past she has always been in the backpack on Trent's back while we play. They didn't charge us for her but they gave her a ball and a club. She did pretty well on the first hole and then dropped the club and the ball and just wanted to fill the ball cups with rocks. Or dangle her fingers in all the "waaaarrr" (water). Or just lay on the artificial turf and watch the "hazards" spin or flip. She was pretty much in the way the whole time.

The boys game of choice is "speed golf". They take turns hitting their balls near the cup and then just keep hitting them until they go in the hole. Each hole takes them a minute and a half at best. Then they move on to see what wacky, zany contraption the next hole has in store for them.

On the last hole our luck started to kick in. Eighteen is a straight shot down with a built up mound around the cup. It is a pain to get the ball up that mound and into the hole - I think I had a seven or so on that hole. Evan got a hole in one! His first hole in one! He was so excited.

His luck continued when he took his turn at the dynamite shack. The shack is what they use for ball retrieval at the end of the game. You have to aim for this little wooden "gully" just a tiny bit wider than the ball that leads into the shack. If you miss, the ball just rolls into the collection bin inside, if you make it in the gully - you blow up the dynamite shack. Evan hit his ball and missed. Then he hit Dad's ball and HE BLEW UP THE SHACK! In my whole life of playing that mini golf course, I have never done that. I don't think he knew what to think - he just kind of looked at it with a mixture of amazement and embarrassment. Then it was Spencer's turn. He hit his ball and missed. He hit my ball and missed. I could tell he was pretty bummed out. He is always so excited to try to blow that thing up and now that he saw that it could be done - by his little brother no less - he was so determined. We still had Hailey's ball so I told him he could hit hers. I told him to try to bounce it off the side a bit like Evan did because that is how he did it. Spencer bounced it off the side and the ball headed toward the gully - it sort of stopped in the middle right in front of the gully as we all stared in disbelief. It was seriously like it was happening in slow motion as that ball rolled toward and eventually into the gully. HE BLEW UP THE SHACK! He was so excited! Both boys won free rounds of mini golf. They were so stoked!

The funniest part was later that night as Spencer was re-telling the story to Grampa Dan he told him that as the ball slowed down it just kind of stopped and then Mom and Dad GASPED! Gasped! Seriously, when did he get so old?

The boys with their free passes. Can I just say how much I love Spencer's "Jim Halpert" hair? This is the hair I wanted him to have all year, but for some reason it won't lay like that when school is in session.

I never got to post anything about Evan's birthday because at the time of his birthday our computer was on the fritz. I love to try to make the invitations for my kid's parties. I love doing it and I think they are so much cuter than store bought. Not to mention - cheaper - since I have all the stuff and I might as well be using my scrapbook stuff for something...

I always make an extra invitation for their scrapbooks (cough, cough) but I usually don't ever "document" the thank you notes that I make. So here it is. I just sent them out last week - extremely belated. I wanted to try to include his five year old picture which I still have yet to get. I tried the other day, but Evan is so hard for me to photograph - he just doesn't have much love for my camera.

I thought they turned out pretty cute. And because I am totally shameless I have to post a photo of his dinosaur bone cake. I LOVED how this cake turned out. I got the idea from Family Fun magazine and their website is where I printed the template for the bones.

Happy 5th birthday Evan! I love you to all the planets and back again!