Tuesday Trash
Hi everyone, it's time for another camera-dump. Ya ready?
It snowed here over the weekend, and the girls and I were outside for a few minutes enjoying it. Really, it was a few minutes. That's all I can take. Thankfully, Sophie doesn't seem to like the cold so I can blame coming inside on her. Yay!
Sophie did enjoy taking a little ride around on the little sled. We need to buy a bigger one, and go find one of the many sledding hills around here to introduce them to real sledding, but for now, this did the trick.
Julie enjoys throwing chunks of snow into the street and watching them splat. I take the credit for that one, as I enjoy doing it almost as much as she does. I just have to keep an eagle eye on her to make sure she doesn't edge too close to the street and fall off the snow bank.
Sunday we decorated the tree. I know a lot, maybe even most, people have themes for their trees and they end up looking like works of art. Our tree is eclectic, and I love it. The glass ornaments go higher up, the homemade and soft ornaments go at the bottom. I didn't realize how many ornaments we ended up making last year till I opened the box on Sunday, but I felt a little proud of myself for managing to do all that with a toddler and an infant. Julie was thrilled to be allowed to hang some of the glass ornaments this year.
Sophie was pretty fascinated by just everything about the tree. We are going through the "look-don't-touch learning process with her, I'm afraid. Notice I'm wearing that blue sweater minus the bobble-nipples.
Yesterday I tried my hand at bread again. This time whole-wheat. It was pretty good, if a little dense as homebaked whole-wheat tends to be. It was fine smeared with butter and honey as afternoon snack and maybe even a bit better with our split-pea soup for dinner.
Still not what I would call mannah, though. We'll keep trying. The only problem is that I ended up eating way too much bread and I felt quite sick afterwards. I need some self-control!
Julie was at a friend's house last week and found herself wearing a shiny tiara out of the dress-up clothes there. Ever since then, she's been begging me to help her make one, so yesterday we did out of construction paper, aluminum foil, glue and sequins. It turned out pretty cute.
This stupid light fixture - we had it installed during the great kitchen renovation a couple years ago. The fluorescent bulb inside burned out several days ago, and we couldn't figure out how to get the lid off to replace it. My electrician was out of town and not returning my calls, so eventually I took this photo to send along with Joe to Home Depot so he could get some advice there. Luckily, they had the same model and he got it figured out. It was simply maddening to have one end of the kitchen all dark and gloomy! It was driving me crazy, and now that we have the light back, it's freaky how beautiful and bright it is again.
I did a little yarn dyeing over the weekend. It's for a custom order, and I hope it's good enough. It took me forever to get around to doing it for various reasons, but I'm hoping it will be dry enough to mail out tomorrow. Assuming, of course, that I can get us out of the house - there is more snow coming down right now.
A few weeks ago I bought one of those gingerbread house kits. It felt like a total cop-out to buy the pre-made cookies and the candy all kitted up, but I knew that I would never get around to baking one myself, and I knew Julie would love this project. We will make our own gingerbread cookies, but I don't think I could make a house this nice myself anyway.
It took me a while to work up the nerve to get started on this project, partly because you need a nice little block of time to work on it without people crying or melting down or needing to be held. Mostly, though, I was putting off the struggle that ensues whenever I embark on a project like this with Julie. She wants to do everything herself, and I'm sorry, but my four-year-old cannot handle things like running the hand mixer, squeezing the frosting bag, or even putting gingerbread walls into place without getting all spastic. In the end, though, she was happy with just watching and licking the beaters.
I mixed the royal icing and put it into the bags. I like to use water glasses to hold the bags while I fill them up - I just turn the edges of the bags over the sides of the glasses kind of like trash can liners, and it makes it ever so much easier to scrape the frosting into them. Also, the glasses serve as nice holding areas for the bags in between uses, helping to minimize some of the mess.
I needed a base to set the house on, so I cut a piece of cardboard and covered it in foil. Classy!
Here is the picture of the sample house on the tin it came in. I can only imagine how *lovely* ours will be by comparison!
The directions tell you to put the sides together, wait a few hours, put the roof on and wait overnight.
The roof is on now, and maybe tomorrow afternoon we'll decorate.
In the mean time, after Julie's dance class tonight I realized that we had no dinner waiting for us at home, so I dragged the girls into the fancy grocery store that's in the neighborhood to pick up some quickly-prepared fare that I'm not even going to admit in public. But once there,we found this:
They were having a Lego menorah-building contest! How cool is that?!!! They even had a "giant" menorah made out of duplo blocks!
I felt a little creepy taking pictures as I was the only non-Jewish person hanging around that part of the store, and I felt even a bit creepier explaining it to Julie, hoping that I wasn't saying anything offensive. I'm pretty sure I wasn't.
And now, I have to go work on the knitting. I'm finishing a certain pair of mittens for a certain little friend of the family who is expecting them. I'd like to get the pair done tonight and maybe even start on the pair for the little sister of that family. To keep me company, I have a DVD of old-school Sesame Street from 1972. I watched part of it last night, and it's great! All the grown-ups look so young. Bob and Gordon, Maria and Luis...and some of the muppets look a little freaky. Muppet technology has come a long way, I guess.
It snowed here over the weekend, and the girls and I were outside for a few minutes enjoying it. Really, it was a few minutes. That's all I can take. Thankfully, Sophie doesn't seem to like the cold so I can blame coming inside on her. Yay!
Sophie did enjoy taking a little ride around on the little sled. We need to buy a bigger one, and go find one of the many sledding hills around here to introduce them to real sledding, but for now, this did the trick.
Julie enjoys throwing chunks of snow into the street and watching them splat. I take the credit for that one, as I enjoy doing it almost as much as she does. I just have to keep an eagle eye on her to make sure she doesn't edge too close to the street and fall off the snow bank.
Sunday we decorated the tree. I know a lot, maybe even most, people have themes for their trees and they end up looking like works of art. Our tree is eclectic, and I love it. The glass ornaments go higher up, the homemade and soft ornaments go at the bottom. I didn't realize how many ornaments we ended up making last year till I opened the box on Sunday, but I felt a little proud of myself for managing to do all that with a toddler and an infant. Julie was thrilled to be allowed to hang some of the glass ornaments this year.
Sophie was pretty fascinated by just everything about the tree. We are going through the "look-don't-touch learning process with her, I'm afraid. Notice I'm wearing that blue sweater minus the bobble-nipples.
Yesterday I tried my hand at bread again. This time whole-wheat. It was pretty good, if a little dense as homebaked whole-wheat tends to be. It was fine smeared with butter and honey as afternoon snack and maybe even a bit better with our split-pea soup for dinner.
Still not what I would call mannah, though. We'll keep trying. The only problem is that I ended up eating way too much bread and I felt quite sick afterwards. I need some self-control!
Julie was at a friend's house last week and found herself wearing a shiny tiara out of the dress-up clothes there. Ever since then, she's been begging me to help her make one, so yesterday we did out of construction paper, aluminum foil, glue and sequins. It turned out pretty cute.
This stupid light fixture - we had it installed during the great kitchen renovation a couple years ago. The fluorescent bulb inside burned out several days ago, and we couldn't figure out how to get the lid off to replace it. My electrician was out of town and not returning my calls, so eventually I took this photo to send along with Joe to Home Depot so he could get some advice there. Luckily, they had the same model and he got it figured out. It was simply maddening to have one end of the kitchen all dark and gloomy! It was driving me crazy, and now that we have the light back, it's freaky how beautiful and bright it is again.
I did a little yarn dyeing over the weekend. It's for a custom order, and I hope it's good enough. It took me forever to get around to doing it for various reasons, but I'm hoping it will be dry enough to mail out tomorrow. Assuming, of course, that I can get us out of the house - there is more snow coming down right now.
A few weeks ago I bought one of those gingerbread house kits. It felt like a total cop-out to buy the pre-made cookies and the candy all kitted up, but I knew that I would never get around to baking one myself, and I knew Julie would love this project. We will make our own gingerbread cookies, but I don't think I could make a house this nice myself anyway.
It took me a while to work up the nerve to get started on this project, partly because you need a nice little block of time to work on it without people crying or melting down or needing to be held. Mostly, though, I was putting off the struggle that ensues whenever I embark on a project like this with Julie. She wants to do everything herself, and I'm sorry, but my four-year-old cannot handle things like running the hand mixer, squeezing the frosting bag, or even putting gingerbread walls into place without getting all spastic. In the end, though, she was happy with just watching and licking the beaters.
I mixed the royal icing and put it into the bags. I like to use water glasses to hold the bags while I fill them up - I just turn the edges of the bags over the sides of the glasses kind of like trash can liners, and it makes it ever so much easier to scrape the frosting into them. Also, the glasses serve as nice holding areas for the bags in between uses, helping to minimize some of the mess.
I needed a base to set the house on, so I cut a piece of cardboard and covered it in foil. Classy!
Here is the picture of the sample house on the tin it came in. I can only imagine how *lovely* ours will be by comparison!
The directions tell you to put the sides together, wait a few hours, put the roof on and wait overnight.
The roof is on now, and maybe tomorrow afternoon we'll decorate.
In the mean time, after Julie's dance class tonight I realized that we had no dinner waiting for us at home, so I dragged the girls into the fancy grocery store that's in the neighborhood to pick up some quickly-prepared fare that I'm not even going to admit in public. But once there,we found this:
They were having a Lego menorah-building contest! How cool is that?!!! They even had a "giant" menorah made out of duplo blocks!
I felt a little creepy taking pictures as I was the only non-Jewish person hanging around that part of the store, and I felt even a bit creepier explaining it to Julie, hoping that I wasn't saying anything offensive. I'm pretty sure I wasn't.
And now, I have to go work on the knitting. I'm finishing a certain pair of mittens for a certain little friend of the family who is expecting them. I'd like to get the pair done tonight and maybe even start on the pair for the little sister of that family. To keep me company, I have a DVD of old-school Sesame Street from 1972. I watched part of it last night, and it's great! All the grown-ups look so young. Bob and Gordon, Maria and Luis...and some of the muppets look a little freaky. Muppet technology has come a long way, I guess.
posted by Shelly Kang at 9:35 PM
10 Comments:
I'm a no-theme Christmas tree person myself. I find the theme trees too stilted, and I think I would get bored with them quickly. I like ornaments that have a history, story, or memories attached. Or ones that I simply like. :)
HI! Just wanted to leave a suggestion for a whole wheat bread recipe... it's one of my newest favorites. I posted about it on my blog a big ago, at
http://crunchyconmommy.blogspot.com/2007/10/i-love-fall.html
I listed the recipe a little minimally there, but just to let you know, the wh. whole wheat listed is King Arthur White Whole Wheat flour, which I love because it's 100% whole wheat but not quite as strong and bitter tasting as red wheat can be. If you are interested and my kind of basic instructions aren't clear, you can either check out the King ARthur flour whole grain baking book or drop me a line at beth@kensingerfamily.com. Oh, and the recipe is only for one loaf, so you don't have to worry about eating until you're sick, though it freezes quite nicely, too!:)
Theme trees are nice, but I prefer a mish-mash of meaningful ornaments. My most favorite ornaments aren't ornaments at all - they are the first collars from all of the cats and dogs I've had through the years. It's a bittersweet memory, but it wouldn't be Christmas unless they were on the tree.
Your gingerbread house kits brought back a lot of memories for me. Every holiday season my kids and I would make one. Throughout the year my daughter would point out certain candies in stores and tell me those would make good shingles, good shutters or good shrubs for next years' house.
My favorite thing to do was to cut squares in the holes of the walls of the gingerbread (before baking) for windows and then sprinkle crushed lemon drops (or yellow lifesavers)into the empty square (the gingerbread was on parchment paper). Then when the gingerbread baked the candy would melt, fuse together and make a yellow 'window pane'.
I also like your Christmas tree. Mine is a mishmash of ornaments too. Hallmark sells a 'photo ornament' among their Christmas ornaments every year. I have put my kids' school picture in one of those ornaments every year. Now I have a whole collection (almost complete, since my youngest is in 10th grade). The kids put those on every year.
Just had to share our Gingerbread House Building Tip---HOT GLUE!! I've never gotten the Royal Icing to work for holding the thing together. At least not well enough to let preschoolers decorate it. We use hot glue to put it all together and keep all the icing for decorating.
Our tree is completely eccentric. Lots of kid-made ornaments, picture ornaments, ornaments from my childhood, you name it.
No help on the bread recipe. I've always made the white bread recipe in the BHG cookbook. It comes out fairly dense but is delicious--- especially toasted. I'm sure any wheat bread recipe will come out even denser. Not sure how you can get around that.
Homemade ornaments are the best. Our tree has all sorts of crazy ornaments. The boys are putting ours up right now (while I'm supposed to be working). Fun stuff!
We have a Kid Themed tree!
Once upon a time, we had a tree with lots of beautiful glass ornaments, then we had kids. Now we have tons of soft plush type ornaments and the ones they make at school. Much nicer than the glass ornament tree of once upon a time.
No broken glass to worry about.
Too funny, we, err I, decorate the tree the same way as you! Breakables up high, some what nice things in the middle and kid friendly, who cares if it falls off the tree ornaments at the bottom!
Can't wait to see what your gingerbread house looks like, I have one here that I am planning on "building" in a week or so!
When the girls get older and remember the gingerbread houses, it won't matter that they were from a kit. It will be the sweet memory of doing it with you. My Mom bought my kids an ornament for Christmas each year from birth to age 18. It was usually something special for that year. A car for getting their driver's license, a nutcracker for the year my daughter danced in a production, sports team ones for my son. When they have their first home and tree they will each have 18 ornaments to start their collection.
I second the vote for the KA white whole wheat. It comes out a lot fluffier and without that bite that a lot of whole-wheat flour sometimes gives. There are recipes for it on their website, but I just use it like white flour in everything--I do find I need a little more liquid when baking bread, but otherwise I just substitute it in cookies, muffins, pancakes etc.
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