Happy Halloween

This little girl has been obessed with "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" ever since Gramma came for a visit and played make-believe with her. Every morning when it is just me and her in the dimly lit kitchen in the pre-dawn hour, Mama Bear and Baby Bear share a bowl of porridge. It fills our tummies and warms my heart. And this Halloween has given me the perfect opportunity to bring out the old bear costume I made for M so many years ago (with Gramma's help, on a hand-me-down sewing machine with a broken foot pedal.) It was his first time trick-or-treating. He was 22 months old and the costume fit him perfectly. T is 30 months old and it's a bit big on her. Even so, it is perfect. I have a feeling that she will be wearing that costume for weeks to come. :)

Oh, the irony

I started this blog to encourage myself to do more fun and interesting stuff with my family. Ironically, we have been so busy doing fun and interesting stuff for the past couple of months that I haven't had time to catch my breath, much less blog about it. I kind of went crazy signing my kids up for activities this autumn. We've been on field trips to the National Zoo, the Baltimore Science Museum, Anne Marie Gardens, the Library of Congress, the American History Museum, and Historic St. Mary's City. We have had family visit and lots of playtime with friends. The older kids played soccer in the Upwards league. M entered an original Lego creation in the County Fair and won 1st prize! J and C entered handmade stuffed animals in the fair and won ribbons, too. They had art lessons. They started gymnastics and horseback riding lessons. M continues with jujitsu. And they are in the Christmas Pageant at church this year and rehearsals started a month ago! And we have joined a second homeschool group. And I'm taking T to the library story time, too. Oh, and we are trying to squeeze in our school work sometimes!

It's been fun, but exhausting. I think we are all ready to start slowing down and spend more time at home. Plans for November: cooking, sewing, knitting, reading, drawing, and celebrating the beginning of my favorite time of the year.

Birthday Bread

I've been making all of our bread at home for a while now. Okay, so I mostly use the bread machine. But it's still better than store-bought sandwich loaves. It's good bread. The kids like it. The main problem is that I can only make one loaf at a time. And with the kids getting bigger, they are eating more. It's gotten to the point that I practically have to run the bread machine twice a day to keep up with demand. So I've been trying to figure out how to work in baking bread in the oven into my routine. I figure that in the oven I could do several loaves at once.
To help me figure out how to do that, I recently bought this book, Artisan Bread in Five Minutes A Day, with some of my birthday money. (Thanks Mom and Dad!) It is amazing. The idea is that you mix up a huge batch of dough, keep it in your fridge, and then you can just pull off what you need each day and bake it up. I have now made several loaves of the basic boule recipe and the kids eat it so fast I haven't been able to get a decent photo of it. All I can show you is the book and our bread plate with a few crumbs. It is so good.

Friday morning cartoons and pancakes

A Friday tradition in the making.

More Summer Goodness

Last week was my birthday. Since the kids were mum about whether or not Ray was bringing home a cake for me (he did!) I thought I would make my own birthday cake. I've been wanting to make a chocolate cake from scratch for a while now. This seemed like the perfect time. I used this recipe. It was awesome! And very easy. I don't think I will ever buy another box cake. I made some cream cheese frosting, then the girls decorated it for me with colored sugar sprinkles. On one side only because some people don't like sprinkles.

The day after my birthday we went blackberry picking. The weather was perfect. A little overcast and cool. I could have picked for hours more than we did.

The kids ran out of steam a little earlier than I had hoped. Will still picked enough berries for about 3 batches of jam, a couple gallons of frozen berries, and enough left over to eat fresh for a few days. The one thing we wanted to make that we didn't was a pie or tart. We just ran out of berries. I guess I could use up some of the one I froze. But I kind of wanted to save those until this winter when we might need a nice reminder of summer.

The next day was all about soccer. Soccer season is here and the kids had a blast at their first games. Unfortunately, my little point-and-shoot camera is woefully inadequate when it comes to getting action shots half-way across a soccer field. This is the only decent one from the whole day:

Brick Fair 2010

This past weekend we took our kids and one friend to the Brick Fair in DC. Even for someone like me, who is not really into Legos, it was pretty amazing. All the creations on display were original designs. And all of them were incredible.

Here are our kids looking at some of the creations done by young kids:
They were neat, but I know M can (and has) made some equally interesting creations at home.

They had a big room set aside full of Legos for people to build with while they were at the Brick Fair. I thought that was a great idea. Seeing all those amazing creations, I know my kids were itching to try building something themselves.

This one doesn't look as impressive in the photo as it was in real life. It was a series of motorized contraptions that moved plastic, marble-sized soccer balls along a course all the way around the room. It was a definite favorite.

This one was my favorite. A scene from Ghostbusters:
Almost makes me want to buy M some more Legos. Almost.

My small changes

I happened across this really inspiring blog a while back. It's called One Small Change. You should go visit it right now. And then come back here. But in case you don't have time I will tell you that its purpose is to encourage people to make small changes in their daily lives that will have a positive impact on the earth. So I started thinking about what I could do. I realized that there is one change that we have sort of already been doing for a while, but haven't really committed to. So, to make it really easy on myself, I thought my first small change would be simply to commit to what we've already been doing. What is it? Paper towels! We used to use tons and tons of paper towels every day. There is always some spill or messy kid face to wipe up. And with two big, elderly indoor dogs...well, we were using paper towels for their messes, too.

Then one day we ran out of paper towels.
It sat like this for a while. Then, partly for eco-reasons and partly for budget reasons I decided to see if we could get along without them. Most of the time it's pretty easy. All the kitchen spills and messy faces are really so easy to wipe up with a cloth. I have a big stack of them and I just grab a fresh one whenever would have grabbed a paper towel. I have a basket in the laundry room (right off the kitchen) where I toss the dirty ones. It does add one more load of laundry each week, but I have to believe that is still better than using up all those paper towels. And it's a really easy load to do. Even the two-year old can do a pretty decent job folding the cloths.
(This one is one of my prettier ones. We also have a big stack of small wash cloths that we use for little hands and faces.)

I feel so much better not using all those paper towels everyday! So I finally committed to this change and took down that ugly paper towel holder. Aaahhh. Much better!

If only I could get rid of that other perpetual eye-sore in my kitchen:

Now I must admit, the doggies messes are harder to deal with. But, I have several old bath towels that are now dedicated "dog-towels" and that works okay. Occasionally, there is still some small mess that is just too gross to want to use a washable rag. So I keep a small supply of cut up old tee-shirts that I can use and toss. But I try really hard not to use these except in the direst emergency.

So that's my small change. I already have a few ideas in mind for some more small changes. Actually, I'm implementing one this week. I'm going to work at it for a little bit before I share. But stay tuned for small change #2.