Pizza party!

Rob had the great idea to reserve one of the rooms at our community center down the street and have a pizza party with a couple of families that we used to see regularly, but have not seen so much in the last few months. We were able to surprise the kids on Monday with this fun pizza party!

The kids all had a great time playing on the playground, learning to play pool, watching a video, and just getting to spend some time together (oh yea, the pizza, juice boxes, cookies, and brownies were a hit too!). The adults all enjoyed the time of food, fellowship, and encouraging conversation.

Thank you "F" and "B" families for joining us, it was so good to spend time with you! We missed you Mrs. B, hope you are feeling better!

Life lessons

This weekend Peanut had an unfortunate encounter with one of our cats.

It seems that Peanut was left out of his cage.

The cat was just doing what cats do: hunt rodents.

Mr. M noticed that the cat had come down the stairs with Peanut in its mouth and gave chase. Miss E heard the cries for help and between the two of them they managed to rescue Peanut. However, it was too late. Though Peanut looked "ok" I could tell he was not. Mr. S and I sat and held him for a few minutes until he died. The kids took turns holding Peanut, and everyone had a good cry. Then they started talking about getting a new hamster. The big kids started asking if they could pool their money to get Mr. S a new hamster. We will give it some time (a couple of weeks?) and then let them do that if they are still interested.

This is an opportunity for learning life lessons about death, responsibility, and caring for others. This is the reason we got Peanut, though we didn't think the hard part of the lessons would be so quick in coming. Mr. S had been so diligent in caring for Peanut, making sure he had food and a clean cage (and even baths, oh my!). We had been so pleased with the care and responsibility he was taking.

rainy days

It's been raining here for about a week, hard rains with loads of wind. Thursday a tree across the street went down.

Friday was one of those days that just felt like a baking and reading day. The big kids seemed to be inspired to bake as well. Mr. M helped Miss J bake up a little batch of muffins from a mix.

Miss E helped Miss C mix up some batter of her own. I was impressed that Miss E was careful to put in little bits of everything she thought was needed to bake up a little loaf for Miss C. Miss C liked adding in some mini chocolate chips. It actually turned out OK, but more like a spongey cookie. Miss C enjoyed it well enough.

I had a great little helper making up bread for lunch. It's been about a month since I've made bread, so everyone was excited to have it for lunch. I need to get back to making it regularly.

While we waited for the bread to bake I read a bit of "The lion, the witch, and the wardrobe" to the kids. I've been reading a C.S. Lewis biography to the kids, which got us wanting to read about Narnia again. It was a great way to spend a gloomy rainy day!

experiment

Mr. S has been asking me if he can do an experiment for the last few days. This is an easy one, but always fun.

I just put "powders" in cups (flour, baking soda, baking powder, powered sugar) and gave him a liquid measuring cup filled with vinegar and let him see what the powders would do.

He thought this was great. Once he saw the results we talked about what was in the cups and how they reacted.

Starting early

Today Miss E had the job of making zucchini bread for our lunch. Of course Miss J wanted to help, as usual. However, Miss C was a new addition to the job today! She was having blanket time near the table while I was doing some chores. She quickly lost interest in her blocks when she saw all off the action happening at the table. Miss E asked if she could join them?

Set up with a bowl, spoon, flour, a measuring cup, and some spices she was one very happy girl (notice the apron?)! It was so sweet to see her "helping" her sisters make lunch, and how she is learning so early to serve her family. Her little servant's heart is such a blessing to her whole family already! Miss C is always looking for things to help with and clean up, and then clapping after she does the job. Her big sisters are setting great examples for her, they are all such blessings to us!

Shenanigans

Mr. R has turned into quite the trickster around here. The other morning I noticed a rope tied to a closet door. I followed it to find out where the other end was....

It was tied to the bathroom door. There were a couple of little brothers in there.

Fortunately those little brothers saw the humor in the situation and everyone got a good laugh.

Pulling his own...

teeth!

Mr. M has several loose teeth, and last week one of them was just about ready to come out. He had me checking it a couple of times a day to check to see if it was ready (I pull the teeth around here). It was so close, but just not quite ready one evening. I told him to work on it before bed and in the morning and maybe by the next evening it would be ready?

Well, I never had the chance to check it again! The next morning he pulled it out all by himself!

Happy Valentine's Day!

We started out our day with pink pancakes topped with strawberries and pink whipped cream! YUM!
Miss J helped me make pink and white play dough. While she waited for it to cool she had a tea party with Miss C.

Once it was cool enough to play with the three youngest got to play with the play dough while the big kids were working on school work.

Lunch was bagels with pink cream cheese and red grapes. Then we moved on to the real fun-- cupcakes!
Each one had a heart hidden inside! I used this recipe. I found the link to the recipe here.

Happy Valentines Day!

visiting friends

At a church we visit regularly (out of town), we keep meeting families that we would like to get to know better. We've been invited by many to come stay with them, and we are slowly taking them up on their offers. Last week-end was one of those times!

We truly enjoyed the time of fellowship that we had with the "G" family. They are a musical family, and despite our being not so musical, we truly enjoyed the time of worship we were able to spend with them! We also enjoyed dinner, dessert, and just some great time to talk and get to know each other better!On our way home we pass a cheese factory, and every time we comment on how we should stop some time. This time we stopped! Since it was a Sunday there was not much actually happening, but we still had fun!

Peanut gets a bath

It seems that Mr. S is not impressed with Peanut's hygiene habits (He pees and poops in his cage! Yuck!) So he has been asking to give Peanut a bath.
Rob supervised this bath time, and it looks like Mr. S did a great job. He did not put too much water in the sink, and dried him off very nicely after the bath. Peanut did not seem to mind the bath too much!
Peanut even got some time close to a reading lamp to help him warm up.
Despite his concerns and the great care he showed in giving Peanut a bath we are NOT letting him do this regularly. Instead we will continue to encourage Mr. S to clean the cage out to help keep Peanut clean. ;)

Molten Lava Cake

I saw this blog post, which referenced this blog post with the recipe, and I just had to try these cakes out!


I surprised Rob with these yummy cakes last week. The recipe makes 6, so after we had ours we called a couple of kids down from bed to help us take care of the rest. They had been extra helpful that day, so we were happy to share with them! Mr. R's first words were "I want this for my birthday cake!." Yea, they were that good!

Maybe I'll try making up some heart shaped ones for Valentine's Day?

My poor tea kettle

For about six years I've had an electric tea kettle. It was so nice to be able to have hot water for my tea ready so quickly. Sadly, my kettle died a few weeks ago. It was replaced by a regular stove top kettle which is working out nicely. This in itself is not worthy of blogging about, but what happened to it is....

Mr. R (and the other boys too), have started disassembling any electronics that die in our house. They have taken apart quite a few things, like phones, computers, PDA's, printers, really anything we will let them. The sweet ladies down at our local thrift store even set aside any electronics that come in that do not work to give to Mr. R! This past week he was given a DVD player to take apart!

Looking a bit rough

Mr. M is looking a bit rough these days. He had a run in with his bed, and lost. Poor guy. It was quite the bump when it first happened, I was surprised the next morning when he didn't look worse than this. We spent quite a bit of time keeping ice on it to help with the nearly golf ball size bump on his head.
*All of the brown markings around his mouth/chin/cheeks are from his run in with a bowl of chocolate the next morning. A much better sort of run in!

He is looking a bit worse now, but feeling better. He has a black eye and a bruise on his forehead. This was the sort of injury that looks bad, but after evaluating him and asking his brothers how it happened (did he cry and move right away, or lay still for a while?) we realized it just looked bad but was not serious. He happened to have visit to the doctor already scheduled, so he got it checked out anyways. As I figured, its all good.

Meet Peanut

We have a new pet in the house.

We've been thinking that Mr. S needed responsibility of the animal sort for a while. We would like for him to have chickens or rabbits later, but he needed to start smaller. He had quite a bit of money saved up (for a five year old) from Christmas and other things so he was able to purchase his hamster himself! We helped him pay for the cage as well as all of the other things his hamster would need.
"Peanut" was the name he chose all by himself. He also picked this one out on his own. It has been cute to watch him care for (and sometimes pester) Peanut. He is learning to take him in and out of the cage, hold him nicely, and make sure he has plenty of food and water.
Everyone else has been having fun checking Peanut out. Miss C calls him "kitty", I guess "hamster" and "peanut" are hard to say and he IS a small furry critter! LOL! The big kids have been kindly helping him out and encouraging him.