SMASH!

Our New Year's Day was celebrated by the kids smashing the gingerbread house. Always a very popular project :-) I put the house on the table, kids around it, and they take turns with the hammer. The chimneys tend to be the first parts to disappear. A first hole in the roof will appear, while all the kids are yelling excitedly. The next ones will make the hole bigger, until one decides to work on a hole at the other side of the roof. After the roof is gone, the walls are fair game, and it doesn't take long before the whole house is smattered into pieces and ready to eat. The kids are looking forward to next New Year's Day already.

A new year and a new baby! Hard to imagine still. I will have my second prenatal on Tuesday, and she should be able to hear the heartbeat with the fetoscope now. I am not sure whether I am looking forward to it, or dreading it. It would be nice to hear it, but there still is some doubt in the back of my mind whether she really will find it. I think I am feeling some kicks, but it's easy to convince myself that those are just figments of my imagination. On the other hand, my belly keeps growing, which should count for something too I guess. Will the worry and ambivalence ever end? I don't think it will before I have this baby safely in my arms!

I have been doing some more decluttering in our computer room. We have three totally clean desks now! Well, as long as you don't look into the drawers or under neath them that is :-) Those are projects for other things. But it is nice to sit here and have a little oasis of neat space around me. Some day, the whole house is going to be like that! But it might take a few years... Heck, a few decades even, but who cares? LOL

Tonight, we finally made pizza again, after being too tired to do it for quite a while. I really must be getting my energy back. The girls were asking for it, so I said yes, let's do it. They had a blast, rolled and assembled their own pizzas. Kate and Erik made cheese pizzas, Jane and Tara chose pepperoni ones. Jane's pizza was in the shape of a ghost... I used the last batch of pizza dough to make pizzas for Sander and me too, just veggies, no cheese for Sander. Veggies, goat cheese, and soy cheese for me. Yummy! We had enough leftovers that we should have another pizza meal out of it, one which just involves putting it in the oven. Love it!

We are getting yet another snow storm. Not too bad, about 3 to 5 inches, but still enough to have to go out there and shovel our challenging driveway! Can it be spring yet? I got some seed catalogs in, so I might spend some time drooling over those, to keep my mind off the winter :-) This baby definitely will interfere with gardening season, but I can only be happy about her anyway, who wants a garden when you can have a baby? LOL OK, maybe I am going to have both, but I can certainly live with a less than perfect garden this year :-)

Tomorrow there will be a homeschool support meeting at our house, so I am busy making my 'famous' cinnamon raisin bread. It's rising right now, and I will shape it after finishing this blog. Then I will put it in the basement, where it's cold, so it will rise very slowly. By the time I get up tomorrow, it will be perfect to just shove in the oven and bake, making the house smell really good when the visitors arrive. That is, if they make it through the snow. But if not, then we will just have more to eat for ourselves :-)

Rolling pizza dough