Birthday Catchup: Tim Turned 16!

Tim turned 16 years old. Less than two years till he will be an adult! Wow!

 

He got many presents and cake and junkfood. He enjoyed it all. While I was standing there and wondered when I blinked so long that he managed to grow from intense toddlerhood to almost grownup teenagehood.

 

He has the typical teenage love of computer games and of sleeping in. How come teenagers need so much sleep and how come it all seems to have to be during the day?

 

Time flies like the wind. Fruit flies like bananas. --Groucho Marx (1890-1977)

 

Happy 16th birthday, Tim!

Gingerbread House Decorating II

 

 

Darkness discovered the bowl of royal icing when the kids were done decorating and volunteered to do the dishes...

 

The finished products. One store bought kit, one home made house.

 

Gingerbread House Decorating I

Every year, between Christmas and the last day of the year, we bake and assemble a gingerbread house.

 

But the real fun starts when it's time to decorate.

 

I make royal icing and the kids go crazy putting candy everywhere on the house. Tons of candy.

 

Of course, they have to eat some of the candy too, to make sure we only add high quality candy to the house ^^

 

This Cat Cracks Me Up

Now that Darkness is our only cat left, he has gotten more social. He still isn't a lap cat, but he likes to be close by where we are and just hang out. As long as we leave him alone that is.

 

At night he likes to sleep in my room, but refuses to go there till I go upstairs. He communicates that to me by sitting down in the chair next to me, and STARING at me, or falling asleep for a while and then go back to staring 'Isn't it time to to bed yet? Did you look at that clock? Come on, I am tired!'

In my room he always drinks some water in my bath room and then settles on my bed once every one is quiet. You know, in such a way that you can't even stretch your legs and wake up with a very heavy feeling, and an 'OMG I can't move my legs!!!!!!!' till you realize it is that darned cat again.

Call Me In Sick...

Sylvia and I were puttering around when I suddenly realized how late it was. I told her 'Sylvia, it is time to get ready for kindergarten.'
She looked at me and stated 'I was getting ready to go out to sled, just call me in sick.'

 

Me '... No.'
Good try though!

Dutch Holidays

My friend visited the Netherlands and brought back this picture for me.
It shows the kind of place where you can buy holiday goodies, like oliebollen, rum/raisin fritters and many other yummies.

 

Dog and Kid on Same Meds

Slightly amusing: both Giant and Sylvia are on antibiotics now. Giant for some kind of infection on his foot (it's clearing up fine on the antibiotics) and Sylvia after some dental work.

 

We are easily amused in our house. And yes, Sylvia has the really bright pink liquidy one. Giant has capsules, two in the morning, two at night. We put them in his food bowl with his kibble. He carefully removes them and puts them next to his bowl. We put them back. He repeats the process. We go back and forth like this for a while and then he accidentally eats them, or maybe just gets tired of having to eat so carefully.

Snow

Yup, it's winter.

 

At least I don't have to mow the lawn, right? (Conveniently leaving out the fact that I kind of do have to shovel the driveway though)

 

The good thing about winter is that it's a wonderful excuse to snuggle up with a cat.

 

Too much life, not enough blogging time. Today I am busy catching up with things. Well, kind of. When I am not being distracted by shiny objects that is.

Tomorrow's length of day will be one minute and eight seconds longer than today.

Happy New Year!

Maybe your 2010 be filled with happiness, laughter, and good health.

 

I have heard 2010 is one of those years you are supposed to look back on the last decade. Where was I 10 years ago? We had only five kids, 8yo and under, those were the times. Kate was a baby, and into everything.

 

Lots has happened during these ten years, most of it good, some of it a bit more interesting than I wanted it to be. If I had unlimited time I would write a long post about it all, but since my bread dough is waiting, this is just going to be a short 'Let's have another great decade!' post.

 

Happy New Year!

 

Perfect Cookies

A few months ago, Kate had a multicultural fair at school, for which each family contributed food and recipes. They assembled the recipes into a cookbook, which she brought home from school just before the winter holiday started. For Christmas, we were going to make some traditional Christmas cookies from this cookbook. Only the cookbook was GONE!

 

We looked under the couch, under the table, behind the book cases, in Kate's backpack, under the cat food, behind the bed, in Jane's pile of books next to her bed, in Mount Clean Laundry, heck we even looked in the book case. You know, where the other cookbooks are. Since we didn't find it, we looked at all these places over and over, just in case we missed it the first four times around.

 

I whined to a friend about it and he patted me on the back saying 'Oh dear, oh dear, that is just so horrible. I am so sorry to hear that.' I snuffled and snortled and cried on his shoulder when he said 'Today is your lucky day though. I just happen to have a foolproof recipe for sugar cookies which even you can't mess up and I am willing to share it with you.' Life was good again!

 

He sent me the recipe. We baked the cookies, decorating them with very Christmassy pink and blue colored sugar (for some weird reason the supermarket seemed to be out of red and green colored sugar!) I twitched it a bit to make it fit the number of egg yolks living in my fridge.

 

Notice how the letters on the cookies spell 'PERFECT' just to make sure everyone knows that we had Perfect Christmas Cookies. As opposed to all these families with only good enough christmas cookies. Not that we are competitive at all, mind you ^^

And the cookbook? Three days later it was found in our newspaper drawer... Maybe I'll make the traditional Christmas cookies to celebrate our next snow storm.