Variety is the Spice of Life

Variety is the Spice of Life or so they say. That must be why God gives us children that while alike in many ways are also very different from one another.

This morning we dropped Garrett off at work and then dropped in the store on the way home to get a roast for dinner. Enoch wouldn't go in the store because:
Enoch: "Dad didn't get me any socks"
Me: Well that's too bad just wear your shoes without them
Enoch" no no no that is SO gross"
Me: Enoch it isn't that big of a deal hurry up and get them on.
Enoch "can we just go home and get my socks please?"
Me: No the store is right here and I need to grab that roast.
Enoch: "I am staying in the car"
Me: thinking-hm not a bad idea. OK Enoch you can sit on the floor of the back of the car and hide from people while I run in and grab the roast.
Enoch: "Ezra has to stay with me"
Me: no if Ezra wants to go you have to go because you can't stay by yourself.
Ezra: I don't want to go I will stay.

I come out with a roast and Ethne eating a wholemeal roll. Ezra goes nuts thinking he should have gone in the store to get a roll and Enoch would do without a million rolls rather then put his feet in shoes without socks. Ezra wears shoes without socks all the time until I catch him :) So On the way home I realize that I forgot that Garrett used all the chipotle sauce and I have to have it to put with the roast in the crockpot. DARN! Have to run back in the store and get it. This time Ezra will not stay in the car until he finds out I am NOT buying Ethne another roll.

The only reason she got one and they didn't was because she had just woken up and hadn't had breakfast.


So when we get home I open up the roast and start putting it in the crockpot. It was SO bloody. I have never seen meat with thick red blood all over. It was almost like they packaged it with extra blood on purpose. It was gross. Enoch saw it and immediately said:
"Oh sick, I am NOT eating that. That is so much blood. I don't like blood and I am not eating blood"
I just ignored him at first but he wouldn't be quiet and kept asking me if I was going to make him eat blood. I said that is OK you don't have to eat it you can have vegetarian tacos tonight instead. I rinsed off the meat and dumped the blood out of the crockpot and cleaned it out. He watched this but it wasn't enough for him. He still thought he better not eat it.
"I am not going to eat that. Ezra are you?"
Ezra: "yup"
Enoch"even if there is blood?"
Ezra: "yes I like blood. Even I won't eat the meat- just the blood."
A bunch of silly kids!

Ethne The Big Girl

Here is our very big girl Ethne. She has on Enoch's backpack and she is loving it. She is all ready for church and today this is our church bag. She has all the writing material, the hard animals, and the few little books and Ethne toys. And too bad you can't see how gorgeous my toes look here ;)

Look at me everybody. Forget the cute girl look at that cute dress :) JK

Oh E-ra just pulled my pack-pack and it hurt. I think I might fall over. This is probably my favorite dress on her. It has so much material and so many pleats. She looks adorable in it and she is just about grown out of it. We might get one or two more Sundays out of it if they are cool days.

I think I'll get outta here. That boy is crazy.

Oh bending over is impossible. Better get on the floor to pick this up.

Mom gives Ethne the job of putting the pillow back on the couch after she removed it. She is a great helper these days. She also has adorable pigtales when she will keep them in. I am getting tired of looking at here bangs in her face, but she rarely will keep anything in her hair.

Enoch's 6th Birthday Party

This is Enoch's 6th Birthday party. He has been telling me for 8months now that he really wanted a Plants vs. Zombies birthday party. Costumes and all. I thought for sure I could sway him and change his mind to something a little less "popular" or "media-like" but no dice. I finally asked myself: OK what will it hurt? And the answer was-nothing! I guess! So We went full force with the Plants vs. Zombies theme. We made letters from "The zombies" as our invitations. Here you can see the bags for pinata candy and desert cups.
Here are some close ups. We bought the bags and then printed the images off the Internet, cut them out and glued them on. I had the boys help me cut them out since there were so many of them and they did a pretty good job, but they tired of it quickly.
I told them it was good for them because they were building scissors skills. They both decided that they would like to go to "scissor school" instead to build their skills :)

Ethne was the youngest and therefor the first to do the pinata. You can't tell here but Garrett and the boys made the pinata and it was a green peashooter just like the one on the cup in the above picture.

Here is a better shot of the pea shooter and the tree that was hitting it. The kids all came dressed up as their favorite plant or zombie.

Down here they are all attacking the candy. Notice the cleverly dressed boy as the pole vaulting zombie. There were some great costumes. I can't find the picture but Enoch was a gravestone eater. Ezra was a blover but then ended up not wearing his costume and same for Ethne who was supposed to be a sunflower.

Inside the pinata along with the candy were paper coins for them to buy stickers from Crazy Dave's shop "Twiddy Dinkies". The kids liked this.

Instead of cake we had dirt cups. They each had a plant "growing out" of them. Here is the birthday boy surrounded by friends opening his presents. He started without me or the camera so I didn't see what he got or from whom. There went the thank you cards-

Some little cuties with their water. It was a nice hot day and everyone was really thirsty. We went through about 4 pitchers of water between about 15 kids and 10 adults.

Here is the birthday boy enjoying one of his gifts-The Silly Straw! The straw is clear so he is drinking milk so that we could see it in the picture.

We all found this very amusing! Great gift. He got great gifts that will be really fun for him. I had him bring them all to me when everyone was gone so that I could see what there was and if there was anything we needed to keep away from Ethne. The ones I actually saw were- the silly straw, A transformer, A Math Card Game, Several sets of Legos, a Crown, and I can't remember what else. From one Grandma's b-day money he bought an Indiana Jones Lego set and from CA Grandparents he got a playmobile Egyptian tomb full of conopic jars, jewels, serpents, deadly scorpions, and treasures untold. He said "mom, can you believe that Grandma and Grandpa got me just what I wanted?". I will post picts of him opening that for you CA grandparents.

More silly straw.

A Celebration For April-Feb. 6th 2011

Feb. 6th is the anniversary of my sister April's tragic death. It is a hard time for all of us especially since Enoch's birthday is 3 days before and that was the last time we saw her that year (at his 3rd birthday party). So each year on this day we try to do something nice for someone else or do something to remember April in a happy way so that we can put more of a positive spin on things. This time I didn't know what to do. We had been listening to a signing time CD that day that always reminded me of her. It was the one she and I put on for the kids when she came over one day and I ended up video taping her trying to do the signing to "The Silly Pizza Song". It was also the CD I listened to in the car driving back and forth from her house to mine the week before she died and then out to the April run for Olivia and to visit the sight where her home had been. So listening to the silly pizza song gave me an idea and the kids and I went out to the store. We bought all the ingredients for a silly desert pizza and then Garrett picked up some other silly Pizza's from the only pizza place around. (that we know of)

Here we are eating silly pizza. One pizza has pickles on it and another is cream cheese and apricot something or other. They were very different pizza's from Hell-no really look below.

Hell's pizza. They have things like purgatory and greed, Lust and Envy, brimstone and gluttony, mayhem and trouble and many many more of the same. They are all very different kinds of pizza from the norm.

Since the silly pizza song has crazy things on it we decided to make a desert pizza to cover all of those. The silly pizza has bread, cookies, cereal, bananas, apples, ice cream, crackers, candy, and extra cheese. So the bread and extra cheese are on the cream cheese pizza. The rest are in our desert pizza. The crust was made of cookies, crackers and cereal. Then there was nutella spread on that after I baked the crust which was our candy. After that we put on the bananas and apples and ice cream and we sung the silly pizza song.

I will try to post the video of us singing the silly pizza song tonight-hopefully it will work.

After that we all shared a memory of April. Ezra and Ethne don't remember her at all of course since Ethne wasn't born and Ezra was only 7 months old. Enoch was really close to April but he doesn't remember as much as he used to so I tried to tell him stories that involved him and April together so that he could remember.

Ethne LOVES the silly pizza song as much as the boys always have and she enjoyed singing and singing to the song.

Ezra said he wished he could have gone to the signing time concert that I took Enoch and Olivia to the year April passed away. Enoch said he wished he could go again and I promised that I would take them if it ever happened close to where we are living again. That night was an emotional and yet very positive night for me. I met my mom and Dorothy up in Salt Lake for the concert and I had the two very little ones with me (Enoch and Olivia). They had some interesting conversations with each other in the back seat where Enoch was asking Olivia about her mommy. Then some really special things happened when we took her home that brought a lot of peace to all of us. I will always be grateful for taking the time to have a really close relationship with my sister and making the most of the time we had together. I don't have the misfortune of looking back with a lot of regrets. I was a great sister to her and she to me and so the memories are worth looking back on and the times were good! I love and miss you April-thinking of you!

"Sweet Dreams are Made of These..."

Today my boys both got up and told me their dreams independently of each other. They were quite exciting actually. Full of adventure and intrigue.

Enoch: "Well, mom and dad were getting food and I got lost. Mom and dad left me with a gun and 3 bullets in it. I went to a place that had a train and Indians were making and selling spears. And and Indian threw a spear and I shot a bullet at it and it hit the spear and then turned and hit the train. Then I went to a wall and climbed up the wall and I followed bones and then I shot a wolf and then you and dad were behind it and then I went further and I fell into a hole that was a trap. But they left the hole open and I climbed out and then I fell asleep. Do you want the part I made up?"
Mom: yes
Enoch: "my made up dream is I went to a store and a chef gave me some tomatoes and I threw the tomatoes on the grill and turned it on and then it made tomato sauce and then he gave me a jar to put the sauce in and then I put it in the jar and I had my own tomato sauce."
Mom, do Ethne's dream.
Mom: what is Ethne's dream?
Enoch: "Ethne's dream um I Ethne was going to a shop that had tomato sauce but it was too expensive that she couldn't afford it and then Ethne bied (bought) a grill that wasn't too espensive [expensive]. And they she bought two tomatoes that weren't too espensive too. And then Ethne put it in the jar when she was done cooking them and she made her own tomato sauce and that was the end of Ethne's dream."

Enoch told me the 1st dream before anyone else was awake. Then after he heard Ezra's dream about the chef he made up the tomato sauce dream. Ezra made up the part about falling into holes after hearing Enoch say that he fell into a hole in his dream. These accounts differ slightly from the ones they told me at first, because I had them come tell them to me again while I wrote them down. I thought they would be better in their own words.

Ezra: "Me and Olivia were going to a Christmas place and Santa was always there and um and I got lost and I got teached to make chicken and then I got teached to make eggs without burning them. And then I fell in a hole with lots of dogs in it. Mom is a poodle a dog?"
Mom: Yes
Ezra: Um there was lots of poodles and I fell in a hole with a lot of puddy cats and I fell in a hole with one long weasel"

"Mama said there'd be days like this...."

This is really the best way for me to describe what my last few days have been like, and today is looking about the same :) It is only 9am and already I have ruined piles of laundry, grumpy naughty youngsters I have unloaded and re-loaded the SAME dishes in the dishwasher (since they were really dirty and I realized it on my LAST dish) and cut my finger on a really sharp knife! Oh yeah! Bring it on I say: with music like this we can handle anything :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQlImg2bm28

check out my new blog

If you click on the link on the right side of this blog that says "My Jamie Oliver Experiment" you can see my new blog. It has the food I am making while cooking my way threw his cookbook and a few of my own in between. It is a work in progress so don't pay attention to how it is set up. It will be undergoing big changes in the next month since I don't have time to work on it very often. Feel free to follow us threw our adventure.
Hope you enjoy,
Ashley

I Love You More Than Playmobile Website

I just asked Ezra:
what would I do without my Ezra?
he gave me a big hug and said "jus, wait until I'n resurrected I guess"
then he said "Mom, what would I do without you?
I hugged him and said "well just do the same I guess" He looked like he might cry and so I said but you do have me
and he smiled and gave me another hug
Then he said:"mom I love you more than playmobile website, I love you more than webkinz, I love you more than the ipad even."

My Birthday Cake and Pesto Alla Trapanese for dinner

OK, so first off I have to say we LOVED the cake. Garrett gave the cake a perfect 10. Which is not a small feat because he is highly critical where food is concerned. It was really great BUT...I have to tell you about my disappointment with it. In my opinion is wasn't quite a 10 because it was just NEARLY perfect. The problem? 1. Cheap Chocolate 2. not enough dark chocolate so I had to use part milk.

Notice the grainy texture on the outside of the cake? That is because of cheap chocolate. I should have sprung for the really expensive chocolate because this cake took hours to make and would have been worth every penny. Generic brand chocolate has too much wax and doesn't melt smoothly like nice chocolate.

Here is the inside of the cake. The dark top layer was made with really nice dark chocolate and it is cake. The middle layer is mousse and it has the same grainy texture and the ganache on top because it was made with the same cheap milk chocolate. The bottom layer was made with good dark chocolate and is a brownie layer.

So here it is. Brownie on bottom, mouse in the middle, chocolate cake on and ganache on top. The different textures and flavors were amazing together. It was definitely a recipe to go into the keepers :)

Pasta with Tomato and Almond Pesto (Pesto Alla Trapanese) for dinner. Very yummy and extremely fast to make. Here is the video link to see the recipe. Thanks for that Lacey.

http://www.americastestkitchen.com/recipes/detail.php?docid=19843&extcode=M**ASCA00

Check out my Jamie Oliver Experiment post.

It is right before the Healthy Bodies Healthy minds post...