Funny things kids say

Walking up the stairs to take a bath:
N says "Let's go downtown tomorrow."
I said, "What do you want to do downtown?"
N says" Let's get a recipe."
I say, "What kind of recipe?"
N says,"A recipe for disaster."

Update on cooking contest

I went to pick up my dish and cake carrier from the contest and an honorable mention ribbon was laying on top of my dish!. Cool! I'm pretty happy with that! This was my first ever cooking contest. I'd say that's a pretty good way to start!

Chocolate Cherry Swirl Cake

So, I did a first today. I entered a local cooking contest. The contest is held in conjunction with the town fair going on this weekend. The festival is called "The Cherry Festival" and the cooking contest was themed around that, so the recipe had to contain at least one 1/2 cup of cherries. I, by no means, consider myself a cooking or baking expert. I do like to try new recipes and often find myself finding several of a similar recipe, combining the ingredients and cooking instructions together and creating a recipe from that. That is what I did in this case. I toyed with the idea of making cherry chicken salad served on a croissant, then I considered granola bars with cherries and other fruits and nuts in it. Then the other night I made a recipe I found on TastefullySimple.com. The recipe used a TS Absolutely Almond cake mix, caramel ice cream topping, chocolate chips, evaporated milk, etc. It is baked like a layer bar with half the almond cake batter on the bottom, the caramel and chocolate in the middle. The rest of the cake batter is put on top and baked like a yummy, gooey deep dish pizza dessert...or cookie bar. That turned out really well. I used that recipe as my inspiration for my cherry contest recipe entry. I thought the flavor of the almond in the cake mix would pair nicely with cherries. So, I revised the recipe to use cherry pie filling instead of caramel sauce. I also attempted to make my own version of the Absolutely Almond cake mix using a yellow cake mix and almond extract. All in all, the end product turned out more like a cake than a cookie bar... So, with just minutes to spare until I had to turn my "piece" in I changed the name of my entry from Chocolate Cherry Cookie Bars to Chocolate Cherry Swirl Cake. I figured I could "make lemonade out of lemons" by changing the name and I would still have something to turn in to the contest. That's what I did. The contest judges "Presentation, Taste, Appearance, Skill and Originality." To make my cake stand out a little bit from the others I "plated it" (don't I sound like a pro. Ha!!!) on a cranberry red (or shall I say a cherry red?) square plate with rounded edges. I cut four large corner pieces out of the cake and placed them together to match the shape of the plate. I typed up my recipe and added some photographed images of cherries and chocolate chips to give it some appearance. I framed the recipe in a 4x6 acrylic photo frame that will sit in front of my cake. So, the red in the cake, the red in the plate and the red in the recipe all looked cute together and went with the whole cherry theme. I can totally see how the contestants on those competition shows you see on the Food Network get really nervous during their contests. I got a little nervous doing mine because I felt like I was racing the clock, especially when my recipe didn't turn out as expected. I can't imagine having a camera and an audience watching my every move! So, it's been fun to do this contest. We'll see how this one goes. I don't expect to take home any of the prizes, but I will really excited if I do. Prizes range from a $100 gift card to our chamber of commerce (the gift card can be used at a large number of the local businesses), a large gift basket of products from the kitchen store who sponsored the event, a gift card to a free cooking class at the cooking store, etc, etc. There are three prizes given in each age category... Sadly enough.. I now qualify for the oldest age category available. :(

I did come up with one trick when I was preparing to transport this cake. As I said above, I had to placed on a plate and I wanted to transport it inside my cake carrier, but the surface of the cake carrier and the bottom of the plate were both very slick, so I put one of those silicone hot pads between the two and the plate did not move while I was driving. Yay!

My cake is shown below. It actually looks much more appetizing in person...Needless to say, I won't be entering a photo contest any time soon. Ha!!

We are having a......

I had a sonogram this morning and we're definitely having another boy!! The pernatologist is confident the baby is healthy and says I do not need to return for any additional appointments unless something else comes up. Yay!!

Blogworthy

Okay, so this is an interesting story...N is going through a few stages right now and those stages just intersected about ten minutes ago. One if his current stages is that he wants to help with everything...on his own terms, of course, but he wants to be our helper. For instance, he helped me carry grocery bags in from the car today (only the light bags that did not contain breakable items). He is also helping with laundry by putting articles of clothing into and pulling them out of the washer. (Our dryer is stacked on top of our washer, so he's not quite tall enough to help with this step). He wants to help with cooking, cleaning, landscaping, etc... Well...N is also going through a stage of not wanting to go to bed. He is trying every trick in the book to get us to come upstairs. D and I can distinguish the "real" cries for help vs the "I want attention" cries for help. Fortunately we have a video monitor set up in his room so we can watch/hear him in his room at all times. If something truly warrants our attention we always go up an attend to it. Oh, and I must not forget we are also going through the potty training stage... So, we are going through more stages right now than I can keep track of. At any rate... This evening we put N to bed as usual...he did the fake "crying"routine as usual and I listened to it, but did not want to respond to every wimper because I don't want him to get the idea that Mommy and Daddy will come upstairs for every sound he makes.. N would never go to bed and Dad and I would be exhausted from running up the stairs a million times if we answered his every call. Anyway. I heard one last unconvincing (is that a word?) cry come from his room about ten minutes ago. Once ten minutes passed I figured he was asleep and I'd peek in his room to be sure he was soundly sleeping. So, I slowly and gingerly crept upstairs. As I approached his room I notice an odor...I figured he had a stinky diaper, I would change it and he'd go to bed... Well, as I rounded the corner to his room I found one dirty diaper and two dirty wipes on the floor...I looked at the doorway of my child's room and found my child laying on the floor (we have a gate across his room so he cannot wander the house at night) on the opposite side of the gate. His jammies laying on the floor next to his bare bottom. His response "I had poopy diaper, Mommy. I cleaned it up." Much to my amazement N had taken off his diap (we call it a diap for short), thrown it into the hallway (as he has seen me do a thousand times when I throw his diaps into the garbage pail outsdie his room after I change him), gotten ahold of two wipes, wiped his bottom and thrown the wipes into the hallway to accompany the diap....He found two wipes and wiped himself!!! Befuddled and shocked I immediately called to my husband for back up. I thought for sure our turn with "poo paint" had arrived. I've heard horror stories of children getting ahold of their poo and writing with it on the walls, smudging it in their sheets and coloring with it on their carpet... Ugh!! Had our turn come?? I wasn't sure what to do first...Clean up my child or clean up any possible mess that may have happened to the bedroom? With much hesitation I turned on the light and approached N's bed....No poo! No poo on the bed, no poo on the floor, no poo on the wall... I asked N "Where's your poo? I smell it?? Where is it?" Being the eager little helper that he is, N hopped up off the floor and said " I don't know..Maybe we can find it!" I asked him if it was in his bed, if it was in his pants... Where is it? Then he looked at me (and D. D was in the room at this point) and said "stinky poo is in my diaper." And sure enough all of "it" was neatly conatined in his diaper, lying in the hall outside his room. I was really perplexed by the situation at this point and wasn't quite sure how to feel. Should we scald him for taking off his diap?? Should we be proud of him for being such a good little helper and trying to take care of business himself?? Or should we just laugh?? We decided to explain to N that he needs to poo in the potty for starters...Then we told him if he has poo in his diap that Mommy and Daddy will clean it up. That he should not do it himself because we don't want to get poo on the carpet or the sheets..."or the walls" says N. Then we said if he has a yucky diaper that he can yell "Mommy, I have a poopy diaper" from his room and we will come change him...Wow! All and all I'd say D and I really lucked out in this situation... There's no "writing on the walls" and we are not on our hands and knees scrubbing any carpet right now, so I'd say we came out of this pretty well unscathed. :) My husband's reaction?? "Only our child would rather poo in his pants and clean it up himself than poo in the potty."

Busy House

We've been keeping ourselves busy lately. We started landscaping a few weeks ago. One Saturday a few weeks ago we spent the morning home improvment store hopping to buy a variety of bushes, shrubs and flowers to plant in front of our house. N tagged along with us for this shopping excursion and actually was pretty good. We had to tell him that if he was good while we were shopping we would stop and play at the park on our way home. Well, he was good and it was lunch time, so we stopped at the Golden Arches, got some lunch, ate it at a pavillion at a park near our house and let N burn off some steam on the playground afterwards. All that morning activity wore N out so he took a great
nap while D and I worked outside. This was one day in the last few weeks that I have had the most energy I've had in along time. Therefore, I was able to help with the project all day long. Our neighbor was outside doing some lawn work and offered to watch N after we woke up from his nap. They were hosting a bible study group. The group hires a babysitter to watch the kids while the adults do their bible study and my neighbor said N was welcome to join them. Thank goodness!!! (Thanks again, neighbors. That was so thoughtful of you!) It was sooo wonderful to have the rest of the afternoon to finish our work. D actually ended up returning to Lowe's after dinner that night to buy more plants. He worked until 9pm to get the job completely done. A few days later we had a truck full of landscaping rocks delivered and got to work spreading the rocks into the flower beds. The rocks really make the project look complete. I got a super great deal on some gorgeous dark brown vinyl covered wicker at Kohls. We set that up on our front porch to make the entry look very cozy. We are sooo happy with it. I will post pix of the finished product soon. For now I have posted pix of the work in progress.





































We've been working on potty training for what seems like forever. We have gradually worked our way into wearing underpants when we're at home. N is still learning the concept of telling us that he needs to go potty, so we are not ready to leave the house w/o a pull up or daiper on, but we'll get there...someday, somehow. :) We are borrowing a really cool potty seat from our neighbor. Her little boy ("I") is one month older than N but has been potty trained for several months so they are not using it anymore. Well, N thinks it is soooo cool that he gets to use I's potty seat. We are currently working on getting N to #2 (sorry for the gory details) on the potty. He has a Diego pop up tent that we had set up in the living room. I noticed that N was hiding in the tent to go #2 (in his undies) one day so the next time he needed to go #2 I put the tent over N's potty (pictures below). He thought that was THE coolest thing and now sits on his potty in his Diego tent any time he has to go #2. It's so cute because he collects several books and sits in their like it's his own little personal bathroom. At this point, I'm happy to let him do it because it's working! He's gone in his "Diego bathroom" three times in the last two days, so I'm going to stick with it.









Other than that we have been spending as much time outside as we can. We have had a very long, cool spring. It's also been much, much windier than I can ever remember. Mix all that in with several rainy days and our days of playing outside seem to be few and far between. When we are outside N loves to play with our bubble machine, we play at our neighbors house with their kids in the afternoons (thanks again!!), go to the parks near our house and try new parks in surrounding towns. Whenever it stops raining that is D's chance to mow, so D, N and I have been pitching in to get that done.

On one of the long rainy days we recently had, I decided to get our paints out. We set up paints, paper, paint brushes, etc on N's picnic tables in the garage and made some fun pictures. After painting a few masterpieces on paper N decided he was more interested in painting his hands that the paper... I let him do that for a little while, then he started touching things and getting paint on his toys so we had to get cleaned up. Before I changed his clothes I let him dance in the rain for a few minutes. It wasn't too cold, there wasn't any lightening and he was already a mess, so I told him to go for it. He loved it!! After that I threw him in a nice warm bath, we had lunch and both of us took a nap. :)

Happy Mother's Day

The other night N was in the bath tub. He insisted on holding the shampoo bottle and pouring some into his hands all by himself. I told him he could and watched him do it thinking I could grab the bottle if the soap poured out too quickly. Well, I wasn't quick enough because he dumped a lot of shampoo in his hands and into the bath water before I could grab it. He did a really good job of rubbing the shampoo in his hair then got one of his cups, filled it with water (very soapy water) and took a drink of it. "Don't drink the bath water, honey," I said. " That's yucky! There's lots of soap in that water. Eating soap will make you sick in your belly." His reaction?? "No!! I want it!!" And as he said no a great big bubble came out of his mouth. Hilarious!! I wished I had a camera. It was so funny!

Last night I went up to N's room to tell him to stay in his bed because it was getting late and he needed to get to sleep. He asked where his paci was (I know, I know... he's too old for a paci.) I started looking for i1t and he started laughing. I knew that meant he did something silly with it so I sat there and smiled at him. He raised his foot in the air and proudly showed me that he had stuffed his paci into his sock.

Thursday night I had supper with friends from my Mom's group. N can always tell when I am going somewhere other than a playdate because I get a little more dressed up. This time I even wore a bracelet that he said was "beautiful!" After he saw my bracelet he knew I was going out. He said "Where are you going?" I told him I was going to eat with my friends. He said "I'm going too" as he ran to the back door to put his shoes on. I said "Oh, honey. This is only for Mommy's. You get to stay home with Daddy." He said, "No, I'm going. This is only for N's." Too cute.

D has made a new Saturday tradition of taking N to our local donut shop to get donuts for breakfast. The two of them go together while I sleep in...or pretend to be asleep. Ha! I think N really loves doing this just because it's time alone that he and Daddy go somewhere together. The other half of the excitement is that they take the truck and N loves to ride in the truck. Last week I asked for a long John with chocolate icing on it. Apparently N remembered my "order" from last week because last night before bed he said he's get me a long chocolate donut for breakfast. Daddy let N carry the bag of donuts inside the house this morning. (N really wants to be a big helper. I hope this continues when the baby comes along!) Daddy got a plate for each of us and N handed out the donuts to everyone saying "This's Daddys, this's Mommy's, this is N's."

Happy Mother's Day.