We've been busy

Ahoy-hoy my readers! Its been a busy week at our house. Every day I've been running errands, buying gifts (and accidentally buying them off a gift list that someone mixed up with last years... eh hem, MOM) and trying to stay up on the house. Miserably failing at the last one by the way.

We had a candy cane lying around and I thought that Elsa might like a taste. Oh yes, yes she did. I tried to remove it from her since she IS just short of 7 months.

She didn't take to it well.


My preciousssss


Eventually I was able to wrestle the candy away. I learned my lesson. Don't give candy to a 7 month old.

Taking a cue from my cousin Jennifer, I picked up a gingerbread house kit instead of trying to do it all from scratch. Man, am I glad we did it that way.

Hello children! Mother is right here... not in that empty corner that you're looking and smiling at. Work with me please!


Grumpy girl who did NOT like being unstuck from her Mommy


Pre-assembly done, and with only one broken wall. It came out of the box broken, not my fault!


After much eaten icing, candy that "accidentally" fell on the floor and couldn't go on the house and must be eaten (Ethan), and a long suffering crying baby, completion!


Ethan's side


Gwen's side



The front. Yes, I'm a very very very poor icer. Also, I had stopped trying to be a perfectionist about it and was just trying to get done so that I could hold the baby. I put icing where I was told to put icing, even if it was so wrong from an architectural and style standpoint.



Wednesday I whipped up this Christmas Rum Cake from probably my favorite cooking blog on the web, The Pioneer Woman. I didn't have a bundt cake pan, and one was not available. Apparently there was a terrible bundt cake pan shortage in Lake Stevens that day. I visited three stores (each stop getting increasingly difficult with a crabby baby and a bored Gwen) to no avail. So we made do with an angel food cake pan which made it rather flat and unattractive, but, it was nummy.

Admittedly, it was hard to use cake mix and pudding mix in a cake. Not that there is anything wrong with using those things, but for me I take special joy in doing things from scratch. However, one really cannot deny the ease of opening packages, dumping them in a bowl, adding water and eggs and oil and voila, cake. My kitchen and dishwasher were not filthy and full of various bowls and mixing utensils like they usually are after such endeavors.

The one on the Pioneer Woman's site looks so much better, but I bet mine tastes just as good as hers.


Today, after grabbing the kids from school, we headed out to my Mom's to visit with Aunt Margaret who has just returned from a month long trip to South Africa with Shawn and Jenni (Jenni is from South Africa). She went on a safari and everything!

Anyway, on the way out there, we detoured and picked up a bin of Barbie type dolls that I got on Freecycle. They were old (they had belonged to this lady's 23 year old daughter when she was real little), but had clothes and some furniture and I thought they'd be good throwaway dolls for the kids to play with. They've enjoyed putting the clothes on the dolls and playing house (there is one boy doll even). Good find. I love Freecycle.

Elly is doing the cutest thing lately. When she's in a sitting position and wants to get somewhere, she hops on her butt. Like she's trying to take off but can't get off the floor. She gets so enthusiastic about it that sometimes she falls right onto her face. We've been trying to encourage her to lay on her tummy so that she can start to crawl, but now that she can sit she doesn't want anything to do with her tummy (except to sleep). Somehow she'll have to learn to crawl from a sitting position. If anyone can do it, it'll be Elsa!

She's really coming into her own, personality wise. Man, she's a tough little cookie, I tell ya. You should see me fight with her to get her into her carseat sometimes. She'll twist and turn and yell and I feel like I should not have to wrestle with my 13lb baby! At the same time, I find her to be my most introspective baby. She's observant and studious. She likes to look at things for a very long time and study every angle.