San Diego

Over the weekend we split up and took two trips. My three girls and my mom and I went to San Diego, while Aaron & Noah went camping in Colorado. This sounded like a great idea (since we were each at our preferred vacation destination) until we all got home and I realized that two trips means twice as much laundry and clean-up... but that's okay. Everyone had a really fun time.

The girls and I were a little disappointed by the lack of sunshine while in San Diego; as you can see above when we walked the few blocks to the ocean we all needed sweatshirts. But my silly girls still loved those few minutes of running around with the sand between their toes. We spent a lot of time indoors; the girls are SO good at keeping themselves constantly entertained... playing pretend, playing games, doing puzzles, etc. I managed to read 3 books over the long weekend, and still managed to get a little sunburnt despite the near-constant cloud cover. My mom read and also brought some quilting projects to work on. We saw Toy Story 3 (which was great fun!) and my dad was able to come over for the last day we were there. We had a good time. I'll post a few pictures of the boys' trip soon!

Ten, really??

It's double-digits for this boy! Woah. How did he get so old?

Every year I tell my kids to stay their same age, indefinitely, and every year they have the gall to disobey me. Although Zoe has told me she will TRY to stay six as along as she can. Meanwhile, it has been brought to my attention that Noah will be a TEENAGER in 3 years. (gulp!)

Happy Birthday Noah; you're such an awesome kid and these past ten years with you have been so much fun. I sure love you!!

Cooking lesson #1

The kids loved their first cooking class today! We started out learning about kitchen safety, which was a little boring but necessary. Then we went over common abbreviations (c = cup, etc) and looked at various measuing cups and spoons to understand their different sizes. Then we were ready to make something! I used this curriculum that I found online, and did "lesson 1," making these yogurt cups:

The kids each mixed up their own tiny batch of dough, enough for one muffin-sized cup. They pressed the dough into the muffin tin and we baked them; they turned out great. I had intended to have them mix up some instant chocolate pudding to fill the cups, but I didn't have any on hand (which is weird, I always do), so we went with strawberry frozen yogurt which I'm guessing was much better. Frozen yogurt inside warm pastry? Yum!
As I hoped they would, they all loved it and I know that was not only because it was a tasty dessert, but also because they had made it themselves.

While the pastry cups were baking, we had a kitchen safety quiz and they washed all their dishes. It was a fabulous little first lesson. They all kept saying stuff like, "Cooking lessons aren't fun, Mom. They're REALLY fun!!

They don't know this yet (Shh.. it's a secret!) but for their next lesson they get to practice cracking eggs! I know they will think that's the coolest thing ever... I'm going to buy a whole bunch of extra eggs so they can each do several. As long as they don't get dropped on the floor I think it should be pretty fun.

FYI -- I am not going to follow that curriculum entirely; for example, I don't think my kids would have a lot of interest in making a cheese ball (lesson four). I am going to think of different kinds of recipes that are more common around this household that I think the kids would love to learn how to do, and that would be a nice reward for eating at the end of the lesson. I'm thinking cookies, homemade pizza; and I'm going to try to think of other things too that employ different cooking/baking techniques and require a variety of tools. I'll let you know what we come up with!

For the cake fans

Starting today, every day this week I'm posting every cake I've made for my kids birthdays (except the ones I wasn't too proud of) on my recipe blog. Photos, and in some cases, instructions. The first four groups of cakes are the same ones I posted on this blog, in 2008, before I had my kitchen blog. The cakes continue up to date, ending with a reposting of Molly's 2010 Rainbow Cake on Saturday. FYI!

http://happylifekitchen.blogspot.com/

Cousins!

Here's my mom with all twelve of her grandkids, swimming yesterday. Thanks for a super fun day Pamma!

All day with the six of us

Noah and Molly at their first ever swim meet

We had a fantastic Saturday. It started very early (Noah had to be at swim meet warm-up at 6:30am!) but it was fun. This is the first year any of our kids have done summer swim team; Noah and Molly are signed up through the city league and they both really like it. They have 45-minute practices four mornings a week (Noah at 7:15, Molly at 8:00) and weekly meets. Fortunately for me and my beauty sleep, today was the only early-morning meet. But as much as I enjoy sleeping in, I also enjoy having something to get us all up out of bed in the morning and help provide some structure to our carefree, school-less days. Today's meet was all freestyle; Noah's age did 50-meter and Molly's did 25-meter. They both swam their best and were proud of themselves; it will be fun to watch them improve over the summer.

After both meets were over the kids had their last-of-this-year regular swimming lesson, with the teacher who we discovered last year. She is great and the kids have each learned so much from her; their previous experience had mostly been the city swim classes which they hardly made any progress in, when they were younger. Aubrie does smaller classes but they are still very reasonably priced, and she has a bubbly personality that is great for working with kids. Parents get to sit in on the last lesson so it was fun to see all the kids' skills this morning.

So remember how we took this trip and we weren't sure of the future with the boat? Well last weekend Aaron spent quite a bit of time on it, diagnosing, testing, evaluating, and hypothesizing (okay so I'm getting carried away here) and it looked like whatever's wrong with it was most likely not too bad. Fixable! The true test was taking her to the lake, which we set out to do today as soon as all the swim meets and smimming lessons were over.

This is the only picture I took at the lake. Naturally, Noah thought those broken, found-on-the-boat sunglasses were hilarious.

Well, um, it looks like the boat's still kinda broken. It was running okay but starting having the same problem it was having before, so we had to forego any extra driving around (like for kneeboarding and tubing). We found a shady spot at the lake to eat our lunch and swim, which was all we did. It was still fun, despite the boat issues... and despite the fact that a bunch of water from the cooler leaked into the tupperware full of sandwiches I'd brought, rendering 5 out of 6 of them inedible, and that I didn't have enough of the "right kind" of granola bars, and the bananas were bruised and the raisens were stale, and I forgot to purchase a boat sticker for our lake pass so we worried about getting a ticket, and there was quite a bit of floating debris (small sticks and the like) where we were hanging out and swimming...

We stayed about 2 1/2 hours and boy are my kids easily amused; all a mom has to do is pretend she's a stick floating in the water, pleading with all the boats around to not run her over. They laughed and laughed. They also were amused that I knew so many of the words to Play That Funky Music White Boy, which was being blasted by a nearby boat. Good times.

On the way home from the lake, at about 5:30, it occurred to me that the six of us had spent the entire day together, the whole time. We watched Noah's & Molly's swim meets all together (and they got to hang out with us until their heat), then we watched their swimming lessons together, and we were of course all together at the lake. Most of our Saturdays are spent on chores, preparing church lessons, etc. and we'll typically do something together like a family swim but it's not often that we spend the whole day all together like we did today. It was great! My kids are so fun, and so funny, and Aaron is such a great dad; I really did enjoy myself and I do love being with all of them. Not to be sappy, but it's true. So, there you have it... pretty much the reason I call it "Happy Life."