January Thaw

When we last left off, Lil Sis was recovering.  Let's just say, she's back to her normal self.  Enough said :)

One cold weekend recently, we were bored and in need of something fun to do.  We were organizing our new markers, crayons, paints, and other Christmas gifts.  I came up with the brilliant idea of recycling our old crayons.  The girls busied themselves peeling the paper off for a couple hours.  They grew weary.  I peeled more crayons while watching a movie.   

We eventually sorted them by color (a day or two later), melted them and poured them in the above mold.  

Voila!  The finished product...pretty cool!

In other news, the girls continue to take the camera on adventures in the house.  Here's a self-portrait of Lil Sis.

Here's a self-portrait of Snickers....or is it?  I think Lil Sis took this one too.  Snickers seems to be doing better.  We switched up a few things with the litter box and medication.  He's not much interested in eating a lot, but he has become one docile, snuggling cat.  Lil Sis carries him around, they fall asleep together at night, he sleeps next to me when I go to bed, and spends the day letting Lil Sis do anything she wants with him.  

One night during the girls' bath, Cool Daddy-O played a little trick on the girls, HGTV style.  We converted the toy room to a bed room and vice versa.  They're still adjusting to the new set up, but one of the first days, Big Sis built this structure on her own.  Usually, she gets really frustrated when playing with Lincoln Logs, but pulled this off effortlessly.  Not sure who took this photo, but I think it's a pretty good shot.

Not sure if this is a self-portrait, but it probably is.

On Inauguration Day, I informed Lil Sis that we'd be watching "grown-up TV" all day.  She found it incredibly boring, however, she loved the opportunity to paint and make a mess without getting in trouble.  She had fun and clean-up was a breeze.  

Unfortunately, our TV decided to die during the Inaugural balls.  Fortunately, I was able to watch a lot of it on the internet (thanks to CNN and facebook).  
Today we had some awesome weather.  Technically, I guess we would call it a January thaw.  The temps were close to 50.  Lil Sis happily pulled on her snow pants, boots and a light weight winter jacket and ran out and dove in the piles of snow.  She had a blast throwing snowballs...

at me!  She has good aim!

She also enjoyed playing with a neighborhood kitten.  This kitten lives outside.  It was -17 a week ago.  This kitten looks fat and healthy.  Not sure how, but that kitten and its twin sibling must have good genes.

After swinging awhile, she said she was done playing outside and ran in.  Tomorrow night it will be approaching 0 degrees again.  It sure was nice to be out and soak in some rays today.

Cookies - Mixing, Baking and Decorating ... oh, yeah ... and Eating!

The weather in Iowa has been downright frightful.  Ice storms, sleet, snow, blowing, cold temps, wind chill warnings, blizzard warnings. All this in the last 4 days.  

In preparation for the storm and Christmas baking, we made daily trips to the store last week. On Thursday, we baked sugar cookies.  I wanted to be able to decorate them on Friday if we lost power.  Fortunately, we had sleet.  Yes, it made the roads slick and canceled school on Friday, but it didn't coat the power lines.

Friday was a fun day for all.  School and preschool were canceled.  Cool Daddy-O stayed home and worked from home.  I spent 3 hours wrapping presents!  That was exhausting, but I'm mostly done.

On Saturday, I mixed up a triple batch of frosting.  We pulled out all the food coloring and ended up with all colors of the rainbow, plus white.

Lil Sis used most every color of frosting and a wide variety of sprinkles on each of the cookies she decorated.  Big Sis was much more exact and meticulous in her decorating style.  It's fun to watch their decorating styles evolve each year.  I think the first year Lil Sis was allowed to decorate (20 months) she ate more than she put on the cookies.  The floor was a lot more colorful that year also.  In fact, the girls were transported directly into a soapy bath tub after decorating.  This year, a simple wiping of the face and hands was sufficient to clean them up.
Here's a view of the finished product.  We decorated a lot of Christmas tree cookies.  We also had stars, candy canes, snowmen,  and mittens to decorate.
I had a bit of fun with the pampered chef frosting / cake decorator tool.  Cool Daddy-O thought I used a bit too much frosting on some of them. Case in point, the star in the photo above and the green tree with frosting garland.
Big Sis declared this cookie her favorite (note the pattern of sprinkles).  She chose that one to eat after supper that night.

Today, we made 3 more batches of cookies, including Sparkling Butter Toffee cookies, Peanut Butter Blossoms, and Ginger Snaps.  The ginger snaps are chilling til tomorrow.

Cool Daddy-O requests acknowledgement for his help in rolling 1 inch balls to form the cookies, cleaning the floor, running the dishwasher frequently, and keeping up with laundry.  To my knowledge he hasn't been sneaking many cookies.

The real reason for all the baking?  Well, the kitchen is on the north side of the house.  The floor has been cold.  The best way to keep the kitchen warm is to have the oven on.  We can't just have the oven on for no reason, so we bake lots and lots of cookies!

The girls and I get to sleep in tomorrow morning due to a 2 hour school delay.  Unfortunately, this throws a kink into all the fun stuff on the girls' schedule for tomorrow.  Lil Sis is supposed to have her preschool Christmas program tomorrow, but the rule is no preschool if there's a school delay.  Big Sis is supposed to have a pajama day at school and watch "Horton Hears a Who" for movie day.   Hopefully, she'll still get to watch her movie.  Due to Friday's school cancellation, she missed her class party.   

White

Today I'm writing about the color white.  White is the color of the snow that fell yesterday and caused school to be dismissed 2 hours early.  The girls played outside for about an hour.

I bundled them up, sent them out, took their picture and then stayed inside and drank hot cocoa while watching them out the window.

When they came in from outside, I decided it was a good time for them to take a bath.  I took a picture of them laying down with white bubbles surrounding their heads.  They love doing this.

I have no idea why the text is blue and underlined.  I am having some strange problems.  Leave a comment if you have a solution.  I don't even see an option to underline text here, so how do I turn it off???????  I'm quite frustrated  I never changed the color of the font either??? What's up with that?????

Now I changed the color, but it's still underlining.  

White is also the color of a wiggling animal we saw along the road on our way home today.  We turned around to see what it was because all I saw was something white wiggling around in my rearview mirror and I thought it was odd.  As we were returning to the site of the wiggly white animal, we saw a truck stop and a guy got out, picked up a squealing baby pig and put it in the back of the truck.  Hopefully they are able to return the pig to his/her owner.  I guess this is the kind of thing that only happens in Iowa. :)

Well, I'm ending this silly post.  It's supposed to be about the color white and in my randomness, I've made it quite colorful!!

Until next time.....signing off.

The Easter Bunny hopped through the snow

Big Squirt was about as excited last night as she was Christmas Eve. She kept coming out to the living room after she went to bed to report that she just couldn't fall asleep. She went on and on saying it was weird, but she was probably going to stay awake all night and then the Easter Bunny wouldn't bring her anything....and on and on. She eventually fell asleep.

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When Cool Daddy-O and I turned in for the night, it was snowing lightly. We had a light dusting of snow this morning. Fortunately, Mr. E.B. left the Easter packages inside the storm door to keep them safe from any critters (aka the neighborhood feral cats).

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The girls were delighted with their stuff. Fortunately Little Squirt didn't make any comments about any of the stuff that was purchased when we were together. I think it was long enough ago that perhaps she had forgotten we had purchased the items.

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On our way home from our zoo trip, we stopped and purchased a "little sister" dress and some matching pony tail holders . Here they are in their dresses (and sweaters) before we left for church. We were in a hurry and didn't have time for a really good shot...so Big Squirt doesn't look very happy.

After lunch we hid the plastic eggs once and the girls put on winter coats, mittens and boots and found them. BRRRR.....it was COLD and windy. The girls still had fun and grandpa and uncle D. got to watch them running around. It was worth it, as they were able to eat more candy.

I think we'll take a break from the candy tomorrow and focus on carrots and cauliflower. Spring Break is officially over and the girls return to kindergarten and preschool in the morning.

Even though there still may be a teeny tiny pile of snow at school, I am NOT sending snow pants to school tomorrow :)