Can I Help?

"Mom, could you take this baby? He's not helping."

Sea Monkeys

Our schoolbooks are here! Minus the ones I forgot (oops).

I don't normally order supplies this early, but my favorite curriculum provider was having a 20% off promotion for all orders placed before April 7th. I could not pass it up.

Like the little mouse in If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, I decided to order everything on the same day even though other suppliers were not having promotions. Yay for batch processing!

The boxes will remain there, on the landing until I'm sick of tripping over them ready to log each one to the database I built to track them. Once that's done, I'll sort them onto various shelves in the classroom where they'll wait until the 2008/2009 school year begins.

Waffle Thursday

Most days of the week we have cold cereal for breakfast. Sometimes we have bagels. There is the odd omelet or pancake breakfast. The most special of breakfasts though, include freshly baked waffles.

On many, many occasions my children would plead for waffles. I felt guilty each time I said, "Not today" and then witnessed their disappointment at having to eat boring old cereal again.

The thing is, I love waffles as much as the next guy, but they are not something I can just jump into at a moment's notice. There are ingredients to measure, equipment to assemble--an appliance to retrieve from the cabinet and plug in for goodness sake. I have to be mentally prepared for such a task at so early an hour.

To ease my poor children's suffering, and to add a little routine to our weeks I suggested that we institute "Waffle Thursday". The deal was that I would bake waffles every Thursday morning, and they would not ask for them ever again. Sweet deal! Since September we've kept the bargain. I half expected the waffle-lust to have fizzled by now, some nine months later, but no. Their zeal is as strong as ever.

Having an excuse to eat chocolate before 9 AM is worth the extra cleanup in my opinion. I sprinkle a few chips onto the waffles just before closing the lid.


If my husband were home, he'd slather them with massive quantities of butter, then load them up with syrup. Since I do not wish to serve my poor, sweet, young children a cardiovascular event on a plate, we slice the waffles into strips with a pizza cutter, then sprinkle on a little powdered sugar.

Cutting them into strips makes it easy to eat them with our fingers--another treat!

Sometimes we have to wait for the waffles. I make them stand in a line. Any "me firsts" go to the back of the line.
Sean looks like he could use a nap.
Happy Waffle Thursday!


Recipe follows
The Dry:
2 cups all-purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
4 teaspoons baking powder
1 tablespoon brown sugar

The Wet:
2 eggs
1-3/4 cups milk
1/2 cup vegetable oil

Additional Goodness:
about 1/4 cup of chocolate chips

Directions:
Whisk together the dry ingredients in a large bowl. Add the wet ingredients and stir to combine. Spoon the batter onto a hot waffle iron and sprinkle with chocolate chips.

Makes 16 waffles.

Growing Tall

This is the resident 11-month old, Liam. He's just starting to get really good at pulling up on nearby stationary objects: walls, gates, furniture, legs of family members...

Here he is standing next to the "growth chart", which consists of one piece of screen moulding screwed into the wall, per child.

Here's the shot at a distance--that's dinner in the crockpot. I heart my crockpot.

When we bought our current home, the plan was to stay in it for about five years (pardon me while I take a moment to laugh at the folly of youth) and then move to a bigger house. With that in mind, we wanted to chart our child(ren)'s growth on something that could be packed up and moved when the time came--something easier to move than say, a door or an entire wall.

Screen moulding was the answer. We screwed a length of it to the wall and added new strips as the babies arrived.

Each child's strip is labeled with their name. Patrick wanted to include marks for us parents as well, but those are penciled directly onto the wall. I guess he doesn't care if those move with us or not.

I married a really tall guy.

Here's a closer shot. We write their age above the height-mark, and their height in inches just below the mark. Note that at 12 years old, Holly is mere inches shorter than me! She makes a point of reminding me of this at various times throughout the day every day. She isn't happy about the fact that her younger sister is gaining on her (and me!) rapidly. She is already taller at 9 years than Holly was at 10. In three years, I expect I will be the shortest female in the house. Maybe two.

Height is documented twice per year, once on their birthday and again on their half-birthday. This does not stop them from "unofficially" measuring themselves whenever the mood strikes, however. Our 5-year old sometimes asks to be measured after finishing a glass of milk, for instance, just to see if drinking milk really does make you grow.

This one will probably wind up taller than the lot of us.