Trip home

We traveled home last week for my brother's wedding. Since Peter is still in his initial six-month work period, he was only able to come for a week. Initially we booked the rest of our tickets so we would have left with him this past Monday. However, thanks to some helpful Air Canada employees we were able to switch the tickets for me and the kids so we get to stay for another couple of weeks. It wasn't free, but since this is probably our only trip to NB before next year we figured we should take advantage of the time.

We didn't change the tickets until Saturday night, so all last week was a whirlwind trying to fit in as many visits as possible, plus get ready for the wedding. We arrived home on Tuesday evening and had a family party at Mom & Dad's where we got to eat Pizza Delight. Yum! I've missed their pizza and garlic fingers. Wednesday we spent a fairly relaxing day just visiting with close family. We ate at the Alehouse for lunch and got scallops and kettle chips ... yum again!

Thursday we visited with Peter's Dad and then his Mom, then headed to Fredericton for the rehearsal. It was good to get to see more people and I got a visit set up for the weekend with a good friend who happened to be visiting her parents from Halifax :)

Friday morning Peter headed back to Fredericton early for the bachelor party day. After brunch at Cora's (another great restaurant that's missing from SK :( ) I headed up with the kids to visit with friends for the afternoon and overnight. Saturday was the wedding day. It was a beautiful ceremony and the rain held off so they could get their pictures done outdoors. I can't wait to see them! Here are a couple snapshots of our little family on the wedding day.


Saturday night is when we changed the tickets (while visiting more friends in Fredericton), so Sunday was a much happier day than it would have been otherwise! Sunday we went to church in Fredericton and got to see lots of friends there, then headed to lunch with more friends, stopped in at a surprise birthday party, then came back to SJ for a combined birthday party for Nathan, Mom, and myself. I think we were all running on pure adrenaline by now - it was such a busy week!

Hannah especially missed so much sleep throughout that week, she's been taking super long naps ever since to try and make up for it. Her disposition didn't seem to suffer too much from the lack of sleep, thankfully.

For this next 10 days or so I'm taking it much slower! Enjoying time at Mom and Dad's and setting up a few more visits with friends before we head home. Peter is tending my garden at home - I can't wait to see how things grew while I was away! I am not really looking forward to taking both kids on the plane by myself ... I guess it will be good practice for next year when I may have 3!

Room Arrangements

With the impending arrival of baby #3, we have had to figure out something for kids' bedrooms. This house has three bedrooms upstairs and one downstairs. None of our kids will be old enough when the baby is born for us to feel comfortable with one of them downstairs, so two kids will have to share a room. Nathan is currently in the bigger bedroom and Hannah is in the nursery.

Our plan was to buy a second crib for Hannah and have her move into Nathan's room for the first 6 months or so of the new baby's life. Then, the two kids with the same gender would share the bigger room.

There was a community yard sale of just kids' items this morning (May 8) in our town. We stopped in looking specifically for a crib and an infant car seat. The only car seat we found was expired, so we passed on that and will likely buy new. They also didn't have any cribs, but they did have a toddler bed with a mattress for $65. The toddler bed has rails by the head of the bed, so we decided we'll be crazy and try putting Hannah in that when the baby is born. She will only be 18 months old, so it could be very interesting, but I'm sure it will work out in the end.

Here is Nathan's room all set up with the two beds ...

(Yes, Nathan's room is pink right now. We'll fix that eventually. We also need to get him an actual bed - he's still sleeping on a twin mattress set on the floor.)

I think we'll probably move Hannah over in early September, about a month before baby #3 is due. It's not like I'll be sleeping by that point in my pregnancy, anyway, so I might as well deal with a bed transition ;0)

Bath time fun

A few months ago I started bathing Nathan and Hannah together most of the time. I never thought I would do it but I tried it when we were staying in the hotel and they had such a good time I couldn't help it. Bath time is now in the mornings with our new schedule, and although we don't get to it every day (sometimes the kids sleep in and we skip that part to get back on track) they love having their baths together.

They don't, however, love having their hair washed. *sigh* Nathan used to be fine laying back in the water, and as you can see from the picture above, he doesn't mind laying on his tummy on his own terms, but laying on their backs causes both of them to tense up. And heaven forbid I get water in their eyes! I would like to use the handheld shower sprayer as I find trying to get the soap out with just a cup takes forever. It is a 30 second job to wash their hair with the nozzle, but both of them flip out when I turn it on. I think I'll keep working at it, though. It will be worth it in the end!

I think both kids would stay in the tub forever if I let them. I just realized the other day that it's a great source of sibling play time. At the moment if I put them in a room together to play, they end up each taking a separate toy and playing with it, but in the tub they splash and play together. It's so much fun to see them having fun together.

Stitching update!

I started this cycle on April 19th and finished on May 5th, so 16 days. Pretty consistent! Here is a link to my last stitching post.

Here are updated progress pics (sorry for the poor quality) ...

Carousel (Theresa Wentzler)
Started: January 2007 (estimated at 182 hours completed)


I think I will be able to finish the horse I'm working on in this next rotation, then only 3 more and on to the bottom of the carousel.

Celtic Summer (Lavender & Lace)
Started: Unknown but later than Feb. 2007 (?? + 12 hours)

I spent most of my time on purple this rotation.

Nativity - Centre Panel (Marbek)
Started: unknown but later than Feb. 2007 (?? + 12 hours)

This picture is really washed out compared to the actual colours. It keeps striking me that this angel is probably 3/4 the amount of work in some of the other complete projects I've done, and it's such a small part of the whole thing! lol.

Dance of the Roses (Lavender & Lace)
Started: Feb. 2007 (?? + 12 hours)

So much yellow!!! I'm not sure how I'm going to make it through when I look at the pattern and see how massive her skirt is. I still don't have a photocopy of this pattern and would really like to get one.

Weekly Round-up

This was another good week for our family. We continued to use our schedule, although admittedly I was not as strict with it this week.

Nathan
Nathan continued with his tracing book this week. He still loves it and is getting into more and more complicated lines. He seems to be less enamoured with puzzles lately, although we did wake up to him having finished one while we slept this morning.

His potty training took one step forward and one step back this week. He started on Wednesday telling me when he would have to pee. This saves countless trips to the bathroom every day! I still make sure he sits before his independent play time, before rest time, before bed, and before we leave the house, but other than that he tells me if he has to go. The step backward is that he will not poop on the potty anymore. He pretty much only goes in his diaper first thing in the morning. I think the best solution for that will be to switch to underwear at night. He generally wakes up dry in the morning so I think he's ready for it ... I'm just not sure I am! I think we'll wait about a week and then start with that.

Nathan sleeps during about half his rest times at the moment. I really thought he was done with naps, but I'm glad I was wrong. This week he ripped up a book during one of his rest times ... as a result all books have been removed from his room for the time being.

Hannah
Hannah completely weaned herself from the bottle this week. She is now drinking a full straw cup of milk at lunch and one at supper, so she is getting enough milk. She still has her soother and likely will for a while. She seems to rely on it quite a bit.

Now that her night sleep is back to normal, I tried her in cloth diapers at night. I had tried about a month ago, but it was in the middle of her teething / ear infection / flu bit and I couldn't be sure if she was waking from one of those things or from the diaper. So far so good with the diapers at night. I'm so excited to be using all cloth except for when we travel!

I've mentioned before that Hannah did not enjoy standing ... at all. She seems to have changed her mind this week. On Friday she just decided that she was going to start wanting to stand and will even try to walk if I hold her hands. I am so excited about this development and will probably focus lots of energy helping her learn to walk independently!

We tried sitting Hannah on a toy car she got for her birthday yesterday and to our surprise, this is what happened!



She loved pushing herself around and chasing Nathan on the car. So much fun.

Peter hired a babysitter and we went out to dinner and movie Friday night. We hadn't gone out without the kids since February, so it was very nice to have some couple time! We saw The Bounty Hunter, and it was actually much better than I expected. The theatre here in our small town is brand-new and it's so cheap compared to going in the city - it cost us $25 for two tickets, a large popcorn, and two pops!

Goals
My housekeeping skills have been pretty good for the last month. For some reason I've been able to keep the house presentable pretty much all the time. I'm not sure what the difference has been but I hope it sticks around! One thing that wasn't working is the cleaning schedule I outlined here. I tried to think about why it wasn't working and I think it's because I had to be all over the house every day for my cleaning. With the kids it's nice to be able to focus on one area so the kids can stay in one spot while I work. So, I decided to make up my own schedule that has me focus on one (or sometimes a few) room(s) per day. Once I see how well it work I'll post what I'm doing :) I did manage to follow the schedule for Thursday and Friday, though, and it seemed good.

As far as the money goal goes, we spent little except for a deal we got yesterday (post to follow in a few days). Since it will save money in the long run I'm pretty happy with that.

I'm going to work with Hannah on her walking for this week.

Happy Mother's Day!

Home-made pizza calzones

Peter and I have always enjoyed calzones from Pizza Delight, so when I knew there was going to be a hockey game on a supper time tonight I decided I would try to make some of my own.

They ended up being fairly time- and labour-intensive, but well worth the effort! They were very yummy. The recipes / ingredients I used are all adapted from elsewhere and I will give credit where I can find it :)

Whole Wheat Pizza Dough (from my bread maker cookbook)
1 cup warm water
2 Tbsp oil
1 Tbsp sugar
1 tsp salt
1 cup whole wheat flour
1 1/2 cups bread flour (since there is more white than whole wheat flour, the name is slightly misleading)
1 Tbsp pizza yeast (the recipe called for less yeast than this, but I always add a bit extra)

I obviously used the bread maker to do the dough. When it came out of the bread maker I divided it into 4 balls and rolled each into approximately a 10" circle. I then put pizza sauce on 1/2 of the circle, added some bacon, green peppers (sauteed ahead of time), ground beef, and mozza cheese on top, then folded over the dough and sealed it. I took the basic instructions for shaping and cooking the calzones from here. I baked them in a 375 degree oven (preheated a stoneware pan in the oven beforehand) for 15 minutes, brushed the top with melted butter, and cooked them for another 10 minutes. Peter's observation was that they could have used more sauce, so next time I will spread the sauce over the whole dough circle and will be more generous with it.

After I had started the dough I realized I only had one small can of pizza sauce available, but I did have a can of tomato paste. I modified this recipe, which I had used before, to make lots of sauce for the calzones. The modifications I made were: I sauteed 2 cloves of garlic in olive oil before adding the tomato paste to the pot (instead of using garlic powder), added 1/4 cup of brown sugar (as I've found the sauce a bit bitter in the past), and omitted the MSG. It was quite yummy, and with the cost of a small can of pizza sauce creeping up to the $2 mark around here, I might start using this recipe more often!

These calzones were super yummy - I will definitely make them again. I served them with leftover pasta salad from lunch, to make it even more similar to the meal Peter usually orders at PD.

Downstairs - before

Due to the shelves I spoke of here, we were able to reorganize the main areas of our downstairs this week. Getting all those boxes out of the main living area meant I was able to tidy everything up, vacuum, and now it's suitable for the kids to play in. It has basically doubled the amount of space the kids have to play in and I find they're getting bored less now that they have access to this space and the toys that are in it. Since the weather has been so bad the past few weeks it's great that they can amuse themselves indoors.

Here is a picture from the bottom of the stairs looking ahead and to the left:

Isn't the carpet lovely?? That's on our list to be replaced, as is the ceiling and paneling on the walls. Since that will obviously take a while, I've decided to try and keep the space as livable as possible until we get to this section.

Here's a view from the same spot looking ahead and to the right:

The door at the far end of the picture is to my cold room (which I love!) and if you look closely past the first post you can see into the bedroom. The bedroom has lovely carpet like the family room except it's green :) If I turned right from this picture and went towards the other end of the house I would hit the bathroom (that still looks as it did here).

And here is a picture if I turn left at the bottom of the stairs and look back toward the other side of the house:

At the very far end on the left of this picture you can see a door. That is the door to our laundry room. The piles of things at the end are the rest of the boxes that have to be unpacked from the move, some stuff for the garbage, and some for the salvation army.

Overall the downstairs is laid out pretty well for our uses, it just needs some major updating.

The plan right now is to rip out the rest of the ceiling next. The wiring down here is very bizarre and we want to get a good picture of everything so we can fix it properly. Then we will finish the bathroom and I'm not sure where we're going from there. Probably walls and then floor, but probably not all at once.

Kettle chips, cookies, and progress :)

Peter is just finishing up his two days off and I feel like we got something accomplished while he was off. He finished the shelves we were working on last week, and having them allowed us to clean up a lot of the downstairs.


With another hour or two of tidying / unpacking it will be a great play room for the kids (it will be even better once we've replaced the paneling with drywall and replaced the orange and brown carpet with laminate :) ).

Tonight I decided to make some cookies I haven't made in a while. The recipe is from my friend Sunshine ... hopefully she doesn't mind if I post it.

They are called Crunchy Crisp Cookies and here is the recipe:

1 cup butter
1 1/2 cup brown sugar
1 egg
1 1/4 cup oatmeal
1 cup coconut (next time I will use a bit less - I'm not a coconut fan)
1 1/2 cups flour (next time I will try another 1/4 cup. I find when using butter instead of margarine the cookies are a bit 'greasier')
1 tsp cream of tartar
1/2 tsp baking soda
pinch of salt

I cream the butter and sugar together, add the egg, then all the dry ingredients. I tried using 1/2 cup of whole wheat flour this time and can't notice the difference. I really like these cookies - I think it's the brown sugar :) Cook at 350 degrees F for about 12 minutes.

And more cooking (this actually happened before the cookies):

I had a 'craving' for Saint John Alehouse's loaded kettle chips today so I decided to try making them myself. I sliced potatoes as thinly as I could, then shook them in a ziploc bag with a mixture of 2 Tbsp melted butter and 2 Tbsp olive oil (approximately). I arranged them in one layer on a cookie sheet and sprinkled them liberally with salt. I cooked them at 425 degrees F for about 30 minutes. Next time I will try 400 degrees F as some of the 'chips' burned.

After they were cooked (I flipped them after 20 minutes and removed the ones that were already done), I sprinkled them with cheddar cheese, green onions, and crumbled bacon. Put the plate with everything back in the oven at 325 degrees F to melt the cheese and served with sour cream. Sorry no pictures - they were gone pretty quickly :)

I was very impressed with how closely these imitated the ones from the Alehouse. They were way too much work to have very often, though!

Well, I must go console Peter since Montreal just lost ...

Weekly Round-up

Since everyone was healthy, this week was much better than last week. I also implemented a new daily schedule for the kids this week. So far it is working out well. Hannah's independent play time is improving, the kids enjoy sibling playtime, and I love that I get to spend one-on-one time with Nathan during learning time. Our days have gone very smoothly so far both with Peter's day and night shifts. I haven't even had to do much tweaking yet ... although I may shorten Hannah's morning nap at some point.

Due in part to this post on a blog I read, I have been in an organizing mood for the past week or so. I bought some totes when we were in Regina on Monday and have put them to good use. I still need many more, but I was able to organize Hannah's closet and under our bathroom sink. To help with my goal of being more organized, Peter is building me over 60 feet of shelving in our laundry room. The room is large, but had no shelves in it at all! It did have an old cupboard of some sort, but it was quite useless. Today we took that out, added two 12' shelves over the washer, and Peter is in the middle of making 4 10' shelves on the other side of the room. Here is the room as it looks tonight:

Hopefully the shelves will hold our million boxes of kid clothes. I can't believe how quickly they multiply!

A few weeks ago we picked up our new living room furniture but I have neglected to take and post pictures of it. I love our new recliner sofa. It is so comfy!



(Happy, Mom? ... Pictures of the house :) )

Goals:
Still doing well keeping the kitchen clean at night. I noticed this week that the two times I didn't clean up before bed I did it first thing in the morning, while the kids ate breakfast. This is a definite improvement.

The schedule really helped me to do reading and learning time with Nathan and Hannah. It's great to have it slotted into our day so I don't get busy doing other things and forget.

I did about half of the daily tasks this week. I started out well, but got off track toward the end of the week. I will continue to work on that this week.

Hmmm ... for this week I would like to see how little money I can spend! lol. We're not planning any trips to the city this week so I have no reason to spend much. I'll probably need to pick up a few miscellaneous groceries at the co-op, but that should be it.