Happy Valentine's Day!

We started out our day with pink pancakes topped with strawberries and pink whipped cream! YUM!
Miss J helped me make pink and white play dough. While she waited for it to cool she had a tea party with Miss C.

Once it was cool enough to play with the three youngest got to play with the play dough while the big kids were working on school work.

Lunch was bagels with pink cream cheese and red grapes. Then we moved on to the real fun-- cupcakes!
Each one had a heart hidden inside! I used this recipe. I found the link to the recipe here.

Happy Valentines Day!

visiting friends

At a church we visit regularly (out of town), we keep meeting families that we would like to get to know better. We've been invited by many to come stay with them, and we are slowly taking them up on their offers. Last week-end was one of those times!

We truly enjoyed the time of fellowship that we had with the "G" family. They are a musical family, and despite our being not so musical, we truly enjoyed the time of worship we were able to spend with them! We also enjoyed dinner, dessert, and just some great time to talk and get to know each other better!On our way home we pass a cheese factory, and every time we comment on how we should stop some time. This time we stopped! Since it was a Sunday there was not much actually happening, but we still had fun!

Peanut gets a bath

It seems that Mr. S is not impressed with Peanut's hygiene habits (He pees and poops in his cage! Yuck!) So he has been asking to give Peanut a bath.
Rob supervised this bath time, and it looks like Mr. S did a great job. He did not put too much water in the sink, and dried him off very nicely after the bath. Peanut did not seem to mind the bath too much!
Peanut even got some time close to a reading lamp to help him warm up.
Despite his concerns and the great care he showed in giving Peanut a bath we are NOT letting him do this regularly. Instead we will continue to encourage Mr. S to clean the cage out to help keep Peanut clean. ;)

Molten Lava Cake

I saw this blog post, which referenced this blog post with the recipe, and I just had to try these cakes out!


I surprised Rob with these yummy cakes last week. The recipe makes 6, so after we had ours we called a couple of kids down from bed to help us take care of the rest. They had been extra helpful that day, so we were happy to share with them! Mr. R's first words were "I want this for my birthday cake!." Yea, they were that good!

Maybe I'll try making up some heart shaped ones for Valentine's Day?

My poor tea kettle

For about six years I've had an electric tea kettle. It was so nice to be able to have hot water for my tea ready so quickly. Sadly, my kettle died a few weeks ago. It was replaced by a regular stove top kettle which is working out nicely. This in itself is not worthy of blogging about, but what happened to it is....

Mr. R (and the other boys too), have started disassembling any electronics that die in our house. They have taken apart quite a few things, like phones, computers, PDA's, printers, really anything we will let them. The sweet ladies down at our local thrift store even set aside any electronics that come in that do not work to give to Mr. R! This past week he was given a DVD player to take apart!

Looking a bit rough

Mr. M is looking a bit rough these days. He had a run in with his bed, and lost. Poor guy. It was quite the bump when it first happened, I was surprised the next morning when he didn't look worse than this. We spent quite a bit of time keeping ice on it to help with the nearly golf ball size bump on his head.
*All of the brown markings around his mouth/chin/cheeks are from his run in with a bowl of chocolate the next morning. A much better sort of run in!

He is looking a bit worse now, but feeling better. He has a black eye and a bruise on his forehead. This was the sort of injury that looks bad, but after evaluating him and asking his brothers how it happened (did he cry and move right away, or lay still for a while?) we realized it just looked bad but was not serious. He happened to have visit to the doctor already scheduled, so he got it checked out anyways. As I figured, its all good.

Meet Peanut

We have a new pet in the house.

We've been thinking that Mr. S needed responsibility of the animal sort for a while. We would like for him to have chickens or rabbits later, but he needed to start smaller. He had quite a bit of money saved up (for a five year old) from Christmas and other things so he was able to purchase his hamster himself! We helped him pay for the cage as well as all of the other things his hamster would need.
"Peanut" was the name he chose all by himself. He also picked this one out on his own. It has been cute to watch him care for (and sometimes pester) Peanut. He is learning to take him in and out of the cage, hold him nicely, and make sure he has plenty of food and water.
Everyone else has been having fun checking Peanut out. Miss C calls him "kitty", I guess "hamster" and "peanut" are hard to say and he IS a small furry critter! LOL! The big kids have been kindly helping him out and encouraging him.