CHRISTEPHI

"Mama, will you play a game with me?" I hear these words at least ten times every day.  Miss M  loves  games!  She'd rather play a game than do almost anything else. Our newest addition to our game collection is the Medieval History Memory Game from The Classical Historian . I'm sure you're familiar with the traditional format of the game of Memory.  You lay out tiles; one person turns over two tiles, hoping for a match; then it's the next person's turn.  The trick is to remember where the tiles you see are located so you can make more matches than your opponent(s). In this version of the game the tiles are pictures from medieval world history for the four major regions of the world: Arabia, the Far East, Europe, and the Americas.  The game helps your child become familiar with the important people, monuments, maps, artifacts, and symbols that they will encounter in their studies of medieval history. Medieval His...

Technology has been advancing at a fantastic rate. My dad likes to tell about how he and his brothers were convinced there'd by flying cars by the time they were adults. He jokes that he's been gypped and he wants his flying car! Those little stories our parents and grandparents tell say a lot about them and their lives.  They're familiar and fun to hear.  I can just picture my dad, a freckled red-headed boy with his nose deep in a Tom Swift novel dreaming of flying cars.  There are other stories told in our families too, important stories about how we became who we are.  And with the Saving Memories Forever app , these stories can be recorded in the storyteller's own voice. Saving Memories Forever is the brainchild of Jane and Harvey Baker who, after putting together a complete tree of their family, discovered there was a void that could not be filled by a mere knowledge of who married whom and who was the child of whom.  They had no sense of w...

Snow day! And by a happy coincidence, Hubby has the day off! So he got to play in the snow with the rest of us. December Photo Project

At the county fair, Hubby moved like a special ops guy (he'd like that description) through the displays and straight to Madam Pig .  Before I knew it, he was back at my side. "Second," he said. Yes, it seems our dear friend Humpty Dumpty  trumped the piggies and ran off with First Place.  Doesn't he look pleased with himself!?  (You don't suppose it'll all go to his head, do you?) And my Indoor Hopscotch got Fourth Place in the Toys category. I entered some of the clothes I made over the past year ( here , here  and here ) and received ribbons on two of them. I was delighted to see that there was a lot more competition in the Clothes category this year! Last year I won first, second, and third but there were only a few other entries and most of them were aprons. But the best fun of all was getting the Committee's Choice Ribbon for Madam Pig and her piglets!  It turns out they did charm the judges after all! Tomorrow...

This weekend we visited the Patee House Museum in St. Joseph, Missouri .  I remember going there once as a kid, but I didn't remember it being so expansive!  We will definitely be going there again when the kids are a bit older.  Little Guy fell asleep partway through, so we only got pictures of the first half or so of our visit. Here's a quick photo dump. We didn't visit Jesse Jame's house a block away because the kids were tired and we were all hungry, but they say you can see the bullet hole in the wall from when Jesse James was killed.  We had a great time together and look forward to going back when the kids can apreciate the history of it better.

My sister and her fiance came to visit this weekend (hence, the sad neglect of my blog!).  We had a wonderful time catching up and visiting Crown Center in Kansas City.  My future brother-in-law loves trains like dogs love squirrels (have you seen Up ?).  So we stood in the long, wrap-around line at Fritz's Railroad Restaurant  to have our meal delivered by train. (The shakes and onion rings are worth mentioning!) Afterward, we took a stroll through the Fairy Tale Village. Then I snuck in Chip's Chocolate Factory while the others went on to the Crayola Store. All in all, a wonderful day!

Today it was finally warm enough to take both kids out to play.  Miss M has been fighting a bit of a cold, so I bundled her up a lot more than was strictly necessary.  She had a blast playing in the mud.  See her expression...both fascinated and repulsed by the sticky, icky mud.  "It looks like poop , Mama!" At least the rain boots I bought her are being put to good use! At one point she was jumping up and down in her boots...they were stuck to the ground and didn't make the jump with her. Ha! It's supposed to snow again tomorrow...and the next day...and the day after that.  *sigh*

This evening I whipped up a pair of lounge pants for Miss M to match her father and brother, much to her delight! I'd make myself a pair and be ridiculously matchy, but there isn't enough fabric left.  Oh well, I have enough lounge pants for now anyway.

I've never been to the zoo in the snow before.  Today was forecasted to be all the way up to 40 degrees.  (It's just plain wrong to think that 40 is warm, but there you have it.)  To take advantage of the balmy weather, we took a trip to the Kansas City Zoo . We started off riding the hand-carved wooden carousel.  Miss M's face was absolutely glowing! Next Miss M got swallowed up by a giant green snake!  She saw this picture and said, "I look a bit worried." Then we visited the Tropics where we saw the two-month old baby Blue Monkey.  It was so cute to see his mom holding him and carrying him around, just like a person!  I've seen baby monkeys before, but they just held on to their mom's back and weren't carried like that.  (I stole this picture from the zoo website 'cause none of mine turned out). We trekked through the snow, slush, and mud to the tigers....meeting a gagged Buddha on the way. Then it was time for ...

As Miss M played in her doghouse , she kept asking for dog things -- dog food, water in a bowl, a leash.  So I took it into my head to make bone-shaped "dog biscuits" from gingerbread. I used  Eileen's Spicy Gingerbread Men  recipe.  The only changes I made were to use real butter instead of margarine, double the cinnamon, and halve the cloves. They were a big hit with Miss M, probably more because of the shape than the flavor.  They were a big hit with me because of the awesome gingerbready goodness!  Mmmm!  Hubby tasted one, but he likes my applesauce gingerbread better.  I'll have to make some of that soon, it's good too!

Take one balikbayan box add a pair of scissors and five minutes of time and you'll have a very happy preschooler (and a few minutes free to work on other projects). Throughout the course of the day it was a train tunnel, an examining table, a dog house, a bed, a store, a car, a tent, and probably a few other things I either forgot about or didn't know about. I may have to pick up some poster paints next time I'm at Walmart for another day of amazing 3-year-old imagination.

Schools in the area were cancelled today due to snow on the roads and bitterly cold temperatures.  Despite the freezing temps, the sky was clear and the sun was shining, all in all a beautiful day!  Miss M was pretending to have a picnic on the kitchen floor.  At lunchtime, I asked her to pick up her toys and spread out our picnic blanket for a "real" indoor picnic.  Amazingly, Miss M (who eats like a bird!) ate all her turkey, swiss cheese, Cheetos, and lemonade and most of her Ritz crackers.  On that front, I'd say the picnic was a roaring success!

The new year has welcomed us, not only with subzero temperatures, but with a few more inches of snow (on top of the foot or so we received at Christmas).  As it's hubby's last day home before going back to work tomorrow, I decided to make snow ice cream.  My mom used to make it when I was a kid.  We always followed two rules...it had to be gathered the second day of a storm (the belief being that the first day, the snow gathered dust and smog out of the air and would be dirtier coming down) and it had to be gathered by setting out a bowl to catch it as it fell, no scooping up already fallen snow. Today I set out a metal bowl and collected a sufficient amount of snow (7-8 cups).  In a separate bowl, I mixed together a half cup of sugar and a cup of milk with a dash of vanilla.  Miss M helped by pouring it over the snow.  Mix well, serve and enjoy!  I was just like I remembered it.

Each year during the week between Christmas and New Year's, I paint my daughter's hands with fabric paint and press them to an 8 1/2 by 11 piece of plain unbleached muslin.  I'm hoping they turn out to be a bit more durable than the clay handprints my mom made of us when we were little...they did not survive the years despite her best efforts to glue the pieces together. I tried to do E-man's hands too, but I couldn't get him to unball his little fists, so I'll have to wait until he's at least a year old...which is fine 'cause that's how old Miss M was when I started this tradition with her! If you have no intention of sewing a quilt, you could use this idea on a t-shirt each year...a new t-shirt or the same one over the years.  Time goes so quickly, it's nice to have mementos of when the kids were small.

To usher in the new year, I wanted to share the faces of my two favorite people.  They are my inspiration, my challenge, my joy.  Though I am with them day in and day out, they never cease to amaze me.  The sparkle in their eyes and zest for life is refreshing, energizing, and oftentimes exhausting.  I'm so blessed to be mother to these two developing personalities.  The year 2009 was a challenging one in many ways...a pregnancy with all it's quirks, the stress of a bankruptcy, anguishing trouble with the in-laws, the uncertainty of uncertain times.  Yet at the same time there was much good to be found.  Watching Miss M grow and develop has been indescribably beautiful.  The sweetness of holding newborn baby E simply takes my breath away.  Though it was a good year in many ways, I'm not sad to see it go. There is so much I'm looking forward to in 2010.  We will celebrate our 5th wedding anniversar...

The past two nights we journeyed back in time to Bethlehem.  I played Mary the mother of Jesus,  Hubby dressed as Joseph, and Miss M was a mostly-well-behaved angel.  Our new little man was, of course, the star as he played Baby Jesus.  It was a big hit with the children visitors to have a real baby Jesus! One little boy brought the flute he made inside the "market" back out and asked if he could play a song for Jesus.  Who could resist such a request?! My little angel procured her own fan club over the course of the two evenings. She did all the activities at least three times and received special treatment from all the "shop keepers."  It was good for her ego since she saw her brother getting so much attention.   She has no modesty whatsoever (which I'm not concerned about at this age) and when people told her she was beautiful angel, she simply replied, "Yeah, I am!"   It was a once in a lifetime opportunity...the...