Princess on Ice

The girls had a fabulous time at Disney Princess on Ice! The tickets were expensive ($30 apiece!) and I wasn't expecting a great show but I was surprised. The show was really good and almost 2 hours! My camera didn't do it justice but you can somewhat see the stage with the huge castle and Cinderella and her prince ice skating. The show was great! The girls dressed up too. In the picture is Sarah, Jenna, Kate, and Paige. They had a wonderful time!


We will certainly want to go next year.

Maybe Matthew will come too. He is getting so big! At his last appointment he weighed in at 21lbs 6oz. Sarah weighs 28 lbs. She's 3. He is 7 months old and a porker! Here is a video of him enjoying the jumperoo (listen closely you can hear it groan under his massive girth).



My attempt to potty train Sarah by just putting her in underwear and "seeing what happened" failed miserably. For a few days I tried this. I think we are back to square one. Potty training is pretty terrible. Jenna maintains that Sarah isn't ready and I should stop forcing her to potty train. Why does my 6 year old have more wisdom than I do?

72 points on Quiddler today and I got to make the word "raiding".

Birthdays!

On Thursday Jenna celebrated her 6 year birthday while Matthew celebrated his 7 month birthday. It was a big day at our house!

Jenna requested a purple cake with purple frosting (shown in picture) and we celebrated with blueberry pancakes.

I took the obligatory picture of Matthew with his stuffed animal to show his growth (there is much growth!). He is soooo big and sooo happy. He is my joy.

The girls absolutely love him. Although he is not getting in their toys yet. Matthew loves to eat (shouldn't it be obvious?) and I snapped some videos of the girls helping to feed him. Here is Jenna and here is Sarah feeding Maffawu.

We met my parents, sisters, and Erik's parents at Ruby Tuesdays in Cambridge to celebrate Jenna's birthday and Dad Cooper's birthday. It was a great time and the kids did really well. Plus Ruby Tuesdays is yummy. That crab cake I had there was amazing! Crab cakes = yum!

39 points on Quiddler today!

My Ways, His Ways

I will post soon about Jenna's birthday and Matthew's 7 month birthday on Thursday. However I wanted to write about how God spoke to me. I'm reading this book called What the Bible is About in tandem while I read the Bible. It is an excellent summary and helping me understand several parts of the Bible I was cloudy on before. In fact, I've fallen in love with Samuel! What an amazing prayer warrior.

Something that has always tripped me up are verses like this " ‘I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.’” ~1Samuel 15:2-3.

Why?

Why put to death infants?

I know God cares about babies, especially very early in pregnancy. So why order the death of these babies. It has always been a sticky point with me and caused me problems.

While I was praying about this issue last night, the verse "my ways are not your ways, my thoughts are not your thoughts" (paraphrased Isaiah 55:8) came to my mind. I believe God answered my prayer and spoke those words to me. I am not going to know the "why" in this life but God has his ways. They are far above my ways. Praise God for speaking to me about this!

Iron Chef: Sugar!

Sugar and spice and everything nice! That's what this Iron Chef was.


It's been a long time but we finally did Iron Chef again. I was so happy and Erik was so happy that I finally stopped bugging him to do it. I just love iron chef!


Anyway - SUGAR! Wow - can it get ANY better??? That was my secret ingredient. YUM!


I made 5 dishes

1. Sweet Sushi - ever since we made sushi over New Years when everyone was here, I've been a little obsessed with sushi. In fact, Erik made taco sushi the other day (no joke). Anyway, I made sweet sushi with extra sugar, cream cheese, and chocolate ships all wrapped in seaweed. It actually worked.


2. Cinnamon baked alaska - I made a sugar cookie base and topped it with cinnamon meringue. Yum! This dish was good but it needed some caramel or something else. I've also been obsessed with baked alaska. I made it for Tim and Jen a few months ago with a brownie base, but it was not successful since the brownies were way too hard. Maybe a sugar cookie base would be better.


3. Sweet pasta salad - this was Erik's favorite dish. I made pasta with a browned butter sauce then mixed in berries and citrus (including grapefruit which I do not like, but I added it to balance the overwhelming sweetness). This dish worked very well.


4. French silk creme brulee - I've made creme brulee many times. I'm not sure why I decided that in a rushed hour I was going to make creme brulee. I know you have to let it sit in the refrigerator for at least 8 hrs to set up. We do not have a blast chiller (I should put it on my wish list!) so unfortunately my creme brulee did not set up. However the flavor in this was excellent! It was better than my recipe for chocolate creme brulee however since I heavily modified the recipe for this iron chef I'll probably never be able to duplicate it!
5. Blackberry lime tart - ooooh yea! This was great! I made a sugar cookie base topped with a lime flavored cream cheese layer with freshly grated lime peel and topped that with fresh blackberries. The blackberry lime combination was so good! I'll have to remember it. I gave this dish a 9 for taste!

Overall this was a really fun iron chef even though I did have trouble with a main dish (yes I did make pasta). Erik and I rated the dishes the same at 15.2. This is a pretty average rating (apples were the highest rated iron chef and prego sauce the lowest basically due to the prego salmon - yuck!).

81 points on Quiddler today!

On My Honor!

Jenna is now a Daisy Scout. She had her Daisy scout investiture ceremony last Monday. Unfortunately I was teaching and unable to be there. However it went well and Jenna even remembered the girl scout promise and the make new friends song.

In addition, Jenna has lost her two front teeth. She is so adorable! It hasn't caused her problems when speaking. However the morning after she lost her other front tooth, the tooth fairy forgot to put money under her pillow. Luckily a potential disaster was diverted when the tooth fairy ran downstairs and pulled some candy out of the candy box as Jenna was eating breakfast. The tooth fairy was running a little late that day.

Right now I'm teaching C++ and loving it! I haven't taught programming in over a year. (I didn't teach for 3 months after having Matthew so I might be a little rusty). Normally I teach database programming or ASP.NET or VB.NET. C++ is very different yet so much fun to teach.

In other news, today as we were going to make pasta for lunch Erik noticed lots of white things in the pasta. OMG! Bugs!

I am not eating buggy pasta! We discovered 10 boxes of pasta (yes we have a lot of food stores) with little bugs in them. Apparently they are wheat weevils. That was nasty. Then the girls wouldn't even eat the non-buggy pasta. Maybe we should stick to pb&j.

I've already broken most of my New Years Resolutions and it isn't even February. I may have gone to bed only three or four times prior to 12:34am and we're already 15 days into January. I haven't been doing my Bible reading plan. I also have not exercised 3 times a week. This will greatly hinder my ultimate goal of losing my baby weight and getting back down to <=123 pounds. I'm just weird about numbers.

Anyway, maybe I should make New New years resolutions!

43 on Quiddler today!

The New Year!

Christmas and New Years was spectacular! We had 8 adults and 3 children crammed in our house for 4 days and loved it. We did a whole lot of gaming (awesome), went shopping, went to Caribou coffee, got to see Jon and Michelle (also awesome), made sushi, and had a merry time together.




Te celebrate our love for Harry Potter, I got invisibility cloaks for the brothers and their wives(I've stopped thinking of them as Erik's brothers)

and have included a *video* of the cloaks working. You will be amazed! You will also notice that I've even left the cat and various papers, etc in place just to show the authenticity (and I didn't feel like photoshopping them out).

So I'm not done with lists. (oh no... not again!)Here are my New Years Resolutions:

1. Send birthday cards to my family on time. I'm really bad about this. Really bad.
2. Finish my 100 day Bible reading plan. It is not the whole Bible but it is a good plan (it skips a lot of the begets).
3. Go to bed <= 12:34am.
4. Exercise 3 times a week.

I couldn't do more resolutions since I would break them immediately. These are my goals for the whole year. Hopefully I will stick with them.

Books I've recently read/am reading:

1. Towers of Midnight by Robert Jordan/Brandon Sanderson. Wow! I love Mat in this book and so many good things happen. This book focuses more on the good characters rather than the forsaken (and I care more about the good characters). David had mentioned that he thought Mat had gotten stale - I agree about this, but Mat was hilarious in this book!
2. The Revival of Song by Jon C. Cook. This is an awesome book by my awesome friend. I can't give too much away but this will be a great series. I'm looking forward to the next book.
3. Brisingr by Christopher Paolini. This book is the third in the Inheritance series. While I like this book, there are several parts that he could have left out that did not affect the plot(to make the story shorter). He writes like Robert Jordan in that he puts a lot of detail into everything. I don't mind that much though - just takes longer to read.
4. What the Bible is all About by Henrietta Mears. This book takes each section of the Bible and gives a summary. It also summarizes parts of the Bible in short little easily memorizable sections. For example, she says the Bible is about: Generation (creation of the world), Degeneration (sin enters the world), Regeneration (Jesus comes to restore God's kingdom). There are a lot of cute little things like that in the book.
5. The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson. This book is getting very good and I'm so glad to be reading this with our Cooper Book club!

58 points today - atrocious!