A Birthday Celebaration

Can it be? Has it really be 5 years since my little Laney Janey was born? My princess is growing up. This past weekend Delaney celebrated her eagerly awaited day....she can now say she is five years old.Ohhh the choices for how she wanted the cake decorated were constantly changing. At first she wanted a lady bug--we call her our Laney Bug. Then it changed to a butterfly, purple with pink spots. Next came the teddy bear or a puppy dog. The final choice was for a dog and a cat. Two of my friends encouraged me to try using foundant icing. They create beautiful cakes with it and I got the courage to try. Suffice it to say, I will leave that to the more skilled cake decorators; next time I will stay with the tried and true, buttercream frosting. Plus the kids didn't like the taste of the foundant. But I think the cakes turned out okay...Delaney was happy with them.

Granny and Papa came to join in for the cake and ice cream festivities. After dessert and presents Barry and I took Delaney on her 'date'. We have a tradition of alternating every other year with birthday parties or special dates with Mom and Dad. This was Delaney's date year.

"A moment with my sister."

Delaney was worried that with out a party the presents would be skimpy...but she got what she wanted --a stuffed 'Littlest Pet Shop' animal--plus cash from both of her grandparents. She's now schemeing about how to spend it.

For weeks Delaney has been planning on where she wanted to go for dinner on her date. Sonic! although the destination changed every so often she always came back to Sonic. She really wanted an icecream treat from there....because everyone knows that Sonic icecream is better than any other icecream in the world. She enjoyed a hot dog, minus the bun, cheese stick, and chocolate milk and of course an icecream sundae with Reeces on the top. (I was proud of myself too, I didn't mentally calculate how much her dinner would have cost if I fixed it at home and compare the price with the one I paid Sonic for...I wanted to, but I didn't :)

Here we are waiting for our food and she is cuddling her new favorite stuffed animal

We've been telling her for a week or so that we had a special surprise for her birthday. The local high school was performing a certian play. We thought she would love it...and she did. It was Blue's Clue's Live. She loved singing along with the characters and other kids in the audience and keeping track of her 'clues' in her handy dandy notebook.

After the show all the characters came off stage to visit with the audience. She wouldn't leave the theater till she met them all. Here she is feeding Blue some of the pretend snow/ cotton balls.

What was really fun was looking for cousin Jakki who was in the cast playing a bunny rabbit and Neptune, from the solar system.

What a fun celebration for a fun little girl. We sure love you Laney.

Inventing History

It's time for history presentations again. We are still learning about the westward expansion and inventors of the time period. Delaney wanted to present again and chose to learn about Johnny Appleseed. She enjoyed reading books and watching a video on youtube about him. She enjoyed dressing up as Johnny Appleseed but was irritated that the "hat" didn't fit very well. I had to hold the pot in place as it kept falling off her head.

Cailin has been reading Kirsten of the American Girls series books. Kirsten was a girl who immigrated from Sweeden and moved westward to Minnesota in the 1850's. What's fun is that this also reflects our own personal family history, I have ancestors that were born in Sweeden in the 1850's--sometime in 1880-81 they homesteaded in Kensington Douglas County, Minnesota. From there they moved and settled in the Spokane area in the late 1920's --when my Grandfather was a young child.

Another family ancestors traveled from Sweeden to Canada and then homesteaded in Minnesota.

Cailin's report was on something near and dear to most people's heart--food! We enjoyed reading about (and eating some too) of creamy potatoes, ham, fruit soup, ginger cookies, dark brown bread. One thing we learned and turned our nose up too...they buttered their bread with lard. Yuck.

Connor, ever loving all things about science researched and reported on the various inventors and their inventions. His favorite inventor is Thomas Edison, he loved that he invented over 1,000 inventions. Here he is showing the timeline he created.

Ryan did his research on another inventor, Eli Whitney. He invented the Cotton Gin and the Springload Rifle. Ryan is very eagar to learn about the Civil War, it was Whitney's invention that helped cotton become a huge cash crop for the Southerners which prolonged slavery and contributed to the issues of slavery and states rights over which the Civil War was fought.

And how can anyone resist this cute smile. After enjoying some food of the time, brown bread, stew and ice cream, (we learned that Thomas Jefferson loved ice cream), we enjoyed the sunshine and played outside.

If you can see it, Liam really liked ice cream too, can you see his ice cream mustache?

Demolition...

Since we moved into our home three years ago we have known that eventually we would have to make some drastic changes to the walls due to the fact that in the 1890's they didn't have insulation, thus winters are very cold in the front part of the house. Well the time has come to fix one of the rooms. We chose Delaney and Liam's room. First we had to clean out the toys, clothes, bedding etc. Delaney is sleeping on the floor (on top of a mattress pad) in our bedroom. Liam's crib fit into our room also.

Taking a break from all the hard work of carrying seemingly endless amounts of 'stuff' down to the living room. (Unbeknownst to Delaney, I will be culling out toys, stuffed animals and clothes when she's not around to complain about it.)

The fun work begins. Cailin was particularly excited to hammer holes into the walls.

When the work starts to become more dirty, the kids are banished downstairs. Notice all the plaster and lathe. The plaster was held together with horse or pig hair. Also notice not one bit of insulation--no wonder it was so cold.

Two walls completed. Ryan helped quite a bit till we realized what havoc it was creating with his allergies. Now his task is to catch up with the laundry, Laney and Liam both got a stomach bug and the laundry is mounting quite quickly.

More to come....

Ooey Gooey Goodness

When I was growing up I would often create all kinds of new food dishes for my family to eat. Some of them must have been good because my Dad asked me to write down the recipe I just created. I was notorious for adding broccoli to most things....I was known to add it to some rather unusual things, to point that it's now a family joke--me and broccoli. The biggest joke was that I would add it to waffles and pancakes-which I never did...but zucchini pancakes are good, isn't that right Elizabeth? (Zucchini is now the vegetable joke of the family) Well Connor must've gotten the cooking gene from me because he loves to create new and exciting food dishes for the family to taste. His latest one is pudding pies. We've had a new one every week for about a month now.

The Radford ward recently had a chili/chocolate cook-off and he created and submitted a chocolate pudding pie. He made a graham cracker crust. On that he placed butterscotch pudding mixed with peanut butter, on top of that came crushed up Butterfinger candy bars. Next came the chocolate pudding layer then topped by whipped cream with a sprinkle of more candy bars crumbles. Mmmmmm... he won 2nd place in the Ooey-Gooey category. He's so happy and quite proud that he has created an award winning pudding pie.

Making Hand Dipped Candles

We have started reading the book 'The Cabin Faced West'. In the story the main chararcter, Ann had a chore of making candles for the family. As we have been studying colonial times and now the pioneer times I have been wanting to make some hand dipped candles. Many of the books we have been reading mention making them. Felicity, of the American Girls series, hated dipping candles. Laura Ingalls thought it was okay, her mother and sister Mary loved it. Today we tried it out for ourselves and we feel the same way as Laura does. It's not to bad. Cailin had fun. She liked watching how the candle got bigger with each dip. ( She also liked dipping her fingers into the wax and created a full set of wax fingers.) Delaney got a bit bored with it but came back from time to time to see how much bigger the candle grew. Over all we had a great afternoon, but we are very glad that Thomas Edison invented the light bulb. I'm sure after a while we would better relate with Felicity and come to dislike the chore.

Above, Cailin adds the colored crayons to the melted wax and stirs it to make sure all is ready to dip the wicks into the wax.

Delaney adds another layer to the candles.

Presenting the finished product, maybe we'll eat dinner by candle light tonight just as the pioneers did.

It's Just Snow.....right?

I've always made fun of the fact that when the snow begins to fall here in Virginia and the roads are barely covered, schools close for the day. I mean my goodness, where I grew up, snow would have to be more than a foot deep before school officials would even consider closing for the day. Today humbled me. We awoke to 4 inches of snow so I called our friends and asked if we could come over for a day of sledding and she suggested that she and I could have some fun scrapbooking while the kids played. Great, it's a date! I'm not frightend about driving in snow, it's just snow and there wasn't to much of it either. A phone call to Barry just to make sure, and he said the main roads were okay, patches of snow here and there, the secondary roads were a bit more snowy, just be careful. Well, the roads that branch off the secondary roads were NOT clear. This I didn't count on. Once on the road to my friends house the going was slow and slippery. I almost made it to her driveway, but the ice was just to much and the tires could no longer hold any traction. I started to fish tail or spin in place. I had Ryan go and get help from our friend and she brought some salt pellets (they were meant to be added to her water softener). They helped, but there just wasn't enough salt to get the van to go where it needed to go. Soooo, I thought, I will just back slowly down the road in reverse, go get some sand or kitty litter and use that for traction to get up the road. Yeh, well that didn't work out so well. The back end of the van just slid to the side and ended up in the ditch. (See above photo)
So I left the van in the road and went to call Barry for help, my friend called her husband too. Barry said he would call a friend who owns a towing truck business to get me out, but he was busy and it would be a while till he could pull our van out. So I waited. After a half hour or so, I noticed that the snow was melting somewhat on the roads; my friend and I went out to see if we could get the van out now that the snow was melting some. "How great it would be" we thought "if we could get the van out before all the men showed up." We shoveled more salt and gravel to give the tires traction, but it didn't work. The tow truch guys showed up first, then my friends husband and they all saved the distressed females stranded in the snow. The truck pulled the van out, friends hubby moved the van into a more secure parking place and my hubby came to see that all was okay...plus I had to get the house key from him. (as we were leaving in the morning I asked Ryan to start the van so it could warm up. I asked him 2 times if he had my keys. "Yes, Mom I have your keys" Barry does not have a house key on his personal key chain, he has one on his work key set and I have one on mine. Ryan did not get my keys, he got Barry's personal key set. So, not only was I stranded in the ditch of snow, but, I was locked out of my house too.) Once the van was out and all was well once again we fed the kids, put the young ones down for a nap and got busy with the more important things of the day....scrapbooking

I was able to finish two double page spreads. This was of Christmas 2006

Here is the double page spread for Christmas 2008. Yea, I'm almost caught up with my family Christmas scrapbook album. If only this were true for the kids' albums.