Bon Appetit!

With Matthew in school all day, I’ve lost my most reliable kitchen helper. But never fear. There is another apprentice ready to step into his shoes. Malia has decided that helping in the kitchen is fun. She will run into her room and grab her apron and oven mitts and then join me in the kitchen.

A little background on the matching aprons: my mother-in-law made me this apron as a gift on the occasion of the arrival of my new stove a year after we moved into our house. When Malia was a baby she was completely intrigued by the ladybug print fabric. She would stare and stare, grab the fabric, she was really entranced. So I got online and found the same fabric, purchasing most of a bolt so I could use it to decorate her room. Her curtains are made from the same fabric and she loves them to. There was still lots of fabric left over so I made her an apron and matching oven mitts for Christmas. Now she dons her matching apron (although hers is still bright and new and mine is quite faded from many washes) and we work together in the kitchen. The hardest part is convincing her that she really is only two and isn’t old enough to handle a knife or the hand mixer alone…

Luckily for us, I happen to have what we call "the wiggly cutter." It cuts veggies in a nice design and is much easier to handle than an actual knife. All my kids have used this handy little device as they began to acquire their kitchen skills. It was worth every penny. And it makes the veggies pretty. :-)

Hip Hip Hooray! Matthew’s Had a Birthday!

Matthew has turned seven. He still gets mistaken for five since he is so small, but he has actually grown quite a bit in the past year. He is no longer the shortest one in his class at school, although he is still on the short side. And his huge personality makes up for his lack of stature. This is one opinionated kid!

His actual birthday was on Sunday so sitting through church, choir practice and lunch before he could open his presents just about killed him. But somehow he managed to survive and was thrilled to receive some Transformers from Daniel and Nathan and a baseball tee/ball pitcher from Kevin and I. He couldn’t take it outside and try it since it was Sunday, but he was appeased by the clip on lamp he received. In our family, receiving a light to clip to your bed signals the fact that you are old enough to read in bed for a few minutes before going to sleep. It is kind of a big deal for our family of bookworms.

Because it was Sunday, we got to celebrate with my family on his actual b-day. Matthew’s favorite animal right now is a tiger, so he decided he wanted a tiger cake. I found a fabulous zebra cake on pinterest, swapped out the colors, and voila! Tiger cake! Matthew chose pumpkin cake because it is orange so it actually didn’t even take that much food coloring to make black. The finished product was so cool looking that for a while Matthew didn’t even want me to frost it.

In the end he decided to go with the frosting and that turned out pretty cool to. And of course when we cut the cake, it was groovy looking inside.

On Friday he invited some of his friends to a tiger party. We played pin the tail on the tiger, lion-lion-tiger (think duck-duck-goose but with a tiger tail), and musical paw prints (we played “Eye of the Tiger,” of course). We also colored tiger masks and ate some cool looking tiger cupcakes. I forgot to take a picture of those, but they were basically the same as his big cake. Daniel, Nathan and Matthew spent the week before the party making rubber band bracelets in black and orange so we sent each guest home with some tiger bracelets, a glowing tiger ring, and a few treats. It was a pretty simple party, but it turned out super fun.

So Matthew is now officially one year away from cub scouts and baptism…and he’s already counting down.

“Neither Snow nor Rain…”

When I lived in Murray I loved our postal worker. We lived in a basement apartment where the entrance was around the side of the house and down the stairs and without fail, he always brought over-sized parcels to our door. He was friendly and knew who we were. He gave me warm fuzzy feelings about the USPS. I actually took time to leave a compliment for him during one visit to the post office.

And then we moves and got the polar opposite in postal carriers. She has never once left a package on our porch. If it doesn’t fit in the mailbox, she just balances it on top. She has delivered our packages to our neighbors next door and across the street-once a big old amazon shipment that contained lots of surprises for Christmas and once a brand new ipod touch! Needless to say, she is not giving me reasons to be fond of her.

Today was a new low for her. It was raining/snowing which makes leaving packages on top of the mailboxes less than optimal. I send Nathan to get the mail and after a few minutes he came back to tell me that he couldn’t get the mail out of the box. I pulled on my coat, put up my hood, and went out to find this:

Needless to say, I was a whole lot of not happy. It was crammed in there so tightly that I had to get a box cutter and cut the box open so I could find somewhere to grab on in order to yank it out. The little gap at the top of the box made it all look deceptively easy, but the top side of the box was completely smooth with nowhere to grab and the little ridge all around the edges of the mailbox that allows the door to stay closed was preventing the box from sliding out. It took ten minutes to get the dumb thing out, all while standing in the freezing rain.

I will definitely not be leaving any compliments next time I buy stamps.

She Refuses to Nap in Her Bed…

…but then once she slows down she just can’t stay awake.

I don’t think she’s quite ready to give up her naps, but when I put her in her bed she just won’t relax enough to let sleep happen. She plays and reads books and just refuses to stop. It’s making our afternoons…interesting.

And as a random comment, by her feet is a wooden baton that I made years ago when I was doing primary music the first time. Over the years it has become a must-have for our FHE opening song. Malia calls it the “ding dong.”

Now I’ve Officially Found Burpies Everywhere…

(FYI: For those not in the know, the towels I used for burp rags became Malia’s security objects of choice. She calls them burpies.)

Vanishing Act

Things keep mysteriously disappearing from my kitchen drawers. Luckily for me, I’ve discovered that 99.9% of the time they magically reappear in Malia’s kitchen. I guess my mini-me has a thing for kitchen gadgets just like I do.

Following in His Mother’s Footsteps

Matthew likes school. He hates homework, but he likes school. Over the last month his class has been reading "Charlotte’s Web" with all the fun activities to go with it. Several weeks ago he was home sick and was just crushed because they had finished the book and he was going to miss the movie. Luckily for us, our local library had a copy on hand and he was able to watch it anyway. And just so you know, although there is a newer live-action version, they still watch the old cartoon that everyone in my generation saw as well. He watched it twice that morning and a couple more times before we returned it.

The last couple of days, he has been playing school. He sets up his white board, gets a stool for the “teacher chair,” lays out his blankie for the reading rug and lines up his stuffed animals on the stool in place of their desks. Then he proceeds to present a lesson on “Charlotte’s Web.”

He even has a pointer.

I’m not sure that he is destined to teach school, but loving his own school experience is one of those things that can morph into a desire to become a teacher. I’m not sure how I feel about that as my own teaching experiences were so stressful…

My Budding Comedian

This morning I was cleaning off my desk, a task I generally undertake when the pile of junk starts to interfere with my view of the computer screen. On the bottom I found a stack of papers I brought home from parent/teacher conferences in November. I had left it there because there was a story in Matthew’s school journal that made me laugh. It had Matthew’s personality written all over it. So I scanned it. Hope it makes you chuckle.

I think my favorite part is, “Aaaaaaaaaa!” :-)

Matthew is, and has always been, a funny kid. He grasped the subtleties of humor at a very early age. In fact, he could understand and use humor and sarcasm before Nathan could and Nathan is nearly four years older than Matthew. He can make people laugh, even though half the time that is not his intention. But I’m grateful for it. I think we all need a bit more humor in our lives.