Daffodil Days

Happy Father’s Day, K. You’re the best dad in the world! I know what I’m talking about, too. I have five little people who are quite insistent on the subject.

I love you more than words can say. I could never have dreamed up a better father for my children. Thank you, Love.

I had hoped to post a video of N.’s first dance recital (which is tomorrow) but we’ve all got a bad cold. I’ll be very surprised if we make it so I’m going to post this video instead. This was taken after her very first ballet class 2 weeks ago. She’s taking a 3 week long (doesn’t it stink to get a cold in the middle of a 3 week class?) praise ballet class. She’s going twice a week for 45 minutes and the recital will follow the last class. She is LOVING it. I won’t be too upset (she will be!) if we don’t make it tomorrow as I’m quite sure she will convince me to continue the classes in the fall.

I’m so excited. I called our telephone carrier (who also has our high speed internet service) and told them I was looking to shave dollars off our budget. They looked at their updated 2009 plans and compared it to the plan I signed up on 5 years ago. WITHOUT CHANGING A THING they switched me to the new plan which saves me $24 a month on my telephone bill. Whoo hoo!! Definitely worth the call.

That’s right. My baby likes biscuits. This is important. I was raised on biscuits (and gravy!). I think my grandma made biscuits every day. I’ll never make them like Grandma or my mom but with a little help from Southern Living mine are OK. At least Izzy thinks so…

By the way, this little angel turned 10 months on Sunday. Good heavens it’ll be birthday time before I know it!!

It started out innocently enough. Facebook had this quiz: “What is your smurf name?” You type in your real name and it comes up with a smurf name for you. Fun, right? I was game. I wanted to know my smurf name. So I typed in my name and got “Insane smurf.” Oh well. I already knew that.
The problem is that one of the little people in my household happened to look over my shoulder while I was doing this and of course he wanted to know his smurf name, too. Eventually I was coming up with all kinds of smurf names (because your middle name obviously will be a different smurf name that your first name and then there is the option of using your first and middle names together…) Multiply that by 7 people in the house and we came up with a lot of smurf names.
Slightly time consuming but no big deal really. Except that after all of the name entry one of the genius kiddos realized they didn’t know what in the world a smurf is!!!
Easily remedied. We have Netflix. Last Wednesday the first volume of the first ever season of The Smurfs arrived in our mailbox. Since we were a little under the weather we stayed home from church and plugged in the DVD after dinner.
Unfortunately, we discovered our second son, W., has a gift for impersonations. In fact, if I didn’t know he is only 8 years old and I didn’t know where he is 100% of the time, I would swear he was the voice of one of the smurfs. Which one? Brainy smurf. Yep. Dead ringer. He sounds exactly like him. And he is so excited to have mimicked the voice so well that he is now speaking like Brainy Smurf ALL THE TIME. You remember Brainy Smurf, don’t you? The only who starts every sentence with “Papa Smurf always says…” and then gets chucked out of the village on his ear because he is so annoying.
Please, somebody, save me from the smurfs!!!
Oh yeah. We sent the DVD back today but they let it go only with the promise that I would add Season 1 Disc 2 to the queue.

I don’t know how I missed this one! I wish the wireless connection on K.’s laptop was working so I could snuggle up in bed and browse this site. Amy’s Finer Things looks to be a treasure trove of wonderful recipes and ideas for the kitchen. I’ve already tried the Pumpkin Banana Chocolate Chip muffins from here and they were a huge success. In fact, I had planned to put part of the recipe in the freezer but had to make a second batch to freeze some! They were gone in record time around here.
Enjoy!

homeschooling in the Springtime.

Izzy is 9 months old!! She is still such a sweetie. A little bit of “mommy clinginess” is creeping in which is sad for the people at church that love to hold her. Hopefully it will be short-lived. She continues to be very happy and can entertain herself for ages. She loves to just sit and clap and bounce her little body. She also loves to hear her own voice. She can say dada, mama as well as nana and meme. She is also getting quite proficient at waving goodbye. No crawling yet but she did keep the tummy off the floor for a few minutes today.

I know by now you are all getting weary of posts about strawberries. I promise this is the last one for now. One final picture of our traditional Saturday night dessert: homemade ice cream — strawberry, of course! A sweet ending to a sweet week. Next week we need to diet!!

Here’s the current update on the list:

* One loaf of egg bread in the breadmaker
* Freeze 2 more gallons of strawberries
* Batch of strawberry jam
* Angel food cake so we can have strawberry shortcakes
* Oatmeal chocolate chip cookies
* Banana pumpkin chocolate chip muffins
* Cut up and freeze lots of luncheon meat we were recently gifted with by our neighbor the caterer

The only thing left on the original list is the muffins that I decided not to make right now. So I’m done! I still have one gallon of strawberries left. We’re going to eat as many as we want tomorrow, make strawberry ice cream and then freeze any that are remaining.

Today’s baking adventures were fun. I cheated a little this morning. You are all going to think I’m terrible!! Instead of a healthy breakfast I made the oatmeal cookies first thing and we ate them for breakfast. Yep! You read it right. I fed my children sugar laden dessert for their morning meal. But hey. It had plusses. 1. They have oatmeal in them 2. Technically it was a hot breakfast as we ate them warm out of the oven and 3. We had milk with them. :) :) :) :)

A couple of days ago I looked through a box of kitchen stuff from my mom’s house. It was mostly full of jelly jar drinking glasses and saucers with no cups to match, but I did find this jem:

Do any of my siblings know the origin of this cookie jar? Was it Granny S.’s?? It has a big chip in the top (can that be repaired, D?) but it warmed my heart to see it again.

For lunch I finally made spinach salad. No one wanted any except me!! Can you believe that looking at the picture of this salad?

The other biggie today was the strawberry jam. Everything went perfectly with that project and we now have 8 jelly jars of very yummy jam to enjoy over the next few months. I used the recipe from here and did the low sugar version. In my experiments with fig jelly I’ve learned that the no sugar jam tastes weird, the full sugar jam just tastes like sugar and the low sugar version is just right!

In other news, W. was Indiana Jones today…

and Iz had a blast playing on the floor: