Pictures Old and New

My good friend Mendy's parents have a farm, and a month or so back they invited Craig and the kids out for the day. Mendy sent me pictures ages ago, and I'm just now getting them up.

Franny loves animals of all kinds, and she was thrilled about hanging out with the goats.



The Doodlebug, riding bareback.





We recently "discovered" a park near our house that is just at the right level for the kids. Not too boring, not too scary, not too close to a road...

We're calling it "the Ladder Park."



Who needs baby swings? Look at this big girl:

I really am a smart person, most of the time.

Slightly funny story that has nothing to do with our kids, but does contain instructions on making chicken broth:

We use tons of chicken broth to cook with. Canned chicken broth isn't terribly expensive, but it does add up, and we decided if we made our own it would be cheaper and much better. It's super easy to do, although (as you will see), not foolproof! (You really have to be a fool to screw it up, but here I am.)

For weeks, we've been saving all our chicken bones in a container in the freezer, waiting until we had collected enough to try this out. Making the broth, like I said, is very easy. You throw all the bones in a big pot, cover with plenty of water, and start heating it up. When it gets hot, throw in half an onion, a carrot, and a stick of celery. Bring it to an almost-simmer, and then turn it down as far as it will go, cover, and let it stand. Overnight, or up to 24 hours. You don't even want to simmer it or it will get cloudy. It's just steeping.

So I do that. I've got my bones and vegetables in the pot, non-simmering. By the next morning, it smells amazing. The greatest, most beautiful chicken broth ever. I am as proud as I can be. This is so easy, I'm so awesome, etc., etc. All I have to do is strain it. Then I am going to boil it down so that it is concentrated, and I can freeze it in ice cubes. Then whenever we need broth, we just have to take out a cube, add a cup of hot water, and voila! Homemade chicken broth to add to whatever.

I grab a colander, take my steaming, delicious-smelling pan over to the sink, not really thinking, and dump the contents into the colander over the sink without a pan underneath to catch the broth. Half of my beautiful homemade broth was washing down the sink before I realized what I was doing! Are you kidding me? What was I thinking?! Agh! I stopped immediately, but there was my broth, swirling down the drain. I was bummed out the rest of the day, every time I thought about it.

(I did manage to end up with a little bit of broth. I strained it into a pan, boiled it down, and froze it like I said. It only made six sad little ice cubes. Still, that's 6 cans of chicken broth ($7) that we got for about ten cents, even with me screwing up. We will definitely do this again!)

The kids stayed with Nana and Papa for a few days while Craig and I spent a few days of much-needed downtime together. (Thank you, Nana and Papa!)

This morning the Doodlebug got to try fishing again. Here he is with Uncle Chad.


They actually caught one! Atticus, Uncle Chad, and cousin Neeley:


Atticus: We caught a fish! A BIIIGGG fish. (Typical fisherman...)
Me: Really? What did it do? (Expecting a story about flopping around.)
Atticus: It TALKED to me!!

Apparently the fish was making all kinds of crazy noises and he thought it was talking to him. He thought it was great.



Franny-girl playing in the garden with her cousin. This girl is wearing me out with the climbing. I was sitting in the living room earlier while the kids were playing in the kitchen. Atticus comes in and reports "Franny is going to fall." He was right. She was precariously balanced trying to climb onto a desk from a chair about a foot away. Is this just a second-child thing? We cannot keep her feet on the ground.

Let's Go Fly a Kite!

Just a few pictures of our weekend fun:



Here is the Doodle flying a kite. He's concentrating so hard!



Doing kite tricks. The "tricks" mostly involved him spinning in circles while holding the string.



He doesn't quite get the whole shading-your-eyes thing. I was doing it and he was imitating me, but as you can see, he actually has his hand over his eyes.



Sweet Frances hanging out on the swings. She enjoyed watching the kite but was mostly interested in playing and petting dogs at the park.

Fishing Trip

School is keeping me all kinds of busy this semester, but we were able to spend some quality time together last weekend.

The Doodle has been begging us to take him fishing lately. I don't know what put it into his head, but he has been obsessed with it. Finally the weather was warm enough that we were able to go.



Of course, he was only patient for about the first five minutes. And I'm not sure that he entirely understood that they were trying to catch actual fish. We did have fun sitting outside and watching the ducks and geese, though.



Silly Ladybug. She had her 15 month appointment today and all was well. She is such a goofball and so sweet and precious and ornery all at the same time. It is so much fun to watch her and Atticus playing together and laughing at each other.

Her favorite new words is BUBBLES!! She doesn't just say it, she exclaims it, every time. There is a hand motion that goes with it too that she made up herself. We are thrilled about BUBBLES around here. She also exclaims it when she sees balloons (and strangely enough, grated Parmesan cheese. I think because she loves both bubbles and Parmesan so much.)

Other new words: She loves saying Bye! and waving goodbye to people. She goes to the door and begs to go play "'side." She says milk, off, yes, no-no-no, Bubba, Dada, Momma, and "Atts!" (for Atticus).

Weekend fun

The Doodlebug's first snowman:



The weather was so beautiful today that we couldn't resist playing outside. And amazingly, there was still plenty of snow on the ground. It was like playing with snow in the middle of spring! We also went for a walk and fed the ducks.

Here is my precious Franny-bug:



She loves to fasten the seat beat on her toy stroller. She will work at it as long as it takes to get it. (She does the same thing with her high chair.)



Yay!! I did it!



Franny is becoming quite the little talker. She went from not really using any words just a week or two ago to using quite a few. We took her out today and she waved at everyone, saying "hi! hi! hi!" (To all dogs and cats as well.)

Words she is really using are:
up: for "pick me up"
help: for anything she wants
hi: of course
eyes: driving in the car with the sun in her eyes, she kept pointing to them and saying pitifully "eyes! eyes!"
cold: when playing in the snow today
clock: she just really likes clocks
shoes: ditto

She has just decided she wants to talk and has started trying to repeat pretty much everything. She also has really started loving on her babies and stuffed animals. Too cute.

Snow Day!

Needless to say, we all stayed home today. The Doodle has been waiting ALL WINTER to make snowalls. Here are the kids preparing to go outside:



It was, of course, freezing outside, so we didn't stay long. Atticus still wanted to play in the snow, though, so here's what we decided to do:



Snowballs inside! We filled bowls with snow and let the kids play in them to their hearts' content. They are young enough to think this was really fun instead of incredibly lame. :)

A few more random pictures from last week:

I threatened to post this one with a "Daddy combed our hair" caption, but Craig insists both kids just woke up from their naps when this picture was taken, and that they are normally well-groomed. (They are.)



The kids enjoying the awesome weather last week at the zoo with their friend Jasmine. Is the Doodle roaring like a lion?



Oh, almost forgot to mention that Atticus put his hand on the hot stove last night as we were fixing dinner! We got it under cold water right away, but two fingers blistered up and he was pretty tearful for about an hour. Poor kid. Everything seems much better today. One finger is still blistered but it doesn't seem to be bothering him. He told me this morning, "I'm not crying some more."