Lazy days

We had another quiet week. 

 

Last Thursday Little Miss and I went to Nathan and Michelle's apartment for the evening, to sing, and play games.  We left before the games since it was getting late.  And had a slight run-in with one of Eureka's finest.  *sigh*  No ticket, thankfully, and it kind of deserves its own post so I shall have to write more about that later. 

 

We went on a Sonic run.  It's hard to tell but she is sitting on a large pile of her dolls on the couch.  

 
Saturday evening we went to the farm and "helped" Mom and Dad and Jakey make cider.  Cecily was in a great mood and played with Gus all evening.  They are so funny together.  At one point they both had apples to eat... Gus stole Cecily's... she tried to get it back... so gross.  Anyway, they had a great time running around together in the dark.

Rustin and Sharon had us over Sunday evening.  Cecily has fun running around with Grace and Eden too.  Crazy kid. 

One evening Bob came home with this floor puzzle for little miss.  It's a princess... he couldn't wait until her birthday to give it to her.  *grin* 

As you can see from the diaper in the above picture, somebody has been refusing to wear pants or shorts.  (She was ok with a skirt today, but she doesn't have that many and I want to keep them nice for church...)  Anyway, so we've been outside and it's quite the sight.  Picture skinny little legs with a bulky cloth diaper bending over with her bum in the air- "Bug!  What doing bug?!" 

Blessings.

All quiet on the western front

Seriously, we have done nothing the last week and a half.

Cecily's fever lasted all day Monday and Tuesday so we spent most of those days on the couch- "want hold you!"

She still wasn't acting herself Wednesday, Thursday, and most of Friday so we were pretty lazy.  Other than going for groceries on Tuesday, I didn't leave the house all week. 

Saturday turned into attempt to hide the pipe day.  My rough estimate for how much bead board we needed was not enough so it's not quite done yet. 

The stairs...  not going so well.  I pulled the tape off from the treads that are painted and was left with this. 

Apparently they didn't prime the glossy oil-based orange paint before the brown and it all came off with the tape.  And my black paint is not drying/ curing, even though it has been days since I painted.  I was leaving sawdust foot prints from the bead board on the treads.  Gah.  Not sure what's going on. 

We finally dug our potatoes and were very sad to discover that about half of them were rotting or had bugs in them. 

Yeah, so really quiet around here.

O wait, there was the pepper incident.  Somebody got into the pepper, which is not a big deal, except that she had it on her hands and rubbed her eyes.  Poor little miss- there was much wailing and she wouldn't get her hands out of her face long enough for me to wash it out.  I very much wished we had an eye wash station...
Blessings.

CAT and KC

We had a busy weekend. 

We spent Thursday evening at Matt and Lena's house.  Little miss was marginally good.  She did not like Uncle Matt's rendition of "What's the Matter Habibi" and took it away from him (her favorite camel book), and was pretty much enjoying all the extra attention.

 

Friday morning Cecily and I got up early (for us) and went to visit Daddy at work.  His division was having a potluck picnic lunch and families were invited to see the building before hand.  We carpooled to Mossville with Bob's co-worker's wife and kids.  It was fun to meet them, since he has a sister in W-ton church.... randomly.  Cecily really liked their kids and wanted nothing to do with Bob or I the whole time.  She followed them around and wanted to do what they were doing.

 

She did take a little time to test display software with Daddy.  "I want tabet, please, daddy daddy."

The rest of the time in Bob's office she colored on white boards with the Schrock kids.  We made a stop at the gift shop on our way out and she picked out a new dozer.  When you push down on the cab it plays an annoying song and drives forward.  Then we headed to a park for the picnic.  Raber's catered the meat so we enjoyed some fantastic sandwiches and all kinds of other goodies.  There was a family with 5 kids that sat on a blanket to eat....  Cecily decided that she was going to sit with them and plopped herself down and wouldn't leave.  O man.  They said they didn't mind so she ate lunch with them and cozied up to the mom....  she doesn't know a stranger.  I have no idea where she comes from.  Then she got to play on the playground for awhile until she got tired.

We left the picnic around two, got home and packed up the car and headed for Kansas City.  She really likes the car, but the sun was in her eyes and I'm not sure what she did with her sunglasses...  mine are way too big and she gets frustrated when they don't stay on.

This is how she entertains herself in the car...  odd child.

When it got dark, we let her watch "movies."  We made decent time, and we had a good trip, except that when we got off the interstate in Peculiar, the car started acting funny like we had a low tire.  We limped along to Galen's since we were so close and it was so late. 

Yup.  Totally flat.  We're just thankful that it wasn't a blowout, it didn't happen on the interstate, and we made it to Galen's.  Just what Dad and Bob wanted to be doing on a Saturday morning before the wedding.

Cecily did not want to go to bed Friday night, but she was up bright and early to play with Raegan and Ashtyn... all of them in their pajamas...

Galen and Shannon have a little girl's paradise; swings, toys, kitties, playhouses. 

Cecily loved it.

It was a good thing Grandma was there to rescue this poor kitty. 

So we (ha! they!) put our tire in the back of my parent's van and we dropped it off at good old Walmart on our way to Scott and Joy's wedding. 

I had my camera but I have no pictures of Scott or Joy or any of the wedding party.  *sigh*  I'll blame it on my noisy little girl and the fact that I was pretty emotional during the whole service. 

Afterwards we were supposed to wait to take a big family picture with Scott and Joy.  Little miss discovered the flower girls baskets and had a ball emptying them and making a huge mess. 

And Bob snuck this picture of Lori taking a picture of Cecily.  hehe.

And that is where my picture taking stops.  The reception was nice, the food was good, and I spent most of it in the nursery with Cecily.  We ended up leaving before everything was over to go pick up our tire and somebody was very tired of wedding.  "Bye bye church."

So Bob and Dad got the tire changed and we headed over to Karen and Randy's for what was left of the evening.  It was a full house.  The whole Wyss family made it out for the wedding except for Kray... so yeah, people everywhere.  Cecily disappeared to the basement with the kids and I'm pretty sure she spent the evening in a pink princess dress eating food off the floor.  Ah well. 

Sunday we went to church and Cecily was actually being really good and was quiet and was even just laying on the floor a little bit.  Yeah....  she was sick.  Poor girly had a fever so we ended up leaving at noon for home.  She slept a lot, but not the whole way.  We let her watch more "movies" and she did pretty good.  Except for the last half hour- she was so tired of the car and just wanted me to "hold you." 

We made it home by 8- probably the earliest I have ever gotten home from KC.  And she had a fever all day today and Bob was home cause he wasn't feeling well, and so we pretty much spent the day on the couch recovering.  Poor Cecily is so hot and she won't take any medicine...  mixing it with very watered down pop and chocolate pudding was only partially successful.  Hopefully she feels better soon! 

Blessings.

Canning and Labor Day Weekend

Last week was spent up to my elbows in fruit and tomatoes, or at least it felt like it. 

Tuesday I went to the farm to pick up pears and tomatoes.  I stood around and watched Lena and Shelly make salsa...  hehe.  Then Cecily and I went to see the kitties while Dad humored me and flame sterilized a garbage can with the acetylene torch.  Yeah....  I would not recommend following links about the dangers of cooking garbage can suppers in galvanized cans.  I should know that you really can't believe all of the crazy people on the internet...  you should not weld galvanized metal, but there is no way you will get a galvanized can to welding temperatures on a campfire, when it's filled with water and other food.  Anyways, moving right along. 

I  spent Tuesday evening making tomato sauce, and then Wednesday doing pears.  Thursday I picked up my new glasses and contacts in Peoria, and then Friday got ready for camping.  And spent way too much time trying to figure out how we were going to blow up our air mattress. 

 

In case anyone is under the impression that my house is always spotless, let me show you the kitchen during canning week.  What you don't see is the mess that little miss makes while I'm ignoring her for produce...

 

It was very hot and muggy still when Bob got home from work and he made the executive decision to not sleep at the timber.  I was not sad, but I did have to put a bunch of stuff away that I had gotten out...I do not enjoy camping in 90 degree weather no matter how cool it gets at night.  So we wimped out.

 

We spent Friday evening and Saturday at the timber.  Cecily was very curious about the tent Brent was setting up.



 There was a line for the swing all weekend.  (Itsa Tee-za!)

 
 These two...  little monkeys jumping on the bed. 

 There are lots of little girls in our potluck.  Poor Max is the odd man out.

 "Isat tootsie's bike?"

 Quite the gaggle of girls.  Very dirty girls.  They played hard.

 Sitting on the woodpile eating apples.

 Here Tyra, have some of my apple that I've dropped on the ground repeatedly...

 We all went to the lake for lunch and swimming Saturday afternoon.  I really only waded and it still felt really good in the heat.

 Then we went home for naps and reconvened for supper.  Behold the garbage can. 

 It took a little bit longer to get it all put together and heat up than planned.  O well.  These little girls had fun rocking.  "Tyra... Tee-za... tootsie... wrockin!"

 It turned out really good!  And now we have a food only garbage can if anybody wants to try it!

If you're curious, our recipe for 10 adults and 10 kids is as follows:

~7lbs assorted sausage (smoked, Polish, Andouille) plus a package of hot dogs

1 package baby bella mushrooms

2 onions, chopped
4 peppers, chopped

2lbs carrots

3 lbs potatoes

2 doz ears sweet corn

liberal use of Lowery's seasoned salt

1 bottle hard apple cider

Layer in can on top of wet corn husks, longest cooking vegetables on the bottom.  Steam for approximately 1.5hrs.  

Next time I would use less water, and maybe start with hot water so the steaming happened faster. 

 

Little miss was in rare form on Sunday.  We went in to the baby room to drop off our bags and then I couldn't find her.  She followed somebody else into church and was just sitting there, waiting.  During lunch she was sitting next to me at the table... until she ran off.  I found her in the kitchen entertaining the dishwashers.  Then in the afternoon she stole Hanna's magna doodle and would not give it back....at least it kept her quiet until church was almost over and I wasn't fast enough and she took off for the baby room.  *sigh*  Nothing like a Sunday to make you feel like a pretty ineffective parent.  *grin*   

 
We spent the evening at the timber again.  Thankfully it was a little bit cooler.  We decided not to come back for breakfast so thus ended our labor day camping for 2013. 

On Monday we all slept in. It was lovely.  Then we were going to borrow Bob's dad's truck and make a quick trip to Menards...  yeah... the truck was dead so Bob went to get a new battery.  They got it running, but it would stall when it idled.  Brought back memories of the old green truck that we had to drive two-footed so it always had a little gas...  Anyway, our short trip to Menards turned into a long afternoon.

And finally, when we picked up the sweet corn at Roth's in Morton, they let Cecily have an ear for free.  She worked on it all the way home and it was the only thing she would eat for lunch that day- raw sweet corn.  She was quite pleased with herself.

 

Blessings.