Guess What!

Tonight I’m up to ten o’clock and mom asked, “So, who posted on my blog?” I quickly volunteered to stay up and post on the blog so here I am posting and staying up late.

Posted by Mark

The first of December

One of our Relief Society activities was a service auction.  I bought a place for Jessie in a play from a lady in our ward who directs community plays.  Jessie choose to be in “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever.”  And she loved it.  She got to be in the angel choir and run across the stage with one of the main characters on her back, screaming “Get her off of me!”  Jessie is so good at memorizing that she had just about the entire play memorized and quoted different pieces to us during dinner.  David and Lisa went to see her on Thursday evening and really enjoyed it.  And Grandma and Rachel went with us to see it on Saturday.  Neil LOVED it and knew that each time the lights dimed that was his cue to clap.  It was so stinkin’ cute. Rachel brought Jessie three pomegranates (instead of flowers) to celebrate, and Jessie was in heaven.We also got to go to Jessie’s first band concert.  Unfortunately we couldn’t exactly hear the flutes individually, but we still knew they were adding to the concert.  Spencer was so excited to hear the band play “The Hanukkah Song,”  his favorite of the songs Jessie had been practicing.  But when they started playing he was really confused, “This doesn’t sound like what Jessie plays!”Neil and I did a little Christmas shopping and he conveniently fell asleep – so nice.  I just tucked his and my coat under his head and I had remembered to bring his blanket and binkie to facilitate that little maneuver.  YEAH ME!The first Saturday of December was a full lunar eclipse.  And Mark and Ken were not going to miss it.  At first they were thinking of getting up at 4:00 am, but it was later revised to 6:00, much more reasonable.It was NOT warm that morning, but it was worth the watch to see the shadow of the earth going over the moon with your own eyes!!  SO COOL!  I opted to watch from inside and then we made some homemade hot chocolate to warm them back up.

This is a little on the dark chocolate side for those of you who are more milk chocolate people, but I’m sure you could add some more sugar if you like.

Italian Hot Chocolate

3 Tbsp. cocoa powder

1/4 cup sugar

2 cups milk

1 Tbsp. cornstarch

1/2 cup milk

1/2 tsp. vanilla

Whisk together cocoa powder and sugar in a small saucepan.  Add 2 cups milk and whisk together over medium heat (the recipe says low heat, but that takes SO long!  So just keep the milk moving and turn the heat up some).  It will take until it is almost almost simmering to get the cocoa powder mixed in.  Turn off heat.  Dissolve the cornstarch into the 1/2 cup milk and stir into the milk on the stove.  Turn the heat back on and whisk until it starts to thicken.  Turn off heat and add the vanilla.

Here is cute Neil’s smile.Mark put together this map at school and was quite proud of his work and how well all the pieces fit together.We enjoyed Mark’s Christmas concert choir at the Elementary School.  He got to be in a special song about how the snowman melted.  All the boys got different parts like monks, Mexican guys in sombreros, Batman, Michael Jackson, jazz, etc.  He was a rapper and a dog.  The rapper line was: yo, in the sun he melted, melted, melted, in the sun he melted small, small, small, word.”  And the dog line was: “who let the sun out, who, who, who?”

It was hard to get a picture of him from the back but, he’s the one it the sunglasses and backward hat right in the middle.

Mom and Heather and two of her kids made it out a week or so before David’s wedding and I’m ashamed to say that I didn’t take very many pictures at all, but we had a lot of fun!  We did make several batches of crescent rolls and mom worked on the center pieces for the luncheon (which turned out awesome):the boys played together:and waved goodbye to the kids in the morning when they left for school:and here’s a cute picture of Alexander that someone took with my camera:

Some Southern Sun

Mark came home from a field trip to the Olympic Park in Park City with exciting news.  He had won one of the extra Olympic pins reserved for the athletes and other special people.  He was so excited!Have you ever been hungry enough to eat a whole horse?  Well Jessie’s birds were!  They finished off her picture in just two days!  Misty had laid 3 eggs and is always gathering more stuffing for her nest.  It is quite interesting to watch her.  She chews off a small strip of paper and tucks it into her wing feathers.  When her wings are full of little papers she hops back to her nest to deposit them.  Unfortunately, I don’t think these eggs made it.  It’s been more than 26 days and no peeping yet.  So now the questions is how to get rid of dud eggs without out her going crazy like Kiwi and ripping all her feathers out too?“In every task there is an element of fun…you find the fun and *SNAP* the job’s a game.”  So true, right?  Here’s Spencer’s idea of fun.  Nothing like squirt gun horns to scare bullies away.Neil is getting pretty good a throwing a ball and loves to play ball with Spencer.Ken had meetings in Phoenix for work the week of Veteran's Day and so we pulled all the kids but Jessie out of school and took them with us.  Jessie spent the week at Grandma’s house and had a fabulous time including a yoga lesson, an 11 course dinner and basic silliness.  She took her birds with her and Buddy, Grandma’s cat, was quite interested in the new guests.

We were able to get a hotel room with a small kitchen in it, which was really nice so we didn’t have to go out to eat all the time.  Restaurant food tends to be so disappointing.  During Ken’s first day of class we worked on homework while Neil took his morning nap and then got ready to go to the zoo.  When we go to the zoo we were surprised to find they were closing early and so it didn’t make much sense to only be able to spend an hour or so there so we left to check out the Botanical Gardens that were located nearby.  Here’s what we saw of the zoo: some ducks and turtles sunning themselves outside the gates.It was totally our lucky day because for some reason admission that day was free!  (That’s way better than between $14 and $22 a person!)

There were SO MANY different kinds of cactus!  These purple ones were on the way in.We had been walking around for a while when Mark asked me, “Are these cactus all real?!!”  I was just laughing.  I wasn’t sure how he thought they’d all come to be.  And of course we all had to touch some spins.They had a monarch butterfly pavilion for us to walk through.  The butterflies were pretty cold though so they were mostly at the top of the trees or hanging onto the sides trying to get warm.  They did have some pretty flowers in there though.  By this time Neil was tired of being held or strapped in his stroller and he wanted to RUN! We did learn the difference between a male and female monarch.  The males have a single black dot on their bottom wings.  Neat-o.  And Spencer informed the guide that there are birds who have learned to pick out the yucky tasting part of the monarch so they can eat them.  She didn’t really believe him -- even though it’s true.  You can learn about it on the Life videos the BBC made.  So after that, all the butterflies we saw were male.  Weird huh.  Can you see the black dots?Mark was totally impressed with the saguaro cactus’.  And they were impressive.  They were SO tall.  I’d say at least as tall as our house.There were climbing cactus, short and stubby ones different colored ones.  It was neat.  But after a while even cactus’ get a little boring for kids.Here’s a Teddy Bear cactus.  It looks fuzzy, but not real cuddly!Here is a pipe organ cactus.And when I saw these little cactus I though, “wow” they don’t even look poky --  they look fuzzy.  Boy are looks deceiving!  They were fuzzy…but the fuzz cut me!!  I couldn’t believe it, a nice “fuzzy” paper cut and it hurt!After Spencer got bored all he wanted to do was push Neil in the stroller.  The only problem is that he’s not quite tall enough to see over it and miss the people coming down the paths.  It was so sweet….and so annoying.We did get to see the inside a a cactus and guess what if you didn’t know it was a cactus you would have told me you were looking at a tree!  That’s right under all that green poky skin is just wood!  No wonder birds and things make their homes in cactus it’s just a tree with green poky bark.And last of all there were these fun gigantic bugs though out the gardens.  You weren’t supposed to touch them, but they were pretty cool.  I liked this daddy long legs the best.We hadn’t brought water bottles with us and were dying for a drink.  I had forgotten how GROSS Phoenix water is, but I was so thirsty I tried not to care that the water at the drinking fountain tasted like a mouthful of raw soil.  Mark, happy to be able to sit in the front seat, helped me navigate our directions backwards to get back to the hotel.  That night we played a little catch with a baseball in the part of the parking lot without many cars until our taco soup ready.

Bean Museum and Mark’s new bow

For one of our play groups this summer we got to see an animal show up at the Bean Museum.  The kids were really excited to touch the turtle…this lizard… (check out his funny tail).  If I had posted this sooner I could have told you all about it, oh well, that’s what Wikipedia is for right?and this huge 15 foot long snake skin.After the show we did a little treasure hunt.  Mark and Jessie worked on one and I helped Abbie and Spencer with theirs.  It was so fun to watch them get so excited when they found one of the animals on their sheet. While we were searching for some of the animals Spencer started watching a nature show on spiders – very interesting and very creepy all at the same time.  He really thought the trap door spiders were the coolest.  It took a little convincing to get him looking for the rest of the animals on his sheet.  I nursed Neil before we left while the kids watched a nature show about Africa.  On the way home they tried to tell me everything they had seen.Abbie drew this cute picture for Spencer. I think Abbie holds Neil more than any of the other kids. Mark has been saving his money for over a year now and finally decided to buy himself a bow.  He had some arrows already from a homemade bow that Uncle David had made him a couple of years ago, but he was so small then that it was hard for him to string it himself, so it didn’t get much use.He is so good about being careful that everyone is behind him when he shoots and is really good about yelling “AIMING” when he’s ready to let-her-rip.  At the store, the guy helping us took Mark back in the back where they have a target set up and let Mark practice and gave him some pointers that really helped. 

When we got home Mark was DYING to try out his new toy, but we didn’t have anything he could shoot into.  Ken suggested that maybe our neighbor would and gave him a call.  Mark was peeking out the window just waiting and waiting until he saw him coming across the street and then he started doing this little excited dance.  I printed out a target to tape to the box and we all went to the backyard to watch.  Mark let me try his bow too, and it was pretty fun.  I even got 2 of my 3 arrows on the box.

Mark was so excited when he got his first 50 pointer, a few days later.  And he left the target on the box until all his holes added up to 100 points.

Where the Fire Bug went

This is a Ken-post, and I just couldn't resist this one.

When I was a kid, everyone knew I had a fascination with fire. Scout campouts were glorious times because there would be fire! I still get teased about it at family events. Now however, the pyromania has gone away. I learned this week where it went - to my son. Mark has it as bad as his father ever did!

On Wednesday I told Mark I wanted to help Grandpa Woodward burn some branches that were piled up and needing to be burned. Mark's eyes lit up and he eagerly volunteered to help. He spent the entire afternoon outside tending the fire, and burned every scrap of wood that needed to be incinerated. When he was done, all that remained were some campfire-sized logs that I told him not to get rid of. If I had told him the trees needed to go to, he would have found a way to add them to the conflagration.

I have a great family! Have a wonderful day!