Quality Time

Ben and I are half way through our Tuesday afternoons just the two of us and yesterday gave me a very valuable reminder about quality time. We had had a day with many meltdowns, both children falling apart over what I would consider fairly trival things. After we dropped Josh off at preschool Ben and I went to the local climbing wall together. While we were leaving we were talking about where we could go for a hot chocolate and we decided that we'd go home so we could do the art project from the library book. Ben was so precious and graceful and appreciative of my time. It only took 45 minutes of my undivided attention to get the wonderful child that I know and love back. Note to self- when it's all falling apart, spend more one on one time with the child.

Gingerbread Kiwis

In honor of our newfound citizenship my friend Debbie gave me a Kiwi cookie cutter. I decided to break it in today with a batch of gingerbread Kiwis (I figured we should make brown cookies for a brown bird). I will confess that we used the American gingerbread recipe which calls for molasses instead of the New Zealand version that calls for golden syrup.

100% Kiwi

We're a 100% Kiwi family now! The boys were both granted New Zealand citizenship when they were born here (after Ben was born they changed the rules and one of the parents has to be a NZ citizen or have permanent residency to give the child citizenship). Dan wanted to have citizenship like the boys, so after we reached the length of time of living in New Zealand required we applied. Here's a photo of us after the ceremony.

For the very cute video of our day, please click on or cute and paste the following link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIGbNrsTZnM

Science Afternoon

It was a full fledged science fair at our house on Tuesday afternoon. Ben and I continued our fun Tuesday afternoon program (Josh is at preschool) and this week we invited Hazel to come join us. The theme was science. We started off with our volcano and did a few cool experiments from the Disgusting Science kit (Ben's favorite was the slimy buggers) and then we did a few others from the Mind Blowing Science Kit (my favorite was the underwater volcano eruption that changed colors). Then Ben & Hazel decided they wanted to do their own experiments. It was wonderful to watch them come up some great ideas, a little of this, mix that and their excitement and awe was just awesome. We made a mess and by the end of our science afternoon Ben was so excited he couldn't sit still, literally bouncing off the chairs and the walls.

Baking with Kids

For Christmas my mother gave me the cookbook "Baking with Kids" by Linda Collister, which she bought from the local shop Jumping Tangents. Since we decided it was too wet for soccer practice we decided to give one of the recipes in the book a try. Below are a series of photos from our baking adventure. We're saving the treats for dessert.

Ben's treasure map

There's are Ben's words, I just wrote them down as he instructed me.

If you want to go on a treasure hunt please ask Ben. Four golden coins, and one treasure map and one telescope and one treasure map. Please make sure if you don't know where, there are arrows in my room or the lounge. Ben is in charge.

Just Peachy

Today's food project-- find some yummy ways to consume an entire bag of peaches from a friend's yard. I am happy to report that Josh and I did an excellent job. We made peach muffins

and then we boiled peaches to freeze (while eating about half of them in the process). And later we made a peach crumble, which didn't look all that great, but tasted lovely. Thank you to all the friends who helped contribute some ideas on what to do with all these lovely peaches. It's been a peachy day and I've only got 2 left over, an impressive feat if you'd seen the bag.