New Family Traditions (and a recipe)

Over the past couple of days, we've had several ideas come up for things we did this year that we'd like to make traditions, like sledding with the cousins on Christmas. Definitely. We also think we'd like to start a Boxing Day pajamas tradition. Many families we know have a tradition of everyone getting new pajamas on Christmas. We learned this past week, however, that pajamas are really cheap during the after-Christmas sales. So we're thinking new pajamas for everyone after Christmas might not be a bad idea.

We also had a big succes this year with our glazed nuts. I got some recipes from my mother-in-law at Thanksgiving for cinnamon almonds and other kinds of glazed nuts. If you know me, you know I love fresh cinnamon almonds, so I was dying to try it out. We thought it would be fun to give little packs of glazed nuts to our friends and family in the area instead of the usual plate of cookies and chocolates. Something different, right? Well, it was a hige success. We got requests back for the recipe and/or more nuts. It was so successful we're thinking of making this an annual thing too.

For those of you that are salivating at the thought, here's the recipe for cinnamon glazed nuts (super, super easy):

1 cup sugar
2 teaspoons cinnamon (this is how much we liked, you can do more or less)
2 cups nuts
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla
1/4 cup water

Combine the sugar and cinnamon together. Mix together the vanilla and water. Mix all of that together with the nuts in your largest skillet. Turn the heat on and bring it to a boil, then turn it down and let it simmer. Oh, and stir it the whole time. This is the most important part - KEEP STIRRING. Once all the liuid had cooked off, you're done. Pour the nts out onto a cookie sheet (usually a good idea to cover it with foil, wax paper or parchment paper for easy cleanup). You can break apart pieces stuck together with the wooden spoon you stirred it with. The recipe I have also stresses the importance of letting these cool before you eat them, but everyone knows that warm is best, right? I would recommend giving them a few minutes to not be blazing hot, then be very careful eating them, especially if there's kids involved.

How many pictures?

Now that I have finished scrapping 2007, I decided to work on more family albums, starting when we were married. This is where the parent picture taking phenomenon really becomes apparent. After viewing my folder for 2005 and making the first few pages, it looks like I will end up with about ten pages from the time between when we were married and when Beeper was born (one year). In contrast, I have 60 pages for this past year. I am sure the year between those two will come out close to the same as this year.



I don't know whether Joe or Nat read this on a regular basis, but I wanted to post this one, because it's my favorite layout so far from 2005. The plaid just really sets off the wedding scene nicely, I think:

Best Christmas Ever

For some reason I always assumed Christmas was less fun for parents than for kids. I don't know why I would think that, since my favorite part has always been surprising someone with just the prefect present. So what could be more fun than watching a two-year-old who is finally starting to understand concepts of holidays and presents? Our Christmas morning was full of trucks and trains and books and cookies.



I admit we rushed him through it a bit. I wouldn't have minded letting him sit and play with each toy until he got tired of it before moving onto the next one. Unfortunately, we had a schedule to keep. We had to wait to open any until Grandma and Grandpa got there, then we didn't want to keep them too long. Plus we had a delivery to make to one of the cousins' houses of some brand new Christmas bean bag chairs (we retain our "favorite aunt and uncle statis" I think) and we wanted to get there before the oldest headed off to work.



That was another thing that made the day so much fun. We spent most of it with extended family, going back and forth between houses. I wasn't sure how that was going to work out, having grown up always spending Christmas at home just with our immediate family. Not ot mention the last time we did something like this, it was not an enjoyable expereince for me. Of course, that was three weeks after Beeper was born, and pretty much all I wanted for Christmas was to nap all day.



After we finished delivering our presents, we went home for a nap. While he was sleeping, we munched on crackers and cheese and watched several episodes of WKRP (Santa brought us Season 1 - and it is the one with the turkeys!).



When he woke up from his nap, we gave him a quick snack before stuffing him in his new snowsuit and driving around the neighborhood until we found where his cousins were sledding. The golf course has a great hill. The first few times down, no one could tell whether he really liked it, but after a while he really seemed to be enjoying himself. My husband (smart man that he is) avoided any going home tantrums by telling him when it was almost time to go that after we were done we would go home and have some cookies and chocolate milk (he doesn't like to eat or drink anything hot - or even remotely warm).



I hope Cori's reading this, so she can see we made good use of the presents she gave us:



Everyone came over for cookies and hot chocolate. Then we headed back over to their house where there was a nice meat and cheese tray along with some delicious rolls and potato salad for munching. And more cookies, of course. Some more of their friends came over, and the adults sat around the kitchen chatting while the kidd watched "Goonies". Beeper ran around hitting people with his new Bulldozer. That was the way we spent the rest of our evening. It was much more fun than sitting around by ourselves with post-toy-opening letdown.



I'm not sure how Beeper will be today, with all the excitement over. I think we'll probably spend a quiet day finishing off the cookies and building a giant train track around the living room.

Nightmares

Beeper has been sleeping surprisingly well since getting back from our vacation. Last night, though was not one of his better nights. Have you ever wondered what kind of nightmares a two-year-old has? Now I can give you some idea.

Sometime in the middle of the night last night, I heard an unearthly scream. I jumped out of bed, and thought to myself, "Maybe he's had a nightmare." I went inot his room and said, "It's okay. It's just a dream." He said, "Itsa my truck! It's mine!" Naturally. I should have known that scream could only mean one thing - a dream about someone trying to take one of his toys. That's the defensive scream he always uses when someone tries to grab a toy from him and he doesn't want them to. What a nightmare.

There's something comforting in the idea that that's what a bad dream is like for him.

More Tucson

This is the end of our trip to Tucson. This week has been just as fun as last week. We started out the week on Monday with a trip to the botanical gardens. They are much smaller than others we've been to, but they make good use of their space. Most of it is herbs and cacti, but it is really neat to see and read about all the different kind of cacti. The children's garden is small also, but very cool. The path is set up to demonstrate the different phases of a plant's life as you walk through it. My favorite part was the giant tile flower being polinated by a large metal bee and butterfly. It's one of many pieces of art around town I have really been impressed by. Other than the predominate "Arizona" themes, I really like the overall style of the artwork in this town.

Beeper's favorite part of the children's garden was the very end where they had several potted plants set up, mostly different kinds of mint, for the kids to smell. They also had a couple of pumkins there for decorations which he hugged and smelled many times. He really likes pumkins, ever since Halloween. They also had a pot of "lamb's ear" for the kids to feel. It took some encuraging initially to get him to touch it (undoubtedly he was hesitant to touch plants after seeing all those cacti) but after he finally did he kept running back to touch it again and giggle at its softness.

Tuesday was not too eventful. Laundry and more shopping.

Yesterday we visited the children's museum, which was amazing. I would say it rivals the one in Omaha even. It's hard to beat the balls of science, as far as exhibits for the older kids go, but for the younger kids like Beeper, Tucson wins, hands down. The room designated for four and unders is called "The Mystery Jungle" or something like that. They have so many fun things to do in there. The coolest is a vertical velcro conveyer belt the kids can work with a pulley. There are little stuffed frogs to stick to it. The frogs ride up to the top, where they are knocked off by a fan and go flying across the room. There's also a little jungle obstacle course and some giant blocks, as well as mirrors and shaker toys for the babies.

There's plenty of things to interest smaller kids in the rest of the museum as well. They had a play grocery store, of course (is this a requirement in children's museums? it seems to be the cnstant everywhere we go). The art room included two tables full of duplo block, which I think we played with for the first hour we were there. There's a dinosaur exhibit, an ocean exhibit, a train exhibit (Beeper's second favorite room, I think), a music exhibit, and several others. So many cool things. I think this is the kind of place you could take your kids to a couple of times a week and they would never get bored. It makes me wish we had a children's museum in Elko. They are so much fun.

More Scrapbooking Links

Along with working on pages the last couple of days, I have been addicted to finding and downloading digital scrapbook freebies. I have especially been on the lookout for boy-themed stuff, as the most common themes out there seem to be flowers and swirlies. I'm hoping to find trains, trucks, loaders, tools, etc. During my search I stumbled upon a couple more great sites I thought I'd share for anyone interested. JenLin is an aspiring designer working on getting her stuff out there. Her blog is devoted to posting freebies of her work. Good luck, Jen. When I saw ShabbyPrincess included on her list of links, I knew she mus have good taste, so I followed her other links and discovered DigitalScrapbookPlace. If you register for their forum you will find tons of freebies that their members upload for anyone who wants to check them out. I have a feeling this will be the place I will find the boy stuff I am looking for. I already found a cool Lego-themed kit there. And if I ever get ambitious enough to start making my own kits, now I have some ideas of where to put them for other people to download.

Scrapping

I never thought I would get into scrapbooking. When I took a Photoshop class a few years ago I got hooked on the program. After that I started experimenting with digital scrapbooking and had a lot of fun with it. More recently I discovered websites with free downloads and template ideas for digital scrapbooking. My pages improved greatly at this point. This is also around the same time the look of my websites improved quite a bit. My favorite scrapbooking site is ShabbyPrincess. She always has fantastic collections available for download. FreeDigitalScrapbooking has some good stuff too, and a good source for fonts is dafont.

I've switched over to the dark side of scrapping now too - 12x12 pages. The downside of this, of course, is that if I ever want a hard copy, I'll have to either get them printed out at Walmart or printed as a photobook from one of the many websites that does that. There's something so much easier about working with the square format that I think will make it worthwhile. At least, it's worth trying for a while.

I also have my first embellishment to add to the world of freeware scrappy downloads. I needed a train this morning and couldn't find one, so I made one of my own. You can download it by right-clicking here and choosing "save target as".

Global Thermal Nuclear War

Yesterday firebirdluver was given a break from his class for a day, so we had a chance to do some sight-seeing with him. We went to the Titan II Missile Museum. If you're ever in the area, I would highly recommend checking this one out. It's very cool. It's the only Titan II Missile silo left, converted into a museum. They've still got a missile in the silo you can check out, and they go through a simulated launch in the command center. As the tour guide explained the step-by-step procedure of a missile launch, I pictured the opening scene from War Games, which apparently followed the procedure fairly accurately. It makes me wish we had brought the movie with it, so we could watch it now. We'll have to pull it out when we get home.

Excerpt From "The Best of Michael Rosen"

Eddie and the Birthday
(Eddie is my second son)

When Eddie had his second birthday
he got lots of cards,
and he had a cake and all kinds of presents
and we sang Happy Birthday,
'Happy Birthday to you
Happy Birthday to you
Happy Birthday, dear Eddie...'
and all that.
He liked that very much
So he goes:
'More. Sing it again.'
So we sang it again.
'Happy Birthday to you
Happy Birthday to you
Happy Birthday, dear Eddie...'
and all that.
And he goes,
'More. Sing it again.'
So we sang it again.
'Happy Birthday to you
da de da de da, dear Eddie
da de da to you...'
And he goes,
'More. Sing it again.'
It felt like we sang Happy Birthday about
Two hundred and twenty-three times.

And the candles. On the cake.
He loved them.
'Eddie, blow.'
He blew.
And the moment he blew it out
he wanted more.
'More candle.'
So we light it.
'More Eddie blow.'
Eddie blew.
'More candle.'
We light.
'More Eddie blow.'
'More candle.'
That felt like two hundred and twenty-three times as well.

And he loved the cards.
Everyone who sent him a card
seemed to think he'd like one
with pictures of big fat animals.

Elephants and hippos.
He got about ten of them.
Imagine.
Your second birthday
and everyone sends you pictures of
hippopotamuses.
Maybe they think he is a hippo.

Anyway he had a nice birthday.

Next day he gets up
comes downstairs
and he looks around
and he goes,
'More happy birfdy.'
So I go,
'That was yesterday, Eddie.'
'More happy birfdy.'
'But it isn't your birfdy--I mean birthday...'
'More happy birfdy.'

Now you don't cross Eddie.
He throws tantrums.
We call them wobblies.
'Look out, he's going to throw a wobbly!'
And the face starts going red,
the arms start going up and down,
the screaming starts winding up
he starts jumping up and down
and there he is--
throwing a wobbly.

So I thought,
'We don't want to have a wobbly over this one.'
So we started singing Happy Birthday all over again.
Two hundred and twenty-three times.
Then he says
'More candles.'
'We haven't got any,' we say
(Lies, of course, we had).
'More candles...'
So out came the candles
and yes--
'Eddie blow.'
He blew.
'More candle.'
And off we go again--
Two hundred and twenty-three times.

And then he says,
'Letters. More.'
Well, of course no one sent him any more,
so while I'm singing more happy birfdys,
my wife was stuffing all the cards
into envelopes and sticking them down.
So we hand over all his cards again
and out came all the hippopotamuses again.

So he's very pleased.
And that's how Eddie had two birthdays.
Lucky for us
he'd forgotten by the third day.

Maybe he thinks when you're two you have two birthdays
and when you're three you have three birthdays
and when you're seventy-eight you...

A couple of days ago, I bought Beeper "If You Give a Pig a Party" - a late birthday present. We have read it now about two hundred and twenty-three times. I think he feels the need to memorize it like he has the other books. Two is a great age. Really.

Oh, and for others with Laura Numeroff fans, there is a great website : MouseCookieBooks.com. Beeper's favorite part was the song where they sing about the mouse and the cookie and put all the wrong words in. I wish we could download it and put it on his mp3 player. Usually when we get out the mp3 player he likes to listen to "Wheels on the Bus" about two hundred and twenty-three times in a row, so it's nice to have other songs on there he likes too.

Tucson - Day 2

So far, we are immensly enjoying our time in Tuscon. At least, I am. I guess I can't speak for the other two. It's really a fun city, kind of big and little at the same time. I have had a very easy time finding my way around town. They have a huge campaign here for pedestrian safety, and even though I haven't been walking around here much myself yet, I can really appreciate it, having spent quite a bit of time as a pedestrian in places less carefull.


Yesterday Beeper and I spent most of the day shopping and playing at parks. The Tucson Mall is huge. When I first walked in, the layout reminded me quite a bit of Cottonwood Mall (in Holladay, Utah), but as we walked along the top floor, expecting to see the end, it kept going and going. It was about twice as long as what I was expecting. And it is not the kind of mall that is only full of more and more trendy clothing stores and not much else. It has a good sized Walden Books, KB Toys, Suncoast, a candy store, a pet store with puppies in the window, and a fun store full of nostalgia paraphanelia (think Elvis and John Wayne lunch boxes). I give it an enthusiastic two thumbs up.


This morning we went to the Reid Park Zoo. Again, I was impressed. I have been to several different zoos. This is one of the smaller ones (I think we walked around the whole thing about three times in an hour and a half) but for such a small zoo, there was a lot to see. They had all the favorite animals - lions, tigers, elephants, giraffes, bears, rhinos, etc. My favorite was a white peacock (I'm rereading the Harry Potter books right now and in Book 7 it mentions the white peacocks at Malfoy Manor, and I wondered whether such a thing really existed until today). They were all in good-sized enclosures, but they were all out and about where we could see them. The Gibbons were hooting and swinging all over the place, which Beeper loved. They even let you feed the giraffes during a certain time of day, which is really cool. If we lived here, I'd definitely look into a membership. Okay, so I'd probably look into a zoo membership no matter where we lived, if there was a zoo, but that's beside the point.

"I don't yike it"

That seems to be Beepers favorite phrase at the moment. He's been informing me almost constantly over the past couple of days what he does and doesn't like. You'd think this would get old, especially when attempting to get him to eat something of nutritional value (ketchup is a vegetable, right?), but I definitely prefer this to his telling us with screams and tantrums what he doesn't like. Hopefully I can encourage him in using words to express himself rather than outburts. Then maybe I can learn it again from him.

Happy Birthday

Beeper is officially two-years-old today. We celebrated his birthday on Saturday, the way we knew we would enjoy most. We had his cousins over for burgers and fries and cupcakes. He had a blast. Of course, he doesn't quite understand the concept of birthdays yet, but he got a big smile on his face when everyone sang his name in the birthday song. He also caught on pretty quickly when it came to unwrapping presents.

This picture is for Sammi, so that she can see that we're putting the platter to good use. If you can't read it, it says, "Ninja goodies vanish as if they were never there." Paul helped pick out the cake mix and frosting. When he heard it was called "rainbow chip" he knew that was the cake for him.

Sunday morning we headed out of town on our way to Arizona for a course firebirdluver is taking over the net two weeks. Beeper is a pretty good little traveler, for a two-year-old, and the day went failry smoothly. He received one of those erasable drawing boards for his birthday, which entertained him for a good part of the trip. We only had to break out the DVD player for the last couple of hours of the trip that day.

We stopped for the night in Vegas. We decided to stay at the New York New York, where we got a better rate than we expected (still more than we would have wanted to pay if this were'nt all going on the comapny's ticket). After wandering around on the first floor for a while, we picked a resturaunt called "America" for dinner. We were pretty impressed with the service. The waiter never let my water get more than half empty, and I was thirsy after being in the car all day. He also came by a couple of times while we were waiting for our food to let us know it would be out soon. Then when he brought it out, he apologized for it taking so long. It had been maybe 15-20 minutes, which is what I've come to expect from most resturaunts. I'd love to go see what this one is like on a good night, if that's a bad one.

We ordered s stuffed shell pasta dish to share. The sauce the shell was stuffed with was a creamy sausagey sauce that was very delicious. We ordered a dessert that had a description along the lines of "chocolate truffle cream sandwiched between chocolate buttermilk cake." The picture looked very similar to a ding dong. The taste, on the other hand, would be similar to a ding dong if ding dongs were about a thousand times richer and creamier. It was delicious and very rich. All in all we had a very good time there.

After dinner we walked up and down the street a little ways. Paul was loving all the lights and sights.

He especially liked the giant motorcycle sticking out of the Harley Davidson sign. He was getting tired, though, so we made one last stop at the M&M place, which was across from the hotel, before heading mack to our room. That was a lot of fun to see, though we didn't buy anything this time.

The next morning we had breakfast again at "America" because that was pretty much the only place open before 7:30. We weren't as impressed by the service or the pancakes, and the orange juice was just plain gross. Maybe it was just that the novely had worn off and we were ready to get on our way. Maybe they just don't try very hard that early in the morning before all the gamblers are up.

We met one of the rudest drivers I have ever seen on the way out of the parking garage. He wanted to go about 35 mph, and we were only going 10. We actually weren't even that far from the exit when he came zooming up behind us and was forced to slow down, but he still found the time to honk. Upon reaching the street, we found several large signs proclaiming that right turns were not permitted on red. As we waited for the light to turn, he honked several times at us, I suppose to show everyone around that was unhappy at being made to wait.

I confess that when I come across drivers like that, I have a habit f wishing bad things on them. For example, I kind of wish this guy got pulled over somewhere today for running a red light or maybe even got in a minor accident for turning somewhere he wasn't supposed to.

We drove all the way to Phoenix before stopping for lunch at a TGIFridays. Firebirdluver spoiled the birthday boy with a neon green apple slushee and some mashed potatoes. He burned himself on the mashed potatoes a few times, and was quite upset, so I took him outside to give him a chance to calm down.

I was going to try to put what happened next delicately, but I am learning that there is nothing delicate about being a parent, ecpecially especially when drenched in neon green barf.

I retrieved some spare shirts for both of us from the back of the truck. We went and changed in the bathroom and enjoyed some birthday ice cream before setting out on our way again. Unfortunately, after retriving the shirts, I apparently forgot to latch the arm with the spare tire properly, and as we drove out of the parking lot, it swung around violently. Fortunately it did not hit any other cars, and we were able to fix it quickly, but it was just another omen of how our day was going.

We arrived in Tuscon a couple of hours later. We had just enough time to check in, unpack, unwind a bit and take a quick drive around before firebirdluver had to head off to the opening dinner for his thing.

Beeper and I went to the resturaunt next to the hotel to pick up some food to bring back to our room. Beeper was pretty tired and cranky by that time. The only two people in the resturaunt were the waiter and the cook. The waiter turned out to be a very friendly guy who cheered the biy up with some more birthday ice cream and his silly jokes while we waited for our food. He even convinced the cook to make a grilled cheese sandwich for Beeper, because there was no kids menu, and I was just ordering a salad, so it wasn't really something I could share with him. The waiter was so great that by the time we left I felt like he was almost an old friend and couldn't help but leave him a very large tip.

Now we're hanging out, watching Kiki until bedtime. It probably wasn't the kind of birthday anyone would ask for, but he isn't complaining, and it has been, in the end, a fun adventure that will make a good story. It will be especially great in a few years when he says, "This was the worst birthday ever." I can respond by telling him the story of the time we had to spend all day driving and he threw up all over me in the parking lot of Fridays.