Long Weekend

Last weekend was a long weekend. We went up to Salt Lake on Saturday to attend the birthday party for Will's grandpa- he's 90 years! Then on Monday we went bowling because school and work were closed for the holiday.

Birthday Fun. Click HERE if you are Mike and would like to see your 4-generation pictures.

Bowling fun.

Confections

Happy Birthday, Will! Will turned twentysomething on Feb 4. He thinks he's old. I've found it futile to try and convince him otherwise.

I found this idea for chocolate covered rice krispy treats, so I made heart-shaped ones on a stick to celebrate Valentine's day. I made about 4 dozen and we got to share them with family and co-workers. The picture above are the hearts waiting to be dipped in chocolate.

The finished product.

On Valentine's Day, I made dinner for a client. I meant to take pictures of the other three courses: Mozzarella sticks with roasted garlic tomato sauce, Balsamic Mesclun salad with granola and dried fruit, and smoky baked salmon with apricot sauce, duchesse potatoes and veggies, but I forgot to get the camera out until the dessert course: French cheesecake with three sauces (Creme anglaise, strawberry sauce and chocolate ganache sauce)

A Day In The Life...

My sister, Lauren, came to work with me at school yesterday to job shadow. She was not happy about it because she thought that it would be lame. She ended up really enjoying herself while making the food (sloppy joes), serving the kids, wiping tables and even doing dishes. She got to wear the trademark lunch lady plastic gloves that are notoriously too big for anyone's hands, but got away without wearing the stylish hair net, opting for a hat instead. She left the gloves on when doing the dishes, and spent the rest of the time facinated with the accidental makeshift waterballoon (it didn't pop, thankfully).

(Click to see enlarged photo)

So Much For Foster Care

Sometimes the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. That's the way I feel about the following picture. To illustrate, I'll list the parts, and you can figure out what the whole picture is.

1. I'm reclining in the dark

2. I have a microwaveable hot pack on my head

3. I'm sniffing maple syrup

4. I have an unhappy expression on my face.

Have you added it up yet? Okay, here are some more clues. I'm doing part's one and two because I have a TERRIBLE headache but we don't have any medicine that I'm willing to take. I'm doing part three because my sense of smell has gotten very keen lately, and I think our house reeks. Sweet smells seem to help alleviate the accompanying nausea. And part four is simply because I've wanted a baby for ever since I can remember, and was conviced that it wouldn't happen, and now that it has I am excited, but so far pregnancy sucks.

New Year Festivities

For New Year's Eve, William and I visited the Heath family, played games, and rang in the New year with Brazil, because it seemed like a good time for the kids to get to bed (and, quite frankly, me too.) Unfortunately, we were having so much fun that we didn't actually arrive home until 11:50ish, and since we had already celebrated, we didn't even notice when the clock struck midnight.

On New Year's Day, we visited the Faber household, as did the Simmons and the Itris, where we played with siblings and Ellie fed William some New Year's peas. Molly, of course, got oodles of table scraps from all the food around (especially the food around Ellie), so everyone ended up having a great New Year's time.

I, for one, am glad that all the holiday activities are over, and can return to a semi-normal schedule.

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Playing Ticket to Ride on New Year's Eve. We had six players, but the game only allows up to five. We had the America version and the Europe version, but decided that the game is more fun with 4-5 players instead of three. William and Stephen volunteered to play both games at once, which is why they are sitting in between the two games. Cynthia was excited that Stephen would be distracted and now maybe she would beat him. I think he won both games.

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Happy 9 o'clock New Year's!

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I don't know why I was so surprised at how much kids like blowing things that make lots of noise. They like it a lot.

Ah, peas. This will be a great year indeed.

Three Years

December 28, 2007 was the three-year mark for the existence of the William and Anna Heath family. Happy anniversary to us! We didn't get to do anything tremendously exciting for it, we actually ended up playing guitar hero as the highlight of the day, but it's only our third, cut us some slack!

William gave me a beautiful Venetian glass heart necklace, which came with a leather band. Not only was it sweet, but I later looked up the "traditional anniversary gifts" chart and found that traditionally the third anniversary is the leather anniversary, but on the modern chart it's crystal/glass. Bonus points to Will for unknowingly accomplishing both!

Year four is supposed to be fruit/flowers traditionally, or appliances on the modern chart. Totally looking forward... I love fruit.

This video is of my favorite Guitar Hero song. Someone passed it with a perfect score on the expert level and posted it to YouTube. I really just like the melody.

Christmas 2007

Merry Christmas! This year we spent most of Christmas Day with Will's family, and had a great time. We played games and ate food and did the gift thing. I really enjoy watching people get gifts that they are excited about. It's a good feeling. In the days leading up to Christmas, I spent a lot of time at a neighbor's house, Emily, because she is the neighborhood digital scrapbook guru, and she helped me to make the following scrapbook pages for my Grandma and Grandpa, who invited our whole family to join them on an Alaskan Cruise this past summer. (FYI, if you click on the link, it will take you to a slide show that does not end up back at this blog, so you'd have to navigate your own way back.)

Grandma's Christmas Cruise Scrapbook

Everyone in our family wrote a thank-you letter, which is where all the captions on each page come from. The letters in full were included in the book given to Grandma on Christmas eve. Yes, I realize there are many typos, but I won't be able to fix them until I get my own digital scrapbooking software.

Unfortunately, I couldn't find the camera on Christmas day, so I don't have any pictures, but maybe when I do find it I'll take a picture of Molly with her Christmas present, a squeaky toy. She loves squeaky toys so much that she usually destroys the squeaker within a couple of days. I had forgotten about this and didn't realize that any time she wanted to play she would grab her toy, come right up and stare straight at me and "squeak squeak squeak" until I gave her some attention. Oh well, it's only a matter of time before this squeaker goes out, too.

Anna and Dad set up the new Christmas tree in the Faber's entryway before Christmas

Making Christmas cookies to give away for the holidays

We made Christmas trees and candy cane cookies this year