Cinnamon Swirl Bread with Hayden

Hayden, one of my daycare kids, and I made Cinnamon Swirl Bread this afternoon. I took a few pictures of it. He seems to love to bake and reveled in being the only one to help, except for licking the batter of course. I'll include the recipe in case you want to try it.

Cinnamon Swirl Bread
2/3 cup white sugar
1 tablespoon and 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
4 cups all purpose flour
2 tablespoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
2 cups white sugar
2 eggs, beaten
2 cups milk
2/3 cup vegetable oil

Preheat over to 350 degrees. Lightly grease two 9x5 inch loaf pans. In a small bowl mix together 2/3 cup sugar and 1 tablespoon and 1 teaspoon cinnamon, set aside. In a large bowl combine flour, baking powder, salt, and 2 cups sugar. Combine eggs, milk and oil add to flour mixture. Stir until just moistened. Pour half the batter into pan. Sprinkle with half the reserved cinnamon sugar mixture. Repeat with remaining batter and cinnamon/sugar mixture. Draw a knife through batter to marble. Bake in a preheated oven for 45 to 50 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center of the loaf comes out clean. Let it cool in pan for 10 minutes before removing to a wire rack to cool completely. Wrap in foil and let sit overnight before slicing.

UPDATE:
We just ate the bread for snack and it was the best batch yet. Good job Hayden.

Relaxing Sunday

We had a fairly relaxing Sunday afternoon, Don worked on the kids 4x4 tricycles, then we fertilized the garden and my roses, fun, fun, you all need to appreciate that I got a picture of Don in shorts and please notice the whiteness. I had to keep Brock inside during that time so I set him in his highchair with some oreos. He actually twisted them open and licked the white middle before he ate the cookies, it was so funny. Don played LIFE with the kids, the old version the new one stinks for any of you who haven't tried it. We were so thankful today for 90 degree temps today, it was 100 yesterday yuck. Hope you all had a great weekend.

Our water baby

Here ae some fun pictures of Brock enjoying the sprinkler. We're hoping our veggies get some water.

Look what we did!

Before unfortunately we unloaded some of it before my before picture so this is actually less mess than usual.

Today after much procrastinating the kids and I tackled our side of the garage. Which includes all their either too big, too small, or for the next kid, or toys for us to rotate through and misc, bikes, strollers, carseats. I figured we better do it before Don got complete frustrated and cleaned it for us which would mean getting rid of all of it. Anyhow, the kids and I are so proud of what we did, even Don was impressed which makes it so much sweeter.

Fun at the park well not really

Wednesday the kids and I went for a walk to the park. There was supposed to be some kind of something through parks and rec going on but we took way too long to get ready and got there as they were closing up. I was so disappointed. I took a picture of us walking and of Brock while they were there. There were still a bunch of kids there and I could not keep track of everyone which makes me completely paranoid so after 15 minutes we headed home. Surprisingly no one complained. I came home and in my guilt caved in and put up the kids tent in the backyard for them to "rest" in. I think they actually had more fun at home than they would have had if the park thing had been going when we got there. It's funny sometimes the simplest things are the most enjoyable.

Just a catching up!

My kids and a daycare kids were playing outside and I couldn't find Ty, so after much freaking out because he wasn't outside anywhere I came inside to find him playing quietly by himself in the living room. He loves to scream and yell and be crazy with the other kids but he obviously needs his quiet time, too.


See we actually use the table, I wasn't so sure about the meal this day though. I had never heard of putting ketchup on mac and cheese but the daycare kids do at home. My kids think they need to put it on everything now, grrr.


I had to take a picture of this, mine are the two on the left. I made popcorn and one of the kids (not mine) asked if my popcorn popper made kettle corn and he said his popcorn popper looked like a box so I pointed at my microwave and asked if he meant that, he said yes. Sooo funny! I made chocolate chip cookies yesterday and while mixing them they all pulled their chairs up to the island again to watch. I am reminded daily of all the ways we can help them learn, even by having them count how many cups or how many cookies I made or even what the ingredients are. I'm hoping to raise my boys soo they know how to cook just like their daddy.

I feel like if I don't blog I get bogged down with pictures and then need to do a misc. blog. Part of my trying to keep myself organized is too not let stuff pile up. Anyhow, I took a few pictures over Monday and Tuesday and wanted to share because it's so cute. Besides I know a few people who enjoy seeing and hearing about our daily lives, no matter how monotonous it seems to me.

My June 23rd resolutions!

Maybe I'll keep them if I do it in June instead of January and maybe if I share it with others I will do it. Our family decided to start a list for Costco and our local grocery stores to compare prices. This is all in hopes that when we receive the food ads on Tuesdays we will actually know if things are a good deal and when go to stock up at Costco we'll be able to see if we should head to the grocery store instead. Of course we'll pick our own fruits this summer when available, and we now have our own garden for some things later this summer. We are really hoping to start really cutting down our food budget. Secondly when we lived in Spokane I read this book called "Side Tracked Home Executive" through that I implemented a cleaning system that I haven't used in over a year. It is broken down by the day, month etc. You use 3x5 cards that are different colors to tell you what part of the house you need to clean on certain days, how many days a week or month of year to do it. Kind of helps me remember some of the parts I forget to do like, flip mattress, clean light fixture above kitchen table, under washer and dryer, stove, those are seasonally by the way, etc. I started using it again this morning and Morgan helped with some of my daily chores. I'm hoping to keep up on it, my house is clean but I think having a reminder for the whole family of what needs to be done will help them better understand what goes into running a household. Of course there's always the obligatory weight loss blah blah blah. So keep us in your prayers, hopefully we can encourage others and if you have any other cost cutting, cleaning ideas we would love to hear them.

Thanks Daddy!

Last night Don decided to let the kids have apples and caramel dip for dessert. While I was getting Morgan's bath ready he decided to throw me in the tub fully clothed, I was so excited about this by the way because I can always use more laundry can't we all? Anyhow, while I was cleaning up I assumed he was supervising the caramel eating, well he was but not in the way I would. Brock comes wandering in the bathroom with caramel covering the front of his shirt and almost all the way up both elbows, luckily Don cleaned up the walls that were lovingly caressed with caramel fingers. Thought I'd share the pictures.

Stop and smell the roses with me!

Don bought me some more roses today at the same nursery. We have to weed tomorrow before we can plant them. Luckily we don't live in Lynden or we wouldn't be allowed to do it. HAHA Anyhow, I held one out for Brock to "smell" and he actually did. He kept pointing to the ones he wanted me to hold down so he could smell them. In the picture with his eyes closed he was actually taking a huge sniff and enjoying it. We should all learn to take pleasure in simply smelling the roses.

Veggies are in!

We headed to our favorite nursery out on Peoria Road near where we've gone the past couple years to get our plants today and got our veggies. We realized this morning that last year we planted our garden May 28 and here it is June 21 and we're hoping we didn't mess up but hopefully God's grace covers gardens too.

We planted seven peppers around our beautiful Maple tree!

There are five tomato plants around our Periwinkle plant and one little basil plant!

Three more tomato plants between the ivy and some other unknown flowery thing.

On the back we planted four cucumber plants, two burpless and two slicing. In the front we ventured into watermelon so we'll see it's our first year with them.

In front of our huge butterfly plant we put a couple pumpkins also a new one for us. Could be interesting.
Don said he thought it looked like we were signaling ufo's with our garden. I'll keep you updated. We love going out every day and seeing all that's grown. Now we have to pray for low water bills =)

ALL DONE

Okay this last little bit took us two hours and I had to get out the big shovel and actually dig down to get the grass that had overtaken one area. It is 80 outside and Morgan and Cale helped but we all complained of sweating to death but hallelujah we're finished. We have the added incentive of ice cream cones by Don if we finished today and we did!! We also got a coupon for Kmart and went and bought ourselves yet another slip and slide. With the sale we bought two so we should be set for at least a month =). Enjoy I might after I take a shower. Thanks to my kids for helping, now we get to plant our veggies YEAH!

It's 11:05AM look what we've done

Okay I have to brag the three older kids and I started at 9:30am and worked until 11 and so far here are the fruits of our labor, we have a little outing planned for part of the afternoon and hopefully we can finish the weeding after that. I will post the rest of the after pictures when we're done. Thanks for the encouragement Tammy I guess it's kind of like running you begin to enjoy it after while.

What a big boy!

Ty is going to be embarassed eventually by this one but I had to share it. I have a little daycare girl that sleeps in a playpen during her nap in Morgan's room. I forgot to put it away yesterday so when I went to check on Morgan last night low and behold look who I found in the playpen. I wish he was still small enough to fit in there.

Visiting with Fred

A couple months ago we had a new addition to our home named Fred. He is a Western Fence Lizard that hitched a ride on Don's truck from California. We thought we might let him got but it was during the time we had a very cold weather here in Oregon so we got him a little habitat and have been feeding him crickets for the past few months. I refuse to touch him, as he is gross and all being a reptile, but last night Don decided to get him out and let the kids hold him. It was the first time any of them got to do that. Don tried to get Brock to even come near him and he would just laugh and run away, that's my boy. So I wouldn't hold the lizard and the kids said if you don't we're going to tell on you, and they did, they called my mom and told on me. I didn't get in trouble though whew!

Pictures from the yard

I went out this morning and snapped a few pictures of the flowers in our yard. Please excuse the weeds, we have some work to do on that which I will blog about after it is done, I am having anxiety about it for those of you who know how much I HATE to weed (sorry Mary about that word but I do) And Mom can you believe these are the roses that just a couple months ago were about 18 inches high, they are almost five feet tall again and full. Don bought these roses for me last year so now he can say he brings me roses every day. They are so beautiful and have a strong scent so I love to have them in the house. I am going to have to do a before and after of our garden just so I can have someone else enjoy my "labor" besides my family.

Dollar Bowling

The kids had a dentist appt Tuesday and did a great job. NO CAVITIES again! Yeah! Good job guys. I decided the night before if they did well at the appt we would go bowling. Lakeshore Lanes through at least the month of June has dollar bowling on Tuesdays so each game is $1 per person instead of $3.50 so a great deal. Anyhow, I snapped a few pictures, I was shocked by their scores even with bumpers they did a great job, Morgan got a little crazy with one shot and threw her ball down someone elses lane, it was so cute but man has that girl got an arm on her. Brock just sat back and relaxed in the stroller, he loves balls so I think just watching them was a huge entertainment for him. He loves Cale and can say his name so every time Cale would bowl he would yell really loud CALE and clap it was cute. I had to include a picture of the scores for both games because frankly I was shocked!