Is it summer already?!?!

We are enjoying an unusual warm stretch of weather in our neck of the woods.  To beat the heat we have been hiding in our air conditioned house...honestly.  I am not a fan of hot weather and enjoy it 70-75 degrees.  Warmer than that and I hide indoors after lunch to avoid sweating.  This works out well with nap time anyways, but by afternoon even the AC has a hard time keeping up, and in lieu of spending a fortune on making the house a few degrees cooler, we eat popsicles.  The cheap-o, full of sugar kind are yummy, and easy...and cheap...but I don't enjoy feeding my kids artificial colors and high fructose corn syrup.  Instead we make our own.  In years past I have used a popsicle mold that always resulted in the plastic handle coming out, but the frozen treat staying inside the mold.  This year I got smart.  The first picture is Monster drinking orange juice out of a shot glass (no judgement, they make the BEST little kid cups) and helping me mash up previously frozen fruit.  We did a strawberry and banana mix and a blueberry mash.  We added a little apple juice to both to help thin it out a bit.  Now here comes the genius part.  I used my vacuum sealer to make ice pop type sections, used a funnel to fill them with mashed fruit, and sealed them up. 






Ta-da!  Popsicles for the freezer that are actually good for you!


Another snack time favorite of ours is yogurt in an ice cream cone.  It is a trick I learned when working at a daycare years ago, and both boys love it.  Monkey makes a good mess of his, but the drips of yogurt and sticky handprints give our dog something to do. 

We have a sourdough starter that Monster helps me feed every couple of days and we have been trying out different recipes.  Earlier this week we made sourdough donuts.  They were tasty and semi healthy since we used whole wheat flour, but then not so healthy because we fried them instead of baking.

 

Monkey is teething again.  Another tooth pooped through three days ago and Monster had to check it out.

 

A few Funnys of the week from my silly boys:

Monster was laying on the stairs leading to the basement hollering at me "I need you mom! I need you!".  I went to see what was up and he asked me to come open the freezer in the garage. 
"No, it is just meat you don't need anything down there."
"Yes! Need pork!" Monster replied.
"What? You need pork? No come upstairs. Do you want a popsicle?"
"NO! Don't need a popsicle, need PORK!"
I ran through a list of options and he finally settled on milk and forgot about his sudden, and strange, craving for pork.

Monkey's gets his name appropriately; I have found him in the following places in the last couple of days: on top of the changing table, in the kitchen sink, on the counter by the fish tank eating junk mail, on top of the kitchen table anytime we leave something/anything on it, and we just replaced the mattress in our room and it is a good five inches taller than the last one, but Monkey has figured out how to climb on my hope chest and get on the bed still.  He also made a good attempt to climb INTO his crib the other day, but fell down instead.

Monster has taken to shouting "MOMMY I LOVE YOU!" whenever he does something he is not supposed to or knows I am upset with him or am not paying attention.  It is cute, but also slightly distracting from the issue at hand.

I moved toys around while the boys were at a friends house this week.  The train table moved to the playroom in the basement and the building blocks came back upstairs.  When I picked the boys up I told Monster I had moved things around.  He immediately told me "Move train table back upstairs!" and I hoped he would forget about it, but he asked all day to move it back upstairs...I think he has forgotten now because as I write this he is actually playing with the blocks whereas before he would just tell me to take them downstairs.

Monster has discovered how cool the library is and asks to go randomly.  He is not into story time and wont sit through it, but instead we have to ride the elevator, look at the adult non-fiction train books, then go pick out a back pack from the children's area (they have themed backpacks filled with books and usually a video), and then he wants to stand at the front door and push the wheel chair button every time the door closes.  It is great fun.  This week though we found the children's non-fiction train books and I showed him we can search for train books on the computer.  That was two days ago and we have read his stack of seven books at least two dozen times.  Apparently he is ready for new ones though, because he asked to go to the library and get new books today.  I love that he is so interested in books right now!  Our library has a children's card program but I think we may wait until next fall to get him his own card when he will be less likely to lose it!

Cheers,

M.