Archive for January, 2009

Tangental Toddlers…

Posted by KK on Saturday, 31 January, 2009

My niece, Raleigh (5), came over this morning to visit with the boys while they ate their breakfast. I was in the kitchen unloading and reloading the dishwasher and straightening up but listening in on their coffee talk. So at our little square dining room table sat a little one at each side. As far as I know, Wheat began the conversation and it all started and ended a little something like this:

Wheat: “Raleigh, look at this cereal box. This is a wind turbine. Do you know what this does?”

Raleigh: “No.”

Wheat: “It creates energy from wind.”

River: “Waleigh, look at this book. I am gonna show you a picture of President Lincoln. <flipping pages>…Look, Waleigh. This is President Lincoln right here in this circle.”

Raleigh: “Jenna has a mean boy in her class and he threw a book at the teacher. He is a mean boy. His name is….Ummm….Nicholas Lester.”

Lake: “Well, he should have been made to go see the principal’s office”

Raleigh: “We don’t have a president at our church but maybe we do and it’s my dad because he’s the preacher.”

Lake: “Not president, the principal! You know….the principal’s office where you go when you get in trouble at a school?”

Raleigh: “It wasn’t at a school, silly. We don’t go to school. It was at our church.”

Lake: “Ooohh.”

Wheat: “Raleigh, did you know I have a parasite in my body? My mom says I have a parasite in my body and it eats all my food up when I swallow it. My parasite is big and long and at attaches to the inside of my stomach and like latches on there and you can drink this stuff that will kill the parasite and then you can poop it out and look at it.”

Snow dayz…

Posted by KK on Tuesday, 20 January, 2009

Man what a day….Jason surprised us all by taking a vacation day (one of many he will be taking in the weeks to come so as to not lose 60 hours of vacation) without telling us. Yay! We also woke up to an amazing blanket of thick, fluffy snow all over our neighborhood…finally enough to sled in for the first time since our kids have been born! After hours of playing in the snow and sledding, we came in for hot cocoa and watched our 44th president take his oath in Washington, D.C., amongst about 1.8 million people. What a cool day!

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We have dreams, too…

Posted by KK on Monday, 19 January, 2009

Our boys had such a fun day learning about the great Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. We read some books and articles online and then did some crafts to commemorate the occasion. In one of the stories, we read that the approximate 250,000 people who attended his speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial in August 1963 stuck their feet in the cool water in the pool in front of the memorial and bought sack lunches from vendors which contained cheese sandwiches, apples and a piece of pound cake. So for lunch we had grilled cheeses, apple slices and pound cake muffins.

Below is a pic of one of their crafts which were reproductions of Andy Warhol’s famous painting of Marilyn Monroe which we took to symbolize that each portrait is the same, just a different color, just like all people.

 

 

 

 

 

 

And below is a pic of our favorite project. They colored the hands all different shades of ivory and brown and pink to represent all the many colors of skin and we printed and cut out MLK quotes and glued them onto the hands. The boys had a blast and we crafted all day in place of math & reading and the usual school work and I think they learned more on this day than they have in months.

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Sunday lunch conversations amongst boys…

Posted by KK on Sunday, 18 January, 2009

River (youngest): “I am stronger than both of you guys.”

Wheat & Lake: “No, you’re not.”

Wheat (oldest): “River, let’s say we’re in a fight. I punch you in the stomach. You cry. I win.”

Lake laughs while River stares at Wheat with a very steely gaze…

River: “I punch you in the penis. I win.”

Jason: choked on his sushi…

 

In his exact, sweet words…

Posted by KK on Tuesday, 13 January, 2009

Lake walks up to me and says….

“Mommy, I drew this picture of us with a heart in between us and I know it looks like a butt but it’s not a butt, it’s a heart.”

 

 

Pesky ants…

Posted by KK on Thursday, 8 January, 2009

Yes…they are back, already! They seem to think along with many of our trees and foliage that it is Spring and when the trees begin to bud then it is time for them to visit the Baileys. Well, you know we don’t use harsh pesticides or herbicides in, around or near our house so this is something we deal with although not without a great deal of screaming and/or sometimes cursing these creatures. We have an air vent next to our front door where they like to enter the house. Why? Don’t ask me…it is no where near the kitchen although these ants never seem to care much about the kitchen and it’s contents. So next to the front door is my desk and they have found many fun things to do there lately. While working yesterday, I spilled a Dr. Pepper into my keyboard. Not that big a deal…the keyboard (detached…this was not my laptop) is old and has been on it’s last leg for some time. So, I did my best to clean it out and went along with my day. Keyboards are cheap…this could have been a lot worse. Today, after school when I began to work a bit, I noticed that the ants built a colony in my keyboard overnight. Ok…now this is really irritating to me. The boys and I had to run a few morning errands so out of frustration and not caring whether this act sent my keyboard over the edge or not I drenched it by spraying a lemon & lime juice mix all over it. I once read that lemon and/or lime juice is a natural ant deterrent and will rid your house of them without the use of chemicals. Well….I really would like to talk to the people who claim this. After I drenched my keyboard with the juice, the boys and I left the house for about 2 hours. When we came back, not only was my entire desk and keyboard uber sticky (which I HATE) but all the ants had fetched bottles of tequila and shakers of salt and were out basking on all the keys.

Question #472 for God when I get to Heaven – Why on earth did you create ants? (This question appears about 236 entries below “Why on earth did you create mosquitoes?”)

 

See saw…

Posted by KK on Thursday, 8 January, 2009

Lake was just doing some reading in his handwriting book and had a sentence that said “Zoey saw two cats” and Lake screamed, “MOM, this book is saying it is ok for this girl to saw two cats!” LOL

Pizza & Facebook…

Posted by KK on Tuesday, 6 January, 2009

So my boss along with a few friends and family members have been urging me to join Facebook for quite some time. Who has time for this? Every day I wake up, brew coffee, feed kids, clean up after breakfast, brew more coffee, school kids, cook lunch, feed kids again, clean up after lunch, work a bit, play with kids, do more lessons if need be, cook dinner, feed kids and husband dinner, clean up after dinner, sit down with family and play a game or Rock Band on Wii (our new family time event since Christmas) and once the kids and husband are off to bed I sit, by myself, and veg and read or crochet and/or both. So, not sure why, but I started a Facebook page last night and OMG how addictive this is!! I knew it would be which was why I was so hesitant. I stayed up way too late making and editing things on my page and then finding friends to ask if they wanna come be my friend and pretty much all day today I have been chatting up people and/or checking out pages of long lost friends, looking at pictures of their kids that I didn’t even know they had, listening to albums that I didn’t even know they recorded, and the list goes on and on. So if yau’ll don’t see me for several weeks you know where I’ve been. LOL

And the pizza part….since I have been so consumed all morning with my head in Facebook I got lazy and threw together a homemade pizza for the boys for lunch. Yes, I think it is as easy (and much healthier) to do homemade pizzas than it is to bake a pre-made, frozen pizza and yau’ll know me, I don’t buy pre-made and/or processed foods. However, I do buy ready-made pizza crusts because I don’t like eating pizza toppings overtop raw dough and that is what every pizza dough recipe I have ever attempted has tasted like. Anyway, NOTE TO SELF: REMOVE the cardboard from under the pizza crust BEFORE baking. While my house is still in one piece, our pizza crust never got crispy as it should have and it tasted like cardboard. I did bake the pizza on my Pampered Chef stone so the cardboard was between the crust and the stone so this likely protected us from fire. If anyone drives by my house and sees smoke, please call 9-1-1!! And incidentally, I have made a hundred homemade pizzas this way and have NEVER left the cardboard under the crust….I am blaming Facebook. LOL