Brayden the Little Farmer

Since Wendy works four nights each week I get to spend time with the kids alone. This year I decided to try square foot gardening in hopes to keep the weed population under better control. While I was out tending my garden Brayden pulled one the kids chairs out into the garden and plopped himself down on it. I turned around and whipped out my cell phone to snap a quick picture. It matches a picture of my father. Maybe Brayden is growing up to be a little backyard farmer.

Air Show

Salt Lake City was chosen as one of three cities to get an Air Show this year put on by the United States Air Force. I took Sabrina and Moira to the Air Show on Saturday along with about 80,000 other people. Even though we could see the planes from our house it is a different feel when you are there on the tarmac up-close. Sabrina was most interested in seeing an airplane that could fly backwards. I was most interested in seeing the Thunderbirds perform. They were the grand finale, of course, and by then the kids were pretty tired of the airplanes. Luckily, they found some friends to play with so I could watch.

Wendy stayed at home with Brayden which was wise because he wouldn't have lasted 20 minutes. I bought the girls some souvenier jet airplanes and they were thrilled about those and played with them for the next week non-stop.

Watch out for striped skunks

Saturday was our 9th wedding anniversary and I decided that I wanted to do something fun as a family. We spent the day at the Hogle zoo in Salt Lake. The kids loved it! The night before Sabrina made a special map of all the animals she wanted to see and took it with her throughout the zoo. Brayden kept yelling at all the animals and had to be restrained from jumping in with the penguins, and the gorilla, and the meerkats. Moira just wanted to go spend her money on a big swirly lollypop at the gift shop. We walked and walked and covered miles. My feet were ready to fall off but the kids were still going (at least until they got in the car and fall asleep). They rode on the train and the carousel. And they watched the elephant do tricks at the elephant show. Sabrina's favorite part was a giant elephant statue that made sounds and even trumpeted the pop goes the weasel song and squirted water out of its trunk at anyone standing in front of it. Ingenious. The animals were pretty docile, probably due to the humidity and the sheer number of people at the zoo that day. (It was packed, memorial day weekend, of course.)

After the zoo we dropped the kids off at aunt Annalyn's house to eat dinner and play while Adam and I went and spent time doing stuff WE like to do. We went to a restaurant supply store that was totally awesome. I know, how boring can we be, but we love it! I bought a big, giant stainless steel bowl, a one-piece metal pancake turner (they're hard to find), and a small sifter for powdered sugar. Again, how boring, but we loved it!! Then we went to go find a quiet restaurant for some good comfort food. We ended up at Mimi's Cafe which we hadn't been to in years but figured it could be a safe option. Oh, it was heavenly. We were early enough that we skipped the dinner rush and ordered food that wasn't overly seasoned or over-cooked. My requirements were for cushy seats, soft lighting, soft music, and delicious desserts. I got it all as I finished off with a decadent chocolate mousse. I've decided that I LOVE french cooking. Adam even got to have scallops and bread pudding. Not together, but they are his favorite foods (besides ice-cream, of course). It was a short date but we were tired. Grabbed the kids, went home, put everybody to bed and fell asleep at 10 pm. I haven't gone to bed that early in months. Does that mean we're old, now?

Because I feel like it

This aloha print background is pretty cute. But it has no significance other than that I felt like it. No, we're not going to Hawaii for our anniversary next week. That's still on my wish list. But our anniversary did make me think of Hawaii and all my great memories from my mission and meeting Adam, etc. As parents we don't get many opportunities to do something just because we feel like it.

Instead of going to Hawaii we're going to the Salt Lake City zoo with the kids. They are super-excited! Sabrina is telling us how she's going to get a map and go straight to the Lions and Tigers and just stay there all day. I'm looking forward to it too. I think we'll have a lot of fun if we can keep our kids from losing themselves and falling in an animal pit.

And next year Adam and I are planning on a real anniversary vacation: no kids, no schedules, no worries. Wouldn't that be heaven! After ten years of marriage it will be time to take a break. But since I have another year before that happens. . . .

Spring is here

Spring has finally arrived at our house. I know it's been a long time since we posted, but spring is a very busy time at our house. We spend a lot of our extra time trying to stay ahead of the lawn mowing, garden cleaning-out, planting the vegetable garden, spring cleaning the house, etc. It's been hectic. We also had ten windows in our house replaced (actually 9 windows and 1 door). The difference is incredible. I had no idea that we were living in such a drafty house. I just figured we were too cheap to turn up the thermostat.

We've also been having problems with our rental property. Looks like we will be heading to the courts once again to deal with tenant problems. After this experience we have definitely changed our format for handling management issues. Even though it's painful, expensive, and time-consuming I look at the experience this way: the only way we learn is from making mistakes. If we did it right the first time we would have no way of knowing why it worked or if we were just lucky. When we make mistakes it forces us to look at the underlying issues and decide if the problem is us, the tenant, the property, etc. That way we actually know why it works.

Onto lighter topics: everyone's doing well. Adam's job is still there, mine is still there, the kids are still there only a little bigger and suntanned. They keep telling us they need a bigger swingset. We have opted to build them a big teeter-totter in the meantime since it's about one percent of the cost of a swing-set. We'll post pictures when it's done.

I've also been busy making strawberry freezer jam. Trying to keep up with the demand in our household. Little kids will eat a lot of jam if it's good! I confess this is a really good batch. Like candy. I bought a flat of strawberries (8 lbs.) for $4.99, spent $6 on pectin and made three batches of jam. Made about 11 pints of jam. Only 9 pints made it into the freezer. IT'S GOOD!!!

Bearded Baby

I just had to post this picture of Brayden. We checked a book out of the library called Whopper Cake. It is about a grampa that makes a HUGE cake for his wife's birthday. It is so big he has to bake it in the bed of his pick-up truck. At the end of the story they give the recipe. It is one of those old fashoned, made-from-scratch type recipes. We happend to have all the required ingredients so we whipped it up. It baked for 50 minutes even though the book said about 30 minutes. It didn't come out of the oven too pretty because we had to keep checking it and that made the cake fall. It was one of the moistest cakes I have ever had. You will have to check the book out of our library to get the recipe.

New Bread Recipe

On Saturday Wendy's aunt stopped by to visit for a little while and brought over a DVD for us to look at. It was a instruction video from Pantry Secrets on how to make bread in less than 1 hour. It piqued our interest, especially since our bread machine takes 2 hours on the rapid cycle.

This recipe calls for 6 ingredients and about 10 minutes of prep time. It makes 4 loaves of bread, or a few dozen rolls, or pizza crust, bread sticks, hot dog buns, or whatever you want. Pretty amazing. The video calls for the dough to me mixed in a Bosch universal kitchen machine (which we have) but you can mix the dough by hand if you want the exercise.

10 1/2 cups flour
1/2 cup sugar
1 tablespoon salt
3 heaping tablespoons yeast
4 cups hot water
3 tablespoons Soy lecithin

Wendy's aunt figures she can make a loaf of bread for about 12 cents. WOW!! Just that day we had visited the bread store and filled our freezer with about $40 worth of bread. According to her calculations we could have made 300 loaves for the same price as our 30 that we bought.

That convinced us to get some soy lecithin (I mean, who stocks that in their pantry).
After I left for work on Monday Wendy got down to work and whipped up some bread following this recipe. Here are some pictures.






The braided loaf was a desert filled with a sugary cream cheese filling.

Today, Wendy made pizza with this recipe and it was AWESOME.