Rest of the cookie pictures

Here are the rest of the pictures I promised.  If I don't post them now, I never will.  

It's times like this that I regret letting Parker wear a shirt that is too small, inside out, all day long and not brush her hair.  Oh well.

Cutting out cookies

A leftover ball of dough scraps that she played with off and on throughout the day.

Decorating the very special longhorn cookies for Bob.  He likes red hots on his Christmas cookies, so Parker was in charge of those.

I finally let her eat one.

Close up of the decorations.  I do the icing (my signature squiggle style), and Parker does the sprinkles.  You can't really tell but they have sparkly sugar on top in addition to the few bits of colored sprinkles that I allow.

Christmas eve in the kitchen

How to you fill the looooong day before Christmas?  Cooking and eating worked pretty well for me.  I started early this morning making cookie dough, then Parker and I cut them out and baked them.  She made it nearly all the say to the end before getting bored.  I have pictures of her helping...I'll put those in a different post.

After we iced cookies, it was time for a special fancy Christmas eve appetizer I've never tried to make before.  Shrimp Dumplings!  I had shrimp in the freezer, and the other ingredients on hand, so if these never got made, I was only out a couple bucks for the wonton wrappers.  They were great - just like at a restaurant.

Next it was time for pizza.  (I bought frozen dough). Parker had canadian bacon and onion and we had canadian bacon, onion, mushroom and pineapple mango salsa.

And now I'm going to SIT DOWN for the rest of the evening and help Parker track santa on the NORAD site.  

Birthday party pics

A couple weeks ago we had a birthday party for Parker.  This was our first 'at home' party for her....in the past, we've always invited her whole class and had it somewhere like a bounce house.  Luckily this year she was into the idea of just a few close friends and doing things at home.  Since she has a summer birthday, it makes it easy to just invite a few girls and not everyone without the word getting out that someone was excluded.

When the girls arrived I had some pizza dough rolled out, and they all gathered around and make their own pizza. 

 While we were waiting for the pizza to cook, I did a quicky face painting job on them (they could choose a heart or a star) and then they ran around a bit and we did silly pictures. 

 After pizza and watermelon and fizzy lemonaide, they colored their aprons (sort of backwards....it would have made more sense to color aprons first and then wear them to make pizzas, but time didn't permit.  I drew everyone's name and a cupcake on their apron with a washable marker and then they used permanent fabric markers to trace over the parts of my design they wanted to keep, and then colored them in.  The fabric markers and the aprons were folded up at the end and put in their goody bag. 

 

Parker hasn't finished hers yet....I drew a cake on hers instead of a cupcake.

 After that we played charades which they enjoyed.  Funny note: Parker has always called charades "smithereens" because she can never remember the right name.  

Then it was cake time.  Parker requested a homemade cake like I did for Bob's birthday.  It's chocolate devil's food (mix) with dark chocolate ganache (scratch) icing.  Next time I might do more kid friendly flavors, but everyone managed to eat theirs.  Everything goes down easily with Blue Bell ice cream (Vanilla bean, per Parker's specs).  

After that she opened her gifts and the parents started to arrive to pick everyone up.  I think everyone had a good time, and Parker was thrilled with it. It wasn't really a ton of work, and Bob was a lot of help which made it pretty non-stressful.   I'd surely do it again if we kept the guest list this small. 

Happy Fake Birthday

At Parker's school everyone brings cupcakes or cookies for the class on their birthday.  I'm pretty sure there are district rules about serving everyone sweets, but don't worry about that part.  Since Parker has a summer birthday, we just pick a day at the end of the year and announce that it will be our cupcake day.  Last year I bought cupcakes and that was fine, but this year I decided to make them myself.  Believe it or not, I've never made cupcakes (not counting as a kid).  Luckily, Parker wanted a certain mix from the store that had colored sprinkles in it ("confetti") so I didn't have to do them from scratch.  I hear that the box and from scratch taste about the same anyway.

Parker wanted to help.  She poured the batter with me hovering over her and dictating her every more.  "That's enough in that one!  Little more in here.  That's enough!"

 

Next was icing.  They looked really pretty like this - light blue frosting with some sugar sprinkled on for a little sparkle.  But we couldn't stop there.  Parker announced that her theme was going to be tie dye.  I don't know where she gets this theme business.....her Gigi I guess....but she's big on wanting to know what the theme of all events will be. 
Cupcake newsflash:  Wrappers are all the rage now.  We made homemade wrappers out of doilies and painted them to give them a tie dye look.  Even Bob helped.

The finished product.  Pretty cute, right?

Big artsy picture, like the food bloggers do.  I added little candy stars, which don't quite fit the theme I'm told, but added that little extra guild on the lily.

I managed to get them up to school without smushing any of them.  In Parker's class, you can dance with friends or do a solo while they sing to you.  To my surprise, Parker did a solo.  She's very comfortable with her classmates apparently.

My cupcakes got rave reviews, and several of the kids carefully slipped their wrappers of and took them home.  

I hope this didn't have too many pictures to load properly for all of you.  If so, let me know and I can break up the posts into parts for faster loading.

Friday

It's friday (or it was when I took these pictures), and friday always ends with pizza.  Sometimes I make the crust, sometimes I get it from Whole Foods.  This was a busy day, so I did WF dough. The toppings are usually whatever leftovers I have that I know won't get eaten over the weekend.  One was red bell pepper, onion, chicken and jalapeno.  One was zucchini, tomato, onion, pesto and goat cheese.  Wanna guess who's was who's?  (did I punctuate that right?)  Parker has recently moved WAY out of her pizza comfort zone and likes black olives on hers.  Last week she had red bell pepper and if we are ordering delivery, she requests sausage. 
Parker was not so thrilled to take this picture as you can see (since it wasn't her idea).  She doesn't appreciate being rushed, and you have to rush when you set hot food down in front of Bob and then say "wait a minute...".  

Parker being a mime (she's trapped in a glass box)

The mime thing is Parker's newest "look at me!".  She's determined to do a mime routine for the school talent show...if she can figure out how to incorporate a headstand into the act.

The other two Parker funnies this week are the day she woke up speaking in a British accent and her singing her original song, Chlorine Spider.  I'm tempted to get video of the Chlorine Spider song, but it really sticks in your head once you've heard it, so probably wouldn't be nice to inflict on you.

Random update

I don't really have much to report, but I'll post some catch up pictures anyway.  

For the last couple months, another first grade mom and i have been working on a quilt for the school's fund raising auction.  We had the kids all color a quilt block, and then we sewed them together and had it professionally quilted.  The quilter was either inspired by our great design, or took pity on us and did a great custom job, going around all the hand prints and adding hearts here and there.  It looks so nice!  Now all we have to do is bind it, and hope it sells for a lot.  Here's Parker's square.  I'll show a pic of the whole semi-completed quilt in another post.

Buddy the fish is doing well (knock on wood).  We've upgraded his tank to one that is lighted, heated, filtered and planted.  Bob has him trained to eat from a syringe.  After some tummy issues, we had to switch his food to tiny pellets, but they sink, so you have to give them to him one by one or he misses them and the foul up the tank.  We also have to soak them first, so the dropper makes them easier to handle.  Buddy gets very aggressive and bites the dropper if you put it in the water...I'm pretty sure we could get him to 'jump' up for his food if we wanted to, but that doesn't seem very nice. 

It's warming up here.  I noticed today that the Angel Trump that we had in the garage for the winter has a couple big flowers on it.  This was a big surprise since I've only seen it bloom late in the summer.  The Myer lemon tree (far right) has lots of blooms too.  Hopefully we'll have lemons this year.

Parker-Built (updated)

One of Parker's quirks is her love of empty boxes.  Usually when something comes in the mail, or we eat all of a cereal, I try to quickly break down the box, or hide it in the garage before she makes plans for it.
 On Saturday, she spied a couple boxes that I hadn't hid yet, and immediately made big plans for them to be homes for her stuffed hamsters.

Step 1 is covering them.  She roped Bob into helping her.  His quirk is that he loves wrapping gifts.  They're a great match.

The completed home.  A cozy home with a patio and outhouse.  Notice the hamster is wearing a scarf that Parker finger-knit for him.  

 

Another Hamster room.  Notice the baby bottle water bottle and the tart pan hamster wheel.

Fall baking

 

I hosted book club recently and made some fall treats.  I think the pumpkins are the cutest...but I got more compliments on the peach tarts. 

End of school party

I'm catching up on posting pictures. Here are some from Parker's last day of kindergarten. They set aside an hour for a class party - we had a 'luau', hence the plastic leis. Most classes did stuff in the classroom, crafts and making sundaes, but I was glad to get them outside to burn off some of the excited energy.

Relay race: plastic egg on a spoon

Sack race (with pillowcases)

Limbo

Parker and her teacher

Group pic

These are the tshirts that I made for the class. I was really pleased with how they turned out. The design is a little hard to see, but it's supposed to look a little bit like a passport stamp. I have the school name and year and a "k" for kindergarten going around the edge. The week before, we passed them around and they all signed the backs of each. It will be a nice keepsake they can wear for a while (some longer than others).

Another tie dye pic

I just noticed this one and thought I'd post it. We got a good laugh from this shirt. The yellow swirl in the middle looks a lot like a caterpillar, and it has 3 red spots that look like eyes, and a scowling mouth.

tie dye shirts

Last week was Parker's birthday and birthday party. For favors, I thought it would be fun to make each girl a tie dye t-shirt. I did most of the 'tying' and Parker helped with the dying and washing.

Ready to help.
"Is it my turn yet? When's it gonna be my turn? Can I help with something?"

Dye application. Parker was mainly in charge of yellow.

Bagging up the shirts to sit outdoors for a spell.

The best part: final rinse and unbinding. They all turned out great!

Final product after drying. If you squint, you can see the spiral better.