Mommy's helpers

It tickles me to death whenever the girls do something like I do. Here they are laid out on the floor reading my cast-off parenting magazines while I perused the new one ...

The only thing better than making fall goodies is making fall goodies with my girls. I found 2 lb buckets of blueberries at the store for only $4, so I made blueberry freezer jam. I used the less sugar pectin, so it turned out very fruity, less syrupy, and very good.

Then I made rolls to take with us for our weekend in Boise. I let each of the girls have a bit of the dough, and they had fun with it. L rolled it out, cut it, shaped rolls, and played with it. S .... well, she just enjoyed every sticky bite of it.

I've found a new way to get to check my email ... the other computer is usually has its power strip turned off, so L and S can play all they want without messing anything up. They love it.

Back to the fall goodies: C came home with a bag of zucchini the other day. I asked where it came from, and he said a woman at work was asking around if anyone ate it. He said he didn't like it by itself, but his wife makes great zucchini bread. She handed him the bag. There were five relatively large zucchini in it. I made spaghetti sauce with it the first night, veggie lasagna with it the second night, then turned the two biggest into loaves and loaves of zucchini bread. I had one left, and I was wondering if I should just shred and freeze it for later or make it into another dinner. Then C came home with another bag: Two summer squash, on zucchini, and one cucumber. So I've only just started ....

I also picked up a whole bowl of green grapes from a friend's vine - I picked them for her while we were visiting, then she insisted I take a large amount home with us. I've got most of them in the dehydrator right now. Golden raisins, anyone?

Just to get something off my chest ...

I answered the door yesterday to a solicitor. It was a young kid trying to get "points" so he could go on a trip to Hawaii and Rome. I could tell by his smooth talk and trying to get me to give him high-fives and the way he stumbled when I didn't respond the way he wanted me to that he was going on a script. I made excuses to go, "I've got to make dinner ... I don't want to keep the door open, we're letting in flies ... I'm not interested ..."

He said my neighbor (motioning towards the other half of our house, where a single lady lives) had sent him over and said, "He's a nice guy ..." So now I knew he was lying to my face. I tried again to get him to leave when he showed me a list of magazines, "I'm not interested in buying any magazines ..." At which point he said, "Who said anything about buying them? I just asked you to look! I'm not asking you to give me any money." (As if that wasn't where he was going with it - sure, I give money to the magazine, but then they send him off on his trip to Rome, so what's the difference?)

"I'm not interested!" I said, and I would have slammed the door, but for my two girls who were standing in the doorway.

And now for what's really bugging me about it: Then he said, "Oh, is it because I'm a black man? I make you nervous?"

Seething and foaming at the mouth ensued. I can't believe the gall of the boy, to use race to sell his magazines to someone who has already shown she didn't want them. In essence, he said, "Well, if you don't buy a magazine from me, it's because you're racist."

I've come up with a dozen responses I should have said, my favorite being, "What kind of a question is that? Are you intimidated by me because I'm white?" What I actually did was say, "No, I just don't want to buy your magazines, Get in the house, girls!" and shut the door as quickly as I could (Which was not very quickly, because I had to pull each of the girls individually out of the way).

Anyway, here's hoping I can stop seething now ...

Just some pics ...

I was going through our pictures the other day and found a bunch I thought were so cute. Much thanks to my sister-in-law, M, who takes such amazing pics of my kids.


We were walking to the church to take family pics, and S insisted on being carried in the bucket I was bringing to sit on.


L is amazingly beautiful, but she's not the most photogenic ... I really liked this pic of her, though. I think it's fitting, since she's almost always in motion.


Here's L again - it's been too cold to swim, really, so she spent most of her time outside of the pool.

The girls like to swing at the park where we've been going walking this summer - even when I told them Mama was done pushing them, they figured out their own way to swing.

Here's S trying her best to do what her big sister did - problem is her arms aren't as long proportionally as her big sister's, and if she grabbed the bar, she'd also bonk her head on it. But she had to try ...

And L, of course, doing the monkey bars. She loves to do it - back and forth and back and forth and ... well, you get the picture.

Look at that adorable face!

The girls figured out they could go down the twisty slide without needing Mama to catch them, and it makes them feel like big girls to do it "all by myself"!

Here's S on the Slide.

And another pretty face ...

Happy 5th Anniversary!

Five years ago on Aug. 6th, C and I were married in the Manti, UT temple.

Las Vegas Vacation

Hi Everyone,

Well, we've survived our first trip without our girls! C had a convention in Las Vegas which just happened to be over our 5th Anniversary, so we drove down through SLC and dropped the girls off at my mom's house before heading down to LV.

First off, the girls did great. We were at my mom's for two days with them before we left, and by the time we did, both girls were just so thrilled to be with Grandma, they didn't even care we were leaving. They were excited to see us when we got back on Friday, but they haven't been half as clingy as I was expecting.

Well, we jumped in the car and headed south on I-15, stopping for lunch in Cedar City. We got out of the car, went in, ordered, ate our lunch, then paused and stared at each other. It had only taken us about fifteen minutes - something that would have taken at least a half hour with the girls. Wow. What a difference it is to be by ourselves.

C had the convention to attend Tues-Thurs, so I got to play. Tuesday, I sat in the room reading for the morning, then explored the hotel/casino, found the swimming pool and all the resturants and shops, met up with C for lunch, then read some more. Wednesday I got to go see my good friend, Rachel, who lives in LV. I found her house easily, thanks to her good directions, and we hung out talking most of the morning. I got to meet her little girl, who is six months older than my S. She's a doll, and she made me miss my own girls. Rachel keeps much better track of all our old friends than I do, so it was fun to hear how everyone from that time in my life is doing.

Wed night we had an adventure. Chalk this one up to my own naiveté: I saw the taxi fares written on the side of a taxi: $3.50 base charge and (I thought) $.20 per mile afterwards. Well, we were at the Hilton, on the north end of the strip. I figured fare from the Hilton to the Luxor would be around $5. Well, except I'd read it wrong, and it's $.20/30 sec afterwards, or somethign like that. And our cabbie took the scenic route. We ended up racking up over $17 in fare before we got to the Luxor. To make it worse, I left my purse in the cab. I realized it almost immediately, and we were able to call the cab company and have him bring it back to us within ten minutes, but I was almost beating my head against the wall, I was so mad at myself.

After the insane cab fare, we decided we were going to walk the whole way back to the hotel, so we did. We took breaks at the Bellagio to see the waterfountains and the garden, and again at the Venetian, where I wanted to show C the indoor canal. We didn't get back to the Hilton until 10pm - just late enough to find out that the "city that never sleeps" closes all its resturants at 10pm. There was only one still open, but it had a line out the door, and our feet were shot. So, we went back up to the room and ordered pizza.

Needless to say, we were tired on Thurs, so I spent the morning in the room reading (praying there would be some kind of redemption at the end of John Grisham's The Appeal - there isn't. I hated it. I do not recommend it.)

Then we went to The Gun Store in the afternoon. C is thinking about gettting himself a handgun now, but if he does, we want it to be something I can handle, too. We went to shoot a forty caliber SIG, and the range instructor we got listened to why we were there shooting and pulled his Glock off his hip and let us fire it. I liked the Glock much much better than the SIG, but then, the SIG had a compensator on the barrel that made it very barrel-heavy. My wrist just isn't strong enough to hold it straight comfortably with all that weight on the end. I was able to handle them both, though, so now C's thinking about a 1911 .45 instead of the .40.

We went back up to Salt Lake on Friday, just in time to meet my mom's whole family at Snowbird. We got to stay there two nights with everyone before coming home on Sunday. There are a lot of people we wish we could have seen driving through Utah, but it was such a busy trip, we didn't have time. To all of you: We love you!

I did take my camera, but I never did get it out and take pics. Sorry.

I think that about sums it up. It's so nice to come home after a long trip.