Waiting for Snow

We have been having a lot of fun with the snow lately, Avot in particular. Despite an uncharacteristically warm December...

okay...it wasn't quite this warm, but close!  some days we had birds singing.

The colder days we spent inside, Avot creating beautiful hot pads: 

...and presents for the girls for Christmas.

It was not even cold for our St. Miklas morning, featured here, from early December.

Zsa-man was taking it all in stride, taking on solids regardless of what the rest of the world was doing.  A true boy, food comes first!

Avot spent many a fair day like this lamenting the lack of snow.  Pipalcious was obviously enjoying it.

Papaya was a little less cheery, probably anticipating that these sunny days would not last.

 While waiting for the famous New York winter snows, we have all kinds of amazing feats at our house:

From Chugger-dude on his ripstik...

...to super Dad and his ability to carry babies and their carriers.

Pipalicious can do strange things with her face.

Chugger-dude is enjoying it all!

Avot is a little frantic, awaiting the snow.  Zsa-man is scared.

Fortunately, he succumbed to slumber.

Meanwhile, someone is on the lookout.

"I see you!"

Well, the snow finally came. Avot made good use of it, running about in the snow every chance she could get, pelting the unwary with snowballs.  She, Chugger-dude and Pipalicious spent an entire afternoon outside chasing each other around, with epic snowball battles.  We are going to miss Avot!

Avot also took Pipalicious to Rudy's, our local hometown diner.  They have a monster burger called "The Mojo" of incredible proportions.  Lek has eaten 5 of them now, with missionaries, family and friends.  The Goob consumed his first one this last week, fries and all and pretty much licked the plate clean.  Avot and Pipalicious?  Pipalicious had a mini one and ate about half of it.  Avot ate about half of hers...but they loved it!

Meanwhile, back at home Spooner and Papaya built castles and bushes and "temples" out of dice.  It is amazing how little the kids need to build and play with!  Dice, game pieces, cardboard.  Hava is always asking me for some piece of garbage or another to keep and use.  Her little set-up on her quiet time blankets are very involved.

Back to the little ones, Papaya and Spooner then helped me cook cookies, a favorite of theirs.  It normally works out except when Spooner takes it into his head to dump more of whatever he can find on the counter-top into the mix.  We have had some interesting, non-redeemable combinations :S.  Just today, for "Nursery" we made homemade pretzels, one of our family favorites:

CTR Pretzels

By Heather Brinkerhoff

1 teaspoon salt

2½–3 cups flour

1 tablespoon yeast

1 cup warm water

1 tablespoon sugar

melted butter

1. 1. 
   Mix the first five ingredients until they form a ball. Then knead dough until smooth and elastic. Cover with a clean towel and let rise in a warm place for one hour.
2. 2. 
   Pull off sections of the dough and roll into long ropes. Form the ropes into the letters “CTR” or make the shape of the CTR shield.
3. 3. 
   Put the pretzels on a greased cookie sheet and bake 8–10 minutes at 450°F (232°C). Brush pretzels with melted butter.
4. We made it safely through this recipe because they were distracted from the dough over to the sink, where Papaya was peeling eggs for our chef salad dinner that night and Spooner and she were busy "washing" dishes with me.  Very wet.  Bonding.

Halloween and snow

Yesterday, Hava and Pipalicious were busy for some time creating scary masterpieces to hang up along our hall.  I came by some time after they had finished, only to notice that they had used glue sticks to adhere their pictures to the wall.

Glue sticks seem so wimpy.  It's not going to take the paint off my wall, right?

Speaking of paint, Avot is excited to paint her room.  She wants something vivid: vibrant green, glowing yellow,...red...purple.  Hmmmm.... :)  J/K.  I am excited for her!

It snowed last night.  Q-dawg, with his usual impeccable timing, got the heaters up and running yesterday. Avot has been mischeviously darting around the house, dumping snow down the neck of unsuspecting kids...and those who are leery :).

The Goob has been doing better with his stitches on his wound from capture the flag (pics on facebook).  He is now not hobbling around like he was.

Liliputian has a little girl's group with a friend where they are studying the lives of famous wonderful women and learning house skills.  For instance, this semester they are learning how to cook.  The lady just wanted a small group for her daughter, so it has been good one on one for Liliputian.  I met the lady when she volunteered to help with Knights of Freedom, but, after talking it all out, we found out she loved working with girls, so we divided and conquered a bit :).

Chugger-dude spent the greater part of yesterday in the motions of work and distraction.  Hard lesson to learn, especially when he has to get up at 6:30 am today to finish mopping, but I have found the lesson sticks and is worth it in the long run :S.  Someday my kids will realize that when it looked like I was being mean, it was actually very hard for me to follow through with consequences and see them suffer.  They will know that I loved them even then...

Snowy memories

First of all, we have learned how to dress warmly, which is particularly easy to do when people like Misty send such beautiful hats and blankets for our baby!  It was like getting a soft warm hug from Grantsville :)!

Spooner loved them so much, he wanted to eat them :).  He "christened" it the first night he used it by spitting up all over it.  Go, Spooner!

As Q-dawg alluded to in one of his comments on an earlier blog, we had quite the snow adventure last Monday.  A delightful family in the ward invited all of us over for dinner and FHE.  Nice, eh?  They are vegetarian and vegan, so it took a little creativity to bring a dish with what we had on hand, but we loaded up all our kids and food and warm clothes and headed out about 2:15.  Q-dawg had worked wonders trying to figure out a good route there, and we were able to make it to their house by 3:30.

They had buckets of toys, two giant exercise balls, a dog outside, and a play area, so my kids thought they were in heaven!  The Mensaros's were wonderful, and we relaxed, played and chatted...well, Q-dawg chatted, I tried to, and the kids exchanged a few words and lots of playing with their kids.  Avot and Lek interacted with the kids and talked occasionally with the adults,  but spent most of the time sitting and listening.

FHE and dinner was sweet and wonderful.  It was nice to feel the shared love of the gospel that brought us together, despite our inabilities at times to communicate effectively (Nora was very patient!). Their oldest daughter and I shared the same favorite song, "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing" (which is in the Hungarian hymnbook!), so we sang that for the opening hymn.  So cool!

We ended the evening around 7 pm, so we could walk the little over 2 miles to the bus to catch it home.  It had started to rain pretty heavily, and then turned to snow as we walked...

...and walked...

...and walked.

Q-dawg had figured out some directions to get us there and had written them down, but we missed a street name or something and found ourselves just headed into a general direction :).  Up hills, down hills, through muddy streets, winding around corners we walked.  Hava made it the entire way on her own! (She has built up her walking muscles apparently :).)  We didn't have any emergency potty breaks, Q-dawg fearlessly kept leading us on, the Goob kept me busy with a long and involved explanation of the Book of Mormon-based computer game he wants to make to help people over come their addictions to computer games (creative).  We made it at last to a street Q-dawg recognized and only had 30 minutes to wait at that stop.  We ate the leftover bread and talked happily under a beautiful tree that overshadowed the bus-stop.  The snowflakes were incredibly big and the effect was wonderful.

Here are some pictures Lek took of a recent snowfall that helps create the mood for the story :).  Beautiful pictures, eh?  He is quite the photographer.

 

When we got to the bus station where we transfer, we figured we either had 4 minutes or 34 minutes to do our "Singing Bee dash" across the skybridge. 

It was 34 minutes.

It was now around 9 pm, and the kids were getting a little tired.  Hava slumped tiredly in the stroller while Papaya went crazy with tired-ness, trying to either slide down into a ditch behind the bus stop or make a break for the busy road.  Spooner was delightfully snuggly and seemed to be just fine.

Much to Lek's chagrin, to pass the time we decided to sing our choir songs.  We delighted the fellow passengers just up the street with rousing renditions of "Matchmaker," "Carrot Stew," and "Love Potion No. 9," to name a few.  So fun!  Q-dawg is doing a great job helping the kids overcome their inhibitions with all our public singing :).

At one point at our time at that "layover", another woman came into the bus stop that we were singing at, and she had quite the nasty cough.  We now have it (although, realistically, it didn't necessarily come from her), and the poor little ones are all dragging.  Sigh.  We have done pretty well staying away from sickness so far, so I am not really whining.  It is just hard to see little ones miserable, even if they are so cute!

We got home late, but safe!  What fun!

I think I already posted this picture below, but loved it enough to post it again, just in case I didn't.

Here the groups is, getting ready to go sledding!

Snow in the ceiling? Blessing in disguise...

We have loved the snow this week!  Nice temps, and off and on snowfall have been such a blessing for my kids who love snow...especially Avot, the woman with the snow dress :).

However, this week we noticed some water patches developing in the ceiling in our kitchen and in the hall.  When Q-dawg called the landlady about them, she gave him permission to go into the attic to check it out.

This is what he found:

Love it!  Snow inside the attic. This house just keeps getting better and better :)! The lack of insulation would also explain a lot about our difficulty trying to keep our house warmed up :)...not to mention our mold problem. 

However, there is an up-side to this!

Q-dawg also found some old sleds in there that the landlady said we could use.  Sweet!  And by "old," I mean old!  Layers of dust and dirt covered them, but the kids were determined and so they and Q-dawg took them for a run down a hill Q-dawg had already scoped out last month.  But there were four of them, so we're good to go!

Check it out!

Some of the gang ready to go!  Nice sleds, eh?

Wonder Hava, sticking it out on the slopes until she had to go potty and Daddy made a mad dash home with her :) (Poem forthcoming!)

Not much to look at, I guess, but the batteries ran out on our camera before we could get better ones.  The kids say you fly down this hill, it is so long.

And, yes, it "counted" for the kid's exercise for the day...one of the big questions in everyone's mind in our house :).

"Never in my life..."

When Q-dawg did his usual trip around the block this morning, shovelling walks as he went, a man asked, "How far away did you come from?"  Q-dawg answered, "Not far, just from the next street over."  The man asked further, "Are you just doing that for service?"  to which Q-dawg replied, "Well, I'm \going up to the neni's house (older lady) that lives on the corner, and I'm just making a path on my way there."

And he said, "Never in my life have I ever seen anything like that."

Funny or sad, you decide :).

We have had a lot of snow here this week, and the kids are in heaven! Here are some other pictures of us enjoying the snow:

Our beautiful, snow-covered backyard, one of our Pipalicious/Liliputian pictures

Lek wanted to get this view of the snow on our neighbor's roof...cool!

Pipalicious and Liliputian got a hold of the camera and took a bunch of winter pictures--this is one of them :)

Chugger-dude and the Goob, in one of the paths they made for Fox and Geese.  Later, Hava was outraged that a cat would walk through the perfect snow and ruin their course.  Imagine that!  Hava,...outraged? :)

Taking a break from Fox and Geese so mom could get a picture.  And, yes, Avot is in a dress.  :) Beautiful, isn't she?

Oh, no!  Pipalicious has a snow ball!

Hava wanted someone to come over and play a new game of Fox and Geese with her, but gave up, and swung on this cool chair instead

Liliputian, showing off the size of the snowman's head

I love my girls!

Hava wanted to make sure this picture was captured...not sure why, but here it is :)!  Maybe she can tell me someday :)...

And here are my men!

Here is the ramp they constructed to roll the middle section on top of the bottom

And now Frosty has a head, complete with carrot and cap!

Check out that height!  Avot and Lek had to get the head-ball on by standing on tip toes and stretching as far as they could.

What a happy guy...

Here is Q-dawg, modelling the wound he got from doing a superman with Chugger-dude into the ditch in our front yard.  Now you know where my kids get it from :)...awesome!  I love it!  The wound doesn't look like much from here, but it created a goose-egg that took up the bottom third of this side of his arm for a couple days.  Ouch!  I guess we need to get him playing football again so he doesn't have to jump in ditches to get bumped up and bruised for thrills :). J/K!

The Goob took a picture of this cool icicle they found on the way home from a walk.