Purple Haze

Lola has decided that after 4 years her new favorite color is Purple not Pink. I think we might have overdone it with the Pink. Anyway this was her latest look the other day. Purple skirt, purple tights and of course the purple Tangled tee-shirt.

Number Practice

Homeschooling is a TON of work, but man she sure loves learning. It makes all the work so worth it. Here she is practicing her numbers on the chalk board. Mom writes them on the black board and then she uses a small sponge to erase them and then draws the numbers back over where the shadow is from the sponge. We also roll ‘snakes’ and shape them into numbers or letters. We use a program I used when I taught preschool called Handwriting Without Tears. It is so cool. They have a ton of ideas on how to teach writing but the kids just think it’s playing- like the snakes with the playdough. Fun Fun.

Martha Stewart Coconut Cake

Baking is one of our favorite things to do in the kitchen. From apple pie to zebra sugar cookies. Since we have adequate experience in the baking department we like trying more challenging recipes. We tried this coconut cake from the Martha Stewart baking book. The cake part was simple but the icing was something called 7 minute icing. Two things happened. First, the cake was slightly over done. Which resulted in a chain of science experiments using different oven thermometers to test the accuracy of our apartment oven. Second, the first batch of icing just stayed a thick milk consistency. So after that we had to get more eggs- ( 6 egg white!)And remake the icing. It seems that the first batch didn’t get hot enough when you had to whisk it . Finally the cake and icing were merged together~ two nights of fooling with it. It was ok, not very coconutty though. So still looking for a good recipe....( I wonder if that cup of egg yolks is still lingering in the back of the fridge?)

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas!

Thanks SANTA for the cool guitar & Taylor Swift Doll! And Thanks Aunt Betty for the cool guitar! Lola has a lot of guitar practice ahead for the new year:) Santa ate a big bite out of the cupcake we left and the reindeer made a mess of the oats we set on the table for them. The magic:) Uncle Brian & Aunt GiGi are the best gift buyers. We loved everything from them, especially the sock monkey kit for Lola. We will love having our new wild cat picture reminding us of Kentucky. One funny thing that happened while opening gifts was that Virgil was opening a gift from Candace and stopped half way and said hey wait a minute... Then he told Candace to open a certain one under the tree. Turns out we had bought the same book for each other. Pretty funny considering when we were shopping we were at the same store just separate sides buying the same book... Having Grammy there Christmas morning really was a treat. Lola loved all her Rapunzel clothes. She also really loved her new wedding Barbie, which came with our first Ken doll. Lots of new books for the Doll too. Hugs and kisses for the family we missed:)

Christmas Eve

Since Grammy had brought a special gift for Lola to use, we let her open it on Christmas eve. It was a cupcake maker. So we whipped up some red velvet cupcakes to leave for Santa to enjoy. Some little kitchen elf really enjoyed the sprinkles. How Fun

First Christmas Pageant

Our Angel:) Lola had been practicing for months listening to the music for the play on a CD at home. She was a beautiful angel. We’re so proud of her! These are her little friends who looked super cute too:)

Carriage Ride in New York

While we were in Philly looking for a place to live we skipped of to New York one day and let Lola take in the holiday decorations. We also took Lola to FAO Schwartz so she could fill out her Santa List and also play a little tune on the giant keyboard. We took the subway over to Brooklyn while we were there and visited some friends. It was fun to be back in NY even if it was just for a day. We look forward to getting back to the East Coast and spending some more time in the Big City.

Practice bundling up for Philly

Since our California beach babe is not used to wearing a coat. We had to A) run to target and get a coat, B) find scarfs and hats and gloves at the bottom of the closet. Lola thought it was pretty fun practicing for the cold. She had heard in a Christmas song that the wind can ‘bite’ your nose. She was very curious to find out what that meant.

Playdough letters

Learning that's fun is such a simple thing to teach parents. If you try to give kids a piece of paper with letters all over, it's not going to be much fun. So adding simple manipulates like letter magnets or playdough letter stamping, to the usual handwriting practice, will make talking about letters and words so fun. Lola really loves it. I'll give her a _UP and the letters P&C and let her make words that she can sound out. She was really interested in words like mom and dad that are the same spelled backwards. It's exciting having her come to me through out the day and say, 'Mom' I just read this, it says fat cat or san diego zoo.' :)

Operation

Lola had first played operation at her Uncle Brian & Aunt Gigi’s, she has since become quite good. She even wants to get ‘paid’ for her services. Sometimes she makes up her own rules where she only wants to get ‘real’ pieces, like the funny bone and the wish bone.

Our attempt at a homemade gingerbread house

The poor pitiful thing... Well, it was fun baking all the pieces. The house smelled amazing. For some reason we can’t keep up with good recipe for making a sturdy cookie house. More research for next years model will be on the ‘to do list’. The candy windows worked-We wanted to try that last year. So the cookie trees turned out pretty cute and edible.

Rolling out the Dough

Gingerbread houses are so fun to make. We love making ours from scratch. It makes the apartment smell so delicious. For the windows we broke up jolly ranchers and put them in the cutouts and while they were baking it melted into beautiful stained glass:)- Assembly tomorrow night.

Preparing for Christmas

Counting down to Christmas! Here's some of my 'to do' list, not in any order
Put up the tree *
Decorate the tree*
Take a sweet Christmas Photo*
Add Nativity pieces night by night*
Make Christmas cards*
Write up a newsletter*
Read the story of Baby Jesus*
Bake Ginger bread pieces*
Assemble Ginger Bread House*
Take Lola's picture with Santa*
Shop & wrap *
Find gifts for donating at church gift drive*

Ok the Trees done

After we assembled the tree, Lola put the decorations on the branches. She of course was not able to reach the higher part of the tree, and she of course wanted to do it all by herself. So after about 20 minutes she let me know that the tree was all done. :) Mommy left it like this for a couple of days before spreading them around the rest of the tree.

Being Silly

Lola loves going to visit our neighbors who have two children. She likes to pretend to be a baby too. We caught a quick photo when they were all being a baby. Silly kids:)

Hello Aunt Betty

After dropping off Eric at the airport so he could spend some of Thanksgiving in Denver, we drove south to visit Aunt Betty. How nice it is to be on the beach. Lola played and played in the sand with a shovel someone forgot. We also went into the little aquarium at the end of the Manhattan beach pier.

Happy Thanksgiving

What a treat to have share Thanksgiving with Friends and Family. Eric & Virgil had fun working in the kitchen. We made a menu for our Austrian neighbors who joined us. Lola liked having her date with their son. She fed him some bread. Oh how tasty Thanksgiving dinner is... YUM.

Spending some time in the kitchen

Homemade rolls from freshly ground wheat.. (take a deep breath of yeast bread.. oh nice:)Freshly made Foccasia bread, makes mouth water. Spinach artichoke dip with peperjack cheese on top- soo tasty, cranberry sauce- terrific on graham crackers and savory with turkey, pumpkin roll with cream cheese filling- yes please! Burbon pecan pie,,,oh so tasty!Of course the always satisfying sausage cheese balls- must for Prewitt family gatherings. And tomorrow, the turkey, dressing, sweet potatoes, green bean caserole.