Don't wipe your nose with your chicken!

As heard at dinner tonight... The things you hear when you have little ones around...

Anyway, we are at our annual excursion to the beach. It's a little early this year; normally we go the week of independence day, but this year we went early to meet Kate and Emily's summer schedules. The boys seem to be enjoying it, despite almost all of us having a cold in various stages. The boys are sleeping well (which is nice since they don't always when we are traveling) and are swimming every day. It's interesting to see how they seem to enjoy kicking off one of us to the other, and instinctively trying to kick and doggy paddle in an uncoordinated tangle of limbs. They didn't care much for the beach tho - it took a little while to get used to the sand, and they didn't like the possibility of the surf reaching them.

I've been trying to take pictures, but I forgot my card reader so I can't download anything... so it will probably be a couple weeks before they get done.

A lesson from the boys

Last week, I made a sandwich and brought it into the living room to eat lunch while watching the boys. Of course, the vultures descended and ate about 1/3 of it. (I should have known better.) Since they handled it pretty well (mustard and all), we decided that we would add sandwiches to their diet.

So, a couple days later, I'm feeding them lunch including a quartered up sandwich each, handing them one quarter at a time and making sure they are taking bites and all instead of shoving it all in. Matthew pipes up to get my attention and I look over and he is brushing his hands together (flat. one on top of the other and palms together) and signing "please." Not recognizing what was going on, I tried to prompt him to sign "eat" or "more" or something like that (since they are getting lazy and just signing "please" for everything). He keeps rubbing his hands together and Nicholas is piping up, so I give up and hand Matthew his next piece and lo and behold, Nicholas does the same thing!?! After another second or two I finally realized that they had invented a new sign for sandwich! Pretty smart for only knowing what a sandwich was for about two days...

One house too many

If all goes well on Monday morning, the MacDonald family will own two houses! Yes, we're a little crazy for both selling and buying in this market. Some people don't understand why we're moving now, and that's okay. The long and the short of it is this is a great time for us to buy in a neighborhood we want to settle down in. It's close to our biggest support system, and it's in a school zone we want our children to attend. It's located in an area that the boys and I spend a lot of time in. It's a little closer to our church. Housing prices in this area are at an all time low. Oh, and Dan hates the swimming pool and wanted to find a place without one!

Below is a picture of our new house (again, assuming all goes well on Monday.)


With that said, our current house is on the market. If you know someone who is looking for a great house, send them our way. :-) Say a prayer that someone buys soon.

Easter Picture!

Taken Thursday morning. :-)

Said to me today...

I was sitting at Lake Eola with the boys and my friend Tyger. M&N were in the stroller reading books and playing with a couple of toys and generally behaving themselves quite well, considering the stroller. Tyger and I were chatting, waiting for church to begin. We'd been sitting in our seats for about 10-15 minutes and I turned around to see what was going on behind me. There were two men sitting directly behind the stroller.

They stood up, right before the service started, and said to me "No thanks. Might be made in China." And then he winked at me.

*ponders the meaning of his words*

I guess I'm a little frustrated with it, because even if he meant it in good fun, or to be funny, it really wasn't. In the end it isn't that big of a deal I suppose, but what if Nicholas and Matthew had been a little older, and understood what the man had said? How would I have handled that comment? I know I will be dealing with comments, funny and not, well meaning and not, for the rest of my life. I'm prepared for a lot of the things I hear and most of the questions surrounding my children/family. I let most of it roll off my back, as I did this comment as well, but seriously... Who cares if a kid was "made in China"? Or made in Vietnam, Guatemala, Ethiopia, the United States, Columbia?

OH well...in nine months I've only had two *slightly* strange/insensitive comments/questions made about my children. It's not all bad.

On the plus side, they were absolutely adorable and behaved fabulously during the service. And if you live in Orlando, watch Fox News at 5pm tonight. You just might see them on TV. :-) And if you do see them, you might notice that they were more interested in the leaves on the ground than the Easter eggs. :-)

Uhm....

No, you don't need to adjust your computer's color settings. The milk really is green. Dan asked for it. Seriously.

I spent the evening working on dinner for my Bible study tomorrow night. (We're having Chicken & Black Bean Enchiladas.) I thought I'd bring a little dessert, and decided to deviate from my normal dessert of Lemon Bars. I made sugar cookies, from scratch! An old MacDonald family recipe to be precise. After they were baked and cooled I did a little looking around on the Internet and found a recipe for icing. Very basic, and pretty tasty. Being that St. Patrick's Day is right around the corner, I added green food coloring to my icing. I frosted said cookies and even shared a couple with Dan.

Because he's a garbage disposal when it comes to sweets, he asked me if he could have the rest of the icing. Uhm...no. I wouldn't let him have it. There must be a quarter of a cup of icing left. Pure butter and powdered sugar. You might say that I'm a mean wife, but really I just want him to outlive me. So we compromised. Green milk. :-)

If you're familiar with the book "If You Give A Moose A Muffin", you'll be able to appreciate what transpired after adding the green food coloring to the milk. We then had to add a little peppermint extract to make it minty. I mean, it was green after all! But now that the milk is all pepperminty tasting, we had to add a little sugar to sweeten it back up. We did stop there, but not before discussing bringing out the ice cream maker and making some green peppermint ice cream. Dan decided we didn't need to do that because we've got Mint Chocolate Chip ice cream in the freezer. Don't need TOO many sweets around here! ;-)

Nothing to say...

Just a picture to share. Oh, and in case you didn't realize it, I failed at the resolution to post a picture every day. Oh well. There's always next year! :-)



My dad took this picture while Dan was out of town a couple of weeks ago. It's kind of sad in a way, because the boys (Nicholas left, Matthew right) look like boys instead of babies. But they are so happy. I think this is there favorite spot in the whole house.