Making Pies and Traditions!

For those of you who know me know that I am all about traditions, especially traditions that revolve around food! As such, Lucas and I had to make pies for Thanksgiving. I remember when I was growing up my Grandma Dot made the best homemade pies, crust and all! If we happened to be around when she was making one of her pies, she would take the extra pieces of crust sprinkle them with cinnamon and sugar and bake them. These extra treats were very yummy! While making my pies this Thanksgiving I had some left over pie dough, so in remembrance of my Grandma, her yummy pies, and a childhood memory, I made Lucas some cinnamon sugar pie crust treats! He loved them and so did Craig!

Turkey Cookies

Seeing as Katie is letting me write some of these blog posts, I feel that I should issue the following warning: The opinions, circumstances and details expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Katie (or the actual truth, for that matter).

Contrary to what you may be thinking based on the title, we did not make cookies out of turkey. Though that may have been easier than what we actually did. Katie has a knack at picking out the most difficult recipes/activities for us to try. This episode of "Frustrate Craig through Cooking" dealt with making frosted cookies that look like turkeys (see Figure 1, although I think we needed to take the picture from a more over-head view to really see what it is).

The cookies, the frosting, and most of the decorating wasn't that bad. The infuriating part was making the legs for the turkeys. This required the precision cutting of pretzels to form something that looked like a leg and feet. I don't know if we picked a bad bag/brand/style/whatever of pretzels, but I cut ~80 pretzels (breaking most of them) to get about 14 usable turkey feet. Needless to say, Craig was not a big pretzel fan by then end (see Figure 2). (Not a very intimidating picture. Note to self, use bigger knife for next deranged serial killer picture.)


Not all of us were unhappy with the turkey cookie making, Lucas benefited and really enjoyed himself!

Christmas at the Mall

Craig here finally doing my dues on the blog. I've been busy the last year or so with my candidacy exam, but now that I've passed and it is behind my, I'm helping Katie catch up with the blog.

Our local mall (the amazing Nittany Mall, don't blink or you might miss it) had its Christmas kick-off the weekend before Thanksgiving. They had fun and games for kids and promises of Santa Claus showing up. We decided to take Lucas and get out of the house. The best part of the whole experience was the fact that Lucas was more interested in the guy dressed up as a Nutcracker than Santa Claus and the reindeer hat the Christmas Magician made for Lucas.

Art Museum

For playgroup Lucas and I went to the Art Museum on Campus. It was interesting and something different to do. The lady that gave us our tour was really good with the kids and making it kid friendly. She even brought a special friend to assist her on the tour, it was an ostrich hand puppet. It was fun to take Lucas to the art museum, which is something I would not normally do. Lucas did pretty well, considering he stayed in his stroller the entire time, due to the fact I did not want to find out what kind of mischief Lucas could get himself into.

My favorite part about this season!

Those of you who know me know I am not a big fan of this season. I don't like being cold and I don't like snow! Unfortunately it gets cold here, really cold! Since there is not much I can do about this I have decided to look on the bright side! The bright side is that when it gets cold I get to bring out the Hot Chocolate maker!!! I love the hot chocolate maker. It is an awesome appliance, one of my favorite appliances in fact (it ranks right up there with the Kitchen Aid, and that says a lot)! The other day we plugged it in and used up the last of our hot chocolate mix from last year! Lucas loved it! Hot Chocolate, yum!

No Nap!

This is what you do when your child doesn't take a nap and you can't handle it that he will not take a nap!


Sidenote: We're not sure how this happened, but Lucas knows how to turn on the TV and cable with the remote. Lucas sometimes watches Sesame Street or Yo Jabba Jabba in the morning while we're getting ready for the day, but that is about the extent of his TV watching, so we're not sure when or how he learned this new trick. Not sure if we like it.

Library

This may not seem very amazing, but to me this was an awesome moment that needed to be documented, when I felt that I was an alright parent! Lucas is a very energetic, busy child. When other mothers go to the library to let there children play in the designated play area (it has a train track, a wood house, puzzles, and other fun toys), they can sit and relax. I am the mother that is chasing after my child as he aimlessly wanders the library and at times tries to escape from the children's area into the main library. I have been taking Lucas to story time at the library once a week. Last week we went to story time and I let Lucas play after. Brace yourselves, here comes the amazing part.... Lucas stayed in the designated area, he even played with the train for several minutes! I got to be like all the other mothers that sat and talked! It was Amazing!!!