Eloise Outside

She brought me her boots. We went outside and watched some workmen clear away a tree with chainsaws. Then when we were tired of that we walked over to the playground. She screamed and tried to claw herself free when I put her in the swing, so she just climbed on the wooden fort thing a bit. Her hat is enormous and kind of distracting, I actually bought it on clearance for her to wear next year but she wanted to wear it today.

Cute

Eloise demanded pigtails today. I decided to try putting them up high and leaving the back down. It's pretty cute, and I love the outfit she's wearing today. It looks perfect on her. I was having trouble getting a good picture though.

Pouting

Smiley, and why the heck did I take her picture with only 1 hair bow? Either take it out or find the 2nd one! Jeez.

At this angle you can't really tell there's only 1 bow. She was trying to get Fina to share her valentine's cards.

Cutey Hair

Fina wanted her hair fixed this morning so I made these little braids. It made Eloise so jealous that Fina was getting extra attention, that she insisted on having her hair fixed too. So she got tiny little curly pigtails. By the time I thought of taking a picture, it was after lunch and running errands, so Eloise had smeared something in her hair and made it all creepy and greasy looking, and Fina's fine hair was coming loose from the braids. Also it's really hard to take pictures of them these days. This one isn't bad, except for some reason Fi decided to sit a foot further from me than Ell was so she looks weirdly out of proportion. By the time I got her to move closer, Eloise was DONE with posing and crawled away. 

She thought she was being onery and ruining the picture by holding the bear right in front of herself, but she didn't realize it was actually really cute. I like the hint of mischief in her face.

Eloise shows off the curls.

Eloise is like "What the heck? Are you possessed or something?"

So I baked some bread...

I was in the mood for homemade bread today so I decided to try my hand at baking some. I'm terrible at making dough with our kitchen aid mixer, it never seems to turn out quite right even though it supposedly makes it way easier. So I figured if I make it by hand a few times, I'll learn what it's supposed to look/feel like and I'll be better at making it the "easy" way. I used this recipe because we have a ton of whole wheat flour that someone gave us, plus it even had the word "simple" in the title. How hard could it be, right?

 I was doing fine until the step where you turn it out onto the counter and knead it. It "may" need 2-4 cups more flour at that point, according to the recipe. So I turn it out and attempt to try to knead it, and it instantly adheres to my fingers giving me these sticky alien hands. There's so much dough stuck that I can barely even bend my fingers, and there's no hope of picking up the measuring cup to add some flour.

But I didn't give up, no, I called in the reinforcements. "Fina! Come here! Take that scoop and dump some flour on top of my dough for me!"

She was happy to be of service, because she had already asked if she could help and I told her no, becuase bread is hard and I needed to concentrate. I'm lucky she didn't decide to be like "Sorry chump, you said you didn't want my help." 

Anyway, with me kneading and her tossing on more flour, we eventually managed to make it into a nice dough. Then she wanted to take a picture of it, so I held the bowl down for her. Sous chef and budding photographer she is.

 So after it rose for an hour I shaped it into loaves. It made 3 loaves, although we only own 2 bread pans. John kept insisting that we own "at least 5" bread pans, but I know we have 2, because that's what most bread recipes yield. (He was home for lunch and he even got down and dug through all the cupboards looking for his hallucinated bread pans. I ended up cooking the 3rd loaf in a little baking dish that is slightly larger in the bottom than a bread pan.)

 It appears to have turned out, I'll know more when it cools enough to cut into.

Sorry

Weez made this necklace at church today. I think she should be sorry that she gave the little girl in the picture a black eye.

(Also Fina asked me what it said and I told her and she said, "Oh, so at church today Eloise learned that she can beat me up and then if she says sorry she'll be happy?" Hopefully they didn't teach her that in exactly those words.)

Baking a Cake

Ok, this isn't baking a cake. This was this morning, sweet little Eloise snuggling bitty baby and patting her head. When she was done with that she read her a book.

 Here's cake though:

Fina measured the dry ingredients herself.

And mixed them. I told her boring stuff about how they had to ration sugar and eggs during WW2 so people on the homefront made up recipes that used less or none of those things. (This one had mayonnaise instead of using raw eggs, which was nice because it meant she could lick the spatula when we were done.)

I may have also gone on about victory gardens and other such things.

But she forgave me for being boring because she was just having so much fun.