My New Salt & Pepper shakers

Since we got married, John and I have never owned salt and pepper shakers. Well, for a while we had a set of really stupid grinders that we got at a yard sale because he just love loved the idea of grinding your own salt and pepper, but they were cheap plastic and I dropped one of them on the floor too many times so we use the remaining one for pepper because we don't use that much salt and also grinding sea salt onto your food is annoying (at least with these lever grinding ones we have) because you can't limit your amount as easily. So I saw these at the store the other day, AND they were on clearance, and you know a bargain like that is hard to resist even though they were only 30% off I snagged them up.

This lovely lady is the salt. I would prefer them to be colorful like real matryoshka dolls, but the white will go with pretty much any dishes I suppose. What's that? Where's the pepper shaker?

They are nesting dolls after all! 

The salt shaker is considerably larger than the pepper, but that's because she has to hold the salt AND fit the other inside her. They're so cool. The only thing I worry about is that the salt one doesn't snap together very tightly so if someone didn't know and held her by the bottom half, she'd probably fall right into their food. Also I like that the salt shaker only has 1 hole and the pepper has 3, because I'm the type that uses more pepper than salt. I suppose you could fill them up the other way around, but that's not what it said on the directions. ;) I also got a matching set of measuring cups, but I haven't taken them out of the box yet.

Sunday's dinner

I was looking for something else in my pictures and I saw that we had taken a decently appetizing picture of Sunday's dinner. Spinach and mozzarella stuffed meatloaf, gross mashed potatoes, and salad. Yum. Also do you totally love our new serving dishes? It's kind of fun to have awesome things to make your food look more appealing, even if we don't really have room to store them. We got them NIB at the goodwill store for considerably less than if we bought them new elsewhere. (And after reading the reviews online, I'm glad we didn't pay very much for them because apparently they have a tendency to break if you pick them up by the handles when they're hot, even though they're supposedly oven safe.)

Ipad adorableness

Isn't it funny how you sometimes have to eat your words? When Ipads first came out, I was horrified at the thought that people would let their kids play with something so expensive. When they came out with special cars that your kids could drive on your iPad I was baffled. I was apprehensive when my mom let my kids play with her nook tablet. And yet...

Look at the crossed feet and the intense concentration. So cute.

She loves it so much and I'm always amazed at the amount of stuff she can just do on it. That is, when she gets the chance to just play by herself. And she's only managed to buy 5 bucks worth of extras for her games. (We have it password protected but if I download her an app then you don't have to enter the password for like 10 minutes, so we found out the hard way that if she tries to buy things right after I've downloaded her a game, it just lets her at it. So now I only download new apps for them when it's my turn and kids won't be playing right away.)

...And 5 minutes later. "I'm just watching her, mom!"

Her solo turns don't usually last very long if Fina isn't at school. Also I think we have twice as many kid apps as stuff for us.

...and 5 minutes after that. Not shown is 2 minutes after that when Eloise realizes what happened and starts crying and slapping Fina in the head.

And as a bonus for reading my ramblings, here is a cute picture of my kids in the masks that they made earlier.

Super Fi and her well dressed sidekick. Little sisters always have to be the sidekick because they're copycats.

I cut Eloise's out for her but Serafina did all of hers herself.

Happy New Year!!

As you can see, we had a swinging partay to ring in the new year.

They don't really know what's going on, but they got to stay up late and eat junk food and have noisemakers and yell "happy new year!" a bunch.

So you know, that's like the ultimate in great days.

Don't you just hate when you try to get away from a new year's kiss so they tackle you and bestow it anyway?

Cheering or beating each other with noisemakers, your guess is as good as mine.

Wooz the party animal.

They're going to be up for 10 more minutes to (in the words of fina) "watch a ball fall out of the sky! Isn't that ridiculous?" (New year on the east coast, close enough for little guys.) Daddy already went to bed, but he gets a pass because you can be a bit of a party pooper if you spent all day getting chemo. And he stayed up through dinner and a "movie" and 2 board games, and even wore his new years crown the whole time, which is more than enough to make his little girls delighted.

Elf present

Fina was just sure she needed to buy Gideon the elf a present. I kept telling her no because I didn't want to have to deal with hiding it somewhere when the elf "goes home", but she went out shopping with grandma today and bought him a balloon at the dollar store. And she was so excited and adorable that I couldn't be angry. It's not a helium balloon, but a small balloon with a stick handle. And it's shaped like a snowflake, which is very thoughtful of her because elves probably like snowflakes, what with living in the land of ice and snow. We spent the whole rest of the day taking the balloon away from Eloise and giving it back to the elf.

So I strung it up like it's floating and he's going for a ride, because elves are magical enough to make their balloon float, right? Hopefully the weight of the balloon and elf don't break the thread or pull the hook he's tied to down overnight. It just has to stay up until after church, when we'll be heading off to my mom's house for Christmas.

In other news, Fina lost her first tooth tonight.

Turns out John is one of those people who is grossed out by loose teeth and by gap toothed grins. Also "the tooth fairy" is a little short on funds becuase I emptied all the change out of my wallet and she found it and put it in her little wallet, and it is probably frowned upon to give your kid money from their own piggy bank from the tooth fairy. The tooth was turning grey before it fell out, I don't know if that's normal or if she got punched and that's why it fell out. And it fell out when she was brushing her teeth and she almost let it go down the drain, but luckily she noticed in time and grabbed it. I don't know if I'm supposed to throw it away or keep it in a creepy tooth pouch in my jewelry box as a keepsake. I am going to err on the side of throwing away because eww, who wants to look at old dead teeth?

Truck

John's mom brought him his "merote" control truck, much to Fina's delight. She was sure that we'd need to buy a new battery, but we charged up the battery and it ran (although we had to buy 2 9v in addition to the rechargeable one it takes, because it was made in the 90s). John loved having a little minion around to retrieve it when he got it stuck in snow banks.

Apparently his sisters were never as amenable to such activities. Go figure.

Fina didn't mind (too much) that John is a remote control hog, she loved chasing it around.

Although I wasn't quite sure who was chasing who.

And eventually he did let her have a go at it. She came inside just glowing because she got to play with daddy.

Also today in the mail John's uncle sent us this super boring home video that John's grandpa (the one who writes the Christmas letters) shot one time when he was visiting. It's pretty much no talking but just slowly panning around the yard. Occasionally you can catch snippets of conversation in the background, but mostly it's just the sound of the wind blowing. At the end he filmed the kids a little bit, but apparently John was being a little shit head that day and kept running and hiding from the camera. There's one glorious scene where John's dad demonstrates how he chops logs with his really dull chainsaw and John makes an appearance when his dad drops a log and he runs in to pick it up for him and it looks like his head narrowly misses the chainsaw. The movie would be hilarious if you cut out most of the boring bits, although it might lose something because you wouldn't know that it was the "good parts".

Woo woo a trip to spokane

We drove down to Spokane to meet up with John's mom this weekend. John mapquested it and said "it's only 5 hours to Spokane, it won't be so bad!" 1. Mapquest actually says 5 hours 51 minutes, you don't understand rounding 2. We are traveling with children and every rest stop is going to be a production 3. It is the middle of winter and the roads are going to be terrible which will slow us down.

But his mom had never even met Eloise and really wanted to see John and the kids, so I gave in and we made the trek. And everyone thoroughly enjoyed themselves, even if we did end up having to stay an extra night because I couldn't bear to be back in the car on Sunday after driving all day Saturday.

John's mom had the worse end of the trip though, it's 10 hours from her house to Spokane and she was traveling with dogs. Everyone had a good time, but I was bad and forgot to get out my camera until John's mom was leaving so I got very posed pictures.

It's like when Dad's family gets together and they all stand in a line and you take their picture, but with more kids hoverhanding dogs and less line. Also I hadn't fixed anyone's hair yet so Eloise has the sheepdog look going on.

The greyhound apparently said something funny and distracted everyone so that the little dog could lick Eloise right in the face. He has trouble holding his licker.