Kids Say the Darndest Things!

I am getting backed up in my blog ideas now that summer is here! These are some of my recent favorites about the kids that I thought I'd share. This video of Grace makes me so excited for the teenage years. I videotaped her at swimming lessons (that video was too long to upload here). She had been scared and crying so I wanted to tell her she did a good job etc. and she would NOT look at me:

After school got out, I was going through the kids notebooks to see if they were worth saving and found this in one of Collins. Interesting to see his perception of me:

Mum (he has read the Harry Potter's at LEAST 5 times - all of them)

strong

Pretty

VERY helpfull

HATES soda

loves water

nice

Has glasses

Exercises ALOT

Culture

We had quite a cultural weekend . . . One of the great things about living in such a big city is the cultural diversity. We spent Saturday running errands for Jons Fathers Day dinner (it was so tasty, I have to put it here - shrimp scampi pasta, artichokes, salad etc. and chocolate mousse and mixed fresh berry parfaits).  We live in a very Asian area of town so our first stop was a new store Jon had found called H Mart. He had told me that they have great fruit and fish. I said Yay! But that if it stunk (literally), I was out of there! After entering the store, I realized we were the only non-Asian, lone English speaking ones there. It was like walking into another little country. I could write a whole page about that store, but won't. Jon was right. They had a seafood section about as big as a regular grocery stores produce area; shark fins, abalone, conch etc. They had great prices too. I had my camera, but since everyone was already looking at us like we were out of place, I didn't want to whip my camera out and start snapping. We also found some fresh lychees, a whole jack fruit and durian (the rotting flesh smelling fruit). 

  Our next stop was the Middle East at a store called Phoenicia. Again, we were the only non-Middle Eastern ones there. We spent about an hour in the store, and could have spend 5 days and not seen everything! We didn't even know what some of it was. But somehow Collin found the lamb head, lamb brains and tongue. As a side note, in his prayer that night he said, "Please help me not think of the lamb heads!" :)

In case you are wondering what Jon is eating in the picture - a smoked mackerel, lamb sausages, flat bread, crackers, cheese, stuffed grape leaves, hummus, lychees, assorted spreads and Turkish Delight (the kids were so excited to try that). Can you tell we had turned the TV on right before I took the picture? If not, look at where the kids are looking!

At Phoenicia they also had a lot of German and British items. We found these Kinder brand filled cookies called Happy Hippos. They caught my eye because they were so cute and when I saw the name I had to laugh. One of our favorite games is Hungry Hippos and Grace is always the pink one - named Happy Hippo (did you know each color had a name?).  The kids thought they were so cute that we needed to take a picture before they ate them. 

P.S. Grace's card to Jon said, "Dear DaD, I love you so much. Ispeshile (especially) on Fathers Day." :)

Budding Chefs

We've had quite an interesting first week of summer! We've been to the beach a couple of times (that's a post in itself - coming soon) and the kids have been "cooking" a lot, which is what this post is about. We also had our afternoon reading time interrupted by 3 huge orange explosions outside that the firemen (my first time, and hopefully last time, calling 911) and power company determined was caused by a branch falling on a power line. The kids were bawling, and it scared me to death too! The next day we were coming back from getting cupcakes for our Friday Night Fun and got rear-ended. Thankfully we were in slow moving traffic so no one got hurt (and amazingly the kids did NOT bawl!). I was glad we had our Montero because our bumper only got pushed in a little and our extra wheel cover got torn. The Mercedes that hit us didn't fare as well as we did. Anyway, back to my little chefs. . . 

                                           Collin has been cooking for us for years, but this week made pancakes on his own.  He got out his Kids cookbook and decided he wanted to make a Lemon Layer cake. He made the batter etc. and when I went to get out 2 round cake pans, there was only one! I remembered I had thrown the other one out before we moved because it was rusty and had never gotten another one! So, we have one square layer and one round one. I felt so bad that his first masterpiece was off kilter because of me! He didn't mind it at all though and thought it was cool. He named it the Topsy Turvy cake. It had lemon curd filling and lemon glaze and was very tasty and lemony.

Grace has started to get and interest in food too - but she seems to be more of the food artist. The picture on the left is of the fruit salad she took about 1/2 hour to cut and arrange on the plate. The one on the right is of her first dessert creation - blueberries and pecans with chocolate sauce and cinnamon sugar (it was really tasty!).