Hand Sanitizer anyone......................

So as we all now know about the swine flu, or whatever the World Health Organization is calling it now that a name change is in the works, my day today was filled with hunting for hand sanitizer. Just to be on the safe side because our youngest has had RSV in the past we decided to stock up on medicine, his neb treatments and Hand Sanitizer. Here in New Mexico we are awaiting the results on swabs of 2 suspected cases of this flu, if they test positive they will be the first to have this strain of the flu. Our Hand Sanitizer was running low but we decided that we had better get some more, plus we were out of those handy little bottles that are great to throw in a school bag or handbag. Well after visiting 2 Wally Worlds and 2 Walgreens I came away with just the little ones, I certainly wasn't going to start driving half way across the city. So for those who haven't done so and are reading this I suggest if you haven't already stock up on hand sanitizer because our shelves are empty here!

The biggest slice of Pizza I have ever seen

I meant to blog about this last week, but there just isn't enough blog hours in the day right now! My darling hubby owed me big time last week, as I helped him write one of his papers for school. So he took me out to lunch, Aaron and I met him at work and off we went just a short trip to a pizza place Jon has talked a lot about, as far as he is concerned it is the best pizza ever!
Personally I am not a huge pizza lover, it's dough, tomato sauce and cheese, whether I make it myself, buy it from Wally world, or delivered from Papa Johns, pizza is pizza to me. Giovanni's pizza place is tucked away in a small shopping strip just by the Air Force base and Veterans Hospital, and is very popular at lunch time. It is just like stepping back in time into an old fashioned Pizza Joint.


You order by the slice or you can order whole pizza's, they do calzones, manicotti (not quite sure what that is), salads and other Italian delights. We ordered our pizza and sat at a booth, Aaron insisted he needed a high chair, we told him he didn't that he was a big boy now and that he could sit next to either Mommy or Daddy, but no the boy needed that high chair. I knew he would get stuck, and figured he would learn the hard way! (which he did)
Now despite the fact that it was busy and only 2 staff were working our slices were ready pretty quickly, Jon brought them over to the table, and I think my mouth dropped to the floor, I have never seen a slice of pizza that big. We were going to be there a long time, it takes Aaron forever to eat, how he was going to eat his slice was going to be one of those"here let Daddy help you" moments!


I was so WRONG, Aaron folded his slice up and chowed down, he ate every piece of it, and loved it, and I have to say it is the best pizza I have eaten and by far the biggest!

For when you have one of those days!

Mondays are here again, the weekend seems to be rolling by way to fast. I wanted to share an email I got from my Mom last week, it made me smile and although Monday is here again I hope it brings a smile to your face.

Gonna be a Bear!

In this life, I’m a woman. In my next life, I’d like to come back as a bear. When you’re a bear, you get to hibernate. You do nothing but sleep for six months. I could deal with that.

Before you hibernate, you’re supposed to eat yourself stupid. I could deal with that too.

When you’re a girl bear, you birth your children (who are the size of walnuts) while you’re sleeping and wake to partially grown, cute, cuddly cubs. I could definitely deal with that.

If you’re mama bear, everyone knows you mean business. You swat anyone who bothers your cubs. If your cubs get out of line, you swat them too. I could deal with that.

If you’re a bear, your mate EXPECTS you to wake up growling. He EXPECTS that you will have hairy legs and excess body fat.

Yup, gonna be a bear!

My bargain of the week!

As we all know times are tough, and when you have a family we all do our best to grab that bargain. Well this week the bargain I got was clothes for our eldest. I swear the boy sneaks out at night and stands in a grow bag (not sure if you have them over here, but in England you can grow your tomatoes from a grow bag!) I know kids go through a growth spurt, but Brendan has been on a growth spurt since the day he was born.
We have a couple of Kids consignment stores here in Rio Rancho/Albuquerque and I decided yesterday I would stop by because our school district decided to change the dress code, and I certainly wasn't rushing out to buy new clothes with only 4 weeks of school left. Plus the boy needs shorts, so I stopped off at Other Mothers it was the first time I had been to the store. It was slightly crazy busy and they had a lot more girls stuff than boys. But being Thursday it was 50% off yellow tag day and 75% off red tag day (even better) I picked up 2 pairs of shorts and a huge bundle of tops, polos and T-shirts for the whopping price of $23.

On Friday Brendan very proudly wore his new clothes and he looked really smart, total cost of shirt and shorts $3.99!

As a Mom there is one thing that I can't do.................

I am apologizing now for blogging about this but I am curious if it is just me or there are other Moms who have the same or similar problem???
Now bearing in mind I have been a chef and handled my fair share of raw meats, fish, oh and squid (really gross to clean) and I have dealt with plenty of poop filled diapers, not just from my boys but from when I was a Nanny. Even those diapers that seem to explode up the back and down the legs, give me them any day instead of cleaning up and dealing with vomit!
Yes folks I just can't do it, that is a Daddy job in our house. I am getting better, but that is only because there have been occasions when Daddy has not been here and I have just had to get on with it(the boys just couldn't wait until Daddy was around!). Which trust me takes me forever, I have this unfortunate problem that being around vomit makes me feel sick, which of course is no good when I am suppose to be comforting my children while they pray to the porcelain god!
Why you might ask am I blogging about this, because I have just finished cleaning up vomit and comforting our eldest Brendan, of course Daddy is at class, and will be home soon, but the boy couldn't wait!

So tell me Mom's am I the only one, or is there that one thing you just can't do?

Mint.............the final frontier

Mint, love the stuff on potatoes, love mint choc chip ice cream have done since I was a kid. But the actually plant that the lovely aromatic herb comes from became the pain of all pains this past weekend. Neither Jon or I are green fingered, I have had a tendency in the past to kill plants, and there has been numerous occasions that I have had to call home, some 6000 miles away, to ask what to do.
When we first moved into the house we are in now, the back yard had a mint bush by the back wall, and my Mom had warned us that the Mint will grow and spread everywhere. Well it had, up the wall into the grass, it was like some Alfred Hitchcock movie "Revenge of the Mint!"
The weather lately here in New Mexico has been really crazy and there hasn't been a chance for us to actually work in the back yard until this past weekend. So on Sunday we all set to pulling weeds and tidying, and we decided that the mint had to go, so we transplanted some of it into a pot, in the hope that we could control it's growth. The actually pulling of the bush was not an easy task, it was never ending, and Jon was heard to say "I feel like I am digging to China"

One of the many trash bags we filled After nearly 2 hours of finding and pulling roots we finally finished and HOPED that we got it all. I have been checking every morning the mint we transplanted because I am half expecting to find that it has broken through the pot and taken over the patio!

Can Crushing Fun!

My boys have found a new obsession!
I honestly didn't think they would have so much fun, but crushing cans grabbed their attention, maybe it was the whole destruction of the soda cans that sparked such enthusiasm!
This past Saturday we all joined in the task of crushing soda cans for Brendan's Cub Scout Pack. The Pack encourages the scouts to collect the cans, sell the crushed cans, and then the money is used to help purchase badges and awards. So I came up with a fun way to encourage the collection of cans, with a bit of healthy competition thrown in for good measure!
The Pack will be having it's first ever Golden Can Award next month. Each Den would have had just over a month to collect cans, which I have the fun task of collecting, crushing and weighing. The Den with the most cans crushed in weight will receive the coveted Golden Can award and a Pizza party. The boys have been getting all competitive, and this past Saturday, Brendan's Wolf Den had already got a jump on their cans so we set too crushing and weighing them.
This was the end result

Harry the Hamster

Harry our long time surviving only pet (we have not had much luck in the pet department!) nearly met an untimely death over the weekend. We have had Harry since 2006 and not only has he grown to resemble "Rhino" from the movie Bolt but his home has doubled too. He has two houses joined together by tubing, which on numerous occasions we have joked that one of these days he will get stuck in! Well that joke became a reality on Saturday, after cleaning his cage and letting him roll around the place in his ball, Harry decides to stuff his face with carrots. Not just one carrot, but his cheeks were full, he then proceeds to squish himself into the tubing, Jon was watching this unfold when the words"he is stuck" came out of his mouth.
Jon managed to get the cages apart and as he releases Harry carrots and food come flying out of his mouth! I will be very surprised if he does that again, we are hoping he has learned a lesson!

The 3rd looking leg that appears to be tucked up in front there is in fact a carrot!

The tubing that nearly caused the end of Harry's life!

Easter for us

I hope you all had a great Easter weekend, ours was quiet and full of egg dying and too much chocolate! Our first Easter back in the States, back in 2002, I realized that just giving chocolate eggs to children was not the norm, I became a fast learner in the Easter Basket department! You see in England we just give Chocolate eggs, they are hollow and are filled with candy. This year the boys had the best of both worlds, Nanny had sent them Chocolate Eggs from England and the Easter Bunny brought them a basket of goodies on Easter morning.

The boys holding their British Easter eggs! I managed to get a picture quick before they ripped into the boxes!

We dyed our eggs on the Saturday and made some bunny cookies. Normally I use the pots to dye the eggs, were you add the vinegar. This year I had brought the Tye Dye kit, looked different and fun. Oh was I wrong, first of all I did not realize that the eggs had to be warm when applying the dye in this kit, and it was slightly awkward having to transfer the eggs to a new a baggie every time you wanted to add a new color. I think next year we shall go back to the good old dye pots. The boys had fun and they said our eggs looked like dinosaur eggs!

Our Dinosaur Eggs!

The boys were very excited on Easter morning, that crazy Easter Bunny had left eggs throughout the house.


The rest of Easter Sunday was spent relaxing at home, while the boys played with their goodies they got in their baskets, and Jon and I were the candy police!

Hot Cross Buns

A British Tradition on Good Friday is Hot Cross Buns. I have never made them before, normally back home we would just buy them from the grocery store. But I decided that I would have a go making them this year, and set to making them yesterday. They turned out YUMMY! I should say that my bread machine did all the hard work!


I have 2 different recipes , one uses icing for the top for the cross, but then the other one said to use a piped pastry for the cross (which is the proper way to do it)

Here is the recipe for a bread machine:

2 eggs + enough water to equal 1 1/2 cups
1/2 cup soft butter
4 cups Bread Flour
3/4 teaspn cinnamon
1/4 teaspn ground nutmeg
1/2 teaspn salt
2 tablespn sugar
1 1/2 teaspn yeast
1 cup raisins

Icing for the top

Set bread machine on the dough cycle, add the raisins when indicated. When done remove the dough and let it rest for 10 minutes, covered. Grease a cookie sheet. Divide the dough into 16 equal parts and roll into a smooth ball. Place on a cookie sheet, cover let rise for about 40 minute. Heat oven 375 degrees, brush with egg wash and bake 18-20 minutes. When cool make a cross with icing.

For the pastry cross you need 1/2 cup plain flour , 2 tblspn margarine and some water. Rub the marg into the flour until it resembles bread crumbs. Then bind together with enough water to make it a soft pastry so it can piped. Then a cross has to be piped on top of the buns before they go in the oven.

Enjoy!

No Computer for the last 2 days

The last 48 hrs have been frustrating, my Computer got a virus, and like a Doctor operating, my WONDERFUL husband performed miracles. It was touch and go at one point and the words "I'm going to have to roll back your computer" were uttered and knowing that if he did that I would loose documents, pictures etc. I waited patiently and having complete faith in my husband to remove the sneaky virus, DR PC worked his magic and saved my computer from being thrown out of the window!
As a heads up for people, if you are surfing the web and you try and go to one of your regular web sites that you visit and that is not the page that displays you have what is known as a root-kit virus, and trust me it is not easy to remove.

But my computer is healthy again and I am so lucky to have a computer genius for a hubby!

Freezing cold Easter Egg Hunt

Only in America do you take your kids to an Easter Egg Hunt and watch the eggs blow away because of the winds and freeze because despite the fact that you live in the desert, the wind has dropped the temperature to what feels like minus five!The words "I'm freezing" were said instead of Cheese!

That was us this past Saturday, it had been a few years since we had taken the boys to an Easter Egg Hunt, and seeing as Aaron is nearly 4 he was able to really get into it all. It had been organized at a local park and split up into age groups, which was great, but there was 6 kids and 2 adults in our group, so the older boys had to fend for themselves while I had the younger kids and our neighbor was with her daughter in the middle age group. The younger kids were so cute, one of the girls decided that 2 eggs were enough for her and plopped down in the middle of the field to see what treasures were inside the eggs! Meanwhile Mr Aaron decided that seeing as his bucket was full, he would stuff his pockets with eggs!

Aaron's stash of eggs

The older boys checking to see if any of their eggs had tickets in them

It was a fun morning, just wish it had been slightly warmer!

Cookie Dough Fundraiser

I have to say we have never done the Cookie Dough Fundraiser before with my son's school. Just because it is just normally us that buys this kind of thing. But this year we decided to do it, and I have to say the cookies are bloody YUMMY! We bought the tubs of dough, which are pretty expensive for their size, but the type of dough is mouthwatering, and even the day after they are still soft and yummy. Brendan picked the Triple Chocolate Chunk, and then I picked the Snickerdoodle one, just because I had never heard of these cookies until we moved to the States.

SNICKERDOODLE

TRIPLE CHOCOLATE CHUNK

If your son or daughter's school ever have the cookie dough fundraiser and you have never tried it, even if you just buy one tub, take it from us they are very good!