The tomatoes are in!

The prophet said to plant a garden, so that's what we'll do.

For God has given rich brown soil and rain and sunshine too.

And if we plant the seeds just right and tend them carefully,

Before we know, good things will grow to feed our family!

(CS, p. 237)

Banana-Coconut Ice Cream Pie

We had this for dessert on Sunday while watching some kids that belong to great friends of ours, the Merkleys, who were off gallivanting around, just having their third baby at the hospital. Jacob ate it and was happy to enjoy ice cream pie - a new sort of pie to him - and I liked it and I'm not sure what Jeff thought, he can leave us a comment. It has a different sort of taste (though I feel sorry for all the coconut/banana haters out there!) and next time I might try a different kind of ice cream or mix-in to put with it. I recommend giving it a try, it was really easy to whip up. The crust is worthy of using for something else as well, so I'll have to remember that for the future. Oh, and I left out the rum of course and didn't substitute anything and thought the banana flavor in the ice cream was a hit. We shall have to eat our leftovers soon, but perhaps not too quickly!! Thanks for a great pick, Spike!

A present from Rebecca

I don't know if she just wanted me to remember her fondly after she'd gone to sleep, or if she thought she was helping in some way, but I found a little prize from Rebecca the other night while emptying the dishwasher and putting away the sippy cups. No wonder I couldn't find the other shoe when I was taking her upstairs to get ready for bed...

Two year-olds are hilarious

Jacob has had me doubled over in laughter a few times recently. I will just list a few examples of his funny sayings and doings, and soon I hope to have a couple videos of him to share. Sorry the first example is so long, but it was probably the funniest.

• He found his set of flashcards we got him last summer. They are just alphabet cards with a picture to go with each letter. We hadn't worked on them for quite a while, since he had learned all the words some time ago. He had the stack in his lap and was saying "What's this one? Net. Very good! {places card down on couch} What's this one? Rocket. Very good! What's this one?..." This went on for a little, and he was being fairly quiet about it so I didn't even realize what he was doing until about the 4th card or so. (Quick side note, he has received a couple Lightning McQueen cars as potty prizes recently, but has no idea who that is except that it's the name of his car.) After he set down the card for Rocket, he picked up castle, congratulated himself on getting that right, and then picked up Q and said "What's that one? Lightning McQueen. Very good!" The picture on the Q card? A queen.
• His new trick is to change the words to any song so he can include Rebecca's name. He thinks it is hilarious. A few examples:

1. The wise man built his house upon Rebecca...
2. All around the cobbler's bench the monkey chased Rebecca.
3. Mary had a little Rebecca, little Rebecca, little Rebecca...
4. I love to see Rebecca (guess that song!)

• Nextly, something he does when he sees an animal outside or in a picture or something: he declares "I will eat it/him!" This is normally okay, but one time when it was almost not okay was when we were in the garden and he was digging for worms with his shovel. Yum. Tangent: don't watch the movie "How to Eat Fried Worms" when pregnant, like I did last year before I had Rebecca.
• He pulls the long grey cord out of the back of our dishwasher and says "I got a trunk!"
• Whenever we get his shirts on or his shoes he tells me "They are just fitting anymore."
• We started having "school" in the mornings sometimes per his request. Today we learned all about fire trucks, and how they are different from fire engines and even built a fire station out of a diaper box so he could park his trucks in there. And I learned how to draw a dalmatian so we could tape it to the side of the box. He just kept saying something about how the fire station needed a dalmatian puppy, so I drew him one. I asked him what we should call the dog, and he proudly said "Oh! Salutations!!" So I told him we'd call the dog Sal for short.
• Today after naptime we are making Cheerios treats and he is really excited. The picture in the Cheerios cookbook shows a dinosaur chomping on one of the treats. Jacob said, "I will eat him and some treats!" I'd prefer the treats, but I guess if he is hungry for a T-rex I can't stop him.
• The other day I told him to tell me a story. He began and said "Once upon a time, Big Bird was taking a walk to see his friend Elmo." Another time I asked him to tell me his favorite story and he gave me the rundown of his previous nursery lesson earlier that week, "Jesus created the world for you. The birds, the turtles, the duckies, oh the sun, and moon and the stars, and bunnies, and TipTop."

TWD: Apple-Apple Bread Pudding

I'm a bit behind today so we haven't tested this yet, but I figured I'd just put up a teaser post tonight and then plan on enjoying this immensely for breakfast tomorrow (I'm hopeful!!). This post will also feature a couple of my favorite kitchen items that I got to use tonight. The pictures are all bad since I started working on all this after 9:30 or so, but I least I do have a window in my kitchen (most of the bigger homes in our housing area actually don't have kitchen windows).

I have never made bread pudding, and I don't recall ever eating it when someone made it from scratch. So we'll see what I think of this come breakfast-time au matin. But here are a few items of business.

1. I love my apple peeler. If you don't have one and you cringe whenever you need to spend precious moments peeling apples with a paring knife, get one of these puppies and use it. As a side note, you'll notice I did the dishes before I baked this time. :)

2. I also love this nifty cookbook stand that Jeff's parents got for me a few years ago when they went to Indonesia. It folds up nicely to store flat and I think it's so pretty. I don't use it all the time but it is nice for holding up bigger cookbooks, like Baking. And I just reminded myself I need to put the freezer jam I made last night into the freezer now.

3. I loved Dorie's instructions for giving the bread the "back-of-the-spoon treatment" periodically in a 30 minute period before baking. But here's the bread pudding shortly before I baked it. I halved the recipe because I felt like it (and I don't have a larger roasting pan!) and omitted the cream and subbed in more whole milk and it looks scrumptious. I think it will need cinnamon so I'll mix some with the powdered sugar when I dust it before consumption.

Please visit Cake or Death for the recipe and click on the TWD button to see many more takes on this week's recipe. I'll add to this post tomorrow after breakfast.

**Alright, I'm adding DURING breakfast. This is great! I am eating it cold right now and will probably heat up the rest of my piece before finishing it off. I put a powdered sugar/apple pie spice mix on top and it turned out delicious. I'm thinking I'll experiment with a peach version this summer!

Sparrows

Last night as we ate dinner, a sparrow came to our window to eat out of our bird feeder. Jacob had recently learned the word sparrow, and so I encouraged him to tell his mother what kind of bird was at the window. He obliged to my request. Stacey then asked Jacob if he knew that Jesus had talked about sparrows in the Bible. She paraphrased Luke 12:6-7, "Are not five sparrows sold for two farthing, and not one of them is forgotten before God? But even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not therefore: ye are of more value than many sparrows." Stacey then went on to teach our two and a half old that Heavenly Father knows each of us, loves us, and is watching out for us. Two points: 1. I am so thankful for a wife who knows these truths and is so ready and able to teach them to our children. 2. I am so thankful for a God who really does know each and every one of us, loves us, and wants us to be happy.

Bedtime reading

I haven't really been keeping good track of this so far except in my head, but wanted to start with this post. Last Fall I picked up The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to read to the kids at bedtime. Then we read Prince Caspian. Then we read The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. We read "Lucy" most nights, but it remained a privilege and sometimes we didn't get to read if someone was throwing food across the table at dinner. Now we are reading Charlotte's Web, and Jacob is loving it. He gets excited whenever Templeton is mentioned, and I have proven that it is hard to keep up different voices for all the characters as the nights go on. Jacob's favorite part by far was when Charlotte and Wilbur had their discussion about the greeting of "Salutations!" being a nice way to say hello to someone. Often before we read he will sit in our laps and very hopefully say "Maybe they will say 'Salutations' tonight?"

We also read scriptures with our kids at bedtime, too, and while it might take us a good 3 years to get through the Book of Mormon at our current rate, it's pretty important for kids to be familiar with the language of the scriptures as well as the stories therein.

Why read novels with toddlers when you spend a while every day reading picture books, too? It's just fun, of course, and it was something I became passionate about when I was working on my graduate degree, but there are other reasons. Borrowing from Jim Trelease's book The Read-Aloud Handbook (Chapter 1):

We read to children for all the same reasons we talk with children: to reassure, to entertain, to bond; to inform or explain, to arouse curiosity, to inspire. But in reading aloud, we also:

• Condition the child’s brain to associate reading with pleasure
• Create background knowledge
• Build vocabulary
• Provide a reading role model

Recent happenings

Jacob hanging out on the butterfly chairs at the kids' garden near our home last week. He loves this place and we still need to take Dad with us, he keeps reminding me. "I think we will take Daddy to the kids' garden soon," he'll say. He also keeps reminding me that "We will go berry picking when there is more sunshine." I explained this to him once a while back and he hasn't forgotten it. We are often amazed at how good his memory is and how well he connects ideas and objects and places in his mind. He is talking so well these days!

Rebecca being cute and holding a book mark that she took out of my scriptures. Hello, molars!

I guess the theme here is "mouths wide open." Sorry for the blurriness. Jacob wanted to build a "taxi car" the other day, and so he got to work moving chairs around. He said he was the driver for Tiptop, which apparently means that I need to have a better imagination. (Any time I've been in a cab, the driver has been in the front.)

He later turned the taxi car into a tent with the aid of some nice blankets

and had a lot of fun in there. It is fun to see him play and get more creative as he grows up. Pardon me for writing "grows up." It makes it sound like he's 8. Phew. Still 2.5.

Here is Rebecca showing off her new dress that her Aunt Amber sent her for her birthday. For some reason this pose just keeps cracking me up. Something about the fact that I caught the end of her very quick smile in this shot and the hand on the couch. Too cute.

Please observe her red hair. I get accused of always hiding it under her pilot caps, but she still likes to eat her hearing aids. And her new talent is taking Jacob's hearing aids out to eat those. Here's hoping we don't have to dress him in pilot caps too. They are pretty cute as far as hats go, but I do like to see her hair and I don't think Jacob would like to have it on his head.

In other news, after Jeff worked many hours outside in the daylight or in the nighttime to put up a fence (and Jacob helping by digging worms and declaring "I will eat them."), we planted our garden on Monday for family home evening. We're looking forward to harvesting some good stuff in a couple months: sugar snap peas, carrots, cucumbers, tomatoes (still waiting to be moved outside), zucchini, crookneck squash, green beans and a variety of flowers: giant zinnias, a mix, morning glories and Lilliput zinnias. Come July I think Jacob will be disappointed that his plans for banana trees did not work out, but we couldn't find any at Home Depot. I haven't broken the news to him yet. Any ideas?

Jiffy Lube Gift Card Winner

Congrats to Commenter #5, Amber! I'll get your gift card shipped to you shortly! Mine came as certified US mail that I had to sign for, so that is likely how you will receive yours as well. Thanks for the good comments, and remember to drive safely in your travels this summer!

Weekend oil change giveaway!

Thanks to MyBlogSpark and Shell Lubricants I have a $35 Jiffy Lube gift card to give away. I also received one of these gift cards and won't be using it for a while since it came in the mail the same week I had the oil in our van changed. Go figure!

To be entered in this giveaway, visit MotorOilMatters.org and leave a comment on my blog with an interesting fact you gleaned from the website, and for a SECOND entry you can take the quiz found under the Fun Matters section and let me know your score in a second comment. Something I found on the site was the Pennzoil Lube Match, which recommends certain kinds of oil for your make and model of vehicle. This might be really good info if you are doing your own oil changes, but I confess that usually I just get whatever is the cheapest recommendation at the auto shop. But it is suggested on the site that consistency in oil changes and oil types will keep your engine running better, so I should probably work on that.

Winner to be chosen on Monday morning!

1. Visit the site I've linked to above and leave a comment with something you learned.

2. Leave a second comment if you took the quiz on the site and let us know how you did. \

Happy Friday!

TWD: Burnt Sugar Ice Cream

This was excellent ice cream! I was a little skeptical as I was cooking it up just because burnt sugar doesn't smell very good, but just take my word for it that this is pretty good stuff and go visit Becky's blog Project Domestication for the recipe. Great pick! I had mine with some strawberries in it, but agree that Dorie's suggestions in the cookbook for shortbread or sugar cookies would also be a great accompaniment. Visit the TWD site through the button in my sidebar to see what others thought of their treat this week!

I had told Jeff that someone else called it the "nectar of the gods" and so later he jokingly said "This is like MANNA!" when he tried a bite. Jacob had a tiny bit and declared that it was "too cold for Rebecca." She's so lucky to have him looking out for her (or it's too bad he's eating her share of the ice cream, it all depends on how you look at it...)! Happy baking!