Pinewood Derby

Since our church building is out of commission for awhile due to extensive flooding, we had the pinewood derby pack meeting at our house.  It wasn't bad except that having a brand new very expensive pinewood derby track in my house made me very nervous that the little boys who live here would find a way to break it.  They kept racing old cars on it while waiting for everyone to show up for the pack meeting and at one point the starting line was having some problems.  I almost had a heart attack after Arthur told me how much it cost.  But being married to an engineer has it's perks, and Arthur fixed it.  Anyway, here's the brand new high-tech track that tells you which car came in first, and by how much.

Working on the car with Dad.

The finished product: Dallin's "Jimmer Mobile."  

There were a lot of great cars this year.  It's a good thing we had such a high-tech track because many of the races were so close, you couldn't tell which car came in first if it weren't for the electronic finish line.
Here are the boys checking out their standings.  Dallin was 4th going in the finals.

Dallin & Charles placing their cars for to determine 1st & 2nd place.

And to our amazement, Dallin won first place.  (It was VERY close!) He told me he couldn't believe that he actually won. (Good thing, since we put "You Got Jimmered" on the side of his car. ) 

Dallin's report on the pinewood derby:

So first off it was the pine wood derby. So I made a pine wood derby car. It was a Jimmer Fredette car. My dad (Arthur ) said it was the Jimmer mobile. I guess he has a point. Oh yeah! I almost forgot! I won     

the race by..............................

1 THOUSANTH! 1 THOUSANTH OF A SECOND!

And then we ate cake!

Happy Heart Day

Aren't these cookies amazing?  

We thought it would be fun for the kids to make some sugar cookies.

But, what happened was that Emma, Jewels and I had a lot of fun decorating these.

Don't worry, we saved some for the kids to decorate too.

I think they did about one per plate.  Okay, probably more than that, but theirs got eaten pretty soon after they were decorated.

Also, it was Sean's brilliant idea to cut a smaller heart out of a bigger heart, which I thought looked very cool.

On Sunday night, Jewels & Eric came over for dinner,

 and afterward, Eric started a crazy balloon war.  Pictures don't really do it justice, but I can tell you that we were all in the fray, and it went on for quite a long time, resulting in opening the doors and turning on the fans to help us cool down.  Nothing like a Valentiney Balloon War to help you feel the love.

These pictures are from Hayden's playgroup which was at our house this week.  I thought we would try out this new idea I got from a friend and make Oreo lollipops.  The idea is that you insert a white lollipop stick into the oreo filling, and then dip it in chocolate (we did white chocolate) and then dip it again in sprinkles and let it solidify.  Then you have these darling little Oreo Lollipops.

Well, I went to three stores and couldn't find those little white sticks, so I figured I'd just use some wooden craft sticks I have at home.  They were a little too big and kept breaking the oreos apart, so we just dipped the oreos without sticks.  It worked fine, even if they didn't look quite as cute as I'd imagined.

Besides, half of them got eaten before anyone had a chance to see them anyway.

Happy Valentine's Day!  

More snow days

Well, that first snow day was followed by three more. There wasn't any more snow.  School was cancelled on Wednesday because it was too cold, and then Thursday, the buses wouldn't start, and by Friday, there was a state-wide natural gas shortage, so they had the kids stay home again to reduce the use of natural gas for heating.  As a result of the cold temperatures and people turning the heat down, pipes all over town have been bursting.  Our church building was among them, which is another story entirely . . .

So with four days off school, the kids did lots of playing with friends and with each other.  We made cinnamon rolls one day, and valentines another day, watched movies and just enjoyed the slower pace.  Here are some pictures of the fun.

Jen's Delicious Cinnamon Rolls

Making Valentines

Okay, I'm including a picture of this, but I have to warn you, it's a little disturbing.  See that dark red spot on Hayden's picture?  He painstakingly created that red spot with a red marker that is pretty much out of ink now.  And he told me that it was a picture of him "with lots of blood at his head."  Hmm.  I'll admit it made me laugh, especially since Hayden thought it was hilarious.  Maybe he has a twisted sense of humor.  Or maybe I should look into therapy? 

I'm grateful for my friend Amber who thinks of such fun and creative things for these girls to do together.  Daphne had a blast making this cute conversation heart wreath and frosting Valentine cupcakes.

Snow Day/ Tamales

One great thing about living in Albuquerque is that it rarely snows here in town.  So when it does, they close the schools and call it a snow day.  You can imagine the jubilation at our house when there was an early morning phone call telling us that school would be cancelled for the day.

Since it was so cold, and everything we would normally have had on the schedule was cancelled, we decided it would be a perfect day to make Tamales.  Julianne had written down some instructions from mom, who learned from someone who really knew what she was doing.  So Jewels brought over the ingredients and we went for it.

First we made the red sauce: Here are the chilis boiling in some water with garlic cloves, allspice cloves, and whole cloves.  I would never have guessed those two spices would be included in a red chili sauce.

Julianne's husband, Eric was awesome and went to Pro Rancher's Market to get this special prepared Masa.  He got 16 lbs of it!!!  (Just for the record, if you go to get prepared Masa, you don't actually need that much, but we felt safe knowing that we definitely would not run out. :)  He also got us a bunch of corn husks.  

Here's Emma with darling little Caleb, because I know mom and all the sisters are probably wanting to see pictures of him.

So you take the the boiled chilis and blend them up.

Make sure the lid is on tight, or it will jump out and burn you.  

(sorry, Jewels, for posting this picture, but your expression really makes me laugh.)

Here's Julianne getting the lid on very tight. 

You strain the sauce to remove the skins and seeds.
(don't actually eat that stuff.)

Meanwhile, your corn husks are soaking in some water.

So then you take a nice big corn husk, and spread a thin layer of Masa on it.  Julianne had brought over some shredded pork that she'd cooked in the crockpot a day or two before. We added our pork directly to the red sauce, and spread some of it onto each layer of Masa.  The tricky part is wrapping up the corn husk.  We started out pretty amateur but got better by the end.

Then when you have a ba-jillion tamales assembled and wrapped, you put them into a gigantic steamer end-down, and squish them in there vertically.  You let them steam for two hours.

When they are done, you take them out and eat them, or bag them up to freeze them and eat them another day.  

Here I am holding up one of our beginning amateur tamales, and then a bigger, better one as a result of us perfecting our technique. (Well, perfect enough for three white girls, anyway.)

And here we are with our beautiful bags of Tamales.  That's only half of our finished product. We made about 50 pork tamales with red sauce and 30 chicken/green sauce tamales.  They take forever, but they are TASTY!!!  So all you Albuquerque friends, if we have some more snow days, and you're wondering what to do with all your spare time ;)  Give me a call, and we can make some tamales.