Preschool

Well, I mentioned in the last entry that we had started pre-school with Alisabeth, it's been nice for us both. She really enjoys showing mommy and daddy the crafts that she makes. Every Monday is a hand puppet featuring something starting with that week's letter. Friday is decided by the mom in charge for that week. Last week we had it here.
The event coincided perfectly with the arrival of my bountiful basket pumpkins which are huge.

The picture isn't the greatest, because it was taken by a 3 year old, but it's decent enough.
So needless to say we had to gut one of them for our activity here. The kids had fun with that. I sat with them and squished the seeds and mush beneath my fingers and made sound effects. I think they enjoyed that the most.



Sorry about the sideways pictures, but blogger does weird things to my imports.

This weeks cooking experiment was to duplicate the squash/artichoke dip we had tasted at the Melting Pot.
Can I just preface with the fact that I know absolutely nothing about artichokes, and the diagrams/images online are less than helpful. I eventually dissected them to the best of my abilities so that I could cut out the heart and chop it up, but I'm sure more trained eyes would have cried at my attempt. Either way what I got tasted fine, so I'm proud of my efforts. (Next time I'm buying the ones in the jar though).
The sauce turned out wonderfully though and we had it for dinner with sliced apples, bread and carrots.

I wanted to include this one to prove that he was still alive. He's actually doing quite well. We allow him outside for most of the day and he usually gets locked out whenever I have an errand to run because he won't come/stay in. The cutest thing to watch is when he scares away the alley cats. He's half their size, but he runs after them and they scatter. It's funny.
His newest trick is climbing in trees. Usually when I come home from my errands that's where I'll find him. He gets down just fine, so I'm not worried.
Featured below are Alisabeth's skirt that I threw together with the scraps from her Halloween costume. I added some shorts from the scraps of another costume I had made in the past :) and then used more of the satin (all of the remaining parts) to sew on a bottom border. So now she has at least one skirt she can play in. I didn't get anything done on her costume yet because my iron was bumped and knocked to the floor one too many times and now sports a cracked/bent bottom which catches on anything and everything when you try to use it.
I'm waiting until we get paid tomorrow so I can get a new one.
Only one week left until Halloween?!?!?!

And last but not least, my masterpiece.

It took me almost 45 minutes to get this thing to go together. I've never wired an outlet before in my life, so that was fun, plus trying to get the stupid ground wire to curl around the grounding screw correctly, and then getting the whole thing to fit nicely into the tiny container was a pain the the putuccus.
Eventually I got it however, so that's what counts. (Jason meanwhile put up 3 pieces of drywall in Alisabeth's room and completed several other tasks, but we won't mention that.)
We also got one circuit completely done (Yeah!!) and the living room is almost completely hooked up. The only thing left in the living room is to drill a few holes to get the wires to the last outlet on the circuit and then the whole thing will be complete. 2 circuits down, 4 to go.
The next exciting thing is Alisabeth's birthday. It will actually arrive on Thursday, but we're waiting until Saturday morning at 9:30/10 am to celebrate it. (I couldn't get her new play kitchen delivered until then.)
We're really excited. I want to make my cheese dip and a few other finger foods and then of course we'll have cake and ice cream. She's been talking about it for a week. She's excited to turn 3.

Well, being that it's a little after 1 in the morning here I'll end this entry, but I'll probably add another one after the birthday party on Saturday.