Making cookies

What do you do when there are a billion feet of snow outside and there are -30oF windchills? Well you do some shoveling that's for sure.  On Saturday there was also some present wrapping, Nerf gun fights, and a Dance Dance Revolution tutorial for my almost 4 year old son.  Then Saturday night we went over to my parents (only a couple miles away) and watched movies, played board games, and had pizza.

But now it is Sunday...it is too darn cold to do anything outside so what did we do?  Well...after the car racing, more Nerf gun fights, contest to see who can shoot down more Galactic Hero figurines with the Nerf gun, some housework, and some Lego building.  We decided to make sugar cookies...with icing and sprinkles.

This meant we need to take a quick trip to Target to get supplies.  One of which was butter flavored shortening...I am not a shortening person, but I was willing to give it a try to make perfect sugar cookies.

We forgot to take pictures of the doing, but we got some of the aftermath.  Keegan help me cut out shapes, Lyle did the oven baking coordination.  Then we all chipped in with the decorating.

Keegan started out as the sprinkler of sprinkles, but was making a huge mess.  After seeing I was getting frustrated with him, he suggested he be the icing spreader.  Well I was dubious, but he actually did a wonderful job spreading icing.  Eventually Keegan and Lyle were both icing and I was the sprinkler...I am picky about my sprinkle uniformity...

We decided to flavor the icing so the green had a little mint extract adding, the pink some almond extract, and the blue some orange extract.  The orange flavoring was definitely the yummiest, but Lyle enjoyed the mint ones a lot too.  See pictures below.

 The froster extraordinare

Tired Karissa cleaning up the aftermath (let me tell you all that shoveling really takes it out of you!)

The sprinkles only cookies.

The Lyle and Keegan frosted ones up close.

The frosted ones.

The icing aftermath....

The biggest thing we learned from this is that...it takes a lot of time and is a lot of work...oh and Keegan is a really great froster :-)

Snow

You gotta' have that post about all the snow we got on Saturday if you live in MN so here is ours :-)

We got a ton of snow.  Here is the view of our deck from our living room window.  That black thing in the right-hand corner is the grill...yes it is buried under snow.

This is the view from our bedroom which also goes out to the deck.  This was halfway through the day, by the end of the day it was a foot higher up the door.

Below is a little movie showing the storm midway through.  Yep, I love Minnesota.  Actually what I do love about Minnesota is that even with all of this snow it was business as usual by Sunday :-)

Mental Leaps

Every once in a while Keegan starts making some mental leaps.  It seems like in a couple weeks he starts doing things that he wasn't doing earlier, not gradually but in a leap type of thing.

I know developmentally they say children will make cognitive leaps throughout their childhood; supposedly this can leave them cranky and out of sorts for a while.

Well we have been going through a bit of this.  The last week or so Kee has been one cranky little boy...but he also started doing some interesting things.

1) Lyle and I can no longer spell words that we don't want Keegan to hear.  For example I said "Lyle don't forget Keegan needs a B-A-T-H tonight."  Keegan says "Mom I know I need a bath, I just don't want one."

Or I say "Keegan wants some C-A-N-D-Y after dinner, is that okay with you?" Keegan replies "I get to have candy after dinner?"

The same thing has happened with the word Santa, now Lyle and I have to spell it backwards in order to talk about Tanas's presents."

2) Coloring and drawing.  Keegan was the king of scribbles.  He would make a vortex of scribbles and call it a volcano.  Today at Green Mill he flipped over his paper placemat grabbed a red crayon and drew a very clear volcano with lava blasting out the top.  Then he drew something over the lava and something down the side of the volcano.  I pointed to the volcano and asked if the read stuff was lava inside...Keegan said "No mom, it's magma...geez.  The stuff coming out of the top is lava.  The cloud over the lava is the ash cloud and the stuff going down the side is the pyroclastic flow (seriously he knows what a pyroclastic flow is)."  I was blown away!  In a week we went from scribbles to detailed diagrams of volcanoes.

3) Dexterity.  Up to this point Keegan has needed assistance with Legos.  He is way young to be playing with them anyway, but he enjoys them so we help him put together stuff he can't do.  Then on Thursday night the item out of the Lego Advent Calendar was a skeleton with these tiny ball socket joints for his arms.  I was having a devil of a time getting it together.  Keegan took it from me and snapped it together in 2 seconds and then handed it back "Here mom, I got it."  I was like "Uh, okay...when did you learn how to do that?"

4)  Money. As I think I detailed in a earlier entry, a couple months ago Keegan asked for chores so that he could make money of his own.  Today he asked if he could count the money he's made so far.  He wanted to take it to Target and maybe get a toy with it.  He was kind of sad that he's done all this work and has nothing but money to show for it.  Lyle and I are all about teaching him to save, but at his age he also needs to equate his hard work with reward (because face it I wouldn't go to work if I didn't get money and was able to use the money for things I like).  So we decided he could take the money and go to Target.  Keegan was surprisingly mature about it.  We told him how much money he had and he looked at a ton of different toys always asking how much they were.  When something he wanted was more money then he had he didn't whine, he just put it back on the shelf.  We explained he could save up his money and get it later, but he wanted something special today.  So he looked until he found a couple smaller things he had been wanting.  He was very pleasant about the whole thing and it really impressed me.

I am sure there are other things he has done that I just can't think of now.  For example he has started becoming more concerned of what people think of him; which is interesting too.  He is kind of hard on himself about certain things.  When he brought home a paper of letters he had traced I praised how good they all looked and he immediately pointed out all the ones he thought looked bad.  When he brought home a colored picture and I said how  much I liked it and put it on the fridge, he wanted to take it down because he said it was too scribbly and it looked like a baby had done it.  (It's still on the fridge anyway, because I like it and I think he should be proud of it).  I hope he is not too hard on himself in the future; but I know I was always very hard on myself so it's not too surprising he's like that...  

Anyway it is interesting to see him grow :-)  He is developing into a very interesting and capable individual!

Firetruck Santa

So last night was the night when Santa comes by on the firetruck and the Fire Station collects food shelf items.  Keegan was very excited and so was I :-)

Only this year it was a bit more complicated.  Santa was supposed to be by between 5:30-8:30pm.  Quite a large window, we knew that previous years he has come by around 7:30-8pm...so we figured this year would be similar.  What complicated this all was that we had swimming lessons until 5:45pm and then Keegan wanted to get tacos at Zantigos.  So we didn't get back home until 6:30pm.

At this point we had no idea if Santa has already been by or not, but we assumed not since we didn't hear sirens in the area.  While Lyle was getting Keegan ready for bed, I was scavenging through the pantry trying to figure out what we had to give to the food shelf.  I had meant to pick up some stuff earlier but forgot.

Then things got more complicated.  I wanted to get something out of my purse.  Hmmm...where is my purse.  Then I districtly remembered leaving Zantigo with a feeling of emptiness despite having just had tacos.  A couple there distracted me when they started talking to Keegan about Santa on the fire truck.  He of course had walked up to them to tell them all about how he had to eat his tacos fast so he could go home to see Santa.  So apparently my purse was enjoying a night at Zantigos.  Off I go to Zantigos to pick up my purse.  Which I found, with everything intact.  Yay for me :-)

I rush back home and Santa still has not stopped by.  It is now 20 after 7pm.  Keegan is in bed, Lyle and I are alternating freezing as we stand by the storm door and listen for sirens. 

Well Santa decided to take a different route this year.  He came in the back way, the way we can't see from our house.  So suddenly there he is trucking down the street.

Of course, for the first time in weeks, Keegan fell asleep by 7:15pm.  So I throw my coat on, race downstairs and grab Keegan.  He is very asleep.  He really wanted us to wake him up if Santa came.  So I am yelling "Keegan wake up Santa is here, he is here!"  Lyle throws Keegan's winter coat on and Keegan and I race down the driveway with Keegan in arms in the extremely cold temps.

Santa is already past our driveway but you can kind of see Santa and you can definitely see the fire truck.  So I am like "Keegan Keegan do you see santa!!!"  He mumbles "NO".  I am like "Keegan Keegan do you see the fire truck!?"  He mumbles "Yeah".  We get candy canes and give canned goods and run back inside.  We are freezing and my arms are about to fall off from lugging around a 35 pound toddler who is a half-asleep dead weight.

We get inside Keegan says "Mom, why did you do that? I want to do back to bed."  I carry him down to bed chattering the whole way about "Wasn't that exciting? You got to see Santa!!"

The majority of the night was wasted looking for Santa, stressing about missing him, and trying to get Keegan out to see him.  But we did it, we got out there to see him so it was all worth it.

Then what is the first thing that happens this morning?  Keegan wanders into the bathroom almost in tears, "Why didn't you guys wake me up to see Santa?"

I just stared at him.  Took a couple of deep breathes and said "We did Keegan, you saw him and I have the candy canes to prove it."

He says "No I didn't get to see him, you guys are so mean."  I walk him out and show him the candy canes.  He says "Oh...mom those are mint candy canes...I hate mint."

Thus began my morning...