Mommathon

We went to WonderEve today at Wonderscope and we were there ALL DAY! We got there at 9:45 and didn’t leave until 5:15 and the boys enjoyed EVERY minute. Mr. Stinky Feet was there, a musician, a juggler, they got out the StarLab and they have a brand new underwater Lego exhibit…not to mention all the other things they have to do. They even served us lunch and passed out snacks in the afternoon. I definitely got my moneys worth.

Liam in his underwater gear. He also has on a scuba pack which you can’t see. Throughout the course of the day, he probably played in the Lego area for at least two hours with whatever child/ren he could find that were close to his age…and they played HARD! Their imaginations were at work. Of course, Colm was right there with them…playing with the big kids and holding his own.

Colm’s favorite room…the ball room.

Pizza break!

The magician was awesome! Seriously!

I got this book for Christmas and I must say, she has some pretty good ideas about how to get extra nutrition into the foods kids already like to eat. Garbanzo bean puree in mac and cheese, sweet potato puree in mac and cheese and grilled cheese, dollops of pureed spinach hidden in pizza, cauliflower puree in noodles with butter, sweet potato donuts and pancakes, etc. Her basic philosophy is to hide the veggies or match the colors with foods they are already eating so they don’t even notice it’s there. I tried the sweet potato mac and cheese today. Liam said it tasted okay it just smelled funny. I am going to try it with beans next to pump up the protein. We’ll see if it works. She stole my spinach and carrot juice in the brownies recipe though!

This is a conversation I had with Colm at church tonight:

C: Mom, what’s that?

Me: That’s the Bible. Father Rich is going to read a story from the Bible. It has stories in it that Jesus wants us to know.

C: Yeah, he’s dead. He doesn’t need it anymore.

Something like that

Liam and Colm are all set to see The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything. After listening to snippets of the soundtrack and seeing that they clearly enjoyed it, I bought the DVD for them. They have been singing Jolly Joes all day…changing the words…using their best pirate voices..oh, they think they are so funny! AND if you buy the DVD, they include a ticket to go see the movie.

Have you ever seen someone out in public without their makeup and not recognized them? Well, I had the opposite thing happen to me recently. I had met someone over the summer at swim lessons and she never had her makeup on since it was early and she was going to work out. That was how I was used to seeing her. Flash forward a few months and we met again in another situation only this time she had her makeup on. I would have NEVER recognized her if her children had not been with her. How embarrassing would that have been?!

This book read like a memoir which is why I probably liked it. I have been reading a lot of books lately about troubled Catholic teens and their families…not on purpose…it just seems to be the case. Anyways, I liked this book. The ending was a little weird, but the rest of it was definitely worth reading.

Liam LOVES our water machine. (Our water machine is the water/ice dispenser in the frig.) He thinks it is pretty high tech and quite a treat to get ice cold water in an instant. He had some friends over the other day and one of them said he was thirsty. Liam piped up that he could get some water from our water machine. They both looked at him like he was a little wacky when they realized what he was talking about. In our previous two houses we had a frig that had a “water machine”. Liam was too young in the first house to appreciate it and in the second house we never had it hooked up because the ice maker made rusty ice. Yuck! So, in this house we got a new frig and had it hooked up…tasty water at the push of a button.

Liam throwing a snowball.

Yummy snow

This was one of the best Christmases I can remember. The boys got what they wanted, but there wasn’t a gluttony of presents. We had several parties to go to, but none of them overlapped, so we could go to all of them and enjoy ourselves instead of worrying about where we needed to go next and when we would need to leave to get there on time. It was just calm and peaceful. It was a nice change of pace.

Scroll down for some holiday outing pics and some early Christmas celebration pics. Merry Christmas!