An Unplanned Day at Home

Due to way too many cases of influenza, Lily and Gregory's school was closed today. It was a dark, rainy, chilly day outside, so we stayed home and stayed inside. How did we use our unexpected day off?

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Lily got a shirt designing and decorating kit for her birthday, and has been so eager to try it out. Life is always zipping and zooming, so today's bonus at-home day was the perfect thing for her. She worked so hard, reading the instructions very carefully, planning her work, and then making her designs come to life. On the right, you can see one of two shirts she decorated today. This was a really fun, nifty project that she was able to do without any help at all (unless you count Gregory's enthusiastic spectatorship as "help").

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At other times of the day, the kids just kind of tootled around the house... playing with toys, reading books, and just hanging out. While the big kids were playing and Henry was napping, Mommy was being SNEAKY. I have a new cookbook, "The Sneaky Chef", which has tips, tricks, and recipes for making everyday meals healthier, sneaking super-healthful ingredients into the foods you're cooking anyway. Like (totally delicious!) brownies with spinach hidden in them, meatloaf with wheat germ, spinach, and broccoli in it. In order to be "Sneaky", you have to make up various pureed mixtures and freeze them, so they're ready for tossing in with the various recipes. Today, I made purple puree (blueberries and spinach), green puree (spinach, broccoli, and peas), orange puree (carrots and sweet potatoes), white puree (cauliflower and peeled zucchini), and white bean puree (pureed great northern beans). Whew! Now the freezer is filled with little plastic containers with single-recipe sized portions of the various purees, and I'm ready to boost lots of our ordinary foods with extra veggies! So far, every single "Sneaky" recipe I've tried has turned out really well and the kids have love everything. Hooray!

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Gregory came to me mid-day and said, "I feel like I need to do something wild. I'm going to the basement." Next thing I heard was the sound of someone playing basketball. Hooray for an indoor play area. He shot basket after basket, with a big happy smile on his face the whole time. And ... Henry missed the whole thing because he was snoozing. Notice he's actually sleeping under the little quilt that came with that crib set a jillion years ago when we were getting ready for Lily's arrival. He's the only one of our kids to sleep in the crib up to an age where a quilt or blanket is considered safe. So, after 8 years, we're getting some use out of it.

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And last (also least), check out our newborn guppies. I'm sure there are many more than these seven, but they are so incredibly tiny that they can swim down between the pieces of gravel and hide from the other fish in the main tank. We just happened to spy these seven swimming here and there, and moved them to this little baby net to keep them from getting eaten out in the main tank. They are about the same size as a grain of rice.