Cooking with Daddy...

Last week Sam and Abby made some quick and easy chocolate croissants for when the older kids got home from school. Soooo simple - chocolate chips rolled up in Pilsbury crescents :)

Somehow Laurence is ALWAYS around when there is baking to try ;) (check out our homeschooling blog for more baking tales)

???????? rotflmao!!!

So I go to sort through the pictures on my camera and I find THIS!!!!!! Hhhmmmmm....... ;)

The bake fest continues....

I think Abigail REALLY enjoyed her day of baking, and we have a pantry full of delicious treats - her brothers and Sister were all thrilled to come home and find so much to choose from!!! Yum!!!

Skills learned? Science, math, reading, home economics, health and hygiene, nutrition......lol but most important we had FUN - the two of us together :)

Baking fest!!

Every week while Sam is at PreK and the older three are at school, Abigail and I have our 'girl's day'. Abigail is free to choose whatever she likes for us to do with our day!! This week, Abigail chose to come home and spend the day BAKING!!!!! We dropped Sam at Pre-K for 9am, then came home and cleaned up the kitchen before getting started!!

Abigail started with a simple Jello cheesecake mix from a packet which Lloyd had picked up last night - he LOVES them and had put ina request for Abigail to make him one!!! She rustled that up VERY fast!!

Cookies were next - 'wholewheat and oat cookies with chocolate and butterscotch chips' to be exact!! She followed the recipe - getting all of the ingredients out and measuring everything.....using my kitchen aid mixer (which she always loves to use). The cookies came out perfectly!!! Totally yummy!

After that Abigail peeled all the potatoes I needed to go with my pot roast for supper!

Then after lunch she set to work on making cupcakes - marble chocolate chip cupcakes - half of which she then iced in BRIGHT BLUE icing!!! Lovely ;) Sam was definitely impressed :) 4 year olds LIKE bright blue icing :)

Cityscape...

I snapped this through the car window last night driving back from town....Lloyd commented on how the city looked so nice with the sun so low. WE were both saying how sad it is that it gets dark so early already. The weather is so incredible right now and waaaay above average!!! They said tonight that by the end of next week we could be waaaay BELOW average temperature-wise, so I guess Fall will arrive with a BANG!!!!

I hope they are wrong!

Pot roast....

I'm still loving my crockpot!! Yesterday I made chicken madras in it......soooo good! We had that with Basmati rice and I cooked up some pappadums just before Lloyd arrived home :) Yummy :)

Last night I prepped this - a beef pot roast. It was cooking ALL day today and by the time it was served - with crispy roast potatoes and brussel sprouts - it was soooooo tender, that it was just falling apart!!! Delicious!!!

Next to come - sweet and sour chicken with yummy pineapple and baby carrots!!

Sam's first day....

Sam started PreK today. He was very excited to go again - this is a new class at a new place for him and he was thrilled to be going! He has been counting down the 'sleeps'!! He had his new indoor shoes and backpack and lunchkit....and he was all set :) We got there nice and early as I wasn't quite sure how long it would take us to get there, but we weren't the first one's there anyway - a few people were starting to arrive - and being early gave us a chance to say hello to the teachers in the quiet and look around the place without too many people around!!

I wasn't sure how Sam would be as he had been soooo upset in June about not going back to his old friends and teachers - but he has grown up so much over the Summer, and he just went on in really excited - he wasn't bothered about us leaving at all - a quick kiss and he was off to play!

He is gone for a full 'school day' - and if you want to see what Abigail and I get up to while Sam is busy at school, then check out the homeschool blog later ;)

In our thoughts...

A family friend of ours (and colleague of Lloyds) has had a brain aneurysm which led to brain surgery. She is now in a coma at the U of A hospital.

She is a single Mom of a large, active family and we all need her to recover quickly and be home with her children as soon as possible.

Lori, you are in our thoughts.

XXXX