Vanilla

On one of the food blogs that I read (I know, you're shocked that Andy reads about food), the author talked about buying cheap saffron and vanilla from saffron.com. I can't remember what prompted me to do it, but I decided to buy some vanilla to see what all the fuss is really about. If you buy it at the grocery store in the spice section, you'll pay anywhere from $10 - $15 for 2 beans. I got mine here for $15 (they have a $12 min. order) for a 1/2 pound. The website says that's 80-92 beans. That's as good as 16 cents / bean instead of $7.50!!! And I have to say, this stuff makes the BEST vanilla ice cream you've ever had. It is absolutely incredible, and the recipe is so simple, I've actually memorized it. It's Alton' Brown's Supreme Vanilla Ice Cream recipe, or something like that. You can find the original on www.foodnetwork.com. I've modified it a bit - it's better, but takes a bit more effort.

1/2 pint whipping cream (small container)
1 pint half & half (normal size container)
1 cup minus 2 Tbs sugar
A splash of Egg Beaters, or some other egg substitute
1 Vanilla bean

Put the cream, half & half, sugar and egg beater in a pot. Split the bean, scrape the seeds, and add the seeds and bean to the pot. Turn on the heat to medium-low and heat, stirring, until a thermometer reads 170 degrees. If you don't have a thermometer, go until you start to see small bubbles form around the side. DON'T LET IT BOIL. You'll know you're getting close because it will start to get thicker, kind of like custard. I don't actually stand there stirring the whole time, I just mess with it every once in a while. When it hits 170, pull it off the heat, and let it cool enough so you can pour it into some kind of Gladware-like vessel. Into the fridge for a few hours. I usually make it early in the morning so I can pull it out of the fridge mid-afternoon. Or do it the night before. Then throw it in your ice cream maker, and let it work its magic. You'll probably want to put the finished ice cream in the freezer, as this stuff sets up really soft.

Kristi likes to eat it with smushed up strawberries poured on top. I made a batch with malted milk mix. I made another one with smushed up raspberries. That was tasty, but I should have run the raspberries through the blender first - I just mashed them with the fork, and the little frozen pods were really cold.

I've also used the beans to make vanilla milk (awesome), and I'm hoping that Kristi will find a way to put them into her chocolate chip cookies, which are the BEST in the world. Seriously, you should try them some time.

I want this on my grave!

"Oh squiggly line in my eye fluid. I see you lurking there on the peripherie of my vision. But when I try to look at you, you scurry away. Are you shy, squiggly line? Why only when I ignore you, do you return to the center of my eye? Oh, squiggly line, it's alright, you are forgiven."

http://video.aol.com/video-detail/oh-squiggly-line/3907746179

Funniest thing I've ever seen on TV!

Sign ups start today....

Andy is going to be gone for about 10 random days throughout the month of June for business (2 trips to San Francisco, 1 to New York, 1 to Philadelphia and a possible 2nd one to NY). I will be posting a sign up sheet so you can all participate in keeping me and the kids sane. Anyone who wants to take the kids for dinner and ice cream may do so. Anyone who wants to take me to dinner and ice cream may do so as well.

Random

I'm sitting here doing homework (again), and watching Kristi work on a blog post and watch So You Think You Can Dance at the same time. She watched it last week for the first time, and was so impressed with some of the dancing that she called me upstairs twice to watch a couple of dances. I figured I'd share the best of them with you, assuming that you don't watch the show. This guy was the last one of the night, and he was freakishly amazing. It's a bit long, but you won't be disappointed if you watch it all the way through - his interaction with the judges is hysterical.

Oh well, at least he makes good money!

Tonight I stumbled upon a hilarious scene. Andy was in Samantha's room reading her a bedtime story.....but this was no ordinary bedtime story. This was My Little Pony. Andy couldn't read about Rainbow Dash and Sparkleworks trying to find "the coolest place in Ponyville" without a little help from his, ahem, shall we say, feminine voice. The problem was he did the voice a little TOO well. Samantha was cracking up! I don't think she's ever heard her dad like that before and she'll never forget it I'm sure. I sure won't.

Boys are Stinky!

Potty training Alex is proving much harder than I had anticipated. I know that Samantha was ridiculously easy to potty train and I was prepared for Alex to be a normal kid, but man this is frustrating!! He's had more accidents in the past 2 weeks than Samantha has had in over a year. He does have many victories and I have been proud of him a lot but when he does so well only to suddenly have a big poop sitting in his underwear, it gets frustrating. I know the poor kid is trying his best and I know that yelling doesn't help with this kind of thing so I am just trying to be patient. And may the gods of clean underwear smile down on us in the near future!!

These pictures are a little far away but you can still sense the absolute adorableness of Samantha at her dance recital! Her recital was Friday night at the local Jr. High and it was almost too cute for words. In the duck outfit she is 3rd from the left, in case you couldn't tell. In the purple outfit she is 2nd from the right being extremely sassy!! Which I appreciate in dance, NOT so much with me at home when I'm trying to discipline her. Both sets of grandparents were able to attend which trilled Samantha. We got video as well but have yet to figure out how to get it off the camera and onto the computer! It's my sister's camera, so we'll have to have her figure it out for us. Anywho, enjoy the sweet pictures!!

Another Flashback

What Samantha is thinking : "I'm giving you cancer with my mind!!!!"

What Alex is thinking :

Scrumptious

Don't even try to tell me you don't want to eat this face right up!!!
Or this one....

Makes me a tiny bit sad they are growing up.....
But mostly I think "Hot diggity I've got cute kids". Samantha with her little elf ears and Alex's massive blue eyes.......sigh, and oh so innocent!

Just cuz I'm a stinker!

One of Andy's pet-peeves is having the sheets tucked in all the way up to his pillow.

One of my favorite past-times is to tuck Andy's sheet in all the way up to his pillow. It's just good clean fun!

A few thoughts on Cinderella.

As I was watching Cinderella for the zillionth time today a few things popped into my head.

1. I feel like Cinderella (only not as skinny and I have toes). I mean this is what the little mice said before singing... "Every time she find a minute, that's the minute they beginnith." AMEN little mouse man!! Every time I find a minute to do anything not serving my two little masters, that's when they decide they need me. Instead of "Cinderella!!!" being screamed at me it's constantly "Momma". Not that I'm complaining or anything. I wouldn't do anything of the sort!

2. I wish all the little critters in real life looked like the ones in the Disney shows. I mean, how cute are the little birdies that wake up Cinderella? They have coats and hats on! I tried dressing up my cat and put earrings in his ears. He didn't like it. I don't think real animals would stand for that yet in Cinderella even the mice have shoes on! And bugs too. Like in A Bug's Life. I wouldn't kill every bug I saw if they actually looked like Pixar makes them look. Maybe in my own world someday I'll make cute bugs. You'll all have to come and check them out.

3. I really don't want to watch Cinderella any more.

Must resist calling them panties!

Alex is on his third day of wearing big boy underwear and he's doing a great job! He hasn't had any accidents yet (cross your fingers!) and has been so good about telling us when he needs to go potty. We still check in with him about every hour and ask him if he needs to go, but it's working like a charm! I still put a diaper on him for naps and bedtime but I know that is normal. Samantha was the exception to the rule and once she was potty trained during the day she also was trained at night and never had to wear diapers at night. That girl can hold it for hours, just like her momma! (I once held my pee for over 24 hours when I was camping with some friends. I have a very shy bladder and can't "hover" to pee.)
Well, I feel that I have filled your heads with a sufficient amount of unnecessary information and may go about my day now!

Here are the kids after bath with their pajamas on their heads, Alex in his blue camo underwear, dancing to old-school Michael Jackson. Yup, we're raising them up right!

Oh, what a nap can do!

Samantha just woke up from a nap.....FINALLY!! She hasn't napped for about a week and a half and it's amazing how one nap can lift the spirits.....of ME that is! Yes, yes, she is happy as well and the nap did her good, but let's focus on me for a second. The health and well-being and happiness of this family really does rest upon me and my mood. I remember it was the same with the home I grew up in and my mom. If momma ain't happy, ain't nobody happy!! It's true! When Samantha doesn't nap she is difficult during the day and wakes up numerous times during the night. This directly affects my attitude in a MAJOR way. Which, in turn, affects Andy's attitude and the children's attitudes as well. It's a sad, sad truth. But just having Samantha nap today (Alex is still asleep...woo hoo!) makes me feel so much lighter and happier. I think I might be able to make it through the day now!

Oh, this video was taken a couple of weeks ago at 8:30 in the morning! Yes, they are still in their pajamas and yes, I did let them run through the sprinklers when it was only 60 degrees outside. And YES, they did have a great time!! Call me a bad parent if you must, I just call myself a genius for buying 30 minutes of happiness.

Tomatoes

I planted my tomatoes and herbs this morning. I love my garden. I got my green thumb from my mom. She got it from her mom. We all especially love to plant tomatoes. My aunt, my mom's oldest sister, passed away on Monday and we went to her funeral today. Almost all of her children commented on their mother's love of gardening and growing things and how she enjoyed watching birds feed at the many bird feeders around her house. All of my mom's sisters are like this and now I see myself and my sisters with houses full of plants and bird feeders and flowers. It makes me proud that I am like my mom and my aunts and my grandma in this way. I like the fact that we can all sit around and talk about gardening and the little birdies that visit our feeders. I remember watching out my grandma's window at the birds and her telling me which birds were mean and which were funny and which ate the most. My aunts all do the same. I see my mom pointing out the birdies to my kids when we visit her house, and it makes me happy.
I think this summer as my tomatoes grow (hopefully 7 feet tall like last year) I will think of my aunt Kay.

Update

In case you're wondering, we finally settled on watching Enchanted.......AGAIN! It has a princess in it and Alex thinks it's silly (thilly in his words), so it works all around. Not to mention I find it mildly entertaining as well!

Conversation that JUST took place.

Samantha: I want to watch a Princess.

Alex: I want to watch Monsters.

Me: We need to find a show that we can both agree on or I will pick the show.

Samantha: Well, I said a Princess, so that's what we're going to watch.

Yes, we are SO screwed with this little girl. She's not yet 4 and is already acting 13. I am amazed everyday at how much easier boys are than girls. Alex has his rough times (he is 2 after all) but usually he shrugs things off 100 times easier than Samantha. Which makes my life so much more pleasant. My sister Kami wants a little girl so badly with her next baby but I hope she knows if she gets her wish, she's in for a rude awakening!!

What is strategy?

So I'm reading this article titled "What is strategy?" for my, you guessed it, Competing through Strategy class. Let me share a choice morsel of wisdom with you.

"The most viable positions are those whose activity systems are incompatible because of tradeoffs. Strategic positioning sets the trade-off rules that define how individual activities will be configured and integrated. Seeing strategy in terms of activity systems only makes it clearer why organizational structure, systems, and processes need to be strategy-specific. Tailoring organization to strategy, in turn, makes complementarities more achievable and contributes to sustainability."

The guy that wrote this teaches at Harvard. I can't express to you how glad I am that I don't go to Harvard right now. I swear, if the guy had used the word "synergy" even once in that paragraph, I would have dropped out.

Why we have the perfect family.....

Because Andy has one lap. I have one lap. Samantha fits perfectly on Andy's lap. Alex fits perfectly on my lap. And we can fit perfectly on one couch and watch Lambert the Sheepish Lion together before bedtime.

I miss Bob Barker

You know those people who sit on their couch and watch The Price is Right and scream the answers at the TV? Yeah, that's me.

Schmoopy!

I woke up this morning suddenly hit with the memory of a poem Andy wrote me when we had been dating only a month. I'm not sure what prompted this memory but I dug through my drawers until I found the print out of the email containing the poem. I think it may be the only copy I have of the poem so I am always so careful with it and someday I'll figure out a better way to preserve it. Andy wrote the poem while he was on his way to San Francisco for Thanksgiving in 2001. I won't share the poem here because I think that would embarrass Andy terribly. Which, oddly enough, was also my same reasoning for sharing the poem! But don't worry Andy, I won't do it. Let's just say it's the most wonderful poem I've ever read! It's so elegant and beautiful and the fact that it was written about me makes it even better! After all of these years together I still get butterflies when I read it. I guess I just wanted to say what a great husband Andy is and how much I appreciate him. Hence the title of this blog.......schmoopy!! I love you Andy!

I never even made it through the book!

Take the Quiz here!

You are Elizabeth Bennet of Pride & Prejudice! You are intelligent, witty, and tremendously attractive. You have a good head on your shoulders, and oftentimes find yourself the lone beacon of reason in a sea of ridiculousness. You take great pleasure in many things. You are proficient in nearly all of them, though you will never own it. Lest you seem too perfect, you have a tendency toward prejudgement that serves you very ill indeed.

I tried so hard to make it through Pride and Prejudice, but never could. The description sounds pretty fair though. Except the tremendously attractive part. I'm just plain ol' HOT!!!!

Things Andy loves

So we've got our computer hooked up to our TV. This is cool because Vista has a built in Media Center, which essentially means that we've got a Super Tivo. Lest you think that this is a total nerd-fest, Kristi actually asked me to do this because a couple of the guys at work have them, and they convinced her that putting all of the kids' DVDs onto a hard drive is a much better way to go instead of fumbling with the disks. That's right, we go into a folder called Disney, and pull up Cinderella, or Monsters, Inc., or Enchanted in about 5 seconds. No fumbling with discs, or cases, or anything. It's awesome.
So the reason I'm showing Microsoft all of this love, is because having our TV hooked up to the internet means I can watch things like this from the couch. Let's see who remembers this one.....



Bump, Bump

That's one of my all-time favorites. I plan to wander through YouTube one of these nights that I'm putting off homework and gather all of the old classics. So far I've gotten Lambert the Sheepish Lion and Paul Bunyan, a couple of my favorites from the old Sunday night Disney stuff they used to have on TV. Have to make sure the kids keep up on the classics. And just to make sure that they don't disappear off of YouTube, I go to www.vixy.net, and that site will download and convert the files into something I can watch in my Media Center. So we'll have a big folder full of the classics for me, er the kids, to watch. If I find some really good ones, I'll post those on here from time to time.

Waaaay too much time on their hands

Kickin' it old school Nintendo style.

krandy.etsy.com

Well, I FINALLY got my first duvet cover listed on www.etsy.com for purchase. I now have a link on my blog here below my pictures that you can click on and jump right to my shop. Kind of fun! We'll see if it sells, but at least it's keeping me busy while Andy does homework! I have started on a second one and have a third one in mind but I think I might see what the response is like for this one before I go too crazy and spend a ton of money on fabric. My sister Kami is also setting up shop on etsy under the name VersaJewel. She has some great jewelry on there so I highly recommend taking a look at her shop as well. But look at mine first! ;-)

A new kind of sandwich!

The picture we chose to study on family night on Monday was the picture of Peter, James and John giving the priesthood to Joseph Smith. Samantha just brought me the picture and we went over it with Alex. 2 minutes later I heard Samantha talking to Alex about "peanut butter and John" and Joseph Smith. I had no idea the church was so tasty!!

Triple D!

We had such a fun day today as we went up to Salt Lake to Ruth's Diner to watch them film an episode of Diner's, Drive-In's and Dives! It was very interesting to see how it all gets put together and how they decide what shots to do, etc. The host, Guy Fieri was there and very involved with all of the shots and interviews. I was surprised he didn't just sit back and wait until it was his turn on camera.
We got there around 11 and they started filming around 11.30. We sat in a section that was just for the people that emailed the show to tell them about Ruth's so Guy knew who to talk to. He interviewed a few of us including my family! He asked Alex to give him knucks but Alex was a bit shy. Samantha had no problem doing it though and has talked all day about "giving the spiky haired guy knucks!". Guy talked to Andy and I about our food and how long we'd been coming to Ruth's at which point I told him we were fairly new customers since we just moved back to Utah after living in the Diner capital of the world, New Jersey. I told him that this diner was better than any in Jersey I'd been to and he liked that I was sassy and offered a throwdown. We'll see if any of it makes it into the show, but hopefully the cute kids will seal the deal! We were half way home when the producer called us and asked us to come back for some additional shots of us eating. We were so full and not in the mood but we went back anyways and they got some great footage of the kids eating and laughing. The guy with the mike was hilarious and making the kids laugh while not looking at the camera.
It turned into a long afternoon but the kids fell asleep in the car on the way home so all was well!
I'm not sure when the episode will air, but I heard Guy tell someone usually about 5-6 weeks. If I find out beforehand I'll post the date on here. I know you're all DYING to see it and make fun of us!!

"Rock me please!"

I know Alex asks me to rock him just to stall bedtime, but if you looked straight into those big blue eyes you wouldn't be able to resist either! Plus, I know that the day will come (sooner than I would like) where he will stop asking me to rock him. He won't even want to sit with me anymore. So until that day comes I will rock him any time of the day or night that he wants!! Just don't tell him that!!

UB40

Samantha is dancing her little heart out to the UB40 music Andy put on and I told her she was a good dancer. She replied, "I've got the moves!". Really! Where does she get this stuff?? She is so fun it's ridiculous. Just as I was typing this she then switched up her dancing and said "Now I'm doing rock and roll moves.". What a character.

Alex is finally starting to say his "S's" in words but he says them with a bit of a lisp. It's very adorable.

A new Andy!

Today starts the Andy Smile Transformation! Andy is not really looking forward to this whole process, it will be painful, but the results I think are going to be fantastic! Today he is having 2 root canals leading up to a set of 8 new crowns for his top front teeth!! They are going to be so shiny and white and straight! If he lets me, I'll take before and after pictures. I know this doesn't mean a whole lot to Andy but I am so excited for him to have beautiful teeth to match his nice smile. The whole thing will be done in about a month. He has an appointment in a week to shave down all his teeth then in 3 weeks they'll put the crowns on.