Peanutella

When I first tasted Nutella (a chocolate hazelnut spread), I fell in love.  I thought it might have been the circumstances - watching the sun rise over the Mediterranean Sea while sitting on my Egyptian friend's balcony in Alexandria.  She passed me the Nutella to spread on my flatbread for breakfast.  I was captivated with the first bite.  A year or so later, when I found Nutella at my Arizona grocery store, I bought it, thinking that I was probably going to feel let down by this product that I had built up in my mind.  But, no, it was just as good as I remembered. 

Ever since then, I have always had a jar of Nutella in my pantry.  I have used it in many ways - on bread, on fruit, as a dip, as a ganache, in a cheesecake, in milkshakes, etc.  Did you know you can save the gold papers on the top of the jar and redeem them for Nutella products?  I'm waiting on my Nutella t-shirt, and then I'll have everything in their boutique ;)  I know, it's excessive.

Yesterday, I came across this recipe on a blog I check every once in a while.  Home-made nutella.  Except substituting peanuts for the hazelnuts http://smittenkitchen.com/2011/01/chocolate-peanut-spread-peanutella/#more-7109  Of course I had to make this ASAP.  I went to our grocery store last night to get some peanut oil, and Trader Joe's this morning to buy the peanuts.  It was very easy to make.  First you roast the peanuts for a few minutes, then get out the blender. Well, I used my blender, but a food processor would work just as well.  Basically you blend the peanuts until they liquify, then add everything else and blend again. 

It will make a little bit of a sticky mess in your blender

But the final product is pretty good

It doesn't taste as sweet as Nutella.  Which makes sense, because the first ingredient listed on Nutella is sugar, but this peanutella has more peanuts than sugar.  Another difference is that peanutella is dairy-free, while Nutella has some skim milk and whey.  Plus Nutella has some artificial flavor - the only bad thing in peanutella is the powdered sugar.  The cost difference is in favor of peanutella, but not by a long ways.  I figured the cost of mine to be about $2 if I spread out the cost of the oil, peanuts, powdered sugar, salt, and cocoa powder.  If you have to buy all of that up front it would probably be more like $11, but the peanut oil is the bulk of that price and the recipe only requires 2 tablespoons.  A jar of Nutella at my grocery store is on sale right now for $2.69, so it is cheaper to make the peanutella.  Plus the peanutella made about 1/2 cup more than a jar of Nutella.

All this being said, last week I mixed some natural, unsaltened and unsweetened, peanut butter with some nutella, about half and half.  This peanutella tastes just like it!  So, if you want to skip the slight mess and minimal time, just do that :)

A lesson on table manners

This is a project that has been on my agenda for months.  I read an article in a magazine about a mom who taught her kids table manners by rewarding them for good manners during dinner time.  Their reward was a dinner at a fancy restaurant, which I thought would be fun for the kids because we hardly ever go out to eat and they LOVE restaurants.  I mentioned the idea to Ellie and she couldn't wait to start!  But wait she did, because mommy is a procrastinator :)

For the most part, my kids have been pretty good at dinner time.  Recently though, they seemed to have forgotten all manners and it was starting to drive me crazy.  To the point that one night I just had enough and threw whatever I was holding down on the table and left the room (luckily it wasn't Violet I was holding.  I think it was a piece of bread).  Finally I pulled myself together and spent an afternoon making this wonderful chart with Ellie.

I drew the lines and labeled the top, and Ellie decorated it.  We brainstormed a list of rules for the dinner table, and here is what we came up with:

No screaming - use your normal voice
Stay in your chair
Say "excuse me" if you need to get up
No talking with your mouth full
Say "please" and "thank you"
No complaining.
You can have a peanut butter sandwich if you don't like dinner
No feet on the table
No toys at the table
Take small bites
Try one bite of everything
No chewing on your hair

I learned from my favorite elementary school teacher that when you brainstorm, you don't edit or criticize, you just write down all the ideas.  I think I will be going through and editing some of these rules later, but most of them are keepers.  The most important to me are staying in their chairs, no complaining, and try at least one bite of everything.  If they follow these rules during dinner, they get to draw a happy face in the next square.  Do you see the darker squares (every 7th square)?  Each of those squares earn them a prize.  These are the prizes in the order they earn them:

1. Fancy candlelit dinner at home
2. They pick any dessert for a night
3. They pick the dinner for a night and help make it
4. Dinner at a restaurant of his/her choosing

So far this is working beautifully.  The kids think it is so fun and really don't want to lose their happy face each night.  It's wonderful to not hear, "Yucky!!  Mommy, I don't want to eat this, it's yucky!" at dinner every time I serve anything but mac & cheese, spaghetti, or pizza.  The prizes they earn are also easy for us to provide, and I am redeeming all our discover card points for gift cards to restaurants.  It will take at least 4 weeks for them to earn restaurant time, so hopefully we'll get the gift cards by then :)  Now the question is, will these table manners remain after the chart is full? 

New year, new baby, new schedule

For a long time I have envisioned a day when I would once again have a clean house.  I have come to realize that a clean house on a regular basis is a goal to be reached far in the future.  Even my standards have dropped to a level of Don't Gross Out Your Visitors, which is much, much less than Spotless, but a few steps above Call CPS now!  This month I kicked my butt into gear and made up a cleaning schedule.  This was prompted by the following: it is the beginning of a new year (thus a fresh start), we just had houseguests so the house was somewhat clean already, our family just got over the month-long stomach plague and I could feel the germs waiting to pounce again, and I felt like I was drowning in housework with no rescue in sight.  New baby = more cleaning/laundry + less free time.  Winter = more time inside (to scatter toys and dirty dishes) + dirty slush on tile and carpet   everything + more laundry.  We are so lucky that this semester Jason is working pretty much completely from home, so he entertains the older kids more with school and playing, he often walks them to school or home, and he's a helping hand with Violet if I'm making dinner.  Plus he usually washes the dishes and takes out the trash/recycling.  And sometimes even makes lunch or cleans the kitchen!   I know, I'm totally spoiled compared to most stay-at-home moms, yet I still feel like I'm drowning sometimes. 

I am understanding that the more children we have, the more organized I need to be.  In order to have any free time at all to watch tv and play on facebook play with the kids, I need to use my other time wisely.  So, the cleaning schedule.  I took an estimate that a house-cleaning company sent me after they toured our apartment.  It had a detailed list of everything they would clean if I hired them.  I broke up the list into catagories of once a month, twice a month, weekly, and as needed.  Then I made up a monthly schedule that dispersed these chores as evenly as possible, with no work on Sunday and a little more time-consuming on an afternoon that I should have more free time.  Now I only have 3-4 things to do each day and if I stick to the schedule, the entire house should be cleaned monthly.  Please understand that this does not mean my house will look spotless all the time!  There are constantly toys and crumbs everywhere still, but at least our bath and toilets should always be clean.  And I'll feel better knowing that even when our house is "messy," at least it is clean underneath the mess.

I also made a food schedule.  Our breakfast and lunch menus will rotate weekly, and our dinners will rotate monthly.  I always like to try new recipes, so those will be substituted in to the menu at will.  Or I'll just be trying out a bunch of new side dishes and desserts.  The food schedule will hopefully help me a lot with making grocery lists and sticking to them.

Earlier this week I sent out my schedule to friends and family, for two reasons.  One, because it took a bit of time to put it together, so I would love if anyone else can benefit from it.  It's an excel file, so it's easy to change anything to fit another person's needs.  Two, if I tell other people I am planning on doing something, I am more likely to actually do it :)

I have been a week on our new schedules, and so far I love them.  Grocery shopping was awesome, because I didn't get anything at all that wasn't on our list.  No quick meals that I grabbed "just in case."  Whenever I do that I end up making the quick meal instead of the more elaborate one that I bought all the ingredients for, and then those ingredients often go bad before I use them.  My daily cleaning schedule is inspiring rather than daunting.  Once I finish my tasks for that day, I can feel free to relax and not feel guilty about the other messy things in the house.  Or, I can not clean all day and do my chores after the kids go to bed.  Sometimes I even get a head start on the rest of the week.  Most importantly, I do not feel like I am hopelessly drowning in housework any more.  And I'm not too embarrassed when people drop by our house.  At least not until my kids run out into the room with underwear on their heads.  And nothing else on.

Family vacation 2011 - Day three

I didn't sleep very well that night, because I kept waiting for someone to wake up.  For Violet to start screaming again, or for one of the kids to get up for the day.  Everyone was quiet all night, until Rowan woke up around 7:15.  I begged him to be quiet (as to not wake up the baby) and bribed him with breakfast in bed.  We whispered to each other while we ate dried mango and granola bars and drank apple juice.  When I felt I could hold him captive no longer, I woke up Jason and asked him to take Rowan out into the lobby to play (or watch Disney channel).  Almost immediately after they left Ellie woke up, so I fed her breakfast and sent her out to join Daddy.  Then, I packed up our many bags.  On our last day of vacation, we had to check out of our room by 10:30am, but we could stay as long as we wanted at the water park.  So as soon as Violet woke up, I called the family back in so we could change into our swim suits for the bazillionth time to spent our last hours at the pool before we headed back out into the snow.  While Jason loaded up our car and I checked us out of the hotel, the kids went to work spending the last few tokens we had.  Ellie divided them up fairly (5 for her because she is 5 and 3 for Rowan because he is 3.  That's fair, right?) and Rowan promptly dropped two tokens into a dumb prize machine that took four tokens to even try for a prize.  Thankfully I caught him before he threw his last token away.  I led him over to a game that the kids had been eyeing all trip, yet had not played.  It was a shooting game that I didn't even realize gave out tickets until this happened when Rowan played it:                            

To our surprise, my delight, and the kids' glee, Rowan had hit some bonus ship and won the jackpot.  168 tickets!  I could not stop laughing at the irony that a 3-year-old who had no idea what he was doing won the jackpot and had tickets just coming and coming and coming out of that machine. 

Rowan was pretty proud of himself.  And Ellie was a lot jealous.  She played the game right after him and won two tickets.  And then started crying.  "It's not fair!!  Why did he get so many tickets!!!  Whaaaahhhh!"  Honestly it was a relief that Rowan won those tickets, because without them they could only afford to redeem a couple pieces of candy.  His jackpot tripled their ticket total so they could each have a plastic piece of crap toy AND a candy necklace.  It's amazing what $10 in tokens can buy, right?  :)

Off to the waterpark, where we enjoyed another two hours of swimming and sliding.



Then, back to reality.  The frigid air welcomed (or shocked) us as we drove back home.  But first, a stop at Culvers to pick up lunch.  And on our 53 mile trip home, we passed four different Culvers.  Now that is Wisconsin.

Oh, and I should mention, Violet came home with a souvenir too, but hers wasn't a plastic piece of crap.  Hers was a nice, pearly white souvenir  :D

Have you ever tried to get a picture of an angry baby's first painful tooth?  I promise it's there, even if it's hard to see 

Family vacation 2011 - Day two

When this hotel was built, someone really knew what they were doing.  In order to get to the waterpark, you have to pass a gift shop (with a giant candy display in the doorway), a lounge blasting the Disney channel all day, a coffee shop with pastries in full view, and, the most enticing, you have to walk through an arcade.  So, every time we went to the water park the kids begged to play the games.  Which were NOT included in the room price :)  But, you could conveniently charge tokens to your room via the wristbands worn throughout our stay.  On our second day we planned to stay mostly dry and explore the arcade, the small indoor theme park, and tubing at Christmas Mountain.  First we went to the arcade, while we waited until 10:30 for the theme park to open.

The kids are so excited!

We taught them foosball, because it took about 100x longer to play than the other games. 

As long as Ellie and I kept scoring, our ball would return so we could keep playing

After spending most of our tokens, we headed to the indoor theme park.  Which, as it turned out, did not open at 10:30 like the waterpark, but 2:00pm instead.  Hmm, there went our plans for the day.  We decided to come back, change into our swimsuits and eat an early lunch, then go back to the water park.  Actually, this time Jason stayed behind with a sleeping Violet while I took the other kids to the water park.  Then, we came back and changed again into clothes and went to the indoor theme park.

We weren't sure what to expect, but I had measured Ellie before we came and thought she could ride just about everything there.  The requirement for everything but the go karts was 48 inches, and she was about 47 1/2 inches without shoes.  I guess my measuring was off, because the signs with height limits were much higher than her head.  I actually asked a supervisor to come out and talk with me because the signs were ridiculously higher than her head.  Someone came out with a tape measurer and sure enough it was 48 inches.  Apparently I need a basic measuring refresher or something...

Anyway, there were only a few rides that the kids could do, but they really liked all of them.  There was something called the crazy trolley (or something like that) that was like a trolley, but it went around and around like a ferris wheel.  Imagine my surprise when the attendant asked if I wanted to ride on it with Violet.  I mean, it even had those bars that push down on your legs to keep you in your seat, but it's okay for a 5-month-old to ride?  Yes, she is 5 months old.  Some people might not know it because I haven't blogged in a couple months ;)   Well, I hopped right on because I was pretty confident that I could hold her tight and, well, when else would a 5-month-old get the chance to ride an amusement park ride besides a carousel?

Violet on her very first ride.

Another ride the kids could do were the bumper cars, but only with one of us driving with them.  I took my turn with Ellie, but as you can see from this picture of Jason and Rowan, it was hard to take pictures.



Ellie had to enjoy this ride by herself.  The ride actually had a minimum and a maximum height requirement, so she was the only one in our family who could ride it.  I think she really liked it; she said, "Mom, that ride made my tummy feel funny, but it was fun!"

And of course the kids loved the teacups.  They loved that they could spin the cups themselves.  I rode them one time, but I spun the car so fast at the end that the attendant had to stop the car when the ride stopped and I sat in the car for a minute or two before I could get off.  That was enough tea cups for me!

After the theme park (which also had an arcade and we HAD to play those games too), we decided not to go tubing at Christmas Mountain.  It was already 4:30, we would have had to go back to our room and bundle up, and Rowan is not tall enough to tube according to their rules.  So, we went back to the room and changed into our suits again (while I ordered pizza online) and went swimming for the last time that day until we came back to wait for our pizza.

And wait.  And wait.  And wait some more.  We ordered from Dominos, which now has a handy dandy pizza tracker on their website.  The tracker will tell you exactly what step your pizza is in the process.  I ordered our pizza to be delivered at 6pm.  When we returned to our room it was 5:50pm, and the pizza tracker told us our pizza passed the quality check at 5:47pm.  Perfect for a 6:00 delivery, right?  Well, the pizza tracker did not move beyond that point.  At 6:20, when it still hadn't moved to "out for delivery" we called the store.  Jason was told that they got busy and the pizza would be ready in 5 minutes and delivered in 10 minutes.  Um, okay, by that time I was hoping that they made us new pizzas instead of our pizzas sitting out for over 1/2 hour.  We were all starving and if it wasn't for cable tv we would have had some screaming kids.  At 6:50 (20 minutes past the "10 minutes" delivery promise) Jason called yet again and  they tried to explain something about the drivers, yada, yada, yada, and that they would void our charges.  I would hope so!  It was finally delivered around 7:15pm, and I tried to tip the driver, thinking that it wasn't really his fault that it was so late, but he refused the tip saying, "It's too late for that."  I'm hoping he meant that the pizza was too late and not that he was being snotty because we got him in trouble or something.  Either way, the pizza was free.  Plus I had splurged and ordered some chocolate lava crunch cakes and they were AMAZING.  I guess it was worth the wait to get everything for free, but it was pretty rough.

I think the day not going at all as planned (although still enjoyable) was a premonition for that evening (which was not enjoyable).  The night that Violet WOULD NOT SLEEP.  I don't know if it was teething, or a tummy ache, or just over tiredness, but she was practically impossible to get to sleep and then she couldn't stay asleep.  Which would be rough at home, but it was horrible in a hotel.  I walked the halls with her for at least a couple hours, with her screaming at points and just staring around with her red eyes wide open at others.  When she finally fell asleep (around 11pm) I brought her back to the room and tried to lay her down and she immediately started screaming.  She wouldn't nurse, wouldn't be distracted, and wouldn't calm down for me or Jason.  For about 45 minutes this continued until I finally tried giving her some tylenol, thinking that maybe it was pain from teething.  She gagged that up and threw up a bunch of phlegm (probably from crying so much), but she seemed to calm down a little.  So I gave her new tylenol, walked her to sleep again, and sat up in bed with her sleeping.  Every time I tried to put her down, no matter how long I waited, she cried.  I think I dozed off and woke up and put her down and finally she slept (around 1am).  And through all of this screaming??  The other kids did not make a peep.  I had no idea that they could sleep so well!  I guess all the swimming (and going to bed late from eating dinner so late) really wore them out.  So, I went to bed, restlessly waiting for someone to wake up...

Family vacation 2011 - Day one

First, let me start at the beginning.  I had been looking at taking a trip to the Wisconsin Dells this winter for fun.  I mean, what is more fun than a waterpark when it is snowing outside?  So, I started looking for deals.  There have been a few bargains, after all, winter is not the busy season for the Dells.  Then a great deal came up.  Buy a $100 giftcard, get a free night's stay.  The giftcard could be used toward anything at the hotel/park, including rooms.  My grandparents gave us some Christmas money that could pay for the giftcard, so I pounced. I bought the giftcard and used it to pay for one night, then used the free night for the second night.  The giftcard also paid for most of the fees and taxes, and the $10 to upgrade our room (more about that later).  The best part is that the room included wristbands to get us into the indoor water and theme parks for three days - check in, our second day, and check out. 

Now, when to go?  Should we go toward the end of winter, when we are soo sick of the cold but it still won't be warm for another month or two?  Should we go near Christmas since it was a Christmas present?  I decided that the third week of the kids' winter break from school would be perfect, since most kids only received 2 weeks off and it would probably be a slow week. 

After a LOT of packing (our car was FULL!)  we set off on the relatively short drive - 1 1/2 hours at most. I should mention that Violet is much better in the car; she only cried for about 15 minutes of the trip. We arrived around 10:30am, even though check-in wasn't until 4pm, because we could get into the waterpark early.  The hotel staff was so nice though and let us have our room right then since it was ready. We loved our room.  Besides being a normal hotel room, it had a half wall that separated out a set of bunkbeds for the kids (that was the upgrade I made).  After exploring the room a little, we ate lunch (with all the food I packed) and changed into our swimsuits.  Violet fell asleep, so I stayed in the room with her while the rest went swimming.  The best part about the hotel is that it is connected via a skywalk to the waterpark, so we didn't have to go outside at all, plus it made it easy for me to just meet up with them later. 

Ellie is our little fish

                                  Rowan wanted to just float on his back all day

     Violet finally went swimming.  She acted like the water was no big deal and she was almost even bored.

After swimming

The rest of our first day was more of the same.  We came back to our room for snacks, then Ellie and I went back to the water park to ride the big slides.  There were only four big slides, but I was right about it being a slow week because we never had to wait in line for the slides.  We came back to the room for dinner - Jason went out and bought some Wendy's.  Bedtime was surprisingly not bad.  I took Violet out to the lobby in her carrier until she fell asleep while Jason put the older kids to bed.  I think everyone was asleep by 9pm, which is not bad for a hotel stay for this family.  The night was a little rough for Violet (and me) and she woke up every 2-3 hours, but it wasn't as bad as it could have been.  She saved that for the next night...