Wednesday: hair, reading, party

 I finally got my hair cut today.  I've been wanting to do so since about April, but with our beach vacation I also wanted to be able to braid it.  I donated it, as normal.

While I was gone Isaac decided to fill up a milk jug with water and toss it off the deck.  Obviously.  What he did not think about doing was putting the evidence in the recycling bin.

This afternoon I read a bit with Isaac.  I was hot and the house was mostly clean and I didn't feel like doing more chores.  It was an easy "yes" when he asked me to read with him.  Tornado joined for a bit.

We had a birthday party with grandparents tonight.  Nothing too big, but we had Buffalo Wild Wings, cake, streamers, and presents.

Tuesday: food

 This morning the kids and I packed lunches at Kids' Food Basket.  It was Joshua's first time, so we all worked at the same table.  (Usually it's tables of two.)  We were so fast.  The kids did an amazing job sticking with it and I think we packed close to 500 lunches.

 

Then this afternoon I got an amazing text.  But for context, I had emailed Katy and suggested that the Land O'Lakes recipe department change their on-line recipes so that the amount of ingredients were in the instructions.  (I.e., Step 2: mix 2 tbsp butter with 2 cup flour.)  I hate trying to scroll up and down with dirty hands because I can't see the whole recipe on the screen.  Katy is the only person that I know that would actually know someone that could make such changes.  

"Amanda, the head of the Land O’Lakes Culinary Center shared your recipe feedback with her team and sparked some very good conversation. She will keep me posted on where they net out. Maybe you will spark a new recipe format revolution!! "

Monday: a nice day

This morning we went on a walk with Aunt C.  It was a lovely time for a walk; it was cloudy and only about 70deg.  The kids were on scooters and as long as we were moving the bugs weren't bad.

I thought Joshua had a dentist appointment today, but when I thought about it I realized that I haven't received a million reminder texts.  I called and there was no appointment!  Score.

The kids made a bunch of things with Legos today.  So much so that I needed to ask the kids to play with me instead of the other way around.  It does mean that I got quite a few things accomplished today though.

Sunday: back

We got back from vacation yesterday, so today we 'recovered'.  It was a great vacation so there wasn't much to recover from, but it's nice to have a day to unpack (somewhat) and get back to normal.

After getting home yesterday we stopped at the LEGO store.  So we started the day with pick-a-brick boxes.  There were a lot of tower pieces this time, so we all ended up with towers.

Isaac made a chaos tower:

Ben made a magical castle ruin in the sky:

Joshua made a Japanese testing tower.  (A place in Japan where they test new designs.)

I made a museum:

And we all made some space ships

We played a game in the afternoon.  Tornado hid in a box until a started shuffling, which scared him.

And we finished the day with family reading time.

Saturday: cats

 Cats aren't allowed on LEGO instruction books, so imagine my surprise when I came down this morning to this:

I moved them off to the side and Tornado took possession.

Friday: morning, pizza

This morning was odd.  My children barely spoke to me.  They were both content doing their own thing, so I listened to two podcasts and then continued with my audiobook.  It was lovely and sad all at the same time.  

I made pizza tonight with the pizza dough and it was delicious!!  I'm glad that I had been doing it with the pizza kits from Crust 54 for a while though; I knew what to expect once it came time to actually make the pizzas.  I knew that I needed all the toppings chopped and ready to go.  I knew about how much cheese to put on, etc.  I made all the dough into pizzas and seemed to be just the right amount for tonight's dinner and tomorrow's lunch, which was 143g of the sourdough discard. 

Honestly, this went so well that I kind of want to try making bread soon.  I had been planning on waiting several months before trying bread to figure out pizza dough, but maybe I won't.  We'll see how busy the summer ends up being.

Thursday: Lego, dough

 Joshua came up with a new game today.  I was expecting it to be decent, but it was actually quite fun!  He made a small Lego item, in this case, a boat.

Without showing us the boat, he took it all apart and put the pieces into a bag.  We drew one piece at a time and had to make a boat.  We ended up with a power boat.

I also started making some pizza dough today.  Liz had kindly gave me some of her sour dough starter.  I've been debating asking for some for a while, but finally realized that everyone likes the "make your own" pizzas a lot more than store bought pizzas.  So the goal is to make pizza dough regularly.  Liz has a lot more experience and suggested some rough measurements for feeding the sourdough, but I'm not there yet so I weighed everything out.  Ok, I think I'm all out of order in this paragraph.  I took out half the current sourdough starter, as I'm supposed to.  I feed the rest of the starter and put it back in the fridge.  With the discard, I started making pizza dough.

And, 12 hours later, it had doubled in size like it was supposed to!  I had looked at it after a few hours and couldn't tell any difference, but maybe it was still warming up.  I folded it, per the recipe, and put it back in the fridge for tomorrow.  I might have more dough than I need, but I'd actually like to make Friday's dinner and Saturday's lunch. I can also freeze it if I have too much.