My blog

This morning I turned on "Curious George" to hypnotize my children, and trick them into forgetting to burn down our house, while I took a shower. That plan was a raging success except for when I emerged from the shower my kids had some kind of mysterious mania for windsocks. We've talked about windsocks before in a passing way, (like a: literally I drove past it at 45 mph while my kids asked about everything they saw out the window and one of those things was a windsock-kind of way.) I don't know what George did in that episode, but their passing interest in windsocks had bloomed into a full-blown obsession in the time it took me to wash my hair. They begged to make a windsock, and McBoy gleefully explained how he planned to hang his brand new socks, which he loves, on a nail outside...awesome... To save the footwear in our house, I convinced them we should make a cool fish windsock and I'm actually pretty happy with how easy it was and how cool it turned out. Ste...

My parents have been living in their house for about 15 years. During that time  zero dogs and zero cats have lived in the house. The previous owners put a doggy door in the door between the garage and house, but even if we had a small animal it wouldn't have been able to use the doggy door because it was boarded shut to conform with fire safety regulations. So this un-used and un-usable doggy door sat there for years and nobody ever looked at it or thought about it until one day my mom decided she wanted that door to be painted black. My dad painted the door and suddenly realized that he hated that defunct doggy door: Once he pointed it out we all wondered how we possibly walked past it for so long without doing anything about it, because now we all hated it. But how do you remove a doggy door? Google had lots of ideas for putting a doggy door in, but not for hiding one. So my dad made a plan to get rid of the doggy door: Using a bit of trim and some bead board he made 6 panels (3...

So literally her whole life, until recently, McGirlie has been babbling nonsense at me. One day, the nonsense babbling stopped abruptly, and she shifted to saying things that have actual meaning and need an actual response. Unfortunately this shift did not coincide with a shift to readily-recognizable-English. Also unfortunately, I didn't catch on to the shift right away. I feel kind of like the last kid on the playground to find out about cooties, or the last adult in the world to get a smart phone...wait... Anyway, the other day I was serving no-bake cookies to the kids and McGirlie kept saying, "Izzih'ot? Izzih'ot?" instead of eating her cookie. I responded in full-on exuberant baby-talk, "Yeah cookies! Yummy cookies!" and she just kept saying "Izzih'ot?" It took a while, with me babbling nonsense at her, before I realized she was asking if the cookies were hot! I am pretty sure this is how it looked from her point of view: So Mama made ...

I made a painting, a great big watercolor painting! I was pretty nervous to try out watercolors but my dad, and my friend Sara Gourley gave me a lot of good tips and encouragement to get started. So I watched a hundred youtube videos and got to work. You have to soak watercolor paper and then tape it to a flat surface so it won't buckle while you are painting it. I taped mine to our card table. Unfortunately that table is made of some kind of space-age plastic that nothing on this earth can stick to. After about the 3rd day of painting all the tape let go. Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!  But I already had a lot of paint on it so I just decided to work with all the buckles. I do not recommend this, unless your life is just so easy that you are looking for a way to make it difficult.  Luckily the paper I used was really heavy, so things worked out in the end. I'm happy with how the painting turned out, but I am probably most impressed with the frame Handsome Bryc...

Things have been busy around here. Here are some pictures of what we have been up to: Ewan's first football game! Daddy reading stories McGirlie's birthday! Sequioa National Forest with Grandma and Grandpa McEwen! McBoy's birthday! And finally, Halloween costumes! Buzz, Jessie, Woody, and Sid: Seriously, I was Sid! Why didn't anybody recognize me??? Doesn't everybody watch these movies non-stop??? Sheesh, Halloween is the worst.

Swig is a super yummy cookie and soda place in Utah. We found out about them through Bryce's sister, who managed at the Provo location for a while. They are known for their super dense sugar cookies, for which you can find hundreds of copycat recipes online. The thing is though, while the sugar cookies are great, the iced oatmeal chocolate chip cookies are THE BEST. So what the heck internet? Why are there no copycat recipes for those cookies??? Don't worry, I made one. Also all the other copycat Swig frosting recipes call for sour cream, but Swig's icing isn't refrigerated so I don't think that is right. I have my own icing recipe below. My copycat Swig Iced Oatmeal recipe differs from regular oatmeal cookies in a few ways: 1. Baking method. Swig cookies are dense and soft, kind of like eating cookie dough, but cooked, but not like a regular cookie...it's hard to describe. I will outline my method in detail below. 2. No baking soda, and just a hint of baking po...

A while back, there was a big stink about some fitness blogger lady who posted pictures of her super ripped body, her three kids, and the caption, "What's your excuse?" I don't really know what the deal was with all that because I mostly only read headlines. But I thought a bit about that headline. I don't have a super ripped body, I can think of a few excuses to explain why, but the thing is I don't actually feel like I need an excuse. I think it's great that this lady is super fit, that is her priority. I'm sure she does all kinds of great things with her family and job and makes time to work-out, but she doesn't do the same things that I do. I only workout in moderation because I need time to paint beautiful pictures, refinish furniture, read with my kids, read with my handsome husband, steam clean my floors, fix my TV, proofread essays, wash a hundred dishes, etc. They are not excuses, they are priorities. And thus, my "Theory of Constant ...