Snow Cream and Pictures

We are all starting to get back to normal health-wise. It feels so good and is a great reminder to me to never take my health for granted. Last night my three littlest guys slept all night without coughing - wonderful. We were able to start school again on Tuesday. We were off most of last week because everyone was so sick. This week we did about 50% of our normal work, and hopefully next week we'll be able to be back at school 100%. I love routine and have sorely missed it.

 

 
Today we had a treat - snow cream. I've seen a couple of blogs talking about this here and here so decided to try it today. The children loved it. I did a diet version for myself which totally underwhelmed me so I turned it into a protein shake. The children topped theirs with some homemade chocolate sauce and pronounced it wonderful.

 

Speaking of diet, after several months of playing around with the Trim Healthy Mama diet I decided to get serious with it again. I lost 22 pounds last year using it, and I would like to lose another 8. So on Monday I started up again and I've already lost two pounds...and this with very tempting foods being brought into the house by others - waffles, ice cream, muffins. My husband did take me out and I didn't follow the plan. One night I was up in the middle of the night with insomnia and ate off plan, but still I managed to lose two pounds in five days. I'm happy. I truly do enjoy this diet.

 

I've also been doing some organizing and purging this week. That feels good too. For a year now I've had some of the children's artwork on the wall in our entryway. The problem is that sooner or later one of the pieces would fall down. Then I would have to figure out what to do this time to make it stay up. The end of this story is that I took them all down, scanned them, and now I'll print them up and scrapbook them.

See what I mean? One down. I'm ready for this wall to be empty.



 

Please indulge me for a minute as a mother - the artwork I am so proud of...

 

Finally, I am gearing up for my husband's 50th birthday party next week. My mom has always taught me to see it big but keep it  simple. My decorations are going to be very simple but I think the winners are going to be 8x10 photos from various stages of my husband's life. I formatted them in my digital scrapbook program. Then when I had them printed someone made a mistake and I ended up paying only fifteen cents a print - bonus. I then bought frames at the dollar store so they can sit on the tables. Here's a sample...

 

 

It feels good to be productive again. How was your week? Have you ever eaten snow as a dessert? ☺

 

 

 

 

We All Scream For Ice Cream

This has been a momentous week for our family. Our second oldest child became a teenager. He’s a wonderful boy. I love to watch him playing with his toddler and baby brothers…makes my heart melt. It has also been a wonderful week weather-wise. We’ve been enjoying hanging the laundry out, having our windows open, lots of walks and playing outside. The Vitamin D is great, right? We’re all sleeping better with all the fresh air.

Last year I started making homemade ice cream for our children’s birthdays. I was constantly searching for a way to do this without eggs and without an ice cream maker. Then several months ago we found an old-fashioned hand-crank ice cream maker at our local flea market. It’s a bit beat up but it does the job. I’ve finally found a recipe for ice cream that doesn’t use eggs. You can see the recipe here.  This is not a cheap recipe, but we only have ice cream on birthdays so we don’t mind spending a little more for these special occasions.

Noah has discovered that leftover homemade ice cream is much better than fresh so tonight he and his brother made the ice cream for his birthday party tomorrow night. It takes a good thirty minutes of cranking to get ice cream. It is soft serve style but after “curing” in the freezer for several hours it becomes harder. I didn’t think of it soon enough, but next time I will use unflavoured gelatin to try and thicken it a little more. One tweak I did make to the recipe was changing the sugar to honey. In order to make the honey mix properly we had to heat the honey with the cream and then cool it before we started cranking.

We’ve had a little taste of the ice cream tonight – you know, just to make sure it was okay.  I’ll let you know next Friday how it tasted. Making our own ice cream is a lot of work but very satisfying. It’s great to know all the ingredients that are in our ice cream – all readable and all edible.

How was your week?