The final hour for the cauliflower

For those of you that are shoveling driveways and bundling up, I'm sorry. We have had a beautiful week and we're actually hoping that it cools off again before we face another long hot summer. Today was about 80 degrees. I mowed the lawn and dead headed the blooming flowers. This fall the kids decided to plant a bunch of seeds. It's Arizona so we don't expect much to grow and don't pay attention to the rules of the planting season. Well...lets just say we could have carved cantaloupe for Halloween and might be having pumpkin seed spitting contests this summer. We even grew cauliflower for the first time and decided to harvest it on Sunday before the crows move in on it. It was delicious! In fact we had such a great weekend. Shea and I ground wheat and made homemade bread and Jam too. Thanks Mom Tanner, we actually made bread and not bricks :) Our dinner conversation had all of us pondering the idea of moving out to the country and living off of the land.

Ready to eat with yummy melted cheese.

Cong Hei Fat Choi !!!!

That's Happy Chinese New Year for those of you that don't speak Chinese. Yes, we look for any reason to celebrate around here. We started this tradition just last year. We decorate and have to eat yummy Chinese food with chop sticks (even the rice). If anyone is interested, the 99 cent store sells fortune cookies and almond cookies in the cool Chinese take-out boxes. We had a lot of fun ringing in the year of the Ox.

Happy Birthday Pebbles

January 6th marks our 1 year anniversary with Pebbles. We decided to make her adoption date her birthday and throw her a little party. My friend Kim told me about a dog food cake they made for their dog and the kids loved the idea. They shaped canned food and decorated it with cat treats and made a "P" on the top. Got a little scary when her whiskers almost caught fire :} Oops. It was the first time she would ever touch canned food and she totally chowed down.

Wild Kingdom in our own front yard. Check out this video!

Happy New Year!

For the first time everyone in the house stayed awake long enough to ring in the new year in the AZ time zone! (We typically celebrate at 10:00 with the East Coast).
After returning home from a day of playing in the snow, we stayed up playing games, making festive New Year's Eve hats, and watching t.v. waiting for the ball to drop. We rung in 2009 with sparkling cider, (or apple Sprite as Shane calls it) Pop Rocks, and noise makers. We could actually hear the Pop Rocks crackling in Shane's stomach a good 5 minutes after he had swallowed them.