Valentine's Day Prep

Charlie is getting better at writing his name, so this year he signed all of his own Valentine's Day cards. It was very cute, but took a LONG time!

Winter Wonderland

Round these parts, snow is a big deal. And this weekend we got quite a dusting. Unfortunately, this coincided with Charlie having bacterial pneumonia, so he didn't get to play outside too much. But it was beautiful, and a lovely excuse to stay snuggled up inside.









Day 1: The snow was just too powdery for a snowman, so we had to improvise:


Day 2: The real deal!


Post snowman fireside snuggle

Big Brother Basket

My co-workers gave me a baby shower today, and did such a lovely thing for Charlie. They put together a big brother basket, which had all sorts of fun things either for Charlie or things he could use to help out with the baby. He was totally mesmerized when I brought it home: He kept asking "Are all of these presents for me?"

Gateau St. Honore

Ben & Kirsten spent MLK weekend with us, working on two completely culturally unrelated cooking projects: tamales, and Gateau St. Honore. The tamales were amazing, although I'm not quite sure what we're going to do with our remaining 4 lbs of lard. I'm proposing lard be sold in smaller containers, in case anyone in the lard industry is paying attention.

Our second project was a Gateau St. Honore, a cake to honor the French patron saint of bakers. (How much do you love the French?) So we made homemade puff pastry, which was then filled with pastry cream, topped with profiteroles than were coated in caramel, and then topped off the whole thing with whipped cream. It was marvelous, though virtually impossible to cut into.

Rocket Man

Charlie's class theme for this week was outer space. He came home one day all enthused about rockets, and so Evan suggested they make one. It didn't take long for us to realize that he thought we meant a REAL rocket. He had already planned for the rocket to have seats for me, Evan and his baby so we could all go into space together. Evan had a stroke of genius and convinced him that step one in any space engineering project was to build a model. So the boys got busy with some poster tubes and Styrofoam cups and came up with this:





Since then, we've been taking a lot of pretend trips into space. One of our favorite stops is the Saturn Restaurant, which even has kids meals.

Pirates

Charlie could not get enough of the pirate ship at Marbles today . . . he even wanted to get dressed up!

Midwife's Assistant

Today we had a visit with our midwife, and Charlie got in on the action by helping Nancy palpate and measure my belly.







The team concluded that the baby is head down, and that I'm measuring right on track!