The Bullet Point Post

I have several things I've been meaning to blog about for a few days, so today you get the condensed version all of it in one big bullet point post! Please contain your excitement....

• For those of you that keep up with BooMama, you know how she was raving about Monk & Neagle. Well now I know what she was raving about!! I got one of their CDs that they were giving away! We listened to it last while I made dinner and even the kids were dancing along. I love this CD. I didn't get a real good chance to sit down and listen to the lyrics, but the melodies are just so cool. It's exactly the kind of music I adore and it's an awesome mood-lifter. Their CD is due out in September, so be sure to keep an eye out for it.

• I'm still unsure if I'm going to participate in Shannon's Dog Days of Summer Giveaway. I have nothing of interest to give away. I have until tomorrow I guess to get my rear in gear. I might come up with something.

• And in gluten-free news...I'm still on the hunt for the perfect GF bread. I have a few recipes I'm looking at, but the other day when I visited my friendly neighborhood Kroger, they didn't have some of the ingredients that I know they had when I was there the last time....stuff that I've seen in many of the recipes. So I'll see if I can make do with what I have. We tried Bob's Red Mill "Hearty Whole Grain" GF bread mix....let's just say that I'm now calling it the $4 experiment. It was not at all very good (of course, I'll admit, that human error probably didn't help) and the kids couldn't tolerate the texture. Stephen's words, as he was spitting his only bite into the trash, "Mo-om, it has NUTS in it!" After that Zachary wouldn't come anywhere near it. On the bright side, I think he's looking a little bit better. Here's what his knees looked like this morning:

• And here are some pictures of his feet from the first day and again this morning....we've had some ups and downs (I think his scratching is just a habit now), but there is definitely some improvement. The first picture is the first day, second is today:
  
  

• Given our new "lifestyle", I've been spending much more time in the kitchen. I already make all of Marc-Adam's baby food, which is time consuming all by itself, but now that I'm making almost everything else from scratch, it's alot more opportunity to really screw things up (which I'm prone to do, hence the name of the blog). So in the last 24 hours, I've spilled a mixture of water, oil, cider vinegar and eggs all over the new paint job on the cabinets and all over the new floor, I spilled a pot full of water all over the electric stove (and on the cabinets, rug and floor) and as I typed the beginning of this post, I forgot about the sweet potatoes steaming on the stove....and burned the cr@p out of the bottom of the pan (and probably ruined to potatoes) and made the whole house smell. The smell woke Stephen up...his room is at the far end of the house and the kitchen is at the other end of the house. It really stinks. And the bread I mentioned earlier? It might have been better had I put it on the right setting in the bread maker and NOT forgotten about it overnight.
  

• And because Alison asked--the kids and I were working on a little mini-project about rain and clouds the other day. After finishing, Stephen said he wanted to give his to Daddy. Zachary piped up that he wanted to give his to Auntie Alison (my best friend). Since she lives too far for us to give it to her (and since mailing it would destroy the idea) here it is:
  

• It's Blustery, The Cloud, in case you can't tell or it just looks a little creepy. Hey, he's 2.

• Marc-Adam is now crawling totally on hands and knees. And today he learned how to make motor boat noises. He's also starting to pull up in his crib which is going to require that his daddy lower the crib mattress so that mama can actually sleep without worrying that baby is going to take a header out of the crib.
  

And that concludes the exciting bullet point post.