Friday Fun

GOBBLE GOBBLE: Thanksgiving is less than a week away now and we'd yet to do any kind of turkey-related handcraft. Today would be the day we'd right that wrong, by gum!

A couple of days ago, I found some sweet turkeys on the Fabulessly Frugal blog. I showed them to Annabelle this a.m. and she was all over making one of her own. I had the apples, marshmallows and candy corn in stock, as well as some candy eyes. All I was lacking was the Froot Loops the prototype had used for the tailfeathers.

As I stared into my pantry wondering what we could use as a substitute, my eyes cast upon the the hideous Oops! All Berries cereal by Cap'n Crunch. Though they didn't have holes in the center, I was hoping we could bore through them with toothpicks. Sure 'nuff, with the right amount of force and a spinning motion, we drilled through those sugary little nuggets.

During construction CJ said, "I am one clever guy, right?. Sometimes I find ways to do something else (when the first way doesn't work). One time when I broke the crunchberry today, I noticed I still had a hole that would work (on another part of the crunchberry) and I poked it in and used it so I would get closer, sooner."

Excellent workaround, CJ. :)

The turkey's body is an apple, its head is a marshmallow half, its beak is a candy corn, of course. For feet we halved those candy corn like sugar pumpkin candies, and we had eyes in stock from past cookie making adventures. We''ll let these turkeys hang around a day or so before the kids eat 'em, tailfeathers and all.

CHOCOLATE GERMAN: Other kitchen action this a.m. included whipping up Christian's birthday cake. His favorite is "Chocolate German" (as the kids call it), so we started by making a couple of layers of awesome chocolate cake with a recipe from the "Confetti Cakes" book.


Then, it was time to find a recipe for perfect coconut-pecan filling and topping. I settled on one from Kraft's Web site. We whipped it up and Annabelle helped spread it on.
I gotta say, the cake looks Deeeeelicious. We'll find out how it tastes on Saturday.
MUCH BETTER: In recent weeks, it has become apparent CJ just naturally catching on to the proper use of much vs. many. So today, we spent about an hour talking about when to use each. For example, many = plural, like, "How many dollars do you have?", whereas much goes with singular words, like "How much money do you have?"

We found several exercises online, including several sites for people trying to learn English. One was English Grammar Online 4U, another was a Germany based Web site.

Through doing the exercises, the kids learned you can't always rely on an S to let you know if a word is plural or not (for instance men, women and people are plural without an S on the end).

The kids did well on the written exercises. It will be interesting to see if tht success translates into correct usage in speech.

Of course, after all of the "much" related phrases, I couldn't get "How Much is that Doggie in the Window" out of my head. The kids had never heard the song so I had to find it on YouTube for them.

RESEARCH PROJECT: For a couple of days, CJ has had a nagging question bothering him. It's about the character Reptile in the Mortal Kombat series of games. "Why does his form keeps changing?" from game to game, he wonders. "He has changed from a ninja to this reptile looking human to a real reptile to half ninja half reptile," CJ chronicles.

CJ asked to go to the Web site of Midway, the games' maker, for answers. However, when we tried midway.com, we found it took us to the Warner Bros. Web site. Clearly, Midway is owned by WB. Unfortunately, there was not a lot of detail on their site about games; it was mostly just promos for new games coming out.

CJ and I thought perhaps Mortal Kombat might have its very own site, and we found out it did. When we hopped there, we found there is a forum portion of the site and figured hardcore MK fans would be talking about all things MK there. And sure 'nuff, they are. In fact, there was a forum category called Future Mortal Kombat Game Discussion, and there, we found an interview with on of the MK game designers that had been translated from Portuguese to English. And apparently CJ isn't the only fan wondering about Reptile's incarnations, because one of the questions was about that. And we learned that in
an upcoming MK title (for release in mid 2011, I believe, Reptile would have his ninja outfit from MK2 and MK3. Mystery solved.

BIG NEWS: I guess CJ must have seen an advertisement or something, because he excitedly reported today, "Oh geez, Mom. Microsoft is getting even bigger with Windows 7!" Sounds like a future Microsofty to me. ...

IN OUR ABSENCE: The kids had a sitter last night - a rare occurrence 'round here. Christian and I were supposed to go see Rick play @ the Red Hook, but that gig got canceled due to a bandmate's emergency. Big bummer. So we just went out to dinner instead.

I asked CJ this (Saturday) a.m. what he did when the babysitter was here and he said, "We made some killer brownies. Were you like 'What? Where did these killer brownies come from?' when you got up this morning?" :) CJ reports he even put peanut butter on one of his.

Earlier in the day, in preparation for the babysitter, we read "Benjamin McFadden and the Robot Babysitter." It's a story about a kid who tries to mess with his robot babysitter's programming, and havoc ensues.

Hopefully the takeaway from it is CJ and Annabelle shouldn't try to mess with their babysitter's programming. :)

THE KING AND US: This afternoon we took a field trip to Seattle Center. However, this was no ordinary field trip. Rather, we were on a mission, and we had a special guest along with us - none other than The King himself, Elvis Presley.

We were trying to complete a scavenger hunt of sorts. The challenge was to photograph a cardboard cutout of Elvis at over 20 different locations around the Seattle Center campus. In 2 hours or less. In the rain (the 'in the rain' part wasn't part of the rules, it was just our bad luck).