Olivia (Mimi) loves to (pretend) cook. She has spent countless hours watching my mom and YouTube videos learning and perfecting cooking skills and terminology. She practices her recipes and when they are ready, she will show you how to cook them. When Mimi is outside, she cooks in her outdoor kitchen and uses anything in the yard and trees as ingredients. Today she is showing me how to make one of her soup specialties.
Mimi adds a dollop of mud. She learned the word “dollop” from how-to YouTube baking videos and loves to say the word.
Mimi is carefully adding the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients. Look at that concentration.
A couple of teaspoons of pepper.
Now some commentary on serving the soup in this little bowl.
Finally finished…Grey (really more like grey-brown) soup. Yes, Grey Soup really is the name.
In most households in America egg dying is an activity done once a year around Easter. In our household egg dying and Easter egg hunts are done all year round. We dye eggs when it’s warm, when it’s cold, when we need something to do. This is the process we follow every time: (1) hard boil a dozen eggs (2) eat 1-2 eggs (3) dye the eggs (4) eat another 1-2 eggs (5) take turns hiding and finding the eggs that have not been eaten multiple times a day. If it’s warm out we’ll hide the eggs outside, if it’s cold, we’ll hide them inside. When they crack from excessive hiding and finding, we throw them away. We do not eat them because they have not been refrigerated. Then when they are all gone, we dye another dozen.
A little after Midnight on August 18 (6 days before my actual due date) I started to have contractions. At 4am I woke Jeff to tell him I was having contractions. I took a shower and waited in bed timing my contractions with my new iPhone app (gotta love technology). Contractions were manageable until my water broke at 8am and everything immediately got very painful. We got into the car and headed for the hospital…of course during morning rush hour traffic. Thank God traffic was not bad because the pain was unbearable. Jeff was in such a rush he drove into valet parking the wrong way but the attendant understood why after she took one look at me. They took me inside on a wheelchair because I could not stand let alone walk. I was 7cm dilated at the hospital (no wonder I was in so much pain). The epidural could not come fast enough. Everyone says your second child comes faster then the first and they are absolutely right. Four pushes and Baby Isabella was here.
Isabella completes our family. I wanted three kids, then I had Olivia, and realized I really only wanted (or could handle) two. Jeff would have liked to have a son, but the thought of having one more child and it being a girl would be way too many daughters for him. We are so blessed to have two healthy girls and so happy to be a family of four.
