Pizza, pizza

We are always on the look out for new recipes that are easy and delicious! My kitchen counter is littered right now with the pages I tear out of Parents and Family Fun magazines looking for fun foods Ellie will like. It can be hard sometimes because they have to be egg, nut, and seafood free. And if they're going to be made during the week, they also have to have little prep time or something that can be made ahead. We really love the Crock Pot!

I recently found a great pizza dough recipe that we adapted a little to fit our preferences. It is delicious and everything I needed was already in the house.

Basic pizza dough

3 cups flour

1 package active dry yeast

1/2 tsp salt

1 tbs sugar

1 cup warm water

2 tbs olive oil

Mix 1 1/4 cups flour with yeast, salt, and sugar; add warm water and oil. Beat with a whisk for 3 minutes. Using a wooden spoon, stir in another 1 1/4 cups flour (or enough so the mixture holds together). Place dough on a lightly floured surface and knead in another 1/4 to 1/2 cup flour until the dough is lump free. This amount is intended to make 8 mini crusts so at this point wrap in plastic and refrigerate/freeze what you won't be using this day. Cover the remainder and let sit for 10 minutes.

Heat oven to 425. On a lightly floured surface, divide dough into the number of mini crusts you want to make and roll each into a 6-inch circle. Put onto a greased baking sheet. Build up the edges slightly and use a fork to prick the bottom of the crusts. Bake on the cookie sheet for about 10 minutes. Take out and add the sauce and toppings then cook again for another 10 minutes. We do this last 10 minutes directly on the rack because it is much crispier this way.

Our favorite sauce and toppings....

Sweet pepper sauce

Combine a 12-oz jar of roasted sweet red peppers packed in water, 1 clove of garlic, 1 tbs honey, salt, and black pepper in blender and blend until smooth.

Toppings

Slice an onion into thin rings and cook with a small amount of olive oil until caramelized. Place onion and crumbled goat cheese on top of sweet pepper sauce.

I'm hungry just thinking about it! Delicious!

Infomercial

Ellie got a book for her birthday that we have recently started reading and we all love! It's called Come Rhyme With Me! and the author is Hans Wilhelm (it's published by Scholastic). It has a page for each letter with a very funny rhyme. The last word of each couplet is covered with a flap to encourage guessing the correct rhyming word. We would definitely recommend it - the rhymes get a lot of laughs at our house!

Ellie insists on reading it almost every night and she thought she'd read some to you....

G is for gorilla, who's got ten useful toes:

Nine of them for walking and one to pick his nose.

Eight Months Old

Audrey is eight months old today and we just can't believe it! She has changed so much in the last month....

- Audrey said her first word earlier this month: mama! We can also tell what she wants when she calls me now by the intonation of the "mama". The mama that she says when she's tires is truly the most pitiful noise I have ever heard.

- Audrey has started to respond to other words that she clearly understands. If you say bye bye or night night to her, she waves her whole arm at you. If you say yay, she claps her hands together. Lori and Audrey have an entire night time routine that happens when I take Audrey up to nurse before bed, which involves a lot of waving on both of their parts. Tonight she even kissed Lori good night!

- In addition to waving and clapping, she is learning other gestures. My favorite is how she points with her entire arm at her bed when she's tired.

- Audrey is desperately trying to crawl! She rocks on her hands and knees but hasn't figured out how to move forward yet. She can scooch backwards and can wiggle her way around in a circle and across the blanket though. She can also get near Ellie no matter where Ellie is and will climb on top of her!

- Audrey is teething again and she is not happy about it. Neither are we!

- Audrey is 28 inches long (which was Ellie's length at nine months) and weighs 21 pounds 6 ounces (which was Ellie's weight at one year). We were told at her last pediatrician visit that she is between the 50th and 75th percentile for length and far above the 95th percentile for weight!

- She is still just as snuggly as ever! She is a baby who loves to be held. Sometimes she'll just sit on your lap and rest her head on your chest, which is the greatest thing. Now that she is becoming much more active we treasure those moments!

Our time

Dress-up time

Drawing time

Lunchtime

Nap time

Check-out-my-chocolate-face time

Craft time

Bath time

Breaking news

Audrey caught up on the news with Miss C today. She's already taking after her mommy!

Valentine's Day

Valentine's Day may be a "Hallmark holiday" to some, but we used it as a great excuse to spoil the girls yesterday! They each woke up to a Valentine's teddy bear and then we started the day with heart-shaped pancakes. Ellie kept calling it our Christmas breakfast and I can only guess it was because she woke to to find a present downstairs!

The sweetest Valentines

After gymnastics, I took Ellie to the dollar store to pick out balloons for Lori and she got to get a hula hoop while we were there, which was probably her favorite thing about the day! After a little hula hoop dancing at home by Ellie and I (a video of which will NEVER appear on this blog), we took the girls for lunch at our favorite local diner.

"Why must you insist on taking me out in public like this, Mama? I'm a baby, not a doll!"

Later in the afternoon Ellie and I made Lori a special dessert, chocolate covered fruit (bananas, pineapple, and strawberries). We had a lot of fun making them and even more fun eating them after Lori's delicious spaghetti dinner!

We hope that you had a nice day with your loved ones as well! Today I hit the clearance sales so we can do it all again next year!

Valentine's Party

The girls are home with me on Fridays, but today I took them to the Valentine's Day party at school. The kids exchanged Valentine's, some of which were more elaborate and came with little goody bags. They also had lots of treats! The teachers started the kids off with big plates of fruit so by the time they passed out the sugary sweets, most kids were less interested. Ellie ate a huge plate of fruit and then just licked the frosting off her cupcake and ate a small cookie. Audrey watched all the action from the safety of my arms or her car seat! The pictures below are from yesterday and today...

Dressed in some of their Valentine's finery for school yesterday

Who wouldn't want to kiss these lips?!?!

We came home to find a Valentine's package from Aunt TT, which included sunglasses for both girls.

and this adorable headwrap!

Ellie very intent of putting sprinkles on the cupcakes and cookies for today's party!

Pucker Up!

Party at school

If somebody could just pass that plate of brownies over here, I would greatly appreciate it!

Ear infection

Audrey has hit yet another milestone - her first round of antibiotics. Boo! After a few days of what appeared to be a bad cold, Lori took her to the pediatrician yesterday. He said that Audrey has an ear infection in one ear and the beginning of one in the other. The eczema on her cheeks is also infected. She started amoxicillin last night and seems to be a bit better today. She is a good patient though! She takes the medicine right down with little complaint and just wants to be held most of the day.

We've also scheduled an appointment at the end of the month with the allergist for Audrey. She started eating Cheerios last week and a couple days later she was red and swollen on her forehead. We're hoping the two things are not related since a wheat allergy is much more difficult to manage than an egg or dairy allergy. They will likely test her for the common allergens at that appointment. We'll keep you posted!

I'm too sick to play.

January Pictures

The past few weeks have been busy ones for us with little time to blog. Here are a few recent pictures from January.

On January 29th, we went to the county courthouse to finalize Lori's adoption of Audrey. Both of our names have been on the birth certificate since Audrey's birth due to the great laws in our state. However, we had to complete the adoption process for federal purposes.

Audrey had a few firsts in January! After our recent pediatrician visit, we were told to start giving her water in a sippy cup, which you can see is going to take a while to master! She is also eating Cheerios now, which she hates. She acts like she's choking every time we give her one! At her check up, she weighed about 20 1/2 pounds. Audrey's biggest first is her first word!! After babbling ma ma for a few weeks now (which we definitely don't count as her first word!), she has started calling me mama when she sees me and when she wants something. It's so sweet and hard to resist!

Boo to water!

We had a beautiful snow fall last night - almost 6 inches, the most of any storm this winter.

Sassy Audrey at daycare drop-off!