Random Happenings

Here's a few things that have been going on around our house lately.

I love bread of all kinds so for a long time now I've been wanting to learn how to make some good rolls. But sadly, yeast and I don't seem to get along very well and I tend to stay away from making bread of all kinds. Then my relief society needed people to sign up to make either rolls or soups and I don't make any soups either so I thought it would be a good time to force myself to learn to make some rolls. I decided to make my mom's recipe since I know what it should taste and look like. As usual yeast was not being my friend and the rolls turned out looking like this. Not at all fluffy and light like they should be. What a waste.



Before giving in and buying rolls for the activity I decided to try another recipe that seemed fairly simple. And it worked! They were easy and delicious. They had to rise for an hour in a muffin tin and I ran out of muffin tins and made a few foil cups to put the leftover dough into and thats all I got a picture of. So even though they don't look that great here, rest assured the ones that were in a muffin tin were beautifully formed.



Last week we learned a lesson that I thought I would share with all parents of small children in case you don't already know. Our washing machine suddenly stopped working properly, it wasn't draining and was making a terrible noise. After having a repairman come out to fix it we learned that one of Conner's little socks plugged up the drain hose. So after paying $108 to have it fixed and replace the hose we learned that we needed to buy a mesh bag from Walmart for $1.50 to wash all small things in. I sure wish I had known that sooner.

This bit of information I am embarrassed to share, but I guess I will anyway. While Cade and I were dating I worked at this discount clothing store that sold new items from stores that often had some kind of damage to them. Cade bought this nice jacket that had a messed up seam for $5 because he knew his grandma could fix it for him. He was right, she made it look like new. It was his favorite jacket and he wore it frequently, but for the last year or so it has been developing more and more holes in it. I kept trying to get Cade to throw it away or at least stop wearing it in public but he wouldn't. He had to have a new one similar to it before he would get rid of it. We found a possible replacement jacket Thanksgiving weekend but it wasn't on sale at all and I refused to buy anything that wasn't on sale during the best sale time of the year. So Cade kept pretending to look for a new one and then last week we were doing some quick shopping and went back to look for that jacket. We were in luck, it was on clearance for $25 (down from $80)! Finally, we can go out in public again without looking homeless, yay!!

Old jacket. I don't think I need to point out all the holes, they're pretty obvious.

New jacket. He may look slightly homeless here too, but its because he's wearing his pajamas and getting ready for bed. But hey, when I'm ready to blog I don't have time for him to get ready for pictures.

And the best news of all. Conner has been scooting out of his blankets or kicking them off of him every night now and we could tell that he was waking up a couple of times just because he was cold. So we bought him a sleepbag to wear over his pjs and a miracle occurred. He slept for 8 hours straight!! We weren't convinced it wasn't just a coincidence but out of the 4 nights that he has worn it, 3 of those nights he slept at least 7 hours. Its like a magic bag!

Just discovering a fun, new toy.

Daddy did his hair this day :) And no, his feet aren't this big but he was out of clean socks in his size.

 

One Century Old

My Grandma Mason turned a whopping 100 years old on Sunday! Woohoo! Even though she isn't too thrilled to still be around I was pretty excited to see her hit that milestone. We got the family together to celebrate. Here is a picture of all of us, it's a small family. My grandparents only had two kids, my mom and her twin sister Lynda. Her sister also only had two kids. So there are a total of 6 grandkids on my mom's side. Besides my grandma and us, my cousin Barbara (yes she is named after my mom) and my uncle Dick are pictured. (My aunt Lynda died a few years ago and my other cousin Richard couldn't make it to the party.)



A Tongan lady from my parents ward made my grandma a lei and a thing for her head. (I have no idea what that is called.) Here she is sporting them.

We began the night by admiring this truck my uncle restored. He likes to restore old cars. Then we had a delicious dinner with 2 desserts. A lemon coconut cake courtesy of Carol Ann and a chocolate ice cream brownie cake courtesy of Jen. Both were fancy and fabulous.

After that we played a rousing game of Jeopardy with questions about my grandma's life with my mom as Alex Trebek.



I never really think about what my grandparents life was like before I existed, its neat to find out about their life before they were grandparents. Just think, my grandma lived through 2 world wars, the great depression, and saw the invention of tvs, computers, cell phones and so much more. Some interesting facts about my grandma:

1. Her and my grandpa worked at competing oil companies and had to secretly date, elope, and then they lived separately for the first year of their marriage. Crazy how much things like that mattered back then.
2. Her family was one of the first in the neighborhood to get indoor plumbing when she was a teenager.
3. She had a tumor the size of a football on her kidney and her incompetent doctor treated her for arthritis. Luckily, before it was too late she switched doctors and was then properly diagnosed. We were lucky she made it to age 50, let alone 100.
4. Her first kiss was to a missionary. Scandolous.

Here are us cousins pictured with grandma.

All of us girls through 4 generations.