Maple Sugaring

This has been on my to-do list ever since we moved to Michigan, but there is pretty much a two-week window every year that it happens.  I caught it this year!  We took the kids on a tour at the local nature center to learn all about collecting maple tree sap and turning it into syrup.  

Here Luke is practicing drilling a hole into a log.

 Here are a few of the collecting buckets attached to trees.  Conditions have to be just right to get good sap from the trees, so that is why you can really only do it for a couple of weeks at the beginning of spring.  

 Here our guide was showing us a more advanced collecting technique than the buckets, where small tubes are attached to a bunch of trees, emptying into bigger tubes that collect into big bins (in this case a garbage-type container).

 We all were able to sample the sap straight from the trees.  Here is a picture of Audrey sticking her finger in the big bucket for a taste.  It looks and tastes a lot like plain ol' water.  I think they said they were lucky to get 2% sugar out of their trees' sap.  No wonder maple syrup is so expensive!  It takes about 6 gallons of this watery sap to make one little jar of syrup.  It was pretty cold that day, so you can see ice forming on the sap.

 Then we all headed to the maple sugar shed to see the sap cooked in to syrup.  You can see all the steam coming out of the top of the building.

 It seems pretty tricky to cook the sap just right, and they kept checking it every 30 seconds or so.  

 In the end, we tasted real Michigan maple syrup on waffles and tried maple sugar candy (cooked down even more until it's a solid).  Both were delicious!  Of course, we had to take a few photo opportunities inside the nature center.  Overall, it was a fascinating tour, and I loved it.  I think everyone else liked it too.  :)

Let's Go Fly a Kite!

We designed a few of our own, which was fun, but the ones from the store flew the best.  Spring is so great!

Sadly, these pictures show how our once glorious backyard is becoming more and more ghetto as the church next door continues to encroach on our green space.  They took out all the trees and shrubs that once formed a green barrier between us and the parking lot, and they installed another parking lot behind our tree house.  It must be time to move!

It's Pretty Much a Slave Labor Camp Around Here

This describes cleaning-up time at our house to a T:

Luke's Basketball Season

Please excuse the quality of the video.  I was taking it on my phone while holding Max on my lap, answering Audrey's questions, and acting as cheerleader!  I did manage to capture a couple of baskets, a steal, some solid dribbling, and great defense.  Go Luke!

My Max

There are so many things I've wanted to record about Max, and I keep putting it off.  Just like all my kids, he is growing so fast and learning so many new things every day.  He is our most independent child, always playing with whatever he can find or getting his own food when he is hungry.  In fact, I have to keep an eye out to make sure he isn't scavenging off the floor, leaving the fridge door open, or pulling things out of the garbage (yikes!).  He LOVES playing around with Luke and Audrey.  They love to play "chase Max", where they chase him around while he screams and laughs uncontrollably.  His favorite toys are cars ("vroom vroom" and "McQueen") and trains ("choo choo's"), balls of any kind, and push toys (like strollers, wagons, and bikes).  He also loves playing with things he isn't supposed to touch, like rolls of toilet paper, feminine supplies, and the toilet in general.  Oh, and I can't forget to mention his aptitude for electronics.  He wants his own iPhone or "foam" as he calls it.  If you have received an early-morning call or text from him already, you know that he knows his way around any program or ap.  He also loves wreaking havoc on our computer and my kindle.  It is amazing how he can find and reach an electronic no matter where I hide it!  He is so cute and fun, that Luke and Audrey ask all the time when we are going to have another baby.  They love to play with him and run around with him.

He is talking more and more, and it is such a fun time.  His vocabulary list is growing quite large, but here are a few words he says off the top of my head:  basketball, football, car, choo choo, bird, dog, fishy, plane, stinky, drink ("deen"), dad, mom, yes, no, hi, buh bye, grandpa, mcqueen, swing, Luke ("guke"), Audrey (od-dey"), night-night.  He babbles nonstop, and sometimes we are amazed when it comes out making complete sense.  The other day he was at one of his many doctor's appointments lately, and the nurse was trying to do a tympanogram on his ear.  Every time she put the device up to his ear, he would scream and say "Ow! Ow!"  She finally turned to me and said, "I'm starting to wonder if he is really saying 'Ow' because it hurts.  Let's have the doctor look at those ears."  Sure enough, bad ear infections in both (again).  He knows what he wants and tries very hard to communicate it, even when it involves a severe temper tantrum in public.  But, hey, we have to take the bad with the good.

He is in the nursery now at church, and he hates it.  We can't figure out why, because it has all of his favorite toys and snacks and really nice leaders who he knows and who give him lots of attention.  He is used to me leaving him since he goes to the gym for an hour every day, but for some reason he is having separation anxiety right now.  Oh well!

And, as previously mentioned, he is having tons of problems with his ears.  He is on his 7th ear infection in a row (one every month), and they just keep coming back.  We are hoping for tubes soon to end the suffering!

And one more story about Max:  he had his first visit to the ER to other day.  Audrey was carrying him around the house, and she accidentally dropped him.  He landed face down on the hard floor, and his chin split right open.  It looked big enough for stitches, and the urgent care wouldn't touch a face on someone so young, so I took him down to the DMC Children's Hospital in downtown Detroit (Clay's stomping grounds).  It was awful.  To make a long story short, after 5 very painful hours, they glued it shut and sent us home.  I'm just going to do it myself next time!  But, Max is okay, and we are hoping for minimal scarring.  He was quite a trooper.

We love you, Max!

Growing Up WAY too fast

I wish time would stop, but it keeps on trucking.  Luke lost both his top front teeth recently.  He has quite a new-looking smile!

 He also celebrated his 100th day of Kindergarten the same week as Valentine's Day.  He made this poster and a few other things.

 He also became a member of the shoe-tying club at school!  He now wears exclusively tie shoes and feels quite important.  

The other day he was riding in the back of the van with a buddy of his.  I overheard him talking about how he has two "girlfriends" at school.  "They just love me," he said.  Sheesh.

Valentine's Day at the Hall House

Valentine's Day was pretty fun this year, as Luke and Audrey were really into it.  Since I had 100 free prints at Costco, I convinced them to do picture valentines with suckers (and hershey kiss roses for their teachers).  They thought it was pretty neat and helped to write messages on the backs.  I was surprised how many compliments we got on the valentines, as I thought it was a pretty well-known idea.  I guess easy and cheap can still be awesome!  Plus, I have pretty cute kids, if I do say so myself.

I forgot to take a picture of Luke's finished product, but here is the picture pre-sucker.

Miss Audrey

My favorite project of the year so far was Luke's Valentine box for school.  This was NOT a knock-off of a Pinterest idea or anything else I found online (which is what I usually do), but was a total Aim - original.  Luke wanted Mario, and we managed to work together to pull it off in one hour with stuff we already had on hand.  I thought it turned out so very,very awesome!

I know you are dying to hear about all the romantic stuff I got for Valentine's Day from my sweetie.  He surprised me with the most beautiful bouquet of two-dozen tulips, and we went out on a fun date to play racquetball and eat Mediterranean (our food of choice right now.  Chicken shawarma is sooo good!).  We have a really good deal with a few friends right now where we trade off babysitting on weekends for date nights.  We are loving it!  I also received a very funny valentine from my Luke.  I had just been arguing with him about how much "screen time" he had left for the day.  I told him he had used it all playing Wii, but he insisted that I had miscalculated.  He left me this note:

 Translation:  Valentine from Luke to Aimee.  I have 1 hour for screens.  I love you so so so so so so so so so so so much.

Funny, funny guy.  Already trying to butter me up.  It didn't work, though.  I'm a hard-liner on screen time.  :)

Max Whistling

Random Goings-On

This winter feels like a bit of a blur - and not much of a winter!  Last year I'd had just about enough of shoveling snow at this point, but we have only had two snows this year.  Crazy, but I'm not complaining.  Here is a little sampling of some things we've been up to:

Here I am with my Activity Days girls right after a snowman relay.  (We haven't had a leader for a while, so I've been filling in.  It is lots of fun!)

We've been having lots of friends come over to play, and here are a few of them making all kinds of things out of sugar cookie play dough.

Luke was able to spray a real fire hose on a trip to the fire station with his "group".  One of these days I'll have to elaborate on that.

A first real snow!  This is the only time we've been able to go sledding this year, and everyone had a blast.

We were able to have Sis. Carol Ehambe over for dinner one night.  She is an old friend from our Grosse Pointe Days, and now she leaves near us in Royal Oak, MI.  We decided we need to do this more often, and it was a lot of fun.  She taught the kids a new card game and told us lots of great stories.  She has had such an interesting life growing up and raising her own kids in Detroit, and she has a lot of wisdom.

Here are the kids creating some gumdrop/toothpick sculptures.

Max is going through a ketchup stage.  He is hilarious!  Basically, he eats a little bit of food with his ketchup.  I'm not sure where it came from, since none of the rest of us are that way, but he knows what he likes!

A friend gave Audrey an Easy-Bake Oven, and here is her first creation.  It is pretty hilarious, since in half the time it took to cook her mini-cake, I cooked the rest of the batter into a big cake.  She was pretty proud of herself, though.

Luke helped me frost the bigger cake.  He thought is was so funny that a lightbulb baked Audrey's cake!  Come to think of it, it is pretty funny.  :)