Even More Snow ...

Huge blizzard this past week-- dumped a good 20+ inches of snow on Lexington:

Lots of shoveling to do -- it was practically an all-morning affair.

The kids had a snow day, which they enjoyed thoroughly. Since then the temps have taken a huge dive-- this morning it was zero degrees Fahrenheit when Amy went out to get the paper. I took the kids sledding:

Lydia had some good "air time" -- since she's the lightest of the three of us, she tends to fly the highest off the jumps.

Experimental cooking

I have been meaning to try the New York Times recipe for "no knead" bread, and this week I finally got around to giving it a go. I used 1/3 whole wheat flour, and a little extra water, but other than that, I didn't make any changes. End result:

Very tasty-- nice crunchy crust, chewy & soft interior. I used a first rise of around 18 hours and second rise of maybe 1.5 to 2 hours. The one puzzle was that the original recipe called for a 6-8 quart heavy covered pot, which turned out to be much too big-- next time I will go with a 4 qt pot. There is also another recipe page that has some pictures, which was helpful.

Second cooking experiment: home-made "Nutella". I stumbled across a recipe while looking for other things on the net, but in fact the web is littered with recipes. This recipe is just roasted hazel nuts (about a cup) and a package of dark chocolate chips. Photo:

The color is quite a bit darker than the store-bought kind, and it's a bit less sweet, but it is amazingly good.

Vegetable-Related First Aid Products

My mom, ever the astute consumer, discovered this fine new product:

Yes, pickle-shaped bandaids. The visionary makers of these band-aids have clearly identified a huge untapped market for vegetable-shaped bandages; I can say that as soon as I saw them, I felt an immediate need to run out and buy a couple of boxes. And maybe a tube of mustard-flavored ointment to go along with them...

Beacoup Snow

This has been a wonderfully snowy Christmas and New Years; Ethan and Lydia have been able to play outside in the snow almost continuously since the start of their vacation. Lots of snow up in Vermont:

and plenty down in Mass as well. This past weekend the kids had fun playing around in the snow with their cousin Tobias:

. . . and we also got a chance to see Theo, who is now quite mobile and verbal (provided that you understand his personal dialect):

We introduced Tobias to the kids word association game and also to the "three part drawing game", which was a big success. I can see the potential for many future games along these lines...

Getting Ready for Christmas...

This year the kids decided to undertake a cooking project entirely on their own, with zero help from mom and dad. Here they are working on gingerbread cookies:

The cookies were really good, too (Ethan picked a recipe from the King Arthur cookbook). Huzzah-- I need to get them started in on making dinners during the week...

NB: astute observers will note that Lydia is wearing a hat indoors in the second photo -- Amy claims that I keep the house thermostat setting way too low, but I pretend not to hear :-)

Sewing projects

Lydia's first sewing project with the machine that her grandmother gave her:

Threading the machine was a little tricky, but the two of us have managed to figure it out. Lydia is thrilled...

Facebook in the news

The Times had another article on cyber-bullying this week (previous article in the series is here). This new one deals less with the legal and administrative issues and more about all the various different tricky ways that cyber-bullying can happen, and the difficulty that parents are having keeping up. One of the examples they cited in the article was a boy who was being bullied by three of his classmates; although the boy had no cell phone and was not on Facebook, the classmates actually created a face Facebook page in the victim's name and proceeded to post lots of nasty material to it. Whew.

I also found this link especially interesting (it was mentioned on Bruce Schneier's security blog, which I follow), which talks about the interesting idea of "wall scrubbing". Cool example of kids taking matters into their own hands to keep control of their on-line social presence (when facing a potentially dangerous/hostile environment).

Confession: I feel very dinosaur-like when I read this stuff.  I can barely manage a blog post a month, let alone a Facebook status update every half hour.  I also feel slightly weird when I tell people that I subscribe to the New York Times print edition;  none of my co-workers takes a newspaper, even among my college and grad school friends it's hard to find people who still read the paper regularly. Amy and I are not ready to give it up just yet, however (also we are secretly brainwashing our kids into enjoying reading the paper too, hah!).