Flying Barrel Of Monkeys

It’s Tuesday

I sure do spend a lot of time in the car. As proof, I hit a milestone this weekend.

The digital number flipping is not nearly as exciting as the old rotary analog odometer dial turning over.

I made robot cupcakes for a birthday party this weekend. I think they turned out pretty cute, if I do say so myself.

The birthday boy had a pinata. MonkeyBoy had never seen a pinata before and he was very impressed. As he told his MonkeyMan afterward, “They had a robot. And I pulled strings. And candy fell out! Candy, candy, candy! Rolls, Daddy!” MonkeyBoy’s current favorite candy is “Rolls!”, more commonly known as Tootsie Rolls. He scooped up a huge handful of them from the pinata spillings, but luckily his hands are relatively small so that only amounted to about six pieces of candy. Enough to make him feel important, but not enough to keep him on a sugar high for days.

It snowed last week. For about two minutes. We were on the road (see #1) and by the time I got us safely pulled over and MonkeyBoy unbuckled, the snow had stopped. I’m jealous of my friends with snow pictures. But hopefully there will be real snow at my folks’ house when we go this spring. Papop has an adventure planned for MonkeyBoy.

I was so proud of my little guy this past weekend. I had purchased some toys to give away to charity including a very large Tonka firetruck. I took MonkeyBoy to a holiday sing-along and toy donation drive and we took the firetruck to donate. I prepped him on the way there, but was expecting kicking and screaming when it was time to give the toy up. Instead, he was the perfect little gentleman. He carried the truck from the car to the donation spot (even though the truck was a big as he was) and he shyly handed it over to the head of the toy drive. He never asked to keep it or play with it. He just kept repeating snippets of what I’d told him on the drive there “This for other kid. I share this truck. Someone else gets to play with it. It got no batteries. The other kid’s mommy will get it batteries. She will fix it.” The battery part was all ad-libbed on his part, the toy was not battery-operated. He just decided it needed batteries and came up with his own resolution about what would happen to the truck. As he handed over the toy, I heard a reporter’s camera going nuts taking shots, but it appears MonkeyBoy didn’t make the cut for the newspaper’s story the next day.

I signed myself up for a craft fair next week. I have no craft items currently made to sell. I think I may be a little bit insane to throw in a craft fair with everything else going on this month.

I took some of MonkeyBoy’s toys to the church nursery to share, since we have limited space in the house and he is blessed with many toys. I caught him playing with the egg game we had given him on his second birthday. I remember when he didn’t know how to use it. On Sunday, he laid down on the floor and solved it right away.

I shot about six hundred pictures in two days trying to get one for the Christmas card. I had to bribe him with candy and ice cream.

Without bribes, I kept getting shots like this:

or this one where he said “I’m tired. I’m going to take a nap now.”

I made three batches of Chex mix tonight so that I wouldn’t have to store the boxes of cereal in the pantry. Why can I get four batches of Chex mix from the rice and corn Chex, but only three from the wheat? Can’t they make the wheat boxes a little bigger? And why is wheat my favorite now when it was the one I used to pick out and throw away as a child? And why did my mom make it with Wheat Chex when no one in the family would eat the wheat ones?

I made cookies for a cookie exchange this evening. There’s a social event tomorrow that needed food donations, so I just donated all the cookies I should have brought home to the cause. I was more interested in the fun of baking and seeing what everyone else made, rather than actually bringing home and eating 5 dozen cookies. I’m in a baking mood and I think I’ll make twelve Cookies of Christmas this year. I based my recipe choice tonight on what ingredients I had at home. The cream cheese needed to be used up, so I made chocolate sandwich cookies.