Who needs toys

When you can play with paper towels.

This the girls idea of helping mom putting things away.

My big helpers.

Staples

I know I know. It has been too long since I posted. It has been crazy in the Steiger household. So just in case you were wondering what is going on well ....

we made one trip to the ER last week and yes those are staples on top of Sam's head. There is not a big story behind it. He was trying to get a cup for a drink and hit his head on the bottom of cabinet door (10 minutes after we got home from the Dr. office with Jo's ear infection). Yep life is good. He is doing great (staples are coming out next week).

Other than that, lots of coughs and sniffles we are doing great and are looking forward to the holidays.

Do Cowboys Use Table Cloth?

During my cleaning and sewing in the basement the boys were busy playing the old west.

Sam made playing card for his cowboys and then he started snooping around my fabric piles and asked if he could use some. He got all exited with what he found and was very proud with his tablecloths.

Then he ask me with the most serious face:

"Mom, do cowboys use tablecloths?"

I have no idea. Anyway the ones in our basement do.

Getting fired

This one was too good not to share it with all of you:

Last week the boys were discussing future potential careers during lunch. We are past the Jedi jobs (from Star Wars) phase and they moved onto more real jobs. They were talking about scientists when Sam froze and looking at me he said:" Mom, when we are done with school at home you will get fired (he said it in a sad voice) and you will have NOTHING to do." Now that was a good one. We laughed so hard with Fil when I told him I will be without a job and he asked if I will get some kind of severance package when I get fired. On another note we had temperatures in the minus twenties last week. It was -22F (that is -30C for all of you outside of US) on Friday morning and I had to go out with all of my four children and we had a ton of stops we had to make. I bundled them up so much but I have to say we did stay warm. As you can see Emma did not make it all the way home. Poor thing got tired on the way home.
Jo learned a new thing from her sister. Bringing a chair so she can help me cook. Lucky me.

Jo has a thing for hats. I have no idea why. Each time we are in any kind of store first she looks for are hats and when she finds some she puts them on her head and wants to take it home. She gets upset that I do not buy her new hats all the time. Anyway this one is a new one but it is mine. Jo had to dig it out of the bag as soon as we got home and she was wearing it that afternoon (the interesting thing is that she doesn't want to wear hats outside).

I hope you are all enjoying much warmer temperatures.

Tooth Fairy buisness and visit from Joda

You'd think that second time around I would know better.

Nate's bottom teeth have been wiggly for sometime. I caught Nate wiggling them often so I thought he was just making them loose since he saw his older brother. I did not think any new teeth were coming in. Yesterday during Nate's reading I saw a second row of teeth. I called the dentist right a way and today he pulled the baby teeth out. I guess you never know.

Anyway got to run.

The tooth fairy has to make an ATM run.

We got a visit from Joda.

(She is only missing a staff)

Boy's Book Club

We inherited a 'few' comic books from my brother many years ago. Since then the boys learned to read and appreciate good literature.

Let me tell you there is nothing like Asterix and Obelix (it is a boys world). I know there are more people out there with good taste.

Nothing like good french literature.

Are you from Ethiopia?

Last weekend when we were at the soccer fields talking to our friends. On the way to the boys game we happened to stop next to an African American father who was watching his son play. He was a very big guy. All of a sudden before we knew what was going on Emma came up to him and with her sweet high pitch voice she asked him:

"Are you from Ethiopia?"

You can imagine we all froze for a moment. But he was very nice and told her he was not and that maybe his great, great, great, great, grandmother was. Jordan was sitting in the stroller and we explained to him that Emma's sister is from Ethiopia. He smiled and said it was nice and he was fine with Emma's question.

Jordan has been home with us for over 7 months and once in a while we run into "African-Americans". I would have to say that we get two different reactions. One is from American (African-Americans) they typically say that it is nice that we adopted her. On the other hand when an African-American person from Africa finds out they start hugging Jo and kissing her and they are so glad we adopted her. I think that it is amazing that you can see they have a some kind of connection with her.

the girls colouring during the boys soccer game Since Emma was full of questions that afternoon she was on a roll and this happened only half hour later. I was not present so I did not see it but this is what Fil said happened. Emma started jumping up and down singing:

"I see HO HO (Ho Ho is for Santa clause)"

It was an uncle who came to watch his nephew play soccer and the boy happened to be on the boys soccer team. Now this man did look a lot like a Santa Clause (beard and all) so Emma was not that far off. He was very sweet about it and even stopped after the game to say hi. Emma was speechless as she thought for sure he was HO HO.

We got two good laughs within an hours time.

If I Get Pregnant In Africa .... ?

Do any of you write down what your children come up with? (This one was too funny not to share it with the world).

All of you know that we have four kids and all of them are eager to share their thoughts with us at the diner table every night. This is a small part of our conversations last night.

Nate announced that he was going to built one hundred huts for his one hundred children (the number of his children has been slowly moving up each time the boys start talking about their future families). Then he changed his mind and told us he will build one hundred and two huts. One for his wife, one for him and the rest for the children (Sam's family will be much smaller). I believed after a good laugh we all would move onto another subject. But Nate wasn't done. Nate asked us with the most serious face this question: "If I move to Africa and get pregnant will my babies be brown?" (note that our children refer to black people as brown). At this point we were all about to loose it. After the laughter died down we did explain to Nate that a babies color depends on the parents and that he won't be getting pregnant. Oh I love this guy. I love his way of thinking and his love for others.

I cannot wait to visit his one hundred and two huts in Africa.

CRIME SCENE: DO NOT CROSS

Yep you are seeing correctly. There was crime scene tape all over our back yard. Wondering what happened? Fil got the boys crime scene tape to play with (it was one of those company promotions one but it looked real to me). That is all to it. If you know our boys you know it was one of the best gifts ever. However, I had to limit them to our back yard so we would not attract to many neighbors. I was hoping nobody was moving into our neighborhood that day. What a sight. Sam was busy taping our whole back yard.
Some of the neighbor kids came over to play with the boys. Well they came first with their parents to make sure everything was ok.



Do not ask me why Nate is wearing goggles.
Jo was a happy girl as long all the kids were playing around her. As you can tell she is starting to get a few more teeth. She has four now.
Our detective

There is never a dull moment in Steiger household.

Just in case you are wondering what I did with 17 pounds of blueberries I made four blueberry buckles, few blueberry pies, froze 18 cups (about 4 1/2 liters) and filled six Steiger bellies (we will have to go get some more for blueberry jam).

And The Teacher Of The Year Is ...

.... Sam?... Nate?

(I see a profeser here by the way.)
... Emma?
As you can see the kids had fun with my new glasses. Yes I do wear reading glasses and I blame it on too much blogging. Maybe not. I do read a lot with the kids and by myself. I sure hope none of the kids will have to wear glasses any time soon. Anyway I hope I will make as Teacher of the Year in our household.

Tuna Sandwiches and Nate

Ever wonder how to get your 6 years old to eat tuna fish? Here is a true story on how my boy got to love tuna sandwiches. I asked my family on Saturday what would they like for dinner. It was late and I was running out of time and ideas. Nate looked at me and asked for tuna sandwich. Both Fil and I looked at each other and said:" Sure Nate". He persisted on having a tuna sandwich for a long time. First let me tell you that Nate is very passionate about Star Wars and since we put him on Star Wars detox he moved his attention to the Calvin and Hobbes comic strips (thanks to Fil). For those of you who don't know this comic strip it is about a little boy named Calvin and his stuffed tiger named Hobbes. Even though Nate doesn't have a stuffed tiger he has his brother Sam with whom he has many imaginary adventures like those in the comics. Hobbes loves tuna so I guess that is where the idea of having a tuna sandwich came from. Nate showed no interest in tuna fish sandwiches earlier and I never realy pushed it. We live on a east coast and we all have been spoiled with fresh fish. All of our kids love fish and chips and I tried to make them regularly (that reminds me I haven't made them in a while). They like fish a lot but never expressed an interest in tuna. We tried to explain to Nate at the dinner table that tuna is fish that comes from a can and he argued with us that he loves fish. I pulled out a can of tuna and Fil made Nate a tuna sandwich for dinner. And guess what?
He loved it. I guess that is one way to get your kids eating fish. I will have to search through the comic books and try to find some other good ideas (I never found the comic strip that Nate got his idea from). Here are some pictures from the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip.

Taco's For Dinner

I couldn't resist taking pictures of my sweet little girl. Can you tell she LOVES taco's. She ate 4 tacos for dinner. That was more then me!
She is definitely not a light eater.
She usually isn't this messy when it comes to eating. Most of the time she does a better job then her brothers but for some reason she just attacked those tacos.

Keeping busy

First of all we got an email from our coordinator to let us know that our in country representative has an appointment for Thursday where he will make an appeal before the judge for an earlier court date.

This is big news in a way. You have no idea how much we (and all the other families) would want an earlier court date. I can now take a day off from constantly checking e-mail until Thursday.

On the other hand I am trying to stay busy as much as possible. I started working on some gifts that we will take with us and I wanted to ask any of you who already made the trip if you can give me any ideas when it comes to gifts. I also found out that there are great craft ideas in the blog world. Anyway I came across The Mini Patch folio a while back and I thought it would make it a great gift. So far I have made several and I have about 8 more to go.

Can you tell I am having fun with it?

I also made a blanket for my baby girl. I noticed that Ethiopians bundle up babies a lot. There were a few families who mentioned this so I better take some blankets with us.
I also made a matching bib since I was already sitting at the sawing machine.
Both the blanket and the bib are two sided.
Sometimes I wonder if I am loosing it.

Emma asked me for some juice earlier today. Since we were already done with school I asked her if she would like hot cocoa instead. You bet she said yes and somehow the boys heard the offer as well. However I was low on milk. Then I remember that I had another gallon down in the garage. Since I was on my way down I thought I should take some trash out. It was also trash day so I went upstairs to collect odds and ends that should have already been in trash can. Then I remembered all the boxes I have been saving since Christmas for my crafts and projects and since I used something else instead I needed to collapse all the boxes and take them out. Sometime in between I heard Nate calling me that Emma bit him (It wouldn't be the first time that Emma left teeth marks on her brothers. I blame that one on Fil's side of the family since I heard many stories from his dad about his uncle biting in school). A little bit later I heard Emma screaming at the top of her lungs. Who knows what was wrong. My guess is one of her brothers walked by her (that high pitch scream comes from me.) So here I was taking all the trash I can get into my hands out. About half hour later I was standing in front of the stove thinking did I forget something? Oh yeah the milk. So I went down this time only to get the milk and made hot cocoa for everybody (about 45 minutes after Emma asked for drink, way to go mom).
Just in case you are wondering about the colored marshmallows that is what I get for not paying attention in the grocery store (I believe it was Nate who manage to somehow smuggle it into the grocery cart. That he gets from his daddy.)

I hope you all had a great Tuesday :)

Nutcracers and being silly

As I wrote yesterday we are on a roll when it comes to crafts this week. I saw this idea from Mailbox earlier in the year and I loved it. First the boys were not so sure about it but they have been playing with them ever since.
Sam even made a gun by himself for his little guy.

Here is Nate and Emma pretending to be asleep (it was time to go to bed and these two decided it would be a good idea to sleep in our living room).
Who knows what Emma was smelling.
And here are some pictures of me (very rare). Emma was trying to give me a kiss and Fil was trying to capture it. We (me and Emma) had a good laught during it.

Yep, two girls waiting for one more partner to join them (hopefully soon).