Help the Ayala Triplets… with Pizza!
Pizza Boli’s in Germantown
and Gaithersburg
are having a fundraiser for the Ayala Family!
Participating Locations:
20012 Goshen Rd.
Montgomery Village,
MD&12949 Wisteria Dr.
Germantown, MD.
Every Thursday
until the end of the year,
they will donate 10% of the days profit to
the Ayala Family/Montgomery County Law Enforcement Officers Relief Fund.
Yes, this is EVERY Thursday. Treat your family and yourself to Thursday night Pizza,
while you help raise money for
Melissa Ayala,
her healthy new triplets (all girls),
and Hector Jr. (not yet 2).
Montgomery County Police Officer Hector Ayala died in the line of duty on Easter morning this year.
Click Here for Prior Posts on Helping the Ayala Triplets and more Background Info…
Surprising Field Trips (a.k.a.- you can lead a child to water, but you can’t make him impressed)
In keeping with suggestions from online parenting guides, and PBS, and articles in the weekend paper, and even blurbs on the sides of cereal boxes, I decided to do something fun and educational with my son. We take ‘field trips’ together.
We got in the car and went down to the National Mall. My son loves cars… and trucks… and planes… and rockets, really any mode of transportation. So I’m thinking, ‘What could be better than The Air and Space Museum?’ Nothing… or so I thought.
I don’t know when you last parked down at the Mall, but parking is surprisingly easy. They added parking all along the service road that borders the Mall, the entire length of it. And if you want to take Metro- you’ve got the stop right there.
I pulled into a space only about a block away from The Air and Space Museum. No meters and ‘rock star parking’…cool! We walked across the little service road to the sidewalk and immediately saw a beautiful fountain in front of the National Museum of the American Indian. It had many levels and an edge big enough for a child to walk along. He loved it (at this point I knew, maybe he’s not going to be as excited as I thought to see Wilbur and Orville Wright’s plane).
I finally coaxed him away from the super cool climbing fountain and we went into the Air and Space Museum. As you all know – it is gigantic. All the rockets were great. All the planes were great. Everything was great, but it’s almost overload for kids…
We walked around a little more. I think we stayed a little over an hour and that included a trip to the Air and Space Museum McDonald’s. The happy meal toy was a NASA rocket – nice touch McDonald’s and NASA.
We then started to leave; he told me he was ready to go. But wait, he was so impressed with the purse/bag x-ray machine that the guards showed him how it worked.
We made another stop at the fountain, crossed the street and my son yelled, “Mommy, look!” It was literally a bus and truck put together, I’m sure to haul artifacts around the Smithsonian. I believe it was a government vehicle.
“It’s a… BusTruck! I’ve never seen one of those before!” And he just stared.
When my husband got home from work and asked what we had seen and learned on our ‘field trip’ my son immediately started in with a description of the BusTruck…
no planes, no rockets…
the BusTruck.
So once again, I tried to give my son an educational experience, and he gave me the education.
…But he’s a fun teacher!
* I originally wrote this post for DC Metro Moms.
Quotable Friday
“Be who you are
and say what you feel,
because those who mind don’t matter,
and those who matter don’t mind.”
— Dr. Seuss
How to Make Gooey Cookies Every Time!
How do make cookies gooey, or even soft, and therefore edible? My cookies resemble bricks.
I’ve never been a big cookie maker. It just never occurred to me to bake my own cookies when I can buy great ones from the Giant bakery… Is that wrong?
Now, my son has his own baking set, complete with rolling pin, whisk, cookie cutters and cookie sheet and he LOVES to bake cookies because we get down on the floor of the kitchen and mix up all the ingredients and cut out the cookies on a sheet.
Yes, the sheet is on the floor… but the cookies are on the sheet, so they don’t touch the floor… No, you don’t have to sample any cookies when you come over!
We’ve been baking a lot lately, producing lots of hard, almost candy-like cookies. My son doesn’t even want to eat them. He just likes baking them.
And then, a breakthrough- soft cookies, like a grandmother makes! I did it! I found out the secret to soft cookies!
How you ask?
I mentioned my desire to know the magical formula to tender cookies to my mother-in- law. How does one achieve the wanted texture? How do I make cookies that don’t harden enough to hurt the teeth?
What’s the rub- practice?… a secret ingredient?… maybe just more of an ingredient, like butter?
My mother-in-law looked at me and very matter-a-factly said, “Oh, just cook them a minute or two less than the instructions say to.”
What? Are you kidding? That’s it?
So I tried it… and it worked. So… I feel good for succeeding in my discovery of good cookie making. But on the other hand- Man, do I feel silly!
This is not a physics theorem. This is not hard. Does everyone know this? Am I the only one who DIDN’T know this? Wow.
But, regardless of how non-chef-like I feel, I am now inspired. My next venture- CAKES!
Talk amongst yourselves…
I originally wrote this post for DC Metro Moms…
Quotable Friday
“You only live once,
but if you do it right,
once is enough.”
– Mae West
Eat, Pray, Love, with 2 Little Boys
Okay, so it’s not exactly ‘Eat, Pray, Love’.
BUT, my friend Mary Jane,
is RIGHT NOW,
making her way through Europe with her 2 youngest sons.
She has 5!
Yeah… 5.
She’s a saint.
She’s 1. Eating… Check.
She has visited churches 2. Pray… Check.
And she loves her boys… and husband. 3.Love… Check.
And she’s also teaching them history while they go!
Isn’t she fabulous???
Check out their travels on her blog-
Yesterday they were in Pompeii… Where will they be today??!!
Quotable Friday
“I have noticed that folks
are generally about as happy
as they make up their minds to be.”
– Abraham Lincoln
Where Did ‘Sick As A Dog’ Come From?
In Keeping With
the subject of learning,
(a.k.a.- since I just learned why some guys are called ‘Trip’…
See Post Below)
today I am venturing into a common saying.
We’ve all said, “I’m sick as a dog.”
Where did that come from?
And why do dogs, who are ‘man’s best friend’ get such a bad rap?
You may be ‘dog tired’. Such n’ Such is ‘going to the dogs’. There are ‘Dogs of war,’ and there is the phrase- ‘hair of the dog that bit you.’
There are the ‘Dog days of summer’… This one is not however, especially negative, as it referred originally to the ascendancy of Sirius, the ‘Dog Star,’ during the hottest days of summer… interesting.
So again, Why do people say,
I’m Sick as a Dog?
Anyone, Anyone?
‘Sick as a dog,’ which means “extremely sick” dates back to at least the 17th century.
It is not so much negative, as it is simply descriptive.
Anyone who knows dogs knows that while they can and often will eat absolutely anything, on those occasions when their diet disagrees with them the results can be quite dramatic.
And while Americans may consider themselves ‘sick’ when they have a bad cold, in Britain that would be called ‘feeling ill.’ ‘Being sick’ in Britain usually means ‘to vomit.’
So there you go!
Bueller… Bueller?
How Can I Be 40… and Not Know This… Again!
Well, it’s another day here and I’m happy to report that I continue to learn things every day; the only thing that is a little disconcerting about this is my thought
AFTER learning said new thing, which is-
‘Why didn’t I ask that question before?’
‘How Can I be 40… and Not Know This?’
So here goes the new bit of information that I just learned, get ready:
Guys who are called ‘Trip’ are really the 3rd generation of a name,
for example- Robert Francis Jones III
Trip is short for ‘Triple’
as in 3,
3rd generation.
Doesn’t that make sense?
Wow. I can’t believe I didn’t know that before.
If you didn’t know that either, I’m happy sharing this new information with you,
if you are thinking, ‘Wow, I can’t believe you didn’t know that either’,
please, just keep it to yourself,
Thank you.
Quotable Friday
“Nurture your Mind
with Great Thoughts;
to Believe in the Heroic
Makes Heroes.”
-
I Was In The 2012 Show !
Check Out …
-
Nicole’s Book
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