Summer Visit

Each Summer, my sister's children visit us for a week or two. This is their second week here. They usually split their time with David & Jeanette, my mom, and us. Last week, Mateo was away at Boy Scout camp and I was not feeling very well so they were at D&J's most of the time. D&J took them along to Lego Land and Sea World. Lucky kids. This week, they are pretty much at our house. Nico, the baby, stays with my mom. There is no way I can handle 2 pre-teen boys, 1 busy-body little girl, and a baby!

Anyway, since this will be more of a stay-cation, I hope the kids won't get too bored. They have been spending their time eating, swimming, watching TV, eating, swimming, eating, more TV, video games, and swimming again. Horacio has been giving them swimming lessons every night. They really like that. They end the day with some quiet reading time and some more TV watching. It seems like a lot of TV, I know, but they're on vacay!

Last night I let Viviana pick meals from my "BH&G Kid Favorites Made Healthy" cookbook. We then came up with the menu for the week and wrote down our shopping list. This morning, we got up and hit the grocery store for our ingredients.




Our first meal was Banana-Berry Smoothies that we had for breakfast. Of course, the smoothies were delicious but they didn't fill up those tummies. I had to cook some eggs with carne asada (grilled skirt steak) that we had left over from this weekend and made burritos for them.

The recipe for the smoothies calls for vanilla yogurt. I used plain yogurt and added a dash of vanilla extract. I didn't realize that by not adding the vanilla yogurt, the smoothies would be lacking in sweetness, so we had to compensate with a spoonful of honey in each. I also like to add a dash of ground nutmeg and cinnamon to my smoothies. Yummy!

For lunch we had the swimming tuna sandwiches which were supposed to be cut into fish or sharks but, oddly enough, I don't have any fish-y cookie-cutters. Harrumph! So I made starfish instead. I think they came out kind of cute. I didn't really follow the recipe in the book because it called for ranch dressing and I don't really like ranch dressing so I made them with my own recipe, which is different every time. Here is what I did today:
2 cans white tuna packed in water, drained
1 celery stick, diced into tiny pieces
2 tomatoes (from D&J's garden :-) )
3 hard boiled eggs, diced
1 Tbs. diced olives
1 tsp. capers
2 Tbs. mayonnaise
1 tsp. brown mustard
salt & pepper to taste

combine everything in a bowl and enjoy!

Andy gives the sandwiches a thumbs up!

After lunch, I had a bright idea that I immediately shared, "Hey kids, why don't we make our own kites and fly them?" To my surprise, my wonderful and creative idea was not met with the same level of excitement, mostly from Mateo who had to be prodded along the way. Of course Viviana was very excited since she loves projects. Did I even bother to look up instructions anywhere? Of course not. What can be so hard about making kites? So we set off to build our kites.

First, we cut some branches from one of our Crepe Myrtles....

...which we fashioned into cross shapes. Our plan was to make three kites. One for each.

I cut open some Trader Joe's paper bags and taped two together for each kite. Then the kids cut out the shapes they wanted. Mateo made a jagged-edge shape, Viviana made a Hello Kitty face, and Andy made a cartoon face.

We were busy at work when...
Horacio came home from his work and rained on our parade. "Those kites aren't going to fly," he said casually as he walked by us. "What?" I threw my hands up in the air. "Why not?" I asked. So he explained how our basic design was wrong and we quickly realized that we should probably just try making one kite with his help and hope that it flies.

After the fact, which is the best time to look up instructions, I found this site which had some pretty neat ideas and instructions for kites. Maybe you will be smarter and follow them before you start.

We will test ours out tomorrow at the park. Stay tuned.

For dinner we made Creamy Chicken and Rice Soup with Oven-Fried Onion Rings. I followed the recipe except that I processed the carrot, celery, onion and garlic I used to cook the chicken with and added it to the soup which made it a little more orange-y in color than the one in the book. It was yummy, I thought. Mateo really liked it. Andy was not liking the celery taste too much and I think Viviana kinda liked it. But they all really liked the onions rings.

Onions before they get yummified into onion rings.

Onion rings. One thing I did differently from the recipe is that I double coated the rings because the bread crumbs weren't sticking to well the first time around. A second round of dipping and coating did the trick.

After "swim class" Mateo and Andy retreated to their usual spots...

...computer...
...and iTouch...
A beautiful sunset, which looked more pink-y and more beautiful in person but because I have such a crappy camera, this is what you get.

Good night!
SC
xoxo