I was going to write about our homeschool meetup today but it’s late. So, instead I’m going to share a cookie recipe.

A few weeks ago, we made some gingerbread cookies. Flume shaped. What is a flume you ask? I don’t know exactly. I always thought flume was used like, a flume of water. But recently, during extremely cold weather in the mornings, my phone has been forecasting flumes with pictures of snowflakes. I’ve never heard that term applied to something that looks like a snowflake. And snow?! In my area? Really, dear phone? You must be mistaken.

But anyhoo, cookies. This is my favorite gingerbread cookie recipe from Cook’s Illustrated. I like them because they’re soft and chewy, not crunchy.

Maybe this recipe was not the best use of this awesome snowflake cookie cutter we got from Alice. Thank you Alice! The cookies spread too much and the little shapes I cut in the big snowflake, baked closed. Oh well. They were still yummy.

Oh and see the little divot in the small flume? I was busy with Nathan when that batch beeped in the oven. I told Alan to check it gently. I walked into the kitchen later to find a whole bunch of cookies with these very noticeable divots in them. Bwa ha ha! That’s not what I meant by gentle.

We just downloaded SAM Animation, a stop motion animation software program. We played around for a few seconds and look what we got.

It is SUPER EASY to use. It took less than minutes to get it going. I registered, downloaded the program, opened it up, and Isabelle started taking pictures right away with our webcam.

So, yeah, really cool. Go get it!

Isabelle has been asking to ride a train for a while now. I don’t know what brought it up. So, this afternoon, we walked down to ride the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) train. Alan doesn’t think of it as a proper train. It’s not like a Thomas the Train kind of train, a locomotive. But close enough. Isabelle was so excited. It was like a little adventure.

I’ve ridden BART before but not with kids. So, when I went up to the ticket machine, I was a little confused. Where was the button for kids’ tickets? I went to ask the agent when I saw a sign that said children BART tickets are sold at specific retail locations, not through the machines. Ahhh…I had forgotten that’s how kid tickets worked.

The very nice agent, I think that’s what they’re called, must have seen the confusion on my face and chased us down to help us. He asked how old Isabelle was. When I replied, five, he said, well today she’s four.

Kids four and under ride free. That’s why. I did not argue with him. I got my ticket and Isabelle put it through the fare gate and down we went to wait by the train tracks.

She excitedly looked at the tracks while we we waited for our train. “Not too close Isabelle, just hold my hand while you look.” I don’t know how people can comfortably stand so close to the edge.

When the train arrived, we were one of the first on. I told her to choose our seats but then led us to some forward facing seats. Me and backward facing seats would not have been a good idea. We sat down and impatiently waited to go. Yes, even Nathan was impatient, impatient to be out of his stroller that is.

I pulled him out and kept him occupied with the train map while Isabelle asked for the camera. The three shots below were taken by her before my camera battery started blinking red. Ooops. But that was ok because soon after that the train left the station.

When we got onto the train, Nathan must have thought we were in a big room with seats or something. I say this because he had the most startled look on his face when we started moving. He wasn’t expecting it at all.

And Isabelle? “THIS IS SOOOO AWESOME!” she loudly proclaimed as we took off. Then she spent the next twenty minutes happily looking out the window.

When we got to our stop Alan was waiting for us outside with the car. Is it weird that we took a little “train” trip to nowhere in particular?

Last week, with our homeschool group, we went on a tour of a yogurt shop, Uphoria Yogurt.

It was yummy and a learning experience.

For example, did you know it takes the yogurt machines 2-3 minutes to freeze the yogurt? Wow!

I think people’s stories are fascinating so I asked the owner, Joseph, what made him open up a yogurt store. Well, frozen yogurt is popular at Joseph’s grocery store, in San Francisco, so he decided to open a yogurt shop close to home.

He wanted it to be geared towards kids and I think he did a great job with that. This is Captain Uphoria.

How awesome is he? The kids all got Captain Uphoria coloring books. And Joseph talked about Captain Uphoria being in a comic book soon!

We really liked the yogurt. It was good. They use fresh ingredients and they’ve created some delicious flavors. I had some cable car chocolate, which I am wanting right now as I type this. I wish they were closer and a drive over there didn’t mean fighting traffic. Sigh.

After the tour, I bought a little bowl, silly me. I should have bought TWO bowls.

I could not get it in Nathan’s mouth fast enough in between Isabelle’s bites.

Yesterday, there was a Valentine’s celebration with our homeschool group. So, on Monday, I thought I’d attempt cake pops for a second time. My first attempt did not turn out so great. The cake part was fine. The dipping part was an abysmal failure.

This second attempt was even worse though. Why? I didn’t have all the proper equipment, namely the lollipop sticks. I didn’t buy more because we had some or so I thought. Turns out we only had eight left.

So, I thought I’d made cake balls and cake hearts instead. Not too big of a change. Except the dipping part did not work, again. I used Wilton’s candy melts and they are just too thick. I thought I’d retry with what I scrounged around for in my refrigerator, which was half of a Ghirardelli dark chocolate bar. It melted a little better but half a candy bar is not enough to cover twenty five little cake hearts and I don’t know how many cake balls.

Oh well. One of these days I’ll make cake balls work. Isabelle liked them though. She enthusiastically ate one when suddenly she said, there’s something hard in this one mommy. Just great, I thought. What else could go wrong?

I was having a devil of the time in the kitchen that day. My food processor, which I’ve mentioned before is on it’s last legs, would not grate my carrots for the carrot cupcakes I planned to make. After multiple tries I finally clicked the cracked bowl on just right and it worked. And when I was cleaning it out, I freaked out for a moment. I noticed a metal piece was missing. I was worried that maybe it had fallen into the carrots, which had gone into the batter, which would mean I would have to dump all 24+ cupcakes. Happily I found it.

But something hard in the cake balls? I didn’t use the food processor for that. There shouldn’t have been anything hard in it. I went over to Isabelle and told her to spit the thing out into a bowl. And the thing turned out to be HER TOOTH, her front bottom tooth, that has been loose for a couple of weeks. My baby’s first tooth, that fell out on it’s own and not being pulled by a dentist.

I set it aside on the counter in the bowl so that we could do something special on the weekend. I should have just had her put it under her pillow that night. Because on Tuesday, Alan accidentally threw it away.

I didn’t realize until right as I was putting the kids down for the night. It was later than usual and I was tired. Then the dreadful thought creeps into my head that I don’t know where Isabelle’s tooth is. I am so upset and the emotion fills me up completely that I cannot think. I shoo the kids into the other room and call Alan on the phone and rage at him.

After I hang up I am still mad and upset. I call Olinda crying about how Isabelle’s tooth is gone. Gone! Gone down the sink. I don’t feel better but I hang up because the kids should be asleep. After the kids fall asleep, I lay there and the anger bleeds away. Isabelle has a mouth full of teeth. We’ll save the next one.

Ok how about something happy now. I told Isabelle to draw a monster for the Valentine cards for the homeschool group. Maybe because she had just lost a tooth she drew such a toothy little monster.

I took her drawing and scanned it into photoshop, changed up the color a little for purple and green and light blue monsters, and removed the eyes so we could add googly eyes.