Detective Mom and the Case of the Missing Diaper

Just because I know I'm going to need material for embarrassment when Ry gets older...

The Case - 9 PM - Arrive home from a regular Wednesday night up at the church. 9:05 Prepare to change diaper and get one squirming 3 year old to bed only to find (dum dum dum....) beneath his pants - there's no diaper to be changed.

The Witnesses - Dad says he knows for sure that diaper was in place at an earlier point of the evening but he had smelled something funny in the hall of the church. Alicia says that she didn't see anything but Ry had disappeared for a while.

Detective Mom's conclusion - we had better check the church after dropping Alicia off at school the next morning and look for more information. This could get stinky.

Case Continued - 8 AM Thursday Morning - back at church, trashbag, lysol, and carpet cleaner in hand. 8:20 Only evidence of unusual behavior was an extreme amount of t.p. in one of the toilets of the ladies bathroom - still no diaper. Need more information. 2:00 P.M. Spoken with most likely suspects to have removed evidence - greatful that they know nothing of the event otherwise I'm sure great amounts of strawberries and chocolate would have been necessary. 2:30 Check the church again, still no sign of any fowl play.

Case Conclusion - Still an unconclusive mystery but most likely theory is that Ry might have actually taken a shot at the bathroom all by himself, including putting the diaper in the trash and getting his pants and shoes back on. Personally I think he did it just to taunt me with the fact that he still refuses to use the one at home.

Bring out the Bicycles

We went biking last weekend for the first time this year. Alicia was pretty upset and grumpy that she didn't get a chance to ride her bicycle so I tried to make it up to her with an afternoon bike ride over at the church so she could actually have room to ride but not worry about dirt/hills/cars. The kids both had lots of fun and were still at it strong when it was time to head home again.

Snow????

The end of April went out with a bang - determined not to let us be fooled into thinking that summer really might eventually be on its way again. It snowed. Okay so all in all the snow was less than a day and it only stuck for about 3 hours but still - It's almost May!!! Ryan - as you can see was not thrilled. Possibly because I was towing him around the yard as I decided to take pictures of it beginning to stick to everything.

Photos from Virginia

For Alicia's birthday she decided that instead of having a real birthday party she wanted to go down to VA to see her cousins. In a moment of insanity we began making plans and even convinced Uncle Matt to tag along for the adventure. In the end although it was a lot of driving and only 2 days there plus 2 days driving it was fun. The kids were amazingly well behaved considering the amount of time they spent strapped in their carseats.


Her cousins all love sports. We spent the afternoon while we were there getting to see Kayla and Kortney's soccer games. Unfortunately it was a little chilly outside which wouldn't have been so bad except that it was also extremely windy.

Alicia's solution to the wind during Kayla's game was to build a fort out of some of the chairs and blankets we brought.

Ryan decided to take it like a man - at least as long as his mouth and hands were kept busy trying to figure out the jello.


The next day we went down to visit a long time friend of Mark and Matt's in Williamsburg. While we waited for him to get off of work we decided to check out Yorktown Beach.

Ryan's attempt to chase the birds so he could play with them.

It just wouldn't be a trip to the beach without a sandcastle. Naturally we failed once again to remember to pack pails and shovels. - Not that the kids really noticed.

This was about as close as Alicia really wanted to brave being in the water. The water (I hear) was still pretty cold and mostly she didn't want more than her toes touching. Once again Uncle Matt was the hero who braved it for her. (not to mention his running out there in the first place to catch the ball that had blown into the water :-) )

The superhero shot!

Pondering the important questions - What is it? What can we do with it? Whose turn to hold it? Can we keep it?

We actually have more pictures than these - but the unfortunate part of having events documented by two cameras is that Mark's still got a chunk of them on his. I'll try and get some of those up soon. Like I said, the trip was really a lot of fun even with the recovery time after so much driving. Hopefully one of these days we'll get to try it again with some more time.

Beauty and the Beast at Weathersfield School

Alicia's first school play was a few weeks ago. Unfortunately I spent most of the time shuffling the kids around getting them to where they needed to be and trying to help with everything I didn't get a chance to take as many pictures as I would have wanted and the lights were dark so I couldn't really get too many that weren't blurry anyways.

The girls getting their hair and makeup done before the show.

The napkins/flowers. Unfortunately by this time they were all a little tired and hungry.

My little Belle

All in all it was a lot of long afternoons and drama I thought was only possible by teenage girls mixed into chaos that tends to surround shows. Still everything worked out in the end and it was fun. Alicia enjoyed herself and wants to do another one next year - I told her we'll see.

Some Easter Time Traditions

In attempts to feel like I'm at least on my way to becoming a decent mom and creating traditions that my kids will somewhere in their deep subconsciousness thank me for at some period of their life I decided to try and have some Easter fun. This was the first year that we've really made our own Easter eggs and it was a lot of fun. Thanks to the web I made my own dye and everything. Mostly this year we had fun experimenting with different things and Alicia enjoyed coloring special things on each of them.


The next morning the eggs had mysteriously been hidden around the house by some surprise visitor who also left Alicia a new dress and Sunday socks in a basket along with some chocolate Easter bunnies. I didn't get a picture of the dress yet but the kids definitely enjoyed the bunnies the poor creatures didn't last the day out.

(don't mind the milk from breakfast still on his face - I was actually impressed that I got some in him before he started in on the chocolate.)

Birthday Preview

Since I don't really have the time yet for a full post I'll just do a quick preview of the birthday madness around here...

For some insane reason, I decided this year to attempt to make birthday cakes for the kids. This was extremely ambitious considering that I've never succeeded in anything of the like. I think I tried to be creative one year for Alicia's 2nd birthday (maybe 3rd) and make a double layer flat cake... yeah... that DID NOT work out so well, thankfully Wendi was here to help me salvage it enough to put some candles on it and Alicia didn't know better.

This was the cake that Alicia picked out...
I know - way cute right - it's called a Mad Hatter Cake and the recipe was on the Family Fun website. Well - here's how my first ever cake creation turned out...All in all not too bad although I wish I knew how NOT to get the silly cake crumbles in my icing.

For Ryan Alicia and I thought of a train cake, I kinda based it on this creation from the Betty Crocker website http://www.bettycrocker.com/recipes/train-cake/5685f320-1e5c-4ebb-b2cd-1ab73633b016 but I customized it a lot... this one Alicia helped quite a bit on. Still we decided that the cookie icing on the rice-crispy treats may look okay, but not so much for the taste - a little too sweet I think when combined.
Okay, so you're probably laughing now, but all in all for my first two cakes I declare it a success. The kids loved them, they had fun helping me make them (or should I say eating the icing and candy goodies whenever they thought they could get away with it.) Most of all I learned tons about how to do it and I'm not so scared of trying as I was before I just got in there and tried to figure it out.

This morning we had phase 2 of birthday cake madness. We frosted the cupcakes I made last night to take to Alicia's class. I didn't get any pictures but I think they were cute. I was swirling the icing in circles to frost them and so Ryan went from calling them "pup-cakes" to "pup-snakes" I won't even discuss the brilliant moment I had when I decided to pre-heat the oven to make the cupcakes last night (at 10:00 because naturally I forgot until the kids were going to bed and then I still had to get them in bed) yeah, let's just say that I'd been hiding the pans with the birthday cakes in the oven and well...because they were both half eaten it looks worse than it was - the train actually pretty much was the same just a little gooey - I just had to laugh at the puddle of icing around Alicia's though.