Abby Attempts: The Great British Bake Off Technical Three

Dampfnudel! I've now found out the reason why I put these off... They're rubbish!! How on earth are you supposed to know when they're done?! They look like they're barely cooked so you obediently follow the timings, plus a couple of minutes extra, and the flippin things are encrusted to the bottom of the pan, gah. I'm pretty sure the dampfnudel itself was cooked, I tried to squish it to see if it was still a lump of dough, but it felt okay (I was surprised, the top looked like a lump of raw dough) so that was a small consolation, now I've got a line of barely edible nudlen (the plural of dampfnudel, perhaps?)

I picked some plums from our plum tree for the sauce and felt pretty pleased with myself, it was tasting delicious. Then I stick buzzed it and it went everywhere, now I've got little bits of plum all over my clothes and the kitchen, hmpff.

Forget the vanilla sauce, I'm sure they called it custard in the bread week episode, so I mixed up a birds instant sachet. Thanks Approved foods, 10p! At least that's one bit that tasted right.

I won't be bothering with them again. You might as well mix in a bit of sugar into a dumpling mix and plonk them on top of a casserole!

Abby Attempts: The Great British Bake Off Technical Four

I needed to do a bit of a switch around with the technicals due to missing ingredients, hence week four has happened before three! So today is lace pancakes, dampfnudel will have to wait.

Today I decided to get the boys in on the action, Zach and Jacob were both with me for these, so the lace and heart shaped brief was quickly tossed aside. As was my sanity as random objects appeared in the batter. A duplo dog was amusing, Zach lobbing in a grubby washing up sponge in not so much... Calmcalmcalm. Failfailfail.

The batter was really smooth... I followed Mary's instructions and mixed in the flour into the eggy milky well GRADUALLY and it looks like that's the key to not getting my usual lumps. You learn something new :)

Using the squeezy bottle (Home Bargains, 39p. Ace find!) was actually really easy, much better than my piping fails. Two out of three of us are nursing small burns,buy what does that matter when you're having fun making shapes like this?! After two fancy hearts it was trains, words, a house, a Mummy with a baby in her tummy (Zachy's request, no, there's no message in there!) and animals all the way.

Highly recommend, lots of fun :)

Find the recipe here http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/lace_pancakes_20045

Trying out Geocaching

Last weekend my friend Nikki posted on Facebook what a great time she spent with her family geocaching. It's like a treasure hunt where you use your phone as a gps and find a certain point, often interesting or beautiful. When you find it you sign the log book and put in a little something that you brought with you, swapping it for something you take out of the box.
I'd seen it as an activity option at Center Parcs when we were there at the beginning of January but we weren't sure if our boys are too young to manage the maps and gps.
Today we tried it. We downloaded the free app and had a look- there are LOADS! More than 2 million, in 185 different counties. And they are everywhere! We picked one to find a 10 minute drive from our house, and we passed a few other areas on our way.
We found a castle we had never seen and had a great time, despite a grumpy baby (probably his second time ever being grumpy in his whole life so I couldn't really complain) and freezing rain. When the gps said we were pretty close we had to have a real search to find the cache but we found it! Really quite exciting, and I bet it could become quite addictive. We did another one on our way home!
So we have found a new favourite :) Outdoorsy, educational, fun and FREE to do with family. You can't beat that!!

TRY IT WHERE YOU ARE!

December is BUSY, and I haven't even done anything Christmassy yet!

Hello!

It has been months and months and I think I'd better stop filling up Facebook with photos, so I'm going back to blogging (I think!)

The past week has been a whirlwind of family, friends, parties, food and LOADS of children!! Oliver turned four, we crammed 12 kids plus three of our own, into our house, we made a foiled-covered rocket (it survived at least four children and three balloons in there at once) Jacob was blessed by Ben at our church, I singlehandedly looked after six children for more than three days (three of my friend's, three of my own- oldest was 7...) And the inlaws, outlaws, a couple of brothers and my Nanna came up all for a flyingvisit for the blessing. It has been wonderful, and now I feel like I need to sleep for a week!

Update + Christmas!

It has been a long time! It is mainly down to me not being very techy and having trouble making this blog app work on our tablet :s But everything is going well for us right now and we are feeling rather Christmassy! This year we have two trees, Ben had grown up with a fake tree and I always had a real tree so I am always a bit sad with our fake tree every year (Ben says a real tree is "inefficient!" Ha) but some friends told us where they had seen some Christmas trees for free (nothing inefficient about that!) so we had a little look through and found one I loved! Then our friend even brought it to our door on his car roof, lucky us! So we have a real one in the lounge decorated by me and a fake one in our kitchen/dining room decorated by Ben (still baubles to go on I think). Haha best of both worlds and even better that it was free :)

The boys: Oliver starts Playgroup in January and is now in a toddler bed having just turned three last week with a train party. He is definitely still a train boy, and particularly excited about the Santa Express we will be going on next week (a train ride where Father Christmas is on it too!!) Zachy is saying some words nowadays!! He says up, down, Dada, Mum, cheese, please, ta, hello, yes, no and amen and he makes a lot of animal noises and can chug like a train (of course!) This is a great breakthrough for him some he has always been the point-and-grunt type :) He loves running some giving us all cuddles and he loves to "bundle" Oliver (they say "bund-O!!!") The boys are often tackling each other (and us) to the floor, they just love it. I am looking forward to having lots of one-to-one time with Zach while Oliver is at Playgroup.

I am really looking forward to Christmas this year, and making it extra special to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ and not getting totally carried away by presents (although there will be quite a few of those too!!) In between talking to the boys about Father Christmas and making reindeer paintings with their feet we have been talking and reading books about the true meaning of Christmas and we will be doing some acting out with them on Christmas Eve :) I think we will all play Wise men, Shepherds and everyone else all at once! We have also been watching some of these lovely, short Bible videos which are very simple and absolutely beautiful and made by our Church. http://www.lds.org/bible-videos/videos/the-nativity?lang=eng

Happy Christmas!

Boy number two, lover of electrical appliances

A video taken a couple of weeks ago in which Zach demonstrates his love of plugs.

Mellow Zach

I feel like I have been scraping by for the past couple of months- we have been trying to tackle Zach's cheeky night feedings for three months and his need for daytime milk from me was getting more and more obsessive (11 months old,  8+ times a day and he would scratch my face and neck from start to finish and was also getting a bit to keen to try out new acrobatic positions). On top of that he developed a new trait two months ago... extreme separation anxiety. He really would get very upset when he was held by anyone else, I was NOT allowed to leave the room and whenever we went out to anything in the village he clung to me. He was also at the height of his blood-curdling scream phase! Wo betide Oliver ever needing my attention,  poor good boy!

On one particular witching hour (4/5 o'clock-ish) in my despair I rang my Mum (on hands-freee, I was holding Zach is one arm and cooking the dinner with the other) quizzing her on whether she ever put any of us in childcare a morning a week!!! Her answer was... "It will pass"! And how right she was (as usual...)

Now I can type this because my dear second boy with the cute face has mellowed beyond belief. I decided that milk was a bit part of the problem, so over the past three weeks I have weaned him entirely off my milk. Life is truly blissful. He naps for two long stretches every day, Ben is able to put him to bed, HE HAS STOPPED SCREAMING! He has let other people hold him a couple of times for a couple of minutes each and there was even a smile once! Over the last three or so days he has been able to play a couple of metres away from me which is such a huge step for him! And, *drumroll* the past three nights he has SLEPT THROUGH THE NIGHT. He is back to being a joy to be around, and no longer drains everything I've got! I have ENERGY to do be a better wife, Mum, look after myself and am focusing on looking after other people. One friend was even concerned at quite how energetic I was- she called me manic!! Brilliant :) To top it all off it is SUNNY, I have a wonderful family, fabulous friends and going to church and living what I know to be true makes me so happy. Ahh, cloud nine!

Fergus Connor, Aberdeenshire photographer

On Friday 10th May our friend and brilliant photographer, Fergus Connor, spent some time with us doing a photoshoot. He was absolutely amazing: everything was so natural and fun- nothing was stressful or forced which was even more impressive when you consider our fairly uncooperative small boys! Even the fact that Oliver jumped and then fell in a big puddle didn't stop him! It was just a lot of fun. I am so pleased with what Fergus got. Now to choose one for the wall...!

Christmas!

This year we are spending Christmas up here in Aberdeen, just the four of us. We feel very grown-up, and so far we haven't forgotten anything important like the cranberry sauce, yorkshire puds or cheese and crackers. Phew!

So far the family fun has consisted of:

- a visit to THE best Grotto in the world, at BA Country Stores. It was decked out in a huge, moving winter wonderland and Santa's workshop, with bits of trucks being assembled travelling over our heads and on conveyor belts... oh wow. Then Father Christmas spent so long with us, and reeled Oliver nicely in with a haribo sweet. Brilliant!!

- a cinema trip to see 'Brave' (great!!) which only costed £2.70, AND the boys were very good throughout- followed by a trip to McDonalds!! We both hadn't been for sooo long and we bought Oliver his first Happy Meal...! The chips went down a storm.

- lots of Christmassy baking

- Ben being poorly so we all snuggled in bed to cheer him up

- we made a gingerbread ruin!!! (the 'roof' is made of strawberry laces... we ran out of icing sugar to stick the real roof on!)

- more Christmassy baking- this is Ben and Oliver making mince pies together. So lovely

- before bed on Christmas Eve, the boys acting out all the parts in the Nativity

- leaving out a home-made mince pie for Santa and a carrot for the Reindeer. Oliver didn't think S.C. would need a drink, instead he was adamant for us to leave the mince pie in the cup

- Christmas day lunch!

- My husband looking especially handsome in his new jumper

... and it's only Boxing day!! More excitement when Ben's brother and sister come to visit at the weekend, yippee!