Life in the Scanlon house

Here are some random pictures about what goes on in our house.  This one is an example of what happens when Daddy's in charge on Mondays and Fridays while I'm at school.  I came home to paint all over Lizzie's face.  I must say, love the unibrow/moustache look.

Daniel with food all over his mouth, of course.

Lizzie at her first dance recital.  She mostly danced with her tongue, which you can see even in this picture, but man she sure looked cute. 

Daniel is obsessed with wearing things on his head.  He calls himself "buckethead" or "bucketboy".  It's not super clear so I can't tell, but he marches around in the morning before I leave for work with these little garbage cans on his head laughing at himself.  To get a good picture of his face I had to lift it up a bit.

Santa brought Spence and I a new KitchenAid blender.  Since then we've been making smoothies like crazy.  The kids love smoothie nights and I always sneak in plenty of spinach.  This is what Daniel's face looks like with his smoothie.  I love the cup mark clear up on his forehead.  When Lizzie saw me using spinach she asked to try it.  After she took a bite she said "I only like spinach in smoothies."  Well at least they're getting it somewhere right?  Now we've been making big batches and freezing the extra for the next day.

Lizzie has been waiting and waiting to play in snow and of course this year we don't get any until after Christmas.  Luckily it was during the break so Spence and I were able to go out and play with them while it was still perfect for snowmen and sledding.  Here's a picture of our massive snowman.  Spence wanted all of these pictures to show how big it is.  Lizzie used gum and other candy for his face.

I knew Spence made it large when not only was it taller than him, but it took both of us to lift the middle and top part.  Man that sucker was heavy!  Then he built two awesome sledding hills for the kids.  Both of them loved sledding, although Lizzie's a bit more obsessed with it.  While they were napping Spence and I had fun on sleds too.  I didn't think it we had to make our own hills, but he made them perfect.  The one in our backyard was so fast I couldn't stop laughing every time I crashed. 

I've nearly covered all our latest obsessions:  Daniel and the bucket, Lizzie and snow, me and smoothies, now on to Spencer and bread.  Since we've been married we've tried to make bread type products (yeast bread) and always fail.  I've even tried a fool proof recipe my mom and sister use, yet somehow it hasn't worked for me once.  Our hometeachers told us about this awesome book called the Breadbaker's Apprentice.  It basically talks about the science behind the bread baking and gives formulas for different types of bread.  Trying out a new type of bread has now become our regular date night.  We've done bagels (asiago cheese and cinnamon/sugar) and baguettes which were both super delicious.  Then we made this Portuguese sweet bread in the picture below that was perfect!  I loved it as french toast because it has this hint of orange, lemon, and vanilla.  

This next loaf is called anadama bread.  It starts with cornmeal, which I was kind of leery of, but man it's super yummy!  I was just mad I was at a math training when it first came out of the oven.  Our favorite bread is of course sourdough.  In fact that's one of the main things we know we HAVE to do at Disneyland in a couple months...get lots of sourdough bread!  For now we're trying our hand at it.  I've got a starter going, but since it takes a couple weeks we'll have to make other bread while we wait.