How to Get Your Child to Eat Oatmeal in Five Steps or Less

1. Make a nice warm bowl and offer to child. If child says no, proceed to step two.
2. Listen as your child whines about cereal while you try to explain that the milk is "all gone" at least ten times. (You must really be out of milk for this to work.)
3. Out of desperation invent "milk" by diluting yogurt with water and pour into cereal bowl.
4. Watch as your child promptly spits out the cereal and "milk" the second it hits her taste buds.
5. Offer the oatmeal again, and watch as child eats up without complaint.

Works like a charm! Trust me, I've tried it. :)

We're Ba--ack!

We are home from our trip to CA and add in a visit from my parents and Ben the week before, so it feels like we've been gone a month! We got home late Sunday night but I didn't finish Breaking Dawn until this morning, so only can I start getting back to real life. So we'll start with a slide show of pictures from the visit to Houston and hopefully later this week I'll write up our California va-cay. I am sure everyone is just dying to hear the update. Right? Right?

My Husband is Left Handed

I've heard that lefties are more creative and this definitely holds true for Ryan. It is so fun to be married to him because he plans awesome birthdays, holidays, and anniversaries. He also plans very fun date nights, although they come around a lot less often then they used too. But this week my parents came into town (pics and details to come later) and he had time to pre-mediate and execute a very fun date night. We left home around 6:30 and headed to Barnes and Noble. First off we gathered large coffee table type books and then sat down to look through them. Ryan told me to mark my favorite pictures which I found a little hard to do since I knew he something up his sleeve. After looking at a few of his selections I had a better idea and started choosing pictures. After about a half an hour the photos were selected and the plan was revealed. We were to re-create the scenes in the pictures to the best of our abilities. There were no rules or time limits, we just had to get creative with locations and props. We took stealthy pictures of the photos with our camera and then headed out to stage our photo shoots. We had a great time sneaking around stores, hiding from clerks, turning ordinary things like barbecue tongs into machetes, and basically acting like teenagers. Here are the results of the night I loaded the picture from the book and then our creation. The last one is my favorite...you'll see why!