Hello Hoosiers!

Warren, Indiana, here we come! We'll be in town for the Thompson Family Reunion (5 generations!) and Salamonie Days. Our itinerary includes fireworks, the parade, an antique tractor show, a demolition derby, a frog jumping contest, and other old-timey, small town kind of fun-- I'm sure we'll end up with a good photo op or two.

What I'm looking forward to most, though, is introducing the boys to lightning bugs (or fireflies, if you prefer) and working my way through Grandma Lou's (almost) never-ending supply of chocolate cake with caramel icing.

ridiculously easy pineapple sorbet

I'm a sucker for any recipe that has the words "ridiculously easy" in the title. I can't wait to try it. You can too, if you click on this link. I imagine the recipe would be really yummy with canned peaches, too.

Update: I made some last night (added some coconut milk) and it was great!

Haiku to Popsicles

my frozen heaven

it's ninety-five fahrenheit

i want nothing else

It. Is. Hot. Temps here have been in the mid nineties all week (and we're without central air, mind you). Which means that not much has been happening with us except for mass consumption of popsicles, multiple trips to the library (and other random, but blissfully cool places), and a whole lot of laying around doing nothing. Things improved greatly yesterday when I figured out a very complicated system of using no less than 6 fans and a little window air conditioner to keep our house in a comfortable temperature range. I deserve some kind of honorary engineering degree or something.

Trouble is, turning on the stove will heat up the house faster than you can say fahrenheit, in spite of all my careful fan placement. And my family is getting sick of cold sandwiches. Which means that I'm in quite desperate need of some fabulous recipes for hot weather food. You know, stuff you can cook on the grill (which we do have, although we're out of "grill gas", as Lincoln says), or stuff you don't have to cook at all... I happen to know for a fact that there are some amazing cooks in my readership (you know who you are), so please share some ideas. I'm prepared to offer a prize to whomever sends in the best recipe (as judged by them crazy Hadfields), which, ironically, might turn out to be something warm and handknitted (you'll thank me come Fall).

green thumbs and whatnot

How time does fly! I blinked and all of a sudden, it's been almost two weeks since my last post-- and not for lack of the goin' on of stuff. Here's the run-down:

I've got a greenish thumb! We tried square foot gardening this year and love the results. There's another box next to this one, but none of the seeds in that box had sprouted yet when this picture was taken and who wants to look at a picture of plain old dirt? You may notice the throng of weeds around our gardening box. They're extremely jealous of the very good care I give to my little plants, and are trying to figure out a way to get in.

We ate our way through a Costco-sized box of Creamies (mostly while Joe was in D.C. on a business trip). For the sake of my sanity, it's best for the boys to eat ice cream treats in the tub, since with just one popsicle, Daniel can produce 5 gallons of sticky, chocolatey slobber(which he then smears all over the couch, or our bedspread, or me). I had to post this video, because everyone needs to hear how cute it is when Daniel says his whole name-- which he does frequently. WARNING: THE VOLUME ON THIS VIDEO IS REALLY LOUD. TURN YOUR COMPUTER'S VOLUME DOWN, UNLESS YOU LIKE THAT SORT OF THING.

Daniel appears to have been making friends with Provo's community of sewer rats at a recent outing to the park. And lest you think we let our kids hang out in the middle of a street-- it's the parking lot at Wasatch Elementary, and school was out for the summer, and he was totally safe and supervised and otherwise well cared for.

celebrity sightings

We borrowed Herbie the Love Bug from the library a couple of weeks ago and the boys loved it. You can only imagine how thrilled they were to find out that Herbie lives in our neighborhood. Now we have to walk past every chance we get to see if Herbie is home so we can say "hi". And who says Provo isn't cool?

our latest shenanigans

(family shot courtesy of Nana and her mad photography skills)

We made our way up to Brigham City this last weekend to spend some quality time with Joe's family. The boys had heaps of fun playing with their cousins, I found time to finish a great book (A Thousand Splendid Suns-- HIGHLY recommended), and Joe managed to get a crazy story out of his brother Benji (the original Hadfield shenanigan-er). We also enjoyed a lovely memorial day barbecue in spite of the uncooperative weather, and I introduced Joe's family to the wonder-that-is-Indian-food.

Whenever Lincoln and Daniel managed to get outside, they ended up next to one of Grandpa's ponds, "fishing" with willow whips. Fortunately for Grandpa's koi, the boys didn't manage to rustle up any tasty bait. Once they get that figured out(along with some hooks), those fish had better watch out!

Speaking of shenanigans, Lincoln's been very keen on dressing himself lately. He usually does a great job, but one day last week he thought it would be funny to put his clothes on backwards-- and insisted on wearing them that way for the whole day. I let it slide, but in return for being forced to go out in public with a "backwards boy", I'm going to use this picture to mortify him when he's 16.

Puddle Jumpin'

We were pretty thrilled to wake up to a rainstorm this morning-- so much that we had to go out and jump in some puddles whilst still in our jammies. Here are some pictures of the boys in action: