Time For a Break, Making Pizza, and Writing

Well, if you can believe this, we've managed to ski for six consecutive days, and we've actually reached a point where we need a break. In fact, yesterday we went skiing and after a couple of runs, the kids decided they'd had enough, and we played on the sledding hill, where they practiced their snowboarding. It was a great week, though, and the opportunity of a lifetime in terms of getting lots of practice in. We had a great time.

We never made it to contradance, and that's kind of a bummer, but we were exhausted and it just didn't work out. I feel bad for JD, but it's not as if our presence was missed. I tried to find out if CH and C were going, but didn't find out until later that they were, and by that time, it had pretty much been decided that we were in for the night. When we learned that J, I, and S weren't going to make it, half of our motivation to go had checked out, and we were ambivalent to start with.

Instead, we hung out after skiing and made pizza, which is always a blast. The kids really enjoy cooking, even though it makes an incredible mess and I have to lighten up in a big way. But truth be told, they do a great job, it's pretty impressive when you get down to it, and pizza in particular is fun for them because they get to be imaginative in how the toppings go on. Best of all, mom gets to have a big supper surprise that is truly made by her kids, and do they ever get into it. In fact, A made me cover all the pizza up with foil so mom couldn't see it and they could surprise her. How cute is that?

The recipe we use makes a ton of whole wheat, multi-grain dough. I split the load and freeze half, and the half that we work with gives us one large round, a medium rectangle, and six small pies. The way we work it, I roll out the the two big ones and makes small balls of the rest. The kids roll out the small ones, and they add sauce and cheese and goodies to the all of them. They work very hard and are very focused on what they do, not forgetting, of course, to have fun by making designs and funny faces with the toppings. It's a great family activity with the all-important reward at the end. You can't beat that.

I've set about modifying my blog a bit, not that anyone will notice because it may not be glaringly apparent, but I'll feel better once it's all done, and may even get a nod of approval from R&J. It's a huge task, however, and will take weeks. Got some potential nibbles for writing, and will soon begin our philanthropic work for schools in Africa.

It begs the question, what am I getting myself into?

Until the next time, thanks for reading.