Kevin's 28th Birthday

Kevin turned 28 yesterday. We didn't do anything too special, I just made him a special meal and then we went on a family bike ride.

I did pizza with loads of porcini mushrooms and even with cheese!

And for the cake I did a chocolate caramel cake and served it with homemade vanilla ice cream. I couldn't find a recipe for vegan chocolate caramel cake so I used a standard vegan chocolate cake recipe and added in some layers of vegan caramel which there is a recipe for in the Vegan Scoop. It turned out pretty delicious I think. But it was just about impossible to get both the icing and the caramel at perfect spreading consistency so it turned out a bit drippy.

Outside

We've been outside since last Friday. It is summer here all of a sudden. Actually it was so hot the past couple of days that we stayed in for a few hours each afternoon just to stay cool. The trees don't even have leaves yet so it's hard to find shade.

We've been spending lots of time on the driveway, in the backyard, at just about every playground and park, in uptown Waterloo.

There's been lots of sidewalk chalk.

And I discovered that even though walking at 7+ months into this pregnancy is often painful, biking is easy and it feels amazing to be getting out and about without the pain. So Henry and I have been out like this several times this week.

And with the nicer weather comes construction. There is some serious construction going on at the end of our street and Henry asks to "see the diggers" several times a day. We've been going at least once a day and sitting to watch them for a few minutes each time.

Cashew French Toast (vegan and soy-free)

In an effort to reduce the amount of soy in our diet (it just felt like too much) I came up with this recipe. I didn't do anything brilliant - mostly just found a recipe for cashew french toast and combined it with our usual tofu french toast recipe to get the same great flavours.

Cashew French Toast

ingredients

2 cups cashews (soaked if time allows)

3/4 cups almond milk

1/2 tsp vanilla

2 TBSP maple syrup

1 tsp cinnamon

dash salt

~10 pieces of soft whole wheat sandwich bread, stale or lightly toasted

oil for pan frying

Put all ingredients except the bread and oil in blender and blend, add a little more milk if it seems too thick.

Dip the bread in the mixture, if there's lots of excess scrape it off.

Fry in oil on medium heat.

Serve with maple syrup.

PS - Happy St. Patrick's Day from Henry. We went out for dinner in uptown and afterward walked around the festivities (the weather was beautiful and it is a university town so there were a lot of party-ers out and about). And Henry had a wonderful time. One woman gave him a little hat and once he had the hat everyone loved him. He ran all around the main public square. He danced to a man playing a drum. Another woman danced with him and gave him a necklace. He was a little nervous about the attention sometimes but mostly he was having so much fun and was very interested in the people.

Spring

We have been having some nice weather here this week. There's still quite a bit of a wind most of the time and there hasn't been loads of sun but it's been nice and has felt very Spring-y.

We had a nice day out in St. Catharine's on Sunday including a visit to Kevin's Grandma.

On Monday the weather was so nice that I was tempted into a nice long walk with Henry. I'm really needing to take it easy at this point in the pregnancy. I enjoyed the walk but was completely shattered for the rest of the day.

Henry has been out on his scooter which he calls his motorcycle. He's been practicing in the house for the past couple of weeks mostly just pushing it while he straddles it and occasionally putting one foot on. The cutest thing is that when he puts one foot on he says he's doing it "like on the computer" because I showed him some videos of other kids riding their scooters. So far he has not been brave enough to try putting one foot on while riding outside.

Today I am definitely taking it easy. We've still spent lots of time outside but most of it was on our own driveway with me sat knitting on the porch.

Sewing For Baby

I've been doing some sewing for baby recently. Baby will be here in around 2 months!

I sewed a couple of little T-shirts, not sure when these will fit - they look pretty big to me. The green one was done using the pattern from Growing Up Sew Liberated and then I made the white one using the pattern and instructions from thismamamakesstuff. The green one took about a million times longer to make and I did not like fiddling with that neck binding, I personally did not think it was worth the extra effort. The white one looks almost as good I think. I also used the thismamamakesstuff pattern for making newborn gowns for Henry when he was the baby in my tummy. Can't believe I didn't think to use it to make T-shirts back then - T-shirts are definitely preferable to onesies for cloth diapered babies.

And I made all 4 of these pants just by making my own pattern based on some newborn pants I had using the method I talk about here. These are tiny, definitely for the first couple weeks. I am feeling pretty confident that this is going to be another tiny skinny baby just like Henry and I'll be glad to have some pants that fit well. Even with big cloth diapers, Henry only had a couple of pants that stayed on well in those first weeks.

And for a May baby I need a teensy tiny sunhat. I used the pattern from the book Sweet Booties in newborn size.

I think I will put a hold on sewing for baby now. Especially because we all have a feeling there's a little girl in there and if I wait I'll be able to pull out the floral fabric for my next baby project. Wouldn't that little sunhat look crazy cute with flowers. Or I could even do a little sun bonnet!

Henry's been such a sweetie recently, so happy playing on his own. I even got some of this sewing done during the day while he played happily in the basement with me. But we have been getting out. Here are some pictures from yesterday, playing in a big puddle which he called a swimming pool. (Today we have snow again and Henry went out in snow gear.)

The Play Kitchen

We gave Henry this play kitchen for his birthday. He plays with it a bit once or twice a day. He sometimes needs some suggestions about what to do. And he mostly likes looking through the food and pretending to eat it.

There is a before picture of this cabinet that I made the kitchen from somewhere on the computer but since I started the project back in September I don't want to look through for it. But it was a TV cabinet that I turned on its side and changed up a bit. There was actually quite a bit of cutting and screwing - changing one big door into two, making that top shelf smaller to keep room for playing, adding shelves inside the oven and fridge, and cutting a hole for the sink. There was even some soldering as that was honestly the only way I could imagine to do the faucet affordably in a way that I liked - it is some elbows and short pieces of copper pipe soldered together. I stapled that fabric on the back to be the backsplash, that perfect fabric just happened to be in my stash of fabric.

And then searching for pots and pans and cutlery and crockery took awhile. We found most of it at thrift stores, I was especially pleased with the Sesame Street plates I found. And Kevin and I made some felt food as well (so fun when the husband wants to make crafts with me!). And I did buy some velcro cutting food. His favourites are the cutting food and the pasta.

And I managed to squeeze it into our kitchen. That was important for me because I had this image in my head of us cooking together each in our own kitchens which has actually happened a few times.

And now that huge project is over. It turned out to be a lot of work but all of it fun (except painting). It was just the perfect project, simple enough that I could just figure out how to do things on my own (with lots of insipration from google) but the culmination of all that work is a pretty big thing I think - a play kitchen with doors on hinges and knobs that turn and Henry knew just what it was as soon as he saw it. And after a week and a half of playing nothing is breaking yet!