Cooking with twins

Lately the twins have taken a big interest in cooking. They love making homemade pizza (so we have to at least once a week) and when I recently made a visit to Holton with them, they both helped Nana make her fabulous strawberry pies from scratch and the homemade whipped cream. Jack calls it "white cream" though. He LOVES it. Here are just come fun pictures we took recently when Popi and Nana came for one of their visits and dinner. They try and do visit once a week or once every other week and it's great!


Making "white cream"


Homemade pizza!


More homemade pizza! (Bella has a tiny obsession with her sunglasses right now)

Bella's First Haircut!

Bella got her first haircut a couple of weeks ago. We noticed that it is getting very long and we wanted to just even out the back. I finally made the call and we did it. She did really well and the stylist really only took about 1/2 inch off at the most maybe. She really just cleaned it up. I will say that since she's gotten the trim you can really see her curl a lot more now. It's beautiful big barrel curls. I am jealous of the curl. I think she gets it from me and somehow my curl just looks like a bad perm!! With the cut she got a certificate and we got to keep a tiny sample of her hair. It was the same package we did for Jack and a lot of fun. Bella loves bows and big fun things in her hair so we bought her a new purple bow for being such a good girl.

Easter: Part Deux

Here are the second half of our Easter pictures, finally. These are from Easter Sunday. Popi, Nana, Uncle Jason, Aunt Catie and baby Lily came to spend the day with us at our house. We had a lovely lunch, hunted Easter eggs in the back yard and played tsougrisma (which I will explain more a moment). The kids really enjoyed their day and have really been enjoying their toys they got. Jack still says "the Easter bunny came to my house and brought me Buzz."


He loves his Buzz!


Wearing one of her new pairs of shoes. They're everywhere. Clearly we didn't think this through!

In the afternoon we headed outside for the Easter Egg hunt. Jack and Bella were so excited about it and about helping their baby cousin, Lily. Lily just turned 1 in February so she wasn't quite ready to hunt on her own. Jack and Bella would go fill their baskets with eggs, bring them back and dump them in her basket for her to have. It was really very sweet. For the most part they are excellent at sharing (with a few exceptions) and I attribute that a lot to the whole "twin" factor. They don't have a choice!!


Before the hunt the twins enjoyed playing with Popi with their old swimming toys from last year!


You can see Jack being so helpful here with Lily and her egg hunt


Hunting


They kind of work as a team!

This brings us to the a game called tsougrisma. I didn't want to explain the game incorrectly so I have copied this from the internet. The point here is that Nana (my Mom) cheated and thought it was absolutely hilarious. She cracked my egg on the side so I was no longer able to participate. I would expect that from a stubborn Greek, not my sweet Mom! She laughed for at least 5 minutes about it because she knew it was so out of character for her!! Popi still ended up winning though. He always does!

The game:
Each player holds a red egg, and one taps the end of her/his egg lightly against the end of the other player's egg. The goal is to crack the opponent's egg. When one end is cracked, the winner uses the same end of her/his egg to try to crack the other end of the opponent's egg.

The player who successfully cracks the eggs of the other players is declared the winner and, it is said, will have good luck during the year.

There are no rules about which end of the egg to tap first, how to hold it, or how to tap - but I've never seen a "system" that works all the time!

The word tsougrisma means "clinking together" or "clashing." In Greek: τσούγκρισμα, pronounced


Our eggs