Why My Children are Driving Me Crazy and Other Pointless Rants: Sunday at Home

It was conference weekend.

I love this weekend more and more every year. It means baking in my pjs most of the day. Who wouldn't love that?

By 10 am I had warm chocolate chip cookies coming out of the oven. It was a beautiful thing.

As always, we bribed our kids to listen to our prophet and apostles with the promise of candy. They picked a different word each talk and then earned a point every time that word was said. 10 points equaled a fun sized candy bar. (After they earned 9 candy bars each in the session this afternoon we decided we need to make this tougher next year. NO picking words half way through the talks when the subject is already known. For diabetic reasons we only let them have three candy bars. I think there are still bitter feelings surrounding the 6 lost bars.)

Despite the gross amount of candy my children consumed today, this system never ceases to work.

It too was a beautiful (yet high caloric) thing.

Colby's tally sheet.

I love that Jeriamia (Jeremiah) was crossed out for famly (family). My kids truly are cheaters.

Also love that Priesthood is spelled greestood, Teach is teech and Meetings is meateengs.

I love love love second graders who can't spell to save their lives!

I think Carter was the designated tally taker as his sheet was more complete.

Meeting is still meating and I could laugh my head off about the spelling of decisions (disishens).

Saylor kept herself occupied most of conference by terrorizing Grady. Poor little boy. None of the other boys had to endure an older sister. I hope he survives.

Between sessions I made a gluten free apple crisp...mostly because I couldn't eat the chocolate chip cookies and I was really jealous.

Our apple tree produced only about 10 apples that were not completely eaten away by worms and even then they had to be cut up to avoid worm holes. They were best utilized in this way as we definitely couldn't just bite into them.

I had seen an apple crisp made on tv earlier this week and I tried a trick that was shown to make the apples less mushy while still allowing the topping to be crispy. I didn't get the recipe, so I had to improvise with past recipe knowledge.

I came up with the BEST apple crisp I have every eaten in my life. It was fantastic. And because I didn't use a recipe, I'm sarcastically naming them "Grandma Sadie Apple Crisp" after my grandmother who hardly ever used a recipe in her life. Sadly, her cooking tasted like she didn't use a recipe- hence the sarcasm.

But...I wrote down what I did for posterity's sake.

Grandma Sadie Apple Crisp

Saute about 10 medium peeled, cored and chopped apples on med/low heat for about 10 minutes with approx. 1 Tbs white sugar

sprinkle of cinnamon

1 Tbs butter

zest and juice from one lemon.

Apples should be slightly firm still and starting to caramelize with the sugar and butter.

Transfer apples to shallow baking dish (mine was smaller than a 9X13) and top with following mixture:

1 cube melted butter

1 C brown sugar

1 C oatmeal

approx 1/4 C flour (I used sunflower mills gf pastry flour)

approx. 1-2 tsp of cinnamon (I really don't know how much I used...I just shook until it looked good...hence the Grandma Sadie name)

sprinkle of salt, ginger, nutmeg and ground cloves

Bake at 410 for about 20 minutes.

(Yes...410 is what I did. 400 seemed to low and 425 seemed to high. I have no reason for this except I was feeling like being different. I totally worked so...whatever.)

After conference was over Steve and I went for a walk to burn off some of the cookies and apple crisp and then when we got home, Steve gave Grady a much needed haircut. Yep, it was haircut number three. This kid's hair is out of control!