Lately: Hats, Good Food, and a Wiggle

My camera is staying quiet these days with my boys in school all day every day. Occasionally I grab a few pictures of Will and Henry, though.  Here's some of our fun from this week.

Henry has been really into hats lately. He grabbed one of Gene's caps last weekend and wore it constantly.

Yesterday, Henry came downstairs in his pirate hat and wore it the whole time he was getting ready for school. In fact, we got in the car and he said, "Oh, I am still wearing my pirate hat!" 

The clock behind Henry says 7:14. He wanted to make sure everyone knew he was completely ready to go a full 6 minutes before we had to leave! Hooray for routines!

We had some good friends over for Labor Day. Henry and Daddy whipped up a quick batch of brownies (the Ghiradelli mix has been my go-to for years!).

I went to Central Market yesterday to look for apples (they have the best selection in town and we eat apples like crazy around here) and as soon as I walked in, I saw these Cotton Candy grapes. According to the signage, this is a new hybrid variety developed in California (by hand pollination) over eight years. The amazing thing is that the grapes actually do taste like cotton candy. The boys love them!

Back to apples: Henry's class has been working on an apple unit all week. They read books, learned the parts of the apples, graphed the class's favorite color of apples, and used apples in math to work on patterns and counting. The teacher in me loves to extend classroom learning at home, so I checked out a few apple books at the library and stocked up on a bunch of different apple varieties at Central Market so we can do some taste-testing. I was looking for unusual apple varieties and found Zestar, Eve, Paula Red and Hidden Rose. 

Yesterday afternoon the boys helped me make an apple cake. We are huge fans of trying out recipes in story books, so we were thrilled to find a recipe for apple cake at the back of Apple Cake: A Recipe for Love by Julie Paschkis. Yum! The cake was delicious. We used two large Zestar apples and reduced the amount of sugar in the recipe, but otherwise followed it exactly. It was the perfect dessert for my apple-loving boys and a fun way to cap Henry's apple unit at school.

And finally, Will has his first loose tooth! His teeth have been hanging on for dear life, but I noticed that his bottom teeth looked crooked yesterday evening. He did not even realize it! There is a whole lot of this going on now:

I'm thinking Will might need a big juicy apple to bite into to help wiggle out that loose tooth!