Worth a Thousand Words

O Henry Bars--a yummy summer treat!

Here is a recipe for one of our favorite treats any time of the year, but they are particularly good to make in the summer since you won't have to turn the oven on.

1 cup sugar
1 cup light Karo syrup

Mix in a large saucepan and bring to a boil, then take off heat immediately*. It is really important to make sure it doesn't boil too long, as it is quite easy to over-cook them and have them become too hard.

Add: 1 cup peanut butter

Stir together and then add 6 cups of Rice Krispies

Pour into greased 9x13 pan

Melt: 1 cup of chocolate chips and 1 cup of butterscotch chips in the microwave for 2 to 3 minutes, stirring every thirty seconds and watching carefully not to burn or over-melt them. (I usually just use 1 pkg. of whatever chocolate chips I have in the house).

Spread melted chips on top of Rice Krispies mixture and give it a couple of hours for the melted chocolate to harden.

Note to Self:

School supply shopping at Wal-Mart or Target for five kids is miserable!!!!

I mean seriously...aside from the crowded, narrow aisles and not very helpful help, how could both stores be completely out of erasers, 24-packs of crayons, glue sticks, colored pencils, and folders?!

Next time I'll just save myself the aggravation, spend the extra five bucks and go to Staples in the first place. UGH!

My baby boy is growing up...

...sniff, sniff. :(
Another rite of passage is upon us. Adam has lost his first tooth. I should be used to these milestones by now, but losing teeth is a hard one for me. Once they start losing them, their little smiles are never the same again. Of course they eventually evolve into cute grown up smiles (after a lot expensive orthodontic work), but there's just something about those cute little baby teeth smiles that melts my heart. Good thing Ellie has a few more years! °Ü°

By the way....what does the tooth fairy leave for teeth at your house? I'm thinking our tooth fairy might be a little too generous with the $3 prize and I might need to leave him (oops...I mean her) a note about that.

Am I Ready For This?

"Mom. I really want to sign up for football this year."

Uggggh!! Football!? No way! We've done basketball, tee ball, soccer, gymnastics, ice skating, etc...but football?! A sport where injuries are expected, where coaches swear liberally, with practice EVERY single weekday! I want nothing to do with it.

But he was really excited to try it out, so despite my plethora of misgivings we went ahead signing him up and hoped for the best.

I was not encouraged when first thing at registration, they informed us that Spencer has 8 lbs. to lose to qualify for his weight division . Since he was half way between two weight classes, we had rounded him down to the lower class naively thinking it would be better for his health and safety....little did we know that the weight classes are much more than a loose guideline. It is serious stuff.

So our 13-year-old boy with his ribs poking through went on a crash diet to lose eight pounds!

Then, after all of two days of practice he came home looking like this!

And guess what? He loves it. He comes home dripping sweat and completely exhausted, but totally enjoying himself.

I may not be ready for the life of a football mom...but ready or not it's here!

Glen's Other Lara!

After all that angst about my name as a teenager imagine how refreshing it is to meet someone who knows instantly how to spell and pronounce my name! Like my college roommate named Lara Greene. You can only imagine the confusion it caused having a Lara Greene and a Lara Crain living in the same apartment, but oh what a fun time we had with that confusion.

Then one day I met this hot guy who didn't stumble over my name at all. Turns out this hot guy's one and only sister's name is also Lara--it was an instant connection! So after several months of friendship and courtship where my name was always perfectly pronounced I married the hot guy...and then there were two Lara Goolds in the world.

Glen and his other Lara (now married with a different last name)

My family thought this coincidence was quite the funny thing, so they decided to make it a family requirement for a proper marriage. Pete married into a family with another Pete. Kristina married Tom, whose one and only sister's name is Christina. Then Matt married Karey who has a brother named Matt. Yeah, it's gotten a little out of hand.

So now with opening lines like, "Do you have a sister named AnnaLisa?" my remaining single siblings are narrowing their fields rather quickly. And I can't help but feel partially responsible for starting what has become a family trend...so I'm asking for your help.

If you know of any eligible maidens with brothers named:
Nate (CO)
Tim (UT)
Or any eligible bachelors with sisters named:
Heather (MN)
AnnaLisa (UT)

PLEASE give me a call...

My name is NOT Laura!

L-a-r-a. It doesn't seem like it would be that hard, but my whole life my name has been misspelled and mispronounced!

In my younger years I hastened to interrupt conversations and lectures to correct a poor soul who happened to mispronounce my name.

"It's Lar-ruh," I would sigh in exasperation (usually while rolling my eyes for greater effect), after hearing the highly ignorant ( in my teen-age opinion) Lair-uh, Lor-ruh, Lori pronunciations. Never mind the more common names of Cara, Tara, and Sara are all pronounced with the "air-uh" sound. Dang it! Everyone should know that Lara is the exception to that rule!

And isn't it common knowledge that my name is not a funkily spelled version of Laura? It has its own unique origin and meaning completely unrelated to Laura. Just look in any baby name book and it's plain to see. Doesn't everyone peruse baby name origins in their spare time?

Okay...I admit I may have been a little bitter and perhaps at one time even harbored secret wishes to be called Jennifer so that I would never have to spell out my name again.

But after a while I came to realize that most people literally could not even hear the subtle variations in pronunciation that bothered me so greatly. So in the name of keeping friends and maintaining a healthy blood pressure, I've chilled out a lot over the years. Numerous acquaintances and even good friends now regularly mispronounce my name and I rarely say anything...and it really doesn't even bother me. Except for an unsuspecting telemarketer now and then....

For Hire: Five-year-old Boy

Name: Adam Stephen
Birthday: 10/16/02
Eyes: Chocolate brown
Hair: Blonde
Disposition: Curious, thoughtful, energetic, mostly cheerful
Current Occupation: Rising kindergartener and prolific demolitionist
Special skills:

*unique artistic style...the world is his canvas


*Wicked good scissoring skills (see evidence above on his own toy....
and below on our 3-year-old sectional sofa)


*Avid consumer of fine cuisine and cookware
Desired Salary: Toy cars and trains (art supplies will not be accepted)

Olympic Fever

Mostly our affliction with the Olympic fever has just quarantined us to sitting on the couch and staying up until all hours of the night...
but with Spence it's afflicted him with an insatiable desire to challenge his cousins/uncles/friends to impromptu races across Uncle Bobby's pool. Watch out Michael Phelps! :)

Rocky Mountain High!

Yay! We finally made it home and I can not deny that I've been feeling a little blog deprived on two fronts--reading all of your blogs and keeping up with this one. I think Glen has been a little worried that I may go on a serious blogging binge, but I have exercised a tiny bit of self-control and finished unpacking first. Of course laundry is another matter...but I'm not quite that patient.

Our trip was a little too long and my picture taking a little over-zealous to confine to one blog post...so I'm going to have to break it up into installments.

Here's the first installment: Colorado!

After leaving DC at midnight (I will concur to the fact that we may have been addled with a touch of insanity for starting a 30-hour trek in the middle of the night)...we were very happy to stand on solid ground again in Glen's homeland of Golden, Colorado. My brother Nate, who had just barely moved to Denver, was nice enough to come hang out with us at Grandma Sandy's house and do his usual niece and nephew benchpressing exercises.


All summer Emma had been begging me to teach her to crochet and knit. She quickly mastered all of my primitive crocheting skills and started checking books out of the library on how to knit. Unfortunately I'm more of a kinesthetic learner and studying the knitting diagrams in a book may as well have been a foreign language for me...so I did what any good mother would do--I passed the buck to Grandma!

Emma was an eager student and Grandma Sandy a patient tutor. I was shocked at how quickly Emma picked it up and soon had a very nice little scarf going. Thanks Grandma!


After a mere 12-hour break from interstate travel we got back into the car for a relatively short trip (only 5 hours) to Grand Mesa Lodge in the mountains near Grand Junction...where lots of cousin/Grandma/Grandpa/uncle/aunt bonding took place!

We were rudely reminded at how badly Glen and I stink at Trivial Pursuit. We are always optimistic that the latest version may prove an easier task for us...but it just doesn't matter. We stink!

Dropping objects through a hole in the ceiling became a favorite past-time for the younger kids. We learned to be careful where we stood, so as not to be impaled by the onslaught of falling objects.

What would a trip to the mountains be without a good dose of fishing? For Glen...it would be heretical! He had a grand time being the family fishing guide and hopefully got his fill until our next time.
Thankfully we don't suck at Scrabble as badly as Trivial Pursuit.

There was a healthy dose of chillin' going on (and code talking about the latest plot twists in "Breaking Dawn").
Playing catch proved popular with young and old alike!

We had a wonderful time at the family reunion and thoroughly enjoyed our time together in the fresh mountain air. We are grateful to Grandma for all the planning she did to make it a great time for all...you're awesome!

Thoughtfulness

Not only do I have a cool husband that surprised me by going out at midnight with his brother and procuring the new Stephenie Meyer book that I'd been anxiously awaiting...
but he also had the forethought to get his first kidney stone the day before leaving on vacation instead of on I-70 in the middle of Kansas.

Witnessing this horribly painful event in Glen's life was traumatic (for him and me) and I would never wish that agony on anyone. However after seeing the offending stone which was all of 3 millimeters wide ( for your stomach's sake I refrained from taking any pictures of the hapless stony monster), I don't see how there's any way that the pain could compare to giving birth to a 9 lb. baby (as some people[no names DAD] like to claim).

Thankfully Glen was quickly back to 100% and we're having a wonderful time on our vacation. :) (I don't have a way to upload pictures yet, but there will be plenty eventually).

The Cost of Convenience

Our car is a trouper. It's a 2002 Toyota Sienna and it's brought us across the country several times and thankfully has given us very little trouble.

As we are about to embark on another one of these crazy adventures tomorrow, we decided that we should get some of our lingering annoyances with the car taken care of--the broken sliding doors and the shaking brakes. So we took it into the Toyota dealership to see what they could do.
We were a little shell-shocked when they called with the estimates, so we decided that although it would end up being a much more painful (and long) process that we needed to try to take it to separate auto shops to see if we could save some precious bucks.

First we took it to the body shop for the doors. Since our driveway is so sloped BOTH of our door handles had broken off and we were growing weary of kids climbing in and out of the front seats all the time. Toyota had quoted us $760 to get them back in working order. Pope's auto body shop did it in $261.

The next day we took it to Costco to get new tires where we saved another $130.

Then we were off to the brake shop where $125 savings wasn't too shabby.

Summary:

$738 more in our bank account.

So we did we do with all the money we saved?

Something long overdue! We got a DVD player installed! Yay!

(I probably won't be able to post much while on vacation, but I hope to have lots of fun photos and stories when we're back!)

We're so buff...

Each Fast Sunday my brother Pete and my cousin Aaron and their families gather with ours to share a delicious meal together and celebrate any nearby birthdays. With a dozen kids between us boisterousness and noise are never in short supply

This summer we'd gotten a little off-schedule due to conflicting vacation plans, so we held our get-together yesterday celebrating all of the summer birthdays at once. Since my Uncle Bobby and his family were in town from Oklahoma they also got to join in the festivities, bringing our guest total to an impressive 23 people.
There literally were people everywhere in our house, including this picnic of cousins eating my version of Cafe Rio taco salad. Yum!


Then, as per our tradition, we had the five summer babies (Cami, Aunt Mary, baby Jakob, cousin Aaron, and Glen) blow out the candles on the gorgeous four-layered multicolored cake that Trish created.

Last time such a large group of Crains gathered together we ended up with a giant leg wrestling tournament--which was quite as entertaining as you might imagine.

This time it was arm wrestling. Glen gave a formidable performance--losing to Aaron, but eventually beating out my cousin Ryan after a five minute grueling match of endurance.

Then, don't ask me how it happened, but I somehow got talked into challenging Aaron's wife, Trish. The first match between us ended in a draw after Trish's son, JD walked into the room and seeing his Mom's strain, came to her rescue by pushing my arm down on her side. But after a rematch where all children were required to retain more passive roles in the contest I finally ended victorious! I'm still suffering from a weak, sore arm, but I can't help but to feel a little more buffed now. ;)

Our laughing and cheering proved contagious to the younger set, with each of my five children challenging someone to a duel of strength!