"More book! More book" - Keira
"When I am dead I will remember chocolate because I love it so much" - Alesia
"Alesia, come now!" - Keira (mirroring mummy I think)
"When you are dead I can eat lollies all the time" - Alesia
"When you go, I'll get Nymaa to give it to me" - Alesia (the great manipulator and schemer)
"Daddy gone, Daddy gone" - Keira, who now thinks Chris lives inside my laptop screen after only seeing him on webcam for the past month.
"Why don't you go to bed when I go to bed?" - Alesia, on her third attempt to stay awake longer
"I'll stay up for the next one, when I'm 8" - Alesia, finally crashing on the couch at 10:30pm after waiting an hour for Australia to walk in (they walked into the Olympic stadium at about 11pm Mongolia time)
Speedy Creativity in the Kitchen
Last night while the girls were in the bath I noticed that two extremely expensive oranges were going mouldy in the fruit bowl. So off to the internet to find a recipe for orange muffins. Nigella.com came to the rescue. Ok, no self-raising flour, but I do have baking power so I think I can figure out the quantities to turn plain flour into self-raising flour. Ok, no ground almonds, but I do have some slivered almonds I brought over from Australia. I get out Chris' big coffee mug (takes the equivalent of three cups of coffee at once, I don't know how he is coping in Burma without it) and Nymaa's dumpling roller (pasty roller with no handles) and two minutes of energetic thumping that was surprisingly enjoyable gives me ground almonds. Ok, 100mls of freshly squeezed orange juice. How much is that in cups? I don't have a measuring jug. I do have baby bottles though, so 100mls of orange juice is squeezed and measured out in Keira's bottle. Yes, yes, Keira - I will come and get you out of the bath in a minute....The goop (lightly mixed with a fork, leave the lumps as muffin mixture should be barely mixed - according to Nigella) is spooned into my silicon muffin tray (an expensive buy on our last trip to Thailand that Alesia loves as it is pink) and into the oven.
15 minutes later Keira is out of the bath, in her jammies, drinking milk from her (clean) bottle, and I have 12 lovely muffins cooling on the oven rack (I don't have a cooling rack, so just dragged the oven rack out of the oven and put it on the bench).
The recipe is really good. You can find it at: http://www.nigella.com/recipes/recipe.asp?article=214
Cafe's on Playschool
I took Thursday off this week and spent the day at home with the girls. We sat down to watch Playschool in the morning (thanks to the Australia Network satelite station) and they had a cardboard cafe set up for the dolls (as you do on Playschool). Alesia wanted one and I was up to the challenge. The results are pictured below. Alesia selected the items on the menu. We will get around to making table menues soon! Oh, and I also made a castle.
Three kids, 20 minutes
This is how the girl's room looked Saturday afternoon after Alesia had two friends over...Actually - when I preview this on the blog it doesn't look as bad as it really did! But it did take us (me) an hour tidy up.
Is your passport valid?
Keira checking that our entry and exit visa's for Mongolia are valid. We have to get new ones every time we leave the country. Only six more sleeps until we leave for Thailand! This is the face Keira made when I asked her to smile.
8/08/2008
I missed making a posting on this auspicious date, so bad luck for me (according to the Chinese). Alesia stayed up for the Opening Ceremony and did plenty of ballet-style dancing throughout. Then pronounced judgements on the athlete uniforms based on how pretty they were (just as well she did not stay awake for Australia). Mongolia had a nice uniform, but Alesia preferred the Muslim and African women ("Mummy, if I go to a Muslim place will I have to have my head covered?" Watching the opening ceremony I realised again just how little I know about some places in the world. Have any of you heard of South Ossetia? They didn't make it to the games, but have been in the news for other negative reasons. It is convenient being in the same time zone as Beijing. My Olympic experience is limited at the moment to broadcasts on the Chinese or Mongolian tv channels here. Somehow it is less distracting to watch events without English commentary.
