December 21, 2007
Here’s a quick idea for some holiday baking fun…
I awoke the other day to my wife in the kitchen making these:
You can either use store bought cookie dough, or you can whip up a batch peanut butter cookies yourself. You’ll also need mini-pretzels, chocolate chips, and red M&Ms.
Step 1: Shape the dough into reindeer head-shaped triangles like these:
Step 2: Insert the pretzels and bake.
Step 3: Insert chocolate chips (eyes) and red M&Ms (nose) into the warm cookies.
Step 4: Eat them.
That’s it. As our five year old would say, “Easy-peesy, lemon squeezy!”
December 18, 2007
I grew up in the Great White North, where snow is a major part of life. Sure, it could be a pain in the butt once you reached adulthood, but as a kid it was pretty much pure fun. And even as an adult, it provided instant urban renewal — an inch or two of the white stuff and you were living in a Winter Wonderland.
But now we live much further south, and snow is an extreme rarity. While I don’t miss shoveling it, and I don’t miss driving in it, I do miss having it around. I have such fond memories of playing in it as a kid, and I really wish that it wasn’t so foreign to our kids. Sure, they sometimes get it when we travel in the winter, but it just isn’t the same when all of the Christmas lights in your neighborhood are bracketed by brown grass rather than snowbanks.
Of course, if we were to move back to snow country, I’d probably grow tired of it very quickly. But, for now, I miss snow.
December 6, 2007
For those of you that haven’t been following along, we just got over a nasty bout of Helicobacter pylori. The treatment for H. pylori is the so-called “triple therapy” of 30 mg Lansoprazole (Prevacid), 500 mg Clarithromycin (Biaxin Filmtab), and 2 x 500 mg Amoxicillin. This regimen is taken twice a daily for a total of 60 mg Prevacid, 1000 mg Biaxin Filmtab, and 2000 mg Amoxicillin per day.
The problem
Unfortunately, swallowing all of those pills is a pretty tall order for a kid. By far the worst was the amoxicillin, which is a huge capsule that tastes (and smells) like rotten eggs. And you get two per dose, for a total of four per day. Ugh. Not a fun experience for our ten year old. Our doctor suggested that we open the caplets and mix them with either apple sauce or ice cream, but that just resulted in a big nasty bowl of apple sauce or ice cream.
The solution
Fortunately, we hit upon a winning combination: the pills, a big soup spoon, and a bottle of Hershey’s chocolate syrup… Simply place the pill on the spoon, cover it with a generous amount of chocolate syrup, and go. The chocolate syrup masks the taste and make the pill slippery and easy to swallow. Once we stumbled onto this combination, it was smooth sailing.
So… If you have to give your kids a big nasty pill, remember that a spoonful of Hershey’s syrup helps the medicine go down.
December 4, 2007
