homemade pizza attempt #2: fail

I really appreciate all of your thoughts and advice on the pizza making! I took them all into consideration and did a little (very little) reading about it.

I didn't get a thermometer, but figured out the right temperature anyway: if you can't hold your hand under the water, it's too hot! Keep making it cooler until you can stand holding your hand under the running water, and it's probably "warm" for dough-making purposes.

My pizza this week ultimately failed, but I did have a few successes: got the right temp for the water, got the dough to rise, then rise again (so cool!). Used an actual recipe for pizza sauce (instead of just dumping a can of tomato sauce on it), and used a different recipe for the dough.

The failures: the crust had the same texture as bread. It wasn't chewy like pizza crust should be. The pizza sauce still was "off"...I need a good recipe!!

My pizza eaters were not as forgiving as last time. One took a TINY mouse bite and then decided she'd rather go hungry for the night than eat any more.

stuck indoors

The cold weather lately ("cold" for Florida people) has had us stuck indoors trying to avoid cabin fever.

Katie got into our hat/scarf/glove basket and this is how I found her:


Just in case it wasn't interesting enough, our headless toddler started running full speed through the house!

And that is how we spent our afternoon.

homemade pizza attempt #1: fail

You pick your battles. Some things are not worth the fight.

Because it's all about priorities, I've decided pizza is worth fighting for. I've wanted to learn and eventually master making it from scratch for a long time and I'm excited to begin learning. I'm going to keep trying until I get it right. Or until we all get sick of pizza.

Round One was a pretty bad failure. It was my first try making anything with yeast, and I have no idea what I'm doing. When making pizza dough, it matters what temperature water you use so it interacts with the yeast the right way. But, how do you know when water is 130 degrees??? Do people just KNOW this stuff by feel?

I also learned the hard way that pizza sauce is NOT just tomato sauce from a can with a few spices thrown on top.

Thankfully Mark and the girls are forgiving pizza eaters and ate it up anyway.

(This is what pizza crust looks like when it has the density of a muffin:)

gem

When given the right activities, Meg can get in a happy zone where she is easygoing and really fun to be around. One of the most surefire ways to make her happy is to surround her with grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles. She LOVES hanging around with them!!

Making cookies with grandma is pure joy.


Meg's current passion is coloring and "writing". She is trying so hard to write words like "mom", "dad", and "Meg". It usually comes out looking like "GEM" with a lot of extra flair on the "e":


She is also my little helper. I ask her to "babysit" Claire while I go off for a minute to brush my teeth or take out the trash, and she will sweetly be singing or reading a book to Claire when I come back.

19 months

Katie is hilarious. She is continuously trying out new words, most of which we don't understand. We are learning her language, though: "goop" is "grape", "puck" is "cup", "kaa" is "Claire". She is into saying "yep" and "nope" for yes and no.

Whenever one of her sisters is crying, Katie does the funniest impersonation of them, putting her fists up to her eyes and saying, "wah, wah!" Not so funny for the crying sister.



Learning to use a spoon and fork. Somehow using a fork makes her happy to eat vegetables. Whatever works!

3 months

This year, I'm going to try to post an update of each girl each month. I'll start with my sweet Claire...

She is 3 1/2 months old already! She smiles, she laughs, she coos...she is a delight. Adding to my delight, she has started sleeping through the night.

Claire loves to hang out with her right arm raised straight up - it is so funny! Her hair is dark and crazy, her eye color can't be determined (dark blue? olive green??) and her skin is porcelain, true to Webb girl form. Not ideal for living in Florida, but we'll deal with it. I see many cute sunhats in our future!