Day 17: The Two-Straw Method

I bet you felt so sorry for Sabine in that last photo, so sad looking, waiting for her taste.  So I have to offer some resolution with this next post.  Eventually the fighting over whose turn it was become so bad, that I had to go get another straw and adopt the two-straw method.  They look like they belong on Happy Days.  Aww.

Seriously though, those shakes were four bucks a pop and I wasn't about to get them each one of their own.  Once you establish the "I want my own" precedent, there's no going back.  I hope this doesn't turn them to a life of anti-sharing when they grow up.  Forced into years of only getting half a serving, my adult children will go through life hoarding their food and hiding away stashes of goodies.

Day 16: Longing for a Sip

After West Virginia we hit Hershey, Pennsylvania and took a tour of Hershey Park.  Jacob got a milk shake in the food court and Sabine was sitting there patiently awaiting her turn.  They were so darn cute I couldn't help but take a bunch of pictures.

Day 13: All Done

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We made ice cream later that night and when Sabine was finished, this is what she had to say.  She's using the sign for 'all done'.

Day 10: Cinnamon and Sugar

This is the last donut picture.  They just made such good pictures.  Jenny doused them in cinnamon and sugar when they came out of the oil(?) they were cooking in.  She used Crisco, but my mom remarked that of course back when she used to make them with her grandmother, it was lard they used.  Mmm, mmm.

Day 9: Donut Holes

When you make donuts, you get donut holes.  They were really good!

Day 8: A Donut, a Mug and a Smile

I think that's how Dave put it when he was standing there observing Sabine.  We had just made donuts as our first big activity when we all got up for our day in Virginia.  My mom, Jacob, Sabine and myself made a trip to visit and meet my cousin Jenny's new baby, Emma.  We didn't get there until very late the night before because the drive took 10 hours, but the kids were remarkably good in the car so it actually wasn't the hell that it could have been.  Our visit was nice; I'll post more pictures as the days go on.

Day 76: Homecoming Harvest

The first thing we did when we got home was check the garden. Even though Zach and I had each told a couple of our friends to come by and take whatever was ready while we were away, there was still a plethora or veggies. This is what we picked the morning after we arrived home (because it was dark when we pulled in the driveway).

Day 48: Proof that wasps are not vegetarian

On Marisa's birthday earlier this week, she and my sister stayed late and had supper here. Since we're a non-meat-eating household, my sister had gotten a little chicken (whose parts I couldn't even stand to look at) for the omnivore crowd. We ate outside, as do the wasps. Long after Marisa had given up on her meal, this little guy kept coming back for more. He'd sit there and nibble for a minute, and then fly off with the piece of chicken. I don't know where he'd go with it, but he (or she) - or someone that looked identical (I don't know, do wasps do the waggle dance too, or is that just honey bees) kept coming back for more. Must have been some chicken.

Day 40: Damsel in Distress

So we went to Camp again for an extended weekend . This time our dear friends, Jen and Dan, and their two boys came with us. It's always more fun when we have company. I ended up taking more pictures of the kids and all the playing around, than I did of the bugs this time, but I couldn't resist this photo. It's a damselfly caught in a spider's web and the spider is getting ready to chow down. It's not that I like looking at dead bugs about to have their guts eaten out, it's just so fascinating that I can't look away - like a gory accident on the side of the road - until I at least get a picture. For this angle I actually had to get into the bottom of the row boat and get my face real close. I should get bonus points for that. Though I love this photo, my main reason for posting it is because I couldn't wait to use the perfect title I came up with!

Day 38: Power Outage

We love power outages. And if you can guess what this drunk-looking toddler has to do with the power going out, then you win. Woohoo! Anyway, we really do love it when the power goes out because we get to do things that we'd never have the excuse to do in real life. Like, for instance, eat really mushy ice cream in bed at 10:30pm (or who knows, maybe it was even later, you don't know, your power is out!) from a cone, when normally, your parents would never-in-their-right-minds give you your own cone because you're only two and if they set the principle then you'll forever be wanting your own cone?

Yes, that's the kind of thing that happens when the power goes out.

And then in a flash, when the power goes back on and all the lights are like, "waaaaahhhh" in your face, suddenly everyone is laughing at you because they had no idea how you were faring over there on the other side of the bed with your first-ever-own-cone. And then you yourself realize what a mess you have become and stumble over to the other side of the bed for a long, cold drink of water to wash away the sticky, sugary taste in your mouth like there's no tomorrow.

Day 32: Cotton Candy

The other day at the playland we got a couple bags of cotton candy to share. There isn't really much to say here, cotton candy is one of the best things on the planet. Sabine was pretty happy with the blue. Yum, yum. I always tell Zach not to ever get me flowers, "I'd rather just have the cash." I tell him. But here's another option, instead of a bouquet of flowers, say it with cotton candy. Just show up at my door with an arm load of cotton candy and I'll be the happiest person alive.

Day 25: Dirty Bean

I'm falling behind again with these daily pictures, so today you're getting a picture from last month. I love it for its obvious reasons, the mud, the spaghetti sauce, but most of all, I love it because it shows how far I've come as a mother. I would never have let Jacob get this dirty when he was Sabine's age. Well, that's not true for the dirt, we've always been dirt lovers, but I mean about the food. I don't even think I was letting Jacob feed himself at this age, for fear of getting this dirty. Now when the kids get dirty I tell them that's how they know they had a good time.

Day 24: Lunch on a Leaf

Here's another damselfly. I took this photo at 'the farm', which is to say, the large expanse of land my mom and Jamie have yet to build on. A lot of activity goes on out there, just no house activity yet. This year we've put in a good sized garden with them, making it officially a farm, or something to that effect.

We were out there a couple days ago watering the vegetable garden and I spotted this guy chowing down on a moth. While the part of me was fascinated by this brutal act of nature, the better part of me wanted to toss my cookies watching the moth struggle to escape his fate of being eaten alive. I kept snapping pictures, in the name of art, until they flew away and now I have all kinds of questions about damselfly behavior and diet.

Day 23B: Family Recipe

This is the day we made blueberry muffins from the 'camp berries' - that's what I call the wild berries we pick. Once a year I try to make blueberry muffins while being true to Nana's (my great-grandmother) recipe - which has been made into a wall hanging (pictured to Sabine's right on the counter) by someone in the family. This is no small feat for me because it means I have to stock things like white flour and sugar, and use butter instead of substituting with applesauce or adding all kinds of other grains. I love the naturalness of this photo - Sabine hanging out on the counter, eating batter off of a wooden spoon, wearing nothing but the apron my aunt just made for her. It's how I imagine what my mom would have looked like baking with her grandmother all summer long deep in the NY Adirondacks...

Day 9: Try that on for size

This picture is another one from the day we went strawberry picking. We were getting ready to wrap things up and head home. Sabine grabbed my mom's hat and put it on. I caught this photo just as she was making a perfect la-dee-dah face. That and the "2" painted on her face, as well as the strawberry juice stain on her chin make this my favorite photo of that day. Click on the image to see the runner-up.

Day 8: Birthday Cake

This year I made Sabine's cake. I sort of had a 'woodland' theme in mind, but as you can see, it more or less turned out to be a bunch of stuff that I'd collected, put on exhibit atop some sprinkles (pond), green fruit roll-up (grass) and crushed up Teddy Grahams (dirt). By the time decorating time came around I was just out of brain energy and it was all I could do to skip the decorating altogether. Anyway, I didn't get much feedback from those who partook of the cake, so I'm thinking it was nothing special.

I don't know how easy the details are to see in this photo because of the decoration behind the cake. That's a tree from Jacob's barn and a teensy watering can, Annie's Bunnies (munching on little bits of fresh kale), Teddy Grahams. An aside: I try not to buy the conventional brands with trans fat, high fructose corn syrup and artificial coloring, so there's a good chance that Jacob's never had Teddy Grahams (at least not recent enough that he would remember). So when he was asking for them today, he asked, "Where are the Teddy Diagrams?" It was so cute I didn't bother correcting him.

Another aside: The decoration in the back is a big #2 that had been circulating around our moms' group for more than a few years now. A lot of the kids in our club have had the honor of having that 2 present for their birthdays. I don't know what other families have done with it, other than have it in their possession for a while, but I put it on display as a decoration and make sure to take the birthday kids picture with it. And if I had a nickle for everytime someone asked, "Is that a pinata?"

homemade

We did a lot of different 'from scratch' activities this winter. Here's a few:

I used all those boxes from shipped Christmas gifts to make blocks. I taped them together, covered them with the brown paper (or used wrapping paper) that came stuffed into the boxes as packaging material, and let the kids color them. There's two crates full of them and the kids like stacking them = free toys.

For Christmas I made vanilla extract to give as gifts. I mixed brandy (but you can use vodka or run too, and one other liquor I'm forgetting) with vanilla beans cut lengthwise. I filled the bottle with the liquor and let it sit for one month before being used. Each time you use it, you just top the bottle off again.
Jacob did a lot of the old-school standby: Shrinky-Dinks. We've got keychains, zipper pulls, magnets and bracelets up the wazoo.

In addition to this stuff, we did the usual baking that we always do, as well as making applesauce. This year I got a food dehydrator for Christmas and we used the homemade applesauce in their to make fruit roll-ups. Yum, Yum!

Providing for the family

Despite the fact that's it's the middle of winter, in our house it's never too cold for ice cream. We have the ice cream maker that you roll around to make ice cream, and we use it a lot. I'd decided we needed some coffee ice cream to go along with the opening ceremony of the Olympics so as the evening progressed we were all pretty bent on having that particular treat.

The one ingredient that seems to be the most difficult to keep around is the actual ice that you put on the outside to freeze the other ingredients. It takes a lot more ice than I can make in the freezer, so usually Zach gets the ice from the college if we've done a good job of planning ahead. A couple times this year we've just used snow, I think that was actually Jacob's idea. So when we were faced with the situation where I'd completely forgotten about the ice, I naturally thought to get some snow from outside.

I guess I hadn't realized the tiny bit of snow that had fallen earlier that day was mostly gone. Zach told me to scrap the idea altogether, but I couldn't let go of it so I snuck outside with a pair of gloves and scraped snow from the walkway. I felt pretty ridiculous out there carrying out my idea of hunter-gatherer but I came in ten minutes later with a ball full of packed snow and we had our ice cream to help kick off Olympics '10.

Day Eight: Who's the Traitor?

Well I didn't post anything for two days because there was nothing new to report. The friggin crock pot is still in the sink. I've done sink-full after sink-full of dishes, each time leaving the dish in question behind. At this point I'm convinced that someone has tipped Zach off because not only has he not washed it, but he hasn't even said anything. Who is it? I thought for sure he'd have done it by now, at least out of guilt for having been doing so many side jobs lately.

Nor have I take any pictures of it because I've grown apathetic about the whole thing. I doubt anyone else is enjoying reading about it anymore, maybe nobody else thought it was funny to begin with.

The only thing that has changed is that the stagnant water in the crock has grown cloudy. It really smells too. Not like a big emanating smell, but if you stick your face in there a little bit of your nose hair seems to get burnt off. Yesterday for some reason I was like a butterfingers doing the dishes and things kept falling off the drying rack into the schmaltz water. And today Jacob was throwing around one of Sabine's toys like it was a baseball. Into the water it went.

This morning before he left for his current paint job, Zach told me the faucet in the kitchen is really acting up (because it is only six years old and leaks like crazy) and that I should try not to use it today. Is he kidding me? Is he trying to get a rise out of me, daring me to not wash the crock pot?

I may have just done myself in though. I promised to make this a completely natural experiment, with no prompting of Zach to do the dishes or anything like that. No mentioning of it at all. I just wanted to see how many days it would take my husband to wash a dish that is just SITTING THERE, growing things.

Well we were both just standing there in the kitchen, right next to the sink, I was off the the left cleaning something up from dinner and there were just a shit ton of dishes. The absurdity of the situation struck me. There is this nasty dish sitting in the sink and I'm trying to ignore it. Zach knows I am as anal as they come, how can he not notice this dish in the sink and not realize it must be bugging the shit out of me?? We're both standing there not mentioning the elephant in the room. Does he really not see this?

I really, really just wanted to sit down and type this out so I sort of asked Zach if he would do some dishes. "You know, just some of these around here on the counter, just to get some of them out of the way." I tried to cover. If Zach washed the crock because of what I said, then I will have to admit defeat by a technicality. I will not have been the one to wash it, but I cracked nevertheless.

My urging might have been the thing to throw him over the edge. When I walked into the living room to hang out with Jacob I heard the kitchen faucet start to run. Will this be the conclusion? We'll see...

Day Six: Baby Steps

Here we are at day 6. There is much to report on.

Yesterday morning all four of us were up before Zach left for work (a rarity). Things were happening in the kitchen, breakfasts were being prepared, messes were being made, so much was going on that I didn't notice the crock had been moved.
Upon further investigation I saw that the 'schmaltz', as I have been informed is the technical word for what's going on in that dish (thanks Pegeen, and yes, it was cream of mushroom), had been dumped.
Where could it be? A quick search produced the answer. Zach had dumped it into an empty cereal bag. We use these bags for compost, so I guess that's what he had in mind for the schmaltz? I don't think the stuff is appropriate for the compost, not unless we want our children's children growing a fifth limb (considering we use the compost on our vegetable garden); not to mention the fact that you can't compost meat waste anyway. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt though because that bag was probably the best option as we wouldn't want any leakage into the garbage.
The thing is, this mess was just sitting on a kiddie table in the middle of the kitchen. Did he think it was it was going to get up and walk itself to the garbage? Actually, I'm inclined to believe that might be true - take a look at the close-up, I'm pretty sure the schmaltz is about to grow legs.
I'm sorry for that picture. I hope you weren't planning to eat for the rest of the day.

Zach came home at lunchtime yesterday and so we were all in the kitchen again. I was making lunch and he was playing with the kids. At one point he was fiddling around with something near the crock. He pointed out the crock and said, "Look Pookie, I emptied that out for you." My brain was screaming expletives but I had to keep my cool and responded in a neutral tone, "Oh, thanks." For ME? How does he figure that was for me? It was his chicken and his job to clean it up.

That evening I cooked a pretty involved dinner which produced many dishes. I was working hard to knock them off when Zach came downstairs from getting Sabine ready for bed. He informed me she was ready to nurse and could I please take her right away? He would finish the dishes.

I guess what he meant was some dishes because it appears that when the drying rack was full, Zach stopped washing dishes. I didn't realize this until this morning. I'm ashamed that I often go to bed with the kitchen left in shambles. It never used to be that way - I wouldn't be able to sleep unless everything was clean. Now I guess I'm just so exhausted all the time that falling asleep isn't as much of a problem as it used to be.

At some point this morning after the kids were fed and I had time to address the situation forming in and around the kitchen sink, I suddenly noticed the crock was gone. I actually looked in the box for it before realizing it was just in the sink. Soaking, apparently.
Oh good. Some of my cooking utensils are in there soaking as well. Soaking up some nice chicken ooze. Those were fun to clean. Halfway through doing the dishes I needed my little plastic scraper to get some gunk off of last night's casserole dish. I couldn't find it where it's usually kept and I got the feeling in my gut that it was at the bottom of this:
Yup, I had to reach in there and pull it out.

Anyway, here's where it stands: I've done dishes a couple times today, leaving only the crock pot behind. I know Zach's been in the kitchen several times today. In fact, he even washed his paint brushes out in the sink. Everyone else is in bed for the night, so I know it's not getting done today. Zach has to leave early to paint again. We'll see what the status is when I get up.