Week #1 Review

No, don’t go thinking anything crazy like, “Hey, it’s the beginning of the new year! Jeanna’s probably going through (yet another) New Year’s Resolution about being more up-to-date on her blog.” Nope, I have stopped making those resolutions altogether. They never end well.

So this is not me turning over some brilliant new leaf and suddenly updating our family blog on a regular basis. This is just an unexpected few moments of me documenting things. And now that the explanation is over, here we go, (drum roll please), the first week of the new year!

1. We have slowly been starting back into regular life, complete with all of the regularly scheduled stuff. Ugh. (But at least co-op got canceled so we didn’t have to do that on Thursday!)

2. I finished copyedits for a project I’m involved in—and I was only a day late! So be impressed. Plus, in case I haven’t mentioned it yet, I’m so excited for this one. Stay tuned for more (ha! like that’s gonna happen!), but just know for now it involves what happens after the fairy tales end! Plus, it involves some people I adore and some stories I love. So pretty much it’s amazing.

3. I cut Addra’s hair again. I want to say something cool about why, but the truth is more like this: 

Me: Your hair is snarly. We have to brush it.  (For maybe the second time the whole week.)

Addra: *cringing the whole time*

Me: We could cut it short again so it doesn’t tangle as much.

Addra: Yes yes yes! 

So it’s pretty much about laziness and pain avoidance. Fortunately, the short style actually really suits her, and she was so so so happy to see how it turned out. I’m still completely muddling through it and making it up as I go along (when in doubt, point cut it some more!), so I’m very happy she liked it too. 

4. Brice was in Utah for a work conference. I love that he gets to go occasionally and spend some time with his sibs, cousin, and parents. He gets to learn work stuff and also get a little parenting vacation. Sure, we miss him, but we also order pizza a lot, so it works out. 

5. We put off Three Kings Day so we could celebrate it with Brice. I’m still not sure what the camels are bringing, though. Man, present shopping is hard.

6. Our friends the Ledbetters are moving away, so we watched their kids for a bit this week while they packed. The first thing their 1.5yo does when she comes over is put on a dress. It makes me laugh. We will miss their family.

7. Slowly but surely our house is going back together after the painting and ceiling fixing from November. This week I put up one of the four sets of curtains I need to! (Granted, I meant to do all four, but household projects are always harder than you think they’ll be. And in some cases, so is drywall.)

8. I discovered that it is indeed really painful to have things shoved under your fingernails! A quite large splinter made its way, suddenly and forcefully, halfway down my fingernail recently. It felt awesome. (This was technically not this week, but I still had to share.)

9. New Year’s came and went. We didn’t even try to stay up late. We are such partiers! I may one day post some comments about resolutions and words of the year, but don’t hold your breath for it.

And now for the obligatory picture dump!

See the red mark? That's how far the splinter went down. Ouch.

Dressed as a princess

Ammon is the prince who is supposed to be hugging her.

Awwww, the hug.

This boy loves having his picture taken!

They stuffed his pajamas full of toy food, which is why he looks all lumpy.
Also, he too loves having his picture taken, but he seems to think that it should always be a super goofy expression. This is the expression he made on purpose for this picture.

Joining in the fun of stuffing toy food down his clothing.

Part 1 of my delightful surprise when I came out of my room one day.

Part 2. At least he put them back in the package?

Addra's haircut and happiness!

Seriously. This is the expression he WANTED in this picture!

See?!?

More ridiculous cuteness. He needed a pic of his fancy hair.

How the baby eats sushi.

What my fingernail looks like now, two-ish weeks later (doesn't hurt anymore though).

Gingerbread in June

Because why not?

I've never made gingerbread before, and the kids wanted to do something tasty. I don't remember how gingerbread came up, but we decided to go for it.* We found a recipe that even suggested the shape of the pieces and such. It turned out easier to make the dough and harder to actually fit things together than I thought it would be. Learning new stuff! YAY! Next time we make a gingerbread house, though, I really want to make a gingerbread hobbit hole.

We all got a side to decorate, and we used Coriel's cake-spinner-thing that she got from her cake decorating class. So, win!


*Lest you're in the background thinking how cool and spur-of-the-moment I am, let me add that our plans had been cancelled that day, and the kids were sad, and I had to really gear up mentally to do it. Meaning it took me several hours to get up the oomph, and it was after I was already prepared to do something different and fun that day. 

Koa's side. It's a door. Which should be obvious, right?

I have always wanted to do the shingles on a gingerbread roof. Now I have! They started out better than they finished. :)

Brice's side. Awwww!

This is Coriel's heart door. See the doorknob?

My hand-cut gingerbread man.

Addra's roof piece.

A glance at the whole thing, sort of.
In front: Koa's lion/hippo/not sure what it is, but he was determined that it stand up next to the house.
In back: Coriel's happy heart person.
The plate we're working on: Yes, it is indeed the plate that I made when I was six years old. You can't see it, but it has my standard pregnant unicorn on it. All my unicorns back then were pregnant-looking (though not actually pregnant).
The blue rim underneath is the cake decorating wheel thingie.

Eating Glue, and so on

I managed to make it through 36 years of life without ever eating glue. Up until yesterday. Yesterday I was sitting at the table with my kids, cleaning up our lunch dishes at co-op. I moved a lid and felt something wet on my hand. It was a little white smear. They'd eaten go-gurts earlier, so I thought nothing of it and just licked it off.

Not yogurt.

The 6yo had a class project sitting next to our dishes, and the class project had huge globs of wet glue. Which is, of course, what I'd just eaten.

In case you're wondering, it was gross. Not the worst thing I've ever eaten (that would be horseradish), but I'd definitely never eat it on purpose. I had to eat an orange slice and a big bite of cake to try to get rid of the flavor, and even then it felt like it was sticking to my tongue. (Sticking. Har har.)

So, there's that item off my bucket list.


In other news, the 2yo is currently even more crazy about reading than his sisters. Yesterday morning he woke up around 5:30 wailing, "Read a book!" Which was pretty much how he'd fallen asleep the night before too.

Also, we were playing with wiki sticks earlier in the week, and I made the letters for the 6yo's name, so the 2yo wanted me to do it for him too. I did, and I spelled out his name while pointing at the letters. It was fun, and then he started jumbling them around and picking up each letter and saying it was his name. Good golly, 2yos are cute.

The next day while I was showering he toddled in (I have got to start locking that door!) holding a bunch of wiki sticks in his hands and saying, "Letters!" Also ridiculously cute. But you probably had to be there to understand.

On second thought, you shouldn't be there. Because I was showering and all.


Now for a teaser: Soon I hope to regale you with tales of our trip to Londontown and my giddy jumping-up-and-down excitement over getting to use a drop spindle. It was good times!

Also, maybe I'll get around to updates on my teen writing class and our epic anthology!

Send in the chocolate reinforcements

Ever have one of those days where you have awesome intentions and then your child has a meltdown and then you have to put yourself in time out for ten minutes so you don't say something you'll really regret and then later you're cleaning the bathroom and your toddler runs the water out of the sink all over the floor and then you get through that crisis too and then your child drops a pickle jar on the floor and it breaks and the toddler is mad he can't play in the kitchen and the six year old is upset she can't eat the pickles and then she hides and screams and all you really want is to steal the entire bowl of pudding that your husband made and hide in your bedroom to eat it but you can't because the cranky, tired baby would probably grab it and spill it all over the carpet?

No? You haven't?

Me neither.

Skills bucket list, foods

Every once in a while I think of some random skill that is really like to perfect. So now I thought I'd start writing them down. Here are the ones I've recently thought of:

Cooking crispy fish skin
Chopping veggies fast like a chef
Lock picking
Contact juggling

Does anyone else have a random skills bucket list?


In other news, I made the fourth and last aspirational groceries meal. Three of four turned out yummy--black bean burgers, avocado tomato soup, and tonight's chicken kebabs. This was the most Mediterranean meal I've ever made. Kebabs, tzatziki sauce (spelling?), a salad with kalamata olives and feta, dates, fancy grape juice, pasta! Whoa nellie. Brice and I looked it, though as usual the kids were not big fans. Too bad for them.

On the other hand, Ammon has been grabbing for all the things. And wanting to eat all the things! So he's been trying little bits of lots of stuff. Including, today, tomatoes, a new baby food, grape juice (just a tiny sip, but his face was awesome), clementine, and an accidental goldfish crackers. Oops. So at least one of our kids likes variety.

Soup

Scene: me feeding baby.
Me: *offers bit of cantaloupe*
Baby: *gnaws on it but makes that face, you knows that face that says he's totally appalled by what I've put in his mouth*
Me: *jokingly offers tiny spoonful of the soup I made, with line, cumin, and jalapeno*
Baby: *eats it happily, gnaws on spoon, eats more afterward*

Later, the baby eats more soup with dinner.

Weird.

Meal #1, 11th Day

 So! Yesterday's aspirational groceries turned into an awesome meal with an awful smoothie.

The smoothie was not entirely my fault. It was the fault of the people who packaged stuff together that made me say, "Yum, that sounds healthy and intriguing." And then afterwards, "Yikes."

The delicious meal involved black bean burgers with jalapeno in them, topped with guacamole and fancy corn. Also, much fresh lime was involved. And you may not remember how I feel about fresh lime, but let's just say the word "heaven" was used extensively. Predictably, the children were repulsed. Except Koa, who actually ate some of it! I didn't even have to slather it in condiments.


In other news, today is the eve of Three Kings Day. Have we yet sufficiently established how much I love this holiday? I just think it's fun and awesome and also I love the wise men. Anyway, nothing profound to say. Just happy Three Kings Day tomorrow!

Aspirational Groceries, Construction Vehicles

 Grocery shopping. I have two kinds:

Pessimistic. This involves a few items of produce that require no preparation, a few canned foods, and a lot of frozen pizza.

Aspirational. This is where I do something like get a new phone app that provides recipes and grocery lists. I menu plan. I dream of all this delicious food that my kids are totally going to eat. That I'm totally going to cook. Because I'm awesome. This grocery trip is almost entirely produce. And weird stuff I've never bought before, like feta cheese (Brice likes it, but I think it tastes like dirty socks)* and flaxseed meal. And it usually calls up mild cooking insecurities, like "Am I inferior because I don't know the difference between toasted sesame oil and just plain sesame oil?" Anyway, today was definitely an aspirational shipping sort of day.


In other news, I came out to kitchen today to discover that Koa had utterly destroyed a couple of corn muffins and was hauling them around in mini construction vehicles on our kitchen table. It says something about my child and our life right now, I think, that I was not at all surprised by this behavior.

And hey look! I figured out how to add photos! Thank you, internet. It's still a massive pain though, so no guarantees.


* Not that I make a habit of eating dirty socks.

That One Time We Cruised, part 2: The Food

Well, you know that the main thing about going on a cruise is the food, right? And it’s true. At first, I wasn’t overly impressed. Our first lunch on board was right near the end of the lunch time, and things were really crowded (we sat outside directly in the blistering sun because we couldn’t find another spot), and they were starting to put the food away. So again, that first day did not make a great impression.

However.

The rest of the trip was fantastic when it came to food. In the first place, most of it was delicious. In the second place, if it wasn’t yummy, you could just order something else! Here are some indications of my enjoyment of the food:

1. When I reviewed the notes I’d written for the blog, I mentioned the food four different times.

2. I even tried their fried eggs at breakfast one morning. (I have never really liked eggs, and I especially dislike fried eggs. But they were just sitting there calling to me. Also, the whites did not have the texture of snot. So, win!) I also tried poached eggs!

3. I had fried eggs again. Voluntarily. I even started making myself fried eggs when I got home! (Tragically, I have not managed to make them without the snot texture.)

4. A couple months later, at my first prenatal appointment, Susan (my midwife) looked at my weight gain to that point and said, “So, do you think is all from the pregnancy?” And I totally blamed at least five pounds on the cruise.

5. There was sushi a couple of times. And since I had learned from research that the real problem with sushi in pregnancy is not the sushi itself but simply the possibility of food poisoning,* I ate some. And felt just a little bit naughty. But also really, really happy.

This was my favorite of the restaurants, though
you really can't tell how pretty it was.

The ambience in the restaurants was lovely. Seriously, these are some fancy restaurants. My favorite (you eat at a different one each night) was made to look like a garden, and the lighting changed as the night got later, so it was like the sun was setting. The room was decorated in lovely dusty pink and sort of a pale sage green. Really pretty. It was fun eating someplace so fancy.

There was this steak one night that I sort of wanted to eat until I died. Mostly because of the sauce. Also, I tried black truffle pasta—because why not? (It wasn’t that epic, but it was still tasty.) And Brice and I both tried escargot (smothered in butter, so it was acceptable—but not something I’d regularly eat). Those were some of the exciting highlights, but really everything was just tasty.

Brice and I discussed why the food was so especially great, and we came up with a couple reasons. The main reason, of course, was just that it was good. But the backup reason—which Brice pointed out—was that it was good, but without a price tag attached. So instead of looking at the menu, then looking at the prices, then saying, “Too rich for my blood,” we just ate. Whatever looked good. Regardless of price. It makes a shocking difference. It makes me think that in the future, when we take vacations, we should make it a point to go out one time to a really swanky restaurant, order something amazing, and just count it as a cost of the vacation.

You may be wondering about what the kids ate. Well, I’m sorry to report that they ate your usual run-of-the-mill kids’ food. We tried to get them to try a few new things here and there, but honestly—vacation is not the time to have arguments over trying that new weird-looking vegetable or that strange brown sauce. So we didn’t.

* And also, sushi food poisoning in pregnancy isn’t worse than out of pregnancy—except that everything is worse in pregnancy just generally. Unlike food poisoning like listeria, which is actually actively worse in pregnancy. So, sushi from a reputable, high quality place: probably not a problem. Sushi from the two-day-old counter at Food Lion: probably a problem. This digression brought to you by Science!

Meat, a Reprise (OR: Histrionics Will Get You What You Want)

A while ago, someone in this household had a mild fit ofhistrionics. Now, I’m not naming names or anything, but I will say that she’s the only female in the household of voting age. Anyway, magically within days of this episode, a major gift card to Fogo de Chao appeared in our mailbox. The note with it said just, “Merry Christmas!” Wow, I felt so loved. Plus, meat!

So that was several months ago. And finally this past week, we went! (The reason it took so long was both slackerliness and the effort to coordinate schedules and have me not freaking out about leaving a baby at home with someone else.) It was so lovely to go out to lunch with my delightful hubby and leave all the kids behind. We dressed up a little, we talked about whatever we felt like, and we could focus on just a single conversation instead of three or four (which always feels like such a luxury).

There was guarana (a Brazilian soda), Antartica brand (the best). There were cheesebreads (essential at a churrasceria). There were sticks and sticks full of meat. Meat. MEAT! (I promise, by the way, that I am not always this obsessed with meat.) There was filet mignon wrapped in bacon. Filet mignon wrapped in bacon. Did you know that filet mignon does, in fact, have a different, softer, more fabulous texture than regular chunks of meat? I did not.

So the food was lovely, and the only real drawback was that they did not have sticks of caramelized pineapple that they carried around (sigh, Braza Grill, sigh). Fortunately, they did have caramelized pineapple on the dessert menu, so even though we were both stuffed and bursting at the seams, we still ordered dessert. After we ate, we pretty much had to waddle back to the car (at least a block’s walk--sheer gastric agony).

We really enjoyed our Fogo de Chao meal. Truthfully, we probably won’t go back except maybe for a rare occasion. It’s just not in our usual price range. But that’s the fun of trying something new and extravagant--it’s an experience to savor for its novelty and fun.

When the server came to show us the dessert menu, he asked if we were there celebrating anything special. Brice said something about an early Valentine’s Day, and I kind of mumbled something about not having our kids with us. But after he left, we realized this is how the conversation really should have gone:

Server: Are you celebrating anything special?

Me: Meat.

Brice: And also . . . meat.

So, to the anonymous benefactor who sent the gift card: We thank you! We celebrate your thoughtfulness. And also . . . meat.

Meat

Scene: The airport, where I am dropping off the hubby for a short business trip. I am attempting to not act like a total basket case because I am, of course, a mature, responsible woman capable of watching her own three children by herself for four days.

ME: [smiling] Have lots of fun in Utah!

HUBBY: Okay.

ME: [still smiling] Have fun playing with your sister and your parents.

HUBBY: [nods]

ME: [still smiling] And get some dinner from Epic!*

HUBBY: [enthusiastically] Or maybe some churrasceria!**

ME: [bursts into somewhat hysterical tears]***

HUBBY: [a little stunned by my reaction] Oh, I’m sorry. Order some Outback while I’m gone, okay?

ME: [nodding pathetically] Yeah, okay.

Scene: Twenty minutes later, at the drive-thru at Wendy’s, I am ordering a burger. It’s not churrasco, but at least it’s meat.****

* One of our favorite restaurants in Salt Lake.

** Brazilian barbecue, where they come around to the tables with giant skewers of meat, meat, and more meat.

*** There is no logical reason why the idea of Brice eating churrasco caused such hysteria. But it did make me realize how much I miss semi-inexpensive churrasco. The only churrasceria in the area that we know of is a snooty, high-falutin,’ $50-per-plate one in Baltimore. That is not happening.

**** Theoretically.