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.

Crawling, Earrings

Today's random stuff is normally post on Facebook:

The baby is eight months today! And to celebrate, he decided to officially crawl! Yay! And also eek!

Whenever we go on long drives, I get time to do things like my jewelry making. So I made two sets of earrings yesterday. For other people. Eventually I'll get to the jewelry I've been meaning to make for me. I was totally going to post photos, but apparently blogger doesn't want me to post photos from my phone. Sigh.

Happy new year! I hope that we can all focus on the awesome this year.

Update: pictures!

The adventures of Pandy

For the past several nights I've been telling the kids stories about the adventures of Pandy the Panda, which is Koa's stuffed bear. These are his adventures so far:

He has made friends with three monster trucks in Texas, and he is now their pen pal.

On his journey to and from Texas, he ate a variety of new foods, including spaghetti, sushi, and Mexican food.

He has painted oodles of imaginary creatures that never existed and never will, and he has had an art gallery owner but then and compile them into a book. Now here spends one day every month writing to his pen pals and autographing books.

He has read about broomsticks and cats and dinosaurs.

He has attempted his very own paleontological dig in his backyard in the bamboo forest, but when he found no fossils in a whole month, he wrote to a real paleontologist and asked what was wrong. She quite back, they struck up a correspondence, and she eventually invited him to a real dig.

Next he's going to use all that space he dug up to start growing a garden and probably canning some food for the local poor people.

But after that I'm out of ideas. What kinds of adventures should an enterprising panda have next?

Conducting an Experiment

It turns out that I have once again been in a blogging funk. But at the same time, I frequently share random things that happen in our family and silly stuff ... on Facebook. Unfortunately, most of my siblings aren't on Facebook. This is a problem, since they are some of the main people I want to update about our life.

At the same time, I've been noticing some things I'm not happy about in myself. I've been getting too concerned about how many "likes" I get on my posts in Facebook. I check far too often just to see if anyone liked what I wrote. It is not where my focus should be. It has become a method of avoiding other things in life.

Previously I had thought, "This is just one tiny thing. I can't put this in a blog post because it's tiny and pointless and blah blah blah." Blog posts must be long and thoughtful and well edited. So I haven't been writing, just telling myself I'll get to it later ... in that mysterious place when I suddenly "have time." Which never comes.

All of which brings me to my experiment. It may not work at all. It may not be a solution that helps me or that improves communication with the people that I love. But I'm going to try it. When I would normally write a post on Facebook, I'm going to put it here instead. Even when it's dorky or short or whatever. I'll still post some things on Facebook, but at least for a little while, most of the silly family stuff is going on this blog. I'll see how it goes.

I may or may not post links to these blog posts on Facebook. I don't know. So if you want updates from me, you should probably follow this blog via email or something. But I won't be offended if you don't. And if you do, I'd love to have you comment occasionally! One of the things I miss on Facebook is actual conversation about things. It's too easy to just push the "like" button and move on.

Oh, and one last thing: I'm doing this pretty much exclusively in my phone. So no more fancy formatting attempts. No smart quotes (which you must know is simply torturing me!). And probably a lot of terrible editing. Which, again, is going to cause me more suffering than it causes you.

And that's about it! I make no guarantees that it will work out at all. That's life!

Sleeping Like Tree Trunks

The other morning, Coriel and I were sitting on the couch talking about how we’d slept. I asked her if she had slept like a log, which she found confusing. So of course I had to explain the idiom, along with “slept like a baby,” which we both agreed was not an appropriate metaphor for deep, restful sleep. In fact, according to her, both of these idioms were weird. After all, logs don’t sleep. 

“How do you know?” I said. “Maybe they’re always asleep. Maybe you’ve never seen a log that’s awake. Maybe they dance around when they’re awake.”

We then went on to discuss tree trunks. I was certain that they are also always asleep.

“No. Tree trunks are awake,” she declared. “You’ve never seen a tree trunk that’s asleep.”

“How do you know?”

“When trees are asleep, they snore really loudly, like a police siren and a car crash put together.”

And now you know.