Category Archives: Kids

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Bread Me Baby

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Around these parts we love bread.  Growing up in New York with access to some great bakeries and spectacular baked goods gives you a certain amount of taste for these things.  I’ve always loved baking and am proud to say I’ve managed to produce some tastey breads and such, but it’s so much work that it’s always been a special occasion thing.  Imagine my happiness finding this book.

Artisan Bread in Five Minutes A Day.  Seriously – it delivers.  I snatched this book up and tried it straight away and was ecstatic to find that I can, in fact, make excellent bread in next to no time.  I’ve made boule bread almost every day and even tried the Pumpkin Oatmeal bread (which is fantastic with butternut squash and apple soup, btw…..as well as with a slice of leftover pork roast and some apple butter.  Yum!).  I’m considering a second fridge just for storing dough!!!!

I did manage to make some apple pies this weekend.  I still have an obscene amount of apples left, so I made 2 pies and only partially baked them.  Then once they were cooled I wrapped them in foil and stuck them in the freezer.  If they can be successfully thawed and baked the rest of the way and still taste good then I’ll use up all the apples this way and have pie whenever we want.  Now if only I could get anything else done, it would be a miracle.

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Apple Picking, and The Crushing Engine Incident

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Saturday was a bit crazy.  And by a “bit” I mean first relaxing, then horrfying, then hilarious.  But I’ll get to that in a moment.  I’d like to start with Sunday.

We trekked out to the local orchard (and by local I mean about half an hour away) to pick some apples.  I hate to admit I’d never been there before then, because it is a fairly huge attraction around here and we’ve lived in the area for going on 12 years now.  They have peaches and all manner of berry in the summer (I’ve had their peach sangria – divine.  And I don’t usually care for sangria) and they have many varieties of apple in the fall.  I was looking forward to appropriating some yummy fresh apple cider, but alas they have not yet harvested enough for a press so no cider until next week at least.  Still, they had 3 varieties open to picking while we were there – Golden Delicious, Jonagold, and my favorite – Gala.  We got our bags and took in the view (on a mountain top – very nice, but also very sunny and very HOT – thank heavens for the breeze) and started off to the Jonagolds, the kids’ spirits high.

The view as we started off.

We went with friends, which sweetened things nicely for Emily and Neve, and I had left Oona home with Paul, which turned out to be a good thing with all the walking and sweating and all.

The girls had a blast picking the Jonagolds (and sampling as well), but it wasn’t long before little Neve began complaining about the heat.

We hit the goldens second, and by the time we got to the Galas the girls were hot, thirsty and grumpy.  The Galas were relatively small and mostly picked over so we took awhile filling up our bags before heading over to the weigh in and gift shop.

Neve is hot and grumpy.

Our haul was about 30 lbs.  Not bad!  And much cheaper by far than the grocery store, plus these are fresh off the tree!  I also snagged a peach cider slushy for me and some muscadine grape cider slushies for the girls.  Yum!  The net result of our efforts will be several pies, a crisp or two, some apple sauce and some butternut squash with apple soup.  Some yummy home made bread will round that out.  Yeah, we’re psyhed.

But let us now turn our attention to the events of Saturday afternoon / early evening.

It began as a pretty lax Saturday.  We had done our shopping Friday night to avoid the weekend crowds and were looking forward to a productive two days.  I had bread to bake and cleaning to do, etc, and Paul decided it was high time he fix the bobcat so that I could get the front garden finished.  You see not too long ago it decided it was old and tired and done and wanted a new engine.  Being the well – connected with all things and people mechanical – type Paul was able to snag a used bobcat engine from a co – worker that would likely fit, and had plans to make a swap.  If you’re wondering, let me answer by saying that no, this is not unusual.  Many engines have been pulled from the many and sundry vehicles kicking aorund here.  I’ll also add that no, Paul is not a mechanic by trade, but it is definitely his secind calling.

Anyway, the dilemma Saturday was either fix my languishing B-mer of its deer damage or fix the bobcat, and we opted for the bobcat to accomplish the aforementioned landscape work.  So after a hearty lunch off he went to attempt the swap.  Being that it was rather humid and hot out the girls stayed inside with me and we all took up places in the play and craft room.  I had the whirring of the sewing machine keeping me happy, there was a seasonal movie on (Monster House) and Oona spent quite a lot of time banging away on a very loud mini piano while Emily and Neve fought over every last thing in the background.

Two, maybe three hours later I hear Paul coming up the stairs and turn to see him lope into the room, all red and dirty and sweaty and looking rather beat down and ready to collapse.  Also not very unusual.  He’s frequently over worked himself in the heat and can’t be bothered to stop for things like water or rest. That’s for wimps.

So rather calmly, though slightly out of breath, he asks why I didn’t hear him outside yelling.  I cocked my head to the side and tried to figure where he was headed with this when he informs me that he’d hurt himself and I evidently had not heard him yelling about it.  He goes on to explain that while hoisting the old engine out of the bobcat using a 2 by 4 as a pry bar he had overestimated the wood’s ability to be easily controlled as well as the engine’s weight (about 200 lbs) and while pulling up and back on it managed to yank it out and back and down  – onto his “man parts”. (he didn’t say “man parts”.  Use your imagination)

He then managed to throw this 200 lb engine off of himself after it rolled off his “parts” and onto his chest and proceeded to scream in pain (the part which I clearly did not hear over the din of childhood in action).  It took him ten minutes to get from the spot where he fell to the door (not far at all) to see what damage he had done.

Now, at this point, I was thinking that you know, hey – here he is, calmly explaining all of this to me and over the worst of it.  So I tell him “Gee that sucks”, etc, and tell him that maybe he should take it easy and get some water and rest for a little while before going back out.  And that’s when he took off his pants and I saw the blood.  It was leaking.  From there. You know, no cuts or scrapes of any kind.  Just leaking blood.  Um, ER time?  Of course he would not hear of me driving him in.  None of that.  He drove himself, thank you very much, and then had to explain to the hospital staff that he had dropped a bobcat engine on himself down there and was now bleeding out of his urethra.  You can imagine the responses.  My doctor winced when I relayed the story to him.  In fact, most people did.

As it turns out, there is no major damage.  He didn’t even get any pain meds while he was in the ER.  Just a lot of questions about how the hell he dropped a 200 lb bobcat engine onto his parts.

And when I went in for my check up this morning they had this message for him:  if he wants a vasectomy so bad, they’d be happy to handle it for him, he needn’t do ti himself.

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Little Bits of Progress

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Yes!  We have progress!  I can thank having a birthday for it – one of my gifts was “time”.  And what a wonderful gift it was!

I made some lounge pants from the Amy Butler In Stitches book, using some Heather Bailey fabric.

I made some accent pillows for the bed.

Emily and I spent time making yo yo’s.

I also worked on some knitting and quilting, and made an apple  pie and some butternut squash with apple soup.  It’s officially my favorite time of year (now to January 1).

I also repainted Emily’s room.  When we first moved in I painted 3 of her walls lavender with a butter yellow accent wall.  I thought it was very sweet, and when clean it looked like this:

Then it went through some various changes – the bookshelf was replaced by a smaller one, the dresser was moved and finally a large chrome rack was put in to give her a place for all her stuff.  I hate that rack.  It never looks good, no matter what.  One of these days I’ll sew up a tent for it….but for now, ick.  But I digress.  Emily’s been asking for a repaint to blue for months now, and when I managed to snag some lovely aqua colored mermaid print fabric we decided it was time.  Off to Lowe’s,  fabric in hand!  It took me only a couple of hours to paint her room and refinish her dresser.  I have yet to get her window treatments or bedding done (and you’ll pardon the mess!), but this is the color and how it’s starting to shape up:

A little more grown up?  I’ll have better pictures once it’s complete.

For now I’m off to comfort Oona, who is grumpy and prone to vomiting today.

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I Can’t Catch a Break, But I can Catch a Bug

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I do have some crafty type pictures to share, some progress to report, etc.  But, that will have to wait.  With the older girls back to school Oona and I have been the lucky recipients of every germ they pick up and bring home.  I’ve got a bad cold I can’t seem to shake, which has gotten worse yesterday and today.  Hopefully I’ll start feeling better soon.  If I am still feeling this bad tomorrow I’ll go get checked out, but for now I am laying on the couch miserable, marveling at how well and quickly Oona is walking.  Now that she’s got the hang of it she’s totally taken off with it.  Pretty soon she’ll be running.  Maybe it;s all the Munchkins we’ve been eating.  Yes!  We got a Dunkin Donuts here!  The holy grail of all businesses I’ve wanted to move south with me!  The best part?  It’s literally a mile from my house!!!!!!!  Too bad I’ve been too sick to enjoy the iced coffees more.

Being this ill also means I haven’t been able to do much cleaning or cooking or crafting.  The house is a disaster, and there is so much clean up work to be done outside I can hardly stand it. I tried over Labor Day to make it look more presentable, but the bottom line is that it is way too much work for me to do by myself when I have no Oona help other than my 9 year old.   But I can sit with the laptop and surf, so I have been doing genealogy research.  It’s pretty interesting – my family mostly seems to have been in the US a lot longer than I had suspected, which is kind of neat.  I’ve come to a dead end in 1811 in Massachusetts so that will require some serious digging to get any more info, if it is to be had.  But see????  I TOLD you I’m a New Englander in my bones!!!!!

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When Love and Fear Collide

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Here we are, a lovely day in August in Virginia.  I know, right?  That sounds so unlike me to say that.  It’s because it’s low 70’s and overcast (we’re desperate for rain!!!) and there’s a nice little breeze and I have spent the day making some cute little fabric yo yo’s (they’re not the toy kind – they are more like little decorative fabric swirlies) with some scraps I have left over from other projects.  There are 3 big Yankee Candles going so the house smells lovely (a combo of Cafe Au Lait, Good Morning, and Blueberry Scone).  My new Cooking Light came in the mail.  And we spotted about half a dozen wild turkeys in the backyard this afternoon.  I tried to get a picture, but alas, they were too fast.  Our neighbor’s cat was out there as well, but I could tell she was rethinking her plan to play with those particular birdies.  They ambled off back further into the woods and I couldn’t properly follow since it is still summer afterall, and there is still a bit of thicket going on that is difficult to navigate.  All I could think as I headed back to the house was Darn!  I could’ve had some Thanksgiving dinner there! Oh well.  Not that I’d actually be able to take one of them down.  I just wouldn’t be able to hunt unless I absolutely had to.  Which is why when I get my chickens I will be using them for their eggs and not their meat.  I don’t think I could butcher an animal I’d been caring for.  Now if someone brought me something they had killed that was already dead and I didn’t have to feel guilty and be the reason it had to die….well then that’s different.  I am probably a total hypocrite, but hey.

Anyway my day was going pretty well, despite the dog poop.  Yes, for those of you that are wondering – I am still dealing with the occasional poop.  Like after I brought Pippa back inside this morning after her outdoor bm and she promptly did another loose one on my wood floor right inside my front door.  She’s “had the squirts” as Paul ever so delicately said, all day today, so she’ll be getting a nice immodium pill in her dinner.  But that isn’t what killed my lovely almost – fall day.  What killed it was that in the middle of enjoying the lovely outdoors and picking some squash while Neve frolicked on the swingset and I was reveling in the weather, I caught movement out of the corner of my eye.  Caterpillar?  There are plenty of those around my veggies, as well as bees and various types of beetles.  So I casually looked up.  And about a foot from my right hand I saw:

I jumped.  I screamed.  I swore.  I cried.  I got chills and goosebumps.  And I most certainly did NOT take this picture.  Paul did.  Right before he doused the sucker with that most trusted of resources,  brake parts cleaner.  A LOT.  And then whacked it repeatedly with the can.  Even Paul was impressed by its size.  All I could think of was the banana spiders we used to see when I lived on Guam back in the day.  Of course they had blue on them as well as the yellow, but this guy was the right size anyway.  HUGE.  That is a technical term, btw.  I get the willies just looking at the picture.  I think the children may be scarred for life.  Emily declared she would never set foot outside again.  I am not sure I want to either!!!!  I can tell you I’ll have a hard time reaching into the garden now!

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It’s the Great Pumpkin

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Or, rather, it’s the first pumpkin.  I have been checking on all of our lovely green pumpkins daily, and I saw that this one had turned mostly orange.  It didn’t really look quite ready, but the stem was turning brown and dried out and so I figured it was time to pick it, lest it fall victim to mold, pests or what have you (the stink bugs here are just awful right now).  Neve happened to be out with me and was thrilled to carry it back to the house and announce to everyone that the first pumpkin had been picked.

We are all hoping this will be but the first of many.  We haven’t had rain in weeks and everything is looking rather sad, so I don’t know.  Cross your fingers!

Next year we’ll be clearing out a larger tract of land that will serve as the pumpkin patch.  I’d like to have enough that I can invite the whole neighborhood every year to pick a pumpkin and have a jack o’lantern carving party complete with hot apple cider and cinnamon donuts (and caramel apples maybe?).  This year I’ll do it on a smaller scale with a few friends that have kids, but I can’t do it up big this year since I don’t have enough pumpkins and it would get too expensive to buy that many.  But I am planning, and it will be fun.

We spent a lovely weekend with friends and taking the kids all over the place so it was busy busy!  No crafting done!  Oh well.  But the girls got to help out at the local animal shelter with their brownie troops on Saturday – we almost came home with a kitten …good thing we’re too broke right now!!!!  Then Emily was off to a pool party for her friend’s birthday, and then later she went to a sleepover.  Big day!  Sunday we all went to Alex’s house to hang out and have dinner and let the kids play and go nuts.  While we were there the best thing happened:  Paul put all the men to work clearing out Alex’s garage and everyone got to see first hand just what a taskmaster/slave driver my husband is.  It was quite vindicating that now they believe me when I say he can be really rough to live with!  And Paul had a great time without getting all greasy.  Amazing.

Oona got another cake for her birthday – Alex made it, along with a yummy blueberry tart – and she loved it.  She was also trying like mad to get the whole walking thing mastered.  They grow up too fast.  Sigh.

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Happy Birthday Oona

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I can’t believe my sweet little baby is already a year old.  Why must they grow so fast????  Just yesterday it seems we were bringing her home from the hospital, all cute and small and cuddly and sleepy.

She was so teeny tiny at not quite 7 lbs!  It’s terrible what thinking about little babies will do to you.  I hated being pregnant, I hate labor, but I love my little newborns! If only you could freeze that moment and enjoy it for awhile before the whole sleep deprivation sets in and 6 months go by in a total fog.

Now she is a full year old with 8 teeth and starting to figure out the whole walking thing.  She took 4 steps today and was so proud of herself!  Happy birthday my little snuggler!

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It’s Late And I’m Feeling A Bit Punchy

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Poor Oona just wants to be held. She’s not fully awake but not asleep……probably won’t be for awhile. And it got me thinking how grateful I am to not be working a regular job. I have no one here to help out so if I were up all night I’d be SOL and very tired at work. Yay for being a totally broke SAHM!!!!

And that got me thinking about my last job and the people I worked with and how some of them I really miss seeing on a daily basis. There’s the occasional run – in at Target or what have you, but it’s not the same. Of course, I also had some unpleasant times as well, and that soured the whole darn experience, unfortunately. It’s sad, really. I left because I was pregnant with Oona and my salary barely covered daycare and after care for 2; there’s no way I’d make ends meet with 3. Still, had things been working better I might have found a way to stay. But I had two bosses, and though one was a phenomenal woman I will always look up to, one was, well…..not. So bad that I still have nightmares because my brain has clearly not come to terms with all the times I couldn’t properly defend myself to false accusations and repeated requests for things I had done like 45 times already! You can’t scream It’s attached in 3 emails to you and in several copies in your inbox – open your damn eyes! to someone in a superior position. You can’t call them out on unprofessional behavior when it’s non quantifiable and hard to prove. I don’t know why she didn’t like me, and I asked around to many other co-workers if I was really that unprofessional and bad at my job. Had anyone of them agreed with that woman, I’d have done my level best to improve. But I had no complaints. In fact my team was always very complimentary. But, that is way work is sometimes. There are some people you just can’t work with if you don’ mesh well. Like my spouse. We live together, that’s enough. We’d kill each other if we worked together, married or not!!!!

I guess what I am thinking here is that yes, it can be frustrating to be broke and be low on art supplies and bogged down with kids. But even so it’s late here and I am not worried because tomorrow I can get my older girls to the bus stop in my jammies. I can even nap with Oona after lunch! And I can find enough here to keep me inspired and energized and ready to create and design whatever I want. That’s what keeps me happy and sane and glad to be where I am. Plus I am an introvert, which as Crazy Aunt Pearl correctly points out, means that I get my energy and happiness from time spent in solitude (no, I’m not anti-social!!! I just need my alone time is all!!!)

And the yarn. oooooooo the yarn! I went a bit overboard buying yarn last year and I still have enough for several projects I haven’t yet started, nevermind everything that is OTN right now. All I need is a fabric budget to put to work what’s in my head and I’ll be all set!!!!

As a side note, it would also be great if Oona didn’t insist on biting me with her 7 very sharp teeth at every turn. Here I am thinking she’s nursing herself into a peaceful sleep when CHOMP!!!!

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Crap

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Yup.  Crap.

It’s 6:30 pm and Oona’s napping.  Which means she’ll be up ’till lord knows when.

And then there’s the actual crap I’ve been cleaning out of Emily’s room.  It’s from her hamster and it’s everywhere.  Also under her bed I found an old blackened banana, half a Heath Bar, many hundred old jellybeans, some ABC gum, several used and wadded up tissues, and 8 tons of other random trash.  It’s a damn good thing the cats like it under there so much or we’d no doubt have RATS in there.  Sheesh.

I’m not really in a bad mood, but since this post seems to be a whine fest let me add that I hate my unreliable satellite system and I need fabric.

But two things made me happy today.  The first is the morning glories that reseeded themselves from last year (I didn’t plant any this year, because even though they are my favorites, Paul doesn’t like the way they vine around the porch).  They grew up despite Paul’s aggressive weed whacking and are blooming on the side porch.

The second is a promise of fall just around the corner in the form of some beautiful little pumpkins in my garden.  I wonder how big they’ll get!

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The Ick Strikes Again

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We survived the first day of school. Emily really likes her teacher so far and has been coming home happy every day. Neve’s first day was likewise a success. She said she didn’t want to come home! She was so cute in the morning in the dress I made her and her sweater and backpack.

She loved riding the bus and waved happily goodbye as it took her off to start a new chapter in her life.

As for me it has been wonderfully relaxing! Oona is so easy and when it’s just us two I feel like I can be more productive. It was almost luxurious. Even the cat was lounging about with impunity, no big kids to manhandle or chase her. I had agreeable purry company all day. It’s been quite awhile since that has happened!

Unfortunately we’ve all been slammed with the Ick. Runny, stuffy noses, scratchy throats, achiness……….it stinks. And this week of all weeks! Poor kids.

I’ve been making sock progress.

I hope to at least turn the heel on this today. I won’t be doing much else since I’m not feeling well. Even Oona’s been grumpy with it. I keep having to use the nasal aspirator on her to suck out all the gunk and she HATES it. But she can’t blow her nose and with all that thick crap in there she’s not breathing well, so it’s got to be done. That’s made her very cranky. But you wouldn’t have known it yesterday in her cute stripey outfit and ultrasonic crawling speed.

Right now she’s all crusty nosed asleep on my lap, making the prospects of a foray into the kitchen for a second cup of coffee dim. So instead I’ll leave you with the “impossible”. A picture of Emily touching her tongue to her elbow.

And they said it couldn’t be done!