Around the house

Some of my favorite pictures are ones from around the house. The little moments that are best described with a quick click of the camera.

I love it when they read together.

Family home evening game last week: sword fighting on the Wii. It is WAY more fun to watch Jay and Rose try to figure out how to play than to play myself. They chop and move in the funniest ways. Sword fighting is awesome. Rose even won one round!

It took a bit of coaching.

Fort! We got a Craigslist treadmill a few weeks ago, and Jay and Rose are putting it to good use. So is Jeff--he gets up and runs before school most days now.

The treadmill doesn’t add much to the décor of our basement room, but that’s to be expected.

Layne is so much easier now that she’s used to staying at our house for a few hours each day, and also now that her teething has let up a bit.

She’s reminding me how to baby-proof…

She loves to stick her fingers in the air vent and pull it out of the floor. My feeble tape barricade only lasted so long. We didn’t have central air when Jay and Rose were crawling-toddling babies, so this is a new one for me.

I made my first batch of SOUP this season last weekend. Those purple potatoes were tasty.

Longest carrot ever.

Jay and Rose are very close to the same size. They fit the same size of clothes, but I buy size 5 for Jay and size 4 for Rose to account for growth.

Being a kid is hard work.

Sidewalk chalk on the driveway. I adore how they always sit so close, side by side. Buddies. Rose reveres Jay, but tries not to show it by always picking the opposite of what Jay wants—if Jay wants milk, Rose wants water, etc. But she still copies him in most other ways. Love.

Layne wanted to draw with chalk too, but Aunt Shaina was too strict.

Snuggly bottle moments are new to me because my babies were fed in the natural way, ha ha. I can’t quite figure out how to hold the bottle, the baby, and a book all at once though. Plus Layne is strong, heavy, squirmy, and just a month shy of turning one, so I’ve been teaching her how to hold her own bottle. Poor girl, at our house she gets treated like the third child. I don’t want to over-intervene. I still love to squish and snuggle her soft little sweet cheeks every now and then though, I promise!

Aw yeah, success! I had to go get my book at bottle time one day, so I set Layne and the bottle on the floor while I quickly dashed out. When I got back, she was trying to drink the bottle sitting up, so I simply tilted her back and when the milk started coming out, she went to town. I only had to point the bottle upwards once or twice. Weehaw, Layne!

Yum. Pumpkin oatmeal muffins and over easy eggs on a bed of lightly wilted spinach with a little cream cheese and parm meling on top. Laaaaa! Dinner-breakfast nirvana, although the muffs turned out a tad on the dry side. When Jeff has parent teacher conferences till all hours of the night like he did this week, the kids and I have breakfast for dinner. They even ate some spinach (fresh, not wilted) and got green drool on their chins, Hulk style.

Those EYES. Last night we had Layne during dinner, so naturally it had to be SPAGHETTI NIGHT! What is it about babies and spaghetti?

One sock on, one sock off, homemade blue towel-bib, booster chair on the floor, spaghetti everywhere. I love letting babies have at it.

As I was typing this post, I heard some wildly happy noises coming from Layne’s room (it’s our third bedroom, and it’s got our crib in it, so it’s basically hers). She had just awoken from her nap and I gave Rose permission to go in the room.

A cozy way to end a long chilly day: 1 teaspoon of brown sugar, a drop of vanilla, and a shake of cinnamon mixed into hot milk, with a heap of whipped cream and cinnamon on top. Don’t forget the blanket and the book or an episode of Eureka on the side.

Fall is the best season.

Yorkshire Pudding

Weird cultural and traditional food fascinates me. During lunch today I started thinking about weird foods and it led to a little online research. I’ve read all of James Herriot’s classic books, but thankfully a Google Books search yielded precisely the passage I was pondering without my flipping feverishly through four fat books to find it.  In his books, James Herriot (aka Alf Wight) explained the wonders of Yorkshire pudding:

“At the moment the phone rang, I was tasting something very near to my heart—Helen’s cooking. It was Sunday lunchtime, when the traditional roast beef and Yorkshire pudding was served. My wife had just dropped a slab of the pudding on my plate and was pouring gravy over it, a rich brown flood with the soul of the meat in it and an aroma to dream of. I was starving after a typical country vet’s Sunday morning of rushing round farms and I was thinking, as I often did, that if I had some foreign gourmet to impress with the choicest sample of our British food then this is what I would give him. A great chunk of Yorkshire pud and gravy was the expedient of the thrifty farmers to fill their families’ stomachs before the real meal started. –‘Them that eats most puddin’ gets most meat,’ was the wily encouragement—but it was heaven… The shrilling phone cut cruelly into my reverie but I told myself that nothing was going to spoil this meal. The most urgent job in veterinary practice could wait until I had finished. But my  hand shook as I lifted the receiver and a mixture of anxiety and disbelief flowed through me as I heard the voice at the other end. It was Mr. Ripley. Oh please, no, not that long trek to Anson Hall on a Sunday… Helen looked up from the table with the stricken face of a woman who can visualise her Yorkshire pudding sagging into lifeless ruin. ‘Oh surely you don’t have to go this minute?’ ‘I’m sorry, Helen, this is one of those things I can’t leave…and the man sounds desperate. I’ve just got to go.’ My wife’s lips trembled. ‘All right, I’ll put it in the oven till you come back.’ As I left I saw her carrying the plate away. We both knew it was the end. No Yorkshire pud could survive a visit to Anson Hall.” [Source: The Best of James Herriot the Complete Edition Updated and Expanded]

I ADORE this story! It’s not even about Yorkshire pudding precisely, but it conveys more meaning than if it had been written solely to describe the stuff.

[photo from Google images]

Google yielded this article from the Art and Living section of the Chicago Tribune—February 18, 1987 Pudding is proud side dish By Lisa Anderson:
“James Herriot, Yorkshire’s beloved author-veterinarian, calls it “the most wonderful food in the world.” Most Englishmen still won’t consider a Sunday dinner complete without it. Puffy, chewy, and sublimely fattening, Yorkshire pudding remains one of the most cherished, traditional accompaniments to an English roast beef dinner. Despite its name, Yorkshire pudding is hardly what Americans would call a ‘pudding.’ Made of a batter of flour, eggs, milk, and meat drippings, if anything it looks like a spongy pita bread. Nothing soaks up gravy better than this comforting form of ‘nursery food.’
“…Yorkshire pudding was popularized in the 18th-Century England by thrifty housewives who found it a convenient way to use up the drippings from their roasts and above all, to extend a meal.
“…In modern England, Yorkshire pudding is no longer used primarily as a meat extender but is served in country inns and fine restaurants as a proud side dish, not only to its classic companion, roast beef, but also to various roast meat dishes.”

Maybe someday I’ll travel back to England and sample a chunk of Yorkshire pud with roast beef, but for now, I’ll keep my distance.

WHAT ON EARTH IS THIS POST ABOUT??

If you’re still reading, bravo—you’re a champ!

Like England’s Yorkshire pudding, every family has at least one beloved food that outsiders find unique, odd, or just plain gross. When I was growing up, ours was cream of wheat. We had it most mornings for breakfast for years. We liked to pour milk and honey on it and drink it through a straw. Yeah, I know. To this day, when I’m feeling ill, cream of wheat rescues me like nothing else can. I don’t eat—or drink—it regularly any more, but I’ll always find deep comfort in its warmth.

  

Last week I tried making a pot of cream of wheat for Jay’s and Rose’s breakfast. There were no lumps, it was creamy and sweet, annnnnd they hated it. What?? It should be written in their DNA! It’s one of the few things I could sometimes stomach when I was pregnant with them! Alas, they did not get the gene. [Google images above and below]

Check this out…cream of wheat pudding?? Yikes. Ok, ok, back to the point…

Jeff invented one of the Weird Foods of our family. A few years ago during an intense post-run calorie debt, he started mixing couscous with tuna and mayo to get more umph from a single can of tuna. I call it tunamush, all one word. He has made this goop for the kids enough times that they LOVE it, and whenever they ask for tuna and crackers, I know they mean tunamush. It took me a year or two to get my courage up enough to try the foul mixture. When I finally did sample it, I decided that while it’s not as awful as it looks, it’s still not for me. But I managed to swallow my gags to learn how to make it for Jay and Rose. I give it to them on days we’re out of bread when I don’t feel like making more, like today.

It’s warm. It’s mushy. It’s got a suspicious fishy-meaty flavor. It’s a filler-meat-extender. Can you see why I started pondering Yorkshire pudding? Glop Glob Plunk.

It’s quick and easy to make though! Put half a cup of dry couscous in a bowl. Boil about 2/3 cup of water, pour it on top, and wait 5 minutes for the couscous to absorb it and soften. Then drain a can of tuna, scrape it into the couscous with 2 plops of Miracle Whip, mix it up and there you have it. Lunch for 2 extra-hungry kids for less than a dollar.

They eat it with Wheat Thins…

…or swallow it straight down from a spoon.

And that’s the White Things’ version of Yorkshire pudding.

One year later

Today I realized that it’s been a YEAR since my last pixie hairchop. A  year and a week, actually.

ZERO: October 4, 2013—after my last pixie. Sniff.

ONE MONTH: November 2, 2012

TWO MONTHS: December 23, 2012

THREE MONTHS: January 1, 2013—The Hides-All Headband

THREE MONTHS: January 10, 2013—Bang relief

January 25, 201—mini pigtails AND the Headband.

January 29, 2013: salon poof after a trim

FIVE MONTHS: March 10, 2013—baby Chase

SIX-POINT-FIVE MONTHS: April 19, 2013—annoying

[grumble]

ALMOST NINE MONTHS: June 20, 2013—another post-trim salon coif-a-doodle-doo

Fixed it, but WILL THIS EVER END?

June 22, 2012: French braid!!

TEN MONTHS: July 14, 2013

ELEVEN MONTHS: August 19, 2013—First “pony tail”

ONE YEAR AND ONE WEEK (and 4 or 5 trims) LATER: October 11, 2013—half ponytail-“bunlet.” It’s about 2-3 inches from my shoulders now. Not bad for one year, eh?

I actually figured out how to make a rudimentary collage (gasp) for the final comparison:

I downloaded Picasa to make this thing. I despise experimenting with new programs. In fact, I haven’t learned how to do much of anything new on a computer in at least a decade, so this was a major stretch for my technological abilities. Be thankful.

Summary: my hair is growing! [little by little] Hopefully soon I’ll be able to tie it all up and go back to my lifelong habit of ponytail wearing. I’ll probably let it get nice and long and flowy for a while and then repeat this whole process again in a few years. The pixie cut journey has taught me that It’s Just Hair. Hair is always annoying in some way or another, short or long or [especially] in between. So do what you want with it—it’ll grow back or go back eventually! It’s a very liberating feeling.