The Heathen Housewife

So I’ve been behind on showing the pictures. My excuses involve the massive sinus headache I’ve been living with for oh, say, the last week, along with the fact that the latest season of the Sopranos just came out on DVD. I still have the headache, and there are still Sopranos episodes waiting for me, but I love y’all, so I’m taking the time to put up some pictures.

First, though, I have to share a little scene from today that made my day, and if you have a heart in your body will at least hopefully ignite a spark of joy. The girls and I were out to lunch with our friends at Panera. I reached for the piece of baguette on my tray and started tearing a chunk of crust off for Sophie to gnaw on, like I’ve done a few times before. Sophie loves holding her own piece of grown-up food and slobbering it to bits. It is incredibly cute watching her grab it with her fat little hands and pass it from one hand to the other, put it in her mouth, take it out and examine it, then put it back in, then take it back out and hold it out for me to examine, smile and nod. But that’s not the best part.

As I reached for the bread on the tray, and Sophie in her high chair watched, she started vibrating with excitement. She knew she was getting that bit of crust and could.not.wait. Her eyes spread wide and she grabbed my arm and tried to pull the entire baguette to her slimy open mouth. This was the kind of moment that in any average day, when it’s just me and the girls, I would have noted with a little smile in passing and moved on to helping Julie with her lunch or eating my own without thinking much of it. But that’s not the best part.

In the brief moment as I picked up the bread and I started to notice Sophie’s excitement, I heard a gasp from the other side of the table and noticed my friend J, (also a stay-at-home mom of girls the same age – our lives our so similar, it’s spooky) who was smiling and laughing at our little scene as just described. It was such a priviledge to share that moment with her because it made me appreciate it so much more. What would have been a passing smirk became a full-on laughing fit and a moment of true appreciation for my baby and the million tiny ways in which she makes my life worth living, even when we are both suffering with colds and she is waking me up all night to tell me about it. That was the best part. Now, let’s look at some photos.

Here’s a better picture of Sophie in her dinosaur/dragon outfit. For no reason other than it’s so cute.

Here are all the kids at Julie’s cousin’s birthday party last weekend. Aren’t they cute?

Julie and Joe the next day playing with the party favor we brought home, or one of them – the birthday girl’s mom was awfully generous and every kid got a typical bag of loot, plus one of these go fish games. Julie got HOURS of play with those fish over the weekend, and not just playing the game. She kept taking them out of the pond and arranging them in different ways, then putting them back “to bed” in the game and making up little stories about how they weren’t feeling very well.

Julie brought home a shaker-thing from preschool on Monday. A thing created from two paper cups decorated in marker and stickers, then filled with bells and other noisy things before being taped together. This was fine, except that the markers weren’t colorfast on the cups, and as she tends to do, Julie stuck it in her mouth with these results. No problem – it washed right off. Notice the pants? She loves the pants.

Sophie proudly showing off the spoon she confiscated from me during a lunchtime food-tasting ritual, as well as the two bottom teeth freshly poking through her gums.

And here she is showing off her newly-mastered pincer-grasp maneuver as she captures a piece of puffed rice.

A tired Julie eating dinner tonight. She is sporting a boo-boo under her eye where some kid at the mall play area hit her with a book the other day. Don’t even get me started on how many things were wrong with THAT picture.

I’m sitting in my car outside my polling place, listening to MPR and drinking a decaf mocha from Starbucks while I type on my Sidekick. Julie’s at school and Sophie is sleeping in the back so I’m taking advantage of my moments’ peace.

Let’s all vote today, people! Woot! We have to exercise what little freedom we have left, lest it be taken away.

I’m still fighting this nasty cold thing. Not going to share the disgusting details with you, but now I really understand why Sophie was so crabby last week when she was in the throes of it.

Julie and I (well, and Sophie was there too) went out yesterday and bought yarn for a new project for her. She is very excited about it, and it is small and easy enough that it should be done in a week or two. All I’m going to tell you is that it involves two skeins of Cascade 220 in pink and purple, and very big needles.

Finally, Cheddar Bunnies are small snack crackers like Goldfish, but made by Annie’s brand and shaped like lil’ rabbits. They are made with some organic ingredients and more importantly, without trans fats. Julie can’t eat them because they’re made out of wheat, but I had a craving for them this week, so I treated myself to a box.

Looking back on this weekend, I think I just had about the closest thing I could possibly expect to a weekend off while staying at home, given that my job is stay-at-home mom. And I didn’t even really plan it that way! I had to just now go back and look at my entry from Friday to remember it, but Friday evening went pretty well, although there was some waking of babies after I hit the Post button. Still, I have no complaints.

Some of the highlights:

I managed to take naps with Sophie both yesterday and today while Joe played with Julie. I felt a little guilty about checking out for the second afternoon in a row, but it was so nice to cuddle up with the baby and get the extra sleep that I so desperately needed. I miss being able to do that every day if I needed to like I did with Julie when she was a baby. I’m still in the throes of this nasty cold, too, so I felt like I at least had a bit of an excuse.

I got to go to the grocery store by myself on Saturday morning. I offered to take Julie with me, but she insisted she wanted to stay home with Daddy, and Sophie was sleeping when I left so off I went free as a lark!

I didn’t have to cook dinner Saturday night. We went to that birthday party and ate take-out barbecue there. It was good, and we didn’t have to clean up the kitchen afterwards either.

I got to go over to the neighbor’s house and sit around drinking a beer for a while last night. We do that every so often, and she called me up just as the kids were going to bed, and I just couldn’t turn her down. She wants to learn how to knit, but I think we’re going to have to do it *before* we start drinking next time.

This morning I made pancakes for breakfast – now that Julie can eat eggs and milk, it’s much easier to create something that tastes like a real pancake for the whole family to eat. By the way, she’s continuing to do great with the new foods. She’s shown no signs of problems at all with eggs and most of the dairy we’ve tried so far. Butter, cheese and milk cooked in things have been no problem. I did give her some yogurt the other day, and that produced a huge raging rash in the diaper area. At least, the rash showed up a few hours after she ate the yogurt, so I’m assuming they’re related. For the mean time, she’ll continue drinking rice milk and I’ll keep avoiding yogurt and kefir, but that’s no big deal.

Tonight I tried a new recipe for dinner, with mixed results. Here’s the thing. We have a chain of stores around here called Let’s Dish. They’re great – you go spend an evening assembling ingredients for eight or twelve meals in ziploc bags and foil pans, which you then take home and put in your freezer. You can take them out one at a time and prepare them with minimal work for an easy, but wholesome dinner. I’ve used it a couple of times and liked it, and I still get their e-newsletters. I would probably still use sometimes, but most of their menus don’t fit our dietary restrictions. Even so, every month when I get the e-mail, I always go check out the menus, and sometimes I get ideas of new things to try. This month, they had some chicken dish with a cream sauce and a cranberry chutney. Sounded great, and now that Julie can eat dairy, cream sauces are an option for us.

So I clicked over to the Food Network’s site and found Poached Chicken in Norman Style Cider Cream Sauce and an accompanying Cranberry Chutney recipe. Sounded good. I noticed right away that the chutney recipe, despite claiming to provide only eight servings, was pretty huge. I pared it down to use just one 12-oz bag of cranberries and three apples, and still ended up with at least eight servings’ worth. It was sweet, but good. So good that Julie didn’t want to eat anything else on her plate at dinner tonight. The poached chicken also turned out okay, although it took longer to cook than I expected from the recipe, and I had a big problem with the cream sauce.

Now, I am no expert on cream sauces. Before the kids, I never made them because I was too busy trying to stay thin to eat something so decadent. Then Julie’s allergies came along. Now, I still think cream sauce is pretty decadent, but I’m a little less obsessed about my weight even though I am much heavier than I was before. So I thought we’d give it a try, but I bought half-and-half instead of heavy cream as called for in the recipe. Well, as soon as I poured the cream into the pan with the partially-reduced cider, it curdled. Broken cream sauce is so disappointing, and although I went ahead and reduced it down, it never did get thick or creamy, but remained a watery substance full of lumps. We ate it, but it wasn’t very good. Any advice here would be greatly appreciated. Do I need to use the full-fat cream? Do I need to mix a little of the hot cider into the cream seperately to warm it up so it doesn’t cook, kind of like you would for a custard? I’m clueless.

I’m off to watch an episode or two of 24 on DVD, eat cheddar bunnies and knit with the blankie for a bit before I head to bed.

It is just after 8, and both girls have been in bed for long enough for me to do a couple things, and I am not utterly exhausted. I come to you tonight prepared to say nice things. Happy things, even. No whining tonight, I promise. They are a bit random, but I suppose that’s better than the meltdowns you’ve been getting all week.

1. I have chocolate. I’ve been sneaking some chocolate into my diet lately and Sophie hasn’t seemed to notice – she’s been too busy worrying about the teeth, and/or maybe she’s outgrown the sensitivity. I bought a couple of high quality bars at the co-op the other day, meaning to send at least one off to my SP9 pal, but it’s looking like she’s out of luck, at least this time. One of the bars is Dagoba’s xocolatl, which is dark chocolate, chilies and nibs. I love chocolate and spicy! I’ve been known to put chili powder in my chocolate chip cookies, so this bar was perfect for me, and I managed to make it last almost 24 hours. The other bar is Divine Dark Chocolate, and it is also very good.

2. I managed to make a pretty good dinner tonight – beef stroganoff – and it was fun to be able to feed it to Julie including the sauce this time. She didn’t seem to notice the difference, but we had clean plates all around. Sophie has been eating small bits of cereal like Oatios and rice puffs the last couple of weeks, and can keep herself happily occupied for something like half an hour or more just sitting in her high chair practicing her pincer grasp and slobbering all over the cereal. It is very cute.

3. Julie had an “accident” this afternoon while we were out at the little local mall. I had just taken her to the potty about 15 minutes earlier, and she did “go”, but then she must have had too much to drink during lunch and bam! suddenly there was a flood while she was sitting on one of the little coin-op rides in the hallway. I am looking at this as a good thing because it took me so totally by surprise. She’s been mostly accident-free for a few weeks now, and it takes an exception to prove a rule. Also, I managed to stay upbeat and positive after it happened, told someone in the management office so they could clean it up, and got her home without a meltdown on anyone’s part. We had clean clothes for her in the car, but I figured it was better just to head home since it would have been too cold to change her, and we were just about done there anyway.

4. I got another fun package in the mail today. This one was yarn I ordered last week from Little Knits, and is mostly for my SP9 pal. I stumbled on this vendor by doing a Google search on my pal’s favorite yarn and they had the lowest price I could find for it. While I was there I also picked up one skein of sock yarn for myself, nothing extremely special, but the price was right and I couldn’t resist. This site has a pretty good selection of deeply-discounted sale yarn – go take a look! The yarn for my pal is really yummy. It’s going to take quite a bit of self-control to send it off to her, but seeing as how I already ate her chocolate, I guess I better go ahead and give her the yarn. I’m not going to say what it is because it would give my identity right away if she’s reading.

5. Tomorrow we are going to a birthday party for Julie’s cousin who is turning 3. I already have the present wrapped and ready to go, and they are serving food that Julie can eat, with the exception of the cake. Luckily, we have some of Julie’s cake left in the freezer still and can just thaw a chunk of that for her.

6. My Netflix videos finally arrived. It never ceases to amaze me how many days of the week I end up going without a video, considering that I am on their 3-at-a-time plan and usually don’t watch more than one per night. You’d think I’d be without no more than one night a week, but it seems more like 3 or 4 nights a week without. Tonight, I have three to choose from, so guess what I’m off to do before bed time! Well, that and some laundry.

Sophie was up a few times again last night, but at least I got a head start on the sleep business which meant that I was slightly more rested this morning. Well rested enough that I got through the day without being quite as crabby and out of it as I was on Wednesday. The girls, they took it all out of me and I’m pooped again, so I’m going to go to bed early again tonight, but maybe there will be time to watch a DVD with Joe first – he got another installments of the Boondocks show from Adult Swim, and I’m dying to see it because the first one was very funny.

In the mean time, here are a few random things from my day. Julie was at pre-school this morning. I haven’t said much about pre-school lately, but we are loving the pre-school. When I picked her up, she had this to bring home. It’s the pumpkin she decorated some time earlier this week for Halloween. I think it’s hilarious.

Here is the contents of the package I got in the mail yesterday. Claudia in Connecticut sent me more amazingly wonderful sock yarn leftovers. People, this is top-shelf stuff. It’s Anne, Koigu, Lorna’s Laces, Claudia Handpaint, and another baggie of som luscious handpaint merino. The blankie is making rumbling noises about wanting a snack, but this is all the quality of stuff that I’m saving for the next blankie or other modular project. I’m seriously considering a sweater or something else just for me, but I’m not going to think too hard about it till the blankie is done. Thanks, Claudia!

Finally, I was sitting in here at my computer nursing Sophie this afternoon while Julie played out in the living room as she often does. Then I hear this little voice say “I’m stuck.” I kind of ignored it at first because I like to give her a chance to figure out a solution to whatever problem she’s worked herself into. A moment later I hear “Mama help.” Still not too upset or panicked, so I took my time getting in there and I find this scene:

That’s Julie in Sophie’s Jumparoo. Darn kid climbed in there and I couldn’t help laughing at her even while I was telling her not to do that again. Luckily the camera was nearby, and I caught a picture of her naughty little smile.

Sophie’s fussing – gotta go!

Really. Ex.Haust.ED. I’m going to bed in a minute, much later than I should have, but much earlier than I ever do any other night. I’m tired. So tired. Sophie is having more sleep issues, and I have a cold, and we have been running around on all kinds of errands and play dates and stuff all week, and there will be more tomorrow.

And Sophie is like a tar-baby – you just can’t put her down right now or she cries. Yesterday I took her to the doctor to get her checked out because this was driving me crazy, and she is perfectly okay – just working on at least 4-6 new teeth. I lucked out and we got to see the best pediatric nurse practitioner there ever was, and she was really nice and supportive about the whole thing. Sent me home with multiple bottles of Motrin. And even so, Sophie was up a LOT last night, and I’ve been dipping into the sleep deprivation barrel a bit too much lately and it’s all adding up. So off to bed with me even though the house is a mess and I’m not going to share with the internet the excrutiating detail of our very happy Halloween. I’m just going to show you one picture and you’re going to be grateful, dammit.

I did get something wonderful and exciting in the mail today, something that I will photograph and hopefully share with the world tomorrow. Good night!