The Heathen Housewife

It has been another rough week at the Kang house. I guess I’m just going to be honest here. I haven’t posted this week because I just didn’t feel like writing, and I didn’t have much happy-happy joy-joy to share around the interweb. I mean, don’t worry – nothing catastrophic came to pass around here. It was just more of the same damn old crap that happens to come along with all the good stuff in life, but it really finally caught up with me this week.

Oh, and I started to type up my whining moans about how hard my life was this week, but it is boring even for me to listen to. Let me try again, only shorter. Sophie got better, Julie got sick. No playdates, no school, no field trips. Leaving me overstimulated and feeling like I couldn’t possibly keep up with the needs of my two lovely children, let alone consider any of my own needs. Everyone was even more sleep-deprived than usual because Sophie has been teething again and keeping us all up at night. It all came to a head on Friday when I found myself screaming at the girls, then all three of us crying our eyes out till Joe came home and made everything better.

And now, two days later, everything does look a lot better. Julie is feeling better and will be going back to school in the morning. I think we’re going to make it. And here’s the funny part – I have a whole pile of pictures freshly downloaded from the camera which prove that there were happy, good moments in the week. Let’s focus on those now…

Julie was quite cute all curled up on the couch with her blankie and her bunny.

There was some warmer weather this week, and I think it was on Wednesday that I stuck my head out the back door and snapped a couple pictures of the Spring’s first green shoots popping up out of the ground.

Of course, it went ahead and snowed on Thursday. And then it snowed again on Saturday and today. But I think it will melt off again this week. We will hopefully be playing outdoors some day this week – I can’t wait to put the girls in their rain boots and let them go splash around in the snow-melt puddles.

I made sourdough bread again, and it turned out even better this time around than the first. The loaves were giant!

Sophie and Julie spread the paper from the easel all across the floor and spent half an hour or so coloring on it. This event was made even better by the fact that they were using the back of the paper that had already been colored on. Julie was just as busy as Sophie is in this picture, but she ran away when she saw me with the camera.

We dyed Easter eggs yesterday. The actual egg dyeing took about five minutes, but I let them use paint brushes with the dye on some paper towels, and that lasted another ten minutes, and then they used the stickers that came with the dye, and then they played with the little egg holder thingies, and in all we got almost an hour out of the activity.

Oh look! I finished the final versions of the sock cuffs. I ended up reknitting both cuffs, for a total of four lace cuffs worth of work in the end. I am happy with these results – I kept the opening in the front, because that is where *I* think it looks best – it helps accommodate the raised instep of the foot there. The edges look much neater with that bit of garter stitch on either side. I did take one bit of advice and got rid of one layer of faggotting at the top, which I had been considering myself. I’ll write the pattern up in the next week or so, time and energy permitting.

The girls got Easter baskets this morning…I struggled with the decision of whether to bring the Easter Bunny into our home, but in the end I decided that the girls should not be deprived of a tradition that many, if not most, of their school friends will be talking about every year of their childhood. And, after all, Easter is an old pagan holiday and the bunny an old symbol of fertility that the Christians adopted for their morbid raise-the-dead holiday (sorry! sorry! I know better, I do, I just couldn’t help myself….Jesus was not a zombie!)

But anyway, the Easter Bunny left two cards at the top of the stairs last night, with long long pieces of yarn attached to them for the girls to follow down and around into the living room to their semi-hidden baskets.

Each girl received a stuffed animal, new spring pajamas, and a handful of candy.

Candy that was consumed befor…

and after breakfast.

And really, it was a small handful of jelly beans, a few Whopper eggs, and a few dark chocolate foil-wrapped eggs. I’m happy with my decision to give them just enough candy that they could eat just about all they wanted in the course of a morning, and be done with it – no fights later about when or how much more they could have, and when they were done there was a big tooth-brushing session to clear out the sugar.

Okay, and I tried a new recipe last night. I read a blog called Make Your Own Damn Dinner, which I love, and she’s written a few times about this panko-crusted fish, which sounded awesome. I always sort of ignored the idea, though, because Joe generally doesn’t care for fish (and I’ve generally come to terms with it – it tastes nasty to him, I’m not going to make him eat it!) and before this fall because Julie wouldn’t have been able to eat the panko crumbs.

Anyway, it dawned on me that Joe *does* willingly eat fried fish sometimes – as in he even orders fish and chips at restaurants occasionally – so maybe he would like this, and I went ahead and gave it a whirl. OMG! It was so easy, so yummy, so wonderful! The only bad part was that it did kind of stink up our kitchen for the next 24 hours or so. I served it with steamed veggies, but next time will make up some cole slaw to go with it.

And! I thought the leftovers would be worthless, so I actually foisted some of the fillets on our lovely neighbors-across-the-street while they were still hot, and the neighbors loved it so much they called me begging for the recipe an hour later. But we still had a bit left over, and I reheated it in the toaster oven for lunch today. I made my own yummy version of filet-o-fish, and it ROCKED!

I mean, nice whole-wheat burger bun instead of the yucky white-bread version, real cheddar cheese instead of the plastic processed stuff, and fresh fish in actual fillets instead of the little uber-processed squares from the freezer. I could have eaten about three of them. I am SO making this fish again, stinky kitchen or no. Thanks, Badger!

Today Julie was feeling much better. Joe brought out the art supplies and she went nuts with them. She’s named her pig Will and has been talking about him non-stop all day as if he is her baby and she is taking care of him.

Oh, and you can see in the foreground, I got a few rows of knitting in on my snowflake scarf before Sophie woke up. To top off all the good, we got to go eat dinner at Joe’s cousin’s house tonight. Her mother-in-law was cooking, and it was a fine feast of ham and scalloped potatoes and other good stuff which I did not have to cook. Life is looking much better now than it did just a few days ago.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 24th, 2008 at 3:49 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.