Shaking it up a little.

For the past 20 or so years I've had the same morning routine. Get up, use the bathroom, shower, get dressed, brush my teeth, put my contacts in and do something with my hair (the teeth and contacts might get swapped around, but the contacts definitely have to come before the hair or there are sorry sorry results). Recently I found that I lacked desire to brush my teeth. Surely not from a hygienic standpoint nor from any notion that it was okay not to do it. I just felt...well...like it was another time-suck in my rush to get out of the bathroom and get Kailin out of their bedroom before she woke Colby and/or get downstairs to check email and get coffee before the boys arrived and my day officially started. Obviously it is not acceptable or desirable not to brush one's teeth in the morning.

I decided to shake up the old routine. Teeth brushing now comes before my shower and you know - it's working great. It's interesting, though, that I'd been using the same routine for 20 years. It never even occurred to me that it had been that long until I changed it and then stopped to think about it. I wonder what else I've been doing for 20 years without realizing?

Fondue Fiasco

I had a brilliant idea to make cheese fondue for dinner last week. We love fondue and I happened to have come across a recipe for beer cheese fondue recently and wanted to try it out. I've made fondue before but haven't really found a recipe I love. I made focaccia bread to dip and we had carrots, celery and apples as well. That was the end of the good experience. The plan.

I shredded the cheese and tossed it with flour just like the recipe said. I followed the recipe to the T. What I got was a large amount of melty cheese below a layer of cheesy liquid. If I heated it enough and stirred rapidly, I could get the liquid to incorporate. At that point, I thought it had "come together" and I dished some onto plates to cool a little for the kids (we'd done this when we had our friends over recently for fondue and it worked great). When I stopped cutting apples to check the temp of the goo on the kids' plates, I discovered a solid lump of cheese. I called Steve in for council.


We agreed I should try adding a little milk (despite the fact that checking the large pot revealed that we'd returned to a state of cheese on the bottom, cheesy liquid on the top). That seemed to help enough that maybe at least the adults could eat it from the pot. I sliced some cheese for the kids' plates and we sat down. It became immediately clear that we'd be having a VERY brief window in which to eat the "fondue" before it returned to a state of a solid lump of cheese. I reheated it once in the middle of dinner to sort of make it usable, but it was so stringy when we dipped into it that we were having to wrap it around the dippers manually and then "cut it off" with our fingers. NOT optimal, appetizing, or desirable. Needless to say, the search for a good fondue recipe is still on and that one found it's way into the recycling bin.

Are there any seasoned fonduers out there who know where I went wrong?

Pinther Pan

Kailin kept asking me for "Pinther Pan" last week. A friend brought Peter Pan over once, but we don't own it, so although I convinced myself that's what she was asking for and kept telling her we didn't have it, she was insistent that we did. Back and forth we went. Round and round. We don't have it, "yes, we do!" she insisted.

It wasn't Peter Pan she wanted - it was the Pink Panther! She's still calling him Pinther Pan or sometimes Peter Panther. At any rate, I've been putting on some Boomerang for the kids now and again for fun. No educational value whatsoever in Tom and Jerry or Pinther Pan or the Smurfs, but they love them all and I love that they love them. They sit and giggle and point and it's music to my ears. So we watch. I didn't realize how violent Tom and Jerry are, though!! It's silly violence and there's no blood and no one dies and the kids don't seem to be engaging in violence toward each other as a result of watching it, but it did get me to thinking about the difference in cartoons these days vs. when we were kids. Really - what if Tyrone came running along and pushed Tasha out the upstairs window of her house? Or what if Dora and Boots lit some dynamite under Swiper and watched him ride off into the sunset in a cloud of sparks? It just wouldn't happen. I'm not saying that the changes are a bad thing. Just interesting myself in the lack of rivalries in today's offerings for kids. Everyone gets along - then again maybe that's not such a bad thing!

An arrogant drunken sailor...

That's what you'd have if you combined the verbal stylings of my kids right now.

Steve and I overheard Kailin telling Colby that she is a genius last night. I don't even know where she's heard that word!! (although at least it's one I don't mind that she's repeating!) We've also heard her say "you can't be trusted" over the past two days. I wasn't sure where she'd heard that one before. She's using it in context correctly, but I don't think she knows what it really means. I was really wracking my brain about where she might've heard that someone couldn't be trusted when it dawned on me. Veggie Tales. Her favorite episode ("The Haman one" as she calls it) has a song about "those who can't be trusted". Mystery solved. Odd to think about which words and phrases make an impact on kids!!

Colby, if you haven't already figured it out, is the drunken sailor portion of the gig. His vocal stylings these days include special versions of sit/seat and also frog. What is it with my kids and frog?! Steve wants to make sure we get both on video before they're gone. Ha ha ha. He's also got some less offensive terms right now. Go-gee (doggy), bee-ba (pizza), wuh-bu (love you), and "I know...." (I don't know) are favorites around here.

Needless to say there's never a dull moment!

WHAT WERE THEY THINKING????

Who named cling wrap? I know I'm not the only one who's noticed that it never clings to anything but itself and even then sometimes it doesn't do that. I was about to complain about it and then thought "well maybe the intention is that you would wrap the item entirely in the cling wrap such that it would be contacting itself and thus cling." However, in my experience, it only ever clings to itself as you're taking it off the roll. THEN it's clingarific fantasticness. Try to apply it to anything you'd like to keep fresh and it's suddenly about as clingy as plain white paper. And yes I know that there's now Press and Seal stuff out there. And for a leak tight seal I'm glad they invented it. But seriously, in all these years since cling-wrap was first invented and we've developed computers and memory that are infinitesimally tiny compared to what they used to be, we still can't master - CLING WRAP? REALLY? Wow.

A rockin' party...

We had Colby's birthday party on Saturday. It was such a nice one!! I have my husband to thank for most of it. Although I did make some of the food and decorate the cupcakes, he did ALLL the cleaning and prep work. He's discovered, I'm a little ashamed to admit, that doing the work himself is a far better choice than having a lunatic, out of her mind wife on party day. It seems to work for both of us and it does make me a much nicer person.

Anyway, it was wonderful to see Colby so surrounded by love! He was his silly, social little self and flitted around to anyone and everyone. He was VERY excited about opening his gifts and after he felt he'd waited long enough, he walked on over and carefully moved a small gift on top of the largest one and dug right in. Ha ha ha. Someone yelled, "Colby's opening gifts" and we were off to the races. He loved everything, although at the rate he was going it was going to take 9 years to open them all as he wanted to carefully and completely dispose of EACH SCRAP of paper before proceeding. It was cute!

He blew out his own candles (okay, a little help from dad - but he did actually blow them (and they flickered a bit on the first try). He didn't seem to know what all the singing was about and got a little wide-eyed about that, but in the end he was okay with it. I took a bazillion pictures, so I'm posting most of them to our Shutterfly site instead of here or this would be a huge huge list of pictures with not a lot of text.

The house was warm and bustling with conversation and energy - just the way I like it. I did stop and say a little prayer of thanks for the wonderful family we have and that they love my kids as much as they do.

A banner day!

Owing to myriad errands needing to be accomplished on Friday, I was unable to post.... but I'm ECSTATIC to announce that Kailin had her first DRY NIGHT on Thursday night!!!! She woke up Friday entirely dry!!! (the feat has yet to be repeated, but we are so very proud of our little girl!)