The Barefoot Kitchen Witch

Strip Tease

Julia has learned how to remove her diaper.

Last night I had changed her diaper and hadn't put her pajamas on yet because at that moment the dryer stopped running so I went over to that part of the basement (on the other side of the child safety gate) to fold the laundry.

While I was over there, Julia, after playing with the little tabs for a few minutes, ripped off her diaper and proceeded to race around the room, grinning triumphantly.

Bill caught her (no daughter of mine is going to run around shamelessly like that!) and re-diapered her and headed back to the TV part of the basement.  I was watching in between folding the shirts and pants and matching the socks.  And I saw Julia, after Bill dusted off his hands in triumph and left her standing there, modestly covered up again.  And she had a look in her eye as she sauntered off to where the toys are.  A look, I tell you.  One that does not bode well for us when she hits her teens.  Or before that, at this rate.

And the next second - there she was - racing out of her hiding spot near the Home Depot Work Bench - diaper in hand. 

And I confess:  I turned away, laughing to myself, to wait for Bill to see her.

"Oh Julia!!"  He corralled her and got the diaper away from her - at this point she was having a grand old time - what a fun game!  He told her to come over and get her diaper back on, but instead she sat down, a little out of his reach, legs TOO WIDE APART, and she just grinned.  Proudly.

But he won that round.  Got her in her diaper AND into her one-piece blanket sleeper.  But this will be a short-lived victory for him...she already unzips her own coat...this new zipper won't take long to conquer at all.

All We Do

Alex and Julia and Bill are in the other room and Alex is hollering something that sounds like "ALL WE DO!" over and over...and in between his thundering cry is little Julia's echo of "Do!  Do!" 

Her vocabulary, by the way, is just increasing by the second. 

"kinny" means "candy". 

"es mah coot" means "it's my coat"

those are my current favorites.

Just for Laughs

I have started a new photo album over there on the right - "Cakes for Laughs."  I used to design and make a lot of birthday cakes - it was one of my (then many) creative outlets.  I was flipping through my own "Album of Cakes" - a photo record of a lot of the cakes I've made over the years - and decided to post a selection of them. 

This first batch is of cakes that were done on or near Halloween over the years.  Halloween is my sister's birthday, so a bunch of the cakes were for her.  My nephew's birthday is a few days later, and so most of the time the two birthdays have been celebrated together.

I know there are more - there seem to be gaps in time in the album.

Anyway - in a couple of weeks I'll do another bunch of them.

I don't pretend that they are great in any way - but they were fun, and I post them for my own amusement as much as anyone else's. Anyway - over there - "Cakes for Laughs - the Halloween Series" unfolds.....

Worth a Thousand Words

I was looking through a couple of OLD photo albums of mine.  Oh my god.  They are hysterical.  And for the most part, the contents will not be posted here.

The first time I ever had a camera - a little instamatic with one of those flash cubes you had to stick on top - I shot the whole roll of film in about 90 seconds - much to the consernation of my photographer father.

I noticed a tendancy throughout the two albums I've looked at - 65% of the pictures at that time (70s-80s) were of family pets.  There are a LOT of pictures of cats.  And my doberman.  And the things they were doing.  Or not doing.  Or when they were sleeping.  On a chair.  On the floor.  On my bed.  On my sister's bed.  You get the idea. 

Anyway, I'll scan some pictures in and post them today if I can.  Right now I hear children coming.  And one of them doesn't sound happy....

Career Day

I didn't want to get up this morning.  I've got the last of a cold - it's in my chest now, which, as far as I'm concerned, is the least fun of all the various respiratory areas a cold can visit.

But anyway.  Also, it is Monday, and I had a great creative, productive weekend and I didn't want the fun to be over.  But too bad for me - it's Monday anyway. 

I woke up reluctantly and hit the snooze button a couple of times more than I should have.  While Bill was in the shower and the kids were still asleep, I curled up in a fetal ball under the covers and clutched at sleep, my eyes shut determinedly.

To no avail.  He got out of the shower, the alarm went off again, and I had to get up.

The rest of the morning was typical weekday morning chaos ("Alex, put your pants on.  Alex.  ALEX.  Put.  Your.  Pants.  On.  Yes you can.  Yes, you CAN.")

It was also COLD this morning - I actually warmed up the car before bringing the kids to daycare and me to work.  Winter is coming. 

We got to daycare and I lugged Julia, her lunch bag, her pillowcase with sheets and blanket for nap time...and Alex's 80 ton backpack that I carry because we move along faster as a group this way.  He carried the toy panda that he decided to bring along this morning.

First stop - Julia's room.  Put her stuff away, hung up her coat, and persuaded her to allow me to leave.

Next, down the other end of the hall to Alex's room.  The Preschool Room.  The doorway to the big wide world, apparently.

We went in and I asked Alex to go take his coat off and hang it up while I signed him in and put the cold things from his lunch bag into the little fridge they have.  I brought his backpack to the other end of that side of the room (it's a big room, roughly divided into three smaller room areas.).  As I was putting his pillowcase of bedding on the stacked-up cots and putting his backpack (which contains at least two changes of clothing, including underwear, socks, and shoes) in the box with all the others, I heard a voice behind me.

It's his teacher - I think she's actually in charge of the entire preschool world there, but it seems like she is also specifically in charge of the group of kids Alex is with.  (There are three groups, identified among the teachers and parents by color.  Alex is in the red group.)  She is not a whole heck of a lot taller than Alex, really, and I don't know how old she is, but she is kind of intimidating.  She's old school.  She commands and everyone obeys.  I think she's a good person and has good intentions, and when Alex told me he didn't like her I figured it was because she's not as cuddley and babysitter-like as a lot of the other teachers there. 

But this morning she pissed me off.  And if I hadn't been all congested and murky-minded with this stupid cold, I probably would have spoken up more at the time, but I sounded kind of like a soft-spoken Elmer Fudd this morning, and would not have been able to argue effectively.

So here's what I'm irritated about.  She asked me if, at dinner time, we all sit around and talk about our day.  So I'm thinking, obviously it's been a while since she had small children at home (if she had any at all - I don't know) because our dinner time conversation involves a lot of talk about the food on the table, how much more Alex needs to eat or wants to eat, and assorted "anh!  anh!" noises from Julia indicating that she wants MORE sauteed green peppers and onions (no, really, this was part of last night's dinner) and someone really needs to put them on her tray NOW.  Dinner is a fast-paced sporting event with little time for conversation.  Bill mostly focuses on eating his meal before it gets cold, and I suck down what I can while it's hot and reheat the rest later while I'm doing the dishes.

So, no, we don't really discuss our day at the table.

But of course the BAD PARENT BAD PARENT light started blinking on and off in my congested head and so I said that he and I talk about the day on our ride home from daycare. 

I had no idea where this was going, but I immediately sensed that I am doing something wrong as a parent and he will be scarred for life if I don't mend my ways.  So I waited to find out which of my ways need mending.

Turns out she was bringing this up because when Alex grows up he wants to be an elephant.

He doesn't want to train elephants, he doesn't want to feed or care for them or operate on them if they have appendicitis.

He wants to be an elephant.

So apparently I need to ask him more open-ended questions (?????) so he will...I don't even know...DECIDE ON A CAREER PATH BEFORE HE TURNS 4????

It was weird.  And like I said before, I was all congested and couldn't talk like a smart-sounding person, so I just watched her talk up at me and nodded my head and (to my credit) pointed out that maybe he DOES want to be an elephant.  When I was his age I wanted to be a cat, after all. 

She "reassured me" that at his age she wasn't really worried about it - but then why bring it up at all?  Just because he didn't say the normal things, like "I want to be a fireman" or "I want to be a baseball player" or "I want to be a stockbroker on Wall Street" or some other clear and accepted career path?  He's a 3 year old child!!!  I sure as hell didn't know what I wanted to be when I grew up at that age. 

And Alex's idea of what people do when they grow up is summed up by this little observation, which he said to me the other day:

"When I'm a grown up I can touch eggs!"

(The whole raw egg thing there...I figure by the time he's an adult he won't touch raw egg and put his fingers in his mouth...something he's quite likely to do at this age.  Why?  BECAUSE HE IS A SMALL CHILD!!!)

But anyway, so my son wants to be an elephant when he grows up.  And apparently this is of some - not much, but clearly SOME - concern to his daycare teacher.

Of course, there is also the distinct possibility that he misunderstood what she was talking about and thought she meant what did he want to be for Halloween, which is a popular topic of discussion at the moment.  And for Halloween he is going to be an elephant.

Yes, but

I may, at times, be a fool...but at least today, I'm a cooking-baking fool.

Springerle will be baked off before I go to bed.

I'm baking oatmeal cookies now - two variations - one with chopped pecans and golden raisins, the other with crystallized ginger and bittersweet chocolate.

And I made a basic sugar cookie dough, too, which, tomorrow, will be transformed into hissing cats, bloodthirsty bats, and pumpkins. 

The timer's going off - I must go now.

Baked Pork Chops

This is an old family favorite.  I think I'm going to make it for dinner tomorrow night.  And serve it with baked potatoes...and maybe a baby spinach salad...

Two Pizzas

I made two pizzas tonight.

Here's what I did:

Took two 16 oz packages of store-bought pizza dough out of the fridge about a couple hours before my projected dinner time.  Set them out on a counter - still in their packages - to come to room temperature.

Then I got the toppings ready...

We're in trouble now

We've been using a portable playpen to block off the stairs to the second floor - to keep Julia penned in on the main floor.

Then she started to get strong enough to move the playpen out of the way, so we put the vacuum cleaner in there and that has worked very well.

Until today.

She has moved the playpen multiple times and each time she gets through the barricade, she books it up the stairs like a little wild creature, quiet and fast.

So I put the stroller in the playpen with the vacuum cleaner, figuring that would buy me a few more weeks of mental health.

But no.

She can move that too. 

Alex loves it:  "Mommy!  Julia's going up the stairs!" And since I was in here fixing a torn page in one of Alex's books, I yelled into the kitchen to Bill, who apparently hadn't heard Alex sound the alarm, because he just kind of said "What?  Where's Julia?  Did she really go up the stairs?"  "YES!" and so he headed up the stairs to catch the little wild creature, with Alex following along, laughing gleefully. 

She is great entertainment for him.

Mail Therapy

So I've been feeling overwhelmed and stressed and depressed and lots of other awful things lately.  Mostly while I'm at work.  Yesterday was particularly bad, actually.  There were moments throughout the day when I just wanted to say "you know what?  I just can't do this any more.  See ya."  but I didn't because I did the math and I don't think we could afford it, plus I really should discuss that sort of thing with Bill first. 

Finally the day finished and I went and got my kids and the day began to improve.

For one thing, on the ride home, out of nowhere, Alex announced "You're a banana sandwich, Mommy!"  He said it like it was some secret I'd been hiding and he'd figured it out and thought it was pretty amusing.

Later on, after we'd been home for a while, and the kids were settled down doing something relatively safe, I got the mail.

And there it was.  My "House on the Hill" catalog.  (I'd link to it but my computer's being weird and I could lose this post so I'll do the linking later...)  House on the Hill is a company that makes and sells springerle molds, among other things.  I've posted a recipe for them somewhere in my recipes category.  I need to restructure that section, now that I'm thinking about it.

Anyway, it brought me a much-needed change of focus.  Here it is, October, and guess what, it's time to start planning the Christmas cookie baking.  YAY!!!  I don't know how to explain how happy that made me, and then, the more I thought about it, mentally planning who I need to bake for, and how many batches I'll need of the different recipes...and I realized, this year will be BETTER than the previous years!!!  I can do MORE!!!  I can go back to doing some of the more time-consuming decorated giant cookies that I used to make YEARS ago!  I can make those really cool gingerbread cookie BOWLS like I did about, oh, probably ten years ago....I HAVE TO START MAKING LISTS!!!

I couldn't sleep last night.  I know I sound nuts.  It's just cookies, after all.  But no, it's way more than cookies.  It's creativity, for one thing.  It's COOKIES, for another.  It's traditions.  It's the holidays.  It's me showing off, probably.  But none of those things compare to the biggest thing of all - the thing that makes all the other elements so VERY possible this year:

My kids are toddlers. 

Both of them. 

I loved both of their babyhoods - I'm not dismissing that section of their lives.  I sort of miss it, when I see little tiny baby clothes at the stores.  But.  Now.  They can play by themselves.  I don't have to carry either one of them everywhere all the time.  They mostly sleep through the night, which means so do I.  In short - I have more time and more freedom.  I need a little of that right about now. 

And another fun thing - Alex helped me last year, cutting out the almond stars.  He will help again.  And maybe Julia can help too...though I can just see her just ignoring the whole "helping" aspect and grabbing blobs of dough off the table and shoving them into her gaping maw as fast as she can....

But still.  I am wound up now.  If I didn't have to work today, I would have stayed up last night making my lists - of cookies, of ingredients, of people I'll send these to or bring them to, of other stuff I need (cookie tins, for one thing...)...ah, the bliss of lists.

We'll bake some cookies this weekend, me and Alex.  You know, for practice.

New Teacher

Just got home from work and from picking the kids up at daycare.  Alex had his first full day in the preschool room today, and I asked him if he had a good day, what he did, etc. 

And then I asked him who his teachers were...and he couldn't think of their names, so I prompted him with one of them, and then he said

"And Miss Brabra." 

"You mean Miss Barbara?"

"Yeah, Miss Brabra.  There's TWO Miss Brabras!"

"Wow..."

"There's two (girl's name) too...the other one is pretty."

The Taste of Raspberries

We've got a monstrous red raspberry bush out in the back yard, behind the vegetable garden, near the stockade fence that separates our yard from the neighbor's yard behind us.  Besides the rasberry bush, which came from Bill's mom's yard, there are two blueberry bushes and a little spare garden Bill put together to corral the extra pepper and tomato plants we had this year.

The raspberry bush is a wild creature that sends out runners under ground that sprout in unexpected places with new little monster raspberry plants.  I'm sure the neighbors have some in their yard.  Think Little Shop of Horrors, only without the carnage or the singing.

The nice thing about the raspberry bush this year is that we've had two harvests.  The first one earlier in the summer, and the second one now.  My sister's got the same thing going on with her raspberry bush.  Pretty cool.

The taste of just-picked raspberries is one of those tastes that connects to a certain period of my childhood.  I was younger than seven.  It was before my mom's parents moved to RI.  They still lived in Fair Lawn, NJ, and we would drive down to visit them periodically throughout the year.  They'd drive up to visit us too, but of course it was way more fun to go there.

Their driveway was on the left side of the house, if you were facing the house from the street.  The neighbor's driveway was right next to my grandparents', and the two were separated by a long cement half-wall that my sister and I liked to walk on.  It was maybe 6 inches wide (I'm guessing here) and we would walk from one end to the other, like tightrope walkers.  Very exciting and - in our minds - a little dangerous.  I'm guessing the wall was maybe two feet high.

Behind my grandparents' yard was another neighbor's property, but the interesting thing about it was that it was higher than my grandparents' yard.  Much higher.  We'd climb up onto the cement half wall and climb up into the Zabriskys' huge yard.  (I may have spelled their name wrong, by the way.)  Anyway, their yard was - to me - huge.  They had a great big garden and at least one greenhouse - and raspberry bushes.  They would invite my sister and me into the yard and offer us just-picked raspberries...I believe they had several varieties.  I don't remember what else they grew - but I remember the raspberries - that tart, juicy bite, warm from the sun, kind of crunchy from the seeds.

They also had 3 Bantam hens that patrolled the grounds.  Their names were Lu-Lu, Taw-Taw, and Brownie.  Brownie was, not surprisingly, all brown, and the other two were brown and white.  They were so cute and tiny!  I loved them.  The Zabriskys (Zabriskis?) would send over eggs for us and we'd have them fried for breakfast - little kid-sized eggs.  Magical little treats.  And I didn't even like eggs back then...but I'm pretty sure I liked these.

So anyway - that's where the raspberries have been taking me this season.  Fair Lawn, New Jersey, a good many years ago.

The Perfect Day

...for roasting a chicken and making mashed potatoes and gravy with mushrooms and caramelized onions and white wine to go along with it...and stuffing too...and roasting the 3 remaining acorn squashes from our garden...kind of a mini-Thanksgiving.  I can smell it in my head.

It is cold and rainy and raw - my favorite weather.  Perfect weather for going to Barnes & Noble to buy something new to read...perfect for sitting in the store's cafe, with a biscotti and a latte, reading a chapter or two of this new book, whatever it turns out to be. 

Perfect weather later tonight, after the kids are in bed, finally, and dinner is over and the kitchen is cleaned up, for me to take a nice, hot, bubble bath and read more of my new book, whatever it is, and sip a glass of chardonnay and just relax.

Perfect weather this morning to bring the kids to my parents' house, meet up with my sister and her kids, and hang out drinking coffee and eating asiago bagels and watching Julia strut around grabbing breakable things in the no-longer-childproofed house....

I am just waiting for Bill to finish the clean-up work (he brewed beer this morning - a drizzly cold brew day means a good batch of beer) and then I can leave the house and go to the book store and the grocery store and who knows where else...my afternoon of solitude in the cold and drizzle. 

I love October.

The Way to a Man's Heart

Alex will be in the preschool room full time starting next week.  He's been spending part of his time in early preschool, and part in preschool, so I should have realized they were transitioning him.  The teacher told me on Friday that they'd put the transition notice in his folder - I didn't see it if it was there. 

But anyway, the early preschool teacher had gathered all his artwork and other stuff and put them in a folder for me to bring home on Friday.  When I got home and got the kids settled, I looked through the folder...a construction paper "chocolate chip cookie" that I remember seeing on the wall of his room recently...a construction paper owl...and - this startled me - little kid writing paper.  You know, the kind with lots of space between the lines, and that dotted line in between the main lines to help you practice your lower case letters...

So there they were...some pages of this paper.  One has a big scribbled bunch of colors that the teacher titled "A lion."  (I misread that at first and thought it said "Alion" and since I had no idea what that might mean, I decided that the teacher hadn't known how to spell "Alien" and they had been drawing creatures from outer space that day.  But no...it's a lion.

And another page has his name written out (by the teacher):  A L E X in all caps.  And a shaky little penciled tracing of those letters, and then the letters copied in pencil below.  I don't think Alex formed the letters on his own...I think the teacher helped him.  But still.  How weird - to see the first example of his handwriting...

And the other page - my favorite one - is this:

  (It's easier to read if you click on the picture first...or, if that doesn't help, it says:  I love my family because...we eat.")
 

      And of course, we do. 

I'm just trying to figure out what meal he was illustrating...must have been from the tail end of summer, when we had blueberries and raspberries ripening.

200 Pound St. Bernard in 22 Pound Little Girl Clothing

Last week Julia got written up (again) for biting.  She was waiting in line with her little classmates, waiting to go outside.  I'm guessing things weren't moving along fast enough - so Julia bit another kid on the arm.

I signed the Incident Report form and as we were leaving the room, the teacher called "Bye bye, Cujo!"

Conversations

My best writing (about the kids, about my life and whatever's going on with it) seems to be done while I'm at work emailing my sister.  And until my daughter decides to sleep through the night again, I don't know how successful I'll be at getting up early and writing or working out or anything else just for me.

So...I started saving some of these emailed conversations, because the way my memory works, it's pretty much guaranteed that once I type it, it's gone.

So...here we go...

Me:  This morning, in the car:  "No, mommy, talk in a mad voice, like a bad guy.l"

Mere:  Was he requesting this? or telling you not to talk in a mad voice?

Me:  He was talking in a bad guy voice about the bad guys in Tarzan (which is the new favorite, by the way) and how the bad guys are NOT NICE because they're BAD GUYS but those bad guys are nice but those bad guys are BAD GUYS cuz they're NOT NICE.

And whenever he spoke of the badder of the bad guys (I'm not sure who the good bad guys were, actually) he would speak in a gruff, growly voice and make a mad, bad guy face:  brows furrowed, nose scrunched, and teeth bared in a grimace of bad-guy-ness. 

And when he'd say that the bad guys were not nice, I'd agree with him - "Yeah!" and that's when he told me to speak more like a bad guy.  And how to do so.

And another day........

Me:  If I could just get up at 4 every day, I would have plenty of free time for myself.

I honestly wanted to get up at 5 this morning and just BE up from that point...maybe do some yoga or something or write or whatever...but then Alex woke up at 4:30 or so and wanted juice and we were OUT OF JUICE OH THE HORROR OF IT ALL and I told him he could have milk or water or orange juice, BUT I WANT JUUUUUUUUUUICE we don't have any juice, you can have milk or water or orange juice, BUT I WANT JUICE...and I just went downstairs and filled one sippy cup with milk and one with water and brought them up and put them near his bed and told him if he gets thirsty, there they are, BUT I DON'T WANT THEM!!!! and on and on and finally just so Julia wouldn't wake up too and want juice even though she never wants juice, I brought the juiceman into our bed and told him he needed to be quiet until the alarm goes off and it's time for MOMMY to get up.  Of course, he was wiggly and kept whispering stuff to me, but at least it wasn't about juice.

And then finally he said, "Mommy, could I have some milk?"

Okay, perhaps it's not my best writing...but it's my most frequent, and that's got to count for something.  Actually, now that I think about it, it's my favorite writing.  The little daily bits and pieces about my kids.  I've got more, but they're buried in my email and I have to find them.