I'm gonna buy me a...

Something major is about to happen in our family.  We’re adopting a dog!  His name is Freddie, and he is a Bichon Frise mix PDaniel found online.  He is currently in a shelter in Park City.  We went to visit him on Friday, knowing he was one of the breeds we were considering; his description on the website was glowing, and well-behaved, young dogs like him don’t show up in shelters every day.  So we went up to visit him.  He seemed like a very sweet dog, good-natured and loving, so we snapped him up.  He was still on medication for a cold, and had to be neutered, but he should be ready by Wednesday or Thursday for PDan to go and get him.  He is thrilled, and spent much of today rounding up dog supplies.  I'm glad, because the dog is his sole responsibility; I have enough people to take care of!

Dangerboy's birthday was last Saturday, and he wanted a Harry Potter party, just like last year.  Ended up inviting the entire neighborhood (almost) of children, as we have been known to do.  I think it was mostly a successful party…several kids asked to stay and play when it was over (roundly denied, we were so tired).  I dressed like McGonagall.  We played the Bertie Botts Every Flavor Bean game as an icebreaker, always a hit.  DB had requested we do a “Harry Potter IV party”, so we had a tri-wizard tournament: diet-soda-and-Mentos fountains to kick it off, then Quidditch, and obstacle course, and a dragon piñata for the three events.  PDan spent lots of time making the piñata, since I couldn’t find one to purchase.  Quidditch was played without brooms, with a soccer ball and a kid running around in one of my yellow t-shirts pretending to be the Snitch.  It would have been more of a success had the grass not been so wet because of sprinklers; several of the kids slipped spectacularly and got soaked.  The obstacle course was lame and last-minute, but the pinata was a hit (ha)!

The cake was another PDan creation: DB wanted the Monster Book of Monsters, so that’s what we made.  I did most of the prep work, and PDan did the creative parts.  Then all the kids went home, we opened DB’s family presents, he started acting weepy, we took his temperature, and realized it was 102.5.  Yikes!  He took a nap and some meds and felt well enough by evening that we all went to Brick Oven for dinner, but after a weekend of high fevers, barfing, and terrible sore throats, he is now on amoxicillin for strep throat.  Poor kid, that has got to be my least favorite illness.

Cookie-Nut funnies:

CN wants a chihuahua and a cat for a pet (not getting them, but oh well).  She wants to name the cat Popcorn; the dog, she wants to name Meat.  She has a stuffed cat she has christened Eyeballs.

CN was using a laundry basket, tied behind her neck with string, as a drum.  She was pretending to be marching in a parade (DB had one too).  Her string broke on one side, and she cried, “My drum is not working!”  She started dragging it along the floor by the remaining string.  “Now it’s a wagon!”  she despaired.  Then she giggled.  “I want it to be a wagon!!” she bounced away.  I thought it was a good example of CN’s flexibility and resilience.  (She can be stubborn too, though).

Last night, at dinner, she said she knows a girl named Guisie (“guy-zie”).  She said that she does not like Guisie.  When asked various questions about this girl,  it turns out the girl lives at Trafalga (local mini-golf place).  She has blue hair, is four years old, and eats bugs.  I asked her if she’d ever talked to Guisie.  CN:  “Guisie said, ‘Come here, come on and eat some bugs with me.’  I said, ‘No!’ and ran home.”  Guisie’s parents, friends, and brothers and sisters are of the same description, age, and disposition as Guisie herself.  This was all told very matter-of-factly, and rather offhand.  I think CN believed it her self as soon as the words left her mouth.  I almost did, too!

I forgot to mention that I threw a brunch party last week for a few of the women in my ward who are having babies this summer.  It was fun.  One of the women is a big Anne fan, so I made strawberry scones and raspberry cordial (straight from the Anne of Green Gables Cookbook), and a friend brought a yummy lemon cake, and I dug out an old Anne soundtrack CD.  It made me want to thrown an honest-to-goodness Anne party someday, maybe for Cookie-Nut, when she's interested.  

TMI time:  I went to the temple yesterday and thought more about the to-have-more-kids-or-not question.  It’s sure a difficult one, fraught with guilt and second-guessing.  I feel these days as though my life is more balanced than it has been in a long time, and I really value that:  I’m exercising a little, working a little, spending time with my kids, writing a little, cleaning my house a little, spending time with my husband a little.  I feel great.  I know that having another baby will throw that off, and if I have one, don’t I need to have at least two more?  So they’ll have playmates?  And then it will be at least six more years before I attain my present levels of balance, and that’s hard for me to fathom.

Then the guilt sets in.  I’m being selfish.  And of course I’d love a baby when it came.  But would I resent it too?  And then feel guilty about resenting it, because I loved the baby so much?  And then ignore it too much?  And don’t I have more time to serve and help others now (like all the babysitting I did today and will do tomorrow), because I’m freed up a little more than women with more kids?  And then there are PDaniel and Dangerboy, neither of whom handles stress particularly well.  DB needs more time with me as it is, and what would happen to that?  I need to consider them too. 

And then I think, well, if I finish my book, I will have accomplished a major goal.  Maybe then I can have one more baby, one to be cuddled and spoiled by the whole family? 

I grew up with only one other sibling.  And we were fine.  But it was what God wanted, right, because Mom just never got pregnant again naturally, and Dad didn’t really want any more kids. 

I think I came away with the feeling that it’s up to me.  And PDan (who is inscrutable when it comes to this question).  That either way, it’s OK.  But that’s hard for me to wrap my head around, with all my Mormon conditioning.  To be honest, I think I’d be happier stopping with the two kids we have now.  If it weren’t for the guilt.

Which is where the surrogacy thing comes in.  I think it would help assuage the guilt.  Don’t know if I’m right about that.

Cookie-Nut:  Mom, can you balance books on your head?  (Yes).  Like the ladies in New York?  (I had images of beautiful models practicing runway walking.)  With food on their head?  (Turns out she was getting New York mixed up with Africa…we talk a lot about travel in our family!  It’s easy to get places mixed up.)

Don't spice me up!

Well, it's that time of year: the sick time. We don't get sick often, but this time of year it seems like it's always one thing after another. I was sick last week with a bad-cold-turned-infection, and PDaniel has it this week. Meanwhile, Dangerboy woke up with croup Wednesday night and we had to take him the the ER for a steroid treatment. It wasn't too bad; we'd have taken him to urgent care, but nowhere else is open at midnight. The doctor said he should stay home from school for a couple of days, but he was feeling fine, so I was stuck with bored kids for a few days. Now Cookie-Nut has a bad cough and I'm keeping her home. And getting a little stir-crazy and tired of entertaining children!

I must admit, though, they both stayed home from church yesterday and played well together all day long. That was a treat. I love it when that happens, especially because CN worships DB so much, and he doesn't often, at this point in his life, give her the time of day. I hope it changes.

Cutenesses:

Cookie-Nut at dinner, telling what she did outside in the snow. She’s been saying her “L’s” correctly more and more lately, which makes me treasure sentences like this all the more: “We made a swide. Then we got on our sweds and swid down!!”

One night I made bok choy/eggplant/tofu stir fry with hoisin sauce and a little red pepper. It wasn’t much of a success; neither the eggplant nor the tofu sucked up much flavor, though the bok choy was OK. I was trying to shovel one last bite into Cookie-Nut’s mouth; she’d tried it and liked it, but she was done by this point and was avoiding the fork, begging for raisin bran instead. Finally she ducked under the counter. “No!!” She yelled frantically. “It might spice me up!!”

CN is so funny. She can create worlds and stories with whatever objects are at hand. In the last 24 hours, she’s created elaborate scenarios using, each on a separate occasion, the following: a hymnbook, a couple of shoelaces, spoons, a puzzle, half an orange and a paint set, a zipper, the pull string on the blinds, a partially-eaten banana. In every case, if her attention needs to be redirected (to brushing her teeth or eating her dinner, for instance), it’s very difficult to pull her out of her world, but I love that her imagination is so vibrant.

Who's your mummy?

Our last "home school" week was almost a flop, but we got one cool field trip out of it, at least! I had rather half-baked intentions of doing cool projects and such that just never got done. Oh, well.

Dangerboy wanted to study mummies. After looking at the picture books l=the library had to offer, I was a bit trepidations...mummies are basically dead people. And pictures of them can be pretty harrowing. But DB was fascinated by them, and not too scared at all (at first, mwahahaha). So we read lots of books on mummies around the world, cat mummies, pyramids, and the terra cotta Chinese warriors (totally different, I know, but I needed another topic).

And we watched movies: the Tutenstein cartoon, not my favorite, but kinda cute; Night at the Museum; Prince of Egypt; and Scooby Doo episodes with mummies in them (this stuff is strictly for fun).

I got a cool book from the library with fun ancient Egypt-themed projects in them, none of which we did. They involved making play-dough mummies, moving heavy books the way ancient Egyptians moved bricks for the pyramids, writing in heiroglyphics, and making a decorated mummy collar. Sounds fun, right? We totally missed out.

I was at a loss about snacks...the book suggested cucumber salad with yogurt sauce, a Middle-Eastern dish. My kids would never have eaten it, but I almost gave it a try. And cheese-block pyramids. Wait, I think we actually did that, come to think of it!

Our field trip was cool though--we went to the California Science Center's exhibition "Mummies of the World." Actually, it was a bit pricey, so PDaniel and DB went while CN and I explored the Ecosystems exhibit, and the boys joined us there later. PDaniel said DB didn't love the mummy exhibit, actually; seeing dead stuff in pictures is less threatening than seeing it in real life. So, it was a bit scary. Understandably. But DB used to be a little scared of mummies, and he no longer is, so there you go. Knowledge is power.
The Center is enormous and technically free, though there is a place where you could (and should, what you can) donate at the entrance. We only had time for the Ecosystems exhibit, which I loved! It is huge, and a really cool blend of fun interactive exhibits and a dose of art/design. I'm too tired to describe it all, but all ages, from toddlers on up, could enjoy it. There's an aquarium area with a touching pool, a "rot" room with all sorts of bugs, an awesome tree room with a tree house and lots of pretending opportunities, an ice room where you can take pictures on a snowmobile and touch a wall made of ice, a huge sculpture made out of fast-food trash...there's a lot to see and do! And we were only in a fraction of the museum. I highly recommend!

Bungle in the Jungle

Well, I want to chronicle the last two weeks of home school that turned into, basically, themed summer-camp (very little school-type work actually getting done). But it's so long ago that I don't remember everything. Here's my best reconstruction.

Week three was rain forest week. We broke it up into several different categories, and every day we studied books from the library about that particular topic:

• Fruits of the rainforest: the kids were blindfolded and asked to guess what rainforest fruits and spices they were tasting--there were obvious ones, like mangoes and bananas, and ones you wouldn't immediately think of, like chocolate and cinnamon. Then we ate rainforest fruit salad for a snack.

• Amphibians of the rainforest: I got a Beanie Baby shaped like a tropical frog and we played "poison frog hot potato" with it. We shaped fruit roll-ups like snakes for a snack (yeah, I know they're reptiles, but they're close, right?)

• Rainforest trees and plants: we went around our apartment complex and collected various leaves to see how their shape affects the way water rolls off of them. We actually nener got to this part, but we did collect the leaves! We talked about how many decorative plants we have actually come from the rainforest, and how many trees there have large leaves to collect as much sun as possible, and yet how they're shaped so that they direct water right to the forest floor. We also painted pictures of the rainforest using a leaf stamp I got at JoAnn's. We were going to collage with real leaves, but alas, we didn't.

Oh, and we had "Venus fly traps" for a snack, made as shown with cream cheese (colored green) and raisins. DB was obsessed with carnivorous plants for a while, mostly because he thought they were people-sized. They actually grow in swamps, but the rainforest has other carnivorous plants, so we lumped them in. (Shown with our real Venus flytrap, mentioned below).

• Mammals of the rainforest, including people. I broke out a pan flute and a recorder (South American instruments) and we tooted around on them for a while. We may have created a band. For snacks we had frozen chocolate-covered bananas. Yum!

We went on two awesome field trips. One was to the Sherman Library and Gardens in Corona Del Mar (free on Mondays--inexpensive any other day). They are lovely--great for a date, you can even eat lunch there--and they have a greenhouse full of tropical plants! We saw some cool ones and asked if they had any carnivorous plants, as I had remembered them having. They didn't on display, but they did in their shop! So we took one home, and DB was thrilled. It perished not long after, but it was good while it lasted.
We also managed to get free-day tickets (available once a month online) to the Huntington Library and Gardens, which have a jungle section outside AND an awesome greenhouse full of rainforest/cloud forest/bog exhibits (including carnivorous plants! Yay!). Those are right next to their children's garden, which is so fun to explore. I have more pictures, but my computer is not cooperating right now. This was a fun week, now that I remember it!
Oh, and for movies, we watched Ferngully, clips from Planet Earth (the birds of paradise are soooo cool!), and Diego. And we could have watched Jungle Book and the Curious George movie, but (curiously) we didn't. :)

I am the walrus?

Well, I'm getting behind on my blogging, as usual. But I do want to report on what we've been doing! I've been worse and worse at making time for "school" as our vacation and DB's actual school gets closer and we are so busy. But our large-ocean-animal week was fairly successful, so I'll report on that.

This week (which was a couple of weeks ago) we focused on sharks, dolphins, walruses, penguins, and manatees--basically all the stuff I planned on seeing at Sea World on our field trip (we have passes--thanks Mom and Dad!). As usual, we checked out a bunch of nonfiction books from the library and had a few fiction-y ones on loan from my mom ("Tooth Trouble" was cute, and a good one for preparing to go to the dentist). We did some reading and rhyming, and a little bit of writing (I've been bad about practicing writing :(--he's going to forget all his lower case by the time kindergarten rolls around! Oh well).

And we did some projects: We made penguin costumes. OK: I did. (It was a hard morning to begin with, and the costumes were a bit under-appreciated. But I got a cute picture out of it.)

We made a sand/shell collage with sea critter drawings.

And I bought some diving toys shaped like some of our animals for a day the kids went swimming (DB's learning to dive for stuff).

A couple of our activities were also our snacks. We tasted nori (dried seaweed--"this is what manatees eat!")--but I knew they wouldn't like it. So we made fruit makizushi--that's a sushi roll. Only we used fruit roll-ups, rice prepared with coconut milk and sugar (I think--I can't find the recipe now), and fruit in the middle. They failed because my rice was too soupy--I forgot to refrigerate it--and the fruit roll-ups were super sticky--I should have used wax paper between the rolling mat and the roll. But they tasted really yummy!

We also made peanut butter balls (no-bake) and rolled them in coconut to make "snowballs." We ate "boats" for lunch one day--peppers with tuna inside.

And had shark-shaped fruit snacks for bribes, of course.

For movies we watched parts of March of the Penguins (it was a bit long), A Shark's Tale, and Atlantis. Free Willy was another one we could have watched (I'm saving some of the other fishy ones like Nemo for when we study fish, maybe in the fall).

Then we had our field trip! I really like Sea World--the vast majority of the population won't ever get this close to these animals in the world--aquariums are not rich enough to house them--and I really think it helps a species to have publicity and interaction. I never realized how obviously intelligent dolphins are, for instance, until I saw them interacting with people from inside their tank.

You could do a whole unit just on their Arctic area, which is really a transporting experience all on its own. I love the beluga whales--they look like moving, floating marble sculptures.

So beautiful. We got a really good looks at a GIANT walrus this time too.

And found out from our books that it isn't unusual--they just look like that~! The thing was at least 15-20 feet long, body the girth of a redwood, with a little pinhead. Weird creature.

No more manatees, though. They got shipped back to Florida. Pity. CN got a great pic with her idol, Elmo, though. She couldn't WAIT to see him, and when she did, she couldn't stop hugging him! Or rather, she stood there solemnly, all snuggled into him, until it was time to go. And she went happily, satisfied. Cookie Monster tried in vain to get her attention!

So that was our ocean week. Next time: a trip to the rainforest.

Stars in Their Eyes

Home-pre-school, second week:

When we did dinosaurs, the kiddos were sick and we couldn't go anywhere. Thusly, we had more time. This week, the "school" thing is rapidly turning into more of a "camp" squeezed into the spare minutes between swimming lessons, trips to playgroup, beach day, the store and the dentist. And our field trips. All of which are pretty darn important too!

But, last week we studied space: You know, the final frontier. Every day we read our "research" books on the planets; stars--constellations, and also where they come from; rockets and the moon landing; and comets and black holes. The whole topic seemed a little more inaccessible to both of them, the pictures in the books harder to understand. (We liked the astronaut's toilet though, haha.) We did our rhymes, and DB persevered in his reading, though it was harder to get him to write any letters. Oh, and we danced to "Age of Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In," 'cause it's fun, and 'cause it's got lots of planet and constellation words in it.

Here are some of our projects: we made a model of the solar system, using our dining room light as the sun. We even labeled a few of the planets:


We also made a "black hole" bean bag game, with the help of PDaniel and his jigsaw. Then we filled up some old socks with beans and tied some sparkly ribbons to them for tails--Voila! Comets. I totally used it in my little-kid piano class too--I quizzed them on their notes while listening to Holst's "The Planets," and they got to toss a comet through a black hole if they got it right.

They also played outside with DB's old stomp rocket, which all kids love.

For treats, we had starfruit,

jello jiggler stars, sun chips and space dogs ( which were....hot dogs), "rocket ships" (which didn't look much like rocket ships, but oh well. They still thought it was cool):

Oh, and on the last day we watched ET and ate Dippin' Dots ice cream (which I called "moon ice cream"). I found some astronaut ice cream at REI, but didn't want to make the drive. Maybe another time. They liked ET, though it was a bit long. CN really liked the John Williams soundtrack.

Then we went on our totally cool field trip to the LA Observatory. It was fun! The observatory is free. If you go during the day, you can see the sun through a special telescope. We'd like to go back in the winter, when we can see through the night telescope at a reasonable hour. DB and CN sat through the Planetarium show quite well, and DB was impressed by it; it was about $15 for the four of us (PDan a student and CN free). DB totally appreciated everything more because we'd been talking about it.

Ancient Voices of Children

So, the week before last Dangerboy and Cookie-Nut were banned from being around any other children because of what I've come to call "the spots." But they didn't feel sick, so I was left wondering what we should do for a week. I decided to start my summer-home-preschool experiment early.

I had a wonderful mission companion whose mother home-schooled all of her siblings in a way that sounded amazingly fun--each year had a theme, and involved lots of field trips and applied learning. I'm not sure I'm up to quite that level of commitment, but I wanted to try some of the ideas, so I've figured out some field trips that are feasible for us to take, and planned home activities to keep us busy based on them. When the kids were sick, we did dinosaurs and the ice age.

Almost every day, we opened with some music (some familiar ones, but DB is also learning his address and phone number based on a little ditty I threw together). Then we danced to "Jeremiah Was a Bullfrog" (frogs, dinos--they seemed to go together somehow) and sometimes a few others. We did "research" online and in library books on the topic of the day--dinosaurs and their skin, dinosaur eggs, volcanoes, the ice age, and tar pits. I read to DB, he read to me, he read some topical rhyming words (tar, far, car, etc.), DB did some writing in his journal or on a letter worksheet, and we did an activity. Oh, and had a themed (more or less) snack. Then, when the kids were better, we visited the La Brea Tar pits, which they really liked. Especially the tar. (Well, CN just liked running around.)

Here were some of our activities and snacks:

We made dinosaur cookies one day, and made them into ice cream sandwiches the next--super yummy.
We decorated "dinosaur eggs" and went on a dinosaur egg hunt. We learned that some dinos laid eggs in a line, or just on the ground, or in holes, or maybe in trees. So we hid them in places like that.We"exploded" the volcano DB and PDaniel made a while back.
We made "fossil pops" with fruit (the fossils) in frozen juice, just like fossils are found in ice.
We made a big bowl of chocolate pudding in which I hid various animals and plastic dinosaur bones. It was our "tar pit."And we went on our field trip. It was fun--it cost us about $20 for all four of us, including parking. We saw lots of cool bones and a real excavation site. As a bonus, LACMA next door was having its free day, so we had a quick look in there too. It didn't turn out to be a terribly kid-friendly experience for us, but DB was actually interested in a lot of the art.

This week we're doing space. It's been kind of a busy week, and we haven't done as much as I'd have liked before our trip tomorrow (to the observatory) but I'll let you know how it turns out.

Optimus Mummified

Dangerboy wanted a "Transformer Mummy" cake for his birthday. My idea involved cupcakes, an action figure, and Ace bandages...this was Peter's idea. And yes, HE MADE IT!! My hero. First time fondant maker, no less.

Is it a touch better than mine would have been?...Do ya think? He spent hours! He made fondant out of marshmallows and powdered sugar, rolled it out by hand, and sculpted the head out of Rice Krispie treats! Not bad for an English Major, eh? Oh, and Cookie-Nut was pretty good inspiration. When she wore DB's Optimus Prime mask she and the cake had about the same proportions.

Happy Birthday Cookie-Nut!

Cookie-Nut's birthday was on the 8th. So smiley, so curious, so amazing. The day after this, her first birthday, I left her alone for a minute and came back to find that she'd used a small chair to climb onto another chair, up to her booster seat, and was standing on the arm of her booster seat with her hands on the counter (presumably ready to climb up there!). So scary. Today she got into the toothbrush drawer again and PDaniel found her sucking on a tube of toothpaste...had to call Poison Control just in case...she's fine, of course, but Dangerboy was not this climb-y or into things. Gonna hafta watch this one. (BTW, Poison Control is going away in California. Gone the way of budget cuts. What is this state coming to? This seems like a pretty basic service to me.)

And she is soooooo loud! On July 4th we went to Ruby's for dinner. PDaniel stepped away to take Dangerboy to the bathroom (which turned out to be a messy experience, yuck) and she let out a screech of displeasure that literally made the whole restaurant fall silent and look our direction. As in, "What are you DOING to that child?" I paid the check as quickly as possible and skedaddled. (PDaniel went back for shakes, of course).

(In other July 4th news, we went swimming with our friends, braved the ward breakfast, and tried, with extremely modest success, to view the fireworks at Huntington Beach. Maybe I'll write more about that later).

Anyway, for Cookie-Nut's birthday, we went to Wild Rivers, a water park here in Irvine. Cookie-Nut had fun, I think. Her favorite part was the section with the fountains that came out of pipes and the ground...meaning we probably could have gone to the Spectrum Mall and she would have been just as happy. And we went in the evening, when it was cheaper, so it was kind of...cold. But Dangerboy had a blast and would love to go back, even though he could only ride the tiny waterslides. He and his daddy loved the wave pool too. (Sorry, we didn't get any pictures--should've got a waterproof disposable).
Then we came home and had cake. Cookie-Nut was pretty tired, but since we presented her with the whole cake, she mustered enough energy to dig in. She poked it a lot first, though. With one finger. :) It was a pretty boring-looking cake, if tasty--some random organic white cake mix from Sprouts (I ran out of time), with homemade lemon buttercream frosting. I could eat that stuff with a spoon! And did!

She opened presents in the morning--she got books, yay!

Anyway, in tribute of Cookie-Nut's birthday, here are some things she has come to be able to do since I wrote last:

• Walks well
• Says "uh-oh," "hi," and "flower" (wow-wow)
• Signs: bird, dog, cat, bear, more, all done, fish, drink, milk, and music
• Has shrieking contests with her brother--they've started to play together
  
• Rolls a ball back and forth with me
  
• Tries to put on clothes over her head (she did it once but cried)
  
• Readies herself for diaper changes (basically comes and sits down on the diaper mat)
• When she wants to be read to, she brings you a book, throws it down on the floor, and sits on you.
• All her first-year molars have come in!

She's really growing up, no? This first year has gone so fast.

New funnies

Thanks for the tip, Melissa! PDaniel and I had quite a few laughs over this site. Scroll down to "Fan Favorites" on the right for some truly awful/hilarious professionally-(??!)made cakes. (And some really excellently-made ones too: see "Sunday Sweets"). I found the holiday ones particularly funny.

Christmas Images

Our first actual Christmas tree (thanks, Gardener!)

Sleeping next to Cookie-Nut; being almost asleep and then feeling her tiny fingers on my cheek

Listening to the perfect high-school tunes, chosen by Shaun, the king of recorded music, as we wrapped gifts Christmas Eve

"Rock n' Roll McDonald's!" during Christmas Eve dinner. Later, Dangerboy singing it (somehow, it became funny)

Later, pillow-reminiscing with P. about about the music that used to remind us of each other before we were married (me: "Kiss Me" by Harry Connick Jr.; him: "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing"--interesting)

The sweet taste of LOTS of dairy-free cookies my mom so lovingly made for me--thank you Granny Westwood for that raisin cookies recipe!!

Dangerboy in his snowsuit--blue pants, red sweatshirt, red-white-and-blue scarf. Pink cheeks. Blue Eyes. Blond hair. Why did I not get a picture??? (Oh yeah, because he wouldn't let me)

Being tackled by P. while wearing my snowsuit--the strange feel of rolling in snow but being perfectly warm. Why did nobody ever tell me how great snow pants are??

Cookie-Nut in the arms of Mom or Dad, in the rocking chair by the fire

Granny Lois' hands, holding the seashell I found in her garage

Snow, a foot high on the stair rail

Dangerboy, so excited about presents!Dad, P., and Shaun endlessly shoveling the driveway (esp. Dad). (Broken snowblower, alas)

P. looking so awesome and at home in his snow clothes, sledding in the front yard with Dangerboy and Shaun (this picture is either of Shaun or Dad though)The boys in their snow cave
Tears over nachos with P. and John at Gringos

Playing with Magnetix at the Samuelsons'

Cherie's insane theater!!

Dangerboy and Brian N. running around the house pulling strings of gold plastic beads: the next generation of friends

Thirty, Flirty and Thriving...

...well, the first one's true, anyway, har har. The big three-oh was a couple of weeks ago now, but due to various viruses and child sleep problems, I'm just getting around to posting about it! I had an awesome day. It started with a delicious breakfast, a yummy omelet cooked by PDaniel. Then Dangerboy and I went to the Pumpkin Patch with his preschool. It was kinda fun, but it would have been more fun had it not been, like, 95 degrees that day. When I came home, PDaniel sent me off to the mall. I didn't get around much to the shopping, but I did have a leisurely lunch at Wahoo's, during which I read my book. By myself. In the middle of the day. Ah, the bliss.

Then I had my very first pedicure (the Happy Nails lady was shocked!) The pedicure was very fun, though I felt a little weird (guilty?) having a nice Filipino lady pamper my feet while I sat in a thronelike chair...I think P. postcolonialist studies are getting to me. She actually completely exfoliated my feet and legs, gave them a clay mask, and wrapped them in hot towels. I don't know whether my feet were worth all the trouble (I think my face would have done me more good) but it was fun! And I like having cute toes for once. (I also got my first eyebrow wax, because the wax lady said I "really need one." Which, let's face it, was true.) When I got home, PDaniel had made an extremely yummy dairy- and soy-free carrot cake, full of raisins and nuts and pineapple--so yummy I ate it all week for breakfast AND dessert. We opened presents--An Arsonist's Guide to Writer's Homes in New England by Brock Clark and Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver. The day ended with a bayview dinner at Villa Nova in Newport Beach. It was good, though a cheese-free Italian dinner was trickier than I thought, and I wasn't able to eat the ice-cream heart they so nicely brought out for me at the end (I just ate the strawberries). Mostly it was just nice to be out on a date with my real sweetheart--our first night out alone since Cookie-Nut was born. Hopefully not our last. So, an action-packed, very fun birthday, even if it was my thirtieth. Thank you so much P.! I'm simultaneously spoiled and lucky to have you!

Allergic Colitis...

...is what Cookie-Nut has been diagnosed with. It means that she doesn't digest milk or soy proteins well, so until she grows out of it, (because she's breast-fed) I can have neither milk nor soy. Sigh. On the negative side, eating out is a pain, no pizza or Asian food (much), or ice cream. On the plus side, I've lost weight, and am eating/buying way fewer processed foods ('cause they all have soy and milk derivatives). And I've made these discoveries:

Blue Diamond Almond Breeze: Who knew you could milk an almond? The chocolate variety tastes and has the texture of real chocolate milk, whole the plain variety tastes very faintly of almonds. Yummy, and waaaaay better than rice milk. (The chocolate kind actually has soy lecithin in it, but since this apparently has no soy protein, it doesn't seem to be a problem.)

Trader Joe's plain ol' potato chips: Ingredients: potatoes, safflower oil, salt. They ain't pretty, but whadya now, they taste like potatoes.

Albertson's artisan kalamata olive bread: (comes in a paper sack). No weird ingredients, and very tasty!

Double Rainbow Chocolate Sorbet: Fudgey and entirely soy-free, which is super rare for chocolate anything.

Also want to put in a shout-out for this great website, Karina's Kitchen, a great blog for gluten-free folks, vegans, vegetarians, and anyone with allergies. She's got lots of great recipes, and most them are adaptable to various food allergies.

Just a few pictures from our little trip last month...P. and I drove up to Solvang and Santa Barbara for a couple of days, babysitting courtesy of my lovely mother. Everything was beautiful, lovely and green; we spent lots of time in a favorite Solvang bookstore and Cafe Angelica. The next day we ate some delicious pastries and headed for the hills--hiked to a lovely waterfall a few miles outside town. Then we drove down to Santa Barbara, and visited the mission (the skull-and-crossbones door is the mission's door from the church to the graveyard where, incidentally, the main character of Island of the Blue Dolphins is buried. I'd forgotten she was a real person). Then we visited the wharf, caught a movie (Persepolis) and drove home. So pleasant, so relaxing. thanks again, Mom! And thanks, P., for taking time off from exam-reading to enjoying it with me!