Author: brookeshelf

The Relatives Came

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My sister and her family are visiting from Pittsburgh, and everyone is ecstatic about it.  Liz is a extrovert, who loves being around as many people as possible, so of course everyone loves being around her.  We had a big family dinner last week, and there was a big bocce tournament in my parents’ backyard afterwards.

My brother, Pat, is big on the bocce:

And isn’t my parents’ garden gorgeous?  I don’t have a garden; I have a yard, which is best for little kids to play in and get muddy.  So it’s nice to enjoy my mom’s flowers on our visits.

And the cousins!  Yay for Cousin Sarah!  She is just between Eleanor and William in age, which makes her the perfect playmate.  Cousin Abby, at age two, is still a little too small for most of the action, but she’ll catch up soon.

It was a really windy day on this afternoon, so I took the kids kite flying when bocce got boring.  My parents have a big dragon kite which is unfortunately very difficult to fly.  I kept crashing it into the ground after just a few minutes of airtime.  Eleanor and Sarah would rush across the field to “rescue” it, Sarah speaking to the kite the entire time as if it were alive.

“Don’t worry, boy,” she’d say, patting the dragon’s nose, “you’ll do better next time.”

Eleanor loved making dramatic arm gestures whenever she launched the kite into the air.  Abby was unfortunately scared of the dragon, and William comforted her whenever it took off.

Poor Jeffrey, though.  He’s a little too old to enjoy playing with so many little girls, and Uncle Alex was in a mood to be alone, so he was kind of the odd man out for the evening.  Rats!

What This Tradition Needs is Big Flamboyant Hats

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Jeffrey went to his first Pinewood Derby this past Friday night, and this is what he looked like:

That’s right, a blur.  When Jeffrey gets excited, he gives it his ALL.  The kind of All that you usually only see in the drunken infield of a NASCAR race.  At the end of the evening, his voice was hoarse from all the cheering.  Yes, cheering — he rooted for everybody, and hardly cared if his own car placed first or last.  In this picture, he zipped out of the frame just as I clicked the shutter button:

(Jeffrey’s car is the one on the far left.)

It was exhausting to watch him — we had gone downtown to the Living Traditions international festival just before the derby, and I was groaning from the Tongan Hula Platter I’d consumed — but at least he got out enough energy to sleep like a log that night!

Brian held him still long enough for this portrait, and as you can probably tell, he nearly exploded after all ten seconds of it.  His car is painted gold with what Jeff calls “pirate decorations” all over it.  At the last minute, he taped a Lego knight in the driver’s seat.  Ain’t he cute?

Road Tested Recipes: Chilled Avocado Soup with Herbed Breadsticks and Lime Spritzers

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I have a deal with my mother-in-law: if she buys the ingredients, I’ll do all the cooking.  On Mother’s Day, I wanted to make something really light and springy for Kathryn, and this is what I chose.  We followed it up with a grilled shrimp salad and finished with angel food cake and strawberry ice cream.  But Brian and I think the soup was the real superstar.

It’s from the book Baby Showers by Gia Russo and Michele Adams, which is out of print.  I’m not necessarily a fan of themed baby showers, but all the recipes in this book are EXCELLENT.  It’s rare that I can say that about a cookbook.  So far, I haven’t found a single dud.

This avocado soup is both refreshing and luxuriant — and best of all, easy to make!  The yield may seem small, but keep in mind that one ladleful is quite enough for one serving.

The herbed breadsticks are a necessary accompaniment, in my opinion — but don’t worry, they’re easy too, owing to using frozen bread dough.

And the spritzers?  That’s known as The Thing My Kids Will Actually Eat.

Chilled Avocado Soup

  • 4 ripe avocados, medium size
  • 2 cups chicken or vegetable stock
  • 1/2 cup cilantro leaves
  • juice of one lime
  • 1/4 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
  • pinch cayenne pepper
  • extra avocado slices and cilantro sprigs, for garnish

Chop avocados into big chunks.  Place in a blender along with stock, cilantro leaves, lime juice, and peppers.  Blend until smooth and creamy (add extra stock or water if it’s too thick).  Place the soup in a big bowl or pitcher and refrigerate until well chilled.  To serve, ladle into bowls, and garnish with extra avocado slices and cilantro sprigs.  Makes about 5 servings.

I suppose you could also swirl some sour cream in there for garnish, if you wanted to be extra decadent.

Herbed Breadsticks

  •  two pounds frozen bread dough, thawed
  • 1 1/2 tablespoons chopped fresh thyme
  • 1 1/2 tablespoons chopped fresh rosemary
  • 1 1/2 tablespoons chopped fresh oregano
  • 2 tablespoons melted butter

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.  Line two baking sheets with parchment paper and grease with cooking spray.  On a lightly floured or cooking-sprayed (is that a word?) surface, knead the herbs into the bread dough.  Divide dough into fifteen pieces, roll into breadsticks, and place on the baking sheets.  Brush each breadstick with melted butter and bake for 15-20 minutes. Makes 15 big breadsticks.

Lime Spritzers

For each serving, you need:

  • juice of one lime
  • 1 tablespoon superfine sugar
  • 10 ounces club soda or soda water
  • ice
  • lime slice, for garnish

In a tall glass, combine lime juice and superfine sugar.  Add club soda and stir until sugar dissolves.  Fill glass with ice and garnish rim of glass with lime slice.

The Gentle Madness

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Apparently I have a problem:

This is what my living room looked like after hitting the county library book sale a week and a half ago.  (Oh hey, and Katie’s on the couch, too.  I just noticed that.)

Keep in mind that I had brought home just as many books after the city library book sale two weeks before that.  (Whoo, and I had to be quick to nab ’em at the county library sale, because people there were RUTHLESS.  When I arrived, there were four bookshelves full of children’s novels, and after twenty minutes in the picture book section, I returned to find only ONE shelf of novels left.  Wow.)

Obviously, I’m a fan of the picture books.  ‘Tis true.  I’ve been collecting them since I was a teenager; I brought my more valuable ones to college, which lead to Brian and I becoming friends (we traded books a lot).

But it’s becoming a problem.  When I first began to collect picture books, I chose them based on the quality of illustration alone.  Now that I know something more about children’s literature (more than the average person ought to know, really), I focus on finding books that are out of print, or likely to be so.  Therefore, my book sale splurges are done with the attitude of, say, rescuing Holocaust refugees (“If I don’t take them in, they’ll disappear forever!“).  I despair whenever I see really good books that are only a year or two old showing up as library discards.  Didn’t anybody want to read them?  Or did the librarians not do a good enough job of promoting them?  Oh, tragedy. And schadenfreude — because those books are now mine.

*rubs hands together with evil grin*

Allergies vs. Cold

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The cottonwood is blooming, which means itchy eyes, a runny nose, and more sneezes than I know what to do with.  For me.  Nobody else is affected, which means I spend a lot of these sunny afternoons watching my children through panes of glass as they frolic in the backyard.

Katie, meanwhile, is dealing with her very first cold.  This means a runny nose and weepy red eyes for her.  It also means that if she’s awake, she needs to be held.  By somebody.  Most often, me.  You put her down?  WAAAAAAA!  (From her.  And then, me.)

I have essentially turned into a human Barcalounger for a three-month-old.  My activities are limited to what I can accomplish with only one hand:

1. reading

2. surfing the Internet

3. loading/unloading the dishwasher

4. goading children into homework/piano practice with a riding crop

Well, maybe not the riding crop.  But that’s about it.  I made an attempt to stir-fry green curry vegetables while holding Katie, and ended up accidentally dumping half of the vegetables on the floor.  Aaargh.  And keep in mind that during all this, I keep sneezing — and I’m a repeat sneezer, ricocheting off at least 5-7 sneezes with every go.  (My personal record?  23 sneezes in a row, set when I was fourteen.  It hurt.)

In other words, not a whole lot is getting accomplished around here.  But I’ve found that, when parenting newborns, one of the secrets of success is to have very low expectations for yourself.  Caring for the baby is the Main Job.  Everything else is just gravy, right?

Right?

If only I could convince my nagging sense of guilt that this were true.

Mom Stuff

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The night before Mother’s Day, Jeffrey woke up at 4:30 a.m. with a nightmare, and I guess the best Mother’s Day present I received was when Brian rose out of bed to take care of him.

Brian wasn’t able to get back to sleep after tucking Jeff back in — and I’m pretty sure that if I had been the one to get up, I’d have stayed up all night, too.

The Upshot: Brian got to sleep in on Mother’s Day while I got up and made the fancy breakfast (old fashioned oatmeal with cranberries and sweet cream, mmm).  While we feasted, the kids gave me presents they had made.

Eleanor had been DYING to give me hers since the second she arrived home with them on Friday afternoon.  She took pains to hide them from me in her room (so I wouldn’t accidentally see them) but then spent the weekend asking, “Can I give you your Mother’s Day present now?  Can I give it to you now?“).

What she gave me:

1. a collage drawing/art project depicting a paper vase with little paper flowers inside.  When I pulled the flowers out, I found little messages on the stems (“I will hep you clen the hous, Mom.”)

2. A necklace made out of a Shrinky-Dink on a chain.  She had drawn a little yellow-and-green lady on one side, and wrote “I Love You, Mom” on the other.  I wore it all day yesterday.

William, at this point, was pouting in the corner and feeling terrible.  Since he had been sick with a cold last week, he wasn’t able to make a Mother’s Day gift for me in preschool and was upset about it.  I told him that a hug was a great present, but he wasn’t buying it.  Eleanor then “gave” him a third present she’d made at school for him to give to me:

3. A pen with a silk flower attached to it with florists’ tape.  I’m sure you’ve all seen variations on this craft before.  I was impressed with Eleanor’s work — she’d wrapped up the pen very well, with no bumps or creases!  I don’t know if I could have done such a good job when I was in kindergarten.

Jeffrey then presented me with his presents:

1. A paper box he’d decorated in Cub Scouts, filled with candy, and

2. A ceramic box he’d made in school, also filled with candy.

I noted that the ceramic box looked like a cupcake, and Jeffrey leaned back and  hummphed.  “Yeah, the art teacher FORCED me to make a cupcake box,” he said.  Which is both hilarious and unfortunate (why not let him make any kind of box he wanted?).

Then he immediately began to pester me to give him candy.  “But you’re supposed to share, Mom!”  Oh, sure.

Brian had given me a present for Mother’s Day back in April — a new stand mixer, so I could survive the birthday/baby blessing double header.  It’s a big glossy Kitchen-Aid, which I have dubbed Mrs. White.  (Not only for its color, but also for its potential for doing in Mr. Boddy.)  Too bad I’m trying to lose the baby weight right now — Mrs. White’s cookie-making potential has yet to be tested.  But still, I love it.

Cinema Camisas: The Lion and the Mouse

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William’s preschool is observing spring break this week.  I was hoping to go out and give him some adventures, but it keeps snowing!  When we woke up this morning, flakes were once again falling outside, and I decided that we needed to make a movie.  It’s been ages since the last one.  (And hey, notice that all of our family films are in the left sidebar!)

But what story can be adapted to the acting abilities of a preschooler and a baby?

This is the answer.  Enjoy.

Going Eggy

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Since we live equidistant from both sets of grandparents, all of our holidays are double-barrelled.  This year we made eggs with one Grandma . . .

. . . and then the other, who had gotten kind of carried away with the egg-itude.  I think there were SEVEN DOZEN of them.  I’ve never used so many PAAS tablets in my life.

We had a lovely salmon dinner with Grandpa . . .

. . . and I made a “Lemon Canadian Crown” for the other grandpa.  This is a frozen dessert, with lemon mousse inside, and a meringue topping.  Ladyfingers make the crust (which I purchased from a store, ’cause I’m not that nuts to make my own).

We also had an egg hunt with Cousin June.  Note that Katie is old enough to wear the pink sweater I knitted for her.

The egg hunt was followed by what may possibly have been the world’s cutest game of kickball.  Cousin June gave everyone hugs as she rounded the bases, and assorted other children kept running back and forth from one fielder to another.  I also took the opportunity to confirm that I still stink at kickball.

Church on Sunday featured what may be the best “youth speaker” I’ve ever heard.  It was given by Eliza, who has competed in debate tournaments at the national level, and the talk was so well-organized and focus that you could almost hear the bullet points as they went by.

On Easter Sunday, Eleanor was thrilled to wear a matching dress with her baby sister.  Cheesy?  Yeah, but I can’t resist.  Eleanor is still very much in love with Katie.

Capitol Reef II: The Reckoning

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Yesterday I mentioned The Tale of the Water Pit, and I know you’ve all been just salivating for it, right?

Brian and I have taken the kids on many hikes, and we’ve never had any major incidents or mishaps, UNTIL . . .

It started out as an ordinary day in Capitol Reef.  We walked through Capitol Wash, and then up a spur trail that leads to the Tanks.

What are the tanks, you say?  These:

They are big pockets in the rock that fill with water.  Ohhhh, you say.  Water tanks.  Right.  They are very important for desert ecology, etc. etc.  And we saw some interesting water gliders in this one.

HOWEVER — the edge of this tank was tricky to walk around, so I decided to stay behind with William while Brian went ahead with everyone else.  And on the way back — eek! — Eleanor fell in!

Right in the deepest part of the water tank.  Which, fortunately, only went up to her waist, but still.  The water was freezing, and it was the halfway point in the trail.  This meant that Eleanor had to hike all the way out of the canyon with wet shoes, socks, and pants.  Poor girl.  She was brave about doing this, but she kept up a steady stream of complaints the whole while.

THEN, right after leaving the dreaded Water Pit of Whine, William began to squirm about in that traditional dance that means a bathroom break is needed.  We found a nearby bush for him to do his business, and right as I managed to get his pants down, he sprayed my arm.  AND got his pants wet.

The tally so far: Two Wet Kids . . . whose clean clothes were all back in the hotel (yeah, hotel.  I don’t camp with newborns, especially with temperature lows in the 20s).

By the time we made it out of the wash, it was 7:30.  We had originally planned to cook and eat dinner at a picnic area in the park, but we couldn’t do that with two wet kids.  We headed back to Torrey, and by the time we had everyone cleaned and changed, it was 8:30, and dark.

There was no microwave in the hotel.  Brian and I couldn’t stomach the idea of cold cuts for dinner after a day of hiking.

The town of Torrey, Utah is small.  Very small.  So small that most restaurants are closed by 8:30.

Except for one.

[insert angelic choir music here]

The fabulous Patio was open until 10:00.  We gratefully ordered a pizza and the kids filled out their Jr. Paleontologist books while we waited.

This is where the story begins to turn around.  For sitting at a nearby table was a pair of women who work as paleontologists for the Museum of Ancient Life at Thanksgiving Point.

They came over and introduced themselves.  Did our kids like fossils?  Did we know that there was a big fossil field just outside of the park?  Would the kids like some of the fossils they had collected?

YES!!

The ladies had a big bag of fossilized clamshell-looking things, commonly known as “Devil’s Toenails.”  The kids were THRILLED to have a handful of them, and later in the trip we drove out to find the fossil hill ourselves.

It’s true: a giant pile of fossilized seashells, in the middle of the desert!  Can’t help but wonder what long-ago people thought of them. We collected our own bagful.

Happy ending, happy ending.  Just watch out for those water pits.