Mama Sutra

Happy dependence day

We've already had our party, three days ago, complete with games and colouring and carnival rides that I was sure were going to give my kid some communicable disease.  Now it's July 4, well into summer vacation, and it's not that my kids are dependent, but there's been a lot of

• Mom, can you sharpen my pencil crayon?
• Mommy, I'm hungry.
• Mommy, I'm still hungry.
• I am very very hungry.
• Mom, I need some more paper.
• Mommy, come look at my pee.
• Mommy, where's my dinosaurs?
• Mom, someone bit me.

Oh yeah.  So now my girls are at the table with dishes full of the not-so-great homemade bubble stuff I made.  Not effective for blowing bubbles, but good for giving little plastic animals a bath.

In other news, I hate all my clothes. This happens with great frequency and regularity, but yesterday I needed to run an errand and look somewhat presentable, and I had pretty much nothing to work with.  My closet is a museum of my post-university fashion choices:

• 1995-2000: hippy clothes, stuff that would accommodate a weight gain of 15 or 20 pounds (lots of empire waistlines, and, yes, I was constantly asked if I was pregnant)
• 2000-2001: dropped 25 pounds, weighed less than I weighed in high school, bought a bunch of cute, sporty clothes with actual waists
• 2000-2003: gained the weight back, moved back into my shapeless hippy dresses
• 2003-2004: pregnant with elder daughter, spent a bunch of money on maternity wear
• early 2005: home with a baby, spent a bunch of time in my pyjamas, lost about 10 pounds, then got pregnant again
• 2006: started back at Weight Watchers when younger daughter was 6 weeks old, lost 30 pounds, bought a bunch of casual SAHM clothes, mostly at Costco
• 2007: went back to work, gained a bunch of weight so my new clothes wouldn't fit anymore; left work to be home with girls just before a long winter and gained back the rest of the weight I'd lost and then some
• 2008: OMG  I HATE MY CLOTHES

After trying on most of the stuff in the back of my closet, most of which is getting close to ten years old, I realized that the best before date has passed on most of my old hippy clothes, which, sadly, are the only things that fit me right now.  I also need new bras.  After running my errand, I made a little trying on clothes expedition and was so disheartened with the clothes part that I ran from the store before I even got to the bra shopping. 

Meanwhile, the awesome project I set my kids up with has certainly kept them occupied for the last ten minutes, but holy hell they've made a pool out of the furniture formerly known as our dining room table and chairs.  Gah.

In honour of the fact that I did not have a migraine

So, around supper time I was feeling pretty gnarly, and eventually I just abandoned the table and the tired and crabby children and took to my bed with my lavender flax seed bag because the advil wasn't working.  The Daddy got the kids to sleep, I fell asleep, and when I woke up my headache was gone so it wasn't a migraine and I'm all phew because my sister has migraines and gets then two or three times a week and I so do not need that in my life. 

In other news, we had a family trip out today (the Daddy had a day off) and went to the greenhouse which is empty (just like our yard!  ha!), and the pet store, and then everyone went outside except for me and I have no idea what I was doing but maybe that's when my headache started...oh yeah, I was trying to read blogs and the letters were all climbing over each other, and then I tried to read a book, but there was a little swirling pinwheel thingy in the lower edge of my vision, so then I just closed my eyes.  I guess that's why I was thinking migraine, because that all seems pretty weird.

I was thinking yesterday that I should only cook for one meal a day, because yesterday it was mac and cheese for lunch and then bbq turkey sandwiches at supper (the bbq part is sauce, the turkey is from the deli).  Then today I nuked some soup and made sandwiches under the broiler (turkey, tomato, dijon, dill havarti in various combinations).  And then there was supper, which I really recommend.  Another Everyday Foods recipe from Jan/Feb 08: chopped salad with spicy pork and buttermilk something or other dressing.  I made it pretty close to what it described, though less spicy on the pork because the pepper was spicy enough for my girls, and then I put some dill salad dressing stuff into the buttermilk.  The kids liked it because they just ate all the parts separately, that and we gave them some chips that were leftover from sandwich night last night.

Because that wasn't enough "making stuff" for me, I've also made homemade bubble stuff.  It took half a gallon of water, 1/3 cup of dishwashing soap, and 1 1/2 tablespoons of glycerin.  The blog I found this on said it would get better after it sat for a day, and I don't know that we found that to be true, but I think I should blame that on using eco-friendly dish soap rather than good bubbly regular stuff.  Back to the drawing board.

I also made some more popsicles.  We've done blueberry pomergranate juice, and orange juice, and tonight I nuked some berries and mixed them with vanilla yogurt.  I don't know what the girlies will think of them but I'll eat them all if they don't.  And then I made chocolate chip espresso shortbread.  I'm not a shortbread purist, I'm not even a great shortbread fan, despite my Scottish heritage.  I think I can blame that on my sister telling me that shortbread was made using goat's milk, which put me off it for a decade or so.  No goat in these cookies, and they are delightfully sandy textured and not too sweet.  Fast, one bowl, didn't even need the mixer (important when I'm baking after the kids are asleep). 

If I had any artistic talent of the drawing kind, I'd be all over spoonflower.  Design your own fabric??  How cool is that?? 

And then there's the funny post of the day that I read at breed 'em and weep.  This could be my kids, a year or two in the future.  Not that I'd ever take them there, after reading this, but...

Return of the SAHM

Something happened to make me stop blogging.   It might have been the pressure of started a third NaBloPoMo, or having a second blogiversary.  Maybe it was reading other typepadders who were complaining about problems with their blogs, like comments not showing up or something like that.  Maybe it was the feeling that I was blogging more than I was living.  Maybe it was finding the F Word, seasons 2 and 3, on youtube. 

Have to come back some time, unless I just don't.  I had a meme that I "borrowed" off of a blog that I lurk at, but that seems like a lot of work.  So, you get recent recipes that I have tried,

Most recent is the batch of rhubarb muffins that are cooling as I write this.  It says it'll make 18 muffins or two 8" by 4" loaves.  I don't have that size of loaf pan, so I chose to do 12 regular sized muffins and 12 mini muffins.  The mini muffins took about 20 minutes to bake, the regular sized ones took 27 minutes.  I omitted the topping because my kids might eat them and they get high as kites on sugar.  Big Sis had a yogurt and a few crumbs of brown sugar left on the table from baking prep and she became a character from Over the Hedge. 

Because I've gone all locavore (okay, sort of, and I know I had a whole rant about the locavore movement less than a month ago...I finished Animal Vegetable Miracle and then read a biography of Alice Waters and I'm a convert now, though it's not easy here), and the only "crop" I have access to right now is my rhubarb plant in the back yard, I'm trying to do lots of rhubarb stuff.  I found this rhubarb site and made a cake and some stewed rhubarb.  The cake was pretty good, but it had a cinnamon sugar topping that I think would have benefited from some butter and nuts.  The stewed rhubarb I mixed with vanilla yogurt, and I liked it, but I think it might have needed a little something, maybe more sugar, because it was a bit too tart.  I like sour, but this left me with that pucker-y mouth feeling for quite a while afterwards.

A couple weeks ago, I made these really wonderful triple chocolate espresso brownies.  They were just amazing.  I followed them up with small batch brownies less than a week later.  I was a bit chocolate obsessed that week.  The small batch part means that you bake these in a loaf pan, so it's approximately half the size of my typical batch.  It still made a lot of brownies, so I sent them with DaddySutra to work.  These were more fudgy than cakey, and they were good too, but I think I prefered the first recipe.

I also tried this chicken-coconut curry recipe.  I modified it a bit because I don't like using more than one pan if I can avoid it.  I used a whole can of light coconut milk rather than a part can of regular.  I don't know if this is a good idea.  Some of the richness was lost doing that.  I found the recipe a bit sweet, which might have had something to do with using more of the light coconut milk, so I'd reduce the sugar next time.

(I'm starting to think this recipe thing is out of control: I should maybe separate this post into two parts, but I'm on a roll now...)

Last night, I made iced chai.  I drink a lot of chai, because the local Costco has been carrying concentrate for cheap for the last year or so.  But, no more.  I have quite a bit stocked up, but I will need a new solution.  This chai is very strong, presumably because it will be iced.  As one of the commenters noted, the ginger flavour is pretty pronounced.  I did make it with all the spices, and the full amount of ginger.  I think I would reduce the ginger when I make it again.  Question: do you think popsicles out of this would be good?

Homemade pizza crust: I can now say I've done it.  I got the recipe here, but I used different toppings.  I made it on a cookie sheet rather than a cast iron pan.  The crust ended up a bit thinner and cooked faster than I was expecting, but that's due to my modifications more than the recipe.  I don't know: I think I'm too lazy to do this on a regular basis.

If you scroll way down on this page, you'll find a recipe for self-hardening clay (I will not make a joke about that).  The stuff is a bit...stiff to work with, but it dries well and then you can paint it.  We made big beads out of it, let it dry two days, and then painted them.  Now we use them to string on pipe cleaners (yes, you could poke your eye out with the ends of pipe cleaners, but they work so much better than yarn).  I got the idea from The Artful Parent. (link is to the main site, not the actual project: everyone's back from their walk and I'm going to need to quit blogging and start making lunch soon).

After my brownie festival, I made these cappuccino muffins.  They were great.  Go, William Shatner!!  And, finally, a Ramsay recipe: frittata with goat's cheese and peas and bacon (okay, he says omelette, but I cooked it like a frittata).  Very very good, and very fast. 

(That was seriously ridiculous.  I have the worst kitchen ADD.)

MayBloMo #14

Ugh...I am too tired to be doing this.  I tried to convince myself that I didn't need to post, because I'm not going to do every day in May anyway, but I need some kind of momentum on a dreary overcast day that has just now turned rainy.

So.  Cooking.  I am cooking up a storm.  Tonight, being the busy night, was cheater food for supper, that being frozen tortellini, frozen peas, frozen meatballs.  But!  We also had the amazing no-knead bread that took very little work but did seem to require that I be home at specific times to make sure that everything got done as it needed to be done. 

Here is where I found the recipe.  Good link, because it also has the link to the original article on no-knead bread that has pictures of what the bread looks like at various stages (wish I'd checked these out before I started because, well, that would have been a good idea...not that the final product suffered, as far as we could tell), and it explains that 1/4 teaspoon of yeast is really all you need.  As in, 1/5 of a typical packet of yeast, and I needed two packets to make pizza dough a couple days before, which of course made me think something was terribly wrong.  But it's not!  And, the flour sack towels that I thought would be damaged forever for having a blob of shaggy dough (best adjective ever) sit on them for two hours: can't even tell.  I think I could teach my big kid to get all this mixed together, it's that easy. 

It's not even 7:30 and I am ready for bed.  I've been up past midnight two nights in a row and since my girls have started missing their naps they've started going to bed early, and since they've started going to bed early they've been getting up early, and this combination of factors is not working in my favour whatsoever.  I'm going to bed.

MayBloMo #13

1. The voice that came on after 12 minutes of trying to get through to sign my girl up for preschool for next September: hooray! 
2. The little voice, "Mommy!  You haven't done your yoga yet!"  So I did my yoga, but 12 minutes into my 20 minutes of DVD I started hearing two little voices: "Are you done yet?  Are you done?  Mommy, are you done yet?"
3. The voice that said, "Yeah, make that coconut bread."  So I did.  Then I made sticky lemon chicken.  Both good, but the chicken was outstanding.  An hour or so from now, I'm going to make attempt #1 at no-knead bread (yes, a year late to the party, I know).  Three new recipes in one day?  I'm questioning the wisdom of this...

MayBloMo #12

Ha.  (And, yes I am still going to space twice after a period, regardless of the whatever of my font-a-ma-jiggy.  So there.)  I did not listen to the little voice that said "you're tired, you don't need to go to the gym, stay home and be slothlike."  I did not listen to the little voice, even as it got bigger.  I waited until the kids went to bed and DaddySutra had everything well under control and out I went.  Granted, I stopped at the bank and at costco, and I kind of took my time, and I only walked for 25 minutes.  But!  25 minutes today is 25 minutes more than I did yesterday or the previous 12 days.  Yes, I did get a month-long gym membership two weeks ago and no I haven't been to the gym since the day I went when I walked for 22 minutes and got giant juicy blisters on my feet.  I've also had about two litres of water and I haven't been snacking near as much today.  And I did my yoga DVD this morning!  Woot!  Now I must go lie down or something.

MayBloMo #11: I return

Well, that was unexpected.  I was starting on my third month of daily posting, no misses, and we had an expected power outage last Monday afternoon.  However, the power came back but we had no phone, no internet.  I suppose I could have gone somewhere and found a computer to keep posting on, but I suddenly had a whole bunch of things to deal with, including finding a phone to call the phone company (I could have used my cell, but I am getting no great deal on minutes, and I refused to pay my cell company to talk to my landline company, especially with the ridiculously annoying voice activated "dialogue" they put you through).  (Oh, did I just go on a rant?  How did that happen?)

Phone was back by Wednesday afternoon, but internet was not working right away as I had to unplug everything phone or computer related from the phone jacks and power and I this is not something I do regularly, so I forgot to plug something very basic in and was thus deprived of my internet for another couple hours until my personal tech support could fix it for me. 

That explains why I missed two days.  What about the other five?  I have no real answer for that.  I could answer, but the stuff that kept me away from here is the stuff that I tend not to blog about.   I had my second blogiversary on May 3, and in these two years I've tried to keep it as anonymous as I can, and as far as I know I'm succeeding.  (It helps that I have done virtually nothing to increase my traffic; I've read all those posts, and I've chosen to ignore pretty much all the suggestions). 

[deep breath]  Okay, now would be a good time to add some levity here.  Maybe I should have a contest.  Yeah, contests are great, and they increase your blog traffic (heehee).  Okay, it's the pre-contest poll: answer the following question in the comments:

• BLOG CONTESTS: LIKE 'EM OR HATE 'EM?

And if you have any good blog contest stories, tell me.

(Here's something that's kind of funny: heard of The Pioneer Woman?  She's pretty popular in bloggyland.  Anyway, she's just finished her second year of blogging.  Just like me!  Except, she has a few more readers that I do.  Like, more hits on a recent post than I've had EVER.  So, she had a contest to celebrate the end of her blogiversary week.  I should have shared this sooner so you could enter (too: ha!  of course I entered!).  Did you check it out?  Pretty snazzy set up, n'est-ce pas?  I priced it out on amazon, and I can say for certain that I will not be able to offer a contest prize in that range.  Then again, I doubt that I'll get 14 553 entries either.  Alrighty then...my ego and I are going to go eat some chocolate now.)

MayBloMo #4

Fourteen years ago, around this month, I got a job as a live out nanny (they referred to me as a nanny, but I think it was just because what 23 year old wants to work as a full time babysitter?).  I was responsible for four kids. 

The interview was great, if by great you mean meeting the three oldest kids while sitting on the picnic table on the deck, then riding the zip line with the oldest kid, then falling off the zip line as the parents came back to tell me they had decided to offer me the job (I was still flat on my back on the lawn as they told me this).  And then I met the snake and the youngest child, and the latter screamed at me and made me wonder if I should have applied for the job in the law office instead.

I hadn't done much babysitting since junior high.  I'd never been more than a date night/couple hours a week babysitter anyway.  Suddenly, I was thrown into a family, and I was not so much a surrogate parent as, well, a door mat.  I tried to be the "fun babysitter" like I'd seen in movies.  They didn't buy it.  I tried to be funny.  They rolled their eyes.  I tried a lot of things and they saw through all of it. 

Finally, I just decided to be blank for a while.  Instead of clapping my hands gleefully when they told me something interesting, I just said "oh" and nodded.  And they'd carry on with what they'd been doing, or they'd tell me more.  I spent several days not making a spectacle of myself, not trying to find some script I was supposed to follow, and I learned a bit about the kids.  They got used to me, they warmed up to me, a bit, and slowly.

I kept bouncing the idea of this post in my head, and I was trying to make the connection between this and "voice."  Having just come off two posts that interpret voice quite literally, I wasn't seeing the connection, or I could sense the connection but I couldn't explain it.  Now I'm seeing that voice to me, whether it is a person speaking in a room or your writing "voice" or this babysitter voice, it all comes down to authenticity.  What the kids heard in my spoken voice on the first days I worked in their home didn't ring true. I didn't know who I should be, and how could I?  Families are so complex; I was entering without knowing the players, the history, the relationships.  I had spent a lot of time in other situations, as a lot of adolescents and young adults do, I think, trying out voices and attempting to become myself. 

As much as I'm glad I like to sing, I think the voice I found that summer was more important.  It's not my voice today, but it showed me a lot about the process, about how to find that path.  (oh dear, I feel my old new age-y voice coming on...)

NotBloMo

Checking to see who is reading this...

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MayBloMo #3

I made it through four years of music school without learning to sing.  I was a flute player, so it wasn't really necessary, and I took orchestra and band so I didn't have to sing in choir.  But, I was required to complete three years of the hell that is Ear Training, and that required daily singing and regular singing tests in front of classmates.  Haaaaaated it, and dug my heels in and refused to learn how to sing.  I must have faked my way through it somehow.

Once I finished music school, I was invited to join a dance group that had a small orchestra.  They initially mentioned flute and recorder.  I hadn't played recorder before but figured it wouldn't be a big problem if grade school kids could play it.  They mentioned singing, but I looked horrified and they dropped the topic.

A couple months later, the girl who had been singing with the group had to leave, and a singer was needed.  Okay, I'll confess: I secretly wanted to be able to sing.  I was sad that I didn't take choir when I was a kid, which had a lot to do with the fact that: a) you were allowed to take choir or French in my elementary school, and you needed French to get into university; thus, I took French, and b) I was one of those kids who was told to just mouth the words in primary grades music. 

I had a chance to start singing.  No pressure: I'd just be singing in a public performance in, oh, three weeks.  Yikes.  I just put my little heart into it and gave it my all, and suddenly a singer was born.  Sort of.  That performance was recorded, and the dancers used it for their rehearsals on the days when the orchestra was off.  It became a bit of a legend because my singing was horrifying awful.  At the time, my ear was so off that I couldn't even really hear what the problem was. 

One of the directors took me aside, and instead of saying I was cut from the singing, suggested that I look into getting singing lessons, and gave me tapes of the music so I could practice at home or in my car.  That was a surprise to me.  I was used to one chance scenarios, all the auditions I'd attended where if you screwed up once, you were just done.

My voice teacher was great.  The other members of the dance group were great.  They would laugh with me about the horrible tape, but they also told me when they could notice improvement.  It was a big change from life in a competitive academic environment.

And after that I went to Julliard and now I'm an opera singer...hahaha, no.  I did take a number of courses in early childhood music, I did teach elementary music for several years, and I take my kids to their weekly music class where we all sing our hearts out.  My girls sing a lot, the songs from class and little invented songs that I adore.  I don't want them to tell me, like lots of little kids in my classes did, that they just can't sing.  I think everyone can sing, but singing can be scary.  I'm so glad I found my singing voice, even if it took 24 years for it to happen.