Not Inadequate

In anticipation of being gone later this week (by myself!), I heroically volunteered to go to WalMart and lay in supplies. It was decided that whilst Jim made the kids lunch, I would dash over and get milk for the kids and junk food for Temporarily Single-Parent Daddy. There is no reason this event should have taken more than an hour. However, the WalMart nearest me is being completely re-arranged. No one saw fit to tell me about this. Instead of the children’s department, I found the motor oil department. Consequently, I spent two hours wandering around blinking owlishly and asking random people if they had seen the boy’s socks. Not only could I not find anything, but there were oblivious employees and giant pallets blocking every aisle. 

Here is what I am wondering. Why did they choose to do this during the day? WalMart is open twenty-four hours a day. Presumably they have people working during those hours. Wouldn’t 12:30 am be a better time to rearrange the motor oil? 

When I came home, I had an uncharacteristic burst of energy and made Jolanthe’s Granola Bars.

And since I had been promising them for two days, pizza and calzones. I use this basic recipe, although I tweak it by using ½ freshly ground whole wheat flour and adding a little sugar.

 Yes, it’s a homemade pizza with hot dogs on it. Don’t judge.

We have a weird lifestyle. Home schooling is weird, there’s no point in pretending otherwise. My husband works from home. This is also weird, but a huge blessing. He has an office in the basement, and every morning at 8 he heads down there to do mysterious computer geekery. Most days, he comes up and has lunch with the babies, and is pretty much always here for dinner. 

It’s nice in a lot of ways. No commute for one thing. When the Big was first born, Jim commuted 2 hours a day and barely got to see the baby. He also works a lot, sometimes in the middle of the night. So when he gets called for some stupid computer emergency at 3am (3am! People! Go! To! Bed! No one needs to be working, much less creating emergencies, at that hour) he doesn’t have to drive to an office in the snow, he can just go downstairs. Not to mention what a 100-mile-a-day commute was doing to us when gas was $4 a gallon. 

I often wonder what the neighbors think since they don’t see us leaving at 7:30am like they do. We must appear to have No Visible Source of Income. We lived across the street from someone like that once, but he was a drug dealer. Some of my friends are horrified at the amount of togetherness we have, but it works for us. 

My kids don’t know the meaning of sleeping in and they get up at the butt-crack of dawn every single day, even if it’s Saturday. So annoying. During the week, Jim gets up with the kids, herds them downstairs and chucks food down their beaks, while I hold on to every last second of sleep I can. He’s swell that way. I stagger down the stairs at 7:59 and he heads to his office in the basement for work. 

The kids play and harass me while I try to get some caffeine into my body, and depending on how nicely they are playing, we start school around 9. We work until around noon-ish and Jim comes up and has lunch with everyone while I take a shower or run to the grocery store or the library or hide in my closet and drink gin. Afternoons are pretty relaxed, they play or watch some PBS, while I cruise the internets and mediate arguments. That’s also the time for reading aloud, watching science videos, finishing up work we didn’t get done in the morning and me occasionally (very occasionally) shoveling out the kitchen. 

After work, Jim comes upstairs and we either begin the “did you have a plan for dinner?” “no, did you?” conversation; or the “remember, I have to work tonight” “what? why didn’t you tell me sooner!” conversation.

So Little is being very uncooperative at dinner lately. She just sits there and holds the food in her mouth and if I tell her to chew, she pretends to chew, but is really just rolling the food around in her mouth. And sometimes it almost slips down her throat whole and she starts making these pre-puking gagging faces. Naturally, I find this v. annoying and the other night I told her if she doesn’t get with the program she is getting peanut butter for the rest of her life because I am tired of all these stupid food games. I might have raised my voice a tiny bit at this point. The peanut-butter-for dinner threat has made a huge difference in Big’s dinnertime behavior, so I break it out for the little girl.
 
Big immediately bursts into tears and sobs, “if Little eats one thousand peanut butter sandwiches she will get sick!” and he is practically hysterical; theatrically grabbing his own stomach, with tears and snot streaming down his face, and sputtering bits of virulent yellow macaroni and cheese all over the place. The macaroni and cheese that I held back as a bribe to get them to eat their meatballs. 

And what can I say to this? Obviously I cannot admit that I would not give them pb&j FOREVER and it is just an empty threat, because then I lose all power. Power on which I have only the most tenuous of grasps anyway. So I am walking this parenting tightrope, threatening one child with consequences whilst simultaneously reassuring the other that I would never do those things….and who is smirking at me across the table, but my very own husband who apparently finds all this hilarious.
 
And then I can’t take it anymore and I give him a Meaningful Look and leave. And who is smirking now? Because now HE is in charge and he has taken up the threatening and cajoling, and if the shrieks of injustice are to be believed, he has actually thrown Little’s dinner in the trash and made a big point of putting the Golden Mac-o-Cheese of Desire in the fridge without giving any to her.

May 8, 2010

We scraped together some money and bought the kids a big play set for the backyard. They should have a fun summer climbing all over it. It has a little house with little decks and a swing set and a place for a sandbox. I hope it’s not too big of a hassle to put together. I don’t like to be lifting stuff, yo. The plan is that I will be able to just sit and read or knit and they will play without feeling the need to shove random dirt clods and bugs into my face. 

We spent part of the first weekend scraping out a section of the yard so we would have a level place to build it. I got a blister. Boo.

May 15, 2010

The play set arrives on a gigantic truck. It had a lift-gate, which is apparently muy awesome to the five year old set. One of the boxes is HUGE. Like, HUGE. As big as a coffin. But longer. And there are pallets of other stuff. What on earth have we gotten ourselves into here?

 After the truck leaves, Big immediately commences building cargo trucks with lift-gates out of legos. 

May 21, 2010

Jim takes Friday afternoon off and we work trying to get the primary support structure together. In the heat. Where the bugs are. Nature keeps touching me. I smash my finger with the stupid hammer. I cry, then feel like a sissy. 

After hours of working, we realize that we have made some mistakes. We are going to have to take it all apart and start over. I’m sure you can imagine what we thought about THAT, and I don’t have to bore you with all the cursing blaming details. 

We start over bright and early on Saturday and work all day (see: bugs, heat, cursing). We have lots of enthusiastic help in the form of a five year old who LOVES construction almost as much as he loves his mommy (at least that’s what he told me). He wants to get as close to the action as possible, which results in a few relatively minor injuries (“keep your FACE away from the DRILL!”). After lunch, I decide to put the kids in front of the television in an effort to preserve my sanity it’s too hot outside for the kids, and turn on the usually forbidden emergency treat – Tom and Jerry. 

We work all day on Sunday, too.

And we aren’t even halfway done. 

I might die.

May 28, 2010

OH MY GOSH WHY ISN’T THIS THING DONE YET?

All I wanted, after WEEKS of working on this monstrosity, is a Memorial Weekend of doing absolutely NOTHING. Maybe grilling some hot dogs and drinking iced tea. Definitely watching Mega Piranha and Mongolian Death Worms, which I have Tivo’d in anticipation of this very weekend. 

But no. 

The Play Set That Will Not End (alternatively - Play Set: Sisyphus Didn’t Have It That Bad) is STILL NOT DONE. 

But finally, after devoting yet another entire weekend to this project: 

Believe it or not, there is still one last thing to do, which is add another picnic table/bench combination on the left under that awning.

Maybe next year.

So now that I am all about the homemade bread products, I have been making pizza dough from scratch. Surprisingly, it’s not even that hard. But if I am going to be Homemade Pizza Dough Person, I need more equipment (obviously). I started out by getting a pizza stone. 

Actually I should say I got another pizza stone. About ten years ago, I attended one of those Pampered Chef parties. The rep was a relative, and the cooking demonstration was something yummy made out of crescent rolls and cooked on a stone. Like a sucker, I bought one. And proceeded to never take it out of the box. Then just last year, in a cleaning frenzy, I got rid of it. I should have just burned two twenty dollar bills, and saved myself the trouble of hauling that thing around for ten years. 

Apparently, to use a pizza stone, you need a pizza peel. I did not know this, and for weeks have been cooking pizzas on my Clearly Inferior cookie sheets, while the pizza stone lay in the bottom of the oven, mocking me. Yesterday, I decided to take myself and my fellow adventurer, Big, down to the restaurant supply store and get one. 

The restaurant supply store is so. cool. You can get ALL SORTS of great stuff there – giant cutting boards, knives, plastic ashtrays by the case – and it’s all commercial quality and less expensive than a kitchen store. I love it. When we first moved into this house, it had a big kitchen with no counter space. (I don’t get that. What is the point with a big, square, empty room with a kitchen shoved into the corner? Does it double as a dance hall? What?) After buying the house and all the appliances and a new water heater…we were in no position to go out and spend a ton of money on a kitchen island. That is when I discovered my local restaurant supply store and the awesomeness that is a restaurant-grade, stainless-steel table, in whatever size and height your heart desires. For a hundred bucks. And it’s indestructible. And only a hundred bucks. Did I mention it was only a hundred bucks?

After we found the peel, we wandered around the store for quite a bit – Big asking ten thousand questions about what everything was, and me hissing QUIT TOUCHING STUFF. I spent $14 on the pizza peel and $12 on scoops, ladles, and pie plates for playing in the mud. Buzz Kill Mom said no to a French fry chopper that would be “perfect for crushing dirt clods, mom!” and a fancy $40 spring form pan that would be “perfect for making mud pies, mom!” 

When I got the peel home, it looked bigger than it had in the store… 

It’s taller than my three year old.

* Why yes, I do excel at blog post titles, don’t I?

We have always had a 7 pm bedtime for our kids; and after they are in bed, we eat our own dinner and relax. A lot of people look at me funny when they find out. I’m pretty sure they are thinking something along the lines of  “wow, for a minute there I thought you loved your kids, but now it’s obvious that you suck! Don’t you know what Dr. Phil said about family mealtimes?”

To which I say: “whatever, dude.”

By the time 5:30 rolls around, I just want to shove something down their whiny little beaks and be done with it. It’s too much of a hassle to try to eat our own dinner while cutting up their food and hollering at them for dropping stuff on the floor and watching the clock so we can get baths over with before The Real Housewives of New Jersey starts. For another thing, they don’t want to eat what we eat, and making two dinners at the same time is more than I can handle. Big is SO PICKY. The other night we told him to eat one more bite of corn and 0.6  seconds after he did, he puked ALL OVER THE DAMN PLACE. His entire dinner – corn, bbq sandwich…it was awesome. Then he’s all “I TOLD you guys I don’t like corn” 

Then he said he was hungry and ate another half a sandwich. 

Little turd.

I have signed up to go to a home school conference in Denver in next week. I am very excited about it. There are going to be seminars and demonstrations and a bunch of curriculum vendors. PLUS, I am going BY MYSELF to stay in a hotel room for TWO NIGHTS, where there could potentially be room service, BY MYSELF. And I can use the bathroom BY MYSELF. Did I mention I was going BY MYSELF? They don’t allow kids, and since we don’t have anyone to leave Big and Little with for 3 days, we decided in the end that I should just go ALONE. As in BY MYSELF. 

Not that I am excited about it or anything. Plus, it will give Jim a chance to miss me terribly and realize just how much I do around here when I am not blogging or shooing everyone outside so I can watch Real Housewives of New Jersey. I might even call him at night and go into great detail about what I had for dinner, and pretend to feel sorry for him having to eat cold cereal, which is what he does to me when he goes away. Maybe I should dial back my enthusiasm a little. 

Wait, one more time – BY MYSELF.

Our yard is a little nutty. The previous owners were the first and only owners of the house, and the wife apparently fancied herself to be a gardener. They lived here for twenty-seven years and she planted things all over, every year, that entire time. When we first moved in and it all bloomed, it was a little…disorganized, let’s say. Some of it had to go because it wasn’t healthy (elm tree - badgered to death by our Neighborhood Association, heroically on the lookout for errant plant life), or because it was planted too close to the house (don’t plant huge bushes 6 inches from the foundation and then not ever prune them for 3 decades - just saying), or because it was plain nasty (gigantic juniper hedge that was a habitat for every spider, mouse, and snake in the area). But a lot remains and every year in the early summer we see this: 

Peonies!

More Peonies!

Day Lilies (I think)

Almost-Ripe Cherries

Baby Peaches!

Let me just say that I had to take quite a few pictures of the baby peaches before I finally got one that did not look R-rated. I never realized how inappropriate those little fuzzy golden globes looked before. IfyouknowwhatImean. 

It looks like we are going to have a bumper crop this year, which is nice because we didn’t get any last year – all the blooms were destroyed by a nasty hailstorm. The peach tree, alas, is on it’s way out. It is being eaten by carpenter ants. I was really looking forward packing the freezer with peaches this year, but when the ants appeared my husband sprinkled ant killing stuff at the base of the tree and now he is all worried that the peaches will be poisonous. If anyone has any thoughts about whether the peaches are edible, I would be grateful.

And because I love them so -

More Peonies!

I am so excited to start making my own bread. My people go through a lot of it, and when I started adding up how much I was spending on bread products every month, my motivation increased. 

When my mother-in-law showed up with the bread machine, my husband, for some reason, thought that meant we would go into the kitchen and make some bread. I was all “take it easy, let’s not get carried away.” When I begin a new hobby, I have a process. First, I had to clean Amazon out of its entire stock of bread books. Then I had to read the books, find the right recipe, and talk myself off the ledge because people like Peter Reinhart are talking about stuff like bigas and starters and mashes and what on earth did I get myself into here? Then I had to spend approximately eleventeen-thousand dollars on loaf pans and dough enhancer and vital wheat gluten and other mysterious things I never thought about before. All of those things had to be purchased on the internet too, because here in Backwater, Colorado, the people at the health food store have apparently never heard of dough enhancer and look at you suspiciously like you might be trying to trick them into selling you rat poison. Then I realized that my inferior storage containers just will not do, and I had to run all over town to find the perfect containers for all this other crap stuff. Obviously, I cannot make decent bread without first getting the right storage containers. What if word of my bread spreads to Food Network and I come thisclose to getting my own show, but then lose out because of inferior containerage? I grudgingly decided I can suffer along with the measuring cups I have, but I put the $25 set on my Amazon wish list for the next time I feel entitled (or the next time I am placing an order and need another dollar to push me over into free shipping).

So for three weeks, I researched and read and bought and assembled and bought some more and had a growing stack of stuff by the front door…and finally, the day arrived.

Lookit. I don’t do things halfway. If I decide I want to make a loaf of bread, the only logical thing to do is buy a 45 pound bucket of wheat. Right? And yes, my entryway is orange.

And why buy dough enhancer when I can make my own for a mere three times the price? At least when my son spills it all over the floor I can make some more.

What? Doesn’t everyone use a label maker? How could you sleep at night otherwise? Note the Fancy New Containers.

And so after washing all the equipment and reading all the directions…

 Wheat before milling.

 Flour!

 Wheat and Other Stuff in the mixer.

 Dough.

 After first rise.

 In the pans for the second rise. 

    

Naturally, we ate an entire loaf with butter and honey right out of the oven. You aren’t supposed to do that, especially if you want to slice it for sandwiches, but Oh My Gosh could it BE more delicious?

The scene opens with the kids playing in the family room… 

Big: What kind of dinosaur should I be?
 
Me: I don’t know – how about that burrowing one?
 
Big: Ok, what’s it called?
 
Me: I don’t know.
 
Little: Oryctodromeus.

Me: What? 

Little: Oryctodromeus.

Me: What?
 
That’s it. My kids are officially smarter than me. Thanks a lot, PBS. I kind of thought I’d have more than three years before I was the dumbest person in the room, know what I mean? I about fell over. Oryctodromeus? Who knows that? Little weirdo. I’m still the only one allowed to drive, though. So I took my ass to Starbucks and got a venti mocha. Maybe I can keep up if I’m all hyped on caffeine. Then we found a construction site and watched a crane load roofing onto a building. I might be stupid, but I can at least show them a good time.