Not Inadequate

• I am at Heart of the Matter today, beginning a series on one of my true passions – freezer cooking. If anyone is interested in how I avoid cooking for weeks on end, while still feeding my family something besides endless pb&j sammies, head over and check it out. I’m taking questions too, so don’t be shy. (Tressa, I was partially inspired to write this for you, since Sucky Friend Deb STILL has not emailed you any recipes. Now I can kill two birds with one stone! Lazy FTW!)

• My kids are still asking for Christmas dvds and Christmas songs. We’ve been listening to Christmas music since, like, OCTOBER. People can only handle so much of the Brian Setzer Orchestra’s Boogie Woogie Christmas. And by “people,” I mean me.

• The government apparently wants to break the internet by passing some bill called the Stop Internet Piracy Act (SOPA). I’m not sure why, but it is in keeping with their policy of “If Ain’t Broke, Quick! Do Something!” (more here, here, and here).

• Jimmie (one day we will wake up and discover that the amazing Jimmie has taken over the entire internet) wrote a great article on Hub Pages last week called Online Friends are Real Friends. I like this article because a) I think everything in it is true; and b) because it makes me feel better about how much affection I feel for my internet buddies. I know that non-online people don’t get what it’s like to feel like part of an imaginary community… Seeing people I know on Pinterest or homeschool forums is like running into a neighbor at the grocery store. Twitter is like bumping into a friend at Starbucks and sitting down to catch up for a quick minute.

Anyway. Not trying to get all mushy here. But AH LUV Y’ALL, MAN. Mwah!

Ta Da! I’m actually gonna do this!

At least once in a row.

Okay, this week we:

• Started back to school at the bright and early time of 10:30am on Monday. Mama’s gotta check in with the internet, you know.

• Spent hours at the beach and learned to identify Limpets, Anemone, Ochre Sea Stars, Snails, Mussels, Barnacles, etc. Read from Seashore of the Pacific Northwest and talked about the tides and tidal zones; identified some of the seashells we have collected and creatures we have seen. Printed out some relevant info from a Magic School Bus literature unit I had; then lost control of the conversation and it turned into a spirited debate about which of the phytoplankton look most like Phineas’s head.

• Tried to deflect Big’s idea to get a flashlight and go octopus hunting in the middle of the night.

• Read Aloud: Mrs. Piggle Wiggle and chapters 1-5 of Cheaper by the Dozen. I have never been the read-aloud mom (Hi! I suck!) so this is a big accomplishment. I am surprised at how much everyone likes it, even my husband wants me to wait until he can listen too. Cheaper by the Dozen might be a little advanced for my group, but it’s our first foray into the reading aloud, so whatever. I LOVED those books my entire childhood. Assuming I don’t backslide into Sucky Mom territory, I think we’ll try the Little House on the Prairie series next.

• There was assorted math and vocabulary; and Little positively breezed through Step One of All About Spelling, solidifying my feeling that the girl is ready to start reading.

• I also became increasingly vexed with the state of my hair. I don’t know if there is something in the water here that’s building up, or if it’s possible that whatever product she used at my last haircut is still cemented to it, but there is SOMETHING ON MY HAIR. Only the hair on the top of my head, not the back or sides. Some film. It’s nasty. I never use products on my hair. I’ve been washing it two or even three times in the shower, but it won’t come out. I alternate shampoo. I’ve even used BAR SOAP on my hair to try to get the gunk off. Right out of the shower, it feels sticky.

Tacky.

Greasy.

GROSS.

Any ideas, internet?

(Cowl Posed Artfully on Weathered Adirondack)

Lookie!

I made a cowl!

I would do that thing where I take a picture in the bathroom mirror wearing it, but there are (oddly) no mirrors here. Who knows what my eyebrows are doing; I shall probably require a weed whacker and pruning sheers to tame them the next time I can look into a mirror. And the tetchy Lesbian Cop Hair is suffering too, I can feel it. I’ve gotten more than one quickly disguised look of surprise from the UPS man. Hopefully the new cowl will distract people.

Sparkly!

(Cowl Posed Meaningfully on Rain-Soaked Deck)

It’s the Tuesday Night Cowl by I’m Knitting As Fast As I Can, and it’s free on Ravelry. This was a VERY quick and easy knit, and if you want to dip your toe into cables, this is a good start. I made the Chunky Weight Yarn version (with Grande Glow Baby Alpaca by Plymouth) and it has only 2 cable rows per repeat, and only 5 repeats. I knit it in 3 evenings while watching old episodes of Firefly.

An evening spent with young Nathan Fillion is a very pleasant evening indeed.

(Cowl Posed Astonishingly on Sea Grass)

• We will be leaving this house in a couple of weeks; and while I will miss the wild, beautiful, fairy-tale-like Oregon Coast, I am looking forward to moving on to a bigger house. Constantly explaining that “Daddy’s on the phone and doesn’t want to listen to your treatise on Proper Flushing Technique” is getting old; and the noise of six thousand Legos being stirred in a bucket is driving me to the very precipice of sanity.

Legos need a room of their own.

Preferably far away from my ears.

Amen.

• The other day, I was linking around the interwebs and somehow ended up at a rabbit hole called Blogthings. It’s a personality quiz site, and I can’t resist a good quiz. Back when I subscribed to the soul-sucking, inferiority-complex-causing publication called Cosmo, I always did the quizzes first.

I started at What Does Your Handbag Say About You and it was all downhill from there. The results alternately insulted me (You would fail 8th grade Spanish!), complimented me (You’re so Organized!) and confused me (You’re an INTJ! No, wait – You’re an ISTJ! Either way, you’re a Boring JudgeyPants!) Go take The World’s Shortest Personality Quiz and see if it’s even in the ballpark. It called me Status Conscious. Which I don’t think is true….I think it’s more that I like orange.

• Big lost his first tooth! As a result of this, I have morphed from the kind of person who thinks keeping baby teeth in a pouch forever is creepy, to being the kind of person who is searching for the perfect baby-tooth storage pouch. I know in 20 years when we are sifting through my stuff and we come across the tiny tooth pouch, that he will be all “mom, gross! who would save teeth?” And I agree that’s it’s gross. But I can’t seem help myself.

Actually, those last two sentences apply to many things about motherhood, don’t they?

• Happy Monday!

The first thing to do regarding the Wrapping Up is confess that with all the house-selling/packing/becoming nomads business, school slipped to the back burner for like, say, the last *mumble-mumble* months. Rather than try to cram 15 weeks of school into the next 3 or 4 minutes, reality thankfully smacked me in the head and I decided to stop running our school schedule from January to December and switch to August to June like normal people, which will have the happy side effect of giving me until June to finish last year’s work.

This means that Big’s first grade year will have taken a year and a half, but I’m okay with it. For one thing, we started school a whole year before he could have attended public school (due to his December birthday). So in fact, my slackerism has brought us around to Right On Schedule. See? Inadvertent Win!

Okay, not really a win, but not a loss either. Maybe a TKO, whatever that is.

Whichever, the main thing is we are starting with a clean (and not behind) slate; and I can dismiss all that guilt that’s been following me around for months.

In the first part of 1st Grade, we:

• Did 19 Chapters of Math-U-See Alpha, dabbled with Life of Fred
• Completed All About Spelling Level 1, began Level 2
• Did a little over half of First Grade Literature (Memoria Press)
• Tried and ditched A Word A Day; switched to Wordly Wise 3000 Book 2, did 5 Chapters
• Did some random Critical Thinking exercises – Lollipop Logic, Dr. Dooriddles, and so on.

• Wrestled passionately over handwriting practice and the dreaded skip-counting
• Watched a bazillion documentaries – Galapagos, Blue Planet, How the States got their Shapes, Yellowstone, etc. etc. etc.
• Took ice skating lessons for 6 months and swimming lessons for a year
• Read voraciously (well, Big did. I read Us Weekly)

• Spent 3 months on the Oregon coast, played on the beach, and learned to identify various coastal creatures.
• Visited the Denver Museum of Nature and Science twice, our local zoo half a dozen times, and the Boulder Butterfly Pavilion once.
• Showed three adorable little girls how to grind wheat and make bread.

Huh. That doesn’t look so bad. I guess I sucked less than I thought. That’s good news, yo.

One of the things I decided I am going to do this year for school is a Weekly Wrap Up. Or Monthly Wrap Up.

Or Yet-To-Be-Determined-Interval-of-Time Wrap-Up.

Hopefully this will do a couple of things:

• Force me to drag homeschooling out of the old cool-whip container in the back of the fridge and into the forefront of our lives
• Help me realize that we do, in fact, do lots of educational and other things of value (I just forget them all due to Peri Menopausal Sieve Brain Syndrome)
• Help me recreate our Awesome! and Impressive! Learning Environment in case the guvmint man ever shows up on my doorstep

Most likely my wrap ups will not look like Melanie’s, whose writing contains sentences like “…he also wrote a three page essay discussing Aeschylus’s treatment of justice throughout The Oresteia…”

No.

Not likely at all, and no one is more disappointed than I.

Probably mine will look more like “…Argued with Big for 45 minutes over the proper way to make a nine. Vented to husband, then ate a pan of brownies. Decided skip counting was stupid. Did not do chemistry due to pathetic discovery I am too lazy to boil a cabbage. Watched 2 hours of The Real Housewives and spent 327 hours on Twitter. Forgot I was supposed to pay the bills this week.”

My, I was maudlin the other day, wasn’t I? It’s almost as if I wrote that post in the middle of the night.

The black, bleak, night.

Huddled in the dark…alone. With only the light of the monitor illuminating my tear-stained face…

It’s not like my poor children have been limping through the streets, barefoot and in dirty rags, seeking out the one kind shopkeeper who will turn a blind eye as they pilfer a roll of day-old bread; whilst I am at home, cackling cruelly at their misfortune and shoveling expensive chocolate truffles into my mouth by the handful.

It’s more that I want to work on being focused on them when I am talking to my children, and less distracted by the mental grocery list I am making. My brain gets noisy, and sometimes I don’t feel like I give ANYthing my undivided attention. I want to focus less on the future and more on the present. That’s what this year is about. We’ve realized that we tend to have a Grass-Is-Always-Greener outlook. We lived in Seattle for almost 4 years, but instead of exploring and experiencing all the amazing things that area has to offer, we were obsessed with paying off our student loans and wondering when we would decide to move back to Colorado. Looking back, we realize we squandered that time because we were focused on the future while the present kept sliding on by.

So 2012 is going to be the year of focusing on the present. One year of no fretting about our retirement account. One year of not worrying about raises or promotions. One year where we choose whale watching instead of adding to our savings account. One year to take the detour to see the world’s biggest ball of string instead of being in a hurry to get home. One year to waste Saturdays exploring the beach instead going to Home Depot and then yelling at the kids to stay away from that saw! all weekend.

One year. The Adventure Experiment.

It’s going to be a bunch of working on myself, which I find quite boring and tedious. I already have to reprimand myself sternly when I’m on Pinterest; because I get seduced by decorating ideas and before I know it, I’m fantasizing about whatever house we buy when we are finished traveling. NO! I tell myself. NO Pottery Barn Catalogs for you! Stop thinking about throw pillows and craft closets!

I’ve worked out a schedule and am prepared to devote 23 minutes per day to self improvement.

Unless it’s a day that has a new episode of The Real Housewives airing. Those days shall be considered holidays.

So here we are at yet another new year. A year in which I will turn 41, dammit, thus being firmly ensconsed in that dreaded decade. Is there any way I can spin 41 to somehow still being in my late thirties? If I find a way, I will let you know.

I was certainly glad to see the arse-end of 2011, which was quite stressful; and am delighted to see 2012, which stretches out in front of us, deliciously empty and full of possibility.

In 2011, we went bonkers and decided to sell our house and everything we owned and set about showing our children the United States.

That tiny sentence does not even begin to hint at the difficulty and stress and worry and arguments which happened as a result of that crazypants notion, but if you’ve been reading here for the last few months, you’ve probably had enough of my whinging endlessly about it, so I’ll move on.

Ever since Christmas was over, I have been exhausted. Bone-tired and itching for a nap from the minute I get up – at 10:30 am, thanks to a generous hubby who mysteriously does not begrudge my sleeping in. I think 2011 finally caught up with me, and all the tiredness I’ve ignored for the last 6 months because we have crap to get done here, people! came crashing down on me the second I sat still.

In thinking of 2012, I can’t help but think about 2011, and why we started down the drastic house-selling road in the first place.

We want to be more present.

To really see and hear our children. To look at them, pause, and memorize their ever-changing faces. To gaze into their eyes, not distracted by the house and the bills and all the stuff that’s mostly nonsense, and think of nothing except what they are saying…thinking…feeling.

To slow down, and just be.

To cook together, read together, learn together, and experience more than suburbia – together.

To get to know each other better. To create happy memories. To work on sharing and being kind.

To learn to make a proper nine, once and for all.

To prevent our children from lying in bed with their spouses in the future, talking about us the way we lie in bed and talk about our parents. Sadly. Disappointedly. Angrily.

To stop staring at the ceiling in the middle of the night, wondering if I even looked my children in the eye that day. Because I’ll know I did.

To stop wondering if I gave them enough kisses. Because I’ll know I gave them hundreds of kisses, and cuddles besides.

To stop trying to remember if I listened to them at all, or did all our interactions that day consist of me bossing them, or scolding them, or way more often than I’d like to admit - yelling at them. Because I am going to work on being calmer and more patient and I shall soon brimming with awesome-momness.

To stop wondering all the time if I am screwing this whole thing up.

(why yes, I AM a barrel of laughs in the middle of the night)

To spend less – or even no! time focused on the condition of the grass and where are we going to get the money to fix the air conditioner and how much longer can we expect that ancient thing to limp along before we have to shell out the really big bucks to replace it and where are these stupid ants coming from, I guess we’d better make a trip to Home Depot and while we’re at it let’s replace that broken doorknob and did you pay that bill and do you think you’ll get a raise this year and your mother called and–and–and….

So that’s what 2012 is going to be about.

Being present.

And maybe teaching these kids to chew with their dadgum mouths closed, for heaven’s sake.

Here on the Oregon coast, it’s windy and rainy. This kind of weather puts me in the mood for soup, stew, and hot noodle-y casseroles.

You know, comfort food.

Today it’s beef stew.

Step One: Get kids settled with a mountain of Legos.

Step Two: Crank up iPod.

Realize for the eleventy-hundredth time that you really should download the clean versions of Holla Back Girl and Hey Mama.

Step Three: Assemble the ingredients.

Onion, Butter, Flour, Tomato Paste, Beef Stock, Stew Meat, and half a bottle of Shiraz leftover from the last time I made beef stew.

Step Four: Chop an onion -

if you have an Onion Paranoid Husband whose mother scarred him by putting giant chunks of onion in everything she ever made and he developed an annoying onion-related gag reflex that has been vexing you for the last 18 years, then do your usual mental eye-roll at your mother-in-law, get out that choppy thing and chop the crap out of the onions. Actually, if I was in my old kitchen, I would have put them through the Magic Bullet. Mmmm….onion puree.

- and saute them in a half a stick of butter in your knockoff Le Creuset dutch oven that you got at Sam’s Club for $40, but which makes you feel fancy nonetheless.

While the onions are sauteing, mix a couple or three tablespoons of flour, the tomato paste, and the wine in a bowl.

Admire your daughter’s Alien Disco.

Admire Squidman especially.

Take a picture of your silly family being Squid People:

(yes, that’s a crib sheet doing duty as a tablecloth. It’s effective and classy. I am, in fact, known far and wide for my fine linens)

Step Five: When the onions are soft, or when you are sick of waiting around for onions to soften, add the meat (about 2 pounds) to the pot, season liberally with salt and pepper, and pour in the wine/flour/tomato paste mixture.

I realize that you could go a lot of different ways with this. For one thing, you could brown the meat before you cook your onions, and if I had felt like hassling with it, I might have done that. But I didn’t. Also, you could put lots of other veggies in it – carrots, celery, potatoes, parsnips, turnips, etc. I might have done that on a different day, but today I am craving meat, so I didn’t. You can do whatever floats your boat, people. Cooking is an art, so there’s no need to get all imprisoned by things like recipes.

Down with the tyranny of exact measurements!

Add beef stock, a little water, and toss in a bay leaf. I used one of those 20-ounce boxes of beef stock and a cup or so of water, reserving the other box of stock to use if the broth gets too thick.

Step Six: Cover and cook in a 350 degree oven for 3 or 4 or 5 hours, or until the meat is falling apart tender. Uncover for the last hour or two so the broth can thicken.

Serve over buttered egg noodles or mashed potatoes.

The color in that picture looks off. Huh. Oh well. It’s yummy, that’s the main thing.

Happy cooking!

Leftovers freeze well, if you are so inclined.

This post is linked to Mouthwatering Monday, Tempt My Tummy Tuesday, Tuesdays at the Table, Real Food Wednesdays, What’s Cooking Wednesday, Foodie Fridays, Food on Fridays, and anywhere else I can think of. 

So naturally, after all the bounty of Christmas, wherein Santa brought every Lego under the sun to our house, we had to have a big, tear-filled conversation about Sharing and Not Being Selfish and People are More Important Than Stuff, and so on and so forth ad nauseum.

We seem to have this conversation all the damn time around here, which makes me sigh internally and roll my eyes and think to myself “we covered this already! Quit being selfish, love your sister, and share your crap! Learn It, Love It and let me get back to Pinterest for crying out loud!”

Little, of course, has many typical little sister qualities – like when Big hates broccoli, Little can’t wait to declare her undying LOVE for broccoli; and when Big gets in trouble for not sharing, Little can’t WAIT to share and be a perfectly generous angel. I remember some of this behaviour from experiences with my own little sister, who would blink innocently while pinching me under the table. I was an idiot who would turn around and smack her in front of everybody and get in trouble. Subletly has never been my thing.

One time, my sister carved MY name into my mom’s sewing machine. My mother actually believed that I had done it, in spite of my protests that I surely would not be stupid enough to carve my own NAME if I was vandalizing something.

Anyway. That’s not relevant.

Character training makes my brain go all fuzzy. I’m never sure if I’m doing it right. I’ll figure it out, though. I want my kids to have a life-long closeness. To be best friends forever. To celebrate birthdays and holidays and be there for the births of each other’s children and all that stuff. I don’t have that with my own sister, and I wish I did.

Blurgh. I need another cookie…