The Birthday Party

Sunday was Great Gramps’s Birthday party.

We pulled out the red fat bat and recruited the neighbor kids to join us in a baseball game…

…and made the Birthday Boy all time pitcher.

Gramps did take a turn batting but we called in a pinch runner for him after witnessing the tackle/slide/take down between John and my Dad at second.

A few hours later when we were all baseballed out it was dinner and cake…

…before we headed down to the lake for a little fishing.

The kids pulled fish in one after another…

… until the sun set and the party was over.

Happy Birthday Gramps hope you had as much fun at your party as we did!

Weekly Photo Challenge: Today

Weekly Photo Challenge: Today

This weeks photo challenge was to use a picture taken on the day you read about the challenge. For accuracy’s sake I feel I must admit that both those things happened on Friday and then it sat unfinished here until now – such is life.

In any case, Friday John replaced our water softener. The water softener lives in the much avoided basement. Much avoided because it is really more of a cellar – as in a Wizard of Oz, hide from the twister, door in the ground, cellar. It comes complete with flagstone walls, lots of spiders, dampness and more rodents than I’m willing to admit to – in general I try to forget that it exist. The problem is, in addition to its not so inviting ambiance, every time we go down to the basement something is wrong.  Frozen pipes, broken water heaters, furnace problems, floods, tornadoes – nothing good happens in the basement. (It is of course possible that my attempting to forget it exists when nothing is wrong contributes to the things that go wrong but that’s not a theory I’m willing to entertain right now.)  It seems that the combination of nasty problems in a nasty environment have even inspired my husband to come up with a new life goal- a life goal of filling the basement with rocks.  Not just fill it with dirt.  No, he wants to move the house out of the way and then to throw large rocks into the basement one by one while laughing maniacally.  The basement has not been kind to him over the last few years. (Again this may be because we chose to forget it exists for much of the time, and again, we aren’t going there today.)

Friday when I took my picture the basement was still free of rocks and John was working in a dark, damp, cobwebby corner once again fixing things and mumbling about filling the basement with rocks. I had gone down to lend a bit of moral support… alright, fine, honestly, I had gone down to escape Ivy who was cheerfully following me around demanding all my attention and driving me mad, but I was also lending John moral support and giving him important things like twist ties.  I’m sure I was crucial to the job, just ask me. Jane was riding on my back in my new mei tai (Thank you Jenny!) and I blindly snapped this photo of her behind my back as she looked behind us both, up the stairs into the light.

Today is Monday, we have soft water, there isn’t a tornado in sight and the other appliances seem to be functioning normally. I shall now publish this post and go back to pretending the basement doesn’t exist.

Next Time I’m Making Hotdogs.

Tonight John and I spent close to two hours making dinner.

Hamburgers with cheese sauce and, get this, buns.

We used ingredients from three different grocery stores.

I raised a duck for it’s eggs.

John shot a deer for the burger.

It turned out great.

First hamburgers we’ve eaten in ages.

Clara friendly hamburgers.

Clara ate two bites.

I gotta tell you, I love the girl, but two is not a good age.

How We Make A Pizza

How we make a pizza in twenty easy steps:

1)Raise a pig.

2) Send the pig to the butcher and get back tasty packages of meat including ground pork.

3) Shoot a deer.

4) Butcher the deer ourselves wrap meat in tasty packages including ground venison.

5) Mix the ground venison and pork with a bunch of seasonings and smoke it for awhile.  Call it pepperoni, store it in the freezer.

6) Make a crust – a yeast free, dairy free crust.

  • Mix together: 2 cups of flour, 1 tsp salt, 2 tsp baking powder, 2/3 cup rice milk, 1/4 cup olive oil. Press out onto cookie sheet, coat with olive oil and pre-cook at 425.

7) Create another crust – a yeast free, mostly dairy free, wheat free crust that Clara can eat, hope that that whatever you come up with turns out better than the crumbly cardboard you made last time.

  •  It did! Today’s Clara crust was my best effort so far, it went like this: mix 1 & 1/2 c barley flour, 1/2 c soy flour, 1 tsp salt 2 t special corn free baking powder, 1/3 c coconut milk, 1/3 c yogurt, 1/4 c olive oil. Press out onto cookie sheet, coat with olive oil and pre-cook at 425.

8) Get distracted by laundry and over flowing garbage and burn the edges of the crusts while setting off all the smoke detectors in the house.

9)Cut up Pepperoni that you made in step 5.

10) Realize you don’t have enough pepperoni and thaw out ground pork from step 2.

11) Mix ground pork with pizza spices from Penzeys and brown.

12) Grate a large pile of goat cheese for those who can’t have cow’s milk.

13) Grate a large pile of cow cheese for every one else.

14) Combine plain tomato sauce with more pizza spice from Penzeys.

15) Cut up pineapple.

16) Assemble pizzas to the direction of a five year old with the help of a two year old.

17) Put in oven to bake until toppings are browned.

28) Get impatient, turn on the broiler.

19) Quick take pizza out as it will be starting to burn because you forgot about it again.

20) Eat.

It’s a good twenty step process right? Fairly healthy result, made with partly local ingredients, minimal food additives, cooking kids… blah, blah, blah. After I look at my kitchen full of pineapple juice, sauce splatters, spilled flours and cheeses, dirty pans, bowls, spoons and baking sheets all I can think is that I really miss the days of the three step pizza.

1) Dial.

2) Open Door.

3) Eat.

Loud Issues

When Clara and Ivy are playing unless bodily harm seems imminent we leave them alone to figure out their own differences. For the most part they manage to play together, work together and resolve their troubles without help. There are of course times when one or the other comes to us in tears and we have to step in and moderate.  Since we’ve been having trouble with hitting and pushing lately the moderating has been happening quite a bit more frequently.

We are saving money by having the girls wear the same clothes. We are saving time by making them wear them at the same time to reduce the amount of laundry.

This afternoon I heard the start of their spat at the sandbox from in the house while I was putting Jane down for a nap.  As I bent over to lay Jane in her crib it escalated into screaming, shrieking and crying and Clara flew into the house yelling like she’d been mortally wounded. Since Clara often screams like she’s been mortally wounded but has never actually been in that condition I wasn’t too worried.  But, wounded or not, the screaming had woken Jane up and my attention was needed downstairs. Now, I suspect that spat occurred not over a yellow plastic shovel like they claim but purely because their little sister was almost asleep.  It’s like some sort of eerie siren song.  When I’m putting Jane to sleep as soon as I stand to lay her down in the crib everyone runs to me with their issues.  LOUD issues. Dogs bark, the cat pukes, the phone rings with advice on how I should vote in the upcoming election, John has questions and children who have been playing quietly for hours start beating on each other and run to me crying.

It’s possible that the frantic, one armed, gesticulating to get out while silently yelling “Go away!” that they receive isn’t the friendliest reception, but seriously, can’t anyone see that “I’M TRYING TO PUT THE BABY TO SLEEP?!”

Ahem, anyways….where was I? Oh yes…

Clara comes into the house screaming.

Jane wakes up.

Ivy follows Clara into the house yelling.

I go downstairs and tell the girls to stay put.

I head back upstairs get the baby to sleep.

Finally I go back downstairs to ask what happened.

There they are still sitting in their chairs at the table where I told them to stay happily playing together.  I have to interrupt the new game to ask what all the fighting was about and with frightening nonchalance I hear:

Clara: “I hit Ivy two times and then she pushed me out of the sandbox.”

Ivy: “Clara hit me, I told her to go away and she didn’t leave fast enough so I pushed her out of the sandbox.”

I had just started to make obligatorily parental noises about behavior, and ways to solve arguments when they asked if they could go back outside and keep playing yet.  I looked at my two happy girls, who were barely paying attention to me because they were still trying to secretly play with each other, agreed and they disappeared all giggles out the door.

Rain puddles after a May storm are fun, but chilly, gotta wear a hat!

Which left me standing in the kitchen with a spinning head.

Did what I think happened just happen?

Was this all just because Jane was going to fall asleep and cosmic forces conspired against their happy play forcing them into a noisy fight?

Is there any way of impressing on your children that they should stop beating on each other when after four minutes neither of them care any longer?

Or is it yet another example that I should learn from of the way kids live in the moment and can let bygones be bygones at the drop of a hat.

I thought about it, decided that parenting philosophy, cosmic forces and moral issues were all beyond me this afternoon, grabbed a Diet Coke and sat down in my quite house to enjoy it while it lasted.