How to Become a Millionaire

All you have to do is invent The Baby Timer.

A little device that sits next to the baby to let you know how long you have until it wakes up again.

I picture a gauge with a needle that can go from green to yellow to red.

Green -Baby will continue to sleep for some time. Take a nap, make dinner, take up knitting – you’ve got time.

Yellow – Baby is past half way point of nap.  Finish getting that dinner on the table, don’t bother taking a nap anymore and don’t forget to use the bathroom!

Red – Baby will wake at any moment!!! PANIC -Did you feed the other kids? Did you pee? Did you eat?

It would be brilliant, mothers everywhere would buy one.

If I had one of those I would know what to do now.

Usually Jane wakes up at this time of night.

Except for the night that she slept seven hours in a row.

Will she do it again? Will it be tonight?

Or if I go to sleep will she wake me up 15 minutes later?

I hate that.

I’m banking that her imaginary timer is yellow so I’ll stay up a bit longer and if I’m wrong and it’s actually green then I’m just depriving myself of good sleep.

It’s a conundrum.

I’m telling you, invent the baby timer and you’ll be a millionaire.

(And how come if an adult sees a baby yawn it makes them yawn but that same adult can yawn at the baby until their eyes water and it has no effect on the baby?)

My Kind of Winter

This is not my kind of winter.

My kind of winter involves enough cold, snowy weather to hide all the sins of fall until spring.

This way if you never got around to getting rid of those thistles in your pasture they are out of sight until the thaw.

Or if there isn’t enough snow to hide them there ought to be enough cold to frost them.

Even thistles look alright covered in ice crystals.

Same goes for nettles.

Neither looks lovely in mud.

Today we’ve got mud.

This is not my kind of winter.

Roses and Noses

Clara used to put everything in her mouth, and I mean everything, if you don’t believe me read this: The Second Child

For the most part Clara has stopped attempting to eat inappropriate things, and moved on to new bad habits.

Yesterday it started with a pomegranate seed…

…in her nose.

A quick blow of the nose and out it came. I tried to tell her that it was a bad idea to put things in her nose. But clearly I didn’t make much of an impression because a few hours later she came down with a small plastic rose in her nose. Plastic roses are apparently much less comfy on the nose than pomegranate seeds. This time Clara was willing to believe that putting things in your nose hurts, and agreed not to do it anymore.

Not long after John got home from work  Storm, my camera and I headed outside for a walk.  When I was only a few pictures into my walk and barely beyond the yard I was called back into the house. Less than thrilled about returning so soon I expected bloodshed or some other equally bad catastrophe to have occurred. I walked in to find John looking slightly panicked, Jane screaming, Clara looking like she just got yelled at and Ivy sobbing in the bathroom.  That’s when I learned that I forgot to tell Clara not to put things in other peoples noses either.  A quick blow of  Ivy’s nose and another rose was produced.

John, who had been assembling tweezers and headlamps while I went for Kleenex,  profusely apologized for his panic and lack of common sense.  Feeling benevolent I decided to chalk the loss of his reason up to three crying girls. That sort of noise scrambles my brain on a daily basis and since there wasn’t any bloodshed in the house yet I didn’t think it should start over a missed walk.

Then I turned to a still sobbing Ivy to ask the question. Why? Why would you let your little sister shove a small rose up your nose?

I am ashamed to say that I couldn’t ask my poor crying daughter this without a massive fit of the giggles, and so tried to be content with the completely unsatisfactory answer of “I didn’t know what she was doing.”

Really? She got it that far in and you didn’t figure it out? Really?

Deciding that laughing while continuing to question Ivy wasn’t helping and that she had learned her lesson about allowing Clara near her nose without any further intervention on my part  I took the screaming baby into the other room.

Soon everyone had stopped crying and life was back to normal. I was left with the impression that while it’s good to be needed I’d like to be needed a little less and get out a little more.

We’ll be working on that.

I’m thinking maybe earplugs for John so that his brain can continue to function no matter the circumstances and nose plugs for Ivy – just in case.

A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness

First off you should know that even though the word witch is in the title vampires feature prominently in the book as well.  I usually avoid vampires, but since I never read anything sensible like a book flap, I didn’t know they were in here until it was too late. Fortunatly gruesome incidents were minimal and I ended up enjoying the book.

Would I recommend it? Well now, if you are someone like John who’s sense of the universe is completely disrupted by vampires who don’t die in the sunlight then you’d better avoid it. If the specific traits and habits of vampires are of less importance to you this may be an enjoyable read with an interesting mix of magic, history and science.

Five Years Old

Turning five is hard work.

Going to the zoo and making monkey noises in the truck on the way home and lunch out and presents and movies and skiing in the yard and dinner and playing – it’s no wonder she could barley muster a smile for the camera.

Congratulations Ivy, you made it through your big day and even had one smile left for the camera!

Sort of.

But thanks for that funny smile,  I haven’t stopped laughing since I saw the picture!

Happy Birthday Ivy we love you and all your smiles!

Pirates!

When pirates show up in your kitchen with a list of demands there is only one thing to do…

..make the eye patch and lunch as requested.

Unfortunatly for me the pirate captain didn’t like lunch and I was informed that “It’s hard to see” with an eye patch on…

… so they made me walk the plank anyway.

Clara Donuts

For awhile now I’ve been meaning to write about Clara and her food issues but it’s not that fun of a story.

It involves too many bad bodily functions and lots of crying.

Lots of crying.

In summary I shall say this:

Clara has a pile of food sensitivities,  she has had them her entire life and we are still working on figuring things out.

Perhaps we can get into the gory details of how we  found all of that out later but I’m not up to that post tonight.

Since Clara has always had issues with food, she’s always had to avoid foods and eat differently from others.  While it’s been difficult, Clara has known for a very long time that she can’t have anything with dairy in it and now accepts that some foods will hurt her belly. When faced with such a food she doesn’t cry or scream or pout.  She just asks, “Me smell?” and so long as you let her smell the forbidden food,  she’s happy.

It’s completely heartbreaking.

It’s also caused us to re-name many things to make it easier for her to tell what she can and can not have.

We have butter and we have “Clara butter.”

We have cheese and “Clara cheese.”

We have raisins and “Clara raisins”

We have sugar and “Clara sugar.”

We have oatmeal and “Clara oatmeal.”

Creative aren’t we?

Most of our diet has changed to comply with what Clara can and can not tolerate, and because of it we’ve been eating very healthy. Lean meat, veggies, whole grains – we’ve got them.   Of course we are only human, so Ivy, John and I gleefully scarf down Clara unfriendly food whenever we get a chance.

And it bothers me.

It bothers me that I have to tell Clara that she can’t eat foods. It bothers me that the rest of us sneak food when she isn’t paying attention. It bothers me that we sometimes eat different food at dinner than she does. It bothers me that she misses out on the snack at story time. It bothers me that I should be grateful that she (and we) are eating so healthy but that I’m just resentful of the restrictions on my cooking. It bothers me that we have to skip doing things with people so we can be home for meals. It bothers me that I can’t magic her problem away. It bothers me when we mess up reading ingredients and she pays for it.  And it bothers me every time she says “Me smell?” and insists that I eat the food instead.

The benefits have outweighed all of the problems in planning our meals and life around her current restrictions.  Even my own emotions, that seem to have firmly attached themselves to the issue, are nothing compared to the improvement we’ve seen in Clara. She is a different girl than she used to be – a much happier one, and so we carry on with the crazy diet.

But it’s still not easy.

This week  Ivy was leaving to play at a friends house. (You know, one of those things that could be called a “play date” but I refuse to call it such because the term irritates me all to pieces… but that’s a different story).  Clara was very sad that Ivy was leaving and so I promised her that we could make a treat once Ivy  was gone. Without hesitation I was informed that she wanted “Clara donuts.”

A little recipe sleuthing and I discovered that donuts have nothing in them Clara can have, but we went to the kitchen and started substituting.

Clara flour, Clara sugar, Clara butter, Clara eggs… I think the only thing I didn’t substitute out was the baking powder and the nutmeg.

I had dumped the dough out and was dubiously staring at the brownish mass I was supposedly making into donuts when Clara looked up from her beater licking and said:

“OOOO! That good!”

She was right. We had successfully made a treat for Clara that I didn’t have to worry about her eating and that she was loving.  It was better than good.  It was great. And the donuts weren’t bad either!