(And All My) Work Be Praise

Owen is not quite sure how to play the guitar. "I'm making thunder." "No, don't take my picture!"

I can't just leave well enough alone. So the recipe called for a jar of caramel sauce. Do you know what's in jarred caramel sauce? Corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup, and artificial flavoring. No, thanks. Especially not when I'm going to all the trouble of grinding and sifting flour from organic white wheat berries. Especially not when I'll use sucanat instead of white sugar even though it doesn't get as fluffy. The author of the recipe commented that if you didn't have jarred caramel sauce on hand, you could simply melt a cup of sugar and use that. Stir until it liquifies, she said. Well, Levi wanted to help, so I set him at the stove (it was on low heat and I was within reach at all times; nobody panic), standing on a chair, stirring slowly with a plastic mixing spoon. I took over when it started to clump, but it wasn't until the sugar was completely liquid that I realized the tip of the spoon was missing, and there were flakes of plastic streaking...

Our local community center hosted a "Butterfly Science" class for Earth Day, put on by a local Montessori school, geared towards 2-5 year olds. None of the caterpillars had actually reached chrysalis stage, so it was more of a "caterpillar science" class, but of course my boys didn't know the difference. (Especially since I had merely billed it as "we're going to do some activities about caterpillars.") It was remarkably well-done. I'm not sure if that's the product of the community center or the Montessori teachers who led the event, but we'll definitely be seeking out these sorts of things to do in the future! It helped, of course, that only half of the registered children showed up; with double the kids, there may have been a bit more chaos involved. After singing a few Earth-day-themed songs as a group, the kids went in groups of 2 or 3 to each of five different stations. Station 1: planting zinnia seeds makin...

What I'm Cooking I've been on quite the cooking spree recently. Mostly just baked goods, though, which doesn't actually help me get dinner on the table. :) Homemade mayonnaise (using the immersion blender I got for Christmas from my mom) Graham crackers  (used all whole wheat flour) Banana Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Bread (made into muffins. I don't love the oats, but they're not awful.) Whole wheat pita bread (stuffed with tuna salad made with my homemade mayo!) Spinach cake muffins Pesto-cream tortellini  (using homemade pesto I keep in the freezer) What I'm Reading I finished the Harry Potter series early last week. The last third of the last book drags on a bit, I thought -- too much flashback, too much waxing eloquent about the power of love -- but the final victory is quite, well, victorious. After devouring all seven books, I went through the little bit of withdrawal that often happens at the end of good books. The series came out whil...

Since my birthday is this month, I planned April's date night with myself in mind. Is that a horrible thing to admit? I just couldn't be sure that we'd be able to get TWO nights out in the same month, one for a date and one for my birthday, and not overuse the in-laws' babysitting or crowd our evenings so full they weren't fun anymore. My husband wasn't entirely thrilled with my plan; since the date nights were his birthday present in the first place, he essentially just re-gifted his own birthday present from me, to me. At least for the "dinner out" portion of my birthday. I assume there's more to come on my actual birthday. (Right?) Anyway, the date: a progressive dinner with an "around the world" theme . 100% snatched from the Dating Divas , except that we went to three restaurants instead of other couples' houses. I even printed the somewhat-cute (but maybe just cheesy?) cards (bearing such lines as Come away with me to Ital...

I've been in situations three times in the last two days in which I said something that seemed to imply that my life is really hard and I kind of hate it. The thing is, that's not what I meant. Er, not exactly what I meant. I suppose that having three children under four years old is, categorically, hard. Getting up twice a night nearly every night for over ten months now has not precisely been easy. I don't love the two times a day (8am and 4pm, post-nighttime and post-naptime) when I'm doing assembly-line diaper changes. Repeating the same instruction a hundred times a day to a toddler is not my favorite thing. I carry around some well-meaning guilt for the nights when I interrupt my husband's chatter about the day to admit that I'm falling asleep. It really actually does take a herculean effort to get everyone to the grocery store, say, and I regularly have to talk myself out of dreading Sunday mornings, because they're just so nearly impossible wit...

Nine weeks ago , I hoped to lose ten pounds in twelve weeks, before my birthday at the end of the month. I've lost 12 pounds since then. That's right, folks: 25 days ahead of schedule, I'm down to pre-Silas weight, and just three pounds from pre-Levi. I can't take all the credit, because I'm extremely aware that I have two rounds of the stomach flu to thank for a good bit of it. I did, however, take last week (from the egg hunt candy through Easter dinner's dessert, yes) off from calorie counting, and I'm pleased to say that my appetite has decreased -- and my awareness of what and how much I ate has increased -- enough that I didn't completely blow it. I'm really, really tired of logging everything I eat, but I keep thinking of the whole section of my wardrobe that would hang so much nicer if I could just whittle off another five or ten pounds. I suppose this is the place most of us live, hmm? If I could just lose those last five pounds . . . ...