A mother's breakfast

Original post on February 8, 2011

Last night I noticed that we were a little low on milk, but I estimated that we had enough for three little kid-sized bowls of cereal.  (Mike doesn't eat breakfast, just gets ready and flies out the door).

 

This morning after pulling out the unexpectedly light jug of milk from the fridge, I remembered that Mike's favorite midnight snack is a bowl of cereal.  His cereal bowl was still on the counter, with a large amount of unused milk in it.  He just puts it in there for looks.  

 

So I ration out what's left:  1.2 bowls of kid sized cereal.  No time for a trip to the store or to cook something!  We're out of practically everything, too.  So I have two choices:  reconstitute the evaporated milk (ew) or make them use Daddy's leftover milk from who knows when.  Ew ew.

 

After the kids are all taken care of it's down to me:  what in the world am I going to eat?  So when I make Adrian's lunch I slice off an extra piece of bread and throw some nutella on it.  It'll have to do.  

 

A few minutes later, while I am still packing Adrian's lunch, Becca pipes up, "MOM!  I finished my cereal!!  I'm still hungry!" We are literally out of any kind of portable food like bananas or apples.  I sigh and grab the breadknife to slice off a third of my sandwich and then go to help her get into her shoes and coat.  

 

When I return to the kitchen, the piece that I cut off for Becca is gone, and I know she's not the one who took it.  Argh!!  I look at Adrian, but this time he's innocent.  I find Emma shoving the sandwich down her throat while half-heartedly trying to put a sock on (the same one I put on 15 minutes ago) with one hand.  GREAT.  So I either take away the sandwich from Ivan the Terrible, who will throw a major fit, or I do what any mom would do:   I hand my part of the sandwich to Becca.  :-P

 

Time to run out the door, and on the way out I grab the tea I warmed up in the microwave... even though I heated it for extra long, by the time everyone's buckled in and the car's in gear, it's merely lukewarm.

The Cake is Not a Lie!

Birthdays, birthdays, they come and go, and before we know it, the children do grow.

Time to plan another birthday cake! I really enjoy making my childrens' birthday cakes. I love surprising them with some special attention from Momma and a cake that's geared toward the kinds of things they like. Last year I hemmed and hawed over the choice for my newly-two year-old daughter, Emma. She wasn't talking, but she did seem to really like Winnie-the-Pooh and Sleeping Beauty, so I decided to do one of these two cakes. After much agonizing, I made a pretty cute Pooh cake that got a really enthusiastic reception:

Yep, that was kind of the extent of her excitement.

So this year, with Emma STILL not really talking all that much, and no specific cake-inspiring interests, I decided I'd just use one of the cake pans I was given and hope for the best. Here is what I am planning for this year:

I think this year I'll do chocolate. Last year she didn't even eat any. :-/

My other children have shown great excitement over their special cakes, and spend the times around their siblings' birthdays telling me what they want for THEIRS. Their cakes were oh-so-easy to decide on. Ariel and Star Wars. That's pretty much been it since I've started making them cakes, although this year it's set to change to My Little Pony and... probably still Star Wars. Maybe I'll branch out into Lego Star Wars for a change.

I don't know how on earth I could possibly make a cake cooler than this one, though:

From now on, all efforts will be compared to this.  "Yeah, it's cool, but of course not as cool as that one cake you did..."  That's OK.  The look on his face was totally worth it.

Fun with wood saws

I am mulling over whether to go buy up my supplies for my next wood project:

I've done four two different successful, not rickety shelving units, so I feel I can do this, too.  Not sure what kind of wood this guy used for the bed, so I am a little hesitant to get started!  I probably won't be doing the headboard just yet-- first things first.

The idea for this cropped up when my box spring mattress busted.  Why buy another box spring when you can just fix it?  And why fix it when you can use that space for storage by building a bed that doesn't need a box spring?  With five people in two bedrooms, storage space is like gold!

This week is simply not good to throw myself headlong into a project.  Can't do it.  But next week....  next week is looking promising!  I could just pick up the materials... right?

I have a tendency to neglect other things when in Project Mode.  Like eating.  Or mothering.  Anybody for watching Cinderella?

I am itching to get started, though.

Look!  It even disassembles easily.  Sniff!!  How can a girl resist? ... Yes.  I am weird.

The Jabberwocky and the Foot

When I was young, the Jabberwocky embodied all that was lurking around in my imagination waiting to nab me as I went into a dark room.  My parents loved that one Alice and Wonderland with the live characters, fun music, many cameos, and the freaky, slimy, red-eyed Jabberwocky that made the lights go out and lightning flash in the movie.  They just couldn't understand why anyone would hate that movie, and pulled it out to refresh my memory regularly.

No one understood why birthdays were never the same for Alice.

Who wouldn't love that face?

So when my son saw a minuscule clip of a movie-within-a-movie that involved a dismembered foot and refused to go into any unoccupied room without someone, I was a bit more sympathetic than I would have been otherwise.  So while I was buzzing off a couple inches of his hair on the back porch, I tried to get a good idea of what exactly he was afraid of, since I hadn't seen it.

He explained the scary scene, which I suspect was meant to be comedy since the lady got kicked in the nose by the foot.  So after trying the whole, "Your imagination is only in your mind and you are the boss of your mind" tack, I asked him what a lone foot could do that was so scary, anyway.  After some speculation, we decided that a foot could only kick, a little, or wiggle, and definitely could not kill anyone like he was imagining.  Then I told him that since he was the boss he could have an imaginary hammer, or even... a feather! He thought that was hilarious.

One thing led to another and suddenly I realized that my son now had an imaginary friend that was a foot.  In keeping with strict traditions within our family, he christened his friend with a very intuitive and insightful name: "Foot."  Before I knew it, Foot was taking a shower, getting ready to leave with us, and even got his seatbelt on first.  (Foot was clearly male, since he indicated that, no, Foot wasn't wearing ANY nail polish.  Definitely boy.)

I was kept abreast of the situation with regular updates on Foot's well-being:  "Foot is happy that he has a family now."  "Foot can borrow MY shoes, so he doesn't get burned on the pavement."  "Foot will protect me from the other evil feet that are trying to kill me."

Oh.  Rats.  That was going so well.  In a weird, alarm-the-school-psychologist kind of way, anyway.