Becca on biking

"Pink bike."
"Ride bike!"
"Helmet."
"Down the road."
"Go fast!

and after Daddy led the bigger kids riding into the street but Mommy stopped Rebecca from following:
"Don' wannoo sidewalk!"

Chocolate coins

When I walked in from church last Sunday, Alex greeted me at the door. "I wanted Katherine to have a chocolate coin."

Since Lar had come home with a chocolate coins a few weeks earlier (and gotten our kids way too excited about getting paid for chores in gold--"How much is gold worth, Mommy?") I knew we had a few. "Really?" I asked. "Is Daddy passing out chocolate coins?"

"No," said Alex. "I thought Katherine should have one. I want one too."

Tricky, I thought. Trying to wangle a treat for his sister so he can get one too. I was impressed by his duplicity.

Except I was totally wrong. He wasn't talking about Laramie's coins, and he wasn't trying to wangle anything. He was talking about his own treats from church. He was trying to share.

A list of things I really wanted done this week

--install closet molding
--fix toilet
--work on another chapter of candy experiments
--invite school friends over for candy experiments
--hang family pictures
--paint hallway before hanging family pictures
--inspect the attic
--organize children's artwork
--weed garden area
--plant seeds in garden
--contact chemistry experts
--buy new hangers
--hang clothes in new closet
--arrange meeting with fence builder


With a list like this, I finish the day pretty discouraged. But by the end of the week, I realize that we actually accomplished a few of them (6, to be exact). Plus I taught my kids piano, delivered them to and from school, did some cleaning, managed to help kids squeeze in a few minutes for projects before bedtime, and even sewed a button.

Why is it so hard to remember all those accomplishments when the list looms so large?

Tired

Things that are easier to do when you're tired:
--kill time online
--eat too much chocolate
--read novels
--lose your temper

Things that are harder to do when you're tired:
--get out of bed
--clean
--motivate kids with fun games
--read nonfiction
--go to bed early

Baby out of bed

The scene:
Rebecca, huddled behind her closed bedroom door, in the dark, with the colored building pieces

The reason:
The crack under the door is the only source of light, and so the only place she can actually see the toys

Moose Goose Kemperoos Cake

This blog is named after a chocolate cake which we make for birthday celebrations. Here is the recipe, which is adapted from a Cooks Country recipe for Chocolate Blackout Cake. Instead of icing, use a rich chocolate cornstarch pudding. Note that every time I make this recipe it varies a little bit--this time I added orange flavor for extra depth--and I live at sea level, so you may need to adjust.

Pudding:
Make this a few hours before assembling the cake.

Step 1. Mix and set aside. This should be a thick, dark paste.
1/4 cup boiling water
1/4 cup cocoa, I usually use Hershey's Special Dark for a deeper color.

Step 2. Cook pudding in a medium/large saucepan.
(A) whisk together to remove lumps.
1 1/2 cups granulated sugar
1/4 cup cornstarch
1/2 teaspoon salt.
(B) Whisk together, then cook over medium heat until thick and bubbly (about 4 minutes).
1 1/2 cups milk
1 cup heavy cream
1/4 cup orange juice (if you want orange flavor, otherwise use milk)
6 ounces unsweetened chocolate, chopped.
Chocolate paste (from Step 1).
(D) Remove from heat and stir in, then cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate.
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
zest from 2 small oranges

Cake:
Preheat oven to 325. Prepare 2 8-inch round cake pans by greasing & flouring the pans (add a parchment bottom for easy removal).

Step 1. Mix together & sift:
1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt

Step 2.
(A) Melt butter, then mix in cocoa until dark and fragrant
8 Tablespoons butter
3/4 cup cocoa (Again, Hershey's Special Dark, and I usually add about 1/4 cup extra)

(B) Off heat, whisk in, alternating with and dry ingredients
1 cup granulated sugar
1 cup packed light brown sugar
1 cup milk + 1T lemon juice (or 1 cup buttermilk)
1 cup milk and orange juice blended (or 1 cup brewed coffee).
(C) Mix together and add
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla.

Divide batter evenly and bake for 30 - 35 minutes. Use a toothpick.

Cool at least an hour before assembling the cake. We use a bread knife to cut the cakes flat after removing them from the cake pans, and then put a large scoop of pudding in the middle before squashing them together. Finally, frost with pudding as usual.

It's traditional to crumble the cut portion and press it into the sides and top, but we also use shaved chocolate or strawberries, or any thing else that's handy to keep the pudding from sticking to the plastic wrap before storing the cake in the fridge.

Magic words

Nobody wanted to come inside to get ready for bed until I said the magic words: Chocolate Cake.

Then Rebecca was the first one up the stairs.

It had to happen sometime

Running around this last week with my husband gone, attending author presentations, teaching ten piano students, making airport runs, getting kids to and from school, writing up candy experiments, visiting teaching, painting wood for the closet, and trying to keep the house in order, I was going to forget something.

Like putting on Rebecca's diaper.

Birthday Monsters

I'm waiting for Sandra Boynton's birthday monsters, who come clean up your house after they mess it up.

I figure we've already got the mess.

Mother's Day

--Made myself a fabulous pizza out of the Williams and Sonoma book with carmelized onions, fresh pesto (well, fresh mixed, even if the herbs weren't fresh after 2 weeks in the fridge), olives, and goat cheese. Turns out the kids do not like goat cheese, even baked on pizza. The cheese-free section went fast.
--Finished the last of Jesse's chocolate orange wedding cake, which was still fabulous. I want a whole one that I can nibble on for a year.
--Dad came and brought a geranium from Mom. He played with the kids and fell asleep on the leather chair for awhile.
--Katherine mounted her window art that she made yesterday, after persuading me it was finally time to get the kit out. Despite the holes I was concerned about, it went up fine without ripping. Turned out great. Katherine now considers herself an expert, and acted as senior advisor when Alex tried one ("Why don't you mix those colors? I'll do this section. You can make the orange darker if you add blue. Don't you like this mix?) Finally I pulled her away by inviting her to make tomorrow's lunch. On a roll with her new expertise, she made sandwiches for the other kids and ruined their dinner appetites. ("I'm hungry!" Alex wails. "Eat the rest of your sandwich," I advise. "I don't want it. I want pesto pizza." "I'm not serving any more until you finish your sandwich." "But I'm hungry!"
--Played my new Mother's Day church music CD about 6 times as background music; it's especially soothing when you're applying lines of black paint to your son's art project. All very zen. I should do this an hour every day.
--Rehearsed next week's musical number with Arren and Amy Lloyd, who made some helpful additions to her piano part.
--Read for a few minutes in my sun chair while my pizza dough rose.
--Was presented with a bagful of presents from Katherine and Alex. Included hand-drawn cards wrapped in red cardstock envelopes, decorated toast-tweezers from Alex (a preschool project), a tissue paper collage from Katherine, who apparently designed the whole thing herself; heart-shaped bracelets made from pipe cleaners; bracelets constructed of sequins strung on thread, with adjustable sizing strung through two-holed butterflies (so adjustable the thread comes out if you pull too hard), a page of word puzzles including a laboriously drawn letter-substitution codemany heart-felt declarations of love, a book Katherine made at school "My mom is happiest/prettiest/most helpful when" (She had to remove the "funniest" page because she couldn't think of anything to fill in). Treasures, all. Katherine later added on a maracca that she made from a toilet paper and beans when I put everybody in their room for quiet time, hoping that Katherine could keep Rebecca from injuring herself, so I could grab a nap. That was the real Mother's Day treat.

Yardwork.

So your son comes running up to you, holding a handful of Herb Robert, as you sit in the sun with a novel. "Mommy, come see! I've found a bunch of giant weeds!"

The giant weeds don't surprise Mommy, who has avoided thinking about them for too long. What does surprise her is Alex's reaction to the "giant weeds." (They must appear giant to him, at least, since the feather-leafed stalks come nearly to his waist.) "We have to pull them. Come on!"

In no time, Alex sets his sister and mother to yanking up the weeds. The Herb Robert comes up easily, invigorating the weed-fighters. Soon Mommy has pulled up the yard waste bin, and Katherine has deputized Alex to deposit the weeds, a bad choice, since he can barely reach over the top. Besides, I remind her, it was his idea in the first place. They continue, scouting more weeds in the back corner of the shed the least visible part of the property. Why can't they go after the rock garden in the driveway?

As the back fenceline gets cleaned up, Mommy decides to go after the roses she's been meaning to prune since February. Some of them get a good whacking; some of them have budded too fast and she can't bear to cut them. Luckily, those were the shorter bushes.

Alex wants to clip too. Mommy sets him to trimming a lavender bush in front while she ponders, and comes to a bleak conclusion: the yard is overdue for a haircut. If it were a teenager, it might get thrown out of school But starting the mower would wake the baby, whose nap is the only thing allowing all this work to go forward.

Mommy reaches a decision and disentangles the hand-mower from the gardening paraphernalia in the shed. There's a bad moment when it gets caught against the power mower, but she levers it out and down. The mower cuts an ineffective swath out of the long grass, but Mommy manhandles it down the strip by the roses. At last she ends up with something like a backwards mohawk--a bare(r) strip down the middle, with long strands drooping over the sides. No matter. The front yard is the one people see, so she takes it there. Surprise--the lawn is in such bad shape it's hardly overgrown at all, excepting the bushy Canterbury Bells. These will soon produce lovely flowers so she decides they're a bonus.

Alex notices the mower. The huge machine is much more interesting than the lavender bush, so the clippers fall to the sidewalk as he runs over. He wants to do it himself, but can't budge it on his own. Instead he "helps," adding forward momentum but impeding mobility. Front yard as shaven as it's going to get (for some reason the blades can't handle long, thin tufts), the mowers decide it's time to head back.

Yes, the backyard needs a mowing. No, it's not going to get a good one now. But, inspired by the memory of the two yard workers next door with their power motors earlier in the day, Mommy attacks it anyway. The mower jambs several times on littered sticks, so Alex gets the stick-collection assignment. Nice, parallel lines are out of the question; the mower veers uncontrollably, and Mommy has to push it where it goes. She ends up running it up and down in short strips, i.e. with running starts that peter quickly. Alex joins in the fun, and their giggling fellowship almost drowns out the niggling interior commentary: "Why am I doing this again? It's taking ten times longer. I won't be able to finish. Doesn't it look worse than it started?" Alex persuades her to keep the hand-mower, only to backpedal a few runs later and demand the power mower after all. But Mommy demures because of the baby. Besides, then she would really have to change her clothes.

But when Alex goes in for a drink, he learns the baby has already woken up. She's sitting quietly on the bedroom floor (he can see her shoes). No longer worried about rustling, Mommy changes into a yard work shirt. There's still lots to do outside. What about all those other lavender bushes? (though the one Katherine has finished for Alex looks nice.) What about the lawn?

Once she's out there, she realizes she can't run the lawn mower with a mobile toddler around, not when the toddler might mobile herself in front of the mower, or out into the great wide open. Katherine votes to go inside. Mommy gives up, realizing how tired she is. But they've put in a good day's work.

If only you could tell.

Bedtime?

One of Laramie's tricks to keep our newly-independent toddler in bed is to put her in the playpen downstairs, and ask her if she'd rather be in her crib. Then there was tonight:

Bedroom door opens, Becca emerges. "Downstairs!"
Becca walks to downstairs door, which I open for her. She peers down. "No downstairs!"
Becca turns, retreats to her room. "Crib!" Gets put to bed.

With Laramie gone, I suppose she had to play all the roles herself.

The Long Drive

I'll admit it: I don't mind a long drive, even the drive we took to Utah last week--16 hours each way plus kid stops and mandatory Cafe Rio pick-ups. When we're all stuck in the car together, we talk. We listen to books. We sing. We're forced to interact.

Activities from our last car trip:
--Listen to another fabulous Patrick O'Brian book (and hope the kids didn't notice the sailor language)
--Laramie explained to me the differences between generations of cell network technology
--Practiced "Mommy, I Love You" for the Primary Mother's Day performance
--Singing competition to see who could sing the most "I Love You's" in one breath(see previous entry). Score: Laramie 23, Loralee 12 1/2.
--Singing "Old Man River"
--Singing the Hello, How Do You Do song from Music Time, with Rebecca choosing who to sing about next. (Rebecca: "Awex!" Alex: "No, don't sing about me!" Rebecca: "Awex!")
--Cross-stitch, with Katherine starting a new pattern, Alex working on a butterfly with me (i.e. I sew one diagonal and Alex crosses the X), and Alex and Katherine collaborating on a home-drawn triceratops. (It looks like a Unitops right now, since all the horns ran into each other.)
--Stickers: Everybody got new sticker books. Sadly, Rebecca can't easily pull stickers off paper, and Katherine was not interested in memorizing the vocabulary in her new Spanish sticker book.
--Coloring with pens (Katherine and Alex) and Color Wonder (Rebecca, who only lost one pen lid)
--Katherine designing an activity book for Alex
--Katherine writing stories about her grandparents, our visit, make believe sailboats and toy cars.
--Katherine writing a poem about leaves, with Laramie and I critiquing.
--Rebecca playing with her new toy phone--best $8 I ever spent
--Laramie and I playing with Rebecca's toys to make her want them (sometimes it even worked)

And here's one from our Vancouver trip a few weeks ago
--Laramie singing along to Paul Simon with me accompanying with the two-octave piano app on his G-phone, which played a half-second late and a quarter step flat. (Actually, Paul Simon was probably flat, since the G-phone has a frequency calculator.)

Knights and Goats

On our recent Utah trip

Katherine: "Alex, you want me to write you a story?"
Alex: "I want a story about goats."
Me: "Ghosts?"
Alex: "No, goats. I like goats."
Dad: "Alex, why don't you write a story about knights?"
Me: "Alex has commissioned a story about goats."
Alex: "Then I'll commission a story about knights. The knights protect the goats. The goats have hard fur."