Speaking of Veterans Day

For the last week and a half, Henry and I have been at war. He has screamed, grumped, and clung continuously. He has followed me around, insisting on being held in a blanket taco and entertained by his personal prisoner.

I called my sister, at my wits end. When I asked her if her children ever went through a stage like this, she said, "No, my children don't scream as much as yours do." Awesome. She asked if he was teething, which hadn't occurred to me. I looked. Yes, he was teething. And she also made a suggestion that I buy some toy cars for the poor lad. "He always has a car in his hand at my house and he is always happy there."

What?! A toy car? You mean he is tired of playing with Grace's oversized fluffy pink unicorn and wants something to get a little testosterone flowing? This was a revelation for me. I have never bought any toys for Henry, because we already have toys for Grace. Why would we need to buy more toys?

I raced out the next morning and procured a small toy gas station with three cars, including the two pictured above. And Henry played contentedly with them for the rest of the day yesterday, occasionally accosting me to hold them up and say, "Car! Car!"

Moral of the story: Don't go to war with me, little children. I have the Allies on my side.

PS. Thanks to all of our real Veterans today. I love my freedom, and appreciate the sacrifices.

At Least the Shows are Educational

Last week while the sacrament was being passed at church, Grace looked down at her program, and stated, "Jesus loves you. PBSkids.org."

Lattice Pie Crust

Since I have an over-abundance of apples, I made another apple pie when our friends came over this week, and I thought I would try my first latticed crust. It is a lot easier than it looks.
Place your horizontal strips on the pie, and fold back every other one.

Place another strip of dough across the pie, then unfold the folded ones over the top of it, and fold back the ones that were previously unfolded.

Repeat that step until you get to the edge of your pie. Fold back the ones that are coming out from under the left-most vertical strip.

And repeat your alternating folding again.

Trim the extra pieces. I should have made my bottom crust come out from under with a lip, and then it could have been folded over the lattice edges and pinched until it was all perdy, but I didn't. Oh well.

I did brush milk on it and use the foil edge-tent method. I was very pleased with my results, and encourage everyone else to try it. My sister said the pie place in St. George is already sold out for Thanksgiving AND Christmas. Can you believe that?

*Note to self: never make apple pie without a peeler-corer-slicer. The resulting labor would bring nothing but abject misery and despair.

Nightmare Comes True. Not so Bad.

You know how sometimes parents find their children in cute little distressing predicaments and don't get the child out until they snap a little pic first, just for posterity? One of those moments did not happen last night.

We had some (delightful awesome) friends over for dinner, and while we visited we heard some disconcerting screams coming from the direction of Grace's room.

Alex ran in to find that Grace had magically pulled her dresser down on top of herself. As daughter of Alex, she exerted her inherited superpowers and held the dresser up until she was rescued.

The (FULL) vaporizer was on top of the dresser, and when it fell the water tank cracked very badly and lost all of its water to our carpet.

Sometimes I just sit around worrying about things. One of the scariest things I have imagined is having a large piece of furniture, such as a television, or a dresser fall on and maim one of my small children. So yesterday, my nightmare came true. Thanks, Grace's superpowers, for manifesting yourselves just then, and thanks Nora, for politely avoiding vaporization.

Robot #3: RX

Alex is working on robot number three. Here is a list of things that this means:


* Vast quantities of time for Alex to spend in the garage, tinkering until his heart feels content.


* Vast quantities of unintelligible conversation directed from him to me, until my brain melts, and I can correctly pronounce potentiometer (though I'm not sure if I can spell it).


* Vast quantities of our little dollars flitting away into Ace Hardware's nut and bolt bucket until our wallets feel sad and alone.


* Vast quantities of nasty filed dust filling the air of our garage, clinging to Alex's clothing and hair and lungs until his wife imagines strange iron-lung diseases that he will be suffering from very soon.

Bountiful Baskets

I joined a food co-op a few weeks ago in the hope of forcing our family to eat more fresh food, and getting that food for less money. You pay $15 plus $1.50 for handling or something, and you get a random basket of approximately half fruit, half vegetables. I have been very pleased with the results both times I have participated. My friend weighed her food and guessed that if she had bought everything on a good sale, she still would have saved $5 on that much food.

Pictured above is the tray after I had begun roasting the tomatillos, poblanos, onions, jalapenos, and some other mystery pepper from the Mexican add-on two weeks ago. The Mexican add-on was $7.50, and also included cilantro, lime, green onion, and avocado. I followed the recipes over here for Chiles Rellenos, and they were fantastic. The tomatillo sauce was a little heavy on the lime for me, but it was also delectable on a salad with ranch.

The co-op also offers bread, and sometimes other things are available by the case, such as tomatoes right now, or peaches in August. This week's option was an Italian pack that had Italian parsley, red onion, yellow onion, spaghetti squash, rosemary, basil, and some other herbs, and I can't remember what else.

There is a $3 sign-up fee, which I presume goes toward the baskets. The co-ordinator keeps them and separates the produce into them, then you go pick them up in your own box or basket. The co-op is run entirely by volunteers. We would like to get a drop in Hurricane, since right now we are taking turns driving to Cedar City to pick them up. If you are interested, check out the site here. This co-op is available in many Utah and Arizona locations. If we get 30 people, we think we can have a drop-off here. Let me know if you are interested!

Confession, For the Record

Halloween. Yes, we celebrated it. I didn't post about it because

a. I forgot to take pictures.

b. I didn't plan our costumes until the afternoon of the day in question. So Alex was Henry Jones Jr. (again), and I was a brown crayon. As I walked out the door, Alex kindly noted that if I didn't want people to get the wrong idea, I might want to make my costume more specific than just wearing monochromatic brown. Horror. Dismay. I ran inside and drew "Crayola" and "brown" signs and taped them to myself, cursing and praising my dear husband and his imagination all the way.

c. Grace was a Princess. Henry was a very loosely interpreted Leprechaun, wearing his green pajamas and a hat Alex bought at a thrift in Ireland.

I think if motherly grades came out, I would get an A in "Instill your children with a love of reading (by example)" and a D- in the "Halloween Celebrating practical."