A Pox On Mother's Day Bake Sales

The title of yesterday's post should have been Friends Don't Let Friends E-Mail When They Are Totally Tired, Cranky, and Fed Up - but I thought that would be too lengthy. I regret if I may have inadvertently led some of you to believe that I was actually tipsy when I wrote that e-mail to my friend. I assumed that my typical reader (aka, another mom) would know that that sort of missive could be penned on almost any typical day by almost any mother without the aid of intoxicating beverages.

Truth to tell, I don't drink. Oh, occasionally I will sip some wine and try to enjoy it. But I do not like the taste of alcoholic beverages. MadMad can attest to this, having dined out with me while we were stalking the Yarn Harlot. While those around me were enjoying whatever those drinks are that have salt (or was it sugar?) on the rim of the glass, I was enjoying a nice refreshing glass of water. With lemon. I'm weird that way.

Larry took me out for a sandwich at our local bagel shop this morning (I know, I know, all you moms are jealous), where we were able to hash out in peace (i.e., without a zillion interruptions and without teens listening in and promising themselves to never, ever make the mistake of getting married) how to balance Larry's desire to attend his niece's wedding on Labor Day weekend and my desire to not have our August vacation plans completely ruined. Once I was able to vent for 5 minutes - all about how if his family really wanted us to be there, maybe they should have asked when we could make it and maybe they should have realized that traveling on Labor Day weekend involves a colossal amount of traffic, which I guess they couldn't even imagine, since a traffic jam to them is anything more than 3 cars on the road at once (okay, so maybe I vented for more than 5 minutes) - anyway, after I had said my piece, we actually had a constructive discussion where we both agreed the situation sucked but, come hell or high water, we were going to make it to the nuptials with all the kids anyway.

Come to think of it, perhaps I am not giving his family enough credit. Maybe they purposely scheduled the wedding on Labor Day weekend, in hopes that we wouldn't be descending on their celebration with our kid-heavy clan. I wouldn't blame them, really.

After this thoroughly fun and romantic conversation, Larry treated me to a kid-sized hot cocoa at Starbucks. Then I picked out a new booklight at Barnes and Noble and he paid for it and handed me the bag and then I opened it and pretended to be surprised.

Yes, Larry does know how to show a girl a good time. Why do you ask?

Later today, I spent over an hour at the bookstore (all by myself), reading knitting books. And Larry watched the kids all by himself. Everyone was still alive and unharmed when I came home. Which means that they fared better than if I had been the one stuck in the house with them on a rainy Sunday.

I informed Anna (before I went out) that her gift to me would be making the potatoes for dinner while I was out. She accepted this task with her usual grace and good humor. It was a touching moment. And to think I gave birth to that child without the benefit of painkilling drugs. And that I spent all of last Friday in the kitchen baking multiple loaves of banana bread for the teen workcamp fundraiser - the Mother's Day bake sale.

I do hope that you all are seeing the irony of holding a bake sale on Mother's Day. The teens' mothers slave away Friday and Saturday baking breads and cookies (Happy Mother's Day!), then all the dads and kids buy these baked goods after Sunday Mass to bring home and give to Mom, who of course oohs and aahs over their gift and then feeds it to them. That is, if she hasn't already run away from home, due to a surfeit of baking duties.

Frankly, if a mother is going to consume those sort of calories on Mother's Day, they'll be from some good quality chocolate, not from some crappy baked goods that some other poor mom had to bake under duress. Not that I am bitter or anything...

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Involved Parenting and Self-Preservation

I decided to be an involved parent yesterday and arranged to meet my friend and her kids at a nearby aviation and aerospace museum. This sort of trip, let me note here, is David's idea of heaven. Brian was pretty excited, too; but Rachel was only lured by the promise of pizza afterwards. Susie is cool with anything, as long as we are nice to her (she started shouting that at the dinner table last night, apropos of nothing, as far as I could tell).

And then, as if that weren't enough parental involvement on my part, we made hamantaschen yesterday afternoon. It isn't that difficult: make the dough, chill it, roll it out, cut out the circles, put a dollop of jam in the middle of each circle, and fold the corners up just right (although how we get corners out of circles is beyond me). Of course, it requires nerves of steel to get through these steps while negotiating with 3 children who exactly gets to do what, when. I sort of needed a drink by the end.

If you have survived all the squabbling over who cuts out the circles and whose turn it is to dish out the jam, you then pop the cookie-laden sheets into the oven. Just make sure you remember to set the timer for 15 minutes. Because I didn't. Luckily, I also forgot to turn the oven on; so nothing burned. Sometimes early-onset Alzheimers can be your friend.

I'm going to have to do absolutely nothing with the children today in order to retain my Idle Parenting credentials.

All around us our friends and their families are being felled mercilessly by some sort of extreme stomach virus. We are avoiding them like...well, like the plague. I am willing to drop off some ginger ale and crackers at their doorsteps (actually, not directly at their doorsteps - I'll stand at the end of the sidewalk and sort of lob it in the direction of their contaminated front doors); but that is the extent of my compassion. I have a family to protect, after all.

Somehow, I don't think I would have been one of those hardy souls who went around nursing the ill and burying the dead during the Plague years; but I definitely would have gotten myself one of those masks.

I wonder, do you have to wear it with the robes for it to be effective? Or would jeans and a sweater do just as well?

Giant Mice! Missing Husbands! Prehistoric Computers!

Apparently, things could be worse on the rodent-infestation front, from what I read in this news piece - at least the ones in our house are a manageable size. And an added bonus: I haven't come downstairs in the morning to find a mouse sitting on my kitchen counter, the way my neighbor did yesterday. So, really, I have nothing to complain about.

Let me say something nice about my teenage daughter Anna (for once). She has magnificent hair. Utterly stunning, streaked with varying shades of gold and brown and thick and wavy as a lion's mane. It is hair to die for. Hair that women spend hundreds of dollars trying to imitate. So, naturally, she spent the better part of last year trying to straighten it so it would hang limp and flat against the sides of her head.

I am happy to report that she has given up this lost cause and has instead turned to the myriad hair products out there that accentuate the curl while damping down any unattractive frizz. In fact, we haven't actually seen Anna in days. Occasionally I slip some food under the bathroom door, where she has sequestered herself in her quest for the perfect curl. Theo, meanwhile, is taking bets on whether a person can actually wear out a mirror.

My children keep baking goodies that tempt me to fall off the Weight Watcher's wagon. Anna made brownies several days ago (before she consecrated her life to hair gels), and tonight David whipped up a batch of chocolate chip cookies. Of course, Anna does hate me for existing; and I'm sure David hasn't gotten over the trauma I inflicted on him this week. What I'm saying is, I don't believe for a second that these are instances of innocent culinary activity. Revenge baking, is more like it.

Larry is still away. He is going to come back on Friday saying how he had to work really hard and it really wasn't any fun at all going to Europe and staying in hotels and eating in restaurants for work purposes, and I may just have to kill him. But only after he orders the new computer, though. I'm not sure what to get, or I would have one already. Instead, I'm still working with this old set-up that looks and acts like something on the Flintstones (I mean, if the Flintstones had had a computer) (which isn't so unrealistic, when you consider that they possessed a vacuum cleaner, okay?). I half-expect a little man to pop out from the back of the monitor with a handful of crayons and yell at me for making him draw too fast.

It occurs to me that I hyperlink too much (I'm a hyper hyperlinker, in fact); but everything I talk about here has such an involved history, and I want to make sure that newbies know what is going on. And speaking of newbies....

I'd like to say "Howdy!" to all the reviewers popping over here from humor-blogs.com. Make yourselves at home and make sure you read more than just the January posts, because, quite frankly, the funny stuff happened in October and December. It's all there: the puke, the Halloween costume ordeals, the joy of the vastly-overrated holidays....Or check out the Popular Posts to the left for some earlier laughs. It's all free!

Sick and Tired

So, I missed posting yesterday. Sue me. Susie developed croup yesterday evening and blew all my finely laid plans to heck. Now I'm sitting here after a lousy night's sleep with a non-functioning brain, wondering how to pick up the pieces. Of my day, that is, not my brain - the brain's a total loss.

Let's see - it might help if I'd get dressed. And there was the Christmas party for our home school group that I am supposed to bring some food to. And I was supposed to bake cranberry bread for my husband's office party (you know, the party that spouses aren't invited to, but we are free to contribute baked goods and other yummy comestibles) (the hell with them).....

I could just blow everything off and lie on the couch all day (my favorite option), but Brian and Rachel are supposed to be in some little skit about St. Francis at the party (the home school party, not the office one). I think. The skit wasn't my idea. One of the other, more ambitious, moms dreamed it up. I'm hating her right now. If it weren't for the stupid skit, I could blow the whole thing off.

I hope I don't catch whatever Susie has. I am not a patient sufferer. I tend to languish - loudly. As in whine and complain. While the house falls apart around my ears. I can't wait until I am older (and, more to the point, the kids are older) and I can be sick for a day without utter chaos taking over my life. I'll be able to sit in an armchair by the fire, sipping hot tea and catching up on my reading (I mean, People comes out every single week, I can't keep up), rather than trying to referee sibling disagreements from the couch in the trashed living room and praying that no one shows up at our front door to witness just how bad our home life can become.

Speaking of which, I'd really better shower and dress. I'm just asking for trouble sitting at the computer in my pajamas at 8 in the morning. Then, I'll go back to bed. If you make your bed first, it doesn't count as being lazy, right?

Betty Crocker 911

I dedicated today to baking all the goodies we need to send in our Christmas care packages to Larry's relatives. What? Where are all the goodies we baked last week? Oh, yeah, those....well, we weren't quite prepared last week...by the time we procured all the cute little tins and boxes to pack the sweets in, well.....they were all gone, okay? The lemon bars, the peanut butter cookies, most of the fudge was no more. I am one person who takes my holiday weight gain quotas seriously.

So this time I planned it right. Boxes at the ready, I decided to just whip right through all the baking in one day and get those babies out of here. By the time I was done, I was seeing double from sugar overload. I'm not trying a baking marathon like that again without a medic standing by to administer insulin as needed. And a pox on outdated cookbooks. The lemon bars recipe called for "granulated sugar," as in what everyone else in this day and age calls just "sugar." As in, not confectioner's sugar, which really didn't work well at all.

The fudge did its part by refusing to set properly. As I couldn't cut it into discrete squares, I settled for packing it in one big lump per recipient. I nestled the lumps in white tissue to give them a more festive look, but....honestly? They resemble nothing so much as wads of poop wrapped in toilet paper (in decorative tins). Theo suggested that instead we put each lump in one of those plastic pooper-scooper bags (provided free at the local dog park) and tie the bags with ribbon. You know, to make a good gag gift. Get it? Gag? We laughed ourselves silly. (Hey, even Anna smiled at that one.)

I am sick of sweets, but I still have to bake the #%$&* (sp?) cranberry bread for the party tomorrow night. And mail off those wads of poop, I mean fudge. Before someone around here eats them. Yum.