One Man's Trash is Another Man's Treasure

Today I stepped into the shower in the middle of a beautiful sunny day. I hadn't washed my hair since Saturday and I promised myself that I wouldn't let it go another day.

You're welcome, Robert.

I emerged from the bathroom fully dressed with damp hair. No walking around your house in just a towel or a bathrobe luxuriously air drying when your nineteen year old brother lives with you.

Even if he walks around the house wearing only his boxers.

I looked out the front door and there was Eddie in a lawn chair making up for his winter induced Vitamin D deficiency by soaking up some much needed sunshine. He and George sat among my purple and white crocuses, George bouncing up and down and patting Eddie's cheek.

I love watching other people love my babies.

I checked some email, opened my google reader for the first time in three weeks (over 250 posts to read!) and combed my hair before I looked outside again.

Eddie and George are now sound asleep on that lawn chair out front. It's parade week in West Des Moines. The week when we get to pile all of the junk we have collected for the past year outside on the curb and a parade of people drives by and they pick through our stuff and take whatever they want before the city comes by to collect it and take it away.

I think I'll go get Georgie and put him in his bed before someone thinks he is a part of my pile and tries to take him home.

It's the Charity Event of the Year

My kids came home from school last week heartbroken for the victims of the earthquake in Haiti.

"So many people died, mom."

"People don't even have their houses anymore."

"There are kids that lost their parents."

I shushed the boys before their sister lost all control of her emotions. She doesn't really know pain. Her most painful experience is having to eat oatmeal for breakfast when she wants waffles, and that's the way I like it. Their lives should be all butterflies. And sparkles. And rainbows.

But they couldn't forget about the people on that island who are suffering.

They thought there was something they could do.

So they hatched a plan. I guess this is what it's like to have a fifth grader.

(When I was in fifth grade, my sister and I had a lemonade stand. My dad saw us out front, and suggested we sell canned soda instead. He offered to buy the soda, we would sell it and pay him back the cost of the soda and keep the profits. We made something like Twenty-Five dollars that day, and we never repaid him. I kept waiting for him to bring it up, but he never did, so we pocketed all the cash. It's okay, though, because a child can never repay all that their parents do for them.)

This Saturday my driveway will be converted to a Hot Chocolate for Haiti stand. They are selling hot chocolate and donating the money they make to the Red Cross.

You have no idea how badly I want to take over the whole thing.

"What are your goals? How much money do you want to make? Then you need to tell at least X amount of people about your project. Here, let me make the flyer. The more people that know about it, the more people you'll have. You should get a local business to match your proceeds dollar for dollar."

Instead, I'm making small suggestions. Stella took a flyer (that her brothers made without any help from moi) to ballet last night, and came home with a couple of bucks from friends that couldn't make it on Saturday but wanted to support her.

They braved sub-zero temperatures and delivered flyers to all the neighbors.

I'm also doing my part by asking my local readers (all 5 of you) to stop by my house between 10:30 and 1:00 (2 1/2 hours? Are they kidding me?) for a delicious cup of hot cocoa. Yesterday they made some cookies to sell and I think I heard something about a plan to make brownies today after school.

If nothing else, you can come by and mock me from your warm car as I freeze my a$$ off supporting my kids. And Haiti.

And that's why I will never have my own cooking show

All of my wildest dreams were about to come true.

I was all set to host several women in my home for a few hours today while I instructed them in the fine art of cookery. I felt sure that they would find my skills to be of such a caliber and my jokes to be so well timed and I would exhibit just the right amount of sincerity that they would insist on using their student loans to fund my own weekend show on local access cable.

But then Robert's dad had to go and get the Big C. (That's what we insiders call Cancer.)

Then his dumb old spleen had to rupture. Stupid spleen.

And he pretty much almost died, but a few angels decided to guide his surgeon's hands and miracle of miracles he made it out of a surgery that nobody thought he would survive.

He is, however, now short one spleen.

The long and short of it is that we took an emergency trip out west, I had to cancel my cooking demonstration, and I hate cancer. Cancer sucks.

But family rocks. Especially mine.

And when they eat the food I cook for them (with a little help from my mom and my sister), they make me feel like a rockstar.

All kidding aside, his story is pretty miraculous and I feel so blessed to count myself a member of his family. They are inspiring men and women. If you are interested in following the progress of Robert's Dad's treatments, visit his blog.

Freeze Frame

Right now, my finger fits perfectly into my toddler's fist. His head is the missing puzzle piece for that space between my jaw and my collarbone. I am never tempted to shove him off my lap. (Unlike a few of the older ones whose bums are quite bony and who shift their weight in a highly uncomfortable manner the entire time they sit there.)

Stella's five year old body, with her knees pulled up to her chest and my arm under her head, curls perfectly into the C shape that my body makes from my shoulders to my knees. I know this fact because of the early morning visits from her that begin before the sun is up. She likes to tell me what she dreamed about while I doze in and out of wakefulness.

Creed runs at me full speed and leaps onto my upper torso, wrapping his arms around my neck and his legs around my waist, hooking his feet together behind me. There's no faking the joy on his face when I catch him. Sometimes, I sneak and hold his hand in public. He pretends not to notice, but I can see him stealing sidelong glances at me. He likes to sit in my lap when we read at night. He would collapse in embarrassment if he read this, but I think that someday he will remember it fondly.

Jack doesn't sit on my lap much anymore. He won't change his clothes in front of me. Public embraces have been replaced by one-armed side hugs. When I am the recipient of a full embrace from him (in the privacy of our own home) his face turns to the side and rests on my ribcage just below my chin. I can feel his arms under my armpits and wrapping around my back. We now wear the same shoe size. I've needed to go into his room to recover my Chuck Taylors. I have mistakenly donned his hoodies as I run around town, not noticing that I am wearing my son's clothes until I catch a glimpse of myself in the glass doors at Target. He likes to fall asleep in my bed when Robert is on call, and I can't bring myself to remove him to his own bed when I turn in for the evening. At eleven o'clock at night, when he is sound asleep in my bed, it's easy to remember the baby he used to be.

I remember when he would lead me on a tour of the planet with my finger in his fist.

I remember when we wasted* entire days snuggling, reading, singing, Mother Goosing . . .

I don't recall the last time he willingly embraced me in public, but you can bet that if it happens again, I will hold on a little bit longer.

I'm not wishing for my babies to stay babies, nor to I want to have another one.

Jack and I read the same books and have lively discussions about them. It's fun to have kids that are learning to play instruments and stretching creative muscles and noticing each other as more than that annoying person who is always there. No matter what. I taught the kids how to play Mafia a few weeks ago, for crying out loud. How fun is that?

I just think the spacing of my children was a really smart thing. Good job, me. Or good job, God. Either way, having kids at all different stages is a really good thing.

*Is that a waste of a day? I think not.

Anxious Much?

Is it a dumb idea to have a Valentine's Day Party?

What if I ask my guests to come dressed as their favorite pairs?

That does make it dumb, doesn't it.

I love having parties, but I also hate having parties.

In the days and hours leading up to any gathering for which I am the hostess I think:

Nobody's going to come.

I don't think I have enough food.

I'm going to run out of beverages.

I'm sure nobody's coming.

This food is gross.

I'm the only person in this town who even likes blue cheese.

I have no friends.

Nobody likes me.

Of course, my friends come and I don't run out of anything and I spend the evening with interesting people and hear interesting stories but then I also usually say something that sounds dumb or lame and reveal myself as a Lord of the Rings loving, Star Wars watching, SciFi loving, Celebrity Gossiping, bad housekeeping, impatient, non-spiritual, gas guzzler who uses plastic grocery sacks and disposable diapers and sometimes forgets that not everybody wants to hear about my funny cute kids but I don't really have much else to talk about because I don't really do much else besides a doing bad job at keeping house and keeping my patience in check and reading too many books.

I feel like having a Valentine's Day Party.

When Kids Get the Camera a.k.a. Skydiving Hamster

Found this on my Flip Video after a night out with Robert. The girl sitting on the bed is the Babysitter.

A House that Looks Good Enough to Eat

Not my house. C'mon, you know that's not true. Decorating skillz, I lack.

I'll be making my gingerbread house next week.

It's one of those traditions that I sort of dread, but the reality is always better than I expect it to be. I just hope I don't have to sit here and make it all by myself. That would be depressing.

Here is the recipe for gingerbread, in case anyone who doesn't already have it is interested:

Gingerbread Recipe:

2 3/4 cup flour

1/2 tsp salt

1 tsp ginger powder

1/2 tsp nutmeg

1 tsp cinnamon

1/4 tsp cloves

3 tsp baking powder

2/3 cup molasses

3 egg yolks (save the whites for the icing)

1/2 cup brown sugar

1/2 cup vegetable oil

line two large size cookie sheets with foil and spray with cooking spray. set aside

mix all ingredients together to form a dough. divide dough in half. press each half into a cookie sheet. (it helps to coat your hands with crisco so the dough sticks less to them.) bake at 300º for 20 minutes. place pattern pieces on the cookie sheets and use a knife to cut around the pieces as soon as the gingerbread comes out of the oven. pull the negative pieces of the gingerbread (the pieces you are not using for your house) off the cookie sheet and allow the house pieces to cool. Separate the foil from your house pieces before they are completely cool, though, because the foil sticks to the gingerbread like an obsessed ex-boyfriend who can't seem to move on.

Royal Icing

3 egg whites

1 lb of powdered sugar

1/2 tsp cream of tarter

Mix all ingredients in a large mixing bowl. Cover portion not being used with a wet towel to keep it from drying out.

I don't have a scanner to scan the pattern for the pieces, but here is a photograph of them, if that helps anyone who is actually going to make one of these beauties.

Side: cut two

roof: cut two

front and back: cut one with all the windows for the front, then use a cookie cutter or freehand a big window on the back piece.

You can't get one of these, he's one of a kind and he's all mine.

That's my mom's handwriting on those pattern pieces. If your little heart is desperate to make a House of Gingerbread, send me your address and I'll mail you a pattern. You could also use pieces of cardboard to make a mock-up of a house and use those for a pattern.

We use hot glue to stick it all together and then we use icing to cover the hot glue. We stick it to a piece of cardboard with a hole big enough to put a nightlight through and covered in tin foil.

Then we do our best to make it look like the candy aisle at Wal-Mart vomited all over it.

Maybe I'll photograph the step by step next week and post more complete instructions.