30 Day Picture Shenanigans - Day 17

30 Day Picture Shenanigans - Day 17: Things My Daughter Does Better Than I

Most parents experience moments where they are caught in awe of their children.  This has been happening to me a lot recently.  Day (or post) 17 of the 30 Day Picture Shenanigans is about things that my daughter does better than I.

My daughter is better at savoring the summer.  I think all kids are.  Remember when summer used to seem like it was a year long?  Today was really fricking hot and this evening it was still in the high 80s and pretty windy.  She sat outside blowing bubbles despite the heat, basking in the sun

My daughter is better at enjoying the small things.

My daughter is also better at blowing bubbles.

My daughter is better at getting along with other people's children than I am.  While we're at it, my daughter is better at getting along with other adults than I am.  Also, she is better at getting out of awkward and/or boring conversations.  Apparently when you are 7, not answering direct questions while staring blankly at a person before walking away is still relatively acceptable.  My daughter is also better with animals.  I have always thought of myself as an animal lover.  It turns out that I don't actually love being around or near animals, I just don't want them to be abused or neglected.  For example, I like Gomer (the butter-loving cat).  I like his cat-weirdness and I found his morbid obesity to be adorable.  Now that he is expensive, underweight, shaggy, half-blind, and really fucking smelly (seriously, his breath is probably what is killing my house plants) I find that I don't actually want to spend any time around him.  My daughter will sleep with that stinky animal every night.  If he is on our bed, as soon as he starts making that annoying noise with his tongue while he's cleaning himself I use my feet to launch him into the hallway.  (What?  I like my sleep.)  Don't even get me started on my mom's Boston.

A couple of weeks ago the child asked if we had any seeds.  She has a flower box that Mr. Sty built her a few years ago that is filled with dirt and random weeds.  I dug around in a cabinet in the garage and found a packet of lettuce seeds and a packet of cucumber seeds that were at least two years old.  She asked for some brief planting instructions, then happily skipped off with the seeds and her little shovel.  Yesterday she ran in the house excitedly insisting that I go with her into the back yard to look at something.

My daughter is better at gardening.

She planted seeds that were years old and every one has not only sprouted, but has gone untouched by the backyard vermin.  Apparently wicked awesome gardening skills skip a generation.

Bastard cucumber seedling.  Had I planted this, it would be dead already.

I can only assume that my daughter is better at frosting a cake than I am.  (I think a quadriplegic would be a better cake decorator than me.)  She is also a better businesswoman than I am.  (She just asked if I would give her real money for some of her art.  I said sure, thinking a couple of quarters would suffice.  She said, "Okay, my art isn't that much.  Like, 2 or 3, maybe 5 dollars.")

My daughter is better at doing my job.

I'm sure that she will grow up to do all kinds of things better than I did.  She'll probably be a better parent.  (Although, when she was 3 she went into great detail about why she hates babies, so maybe not.)  She'll probably be a better cook, have her dream job, travel the world, drink better beer...  But I guess the goal of all parents is that your children be better people than you.  (So, really, if she does grow up to be an awesome person, that means that I kick ass too.  Ha!) 

30 Day Picture Shenanigans - Day 16

30 Day Picture Shenanigans - Day 16: Birthday Cake

Tomorrow is the girl child's 7th birthday.  (I am old.)  We celebrated yesterday by mini-golfing with my parents and then going to a local restaurant for lunch and a slab of ice cream cake as large as a house.  Today she and I (and the neighbor girls) planned to bake the most fantastic birthday cake.  I am generally a believer in doing everything from scratch, but I've recently begun biking for exercise again and that makes me lazy in every other area of my life, so we made (hold onto yourselves) boxed cakes.  I have been seeing cool pictures on Pinterest of ombre-colored cakes in which the layers are varying shades of green or whatever.  Child is all about anything being rainbow colored, so I split two prepared box mixes into 4 cereal bowls and added enough food coloring to each bowl to make the chemist and mother in me shudder.  Each bowl went into it's own separate 8-inch round pan so we ended up with teal, purple, dark pink, and orange cake layers.

Everything was great up to this point.  I forgot to grease the pans, but the cakes came out alright.  I let them cool.  I made buttercream frosting from scratch (using 2 pounds of powdered sugar, holy crap) and dyed it a lovely hot pink color (involuntary twitch).  What's that you say?  "Wow, this seems to be going pretty well so far, despite the fact that your child should be taken away from you for your use of box cake mixes and synthetic food dyes."  Oh, don't you worry.  Things began to go horribly awry starting...now.

First, while the cakes were cooling on large sheet pans on the kitchen table, the stupid butter-loving cat kept trying to eat them.  (Please see previous entries on what other stupid things my large cat likes to eat.)  To prevent this, I covered the cakes with clean flour-sack towels.  Usually he's an "out-of-sight, out-of-mind" kind of cat.  Apparently today he was an "out-of-sight-so-that-must-mean-I-can-walk-on-it" kind of cat.  I came upstairs from doing one load of laundry to cries and screams from the three girls about how the cat had "ruined the birthday cake" and to find girl child with the cat in some kind of upside down half-nelson.  Really, thanks to the towels, the cakes were not ruined.  They just had tiny cat-foot sized holes in each one.  (Seriously, every single one.  They were set up in a square formation.  I think the cat was trying to play Dance Dance Revolution on the birthday cakes.)  No biggie, I calmed the girls down, moved the cakes, and carried on with the day.

The second problem, in hindsight, probably started when I got all "I know I'm supposed to cut the round tops off so the cakes are flat and I should probably cut the edges off too, but fuck it!  I'm so awesome that nothing could possibly go wrong here!  They're all the same shape and size...I'll just spread extra frosting in between the layers so that they stick together.  It will be fine!"  (The laziness.  I have it bad.)

The third problem is that I fricking suck at frosting cakes.  Actually, I suck at decorating anything, unless the goal is to make it as ugly as possible.  Leading us to today's picture shenanigan:

Behold!  The ugliest fucking birthday cake ever created!

The back half of the cake is pretty much gone...it gradually avalanched onto the kitchen table while I was trying to frost it.  I finally just gave up and tried to make the front as nice as possible.  Yes, this is my best cake-frosting job.  Thankfully, little girls don't care what a cake looks like, as long as it tastes good and you let them put an obscene amount of sprinkles on it.

The caved-in back side of the frankencake, in case you thought I was exaggerating.

 The layers are kind of cool at least.

Next year I'm buying a goddamn ice cream cake.

30 Day Picture Shenanigans - Day 15

30 Day Picture Shenanigans - Day 15: Flower Shop

Some days my child is a complete turd.  She just acts like an asshole.  I know that all kids do this, but I have very little tolerance for it.  Child's room is so messy that you literally cannot walk beyond the doorway without stepping on library books and Barbie shoes.  We have been trying to get her to pick things up after she's done with them, but the cleaning thing does not seem to be sticking.  When I told her that she and the neighbor girls couldn't play in her room today, she went into fricking meltdown mode.  Crying, pouting, hiding under the coffee table...pretty much everything short of giving me the finger.  (I'm sure she would have if she knew what it meant.)  After 30 minutes of me ignoring her she decided that her "mood meter went up" and that she was fine now. 

I was not.  I was calmly pissed.  I am tired of cleaning her room for her only to have it destroyed 24 hours later.  I know that every kid does this and that it would help a lot if there wasn't so much junk in her bedroom.  While she was outside playing I went into her room and put everything into not one, not two, but six huge black garbage bags.  I left her bed and a large beanbag.  There are a few books on shelves and some stuffed animals.  She came in halfway through and seemed thrilled that I was cleaning her room for her until I informed her that these bags were going into the garage until I can sort through them and decide what she gets back.  (In hindsight, I should have thought a little harder about what I was chucking into garbage bags.  Her TV remote and Nintendo DS charger are in there somewhere.  I'm not opposed to a stretch of time without TV or video games, but the noise from the TV at night helps her sleep, so this should be interesting.)  Mr. Sty came home shortly after and, while he admitted that everything needed to be sorted and some stuff needed to go, told me that I had gone crazy.  (This feeling of his was only affirmed when I went and did the same thing to the kitchen cabinets after the bedroom was empty.)

After being thoroughly annoyed with my child for most of the afternoon, I went outside to discover that she and the neighbor girl had spent their hours setting up a "flower shop" on our back deck.

(My favorites are the "purple magnificents". And the "tree stick".)  

Sometimes kids do things that are so innocent, imaginative, and reminiscent of your own childhood that they really could be standing there flipping you the bird and you just wouldn't care.  After discovering this, I felt like the asshole for thinking that my daughter could possibly ever be a jerk.  I'm sticking to my guns about the toys for now, but not letting it be the major thing in our day.



Cooking Tip of the Day: Soft Pretzels
Yesterday, my oh-so-wise child told me that we really should just make our own bread, jelly, and cheese.  Today, when she said that she had a taste for soft pretzels, I decided we could make our own.  I turned to my cooking bibles and found this pretzel recipe.  This was actually surprisingly easy.  The dough recipe is pretty standard.  After letting it rise for an hour, you split it into 8 pieces.  The pieces are rolled into thin tubes and then shaped.  We did some standard pretzel shapes and then Child got creative and made some figure-8's, some clover shapes, some that looked like eyeglasses...  Anyway, apparently the key to a soft pretzel is boiling it in baking-soda water for 30 seconds before it is egg-washed, salted, and baked.

The whole process was going splendidly.  I was all "Oh, man, I am so awesome.  I'm making pretzels!  I should take a bazillion pictures like those fancy food people and put them on my blog and everyone's mouths will water and I will be some kind of super mom!"  (Side note: In case you don't know or haven't figured it out yet, I use my phone to take any pictures on this blog.  Why?  Because I'm cheap and lazy.)

This leads us to our cooking tip of the day: when you are boiling the pretzels in the baking-soda water, it is very very important to NOT drop your phone into the water.

Yes, that's right, while I was up on my high horse I kerplunked my phone directly into a pot of boiling soda water.  I don't quite remember how I got it out.  I'm assuming that I used a spatula since my hands aren't covered in burns.  Child ran away as if the events were going to result in some series of fiery explosions.  I cursed and gutted the phone, drying what I could.  I threw it in a bag of rice (which I found rather quickly thanks to my earlier cupboard cleaning).

I don't know how, but it still works.  Maybe I got it out of the water fast enough?  I have dropped other phones (yes, plural) into toilets and they do not work.  The bad thing, though, is that my camera lens is now covered in a fog of water vapor.  Also, apparently baking soda water leaves a white crusty film over everything once the water is evaporated, so I'm sure that will be all up in my phone too.    So, no pictures of pretzels for you.  But trust me, they were amazing.  We dipped them into a chocolate sauce that I made a couple of months ago.  (The sauce was so good that I couldn't bear to throw it away, so it's been waiting in a jar in the back of my fridge for the perfect moment to come.  I think this was also an Alton Brown recipe.  I love him.)

Anyway, summing things up: Everyone is an asshole sometimes, even small children.  Everyone is inspiring and amazing sometimes, especially small children.  If you started a blog to essentially poke fun at most other blogs, but then try to do something like those other blogs, the universe (hear me mom?) will reach down and slap your expensive electronics into boiling kettles and then laugh at you.  (Screw you, universe.  Screw you.)

30 Day Picture Shenanigans - Day 11

30 Day Picture Shenanigans - Day 11: What Keeps the Girl-Child Busy

Mr. Sty and I homeschool our daughter.  During this past semester we had someone who could babysit her during the days, but our sitter recently decided to start working in a dental office again.  Thankfully, I can take the kiddo to work with me.  Yesterday I taught a knitting class for kids, which she joined in on, so that led to some entertainment for the day.

Why do kids love to sit in stupid places?  I feel like I can't keep her off of the counter.

Here she is with Crayola's Dry Erase Crayons.  They are actually pretty cool.  She colored flowers and yarn balls all over the big front window.  The crayon wipes off really easily.  Coloring on a window somehow is just waaay more fun than coloring on paper.

She is very well behaved, but trying to think of things to keep her busy all day while I'm also working makes me exhausted by the end of the day.  Remember that story that I was going to tell you the other day in my post about voting?  I'll share now.

Ridiculous Parenting Moment: 

The other day was just one of those days when everything the girl-child did was not necessarily naughty, but it was annoying enough to have to tell her to stop.  Over and over and over.  For example, everything that she fricking ate that day was shoved into her mouth whole.  Seriously.  Every time I turned around, she had her cheeks stuffed like a binging chipmunk and could barely breathe, let alone talk.  Driving. Me. Nuts. (Yaaaaarggghhh!  Hahaha...)  Anyways, later in the day we were sitting at home.  She was eating a soft pretzel for a snack while sitting on the loveseat in our living room.  The front door was open to let in some breeze and the loveseat faces the door.  I was standing at the kitchen table about 10 feet away, but not in view of the door.  I was talking to a friend who was over (the one with the pig-gum) when child began making muffled sounds with her voicebox.  She was trying to communicate, but had so much fucking soft-pretzel crammed in her face that she couldn't even move her lips.  I freaked.  The following conversation ensued.

Me: (yelling, naturally, because I was at the end of my fricking rope) For Christ's sake!  You seriously have soooo much food stuffed into your mouth that you can't even talk!!!  What the hell!  Don't try to talk when your mouth is that full!  Don't put that much food into your mouth!  You're seven years old, not two!  I've been telling you ALL DAY that you are GOING TO CHOKE!  You know what?  You're going to choke, and I'm really not in the mood to do the Heimlich maneuver right now, so I'm not going to.  (At this point she is laughing, as she usually is when I start getting hysterical and/or threatening her with death.  She thinks it's completely amusing.) (Also, probably not the best idea to do anything to make your child-with-a-mouth-full-of-pretzel laugh, especially while you are lecturing her about choking.  Hindsight.) Do you even know what the Heimlich is? (She nods, muffled laughter coming from her doughy maw, while making a Heimlich motion on her own midsection.)  Good, I'm glad you know, because you'll be doing it to YOURSELF!!!!!

Voice Outside: Uh...hello?

(I freeze for a second like a deer in headlight, then walk to the door to find a middle-aged man standing on my porch with a clipboard.)

Man: Um, hi, I'm with the democratic (words I couldn't understand...perhaps his mouth was full of pretzel) and I wanted to remind you to...

Me: Yep, voting tomorrow.  Yay democrats!  I'm on board. (Seriously, that was the third person I'd had at my door that day.)

Man: Uh...okay, good.  So, I was listening to you talking to your daughter just now.  She was trying to tell you that there was someone at the door...

Me: (nervously) Oh, haha...maybe if her mouth wasn't so full, I could have understood that.  She's been doing that all day.  Kids, you know?  (More nervous laughter...)

Man: Okay, well, have a good night. (Walks away.)

My Friend: (laughing hysterically) Huh, well, I guess you can expect a visit from child services.

Me: (also laughing hysterically) Seriously!  Who does that happen to?  He would stand there for a full 2 minutes while I tell my 7-year-old that I'm going to let her choke to death.  Don't people knock anymore?  Or ring doorbells?  I should be writing a book!  You can't make that crap up.

So, ladies and gentlemen, the lesson of the day is that if you threaten your child with death, you should do it behind closed doors.