Easter Sunday and a Link-Up

31 March 2013

We found ourselves at a super early Mass this morning. We decided to take advantage of how early our toddler wakes up to avoid the Easter crowds. It was nice to get a seat at the 7:30 Mass, but I did miss myself some full choir and organ action.

Jacob and I stayed up late last night dying Easter eggs au natural. We cobbled together some dyes from an old beet, some frozen blueberries, and turmeric. Mine are the earthier ones and Jacob's are the flashier ones. I was pretty pleased with our results.

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As was the little man.

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As fun as the eggs were, the highlight of the day was certainly Jake's "skateboard"


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He pretty much wears his dad's helmet and talks about skateboards all day long, so we figured we'd indulge the critter this holiday.


And now to link up with Grace, Kayla, and Erica for some:


Camp Patton

Here's the 'fit.


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Outfit details: 
Dress: Urban Outfitters
Shoes: BCBG via Ross
Cardigan: Gap back in the day
Necklace: my grandmother's
Color Palette: embracing the season
Fake smile: Jacob's snarkiness

Now I will say a Happy Easter to you and send you on your way with one final picture that I hope will brighten an already bright day.

Say hello to 11 weeks of baby numero due. 


We're more than stoked.  And even Jake gave the concept of a "baby in mama's tummy" more notice than ever today when he insisted that the baby wear Papa's helmet.
 
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Have a blessed Easter, friends!

Toddler Mementos

27 March 2013

So Jake is talking more and more, and I absolutely love it. It's been my favorite part of parenting so far. So I will - as mom bloggers do - preserve some of the gems here periodically. And you can all tell me how no toddler has ever said anything cuter.

This morning as soon as he woke up, he came into bed with us and asked for "More Diego?" Jacob asked him if he was just with Diego in his dream, and Jake nodded. Then Jacob asked what he and Diego were doing, and Jake said they were eating flowers. (Of course, what he said sounded more like: "eedeen dours.")

He will repeat something FOREVER until you acknowledge it: 
"ees nunning. Nunning. Nunning. NUNNING!" 
"Yes, Jake, he's running." 
"Uhuh." 

Whenever we let him sip a carbonated beverage he calls it "Spicy Juice." 

He really likes making people laugh. On my birthday, I kept asking him to say "Happy Birthday, Mama" and he would say "Happy Burday Jake!" and then crack up. Now whenever I laugh at something he does, he turns to me with a big grin and says "Happy Burday Jake!"

He's obsessed with skateboards, helmets, honey bees, balloons, Diego, and basketball hoops. 

Butterflies and helicopters are pretty OK.

We have some friends whose last name is Delgado and he calls them the "Avocados" ("Adodados")

He knows things come in two sizes: "BIG!!" & "baby"

He loves reading books, with us or by himself. Now when he reads books to himself he narrates them, but no matter what book he's reading, his narratives are all apocalyptic: "OH NO! OH NOOOO! Uh Oh! Uh Oh! BOOM! Ees fall down! OH NO!" 

Then there are things that I don't love hearing. He's grabbed his stomach a couple times in the last day or two and said "Tummy. Ouch!" - nothing like that to send my mother's mind to dreams of the emergency room for our second appendicitis in eight months. 

I didn't love it yesterday when I was snuggled on my bed talking to my mother on the phone as Jake played alone and contentedly in the living room for the first time all day, and he came in with big eyes pointing back to his play area and said, "Uh Oh poopie."

No. Can't say I love that one. 

Especially when I go to find the "Tummy. Ouch" prophecy fulfilled in a green pool on my floor.

And on that not-at-all-disgusting note, I will leave you with nary a picture because that takes entirely too much energy, and a picture would expose just how exquisitely beautiful the weather is here, and I couldn't do that to you all.

Bye for now. I'm off to eat my weight in cuties and watch Call the Midwife. You should too.

Making Good on Some Blog Tags: 5 Things

21 March 2013

Since blog tagging is all the rage right now, I've found myself woefully slowing up the tag games and for this I totally apologize. In the past few weeks I've been tagged in a couple different types of Blog Tags. Jessie, Emily, and Brenna recently awarded me some lovely Liebsters, Angie tagged me in a similar Q&A post, and now old roomie Anne has tagged me in a 5 Things post. When it comes to me in bloggy-land, I'm much more of an input than an output kind of girl. By this I mean: when was the last time I posted? Oh, right, over two weeks ago. But my Google Reader is - wait for it - empty. So since I did an 11 Things post so recently (that is. a year ago.) and it's so similar to the Liebster Tag, I'm going to stick with the more manageable 5 Things today but afterwards I'll answer some of the questions the other taggers posed. 

So, here you go.


5 Things You May but Probably Don't Know about this Bloggess

1. I have a freckle on one of my big toes. It's just under the lower right corner of my toenail and when my toenails are done it kind of reminds me of a Marilyn Monroe type beauty mark. But on my toe. 

2. I think Dr. Pepper is the best drink in the world. But because I'm such a health nut, I only drink one about every three years. (If you don't count all the sips I have of my sister's whenever we're together.) 

3. Jacob routinely defines me as an extremely picky eater because I don't like olives and cherries.

4. I played a furious amount of piano in high school. Like hours and hours a day. My technique was never very good, I was sloppy and my method resembled barrel racing more than, say, mathematics. But I had a lot of heart, and overall I was quite good. I loved playing, but I never had any aspirations regarding the piano. Primarily because I was MORTIFIED by playing in front of anyone outside of my family. In my 12 years of recitals, I only walked out of two without at least feeling the urge to cry. I walked out of several straight up bawling.

My piano career ended rather unfortunately my freshman year of college after a bad experience with piano lessons at school when my teacher made me feel completely stupid. (I was and still am overly sensitive, so it was only half his fault at best.) In our last lesson - after the recital - I remember him noting that he'd actually expected that I'd have trouble with the two difficult pieces, but he was surprised that I'd messed up the little Prelude. Not Mr. Social Grace.

Three years later on the day I graduated, that teacher came and found me. He apologized and told me he hoped I would keep playing. Remembering that moment still makes me cry.

5. I cry pretty easily.

For 5 Things I tag: 

  
***

Some questions from the other tags:

1. What's your favorite TV show ever?
FNL. All the way. It strikes all the right chords. Clear eyes, full hearts. Texas Forever. 

2. If you had to eat one thing or meal all day for a week, what would it be?
Pizza. I frequented some pretty amazing pizza by the slice places daily while living in Rome. If I ever went back they'd be the first place I'd visit. Sorry antiquity. Sorry basilicas.

3. What was the last book you read & was it any good?
I read Persuasion over the weekend. It's probably my third time reading it. And, as usual, it was wonderful.

4. What do you love most about the town you live in?
The beach. Some surprise there, huh? I'm a small town country girl who develops anxiety when she can't see the horizon. So I very much appreciate living in a city where I'm only a few minutes away from the end of America.

5. Do you have any special talents?
I can snap six fingers; I drop things a lot, but I'm wickedly good at catching them; when in the crab-walk position, I'm very good at holding people up while they stand on my stomach. (I actually think a lot of people could do it, they're just too intimidated to try because it looks very hard...and equally stupid.) However awkward, it's a bit of a party trick, and my record is 230lb. This is pretty much how I scored my first boyfriend. He only weighed about 185, but he was impressed.

6. What are your favorite smells?
I love the smell of orange rinds, freshly sawed wood, men who've just mowed the lawn, and old musty books. I pretty much abhor all artificial scents. I give a huge radius to Bath and Body Works and Abercrombie. Gee willikers. 

7. What song do you want played at your funeral?
I really like morbid questions like this. Probably "Of the Father's Love Begotten" - I know it's a Christmas song, but a young men's choir sang it at my wedding while I walked down the aisle, and it was pretty much my favorite part of the service. There's something about the final "evermore and evermore" that just gets me.

8. What is your least favorite thing about yourself?  
I've already mentioned in this post about my sensitivity. But I'm also pretty insecure. I don't trust my opinions, or my taste, and I'm constantly second-guessing myself. I think my insecurity causes me to miss out on relationships because my first assumption is that people don't care about being friends with me, and I miss opportunities to bless people because I don't think it would really matter to them if I did something nice.  Other least favorites are my skin, most days my hair, and my leg/torso ratio.

9. Why do you blog?
For the same reason a lot of other mom bloggers do. I started to keep a record of family stuff and make sure the grandparents were always updated, but I keep it up because of the community that it has afforded me. I refer to other bloggers as my "friends," and Jacob always makes fun of me for it. He, of course, is just jealous. 

5 Favorites Link-Up

06 March 2013

I'm taking a break from my Spring Break paper-grading train to link up with Hallie. I'm very happy to do this because grading is most certainly my LEAST favorite, and so it will be a good exercise to remember the better things in my current vida. I'm using this post as an incentive to grade because you all are so much more fun than student writing. Even though I did have a student write "for-fill" instead of "fulfill" this morning which has almost (almost) made it worth it.

So 3 papers graded = add one more thing to your favorites list.


- 1 -
I'm sure I'm not really introducing her to any of you, but I'd be lying if I said Ana wasn't one of my five favorites this week. Not only because her kids say the funniest things ever but also because of her baby's hair and because she has made me a winner for this project and is sending me a prize and I'm quite quite flattered!

- 2 -
Three papers down and I'm back to dwell on nice things for a couple of minutes. One of those nice things is this ring: 
Which Jacob bought me for my birthday after scouring my giftable Pinterests. You can find it here. I'm hugely intimidated by jewelry. My accessorizing usually involves me putting on an unassuming necklace and maybe taking it off six months later. I want to get better at it, but I hardly have any jewelry and building up my collection just seems like one more way to make bad shopping decisions. This ring will be my gateway piece into a world of accessorizing like a grown up.

- 3 -
This book:
 
I've been making friends with the microcosmos recently, and I have some homemade lacto-fermented ketchup to show for it. My son's father recently introduced him to "tsapus"/ketchup, and now Jake routinely gets the bottle out of the fridge and brings it to me during the day. Since I wasn't too keen on the ingredient list, I pulverized and cooked down some tomato sauce and added some spices and honey and kefir whey. Then I let it ferment on the counter for a couple of days and voila, a healthier ketchup with all kinds of bacterial friendlies for my little guy, because, yes, I am THAT mom. 

I suppose this also outs me as the mom who's using ketchup to get her kid to eat whatever she wants.

Anyway. Next project: red wine vinegar. I just have to find myself a vinegar mother because I have plenty of red wine. Once my vinegar from Trader Joe's developed its own mother, but I didn't realize how precious it was at the time. Now you can find me at the West LA Trader Joe's holding up bottle after bottle of vinegar to the light to see if there are any wispy remains of yeasty bacterial life in any of them. 

For any of you germaphiles out there: could I use the mother in ACV for other vinegars? I should probably just find that out from Mr. Katz. Or Google it.

- 4 -
Brussel Sprouts


All day every day I just want to eat Brussel Sprouts. My favorite way to prepare them is to saute some butter with garlic and then add the halved sprouts face down and let them cook like that till they're done and their faces are all fried and crispy. My. I have to stop now.

- 5 -
 And finally: Salted Malt Shakes

Jacob has been making milkshakes recently with malted milk powder and salt, and they are absolutely divine. I highly recommend them to all of you who are not so interested in brussel sprouts and even less interested in lacto-fermented ketchup.

Happy Wednesday.

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