I Heart Halloween

You put on a costume, knock on your neighbors’ doors and they give you candy?  Superb holiday. 

Really:  superb.

To Infinity and Beyond

Buzz Lightyear is crying in all our pre-Halloween party pictures, either because he recently found out that he’s a toy or because he wanted to be the one to take the pictures.  I’m pretty sure it was the second reason. 

All was fine once we actually arrived at Rush’s school.

I’m not sure how long the kids lasted in their costumes, but by the time Tate and I arrived for the party at lunch, most of them were back to regular clothes. 

Tate loved being at the party. 

Comparing last year’s party to this year really emphasized how much Rush has grown over the past year.  At last year’s party most of the kids were so confused by their parents showing up that they cried the whole time; this year everyone was excited.  Last year Rush wandered around aimlessly when the teachers pulled out the rope to hold to walk back to their classroom; this year as soon as the rope came out Rush ran over and grabbed it.

We’re gearing up for trick-or-treating and Rush has been practicing saying “trick-or-treat.”  He definitely understands the candy part.  Tate may be too little for candy, but I can’t wait to see him in his costume…

Smokin’ Hot

For someone who loves to cook, Trent doesn’t do very much cooking.  He likes to watch America’s Test Kitchen on PBS and talk about how to make the most complicated chicken pot pie ever without actually producing a pot pie.  A generous estimate is that he cooks something once a month.  And based on my memory, he skipped both August and September.

I say this not to make him feel bad, but to encourage him to get in the kitchen and cook more often.  Do it!  We all win!  When he steps into the kitchen, he typically produces something precise and delicious: a layered cheesecake, a perfect Tex-Joy cheese omelet, a heaping mountain of pulled pork.

He recently spent a Saturday smoking a pork shoulder.  This is a man who recently said would probably never get into smoking because he has no desire to spend all day tending a fire.  I think it was a classic case of saying you will never do something only to find yourself doing it by the end of the week.  As soon as he decided to do it, it was an all consuming period of soaking woodchips and devising the perfect spice blends.

I think he’s found his new calling.  I envision the fall of 2012 spent in the backyard with the soothing smells of smoking meat wafting through our neighborhood, the boys playing and Trent tending the flames to the sounds of college football.  And I’ll be enjoying my free time, doing whatever I want and taking a break from constantly figuring out what everyone is going to eat.

That spidery hand is mine, caught in the act.  While we ate a large portion standing over the stove while we thought about putting it into the fridge, perhaps the finest moment was eating it on fresh tortillas with guacamole, pico de gallo and freshly squeezed limes.  We thought we would have a freezer filled with pulled pork, but we finished all of it by Wednesday. 

My public message to my husband:  PLEASE KEEP COOKING.

Ooh, la mer

October through January is the best kept Crystal Beach secret.  The beach itself is free from cars and seaweed and has a wonderful, otherworldly peaceful feeling.  You can stand and look into the water and not see any other people; it’s just you and creation.  Of course, people are creation too, but it’s a different spiritual moment with just you, God, and the waves.

At the end of the trip, a long stretch at the beach feels just like a weekend at the beach because every day is basically the same.  Spend time on the beach, cram in board games during naptime and after bedtime, hang out on the deck.  Repeat.

I ambitiously brought three books with me, which was never going to happen, but I did -by a carefully calculated turn of events that included staying with Tate during his morning nap while everyone else went to the beach or fishing and spending the entire time in the bathtub with my book- finish one.  Plus I was able to squeeze in a paragraph or two with the perfect trifecta:  book, beer, cheese and crackers. 

(A quick nerdy tangent…the book I read was about the making of the Oxford English Dictionary, five stars, loved it.  I now (vaguely) want a copy of the OED and it appears that a full set is approximately $1000.  In real life, my Merriam-Webster’s has always worked well for me and I can barely get through an OED definition with all its word origins, so I’m not adding that to my Christmas list this year.)

Do you think Tate’s still teething?

Shells must have a much richer flavor than steamed veggies.

My mom is the master of finding sharks’ teeth.  My mom and dad have a little jar on the kitchen windowsill full of sharks’ teeth that they found on the beach.  It involves a lot of looking for “that certain glint” in a stretch of broken shells like this:

My mom claims that once you get the hang of it you can just tell the difference between a shark’s tooth and a broken shell.  As for me, I picked up about four hundred broken black shells before finally finding my first shark’s tooth ever! 

I started my own sharks’ teeth jar, currently holding two teeth.

Please take a moment to ponder how quickly day breaks, illustrated by Rush watching my dad and Trent get the boat ready to go fishing.

And five hours later, here he is checking out the fish.

A test of my patience as a mother arrives when I start building a sandcastle with Rush, only to have to hold back from yelling “STOP KNOCKING OVER MY SANDCASTLE.”  I mean, he does have to learn to stop knocking over people’s sandcastles and we’re working on that.  But I have to remind myself that just like I’m having fun digging the moat, he’s having fun filling it back in behind me.  Grr.  We’re both growing.  Without Rush’s influence I never would have thought to jump all over the castle and destroy before leaving the beach, but that’s what we did.  It was, in fact, satisfying.  Dust to dust.

Any moment spent on the beach with Rush and Tate is among the best moments of my life, every time. 

And one more notable moment in our world:  Rush has graduated out of the pack and play.  He kind of moved into a bunk bed, kind of not. 

We’re all home, happy, semi-unpacked, reacquainting ourselves with real life responsibilities.  To quote the boys’ favorite beach book, Goodnight Beach: 

Shine bright all night lighthouse.  Goodnight beach.  Thank you for sharing a wonderful day.

Getting Pumpky at the Patch

Happy accident this morning:

Trent whipped up a batch of batter for pumpkin pancakes and I ended up at the griddle flipping them.  They batter was dense, which I remembered from last year, but as the outside cooked the inside stayed pretty soft.  While I was waiting for the insides to finish cooking, I tried to find the rest of the pumpkin to put into the fridge.  When I found an empty can I realized that Trent put in the entire 15 oz. can of pumpkin instead of the 6 tablespoons called for in the recipe.  An error like that is completely out of character for Trent, but it was totally in our favor.  Breakfast was basically pumpkin pie sans crust, smothered in Mrs. Butterworth. 

Breakfast set the tone for the day.

We ended up skipping actually picking out and purchasing pumpkins in favor of going to eat Mexican food.  It was really too hot to wait in the Saturday line to check out.  The pumpkin patch plus the tractor plus the playground plus a cupcake from the bake sale overshadowed bringing home a pumpkin anyway and we all left happy.  We’ll go back for pumpkins soon.

And fun fact:  I was looking up the word pumpky to make sure it wasn’t something filthy and it turns out that in Czech, pumpky means knickerbockers.  If you haven’t learned your something new for today yet, there you go.

Favs for Today

Today was just a great day.  After extensive research, I’ve found that on any regular day the determining factor between a good day and a hard day has nothing to do with tantrums –it took us close to 30 minutes to walk home from the cul-de-sac today and it’s a fairly short street- and everything to do with how my hair is behaving.  I’m not saying my hair looked good today, because it did get mashed blueberries and pears stuck in it around 7:45 this morning and that fruit’s still in there, but it felt good.  I mean, the blueberries/pears didn’t feel good, the hair sitting on my head felt good.  Who else knows that good hair day feeling?  Amen sister?

And the weather helped, oh the weather.  I understand that the weather is a blanket good and one person can’t earn points to change it for her benefit.  But as I enjoy the beautiful October weather after being outside every single day this summer, I can’t help but think I earned this.  I know I didn't; that doesn’t even make sense.  But really, after being at the park and in the backyard on those 110 degree days, I am really appreciating low 80’s.  Thank you God for the relief.

Not just a favorite for today but a favorite for every day- I will never get tired of seeing a baby covered in spaghetti.  It’s cute and hilarious every time.  Actually though, let me clarify:  a baby in the kitchen, not a spaghetti covered baby in my car.

Remember this kid?  Rush circa 2010

Another thing I am really loving right now is the bible study I’m doing at the Episcopal church where Rush goes to school, A Woman’s Heart, God’s Dwelling Place by Beth Moore.  Sounds sweet, like reading some psalms and talking about how it makes us feel.  But really it’s about the Tabernacle, Israelites in the wilderness building a place for God to dwell with them.  Want to talk about the lampstand in the Tabernacle?  Because we’ve researched it in Genesis, Exodus, prophets, gospels, and Revelation, looked at the Hebrew and –ask Trent- I want to talk all about it.  Get me started on any of this stuff.  Anyone who has been around me for more than 5 minutes lately has heard my spiel on manna. 

I’m proud to be doing this at an Episcopal church because sadly I’ve never experienced this kind of bible study before and I’ve been an Episcopalian forever.  Episcopalians are an intellectual bunch, so why are we missing out on this research?  Let’s get with it Anglicans.  Why are we the ones sitting around just talking about how a specific verse makes us feel?  Let’s not be too proud to learn something from the Baptists about studying the Bible.

And more favorites for October 2011?  Eating nachos with the fam tonight and watching Up (tear jerker every time), one wonderful child who is giving kisses and stringing more and more sentences together, one wonderful child who is taking a few steps behind a walking toy, a husband who actually stayed up past 11 PM to hang out with me tonight, getting to wear my black zip-up hoodie (it has no hood), plans for a craft fair and pumpkin patch and snow cones tomorrow.  Thank you Texas, your summers may be sweltering, but at least it’s always snow cone season. 

Girlie

My niece just took her longest road trip to date, to our house.

We had a sip-and-see at our house on Saturday morning for Casey’s Houston area friends to come meet her baby.  There was plenty of ooh-ing and ahh-ing over the little Carolena. 

We embraced her girlie-ness and made a “sugar and spice and everything nice” centerpiece.  It was a little disconcerting to walk around my house to look for “everything nice” and not come up with anything.  I considered a purple dinosaur for awhile, then contemplated just tossing a jumble of bras on the table.   Besides some birds I put out around Easter, we’re lacking on feminine knick-knacks.  It’s apparently time for me to re-embrace my femininity.  I live most of my life in the bottom half of the following picture:

Here’s my love letter to Carolena:  sifting three cups of powdered sugar with a broken sifter to make sugar cookies with her initials.  I always forget how tedious sifting is until I have to do it.  And actually Carolena, I think my mom finally took over and finished the sifting for me.  That’s just more love poured into those cookies for you.

Magazines make it look so easy, constantly peddling their royal icing holiday sugar cookie recipes.  Real life involved sweating and yelling and enlisting every available adult to help with the cookies before the frosting hardened.

And I want to know if at some point a professional baker stops ending every batch of frosted cookies like this:

Hopefully not.  I want to imagine bakeries with glass cases full of perfect cookies and bakers standing in the back shoving the leftover icing cookies into their mouths.

Well, that’s as far as I’m going to get summing up the weekend, other than to squeeze in the fact that my mom, for the first time, had all three of her grandchildren together.  But that’s it.  I’m out.  I have two boys waking up way to early from their naps, both crying.  Duty calls.

Painter’s Tape + Matchbox cars =

Fantastic road!

I can’t take credit for the idea; I saw it somewhere on the internet.  I’m glad to have a new rainy day (assuming that –please God- it rains soon) activity.

Putting the East in East Texas

We just returned home from a visit to East Texas to see my brother.  My dad was also visiting, so add in my brother’s housemate and we had a-

guy’s weekend!  Oh, and I was there too.

I love going to Tyler.  Not only do I get to spend time with my little bro, but the Mexican food restaurants all have free soft serve ice cream, the hamburger restaurants all serve all-you-can-eat beans while you wait for your order, and the Caldwell Zoo is a very, very awesome zoo.

The wild bird encounter remains one of the best zoo exhibits ever. 

There are some benefits to being a part of a guy’s weekend.  In between a morning spent at the zoo and a night at the East Texas State Fair we went back to Hunter’s house for naptime.  Everyone napped to the calming (?) sounds of a football game on tv and I got to lay on the couch and drink a Miller Light and read Men’s Health.  All in all, not a bad afternoon.

The boys had their first fair experience:  the bright lights of the midway, funnel cake, lemonade, pig races, rides, and very friendly firefighters.

Rush had his first ride experience (not counting most of Disney World in utero.)  He loved it, more more more.  My dad was really helpful with both boys all weekend and totally took care of Rush during his racecar experience.

It was an action packed weekend and both boys were, at times, beyond exhausted.  It warmed my heart on Friday night when I heard them laughing and laughing from their pack and plays when they were supposed to be going to sleep.  Brothers, as they should be, goofing off at bedtime, the sweetest sounds of laughter.  I went to peek in the room and saw that Rush had in fact climbed into Tate’s pack and play.

It all seemed a little less sweet when Rush woke up in the middle of the night and yelled “It’s really dark, Tate!” and then Tate woke up and they both started crying and never went back to sleep.

They’ll catch up on their sleep this week, maybe with long naps tomorrow…