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.