Sometimes I feel like I make up for being the most irresponsible creature in the world, by adding “foolish” and “silly” to the mix for balance.    Somehow, out of eight great-granddaughters, I’m the lucky one who ended up inheriting my Great Grandma’s wedding china.     As thrilled and fortunate as I feel about that, I often wish it had gone to someone else.   In fact, up until a few days ago I didn’t even think it existed anymore, thats how badly my possession of it has gone.   The precious stuff made it safely to Ohio after we got married, but it was the hasty retreat back to California six months later that was its demise.    I don’t know if I didn’t pack it well enough, or I just don’t know the proper way to pack China.   Whatever the case,  somewhere in Arizona we went over a speed bump so fast the trailer got air, and the box of china went up and down where it landed with a mighty crash.   Such was the state of my heartbreak, I couldn’t even look at the poor box of broken heirlooms for weeks.  Entire generations worth of memories and heritage gone in a single misplaced mishap caused by poorly painted pavement.    
How my Grandmie could go 80 years without breaking anything but one teacup, when her hapless great grandaughter couldn’t make it 6 months without destroying the entire set is beyond me.  Obviously.    One day I finally nudged the box with my toe and heard the depressing sound of tinkling broken glass and decided I just wasn’t ready to open the box.   As long as it was closed I could pretend that it was still whole.  
I managed that kind of denial for almost six years, until this weekend I was cleaning out the garage and finally worked up the courage to open the box.    I tearfully picked broken glass out of the newspaper only to discover, piece by piece that all my china was actually…completely unscathed.   Someone, (presumably myself) had set a pottery barn drinking glass in the top of the box and it was the guilty culprit making all the broken glass sound effects.   Everything else was in tip top shape.    I couldn’t believe it.  All that guilt for nothing, and all those years I had a full set of china and didn’t use it. 

Bah!

Thats a lesson for me. 

Ohio was…fantastic.    This born and bred Cali girl loves her sunshine and beaches, but our rainy season was disappointingly un-wet this year and my bones were begging for some luscious greenery and summer rainstorms.
I got both.    At one point Gab and I were picking blueberries in the rain, next to a picturesque pond in the rain, complete with grazing horses and wooded backdrop in the rain.   Did I mention it was raining?!?  It was perfect. 

In Ohio they also leave abandoned machinery lying around.

In somewhat editorial news, Charlie’s birthday party was a roaring success (at least in my mind, and I hope in everyone elses).   Up until the last second I was biting nails over the yellow jackets.   As per Sharon’s suggestion of mint, I took it the obsessive compulsive extra mile and washed all the table linens and napkins in mint essential oil.   I stuffed bunches of spearmint into vases, floated mint in bowls, sprinkled mint around the perimeter of the party and kept spray bottles with mint water handy.    I felt like we were warding off vampires….or maybe bogeys since we did sort of have a magical theme going on (theoretically). 

 I should apologize for these photos’, but really, I did the best I could under the circumstances.
Here we go.

My lovely unironed table cloths and the aforementioned mint in vase.

Liz made pie and lemon cupcakes.  I bought mismatching dessert plates.

We also bought mismatching cups…noticing a theme?

Maeken, our pet dragon also made his appearance.
 

We ended up serving coconut chicken curry, jasmine rice, vietnamese noodle salad, spinach salad with strawberries, melon salad, and sparkling lemonade with mint.  

Everyone seemed to enjoy it.

Especially Charlie.

We strung fairy lights.

And sang happy birthday to Charlie.
 

He put on a good performance with the cupcake. 

So good in fact, he had cream cheese frosting in his ears, up his nose, and down his diaper, so into the kitchen sink for a bath he went.

Then he opened presents.  He’s behind all that tissue paper somewhere.

Tired Liz and Ez take a break with Heather.  Party all done.

There are apparently very good reasons that Thanksgiving and all its trimmings are reserved for a blustery month like November, because it’s far too hot in July to roast a turkey.
    Last year we sequestered an extra turkey in the deep recesses of the freezer to be enjoyed at a later date… like when turkey and stuffing regained its pedestal of yumminess after we got thoroughly sick of it during the holiday season.    Well now it’s July and I needed more room in the freezer so out it came.   Someone gave us a meat smoker, so what could be better than a summer version of the old classic?  Smoked turkey, crockpot mashed potatoes, grilled green beans, stovetop stuffing, and strawberry shortcake with vanilla icecream for dessert.  

All I can say is “ha”….HA!   After numerous attempts at trying to clean all the black widows out of the meat smoker, attemtping to assemble all the pieces, and searching for the owners manual online (all with Jamie and Charlie “helping”), I discovered by trial and error that using charcoal is a disastrous affair.   Defintiely flirting with the dark side.   Anyone who can successfully cook with charcoal has my deepest respect.  The smoker was a serious no-go.  Perhaps if I’d had more time I could have eventually figured it out (like maybe in ten years or so), but for now it ruefully remains a connundrum to me, so the ill fated turkey got slapped in the oven with no bag, no baster, and no meat thermometer .  My kitchen is obviously sadly lacking when it comes to cooking meat… I don’t have a meat carving knife either (resulting in a woefully undercooked bird that later had to be microwaved to death…poor bird).  Oh and in case anyone is wondering, you cannot cook mashed potatoes in the crockpot.  Sure you can heat already cooked mashed potatoes, but you can’t start from scratch.   Or maybe I did something wrong, but whatever the case my poor potatoes turned not pink, not brown but gray.   And they tasted awful.   So I had to re-do the potatoes and do them the traditional way (I’m sad to confess that’s 20 lbs of potatoes total). 

So in the end the kitchen ended up hotter than the inside of the oven itself and we ate outside in an attempt to salvage a pleasant evening out of the debacle, only to be chased back inside by swarms and swarms of bees who came to flirt and make food.  

All this of course as a way of celebrating Jim and Charlie’s birthday with my parents.   Happy early Birthday guys.

PS.
Does anyone know how to keep bees away?  I have an outdoor party for Charlie tomorrow and I am at my wits end about the bees. 

I forgot to add… Charlie took his first steps on Sunday.  Two steps to be exact, and towards a perfect stranger to boot.  Sheesh.

The brownies have been at it again.  One of them put a pot of blue dye under our kitchen fairy door (which is really just a small window we like to hop in and out of and use as a quicker means to the backyard)  Liz hopped through it last night and ended up dyeing herself blue, very Big Fat Liar style.   We have the footprints across the back patio, and she’s still sporting a blue foot.  More than just the household fairies were laughing about that one,  I guess they don’t like it when we use their entrance. 
 
 Normally our house is chock full of both monsters and fairies all living happily together under one roof.   But lately there’s been some sort of insurrection from the monsters, and Jamie went from being their number one groupie, to being utterly terrified of them.   He normally says a cheery goodnight to the monsters in his closet, before he goes to bed, and Monsters Inc is one of his favorite movies, and then one day his cute little brain discovered it was great fun to pretend to be scared of them, and it all went downhill from there.  I came inside at sundown the other day to find every.single.light. in the house turned on including closet lights and lamps.  Jamie was hiding under the table where he valiantly explained to me that Monsters are scared of lights.  mkay. 

But now he has a vanquisher.  We’ve discovered the joys of making and baking polymer clay, and so we’ve been crafting frogs, and owls..and dragons.  More specifically a dragon named Maeken (as in “I’m ‘makin’ a dragon mom”  what can I say, he’s a rather literal person).  We were playing with the clay and talking about monsters, we talked about God and angels…good guys and bad guys, and somewhere in there Jamie knighted his clay dragon as God’s defender against monsters.  Ahem.  So maybe we’re still working on the finer points of theology. 

I keep meaning to take a picture of our clay pet dragon, but until then, here are some pictures from swimming the other day.  

It was Charlie’s turn to give mom a heart attack today.   We were keeping shop at Fotizmos (a shop our church started featuring local artists, books and whatnot), and Charlie while crawling so fast his legs turned into blurry, churning gyroscopes, managed to somehow hook his leg in his too-big romper which sent him flying head first off the pathway and into a cactus.  A very angry and pissed off cactus.   He hit it so hard he broke a chunk off and it imbeded itself so far into his forhead it was stuck there… like a malformed tumor with spikes growing out of his head.     He cried, Jamie shrieked, and I yelped as I tried to perform cacti-removing surgery on a wriggling, thrashing one year old.    I couldn’t get a good enough grip on it (despite Jamie’s very detailed instructions and opinions), and it took multiple tries and several cactus related injuries to my hands before I managed to tear it off him…and which time I promptly dropped it on his leg where it stuck again.   It was the kind of cactus with those nasty little barbs that go in, but won’t come out.  Like a fishhook.   When  I finally got the ill-fated thing off both of us, we were so covered in little spikes that two hours later I was still finding random ones on both his feet and head.    I think we narrowly avoided the ER on that one, a touch more velocity and he’d have landed eyeball first into the thing. 

Charlie is much more accident prone than Jamie is or ever was.   Despte Jamie’s propensity for mischief, he has a great sense of balance and an even greater time, space, height awareness.  As a baby you could put him on the bed and he would crawl to the edge and peer over it suspiciously before backing away from it slowly and then demanding someone put him on the floor.   Charlie just happily zooms right off the edge without a moments thought and then looks up after landing face first on the floor as if he’s just so offended. 

Speaking of Charlie… he turns one in two weeks.   I’m quite happily in denial though.  Like hs brother and parents before him, he’s a rather petite little sprite baby, and nobody thinks he’s older than 6-7 months.    He has no hair either (cept a little golden fluff around his pointy elf ears) which makes it so much easier for me to soak in the baby goodness just a few months longer. 

We’re having a (very) small fairy birthday dinner for him.   I figure this may be my only chance to have a fairy themed party as I’m not sure either of my kids would willingly subject themselves to one, but since Charlie is still too young to care, what better way to celebrate than with the birthday of my very pixie like baby.

After all the mishaps with paper making the other day, we did finally succeed in making some suitable, hand painted invitations.  Completely pointless of course, but it was a good, fun project, I’m just sorry my kids don’t have my own truly gifted mother as their art teacher.   I’m sadly lacking,  I can’t figure out how to load a paint brush correctly to save myself and thats why this picture is taken from a distance.