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. 

If you haven’t read the Prydain series by Loyd Alexander, get thee to a library and check them out.     They are among the grandparents of modern children’s fantasy.   If you like Harry Potter, then they are at least worth a second look.  If you don’t like Harry Potter, but you do like the Chronicles of Narnia…then again, check these out.   If you think all of the above are evil and/or boring (including but not limited to Lord of the Rings), then run far far away because you won’t like these books.
   Although, wasted advice as I’m pretty sure I’m the last person on the human trod world to read the Prydain Chronicles, everyone else I’ve talked to was required to read them in school.  A very dastardly offense because it seems required books instantly accomplish the very opposite.  Don’t believe them!  It’s all a lie. 

I tried my hand at paper making.  In a very annoyingly Martha Stewart sort of way, I thought it would be a cool idea to make Charlie’s birthday party invitations from recycled paper.  What better way to use trash around the house?   Six hours of failed attempts later, a kitchen covered in paper sloop, and two kids who had eaten their way through the better part of a bag of raw potatoes, I heard Jim pull in the driveway and I gave up in defeat.  It was 7pm when Jim came in and surveyed the wreckage (and I do mean wreckage).   We ate noodles and soy sauce for dinner. 

Normally I would be a wailing, discouraged mess, but instead I’m encouraged.  The day wasn’t a complete failure, I learned lots of things, like you really do need the top to the blender…a plate wont work.   And wind and papermaking do not mix.     Really, I made a lot of progress if you think about it.

And that ^ is what I learned from the Assistant Pig-Keeper. 

Sometimes I feel like I spend all of my time thinking up ways to eat more food, better food…and sometimes healthier food.    Italian food is one of those deceptive things.  What could be easier than pasta and tomato sauce? But no, while both are good (because truly… who can resist noodly goodness in any form?), one is like me on a night I try to dress up.  Only satisfied as long as I’m looking in your own mirror, but the moment I stand next to a truly beautiful girl in a truly stunning ensemble, the realization of awkwardness and wrongness is oh so painfully obvious.   
Jim and I went on a date tonight to this little Italian wine and coffee bar where all the locals go to swing dance and learn the lindy hop.  It’s been on our list for awhile, but we only finally got a chance to go tonight.  So amazing.  I prefer to support local venues and this one has the added attraction of having truly scrumptious food that would make Olive Garden blush so hard it would disappear in a cloud of embarassed smoke.   Seriously.

I was drooling looking through the lastest Anthroprologie catalog when I was reminded of a Friends episode where Rachel tricks Phoebe into thinking the stuff she bought from pottery barn was original one of a kind pieces.   Phoebe is apalled when she finds out her authentic apocathary table is just your standard, factory made table, mass produced by starving children in China.  And yeah, I guess I kinda had the same wonderings.  As much as I love the gorgeous eye candy at anthro, I thought I’d try my hand at making some truly original, one of a kind stuff (in my own sweatshop filled with very authentic crying babies). 

In other news:   Jamie is on a hunger strike. 

There are gross things, there are really gross things, and there are things that shouldn’t even be talked about they hit such an epic level of nastiness.  You have been warned. 

I had been lulled into a false sense of security.  After hours and weeks of backbreaking labor, the back yard was finally beginning to resemble a place you’d want to relax in instead of the inner-city junk yard meets tumbleweed manor it had become.  We got the jacuzzi up and running (although we need to fix some of the paneling we broke), the pool was up, filled and lustrously refreshing.  The garden weeded, tilled and planted.  The lawn green and revived.   I came home from work today, and stood in my perfect backyard, breathing perfect air, with perfect weather, and thanking God for my life.   The kids were swimming in the pool and jacuzzi, and Charlie was babbling and blowing bubbles in the water like the little sprite baby he is.   Jamie was showing off his swimming skills and Julia was splashing more water out of the jacuzzi than there was in the jacuzzi.   All was well until I heard the four words that changed my afternoon.  “…poop in the pool!”  and that wasn’t even the tip of the iceburg.   In retrospect I should have got down on my knees this morning and prayed for floaters in the pool, but no, the jacuzzi had turned into full on diahhrea soup.   My life seems to be filled with moments where I don’t think it is humanly possible to press on as mother of my children.   I mean who crowned me as the adult in this situation?  I had absolutely no desire nor know how to pick out poop soaked children to clean them, disinfect them and then somehow do the same to the hot tub.  Seriously.     No amount of gagging and retching on my part was making it go away either.   Sadly.

 I got the kids cleaned up, put Jamie on his bed (he was the culprit) changed into old clothes and “we” (because I envoked my rights as eldest and made my siblings help me) emptied the hot tub bucketful by bucketful in the nastiest assembly line I ever have and ever hope to partake in.  Scrubbed the hot tub down, disinfected it, filled it, emptied it again, scrubbed it again, and refilled it.   There has never been a more clean and germ free hot tub in the history of mankind.   Really.

“I want to be pop-a-u-laaar.” 

Wicked is now on my list of must have Broadway soundtracks thanks to Kevin and Bethany.   I’d like to say I’m um…too popular  mainstream… to listen to broadway music, but truth is I’m addicted.   I’m sure any true Broadway fan would be snootily offended if they knew it is the music I clean house to.
Techno is for working out, heavy metal for driving, ccm for cooking and hanging out, pop for grocery shopping and broadway for getting the house cleaned and scrubbed top to bottom in less time than it takes Mary Poppins to snap her fingers.  Actually it’s kinda rather Disney princess of me.

We roadtripped this weekend up our intolerably long state to visit Kevin &  Bethany, stopping in LA along the way for coffee at Lauryls where I got to meet Bekah in real life after picturing her as a very pretty cyborg for the last 4 years I’ve known her online.  

After that it was straight shot to San Jose where we pulled up to a very pink house and I found myself face to face with a license plate that read “Lst Ryts”, hanging off a very old and very burtonesque hearse.  I’m pretty sure it has multiple purposes, and someone, somewhere doesn’t know that muggles find it rather disconcerting.   Bethany says you can actually see it on the street view of google maps.   

We pretty much spent the whole weekend relaxing, hanging out and watching movies. There were a few picnics in the rose garden thrown in for good measure, and a playground made entirely out of climbing ropes.  It. was. bliss.   After weeks of pure insanity it was exactly what we needed.   Bethany is an amazing cook, especially for someone doesn’t brag about it much.

The hardest part was saying goodbye to baby Jack this morning; knowing he’ll be so much bigger the next time I see him, and he wont have a clue who I am.  Alas.

We stopped at Joel and Veronicas on the way home.  Jamie and Benjamen share the illustrious heritage of having had the same due date, and although Jamie was born prematurely, they still act like long lost twins.   Before Jamie was even out of the car, Bejamen came tearing out of the house, and down the pathway where they met in the middle with arms outstretched for a bear hug like long lost friends.    The only thing that can match Jamie’s three year old, dramatized emotionalism is a fellow dramatic three year old.   Seriously, I repeat, the terrible two’s are nothing to compared to the daunting emotional verbosity of the three’s.

It took us forever to get home, mostly thanks for Jim stopping at every walmart along the way in search of ammunition.  I honestly have no idea what for.    It’s good to be home, but we miss baby Jack already…and yeah, I guess we miss Kevin and Bethany a little bit too.

Jamie is home from the mountains, as crazy as he is, or because he’s as crazy as he is I missed him, the house seemed ultra quiet without him.   Ultra quiet was needed on this occasion, because the plague descended on our house last week.  Charlie and Jim were sick first, then Jamie, then me.   Nine days of pure hell and my lungs are still hacking and my ears are still ringing.    Somewhere in the middle of it, Jamie got bored of watching tv while his mommy fevered away on the couch, so he begged his Grandpa (who is incidentally living with us mon-fri) to take him up to their house for the weekend.   Permission was asked and granted, but it resulted in a little incident where Jamie ran away from home.   Thinking my dad had forgetten him, he frantically packed his backpack with his toothbrush and enough pants to outfit a milipede and he took off for the mountains on foot   Luckily I soon wondered why the house was so quiet, and went searching for him.  My heart started beating a little faster when I couldn’t find him anywhere inside, nor outside.   I tried shouting his name but I had no voice, just a raspy, congested, frantic whisper.   I had no car, Jim took it to get an oil change, so I took off on foot with Charlie tucked under an arm.    I finally found Jamie a 1/8th of a mile or so down the road, just past the main house.  He was barefoot and pantsless, bound and determined to walk the 230 miles to Lake Arrowhead.   When he saw me he ran up screaming bloody murder because although snakes are not terrifying, ants are…at least the kind that chase you (so says Jamie).   I was so relieved to find him, that I forgave him for making me run my aching, shivering bones up the road. 

This was the worst of it I think, imortalized in picture form for posterity.   It’s times like this I really want my mom, I don’t want to instead be a mom.   Instead of laying on cool sheets, sipping gatorade and watching Little House On The Prairie reruns,  I’m stuck with two sick, cranky, crying  kids.   Fun times.

Nine days later however, I finally turned the corner.   And in celebration I actually cooked… pear moos.
Thats right….some sort of mennonite fruit soup, recipe compliments of a friend in Minnesota.  It was yummy.  Charlie was not a very happy camper.