Inept Parenting: 2
Rainbow #1- Taken from Thatcher's Window
Another God-related one. While I’m on the subject.
So, I want my kids not to take for granted that we are very, very blessed. We have a decent house, and 2 cars, and 2 parents, and 1 parent has a job, and there is food and clothing and love and even treats! We are way luckier than a lot of people out there. But beyond that, I want them to appreciate beauty- beauty like the sunset, and a gathering storm, and a perfectly cool day- and to thank God for those blessings too.
It started last week, when I drove them to Ky for Nanny’s funeral, and on the way, after coming in and out of a series of summer storms, they spotted a rainbow. And then another. And then another. It was amazing, and I realized none but Thatcher had ever seen a rainbow in real life. James proposed that maybe God was sending us a sign….a sign that we would be safe through the storms. A sign that Nanny would be okay (I started to interject here, but he came up with another right away.) A sign that He loved us.
Rainbow #2
Caden began to vigorously thank God for the rainbows, and during the rest of the trip, he found both a crocodile and a tornado-shaped cloud formation to thank God for as well.
But yesterday, coming home from the Y in the afternoon, James saw a “shooting star”. It was not a shooting star, it was a jetstream, but Caden overpowered my observation with “Thank you God!” A few minutes later the sky started to darken quickly with thunderheads, except for a small patch of daylight to our right. A bit of sunshine still clung to the tip of one fluffy cumulus clump, and Caden exclaimed, “Look! I bet there’s GOLD behind there!” And he thanked God for this present too.
It’s cool to let all the fake ones slide, right? Because that’s what I do. I wouldn’t really know how to take all those presents away from him.
A Journey in Inept Parenting
There are so many times when the kids say or do something that I’m not equipped to handle correctly. I thought, since everyone knows I spend all my time writing the other blog right now, that this would be a fun and easy outlet for me. I’m getting tired of coming up with coupon scenarios.
Yesterday, as I plopped into my seat after running around the van buckling seatbelts and fending off slaps (from Addie, who did not want his seatbelt) Caden asked me,”Is Jesus in my juicebox?” I paused, keys en route to the ignition, to look at him.
“Why do you ask that? Umm, no, I don’t think Jesus is in your juicebox.”
James chimed in, “But, I told him Jesus is EVERYWHERE!”
“Well, yeah, I mean, God is everywhere…in our hearts….and He’s all around us….and- but he’s not in the juicebox.”
Was that wrong? I don’t even know. Maybe Jesus is in his juicebox.
I want to do this.
I will apologize for not posting eventually- but for now, straight to the point.
My last day in Lousiville, I picked Papaw up at his house and took him to breakfast. We had biscuits and gravy, and in the short time it took to excuse myself to the ladies room and return to our table, he had become confused and was standing up with his jacket on, searching the room with nervous eyes. I took him by the arm and led him outside to the minivan.
We made our hospital entrance with him in a wheelchair and me pushing it quickly through the corridors. Upon reaching Nanny’s floor, we passed the nurses station and rounded the corner of her hallway. It was there we came face to face with a momentarily bewildered Ruth-Ann. For just a second she stood stock still, her arm raised slightly and holding a cell phone, as if preparing to put it to her ear. And that was all the time it took, my friends. All the time Papaw needed to gather his wits, tilt his head quizzicaly, and demand:
“What are you? Posing for animal crackers?”
And out of all the shit that I won’t recall from this trip…. as I grow old and try to remember my grandparents and how they were- who they were- this is something I will remember forever. And I will laugh every time.
ice cream cake
Sigh.
This is embarassing.
Yesterday I tried – and failed – to make an ice cream cake for Thatcher’s 3rd grade teacher, Mr. Moss. It was edible, if you can classify tilting a plate to slide an ice-cream-cookie-butter-blob toward your face “edibling”. And maybe you shouldn’t. But because I like us both to learn from my mistakes, I am going to post this tutorial anyway.
Homemade Ice-Cream Cake
- First, you need all this stuff: butter/margarine, 2 packs of cookies/candy bars, frosting or cool whip, 2 gallons of ice cream*
As you can tell, I like to go with the cheapest ingredients available- generic all the way- because it really makes no difference in the outcome. I only used fancy ice cream here because it was fifty cents.
- Line your pan of choice with plastic wrap or tin foil. Leave enough on the sides to fold over the finished cake for freezer storage.
- Next, chop up the oreos (or in my case, Hydroxes) into coarse crumbs with a knife. You can’t do this in a ziploc bag with a rolling pin, like normal, because with the cream and all you’d just end up with a bag of chocolatey paste. I have done this.
- Now melt 3 TBSP butter in a bowl, pour all your cookie crumbs in, and stir. Once it’s mixed will, press the butter-crumb dough into the bottom of your pan evenly. It will look and feel gross, but never fear- when frozen, it will all be okay.
- Get your ice cream out and chop the whole box in half- then slice into 1″ pieces and lay over the cookie crust until completely covered. Smooth over the top with a spreader(I warmed mine in hot water first) and stick straight into the freezer.
- While that layer is hardening up again, chop up the other package of cookies- or use chopped candy bars this time. Pour the crumbs over the ice cream layer (sans butter this time!) and press gently until all is even.
- Repeat the ice-cream slicing and placing with the second box, spread smooth, and fold the plastic wrap up to cover everything. Place in the freezer for 4 hours or overnight.
This is where my story gets sad guys. Since Mr. Moss’ birthday party was at 2:00, and I didn’t start this project until 11:00, my ice cream cake had only an hour and a half to set up. Keeping this in mind, let’s continue.
- Pull your cake out of the freezer, fold back the plastic, and finish by spreading Cool Whip over the top and piping a decorative border around the edges. If you bought a can of frosting, thinking you could simply melt it a bit in the microwave and then pour it over the top of the cake, giving you a quick and easy smooth, frosted surface- then you were seriously mistaken and/or drunk. When you try to do this, you will find that the frosting freezes on contact with the ice cream and sits there in ugly, unspreadable puddle-globs. You might then choose to spread these frozen globs clumsily around and cover all in a blanket of sprinkles. This will have to do, you will tell yourself.
- Put the cake back in the freezer for another 15-30 minutes to set the icing. When you take it out again, you should be able to lift the cake carefully from the pan by pulling the plastic wrap up on both sides. Set on a platter so the yummy layers will be visible to all- enjoy!
If your cake did not freeze for many hours, you may decide to leave it in the pan for party time. You will plunk candles into the frosting-sprinkle soup forming atop your cake. You will light them and sing as fast as you can while eyeing the wax puddles sink into the topping. You will raise your knife to cut the first square, and it will plonk to the bottom of the pan the moment you press it to the ice cream. All the layers start to combine into a slimy, green pile which you plunk with a spoon onto each child’s plate. They like it anyway. Mr. Moss declines seconds.
*This is what you need to make enough for a 3rd-grade class, you can make a smaller one with about half.
still kick
While I was standing in line at Bi-Lo today with Thatcher and James, I told them that Yes. I would LOVE to play Monopoly with them tonight. And while usually I would be lying through my teeth, due to the difficulty of playing anything that involves pieces, paper money, a board, or a time commitment within Addie’s destructive grasp, the little boys are gone this week. And deep down I love Monopoly. And I am kind of awesome at it, in that I buy ever property I hit, including Matt’s favorites, while he grinds his teeth at me. And then he lands on all of them until he is broke. And broken. So fun!
Anyway, I told them that we could sit at the table and eat snacks while we play, but the boys wanted to play on the rug. I told them that me and dad are old people, and we old people don’t like to sit on rugs and bend over while we play Monopoly.
“You’re not old mom, cause you’re still kick and if you’re still kick then you’re not old.”
“Where’d you hear that?”
“Nowhere. But you’re still kick, and dad’s still kick, and grandma and grandpa are still kick, and mamaw and papaw are still kick and…..”
The rest of this is just white noise really.
JEALOUS????
This is what James made me for Mother’s Day this year. I think he was trying to tell me how I am puzzle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma…… of awesomeness. Maybe one day you too will have your likeness glorified in jigsaw form.
for the cripplingly thrifty
Okay, so in order to never foist my coupon hysteria upon my good friends again, I have started a coupon blog. Lindsay is helping me out by taking care of the Chattanooga side of free-ness, and I’m concentrating on Cleveland. We’ll be putting up free events and festivals, free food days at restaurants, good deals at the grocery, free things we found lying in the road, that one vending machine that gives you your money back plus your candy bar, neighbors that are cool with you stopping by at cookouts, and other things of this nature.
If you live around these parts, or are just curious, here’s the temporary site– although I one day hope to move to my own domain in case admen come a-calling. I have high hopes, what can I say.
mother’s day
I really love being a mom. I love it so much that I went and sabotaged my college career to get right on that. I know it might not always seem like I love it- in fact, I find that the hassles of motherhood are much closer to the tip of my tongue than the joys. The joys are there, I promise, but they just get buried in the muck of daily life and it takes something to unearth them. Something small. A moment. A word. A look.
Thatcher stood upright beside me in church as I knelt for a blessing last Sunday. His hand squeezed my shoulder and he tried to read my face as Fr. McGinnity raised his hands over us calling down grace. Father prayed for mothers who had lost children, and although my miscarriage years ago was not a traumatic one, he searched my eyes with his- to see, to understand. My Thatcher is a beautiful innocent boy. He is tender and loves me and makes Addie his morning juice and drags out the garbage cans and cries on my lap still after school. He has a temper that he unleashes on his brothers often, with a great slamming of doors and stomping up stairs and yelling out final dramatic declarations. But he is also an amazing comforter to them, if James or Caden has had his feelings hurt by someone or gotten into trouble of some sort, he will sit beside him rubbing his back and lean his head against him and speak soothing silliness. And if that doesn’t work, he will inevitably stand up and do a slapstick routine that will end in him falling to the floor and the afflicted person erupting in tearful giggles. He is amazing.
And often when I go to bed at night, I know that I have not loved him enough that day. That I have been too wrapped up in myself, or the business of the nighttime routine, or keeping myself from burning both the chicken nuggets and the rice-a-roni, to just listen with all my attention to a joke he made up. I said “mm-hm” instead of laughing.
He was my first born. I forget this sometimes, not the birth order, but our history together. How there for a while it was just us. How at 19 I would stand holding him in the doorway of our rundown apartment waiting for Matt to get home from his pizza delivery job. How when the familiar sound of the Volvo’s breaks turned out to be the TARC bus instead, we went back to the bedroom where I would cry us to sleep. How he and I would snuggle every morning while he nursed on the couch and watch Toy Story or A Bug’s Life, and eat graham crackers. How we took showers together because even if I put his baby swing in the bathroom he would wail unless he could see me. How on warm days I would sit on the back stoop and give him bubble baths in his tiny turtle pool, and he would smile the whole time, so happy he was to be naked outside. How we would take walks to the little grade school in St. Matthews to play on their swings- and how much he loved being pushed while I yelled “To infinity- and beyond!!!” How many nights I paced the kitchen floor singing “Amazing Grace” and holding him just so, until his eyes finally closed.
Things were eaiser in different ways, and harder in different ways than they are now. I forget too often how lucky I am to be a mother. I forget too often how much I love being the one these kids call “mom”. But it just takes something little to bring it back to me.
Not Thatcher- Caden, but another example of a little thing.
bionicle cake
This is not a triumph, let me start by saying that. This is merely an option to consider if you should one day find yourself in need of any- oh any!- idea as to how to make a Bionicle cake for your son’s (or daughter’s!) birthday.
My James, on the brink of turning 7, was all but certain that he wanted a skateboard-ramp birthday cake. I was intrigued, but undaunted, at the prospect of building a halfpipe out of cake pieces, icing them over, adding some railing details, and inserting a couple Tech Decks for effect. I had it pretty much planned out, when he changed his mind and decided instead on a Bionicle cake. In case you do not happen to be surrounded by little boys, or spend much time watching kid commercials, this is a Bionicle:
It’s a Lego toy that comes in a hundred pieces in it’s own pod, and you assemble the pieces into some sort of alien robotic action figure. They look pretty cool, until someone decides to launch their Bionicle across the room for an aerial attack, at which point 15 pieces fall off and 2 of those get lost forever. I’m not a big fan of these toys, because at the end of the day I am the only one who can locate the missing components, a trick I have learned by treading on said shrapnel in bare feet on an hourly basis.
So, with a feeling of dread, I began searching the internet for Bionicle cakes. They were mostly store-bought sheet cakes with edible images of Bionicles plastered or airbrushed across them. A few homemade sheet cakes with Bionicles posed on top. One or two professional attempts to carve a Bionicle mask out of cake and form fondant features atop it. The plain cake with Bionicles posed on top seemed the most make-doable, so I asked James what it should look like and he gave me some vague pointers:
- There should be Bionicles in battle.
- There should be tall pointy things around them, like in a cave. Stalagmites? I ask. Yes, yes, stalagmites.
- The ground should be red.
I looked around for my rectangle pan, and realized that it was in the fridge full of leftover enchiladas. Forget washing that, I decided to make 2 round cakes, one for each Bionicle to stand on. After racking my brain to think of a candy or cookie that could resemble stalagmites around the scene, I opted for a cardboard backdrop instead. Once I’d cut and colored all the tall pointy things to look ominous, and added a center obelisk like the one from the Bionicle City, I taped them around a cardboard base. After arranging the two round cakes in the center, I started mixing up some red icing. No matter how much red food coloring I added, however, the icing refused to be anything but pink. I added other colors to brown it up, but the closest I came was vomity pink. Pulling a can of chocolate frosting from the pantry, I mixed it in until I achieved a sort of brick red hue and called it close enough. I iced the cakes with a crumb coat- just enough icing to seal in all the crumbs and cover the dents. Then I melted the rest in the microwave for 30 seconds or so and poured it in globs over the circles. Having achieved a semi-lava-ish look, I mounted his Bionicles upon them and voila, the finished product:
Although this was obviously not an amazing “cake”, but more a pathetic cake aided heavily by props, it was enough to garner surprise and awe from James, and the requisite “Awesome!” that is the real goal of every little boy’s mother.
The Art of Making Do 