My Kid's Baking Class, or, a Growth Mindset isn't for the Weak

fresh homemade croissant filled with prosciutto and cheese

Want to know yet another of my fun neuroses?

I don't like to see people praised for qualities like talent, intelligence, or beauty. Like, I'm not a psychopath--I tell my children and my husband that they're talented at whatever and they're smart and they're attractive, etc., but those are meant to be just, you know, the kind of compliments that make sure people know they're loved and awesome and appreciated.

But it's not, like, good or bad to be those things. People are also born the way that they're born, and they can't help how they're born. In my mind, if someone shows you, say, a test that they earned a good grade on and you say something like, "Oh, you're so smart!", you're really just pointing out that they didn't work hard for that grade because all they have is a natural knack for the material. 

This is 100% related to my childhood fucked-upness because hey, guess who got praised all the time for being smart and then about lost her damn mind when shit got difficult in college? I'll give you a hint: it's the same person who also got told all the time that she was fat and was not pretty, so I have first-hand knowledge that being called out on stuff you can't help is not the road to excellent mental health.

So for my kids' whole lives, whenever I've seen a knack emerge or a talent unfold, it's really important to me that when I encourage them, I'm encouraging them for what they've done to improve, not the simple fact of a condition they were born with. And whenever someone praises them for being smart or a good artist or looking pretty or whatever, I am 100% that nag who reminds them that it's what they do with their DNA-given amenities that's important. I have literally looked my children in the eyes and told them, straight-faced and unironically, "With great power comes great responsibility. You must use your powers for good." THAT'S how bad it is around here. 

I was kind of relieved, honestly, the other day when I started to say something about a recent compliment and my kid interrupted me to irritatedly note that, "Yes, Mom, I know it's nothing to my credit and the important thing is how hard I've worked to achieve this result! UGH!" She wouldn't be quoting me with such annoyance if she hadn't internalized the message, right?

I mean... right? Ahem.

ANYWAY, all this to say that my kid has been using her powers for SO MUCH PERSONAL GOOD lately! The kid has always had a knack for cooking, particularly baking. She likes the precision required to achieve perfect results, and she likes the artistry also required. Just between us, I also think it lends itself well to her own personal brand of pickiness, in which she wants to eat only the thing that she wants to eat and it must also be delicious and also look exactly right. 

When a kid seems to have a talent or interest in something, enrichment and challenge are the two ways to turn it into something that IS to their credit, so I've always tried to do that with this kid and cooking. She's had a lot of great experiences, but I, personally, don't have anything to teach her in that regard, being, alas, a miserable cook with zero interest in improvement, and she's never really liked children's cooking camps or classes, because she's never really found the work to be at a high enough level with the "proper" emphasis on perfection.

Junior year of high school has so far always felt like a good time for my homeschooling kids to start taking a real college class or two, and this kid actually started the summer before, when the local community college unexpectedly offered their entire summer course catalog free to current high school students. She'd wanted to take both Intro to Baking and its pre- or co-requisite, a ServSafe Manager Certification course, but alas, the baking class was cancelled so instead she chose to learn about serial killers while also becoming ServSafe certified.

And then in the fall I forced her to take a college art class, also in service of challenging and enriching one's innate gifts. 

So not until this spring semester was my kid finally able to put her ServSafe certification to use by FINALLY enrolling in this much longed for, much anticipated Intro to Baking class.

If I had known what would come home from those school kitchens, I would have moved heaven and earth to make this class happen sooner. Because OMG. It's like living in an expensive French bakery over here.

Check out these loaves!

The sandwich bread and dinner rolls!

The doughnuts, some filled!

And I'm not even going to lie--I teared up when I bit into this croissant, filled with homemade chocolate hazelnut spread, fresh from the oven and still warm:

Each baked item this kid has brought home has been the most delicious baked item I have ever eaten. Her cinnamon rolls were better than Cinnabon's. Her sandwich bread was better than Dave's Good Seed's. Slap my face, but her dinner rolls were better than Aunt Fannie Sue's. 

And she's got all this knowledge, now, of how stuff is supposed to be. She's reading her textbook and listening to the lectures and telling me about the baker's percent of salt in a recipe and hydrating your dough and why you should punch it down, all this stuff that I've never known and never even fathomed was something that could be known. 

I made a batch of apple muffins over the weekend, mostly because apparently only my college kid was doing her duty with the apples so we suddenly had several extremely puny-looking ones in the fruit bowl that nobody in their right mind was going to eat out of hand, but also because I thought that people might like muffins. And people ate them okay, but they for sure weren't delicious. I think I didn't use enough oil, and they were definitely too dry so I probably overbaked them, too? So I mentioned the uneaten muffins last night, as a reminder that they still existed and we needed to force-feed them to ourselves the next morning, and my kid was all, "Oh, right! We're actually making muffins in my class tomorrow!"

My immediate thought was, "Oh, shit! I will never be able to make a muffin again! Everyone will know that my batter wasn't hydrated and my baker's percentage of baking soda was off and I don't know how to cook!"

But you know what? That's the young me talking, the little kid who thought that smart is something that you were, not something that you did. What I'm ACTUALLY going to do when my kid brings home her beautiful batch of muffins in a few hours, the ones that will look and taste a thousand times better than my dry, hard apple muffins, is praise them for how beautiful they are and how delicious they taste, ask my kid a billion questions about how she did such and such to get such and such, compliment her for the work she put into improving her skills and achieving such a perfect result...

... and then ask her to teach me to make delicious and beautiful muffins, too. Tbh I'd kind of rather continue to bake sub-par muffins than take the time and effort to learn the skill properly, but we must let the kids see us practicing a growth mindset if we want them to do it, too, sigh and ugh.

The Epic of Gilgamesh and Gingerbread Cuneiform: Studying Mesopotamia

My teenager's combination World History/Art History study (that I'm still not entirely sure how I'm going to record on her high school transcript...) is a TON of fun. We read the history and the art history, study the major artworks, read some literature or mythology, do something immersive, and write about it. I love it, and so far it seems pretty teenager-friendly, too!

My favorite parts of her Mesopotamia unit were listening to The Epic of Gilgamesh (the teenager ships Gilgamesh and Enkidu, and I can't say that she's wrong), envisioning the Ishtar Gate (not to be confused with the Gates of Ishtar, a Swedish metal band), figuring out the Sumerian genealogy of gods and goddesses (always a hit with my mythology-obsessed kid), and making this gingerbread cuneiform.

The idea--and the gingerbread recipe!--come from this Edible Archaeology post. We also followed the author's suggestion to use a disposable bamboo chopstick as a stylus, which led to a whole adventure of eating at several local Asian restaurants over the course of a couple of weeks, since every restaurant we went to happened to have the separated chopsticks with round ends, not the snap-apart ones with square ends!

Finally, we were met with success--and absolutely DELICIOUS ramen--at this little place tucked into an apartment complex behind the grocery store near the mall:

With the proper bamboo chopsticks and a batch of gingerbread dough, we were ready to write!

We did not follow the author's highly ambitious example of copying a large cuneiform tablet, because WHOAH. Instead, we cut small squares, then used the stylus to copy some of the examples from my teenager's world history textbook:

A chopstick makes a PERFECT stylus!

Baked, the impressions still showed perfectly!

Cuneiform sign meaning "god" or "sky"

Cuneiform sign meaning "day" or "sun"

The student scribe takes an art break!

older Cuneiform sign meaning "barley." Doesn't it look like barley?

Since we did this project right before Christmas, we went ahead and used this dough to also make gingerbread cookies, and the kids made their gingerbread houses. Eleven years into this beloved tradition, I'm now a devotee of melted sugar as glue, and I still think the houses look messy and gross, but nevertheless, they bring me joy:

A lot of hands-on history projects are just fun little craft projects that don't teach a ton about history; if you want your hands-on history project to be valuable for history, and not just a thematically-related activity, you do have to be vigilant. When the kids were very little, for instance, letting them build Egyptian pyramids out of sugar cubes didn't teach them anything about the history of Egypt, but it was a good STEM project and they loved it. But having them create salt dough maps of Egypt and paint and label them was also fun, and reinforced some useful information about Egypt that we still know, such as the fact that Upper Egypt was south and Lower Egypt was north because that's the way the Nile flows, and that the Delta is shaped the same as the Greek letter. 

There's nothing wrong with doing thematically-related but non-valuable projects, even with older homeschoolers--my teenager created this gingerbread Stonehenge during her Astronomy study, learning little about Stonehenge but a decent amount about gingerbread construction and hand-building, and it was fun! But this gingerbread cuneiform, we found, taught us a LOT about cuneiform, and therefore about Mesopotamia. We were all surprised to see how exactly the square stylus recreated the cuneiform, and how well the imprints stayed when baked. You wouldn't be able to recreate that nearly so easily by drawing the figures, but you could get a LOT of cuneiform onto even a hand-sized piece of clay, and that clay would be portable, durable, and virtually immortal. 

That's a lot of knowledge gained for oneself while also decorating cookies, drinking eggnog, and listening to Christmas music!

We've spiraled through history throughout our homeschool years, or done interest-led unit studies non-chronologically, so I've built up a lot of Mesopotamia resources. Here are some of what we've enjoyed over the past dozen years:

• irrigation activity. Irrigation was critical to the development of Mesopotamian agriculture! Here's an idea for how to model an irrigation system. I think it would be cool to use chia seeds so you could build an actual working model!
• map of known ziggurats. Research these via YouTube or Google Images, place them in your salt dough map, glue thumbnail images to a wall map, flyover them in Google Earth, etc.
• Mesopotamia flashcards. Use these flashcards for matching or memory work. 
• popsicle stick war machines. If you read Story of the World (which you should!), you'll encounter Sargon the Great. You can use popsicle sticks to model some of the war machines that he used.
• Royal Game of Ur. You can't study Mesopotamia without playing this game found in a tomb in Ur!
• sexagesimal system. Mesopotamians counted in Base 60, something that you can still see reflected today in activities like measuring time (60 seconds, 60 minutes) and circles (360 degrees). Here's a starting point for researching the sexagesimal system, but I've found some great activities in books over the years that I pull out occasionally for math enrichment.
• Treasures of the UCLA Library: Cuneiform Tablets. My teenager and I watched this short video before beginning our side-hustle as cuneiform scribes. 
• write your name in cuneiform. This is a fun way to get just a taste of cuneiform writing
• Ancient Egyptians and Their Neighbors: An Activity Guide. This book has a good recipe for sebetu bread. Read more about sebetu and Mesopotamian recipes here. 
• The Complete Middle Eastern Cookbook
• The Epic of Gilgamesh
• Eyewitness Mesopotamia. Eyewitness books and Smithsonian Handbooks were the kids' JAM when they were little!
• The Lifeboat that Saved the World. The author is one of the Mesopotamia curators at the British Museum!
• Story of the World, Volume 1. You must listen to the audiobook of this, because Jim Weiss!

And the beloved spines of our current World History/Art History study:

• Archaeology: The Essential Guide to Our Human Past
• Duiker's World History
• Gardner's Art through the Ages
• and lots and lots of images found via Google Images or downloaded from museum digital databases

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Halloween 2022: Rapunzel and Her Tower

This is the last time for who knows how many years that I'll get to spend my second favorite holiday in person with all of my favorite people.

So we did it all! 

Can you be too old to trick-or-treat? NOPE! 

Syd's got ballet all Halloween evening, so at least my practically fully-grown teenagers only trick-or-treated once, here at our local state park's event. 

Rapunzel's Tower was a hit, but I think it was also Will's most awkward costume to date, and this kid has worn some awkward costumes over the years!

Can you eat too much Halloween candy? NOPE!

This Halloween snack mix looked better on TikTok. It turns out that it's nearly impossible to create a Halloween-themed movie night snack mix that the entire family will like... so instead we created one that nobody loved!

Can you watch too many scary movies! Yes, but also NOPE!

This year's traditional meatloaf mummy for our traditional Family Movie Night!

The meatloaf mummy was joined by skull mashed potatoes, cheesy breadstick bones, the above cocktails and mocktails, orange dipped pretzels, a DIY candy apple bar, and after Syd got a look at the menu, she roasted some vegetables so we don't all die of malnutrition.

Can there be too many carved Jack-o-lanterns on your porch? NOPE!

Okay, but can there be too many Jack-o-lanterns on your head? ALSO NOPE!

I am going to frame this entire photo shoot and put every photo on my walls, all year round.

But surely otherwise there can be too many Halloween craft projects. THAT IS VERY MUCH ALSO A NOPE!

These babies get to stay on the coffee table through Thanksgiving!

The only thing we're missing out on is neighborhood trick-or-treating tonight, since us country folk don't get the pleasure of kids coming around to our houses. But when we pick Syd up from ballet super late, we're still then going to pick up our traditional Halloween take-out pizza, and we're still going to stay up even super later watching our very last horror movie of the season while eating the rest of the kids' weekend trick-or-treat haul.

And then Nutcracker season begins!

Cooking with Teenagers: Popcorn S'mores Treats

 

While Matt and Will were in Peru, Syd and I invented this recipe to answer the age-old question of What Sugar Can We Eat Without A Trip To The Grocery Store?

We had all the ingredients to make s'mores, but we didn't want s'mores. Syd wanted Rice Krispy Treats, but all the cereal we had was a half-empty box of stale Corn Flakes (and here's me just now realizing that I'm 99% sure that half-empty box of stale Corn Flakes is still in the cabinet... hold on for a sec while I go toss it to the chickens).

We dug around our cabinets, considering and then rejecting Rice Krispy alternatives. Uncooked Ramen noodles? Hard pass. Broken graham crackers? Golden Grahams Treats are delicious, but... pass. 

Popcorn to the rescue! 

Syd and I experimented with substituting popcorn for the Rice Krispies called for in our favorite Rice Krispy Treats recipe, and it. Was. DELICIOUS! To tell the truth, I actually prefer the popcorn! It makes a larger batch of treats that aren't as sweet, and since popcorn is a whole grain I feel like it adds some fiber and nutrients. 

Because by this time I had talked myself around to being in the mood for s'mores, we also chopped graham crackers and frozen Hershey bars and added them to the batch along with mini marshmallows. And that's how we created the perfect treat!

Here's how to make your own delicious Popcorn S'mores Treats:

You will need:

• 1/2 cup popcorn kernels
• 1 bag marshmallows
• 1 stick salted butter
• dash of vanilla
• mini marshmallows
• chopped graham crackers
• chopped frozen Hershey bars

1. Make popcorn using your favorite method. Our $4.50 Goodwill air popper of indeterminate age is still going strong! It's like this one but with an amber lid, and it is an immortal beast of an appliance.

One-half cup of popcorn kernels makes so much popcorn that we have to divide it into two bowls for mixing the remaining ingredients and then pour it into an giant half-sheet pan to set.

2. Make the marshmallow sauce. Melt a stick of butter on medium-low on the stove, and add a dash of vanilla. When the butter is melted, turn the burner to low and stir in an entire bag of marshmallows until they're completely melted:

3. Stir everything together. Pour the marshmallow sauce over the popcorn and stir it with a rubber spatula. As you stir, gradually mix in the other add-ins, saving the chopped frozen Hershey bars until the marshmallow sauce has cooled a little. That, plus starting with frozen Hershey bars, will keep most of the chocolate from melting into the sauce.

4. Refrigerate. Syd doesn't like storing any of our Rice Krispy-adjacent treats at room temperature, because she likes them super firm and crispy. We actually keep these popcorn s'mores treats in the half-sheet pan in the refrigerator, and just cut a piece as we want it.

I think these would also taste delicious with a variety of other mix-ins. The kids would never let me get away with making a batch with dried fruits and nuts with the mini marshmallows and chocolate, but to me that sounds SOOO good!

Cooking with Teenagers: Whole Fruit Strawberry Lemonade

 

This whole fruit strawberry lemonade has too much sweetener to be health food, but I declare that the whole fruit makes up for it, and it's so delightful and refreshing and yum--WAY better than powdered lemonade mix!

The kids and I have been making this strawberry lemonade together since they were small and I found the recipe online. I used to make the recipe as-written, including leaving the lemons unpeeled. We prefer to wing it now, so the lemonade is a little different every time. It's better to wing it, anyway, because lemons are always different sizes and strawberries are always sweeter or less sweet than the last time, so the amount of sugar required is always going to be different. And I don't usually buy organic, so I do prefer to peel the lemons. Anyway, putting lemon peels down the garbage disposal makes the kitchen smell awesome!

The one fancy piece of equipment that you might need is one of those super-powerful blenders. I bought a refurbished Vitamix a billion years ago (or at least a decade ago, which is the exact same thing), and it's still the best thing in my kitchen. The only thing I've ever had to do for it is replace the pitcher after I, myself, dropped the lid plug into the blender while it was running and cracked the pitcher and tomato soup flew EVERYWHERE.

So I don't know if you exactly *need* the world's best blender to make this recipe, but I've only ever used the world's best blender to make it, so your mileage may vary, as the kids say.

This recipe that the kids and I use makes one completely full blender pitcher of lemonade.

You'll need:

• 2-4 fresh lemons, depending on their size. 
• around a quart of fresh strawberries, tops removed. Sometimes I'll cap these fresh, put them in a quart-sized plastic baggie in the freezer, and pull them out to use frozen.
• sugar to taste. If I'm in charge of the sugar, I'll use more like .5-.75 cup. If a kid is in charge, they inevitably dump in a full cup of sugar without even tasting the lemonade first.
• water.

The goal is to fill the blender pitcher maybe halfway full with fruit, at least half of that lemons. Peel the lemons, but otherwise just toss the whole fruit into the blender:

Strawberries, as well, should be capped, but otherwise just throw them in.

Next, add water to just below the maximum fill line of the blender.

If I'm making the lemonade, I'll blend it, then taste it, then add sugar and blend again until I like the taste. The kids don't even bother--they dump in a full cup of sugar along with the fruit.

Blend the lemonade on high to pulverize the fruit:

There are also lemon seeds in there that you'll be pulverizing, which is why you might need a high-power blender. Even on the days when we've not done such a thorough job and we've been left with a seed bit or two in our drinks, though, I've never heard the kids protest, and they can be picky about fruit.

Blending the drink at such a high speed makes it a little foamy. You can skim that off or politely ignore it:

Pour the lemonade into a Mason jar filled with ice, add a glass straw, and enjoy your summer day!

I keep meaning to try this recipe with fruits other than strawberries--I think cherries or blackberries would be absolutely delicious--but strawberries are so bountiful right now that I've never gotten around to it. We do have a bit of a watermelon problem going on at the moment, though--why is it that every time I buy a watermelon, the kids eat themselves sick on it as soon as it's cut, and then I essentially have to force-feed them the rest of it before it goes bad? And then a week later they're asking for watermelon again? 

So maybe my next experiment will be to make Whole Fruit Strawberry Watermelon Lemonade? I wonder if it would taste good with boba?

Homeschool Chemistry of Cooking: Gelation and Spherification

 

Gelling and spherification are good hands-on activities when you're studying proteins, as it's the unfolding of proteins that allows the hydrophobic amino acids to cross-link and form a gel.

You can even look up the exact amino acids that make up the gelatin (probably glycine), and you can model those amino acids. You can also chemically test foods for proteins, if you want to make your study as hands-on and context-building as possible.

Syd and I have been working through this Harvard EdX class, Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to Soft Matter Science, and that's where we learned how spherification works. When cooking, you gotta love your polymers!  

Although the process that Syd and I used does result in spherified liquids, this isn't exactly the type of spherification that occurs in fancy molecular gastronomy restaurants. There, they use alginate and calcium to build that gel layer only around the outside of what they want spherified, leaving the inside as liquid.

These gel spheres are a solution of liquid and gelatin, and we used physical processes to shape them. 

Syd and I found a really easy-to-follow recipe for making edible spheres in The Complete Cookbook for Young Scientists, written by America's Test Kitchen, but they've actually also put the complete recipe here. It involves lots of fun stuff, like nuking pomegranate juice and unflavored gelatin--

--whisking it (tiny whisk optional but encouraged!)--

--prepping some VERY cold vegetable oil--

--and using a squeeze bottle to drop the solution into the cold oil:

Rinse the oil off, and you've got tiny, edible spheres of pomegranate gelatin!

The process IS very interesting, but alas, Syd and I both thought that the edible spheres were super gross. We never did get every minute speck of oil rinsed away, so they definitely felt oily, and they'd lost a lot of sweetness, as well. 

If you ever could get all the oil rinsed off, I think that these edible spheres would be fun as ice cream toppers, or even as a boba substitute in tea. For us, though, we marveled at our cross-linked polymer chains enabled by the heat-activated unfolding of proteins to reveal the hydrophobic amino acid components...

... and then we fed them to the chickens.

Cooking with Teenagers: Mochi Ice Cream

 

These mochi ice cream balls did not turn out to be delicious, but since the whole point of Cooking with Teenagers--for me, at least!--is spending time with my kids, none of us bickering, it was a successful endeavor, nevertheless.

Not delicious, though!

Mochi is one of the recipes from Cook Anime that I'd been wanting to try, along with the Royal Milk Tea (haven't made it yet) and the Matcha Ice Cream (SOOOOO gross, but Will admitted that she *might* have forgotten the sugar, so we need to try that one again). The recipe for mochi is super simple, although it does call for one perhaps difficult to obtain ingredient:

With that on hand, however, all you have to do is mix and microwave and mix some more!

It took a couple of tries to get the consistency correct, and we made another mistake of sprinkling more flour onto the mochi dough to roll it out, because it was SOOOO sticky. What we were supposed to do was wet our hands and rolling pin, and if we'd done that we might have avoided the raw flour taste of the mochi, which I bet comes from adding in so much... raw flour, d'oh.

Regardless, we refrigerated our sticky dough, then cut it into circles, added scoops of ice cream--

--and pinched the dough around the ice cream:

Let it freeze some more and you're done!

Our mochi ice cream ended up looking not unlike store-bought mochi ice cream--

--but its overall taste is not delicious.

Ah, well... the adventure may not have been successful, but the real treasure was the friendships that we made along the way!

Mardi Gras Unit Study for Homeschooled High Schoolers: Year Two

Last year, Syd was stuck doing public school busywork while Will and I thoroughly enjoyed our Mardi Gras unit study. This year, Will spent a week in California visiting her grandparents and attending Girl Scout camp at just the perfect time for Syd to have HER turn at this super fun cross-curricular unit.

Whether homeschoolers are little or big, social studies is always fun and valuable, building context, familiarity with diversity, and geographic awareness. Mardi Gras is an especially terrific unit study because it's celebrated in many areas worldwide, but differently in each of these places. In this unit, we studied celebrations in New Orleans, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and Venice, Italy. There was plenty of room, as well, for conversations about other interesting place- and religion-related topics, and there are a ton more connections for cooking, history, environmental studies, and any of the other billion wonderful topics that come up when a teenager and her mom are hanging out and making king cake.

We did all the activities in my lesson plans, but, unsurprisingly if you know Syd, her focus was on the baking.

For some seriously old-school vibes, Syd and I listened to this classic while she worked:

• Carnival at Candlelight

How long has it been since we've listened to a Magic Tree House book for genuine enjoyment? High Tide in Hawaii, maybe? Regardless, we've just discovered that the newest book requires Jack and Annie to climb Machu Picchu and rescue a baby llama... so obviously I requested it from the library. Time for a Family Read-Aloud Throwback Night!

When we weren't listening to a children's book that we've already listened to 400 times in the past decade, we've been listening to a lot of local radio stations off and on for their Carnival music. 

Here are some good New Orleans stations:

• 98.9 Dolphin Radio
• 1590 AM WKKAY

Here are some good Rio de Janeiro stations:

• Radio Batuta MPB
• Bike Web Radio
• FM o Dia 1005.

There are over a hundred radio stations in Rio de Janeiro!

Here are some good Venice radio stations:

• Radio Onda 1
• Radio Ca' Foscari

Syd's beautiful king cake did not look this pristine for long:

Matt ate the last piece for breakfast this morning, which was as good a way as any to celebrate Fat Tuesday!

Cooking with Teenagers: Rice Krispy Treats as a Coping Mechanism

The kids and I have been spending almost all of our school days in the kitchen for the past month, after a quick New Year job of retiling the main shower turned into a month so far of workers with power tools and a fondness for the Steve Miller Band demolishing and rebuilding quite a lot of our main bathroom, walk-in closet, and family room. 

All we've got left is replacing the bathroom floor, and drywalling and painting the family room and bathroom--oh, and retiling the shower!

It turns out that when you're hanging out in the kitchen all day every day, feeling discombobulated and edgy because you hate having strangers (even strangers with terrific taste in music) in the house and you hate having all the furniture and crap from half the house moved into the other half of the house to make it all messy and you especially hate having all your books disorganized on the floor and you REALLY especially hate when a worker comes in and asks you a trick question like which way do you want the new bamboo floor boards to run or how you want the bathroom floor tiles laid out as if you even know something like that (do you want to know my secret trick? I ask the guy what he thinks, and whatever he says, that's what I tell him we should do)...

Yeah, when you're doing all that, and you've got a constant backache from sitting on an uncomfy kitchen stool and you're also, you know, still stressed out about getting Covid, you and your teenagers sometimes get the brilliant idea to buy a bunch of sugar cereal and spend half an afternoon making gourmet Rice Krispy Treats.

Pro tip: the absolute best Rice Krispy Treat recipe is literally the one on the back of the Rice Krispies box. It's important to add extra mini marshmallows in with the cereal, though:

We made a standard version, then we made a version with red food coloring and red sprinkles, then we made a version with peanut butter cereal, then we made a version with peanut butter cereal, m&ms, and chocolate chips, then we made a version with Fruity Pebbles and Froot Loops. These are all that are left at the moment, though:

Like, I know you CAN do some super educational stuff with Rice Krispy Treats, but tbh I mostly just keep thinking about that time that we took Luna to the Kentucky Horse Park and it turned out that she was terrified of draft horses, so every time she saw one and opened her mouth to bark I stuffed her face full of peanut butter instead.

In other news, I just found this on my public library's website:

• Treat Yourself! How to Make 93 Ridiculously Fun No-Bake Crispy Rice Treats

Because the way things are going, we've got at LEAST another month of distracting ourselves with sugar ahead of us...