I really don't cook. I don't enjoy it--in fact, I find cooking tedious and uninteresting, requiring too much clean-up and fuss.
Mind you, I think nothing of doing plaster of Paris at the living room table, or tie-dyeing with the girls in the backyard WITHOUT GLOVES, so clean-up and fuss aren't in fact issues for me. I just don't enjoy cooking.
I mean, why cook when you can just make a sandwich?
The other moms who I know who don't cook happen to have partners who DO cook, but I happen to have a partner who needs me to tell him, every single night, "Just ask the girls if they want a peanut butter sandwich or a grilled cheese sandwich or a smoothie, and there's canned applesauce and frozen corn or blueberries, and see if they'll eat a carton of yogurt with it." Seriously, every single night he needs me to tell him options for a quick and suitable dinner for two children. I think he eats baked chicken for dinner every night, I don't bother to ask.
And no, we're not one of those families who eat dinner together, with the tablecloths and napkin rings and candles and crap. Sue us.
That being said, I do get a lot of pleasure out of an in-season fruit salad:
It doesn't require cooking!
I don't tend to cook normal stuff every day, like a nice pot of spaghetti or a brown rice stir-fry or whatever normal people stand around in the kitchen for an hour and cook for dinner every single day, but every now and then I will try out a recipe, especially if it sounds just crazy:
The Pioneer Woman's Knock You Naked Brownies were CRAZY. I didn't put all the fuss into them that she did, but yeah, they turned out just a smidge over-the-top. Insanely tasty, and unlikely to be baked again unless I'm ever invited to a potluck at which people would be impressed by over-the-top sweet desserts. That potluck would probably be in Arkansas.
I got bored with baking bread every day, so now I pretty much only make the occasional pizza crust, but after the instruction of my friend Cake, I do now officially know how to make pie crust--
--although it's kind of a lot of work. Still, the family praised and praised and praised the strawberry pie that the crust turned into, and although I'm pretty sure that all the praise every time I cook something is a not-so-subtle strategy to simply get me to cook a little more, I do have plans to make that pie crust again soon, this time for quiche, and also to at some point to get around to trying out both zucchini fries and overnight cinnamon rolls.
Or, you know, we could just continue eating sandwiches. It could go either way, really...
Life-size family, with all their clothes and accessories
Roman gladiator gameboard, which stretches ALL THE WAY across the basketball court
it's like hopscotch, but with swords and horses and rivers to cross
We have a date to make more sidewalk chalk this week, because Will thinks that this game would also be pretty great if you used Ancient Egyptians instead of Romans.
Her correctness about this particular issue is a sure thing, wouldn't you agree?
Matt accused me of homeschooling solely for the moment that occurred last week, when I turned around in my seat in the car and asked my daughter, "Quis es?"
"Willow sum," she promptly replied, and Matt is, of course, perfectly correct.
I am a Latin nerd.
With Will's permission, I've added Latin (and typing, but that's a different post) to her list of daily responsibilities. So far she's really enjoying it, mostly because her textbook, Minimus, is so ridiculously super-cute. Witness:
Later that day, I explained to her that the cat's name, literal translation something like "Vibrate to the Utmost," was probably due to the fact that the Romans might have thought of cat's purring as vibrating (which it is), and thus the cat's name could be more accurately translated, then, as Purrsy or some such.
Last year during our big Boston trip, Matt's parents took all of us for a day at Plimoth Plantation. Honestly, Plimoth itself was not my favorite tourist spot--it's one of those recreated villages, and I am just not comfortable walking up to a stranger minding her own business grinding corn and being all, "Hello, who are you? What are you doing? How long will that corn last? What's your preferred method for making corn pone?" like you were supposed to do.
Mostly I tooled around and took in the kitchen gardens, and snuck into people's huts to stare after they had walked out of them, and the Wampanoag village was actually pretty awesome, but I did do some damage in the gift shop. I bought the girls little porcelain Pilgrim dolls (and I wish now that I'd bought Sydney the big ones, too), and a cornhusk doll-making kit, and seeds to grow a Three Sisters garden, and lots of postcards for scrapbooks, and a quill pen making and writing kit.
When I buy stuff that's on big sale, or stuff that's unique in that way, I throw it all into my Magic Craft Cupboard, and whenever the time is right it comes back out again.
Let's see...the girls still play with the Pilgrim dolls, we made the cornhusk dolls back in the winter, we didn't end up doing the Three Sisters garden this summer because the Tom Thumb popcorn looked more exciting in the seed packet than the Plimoth Plantation corn did (but I think the seeds will keep for another year, so def a Three Sisters garden next year), the postcards will probably come out again this fall when we'll study pilgrims again, and that quill pen kit just happened to look mighty tasty just recently when Sydney and I were reading some book or other about the Declaration of Independence (Independence Day has been an area of interest lately, obviously), and she said that she wished that she could write with the pretty feather, too.
You do, huh? Well, let's take a trip to the Magic Craft Cupboard and see what we find!
I used my x-acto knife in dangerous ways to cut each girl's quill at an angle, carve it into a nib, angle the nib, then slit it up the middle a little, while the girls used eye droppers to drip water into their powdered ink to rehydrate it. Then I handed each girl her quill and a giant piece of textured artist's paper, attempted to demonstrate how to properly hold the quill (they weren't such good listeners, sigh), and let them go:
I did ask each girl to write her name with the quill pen--we'll crop them later and put them in their Independence Day scrapbooks:
Ignore the fact that they both keep holding their quills backwards--my theory is that kids these days only ever use writing instruments with rotational symmetry, and thus the concept of one specific pen grip is too foreign to get right away.
Writing all kinds of words was fun--
--but Willow, especially, got really into the artistry of pen and ink, and covered a whole huge page just beautifully, in my opinion:
Everybody loved using the quill pens, but all I can tell you is that after using quill pens as one's sole writing instrument, the using for the first time an ink pen that didn't require pausing to dip it into ink every few letters must have felt AMAZING.
Ink pens just aren't this pretty, however:
Here are some other Declaration of Independence resources that we've been enjoying this month:
for quill pen pics