Judah has had a weird illness these past couple days. He is very normal all day long and every now and then complains that he has a tummyache. Two nights ago, he vomited profusely at 1am. Last night, he vomited at 11pm. Today he had diarrhea the minute we got home from a birthday party where he was perfectly fine. I feel bad for the little guy. He feels GREAT after each "purge" but it has me worried because of dehydration.

I dashed over to Whole Foods and bought some electrolyte water which he has been gulping down - yay! I also made a plain white rice "soup" that is nothing more than two cups of rice with 24 oz of water seasoned with Better than Bouillon Organic Vegetable Base. I am thrilled that he ate that and loved it because he's such a picky eater and I've now got another winner for the pantry.

Dixie Training Progress

This is after Dixie's 3rd obedience lesson. She's doing SO WELL!

We were catching up on American Idol last night (TIVO is our savior) and at some point somebody said the word "stupid". Judah announced, "I am *soooo* sick of the bad words on TV." So we asked what words he meant.

He replied, "Words like 'stupid', 'dummy', 'loser'. Those words are so STUPID."

Then, he proceeded to build a CHOCOLATE PUDDING FACTORY with his architectural blocks. He even had a song to go with it. "We work real hard at the chocolate factory..."



When he got tired later, he was lying with his head in my lap and we talked about school for a while. We talked about kindergarten and who his teacher might be and he told me about one of the PK teachers letting them wear the "Crown of Coolness" when they follow directions.

{Swear Word}

It was only a matter of time.

Dixie decided to eat her house specialty favorite, the "Judah Ankle Sandwich". Judah dragged Dixie along across the living room, she still clamped down on his ankle, he trying to pull himself along the back of the sofa.

With an exasperated look on his face, he said very calmly, "Mooooom! Get the damn dog!" My head whipped up and I asked, "What kind of dog?" Judah: "The DAMN dog." Big ear to ear grin. (Four year olds instinctively know when they've said a bad word.)

Thus began an explanation of how dams are used to block water and isn't it silly to name Dixie after a wall? He agreed and I haven't heard it since.

Now that Judah is old enough to help with basic chores, when the weather is more agreeable, I will begin taking him to the "For the Love of the Lake" shoreline spruce-up at White Rock Lake. It is disgraceful how picnickers throw their refuse in the lake with little care about the impact they make on the wildlife.

Take for example little Six Pack. I am so tired of the discarded waste by careless people. Here we have this oasis in the middle of the steel, glass and concrete city of Dallas...a place with waterfowl, forest animals, a botanist's heaven, restricted paths and roads for pedestrians and bicyclists and Flying Scot sailboats with their bright white masts billowing in the wind. White Rock is full of trails through tall grasses where you may see purple martin houses on tall poles, oak groves full of squirrels and woodpeckers and miles of shoreline with marsh grasses teeming with ducklings...and pollution.

Living in the Kitchen

I still knit when I can, but the new puppy is a yarn thief. Having just lived through my mom's puppy shredding some Size 1s when I set down a pair of Jaywalkers to go get a coffee refill, having my own little beast wait in shadows until I walk two feet away from my yarn and then launch upon it has me needing to plan strategically when I can actually pick up the fiber and create something...car, airplane, bedtime (which is the worst time for me to knit lace...I nod off and get lost in my pattern).

So, cooking has filled the void that no knitting has left.


This week, I have made oven-baked Sweet Potato Fries spiced with cumin and red pepper, whipping cream biscuits -- world's easiest biscuit recipe (1 cup heavy whipping cream, 1 cup self-rising flour - dropped by the spoonful onto a baking stone and baked at 425 for 15-20 minutes.) I made my staple breakfast treat of tart cherry muffins, baked some spicy/sweet pecans for salad topping, steel cut oatmeal spiced with vanilla and golden raisins, homemade hot cocoa, baked Chocolate Crazy Cake in a rice cooker, fresh tabouli, and an improvised cornbread made with corn masa instead of corn meal...using what was available in the pantry and turned out to be so creamy with fresh corn kernels dispursed throughout...an accident that will be repeated!

what the world needs now

what the world needs now
Originally uploaded by getthebubbles

I have been spending a lot of time in the kitchen since my grandfather died on 20 December. It is therapy for me and a healthy way to grieve. I am filling the bellies of my two guys and I feel a sense of joy by making things that send my husband back for seconds. I baked four Apple Dapple Cakes over the holidays, whipped carrots and parsnips, baked fluffy whipping cream biscuits that melt in your mouth and then created Smitten Kitchen's delectable Icebox Cake.

I baked the Barefoot Contessa's buttermilk soaked oven fried chicken, 101Cooking's Roasted Cauliflower Popcorn, baked acorn squash with a buttery brown sugar & orange peel zest glaze, made a lemony waffle batter for the Texas Waffle Iron and a pull-apart coffee cake that is made with refrigerated biscuits, sugar, pecans and butter.

My ideal presidential match list is rather frightening. Mike Gravel as #2? Golly, I'm more liberal than I thought. I was a certified card carrying lefty lib in my 20s, but thought that now that I've become a parent, I've gotten a bit more conservative...maybe not?

91% Dennis Kucinich (D)
87% Mike Gravel (D)
85% Joe Biden (D)
85% Chris Dodd (D)
82% Barack Obama (D)
81% Hillary Clinton (D)
79% John Edwards (D)
71% Bill Richardson (D)
35% Rudy Giuliani (R)
25% Ron Paul (R)
22% John McCain (R)
15% Mike Huckabee (R)
15% Mitt Romney (R)
14% Tom Tancredo (R)
6% Fred Thompson (R)

Get your results from 2008 Presidential Candidate Matching Quiz

Young Jedi Knight

Judah & I watched Return of the Jedi last night. The Ewoks aren't so annoying when you watch it with a four year old. He loved them so much that I was able to forget that they were likely added to the movie by George Lucas for the obvious product endorsements that followed the theatrical release of the film.

Something I did not like about the DVD "re-release" version is that at the end of the film when the ghostly Jedis - Anakin, Yoda and Obi-Wan - are overseeing the Ewok village celebration, George Lucas replaced Sebastian Shaw, who played the old Anakin with Hayden Christiansen as the young Anakin, but here's my question....why is Obi-Wan still old (Alec Guinness)...why wouldn't there be a young Ewan McGregor? I'm just sayin'...

We're going to hole ourselves up today for the Cowboys game at a local sports bar. Dixie has been wearing her Dallas Cowboys bandana since yesterday.

Micheal nearly made me a widow yesterday. We met our friends at White Rock Lake for a family picnic & sailing afternoon. The weather has been mild this winter and started out very promising with a glorious sunshine and slight breeze. Perfect sailing weather. Once we got the boat lowered in the davit, a norther blew in and the temp dropped pretty rapidly. All of us mamas decided we would rather take the kids to see the new VeggieTales movie than freeze our knickers off on the water. Micheal, Bret & Zad decided to sail.

A couple hours later, I was trying to reach Micheal by phone as he had his Blackberry with him but he wasn't answering. We eventually got Bret on the phone and he said, "Well, first I want to tell you that we're all accounted for..."

The sailboat capsized and in the process, Micheal was projected from the boat into the icy (and unfortunately, polluted) water. He had on a couple layers of clothes, his jacket started to fill with water and he lost buoyancy. He is a former lifeguard, so it wasn't an issue of his skill in the water, it was that he may as well have been wearing a cement block.

Thankfully, there was a regatta and so the rescue boat was out and they retrieved him just as he was about to start shedding his clothes to lighten his load.

The Blackberry is toast, but it is of no matter since the more frightening thought is that he could have drowned or if we had put the children on the boat...well, I can't even think about that.

We drove back to Bret & Tiffany's house after the movie and saw the guys powerwashing the mainsail in the front yard. Micheal was barefoot with Bret's borrowed clothes and holding a brandy snifter.

Jorge is staying with us this weekend. He is visiting from Prague. His social calendar is always full when he is in town, and we're a very active family, so I've not seen him too much except at dinner. I think he leaves today...not sure. We had dinner at Nancy & Marco's house last night. They had their first baby, Luca on 28 December. Marco's mom is staying with them for a couple months to help them get situated. I was in awe of Nancy's ability to birth a baby two weeks ago and yet find time to prepare homemade tiramisu for dessert and has already enjoyed several lunch outings and seems so in synch with the baby. I seem to remember not finding time to brush my hair when Judah was first born.

In other news, I start my new position at work, effectively....oh, now. Hoping it is a satisfying move.

So, we got a dog. Meet Miss Dixie.

My life as I knew it is temporarily on hold until I am through the stage of chasing her away from the carpeted staircase, spraying Bitter Apple on my bamboo area rug border, twice daily trips to the lake for an extensive game of fetch and chase, a walk around the neighborhood, 8x to the backyard for potty time, waking up before dawn to sit under the moon, my hands becoming chew toys and the process of bonding a boy to his dog.

I am desperate to knit but I have not had time, and besides, Dixie has already found my Louisia Harding Angora and managed to unravel about 1/2 a yard before I caught her and relocated my knit bag to a secret location.

She's a good dog, overall, but being 7 weeks old, she's a HANDFUL. Training is demanding, but I'm determined to try!

In other news, I'm a bit anxious because Judah's Optimus Prime costume is in the mail, but not at my house and he needs it by Tuesday. Our eBay seller dragged her heels on the shipment and so now I'm watching the mailbox faithfully and just praying it arrives tomorrow. His school costume parade is Tuesday!

Filed under "You know you're a parent when..." you spend a full hour with your nose pressed to the glass at Krispy Kreme watching donuts make their way through the conveyor belt, toast in the hot oil and pass through the glaze waterfall. Judah was completely fascinated by the mechanics. A cup of coffee, three donuts later and our little family considered this a terrific Friday night.

Micheal did carpool today (I need to thank him for covering me this week while I get ready for my meeting!) When he and Judah got home, I greeted them at the garage door. Judah looked up at me with wide eyes and asked, "Mama, are you hurt?" I said, "No!" Then he asked, "Do you have a cough?" I didn't understand why he was asking until he pulled out a construction paper "doctor satchel" in which he had pasted a red first aid cross and filled with a tongue depressor, a medicine dispenser, a Q-tip, a piece of gauze, two cotton balls, a latex glove and a Band-aid. I feigned a coughing fit and he grabbed me by the hand saying, "Come on, Mama, you need to lay down on the couch so I can fix you all better." He filled the medicine dispenser with water from the sink and had me prop up on a pillow to drink it. I did feel better! :-) He put the Band-aid on me and then rubbed the cotton balls all over my face and arms. Then, he finished up by wetting the gauze and placing it on my arm. Such a sweet boy.

This is going to be our busiest weekend in a while. I went out with the moms in Jude's PK4 class last night, had a breakfast meeting w/Morgan related to our church volunteer work, got back to my regional board meeting prep (been pulling 11 hour days this week...working whenever I can...miss my family!). I had to bake cookies at the crack of dawn today because I'm a home baker at school and we've got a fall festival tomorrow where baked goods, books, music, etc will be sold. Tomorrow I get a couple hours to myself while the boys go sailing, then it's off to the school festival where I am the class shift coordinator and am working a shift of my own with my friend Tiffany. Sunday is church, seasonal decorating of the church playgrounds and campus, then a birthday party followed by a Cowboys viewing party.

"Getcha popcorn ready!" - T.O.

Next week is going to be my hell week of getting my board meeting locked and loaded (it nearly is, so maybe the remaining bits will be sorted out by Tuesday!), then next weekend is fall break where we're hopefully going to the ranch for a few days of R&R, then back for the meeting, followed by another weekend at another ranch with high school friends of Micheal's and then Halloween carving and trick or treating, capped off by a Rocky Horror party in early November. Whew!

Somehow in the middle of all of this, I'm knitting socks for Socktoberfest, a scarf for Judah, which I have love/hate for the merino it's being knit with (the up side is it's soft and has good drape, the down side is it sucks the moisture out of my hands and I am not fond of the colorway and intense fuzziness now that it's knit up.) It looked prettier when it was wound up in a ball.
I'm busy adding my projects to Ravelry and my books to LibraryThing. And thinking of adding a 5th knit project - Maine Morning Mitts (copyright Clara Parkes) out of the ball of Noro Kureyon that was to be a hat for Judah, but I am repurposing for these fingerless mittens. I'm rereading Harry Potter's Goblet of Fire, rereading Pride and Prejudice (for the millionth time) and also poking through Pat Conroy's The Water is Wide.

Kiss the Girls

We are completely settled into our fall schedule, though I feel like I am busier and needing to stay more focused on my calendar than ever before. Between work responsibilities (a board meeting, and two conferences in Sydney, Australia and San Juan, Puerto Rico), school (Annual Fund Grade Level Sponsor, Fall Festival Shift Coordinator), personal (PK4 soccer, social engagements) and church (Parent Leader for 4/5 year olds)...whew...there's never much down time and though I do fantasize about just "sitting down", when I do, I feel guilty and restless like I should be doing something and just go around cleaning things.

Judah has been thriving at school this year. He's pre-reading and very interested in books. He speaks a smattering of Spanish quite frequently and seems comfortable switching between the two languages. He gets to play with schoolmates just about every single weekend.

An amusing development is a friendship with a little girl in his class who for the past few weeks, according to her parents, has become very interested in Judah. We had dinner at their house last night and they told us that she kissed Judah at school. Sometime later that night, Judah called me into the living room and said that she was trying to kiss him again. He, being a boy, was reacting by tactical diversion. Trains, TV, jumping off the sofa, wrestling, anything to avoid THE KISS. He **absolutely adores** her, but I think he's entering the very beginning stages of "girls, gross!"

A funny comment by Judah this week while playing with pretend cheese. He was grating it and told me, "Mama, I'm cheddaring the cheese."

Any discussion about people behaving badly, such as when I told him that Marion Jones might be stripped of her Olympic medal because she cheated (my reason for explaining this was because he saw her TV admission of guilt and wanted to know why she was crying and I thought it was a good lesson in honesty), Judah turned into, "Well, if they take her medal away, I will punch them!" Sigh. Boys.

We took Judah roller skating (old school style) this weekend. Tons of fun and something we will likely do more often now as it took about two turns around the rink for me to get the hang of it again and Jude is pretty keen to **try** it...although he played air hockey most of the time that he was there.

This pretty much sums up how Judah felt at the end of the second day of school:

So far school seems to be fun for him, although when I picked him up at carpool yesterday he informed me that one of the new girls poked him in the eye, pinched his cheek and bit his knee. I wrote his teacher a letter since I am only hearing half the story and don't know what led up to this, but I have to say that I'm pretty unhappy about it because he had a rash on his knee where he'd been bitten when he woke up today. His "pinch" was a scratch down the left side of his cheek.

Funny story. We have been digitizing all of our CDs -- we had around 2,000 and have been slowly getting through the stash, burning and selling for cash. We went to a certain very popular used bookstore in town and turned in about 200 CDs. A couple hours passed and they still had not called our name to pick up our cash offer and Judah was starting to get really antsy, so we investigated to see what was up. Turns out they had given our cash offer to another customer, completely by accident, who had just turned in a stack of books. $355 offer. For used books. That guy hit the jackpot! Of course, they had to then give us our $355, so according to the gossip mill of other waiting customers who knew what happened, that guy made off with about $300 more than he should have gotten. He was walking toward the cash register exclaiming, "Man! I usually only get $20 when I come here!"

We're anxious to finish burning the rest of our CDs...it's a slow and deliberate process as we never really have a lot of downtime to sit around loading up music and deciding which of the approximately 12 songs on a CD we really can't part with -- the filler doesn't make it to my hard drive.

My mom is coming for a visit over Labor Day, so I have set my sights on gardening this weekend. After traveling for a month this summer, the 50 days of rain and then 100F+ weather, my garden looks horrible and I'm trying to regenerate some plants that have gone south on us. My wildflowers are still "eh" but not dead, my ferns are pleading for cooler weather, the fuschia did not make it past June, unfortunately. I don't even know why nurseries sell fuschias in Texas. But, my tomatoes and beans are producing and starting to grow new stems, so it's not all bad.

First Day of School

Judah started PK4 this morning. Going cold turkey on early bedtime and waking up at 6am was HARD. He has been staying up 'til 11pm sometimes and waking up around 8am.

This was Judah when he first woke up, poor thing:

Once we reminded him that friends would be at school:

We had a quick costume change into his uniform, "nametag banana" included, and he was ready for school. The class theme is Curious George and with half the class being new kids, they have to wear their bananas this week. Ha!

As soon as we joined the carpool queue (which went very smoothly....shock!), he was THRILLED. He really missed his friends so much and I'm sure will have a blast today. And although I miss him like crazy since he's been my little sidekick all summer, I know he's having tons more fun and I can actually get some work done.

As Time Goes By

Having had some type of online journal for years and at some point always dropping off for months or even a year at a time, I am back again as I always regret not keeping a written record of the day to day experiences with a little boy in our household.

Judah is almost four and a half years old and begins his PK4 school year in two days. He remains a sweet and fairly easygoing little boy temperament-wise although his "boy energy" level has kicked into high gear and we have to engage in a lot of discussions about why it's absolutely not OK for him to hurl Tinkertoys at me even if they are "arrow pointers".

He loves to sing and his current favorites are "the Shrek song" (All Star from SmashMouth), Tutti-Frutti from Little Richard, the theme song from Jimmy Neutron and Kids in America from Kim Wilde.

Another "note to self" that I often find on scraps of paper when I don't have time to post to the blog at that particular moment...

6/9/2006 - peanups, flamingo (flamenco), potty - 5 (6?) times, poop - in big potty, my bed / my house, ooooo, that's pretty

Translated -- Judah was calling peanuts "peanups" and flamingoes "flamencos", we were toward the end of potty training and he was doing a super job. He was establishing his territory with "this is my house, this is my bed, this is my mommy & daddy, these are my toys, etc" and everything he picked up caused him to exclaim, "ooooo, that's pretty!".

I think my favorite phrase as he was learning to discuss his bodily functions was, "Poo Poot" or "I Poo Poot!"

I was cleaning up some old files on my laptop and came across this little blog note:

1/30/2004 - Judah is crawling (backward), trying to stand, screams at the top of his lungs just to hear his own voice, loves looking at himself in mirrors, doesn’t like naps anymore, likes banging on things and eating pureed bananas.

That really took me way back considering that Judah is now making his own social engagements. He rode home with a classmate yesterday to play at his house and has informed me that he asked another classmate to come over to play on Tuesday.

We are gearing up for the holiday season. Tonight, we will go downtown to see the lighting of the Neiman-Marcus Christmas Tree and also the lighting of the city tree. There will be street vendors (hot cocoa! hot apple cider!), horse-driven carriages and live entertainment (Trout Fishing in America, eh). Should be a great time and a tradition we have decided to repeat every year. I am putting up our own trees (we do two) this weekend -- never have done this before Thanksgiving, but I just **feel** like doing it and as somebody in Highland Park has already beat me to the punch, I think it's OK for me to break a few rules.

My mom was in the hospital earlier this week in N.C. for vertigo. Pretty scary as they had to run many diagnostic tests to rule out neurological or other nefarious causes. She followed up with her ENT and turns out she has an inner ear infection. She's on the mend and I can sleep at night again. 1,000 miles distance feels like a million when your mama is sick!

How's this for organization? A colleague officially finished her Christmas shopping yesterday and brought the loot for faraway relatives to the office today, all wrapped and ready for shipping. Gosh, I'm so far behind. I'll probably be shopping on 24 December.