swimming

without further ado...

...a few fourth of july pictures.

"it doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who i remember he was."

-anne sexton

miss you, dad, and wish you were here to meet J

as we celebrate his fatherhood to our own little girl.

you'd love them both.

2009 trigderby lake trip

this evening we returned from my immediate family's annual lake trip.  we are sunburned, sore, and exhausted after four days of boating, fishing, canoeing, swimming, wakeboarding, campfires, grilling, and chasing kids around.  some of the gang filmed a horror movie; plot: group of kids go to the lake for the weekend and are murdered after making incredibly stupid survival choices.  with any luck it'll eventually make its way onto youtube, and i'll link you.  i'm sure it will go viral instantly, if not sooner.

my sister and kitten

***

i did a terrible job of photographing the goings-on this year, but i blame it on the added distraction of Kitten.  thank you, trigerbys.

clickity click to a small flickr set

memorial day 2009

click

wherein i reduce my life to bullet points because i don't have time to post in full sentences

• summertime starts next week!
• repainted the very large guest bedroom and are moving Princess out of her small bedroom into it next week while she's at her mom's as a start-of-the-summer surprise
• new bedspread, rugs, lamps, paint, curtains whole new 1st-grader look: no more pale pink princess, lots of bold purple, pink, blue, orange, and lime green; J doesn't see the big deal--obviously he was never a seven year old girl
• Princess is going to summer camp at Kitten's daycare - SO looking forward to dropping them off at the same place each morning
• trying to make summer plans, gave Princess the choice of visiting any state contingent to oklahoma, she picked kansas - what's in kansas?? - we convinced her to do arkansas; will probably go to branson 2 nights then eureka springs 2 nights - suggestions welcome
• annual lake trip with my family coming up in a few weeks
• Kitten's 9 month check-up is next week - NO VACCINATIONS THIS TIME so don't have to worry about that for another three months
• J blew out his knee last sunday (kneeling in front of the fridge to check out what kinds of beer we had after helping my sister and her husband remodel all day) which ended us up at the ER; we've consulted with ortho and had an MRI today, check-up next thursday will reveal whether he'll need surgery to repair what is probably a torn ligament
• work is crazy, hectic, miserable, annoying, and makes me clench my jaw, but i still wouldn't trade the flexibility that having my own practice gives me for anything, because you can't put a price on being able to skip out of the office immediately without having to make up the billables over the weekend when you get a call about a sick kid
• Kitten and Princess are complete opposites, i can already tell - Princess is very cautious, "wait and watch" type of girl; Kitten sees it, wants it, and is INTO it in 0.395 seconds
• southcrest hospital ER had us in and out in 1 hour - impressive for the second ER visit of my life
• my first visit: hillcrest, 10p.m., friday night, handful of friends, accident (not mine) with a bottle of spiced rum, a new glass pitcher from pier one freshly washed in hot water, and an ice maker in the dorms
• Kitten update: favorite baby foods: peas (yeck), cherry applesauce; least favorite: bananas, squash; pulling up and sitting down proficiently, moves from object to object (couch to coffee table), will be walking in no time; says "gaga," "yaya," "baba," and a little "mama" and "dada," but doesn't yet assign meanings to anything
• my sister and her husband are still remodeling their house and it is going to look amazing when it's finished
• my sister and her husband also adopted a new dog, lexie, who is like a long-lost twin to their yellow lab maggie
• if you see my sister or her husband be nice to them because their plate is FULL and they can't really speak in full sentences right now
• Kitten's still sleeping in the pack and play in our bedroom; after we finish Princess's room i'm going to actually dec-or-ate Kitten's room with the goal of having her sleeping in there by her birthday in august - we can't have her dreaming in anything less than a well-appointed bedroom, can we?  i've picked out the pottery barn kids "brooke" bedding pattern and hopefully will be able to buy it before they discontinue it
• made homemade chicken fried rice for dinner tonight and it is SO much better than the stuff from Asian Chef down the street
• and finally, congratulations to my friend jennifer taylor who just found out she's having a GIRL!!!!! to become a little sibling to her son blayne.  welcome to club pink.  i know you're thrilled.

mother's day

“If you are a dreamer, come in. If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, a hoper, a prayer, a magic-bean-buyer.  If you're a pretender, come sit by my fire, for we have some flax-golden tales to spin. Come in!  Come in!”  -Shel Silverstein

8 months old, 16lbs 2 oz

where: under the piano

when: friday afternoon

likes: pulling toilet paper off the roll, opening drawers and emptying them of their contents, the dog bowl

dislikes: having her face wiped, diaper changes, squash

she takes my breath away.

thanks, mom, for making me the kind of woman

who could love her own daughter this way.

if chocolate is the answer, the question is irrelevant

sometimes, you need a chocolate cake in your life.  not because it's anyone's birthday, or a holiday, or any other reason.  

thus was Princess's opinion yesterday evening.

and who am i to deny a child chocolate?  the importance of chocolate has been deeply ingrained in me since birth by my mother, who has been battling a serious hershey-bar-a-day addiction since 1977.  and she's still thinner than me.  *shakes fist at the sky*

she fed us hershey's for breakfast on standardized test days because she read that chocolate improves mental acuity.  hey, worked for me!

anyway.

that says "Happy Friday," not "7APQY PNIDAY." 

my cooking is hearty and rustic;

my detailed icing skills are less than stellar.

i'm more paula deen than barefoot contessa, and you know what?  i'm okay with that.

and NOW i will share with you, my few faithful readers, my family's generations-old, top-secret recipe for chocolate cake from scratch.

this recipe is so simple, and yields such amazing results, that i promise you will never bake another chocolate cake from a box.

GRANNY'S SOUR CREAM CHOCOLATE CAKE

("Granny" was my great grandmother - my mother's mother's mother.  I think she'd be okay that I'm sharing this recipe with you, but don't tell the ladies down at the First Christian Church because it's possible she never shared it with them.)

INGREDIENTS FOR CAKE:

2 cups flour                                  1.25 t. baking soda

2 cups sugar                                 0.5 t. baking powder

1 cup water                                   1.0 t. salt

3/4 cup full fat sour cream        1.0 t. vanilla

1/4 cup shortening                      2 eggs

2 heaping T. cocoa powder (i consider "heaping" an understatement)

dump it all in a bowl in whatever order.  mix well.  pour into a greased-and-floured (really even that step is optional) sheet cake pan.  bake at 350' for 35 minutes.

INGREDIENTS FOR ICING:

1/3 cup softened butter               3 cups powdered sugar (approx. 1 box)

2 heaping T. cocoa powder       1/2 cup full fat sour cream

2 t. vanilla

dump in a bowl.  mix well.  ice cake.

let the cake cool before you ice it or the icing will melt on the cake and be too runny, not set up right.  but i find that if you let the cake cool for about 10 minutes while you're assembling your ingredients and then throw it in the fridge while you actually make the icing--even though i'm sure you're not supposed to put a hot sheet cake pan directly onto a tempered glass shelf in the fridge (although i've avoided disaster so far [but it reminds me of one time when my mom was making gravy from roast drippings in a pyrex dish on the stovetop which is supposed to be okay and the pyrex dish EXPLODED and if that happened inside my refrigerator--nooooes!]) then the cake will probably be cool enough to ice.

***

and then, because it's friday and we've made a cake for no reason,

sometimes it's okay to set the warm cake on the coffee table and eat it straight out of the pan.

sometimes.

(did i tell you J cut his hair?)

Princess looks a little like a black mamba with all that chocolate in her mouth and missing teeth.

"i have to brush my teeth GOOD tonight!"  -Princess

happy [chocolate] fridays!