This is 40, Installment 10

You guys. It's less than two weeks away. The big 4-0. I'll be old in two weeks.

So.

Let's talk about memes.

I feel like I'm fairly meme-confident. I can see one and GET IT. You know, it's subtle and it references something in pop culture and/or the news and I chuckle knowingly and confidently to myself. I make it clear to anyone around me that I understand it. We laugh about it. We're so knowledgeable and worldly. NBD.

The other day my sister sent me a meme that she also attached a caption to. I looked at. Looked at it again.

I had NO idea what it meant. NONE.

But you can't let the sender know, obvs. So I asked my brother what it meant. I asked him several probing questions, trying to extract her meaning from it. It's a meme. It is not supposed to elicit probing questions. I asked him more questions, and then just stopped after several rounds for sheer embarrassment of the texting disaster that was happening on my phone.

I'm still not sure I completely comprehend what it means.

Getting old is hard.

This is 40.

Something I still get: tacos. Yum.

This is 40, Installment 9

The day is fast-approaching. It's less than a month now until I turn 40. I feel like I'm recording my last will and testament here. My last words. But for now I'd just like to write about smoothies. Why? Because they're amazing and I'm completely in love and I think it might make me old. Or else super healthy and robust.

For the past three months I've been making smoothies nearly ever morning. How else do you expect me to eat kale? Turns out kale is not only ridiculously good for you, it's also super filling. I can exist all morning with my tummy full of kale and a whole bunch of fruit and seeds and not be hungry until noon or later. It also cuts down on my coffee-intake, which I suppose is for the best.

I feel like smoothies could be an old person drink. You know, don't have to put the dentures in, just blend, sip through an elbow straw so you don't to raise your head, and swallow. But I don't actually think smoothies are an old person thing; I just thought they might make a good turning 40 blog post.

However, they did make me think of dentures.

So.

This is 40.

Denture-friendly 

In case you're interested in practicing for the denture life, or tricking yourself into eating kale, here's what I've been putting in smoothies. Not all of these into one smoothie, but I've found good combinations of flavors that include these ingredients.

kale

spinach
carrots
bananas

pears

apples

oranges

frozen strawberries

frozen mixed berries

frozen cucumber slices from cucumbers that had been in the fridge too long so I froze them.

frozen cranberries

frozen pineapple chunks

avocado

coconut

ground oatmeal

chia seeds (soak 'em first) 

ground flax seed

plain yogurt (vanilla-flavored when I'm feeling wild)

coconut milk

unsweetened cranberry juice

ice cubes

This is 40, Installment 7

Remember when kid food was cute? I mean, in the beginning it was adorable-- baby's first solid foods, funny faces. Then it got a little messy as they started feeding themselves, food all over the upper bodies. But still cute. And little. Then you could do creative things with the food-- shapes and colors and such, and they'd semi-appreciate it, maybe even help you with making it. Still, it was little.

I am past the little food phase of my parenting life. I'm pretty sure I'm now on to the huge food phase. I have three boys and all they're doing is eating and moving.

Recently I just owned it and started feeding the twins two dinners a day on hockey practice days. They'll down a frozen pizza or two after school and before practice (to be clear, I cook them first), come home from practice, and eat tacos and drink smoothies. The second dinner is the one where they smell like dank hockey gear and sweaty helmets, in case you wondered.

Brian often makes them two breakfasts on hockey game days. Piles of sausages and a carton of eggs. Twice. If they don't eat that much then they end up eating 20 granola bars and 25 string cheeses and we will be out of school snacks for the week. And they're skinny and they're not very tall.

Guys, it's only going to only get worse from here. We might need to take out a second mortgage to afford our grocery bills.

This is 40.

Eaters

It's Autumn Again

We are already two and a half months deep into first grade! Which means...Halloween costume conspiracies are thick and heated. A few months ago the twins were definitely going to be Star Wars characters. But now they are obsessed with Harry Potter. Teddy's biggest obsession to date has been garbage trucks, so we were thinking of making him into a garbage truck. Though just today he climbed into an oatmeal box and called himself a train, so I think we'll go with making Teddy a train costume from old cardboard. He also loves water fountains, which might be more straightforward.
We only have a little over a week, but I think we'll pull something together.

Just as a recap of Halloweens past, here are some of our former Halloween costume links for you to enjoy:

That time I made the boys into ceiling fans
When they were astronauts
The epic dinosaur costumes

Here are some other fall-ish things we've been up to around here.

Cubs baseball

Our fall baseball team this year is the Cubs! It's perfect because the real Chicago Cubs are in the playoffs right now. In fact, they are currently in the National League Championship Series against the New York Mets (who I am still mad at for beating the Nationals), and last weekend our Little Cubs played the Little Mets, which was cute.

Teddy preps the field

Good game, Cubs and Mets!

Snack time: the highlight of the experience

Outside time

We've had marvelous fall weather and have been able to spend quite a bit of time outside, doing predictably fall activities like collecting leaves and acorns, and the less common feeding of Sun Chips to fish, and casting spells on everyone with our Harry Potter wands that we made from chopsticks and hot glue.

My grand plan was to have the boys paint acorns and put them in a glass vase and use them to decorate the mantle. We didn't quite get to the painting phase, but we did have a spirited acorn-collecting competition and I put the best ones in a vase on the mantle. I'm sure it is just a matter of hours before they are blasted off the mantle and scattered all over the living room, but for now they feel festive to me.

We've been to our favorite local spot to enjoy nature, Popcorn Ponds. It's just down our street. We collected leaves, saw a giant toad, turtles, and spiders, threw countless seedpods into the water, and fed chips to an exuberant school of fish.

Tree ate Ted's shoe

Biking

Cal and Clark have been biking. We'd always felt deficient as parents when we watched them try to pedal bikes of any sort. We just don't have the space to store bikes and we don't live in a place that is conducive to learning to ride a bike. But my sister is a bike gal, having worked at a bike shop for quite awhile, and she helped us find good quality second hand bikes, and my in-laws generously are letting us store them in their garage a few miles away. The boys are already riding them! Instead of training wheels they rode around on bikes that were too small for them for a few days and then tackled the big ones. No sweat. Bikers. Bam. Just like that.

More outside fun...

This is probably the first selfie I've pulled off with all of our faces in it.

Pumpkin-getting

Our fall would not be complete without a visit to Hartland Orchards, our favorite farm ever, to get pumpkins and eat caramel apples and kettle corn. We went last weekend.

Out of the whole pumpkin field, Teddy found the one little
green one, and that's what he wanted more than anything else.

We got some normal ones too.

Watching the caramel apples being made...

Just add nuts

We got to bring Aunt Bean this year!

Teddy was not into the whole caramel apple idea.

Cal gets Clark's feet in his face when he tries to catch him going down the
slide.

Teddy went down as many times as we let him and all by himself.

A good day for us all

Drink-making

On Brian's birthday I made caramel apple martinis as well as butter beer, which, I trust all of you know, is from Harry Potter. I found various recipes on Pinterest and sort of combined them. Both drinks were extremely sweet, but amazing. I made a version of the martini not so sweet by using half regular vodka and half caramel vodka.

Here's the butter beer.

Butter beer: I didn't exactly measure it, but I put a bunch of ice cream in the blender with a bunch of cream soda, a couple squirts of butterscotch topping, and some ice. Put it in a cold glass from the freezer to make it seem especially Hogsmeade-ish. 

Tip: Make sure you don't fill the blender too full and be sure to give the mixture air as it mixes so the cream soda doesn't explode the lid off. I have good reason to believe it will. To give it some over-21-kick add a couple ounces of butterscotch schnapps.

The boys drank all the butter beer they could get their hands on.

Caramel Apple Martini: 2 oz. apple cider, 2 oz. caramel vodka,

1 oz butterscotch schnapps, shake with ice, pour glass rimmed 

with caramel sauce, garnish with apple slice.

Pretty!

Fall Snack Experimenting

Today I made apple pie granola bars. I have a recipe that I've used for straight-up granola bars with brown sugar, honey, cinnamon, and vanilla. But, being inspired by fall flavors and such, this time I decreased the sugar and honey and added applesauce, caramel dip, all-spice, nutmeg, and finely chopped and peeled apples. They turned out well, though I doubt anyone would call them apple pie flavored unless they knew the ingredients. They also didn't harden as well as I hoped, but they will be a staple of the lunch boxes this week.

Cutting straight and/or even lines: not in my skill set

Reading

Brian has been reading Harry Potter to the boys and they are beyond obsessed with the books. They are always talking about the books or acting out scenes from the books and their own scenes, loosely based on the books. We have to draw a line and cut them off from Harry Potter talk occasionally. The boys have started real homework! So they're reading even more than usual these days, which is great.

We've read a bunch of fall and Halloween-inspired books as well, but as this post is getting long and tedious already, I'll save my book reviews for the next entry-- which I promise will be soon.

Until then...go play in the leaves or something.

Clark, in full hockey gear, reading to Teddy

Thursday Thesicle

Imagination can flourish in after-dinner vegetable prison.

Thursday Thesicle

Be open to the culinary experiments of children; they could change your world.

(Yes, you see this right. Waffle, bacon, egg, cheese, waffle sandwich- Clark's brainchild)

The Shelves of the Fridge

We've had a busy schedule lately, which has thrown a monkey wrench in our grocery-buying schedule. Since I don't drive, our Sundays usually involve family grocery shopping, and during the week if we need something I can walk to get it or Brian can pick it up from the store on his way home from work. For some reason this week we've just been using up things and not getting to the store and our fridge and freezer are as empty as I've ever seen them. Yesterday I cooked up an unidentified cut of meat. I like lists so I thought I'd record for posterity, a list of what we have in our fridge and freezer for your amusement and for my amusement and my shopping list. Maybe I'm the only who finds it amazing, but if you saw our fridge normally, what with two boys who eat like they have hollow legs, you'd be amazed too.

Fridge
green onions
carrots
lemon juice
peanut butter
almond butter
butter
various jams and jellies
hot sauces
various salad dressings
ketchup
parmesan cheese
soy sauce
worchestershire sauce
salsa
eggs
leftover quinoa and steak
yeast
milk
corn tortilla shells
a tiny bit of hummus
champagne
sparkling cider
ancient can of seltzer water
water
A TON OF BREAST MILK

Freezer
two chicken breasts
pack of bacon
two burritos
butter
corn
peas
cauliflower
blueberries
bag of mixed fruit
ice packs
ice cube trays
A TON OF BREAST MILK

That's all. And our pantry isn't much fuller. Now it's become kind of a game to see how long we can go without buying things and how much we can use up. Can I offer you something to drink? We have water, milk, seltzer water, champagne, sparkling cider, and breast milk.

Though leery at first, because they've traditionally been afraid of carbonation,
(IT'S BURNING MY TONGUE!! IT MAKES MY MOUTH SHIVER!!)
the boys and I polished off a good 3/4 of a bottle of sparkling cider.

Crepes by Clarvin

So I'm sitting here in a quiet house with a nice glass of wine and wanting so badly to work on some long-ish blog posts that have been in my head for awhile, but I know that I won't last much longer and that I'll never get anything posted unless I keep it simple. Somehow these days fly by so fast but they go so slow. They go slowly when the baby is screaming, Clark is having a meltdown over something trivial like orange juice or the way Cal looked at him, and Calvin is screaming for help on the toilet. Those moments take forever. But somehow it all comes to an end in a messy whirlwind and the house is quiet except for the dishwasher and the crickets outside.

So, to make things less complicated I'll just write about today. We read a delightful little library book yesterday called Crepes by Suzette by Monica Wellington. It's an impressive piece of art, actually. The backgrounds for the pages are photo collages of Paris, with real people inserted in places like windows, but the main characters are all drawn in the foreground. At the end of the book there's a crepes recipe so this morning Clarvin and I made crepes. (Clarvin is the name that our friend Margo uses for the twins in order to save time, space, and effort.) We used lemon with powdered sugar and strawberries as filling and they were delicious. I love books that include activity ideas. I highly recommend the book and the recipe.

Here are some pictures from that, as well as some other pictures from the past couple weeks just for kicks.

Master Theodore and I attended Missy's garden tea party to celebrate the
200th anniversary of Pride and Prejudice. Delightful.

Teddy keeps smiling

Hockey started!

The ones down on the ice in the corner? Those are mine.

Little sweaty after, but very enthused, as is volunteer coach, Dad

Clark played third base with Dad at cousin's 10 year old birthday party!

Calvin on deck

The 10 year-olds modified the pitching for the 4 year-olds

Teddy bundled up

Teddy slept through the night last night!