Emergency Cookies!

Posted on 9/24/2008 by cheesefairy

I found myself at a new food-concerned blog today, called everybody likes sandwiches and I was happily scrolling through lots of delicious recipes when I saw a link to an oatmeal cookie recipe. So I followed. It was a post from 2006 and the oatmeal cookie recipe was in honour of that night’s episode of America’s Next Top Model. And there I was, reading it ON ANTM NIGHT. What could I do? Trombone thought he’d died & gone to heaven. “Oh, I LIKE cookies,” he affirmed as he stole chunks of butter while my back was turned. (the recipe calls for canola oil and claims it’s just as good as butter but I actually didn’t have any canola oil OH WELL) Excellent recipe. Delicious.

So go, do it. It’ll take you 20 minutes. Make oatmeal cookies and eat them while you laugh at the supermodel wannabes who can’t eat oatmeal cookies because they are afraid to eat. Especially eat them while you watch the supermodel wannabes pose for some wretched semi-submerged under water “smile with your eyes” photos.

Hey, over here. COOKIES.

The End.

Posted in bloggity!, food, television | 1 Comment

I Finally Found Someone

Posted on 9/24/2008 by cheesefairy

If you are a size 14 or smaller, looking for clothing that is not off-the-charts expensive, incredibly ugly or made of recycled margarine tubs that will melt in your washing machine and if you are, like me, of an older age than the standard mall clientele, (excepting, of course, the Most Depressing Mall in the Universe where the average age is 82) I heartily recommend H&M for your no-frills shopping needs.

I walked in. The staff ignored me. I think I actually became invisible when I walked through the doors, through the magic of Uncool. Left to my own devices, within 15 minutes I had found 7 dresses to try on. I went to the fitting area where the fitting boy had to acknowledge me because I was holding store merchandise and was thus, sort of cool. (Ish. He wasn’t totally convinced.) And we had the following hilarious conversation.

Him: One two three four five six seven, okay so you have seven items? But you can only take in six? So I’m going to put one over here, so, like, you can get it when you’ve tried on the other ones? Like if you decide you don’t want one of those ones, you could switch it for this one and put one of the ones you don’t want on the rack? I’m just going to put it on this rack here…
Me: ……

Sweet, sweet fitting boy. I have been shopping for clothing longer than you’ve been alive. I know how it works.

And then, one of the dresses was just what I was after! And only $30! So I made haste to the checkout where another glamorous teen – I guess they can’t really be teens, or they’d be in school, right? OH MY HELL I am old – took my money and gave me a free magazine, all without looking me in the eye, not once!

If you enjoy the hands-on approach, H&M might not be for you. But if you are someone who has an hour to shop while her mother entertains her children at the park and who doesn’t feel like looking anyone in the eye either, necessarily, thumbs way up in the air baby.

* We got home and were having lunch and I tried on the dress for my mom’s opinion. Very nice, she said. I said to Trombone, do you like my new dress? He said, yes, but don’t forget pants, mummy! (my junk was totally covered, don’t worry)**

** This is what comes of being The Kind of Woman Who Doesn’t Wear Dresses. You raise Boys Who Don’t Know What A Real Woman Looks Like. Vote Conservative! ***

*** I am pulling your chain.

Posted in clothes, trombone | 3 Comments

More Clothes & Junk

Posted on 9/23/2008 by cheesefairy

Did I ever tell you guys that I love the word “junk” as a euphemism for genitals? No? True. Co-worker A used to use it all the time and then a couple of weeks ago Saint Aardvark was telling me about a podcast he listens to that is all about home brewing beer and apparently it is quite a lewd and rude podcast and one of the hosts mentioned that he was talcum powdering his junk, it was so hot in the studio (right, SA?) and I just howled and howled. I think it’s perfect for boys or girls (yes, I am going to teach my children the correct words, this is adult-euphemism only); non sex-part specific and not truly derogatory, because we all have a junk drawer, right? But really it’s full of valuable stuff, or else we’d toss it? I am going to use “junk” as much as I can.

Unless someone posts a comment telling me about how it was originally used to refer to homeless puppies addicted to heroin in which case I might feel bad enough to go back to saying “bits.”

I did a preliminary scouting mission for clothes on Sunday; I am going to a wedding in a month and though it’s not black tie or anything, I don’t have anything remotely appropriate to wear. Hell, as I mentioned, I don’t even have a pair of jeans I like right now. Having not been shopping for non-maternity clothes in quite some time I was (not really) shocked to discover that sarah is right; empire-waisted clothing is everywhere. And it really DOES make me look 4 months pregnant. The alternative this season appears to be sweater dresses and while I can rock a sweater dress till your mohair sheep come home, I do run hot blooded as a rule and in a festive party-type environment where alcohol is being served, I run my own internal combustion engine.

Does that even make sense? I like how it sounds. Junk!

Today the search continues, with a possibly doomed-from-the-start expedition involving me, two kids & my mother. What else are you gonna do on a Tuesday?

Posted in clothes, language | 1 Comment

Peace and Quiet

Posted on 9/20/2008 by cheesefairy

We’re in a phase right now where Fresco needs jiggling to sleep. If you put him down in the crib, he flips and whether or not he can flip back is incidental; it just doesn’t occur to him. He likes looking at the ceiling too much.

I should clarify; he sleeps on his stomach and has been flipping on to his back, my frustrat(ed)ing little turtle. And if he could sleep on his back, I’d leave him be, but he can’t. He just gets more excited and more loud, holy hell he’s loud.

Anyway so I am spending a lot of time jiggling, left foot / right foot / left foot / right foot and sniffing his head and thinking calming thoughts so I am not thinking about all the other things I could be doing if I wasn’t jiggling this damn baby so much, things I used to be doing, back when I didn’t have to jiggle this damn baby so much. More and more, my mind comes back to labouring with him, delivering him, seeing him for the first time. Back even, to the afternoon of the night I went into labour, big and cumbersome at the park, starting to cramp, is this it?

I remember doing this with Trombone, too, in the heat of futzy sleep stuff with him, when he took 45 minutes of rocking and nursing and jiggling to get to sleep I would often sit / stand / rock in the dark with my eyes closed and go through each detail leading up to his birth, telling myself the story and marveling at the miracle of his being there at all.

I began to think I was becoming obsessive but like the sleep futziness, eventually I had turned it over in my head enough to let it go, put it in the “distant but still clear” memories file in my head, out of the “feels like yesterday” memories file.

I am lucky to have had relatively easy labours and I feel peace when I reflect on them. Would I feel differently if I had endured longer, harder (in many senses of the word) labours? Maybe. But I think it’s also a brilliant technique that evolution-brain has developed to calm the tortured mother’s soul. Is it a coincidence that I am coming back to this method of focusing on their beauty and my own strength at the same stage of infant development? Well maybe.

It is also as close as I have come to meditation, rocking these babies in the dark.

( Fresco, 5 months older and cuter than a stinkbug in a birthday hat )

Posted in Fresco, the parenthood, trombone | 2 Comments

You Know the Jeans are The Wrong Cut When

Posted on 9/19/2008 by cheesefairy

I remember a time before low-rise jeans. It was high school, I think. Pants came up to my waist, my real waist, and I wore a belt to keep them there because my waist was a smaller circumference than my hips. I remember this being quite a trial; I would pick out jeans that would go up over the hips and then they would gape at the waist and with the belt, it just cinched all that extra fabric and man, that was nasty.

So I have always thought low-rise jeans are magnificent. The waist of the jeans sits below your actual waist, so the difference between the hips and the waist measurement don’t matter as much. I started wearing low-rise trousers the summer I got my navel pierced and needed to wear bottoms that didn’t interfere with the healing. I never went back.

Unfortunately, after growing and busting out two children in three years, my body is a different shape now than when I was 21 (oh, it is to laugh!) and my actual waist, somewhere up there, is who knows what size. My middle, the vast plain between my hips and real waist, is pretty squishy. Thus, my low-rise pants, while I can still get them on and zip them and everything, have a tendency to create The Evil MuffinTop. Or, as SA was calling it last year, The Donut. Because my belly button in the middle..oh, nevermind.

But is the solution to go to high-rise pants? I think that would be much more uncomfortable. And I think they are ugly. Also. What kind of pants do you all wear?

PS: I mostly tell this story of pantly woe in order to relay the following anecdote. I was preparing to nurse Fresco this morning. I had just dressed myself in a pair of low-rise jeans from last year and a t-shirt. I lifted the t-shirt and the eager baby, who was still nestled in the crook of my arm, dove in and started to suckle. Unfortunately he was a few inches too low and ended up latching on to a thick chunk of my midriff. I was too busy laughing to reposition him right away. When it became apparent no milk was forthcoming, he broke his seal and pulled back to look up at me with a nasty glare. Then he used his free hand to pound me in the ribcage. False boobage! How dare you! he said. My low-rise days are over, I fear.

Posted in clothes, Fresco, funny, more about me! | 6 Comments