A brief conversation between a mother and a son while preparing dinner.
Nathan: “Mom, when will Zoey play foosball with me?
Mom: “Have you asked her?”
Nathan, as he rolls his eyes as if thinking, “Is this lady serious?”: “Yes”
Mom: “Did she say, Yes, No, or maybe later to put you off?”
Nathan: “Well, she did say later.”
I stir whatever was cooking while Nathan walks around the table.
Nathan, with a mischievous grin: “I like to think she meant later when she told me, ‘not today’.”
Today is the first day of school. Nathan and Zoey are officially a 5th and a 4th grader. Man does that ever make me feel old.
Do you remember how on the first day of school you would dress in your best clothes, have the outfit all picked out and ready for the morning? Maybe that was just me (at least until sometime in high school when I finally realized it didn’t really matter what I was wearing. Today, Nathan tried to wear a shirt that has a monkey shooting flames from its butt. It’s a funny shirt (especially if you are a 10 year old boy), but not really appropriate for school. Being the uncool mom that I am, I made him change shirts.
At work, it was someone’s birthday so I told them I would bake a cake. When asked what kind she would like she was no help. She said she liked the frosting of a German Chocolate Cake, but didn’t really want a chocolate cake. When I did a search for “cakes with coconut” a few popped up, but this one sounded like it had the most promise. I made two cakes, one for work and one for us to eat at home. I am so glad I did. It was totally worth the effort of making a cake from scratch. The cake was absolutely delicious.
Here are the things I did differently:
A) I used two sticks of butter instead of shortening.
B) In an effort to make the cake slightly healthy (and to offset a pure butter cake), I also used fat free cream cheese for the frosting.
C) I don’t keep buttermilk on hand so used a measuring cup with 1 tbsp vinegar topped off with milk.
D) On the second cake, I used two 9 inch cake pans instead of three. There really wasn’t enough batter for more than two pans.
E) On all of the cakes I bake, instead of greasing then flouring, I spray the pans with Pam then sugar. It works just as well and leaves no flour residue on the baked cake.
Italian Cream Cake (From Beth Lott’s Mom)
For the cake:
1/2 cup shortening, room temperature
1 stick butter, room temperature
2 cups sugar
5 eggs, separated and at room temperature
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup buttermilk, at room temperature
2 cups shredded coconut
1 cup finely chopped pecans or walnuts
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
For the frosting:
1 (8-ounce) package cream cheese, at room temperature
1/4 cup butter, softened at room temperature
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 (16-ounce) box powdered sugar, sifted
3/4 cup finely chopped pecans or walnuts
Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F and grease and flour 3 (9-inch) cake pans.
In the bowl of an electric mixer cream the shortening, butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add the egg yolks 1 at a time, beating well after each addition. Sift the flour, baking soda and salt together onto a sheet of waxed or parchment paper. With the mixer on low speed, add the sifted ingredients in batches alternately with the buttermilk, beginning and ending with the dry ingredients.
In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites until stiff, and gently fold into the prepared batter. Add the coconut, pecans and vanilla and fold into the batter. Divide the batter among the 3 prepared cake pans and bake for about 25 minutes, or until golden brown and a tester comes out clean when inserted into the middle of each cake. Allow the cakes to cool in the pans for about 10 minutes before turning them out onto a wire rack to finish cooling. When the cakes are completely cool, stack the layers with the frosting and frost the sides and top.
While the cake is baking, prepare the frosting. In a large bowl combine the cream cheese, butter and vanilla and, using an electric mixer, beat until smooth and creamy. Add the sifted powdered sugar and mix until thoroughly combined. Add the nuts and fold together. Keep refrigerated until you are ready to frost the cake.
Allison has been on a roll with the funny comments the past few days.
Greg has been learning how to play the harmonica for a few months and carries it with him on road trips. Over the weekend we drove an hour to a bigger city for school clothes, haircuts, and supply shopping. During the drive Greg pulled out his harmonica and started playing. Allison piped up from the backseat, “While we are shopping can we get some earplugs so I don’t have to listen to Dad play?”. When I turned around to look at the little imp, I noticed that she had her hands over her ears.
While waiting for Nathan’s turn with a hair stylist, the kids were looking at a magazine. Nathan pointed out a style that he liked (long and shaggy just like all of the other boys his age). Greg came in from the car and the first thing Allison told him was, “Dad, Nathan wants to get his hair cut like a dork!”, and gave a little laugh.
Tonight was meet the teacher night at school. Unlike last year, there were no social mishaps. Zoey moved campuses to the same school with Nathan so he took us on a tour. He pointed out various rooms like the Library, the Math and Science Lab, and the SAC, room. Allie misheard the name of the last room. “I sure hope there are people in that room so I can slap them!”
Work has been kicking my butt the past few days. I’m not going to completely bore you with the details but what I thought was going to be a routine backup of the server ended up crashing one of it’s hard drives over the weekend. I don’t mind admitting that I’m pretty geeky. It’s something with which I’ve had plenty of years to adjust. I still hate when something goes wrong with the servers. While I know the basics, it’s just enough to keep my head above water. Thankfully, when I married Greg, he came with two brothers who know more than anyone should know about technical stuff. With much help, we got it back up in time for open of business Monday morning.
Besides servers crashing there have been program updates (which are always buggy) and other random things that have kept me at work so much the past 4 days, that I just don’t feel the urge to jump on the computer and post a blog entry when I finally make it home.
To keep you entertained, here are some pictures of LT and my dad’s family puppy Libby from way back on Zoey’s birthday weekend. They were puppies. When they got too tired to chase and nip at each other, they would just lay down and keep nipping.
They just look oh so mean.
Not really any words today, just pictures. Thank goodness they didn’t expect us to eat any. These were taken about 2 weeks ago. Back when we were still getting rain almost every day and had not started breaking the 100 degree mark.
I apologize for the lack of posting. I’ve just been lazy the past week. I have pictures, but they are not uploaded to flickr yet. There may be a video or two in the works, but I had to free up some hard drive space on the kids’ computer (it is the one we use for video editing since they don’t need all of the space videos take up). There is also a point to be made that there just hasn’t been anything worth posting.
During the summer when my brother and I were little, I think we spent almost every day that we could at the city pool. There was a deck for bathing in the sun’s evil rays that was the prime spot to put your towel if you wanted it to stay dry. It never failed that someone had a portable radio that would be drowned out by the sound of everyone splashing and swimming. We would have contests to see who could dive off of the high dive and swim the farthest towards the shallow end without coming up for air, or who could do the best cannon ball and splash the life guards or try soak the people on the upper deck.
This picture is of the newly renovated pool (ok last year) but it looks like they took out the high dive and the slide. The kids who swim there now don’t even realize the fun they are missing.
Because there isn’t a community pool here in our little town, we were lucky to find a lady that offered swimming lessons from her own pool the first summer we moved here. Last week was the last week for swimming lessons and Greg took the video camera with him so that I could see that Allison really does swim like a fish.
Because they have been taking lessons for the past 5 years, Nathan and Zoey just work on perfecting the strokes and dives they have already learned.
Zoey still usually jumps in because on her dives, she goes in knees and belly first.
During “free-time”, the kids take turns surfing across the pool on a boogie board.
How did you spend your summers when you were growing up?
A little grossness from the mind of a 3 year old.
Allison and I were hanging out watching TV and talking in my room.
Allie – “Hey mom, Ratatouille sounds like rat-a-poopie. Why would anyone eat something that sounds like that?”
Me – “Yuck! I would never eat rat poop!”
Allie – “Yeah, me neither!”
- a few seconds go by, then Allison whispered, “Dad didn’t say, ‘Me neither’, he must like to eat poop”. Then rolled around on the bed laughing herself silly.
Zoey’s slumber party weekend was a success. All of the girls arrived ready for some fun and we sent them home exhausted. I hope their parents forgive us. Between the trampoline, swing set, pillow decorating*, and karaoke** we had plenty of activities to keep everyone entertained. At the end of the night we had them settle in to watch a movie, hoping that they would all drift off to sleep. Fat chance. Eventually we turned on Radio Disney, turned off all of the lights, and the grown ups feel asleep to the sound of whispering girls.
I felt like I was teetering on the edge of insanity for most of the night. There wasn’t really a time when things were out of control, but I felt like there was a huge possibility that one thing would send the whole night into chaos. Eventually, two of the girls decided to storm out of a room declaring that no one was paying attention to them. This cracked me up, since a) they did it together and b) 10 seconds later everyone was looking for them because it was their turn to sing. Thankfully, the crisis were easily repaired with a few words and a hug or two. No one’s feelings were hurt too badly (with 7 little girls there is always a good chance for tears).
Somehow it came up in conversation that you say boys are handsome and girls are beautiful. The end of this part of the conversation went this way and sent all of the girls into a fit of giggles.
Girl 1 – “actually girls are beautiful and boys are ugly”
Girl 2 – “what if you were a boy?”
Girl 1 – “I would be the only handsome one, all of the others would be ugly”
*Ugh, what a mess. (hopefully, I did not ruin my favorite skirt since I was an idiot and forgot to change clothes)
** We have some great video footage of the girls singing along with High School Musical.
*** I thought it would be funny to put on black bars a la isabel.
As we all have come to realize, the new photo montage at the top means it’s almost time for someone’s birthday.
Things seemed to go alright last year, so tomorrow night we will be hosting another slumber party for a slightly early celebration of Zoey’s 9th birthday. This time I have, hopefully, more age appropriate activities and food that won’t turn up little girls’ noses. Fun things they will be doing? Using rags to curl hair, decorating pillowcases, fingernail painting, karaoke, making s’mores, and general craziness.
The rest of the weekend will be family filled with my parents coming down for a visit and a birthday breakfast on Sunday. Wish us luck!
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