Date

I had a lunch date with Jim and Jack on Friday.  It was pretty fun and delicious.

Jack brought his mini-mimi-cup, aka Lilly's American Girl doll cup.

He refers to his sippy cup as "mimi-cup," you might spell it as "me-me cup."  He now refers to all drinking vessels as "mimi-cup." (I spell it mimi because I really liked the character "Mimi" from the musical Rent, and I took Italian in college and one of their main pronouns is mi, I think.)

The server told us that the soup of the day was a butternut squash, cabbage soup.  He told us that even though it sounded disgusting and he personally disliked butternut squash OR cabbage, the soup somehow tasted amazing.

I can't tell you how much I doubted his statement, so I ordered the soup just to prove him wrong.  However, I was wrong.  This was some of the most amazing soup I have EVER had. I also dislike butternut squash and cabbage and I started to doubt that those two ingredients were even in the soup.

I challenged the server and begged for a recipe.  He asked the chef and the chef refused, he wouldn't even tell me the ingredients.  The chef comes into the restaurant at 11PM and makes soup until 3AM in secret so no one knows what goes into them.

I called the next day to order more soup and it was gone, no more soup.  The magic chef cooks on whims and doesn't write down recipes.  Now I will spend the rest of my life in search of a butternut squash cabbage soup that tastes amazing.

Bedtime for Jack

Jack was dressed by three different members of our family tonight after bath time.

Then he escaped outside.

Warning: Hippy-natural blog post

I decided on Saturday that I was going to eat "real food." Actually I started thinking about it a few weeks ago, and a few years ago (before Jack) I did eat that way.  I have slowly been moving back to a less processed diet. However, even I am annoyed at my new hippy ways.  I really dislike people who preach about their healthy lifestyle being better than my sugar recipes.

I spent ALL day Saturday cooking, baking, juicing, and making a HUGE mess. Jim helped tackle the project and the mess.  We ran the dishwasher 3 times on Saturday, it needed a 4th go around, but we were too exhausted to empty any more dishes. Sweet Lilly took pictures to document my mess (the rest were deleted).

The kitchen finally arrived at clean status Monday morning.  A lot of the food I made ended up in the trash because it was disgusting.

Last week I made whole wheat pancakes, crackers, and whole wheat tortillas, all a HUGE success.  Even Jack ate them all.  I will continue to make those regularly, only because there were delicious, not because they are super healthy.  If you are like me and despise whole wheat and crave delicious nutritionally void white flour, I found that a white 100% whole wheat flour exists.

Anyway, that is my new focus now, I am pretty annoyed with myself and my hippy ways. Here are some cute pictures of Jack on the trampoline to soften the hippy ways. (Clothes from the gap washed in Tide detergent which has lots of chemicals. See, I am really not a whole lot of hippy.)

The Philadelphia Flower Show, 2012

The Philadelphia Flower Show.  Where do I begin?
The annual Philadelphia Flower Show usually falls on the week of my birthday, it is 2-3 hours away from our house, and it is insanely over priced for a flower show.  As a result we have never gone.  However, the stars aligned for Jim this year and we were all able to attend the big event.

(As I was taking this picture, a lady rushed up to me and said "You do NOT want your picture in front of that sign! Don't you know what it means??"  I assured her that I did know what it meant and that is what made the picture, and consequently me, so funny.)

You may or may not know that Jim is a pretty serious gardener.  He thinks about his garden year round, composts year round, and spends hours and hours in his garden.  I can't tell you how much I admire his desire to garden and how much I enjoy reaping the benefits.  It is quite similar to the little red hen, I am never willing to help with any of the steps of gardening other than eating the final product and nagging about the hose being left out.  Jim has a lot more sympathy and compassion than the red hen and lets me eat his produce.


I digress...


This year Jim was going to attend the show with his mother, who is also an avid gardener, and they were going to have a lovely mother/son outing.  However, the morning of the show I was feeling spontaneous and decided that I would come along, with the children, and we would all have a wonderful day looking at flowers together.

(Lilly was as overwhelmed as I was by the insanity of it all.  Jim's mom is on the left, not the angry lady to the right who was bitter that I was blocking the bonsai tree that was 30 years old.)


Here is a quote that aptly described the flower show from the Huffington Post:  "Remember that intense episode during Downton Abbey Season One when Lady Violet and Cousin Isobel faced off at the local flower show? Well this is like that on steroids...The nation's largest and oldest indoor flower show (dating from 1829) is a huge extravaganza for the horticulture community, annually attracting over 250,000 visitors to the Pennsylvania Convention Center. It's like the Westminster Dog Show meets the Tournament of Roses Parade crossed with a huge trade show and shopping spree for flower people."

Each year there is a theme, and this year the theme was Hawaii.

(This was to simulate walking under water with hundreds of real orchids above you.)

(Main exhibit, this is about as close as I got.)

The flower show sells tickets as general admission, so they don't control the number of people that come in a day.  To say the place was crowded would be an understatement.  We were never actually able to get close enough to the main Hawaiian exhibits. 

I could never actually get a picture without a stranger stepping into the show.  It was so crowded that when Jack was having a fit he leaned out of his stroller and slapped a man on the leg out of anger.  When Jack is angry he looks for things to hit, that man was the closest thing to hit.

I took the children down a long hall away from the crowds, and we spent a few hours there throughout the day to get a break from the flower crowds. Lilly and I decided to call the small space our apartment, and when asked what was her favorite part of the day, she responded "our apartment."  See, I am a fun mom!

Poor Jim. He is a dedicated gardener and I have a feeling I put quite the damper on his day.  I did not complain out loud...too much, and the children and I kept happy faces despite the crowds.  I promise to let Jim go alone next year, and have a fantastic day all to himself.

32

Last week was my 32nd birthday. It is ridiculous that I am 32.  I still feel like I am 27, maybe 26. I am in complete denial that I am 32, have two children, one in school, and that I just had my hair colored to hide some of the gray.

I realized that time marches on, which is much better than the alternative.

I always make high demands around my birthday and Jim is always great at fulfilling them.  He made me a delicious breakfast and had presents waiting, with one hidden in the piano.

We went out to dinner at a hibachi grill with the children.  They were terrified of the fire, they spent the entire meal in one of our laps.

 I was horrified at the inappropriate comments from the "chef."  Let's just say that a hibachi grill at night in a college town is not an appropriate venue for children.  Too much liquor and innuendo for my taste.

My neighbor baked me a Texas sheet cake for my birthday. It was so sweet of her, and equally delicious!

For whatever reason, when I went to blow out my candles, I didn't take enough air and I only blew out one. Everyone was ashamed and Lilly had to help blow out the rest.

I hope the birthdays keep coming for a long time, and I hope that I will look back on this post and think about how ridiculous it was that I thought 32 was old.

Visit

My mom came to visit last weekend and watched the children while Jim and I ran our race.  We had a great time.  We ate lots of food and my mom bought beautiful clothes for my children.

You can see Jack sporting the medals we received after our race.  He wore them all day, both of them.  We all love when my mom comes to visit!!  We watched movies, ate treats, shopped, and just had a great time.

Humdinger.

I am a tad behind on my blogging, it takes so much more time to upload my pictures and edit them now that I have a decent camera.  The files are huge!  What used to take a short amount of time now takes me hours and hours.

I will update working backwards.

We told Lilly it was time for Family Home Evening.  This is how the conversation went:

Lilly:  Oh! Can we play a game??
Jim: Yeah, the game is called clean up the entire house.
Lilly: Mom, really?
Me: Umm.....does that sound like a fun game for you?
Lilly: Yes!
Me: Then yes! That is our game tonight.
Lilly: Okay! We can clean every room as a team, we all work together in each room until it's clean.

How sweet!  It didn't exactly work out like that, but I sure did appreciate her enthusiasm to clean AND work as a team.

On Saturday I ran the half Humdinger race here in Danville.  This is the first year that they offered a half-dinger, which was 4.2 miles as opposed to the 7.1 miles through the mud and mountains.  I was pretty annoyed that they called it a half, when it was NOT a half. A half would have been 3.55 miles, I really would like more credit than "half."  Jim was hard core and ran the entire race for the third year in a row. He would not be shamed by competing in a half-dinger.

The race started out running through uneven corn fields. It's as painful as it sounds. (Photo from race site, I have permission to use it.)

The race was horrible as expected.  People kept losing shoes in the mud, the terrain was uneven and physically painful to run on, lots of obstacles, creeks to cross, logs to balance on, and a pig barn to scale. Some people find this "fun" I find it horrible.  Yet it is my second year competing.

You start running through this cornfield and work your way up into the hill you see in the background.

Not very many people raced in the half-dinger, only 25 women of the 450 racers ran the half-dinger.  I came in with the top runners who ran 7.1 miles, it was so much fun to have a crowd and be cheered on!  At the end  of the race you have to scale a pig barn then jump out the window and slide into the finish line.

I chose the easiest way to scale the pig barn by climbing the hay stacks.  Although you have to scale three cement walls to get to the hay stacks.  They really discourage wimps in this race.  The options were a rock climbing wall, a rope, a rope ladder, and hay stacks.

Yes, I paused to smile for the camera because I was so thrilled that there was a camera to witness me finishing!

This race is not for amateur runners, which I am.  The slowest runners pace 10 minute miles or less in this race. Last year the only reason I didn't come in dead last was because the two women ahead of me got lost in the woods so I crossed the finish line right before them.  To say it was humiliating would be an understatement.  When I crossed the finish line they were already taking down the race, there was no food left, and my husband and friend had circled back to find me.  I am sure they thought I was lying dead in the woods.  Suffice it to say I was overjoyed to finish the race when people were still around to cheer me into the finish line and to eat the food provided!

My friends keep talking about how they want to finish the full race next year.  From the girl who was always picked last in gym class, I LOVED finishing at a decent time.  Even though everyone figured out very quickly that I was a half finisher, I couldn't care less! It was a great few minutes!

My little piano student was there with her mom and they didn't know I was running, she was so excited to see me.  Although today during lessons she did ask me if I had run the half, when I told her I had she said "Oh, that's why you finished so fast."  See, I fooled nobody, but I did get a really good meatball sandwich!

I am totally a poser pretending to be a top finisher, but it was great! So now that I have no more dignity and have sold myself out for a few minutes of fake glory, it's back to training for me.