Category: Family

The Meat Roll Revisited

.Reading time 4 minutes.

How does a person post with a misspelling in the TITLE? That’s a dumb person. I don’t know anyone that dumb and I’m glad. Since today’s theme is dumbness, here is a story:

There once was a girl,
who loved a meat roll.
Sixteen years passed and she didn’t see that meat roll that whole time.
She missed it.
And one day, she decided that enough time had gone by. So she squinted and frowned over a dingy digital photo of her meat roll recipe, which truthfully she was just thankful to have. And she went to the store without making a list of the things on that recipe photo. Most people would view that as a mistake. She would, too, when she got home and started to brown her ground beef and realized that she didn’t have an ingredient. It was just a small ingredient. Maybe she could get by without it. It was just the french loaf. Just the ROLL portion of the meat roll. Idiot girl. Does she own a pencil and a pad of paper? Yes, she does. She just isn’t a frequent user of such.

So she talked her feverish son into going back to the store, again, for that final, rather important ingredient.

And she made the meat roll. With the right amount of beef. It rolled just fine.
And she blew a tender kiss to her meat roll and said, “See you at dinner!”

The End.

I had to call Todd for a cooking question. There are so many unfortunate things wrapped up in that fact that I have decided not to address any of them. I will make a couple of observations about the meat rolling process:

  1. It is harder to roll a meat roll with a 4-yr-old than it is to do it alone. Though I was not good alone, I am practically disabled with the help of short people.
  2. I do not understand why you have to buy enough flat leaf parsley to sod your front yard just to have one tablespoon for a meat roll. This makes no sense to me. I know it was only 99 cents. But how ’bout let me pay a dime for a smidge, you know? This bushel could have clothed Adam AND Eve.
  3. You know how a 20-yr-old college guy acts when you hand him a naked baby? That’s me with dough. Or spices. Or parsley. I hold it out away from my body like it’s going to wet me. I am completely out of my element. I have sympathy for those frat boy babysitters. But I wouldn’t hire them to sit for my kids any more than I’d hire me to cook for anyone.
  4. Is this Doll Week? You wouldn’t know it by this post.
Helper!
Doughy Bigness
Spooned and Pressed, evenly and slightly
Annnd, that would be hair...on the meat roll.
What I needed vs. What I had. Slight differential.

Would you like to come over for dinner? It’s a meat roll. We’ll make sure there’s no hair on it. Mmm.

The End. Actually.

Get Your Cheer On, Doll Fans

.Reading time less than 1 minute.

Feeling a little underwhelmed today? No worries. Here’s a little message from Cheer Baby.

Yeehawwww! Wahoooo!

What in the world is she saying? Susan’s remarks made me laugh and then I listened to the cheer about 8 more times. I think she is saying:

Munchkins say, “How-de-do!”
We are here to cheer for you.
Yeehawwww! Wahoooo!

It’s really the only nice cheer she has. The rest of them involve taking people down in vicious, awkward ways…

It was never supposed to be about Improvement

.Reading time 3 minutes.

Todd and I were talking on the way home from church tonight. Actually, everyone was talking on the way home from church tonight. When this occurs simultaneously, it sounds like a bad crowd noise scene in a low budget Japanese film. Often Todd and I cannot hear each other. But tonight we could.

“I started laughing in class tonight, inappropriately, when I thought of a new food contest,” I said.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Hold a raw egg in your mouth for 60 seconds and then spit the yolk as far as you can. Distance will determine the winner,” I replied.

“So basically,” he responded, “Your blog is now a stunt show.”

“No,” I said, firmly. “We just have Food Fridays.”

“But you said that Fridays were going to be you doing something you’d never done before. For growth. That’s what the tomato was,” he stated, quite reasonably. I ever-so-vaguely recalled some portion of this conversation.

“Well, the tomato went bad. There was no growth there. It was never supposed to be about improvement,” I said.

“Ok, then,” he said. “You’ve just become a morning DJ show in written form.”

Hmm. That’s not good. We’ll have to do some thinking on that one.

Today ran away with me. I felt like I could not keep up, which probably was somehow related to going to bed at 3:15 a.m. and getting back up at 6:40 a.m. That’s not good math and it definitely isn’t the better part of wisdom.  I will say that what IS the better part of wisdom is that the only thing I took to school for Mama’s Boy’s birthday was some well-thought-out goody bags. Anyone who has read the Cake Wrecks entry from awhile back will know that I should not transport live food. Ever. Or bake. Or serve. Dropping off goody bags is right up my alley. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a gruesome goody bag incident. I’ve certainly never caused one. That feels good.

So the tomato didn’t work out so well. And I can’t play the trumpet. I don’t discipline myself very well in going to bed on time. But ultimately it actually IS about improvement.  For an ancient lady going on 3.5 hours of sleep, this day was a slam dunk. But I’m not chancing two sleepless nights in a row.  So I bid you a fond farewell for now.

I need your doll stories. Or pictures. Or videos. Or poems. Or genealogies.  Next week is going to be fun. Fire away.

Dear Boy,

.Reading time 5 minutes.

It is 2:13 a.m. on March 16, 2011. It is my Mama’s Boy’s birthday. Every part of my back and eyelids are telling me to climb in bed next to Jingle Joints (my 9-yr-old. Why he is here on MY side of the bed is a lengthy, rather dull story, so I’ll skip that one for a slow day in Blogville.), but my heart is telling me to take a few moments and honor one of the most extraordinary boys ever born.

He truly is. Extraordinary. Almost extra-terrestrial really.

He was born on a Tuesday afternoon and placed immediately up against me for a first hold in this world. After about a minute of a strained cry, the doctor determined he wasn’t quite all right, so they ushered him away from me and he was gone for the next 8 hours. That was an exhausting 8 hours, swollen with anxiety about what was actually happening in the NICU. As it turned out, it was fairly standard stuff. But it isn’t standard to not have your arms around the baby you’ve loved for 9 months and who has only been in the world for a few hours. There is nothing that feels standard about that. When they finally let me see him, it was about 8 p.m. I was shot. But I was so happy to be headed down that corridor in a wheelchair. He was hungry. And screaming. Really. Really. Screaming. He can still scream, 7 years later. I scrubbed my hands, rolled around by his bassinet, and the nurse handed me my pink, wrinkly disgruntled baby. I laid him up against my chest and said,

“Hey, boy. It’s mama.”

And in that exact instant, he stopped crying. Not a peep. And then I started up. Because I couldn’t believe that he was here. That he was mine. That the sound of my words could be a salve to anyone’s soul. It was a moment I will remember until I don’t remember how to string two words together anymore.

That was the day he became my mama’s boy.

I ruined that beautiful scene 10 minutes later by almost passing out, actually throwing up into a cup, and handing that sweet swaddled nugget back to a stranger. Who knew having a baby could be so hard? Oh, yes. Everyone. But it got better from there. And it has ever since.

Since it is 2:27 now, I will not try to recap the 7 years following. They have been amazing. How can he be that cute? That smart? That weird? How can he not know that someone is about to club him for being so annoying at the worst possible moment? How does he not sense when the joke has gone too far? How can his jokes make me laugh so hard right before they go bad? How could God have been so good to me?

I need to find him a good wife. He’s amazing…but he’s going to need a good, good wife. I have begun praying on that one and will continue. But as with everything, I believe I should try to do my part. And so I will post a video that I hope will serve as a Meet the Arranged Husband audition tape. Have your daughters watch it. Send me one in return. And we’ll talk.

Happy Birthday, boy. You are amazing.