I am about to call this a day. I wonder where that phrase originated. Elaine, get on that one. If it’s interesting, tell me about it. If it’s dull, I don’t care. I imagine a greasy old dude walking over to his kerosene lantern and saying, “This is a day.” And then he exchanges his overalls for a nighty and climbs into bed.

That’s not exactly how I will do it. I will just announce it on a blog. But the reason I would call it a day is that it is a day. A day that is done, but a day nonetheless. It is what it is called.

This brings me, albeit awkwardly, to things that are called the wrong thing. Or perhaps I should say that they are irresponsibly defined. A baker’s dozen. Why do people DO that? Why do I have to know that a Baker’s Dozen is 13? Why can’t that just be called 13 of something? A dozen is 12. A Baker’s Dozen should be 12 of something that belongs to that particular baker.

Really. I mean this.  This is hard for people like me. People who struggle to read the recipe right are certainly going to be challenged by the cutsie colloquialisms that belong to real cooks, don’t you think? The jargon is staggering.

And not that this is really related, but just walk alongside me for a second. A cake mix.  Wouldn’t you think that is just for cakes?  Is everybody supposed to know that you can use a yellow cake mix for yellow CUPcakes? There aren’t separate mixes for cupcakes?

Well, maybe that just seems really, REALLY obvious to every last person that is over 11 years old. Maybe even to people who are under 11. Or maybe to people who are over 11 but don’t speak a lick of English. Maybe I’m the only English-speaking, over-11 person in the free world that would question whether there’s such a thing as a dedicated cupcake mix.

The answer was as disconcerting as the fact that there are two kinds of dozen.

And so with that, I will call this a day.

Day.

I recently acquired a new doll. This one belonged to the Informinator’s daughter. We’ll call her InformiJunior. While I laughed my head off when I first heard what this doll can do, I must sincerely acknowledge the following:

• InformiJunior loved this doll.
• My own girls now love this doll.
• I think I love this doll, too. Just enough so that I panicked when I couldn’t find her today. There’s a lot to be said for a person, or a toy, that can cheer for you while simultaneously mocking the other team.

Anyone that can get by with these cheers has my vote. So to kick off doll week, we’ll start with my favorite cheer and the other four will follow each day this week.

Just to be very sure you understand what Cheer Baby is saying, I’m posting the lyrics. Chant along. It’s a tad addictive.

Riding on a donkey, sitting on a cactus.
We think your team needs a little practice.
Jump in the tub.
Pull out the plug.
There goes your team,
Chug, chug, chug.

I wish I could extend the hand of friendship to the man or woman that wrote those words. I mean, cactus and practice? Pure genius. And then, with a stroke of vengeful rancor, Cheer Baby wills the other team into the tub, where she sends them spinning down the drain with a triple chug “take that!”  Awesome.

And just for my own edification, I did a Google Images search on Cheer Baby. It didn’t turn up my baby, but it turned up these little gems.

Some Teletubby Cheerleaders…

And then this one. Little too much mixture of doll and reality for my taste.

Here’s Bad Hair Cheer Baby in a laundry basket or something…

And here’s one in a perpetual squatting position. She must have great quads.

And a shout out to the Longhorn fans…

Whoa. I’m going to stop after this one, because there is just nothing else to say. What in the world?

It all started with one recipe.

The Italian Meat Roll.

It was 1995.

“This is either divine or we’re going to spew it out of our mouths the first bite we take,” I said to Kelley, my sister-in-law, who was joining me on this grand cooking adventure. We were carefully perusing the pages of our new Cooking-Once-a-Month book. And dude, if we were not excited about it! This was going to revolutionize our lives. This would feed our families (three people, total) for a month and would require no thought from us beyond that first day of cooking. This was awesomeness, Missy-style.

Then I started reading my menu choices. Split pea soup. Lentil stew. Corrugated Cow Tummies. Spit in a bucket. Why would you split peas anyway? They are already so tiny.  And I still do not know what a lentil is. I just know they shouldn’t be eaten. In stew or elsewise. But we jumped in and started making our month’s menu plan and accompanying grocery list. We had committed. There was no turning back.

I have no memory of what would have to have been a massive trip to Publix. I suspect that the part of my brain that protects me has suppressed this memory forever. As much as I hate the grocery store, I can only imagine how painful it must have been for me to shop for a month’s worth of ingredients for recipes that I was already questioning. Beyond acquiring groceries, the next step was to plan a Saturday when Kelley and I could both be available to cook all day. Doesn’t that sound fun? Stand up all day on your only day off work and do the thing that you absolutely hate to do for even 15 minutes at a time. But in theory, this was going to save me from doing it every night when I was brain dead and unmotivated. In theory.

I have only a few sketchy memories from that day of cooking 16 years ago. One is that my feet hurt really, really bad at the end of it. I had recently injured my ankle and I think it was swollen up like an old lady’s in pantyhose by the end of it. I also have a flash of memory about the split pea soup and lentil stew. I remember cooking it…stirring…smelling…squinting…trying to cook with my head and nose at a complete right angle. This is the color of the Incredible Hulk. And I bet this is what he smelled like when he was mad and beating people up. I’m never going to eat this. And I didn’t. Ever. I threw out a frozen block of Hulk Stew 6 months later. It landed like a brick in the bottom of my trash can. I think I heard it crack on impact.

And, of course, I remember the Italian Meat Roll.

I remember that meat roll like it was last night and my name is Giovanni.  The recipe was spread out in front of us in a kitchen the size and shape of a tie box. The ingredients were also spread out in front of us, occupying what teensy amount of counter space we could afford. Thaw dough. OK, Publix took care of that one. Now what? Spread into a 14 x 24 inch rectangle. 14 x 24 inches. That’s 2 feet by a legal sheet a paper. Yowza. That is one big ole dough rectangle. Well, okay. We started rolling that out. It was supposed to be a quarter inch thick and the aforementioned hugeness of rectangularity.  Done. Next…

Brown ground beef; stir in remaining ingredients. Get the beef, I said to Kelley. 2.5 pounds. We started browning. And stirring. It smelled a whooooole lot better than split peas or lentils, I can tell you. On this one point, my memory does not betray me.  Spoon filling evenly onto dough, slightly pressing filling into dough. Hmm, now we are definitely getting more complicated. We’ve gone from objective math to subjective adjectives. And we are spooning evenly ONTO and pressing slightly INTO. We started spooning some cute little dollops onto the dough…very evenly, of course…and pressing those into the filling. And we spooned and filled and pressed and shaped and pressed and filled and spooned, slightly and evenly. And then we wiped our furrowed brows to observe our dough and filling creation.

That is a lot of beef.
And dough.
But mostly beef.

Roll dough lengthwise like a jelly roll and cut into 24 1-inch slices. There’s that math again. It was time to roll. The oven was preheating. We were ready. So we started rolling. We rolled that 24 inch x 14 inch slab of dough up over that warm ground beef. Except that we really didn’t roll it. Because it wouldn’t go. There was no room to roll anything. That was like trying to wrap a giant zucchini with a miniature banana peel. Well, okay. We won’t roll it, per se. We’ll fold it up, ever so gingerly, over the beef. So I tried that for about 3 seconds. That obviously wasn’t happening either.  We had ourselves a big fat 3T Beef Baby trying to squeeze into a 12-month dough onesie.

So, let’s both get on either side of this thing, I said to Kelley. You fold that side, I’ll fold this one. Ready, heave.

Nope. Now the dough was starting to disintegrate completely. It look liked some poor kid’s minnow net. We had caught some beef. And it ruined our net.

What in the Abraham Lincoln is going on here? Shouldn’t this be easier that this? I don’t think it was supposed to take 20 minutes and a forklift. Kelley was perplexed, looking over the recipe for the 7th time.

Wait a sec. How much ground beef did we brown? she asked.

2.5 pounds, I answered automatically. She started laughing. Really, really hard. I was kind of aggravated at the entire process, since as I’ve stated, I already hate cooking. But she was laughing really, really hard and could no longer speak English to share with me what was so very funny. But her finger was lodged on the page in a very purposeful manner and so followed with my eyes. And then I started laughing too. I was also crying, mostly because of the laughing, but also because I hate cooking and split peas and having to make second trips to the grocery store. I plopped down on the ugly tile floor of the tie-box kitchen so that I could laugh properly without further swelling my old lady pantyhose leg.

The recipe called, rather plainly, I might add, for 2.5 CUPS of browned ground beef. That’s quite different from 2.5 pounds. Especially when you start jellyrolling it into mushy pizza dough. When we were all done laughing and crying over the beef that ate the pizza roll, we stood back up, straightened our aprons, and made a new plan. We tossed the abused and evaporated dough into the trash can, went back to Publix for a new one, reduced the beef by more than half, and rolled that meaty deliciousness up into the bread dough like a hand in a glove.

Well, that only took a half day. Cooking once a month was quickly becoming cooking FOR a month. Sweet mother of the Incredible Hulk.

Ah, the meat roll. I never did cut it into 24 1-inch slices. I just couldn’t further press my luck. So we cooked it as a solid roll and cut it as we ate it, in any size slices that we wanted. And though it had exposed the losers in us, we loved that meat roll. With this little dose of honestly, I announce to you some Recipes for the Unskilled and Lazy. I’m 3 parts unskilled and 1 part lazy. But I’m all parts “can’t cook”, so these recipes have been tried and true by a person who truly isn’t intuitive in the kitchen.

And though I royally messed up this first attempt at the Italian Meat Roll, you will not make the same mistake and I feel it is safe to put this recipe into this category as the first meal on the list. More easy meals and leftover creations are coming soon in this category. Also, this is Doll Week. Let the good times roll.

Wow, I’m grumpy. So, so grumpy.
It’s funny how this works. Funny peculiar, not funny ha ha. To my kids, it must be funny bewildering. I’m sure they don’t know what to make of me on a night like tonight.

I think I must have a very, very fine line in there somewhere. On one side of the line, there is celebration of life and children. The more the merrier! Ha ha ha ha! Jubilation! Yes, 7-10 children at a time! Come one, come all! I don’t even need to know where you live and it doesn’t matter how you behave when in my presence.

On the other side of that line, there is Go to Bed. Now. Wny am I the only one who ever picks up ah.toy around here? Bunch o’ ingrates. Dirty little street urchins.

The process of crossing over from one side of the line to the other is completely random and illogical. It can take all day to get there, such as today.  It can be prompted by excessive noise. Mess. Or perhaps even warm ears.  The mess factor is definitely a large trigger point. I hate tripping over junk. But I do enough of it to create my own bad dance moves.

The sad fact of all of this is that I don’t have any solutions. Barking = Ineffective. Frothing at the mouth? Almost humorous. Restrictions? Aah. Who cares? Lecturing = Blah blah blah blah blah.  Rewards? No, thank you. We are already spoiled rotten. Punishments? Pa-shaw.

I need solutions. I’m thinking about just throwing out all the toys and giving each one of them a corn cob doll. It was good enough for Mary Ingalls after all. And Laura didn’t even have that for crying out loud. So what if it isn’t 1885?

As I was exhaling from a day of pick pick pick, mess, mess, mess, bleed, whine, spill, flop and spill again and then as I was further exhaling from having typed it all up, thus reliving it for the second time, my 2nd born walked in.

“Mama,” he said. “My neck has bumps all over it. So many bumps. All over. Feel,” he said. It’s true. He’s all broken out. His glands are swollen. Something is going on. I need to call my mom, the doctor. She’ll know what to attribute all of these odd maladies to.

“Yeah,” I said. “You’ve got something going on with you right now. Probably the best thing we can do for you tonight is get you some sleep,” I said.

“Yeah,” he agreed, starting to turn and walk away. Then he turned back around. “I want to give you a hug,” he said.

“I want to give you a hug back,” I said. He wrapped his arms around my neck for a moment. Then, as he pulled away, he kissed me square on the mouth, which is a bit unusual for him. “I love you, boy,” I said.  Now go to bed. Now. And pick up your trash on the way up the stairs. Ungrateful slob.

Just kidding. I feel much better now. I guess all I needed was a hug.

I have a special skill. It isn’t blogging. Or dog grooming. Or even chin ups, Flecky FigPenny. My own special talent, shared only with a small contingency of people, is ear folding. I can fold my 40 year old ears inside themselves, like they are a compact, portable body part. Folds down for easy storage! I’ve been doing this for almost 40 years, as a companion to my thumb sucking habit. I know. I sound like a real catch, don’t I? I do not still suck my thumb, just to be perfectly clear. But I do still fold my ears. And in constantly doing so, the cartilage never hardened. They are as floppy as a cocker spaniel’s.  But the strangest thing about this weird little skill is that I prefer them tucked in. This is a problem, because it doesn’t look normal to be doing this. I do it subconsciously and often find that I’m in portable mode, unawares, with 10 people staring at me trying to figure out which birth defect to log this under. I distinctly remember a Sunday morning in church about 14 years ago when I glanced over into a section of the building we called the Alcove and noticed several pairs of eyes glued to me with very bewildered expressions. I reached up, slowly, like a person trying not to move when a pit bull is about to eat them alive. Oh. They were tucked in. Both of them. I tried to pop them out without anyone seeing my hand or my ears move. Kind of a ventriloquist situation, except without the mouth. Or the puppet. I tried to just look away from the gawkers and get back to the preaching at hand. Listen to the sermon, people. Don’t be afraid of what is different.

Anyway. Besides the very odd fact that I prefer my ears tucked in, there is one more oddity wrapped up in this: they have to be cold. For it to work…and be comfy…my ears have to be cold. The summers are rough. I just can’t get that quality time with them like I really need. But the worst ear-folding week of my life came in July 2000. Hawaii. Everything else about Hawaii was to the utmost level of perfection. The only problem was that the islands were 84 degrees at all times, with no air conditioning in any vehicle or establishment anywhere. So my ears were hot. For a week. I kept trying to fold them, and then I would pop them out in disgust and frustration.  Hours would pass. I’d try again, only to fail. Again. This went on for more than a week. I was desperate. I even tried ice. That was too cold.

Many wonderful things occurred while in Hawaii. Boogie boarding, toe-ring wearing, cliff diving, snorkeling with the sea turtles, etc. And when we boarded the red-eye flight 8 days later, I left a small part of my heart there on that island. But when that cold blast of airline AC came on overhead, I aimed it straight at one ear and then the other, tucked in, and went to sleep. Trading a small part of my heart for the large, floppy part of my ears was small price to pay.

My ears are cold tonight. It’s a good ending to a good week.

Say what you will about this talent. Maybe you’re even one of the ones I’ve caught staring. But deep down, you are wishing yours folded down for easy storage too.

Got a doll submission today. I spit part of a girl scout cookie out when I saw the photo. Dig deep. I know you have a past with some doll, somewhere.

Mom, Dad – Is Thomas in your attic? I need to know.

OK. Moving on.

I’m only going to do this one more time, at least today. Because right now the horse is already dead. And I am beating it with very little mercy.

This Daylight Savings thing. I thought we’d made it through unscathed. Why was I thinking that? Am I above natural law? On Sunday, I thought perhaps I was developing that skill. And I am thankful that Sunday was smooth and pleasant from start to finish. But that was Sunday. And we’re at Tuesday now.

I typically blog at night. You might note the fact that I didn’t last night. That’s because I had been whipped about the head and neck all day by my four short people and two extras. Four + two more makes SIX. Not just a regular six, either. Six that are under the influence of DSAUTODT. What does that stand for? Well, I’ll tell you. Daylight Savings Time is a completely false term. As I stated on Sunday, we aren’t saving anything. We didn’t save up over six months and have an extra hour to spend here. We stole it. We shifted it around unnecessarily and to our detriment. So I’m sitting at my own boardroom table and changing the name. Daylight Shifting Around Unnecessarily To Our Detriment Time.  DSAUTODT. If you practice, you can develop a pronunciation for that. It’s sure to catch on once I reach the right people. The fact that it is slightly hard for the tongue and palate is a reflection of the pain the change inflicts.  At any rate, the kids were crabby. Crabby like they’d taken a pill to transform them into an angry, hungry, mid-hibernation, bear with no conscience. Angry with enough energy to launch a space shuttle. Really I’m only talking about the middle children. They were a mess.

Today is a new day. With a new announcement. No, people. There is no fifth kid. Please go bother someone with only three. Better yet, really go bother someone with two. I’m off the market.

There has been much attention paid to Babe, the Snappshots doll. (By “much attention”, I mean that of the 10 people who stop by here regularly, 4 are quite bothered. Just wanted to clarify that the numbers here are not staggering ones.) I’ve heard everything from keep her, we love her to please no more pictures of abandoned sad little dolls. Fair enough. I will no longer photograph her abandoned. But in all fairness to me, I would like to point out that she is A DOLL. Not a real baby. She isn’t really even the representation of a real baby. She’s a real baby’s plaything.

But that’s an argument we can’t settle. What I’m noticing, though, is that many, many people have doll stories. A large portion of these stories are scary doll stories. A doll that haunted you as a child. A doll that started out cute and somehow three weeks later had all of its hair standing on end with the glassy-eyed gaze of a woman scorned. How DOES that happen? But there have also been stories of sweet dolls, funny dolls, sad dolls surfacing. Discovery Channel has Shark Week. Snappshots has EXTREME DOLL WEEK. Send me your stories, pictures, blurbs, poems, videos. Anything that depicts, verbally or photogenically, a doll, past or present, that is extreme in some way. Starting Monday, March 21, I will begin posting the more extreme things that come through. So if you’ve got something EDW worthy, send me an email at missy at snappshots dot com. I’ve already received two things that are definitely going up next week. This is a theme with promise.

I’ll leave you with an example of the creepy, since it is what you’ve come to expect of me. I borrowed this one from a friend’s garage (sorry, friend…please don’t be offended by this). She had a look in her eyes that is going to keep me up at night. So I set her in my hallway last night and promptly forgot I had done so. THREE TIMES this morning she scared the daylights (DSAUTODT) out of me. She also got an immediate remark from my 4-yr-old as she came down the stairs this morning, AND scared my 9-yr-old son. Twice. With dolls like this, who needs a pit bull?

The 9-yr-old actually screamed a little when he came around the corner to this…

And….carry on.

If the children had awakened as Smurfs this morning, I couldn’t have been more shocked. They are indeed still human, still pale, and still have full heads of hair — but to my great shock, Day 1 of Daylight Stealings Time was a flawlessly, perfectly perfect slice of perfection. Actually, I think the Smurf thing would have shocked me less.

I’ve been a parent for almost 10 years. This is my 9th Daylight Stealings transition as a parent. And this is the first one that didn’t embody the spittings of a grumpy dragon. They awakened happily on their own before 7:30 DST, we were early to church, they sat like angels through a long sermon, they ate their lunches like hungry street urchins, they helped rake and bag 8 bags of leaves from the front yard this afternoon (I can’t even go into the details of how well this one went…I’ll pass out), and sat through evening church as angelic as they had in the morning. No crying. No complaining. All day long.

I have two theories on the day:

• Either my Daylight Stealings Transition Planning document is finally tweaked to efficiency and effectiveness,
  OR
• I’m going to look up carefully as I walk out the front door tomorrow morning to avoid being beaned in the head by the dropping of the other shoe.

Until next November, may your memories, and mine, of that lost hour sweetly sustain us. Carry on.

A few minutes ago, while I was sitting on my rumpus relaxing, I heard a very small knock at the front door. This was a sound definitely made by a small set of knuckles. I went to the door, opened it, and looked down. Standing there at my stoop was my tiny 4-yr-old daughter. She had been playing in the front yard. As I stood there, she beamed at me, stretched out her arm, and said, “A presentation for you that is a present.”

Ah. A presentation that is a present. I looked to see what was pressed in her palm. It was a stack of green leaves from our Ligustrum tree. She had picked 7 leaves from my own tree and brought them to me.

I beamed back at her, bent down to take the leaves and hug her, and said. “Oh, thank you so much! This is wonderful.” And then I went to set the leaves down in the kitchen window sill and went back to what I was doing. Those were already my leaves. I didn’t need leaves. And yet, it was a very sweet thing that made me happy. She had brought me a love gift.

As I set those leaves down, I immediately thought about my pitiful attempts to bring my own “gifts” to God. Everything I can give Him is already His. Most of my gifts are weak and tiny. And yet, He wants me to come to Him. He wants us to offer Him our pathetic little offerings from the largest parts of our hearts.
I thought about this verse:

Acts 17:25-28
²⁵ Nor is He worshiped with men’s hands, as though He needed anything, since He gives to all life, breath, and all things. ²⁶ And He has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and has determined their preappointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings, ²⁷ so that they should seek the Lord, in the hope that they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us; ²⁸ for in Him we live and move and have our being, as also some of your own poets have said, ‘For we are also His offspring.’

He doesn’t need anything from me, but because I am His child, He wants the sorry stack of leaves from the tree that was His already. So I need to keep bringing them to Him. Thank you, Beloved, for reminding me of this today.

Well.
If you are reading this tonight, finish quickly and then go immediately to bed. You are in for a rude shock when that alarm goes off on your Sunday morning. Because it’s THAT night of the year. The night the Daylight Gremlin comes and steals the hour it has no right to touch.  All day I have been strategically planning for this. OK, if we eat breakfast and are done by 8:20, lunch at 11:36, dinner at 5…then 5 will be the new 6. We can throw the kids into the bath at 6:20. They can each have 4 minutes in the bath, which brings us to 6:36. Brush, jammy up, launch into bed, fall asleep immediately, and maybe we won’t have any melt downs tomorrow. As if. My plan mostly worked. It would have gone slightly better if SnuggleMonkey hadn’t scraped both knees today, causing her to walk like Baby Frankenstein throughout all of my evening instructions. That added at least 6 minutes to my process. By 8 NEW TIME, Beloved was out. The boys were out by 8:30 new time. And SnuggleMonkey was confined. That’s all I can say about her.

I predict a disaster. For 9 years, I have carefully written out a Daylight Savings Time Transition Planning document. It is foolproof and scientific. I have followed it painstakingly and tweaked it each year to utter perfection. And yet, each year, there is a screeching wreck that occurs the following morning between attitudes, and opinions, and the darkness that should not be. And so…though I have carried out this plan perfectly…a morning disaster awaits me. Only morning can tell on this one.

Pasted in below was my journal entry from last year’s Daylight Savings deal. I wrote it up on a Sunday morning.

What are we saving here? Daylight? Did we save it? No, we stole it from morning, when PEOPLE NEED TO BE AWAKE. So it will now be light when I want them asleep at night and dark when they are forced shockingly awake. It is now 7:18 on Sunday morning and every person is asleep. I find this silly. For the non-church going world, they are loving it. Sleeping in. It’s paradise for them. For the church-going world, why can we not start these ventures on Friday night? I want to propose that all future ridiculous Daylight Stealings start on Friday nights, so that at least I can roll over and go back to sleep in the dark on a Saturday.

One year later, I stand by this emotion. To ease the pain of even the thought of a lost hour, I am going to stare at this photo of a tiny Beloved. It will stop the crying of my tired soul…