Nerd Night: Spicy Gingered Carrot Cake

by Mir on April 25, 2016 in Dungeons & Dragons & Diabetes, Haven't been hit by lightning yet!

This weekend I Planted All The Things and Baked All The Things and also managed to burn a spectacular burn across my arm in an impossible location while I was rotating the pans in the oven for this cake. I am talented! Now on my left arm, my tattoo is busy scaling/flaking (“SOON I SHALL REVEAL MY TRUE FORM!” I keep screeching at the children, who have long suspected I am actually Cthulhu underneath all the gray hair and under-eye bags), and on my right arm, I have a 2″ long blister. I’m a mess.

I’m such a disaster, I never even told you to go read my latest advice column over at Alpha Mom, which you should really read if you have a high school senior in your house you are thinking about drowning like an unwanted kitten. (Not that I’ve ever had such thoughts. More than once every few minutes.)

ANYWAY. Recently I scored a deal on a metric butt-ton of ginger chips (I think I paid, like, $7ish for 6 bags) and when it arrived I was all, “Whoa. That’s kind of a lot of ginger chips.” Personally, I love all things ginger and will happily eat crystallized ginger like this straight from the bag, but I knew it would be a harder sell to get the kids to eat it. So: Carrot cake! Surely that would work. Yes? Yes!

ginger-carrot-cake (more…)

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In a word: OOF

by Mir on April 20, 2016 in Aspi(e)rations/AD(D)orations, Offspring: ecstasy and agony

In the ever-losing game of balancing out the time I spend with each kid so that neither assumes I love the other better—or both of them assume I love the other better, but I feel pretty confident that they are being ridiculous drama llamas—I was thrilled to discover that the day after Chickadee’s birthday, there was going to be a screening of Autism in Love at our local indie cinema.

“Hey Monkey, would you like to go see this documentary with me? I think it’ll be pretty interesting.” I was braced for a shrug or a swift refusal (this would, after all, cut into his gaming time…), but to my delight he agreed right away. (I also invited the rest of the family, by the way. But it ended up just being Monkey and me, which was fine.)

This movie caused me to have A Lot Of Feelings, both because of the movie itself and how Monkey reacted to it. The premise is simple: they follow four autistic adults who are either in or want to be in romantic relationships. Two of them are a couple, one is married (but his wife is in the hospital with end-stage ovarian cancer, and it’s unclear if they ever lived truly independently), and the youngest of the bunch is a young man who really wants a girlfriend but is struggling with… well, everything, seems like, but especially that.

There are highs and lows in the film, but it was the ride home that was most interesting. (more…)

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Forever marked

by Mir on April 19, 2016 in Growing, Offspring: ecstasy and agony

Remember the Very Special 18th Birthday Thing I mentioned yesterday?

We did it.

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Nerd Night: Buttered Popcorn Chocolate Chunk Cookies

by Mir on April 18, 2016 in Dungeons & Dragons & Diabetes, Offspring: ecstasy and agony

I’m not gonna lie; I’m a little verklempt today. (Spellcheck insists that verklempt is not a word. Spellcheck is now dead to me.) In just a few short weeks, my blog turns 12, which isn’t all that remarkable, I suppose. But it means that when I started here, Chickadee was just 6. And today, Chickadee is 18.

I once gave birth to a baby and now that baby is a full-grown adult human (theoretically) and I HAVE MANY FEELINGS TODAY. I will give you just a glimpse of some of that, in a minute, but of course we all know the important thing here is THE GOODIES. (Of course.) This morning the kids had traditional birthday cinnamon rolls, as is dictated by family law (prepared yesterday, refrigerated, and pulled out and baked wayyyyyy too early this morning), but yesterday for Nerd Night I made buttered popcorn chocolate chunk cookies.

popcorn-cookies (more…)

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Before you ask…

by Mir on April 13, 2016 in Growing, Offspring: ecstasy and agony

… no, the bathroom isn’t done, yet. I have decided, however, that we’re going to spend 100% of our family and any entertaining-guests time in that damn bathroom once it’s complete, as it will then be the nicest/newest room in the house and I want to make sure our enjoyment of it outweighs these weeks and weeks of ineptitude and incompleteness. (“Welcome to our home! Please follow me to the upstairs bathroom. Now admire it. I SAID ADMIRE IT. Yes, very good, thank you. We think it’s lovely, too. Can I offer you a beverage? No, don’t move, I’ll bring it to you here in the bathroom.”)

In the meantime, I’m working on taking it in stride, as best I can. This whole thing where my kids keep forcing me to grow as a person is REALLY cutting into my righteous indignation, I tell you what. You can hop on over to Alpha Mom to read more about how we’re changing the stories we tell ourselves these days.

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Nerd Night: Banana Pudding Bars (and bonus mom-ery)

by Mir on April 11, 2016 in Dungeons & Dragons & Diabetes, Haven't been hit by lightning yet!, Offspring: ecstasy and agony

Nerd Night was on hiatus for a few weeks (Easter and other scheduling issues), and lo, there was much sadness across the land. “Why aren’t you baking us delicious sugary things?” lamented my spawn. It was tragic, truly.

Sometimes I get a wild hair about a certain kind of recipe, and other times a recipe just sort… suggests itself to me. Like, two weeks ago, Nilla Wafers were the Penny Item the day I went grocery shopping, so I ended up with a box of those. And then a week ago, Jello Pudding mixes were B1G1. So I figured I’d make a good ol’ southern banana pudding, but of course both of my children actually don’t like banana pudding because “the texture is weird with pudding and chunks all together,” so I found this recipe for banana pudding bars, instead. If you look at their photo, and then look at mine, you’ll see that mine don’t look anything like theirs, for some reason.

banana-pudding-bars

Why? I have no idea. I made the recipe as directed save for three minor changes: 1) I used the entire box of Nilla Wafers (and a little extra butter) for the crust, because what was I going to do with extra Nilla Wafers?, 2) instead of two eggs, I used one egg and one banana (more banana flavor = more betterer), and 3) I added extra white chocolate chips because yum. Also, the recipe says to bake the whole thing for 10-12 minutes (after the crust pre-bake) and that is a DIRTY LYING LIE, because I ended up baking it for… at least 30 minutes. Maybe 35. I think that was just a typo, honestly.

The children report these were “dense and banana-y and delicious.” (They should be, as one pan contains 3+ sticks of butter.) Monkey also added his highest praise of “The texture is very pleasing.”

Now here’s something that has nothing at all to do with baking: (more…)

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It’s all about moderation

by Mir on April 8, 2016 in Haven't been hit by lightning yet!, What do I do all day?

I mentioned that I’ve been making bread again, right? The thing about homemade bread is that… then you have a lot of bread lying around. Weird how that works. And my first few batches of homemade sourdough didn’t rise quite as much as I wanted them to, plus they weren’t terribly sour, which means they were excellent for things like toast but not so much for things like sandwiches. You know what else homemade, dense bread like that is great for? Overnight French toast.

If you’ve never made this before, go make this overnight bananas foster French toast immediately. And look, I’m not gonna lie… I made this for my kids for dinner, because my children need more calories shoved down their gullets, but this is not health food. (I made it with homemade wheat bread so I’m okay with it.) Just don’t think about it too hard; it has BANANAS which are HEALTHY.

Me serving my kids French toast for dinner: Questionable parenting. Me trying to help a reader grappling with sensitive teenage identity issues: Hopefully better parenting, but I guess only time will tell. And I feel like balancing some compassion and understanding with carbs has its place, too.

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Time keeps on slippin’, slippin’, slippin’…

by Mir on April 5, 2016 in What do I do all day?

I feel like we are busy all the time and there are a million things happening at once AND YET I am also somehow getting nothing done. This is… probably not good. Some of it is under my control and some of it is genuinely not, but even the stuff I can control is often being replaced by other, perhaps less pressing, things. Because I’m a dumbass.

EXAMPLE 1
Thought: “Oh, I should really work on revising my resume.”
Action: Revising my resume.
Action: Spend a week cultivating my own sourdough starter, commence various baking experiments, throw away a few loaves, eventually produce decent sandwich bread for my family.

EXAMPLE 2
Thought: “Right, we have all those things to schedule this summer. I should get on that.”
Action: Scheduling those things.
Action: Scheduling things for the 300 volunteer committees I am somehow serving on, as well as finally submitting some receipts for reimbursement because a year ago I bought some candy for the concessions stand to sell and I just remembered.

So basically I am about a year behind on… stuff… and in the meantime MAH BAYBEE is graduating in less than two months and MAH OTHER BAYBEE is also doing non-baby things and I am verklempt. So! A few recent snippets: (more…)

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Some things just suck

by Mir on March 31, 2016 in It's not a regret, it's an "experience", Offspring: ecstasy and agony

I’ve been whining about our unfinished bathroom for… several weeks, at least, by now. What a mess! What an inconvenience! A first world problem, to be sure, but ugh. So annoying. And I’ve been trying really, really hard to gain some perspective on this, because it’s not that big of a deal.

The good news is that today we have a mirror! Not that I haven’t ABSOLUTELY LOVED Monkey coming downstairs every day with rumpled hair after his shower—soliloquizing on how maybe no one has noticed, but their bathroom STILL DOESN’T HAVE A MIRROR—to grump his way into my office bathroom and make himself presentable. I thought today the mirror and frame and remaining finish work was going to be completed, but HAHAHA of course not. The vanity needs some final touches that involve something called a “finishing kit” which is on backorder. Still: progress.

The bad news is that, much as you should never pray for patience, you should never sit around telling yourself to get a grip and get some perspective, this isn’t really a huge issue, because then surely life will hand you something harder. Nearly 18 years into this parenting gig, and I still haven’t figured out how to keep my kids’ hearts from being broken. I’m, like, a perpetually unfinished bathroom. SO CLOSE AND YET SO FAR.

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Nerd Night: Easter Whoopie Pies

by Mir on March 28, 2016 in Dungeons & Dragons & Diabetes

For two weeks in a row, now, there hasn’t been Nerd Night. This would be a Major Crisis, but fortunately yesterday (for Easter) we found ourselves at a gathering that included most of the Nerd Night crew. So: no official game, but at least the kids got to hang out together. Also, I baked, because it seemed like the thing to do.

Specifically, I made two kinds of whoopie pies, because whoopie pies are a pain in the butt, but hey, it was Easter, after all.

whoopie-pies

In case you want to make your own, the lower image is the traditional chocolate version with no changes, and then the top ones are these lime-filled ones, though I added some ground ginger to the batter, too. (I added two teaspoons and it wasn’t enough to be noticeable in the final product. I’d go at least a tablespoon, next time.)

We ate, drank, and were merry. I brought two dozen pies to the party and they all got eaten. It was a good day.

(Did I hide 2 chocolate ones in the back of the fridge and put them in the kids’ lunches today? Maaaaaaaaaybe.)

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