Here we are adulting
Hey! How was your weekend? Didja do anything fun? Things were pretty uneventful ’round here.
I mean, um, I’m pretty sure there wasn’t anything good on TV, though my firstborn did graduate from high school. That was pretty much the most exciting thing ever for a million reasons, chief among them that I will do almost anything to see her looking as happy and proud of herself as she did on Saturday. It got even better on Sunday, when everything was over and we bid the relatives adieu and commenced spending the entire day lounging around in our pajamas. Not that the rest of it wasn’t great, you understand, but that day of communal couch-potato-ing was sort of like the collective exhale. It was glorious.
My parents were here, and Otto’s godmother, and after graduation we threw a small not-a-party because Chickadee did not WANT a party, so we compromised with “we are just inviting some of OUR friends to come drink some sangria and eat fancy cheese and hang out, you can show up or not.” Originally she said she would probably be elsewhere, but oddly enough, she ended up spending most of the evening with us, leaving to attend another party for about an hour (they had cake, so: priorities), but mostly sitting outside with the rest of us, feet tucked up underneath her, phone constantly in hand, looking every inch the incredible young woman ready to take on the world who she’s somehow become.
Lest you think everything has changed, however, rest easy. Be ye not alarmed! The Chickadee we know and love is still herself in this new “adult” form. read more…
Recent discoveries, in no particular order
Graduation is on Saturday, and so I will just be over here Cleaning All The Things and Cooking All The Things and Crying About All The Things, if you need me. However, I’ll leave you with a few items I’ve noticed of late, because I am nothing if not helpful.
1) Wishing you could lose a little weight, but feeling stupid for being shallow and wishing you could lose a little weight? Solution: Have one of those fancy keep-track-of-everyone’s-profile bathroom scales, and then one day while trying to flick some lint off the scale with your toe before weighing yourself, somehow accidentally tell it you’re profile 4 (your husband’s) instead of profile 3 (you). You will be whatever weight you are, BUT then it will cheerfully inform you you’ve lost 75 pounds since you last weighed yourself! You’re welcome.
2) Go make this as pasta salad immediately for every summer barbecue and event henceforth if you like avocados. Use a more pasta-salad-y (totally a word) pasta; I did gluten-free penne. Add grape tomatoes, too. But it’s basically avocado pesto and it tastes like summer and you can customize however you like. (Do it cold. COLD. I tasted it warm and it was weird. Do cold. And add LOTS of lemon juice so it doesn’t brown.)
3) My 18-year-old graduates in just a few days and it turns out she still doesn’t know how time works. Should I be worried? We had an argument (full disclosure: arguing is kind of what we do) because she asked to go out with a friend “this morning” because “they’ll be busy this afternoon” and I said okay and then she said she’d be home for dinner and I had to explain that she was asking to go out ALL DAY and she insisted that “this afternoon” means “dinnertime” and then my head exploded. THAT IS NOT HOW TIME WORKS. But okay.
4) You may not be able to teach an old dog new tricks, but it turns out you can teach a young Monkey how to drive. Add it to the long list of ways in which he just keeps on being awesome.
That about sums it up
As we continue barreling down the road to graduation (AAAAIIIIIEEEEEEE), life refuses to stop, regardless of the MANY MANY FEELS that seem to be popping up everywhere. Sheesh.
To top it off, today is Otto’s and my 9th anniversary. I’m not entirely sure why he’s still here, but I do bake a lot of cookies and stuff, so who knows. He continues to be my anchor in the very best sense of the metaphor: my strength, my favorite, my dependable partner in everything, really, but most notably in late-night-television-watching-and-tormenting-the-dogs-with-popcorn. Everyone should have an Otto. But not MY Otto, because I’m using him and you can’t have him. (Uh, I’m going to stop talking about this now. He might catch on that although I love him madly, he can surely do better.)
I do have a post over at Alpha Mom for you today, all about the current whirlwind, but first I’m going to share a photo because 1) my daughter is gorgeous, no? and 2) in the history of senior quotes, in my unbiased opinion this is the most true and perfect one that ever there was. That kid is gonna be okay.
Testing, testing
School is almost over (!!!) for the year, and my kids are deep in exams. The great state of Georgia (and most of the country, it seems) is eager to make sure that No Child Is Left Untested, so between SLOs and EOCTs (Student Learning Objectives and End of Course Tests) and APs (Advanced Placement), I’m pretty sure classes are over and the only thing the kids are currently learning is how many kids can actually walk right off campus with a single test pass. On the rare occasions when they find themselves in class WITHOUT a test, they seem to be engaging in the time-honored learning traditions of 1) watching movies and 2) eating snacks.
With all of this test mania going on, you’d think they’d be studying their little butts off, but you’d be… incorrect. And I am relieved to know that I am not the only person who is struggling with teens who don’t feel the need to study. More on this SUPER-FUN phenomenon over at Alpha Mom.
Ready or not
This whole school year has blown by in about three seconds. While I think to myself, “Wow, this year is just ZOOMING by!” about 428 times a day, I must’ve randomly ALSO thought, “Wow, I haven’t been sick in a long time!” at some point last week, thereby jinxing myself. We had some family visiting for the weekend and I woke up sick on Friday but rallied for their arrival and dinner that night. By the next morning, though, it was clear that I wasn’t going to be able to shake it off. I ended up having a cup of coffee and going back to bed, where I pretty much stayed until yesterday. So that was… not fun. (How sick was I? I was so sick, I sent leftovers to Nerd Night. Blasphemy, right?)
Yesterday I ran a couple of errands and came home and slept for two hours, after. Today I’m shaky but basically upright. Progress! And then I sat down with our big kitchen calendar to fill out the month of May and there’s so much STUFF I am overwhelmed and thinking bed was a much easier place to be, endless hacking cough and all. There’s so much happening and so much changing and I’m not ready. Then again, most of those big changes aren’t about me. Over at Alpha Mom I’ve got a few thoughts about my kid’s upcoming college adventure, only it’s not about the kid you already knew was going to college.
More reasons why I am a little high strung
Did I mention that I—like every other person in the world who likes to cook and bake and who gets periodically sucked into food trends—made some sourdough starter a while back? I did, and now I have returned to that place where I don’t buy bread, I just make a couple of loaves every week. That’s all good and well (I enjoy doing it, the family seems to enjoy eating it, and it’s both cheaper and more nutritious than the stuff from the store), plus I’m experimenting with making other stuff (sourdough pizza crust! sourdough garlic knots! sourdough oh look I’m making something else I can’t eat but you guys enjoy it!) and generally feeling JUST LIKE a homesteader of yore. (You know, if said homesteader had a wheat allergy, drove a hybrid, and had a couple of very spoiled lap dogs.)
Anyway. This morning I went to make some dough for this week’s bread and got my beloved KitchenAid going and I turned my back on it to do something else and shortly thereafter the mixer WALKED OFF THE COUNTER AND CRASHED TO THE FLOOR. It unplugged itself and everything. The results, in no particular order: I had a minor heart attack, the floor was both gouged AND cracked (awesome), I panicked that the mixer was broken (it still works but… I think I need to have it looked at), and I swore a lot at the bread dough. THIS IS WHY WE CAN’T HAVE NICE THINGS, STUPID SOURDOUGH.
Also (this is not related but it’s another reason I’m high strung), I am busy trying to get my kid ready for a dorm when most “what to buy” lists aren’t geared towards kids who would not, say, remember their own heads if they weren’t attached. So I came up with a supplemental list for those of us whose kids need a little extra support.
Nerd Night: Spicy Gingered Carrot Cake
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!
In a word: OOF
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. read more…
Forever marked
Remember the Very Special 18th Birthday Thing I mentioned yesterday?
Nerd Night: Buttered Popcorn Chocolate Chunk Cookies
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.
