Giving up Naps

Life as I formerly knew it, seems to be ending. I believe my daughter is about to give up her naps. :sleepy2:

This would be the part where I emit a primal scream, “Noooooooo!!!!!”:shocked:

There’s something comforting about having the children go down for their naps after lunch. A private moment alone with the hubby, a chance to do something together without the constant interruptions. Our son gave up his naps last year at age 3. One weekend he just stopped taking them. He was awake from the moment we put him down until the moment we went in to get him. Of course, he’s always been an easy-going child. Even now, if we ask him to go into his room and color, he’ll happily obey.

Not so, the Evil Child. :angry: If we tell her to go and color, she’ll say, “No!” :ick: Then she’ll drag a chair across the kitchen table and proceed to take knives out of the chopping block. :woot:

Today when she was supposed to be taking a nap I came in from outside to check on her and she was EATING THE EASTER CANDY. Along with my last Cadbury’s Creme Egg!! I believe I could kill her. A judge would let me off, don’t you think? The penalty for eating the last Cadbury’s egg is clearly equivalent to a murder penalty.

It’s a good thing she’s cute or she would not be turning age three, let me tell you. She just barely made it to her second birthday.

Was she filled with remorse in any way? A smidge. Only because she didn’t get to FINISH eating the candy; that’s the regret she held. :hissyfit:

And the Winner is…

Emma Sinclair for her Crockpot Mexican Chicken! :hello2::worthy: Emma wins a $20 gift certificate to Barnes and Noble.

Once again, all finalists will receive free books. You need to e-mail me your snail mail addresses! If you had to post more than one recipe, you’ll receive more than one book! Thank you again for entering!! (There was a sale on exclamation points at Target…)

Crockpot Mexican Chicken (super easy)

Toss 4 chicken breasts in the crockpot (frozen or not, doesn’t matter)
Sprinkle with one package of taco seasoning
Top with one jar (24 oz) Salsa
May add some hot sauce or crushed red pepper if you like heat.

Cook 6-8 hours (maybe slightly longer if frozen)

I shred it to use in tacos, it practically shreds itself it’s so tender. It also makes a TON of food. I’ve used it for tacos one night and then enchiladas (roll in tortilla and then top with canned enchilada sauce, cheese & bake) later in the week.

Second place was:
Sticky Toffee Pudding posted by Fiona Lowe
(originally created by Jill Dupleix)

The success of this recipe is in making DOUBLE the amount of toffee sauce!

Ingredients:
1 cup dates — pitted and chopped
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 cup boiling water
2 TBSP butter
1 cup soft brown sugar
2 eggs.
1 1/2 cups self-raising flour sifted. (OK you guys…the Americans…you make your own Self raising flour by adding baking soda to it so do that). Unless you live on the coasts and then I think you can find SR flour these days. But when I lived in the mid west in the mid- late 90s it wasn’t there)

Toffee Sauce:
1 cup soft brown sugar
3/4 cup light whipping cream.
1/2 tsp vanilla
2 TBSP butter

METHOD
Mix dates and baking soda in a heatproof bowl. Pour boiling water on top
and leave to stand. Cream butter and sugar until pale, then add eggs one
at a time, beating well after each addition. Gently fold in sifted flour,
stir in the date mixture, and pour into a lightly buttered 18cm or 7″
square or round cake tin. Bake in a preheated oven (180 C)(350-375F) for 30-40
minutes, until an inserted skewer comes clean.

The Sauce
Combine sugar, cream, vanilla essence and butter in a saucepan, bring to
the boil, stirring, and simmer for five minutes. Set aside until ready to
serve, then quickly reheat when needed. Cut pudding into squares and place
each square in the centre of a warm dinner plate. Pour hot toffee sauce
over each square and serve with fresh cream or vanilla ice-cream on the side. (Harry Met Sally, style.)
It’s wickedly good!

Anybody else hungry? :hungry:

The Finalists–Voting Begins!

Thanks to everyone who entered the Summer Recipes Contest. Everything looked amazing. I’ve chosen a few finalists in each category, and I need your help in voting for the winner! All finalists, please post your recipe(s) in the comments section and I’ll mail you a free book! Also, e-mail me your snail mail address so I can send it. Now for the Barnes and Noble gift certificate. Please vote for the one recipe you like the best. The only catch is, you can’t vote for yourself!

The finalist recipes are:

Main Dishes:
Crockpot Mexican Chicken
Sweet and Spicy Salmon
Bruschetta Chicken Bake

Side Dishes
Chinese Chicken Salad
Caprese (tomato/cheese salad)
Unstuffed Cabbage Rolls

Desserts
Crustless Strawberry Pie
Sticky Toffee Pudding
Microwave Chocolate Chip Cake

These all sounded incredibly delicious! If there’s a recipe you wanted to know but it didn’t final, please post a comment and I’ll see if I can coerce talk the person into letting us have the recipe.

Okay, once again, please vote for the recipe you think sounds the best! Thanks for entering. :shimmy:

Last chance to enter the contest!

Okay, there’s one last chance to enter the Summertime Recipe Contest! It’s so easy. Just enter the title of a recipe. No need to type anything further (at least at this point!). Nobody likes to cook in the summer, so we’re sharing our favorite meals.

So far, here are the entries. I’ll be deciding on finalists today, so if you have any other recipes you make during the summer, post them in the comments section. If I have put any in the wrong category, let me know and I’ll fix it.

Main Dishes: (come on, we need more of these!)
Crockpot Mexican Chicken
Bruschetta Chicken Bake
Crockpot Cheeseburgers

Side Dishes/Salads:
Caprese (tomato and cheese salad)
Meatloaf Muffins
Unstuffed Cabbage Rolls
Chinese Chicken Salad
Sunshine Salad
Jell-O Shooters

Desserts:
Sticky Toffee Pudding
Creamsicle Pie
Crustless Strawberry Pie
Lazy Peach Pie
Strawberry Whipped Dream
Mixed Melon Ball Dessert
Toblerone Strawberry Fondue
No-Bake Banana Pudding Pie

Beverages:
Strawberry Lemonade with Splenda

Last chance! Enter an idea for cooking and tomorrow I’ll post the finalists. :woot: Don’t forget–a Barnes and Noble gift certificate is on the line!

Summertime Recipes

I spent all of Friday and Saturday shoveling this enormous pile of mulch. Let me tell you, my legs and arms are still aching. It was eleven cubic yards. You can’t tell from the photograph, but the mulch is waist-high. But our flowerbeds are beautiful now, and they look as though they don’t have any weeds. Hey, I can dream, can’t I?

Now that the weather is warmer, I’m finding it harder to cook. On certain days, particularly when it’s hot and muggy, the idea of cooking or even grilling sounds horrible. :bath: So, since I haven’t hosted a contest in a while, let’s have one that can benefit everyone! We’ll call it the Summertime Recipes contest.

Here’s how it works. Post the title of some of your favorite summertime recipes (you don’t have to write out the recipe yet). Example: Grilled Beef Shishkabobs. That’s all you have to do for now. They can be a salad, main dish, or even a dessert. Enter as many times as you like between now and Tuesday night!

On Wednesday, I’ll narrow down the finalists and we’ll vote on the ones we want recipes for. All finalists will receive a goodie of some sort (free book, possibly?). Then they will e-mail me their recipe and I’ll post them to share. Grand Prize winner gets a $20 gift certificate to Barnes and Noble. :wave::banana:

My hope is that everyone will have a new repertoire of summertime recipes to try out. Good luck! :hungry:

Today’s post…

is over at Dot Moms!

Then you can come back here and share your own interesting moments with a two-year-old. :shark:

Her party went well, by the way. My heart melted into a little pile of butter when my husband came home from the store with a bouquet of chrysanthemums for his little girl. :dance: What a great guy!

The cake tasted good, but the appearance left a little to be desired. Note to self–Mississippi Mud Cakes don’t work well in layers that are not of the same size. Second note: Hot fudge frosting will make the marshmallows bleed out the sides until the cake looks like a volcanic eruption. It wasn’t pretty, but we ate it anyway. :hungry:

My daughter’s favorite present was…wait for it…a cleaning set. Yes, the brainwashing has begun. I bought her a toy broom, mop, dustpan, and feather duster, complete with a bucket of play cleaning supplies. She was in heaven.

Last, the daily total was 7.5 pages. Not bad, all things considered. Today I decided to bite the bullet and finish all line edits for the book I owe two agents. I started on page 203. 87 pages down, 68 left to go. Mostly it’s going very well. There have been a few moments of what drugs was I ON when I wrote this drivel?? But the goal is to stick this puppy in the mail TODAY.

After that, I’ll go paint the shed. :woot: So exciting!

Birthday Girl

Today is my daughter’s 2nd birthday. Okay, all together now: Awwwwww!
I’m baking a birthday cake this morning. It was so hard to come up with the right recipe. She loves chocolate (that, of course, is a hereditary trait) and I wanted to do something a little more special than just a plain chocolate cake. After much debate and searching through numerous cookbooks, I decided upon a Mississippi Mud Cake. Devil’s food cake, topped with marshmallow creme, then hot chocolate frosting poured on top and sprinkled with pecans….Mmmmmm…:hungry:

My family grew up with pies. Cherry pie, pear pie, peach pie (my personal favorite), lemon meringue…you name it. We were all about pie, not cake. Once, we made my mother a birthday pie instead of a cake.

I did make “Death By Chocolate” once.
I will say this–the directions were amazing. It took me two days to make all seven layers, but the recipe would tell you exactly what you needed to do. Blend in a food processor for thirty-seven seconds (that sort of thing). It was great. And I learned that when you’re making complicated recipes, the quality of chocolate really does matter. You can’t substitute melted chocolate chips for melted chocolate bars (I tried that once). But in the end, you come with a great dessert.
On the writing front, I wrote another 10 pages yesterday. That’s a total of 21 pages in two days. Gotta love that. I’m not sure how much I’ll manage today with all the birthday stuff, but I’ll plant myself in a chair and write until 8:00 a.m. After that, lots to do!

But I do have a question before I go. What’s your favorite kind of cake? Or are you a pie person?

Vacation

You know, I think it takes a sick person to be on vacation and be absolutely thrilled at the idea of sitting in front of a computer and writing. Clearly, I am deranged.

That said, I wrote 11 pages today! :flying: See, if I were writing full time and all my children were in school, I could write much, much faster than I do now. It’s the interruptions that kill me. I average about 4 pages an hour if I tie myself to the chair, know what I’m about to write, and do not touch the Internet. Anyway, it was a great morning, and I ran errands after that. I’m now going to kick back and do line edits on another project. I KNOW. The excitement is just too much! Hold me back! :shimmy:

Yesterday, the children consumed their body weight in chocolate, several chocolate bunnies sacrificed their lives on the altar of joy, and hubby and I watched one of my all-time favorite movies The Karate Kid on DVD. Now if I could just train my children to wax the cars, paint the house, paint the fence, and sand the floor, and make them believe they were actually karate training, I’d be set. Oooh, there’s an idea! I could brainwash them into thinking that mopping the floor, vacuuming, and dusting, are all part of their karate training. Mop left-mop right. Big dusting circles. They must be coerced into the Master Plan.

So, did you have a nice Easter?

Happy Easter

The kidlets and I had fun this morning. I boiled 18 eggs and we spent time decorating them. It took all of 10 minutes for two toddlers to dunk all 18 eggs and decide they were finished. :woot: Yours truly also figured out how to use the Magic Crayon in the kit. These things are COMPLICATED, don’t you know that? They don’t tell you whether to color the eggs before or after you dunk them. Last year we tried to use the crayon on top of the egg–of course, that didn’t work.

This year, I had the brilliant idea to color the eggs with the Magic Crayon before dunking them. Yes, I am a Super Genius ™. :wave: Seriously, though, they don’t TELL you these things in the instructions. It’s a complex technical issue. In any case, my kids were able to scribble fantastic designs worthy of Faberge.

Here’s a picture of a little Easter Bunny wishing you a wonderful holiday!

It was a three-chocolate-bunnies kind of day…

Over at Kelly’s blog, she mentioned her company gives out Lindt chocolate bunnies. Today in my box I found a Take Five candy bar, which was nice, but it was one of those days when I would like to crawl inside my filing cabinet in a fetal position and stuff my mouth with jelly beans.

Let’s see…where to begin?

1. School politics and lesson plan minutiae and why not putting checked boxes makes you a lesser teacher than a teacher who does put checked boxes in her plans. Because clearly if you don’t have boxes checked for every blessed thing, you are a SINNER.
2. Discovering that my grocery list fell out of my pocket and I had no clue what I had to buy.
3. Turning around in the freezer aisle to see my two-year-old topless and swinging her shirt around her head. “Funny, Mommy!” she shrieked. :woot:
4. Picking up panini and pasta as a special treat for dinner, only to find that it tasted AWFUL and had to be thrown away. :ick:
5. The aforementioned daughter thought it would be even funnier to dump her water all over herself and the floor.
6. Eating macaroni and cheese instead of a spiffy Italian supper.
7. Bathing and putting the kids to bed while hubby is playing softball. We offered to come watch the game and he declined. “No, honey, that’s okay. It’s nothing much to watch anyway.” Yes, I know the truth. He is reveling in his child-free glory.

I do believe there is a Cadbury’s Creme Egg somewhere with my name on it. I shall sacrifice it to the gods, and perhaps my day might just get a little better. I’m also reading Amy Knupp’s Superromance Unexpected Complication. Amy, I’m on page 82 and it’s YOUR FAULT that my kids received an inadequate bath and will likely have dental problems because I did a lousy job supervising their tooth-brushing. Man. It just HAD to be a catchy, hooky sort of book.