Mommathon

I made this for dinner tonight; I got the recipe from Cooking Light and it was great and easy.

Spread 2 tablespoons of hummus on a whole wheat wrap. Put about 1/2 cup of shredded chicken breast on top of that. Put a few strips of roasted red peppers on top of that. Put about 2 tablespoons of creamy Caesar dressing on top of that and then put a little bit of lettuce on top of that. Roll it up and eat it. Yum!

This was a good book.  It was about how quickly your life can change.  The character is a SAHM and has been for 17 years and then her estranged father gets injured and ends up living with her and her family and her mom.  It is a feel good tale of family and the sacrifices that family members often make for each other.

My friend's son got a set of Wedgits for his birthday.  I had never seen them before, but they are so cool.  They are so simple that they are neat.  The box says that they are for people ages 2-102 and I believe it.  You can't just let them set there.  You have to play with them.  Go to wedgits.com to see them.

I had to share this because I think it is so cute.  My grandma is 87 years old and is definitely  what you would call a farm girl.  She was raised on a farm and she raised her kids on a farm.  The woman enjoys eating liver and doesn't squirm at the thought of eating cow's tongue for goodness sake.  So, anyways, I was talking to her today and she said that my dad got her some avocados because he got a bunch that were particularly yummy and he thought he would share some with her.  Well, she has never had an avocado before but she thought she would give it a try.  She hated them!!  She said there has never been anything that has passed her lips before ever in her entire life that was so bad that she had to spit it out.  She was telling my aunt about this and my aunt informed her that there is a dip you can eat with chips that is made out of avocados.  I didn't have the heart to explain to her that the dip has a name and nearly eveyone in both North and South America knows that it is called guacamole.  :)  She doesn't get out much.

Can you tell I have been reading a lot lately?   This was another beach read.  This is a fictional story about a woman in L.A. who has just had her first baby and is really struggling with her new role.  Breastfeeding is not working like she thought it would, her C-section scar is atrocious, her hormones are in full rage and she is basically an overall mess.  One thing I have noticed is that there seems to be a lot of books out like this lately.  There is even another book out there with a similar plot that has the exact same title as this book.  This author has written another fictional book about being pregnant called Notes from the Underbelly.  Again, there seem to be a lot of books out there that are written about this topic.  Now that Oprah has America reading there is an audience for all of these stories geared towards women...just a theory.  :)

You need to checkout librarything.com.  It is so cool!  It keeps track of the books you are reading and can tell you what other people are reading who have also read the books you have read.  You can also add it to your blog so others can see what you are reading as well.  It also can recommend other books based on the genre/topics of the books you are reading.  One catch, however, is that ten people have to have read the book you have read for it to give you any social data on that book.  That can happen quickly, though, last week a book I read had only been read by six people at librarything and a few days later it was up to ten.

I just finished reading this book and it was sooo good.  The narrator is a high school junior whose family has just been moved from Indiana to Mississippi in the early 1970's.  His new high school has been newly desegregated and his new best friend has a lot of secrets.  This story is funny in parts and shocking in others, but either way you want to keep reading it because you want to find out what is going to happen next.

Liam can be the king of procrastination if he is trying to get out of doing something, like going to bed.  So tonight he was s-l-o-w-l-y making his way towards the stairs to go to bed and I was beginning to lose patience with him when he says, "But Mom, I'm trying to be a sloth!"  How can you argue with that?

Yesterday we had a heat index of 108; today it is 74!

I didn't realize this was an Oprah book until I was about halfway through.  I should have known though because the book is so depressing.  The main character is a woman who is Catholic and is married to a man that treats her horribly.  To make matters even worse they live with his elderly parents who treat her like a slave and either ignore or insult her children for sport.  I think the next book I read is going to need to be a little more uplifting.

There are two types of sign-ups at Liam's preschool.  One, is to sign up to bring a snack that corresponds with that week's letter.  For example, if the letter of the week is B, then you should bring something like bananas or bunny-shaped crackers.  I would gladly bring the letter-of-the-week snack every week.  The other sign-up,however, is to bring homemade play-doh that corresponds with the color of the month.  Liam's first year of preschool I made my obligatory batch of play-doh, I believe it was purple and we even put sparkles in it.  I must confess, however, that we did not bring play-doh at all last year. (There is a certain amount of guilt that goes along with neglecting this motherly duty.) I REALLY don't like making play-doh.  I just don't like it.  Today, however, I made play-doh, thanks to Mr. Rogers.  There was a recipe for it in a video  Liam was watching:  combine in a bowl 2 cups of flour, one cup of salt and one cup of water.  Stir and add food coloring if you would like.  It makes about 8 smallish blobs of play-doh.  It doesn't get much easier.  You don't have to heat it which means you don't have to wait for it to cool and you don't have to really stir it that much. It's great; we love it!  Thanks to Mr. Rogers I can now sign-up for both snack duty and play-doh duty.

He got demoted.  He went from Sharks 2 to Sharks 1.  He graduated from Sharks 1 about a year ago, but I guess he forgot everything he learned.  Today was the first day he said he had fun at swim lessons though and that's important, too.  I do hope, that at some point, maybe next summer, he will make it through Sharks 2.  I would like him to be able to swim AND have fun.  Also, if he stays in Sharks 1 for too long, Colm and Liam will be in the same swim class.  Frankly, however, I don't think Liam cares, as long as he doesn't have to put his face in the water he could stay in Sharks 1 forever.

The Known World

Reading Lolitha in Tehran

Girl Finds God

Mission to America

Other People's Children

Night

The Old Ace in the Hole

Black Swan Green

Miss American Pie

Revenge of the Pasta Eaters

Babyville

Something Blue

How to be Lost

The Right Fit

Tales from the Crib

Vinegar Hill

Bed Rest

Limbo

The Tenth Circle

One Mississippi

Just the title alone gets your attention, doesn't it?  It is the title of book I am currently reading written by Jennifer Weiner.  She has also written In Her Shoes and a couple of other books that I have read, but I can't think of the titles right now.  This book, okay, all of her books, would definitely qualify as beach reads.

This all started when I dragged everything out of the hall closet to clean it. As you can see, I didn't get very far. My cleaning quickly turned into a game of dress up.

I am currently reading The Speckled People by Hugo Hamilton. It is a memoir. (I am on a memoir kick right now and have read just about everyone recently published and if I haven't read it I am probably on the waiting list at the library for it.) Anyways, it takes place shortly after WWII in Ireland. It is about a boy whose father is Irish and his mother is German and how difficult is was to grow up in Ireland when everyone in Europe was still hating all things German. To make a bad situation worse, his father will only let the family speak Irish (which hardly anyone in Ireland speaks) or German, which no one in Ireland speaks. They are strictly forbidden from reading anything English, listening to English music or playing with children who speak English. And I thought my parents were strict!

My kid is the kid who is kicking, screaming and crying at swim lessons. Yep, that's us. We're the ones you look sadly at and think, "Poor thing, I'm glad my kid's not like that." I never thought I would have a child who was so terrified of swim lessons, but I do. He LOVES the baby pool, but he is 4 and is getting a little too big to be splashing around with the babies. He has not always been this way, though. He loved swim lessons when he was a toddler and he even liked them when he was 3 when he had to get in the pool without me. Then, there was the fateful summer (last summer), when we had a teacher who thought it would be fun to roughhouse with the kids. Liam likes to roughhouse just as much as the next kid, but he completely respects the danger factor of water and realizes that maybe the pool is not the best place to roughhouse especially with a bunch of non-swimmers. She ruined him. THANK GOD we have an awesome swim teacher this year who somehow manages to get him in the pool and then manages to drag him away from the side of the pool so that he can actually be an active participant in the lesson. (She was even bold enough to grab him by the ankles as he tried to bolt on the first day. (Yep, it's that bad.) She was still in the pool and he was on the side. Then there is Colm who gets upset when his swim lessons are over. He loves the pool! Maybe some of it will rub off on his big brother. :) We only have to do this five more times and then lessons will be over for the season.  Phew!

Whether you decide to homeschool your children, send them to public, parochial or private school, families do what they do because it works best for THEIR family. Okay, now to part where I vent. I was speaking to someone today who had enrolled her ten-year old son in a cake decorating class. When they got there he was the only boy and he refused to go in. I would say that is a pretty normal reaction for a boy that age. The mom, on the other hand, got mad at her son and told him he was behaving like a public school kid. WHAT??!!! Like I said before, families choose to school their children in a way that works for THEIR family. We are lucky that we live in a time and a place where we have those choices. DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT use your choice to teach your children that your way is better and those other kids are just a bunch of sorry suckers. I have no tolerance for people who teach their children to hate or in any way look down at other people.

This is why everyone needs a sibling. Today was a rainy day and since we couldn't go play outside they spent part of their morning using these blankets to dress up as ghosts, to wrap themselves up like burritos and to wrap each other up to the point where they both would fall over giggling.

I just turned in my last assignment of the summer.  Yippee!  I now, officially, only have four more classes to take which I will have finished by this time next year.  So now I can relax and read what I WANT to read until mid-August when classes start up again.

My shower is going to finally be clean!  The people who brought us those cute little scrubbing bubbles that run around your bathtub to get it clean have outdone themselves.  They have come up with something that will clean my shower for me with the touch of a button.  It hangs in your shower and you push the button with the cleaning stuff in it and shoots out everywhere and cleans the walls, the door-EVERYTHING!  If your shower is already clean it will keep it clean and it if is not clean it will have it clean within a month.  You can even go to automaticshowercleaner.com and get a coupon.  I never thought I would be so excited about a cleaning solution.

It's a volcano..can't you tell? Liam decided today, out of the blue, that he wanted to make a volcano today out of bread and spaghetti sauce (for the lava). I decided what the heck, let's do it. So we pieced together a volcano and he poured the sauce on top. We then added baking soda and vinegar and...kaboom...we had ourselves a volcano. He thought it was great so made another one with more baking soda and vinegar. He was pretty impressed with the whole thing, but now my driveway smells like vinegar.

We have had so much fun this past week with our extended family from New York; my oldest brother and his family came to visit us. Liam and Colm couldn't get enough of them and the girls were so good with them. They played Chutes and Ladders, Candyland, Dragon Tales, went swimming, played hide-and-seek and read stories together. We really look forward to their visits since we don't get to see them very often.



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Our chocolate experiment is working. I stole an idea from Family Fun magazine and we are enjoying the results. We love chocolate and we have had a lot of family members traveling recently, so we asked them to bring us back some chocolate. So far, we have chocolate from Brazil, Toronto, Spain and France. We are saving the wrappers and pinning the wrappers to a map so we can remember where they came from. I think we will also keep a chocolate journal so we can remember when we got them, who got them for us and what the chocolate tasted like.

I kid you not! We were at the doctor's office today and there was a sign hanging in the elevator about a seminar you could attend about new sterilization techniques. The clincher was that the flyer was printed on paper that had farm animals on it. I kept reading it to see if it was geared towards veterinarians or something, but no, it was geared towards women who want to be sterilized-like a cow!

Last night while Liam was taking his bath I noticed he was  closely inspecting the bottom of several of his bathtoys.  He then stated, "Mom, everything in Kansas is made in China."