When the kids eat m&m’s, I make them give me all the ones with my initial on them.
My blog presence lately has been scattershot at best. Deadline this, deadline that. Too little time to keep up, sadly. 
But on the plus side to all this work… Read the rest of this entry
Here are my ideas. Vote or add your own:
(If you missed them, here are parts one and two.)
When you were last with our heroine, I’d just discovered that I had refrozen my pumpkin puree for the pie I was supposed to take to Thanksgiving lunch that day. I had no choice but to grab another bag from the freezer and toss it in a bowl of warm water to hopefully thaw in time.
Recall that I had proudly announced to my husband that there would be no last-minute dash to the grocery store, as I had remembered, for the first time ever, that I needed evaporated milk for this recipe and so had bought it in advance.
While waiting on the puree, I started to make the pumpkin pie crust, by hand this time, when I stopped to put Joe down for a nap. I asked my husband to step in. When I came back, my husband was gone. On the counter was our near-empty tub of Crisco. Read the rest of this entry
Now that my husband and three daughters are at a Christmas pageant, and I have the wonderful excuse of staying home with a sleeping baby boy, I can give you Part 2! (If you missed part 1, you can find it here.)
Backing up a bit, since my laughing mother kindly reminded me that I forgot this tidbit: The night before Thanksgiving, the girls and I made pumpkin bread to have for breakfast Thanksgiving morning. Baking with the girls is stressful. They are adamant about having an equal amount of tasks to do.
“You crack the egg, then I’ll put it in, and she can break it with the spoon.”
“We need one and half cups of flour, so how about we each do a half cup?”
“You hold the measuring cup while I pour and she stirs it in.”
I kid you not. And four people crowding around the counter (me to supervise) is a mess. It didn’t help that we were pushing up against bedtime, so I was trying to hurry.
With these girls, hurrying is not in their vocabulary. That preheat oven step needs to come, like, 7th next time, because the oven was ready to go looooong before the batter was in the bread pan.
To make matters worse, my thawed pre-packaged bag of mashed pumpkin wasn’t quite enough, so I had to borrow from the bag for the next day’s pie–an issue I’d sort out later, darn it, just get the bread in the oven already!
Finally, the oven door shut and the girls were scooted off to bed, with the torturous smell of baking pumpkin bread wafting down the hallway.
The next morning, as we enjoyed our delicious bread, I searched for the bags of pumpkin I needed for my pie. They were nowhere in the fridge. I checked the counter, the sink? Nada. Read the rest of this entry
Just a quick note to tell you Chex Mix was on sale for 99c again. I grabbed a dozen, plus a few other things, and got in line at the store. Lo and behold, The Chex Mix Guy was the cashier.
How appropriate.
“I cleaned out your Chex Mix supply again,” I said with a wry smile.
“Uh-oh, you again. Do you need me to check in the back for more?” Read the rest of this entry
Not me. So very not me.
We spent Thanksgiving with my in-laws. Last year I brought a pumpkin pie. In the past I’ve made the crust from scratch, but that time I decided to go store-bought.
Why do frozen pie crusts always come in packs of two?
So I made up the pie mixture with pumpkin from our jack-o-lanterns. (A friend asked, “Were they cooking pumpkins?” “Uum, no…? But they’ve always worked before.”) I poured it into the frozen crust.
Apparently you’re supposed to pre-bake the crust before you bake it as a pie?!
The inside of the pie was done, but the crust was hard and raw.
Oops.
Doesn’t that look good? It probably is. Because I didn’t make it. Thanks, pixabay.
My daughter decided to give her brother peanut butter. Then she called me: “Mom, Joe needs to be cleaned up.” Read the rest of this entry
On my birthday, one of the girls asked for a bedtime story. So naturally I said, “Thirty-nine years ago today, the most wonderful mom in the world was born.”
My husband added: “And so was Betsy.”
(Reminiscent of the famous choosing a cat story, don’t ya think?)
Hubs texted me that day: “Do you have a cake?”
Me: “No.” I mean, if I had one, I’d have had to bake it myself. So, clearly no. Which was fine with me. Just show me to the nearest ice cream. But he said, “No wife of mine isn’t going to have a baked good on her birthday.”
He turned up after work with six mini fruit pies from Walmart. Fifty cents each.
Who says the romance is dead?
You’ll note there are only five pies pictured. The sixth, an additional apple pie, was left out. That’s my husband’s favorite. He bought two of those. I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions.
I leaned to the side so as not to mar the view of my single candle (to reflect the age I act) and my little “Happy Birthday” sign.
And I missed the Read the rest of this entry
I get silly and perhaps slightly whimsical with my children and buy junk like this:
It was cute and only $2. That should’ve been my first clue. It works as well as any $2 potato peeler would, that is, not at all. But, at least it was only $2!
And also this: Read the rest of this entry
Chex Mix is delish. I especially like the cheddar flavor. And let’s not forget Turtle Chex with its chocolately goodness. So when the CM, as the cool kids call it*, goes on sale, I pounce.
[*No one calls it this. Definitely NOT cool kids anyway.]
The grocery store advertised Chex Mix for $1.99 for the Family Size bags. I was all over that. But the only bags on the shelf were of the smaller size, NOT on sale, for something absurd like $3.99.
Umm, no.
However, there was no Family Size to be found. A worker looked everywhere and confirmed this.
I said, “So I’m not crazy.”
He said, “Well, we’ve established that you’re right about the Chex Mix, but that doesn’t prove you aren’t crazy.”
I was rather shocked, first of all by his wit, which made me LOL, and secondly that a comment like that was “allowed.” Doesn’t it fly in the face of “the customer is always right” mentality? I didn’t mind of course, as I love a good laugh.
His solution to my dilemma was to sell me two of the smaller 8 oz. bags at the cost of the as-advertised-but-nowhere-in-sight 15 oz. bags.
I grabbed 12.
At check-out, Read the rest of this entry
