I Had the Stupidest Night's Sleep Ever

As the title says, I had the stupidest night's sleep ever. I have entered the phase of my life wherein if I have anything caffeinated after about 10:00 a.m., I can't sleep half the following night. Last night, I really blew it, because I had a couple of Cokes with dinner at Howard's Place at 6:00 p.m. effectively shooting my night's sleep and my anti-high fructose corn syrup campaign in the rump all in one shot. Darn you, Howard's chicken fingers with gravy and your evil, seductive ways!

Anyway, after a scintillating Jane Austin movie marathon (ah, the many faces of  Mr. Darcy... all of them cranky) and the semi-successful conversion of half of my favorite pair of socks (sadly sporting holes in the sole) into half of a pair of fingerless gloves, I went to bed. I thrashed around and annoyed Joe for a while, resolved never to yell at Charlie again when he flops around in bed for a half hour before succumbing to sleep, and finally entered CDS (Copious Drool Sleep) around midnight.

At 3:00 a.m. I was jolted awake by Abraham crying. When I went to comfort him, I fell asleep in his bed until 4:00 a.m. when my hummingbird-sized bladder woke me. After stumbling back from the bathroom, I went to my own bed where I slept until 4:42 a.m. That was when Abraham woke again. I went to comfort him. I went back to my bed at 5:12 a.m. At 5:38, I woke again to Abraham crying and saying "Uh-uh!" on the floor at the foot of my bed. Okay, I admit it: I picked him up by his ankles, dumped him in bed beside me, and smacked his fanny when he tried to throw himself on the floor in a fit of temper. He subsided back into sleep. I subsided back into sleep. The alarm rang. I don't think a new alarm clock is going to cost that much. It's the window that I threw it through that worries me...

The saving grace of a night like that is the excellent blog material. While I was flitting in and out of sleep like a demented hummingbird hopped up on Crank, I had a couple of truly bizarre dreams which I remembered way better than I wanted to. Get out your dream symbol dictionaries, because I need help with these:

In the first dream, Joe and I are standing in a pumpkin patch. The pumpkins are quite large, but most of them are still green, or green with orange patches showing. I keep trying to pick them, and Joe keeps saying, "No! Don't pick the canteloupes! Only pick the watermelons!" And I keep saying, "But these are pumpkins!"

Even in dreams, men are unreasonable!

In the second dream, I have apparently decided to go back to college. I have versions of this dream a lot: wherein I am at college and remember I have kids. What did I do with them?  Anyway, in this version of the dream, I am in this enormous, labyrinthine university that seems to have undergone a recent bombing, because there are holes in the wall in random places. The boys are with me, and we are running up and down staircases and hallways in a great hurry, though I'm really not sure where we're going. Ultimately, we end up in a crowded room where people are packing into an elevator every few minutes. I watch as the elevator opens  vertically, like a dumbwaiter, rather than the traditional sliding doors. There is no back. A couple of ragged holes open on a pretty green yard with paths and people. A youth steps onto the elevator just as it goes shooting up and ends up going with it clinging by his fingertips, though this doesn't seem to alarm him. Suddenly, Abraham goes running through the open elevator shaft and out the blown out back. I jump to put myself under the door, holding it up with my arms above my head so it won't close Abraham off from my sight. I am shouting, "Abraham, come! Back! Here! RIGHT! NOW!" and he's taunting me, saying "Uh-U-uh!" while scooting further away. I can't go to get Abe without leaving Charlie, but I can't let Abe get any further away, so I make the choice to go after Abe. I think at this point even my dreaming brain was too traumatized to allow any ill to befall Charlie, because when Abe and I crawl back through the blown out hole in the wall, we find Charlie just fine except that he's standing in a puddle of spilled chicken soup.

Will someone please prescribe medication?

Because Food Shouldn't Require Penance

Hannah's Meatball Soup Thingie
 

Rice:
Prepare 1 cup (dry measure) of brown rice first because it needs to simmer about 35 minutes to be ready.

Meatballs:

1 lb Italian (Fennel) Sausage
1 lb burger
2 cups blenderized oats
2 eggs

Mix all of this together with your hands and roll into smallish meatballs (1 inch). Sear all on all sides in a lightly greased skillet, or cook with a little bit of water in the bottom of the skillet, rolling occasionally.

Soup:

Prepared brown rice
Large (32 oz or larger) can of chicken broth.
Bag of frozen spinach or a bundle of spinach leaves
Three carrots, sliced into coins
2 Tsp salt
Several Bay leaves

Simmer all of this together while the meatballs cook, throw in meatballs and eat. Bliss!

I was going to take a picture of this, but I forgot... so how about some cool pictures of ice instead! (Maybe even cold pictures of ice...)

 

 

Pseudo-foodie Blog # Whatever

My children like to eat fish.
Sorry, maybe I should've had you sit down before issuing a statement that shocking. I'll give you a moment.

Seriously, though, my children like to eat fish. Not fish sticks. Real, honest-to-Neptune fish. Charlie prefers cod, but that's expensive. See Cod by Mark Kurlansky for way too many details. We've all decided that tilapia is pretty good too. I love it! What could be easier? Plunk frozen tilapia on oven pan. Salt, chili powder, lemon juice, sage. Oven at 400 for half an hour. And we're all basking in the Omega-3. A few nights ago, the kids and I sat down to a dinner of tilapia, green beans, and homemade (as in not boxed potato by-product) mashed potatoes. Charlie asked for a glass of milk. And they ate it. Sans coercion. I'm getting light-headed just thinking about the nutrition. If only every meal was like this.

Maybe its just me, but food feels like a moral issue. First I think I'm doing a good job because I don't let my kids have Cocoa Puffs or Spaghetti-O's and I make them eat from the Food Groups. But then I start to realize how much sugar is in things that I think of as good food: yogurt, store bought spaghetti sauce, granola bars (even the not-fudge coated ones...) The natural parenting people; the same ones to praise things I believe in, like natural childbirth with midwives, breast feeding, raising your own children, and going outside occasionally... these people are very quick and vocal about how sugar is THE DEVIL! They're the same people who are quick to tell you that potatoes are actually a bread and that corn should only be used as an alternative fuel and suddenly... ACK! What am I feeding my kids!?... I'm not sure I'm doing a good job any more. My children eat sugar and like corn and potatoes... Crap! And you can't buy anything sugar free because it all has aspartame in it and that breaks down into formaldehyde which is... embalming fluid!? ACK! inside your body causing Alzheimer's and dementia and school shootings and tax fraud and parking tickets!!! Going grocery shopping makes me start to hyperventilate. It feels like if my kids don't eat dairy free, sugar free, chemical free, home grown, all natural baby spinach salad with raw walnuts and raspberry vinaigrette and a side of avocados, then I am a failure as a human being. And what kid eats that kind of stuff!? This is the kind of crisis that generally causes me to freak out and bake chocolate chip cookies for comfort. Whew! *wipes brow with an exhausted air*

I'm trying to short circuit the freak out this time around, which led to a strange side effect. I developed a positive obsession with this recipe I heard about on the radio for saffron yogurt, without ever even having tasted it. The problem is that this recipe calls for both saffron and cardamom, each of which requires selling your kidneys on the black market to be able to afford a small bottle. Since I only have two kidneys, and I'm pretty sure I need to keep at least one of them I decided to leave out the cardamom. The good news is that the yogurt was still positively addictive, even without the cardamom. The bad news is, nobody wants to buy my kidney off of Ebay.

Saffron Honey Yogurt 

1 tsp milk
5 threads saffron
1/2 cup plain yogurt
2 Tbsp honey
Dash ground cardamon, cinnamon, ginger, or cloves

Put the milk in a very small bowl and heat it in the microwave for 10-15 seconds. Add the saffron and allow to soak for 5 minutes.

Meanwhile, mix the yogurt, honey, cardamon, etc together in a small bowl. Add the milk-saffron mixture and stir well. Cover and refrigerate for one hour or more. Stir again before serving.

Bliss!