During my time at home this summer we’ve been eating very well. I’ve been cooking and baking up a storm. I only wished we ate this well during the rest of the year.

Then I had what could only be called an epiphany.

Here’s the situation. During the work/school week, we’re so famished by the time we get home that we end up getting fast food or heating up frozen meals instead of cooking from scratch. This has been the case for YEARS, and we’re sick of it. With the kids returning to school and me returning to work in a couple of weeks, I was desperate to find a way to fit home-cooked meals into our busy lives. Finally I thought, if we’re too hungry and tired to cook dinner as soon as we get home, why not cook AFTER eating dinner?

So this week I’ve been running a simulation. Every night, we’ve been eating dinner around 6:30. Afterwards, I clean off the table, put the dirties in the dishwasher, and then get to work.

How is it going? In a word, WONDERFULLY. Tonight we had chicken sausage / broccoli (cooked 2 nights ago) and turkey chili / brussel sprouts (cooked last night). We have so much leftover that I didn’t need to cook tonight (for tomorrow). I could really get used to this.

Categories: food
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This was a happy week. It was all about the laughing, the blowing of wet raspberries, and the socializing.

My sister visited with my two nieces, the younger of which is only a month younger than Angelina. Don’t they look almost like twins?

Here we are visiting some friends who are expecting a baby in a few months. Their dogs have not spent much time with kids, but they were very well behaved around ours, especially Angie. They’re going to become very good companions for a little boy soon.

Categories: angie
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The Associated Press obituary is positively poetic. (Via Publishers Weekly.)

Categories: news, politics, reading
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We don’t have very many ‘formal portraits’ of the kids. It’s not that we don’t enjoy having them and hanging them in the hallway, it’s mainly the process. You get all the necessary crap together to sustain a three-month-old while on a trip out of the house, go out in the scorching heat, get in the car, drive somewhere, back in the scorching heat, into a shopping center of some kind, and then you wait. Has anyone ever been to an affordable kid photography place that isn’t ridiculously overbooked? As if the previous hour wasn’t unpleasant enough for your baby, when you get there at precisely the time you reserved they tell you they’re running late and you’re just going to have to sit on your ass for twenty minutes. When it’s finally your turn and this teenage girl is waving a stuffed animal at your baby and making stupid noises like that’s going to stop the screaming and you’re crouched there under the glare of the studio lights, propping up the baby and trying to stay out of the frame and you start getting that pounding headache and you pray that it’s your mutant powers about to manifest and you’re going to go all Drew Barrymore and everything is going to start blowing up around you…

Well we gave up on all that garbage years ago when Ana was around nine months old. Since then I’ve taken just under ten thousand pictures, probably 99.9% of them featuring our children. They’re mostly candid shots of the kids at play, reading, running around, doing kid stuff. Just enough of them have been decent that we really haven’t considered going back to the world of ‘formal portraits’ for the kids. This decision has cost us though. I have relatives who may stop speaking to us if I don’t provide ‘formal portraits’ in a specific size to match the dozens of very similar looking pictures already hanging on their wall. The last time we sent pictures it was like, oh that’s very nice thank you for the snapshot but we’re really looking forward to the pictures you’re going to send us for The Wall.

Yeah. So… how do I take a picture that looks as if it were shot by a teenage girl in some kid portrait studio somewhere? Ideally it should actually be a good picture so that we can use it too…

I’m pretty pleased with the results, given my ghetto approach to creating a portrait studio. About half of the lighting is indirect sunlight through a big sliding door, the rest is from a 55w daylight CFL bounced off our rice paper closet panels. White sheet and gooseneck floor reflector from Ikea, daylight CFL from the internets – total cost about $45.

The best part? She was still smiling afterwards and so was I.

Categories: kids and parenting, toys
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Thursday I had to attend another meeting. I left Angelina home with Kevin and some freshly expressed mommy milk and came home to the good news that she drank it all without a fuss. Kevin even had to defrost some milk from the freezer because she wanted more. She didn’t start fussing until around the 4th hour of my absence because she missed me (awwww), and I arrived home shortly afterwards.

I’ve been wondering whether our Burt’s Bees baby wash was causing Angie’s skin to break out. I finally confirmed it this week. The first time she broke out in a rash I stopped using it and started using Cetaphil instead. After the rash went away I tried Burt’s Bees again and voila, the rash came back, so now I’m sticking with the Cetaphil.

Here she is enjoying the ExerSaucer my parents lent us. As predicted, she loves it! You can tell in these pictures that she likes to lean forward. She also does that when sitting in our laps. IMHO it’s a good substitute for tummy time because it exercises similar muscles. In fact, after a couple of weeks with no tummy time, today she was able to push herself up while lying on her stomach.

Today I was in desperate need of a pick-me-up and drank a cup of caffeinated diet soda for the first time in over a year. According to the info I found online a little caffeine doesn’t really affect the breastmilk, and I haven’t noticed any changes in Angie’s behavior after I’ve had regular coffee, but she was unusually fussy a few hours after I drank the soda. I’m going to keep an eye on the situation and see if it happens again.

Categories: kids and parenting
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