The Family-Holiday Morass strikes again

I haven't gotten around to doing anything in the past few weeks. Ever since Thanksgiving, it's been one unfocused, vaguely hectic day after another. Nova has been struggling along with her teeth. She has horrible decay in her front top teeth because of my tooth-cleaning negligence combined with night nursing, and her bottom back molars were coming in.

Nova had her 2nd birthday, and I made two cakes for two separate celebrations of the occasion. The first, a Chocolate Brownie Torte with White Chocolate Mousse and Caramelized Bananas was a bit of a flop, but tasted good. Nova enjoyed blowing out the candles and eating it.


The second cake was equally mediocre, but held together better. It was a basic chocolate cake with orange frosting and chocolate-frosting decorations. I tried to decorate it with the traditional pastry bag and tips. Nova ate the bits of chocolate off the top. Obviously her diet is not as tooth-friendly as a dentist would wish for, either.

We have been doing a much better job at keeping up with the tooth-cleaning, though, and she has an appointment to get some fillings on Christmas Eve. Hopefully there'll be enough excitement afterwards that she'll forget the agony and forgive us for putting her through it!

Meanwhile, we've had a storm which had us snowed in, with the power on, for a good 36 hours. We all played in it together on the first day, making snow angels and throwing the dry, powdery snow around. Nova had no interest in coming inside until she was soaking wet. This morning, I introduced her to sledding. We went down the gentle slope of hill next to my parents' house a few times, and promised to come back to it later today, or tomorrow morning.

I intend to write Christmas cards and send them out in the next 48 hours. Ha!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Creating a Home for Body, Soul, and Spirit by Bernadette Raichle rating: 4 of 5 stars I borrowed this book from the local Steiner playgroup. I've enjoyed the parent-toddler group, and have picked up a lot of ideas about education and childrearing from its Steiner/Waldorf based activities, but I've always been a bit uneasy about its philosophical underpinnings. Here, at last, was a book which was explicit about how Anthroposophy informs the operation of a daycare centre, and man, is there some whacky stuff in there! The anthroposophical jargon about creating a "penetrated" environment and the four sheafs (Physical, Etheric, Soul/Astral, and Ego) would turn off most people I know, but it does explain why Waldorf kindergartens are organized the way they are. I gave this book four stars because it was exactly what I was looking for, and because I think it is useful, but it is not particularly well-written. Some sections are less well-developed than others, and as I
Read more

Spanische Windtorte

Image
When I was young, my mother had a nearly-complete set of the Time-Life Foods of the World cookbooks. Although the recipes in these were not, as a rule, very good, I was much taken with the photo on the cover of The Cooking of Vienna's Empire -- a Spanish Windtorte. I told my mother that I wanted one for my birthday cake. I had not grasped quite how difficult they were to build. I think we wound up with more of a Pavlova instead. The thing is, a Spanische Windtorte is almost exactly the same thing as a pavlova, only with a fancier-shaped meringue. So, when I set out to make one again yesterday, I used a combination of this Pavlova recipe and these Spanische Windtorte instructions . I increased the quantities in the pavlova recipe by about 1/3, and, in the final step, did not macerate the fruit but rather mixed it with sugar immediately before adding it to the whipped cream mixture... but I'm getting ahead of myself. Making the meringue was fairly straightforward, except that
Read more

Sick days etc.

As with NaNoWriMo, my attempt at NaNoBloPoMo has been a bit uneven. I'm on day 11 and I think this is my 9th post. It's not that I don't have ideas, it's just that the day has been slipping away from me. I have all sorts of miscellaneous household stuff to do all the time, I have bits and pieces of paid work, and I like to keep up with the news, which is always incredibly distracting. Today I'm also achey and tired, probably fighting off the Thing That's Going Around. My son had it about a week ago, my nephew and niece have it, and my husband has also been feeling a bit under the weather. I'm not absolutely bedridden -- I did take the dog out for a walk, do laundry, and do grocery shopping -- but I spent a good part of the day lying around feeling like doing nothing at all. So it seems like a good day to talk about what to do when you're feeling like crap, because being on the road to better health doesn't mean you'll never get sick, especially
Read more