Not a Professional Girl

The other day my son was talking about getting himself a girlfriend. I asked the usual questions any mom would ask of a 10-year old boy, how does he know her, is she cute, what does having a girlfriend mean? He said it meant that they would be in a relationship, but they would only see each other in lunch. He tried calling her but her cell phone was off. So he asked one of his friends to ask her out. Apparently, every time he gets next to her at lunch, there are people around he doesn't like and he didn't want to ask her out in front of "Them." (See, even my 10-year-old gets the whole "Them" thing). So he asked his wing-man to help him out. I warned, "I don't think girls like to be asked out by other people, that is like you don't care enough about her to ask her out yourself."
My son argued, "Mom, she is not a professional girl. She won't even know about any of that."
I almost ran the car off the road. I took a deep breath, trying hard not to burst out laughing, and replied calmly, "You are right, I am just gonna keep my mouth closed."

It was so cute and and the conversation went on from there to one of the best reasons why he likes her. She plays Bakugan and has a very rare Bakugan he covets. He plans on trading her for it and has the transaction all figured out. Sound like a professional boy to me, eh? So last night my sister Pinky is over and we are telling her this story and she inquires, "What is a professional girl?" My son got up and started prancing around the dining room saying that professional girls were snotty and thought they were so pretty and cool. We were laughing so hard as he imitated all the girls he didn't like. As we also joshed him about only liking her for her Bakugan potential, he objected, saying, "No I liked her as soon as my friend started liking her a few months ago." We all laughed at that. It was classic, said my sister, because that is the way boys work or something like that. I am sure she will put what she actually means in the comments.

Ebay hates me, I'm gonna go eat worms.

OK, I have no bids, am I the stepchild of ebay? I spent all day posting those stupid Bakugans, I can actually tell some of them apart now and have spent hours locked in my room so my son wouldn't happen upon them. Not one stinkin' bid. I could do better if I set up shop in the school cafeteria, the boys would buy me out. Well, this may be a very short experiment.

Christmas Gifts for Moms

My girlfriend Deb wrote and compiled this wonderful book, Birthdaze, with her friend. They shared birth stories with us moms, "stories from the trenches of womanhood." It is funny and heartwarming and brings all those birthing feelings back with a rush. It is the perfect gift for expectant moms, and for baby showers. The two boys on the website are her beautiful twins, they are always playing at my house, and they are as cute as they appear. Visit her writermomz website here, or in my sidebar.

BLOGGING MOMS TAKE NOTE!
BIRTHDAZE II is already in the works! If you have a story you'd like to share with other moms, please email your proposal and writer credentials to debe1@comcast.net with the subject line "birthdaze 2." She is especially looking for stories of:

* home births (both modern and from the early 1900s)

* pregnancy and childbirth outside the United States

* a dad's perspective of his wife's pregnancy, labor, and delivery

Freaking out today

I am freaking out today because I noticed that my daughter's spine does not look right. I mean it looks and feels seriously out of whack. I made appointments and we will see the doctors next month, but until then, I am freaking out in a big way. I can't wait to get the x-rays so I can see if I am just wrong.
My best friend in middle school and parts of high school, Stacy Freeman, used to wear a Scoliosis brace. It was so uncomfortable and it gave off a bit of a funk. She had to wear it like 16 hours a day and she was so self -conscious of the way it make her clothes stick out in weird places. She had bumps under her neck, not on her chest, at least we couldn't see the bumps on her chest because the hardware stuck out too far. It also gave her little skin sores if her t-shirts got bunched up underneath even a little. It was so uncomfortable, I do not know how she ever bore it, and I thought she was so brave. She hated having to take it off for Phys. Ed. and she always needed help for that. In the three minutes they give you for changing, it is not enough time for TWO people to get that thing rigged.
I am freaking out because if my daughter does have this dreaded condition, it will seriously impact her life. I know firsthand that it will and my daughter is such a physical, busy girl, that she will have to deal with taking it off and putting it on all the time.

So I am praying real hard and hoping it is just a mother's imagination running wild.

PSSST. If you have any insights into this condition, feel free to comment.

Right Under Me II

The raging schnauzers have struck again, as we were eating our UN-Stone soup, the dogs were ripping apart the trash bag full of shredded mail in my front room. Guess someone put some kind of food in that bag...oops that looks like my Cheetos bag!



Now they are in Coventry

Stone Soup

Today one of the classrooms made stone soup in school. We could smell the aroma wafting down the hallways and everybody in the building wanted some. On the way home from school, my fifth-grade son was talking about the smell and asking what stone soup was. I told him the story and he wanted to run right home and make some. He thought it was funny about the stone and wanted to know if they actually had to eat the stone. I patiently explained that it is a group effort, which everyone has to contribute to for it to be stone soup. He came back with, “ Well, can we make it anyway, without the stone and the meaning?” It was too cute. Of course we went home and made UN-Stone Soup, as it will be known forevermore in my house.




Here is my son tasting the UN-Stone Soup.

Here he is after tasting the UN-Stone Soup. What a happy dinner. I actually got a hug and a kiss and breathless thank you.

TEETHING

Ok, I just had too many memories tied up with teeth after reading mrlady's son's story, I had to post. My son is 10 now and trying to pull two teeth out, so I am going to warn him that the tooth fairy won't come if they came out early. He feels that the tooth fairy is a scam and I told him that the tooth fairy will not visit if he doesn't believe either.

I was awful when I discovered the Tooth Fairy in first grade, and so were my friends. We loved the money and couldn't wait to lose our teeth. It was a beautiful time in our lives, even if we could only eat pureed foods. First of all, if our tooth came out in school, we got a cool necklace shaped like a tooth to put our tooth in and special treatment all day from the nurse in the form of ice pops to stop the bleeding.
After my friend Leslie lost her first tooth in school, most of the girls in my class spent entire recesses trying to dislodge each other's teeth. There were so many bloody grins that year that I am sure my teachers felt like they were at a vampire movie when we smiled as a group.
We tried every trick that Tom Sawyer did and more, thank god there was no internet back then, or we would have needed dentures.
After reading the comments on mrlady's post about teeth, I am no longer embarrassed by the silk drawstring bag that holds all my kids baby teeth and a few of the puppies too. (You know that the tooth fairy sent them back to me just so I could keep them after she was done turning them into stars right?)

Handmade Christmas

This Christmas, we have the added pressure of my daughter wanting to get her friends something. She felt bad last year because some of her friends bought her stuff and she was not prepared to reciprocate. So this year, we have a month to prepare to make some cool little handmade (Made with Love) gifts. I have been trolling the internet and found some cool ideas, but I have to have some labels made. My daughter and I have talked for years about making some of her own clothes and she has a line name already chosen, so I must get working on that. Today I learned how to make a dress form very inexpensively and so now I feel like we can really get started on this little dream. I will clean the house and get started on sorting fabrics that we can use. I have bags of scraps upstairs just waiting for new life. Of course, my husband will start moaning about the threads and pins he will undoubtedly find on the dining room floor, so I am thinking of setting up shop downstairs in the basement. I won’t get in anyone’s way and I won’t have to tear down everything for dinner every night. Now I know this may not be an exciting blog entry for you, but for me it helps to solidify my thoughts and make plans, so tough, just deal with it. I am going to take a trip to goodwill to get an old t-shirt to make the form with and maybe find some fun old sweaters, you will see what we make out of them later!

Bakugan Tournament

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Yesterday, I took my son to his first Bakugan Tournament at Toys R Us. It was crazy fun for the kids and a lot of his friends showed up. I told him about it only 2 days before, because I had gotten an email from the store (I never usually open the mercenary emails, good thing I did). He told some of his friends and I managed to get a bunch of pictures of them battling each other. His friend Nick even made him a shirt to wear! My daughter, husband, and I cheered on all the kids from our town and it was so serious, they were talking trash to each other and everything. At one point, my son had to face off against a 5 year old, it was the most precious moment, I was so proud of how patient he was with the younger one, he taught him what to do and proclaimed a tie when the went up to register the score. He even battled him an extra time. The Toys R Us employee was so good at keeping a straight face and recorded the “Tie” win so the little boy walked away happy. There were sad moments as well, my son faced off with a lot of friends, so when he had a victory; we were both happy and sad. I think it should have been a double elimination tournament, so that everyone had a real chance to advance. We are going to do this again, only we have decided to have a play date tournament at our local library. They have a room we can use and the boys will have something to do during the yucky weather. At the toy store there was a lot of standing on line, so we will have multiple face off’s and double winners will advance. There are so many kids that love to battle, and I can’t fit them in my house, so the library will work out fine. Now I have to figure out how to pay for the prizes. Plus, I have to actually learn the rules. By the way, my son won the tournament and is looking forward to their next one. Good job Toys R Us! Now if you had actually had the Bakugan Brawlers to sell yesterday, you would have made scads of money!
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Latest Obsessions

For those of you with kids, you are probably quite used to the daily and weekly obsession changes. I mean I am simply minding my own beeswax when a breathless 10 year old comes running up to me babbling about something or other. At least 9 or ten times a day this week he inquires if his Phillies World Series Championship Hat has arrived in the mail yet. Today is sunday, so technically I should be off the hook. I even gave the little $%#! the tracking number so he could follow the package and stop bugging me. It didn't work. He still keeps looking in the mud room for the package and talking about it. I am sure in church today when he lights a candle, it won't be for Great Uncle Tony or Poppy, it will be for that damn hat. After the hat arrives, he will be onto something else. Bakugan figures and cards seem to be an ongoing obsession, every Monday he wants to race off to the Toys R Us or the Walmart to see if new creature marbles were delivered. If my husband says he wants to take a ride to get a Starbucks, my son throws in a Toys R Us request.

My daughter has a new one too, she is reading that Twilight series by Meyers and cannot put that first book down. I got it out of the library yesterday afternoon, she will finish it very soon. She is talking about using her babysitter money to buy the series because she wants to "keep them" for her kids. She wants to re-read them like her Harry Potter books. I have always pushed for Library books, because I want to keep the library in business and because if you read as fast as my daughter and I do, you know that any book has to be absolutely amazing to actually purchase. I cannot afford either of our book habits. We would spend more than the heaviest cigarette smoker on their worst weeks. Unfortunately, I had bought the second book in the series for my daughter thinking it was the anthology, it wasn't so now she wants to own them all. We couldn't even get her to talk to us yesterday, she laid on the ottoman in a very uncomfortable pose and just read. I will get that book after she is done with it to see what the hub-bub is all about. If it is good, we may send a request to the Library Fairy that the entire set will be under the bookshelf on Christmas morning.

Enjoy the Flash!

As I uploaded pictures from last night into my laptop this morning, I was bit annoyed that the men complained about the flash of the camera, we could have gotten some great shots of me and my sister. Instead I have a bunch of pictures I really don't like and we have no table shot at all. I need some good shots of me and my sis. Anyway, loved dinner last night, it was too delicious! We took my sister and her man, my kids, and in-laws to A Touch Of Italy in Egg Harbor Township and had a wonderful time. I adore a leisurely dinner with good service and they certainly treated us right. It didn't matter that is was pouring hard enough for me to start looking for the closest Ark, the restaurant was very warm and welcoming. Our waitress Dana was so cute and funny and she brought us the hottest rolls right from the oven. She took such good care of us that I actually felt spoiled. We used to go to this restaurant a lot, just me and my family, and we had a great waiter named Steve. I don't know what they pay their staff here, but I have never been disappointed. I had these amazing sun-dried tomato & broccoli rabe ravioli. YUM! The cannoli was not authentic, not enough ricotta or something, but everything else was fabulous. Now I am stressed about what I am cooking for dinner, nothing will top that. That is always the downside to a great meal, you want more, and you want it everyday. I guess I will have to break out the cookbooks today. We just put some pumpkin bread in the oven, and the chicken stock for the Matzo ball soup is already cooling so I can scape off the fat to form our matzo balls. My kids and I am thoroughly enjoying the days off from school. I was up early looking at the Halloween photos from my friend Kim and returning long overdue emails.

Casciano Coffee Bar and Sweetery

Casciano Coffee Bar and Sweetery is the best place to go after voting, Ahhhhhhhh, the foamy latte, We got some great shots of the Eagle Theatre Restoration and we are listening to conversations about the election. On the TV is Obama and his family voting, he is taking an awful long time to vote, Talk about milking a photo op. I guess it is to be expected, but I am getting jaded by all the posturing of the candidates. 15 minutes so far.... still going... still going... better than the energizer bunny... ah shucks this is ridiculous. Anyway, back to the lattes and Banana Nut muffins, uuuuummmmm....

Halloween 2008

Enjoy all the pictures of Halloween 2008. It almost didn't happen because of the Phillies Parade, but Freddie got us out of the city on time.
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Phillies World Series Celebration

Citizens Bank Park!

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We decided to go to the parade since my husband has been talking about it since before we met. I thought it might be a nice idea to "Sleep Over" instead of fighting the traffic on Friday morning. We booked a hotel, got our tickets to the Lincoln Field Rally, packed and headed out. It was very spur of the moment and I am so glad we did it.

   Our hotel, the Econo Lodge in Philadelphia, .7 miles from Lincoln Field. Lovely staff, horrible electric outlets. This place doesn't earn a star for their rooms, it is a very low budget place, but their staff more than makes up for the rooms. It is a short walk to the stadiums.

The Penrose Diner food is good. They are right across the street from the Econo Lodge. This is where my husband got to shake hands with the Phillies first base coach, Davey Lopes. Guess he had time for breakfast before the parade. Nice staff, they were all dressed up for halloween and I never so a diner so full of red before.




Everyone walked all together in the streets lining up for the parade. There was not one person in a bad mood, it was wonderful!

The Spectrum, soon to be torn down. I know it is in bad shape, but it is sad to see the past broken up for shopping and bars.

This was a freaky shot, we went up to "visit" my husband football seats, I cannot imagine sitting up that high on a cold snowy day. There is no leg room and the pitch is so crazy that you would fall over seats if you stood up a sneezed real hard. I know that the new stadium seats are closer to the field, but I thought is was worse than Veteran's stadium. I am not going to an Eagles game in those seats, no way, no how.

My son in his Phillies gear.





Family Photos! Love those helpful strangers.

The William Penn Curse Is Dead!

My "Special" Pinky

My Pinky will never be the same, my pinky toe that is, not my sister. I broke it by trying to put the foldable TV table away. I dropped it instead and smashed the #@$% out of my toe. This is what happens when women clean the house, they get attacked with furniture. We should just know better by now; men should move all the big stuff that they leave out. Anyway, it has been over a month, it is still really red, and I still can't get my sneakers on. I am going to lose the little nail too, I can just tell. I assume that when the cuticle of the nail stays black for over a month, that it may not even grow back? I might be getting a fake pinky nail at the salon for the rest of my life. Acrylic on my feet? eeeeeeaaawwww! By the way Wendy, thanks for giving me that table, me and my pinky toe will remember you always.

I am not going to get excited...

I am not going to get excited, I am not going to get excited..Oh, h...e...double hockey sticks, I am a little bit excited. It is a smoke day. There is simply too much smoke from the forest fire to open the schools. I have all these wonderful plans for my day with my kids and nephew now, we can do ANYTHING! I am thinking I can get so much done. BUT you know that I will probably be sitting on my duff reading everyone's posts from twittermoms or somewhere. I always do this, If there is an extra day of life, i think I am going to get so much accomplished and I get all excited. I should just amend my expectations and KNOW that I will not get a thing done, the house will actually get messier as all the kid's friends come over to "visit." "Visit" is code word for, " I know teachers don't have to go to work today, could my kids hang out with your kids?" It is always fun, so I am not complaining, but my husband does wonder why our house looks like tornado alley when we have been home all day. Ok, I am at least calling my sister for a good talk, baking something good, and I am throwing another layer of paper mache on the character heads, I will post about that experience later. I am also going to get the fabric and make Lucy's dress today. OK, there are my plans, Everyone of you crazy moms better not post today or you will throw me off my game.

Mole Day

Happy Mole Day!

I have been driving my daughter crazy with mole day jokes for the past three days. She may be leaving the family fold over it. I plan on texting her and bugging her all day. Too much fun. I tried to convince her to wear a big felt mole on her face but she wasn't going for it. Maybe in high school. I mean, who doesn't want a MOLE? She wasn't even excited to make her little stuffed mole. What a great science project, I mean how often do you get to make a stuffed animal for homework?

Not a Five-Star Restaurant...

Today my ten-year old son told me a little story. He said they had chicken patties for lunch in school yesterday, but it was only half a patty and half of a hotdog roll. Apparently, his class had gotten to lunch too late to get the whole sandwich, there wasn’t enough left of the regular rolls or patties, so each kid received half a chicken patty on top of half of a hotdog roll. The funniest bit was the part that happened before they even got to the cafeteria. Their teacher was perturbed about the way they were pushing and shoving to line up for lunch. She said, “Calm down, it is not a five-star restaurant.”
According to my son, she was right, “It was more like a negative 5,” he told me while giggling at the same time. My poor son, spoiled by home-cooked meals, complained that he didn’t have enough time to eat the ½ patty on ½ bun because, “ I wasted all my time trying to figure out how to eat it and laughing about it with my friends.” We put ketchup on it and tried to eat it, but it was hard. The lunch ladies are never going to live this down. I wish I could have been there.

Piano Lessons Paying Off

After years of badgering my daughter and my son to practice the piano, I have my revenge and payoff. My daughter actually wrote a song, and a good one at that. She composed the music and everything. It was what I always hoped she would be able to do if she ever got the whim to do so. I love writing lyrics but the inability to write my own music held me back. I wanted my kids to have a better shot if they were so inclined. Now, if I start calculating how much this has cost me, lets see...$17.50 a lesson for 6 years at one lesson a week... That is $5, 460.00, One Beautiful song...priceless!

Making tomato sauce from scratch

How to Make Homemade Tomato Sauce
Use Those Fresh Romas from the Garden
By Michelle Wendt
As published on Associated Content


This year my family planted cherry and grape tomatoes. It was our first year gardening after a three-year hiatus; we were just planting for household eating and not for canning or freezing purposes. Having no room to plant melons is always a disappointment, but the gentleman around the corner grows them and he typically sells them to us. Stopping by to get the melons, we found out that he was flush with ripe, Roma tomatoes and selling them for a $1 per half-bushel container. I told him that I already had enough tomatoes, but he was stressed that they would go bad before he could sell them and he argued with us in his Italian accent, " Take them home, make up some sauce, it's good eating. They gonna go bad here."
Well, we are not the type to let down a little old man, especially a neighbor, so we bought a bushel and prepared about 8 quarts of sauce from them. My thirteen-year-old daughter Haley, who is learning how to cook, practiced blanching the tomatoes in boiling water for two minutes. Then we let the hot tomatoes cool for a few minutes and sliced them in half. By grasping the ends of the tomatoes we pulled the skins right off. It was so easy. We had a bit of trouble with a few of the stem ends so we kept a small paring knife handy to assist us with the more unruly skins. My sister Pinky informed me today that if I had scored the skins before blanching, I would not have had this problem. According to her, this method also works well when skinning peppers. Haley had a great time skinning them and kept pushing me out of her way, I was stuck just slicing them in half.
After peeling the tomatoes we put extra virgin olive oil in the bottom of our stock pot and dumped in the pulpy fruit. My friend Belinda used to give the tomatoes a squeeze to get out any stray seeds before she cooked them down, but Haley and I decided to skip this step; Roma tomatoes do not have many seeds at all, so it is not usually a problem for me. We added fresh oregano, basil, thyme, rosemary and marjoram from the garden, and dried parsley and red pepper flakes from the pantry. Each one of the fresh spices grows very well and I am always delighted to utilize our abundant herb garden. We picked, washed, minced, and added the Italian spices a bit at a time as the tomatoes cooked down. Belinda used to say that if we just added the spices at the beginning, they would not be as aromatic or tasty as they would be if we kept adding some during the cooking process.
Simmering the tomatoes for an hour and half, we started to get a bit impatient that they weren't "cooking down" as fast as we wanted them to. Haley used the immersion blender to break up the more stubborn pulp and I added whole garlic cloves and minced garlic. I like to remove and use the cooked whole cloves and some butter to mash on Italian bread later. It is delicious! After pre-cooking our sweet Italian sausage in the frying pan, we added it and the juices to a portion of the sauce and allowed the meat sauce to simmer some more. The reason we reserved some of the sauce was to have an ample supply of both marinara and meat sauce on hand during the winter.
The sauce was finally done and we had to think about storage options. I save all the quart containers from the deli and Chinese food takeout, and I do not mind writing on them a bit. They fit well in the freezer door and are an invaluable resource to us as we make huge batches of soup all year long. After putting sauce up in the containers, we cleaned up our little mess and the rest of the family pitched in at this point. My husband explained how he would take care of the pots just like he had when he was young. He grabbed some of the Italian bread and took over the stockpot. Soon, my whole family was standing over the pots with slices of bread and scooping out the remains. It was the perfect end to a wonderful afternoon and I will remember the happiness of cooking with my daughter as we use each quart of sauce this winter on our pizzas, linguini, and parmesan.