Poor Pookie!

My friend Sara forwarded the link to the Flickr stream from the New York Public Library. Among other things, they have a lot of Ellis Island photos, and some are just amazing. Check out these two children from Holland, photographed around 1905. Their shoes! The rick-rack on her dress! Her little doll and his comforting hand on her back! ZOMG.

Captain Obvious, Paging Captain Obvious...

So here's my problem. I make the Chinese-ish food. I make the sauce. It's thin. I mix up a cornstarch slurry, like I'm 'posed to, and I mix it in and nothing happens. No thickness, no yummy glossy sauce. Bleh.

Or, I get disgustingly thick, jelly-like goo. Double Bleh!

Problem #2: rice. We're not great at making rice. We do ok. But sometimes it's gross and sticky (I like sticky rice, but there's sticky rice and then there's wallpaper paste), sometimes it's wet, sometimes it has a funny taste and leaves a starch layer on my teeth. I'm crap at rice, as Will might say.

Tonight, I solved both problems.

Months ago, I bought a bag of noodle disks at the Large But Not Very Nice Asian Market. It was maybe 20 disks (the size of a rice cake), dried and pressed. Like ramen. The whole thing cost maybe $2.99. And I thought (tonight), "what if I used noodles instead of rice? Would the planet spill off its axis, ending all life as we know it?"

Prolly not. So I boiled some water, then dropped in two disks and turned off the heat. After about 3 minutes I drained the noodles. They were not fully cooked.

Meanwhile, I'd been cooking tiny chicken chunks in a very hot pan with teriyaki sauce (they were marinated in it and I just dumped all that in the pan). I added sliced water chestnuts. I added a handful of snow peas. Then I dumped in the noodles. They soaked up the sauce, turned a satisfying beige, and were done in approximately 2 seconds.

Yum. Noodles, chicken, peas and crunchy bits, all flavored with teriyaki but not dripping with it. And no waiting for rice. And no cleaning up the rice pot.

Yay!

New Jammies!

Fun: taking pictures of Iain.
More fun: pointing the camera at him, pressing the button, then showing him the result. What a ham!


But the real news around here is: Iain has new jammies. And not just any jammies. When I stopped at Kid-To-Kid Tuesday, I bought (in addition to 4 new pairs of pants for Mr. Grows-Without-Cease) a pair of flannel PJ's. Thomas the Tank Engine PJ's, to be precise.

Oh, it's just so exciting I must grab my toes. TOES!

California Update

This just in from our California bureau:

Tonight, our young lady ran around the house shouting, "Macabee!" like, a hundred times.

Further, she pulled the Canadian flag out of one of our kitchen drawers -- what, you don't have a Canadian flag in your kitchen? -- and spent a full thirty minutes sneaking up on the cats and *draping* them with it. So that the cats were walking around under the Canadian flag, bummed, with just a head sticking out. I would like to apologize to Canada.

We're also on a cycle of approximately ten screaming tantrums per hour. That's an average of one every six minutes, dude. I s&*% you not. She makes floppy arms -- she sort of shakes the arms very loosely, with the hands limp and banging around. And informs her parents that they can really-extra-suck it, because NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO YOGURT NO NO NO NO NO NO NO!!!!!!!!!

I mean, dude. The dad may have to start drinking again.

Ouch. I think the next year is going to be interesting for all of us. Except Callie's Staff, of course. She's already more than a quarter through The Twos, and by all accounts doing fine. I'm a leeetle beet jealous, but she's so cute it's hard to hold it against her.

Running (with or without WAFFLES!)

Tonight we confirmed that Iain is actually running. Running. As in jogging, sprinting, bopping along with a pair of shorty-shorts and a terrycloth headband, looking for birds you can take back to your pad and with whom you can rap about your etchings.

Or something.

Recall that Iain decided to walk at 16.5 months. Plenty of people said, "Oh, you watch. He'll go from crawling to running in a week!" Nope.

NOPE! [I'm not bitter and you can't prove it.]

Instead, he's been toddling all this time. But Sunday night when Callie chased him, I saw him run a bit. Not walkveryfast (what he usually does), but a true run.

And tonight he was doing it again. Real running, with all the stomping and face-plants that implies.

Yay! Now all we have to do is hide the scissors.

Poem for Penzey's

Ancho Chili Pepper Ground
Whole Special Extra Bold Indian Black Peppercorns
Whole Malabar Indian Black Peppercorns
Pink Peppercorns
Cumin Ground
Natural Cocoa Powder
Garam Masala
Powdered China #1 Ginger
Taco Seasoning

Someone special has all this flying to her door from the spice capital of the Upper Midwest.

Behold: The Waffle Monster

Pretty much anything you ask Iain these days results in this: "WAFFLES!"

Brekkie? WAFFLES!
Lunch? WAFFLES!
Dinner? Manllaaaaaa! [vanilla] followed, often, by: WAFFLES!

He's eaten the stash I made a week ago (ten waffles in the freezer, 4 eaten by me, that leaves 6 whole waffles in Iain's tummy. And he poached about 1/4 of mine, too, so that's one more whole waffle.). I might have to pack away the waffle iron for a couple of weeks just to break the cycle.

Oh, and he outgrew his pants and weighs 28 pounds. Coincidence? I think not.

In other news, his new favorite book is beaten-up copy of the A to Z book by Sandra Boynton. And here's where I have to give props to daycare: he knows more than half the letters. Knows them perfectly. And many of the rest he only gets wrong because he mistakes them for letters they resemble (for example, V and W, or S and Z).

I should have seen this coming, because Callie can recognize her name. But I confess I never really considered that pretty soon I'd have to come up with a secret cipher so Charles and I can pass notes that say things like "Check out the size of that Head!" and "Are we out of WAFFLES? Oh no!"