We go through a gallon of yogurt a week. Those cute little individual yogurts became a joke a long time ago and we switched to the grimmer “family size” pints that come in two awe inspiring flavors. Strawberry and Vanilla. My kids felt like this was the yogurt boneyard as there were no bouncing rabbits or superheros promising half sugar and healthy bones...but alas, my offspring punished me by consuming more yogurt, not less. Our yogurt consumption got so out of hand I had a yogurt maker in my Amazon cart and was researching urban cows, when the ever classy Walmart answered all my yogurt dreams and started selling massive containers of the healthiest, plainest, fattiest, thickest yogurt I’d ever laid eyes on. I thought maybe my kids would turn up their delicate noses at it and I wouldn’t have to consider getting stock options in the dairy market, but instead they like it MORE. (take that Mr. Rabbit)
And this is what my gourmet cooking hobby has devolved into… freezer, crockpot, costco and hurling massive globs of soured milk at my children while I rotate long division, phonegrams and the principal parts of verbs (and that’s on a good day).
I lost the baby tonight. I was making dinner and thinking wispy nonsensical thoughts when it occurred to me I’m not usually allowed such luxury. I was missing my stalwart sidekick. The (normally) naked one who dismantles the Tupperware cupboard and starts a rock band in the pots and pans… he wasn’t with any of his brothers and I checked the house twice before moving on to the backyard and garage. I was telling myself not to panic and that he had to be around here somewhere when I was casually informed he’d gone out the front door “to look for dad”, which was a big problem considering dad wasn’t home. After running up and down the street debating whether I should start hollering like a madwoman in hopes I could enlist some neighbors, I decided to check the house one more time. Of course I found him… happily behind my bathroom door with a palette of last year's Halloween makeup which he was dutifully painting all over himself and everything else . He jumped up and down with excitement flapping his arms and jabbering in what I could only translate as “Look Ma! I’m going to be the next Rembrandt!”.
We’re reading “Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland” by Lewis Carroll for book club, and I’m having a strong case of nostalgia. That same feeling you get when you hear an old song, or smell something that reminds you of your great grandmother’s pot roast. Unfortunately, my 2016 middle aged brain is a little horrified my seven year old self was in love with a book written by a creepy mathematician who was so obsessed with three little girls he wrote out the story he’d been telling them. One of the questions for our book club is “ Do you consider this book to be an adult’s view of childhood, or a child’s view of adulthood?” and the question contributed not a little to the aforementioned lost baby episode.
As an adult it seems surely the book had its origins at Burning Man or something, but I also distinctly remember consuming the book as a child and thinking it made perfect sense…. Which makes Mr. Author Man a bit more creepy, not less...hmm. It has very little in the way of plot (like most Romantic Era books. cough cough), but lots of pretty words. I still have the same, beautifully bound hardcover that captured my attention as a child, so I strategically left it out today for my own children (to see if it would capture their attention), but the only comment I got was, “Oooh, we can use that book to hold down the corner of our fort!”. And thus it went back on the shelf to continue its Velveteen Rabbit existence.
...maybe in a few years I’ll give it and my cookbooks another shot?