Writing, Heat, and Lonely

I should note--which will make him feel good--that although the Husband is travelling on business this week, he has made sure to instruct me to turn on the security system, keep the dog inside, and has pointed out where the gun is.  So, in case there's a mad stalker somewhere hoping to take advantage--just know that our stuff's not very pawn-able and not worth the whole dog-chewing-parts-of-you-off thing.

Alas, the Husband IS travelling, which I hate.  He hates it too.  The advantage of having him gone is that, hopefully, I'll be able to write at night when I would otherwise be chatting with my soulmate.  Lemons and lemonade, you know.

It's been terribly hot here.  Even the newspaper thinks so, and it's supposed to be bad for the next ten days.  I am proud of how well we are adjusting, actually.  Saturday we even went to the park and fed the Very Ugly Ducks, and nobody passed out.  Milkshakes from Chic-fil-A were mandatory on the way home, however.

I read, about a lady author from the 1800s named Elizabeth Prentiss, that her children said their mother's word was law "but, o happy truth!--it was also Gospel'.

With that inspiring thought, I'm going to go mother my children for the day.  Sort of makes you want to bite down on a lot of the words that spring unbidden to your tongue, doesn't it?

Cheers,

Breanna

Camera Charging...Again...

Give me a break.  I just this week figured out how to schedule my laundry so we didn't have half-done piles of clothes spilling over the counter in the laundry room.  Someday I will also figure out how to keep my various and sundry electronic devices charged.

The kids have been loving our wading pool, and I have been...shocked that we're in a land where I have to let the hose run for a while to make sure the water isn't scalding when it comes out.

The Husband had to take his car to get the A/C fixed this morning because it's dangerous to drive around without it here.

We're just having a slow weekend here, and I'm trying to get some fiction writing done.

Cheers,

Breanna

A Texas Morning

That's right. 79 degrees at 7:38AM.

Well, it's hard to take a picture of yourself.  But I thought I'd just post one of me in my jeans that I couldn't remotely zip up a week ago.  I am really loving T-Tapp.

He puts himself into this position, if you're wondering.  Naps for over an hour this way, too.  Bizzare.

Sort of practicing the letter "D", except her magnadoodle (or "drawing board") is upside down here because sometimes it has to be a kite.

We're reading these books and have a hard time telling d's from b's, so we're practicing.  (And by "we" reading I mean "she" reads them.  Pretty good for age 3, huh?)

"CHEESE!  CHEESE!  CHEESE MAMA!  CHEESE!"

"I'm taking your picture, Mama! CLICK!"

Thinking serious thoughts, not in the mood for photography.

Our lamps, tornado/power outage ready.

"TAKE MY PICTURE!"

Our evolving schoolbook cabinet, which needs cleaning out.

Cheers,

Breanna

Mead Making

By the way, in all honesty I should tell you our homemade beer turned out pretty terrible.  It was the "kit" beer sold by Mr. Beer, which comes with a can of ingredients to pour into the water and which is, as the Husband put it, "microwave dinner brewing".  The beer tastes, again as the Husband put it, like "beer flavored seltzer".

But the mead's still turning out good, though.

This is what happens when you get the Husband on board with something: total buy-in.

A five-gallon glass carboy, if you're wondering.  I keep thinking someone will see it through a window and think we're cooking meth.  (We're not.  It's honey, water, yeast, and fruit.)

All that's left of our first batch, the one I brewed in a spring-water jug.

(By the way have I mentioned I love my CSA? "CSA" is Community Supported Agriculture, a fancy word for a farmer who delivers you vegetables.  Mine also brings a dozen eggs from her chickens that get to get out and scratch.  Her name is Georgiaberry.  How awesome is that?)

Anyway, back to the mead.  The one on the left is orange flavored (kinda, you don't really taste the orange) and the one on the left is the strawberry, which we tasted although it's not quite done yet.  It's already really good.  I like it better than the orange, although the Husband says it's a bit sweet for him.

This is what the Chickabiddies were doing while we were siphoning things from one carboy to another.  Littleman was sacked out on our bed (the better to keep him asleep while brother and sister flail and fight going to bed on the other side of the house).

He had a doctor's appointment this morning and weighs 14 pounds.  He's a chunk.  Also he thinks he can sit up.  He turned 4 months old today.

Buddy, sacked out on his own bed,which is lined with pillows because Bud flops a LOT during the night and frequently ends up at the other end of the bed entirely.  Night before last we got up to find him snuggled into his sister's bed, both of them happy as clams.

Miss Boo, who sweats like a lumberjack when she sleeps, even if it isn't 100 degrees.  (That's where our temperature has been for the last few days, and the newspaper's been running editorials about heat exhaustion.  Yikes.  I'm so thankful for the AC.)

So you see we planned our mead-related activities to cooincide with all three kids being asleep.  That's how we  have to roll in this house.

Also randomly, I don't think I mentioned I love my new china cabinet.  It's awesome.

The Husband bought this bucket to ferment in, feeling my spring-water jugs were piddly and unprofessional. (My response: but they only cost 88 cents.)

The Husband insisted on taking my picture while the siphoning went on.  Because this took ten minutes, I was ok with that.

The siphon.  Get the shorter length of hose if you order one.  We should have.

Bottling the (almost) finished orange mead from the last batch--our new batch is that cloudy stuff to the left.  It looks better before you drink it, though.

The still-clarifying strawberry mead, in bottles.

Tasting it... it's sort of like alcoholic, seedless strawberry jelly, but the consistency of wine of course.  Not bad.  Will be better after another few weeks, though.

This shot was the Husband's idea.  He likes symmetry.  That half-full bottle of strawberry bugged him, but our gallon didn't make quite so much as with the orange because a lot of it was taken up with strawberry puree.

Now the kids are playing with every bit of tupperware in the house, so perhaps I should wrangle some school for them.

Cheers,

Breanna

I Just Realized

When some people take lukewarm 3-minute showers, and perhaps don't get them every day, they are called:

-Conservationists
-Marines
-Missionaries

When others do, they are called:

-Mothers.

Let me set the scene for you a bit.

So this morning Miss Boo bit her brother again, and I had to have a big hairy talk with her and finally come down to threatening to bite her myself if she ever does it again.  That seemed to scare her straight.  The biting just was a hint of what was to come all day.

I thought, we'll go to Chic-fil-A for lunch and play in their indoor playground, because it's really hot (99F) and I don't want to play on our sunny back porch this afternoon.  We go to Chic-fil-A and like a dummy I order the kids bright red Hi-C with their chicken nuggets, thinking "well, they do love the Hi-C".  We apparently looked pathetic enough that the gal behind the counter carried our tray to us.

Littleman was sleeping in his pack on my chest and all went well while we were eating, with the exception that Bud spilled his drink on his pants and then tried to crawl under the table to lick salt off the floor.  It was, of course, the middle of the lunch rush, but this didn't occur to me while we were making our plans.

We had finished up lunch and were getting ready to clean up our table and go to the playground side of the restaurant.  I put everything on the tray, intending to take it to the trash can a mere five feet away.

On the way, because I'm balancing the tray of trash in one hand and holding onto Buddy with the other, I drop a french fry container and then while I am exclaiming about that, a Hi-C cup.  By now we have an audience of four or five little old ladies.

Then I get the trash in the trash can, try to grab some napkins to wipe up the spill, and Bud decides it would be a good idea to grab hold of a highchair next to the napkin dispenser and roll it under my legs.  Which I can't see because I'm wearing Littleman.

So as Miss Boo is helpfully swabbing Hi-C around the floor with napkins, I fall over the highchair and land on Buddy, prompting the whole restaurant to be concerned about us.

I snatched everybody up and dragged everyone home.  We didn't even get to play in the dang playground.

At home I am trying to find things to do that will keep the shreds of my sanity together so I first complained to my mother (thanks, Mom, it helped a lot) and then decided art projects might be calming.

After they painted on each other, we went to playing in separate bedrooms.  Then I was trying to nurse Littleman, while having to keep Miss Boo from running on the couch every five minutes, when Buddy got into the pantry and dumped out a half a bag of grain, which I then had to vacuum up because we live in dang TEXAS now and we can't leave a SINGLE grain in the drawer or we'll get COCKROACHES.

I was starting to say "dang" a lot.

So then I thought, I am stressed and my voice is probably getting raised too often.  I should do something to de-stress, like working out, which seems to improve my mood most of the time.  I have a 15-minute workout called T-Tapp that I am really liking.  I should be able to get them to play by themselves for 15 minutes, right?

Well, kinda.  It was more like a 7 1/2 minute workout, because the older two were terrifying Littleman by shoving their faces up next to him and saying "WE LOVE OUR BROTHER! HE'S SO CUTE!"

It's so dang hot that 7 1/2 minutes was enough to make me sweaty enough that a shower wasn't optional, so I carefully left them occupied in Bud's room, to all appearances absorbed in the toy horses.  I took Littleman to my bedroom, and sprang into the master bathroom shower.

I came dashing out of the shower only to find Buddy had broken a pin clean off of my Kindle case, which means I need to order a new one.

All this and it's not even dinnertime.

I am waiting for something to catch on fire or someone to break out of the house and run naked and giggling to the construction site across the street.

Phew.

I do feel better after sharing, however.

Cheers,

Breanna

The Jibblies

I've got the jibblies a bit this morning, but knowledge is power.  First a cute story from Miss Boo to make up for what I'm about to do to you:

Miss Boo says this

is pronounced "hockey doody", NOT "pterodactyl".  Just thought you'd like to know.

This

is pronounced EAHAYGOUGYGHGHAGHAHAHAHAA!

Don't worry, that's a photo from Google.  I wouldn't hang around taking a picture of a snake, especially not one with its head up in a "don't tread on me" kinda way like that.  Also, I did not see the snake myself--I heard about it third-hand from the people down the street yesterday, who had it in their yard.

Still.

So I got up and Googled this morning.

I now know that the Texas rat snake is often mistaken for the northern copperhead (pictured above), but that it's difficult to be sure without peering at the animal's evil little head.  I know that the back yard we have, which is bare and has close-clipped grass, is ideal for discouraging snakes.  I know snakes generally come out in the early morning, night, and evening, being as how they can't regulate their body temperature except by sitting on something hot or cold.  And I know that I'm going to move some stuff into our garage and off our back porch, to eliminate even more cover.

All this and the snake wasn't even in my yard, it was several houses down and closer to the drainage ditch that functions as a creek most of the year.  I suspect there's not enough to eat or drink in my yard to attract a snake.

But still.  Jibblies.

Of course, much more potent than my piddly efforts at removing snake cover (and thankful releasing of the dog before the kids every day) is the fact that the Almighty is--well, almighty.  As Miss Boo says, "Jesus is the Boss of snakes."

(Actually she says "I am the boss of the vacuum and Jesus is the Boss of me" more often, but the same principle applies.)

Sorry if you've got that snaky feeling now.

Cheers,

Breanna

Just a Few

Between the climbing-into-the-baby's-high-chair-and-having-a-poopy-accident and the jumping on the couch, I have only a few shots this morning:

...and my new hair.  Sort of.  Flat from being slept on.  Use your imagination.

Cheers,

Breanna