Year: 2007

One in a million

When Caroline was still just a wee little baby, who held my heart in the palm of her tiny, tiny hand, I started playing a game with her every time I placed her on the changing table. I would say, “How many kisses am I going to give Caroline? Oooone? Twoooo? Nope. A MILLION. A MILLION!!” And I’d kiss her little cheeks and her hands and her round tummy. She’d giggle and squeal and just melt my heart a little bit more.

Eventually, she outgrew the changing table and, thankfully, became potty-trained. We don’t have the opportunity to play our little game 6 or 18 times a day like we used to but, every now and then, she’ll come plop herself in my lap and say, “Give me a million kisses, Mama!”

So I stop whatever I’m doing to take advantage of this sweet, fleeting moment in time, and I listen to her giggle and squeal and my heart melts all over again.

A day will come when I’ll be lucky to get even one kiss so, for now, I’ll take the million anytime I can get them.
In heaven this will be totally fat free

A few of y’all asked or emailed about the recipe for the cheese biscuits and strawberry butter. And I’m always happy to share a recipe that will bring someone great joy and high cholesterol. So here it is.

Paula Deen’s Cheese Biscuits

2 cups self-rising flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp sugar
1/2 cup Crisco shortening
3/4 cup grated cheddar cheese
1 cup buttermilk

Preheat oven to 350 and while you’re waiting, go put on a pair of pants with an elastic waistband. Mix flour, baking powder, and sugar together using a fork; cut in shortening until it resembles cornmeal. Add cheese. Stir in buttermilk (because the stick of lard and all the cheese isn’t really enough fat) all at one time just until blended. Do not over-stir. Drop by spoonfuls onto a well-greased baking sheet. Bake 12-15 minutes. Makes about 8 large biscuits or 12 medium size ones.

Strawberry Butter

1/2 stick of butter, softened
2-3 tbs. powdered sugar
2-3 tbs. finely chopped strawberries

In a small bowl, combine all ingredients until blended. Makes about a 1/2 cup.

Serve with warm cheese biscuits. Eat and know that there is a God in heaven who loves you and is the giver of all good things, including cheese biscuits coated in strawberry butter. Of course, if you eat like this all the time, you may meet Him sooner rather than later.
Here’s mud in your eye

Last week, I asked y’all for some tips on throwing a baby shower and got all kinds of great suggestions about food, decorations and games. I am now going to return the favor and share with y’all two pieces of baby shower advice that I learned yesterday.

1. Do not wait until midnight the night before the shower to start tying silver baby cups and spoons to your chandelier because between the tiredness, the PMS, and all of the clanking of the spoons, you will experience a moment that will make you want to hurl priceless family heirlooms through your kitchen window.

2. Do not decide to wear some cute, black polka-dot shoes with high wedge heels to the shower. By the time the shower is over, you will find yourself seriously considering amputating your feet with a butter knife.

You’re welcome.

All week last week I had a running list in my head of everything I needed to get done for the shower. I planned my menu, bought the groceries, ordered some petit fours from a local bakery, polished silver and borrowed a mammoth coffee urn from my sister-in-law. I was the model of efficiency and, by the time Saturday arrived, all I had left to do was pick up the petit fours from the bakery, go buy some flowers, decorate the house and make the breakfast casseroles so that they could sit overnight.

Piece of cake, or petit four as the case may be.

Anyway, I think I may have mentioned at some point that there has been a lot of rain over the last few weeks. Lots of rain. Lots and lots of rain. So, Saturday morning, our friend W (who is married to E, the baby shower guest of honor) calls to see if we want to drive down to his ranch, bring the four-wheelers and go mudding, better known as muddin’. P said he’d go and take Caroline with him but, in a fit of free-spiritedness and overwhelming nostalgia caused by watching too many episodes of The Wonder Years, I decided that life was too short to send my husband and baby off to have fun without me while I worried about tying a bunch of baby spoons together. I wanted to go muddin’ too.

Sunrise, sunset and all that stuff.

So, I ran to the bakery, picked up my petit fours, came home and threw on some old jeans, a t-shirt, and a baseball cap, and jumped in the truck with P and Caroline. I decided everything else could wait until later, even if it meant I was up until the wee, small hours of the morning.

I had so much fun, which is living proof that you can take the girl out of Southeast Texas but you can’t take the Southeast Texas out of the girl. The ranch was literally a mud pit. We had so much fun and listening to Caroline scream and laugh every time the mud came flying up was totally worth having to go buy flowers at 9:00 last night.

And to give y’all some idea of the amount of rain, this is normally a road.

And here’s some random woman in a baseball cap posing with my child.

I don’t have a picture of E but, rest assured, she was a vision right out of a Pea in the Pod catalog with her pregnant belly coated in splattered mud. It really is the way most mothers-to-be spend the day before an elegant baby shower brunch.

We got home around 8:00, after stopping for a lovely dinner at the Dairy Queen in Lytle, Texas. It’s a wonder that it’s not in Zagat’s guide because, really, the dead, smashed fly on the venetian blind added that little something extra to the Steak Finger Country basket experience. But at least we got Blizzards. Later on, I would need that extra boost of energy that only a Reeses Peanut Butter Cup Blizzard can provide. And did y’all know that they now make Blizzard cakes? They do. They really do.

Moment of silence and reverence for the Blizzard cake.

After I finally got Caroline clean and in bed, I ran to the store to buy flowers, came home and commenced with the baby shower preparations. I cooked, I tied ribbon, and I arranged flowers. Finally at about 1 a.m., I climbed into bed so that I could toss and turn until about 3 a.m. because once my brain is on, it’s hard to turn off. So, I laid there and pondered what time I’d need to put the casseroles in the oven the next morning, worried about making an appointment to see the dentist, calculated the ratio of the U.S. dollar to the Euro, and solved quadratic equations in my head. Oh, and I also might have thought about what I was going to wear the next day.

For the first time since she’s been born, I was actually a little glad that Caroline woke me up at 6:30 a.m. I spent the morning cooking and cleaning up, while she had a meltdown about the fact that I had used her silver baby cup to decorate. She kept saying, “But it’s mine. It’s my cup. I don’t want you to use it.” And honestly, I wanted to say, “Well, then that cereal is mine. I bought it and I don’t feel like sharing. Give it back. Oh yeah, and quit sitting on my couch. It’s mine.”

But that would be wrong, because I am 35 years old.

So, we negotiated the terms of a lease agreement for the use of the silver cup, and I’m afraid she may be taking lessons in used car salesmanship from JoEL. She drives a hard bargain.

All said and done, the shower turned out very well. We didn’t play any games, mainly because I think party games are of the devil. I have always felt this way and even in 4th grade had no desire to “break the ice” with other kids by lining up and passing them an orange from under my chin. In spite of the lack of party game playing, E had a nice time, got a lot of really nice things for the babies, and everyone said the food was great. The hit of the day were the cheese biscuits with strawberry butter. In fact, thinking about that leftover strawberry butter sitting in my fridge makes me want to grab a large spoon, label it pudding, and call it a day.

I’m pretty sure strawberry butter isn’t part of my new Cooking Light initiative, but Cooking Light doesn’t really offer a lot of help when it comes to PMS.

Here are a some pictures for posterity. Unfortunately, you can’t really see the strawberry butter.

I’ll be rested and ready to throw another party in about 5 years, which would be okay if Caroline’s birthday weren’t just a little over a week away.

Party on.

But this time, I’m wearing flip-flops.
Thank you, Captain Obvious

Note to the Express News: Thank you for stating the obvious since 1861.

Note to the rain: Go Away.

Note to the neighborhood swimming pool: It is my sincerest wish that one day I will find myself reunited with you, your energy burning powers, and your lovely snack bar with the cookies-n-cream ice cream sandwiches.
Our house was a very, very, very fine house

When I was 5, my family moved to the suburbs. It was the mid-70’s and it was the thing to do. We lived in Houston and moved to a fairly new subdivision off of FM 1960. I remember my mama telling me that FM stood for farm to market road and it meant that this paved four lane road used to be nothing but a dirt path that farmers used to carry their produce to the local markets. It fascinated me to no end to think that, in my mind at least, just mere months before we moved there, the road was covered with old men in overalls pushing wheelbarrows full of produce.

We moved in to our new two-story colonial-style home in April of 1976. I remember the month because I was enrolled in a new Kindergarten class just in time to participate in their theatrical performance of The Tortoise and the Hare. Since I was a latecomer, I was given the role of stand-by rabbit #4 and my costume consisted of a pink leotard and tights with a bonnet like thing with white bunny ears. It wasn’t nearly as splashy as the costume a girl named Amy got to wear, which was a full-hot pink bunny costume complete with a yellow fur tummy. Oh, I was envious and, in fact, months later when Amy and I became friends and I spent the night at her house, I saw the bunny costume hanging in her closet and suggested that I try it on. It was rabbit perfection, just as I had imagined.

Anyway, I vaguely remember the day we moved into our new house on Misty Lea Lane. A few things stood out to me immediately. The first was that we had a fire hydrant in our front yard. I thought that was about the greatest thing ever and if, at the age of 5, I had been allowed to write the MLS listing of our new home it would have read like this: 4 BR, 2 1/2 BA, NEW CARPET AND FIRE HYDRANT IN FRONT YARD. The other feature that took my breath away was the fact that it was two stories. The stairs offered an endless amount of possibilities for entertainment. And lastly, the wallpaper in the entryway was a flocked, velvet texture in a lovely shade of avocado green. I remember feeling that wallpaper with my fingertips and thinking, “Lawsy, we sho’ is rich now Miz Scarlett.”

One of the best features of the house was that the downstairs portion made a complete circle. If my friends and I wanted to play hide and seek, we could start in the formal living room, which led to the family room, which led to the breakfast area and kitchen, then the dining room and back to the living room. It allowed for endless games of chase. And there was a closet in the den, right next to the wet bar (love the 70’s and the requisite wet bar), that was tucked under the stairs so that the ceiling of it was slanted. It fascinated me to no end.

All the bedrooms were upstairs with my parents’ bedroom on one side of the staircase and the other 3 bedrooms on the other side. I remember lying in bed at night, trying to gather up my courage to walk to their room, knowing I would have to walk past the stairs and heaven only knows what could have been lurking at the bottom of those stairs just waiting for a 6 year old in a Holly Hobby nightgown to walk by.

I had my own room with a brass bed with an old-fashioned bedspread with yellow flowers on it but, in reality, my sister and I shared her bedroom. She had two twin beds with pink headboards, and I slept in the room with her every night because I gave new meaning to the word scaredy-cat. I’m not sure what kind of defense I thought a 3 year old in Winnie the Pooh pajamas would offer me from the boogeyman, but I felt better knowing she was there. Plus, when insomnia hit us, we had a playmate right in the next bed. And my sister always kept a stash of Sunmaid raisins in her nightstand drawer which, looking back, was sheer brilliance on her part.

The remaining bedroom was a guest bedroom/playroom. It was filled with our Barbies and their townhome, complete with elevator, various baby dolls and doll beds, and a record player so that we could listen to The Bee-Gees or Olivia Newton-John. We spent hours playing in that room and Barbie put on many the concert with her Olivia Newton-John lipsynching skills.

One of the best things that ever happened to that house was when my parents got it professionally landscaped. The landscapers filled the yard with flower beds covered in dark, pine mulch and each flower bed had a little ditch feature around it to keep the grass from encroaching on the bed. My friends and I would fill up those little moats with water, drag Barbie out there in her Winnebago and have a good, old fashioned Barbie campout complete with a river. It was treacherous terrain for Barbie and Ken, roughing it out there amongst the azaleas.

We had a metal swing set with pastel-colored stripes winding around the legs. Whatever happened to the good old metal swingsets? They’ve been killed off by the wooden playscape, probably because all of the tetanus shots kids of the 70’s had to have after being cut by a sharp piece of metal sticking out of a see-saw.

We would spend hours swinging and jumping out of our swings. Twisting them around and around until the chains creaked and couldn’t go any tighter, and then spinning wildly out of control, stumbling off the swing and falling facedown in the St. Augustine grass.

The backyard also had a cement patio and it was the scene of much of my early rollerskating choreography. I would put on my new white rollerskates with lime green wheels and stoppers, and come up with routines that would make Olivia Newton-John and the entire cast of Xanadu weep with envy. It was just a matter of time before a talent scout discovered me on the back patio and begged me to come to Hollywood, or maybe just The Magic Skate.

Our house was on a street with a cul-de-sac and there was never a shortage of kids to play with, night or day. This was back in the days when parents didn’t live in as much fear as we do now, and we were allowed to freely roam the streets of the neighborhood in pre-adolescent gangs, searching for the next game of kickball, freeze tag, or hide and seek. And finally, dusk would fall and you’d hear mamas all up and down the street calling for their kids to come inside and eat supper. My best friend, Caroline Fletcher, lived two houses down and we probably killed the neighbors’ lawns in between our houses with all the running back and forth we did all day long.

I’m the one on the end with the goofy look on my face. Obviously, I have always been shy and reserved.

We lived in the house until the summer before I started 7th grade. By then, Caroline Fletcher and her family had moved away and so had several other families. I guess on to bigger and better parts of suburbia. My parents had gotten divorced, so my mama moved us to Beaumont to live down the street from her mama and daddy. We moved into a smaller house in Beaumont, one that holds just as many memories, but memories of teen years and bedroom walls filled with Homecoming mums and cheerleader pom-poms.

When I think of my childhood home, I always think of the yellow two-story house on Misty Lea Lane with the white shutters and a mailbox out front that my Big Bob built that was a perfect replica of the big house. It was the place where I built my memories of childhood; long summer nights filled with fireflies and kick the can, 4th of July block parties in the cul-de-sac, walking home from the bus stop after a long day of school, and riding my blue bike with the flowered banana seat up and down the block while Caroline Fletcher rode her Green Machine right next to me. Memories I wouldn’t trade for anything in the world, memories that surprise me even now as I sit here with tears in my eyes, filled with more nostalgia than should be allowed.

If you want to share memories of your childhood home, head on over to Mary at Owlhaven’s for more information. Or if you just want to read some other memories, then go check out all the links.

Meanwhile, I’m off to help Caroline create some childhood memories of her own.
Preschool’s next top model

Rain. I don’t even know what to say about the rain. If y’all visit one day and I’m no longer here, just know that the rain has driven me insane and I’m curled in a fetal position somewhere mumbling, “Just make it stop. Please make it stop.” A few rainy days are nice. No pressure to get out of the house or do anything.

“Hey! Let’s put up the ladybug tent, get some blankets and watch some movies! It will be fun! FUN!”

But we’ve turned a corner. The ladybug tent mocks me from the playroom and if I have to watch Cinderella try on that slipper one more time, I may seriously lose my mind. I even broke down and rented “Barbie and the 12 Annoying Princesses”. It’s not pretty.

Caroline’s new favorite rainy day activity is to change her clothes as many times as possible in a 24 hour time period. She starts in at 6:30 a.m. with “What are we doing today, Mama? I’m going to get dressed!” And off she goes to put on outfit #1.

After a breakfast of waffles and a little “Go Diego Go”, it’s time for outfit #2.

When I announce we’re going to brave the rain and go to the grocery store because I am desperate to get out of the house, it’s time for outfit #3.

I tried to fight it for awhile, but the endless rain has sapped my resolve. The inmate is running the wardrobe asylum.

Here she is in the queen dress from her Halloween costume two years ago.

This was wardrobe option #4 today and lasted long enough for her to demand that I take a few pictures. So, not only is she wearing multiple outfits a day, she is also barking orders about photo shoots, proper lighting, and making sure I get her best side. It’s like living with a miniature Naomi Campbell.

We did have a moment today, in between outfits 5 & 6, where I saw a glimpse of myself in this OCD wardrobe behavior. She was stripping down, running towards her room and yelled, “Mama! I’m going to look in my closet for something else to wear! WISH ME LUCK!”

Godspeed, little fashionista. Your mama has often uttered those same words.