Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

You know how it is when you’re feeding a family–it’s rarely worth making recipes that no one loves as much as you do.  Rarely,  you understand.  Sometimes, however, a mom’s gotta do what a mom’s gotta do.  None of my children enjoy this Bacon Tortellini Bake as much as I do, and my hubby is a potato rather than a pasta man, but since I love it, and no one actually despises it, it came up in the dinner lottery this week.  And seriously–it’s creamy, it’s cheesy, it’s bacon-y, and it’s got broccoli–what’s not to love?  (My oldest would say the cheese tortellini, my second would say the broccoli…whatever!)  I use half of a Costco double pack of frozen tortellini, which is more than the recipe calls for, so I up the broccoli to 4-ish cups and measure the sauce ingredients generously.  I’m also pretty stingy on the cook time for the broccoli, because where broccoli cooking is concerned, less is almost always more, right?  And I use whatever milk I have on hand, which lately is 1%.  And it works.

And it’s yummy.

You should try it.

My friend and I were having such a lovely lunch together today until I realized that my son wasn’t eating.  He said he didn’t need to go potty and yet he was barely touching his sandwich–which is not normal.  I took a good look at him, realized he was looking quiet and less than thrilled with life, and my heart sank.

“Does your mouth feel funny?”

He nodded.

Two hours later we were in the pediatrician’s office, where (despite no other symptoms–yet) he had his THIRD positive strep test in six weeks.  Our doctor spent some time considering before deciding to try him on an antibiotic meant to treat a strep carrier rather than someone with active strep.  I made my routine call to the pharmacy on my way out–my son’s doctor just sent in a prescription, just wanted to make sure it was received and it’s being filled–only to be told that they didn’t have it.  They’d have to order it, and it would be in tomorrow, but did I realize my insurance wanted me to pay $200?  Maybe it would be cheaper in capsule form…except that my son is four.

Peachy.

I called the doctor’s office back and asked them to call it into a different pharmacy, because I was NOT waiting until tomorrow.  It took a while for them to receive the call (it was apparently the last one on their voice mail), but I eventually paid $212 (and change!) for four glass bottles of something I can’t spell.  The pharmacist at Walgreen’s looked at me as he was readying it and asked if my son had had that one before.  When I told him no, he winced.

“It smells and tastes terrible.  We can add something in to try and flavor it if you want…”

“Does it make a difference?”

“Not really, no.”

I gave him mental points for honesty and told him not to bother.  Now I get to give my obstinate, “I don’t want to take any medicine!” son 12 mL of this stuff THREE TIMES A DAY.  For TEN DAYS.

Then I get to take him back to the doctor’s for another throat swab, which he hates.  And in the meantime, my poor boy is utterly miserable.  Like, asking to go to bed at 6 o’clock miserable.

Nope, not the day I was hoping for at all.  How was YOUR day?

When I went through Juana & Lucas on the treadmill I enjoyed it thoroughly, but I wasn’t sure how my 7-year-old would react.  It’s a chapter book with lots of vivid illustrations, true, but Spanish words are sprinkled on at least 70% of the pages; the overall meaning is always understandable from the context, but still. How does a kid react to that?

In my girlie’s case, she read a chapter or two and then told me she wanted me to read it to her.  We compromised by reading it together; I carefully assigned her the pages with either no Spanish words or very easily pronounceable ones.  I read the other pages, looking expectantly at her after most of the harder Spanish words, and she almost always nailed the meaning from the context.  Since she’s my most timid girlie–she wants to feel very confident before she attempts anything new–I suspect her issue was more discomfort over not being able to pronounce the words, since she clearly had the comprehension down anyway.  A more intrepid personality would likely take off running with it, especially since Juana is a delightful character.  A spunky soccer player from Bogota, she’s sure that there isn’t enough room between her pigtails to learn ‘the English’ that her teacher is trying to teach in school…until she looks for support from her family and friends and finds support for her teacher’s mission instead!  With the proper carrot dangling in front of her, Juana attacks the English with gusto, gaining not only a trip to Spaceland but a love of travel as well.  Packed with plenty of laughter along the way, Juana’s journey is a fun and worthwhile one for any reader with the context awareness to manage the book.  Be sure to take a look at this one!

I can’t even remember what brought the Anna Wang novels to my attention; all I can say is that I just finished the third one, and The Year of the Fortune Cookie was at least as delightful as the first two.  In it, Anna works to find the right place for herself in middle school before heading off to China with her former teacher and her husband, whose adoption of a Chinese baby is finally going to happen.  While some of the situations involved seem a tad unlikely and/or on the rosy rather than realistic side, I enjoyed the book enough that I didn’t really care.  And kudos to the illustrator as well–Patrice Barton’s drawings added to the reading experience for me, even though my focus is usually on the words, just the words, and not much else besides the words.  Overall, these are gentle books that still manage to encourage readers to think outside of their experiences and comfort zones.  Our world needs more of these.

Oh, and by the way…both of my older girls are now enjoying this series.  There may or may not be conflict over who reads this one first!

Last month, we ate Christmas dinner with my parents for the first time in quite a while; as my mother and I were planning the menu, one carrot recipe came to mind.  Do you remember me mentioning, many posts ago, a carrot recipe so divine that I called my sister’s former mother-in-law to get it–not long after my sister’s divorce from her son?  This is that recipe, friends.  Getting it was worth every minute of one of the world’s most awkward conversations.  Call it carrot casserole, call it holiday carrots, call it what you will; I call it amazing.

2 lbs carrots

1/2 C chopped onion

1/2 C butter (the real thing)

1/2 C crushed saltines

1 C grated cheddar (medium or sharp)

Peel and cook your carrots in water; drain.  Mash them, but not too finely–you want some texture there.  Saute your onions in the butter; combine cheese and saltines in a separate bowl.  In a sprayed baking dish, spread half your carrots, half your buttery onions, and half your saltines and cheddar.  Repeat your layers and bake at 350 for about 30 minutes.

That’s it, folks.  And IT is heavenly.

Happy New Year, folks–I’m back!  (I’m sure you all missed me dreadfully.)  I hope your holidays were lovely.  We had the opportunity to spend LOTS of time with family, and that’s the best part of any holiday.  I’ve got more than one book waiting to be reviewed, however, so without further ado I give you Terrible Typhoid Mary:  A True Story of the Deadliest Cook in America.  Mary is Susan Campbell Bartoletti’s latest non-fiction for young people, her earlier works of non-fiction having earned her a Newbery Honor Award and a Sibert Medal (among other things).  I’d heard of Typhoid Mary before reading it, but I was pretty vague on details, and that turned out to be a good thing; many of the “details” floating around out there seem to be creations of the yellow press of the early 20th century.  Bartoletti does an exceptional job of giving us not only what accurate details there are to be had, but the context of those details as well.  Mary Mallon, in the light of that context, is a terribly sympathetic figure.

Unfortunately, she is also a little known one; Bartoletti works hard to present as many facts as possible, but the necessity of carefully stated supposition (“Due to such and such a cultural practice of the time, Mary may have felt such and such”) in order to present the facts in their proper historical setting affects the flow of the writing.  It’s unavoidable, in my opinion, but I wish I hadn’t been reading it over the holidays.  All the activity of the season made it harder to focus on a story that was already only as smooth as it could be.  Mary, however, is still an unequivocally fascinating book from multiple standpoints.  The most obvious, of course, is a historical one, but scientifically (and legally!), it reminded me a bit of a junior cousin to The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Either way, it’s a worthy addition to the world of intermediate non-fiction.

I was possibly planning on taking the week of Christmas off, but clearly I didn’t make it that far.  On the other hand, I’ve done a decent amount of wrapping, and I’ve finished more than half of my Christmas cards, so that’s got to count for something!  For whatever reason, my time is slipping away from me faster and faster, and so I’m bailing on any attempt to pick back up here until after Christmas.  (Possibly until 2017, but we’ll see.)  In the meantime, good luck with all of your preparations, and remember–be extra nice to retail employees this month!

Fellow parents–why is it that when all of my kids are outside together, or downstairs, or in another room, and the youngest starts to cry or be naughty, the rest of them don’t even register the fact? And yet, when I’m in the same room with that youngest, standing six inches away from her, and she starts to cry or get in trouble, her siblings rush to pick her up or stop her from misbehaving? What natural law governs that reaction? Because it drives.  Me.  BONKERS.

Last Saturday we went to a baptism at 4 pm, which meant that if I wanted real food (and I really, really did), a crockpot recipe was going to be the way to go.  I opted for the first one I saw that I had the ingredients for, which happened to be this Creamy Crockpot Chicken and Wild Rice Soup; thankfully, it was just as easy as it looked.  I even sauteed the onion and celery for a minute or two before adding it in, since I prefer the flavor that way, and it was still pretty fast to put together.  We all more or less liked it, too, although I didn’t add enough salt and pepper.  (I never do when it says “to taste” without giving a ballpark estimate, because I’m always afraid of adding too much.)  I intentionally left out the cup of water, since thicker soups are easier for kids, and it worked perfectly well that night.  (The leftovers thickened up quite a bit, of course, because rice.)  I’m planning on playing with this recipe a bit, but I enjoyed it, and it made a TON–it filled my biggest crockpot, which just might be a 7-quarter.  If you want easy soup to feed a multitude, go for this one!

I HAVE FINISHED A BOOK.

Okay, that sounds pathetic, but seriously.  I finished one book in November (that’s not counting treadmill books, but STILL).  Life is feeling exceptionally busy right now, and let’s be realistic–that’s not going to end until we’re done with December as well.  Which is why I’m celebrating having finished a book.

The best part is that it was a delightful book; it made me laugh out loud and want to be friends with all of the characters.  (True, Emily’s mother’s “if it’s meant to be, it will happen” attitude did drive me crazy–if she were my mom, I’d say that about my chores and then go read a book instead–but she was still actually lovable.)  Emily is named after Emily Dickinson, and her English professor mother is sure she’s meant to be a poet herself, despite the fact that she doesn’t enjoy poetry (she prefers to copy her favorite romance novel happy endings onto index cards to save and write periodic letters to Danielle Steel).  Their views on destiny come to a head when Emily’s most prized possession gets accidentally donated to Goodwill–right after she discovers that her father’s name is written inside of it.  Her wild quest to track it down involves tree sitters, bookstores, a stray dog, and a smattering of other people’s poetry before reaching its (most satisfying!) conclusion.

There are possibly some plot stretches here, although several of them work when you consider the part fate plays in the novel; ultimately, however, I enjoyed it too much to care.  If you’re a book lover, don’t miss this one!