Shubinesque

Sunday night we had a BBQ and I tried out my MIL’s ice cream maker. OH MY GOSH!!! Well, that stuff is just too good to exist which explains why it had been completely devoured within just a few moments. I’m never eating store-bought ice cream again (hmm, that might be pushing it. Just forget I said that.) Here’s the recipe that we made. It makes 1 to 1.5 quarts of ice cream (pretty much fills a 1.5 qt. ice cream maker):~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Ice Cream

1 1/2 cups chocolate chip cookie dough
2 large eggs
3/4 cup sugar
2 cups heavy cream, or whipping cream
1 cup milk
2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Chop cookie dough into bite-sized pieces. Place in a bowl, cover and freeze. Whisk the eggs in a mixing bowl until light and fluffy, 1 to 2 minutes. Whisk in the sugar, a little at a time, then continue whisking until completely blended, about 1 minute more. Pour in the cream and milk, and whisk to blend. Add the vanilla and whisk to blend again.

Transfer the mixture to an ice cream maker and freeze following the manufacturer’s directions. When the ice cream is quite stiff (about 1 minute before it is done), add the chopped cookie dough. Be sure to wait until the last possible minute or the dough will get sticky and unmanageable. Continue freezing until done.

Makes 1 quart.

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A few weeks ago I posted that Henry was a super crabby baby. Well, I think we’ve finally figured out the magic trick to get him to cool his jets. It’s a two part trick, which makes me feel better about it taking me eight weeks to figure out what it was.

First, I cut dairy (except yogurt), chocolate, and coffee out of my diet. That helped a little bit. Then I started making sure I burped the living daylights out of him after every meal. This entails serious whomping on his back for ten minutes to such a degree that when we’re in public people start looking at me like “what is that lady doing to that poor baby??” When I sit him on my lap and he has bubbles in his tummy, he stiffens up so much that I can barely get him to bend at the waist. When he’s all done burping, he’ll sit on my lap all relaxed and happy. That’s the test.

This pretty much clears up whole charming evenings of crying (like evenings at the theater but with more drama) and we’ve discovered that he actually smiles and is quite adorable when he does so. The big downside to all this is that I have to cut half of my favorite food out of my diet, and some days one must eat ice cream, especially if one has just foolishly made it themselves. George helpfully spent all day Monday reminding me that my five minutes of bliss produced twenty-four hours of misery. Thanks, Honey!

Unfortunately, now Henry is trying to come down with another cold so that’s making him slightly crabby. No one here has a cold and I don’t know of anyone at church or anywhere that has one either so I don’t even know where he got this (the last one was from his older sister coughing on his face). Argh! Hopefully it will be gone by the time Family Camp comes around in two weeks.

In potty training news (because I know you all like hearing about poopies and peepees), Faith is doing great with numero uno and disastrous with numero dos. It’s been what, three weeks now? She has yet to get ye old pooper in the appropriate receptacle. This is not a good way to please your mother, father, or older siblings whose bedroom floor you poop on (this was yesterday). Last night George woke me up around 5 am to tell me that Faith had exploded and he needed some help with cleanup crew. Thirty minutes, a bath, and a fresh change of sheets later, we made it back to bed. This qualifies in the mother and father not pleased category.

I hope this gets sorted out soon. This is the fifth child I’ve potty trained and none of the other ones had this problem. We’ve had other problems, such as Georgie not wanting to get off the potty if his poopies wouldn’t come out and one of the older girls (I think it was Trinity) being too scared to flush the toilet afterward. Both of those were sorted out by hitting on a story that helped analogize the problem to something that they were already familiar with. I started one last night with Faith that will hopefully make sense to her. If it does, I’ll publish it in the next post (again, I’m sure you’re dying to know…).

In the meantime, if any of you other Moms out there have encountered this problem and come upon some brilliant solution (or pedestrian solution or any solution), please post it. I’d like to have this sorted out before camp as well if at all possible. I hate potty training!

Oh, for you RCCers who are going to Family Camp and are looking for cheap croc knock offs for your children to destroy (those are the foam plastic clogs that you see everywhere you look), I priced them out all over and have the results posted on my new shopping/sales blog here (there’s always some good reason to start a new web project, right?). If anyone else is interested in coupons/codes, feel free to take a look. Only a couple of posts are there right now because I just put it up last week, but if you stick your email address in the form on the right hand sidebar, you’ll get email updates for new sales.

Rachel