Ahhh, it’s so nice when the children start getting a little big bigger and more helpful. Take Georgie, for example. He’s eight now and delights in responsibilities like walking Kyra (age 2.5) to Sunday School before he heads up to his own class.

Usually I do this myself so that I can take her potty beforehand; but this week I left something in the car and when I returned from retrieving it, Kyra was already off to class. I messed with Faith for a few minutes and then visions of a wet-pantied child started crowding into my head, so I hopped up the stairs to go check on her.

When I got to Kyra’s classroom, a small knot of three other women whose children are also in the class were standing outside the door chatting and distance monitoring their own brood for unexplained meltdowns (this is the two and three year old class after all, and this round has about eleven boys to three girls). The Moms started laughing as soon as they saw me coming….

“I just came to check on Kyra; looks like she made it to class okay.” I said, peeking through the door.

“Yes, Georgie brought her in.” replied one of the Moms. More laughter (a lot more).

Apparently Kyra had been just fine up the stairs and down the hall but freaked out as soon as she got near the classroom door. Being the sensitive, gentle brother that he is, Georgie decided to tackle her into Sunday School. It seems he managed to push, pull, shove, force her into the classroom despite the screaming, kicking, and other unpleasantries aimed at him.

Unfortunately, after all that Herculean effort dragging her into the room, she managed to escape his grip and fled back through the door, so he had to duplicate all of this effort and coerce her back into class a second time! Upon re-depositing her in the classroom, he blithely announced “Here ya go. See ya!” and ran away down the hall, leaving his howling sister alone to be comforted by Mrs. K., the Sunday School teacher.

Wow, I sure am thrilled that my son is getting bigger and so much more helpful!

Rachel

Last summer I got on a huge bread kick, and spent a month or so trying to find a good French bread recipe that I could make from home but that would taste like proper Artisan bread. After the utter failure of six different recipes, I gave up in disgust.

Well, no more! Last Tuesday our local propaganda wing.. errr… newspaper, The Oregonian, published the greatest Artisan bread recipe I’ve ever seen. Crunchy, flaky crust, soft and yummy guts. Ahhh, heaven. Plus you don’t have to knead it! I tried it last Wednesday and it came out so well that I’ve made seven more loaves since (gave away five of those).

I’ve made it so much this week that I actually know it by heart now. When I was at Hubby’s parents’ house the other day, I typed it up for his Mom and I thought you guys might like it too. I throw all the ingredients (all four of them) in a bowl in the evening and let it sit overnight. Then I make the bread the next day. Good luck!

NO-KNEAD ARTISAN BREAD

(recipe originally came from The Oregonian FoodDay, 3/13/07)

3 c. flour
2 ½ t. salt
¼ t. instant or rapid-rise yeast
1 ½ c. plus 2T lukewarm water
Little bit of cornmeal

Bread pan requirements: Use a three to six quart covered casserole dish, round or oblong. A heavy dish works best (cast iron, Corningware stone, etc. Probably not glass. I use a white ceramic-plated stoneware casserole made by Corningware.). This creates an environment in your oven that is similar to a breadmaker’s steamy clay oven and gives your bread that super-yummy crust.

1. Combine first three ingredients in a large bowl and then add water and stir well. Dough will be wet and sticky. Cover bowl with plastic wrap and let sit in a warm location (like 70 degrees-ish) for 12 to 18 hours. You’ll know dough is ready because it will bubble on top.
2. Dump dough onto a floured surface and fold over once or twice. Cover again with plastic wrap and let rest for 15 minutes.
3. Shape into a ball (or oblong roll) and pinch seam. Don’t handle dough too much. Flour a cotton dishcloth (not terrycloth) and sprinkle with cornmeal. Place dough on cornmeal seam-side down and sprinkle top with cornmeal. Cover with cotton cloth and let rise 2 to 3 hours.
4. Preheat oven to 450 degrees. While oven is heating, put pan (without lid) in oven and let both pan and oven heat up for 30 minutes or so. Remove pan (it’s HOT so be careful), pick up cloth, and roll off cloth into pan seam-side up (it kind of goes ker-plop). If it’s uneven, just shake pan a bit and it will settle in. Dough will be wet. Put lid on pan and bake for 30 minutes. Remove lid and cook for 10 to 15 minutes more until bread is golden brown. Take bread out of pan and let it cool on a wire rack. Yum!

For variations, add whatever herbs/spices or things you want. If it doesn’t work or I forgot something pertinent in the recipe, just call or email me and we’ll figure it out. First things you should check are if you’re using the right kind of dish to bake it in and if you’re using instant yeast.

Rachel

P.S. This dough seems to be pretty sensitive to humidity, so for Portland I have lessened the water and salt (that’s for flavor) as follows:

3 c. flour
2 t. salt
¼ t. instant or rapid-rise yeast
1 ½ c. lukewarm water

Try it a few times where you are and adjust as needed. If the dough is too wet, your bread will be flatter.

– WARNING: Spoilers ahead for the new film, 300; but since the movie contains only a scant plot, it shouldn’t detract from your enjoyment of the show. –

Handsome Hubbiness and I managed to escape again last Friday night for the second week in a row!! Imagine me doing the Elaine dance with the thumbs (from Seinfeld), and you will know what my happy dance looks like. Actually, it’s lamer than that.

Since I was inexplicably in the mood for something loud and subplot-free and Hubby never complains about those types of little movie quirks, we went to see 300. The film is based on the Battle of Thermopylae (pronounced like “Monopoly”; I looked it up) in 480 B.C. between 300 Spartans and a gazillion Persions (I’m pretty sure that’s the accurate number for the Persian hordes). In this case “based on” means that they have the 300 and gazillion numbers about right, but they add things to the bad guys cadre such as a giant with what seem to be huge lobster claws for arms and hulking elephants and rhinos that have been either dieting on steroids or were born in Middle Earth.

Wow, is that flick manly! I’m pretty sure they shot that movie on testosterone-soaked film stock. Practically every single frame has blood, guts, whacking, hoo-ah-ing, and other blood-drenched, war-related activities. The only exceptions are the three brief scenes with the naked women, and an almost interesting enough to make “subplot” status political problem back home (mainly this keeps the viewers from getting battle fatigue). Even the end credits have animated blood spattering everywhere! Made Braveheart look like A Walk to Remember.

If you typically like “guy” movies and aren’t terribly bothered by things like fictional beheadings, 300 is thrilling in that “Oh my gosh, OUR PLANE IS CRASHING” kind of way, and it is awe-inspiring to actually look at. The colors are washed out and high contrast-y, giving it a stark grittiness; and Gerard Butler who plays King Leonidas (the lead) is unbelievably strong and charismatic (I liked him back when he played Dracula in Dracula 2000. Please don’t tell anyone that I’ve actually watched that.).

Yes, in between the hacking are only about 50 spoken lines in this movie and half of them are silly, and yes there is a fair amount of random ridiculousness thrown in, and yes the women’s dresses are utterly impractical and the mens’ costumes equally deficient (however, if you like the Mr. Universe contest, you will find something to appreciate here). Despite all that, the battle scenes are fantastic, and the end left me practically giddy with patriotism (another thing I may or may not admit to upon future questioning).

This movie works because it is full of unapologetically strong men, men who rush out to protect the things they love regardless of personal cost, even if they know the cost is certain death. How can you not love that? What says “I love you” more strongly than decapitation? If your husband has been feeling a little put-upon lately or has a boss at work who makes him feel like a drone, help him find his hidden “hoo-ah” by taking him to this movie. You can close your eyes through it if you want; he won’t be watching you.

Rachel

Heehee! I had such a fun day today. I spent the entire day at a seminar on search engine optimization. Gotta tell you, I’m a bit distressed that this actually sounded interesting to me; but it was full of all kinds of fascinating information. So cool!

Anyway, hope you guys had a nice weekend. Anika’s croup went away and she promptly acquired an ear infection while at her other Grandmother’s house, so we got a call at 2am and Anika was returned to us by George’s sister (who was on her way to work) at 7am.

Apparently Anika decided that it wasn’t enough to make her Auntie detour first thing in the morning, she also needed to add her own special design touch to her Aunt’s Volvo by barfing all over it on the drive home. Delightful! I got a somewhat distressed email from the Auntie later that morning asking if I had any advice for getting vomit smell out of a car. This is something we’ve had more experience with than I really care to think about, so we had a few suggestions. Anika seems much better now, but Kyra’s been quite weird.

Kyra got in monster trouble for biting her sister (she’s never been a biter), scooping out most of a jar of peanut butter with her fingers and eating it (I was upstairs for about three minutes!), and then getting into the fridge to get an egg for Faith who promptly broke it all over the floor and then swam in it (ha! At least that one wasn’t on my watch). That was all Monday within about five hours.

She further honed her grief upon grief routine yesterday, and I am beginning to weary of sitting on her for things like flipping out when I tell her to go down the stairs, carefully pouring a cup of milk out onto the table as a form of entertainment, and toothpaste fingerpainting on the upstairs bathroom mirror (actually, she practices this one regularly and has so far proved difficult to deter). Those were all yesterday.

All in all, she’s such a troublemaker that her behavior would be shocking to me if it weren’t for the fact that this is actually the second child in our cache to exhibit such tenacity in the cantankerous department. Georgie (our oldest, now age 8 ) was equally single-minded in his demolition-oriented tendencies.

However, after a solid three years of the extremely terrible and misleadingly labeled “two’s” (that lasted from eighteen months until age four and a half), preceded by nine months of increasingly willful behavior, I remember exactly when it occurred to me that all this stubbornness might at some point parlay into more positive character qualities.

Georgie was in the back yard trying to swing across the monkey bars, which he so far had not managed to master. He missed one of the rungs and landed smack on his back, knocking the wind out of himself. At four years old, he scared himself pretty good and came running over to me on the porch. I looked him in the eyes and talked him through it, explaining that he just startled his lungs when he fell and they were flipping out a little bit which is why he felt like he couldn’t breathe.

I kept eye contact and continued on telling him that this happens sometimes with falls like his and not to be scared because his lungs would remember their job in a few seconds. They did, of course, and he recovered just fine. I assumed that such a scare would mark the end of his monkey bar endeavors.

Not wanting him to give up entirely, I told him that when you first start learning things they are always hard, but not to get discouraged because when you have trouble doing something it just means that you need to practice until you can do it. His eyebrows jumped up, he exclaimed, “oh! Practice!” and then he immediately scampered off to the monkey bars again to do just that. By the end of the week he could go all the way across.

This was the first application of this strong character to a constructive use (overcoming fear and finishing something he started) instead of to decidedly less endearing uses such as taking the forbidden DVD’s (that would be all of them at his age at the time) off the rack ten times every day despite all correctionary measures or grabbing from his cousin every single time they got together for three years in a row.

Georgie is now developing into a fine young man. He still retains that force of will, but has learned and continues to improve at pouring that into productive projects. By age five, he could do fifty piece puzzles. He had a slow start at reading but he keeps plugging away at practicing, and this year his reading has finally sped up and improved dramatically. He builds ridiculously elaborate bionicles from the thirty pages of detailed instructions he prints off the lego.com website and is generally very difficult to sway once he’s made his mind up on something. He is interested in virtually everything, is humongously helpful, and is almost always a happy guy.

So yes Kyra is a gigantic stinker pants, but I know that if I keep after her she’ll settle down into a happy, energetic, determined girl when she gets a little bit bigger. That’s what I keep telling myself anyway….. Hehe. In the meantime, she’s got a really sweet little smile and is pretty cuddly (when her eyes aren’t busy betraying her sneaky plots), so I guess I’ll put in all that work for a couple more years until she calms down a bit. Maybe Faith will be easy like Trinity. Actually, if current behavior is any indicator (and it’s usually a pretty good one at age one), she’s probably going to be a real handful in another year or so herself. Argh!

Rachel