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Sylvie has been letting herself into the freezer and pulling out whatever she can find that might be good. Amusingly to me, she typically ends up with good stuff. In this case, a small container of ice cream. And just as before, she let me know with a few load “YUMMMM!”s.
Around here, buckets are the new box. Hours of entertainment.
4th of July pictures (just developed ;))
I hope those streamers are bio degradable as my backyard is pretty well covered in them.
First, the good thing:
Cold Brewed Coffee.
If you enjoy coffee, and can tell the difference between an Americano, a coffee machine brew, and a hot drip, you might try cold brewing. A cold brew tastes similar to an Americano in that it leaves most of the acids in the bean, so you are more able to appreciate the nuttiness, hint of chocolate, and natural sweetness of your coffee. I typically dilute my coffee with a splash of milk, but I can drink the cold brew full strength.
To cold brew:
1/3 c ground coffee
1/2 c water
place this in a glass for the night, and then in the morning, run the mixture through a coffee filter, add milk or water to dilute to your optimal strength and drink.
I’m not patient – if you didn’t gather that from my speedy french bread – so this morning I set a filter filled with coffee in luke warm water for 1.5 hours and then filtered and drank full strength. I’ve got enough energy to light a small house, now. But it was delicious!
The bad thing:
Sylvie is apparently still not well.
She fooled me with her ravenous refueling Sunday morning. I thought she was back to normal. So, she hung out with the nanny yesterday, but apparently wasn’t her usual self, and had her own diaper fireworks. Last night we revisited all she had nibbled on through the day. Not at the pacing of previous nights, but I guess there wasn’t as much to re-visit. She’s home with Doug, today. He seems to be struck with the badness as well.
My poor family.
Since there are some dear-to-me coffee addicts in this world, I figured I would rush to post this, in case it saves a life.
Here’s a link to a calculator that tells you how many of your favorite drinks you could consume before the caffeine killed you.
(We all know this is just for fun, right? I mean the site doesn’t even post what time period you’d have to consume the drinks within! If all it took to kill my husband were 75 cups of drip coffee, I’d probably never have met him!)
So the bread looked very authentic, but the process was long and drawn out and I didn’t have the patience to wait the final 5 hours while my baguettes achieved additional fine bubbliness of their outer crust, so I suppose the final product could have been better, but it was pretty good.
[There would be a picture of the bread in the oven right here if I weren’t having issues uploading pictures. Maybe tomorrow?? For now, just envision crunchy loaves of slightly sour, slightly nutty real french baguettes.]
I used the basic french bread recipe from The Bread Bible. Aside from skipping the 5 hours in the fridge, I made a few other substitutions: I used plain old King Arthur unbleached white flour and 3 tbs King Arthur ground whole wheat in the dough. My poorish was all whole wheat.
I’ve had this stuck in my head ever since the baguettes started looking baguette-ish and less like blobs.
At the risk of sharing too much information, I feel like I’m living in a cross between night of the living dead and exorcist with all the bodily fluids coming out of orifices they should not. Will has kept things down since the 4th, but it sounds like a fireworks display when he goes to the bathroom. (You probably didn’t want to know…) Sylvie fell ill last night just before midnight and spent the next 2.5 hours emptying her stomach. Hers was more frightening, not just because she’s a wee 23lbs and 1.5 years, so she doesn’t have much in reserve. She was really quickly headed towards life threatening dehydration at an episode every 15 – 20 minutes. Thankfully, once her stomach was empty, she stopped for the evening, giving her body some time to rest and benefit from the few sips of Pedialyte she’d held down. The pink bowl is seeing some action this weekend.
Thankfully, I think these are the 24 hours stomach flus, as both kids have held food down the morning after. We walked over to the bagel shop this morning, and Sylvie finished Will’s cinnamon stick and half a bagel.
On a less yucky note, the boys are off at the hardware store buying a super low flow showerhead. We’ve got a 2.5 GPM, which is one of the lower standard heads, but there are 1.5 and 1.0 on the market, which I grew up with and am used to. I’m interested in this:
Allegedly, this thing works better than the $12 low flow heads we grew up with. I’ll wait and see what the guys buy.
I’ve also checked all of our sinks for aerators. We can’t buy and attach aerators as none of our faucet heads are threaded. Again, I suspect that it is like our showerhead, we’ve purchased all of this stuff recently enough that it is probably aerated or at least low flow already, but I’m sure we could do better…
Finally, I’ve got a ball of french bread dough rising in our oven. We’ll see in ~2 hours if I can make decent bread with my own two hands. After 17 years of using a bread machine, I’m not sure I’ve got what it takes anymore, but we shall see. If it turns out, expect pictures, at least of the crumbs…
“… so I can take your picture?” (overheard Dad to Will, encouraging Will to shoot a gun shaped popper)
At risk of turning you off with too much information… If you’ve been following along, we are trying to do our part to conserve water by using our bath-water to maintain the yard. Well, we’ve kept it up, but it has not been fun in our multilevel home. I’ve been trying to think of alternatives to lugging the 5-gallon bucket of water through the house, down the stairs and then hefting it into our planters, as the process kills my back. So I was thrilled when I remembered how a toilet works and it occurred to me that at 1.6 gallons per flush, I could be saving us water AND lightening my post bath ritual. No, I’m not skipping flushes all that often ;). Instead, I’m using our bath water to flush the toilet!
Ecologically it makes a lot of sense, and it saves me some of the trek through the house. The cons are that I’m sure it is not as ecologically friendly as watering the yard, and it has me worried about another more embarrassing dilemma – Ring Around the Potty!
Just what chemicals are safe to use on that unsightly soap scum I’m undoubtedly introducing to our potty? I’ll keep you posted as I research this. I’m thinking we may resort to baking soda, and I’m embarrassed to admit that I have been considering changing bath products to reduce the amount of soap scum we leave behind. We already use Dr Bronners all natural soap, but although my Bumble and Bumble hair products are eco friendly (not tested on animals), I don’t think the silicone they contain is all that great for the env or for my inevitable ring around the potty.
… stop rolling your eyes!
Vomiting ranks right up there with deep gashes, broken bones and ear infections as one of the worst child afflictions. It is just awful. There is something traumatic about waking in the middle of the night to that tell-tale cough and then splat of a recent meal making its exit out an uncommon passage. I don’t know if it is the fact that vomiting rattles my typically unfazed children and so I’m just overcome with pity, or if it is the drama of helplessly watching as my child turns inside out that keeps me awake at night. Add to that the unpredictability of it which has me taking mental stock of every possible bedding option, lest we run through them all in the frantic battle to get to a receptacle before my child explodes in his/her imitation of the exorcist, leaving the entire family stuck wrestling those last winks from the breaking dawn on a bare mattress or cold floor.
Anyway, we’re in the throws of a stomach virus. The cough came at 11:35 last night, followed quickly by the panicked and scared cry of my 4 year-old. This is the worst we’ve seen, yet, as Will emptied his stomach over the course of 5 episodes and has been asleep since. Needless to say, we didn’t ride on the retired military vehicles in the Novato parade this morning, and we aren’t blowing anything up with the neighbors this evening. Instead, I finished the pirate birthday invitations, we distributed them to neighbors and postal box on our morning run, and we’ll probably try to make a festive dinner, then have our own celebratory pops and bangs before an early dinner. I should try to squeeze in some curtain sewing. (I still haven’t finished!)
Here’s my attempt at getting Will to eat lunch:
This experience has me thinking – I think every family has “the bowl”. The one they pull out to stick next to the bed of the digestively impaired. We have a pink plastic nesting bowl most often employed in the stain removal pre-soak of kids clothes. I’ve seen the in-law’s bowl. My childhood bowl was the largest in a set of stainless nesting bowls. In retrospect, I’m surprised I was able to stomach the contents of food we served in the matching bowls, regardless of how sanitary I knew they were… I mean, those reminders of illnesses past are pretty strong. I’ve held a grudge against Good Company Barbecue for the returned dinner I ate there in highschool for the 17 years since. And I still can’t look at a rice cracker since they reappeared during a bout of the flu while I was in 2nd grade. So the bowl we’ve all got them. I’m pretty sure ours was retired to Goodwill after it’s service to the ill. This raises an interesting question, how many of these bowls graduate to potluck serving dishes when the kiddos grow up? (I think this is a detail we’re all better off not knowing, no matter how many sterilization trips that thing has taken through the dish washer.) And thinking about “the bowl” has me rethinking why I’d ever consider buying a bowl-like receptacle at Goodwill…
