Stuffing Fit for a Superhero

From Sonja:

1 cup onion chopped
1 cup celery chopped
1/2 tea Tabasco
1/2 tea poultry season
1/2 cup butter
cups bread (cut to cups if not stuffing a turkey)
2 TB parsley
1/4 cup Sherry
1/2 cup pecans chopped

Cook onion, celery, Tabasco, poultry seasoning in butter until tender. Pour mixture over bread and parsley. Add mushrooms, Sherry, and nuts.

Stuff turkey OR cook at 350 - 40 fr 1/2 hour

Tricks- if not stuffing a turkey, you may need to add more "juce" - butter, mushroom juice, and Sherry. Bump up the Tabasc an use fresh parsely instead of the dry stuff.

Happy,.. er,.. Irrelevant Holiday!

Yep, it's that time of the year when we get to eat all sorts of yummy fall foods,.. turkey, cranberries, pumpkin guts,.. it's almost Thanksgiving! So you know what that means,... I'd better post some Halloween pictures before they become totally irrelevant. Nothing like getting down to the wire,...

We started the holiday in grand tradition by going to the local pumpkin patch. Between figuring out how to squeeze the visit between football practice and games for three boys, and making sure the pumpkins weren't green mush by the time Halloween rolled around, it was an orchestration of scheduling.

After finding Jared at the culmination of his school sponsored (but parent funded - there's a recession, you know) fishing trip to the regional park, we headed to the patch with about 55 minutes of pickin' time before the scarecrows start to give you the ol' evil eye to get the heck out of the shrubbery. Even farmers want to eat dinner at a relatively normal hour. (Did I blog this already? It's been so long, I forget,...) Well, we got lots of cool pumpkins, played some mean football in hell, I mean, Thermal, California and hosted the annual 'Silly Chili and Halloweenies' at the homestead.

The fam. Notice the Paul Bunyan and his real axe. Also notice the ghillie suited kids. Oh, you can't find them? Yes, I did a good job. Tinker Bell. The unicorn, and me, showing my horns.

Here are the son and daughter of the original Thing 1 and Thing 2.

Now you know what I mean. (Isn't that CUTE??!!?!?! Wen, I got some cushions that could use some covering, if ya know what I mean,...)

The crazed clan. We had a great time. Boys trick or treated for about an hour, came home for sustenance and then went back out to jump out of bushes. The girls did great. Fifi figured it all out and had a blast. We have enough candy to last us until, .. well,.. next Halloween.

Geography Matters

Kudos Washington Post! As a BA degree holder in geography from the University of Washington, I couldn't agree more! (Go Dawgs!)

Pumpkins!

First installment of the pumpkin carving ritual. We really should just buy into the whole 'family pumpkin' instead of carving five. And somehow an errant sixth pumpkin made it into our wheelbarrow at the ol' pumpkin farm (that happens when you have a gaggle of people you are trying to control in a retail establishment. Too many pumpkins, bunches of skittles in fists of toddlers who are in the plastic vehicle part of the cart at the grocery store that you have to carry back in with said child and profusely apologize for raising a clepto, wondering the whole time if it's some sort of a sting operation.)

We made it to the pumpkin patch at 5:10pm (patch closes at 6pm). Got pumpkins. Little boys trekked through the corn maze. Big boy was too cool to do things like that so he hung out. Little girls bounced in an oversized air filled pumpkin. The whole time, the young male attendant would come over to comment on how cute they were, and Fifi would cry for mommy and stop jumping. Finally I had to be a meanie and just plain out tell the dude in the pirate hat, "my kid's afraid of you. Don't come over here." I'm sorry to hurt your feelings, but really,...we paid $3 for her to jump. Leave us in peace.

Sunday meant trunk or treating at the Church parking lot. Every year I have visions of decorating our Suburban and doling out candy and every year I am waylayed by too much football and small children needing my attention. And this year, it was the dreaded ghillie suit.

Argh. What's a ghillie suit you ask? It's a camo suit covered in tree branches and the like that hunters use to hide from those maurauding ducks. Then they became popular with paint ballers. Now, we don't hunt ducks or shoot paint ball guns, so I wasn't about to buy $70 ghillie suits for two boys who thought it would be fun to dress up like that for halloween. I'm all for delusion in my life, so even though it's a well known fact I can not sew (nor am I really too crafty - I had white flowers at my wedding because I couldn't pick a color) I am a bargain hunter and set out to make the ghillie suits, not buy them. To walmart for $15 camo sweatsuits. To Michael's for spray on adhesive and various fake leafy plants; ivies, fronds of ferns, waxy deciduous leaves, along with a big needle and some thread. (Seriously, I send my clothes to the cleaners for them to sew on a button. Pathetic.)


HOURS (and I mean hours) later, I have one suit ready to go for Sunday's 'dead run' at trunk or treat. The suit has leaves sewn all over it on the top with moss on the top and the bottom. It sheds. A lot. So it can not come in the house. (that's saying much from an owner of a German Shepherd and a Husky - too majorly shedding dogs).

I lay it carefully in the back of the Suburban so we can transport the specimen to the Church. Carefully put child into ghillie suit. He refuses to paint his face in camo to match, so most people have no idea what the heck he is and start to refer to him as a 'tree.'

What are the rest of the clan? Let me break it down for you: I went EARLY to KMart (gack! Of all places!) to get costumes or the girls - B was a cute fairy with a light up skirt. She didn't want her hair combed or to wear shoes. She was going for that total 'Tinkerbell lives in the forest with a bunch of orphan boys and so do I' look, but I finally talked her into some ballet slippers. Other than that she totally looked the part of the fairy on the island of lost boys,...

Fifi was to be a CUTE, cute, cute little unicorn - complete with an adorable little body suit in the shape of a white hershey's kiss with purple wings (I know unicorns don't have wings, just go with it. It was cute.), little white hoof shaped shoe covers and a white hat with a purple horn. She DID NOT LIKE IT. I threw her little blue ballet jammies complete with frilly skirt from Grandma Z and some pink sparkle shoes on her and she was good to go.

K was the ghillie monster, er, tree. J (the cool one) was to be a mad scientist like last year, but he left the lab coat and crazy glasses at home, so all he wore was a crazy hair whig. Which was enough to have the middle school girls thinking he was that-kind-of-minimalist-halloween-cool and slyly follow our group around the parking lot. (I saw you girls.)

Z - ddn't have the ghillie suit done in time so he threw on an old skeleton costume, his Duck's hockey jersey and put a bag on his hockey stick. Dead hockey player. Excellent, CHEAP, easy,.. and he won FIRST PRIZE for scariest costume. Go figure.

I threw on some stuff (complete with stuffed parrot! It's amazing the stuff we've accumulated in the halloween box after 12 years of kid halloweens!) and went as a pirate wench.

Pumpkin patch again with B and about 50 crazy toddlers this past Tuesday, today is her 'harvest party.' I've got the orange jello ready to go. Friday is the Radio Disney party at the Elementary school (there are good things about being in Southern Cal), and the necessity for me to torture myself for 30 minutes in the 'crush the can' booth. Saturday is three football games in Thermal, Cal. (so appropriate for halloween - we're playing football in hell! Excellent!) Then small dinner party for whoever wants to show up at our house, then trick or treating through our neighborhood. Then, a few kids will spend the night, ensuring we don't actually rest until next weekend. Oh wait, that's Z's birthday. Never mind then.

Faith Matters

Get on the newsfeed for a little introspection to your day. Faith Matters Now with Fr. Edward Beck and Chris Cuomo.

Some Spam is worth a can opener

You just need a good laugh on a Monday. Especially after pneumonia made you cancel a shopping trip with your best girls (and boy). And then you were stuck home all weekend long with yet another child feverishly ill.

This was sent over from Sonja, it's worth the post!

If you are an owner of a dog or know someone who has a dog which belongs to the 'dangerous breed' category; or if you have a child visiting your house, please take this as a warning.

Don't leave your dog with any small child unattended under any circumstances! Only one little moment was enough for this to happen:

October flies right in

Fifi is now my cuddly little girly girl. Beans broke my heart the other day when we were getting ready for Church and she informed me she 'doesn't like dresses.' WHAT? Next, she'll be telling me her favorite color is blue. Beans favorite thing to wear are jeans and her Hello Kitty! long sleeve tee shirt. So, we are all happy here the weather has turned and it's now in the 80's so she won't die of heat stroke in the name of fashion. I'm also not allowed to do anything besides put in a clippy into her hair. No pigtails. No curly ribbon pony tails. No french or other kinds of braids. No headbands. I can only look at other little girls and dream about the possibilities. Fifi is sprouting a little more fuzz on the top of her head, so the Crusty the Clown look is dissipating and I can actually get a little, tiny clippy to stay in for a while if I take every strand of hair possible, twist them together to create a rope, and then fasten it within an inch of her life to her scalp. Viola!

We spent this past Sunday at the Miramar airshow dragging a feverish 12 year old and four other winsome children around 25 miles of tarmac to look at things with wings. And see war games with real smoke and real loud BANGS! That Fifi didn't like last year, and you know what? She doesn't like them this year either. We saw the Blue Angels, but it was kind of a let down, after practically living with them at SeaFair forever in Seattle. Nice to have a little bit of home with us since we can't rely on the Dawgs to give us a warm fuzzy feeling. Can't wait to see the Notre Dame fans at the boys' football practices this week. It'll make for a long one.

Everybody run, 'Bina's got an AK-47 so some other pointy thing that holds lots of bullets. Zach was in HEAVEN. His latest fixation of learning-more-than-is-humanly-possible after his jaunts with dinosaurs, arctic animals, birds and owls is now warfare and guns. I have a lot of military shows that are impolitely taping over my Grey's Anatomy and House on the ol' DVR. He draws pictures and picture and pictures, reads all sorts of books and has Wikipedia bookmarked on his Internet browser.

All this collection of facts and his testing scores prompted a letter from the school letting me know that they are considering him for entrance into the Gifted and Talented program at school, and could I please take a moment to fill out this questionnaire. Great. You know what, people who make crazy rules? It is hard enough being a parent. I don't need the added pressure and catholic mother's guilt knowing that the questionnaire I filled out for my kid's consideration into a gifted program was so horrible that they decided not to allow him entrance. I won't know until later this week, I guess, but I'm already stressed about it. I waited until Hubby came home just to bounce my answers off him, have him analyze my handwriting (do I look too desperate if I slant it? I shouldn't heart my 'i's, should I?). For all I know, the school has tapped into my iPhone and it's already confessed that I'm probably not good material for a GATE parent. (which, btw, I CRASHED this afternoon. Seriously. The easiest piece of electronic equipment known to man? Something a monkey can operate - and I'm sure they have an app for that - died and won't open it's ever lovin' Apple eyes.)

Here is the Zman in front of something with wings that has some sort of significance. I'm sorry, I wasn't paying much attention, besides counting heads and sporadically screaming "Where is the BABY!" every so often and having various and sundry people related to me point out she was right next to me.

They are cute, aren't they? Or is it just my imagination? Football is going,... we got shut out this past weekend, but everyone is playing a good game and having lots of fun. That's what counts, right?