September has been kind of a weird month so far. We've all been frantically recalculating our schedules, as we add
several new activities, new piano students, golf trips, random outings with friends, and a few other things. What's made it a weird month for me is that I keep getting sick. I've had two bad colds that sidelined me for two weekends in September. Each cold came on right after completing an Activity Days activity. COINCIDENCE?!? Who knows? All I know is that two bouts of fever in three weeks is a pretty annoying way to spend a month. It slowed me way down, and crimped my family's style as a result. My girls were often left to their own devices, and hung around bored at home, playing with various electronic devices or else trashing the house.
But I have high hopes that my health will hold up for the next month. At least, it had BETTER hold up, because we have a lot of big events on the way. A family trip to Phoenix to watch the musical
Wicked! Fall Break! A camping trip to Rocky Point, Mexico! My birthday! Halloween! Yes, it's that time of year when lots of
stuff starts to happen all the time. Hopefully I'll be blogging all about everything...if I don't get sick again *grumble grumble*
Luckily, I managed to stay healthy for Labor Day itself! We entertained thoughts of barbecuing, mountain climbing, and trying out other awesome things. However, since we are all super lazy on the weekends whenever possible, we wimped out on most of those ideas, and we settled on an alliterative day: The BARRETTS would go BOWLING, then eat lunch at
BEYOND BREAD and shop at
BOOKMANS.
It turned out to be a really fun day (even if we didn't do everything in the original order). We picked up a bunch of new kids' books at Bookmans, then walked a few doors down to Beyond Bread, a delicious bakery, where we proceeded to stuff our faces with their huge sandwiches.
The sandwiches weren't the biggest I've ever eaten, but this restaurant didn't really have kid sizes. As a result, the girls couldn't open their mouths wide enough to eat their sandwiches...and chewing the fresh bread became a super-human feat of strength! They loved the taste, but they were not ready for those portion sizes. Oh well, better luck next time...it sure beat going to BURGER KING (which is where we could have gone, if we were sticking with the "alliteration" theme).
Shortly thereafter, we went to a bowling alley in Tucson, where the girls bowled one game and Nathan and I bowled two games each. We got this idea after seeing the girls have so much fun
bowling with their cousins in Colorado this summer.
It was so much fun! We put the girls on a lane separate from us, which meant the adults and the kids could each go at their own pace. That turned out to be a great idea, since Nathan and I took our turns much more quickly than the kids. I probably bowled my greatest game
ever that day (by professional standards, it was pretty low-scoring, but compared to my pathetic previous output, it was a phenomenal game!). The kids had a great time and thankfully didn't get too competitive with each other.
A few days after this wonderful day out, I got sick
again. Ugh. As it happened, the night I was sick, Grandma Barrett invited us over to her house to watch the BYU football game. The kids were excited (as they always are to go to Grandma's house; she has a cat
and cable television, after all). Lorelai was so excited that she decided to make a special dessert for Grandma. She chose a pretty ambitious project:
These are little chocolate-peanut butter cheesecake bites with frosting and an Oreo cookie crust. They were, in point of fact, incredibly delicious. They were also very time-consuming to make and Lorelai needed a lot of help...from none other than sick old Mom! It was a very drawn-out process; I'd help her mix one set of ingredients, set it in the oven, then go lay back down on the couch and fall asleep. Then when the oven beeped, I'd stumble back into the kitchen, pull them out of the oven, set them in the freezer to cool off faster...and promptly fall asleep again. As you can imagine, it took quite a while to get them done (and we were a little late to the game as a result). But it all worked out in the end; The cheesecake bites tasted great, everyone had fun at Grandma's house, I got to take a nap, and BYU's football team won! Just one note to myself: next time Lorelai wants to cook, and you're not feeling well, encourage her to make Rice Krispie treats instead!
Lorelai wasn't the only one of my children who got the cooking bug this week. Celeste had her best friend Alissa over to play, and they both got the idea to create food "inventions." This meant looking in the cupboard and mixing together whatever they felt like. As tired as I was, and as much as I wanted to sleep, I knew the kitchen might not survive the onslaught of creativity. So I tried to supervise a little bit and keep a nuclear meltdown from occurring. Plus, I helped them "cook" their slop into...something...
Yuck! I used our small griddle, since both girls' concoctions were "pourable". I hoped the end result would be at least roughly pancake shaped. No such luck with Alissa's "batter"--it was so runny that I ended up having to "scramble" it like eggs just to get it to take shape at all! The girls both offered me a bite of their "inventions"; I politely declined. Later, as the two moved their play date upstairs, the food quietly found its way into the trash.
Really, I should be proud of the girls for their daring in the kitchen. It's a good sign that they want to try cooking, and I want to encourage that. But in practice, it also means I'll have to deal with a
lot of nasty food, until they start figuring out how everything works. It also means extra work for me, at least in the early going. I hope that in the months and years to come, I can guide all my girls in the kitchen, and help them all develop a few skills that will help them fend for themselves in later years.
September is already mostly done, and a busy month is on the way. Stay tuned for more updates!
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