Featuring Ethan’s knee!

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I decided I wanted to make a quiche today.

I have a lot of herbs growing, and the only ones we actually use is the rosemary, on chicken and on roast potatoes. I should make some pesto, but I’ve actually never had pesto, so it never occurs to me.

Anyway, so I decided I wanted to make a quiche. I did a search on foodtv and came up with one from Paula Deen, the woman who uses a stick of butter in EVERYTHING. It HAD to be good. It was for bacon and spinach quiche, with swiss cheese.

So I knew I had a bag of spinach in the fridge, but it was bolting rapidly.. I sifted through it, picked out some good leaves and carefully washed and spun them dry in my spinner and chopped them up. then I decided they were too far gone, and I knew if I put spinach in it, there’s no way James would like it. So I ditched the spinach and picked some of my basil. Because hey! that was the whole point anyway!
It called for a pound of bacon. I never use bacon in cooking really. I keep a package in the freezer that I use whenever I make potato soup, but it just never comes out often. I was fortunate that the bacon in the freezer wasn’t freezer burned. So I pulled it out, cut some off the slab, and cooked it up.

I realized it wasn’t nearly enough.

So I pulled out the bacon again and cut up the remaining slab. that’s right. ALL OF IT.

Look at all that precious artery clogging GREASE! Gee, I wonder why I don’t eat this stuff very often?

I didn’t have any swiss cheese, so I just used cheddar.

It called for cream, but nope, haven’t got any of that, so I just used 2% milk. I figured there was enough extra fat from the bacon anyway.
I also didn’t have any pie crusts on hand, and sure as hell wasn’t going to make any.
So…. I’m making a Spinach, Bacon and Swiss Quiche.

Except there’s no crust, basil instead of spinach, and cheddar instead of swiss. Also, I like corn, so I put some corn in it too.

So really, it’s a Crustless No-Spinach, No-Swiss, Plenty-o-Bacon, Corn & BASIL Cheddar Quiche. YUM!

I also forgot to put the basil INTO the quiche. I slid it into the oven when my eyes lit on the chopped basil that WASN’T IN THE ACTUAL QUICHE ARGH, so I kind of stuck my hand full of basil into the hot oven and tried to fling it in there on top (where it will now probably burn, oh goody!) without losing a limb.

You know how those chefs on the food network are always sliding stuff into the trash as they prep and cook and saute and they finish with something and have a cloth to handily wipe it off their cutting boards and countertops, and by the time they’re done everything in the kitchen is sparkly-er and shinier than it was when they started?

Yeah, I’m not like that.

Recipe:
6 eggs
1 1/2 c. 2% milk
lots of pepper
1 lb of bacon
a handful of grated cheddar cheese (I didn’t measure, I just used the bit of cheese that was left.)
couple of handfuls of corn
chopped basil

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

I sprayed my tart dish with a Pam-like spray, and then put the bacon in the bottom.

(Holy shit that’s a lot of bacon.)

Then came the corn and the cheddar cheese.

then I poured the egg-milk mixture carefully over the top.

Put in the oven, but remembered the basil and tossed that in there on top.

10 min. update: Quiche is in the oven cooking now. It smells delicious. Anything with that much bacon should be good.

20 min. update: Basil isn’t burning. Yet. Smells yummilicious. I’m getting hungry.

Baked for about 45 minutes – until there was no jiggling. My oven tends to take 5 minutes longer than most recipes call for.

post-cooking: this quiche is so yummy. I was correct, in that lots of bacon = GOOOOOOD. Now I will probably go bacon-free for another 5 years. Basil didn’t burn, everything was soooo delicious. If I had one complaint, it would be that it was a touch on the salty side. I salted the eggs, which was probably unnecessary, since bacon has plenty of it. Still. Yum.

UPDATE: James even liked it. Or he knew what was good for him and made himself eat it. And lie to me with a straight face. He’s a smart man.

James went in to get Ethan this morning after we both slept in to 7am (we usually get up about 6.20). I was a little surprised that he wasn’t up already. He was still in bed, huddled in sweaty sheets with a fever of 102.5.

ARRRRGH!

Just to recap: Last Thursday his school called and reported he had a high fever. I hurried and got him and stayed home with him Friday. Took him to the doctor, who about wrecked her pants at how swollen his tonsils were. Took a rapid strep test, which turned out negative. Took a normal strep test. Results will take 3 days, so she put him on antibiotics. Monday came, test was NEGATIVE! So she said to stop the antibiotics.

And now, 1.5 days later, he’s down with a high fever again.

He was so miserable, was on the verge of tears. It was so sad.

So after the obligatory “Who stays home with him?” discussion, I stayed home with him, James took Jocelyn into school.

I called the doctor when it got to be a more reasonable hour (I decided 8:16 was reasonable. It was agony waiting til after 8:15) and she was stumped. She asked if there were any new symptoms, and honestly, it seemed like it was exactly what was going on last week. So I brought him in, and she took a look, and pretty much said, “Sure enough! He’s sick!” Well, she did say that the tonsilitis could be viral, but with his glands as swollen as they were, they needed antibiotics and broke out a prescription for the stronger stuff.

He was feeling much better once his fever was down. Better enough to point out ALL the RED trucks, construction trucks, and cars on the way to and from the doctor’s office. Better enough to insist on taking the stairs when departing the doctor’s office. Better enough to get all sassy with me 20 minutes into me trying to kill time in Target waiting for the prescription to be filled.

So back at home, things were going fine and he was actually sleeping and I was about to get some actual work done, when the kids’ school called.

Jocelyn was running full out in her classroom when she slipped or tripped or something shiny distracted her and she cracked her head against the “cubbies” (think very small cupboards with no doors, so the kid’s individual bins can go in and out).

The skin wasn’t broken, and she seemed to be doing fine, they reported, but I had better come get her.

“Do I need to take her to the emergency room?” I asked, trying to figure out just how bad it was.

“Her eyes are good, and she isn’t acting strangely, but really I wouldn’t want to make that decision for you.”

So I flew upstairs, put shoes on a barely conscious Ethan, grabbed keys and off we went. I shooshed Ethan a number of times while I tried to get a hold of our pediatrician (she had just seen us this morning. Patience of Job, that woman has. Yoda, I am not trying to be.) Left a message with her service, hung up and tried to listen to Ethan since he was doing so well with me snapping at him to “SSHHHH! I’M ON THE PHONE!”

“I saw a digger Mommy.”

“Oh yeah? A digger?”

“It’s a police digger.”

“I don’t think police have diggers, Ethan.”

“They do. Just one.”

“Aha. …. What does this police digger do?”

“Mommy, it’s digs. VERY FAST. With a SIREN.”

He didn’t limit his conversation to police diggers. I had told him Jocelyn got a bonk on the head. He did his best to reassure me:

“Did Jocelyn bonk her head?”

“Yes, she did, honey.”

“Very hard?”

“It was a pretty hard bonk, yes, but she’s ok.”

“I think she bonked her head so hard that it opened up and all the blood came out all over.”

He’s not the best comforter.

The doctor told me that it’s ok to let her drink and eat, and give her some tylenol for the headache she’s bound to have. I’m to watch for any abnormal behavior, wooziness, vomiting, extreme sleepiness.

If I didn’t know any better, I’d say the woozy nausea I felt all the way to school meant I had a good bonk on the head.

She was doing fine when we got there. The teachers said that it was definitely a hard bump though, it was LOUD, and it was VERY swollen pretty quickly. In the time it took for me to get there however, it had improved quite a bit. She wasn’t crying or fussing, she was happy as a clam, holding up her ice pack to her head, sitting in the chair swinging her legs back and forth.

It’s now been almost 4 hours from the head bonking and she is still fine, though her head looks nasty. she’s spent this time refusing to eat the dinner I made (very normal), taking her diaper off and insisting that I put it back on fourteen zillion times, annoying her brother by LOOKING AT HIS GEOTRAX TRAIN and tryig to send her mother to an early grave via cardiac arrest by spinning around and around and falling down narrowly missing even more furniture.
I still feel woozy and nauseas. Fifteen more minutes.. and there’s a stiff martini with my name on it. I’m sure alcohol will help the parent trauma.

No big house projects were done or started on this weekend, as I had bigger fish to fry, visiting with long lost LINDA!

(Look at me, playing in photoshop, wheeee!)

I met Linda at BYU’s Theatre Workshop when we were both.. oh I don’t know.. 14? 13? Workshop was the point in my young life where I truly moved from “child” to “young adult.” Have 30-50 people work together, play together, eat together, sleep together, build, dance, act, sing together for 5 weeks, and you get very close. It was an amazing experience and when it was over, it was heartbreaking to say goodbye. I didn’t know her well the first year, but I went back the next year and we immediately bonded as several in the small group that had gone to workshop the year before. Linda is quite the writer, and it meant that she corresponded diligently throughout all our time apart. I couldn’t tell you where the other friends I made at workshop ended up (except when I ask linda, and she sometimes knows), but Linda and I wrote diligently.

We both ended up at BYU freshman year, which made “keeping in touch” much easier 🙂 The summer after freshman year, we decided that we simply MUST room together at least one term, short as it might be, and so spent summer term in Campus Plaza, a hole of an apartment complex whose biggest asset is the proximity to campus (I could get out of bed at 7:50 and still make it to my 8am class with a few minutes to spare). We had many adventures, hiking to the Y, driving up to Park City where my folks lived for the weekend, and a road trip to Grand Junction, CO for the 4th of July (we were determined to go to a state that would celebrate the FOURTH OF JULY HOLIDAY ON THE ACTUAL FOURTH OF JULY – and it was on a Sunday, and therefore celebrated Saturday instead of Sunday in most of Utah. GOOD LORD PEOPLE.)

She also roomed with me a year later after one of my roomates moved to the dorms and we had a spot open in my apartment. She later transfered to Arizona State University, and I later transferred Away From Utah. I visited her in Arizona, she visited me in Atlanta, we met in New Orleans once. She was (one of) my maid of honor when I was married, and through the glory of email we’ve kept in touch. I haven’t seen her in quite a while though, and so I was very excited to see her this weekend and hear about her adventures in Korea and in life.

Much was discussed over chips and queso (the girl’s been in Korea, of course she must be taken to California Tortilla for chips and queso), aimless driving in the car, and in a quaint little park in Manassas were we just chilled out for a few hours. More was discussed at home, over many many many MANY alcoholic beverages. I made waffles in the morning that lacked the proper amount of eggs, and the proper amount of baking powder, and subsequently were like eating cardboard. They made me feel as if I’d eaten a brick (not a good feeling when the hangover is just barely staved off). I was sad to see her go after I drove her to the bus station in DC (and again, sorry about making you late, darest dearling!)

Anyway, lovely weekend, mostly spent visiting with Linda Lou Lou.

Ever since I posted a sort of photo journey of Ethan through the years on his birthday, it has been bugging me that some of our old photos were AWOL. I looked and LOOKED through flickr and our photos locally and could not find the pictures I KNEW we had somewhere of the day that Ethan was born. The early ones I posted were from when he was a few weeks old.

So finally, I hounded James to dig up HIS old archives and put them on our file server, and I’ve been going through them fairly meticulously and checking them against flickr and uploading the ones that were missing.

The photos taken on day that Ethan was born are now there, however, NOW I can’t find the photos of the trip we took to NY the fall of 2003.

Argh. I think this may be a long process.

and once again, I’m reminded of the couple of factors with flickr that make me not love it with the fierce blazing heat of a thousand suns, like everyone else seems to. I’ve just uploaded some photos ranging from 1999 to 2004 and it seems like everything is always organized by date UPLOADED rather than date TAKEN and that bugs me to no end. I always have to go in to ‘archives’ and specify ‘date taken’ to find anything at all. Oh well.

Didn’t I promise photo bliss? I’ll shoosh now and get to it. some cute baby pictures of my babies. Sometimes it’s hard to realize how much and how many changes we as parents have gone through as well as the kids themselves.. until we look at the photos and say, “Awwww, remember when?”

(OMG look at the red hair! it’s red! oh how i miss thy redness! except that it’s gone from that nice red to a nasty orange color i hate and that’s the entire reason i stopped dying my hair red but STILL! I LOVE YOU RED!)

Oh, right, this was about Ethan. Not my nasty orangey red hair. Carry on.

I wish I had a photo like this one without my hands on his head, but the truth is, I just couldn’t keep my hands off him. Not even for a picture of just him. He was just too beautiful.

And just so you realize just what exactly the sort of man I’m married to …. here is the photo he took of his son’s first shit:

this same man also turned to me a few hours after holding our son and being together as a family for the first time, and said with a little tear in his eye,

“Our son will never know a world without Tivo.”

I only smiled and nodded, too emotional to speak.

My favorite sheets, the first ones I bought for our real live adult bed, the beautiful soft cotton 500 thread count sheets… have finally given up the ghost.

In fact, they probably gave up the ghost about a month before I stopped using them, but I was in denial. The threadbare spots gave way to actual holiness, and not the kind of holiness that brings you closer to God. The kind that brings you closer to MATTRESS.

Still even they they had holes and I’d mended some rips in them, they still had to have some practical use, right? YES DAMMIT I LOVE THEM I’M KEEPING THEM IN SOME FORM OR ANOTHER!

Well, I am always intrigued when I read my Lucy Maud Montgomery books and they talk about braided or rag rugs.

So, fIrst, I tore my beloved top sheet into 1″ strips. Then I crotched myself a nifty bag. I don’t think I have any pictures of my bag.

Both the kids were quite taken with my bag. So next I made one for Jocelyn.

I didn’t think Ethan would like a bag, so I started to make a rug for him to go next to his bed. But when I told him that, he informed me that he wanted a bag too. So I made him one too.

What these bags really need are linings.

I was pretty enamored with my bag for a while. I even stopped using my purse completely. However, the novelty has worn off and the drudgery of digging through the bag for all my crap — well, I’ve lost my love of the bag. I need a bag with pockets – and different sections.

Maybe I could sew up a lining with sections / dividers, but honestly, I am really not that great a sewer. I took the mandatory sewing in home ec. in jr. high, but all my efforts since then, including the stab at quilting I’ve done a few times, have been of my own engineering and thoughts with no real knowledge of the “correct” way to do anything to back me up.

So if anyone wants to throw some sewin’ learnin’ at me, I would be so appreciative.

Still. Cute bag. Love the super-whiteness of it.