Evie Update

Closer and closer to Halloween

/ Shane / 1 Comment

On Friday, Evie and I tried our most ambitious baking experiment yet: a pumpkin roll.

Pumpkin roll is easily in my top 2 deserts all time. I could probably eat one by myself, in a sitting, if I had to. But this is the first time I ever tried to make one. People kind of talk it up like it is hard, so I was a little worried, but honestly it wasn’t really that much trouble. And it was deeeelicious (even though half of it was eaten by a bunch of barbarians).

On Saturday we hit up the Halloween thing at the Lincoln Park Zoo, where we are members. It was a cold, wet, miserable day like you wouldn’t believe. The kind of day where nobody should be outside, everyone should be inside, under blankets, with something warm to drink. So traipsing around the zoo wasn’t really the greatest idea. Especially since Evie couldn’t wear her coat, because that would have ruined her awesome bat costume. It wouldn’t have been so bad, but most of the indoor enclosures were closed for the day, meaning we couldn’t get out of the elements. Luckily the bat enclosure wasn’t closed, so we were able to get some pictures of Evie in her bat costume looking at the actual bats. We did not stick around for the music or trick-or-treating, but Evie did ride on the carousel, so she was happy.

Finally, on Sunday we carved pumpkins. Readers of this blog will not be surprised that Evie requested that her pumpkin be crying, with tears running down its face. That being said, I am quite proud of the way hers turned out, very sad looking. Evie was a good model, fake crying for me whenever I needed it, to get the look right. She wanted my pumpkin to be angry / scary and Sara’s to be happy. She helped do hers, but got bored long before everything was done. That’s okay, I had fun doing it. Plus I have a bunch of roasted pumpkin seeds to eat now!

One last thing to mention about the weekend, I opened my first jar of pickles! They were very good. If I had been given that jar by my grandma, I probably wouldn’t have thought twice about it. But, since I was the one actually making them, I was maybe a little over critical of them. They were a little vinegary and a little salty. Still, all in all, not too shabby for my first time out!

“Daddy is better than ice cream”

/ Shane / 15 Comments

She probably only said that because I made her eggs for a snack and then we baked banana bread.

I’ve been on quite a baking tear lately. Evie loves to do it, measuring, dumping, mixing, and it’s something that can pretty easily eat up a big chunk of our day (in a good way). And the best part is, you actually have something to show from it! Something delicious.

So, after our excellent trial of making some Halloween cookies, Evie and I took it to another level. We started by making banana bread on Friday. Then, on Sunday, we made waffles in the morning, followed by oatmeal raisin cookies. Finally, I took on my most ambitious project yet, making homemade spinach/chicken/bacon calzones from scratch (meaning using the bread maker for the crust).

The calzones were a lot more work than I was expecting, perhaps cooling my ardor for baking a little bit. They turned out good (despite Sara’s efforts to sabotage my recipe), but I’m not sure it was worth the effort. Still, I think I will try to think of baking as a fun activity to do, like going to the park, or doing a craft project. My mom is an excellent baker, and when I was growing up, I remember that we almost always had some sort of baked desert lying around somewhere. That is something I remember fondly from my childhood.

Finally, since we were talking about my waffles and all, Sara and I were having a little debate. Obviously, we will settle this like adults, with a web poll. The results of this poll are final, and cannot be questioned in any way.

Halloweeny Weekend

/ Shane / 4 Comments

On Friday, Evie and I really got into the Halloween spirit. We got out the Halloween decorations and decorated the whole house, including a Halloween tablecloth that only covers like 75% of the table. We also made Halloween sugar cookies, shaped like bats, cats, pumpkins and Frankensteins. This pretty much wrapped up the whole day since we had to make the dough in the morning, the cookies around lunch and then make and use the frosting in the afternoon.

Evie was already impatient for Halloween, and this didn’t help much. She has been asking multiple times per day, “Is it Halloween yet?” We tried to get some supplies for her costume over the weekend, but we had some pretty bad luck. We also haven’t carved the pumpkins yet because I was worried they wouldn’t last until Halloween. So we still have some Halloweenin’ to do before the big event.

The other news of the weekend was the big used book sale in our neighborhood. We managed to nab 55 children’s books for the grand total of $19! (Actually, it was even better when you consider it was 52 books for $13, the last 3 books being $2 each) We haven’t even gotten a chance to read them all yet.

The grand prize as far as Evie was concerned was a big, hardcover Curious George collection, with about 7 of the original stories in there. I am sure they were the original ones because they contain many things that would no longer be appropriate for kids books, such as George smoking a relaxing pipe, or George getting high by huffing ether and then passing out. I am not kidding, that is in there! I have to say though, those original stories are so much better than the newer, more commercialized ones, even if they are a little non-PC.

So Evie demanded this book as soon as we got home and continued to demand more Curious George all the way through. The result was that I read all 400 pages or so straight through as she sat enthralled for about an hour and a half, after which she demanded more. I have no doubt that she would have sat through it again, but my voice was getting raspy and my throat was sore.  “Guess she’s ready for chapter books,” said Sara. I mean, she is 2 after all.

To sleep, perchance to dream

/ Shane / 6 Comments

One night Evie was crying in her sleep. I went to see what was the matter and she explained to me that, while she was lying in her crib, a frog was trying to eat her legs. I explained to her about dreams and she went back to bed, but this dream stuck with her for several days, until we had to have a lengthy discussion about good dreams and bad dreams, and why bad dreams couldn’t hurt you.

Now, I don’t know about you, but this sounds like a horrifying dream to me, even as an adult. There’s something particularly creepy about it being a giant frog, I can totally picture it. I’ve seen Pan’s Labyrinth.

The fact is, I have very vivid dreams that I almost always remember on a nightly basis. When I was a kid, I was deathly afraid of the dark. I would lie awake nearly every single night with the sheet pulled up to my eyes, getting carried away by my very vivid imagination. Naturally, I would rather Evie was spared from that.

The other day she told me about a dream she had. She was flying down a long hallway, like a bat, while “something with no mouth and no feet” walks behind her. Creepy to the max. On one hand I am proud that she has such a vivid imagination. I think that will serve her well in life.

I’m sure every kid has nightmares. It’s probably not a big deal. Anybody else have any experience with this? How old were your kids when they started having nightmares, and when did they grow out of it?

The Toot Hole

/ Shane / 7 Comments

When we were camping, there was a missing knot in the bench of the picnic table, leaving a hole. Evie asked what it was for and, because I take the “Calvin’s dad” philosophy of question answering*, I naturally told her it was for “toots”.

Let me back up a second and explain toots. We didn’t have any cutesy names for bodily functions when I was a kid, we called a spade a spade. When Evie was younger, Sara asked me what names we should use for things and I was like, “huh?” It just didn’t occur to me that you should make ups some silly phrase. It doesn’t make it any more polite people, talking about farts in the first place is what’s rude, not using the word fart. That being said, when Evie says “toots” it’s the darned cutest thing you could ever imagine the world.

So anyway, I told her the hole was for toots, not thinking much of it. The “toot hole” (as Evie called it) must really have captured her imagination. She went around telling everybody about the toot hole and spend a decent amount of time trying to toot on the toot hole. It wasn’t long before the origin of the phrase was traced back to me.

Time passes and I don’t think much about it. Then one day we were sitting out on the back porch and she said, “My red chair has a toot hole!” See, her chair is one of those plastic ones and it has a hole so that (presumably) the water can drain off. I had long since forgotten about the original toot hole and the fact that she remembered it took me by surprise. This brought another round of Evie doing her darndest to toot on the hole. Not as funny as the first time, since I now had the sinking feeling she wasn’t going to forget about this one.

Fast forward to this week. Evie and I were pretending to go camping, one of her favorite games. Evie was telling me a big story about her imaginary, fully-featured lawn chair. It was blue with yellow arm rests. It had all the features, cup holders, a thing to lie back in, and, of course, a toot hole.

Don’t say I never taught you nothin’ kid.

* I couldn’t find a good copy of the Calvin and Hobbs strip I was looking for to embed in this post, but you can see a grainy one here. It’s kind of hard to read, so I will reproduce the text:

Calvin: Dad, how come old photographs are always black and white? Didn’t they have color film back then?
Dad: Sure they did. In fact, those old photographs are in color. It’s just the world was black and white then.
Calvin: Really?
Dad: Yep. The world didn’t turn color until sometime in the 1930s, and it was pretty grainy color for a while, too.
Calvin: That’s really weird.
Dad: Well, truth is stranger than fiction.
Calvin: But then why are old paintings in color?! If their world was black and white, wouldn’t artists have painted it that way?
Dad: Not necessarily. A lot of great artists were insane.
Calvin: But… but how could they have painted in color anyway? Wouldn’t their paints have been shades of gray back then?
Dad: Of course, but they turned colors like everything else did in the ’30s.
Calvin: So why didn’t old black and white photos turn color too?
Dad: Because they were color pictures of black and white, remember?