Cold Brewed Coffee: Update

/ Shane / 1 Comment

I did a First Friday Food post about cold brewed coffee a while back, but we had an amazing discovery which deserved an update! If you use cheese cloth instead of paper coffee filters, the filtering time goes from about 2 hours to about 1 minute! We still filtered the grounds out once with a mesh strainer, but with the cheese cloth you basically just pour the coffee through, no waiting. We couldn’t tell any difference in the final product.

It’s not very often that you can so easily improve your efficiency by 6000%! In fact, doing it this way seemed easier and faster even than using a Toddy. Plus you can reuse the cheese cloth, so you don’t even have to throw away the paper filters. It certainly changes making cold brewed coffee from, “you better really like it” to “why not?”

The Honey Badger

/ Shane / 1 Comment

Someone was talking about the fierce Honey Badger and how it simply does not give a shit about anything or any other animals, and I had no idea what they were talking about. So I looked it up, and of course it is another Internet meme that I am the last to know about.

Nonetheless, it is endlessly entertaining. I think this guy should narrate every animal show. It’s his amazing commentary and insight into the life of a Honey Badger that makes the whole thing interesting, more-so than the  actual animal itself.

And now we’re all on the same page: nothing can stop the Honey Badger when it’s hungry.

What sound can’t you handle?

/ Shane / 6 Comments

You know how sometimes there is a sound that just gets to you? The obvious example is nails on a chalkboard, but honestly that doesn’t really bother me all that much. We were discussing this over the weekend and it turns out that there are certain sounds that you can’t handle, but everybody’s sounds are different.

For Ron, it was the sound of a knife cutting on a wooden cutting board. For my mom, it was cutting cardboard with scissors. Sara can’t handle the sound of chalk writing on anything, or even touching chalk for that matter (“it’s just so dry!”). She has the same problem with the sound of someone writing with a pencil. As for me, it’s the sound of nails on the felty fabric on the inside of the roof of your car.

So at least mine is something normal and everybody else has totally bizarre reactions.

Ugh, man I tell you, it makes me shudder just to write it down. I can’t even picture the roof of the car in my head without a reaction. Even weirder then the fact that everybody has some strange sound that affects them, apparently hearing the sound affects everybody differently.

For Ron, it gets him right in the back of his shoulders. Mom gets little shivers on her arms. Sara gets goose bumps (even just talking about it – she demonstrated). Mine makes my back teeth feel funny.

It’s hilarious how everybody can talk about their own hang-ups and reactions very seriously, but everybody else’s sounds ridiculous.

So what is your sound? And how does it affect you?

Our little bus rider

/ Shane / 1 Comment

The other day we noticed a giant praying mantis clinging to the side of the car, maybe 5 inches long. I don’t know where he came from, I don’t remember seeing any praying mantises around the building. I tried to shoo him away with my coffee mug, but he just climbed onto the back window. I figured he would take off when we started driving, but he didn’t. He clung to the back window the entire way to drop Oliver off at day care.

Hey, can I get a ride?

Since he was right where the kids could see him, he was a big topic of conversation. We decided that perhaps he was a passenger on the “1-daddy-2 bus”, which is the route which serves daycare, Evie’s school, and my work (I happen to be the driver on said route). Evie had me announce the stops to him, in case he wanted to get off. I usually announce the stops inside the car, but she had me repeat it on the outside also (“This is the 1-daddy-2 bus. Next stop, school.”)

The main theories were that he was either, A) commuting to work on the bus, B) coming home from a night by our house, or C) moving, because as Evie put it, “bugs don’t have any furniture”.

I assumed he would leave while we were stopped at daycare, but he was still there when we got back (Evie ran ahead to check). I decided to leave him, figuring he’d blow off when we got on the highway. At his point we decided perhaps he was going to Evie’s school because it, “sounded like a nice place to live.”

By the time we got on the highway, we were pretty invested in the little guy. We had invented a little history for him: what he was up to, what kind of life he leads. Therefore, it was very disturbing when, rather than just letting go and flying away, he attempted to hang on for dear life. It looked very painful, and I fully expected it to kill him. His head was snapping around, his legs were twisted, and he tried to open his wings for stability which were quickly flipped inside out. It was awful. Here was our little buddy, dying painfully before our eyes.

“Pull over daddy and let him climb back on!” shouted Evie, quite distraught. I couldn’t blame her, I was thinking the same thing. Unfortunately, there’s not really a good place to pull over there. “I’m going over to the slow lane to drive as slow as I can!” I shouted back. That was all our buddy needed. Even through the rear-view mirror, I could see the look of resolve in his eyes. Slowly but surely he put got one leg at a time back onto the window. He straightened his wings. Then, just as the inspirational music began to swell, he fought the wind, using his front claws to pull himself over to the side where the wind wasn’t as bad, and hunkering down close to the car so he couldn’t be thrown off.

It was as inspirational a struggle as I’ve ever seen from a movie. Excuse us if there was a little bit of cheering, and/or cars being run off the road, since I was busy watching the mantis instead of the traffic.

Finally we pulled up in front of school and I asked Evie if she wanted to hold him in her hand and show him to her teachers. She was very excited about this. The mantis, on the other hand, was not. Perhaps a little grumpy from the rough ride, every time I tried to pick him up, he would launch himself at me, snapping and attacking with those signature claws. After a few tries, I managed to convince him to climb onto Evie’s lunch box.

She was triumphantly carrying the lunchbox into the school yard, when the mantis suddenly leaped off and flew away to hide in the garden. In order to prevent Evie from being disappointed that she didn’t get to show everybody the mantis, I said, “Hey, I guess he did want to get off at this stop!” Right away her grin was back, and she ran to tell her teachers about how we had brought a friend with us to live in the garden.

There has been a lot of speculation about our little buddy since then. We haven’t seen him, but as Evie points out, he’s good at hiding because he “smells like a leaf”.

We’ve also begun to wonder if the 1-daddy-2 bus is the only form of public transportation he uses. Perhaps he arrived at our house via the train? Who knows where he originated from?

In any case, he provided us with a little magic on what is normally a pretty dull task.

The Miracle Cure for getting your kids to sleep

/ Shane / 2 Comments

When we last saw our heroes, they had completely given up on getting Oliver to sleep. Boy how two months can change things!

After the last post, it got worse if anything. We had him back in our room, but it was unpleasant for everyone. At night he would be tossing and turning in bed like a maniac, punching me in the face, and just generally keeping us all up all night. It didn’t help that he happened to be getting 3 molars at this time, but I remember there was even one night where he was awake for 4 hours right in the middle of the night. Brutal.

The worst part is, the 6 weeks we spent trying to get him to sleep on his own in the other room seemed to have done some permanent damage. He was very, very suspicious that we were going to leave him, so every little sound would bring him instantly to his feet, screaming. Since we would wake him up whenever we went into the room, Sara and I took to sleeping on couches in the living room every night until he woke up the first time. Putting him to sleep was a challenge as well, since he was suspiciously alert for any kind of attempt to leave the room. So turning the pages of my book would wake him up, to say nothing of actually trying to creep out, open the door, etc. My only recourse was to wait for at least an hour until he was deeply asleep before I could sneak out. This was a very frustrating hour! We got used to walking on eggshells to avoid waking him.

Now, we put him into the crib in his bedroom with Evie and he quietly goes to sleep by himself. A couple of times he’s slept through the entire night.

Believe me, being able to type that sentence is more flabbergasting to me than anyone. So what was the miracle cure? Waiting until the time is right!

It’s very clear to me now that there was nothing we could have done to make him go to sleep easily back then. This time it went so smoothly and easily, that it was clear the time was just right. Why was the time wrong before? Who knows. Maybe he just wasn’t old enough to have the skills to be able to do it. Maybe it was the molars. Maybe he was in too much of a “mommy” phase. Every kid is different, and every kid is in different situations at different times.

The first time we tried to let him “cry it out” for over an hour multiple nights, and it didn’t work. This time it took 20 minutes the first night, and that was it. The first time it went on for 6 weeks. This time it was over in a matter of days.

It still hasn’t been perfect. The first few days he was getting up at 4 a.m. But that is a different problem, and that problem we could work on (we’ve had some success in the past with this issue). He’s still waking up a time or two some nights. But again, this is vastly better than it was. And sometimes now he can even put himself back to sleep! Also, his awakenings are increasingly after 4, so I think that it is all related to him wondering when we are going to come in and get him. Hopefully the “ghost light plan” (a lamp with a book in front of it in this case) will solve this issue.

I have to say, the whole thing makes me feel so much better. You hear these stories about parents who let their children cry it out when they’re 10 months old, and it only takes 5 minutes and then they sleep blissfully through the night. I used to think that these stories weren’t true (lies, all lies I tell you!) because the alternative was that I was somehow a bad parent. Now I think they might be true after all. Your kid is ready when he’s ready. Maybe for some kids, that’s 10 months. For Oliver, it wasn’t.

So, just like all Miracle Cures, it’s not as easy as it sounds. You have to determine when the “right time” is for your child. That part has no easy answers. But the good news is you have permission to stop and wait if it’s not working. I wish we would have done that the first time, instead of trying to force it for 6 weeks.

But when it finally does work, boy is it fantastic! Sara and I feel like we have a new lease on life. The sun is brighter, flowers smell better, food tastes better. We even had two nights in a row where we played board games, since the kids were asleep early at the far end of the house. Board games!

It’s almost like I’m human again.