Overheard:

"Whoa, something stinks.  Did you toot?"
"Yeah."
"Wow.  That is really stinky."
[seriously distressed voice] "I don't know why I keep smelling like Pa-pa!"

Overheard: (Why, thank you.)

I'm glad my husband's not here.  Because then he'd expect us to have all this yummy food at our birthday parties.

One of my friends, the mom of Nathan's best buddy, came with her boys to Nathan's 5th birthday party.  We had a pretty simple fare, I thought.  Hamburgers and hot dogs, and different salads.  I made pasta salad, and my family brought several others.  It's not my fault my family loves flavorful food. :)

Culinary Self-Flagellation

I consider myself a decent cook.  While my cooking wouldn't necessarily be called gourmet, I think most of what I eat is enjoyable.
However, I will admit:  I do make some pretty amazing sugar cookies.  And some dang good cinnamon rolls.  And a pretty good pies, too, now that I think about it.

So let me change the subject.
Monday, I joined my Mom and brother on the carb-free train.  What I'm doing is not as strictly the Atkins (I eat vegetables, minus corn, carrots, peas, and potatoes), but it's still pretty strict.  When you get the munchies, there's not a whole lot that's munch-able, at least not in our house.  Seriously, Tuesday, my teeth were aching for something crunchy.  I'm not being totally fanatical about it - I had 3 Fritos to try to satisfy that need for crunchiness, and I had a bite of Paul's grilled pizza on Monday.
The reason I decided to try out this diet is because I've been feeling very bloated and fat. As we all know, after you have a baby, there's a certain amount of belly fat you can't do anything about.  But it was just a blah feeling all the time.  My mom said it would help with that, and it has helped.  And even though it's only my 4th day, my belly does feel (and maybe look?) less bloated.

Back to the original subject:
Once a month, Paul likes me to make treats for him to take to his shift at work.
Well, I promised them cinnamon rolls before I decided to do this diet.  This is where the subjects come together:  If there is one food/flavor I love, love, love, it is cinnamon.  You can't go wrong with cinnamon.  I even put in on ice cream occasionally.  But white bread, not to mention sugar, would definitely be a no-no on a carb-free diet.

He takes four 9x13s (1 dozen each) to work (I made two plain, one apple, and one chocolate chip).  Anything in the two rounds is the "ugly ends" from the dough roll, which I keep for our family.  But they turned out just as beautiful and fluffy as the others!  And this pic is even before I added the frosting!

Seriously.  It was total self-torture to make these.  And they were the most perfect batch I've ever made - go figure!  And I made apple cinnamon rolls, which I love.
I did sample one taste each of the apple and the chocolate when the boys were eating them last night.  And they are as definitely as good as they look!  It was hard to stop at one bite!  So, it's a total lesson in self-control for me to ignore the pan of cinnamon rolls on the counter.
Ah, the things we do for the ones we love. :)

Recycling

I have kind of a love/hate relationship with recycling.  I love (okay, like) that I'm not adding to the massive amounts of trash in the landfill, but I hate that it stacks up before I finally get it taken to the recycling center.
I think that I really started trying harder to recycle after Nathan was born.  I got to thinking about how many diapers I threw in the trash.  Then I got to thinking about how many babies were in our town, and how many diapers were being put in the landfill every week by all those babies combined.  And the thought of all that poop in a pile just kind of grossed me out.  Even though I had already decided to do cloth diapers for finance's sake, that thought just reinforced my decision.
But diapers are not hard to decompose, I would think.  I got to thinking about the amount of plastics and glass everyone throws away - that stuff isn't decomposing for a long time.
The boys have a movie called Mighty Machines (basically a bunch of videos of different machinery doing jobs).  They have one of a trash truck doing it's route and it shows the landfill.  I've never been to our county's, so I was surprised at how huge it was.  And gross.
So I started trying to recycle.  I only do things that our local recycling center takes (#1 and #2 plastics, soup cans, pop cans, glass, paper, and cardboard).  Once we take those things out, a week's worth of trash is only 2 bags, and that includes diapers.  (If I was religious about recycling junk mail, it would probably be less than that.)
But I hate how it stacks up!  My storage totes take up too much room to keep on the back porch, so we keep them in the shop.  (I wouldn't need the storage totes if I took it to the recycling center every week - but, let's be real, that is never going to happen until I'm an old lady and have nothing better to do.)  I keep a basket by the back door to take the stuff out to the shop when it's full.  But because I (or someone else in this house whose household duties include the garbage, which in my book includes recycling by extension) am too lazy to take the basket out to the shop every week, there is always a precariously balanced pile of soup cans, milk jugs, alfredo jars, and shampoo bottles on the shelves by the back door.  I hate that. .
But I do like the thought that by doing this little bit, it's keeping some of the non-biodegradables out of the landfill.
And if everyone did that little bit, which isn't hard, just slightly inconvenient, it would make the world a more beautiful place.