• Bug,  domesticity,  Stealthy Spy Cooking,  Tis the Season

    Falling for Fall

    I love Fall. I never used to. As a kid, fall meant bulky scratchy ill-fitting sweaters and tights that wouldn’t stay up. It meant school and lots of stay-inside days. In high school, Fall and Winter meant rain and if it rained then the hairspray on my bangs would completely lose all it’s stiffness and my day would be ruined. Oh the horror.

    But now I love wearing bulky clothes. I hardly ever wear tights but I love wearing socks. I still don’t really love rain but I could care less what my hair looked like. I love the crisp air in Fall and the blue blue blue skies. I love taking walks with Baby Bug and not feeling drops of perspiration run down my back underneath the baby harness. I love sipping hot drinks and walking on a beach completely bare of tourists. I love thinking about pumpkins and butternut squash soup and warm cozy things like making pies.

    Speaking of… I wonder if I’ll be able to pull off making pies now that I have a baby. It was such an achievement for me last year. I think I can do it. And you know why? Because I AM the MASTER MEAL PLANNER!!! [insert cheery tooting kazoo music here] Meal planning rocks. I thought it was a silly idea at first. Just one more thing to fill up my day. I thought it was overkill. I mean what are you going to ask me to do next? Lay out my clothes on the bed the night before and iron my shirts! Enter my receipts into an Excel spreadsheet? That’s just silly talk.

    You know what? Meal planning works. It was a very productive exercise to force myself to sit down and think about what I had on hand and what I needed from the grocery store. I usually just wing it and it’s a good thing I’m creative because you know how well winging it works. Then I got out my big fat Joy of Cooking cookbook (that I just happen to be reading these days. I kid you not.) and I picked out one new recipe to try. We have “new recipe night” now. It’s kinda fun. Except I think I’m either allergic to walnuts or I poisoned myself. (I’ll try to link the recipe on my cooking blog and link it here later.)

    I feel like such a fake trying to be so domestic but it’s not that bad really. If I’m here being a mom 100% of the time, I might as well embrace all the facets of professional wife-and-momhood and be good at it. It just feels so foreign. I’m not a good cook. I don’t really like to clean. I’d rather spend all my time playing on my computer and making things. But this is what fits around the baby’s nap times and this is what makes my family happy. So I’m going to do the best job I can. And maybe along the way I’ll enjoy it and become a good cook. Imagine that!

    Enough about that. Here are some more swing pictures. We have a lot of pictures of Baby Bug in the swing. Mostly because we go to the park EVERY DAY!!! I have to. It keeps me sane. But these pictures are special because I sort of almost got a picture of her peek-a-boo invisible new tooth. It’s there, I can feel it. It just doesn’t really show up well, especially in a gritty slideshow.

  • Niece-com-poops,  Tis the Season,  travel

    Picking Raspberries

    Picking raspberries rocks. It’s a bit expensive ($30 a gallon) but when you think about the entertainment value and all the raspberries you can eat for free while you’re picking, it’s almost a justifiable cost. Then throw in fun with your family and endless photo opportunities and I’d say what a deal! Better than Disneyland or gambling in a casino and how much money do you waste doing that?

    My mom has this idea that we should do a fun outing together as a family (not counting my dad who is a trucker and always on the road or Toby who works every single day) every month. So far we’ve got something fun every season except Spring. Or maybe I should say we’ve got fun things we do in Fall. Like our favorite pumpkin patch and Oak Glen for apples and cider. And now we have a new fun thing to do in summer. Picking raspberries!

    I didn’t even know raspberries grew around here but they do. It’s only about 30 minutes up the mountains from my mom’s house and if you could just skip Beaumont I’d say it’s a lovely drive! I’m trying to talk my mom into buying property up there but I think she’d rather spend her money buying gifts for her grand daughters. It would be fun to have a bed and breakfast/farm or ranch up there. Just close enough to the city to do some shopping at the outlet mall and just far enough away to have some chickens and not have to look at anything but your own property.

    Riley Farms is so photogenic. It would be great for a wedding or a family reunion. Everywhere you look you see green hills and sprawling pastures. They have goats and lazy dogs, apple trees and bales of hay to play on… it’s like being back in time. The buildings are all very rustic and the people who work there even dress up in period costume. The only thing not back in time are the real bathrooms with plumbing and flush toilets. I hate pit toilets.

    We went on a Friday and there weren’t any crowds. It was just us and maybe a few other couples milling around picking copious amounts of ripe red raspberries. I can’t think of a single thing I can say bad about this experience. I’d recommend it to anyone willing to shell out that much money for raspberries. You can buy smaller containers but we wanted to really pick a lot of raspberries. When we got back to my mom’s house, she made three batches of delicious raspberry jam. Yum!