Breakfast at IHOP

Bobby, Alice, and I hop over to IHOP for breakfast this morning. I do some "mystery shopping" now and then, so sometimes we get free meals at random places. IHOP is today's random place.

Bobby orders the strawberry Belgian waffle and I have Eggs Benedict. We give Alice bits and pieces of our meals. Alice enjoys the strawberries and syrup quite a bit. She spreads some of it on her cheek. Bobby quickly, and expertly, wipes it off her face and manages to get the last bit just as Alice decides his actions are annoying. She waves her hand up by her ear to shoo Bobby's napkin away and smears a whole new strip of syrup by her eye. Now it looks like war paint.

I just love having this kid around.

CSA share May 27th

Here it is! The first batch of produce from our share of the Bob Brackett CSA.

2# rhubarb

1/4# spinach

1/4# salad mix

1 bunch garlic chives

We used half of the garlic chives in a black bean dish served with rice. They were cooked so long in the crockpot that there was little garlic flavor by the end. I think we'll dehydrate the other half and see how that goes.

The salad mix is bold. The bugs appeared to have liked it in the field, but I'm okay with a little crop damage here and there. Makes it more real. The flavor is bold. Not spicy, not bitter, not dirty. Just bold, strong, earthy. I had to dilute the flavor with some spinach and romaine in my salad yesterday. Maybe I'll graduate to full-strength by the end of the summer :)

I'm still deciding what to do with the rhubarb. Perhaps a dessert. Perhaps jam/jelly. Perhaps it gets frozen until the strawberries ripen.

Kinder Surprise!

A former lab mate sent me a surprise package! Kinder Surprise eggs from Belgium! And a delightful Kinder-Surprise-like toy that she said reminded her of me. I absolutely adore KS eggs. A few years ago I bought a case of them from Canada and handed them out to my coworkers and friends for Christmas. Of course, I made each person open their egg as soon as I gave it to them (my passion for KS eggs would probably border on obsession if only they were easier to get in the U.S.). Here are the three little toys that were in these eggs:

Each toy has a little code you can type into the Belgian KS website for a little more info. We used an online translator to decode the French explanations. Perhaps HeidiPB and J would interpret them differently?

• Bernard L'ermite rouge: La limace la plus paresseuse de toutes aime se reposer sur la plage

Bernard red hermit: The laziest slug of all likes to rely on the beach

• Ovni violet: La nuit, il vole sur les pyjamas en laine des enfants les plus sympathique

Purple UFO: At night, it flies on the woolen pyjamas of the nicest children

• Shrek est un ogre au grand coeur. Il a hâte d'échapper à la vie agitée du royaume pour retrouver une existence tranquille dans son marais avec sa femme Fiona et ses amis, Potté et l'Ane. Dans cette aventure, il va s'apercevoir qu'épouser une princesse entraîne toute une cohorte de royales responsabilités

Shrek is an ogre in the big heart. It is impatient to avoid the life agitated by the kingdom to find a quiet existence in its marsh with his wife Fiona and his friends, Potté and the Donkey. In this adventure, it is going to realize that to marry a princess draws away whole cohort of royal responsibilities.

My former lab mate remembers my little love for KS all these years later. I wonder what other people remember about me. Out of context, any small personality quirk can seem like some freakish obsession. I wonder what I'm remembering about other people...

I remember odd things about some people long after I've forgotten all the normal things. Food associations are especially memorable. Zippy chicken and the Garners. Banana pudding and my mom. Bobby and snap peas. Chard or fortune cookies and the Graberts. Rolled tacos and the Hersoms. Lentil soup or beet salad or TVP chili and Heidi.

Not everyone has a food memory in my brain, and some food memories even fade with time, but you might be surprised to learn what I remember you by.

Bobby's Sunday Summary

This week was like a lot of other weeks. Susan already wrote four entries in the blog about this week so I won’t bother to talk about all the things that she did.

This week at work was somewhat new and interesting. My new boss came to town. I just recently switched groups and the same day that I transitioned into the new position the guy who was going to be my boss transitioned to a new position too and we all got a new boss who is based in California. He seems like a really nice guy, but it is rather interesting that for the last year and a half I have essentially been reporting to someone off site.

Alice caught on to the idea of signing a lot more this week and also communication in general. She has picked up and started using the signs for fish and her favorite, baby. She uses “baby” to tell us that she wants to find her dolls to play with and also to point out that there are children her size and smaller around. She loves to stare out the window and sign whenever she sees a bird. She even tries to say bird. Another word that she knows is toes, which she loves to bend over and grab whenever anyone says it. She is very happy that she knows what it means.

Yesterday we went to the Temple. It was a nice trip, but also a kind of odd one. It being a holiday weekend the Temple attendance was actually down quite a bit, but they had just called several new Temple workers from our ward and almost all of them showed up. There were several sessions where there were more temple workers than there were patrons.

Stroller Success!

It has been one emotional breakdown after another over the last couple days, but we finally figured it out. Here is Alice successfully navigating her new doll stroller around the house:

[flv width="400" height="300"]http://evansfamily.powweb.com/movies/2008/StrollerSuccess.flv[/flv]

Let me explain how truly monumental this little video clip is. For all of us. For the last two days (that's when the stroller joined our household), whenever the stroller would run in to a wall or piece of furniture, Alice would scream and shake the stroller violently and finally collapse herself on the floor in tears. As soon as Bobby or I would unstick it, she'd hop up (still sobbing) and run away with it as fast as she could, thus smacking it into another wall or piece of furniture and collapsing in frustration yet again. I could tell she desperately wanted to play with it, but she couldn't get it to work.

I wanted to help her sooooooo bad. I cleared everything off the floor...but the walls remained. I took her and the stroller outside...she ran it into the garden fence. Finally, this morning, I put my hands on top of hers and let her feel how I turned the stroller this way and that. I noticed at that moment that the front wheels had been half-locked into the "straight" position this whole time. They would turn enough for an experienced cart-pusher to make it work, but it was a hopeless situation for a newbie. I unlocked the wheels and Alice was zipping around corners and avoiding obstacles in two minutes.

Woo hoo!