{pretty}
For the parish’s annual Ladies Luncheon, this year Sweet Pea and I sported matching chef hats. She’s just started to get helpful in the kitchen and does some of my vegetable prep work for me (peeling garlic, potatoes, and carrots, juicing lemons, that sort of thing) so I thought it would be cute to have her hat say “Sous Chef.” (Plus, then the next kid can wear it when she outgrows it.) She’s getting to be such a lovely young lady. Mine said “Mama Chef” because I embroidered it the day before the luncheon and I was all out of imagination.
Update: It occurs to me to mention that there is always a prettiest/funniest/most creative hat contest at our ladies luncheon. I’m not that out of touch with fashion. Also, Sweet Pea won again! She was pretty excited about it.
{happy}
Jiddo made bunk beds for the kids to my specifications! New Boy is coming in May, so Mishmish needed to get kicked out of the nursery and learn to sleep in a real bed. Only a couple nights of trouble, and now he SLEEPS THROUGH THE NIGHT. Oh. My. Goodness. Can I tell you how much I desperately needed for him to start doing this??? You are looking at one happy mama. Jiddo also made shelves to go along the bunk beds (which will attach on the left side there and have two shelves open bunkside for each bed so the kids can have their own personal storage space), but they didn’t fit in the SUV with everything else. They’ll come later and add some much needed book shelf space for the ever-expanding collection of children’s books we have. Not in my original design request, but so awesome, is the fact that the entire bookshelf was built to be able to be used as a stand-alone piece of furniture if at some point in the future we didn’t want the shelves near the bed. My dad is amazing like that.
{funny}
Contained in this stock pot is a huge slab of partially rendered suet. My ambitious friend and I are planning to tackle Soap Making, and we are going to use tallow because we happen to have a nearly free (and probably nearly unlimited for our scale) source of suet. I’ve rendered lard before from pork fatback, so I figured this would be about the same level of smell (lard making is pretty mild in that regard). Boy was I wrong. I managed to stick out the first batch because it was just warm enough to tolerate the window being open in the kitchen. This second batch though… I’m seriously considering taking it outside to dispose of it. Just lifting the lid for a second sends this horrendous stench through the entire main living space. Note to self: there was an excellent reason women used to make soap outside in warm weather, and it wasn’t just because it was messy. Phew!
{real}
Fr. A was pretty sure one of his platys was in a family way yesterday, and this morning sure enough we had a small fry swimming in there. Don’t see it? Neither do I. Yes sir, learning all about the dark realities of sea life around here. I think my butchering project has started rubbing off on Sweet Pea. She didn’t even bat an eyelid when I told her. The only thing she said was, “Good thing we weren’t going to eat him for dinner!”
