What’s Wrong With The Breck Girl Look?

The act of blow drying my daughter’s hair, has been an act of torture for both her and I FOREVER.  I brush and she screams, I yell, we huff and we puff, it is a regular old nightmare.  Tonight, the light bulb finally went off.  She’s going for this look:

While, as a child of the 80’s, I’m going for this:

Really, truth be said, I’d love to see this:

Sigh, I guess there will have to be some compromise found.  I understand the Susan Dey look, but really is there anything wrong with being a Breck Girl?

 

* For those of you who know me.  Yes, I realize I would have hated being a “Breck Girl.” I recognize the hypocrisy.

So How Does a Dairy-Free Birthday Cake Work?

My little caboose turned one!  Can you believe it?   Xander is an entire year old!  As many of you know, he has been kicked off of dairy again!  That means some of life’s greatest pleasures are withheld: cheese, milk, yogurt, sour cream, are taboo, gone, struck down, not to be had.  Oh, the agony….  I digress.

We had to restart Xander’s dairy/soy free diet again, one week before his birthday.  A few days into the diet, it hit me, his cake!  How am I going to make him a dairy free cake?  There is no way I’m going to make this little guy a birthday cake that he can’t eat, NO WAY!  I’m crazy about birthday cakes, especially first birthday cakes.  Over the years I have made some horrible, ugly, birthday cakes (see an example below), but they have been made from the heart, except for one.  It’s one of my biggest guilts (ok, I know it’s trivial) is that I bought an ice-cream cake for Daniel’s first birthday.  So, there is no way that my caboose, is not going to have a homemade first birthday cake.

The research began and I settled on a Cherrybrook chocolate cake mix.  I know it was a mix, but it was dairy and soy free.  I then tried their frosting… it was awful.  I don’t know if it was the shortening that I used, but it was too sweet and had an awful texture.   After some goggling I found this recipe, it’s essentially a meringue frosting, and super easy to make.  I whipped up three batches of frosting and decorated the cake, and I must say it looked and tasted pretty darn good.  Yippee!!!

Now, on to my confessions.  Number one, I was so focused on making a successful dairy free/soy free cake, I didn’t make enough.  So pretty much only the kids got a taste of the cake, seriously only an idiot does something like that.  My second confession is that by the time I had the last quarter of the cake to cut, it just started falling apart.  The frosting became too warm and started slipping.  I sort of suspected this might happen, while I was decorating the cake.  I had a conundrum.  I have started freezing my cakes before I frost them, because it is so much easier to decorate them.  But now I have a frozen cake, that needed to thaw, but the frosting had to stay cold….why does stuff like this always happen to me?  Someone explain, I swear, I try to think things through.  At any rate, we left the cake in the garage overnight, and we took our chances and brought it in to defrost in the morning, and the cake started falling apart.  So next time I use this frosting the cake won’t be frozen.  I will use the frosting again, because it tasted pretty good and didn’t have any of the forbidden fruit dairy.  What matters, is in the end, Xander ate his homemade dairy/soy free cake, and loved it!

Unrequited Love

I have to confess I have an unrequited love, my Brio stroller, baptized “the Cadillac” by my father. Of all the material things in my life, I have to say I love this the most. I used to think it was plain snobbery. I liked my Graco stroller I had when my daughter was first born, but it was hard to walk with unless the pavement was next to perfect. The wheels began disintegrating immediately, and I couldn’t see Pumpkin, she faced out into the world. But in the end, the Graco just didn’t hold a candle to the Cadillac. You see, my stroller is made of steel, has a suspension system (which means my children don’t have whiplash every time I drive them over a crack in the pavement), and the seat can face forward or backwards whenever I choose. But no, it’s not snobbery… it’s a cultural thing.

For those of you who don’t know, I spent most of my childhood summers in Sweden and I lived there for a few years as well and every once in a while my Swedish side pops up in the strangest ways. After reading Linköpinglivin' I had an aha moment last Spring. It’s not just the engineering of my stroller I love, but just what it represents. If you read that post, it really sums up how I feel about parenting. Growing up strollers were just a part of life, you see them shopping, at restaurants, on boats, trains and trams. Everyone helps you through a door if you have a stroller, upstairs, and into the bus. In fact, trams and busses have a special place for strollers. If the baby falls asleep while shopping, so be it, you wheel it into your house, and that is where the baby sleeps. Babies are just an integral part of the culture. Now, I know most Swedes live in a walking culture, that American’s don’t have, that’s for another blog. Back to my unreasonable, undying love, it was rekindled this past week.

In the search for better mileage last year, we downsized our minivan to a Mazda 5 before baby number three showed up. To my great sadness, I haven’t been able to use the Cadillac as much as I like, because it’s only drawback is that it’s HUGE and doesn’t fit in the car when I have all three kids with me. However, things changed this last week, I was giddy, my kids began to walk to school and I follow right behind pushing my stroller. I love it, I forgot how great it rides, it can take uneven pavement, it even has a raincoat, and just like the Swedes, in my hallway, my baby took a cozy nap in the stroller. Cadillac, I love you even though there are newer and fancier strollers out there, even the US has the Bugaboo now, after nine years, there is no other stroller.

Chokeables Everywhere!!!!

There is this cute little guy, that came into our lives about 7 months ago.  He’s cute and sweet, but he won’t stay put.  As of this morning he likes to play sitting up more than laying down.  He rolls, he crawls, he scoots, you name it he moves that way.  Sport thought his police car, that was 20 feet away and behind a chair, was safe…oh no, not for our little caboose.  Needless to say we are in a rush to baby proof the house before he decides to walk, oh I don’t know tomorrow.  Among many things that means LEGOS, are now restricted to the kitchen counter or our rooms.  And it means I have to tackle the kid’s art table, UGHHHH.

The art table, was a wonderful present from Santa, I guess about 5 years ago.  It’s been great.  The kids draw, paint and periodically have lunch on the table.  But the stuff that goes with the art table, yikes!  I have paint, pipe cleaners, beads, you  name it stuffed in closets and cute little bins beside the table.  But as with everything else my kids seem to have, if it’s not out they don’t use it.  So today, in the interest of the little one’s safety, I proclaimed it was time to get rid of the art table or at least move it out of the kitchen.  I lost.
So, this is my happy medium.  I decided to put everything in this little chest from my grandmother.  The chest is going to be right beside the art table and if they have to get anything it is right there.  The paper bin will sit on top, because if the baby gets into that he won’t choke immediately and it’s heavy, so it will make a large sound as it hits the baby to the floor before he reaches the chokeables.  I may have to find a lock…. we'll see.
I have told the older angels, that I want wonderful little art projects from them, since they have all types of creative stuff at their fingertips.  But, if there is one chokeable left out it is getting ditched.  All for the safety of the baby.  Seriously, I’m not sure if this baby is going to survive…