I Am So Funny :)

It was beautiful out this afternoon, so I let Eli stay at school for a bit and play on the playground with his friends. As we were walking back to the car, I cautioned him that he'd been playing a little too rough. His response? "But mom, I was just playing enemies with my friends!" My response? "Hmmm...so do you play friends with your enemies?" His response? To my great delight, it appears that Eli has mastered the eye roll/sigh combination. :)

Crazy Fast Layout

Under twenty minutes, including the printing of the photo:

I've been part of a small supper club full of serious foodies for three years now, and it's so much fun! We rotate the hosting every month; the host is responsible for choosing a theme for the dinner and making the main course, and the other couples provide the first course, side dishes, and dessert. Everyone also brings something to drink to accompany their course. We make a couple of exceptions to the norm each year and do either a family dinner (where we start earlier in the evening and include all of our kids) or go out together to a restaurant.

While we've done a lot of very interesting themes (Georgian food anyone? the country, not the state), we keep coming back to the Sunday Suppers at Lucques cookbook (see salad above). When Seth and I lived in LA we ate at Lucques more often than we could afford to; after we moved to Denver I stalked the publication of Suzanne Goin's cookbook and bought it as soon as it came out. Now we've converted our friends and everyone in our supper club has bought their own copy! It's full of seriously time-consuming dishes with ingredients that are sometimes hard to find, but every minute spent cooking something from this book is worth it. Trust me!

Random List of Things That Make Me Happy

• honey vanilla chamomile tea, with honey
• Sadie saying, "Mommy, you're my special friend."
• anything by Jonathan Kozol
  
• lowercase letters
• asparagus
  
• friendship
• notes from Eli
• patterned paper (especially if it's American Crafts, Collage Press, KI Memories, October Afternoon, or Scenic Route)
• Mark Kurlansky's article in the most recent issue of Bon Appetit, in which he takes down the movement to sneak vegetables into children's diets by camouflaging them
• days that Seth works from home
• "Friday Night Lights"
• Bazzill orange peel textured cardstock
  
• laughter

Sometimes You Need a Little Grownup Time

And I got two nice doses of that this weekend.

Friday night I got together with friends to scrapbook. It was great hanging out with everyone and it felt good to finally get a layout done after having been in a slump.


Saturday night Seth and I went out to dinner with two other couples to experience Denver Restaurant Week (nearly all of the swank restaurants in town participate, offering a three-course menu for $52.80 per couple). After an unpleasant start to our evening (the restaurant we'd made a reservation at screwed up said reservation, but the manager rectified the situation by getting us in to a sister restaurant and giving us some gift certificates and coupons) the night turned around nicely. Our conversation wandered from food to life experiences to politics - a very nice change from "Wonder Pets," toilet-training, and reading Caps For Sale for the umpteenth billion time!

Gumdrops With Legs

Sadie's new favorite hobby? Drawing gumdrops with legs. I'm not sure where the idea came from, but she's taken off running with it. This morning she produced an entire gumdrop family:


That's the baby gumdrop at the top, and the rest of his family below (left to right: kid, dad, mom).

Roses Are Red

I think Eli and I have the same brain. Seriously. He was doing "homework" (in quotes because he's only in kindergarten) the other day and one of his assignments was to decode a message where a picture stood in for each letter. As soon as he decoded each word he read what he'd decoded so far. When he got to "Roses are red," he paused for a second and then said, "Well, yeah, but they could also be pink or yellow or white or some other color, right, Mommy?" Right. It was at that moment I knew that he will have all the same issues with standardized tests I always had. Sure, there's always one "best" answer, but who's to say that any number of other answers aren't equally valid, depending on what angle you're coming from? Sigh...

With that, I shall leave you with an "I love you" card I made. Why post it here? 1) It matches the title of this blog post. 2) I took no photos of Eli doing his homework. 3) I have ceased to be able to make layouts and can now only make cards. Mojo, where are you?


Note: the patterned paper in the background is another October Afternoon paper from the new Detours line. (The rub-ons are all also October Afternoon, although not new.)

Sick

My house is currently full of tissues, juice, children's medicines, and chicken noodle soup. The kids have watched far too much television. Hopefully we'll be through this soon!