holiday weekend report

Whew! We had a weekend, all right!

On Thursday it was ridiculously hot and I baked a whole bunch of stuff and the kitchen was like a sauna. d'oh.

On Friday we drove out to the cottage and it was ridiculously wet/rainy and cool, which was kinda sad. But we still managed to have a nice Fourth of July cookout with mom, sandykidd, metafrantic, Bastian, and family friend Brian and his girlfriend. Enormous quantities of food were grilled and consumed. The shortcakes that I had baked on Thursday were made into strawberry shortcake and eaten with gusto. Also mit schlag. ;)

I made some of the shortcakes with Bisquick as usual, but I also made some from scratch, so that's recipe #39 this year for me. Also last night I chopped up some of the leftover grilled tofu from Fourth of July, mixed it with some of the leftover grilled corn (mmmmmmmmm, corn), mixed in some farm-share carrots that I had lightly steamed, sauteed it all up in some oil with salt and pepper, and added balsamic vinegar and chopped farm-share parsley. Yum! So I don't know what to call that, "Independence Day Leftovers and CSA Delight" or something silly like that. So that's recipe #40 for the year. w00t.

Anyway, mom and the kids and I slept over at the cottage Friday night, and Saturday morning we slept super late! Ruthie woke up at her usual 6:30 and was bouncing around on the bed and chattering -- but quietly enough not to wake anyone except me -- and I was lying there thinking sad thoughts of how much I didn't want to get up that early, and then she started nursing again and the next thing I knew it was 9:30!!!!!!!!! ZOMG!!! I could not believe it. Mom and Isaac had also slept quite late.

Saturday was similarly gray and rainy and chilly to Friday, and the forecast for Sunday was more of the same, so we decided not to stay at the cottage. We left around 3pm Saturday, and went strawberry-picking at a farm on the way back (which we always want to do but since we're usually driving past either late at night or in gorgeous weather, we never want to stop). That was fun. We all enjoyed picking our own strawberries. Then we came home and crashed. The kids hadn't napped (on account of the late waking) so they were beat.

Sunday we did not much of anything. We hung out for a while, then we went and played for a while at the water-park near mom's house; went home and napped, got up and puttered around. A slow day. Mom and I were very annoyed that Sunday turned out to be such a beautiful day -- if we had known, we might have stayed at the cottage. Mom actually ended up going back out there Sunday night. (She doesn't work Mondays, so she can stay over.)

So that was our weekend basically. It was a blast! Now we have way too much of the following left over from the festivities:
* watermelon (a whole one, uncut as of yet -- must coordinate with Meta and SK on this one)
* cantaloupe (also a whole one uncut)
* blueberries (none of us really like them, so any amount is too much)
* grilled tofu (I shouldn't have made two packages worth, since no one eats it except me; the meat-eaters occasionally take a bite just to be polite)

We also have way too many mosquito bites, but that's a whole other story....

one other thing, not a good one

Also, forgot to mention that I got home from the weekend away to find a water/sewer bill from the city...for $1100. Yikes!!!! Considering that the last one I paid was $94, this was a bit of a shock, to put it mildly.

After lengthy examination of this new bill alongside the last one, the following things become clear:
* They bill every 4 months. The previous bill covered the period ending October of last year. The bill ending February of this year seems to have gone missing, because I don't recall seeing it, and the new one references it.
* The bill ending February apparently was for around $600. I can understand the period June-Oct being less than Oct-Feb, because in the winter we use heat and the heat uses water. But from $94 to $600 is a ridiculously large jump.
* The bill for Feb-June is about $500 (thus the total of $1100, including the Feb bill that I never got). I probably used a similar amount of heat in Feb-June as in Oct-Feb, considering how cold it continued to be throughout March and April.

Still, it definitely seems like something must be wrong here and I'm girding my loins for a call to the city water department. Mind you, Brian will pay half of whatever it ends up being, but half of $1100 is still way more than I can afford to be paying right now. Sigh.

And a Ruthie thing before it slips away!

Sorry to be spamming your flist today! Lots to catch up on.

The trouble with the age Ruthie is at, is that if you don't post about "the new cute thing she's doing" in timely fashion, then by the time you get to it a couple days later she's not doing it any more. But I have to post about this anyway because it was so cute for the few days it lasted.

Ruthie went through a phase last week where almost everything she said was prefaced by "I take my binky out and I say...." (binky = pacifier and I hope I've posted here about how she bizarrely decided to take up pacifier use all of a sudden at the age of two-plus. Mostly I'm going with it and hoping it passes quickly.)

Largely this would occur at those times, which are many these days, when she is expressing herself nonverbally and I'm trying to urge her to use words. For example:

Ruthie: (yanking up my shirt)
Me: Ruthie, what would you like to say?
Ruthie: I take my binky out 'n I say, Nursie peez!

or
Ruthie: (whining and fussing while trying to get the box of Cheerios off the shelf)
Me: Ruthie, could you please use some words?
Ruthie: I take my binky out, I say, peez have some Cheerios peez!

By the second day, she had started slurring/eliding the whole thing down to something like "taymybeeoutsay". LOL.

The funniest part is that in 99% of these instances, she did not actually have her binky in her mouth!

We did also have one evening last week when she threw major fits over being asked to use words -- twice! The first time, she wanted to take her sock off and was having trouble with it, so I said, "If you want help taking your sock off, you just have to say 'please help me with my sock.'" This precipitated a lengthy session of screaming, sobbing, stomping, throwing self on floor, etc....until she finally calmed down and said it. Then we went through the whole thing all over again with the Cheerios. Oy! Terrible Twos anyone? Fortunately, most of the time, she's willing to rephrase herself per my coaching.

Whew. Life with a toddler! Never a dull moment, people.

Tweets for today

Here are the things I said on Twitter today.

• 09:36 Ruthie on seeing a brown UPS truck: "Yook, a chocolate truck!" (yook = look, not Kevin Youkilis) #
• 11:31 @biggerhamster I know! I had one of those things fall apart on me the other day. Icky gritty black stuff all over my ears and neck. Yuck! #
• 11:33 Offering up my old breast pump on the local moms' list. Why is this so hard? Nostalgia for this stupid thing? srsly? wtf. #
• 15:09 So disappointing to peel open a new banana only to find it all brown and rotting inside. :( Now what'll I have for afternoon snack?? #

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