Chicken and Biscuits, late night oven fires and firetrucks

Today was one of those very random days in which we ate lunch around three o'clock and had dinner around nine. I made this funky chicken and biscuits, potpie variation which went completely awry. First off, I mixed up the entire casserole and thought I'd save some serious time (since it was, after all, eight o'clock at night) by topping it with some refrigerator biscuits I had left over in the fridge, rather than whipping up the biscuit mixture described in the recipe.

However, upon opening the biscuit container thing-a-ma-bob, I realize the expiration date on the can said February 2011! What in the crazy world?? I could have sworn I just bought those biscuits just a couple months ago. Apparently "a couple months ago" was really about nine months ago. Oiy. And let me tell ya, they weren't lying when they stamped those biscuits as expiring in February. You could a put a fork in those biscuits cause they were done. Needless to say, the biscuits made it into the trash and I had to resort to plan c.

"Anyone have a plan c."

Looking around....

Nope. Turns out Kaydn Rye had no bright ideas. Little baby Nehemiah just grinned at me and the dogs cocked their heads to the side in consternation.

So we put some refrigerator croissants on top that I had originally reserved for a Chicken and Broccoli Braid about a month ago (this recipe is so good). Obviously I had forgotten the plans I had for the broccoli braid.

So anyway, with that problem solved I put the casserole in the oven and somehow touched the oven coils with the potholders and slightly started the potholders on fire.



Kaydn Rye, reminiscing about the last time I had a fire, about three weeks ago, when I started a rather large grease fire on the stove after forgetting the oil warming up on the stove, says, "I don't like all these fires. I hope the fire trucks don't have to come to our house."

I'm sure the image of Brandon throwing the flaming pot of oil onto the lawn to try and smoosh out the fire is forever embedded in the kid's brain, as well as the time I started my very first oven fire a couple years ago in my grandma's oven while making puff pancakes for my grandparents and my great-aunts (sooo very embarrassing, but the puff pancakes were so good).

Or, there was the time I had to stay at my aunt's house in town during a blizzard cause I couldn't make it back to my house (which is in the middle of nowhere) after a hearing I had to attend for work. I threw my pajamas on the bathroom counter to get ready for bed, went to go do something else and found Kaydn screaming in the bathroom. Apparently pajama pants start on fire when you throw them on top of a burning candle.

But all is well. The potholders are done for, as were the potholders used to throw out the flaming pot, so I must make a trip to the store for some new potholders, and because my microwave is directly above my stove, once I get a new microwave handle, all evidence of any cooking fires will be lost.

Oh, and the potpie with the croissants tasted great, but I plan on giving it some biscuit love next time. Note to self, keep some un-expired biscuits in the fridge....

A Housewife's Current Stifled Creativity

The last few days of my life have seemed like one big check-off on the grand to-do list of life. Really stifles all my creativity. As I get older I find it more and more difficult to keep the very random, imaginative, creative and unconventional person in my head coiffed by my very type A, chief-operating-officer, stressed-out, scheduled, task driven, choleric/melancholy personality combination. Leads me to wonder, really, who in the world am I? I should know by now, I'm 30-years-old for pete's sake. Oiy.

I am the lady you see bouncing down the street going 10 miles over the speed limit with the crazed "I'm late, move out of the way!!" look on my face. It took me quite awhile to realize it wasn't that I was cursed with a Durango that happened to have bad shocks and struts, but rather I just don't slow down for the bumps and therefore am a suspension's worst nightmare.



Sometimes I'm late for the simple reason that my hairspray routine just took too darned long. People with perfectionistic, melancholy personalities should not have curly hair, it's just too unpredictable. Somewhere I read that you will always know a melancholy by the presence of super duper hold hairspray in their bathroom cabinet. That might have been courtesy of my friend Shona, not sure. But you don't want to leave your hair to chance, yikes! Scary.

Today, with a home school activity and ATA karate added into the mix, the entirety of the day felt like I was literally throwing baby Nehemiah in the stroller to head out the door again. There are some days when it seems like once he's strapped in his little seat, Nehemiah will look up at me with eyes as big as dinner plates wondering, "What in the world are we doing now?" And Nehemiah started out the day in the garden plotting out a 3X3 foot square for Kaydn Rye to collect bugs for today's insect experiment, so he had a very busy day.

The day before we had a pool party (very fun time with my peeps!) in a neighboring town, so after the party I made my rounds and stopped at my grandparents' house and then my parents' farm. Ended up helping my mom stain her deck and then realized that after an entire day on the road, I didn't have any diapers left, so Nehemiah rode home in a towel. What can you do, I had to give myself some grace on that one or I would have felt completely ridiculous about wrapping up my kid in a towel and strapping him into his carseat. Oh, and then I got a speeding ticket on the way home, very funny. I guess because the road between here and Blaisdell is so bumpy and bad, they reduced the speed limit to 35 on that road. I was going about 55 and wondering, "What in the world is up with this road?"

Well tonight is one of those nights in which Nehemiah has gone to bed with just a diaper, his onesie and a blanket. My unconventional, random self apparently decided to put him to bed tonight. At least Kaydn Rye was put to bed properly.

What I Did During My Summer Vacation

If you were to regularly follow this blog, you would think I now post yearly, but alas, you would be wrong, my blog merely took a vacation, a year-long vacation.
However, there does come a point when you must complete the "this is what I did on my summer vacation" post.

So to sum up the year in one sentence - I home schooled my son, got pregnant, became seriously ill, took a sabbatical from my legal writing job and added baby Nehemiah to our family.




At this point in my life I wake up wondering what exactly an average day in my life should look like.

For instance, we returned from a weekend trip to the Black Hills in South Dakota around 5:30 this morning. Definitely not normal to finally hop in my bed at six in the morning. I fed the baby, fell asleep till the next time I needed to feed the baby, woke up after Kaydn Rye yelled up the stairs, "Ma, can I watch one cartoon this morning?" and I made my way downstairs at about noon. Halfway down the stairs I hear some moaning coming from the baby's room and realize it has been three hours since I last fed him and that he will inevitably need to be nursed just when I find myself so hungry I could chop off my toe and eat it. So, I gather my accoutrements - a couple cinnamon streusel muffins, a cup of Juicy Juice and my current bible study book, "Believing Gd" into the sun room - and the baby and I both have breakfast.

By one o'clock in the afternoon I realize Kaydn Rye has not had anything to eat at this point in the day and I try to come up with a nutritious meal that won't expend more than two ounces of my energy. I come up with leftover spaghetti from last night's restaurant meal, some cucumbers with Dorothy Lynch sauce and a few cherries. After all, a protein, a vegetable and a fruit are absolutely required at every meal in my world.

We sit down together at the table with Nehemiah in tow and have a nice chat. After dinner I ask Kaydn to unload the dishwasher, unpack his suitcase and finally change out of his pajamas. I decide I'm going to lapse into a coma if I don't take a nap so I lay down in the sun room with Kaydn in slaving mode. Just then I remember that I need to check to my email to determine whether or not I have interviews to do for any trial commentaries that will need to be submitted to my editor this week. I ponder the urgency of email-checking for a couple minutes and finally decide I will promptly check my email upon waking but will not get out of the chair to check it immediately.

So back to sleeping...just as I begin to doze off, I look at the window ledge and realize it is heaping with dust. Again, I ponder, "Can I fall asleep with the knowledge that there is dust residing on the window ledge?" I take a deep breath in an attempt to calm my mind about the dust, and I add dusting to my list of immediate tasks upon waking. However, suddenly I see that not only is there dust in the window ledge, but there is also a finger smudge on the wall below the window. Well, that changed everything about the situation. It was out of control at that point.

By the time I did finally fall asleep, the baby was ready to be fed, again. I then needed to proceed with work email and life in general. After proceeding with email, life and such, I then remember I have a MOPS steering team meeting to attend in about a half-hour. My plan of editing a straggling trial commentary from last week became a distant dream at that point.

So tomorrow is another day to try and achieve normalcy. Currently my beautiful summer flowers are dying, my yellowed grass is telling me that the nights are beginning to get very cold and the grapes growing along my trellis are no longer hanging off the vine. Yet on my front porch I was greeted with life morning, reminding me that just when all seems lost and when complete failure seems imminent, Gd's Almighty Power can breathe life into it all....