baby, it’s cold outside

Here i am in the midwest and it’s got to be below zero out there. i made some yummy chocolate chip cupcake/muffins yesterday and they were fabulous and moist and now they are gone. i didn’t bother taking a picture because they were white on top. Not very intersting to look at, but suffice it to say, the inside was chock full of..well, chocolate. And moistness. Did i mention they were moist? It does hurt a little to kiss my own ass, but i don’t care. They were THAT good. I got a book in the mail called 500 cupcakes and even though it says on the inside cover that this is the only compendium of cupcakes i will ever need, i still feel that i need more. Some of the recipes are a little strange. My collection of Wonder Woman weirdness(including a box of macaroni and cheese with Wonder Woman on the front and her insignia soon to be tattooed on the back of my neck) does indeed imply that I am all about strange, but something about couscous and onion cupcakes, or eggplant and caviar cupcakes makes me somewhat ill.

Chocolate cupcakery

Yesterday i decided to experiment with a cupcake recipe i pulled from the internet. It seemed like a good one. There was apparently a celebration of chocolate cupcakes on Good Morning America in which they had chocolate cupcake day. I’m all for that. (I’ll post the recipe later.) Anyways, i made them but tweaked the recipe a bit by adding semi-sweet chocolate chips and shortening the baking time. Plus i didn’t have cake flour so i made my own using cornstarch. When it was all said and done, the batter didn’t really seem like batter, it seemed like mousse. I had to scoop the batter into my muffin cups which were lined with the cutest liners ever that had cartoon cupcakes on them. For future reference, chocolate batter with white liners that have images on them is dumb. The cupcakes turned out somewhat dry and crumbly, and you couldn’t see the cutie pie liner images. I made chocolate buttercream, sweetened whipped cream, and i had some leftover strawberry cream cheese frosting from strawberry cupcakes i made a few days ago. i experimented with each and found the strawberry to be the yummiest, but that’s not the point of this story.

Picture me as a mom who drives her kids to scholastic bowl, cello lessons, and dermatologist appointments, does the dishes twice a day, takes out the garbage daily, gets up at 6:30 three days a week to take the kids to school, works two or three days a week waitressing, and of course chases after her toddler all damn day. You get the picture of how tired i am, right? so this morning i fell asleep on the couch. You see where this is going? I woke up to a chocolate face right in my face saying, “mama?…mama?” Somehow she reached up on top of the counter and pulled down the entire cooling rack with buttercream frosted cupcakes on it. She then proceeded to smear them all over the fridge, the floor, the couch, herself, and she was starting to rub it on me when i was awakened by her deceivingly angelic voice. I mean, who cares, i don’t really like buttercream anyway but I just got done cleaning it. I wanted to get pictures and put them here but i was in too much of a hurry to get the poo-like substance out of her nose. God i can’t WAIT for play-doh. (Picture me stabbing the first person who gets her for her.)

Now she’s whining about not being able to get up on the couch on her own, so i must leave.

Adventures in baby-ing

I can’t refer to hanging out with my child as babysitting, it’s ignorant and just plain wrong, so i call it ‘baby-ing.’ Tomorrow it will probably have a different name such as “adventures with the pain in the ass child” or “adventures in talking constantly without saying an intelligible word.” Today, she refused to eat her yogurt. It’s pretty tasty yogurt, the stonyfield farm organic variety with cereal in it. Who knows why, possibly because it’s not in finger food form. Or maybe she has been eating the same damn yogurt for three months since she stopped eating jarred baby food for no apparent reason. She’s such a jerk sometimes. I’m curious as to why I haven’t lost like 80 pounds in the last six months. I don’t think i have sat down for more than five minutes at a time during the 13 hours she’s awake. She won’t sit down to drink her milk or juice so i let her carry it around. If she gets quiet, it means that she’s trying to empty the “spill-proof” cup out onto my microfiber couch. FYI- those cups aren’t spill-proof. (I hate sippy cups. Why can’t they drink bottles till they’re like 5? who cares about crooked teeth? they’re just going to fall out anyway.) I constantly have to find her and take her cup away and put it on the table or counter. She’s such a stinker, i want to just smoosh her face sometimes.

Olivia is the best baby ever

God, that is so not true. For instance, i’m in here not paying much attention to her (great mommy skills, i get it) and suddenly it goes quiet in the LR. I lean backwards to look. The TV is off. I get up to see why and she starts running behind the couch, which we moved forward a couple feet for the purpose of her running behind it. She has the remote. Next starts a tug of war which i nearly lose due to her freakishly powerful upper body strength. She screams something at me which sounds kind of like ‘omma cot iggoo!!’ and cries until she realizes I’m not giving it back, then goes about her business of trying to pull the humidifier off the end table. She figured out months ago how to turn the TV off by the button on the front so now she’s doing that. Whatever. The dr. said to get her off bottles and formula so I’m trying like hell to wean her from the two. I ended up just cutting her off cold turkey. I haven’t gotten much protesting since i replaced her formula with Horizon organic milk (she wouldn’t touch soy milk even though she had soy formula) with a little bit of Hershey’s syrup in it. I bought a bunch of disposable/recyclable cups and we’re good to go. So far.