Category Archives: I almost failed Home Ec

Adventures in Gingerbread

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Well, it’s the holiday season, and you know what that means!

Look at those excited faces. 

GINGERBREAD HOUSES!

I have to admit, I was pretty nervous about the whole thing.  It’s not like I pretend to be Amazing Crafty Mom, but remember last year?

Note the sad, sliding wreath, stopped only by the sad, sliding candy door.

Those yellow candies were supposed to be gravestones.

The window.  The WINDOW.

The cheerful, giant gingerbread man who lives in this shambles of a house.
When I assembled our materials, what kept me going was the thought that it couldn’t possibly be worse than last year.  And happily, it wasn’t.  I followed some advice I received after last year’s disaster: a) Buy a kit that has pre-made icing, and b) buy a kit that has the house already assembled.  Let me tell you, for all who may wish to make a gingerbread house but are as poorly equipped to do so as I am, those two pieces of advice are worth their weight in gold.
I guess advice doesn’t actually weigh anything.  Let me rephrase: those two pieces of advice ARE gold.

The kids happily decorated and ate the stale, crunchy candy.  Things stuck to the house and it looks kind of cute, I think.

It looked cute enough that I set it on the coffee table as a decoration.  I was supremely proud – the house was not hideous, and I had just created Christmas cheer!  Just like that!  The coffee table looked festive and decorated.  But I forgot about the wild card that is my dog.

Barkley’s a really good dog, despite his penchant for consuming his own frozen fecal material and vomit.  He likes to be obedient, and he doesn’t like to be scolded.  I placed the gingerbread house on the low coffee table, looked at him sternly, and said the magic words, the words that work, as will be seen, most, but not all of the time “Leave it”.

Gingerbread to a dog seems to be like crack cocaine to a junkie.  He licked it.  Now, normally that wouldn’t bother me because it is not like we are actually going to eat the gingerbread house given that it could be years old and who would know?  It’s rock hard and pretty disgusting.  I bake gingerbread and it’s delicious, but that stuff that comes in a box from who-knows-where?  No one is eating that.  Unfortunately, once Barkley got a lick of that gingerbread house he needed more.  Just one more hit, man.  Just one.  Then he transformed into a dog who was actually on crack cocaine.  I think it was the coloured sugar pathway I had creatively added to the cardboard.  He started bounding around the living room, wagging his tail frantically and nudging each person with his nose before moving on and nudging everyone all over again. 

I thought maybe I should take him for a walk, which ended up to be the most insane walk of all, with him pulling on his leash and practically pulling me off my feet.  He sniffed the ground in a crazy, uneven fashion which made me worry that I had actually ruined my dog.  As soon as we got home he bowled me over running inside straight to the coffee table where he stood there looking completely bereft as my husband had moved the gingerbread house to the higher end table.  Then he sadly curled up on his bed and passed out.

I’m happy to report he is back to normal now.

Sure, the house looks good.  But look at our attempt at a gingerbread tree. 

Baby It’s Cold Outside, aka The Holiday Date-Rape Song

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I was sick this week with a weird little illness that manifested itself as a sore throat, tight chest, and overwhelming exhaustion.  Today is the first day I haven’t felt as though if I closed my eyes for more than a blink, I would succumb to narcoleptic urges.  Unfortunately I woke up with no voice – NO VOICE; how to communicate with children? – but it has started to come back now so I can issue commands without the children ignoring me unconsciously (as opposed to the conscious ignoring) or having them answer “What?  WHAT?  I can’t hear you!”
The boys have been in swimming lessons with their school all week, and this always seems perverse to me: swimming in the frigid city-run pools, then walking back to the school in sub-zero temperatures.  The boys seem to be completely depleted by these lessons, or else they have what I have, because this whole week they have become progressively more and more tired.  At lunchtime yesterday, Mark started asking if he had to go back to school in the afternoon; he was soooo tired.  Normally I would have just kept him home, as it was very cold out and the thought of getting everyone dressed and out the door, again, was just too tiring.  After all, how much actual schooling gets done on a Friday afternoon (which is only 80 minutes long) one week before winter break?  This is where homeschoolers have the win.  THE WIN.  However, both his snowpants and backpack were still at school, the boys had haircuts after school, then we had to pick the dog up from the groomers…and I convinced Mark to “just keep going” and promised that after all of that we would just curl up on the couch and watch The Charlie Brown Christmas.  As it turns out, Mark’s class just went to his Grade Five “Buddy” class – the school pairs up older kids with younger ones in a buddy system – and watched Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.  Clearly a LOT of schooling goes on a Friday afternoon one week before winter break.  While Mark was learning about reindeer and their exclusionary tactics, I set Jake up with Starfall on my laptop and proceeded to make all the beds with flannel sheets fresh from the dryer.  Is that a good idea when one is exhausted?  No, it is not.  It took every ounce of willpower not to crawl between those sheets, those cozy, fuzzy, warm-from-the-dryer sheets.
I’m happy to have some energy back today. 
I have great holiday mojo, holiday chores do not get me down, with one exception: gift wrapping.  I decided that I must wrap gifts today, and THREE HOURS later, I finished.  I considered throwing in the proverbial towel and forcing my husband to do it, but he was busy repainting our bedroom, so I kind of felt like I should be doing something productive.  So I wrapped gifts for three hours.  The issue isn’t the number of gifts I have to wrap, it is that I am completely incompetent with gift wrap.  It looks like a three-year-old wrapped my gifts and I don’t even have a three-year-old in the house.  In fact, the two gifts that Jake helped me wrap look significantly better than anything I did on my own.  I don’t know what my problem is.  I always have way too much paper, or not enough, and my hair evidently falls out from the strain because strands of it are always stuck in the tape, or the tape gets stuck on my nails and takes off my nail polish, and then the ribbon.  My word, the ribbon.  How does one make a bow that doesn’t look like something my dog chewed on or, alternately, some kind of poky, pointy, Sputnik-like object that one stuck on an oblong, weirdly shaped, strange cornered parcel?  WHAT IS THE SECRET TO TYING A PRETTY BOW???  By the time I was nearing the end of the gifts, I was pretty much like “FUCK THIS.  NO MORE BOWS.  I HATE ALL OF YOU.  NO BOWS FOR ANYONE.”
So maybe not the Christmas spirit.  I really need my voice to come back full force so I can start with my White Christmas rendition, or Mele Kalikimaka, or even Baby It’s Cold Outside (or as I like to call it, the Holiday Date-Rape Song!).  After all, the best way to spread Christmas cheer is by singing loud for all to hear!  And maybe having a glass of wine.  That should bolster my spirits.

I guess they were deprived, after all.

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One of the things I love about having my own little family is the ability to make traditions.  It’s like when one becomes a parent, one has the magical power to carry on family traditions, or not, so when we had to cancel our Thanksgiving trip this weekend due to illness – which was fortunately short-lived – I thought, opportunity knocks.
In direct contrast to seemingly everyone else on this continent, a turkey dinner, to me, is not an amazing and exciting feast, one to be anticipated and to impel the wearing of elastic waisted pants.  A turkey dinner, to me, is a dinner in which I eat dinner rolls and vegetables.  Even in the days in which I did eat meat, I never enjoyed turkey, and the sight of a turkey, cooked or raw, could turn my stomach.  It’s just so…graphic.  I do not particularly enjoy mashed potatoes or cranberry sauce, stuffing is repellent to me, and I do not like pie, any kind of pie, but especially pumpkin.  So while I understand that the vast majority of the population looks forward to a turkey dinner with all the trimmings, I most certainly do not.
So when we opted to stay home for Thanksgiving, I put together a Sunday dinner that consisted of the following: freshly baked European peasant bread, salad with goat cheese, dried cranberries, pine nuts, and balsamic oil and vinegar, and butternut squash bisque.  I also prepared pork chops for the guys.  The dinner was delicious, I thought, and happily festive, what with the squash and the cranberries.  My husband even went so far as to say that the soup was the greatest soup he had ever had, although I took that with a small grain of salt as he had just finished golfing, strangely, 24 holes, and was ravenously hungry.
Despite that, my husband really missed his turkey dinner.  We discussed traditions, and he is of the camp that the boys should be able to have a turkey dinner for certain holidays, Thanksgiving being one of them, even if we do not go to someone else’s house for it, as we would have this weekend.  So, yesterday we went out for dinner, and he ordered the Thanksgiving special.
It’s hard sometimes to merge family traditions when you get married, but it’s especially hard to just ignore family traditions.  As far as I’m concerned, I could never be involved in another turkey dinner for the rest of my natural life, and I would be happy.  My husband and the boys feel differently.
Our conclusion?  My husband can make his own turkey dinner.  I’ll make the soup. 

Maybe for our next Thanksgiving dinner, we can have duck!  Just kidding.  Ew.

I have a bad case of the Fridays!

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Which is to say I’m kind of tired. It has been a long and disjointed week, ending with the kids out of school today due to parent/teacher interviews. My husband was out of town for a couple of days, which always makes for a long, disjointed week. When he told me he was going out of town, my mental reactions were threefold: a) Nooooo…it’s Jake’s birthday, you can’t be away for Jake’s birthday, b) Nooooo…I’m going to miss yoga, and c) Ooh, I can watch When Harry Met Sally and repeat all the dialogue without someone complaining about this being “annoying”. Solo bedtime is not at all difficult these days, with the grave exception of lecturing Mark on rinsing out the giant handful of shampoo he uses for his half-inch long hair, but I still found myself tired out by the end of it.

Also tiring was my attempt at domestic goddess-hood. I just completed baking and frosting two dozen cupcakes for tomorrow’s party. Besides those, in the past five days I have made the following: banana muffins, zucchini loaf, sugar cookies, bread dough, and a birthday cake. My whole life is revolving around baked goods, plus my regular meal preparation. In addition, I have made three separate trips for groceries, including an anxiety attack-inducing trip to Costco. It’s all about food around here, apparently.

Then, there was today’s extremely misguided shopping trip at Wal-Mart. As I mentioned, tomorrow is Jake’s birthday party, and since September is a time of new friendships and classmates, I decided to invite his entire kindergarten class – which sounds more magnanimous than it is, given his small class size. However, not everyone RSVP’d, which is irritating. Still, I felt like that should not bother me – although I did list my email address in the scenario that someone, god forbid, didn’t want to actually speak to me on the phone. I just assumed the non-RSVPers were not attending, but according to Jake, some of them ARE. People! Passing messages through kindergarteners is not a reliable or acceptable method of RSVP. PICK UP THE PHONE. I don’t know their parents or phone numbers, so I can’t check. However, I realized that if those children are attending, then I needed to get a few more environmentally friendly paper bags to make goody bags out of. Hence the last-minute trip to Wal-Mart. At two o’clock in the afternoon on a day where there is no school.

The parking lot was insane. The crowds were insane. When I discovered that they were all out of little paper bags, I felt that the best possible scenario was for me to just lie down on the floor in the aisle and stare at the ceiling for a while. If it were not for the fact that the floor is likely swarming with germs and that I would probably cause some sort of violent shopping-cart rage and get seriously injured, I would have done just that. Instead, I herded my extremely irritable self and my extremely irritable children through the soul-destroying aisles and past the crabby and smelly shoppers to the checkout. In the lineup, I tried hard to breathe deeply and not be bothered by the guy behind me who kept, despite the fact that there was no place to move, inching his cart forward until it was actually touching me. Don’t be upset, I said to myself zen-ly, you’ll be out of here soon, and does it really matter if some mullet-wearing guy who reeks of garlic and cigarettes is invading your personal space? In the grand scheme of things, does it matter? Then I came home and stared blankly at the wall for a while.

Fortunately my neighbour is celebrating her birthday tonight and has invited me over for a margarita (or several). I could really use one, it would seem.

Octopuses or Octopii?

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I’ve spent whole chunks of the day staring out the window at the sheets of rain pounding my already hail-flattened garden, popping Vitamin D capsules in an attempt to stave off a grey sky and petal-less flower induced depression, avoiding the front window where I have a clear view of my shirtless neighbour’s yard, where he had, inexplicably, piled a very large pile of topsoil on his lawn several weeks ago, this pile of topsoil having turned into an unsightly mud mountain.

Mark, very cheerily, announced this morning that the great thing about rainy days is that we don’t have to put on sunscreen!

That’s true, and that’s one way to look at things. Putting sunscreen on the kids is not what it once was: essentially chasing them through the house, with a handful of SPF 45, shrieking at them to hold still and wrestling them to the ground while applying it to a child who apparently has mistaken sunscreen for boiling oil and is screaming appropriately. Now, the boys do allow me to apply sunscreen in a painless, tear-free way, but not without a constant stream of complaints and sighing. I do like Mark’s look-on-the-bright-side approach.

Because I am evidently a masochist, I like to visit a website called Rhythm of the Home. It’s such a lovely website, with inspiring crafty ideas, which I have no hope of recreating. Really, the rhythm of my home is much less melodic. The rhythm of my house is more based on Dinosaurs: Meat Eaters Chomping the Plant Eaters, or Bakugan Battle Brawlers versus Ben 10 Aliens, or Mom I Accidentally Destroyed Something. However, I occasionally strive to be a crafty, artistic mother, and I know what you’re going to say. Enough already, Nicole. Enough. You will never be that crafty, artistic mother. And you would be right.

I saw this craft, making a yarn octopus, and I thought it looked fairly simple, fairly straightforward. So this morning, in anticipation of the need for rainy day activities, I bought some yarn and some felt. My parents popped by for a visit this afternoon and my mother spied the giant ball of yarn and looked at me quizzically. “Are you going to try to KNIT something?” she asked calmly and clearly, the way you might speak to someone in a hostage situation.

Here is the result of my best effort in octopus making.

Mark named his Moppy. Jake named his Bum.


I asked Jake if I should make a face on his octopus. He said, “I don’t really think you should. I like him with no face.” I feel judged.


Moppy and Bum, getting ready for their Heart and Soul duet.

Everybody’s talking at me

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“I just wish I could one day watch the news in peace” my husband complained the other night, over the din of the kids playing and their varying sound effects. I emotionally answered that one day the kids would be gone and moved away and then it would be silent, and sad, and then he could watch the news without interruption. He replied with a curse which I will not repeat, and followed up with a comment to the effect that he wasn’t wishing the kids to move out, he was just wishing them to be slightly less loud for 30 minutes.

This is the fourth consecutive day of cold and rain, and the boys have been in astonishingly good spirits. They have played together, happily and without fighting, not even an argument – cue the chorus of singing angels – all afternoon. They have also been constantly talking all afternoon. I am not exaggerating when I say that there was not one minute of silence all afternoon. Not one minute. It was almost like the children are equipped with a chatter button, and it has been jammed into the “on” position, and the volume has been cranked to “maximum”. Even during activities that might be considered quiet activities, such as colouring and using the bathroom, there has been a constant stream of chatter, along with varying sound effects. Twice today I darted to the bathroom thinking Jake was calling for help, when he was actually just singing.

I’m not complaining though. The chatter has been pleasant enough, and has been nice background noise for my obsessive baking. I guess it’s the weather, but this week, in addition to my regular meal preparation, I have made the following: boule, granola, cinnamon loaf, banana bread, cookies, and three litres of roasted tomato sauce. It has been epic. I started off thinking that I will be out of the house most of the weekend, so perhaps I should prepare a few simple snacks for my husband to feed the kids. It then started to spiral out of control. Fortunately the rain is starting to taper off, as I’m running out of recipes. And room in the freezer.

It’s a good thing

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It’s Saturday morning, and the house is so peaceful – it’s just me and the dog; the kids are at swimming lessons, the house is filled with the scents of bread and chocolate chip cookies. Someone recently referred to me as a “Martha Stewart” and I didn’t respond right away because I needed to figure out if that person was being sarcastic or not. Apparently she was not being sarcastic but was referring to my love of baking things; clearly she was not referring to my complete inability to perform any task that requires artistic or decorative skills. Because I’m pretty sure if Martha tried to decorate cupcakes, they would look more like edible art and less like someone visually impaired and with only one hand attacked them with frosting and sprinkles.

Also I think Martha would have a much better craft supply storage solution than put everything on top of the fridge and hope that an avalanche does not occur while cooking.


Notice the various crafts and colouring pages.


The fridge is generally covered with three or four layers of paper at any given time.


As should be obvious by this point, I have one child who is really into crafts and colouring, and one who is sort of into crafts and colouring, with the result that the house is overflowing with art. So here’s my question: what does one do with it all? I have two giant containers in the basement where I keep a LOT of it, but eventually I smuggle piles out to the recycle bin. So what do you do with all of your children’s art, and how do you decide what to keep? While I’m at it, how do you deal with clutter?

I’m a baskets sort of person. Note the Bakugan stuck on the metal part of the fireplace. Classy touch.

But this is what it looks like under one of my living room end tables. NOT SO GOOD. I think the Hungry Hungry Hippos got so hungry they detached themselves from the game and died a slow death. I actually think that having an Attractively Decorated Home is incompatible with children. Or maybe it’s just me and my filled-to-overflowing-with-children’s-art-and-toys home.

Awww! So cute. This has nothing to do with clutter, but I think he’s looking for a walk. Enjoy the weekend!