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Twenty Years Out

I know you're probably thinking this must be a very recent photo but in fact, this was taken twenty years ago when I was about to graduate from high school.  Okay, no need to point out that I've aged a bit since this time.

This past weekend I attended my twenty year high school reunion. Not only did I attend my reunion, but I tried to help orchestrate conversation about it and get people there.  I could never quite completely throw myself into planning stuff though because it didn't feel quite right to me.  Let me explain.

I attended this school my junior and senior years of high school. I was raised in a religious community where it was common for high school students to attend boarding schools, of which this was one. My family had just moved to Virginia and I literally did not know a soul, aside from my brother.  (But bear in mind that at that time in my life, my brother and I could barely go twenty minutes without threat of ripping each other's throats out.)  So I had no friends and was away from all of the family that I actually got along with.   

I think the high school years are likely a challenging time for anyone but I found those two years to be particularly challenging.  Maybe time has exaggerated things in my memory but I think that I always felt like a bit of an outsider.  Most of my classes were with the same group of kids and I had few friends in that group.  In hindsight I realize it was probably just circumstances - I came late to the party and friendships had long since been established. Many of these people had known each other since childhood.  And I wasn't exactly putting myself out there.  I was scared. I avoided most extracurricular activities.  There has been no other time in my life when I struggled to connect with people, in the same way that I struggled those two years.  Perhaps if my parents had been around they could have nudged me in the direction I needed to go, but they weren't.  I got through those years but I did not love everything about it.  Having said that, I think it was a great experience for me and I learned a lot about life during that time.  Plus I did have some great friends and we had many, many good times.  But yeah, those years weren't as much fun as say, pretty much any other years in my youth. 

So skip ahead twenty years to where I find myself in the thick of things trying to help get the ball rolling on this reunion event.  I'm not exactly why I decided to attend the reunion, let alone help plan it.  I've not been very good about staying in touch with my friends from that time. I didn't know if any of them would be attending - although I do think I got involved in hopes that they *would* attend.  But whatever the reason, I decided to try to help get this thing organized.

Meanwhile, I discovered that I had a little spot of cancer on my head which needed to be removed.  I've had many things removed by a dermatologist and this is like the best possible cancer you could possibly get (it's pretty much harmless) so I was not expecting it to be a big deal.  Uh, wrong.  This is how I looked like two days after the procedure (note that I'm putting a link and not embedding an image because for other squeamish people, such as myself, this is not a pleasant photo).  My eye was swollen and then my cheek puffed up right into my peripheral vision.  Eventually both my eyes turned a lovely shade of reddish purple. It was quite impressive.

About a week after that, my kids started getting sick one at a time - very sick.  We're talking high fevers, projectile vomit and all sort of unpleasantness that lasted for numerous days.  Those last two weeks before the reunion, I literally had a sick child at home every single day.  My free time all go sucked up by that.  So I didn't get around to some of the stuff I had planned to do like put together a slideshow of photos from back then and perhaps even scan pictures from our old yearbook.  In fact, when I went to look for the yearbook from our senior year, it was nowhere to be found.  I have yearbooks from every other year but that one has gone missing.

On the day of that we were supposed to drive to my old school, there were tornado warnings and ridiculous rain storms.  Dwight and I got drenched stopping by Costco to fill up the gas tank and pick up cookies for the reunion. 

But we made it to our hotel safely.  We watched a bad movie on TV and then went to bed.  I was looking forward to a night of interrupted sleep after dealing with sick kids for the past two weeks.  Well, guess who woke up in the middle of the night, having apparently contracted the same bugs my kids had had?!  Seriously?!  But by mid-morning I was feeling better and around noon I finally felt well enough to venture out and visit for a bit.  Armed with hand sanitizer, I definitely enjoyed reconnecting with former classmates - albeit briefly.

Two of the people that helped me survive those years

By about 8 pm, I was spent.  That's pretty crazy because ordinarily I'm a night owl but not this night.  So we said our farewells and headed back to our hotel, where I promptly dropped my Fitbit into the toilet.  Luckily it was a clean toilet but still, that was NOT cool.

So, I'm left wondering what just happened:  I got an incision on my face, all four of my kids got very sick, I lost my senior yearbook, I got rained on, I got sick and I dropped my Fitbit in the toilet. Am I forgetting anything? Was I maybe not meant to attend that reunion and more importantly do I dare attend the next one?

The Quest for the Perfect Salad

A couple of months ago my friend took me out for lunch to a cool little restaurant in Leesburg, The Eiffel Tower Cafe.  (We both have a little love affair with all things French.)  The food in general was very good but what particularly made us swoon was the "Wild Mushroom Salad with Goat Cheese".  I start salivating every time I think about it. Yum.

The first time we were there, the food was delivered and looked delicious but I told her I would resist the temptation to Instagram my food.  The second time I had no such scruples and I took this cell phone shot of that delightful salad. (It would be a mistake to find this salad lacking based on the poor quality of photos that my cell phone takes.)

The other day, after having tended to a sick child all day, I suddenly got a hankering for this salad.  (Which is not really shocking because ever since I first had it, I've pretty much craved this salad nonstop.)  As I was saying, I was hungry for this salad.  My husband was headed to grab something from the grocery store so I asked him to pick up greens, mushrooms and goat cheese.  While he was doing that, I made a balsamic vinegar reduction, which turned out to be pretty easy.

He came home with spinach as the greens. I wouldn't recommend spinach for future endeavors but it still wasn't bad.

 

Next I went to the grocery store.  I must have caught them right before restocking because they were a little low on things and didn't have endive so I tried it with romaine and a mushroom medley.  I liked the mushroom medley.  I liked the romaine better than the spinach but it still couldn't compare with the original.

So the quest for the perfect salad continues (because I'm telling you, this salad *is* perfect).

By the way, since I was already sauteing mushrooms, I also sauteed some tofu and put a tofu and mushroom mixture on top of some Shirataki Noodles.  That was yummy too.

We Got Cannibals Up in Here

This morning Kardynn and I were discussing the importance of being honest.  I was trying to drill into my little five year-old that every time she tells a lie, we trust her less and less.  She piped up, "Yes, it's part of being a cannibal."  I was startled and trying to figure out the connection until she repeated herself, "It's part of being ah-coun-able (accountable)."

I feel safer already. 

(For the record, it does seems to me that cannibal children have a mighty big incentive to be honest to their cannibal parents.)

This Week's Menu

The other day I mentioned that I was loosely following a meal plan at EatingWell.  Well I thought I would share the recipes that were/are on the menu for this week.  (All these images are from EatingWell's site.)

The other day we tried this recipe for Fettucine & Mushrooms.  I thought it was quite tasty although I would have preferred it with more mushrooms.  They were a little sparse for my liking.  If it I make it again, I will at least double the mushrooms.

Yesterday I made another batch of this Vegetarian Hot Pot.  This is my third time making it so clearly I like it.  Dwight and Oskar both enjoyed it along with me although the girls still aren't sold on it.

Other meals on the menu are Tofu And Veggies with Maple Barbecue Sauce.

Sausage, Mushroom & Spinach Lasagna

The Big Salad and Pecan Mushroom Burgers.

A Day in the Life of My Internet Browser

Recently I read two great articles at Huffington Post.  I've had them sitting up in tabs on my computer for a couple of days.  Do you ever do that?  You go to some page on the Internet and like what you find, for whatever reason, and then you hate to close that tab?  I think that's maybe what Bookmarks are for, but I never really use Bookmarks...instead I just leave all these open, tabs cluttering up my browser's title bar.  Or I leave open windows for stuff I need to do...my Internet To-do list.  Perhaps I'm the only one who does this. I can tell you it makes my husband crazy.  At any rate, like I said, I've had these two posts sitting there.  But I'd like to tidy up my browser tabs a bit so I need to do something with them.  I hate to just close them without somehow acknowledging how much I appreciated them, so I decided to post links to them on my blog.  That will provide the appropriate closure for...well...closure.

So here you go:  10 Things I Learned When I Stopped Yelling at My Kids and How to Do Less and Live More.  You're welcome.

In case you're curious about other tabs I have open, there's one for a summer camp that I plan to enroll my kids in. 

There's another one with a picture that I took yesterday of the incision on my head after having a teeny, tiny spot of cancer removed (check it out, if you don't mind that kind of thing).

I have two tabs related to a last minute ski vacation we were thinking about taking - Southwest and Vail. 

There's a tab for this great little blog I discovered the other day, called Brittany, Herself.  Most recently I read this post. 

There's another tab with a half-watched tutorial at Kelby Training.  I have an Amazon window open because I was looking at exercise DVDs - which ties together with the tabs for MyFitnessPal, Endomondo, Fitbit and EatingWell.

What else?  Oh yes, just yesterday the kids and I made these cookies, only we didn't have sour cream so used plain yoghurt instead.  No one complained.  I am curious to know how they would have tasted with sour cream, however.  Delightful, I have no doubt.

I found out that even though you can't find the last season of Monarch of the Glen on Netflix, apparently you can find it on Youtube. 

And of course I always have Facebook, Google Calendar and Gmail up.

So there you have it - a day in the life of my Internet browser title bar.

Third Grade Woes

Yesterday Oskar was playing with a fellow third-grader.  Knowing they had recently studied Roman history, I pointed out to them that it was the anniversary of the day Julius Caesar was assassinated.  Oskar's friend said, "Wait, that's a guy?  Up until now I thought it was a girl."  I chuckled but realized he had a lot of reasons to think that.  We always see Caesar depicted wearing a robe and with a laurel around his head.  And the average little boy probably isn't encountering the name "Julius" too often in his everyday life.

While I'm on the topic of little boy, perhaps fellow moms-of-boys can relate to this conversation I was having with my son.  I was trying to convince him that as soon as you feel the urge to pee, you should go do it.  (Um, yes, this kid is nearly ten and we're still having this conversation.)  But this is when I discovered that there was more to the tale.  He told me that XYZ Friend had told him not to go to the bathroom so much.  Wait...what?  I said, "Why on earth would he tell you that?!"  So he explained that he had confided to his friend that he doesn't think he's very cool at school. This friend is older so of course Oskar puts incredible weight in everything he says.  This is the advice his friend had for him, "Don't go to the bathroom so much."  I asked Oskar if he's been going to the bathroom a lot at school (because he sure doesn't at home).  It didn't sound like that was a particularly frequent occurrence for him.  But I guess his friend just thought that was the solution to life's problems. I'm still baffled by it.     

I tried to convince Oskar that that was terrible advice and that it's definitely NOT cool to be doing the potty dance at school...or worse. 

Meanwhile, I feel sad for him that he feels out of place with his peers.  I feel his pain...or at least I did back in third grade.  I remember struggling to fit in too.  I had always been so confident that if *I* had kids, I could spare them all the misery and suffering that I had gone through. But now that I do have kids, I've learned that it's not quite that simple.  Oskar's a really smart kid who seems to be interested in things many of his peers could care less about.  It seems to me that it's awfully hard to be smart and cool.  There are certainly plenty of kids who pull it off but I've known more who have struggled in their youth. Fortunately, by the time you become an adult, being smart is generally considered super cool...at least by all the other smart people.  *hehe*