The Toxic Housewife

We live in suburbia, but our house is near foothills, and it butts up to a business that has a large field.  Hawks, quail and raccoon live in that field, along with an assortment of adorable rodents that our cats periodically kill and proudly bring home. Bee can't get enough of The Field.  He's sooo thrilled he found a house that doesn't have neighbors behind it.  He can watch the sun set on the foothills, listen to the birds, and run around naked in the back yard.  Not that he would.  Recently.

This weekend was S.B.'s sixteenth birthday.  To celebrate, we hosted another Sick and Twisted family affair at our place. Tired of pushing two long tables together and crowding into our living room as we usually do at such functions, I decided to set up several smaller tables for a more intimate ambiance.  Of course, the only small table I have is the small patio-type one shown in the left of the picture.  Which led me to decide we needed an indoor bistro-cafe.  Which led me to deduce that we needed strings of lights.  Which led me to determine we needed an umbrella from which to hang some of said lights.

It has been a busy baking week for The Toxic Housewife.  The good news is that Bee's greatest fantasy has come true: I've figured out how to make bread from scratch.  I'm talking real bread, with actual yeast, where you have to let the dough rise and then punch it down.  Several times. Making bread isn't actually as daunting as I thought it would be.  In fact, it can be quite relaxing. The white bread was good.  The cinnamon-raisin variation to it was even better (how could it not be?).  My initial attempts at making whole-wheat bread, however, resulted in miserable, hard lumps that not even the winter-hungry squirrels would eat happily.

I think my attempts to properly teach Mr. C the English language have backfired. One of my college majors was in Elementary Education, where we learned that one of the most effective ways to teach a child proper English was simply to repeat their misspoken phrase back to them, but correctly.  At least, I think that's what we learned.  The point is that it subtly cues the child that they've made a mistake, and lets them know the proper use of the word or phrase.  So, if a student says "I hears the school bell," you should reiterate, "You hear the school bell, huh?"; and if a child says "I goes to the park yesterday," you respond, "You went to the park?  What did you do there?"; and if he says, "I punches Bobby," you should -- with interest and excitement -- respond, "Oh, did you punch Bobby?"

I rearranged this week's Cookie Co-Op selection so I could have extra offerings of the Spring Juju Lemon Cream Cookies pictured directly above.  I had them out at today's playgroup session, which was a "Summertime Blues" party.

Mr. C is in the midst of potty training, which is a very exciting time . . . mostly for Bee and me.  We spend our days fawning over the training toilet, speaking about it in happy, excited voices, exclaiming how fun it is to go pee-pee in the potty.  Mr. C, for his part, gamely tries; but I suspect he thinks we're nuts.

Can you believe the lengths I go to to provide fresh, quality cookies to the Cookie Co-Op members?