March 2008 – Page 6 – Life on a Tightrope

The other day, as I was perusing my cookbooks in search of the week’s menu, I found a yummy-looking recipe for peach cobbler.
“Peach cobbler!” I said, “Yum!” and set about writing down the ingredients on my grocery list.
“Actually, you know what sounds good?” replied my loving husband, “Blackberry cobbler. Yum!”.
So I looked for a recipe for blackberry cobbler.  It has strange (read: icky sounding) ingredients, and you’re supposed to cook it in a slow cooker. Yea, I know, right?
So today, after I put Blythe down for her afternoon nap, Alison and I got to cookin’. We had ripped open approximately 10 packets of sugar-in-the-raw trying to come up with 3/4 cup of ‘granulated sugar’ before I thought I’d better check.  Because I thought, if it was regular sugar it would just say, “sugar” right? But what is granulated sugar? So I googled it, and duh. “Granulated sugar” is just plain table sugar. Why didn’t they just SAY so?  Alison made it through the “bottom layer”, which is mixing the berries with the (plain old regular) sugar and instant tapioca pudding (what?), before I had to send her to the other room. For eating sugar under the guise of “smoothing it out”. And then claiming the sugar around her lips got there by accident while she stirred.
(Does this look oddly like bugs to anyone else?)

So then came the top layer, which involved flour, brown sugar, nutmeg and some other stuff. I had to open a new package to get the amount of sug’ I needed, and has anyone else noticed that packaging is getting harder and harder to open all the time?
(How on earth am I going to reseal THAT?)
The recipe says it takes 15 minutes of prep time, 4 hours of slow-cooker cook time before you can enjoy your blackberry cobbler. But maybe leaving the laptop open on the stove was a mistake.

Length of prep time when reading your favorite daily blogs while you stir: approximately the length of a 10-month-old’s afternoon nap (an hour, give or take).

There’s the crock pot, all full of cobbler. And Alison, in heaven.

So how did it taste, you ask?  Honestly? Kinda icky. Just like I thought.

I was doing so well there for a bit, updating my blog every few days. And then every person in this house got sick (and possibly even the cats, they do seem to have left a few more vomit piles for me to step in lately).

How many illnesses can co-exist in the same household at the same time? I don’t know the answer to that, but it seems to be quite a few. Luckily there has been no FLU, and no VOMIT (other than the cats) and for that I am grateful.

Although, Alison is still keeping me informed about the consistency of her poo (“not wet” for a few days, hooray). But oh, to have a few hours of uninterrupted sleep. It makes me pine for the days when Blythe predictably woke to nurse 2-3 times per night, and then immediately returned to sleep. Rather than wake up coughing, and decide that it’s time to PLAY for 2 HOURS and scream BLOODY MURDER if I leave the room.

But, to her credit, in the past few weeks she has been plagued by one ailment after another. First, she caught a cold from her sister. No surprise there, Alison is in preschool where snot abounds, and she has no concept of “personal space” when it comes to Blythe. That turned into bronchitis, which was accompanied by an ear infection. Shortly thereafter came a horrible cold (which I’m pretty sure we all caught from someone claiming “allergies”) followed by some nasty cough, much worse than the bronchitis, followed by 4 teeth in 3 days, which coincided with a NEW COLD, which apparently involved a really ITCHY nose, which caused her to rub SNOT INTO HER EYES which caused her to have conjunctivitis (fancy word, meaning: pink eye).

The cure for the pink eye was special antibiotic eye drops, and here are the instructions:
Two drops in each eye, four times per day, for seven days. For best results, place one drop in each eye, wait a moment, and repeat.

What, an infant is going to allow you to drip things into her eyes and then let you wait a moment, and repeat? Four times a day, for seven days? I can’t even get her to stay on her back long enough to wipe her butt, much less put a bunch of drops in her eyes. She has become such a pro at squeezing her eyes shut, she’s started doing it for fun throughout the day.