Every day is so full of things to do, I am always working on something. There has been no time for involved cooking projects, French translations, knitting or writing. I have also been too busy to enforce the chore lists for everyone, and most of the time end up doing it myself because it's easier. It's funny how the busier I am, the lazier my children are. This has been very bad for Mirin, especially, with his "lazy constitution", he is getting up later and later and spending so much time loafing around on the sofa or in bed reading stupid comic books (there are some great comic books out there - he is reading stupid ones - if you don't believe me, just flip through a My Little Pony comic book and you'll see what I mean). The chore chart has been untouched for a week. I am just realizing this and feeling the need to do something about it (= Mama Monday Chore Crackdown).
There is just so much going on these days. So many big projects, so much catching-up to do....and we were just hit by THREE birthdays within a week - Clothilde's fourth birthday (I can't believe my baby is already FOUR!!), Mirin's twelfth birthday (last year before the teens!), and my little brother's 26th birthday.
I have been fated from the age of seven in my family to carry out birthday celebrations for everyone. For the children, this is a special dinner of their choice (Clo wanted hotdogs, Mirin picked baked fish) and a homemade cake of their choosing. My children literally spend all year deciding what kind of birthday cake they want.
Clothilde wanted carrot cake, so I made the soaked-flour carrot cake from Nourishing Traditions. Mirin wanted a chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream cake - one of the more involved cakes I've ever made, as I also had to make ice cream. It was really, really good though - being made only of chocolate chip cookie dough and homemade vanilla ice cream.
For my little brother's birthday, the children were going to make a cake, but were too lazy (see above) to even pick one out. So I ended up making cream puffs - I really am fated to do it - instead. Unfortunately Ethan was reading something aloud to me (very interesting that I wanted to hear) while I was measuring the recipe, and I measured twice as much butter as necessary for the 3x recipe. I only realized the error when I added the flour, and it didn't thicken properly - and horrifically we were out of flour, so no correction could be made. My mom scrambled around and found some Einkorn flour I added, bringing the recipe up to 6x the original 8 puffs. It turned out OK, except that my oven could only hold four baking pans at once - the cream puffs were abnormally large in compensation, but they (mostly) turned out ok!
Looking forward to a more leisurely week this week - but we'll see. What is it about this time of year that always seems like busy madness?
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