Requisite October

SOMEONE in this house up and turned 7 last week. And determined that his front upper tooth is decidedly wiggly.

SOMEONE ELSE in this house is having trouble with all of this "growing up" nonsense.

We waffled on the idea of a birthday party - they are so much work, and the kids just EXPECT them now, like it's a first amendment right. We thought about letting Finn just invite 2 or 3 friends to go to the movies instead, but in the end we couldn't pass up a deal - the new Tae kwon do studio the kids take lessons at was having a special on birthdays, so big birthday party it was.

[Wait, what?? Just saw a commercial for a showing of the Sound of Music starring Carrie Underwood. With Heidi braids. What the what? I don't think this will go well. What was wrong with just showing the original, eh? Gah.]

Side note over.

He also wanted me to make him a Tae kwon do themed cake, so this is what I did:

It's supposed to be a Gi with a black belt (though Wikipedia tells me that Gi is actually the name of the karate uniform, and the Tae kwon do uniform is called a dobok? We'll go with Gi since it's shorter and I'm lazy). You'll notice, of course, that the belt is not actually black, but is in fact yellow. I decided to try my hand at making fondant (I made the marshmallow kind, if anyone is interested in that kind of thing) for the collar and belt of the Gi (the rest of it is frosted with buttercream because it tastes much, much yummier than fondant). I made a big batch of fondant (which is white), and then tried to color half of it black. The amount of black food coloring I had to add, and resultant cocoa powder to sop up the extra gel/liquid, to make something actually black rendered the stuff useless. So yellow it was!

I figured it was all the same to a kid who's only a white belt, right? Plus yellow is his favorite color at the moment.

Working with fondant is not for the faint of heart. This is what my kitchen looked like afterward:

Just keeping it real

The party was a big hit. They ran the kids through their paces for about an hour, and then we sped through pizza and cake. Finn got to cut the cake with a "Samurai" sword:

After

(sorry, am too lazy to white balance the photos)

You can see more photos of the rest of the birthday weekend, including Finn's breakfast in bed and his new fish (PETS! We gave him his very own pets for his birthday) if you follow me on Instragram. I don't know how to link to that here. Hmm. My handle is allisonmilutinovich if you want to look for me, and I will see if I can figure out a way to create a link in the sidebar of this blog. I've been taking lots of photos and sticking them on Instragram, and it is not easy to collect them all into a blog post (unless it is? And I don't know the trick? I just end up e-mailing myself each photo if I want to download it and stick it in a blog post. So mostly I don't, which means all these photos will eventually disappear into the Instagram ether, I'm afraid). So if you are interested in seeing them, follow me!

That was all LAST weekend. THIS weekend, we went to a pumpkin patch. We did a search for "Maryland corn maze" and pretty much went to the first place that popped up - Summers Farm. It was a HUGE hit with the kids - we were there for about 3 hours before we even contemplated heading to the pumpkin patch. There was a bouncy thing (not a moon bounce - more like a huge bubble lying on the ground?), slides, goats, ducks, apple guns, homemade doughnuts (though not as good as Smolak's, Massachusetts peeps), a big corn pit, random games, and a ridiculously large corn maze.

Entering the corn maze. Full of energy, bounding ahead.

By the end, M. was carrying Lucy. It took almost an hour. Lucy claims now that she was mostly just disappointed that M. and I didn't abandon her and Finn in the maze to make it out on their own. But I know the truth - girlfriend is NOT fond of walking.

Finally on the tractor toward the pumpkin patch

And after, with their spoils.

And since Halloween is only a few days away, we couldn't let any moss gather, or whatever that expression is. We dug right in with the scrapers and serrated knives as soon as we got home, elbow deep in pumpkin guts. The results are good, as are the roasted pumpkin seeds.  The pumpkin on the far right is Lucy's (she went with an arching cat design), and the one that looks like it's just at the bottom left edge of our front door is Finn's (it's a reaching, claw-like mummy thing). The other two that are lit up are actually fake.

Posing near their creations.

Am officially exhausted. But glad I've finally posted SOMETHING here. :-)

The Most Valuable Thing I Learned in Grad School

In a former life, I was a fruit fly geneticist. I spent many hours sorting flies (separating the boys from the girls), collecting virgins (true story), looking at flies, talking to flies (probably), and above all, killing flies. I keep saying that if karma really is a bitch, I am due for a huge swarm of fruit flies to descend on me and dump me in a vat of caustic liquid any day now.

I learned many things as I toiled away on my dissertation research, but I think that killing fruit flies is the one practical thing I have put to use most. I thought I had shared the simple art of fruit fly trap-making with my entire family by now, but just this past summer I schooled my uncle, who may be a retired Navy Commander of a nuclear submarine AND a lawyer AND current Ph.D. candidate, among other accolades, but he did not know how to properly get rid of the fruit flies buzzing around his kitchen.

And now I will share it with you. All you need are a handful of items you probably have in your house right this very second:

Some paper (an index card, probably the 4X6 size, would also work great), vinegar (I used red wine vinegar, but any type would work - please don't use expensive, high quality vinegar!), liquid soap (hand, dish), a jar or cup of some kind, and tape. I also needed scissors (not pictured).

Take the paper and tape, and make a funnel out of it. The funnel is going to sit in the opening of the jar/cup, so you need to make sure that it is not so long and/or thin that it will touch the bottom of jar. To achieve this, I first cut my paper (regular computer paper) in half:

Now, when you take one of these half sheets of paper and make it into a funnel/cone shape, you can see that it's still a little too long for the jar:

I snipped off an inch or so of the bottom (narrow) part of the funnel, and then re-formed the funnel so that the bottom was much narrower than the top, securing it with tape:

Then I added a little vinegar and 2 pumps of hand soap to the jar before resting the cone in the opening:

The cone should not be touching the vinegar

Simply place the trap somewhere prominent/near where your fruit flies have been appearing. I put mine on the edge of the pass-through between the kitchen and the living room:

Then I left to go help M. finish up bedtime with the kids. When we got back downstairs, less than half an hour later, I already had 5 fruit flies at the bottom of the jar: 

I would expect this in my mom's house, where the empty wine bottles outnumber the people by about 16 to one. But we've been living off of boxed wine (no empties!) and the occasional beer, and I've only seen the occasional fruit fly buzzing around, so I wasn't expecting such a quick response. It's like magic! Or science!

Now you, too, can amass bad karma by going forth and killing fruit flies. But please remember - with great power comes yadda yadda...

iWant

I'm loving all these book recommendations - please, keep them coming! So far I haven't begun a new book - I'm weighing my options. I finally figured out how to borrow e-books from my library, but unfortunately, everything I looked up was already taken out. So I have 4 or 5 books requested for hold right now - I have a feeling that it will take a while to get them.

In other news, I think I may finally give in and buy myself an iPhone. I've been living with my non-data plan, bare bones/basic phone quite happily for a long time, and I've been reluctant to upgrade to a phone that will cost me an extra $30 a month. But M. got an iPhone a few months ago (he already had a Blackberry, which was no bueno - and I can attest to this, as I also have a Blackberry supplied by my job and it, too, is no bueno - so the only extra cost for his iPhone was the phone itself), and what can I say? I'm jealous. I want a cute phone case (I will get a super cute and probably not-at-all-practical one, I have already decided this. Just haven't decided on WHICH super cute case), and I want to amuse myself with the Internet and Pinterest and Facebook and Instagram and all kinds of other crap all. the time. I want it, I do.

I've usurped M.'s phone to a degree - I set up an Instagram account for myself on it. This is because M. does not "believe" in Instagram; he's all "why would you want to take a perfectly good photo and ruin it?" Jerk. Anyway, I knew he wouldn't want to set up his own account, so I went ahead and did it. But every time I want to take a photo, I'm not holding the damn phone. Because it's not mine, of course. And I want to take ALL THE PHOTOS. All the time. Capture the moments, what have you.

AND. And. My 10th anniversary is coming up. The "celebration" gift for 10 years is tin, and there is some tin in the iPhone (albeit apparently illegally mined), so this is totally legit, right? Plus, M. will be GONE on our 10th anniversary, and he won't be just anywhere, he will be in ALASKA. Because he gets to go to all the fun places. I get to drive back and forth to Northern Virginia.

I think I deserve two iPhones.

Trapped in Storyland

I'm on a reading kick lately - gobbling up books left and right. I almost feel as though I spent the last 7 years in book jail, separated by lack of time, effort, and energy from throwing myself into books, and I've finally been liberated.

I don't know why I have this feeling right now. Ever since I became a parent, I typically climb into bed somewhere between 10:00 and 11:00 at night, pick up a book (when I manage it), and struggle behind half-open eyes to read a few pages before conking out for the night. It's not that I haven't read any good books in the last 7 years - I have! - it's just that I'm so. tired. every. night.  And as a result, it's takes me such an agonizingly long time to read each book that I lose the connection to the characters, the setting, the flow, each time I put the book down. I spent an embarrassingly long time reading the Game of Thrones series (I did finally prevail, but refuse to re-read them all when the next book in the series comes out), and I think it broke me. My Kindle lay fallow for months while I settled for Facebook or Pinterest or a half-hearted perusing of Entertainment Weekly before heading off to dreamland.

But NOW! I climb into bed and read far too late into the night for the 6:00 a.m. wake-up of my alarm. I snatch moments here and there - while the kids are playing in the tub, at Lucy's dance class, while M. watches football on TV - much to M.'s annoyance. I served on jury duty last week, and the extended recesses and lunch breaks while the judge and lawers worked out various law-ish things was like manna to my furiously-reading eyes. I 've taken to carrying my Kindle in my purse, just in case opportunity knocks, and sometimes I'm so engrossed that I fleetingly consider grabbing it at red lights (would never. but want).

I'm not reading high-brow literature here, so don't be too impressed. Mostly I find my books through family, or from recommendations by a couple of the bloggers I read who regularly update on what they are reading. I'm trying to be better about adding titles to my Amazon wish list when I come upon particularly glowing reviews, so that when I finish a book, I don't have to face that sad "but what will I read now that I'm done?" feeling for long.

Here's what I've been reading lately, in case anyone else is looking for inspiration, too. I would do a "thumbs up/thumbs down" thing here, but honestly, I liked every book I read. Am I easy to please? Perhaps:

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card (sci-fi) - I borrowed this from my mom, because I wanted to see what all the fuss was about, but felt conflicted about giving the author any of my money what with his whole "gay people shouldn't get married" stance. So this way I could read (her battered, very old copy) for free! It was a GREAT plot, especially considering how long ago it was written, but suffered from a lack of development in the latter half of the book. Card spent so much time delving into Ender's experience in Battle School that everything that came after that seemed so rushed. Also the Peter and Valentine storyline was obfuscating. But I really, really liked the book and will probably (eventually) see the movie.

Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card (sci-fi) - the sequel to Ender's Game. It took me a while to get into this one - the beginning is wordy and has little connection to Ender's Game, so it's not like you're picking up right where that book ended. Plus, Card continued his "let's name the aliens something off-putting" (in Ender's Game, the aliens involved were called "buggers") convention by basing the storyline around an porcine-ish alien species he called "piggies." Hard to feel connected with THAT. But get into the book I eventually did, and it was another good read.

The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey (fiction, of the regular-but-slightly-magical kind) - this book was absolutely beautiful to read. Every description was perfect, but there wasn't TOO much description. I was engrossed. Not one of those "excellent literature is dense" books - very readable. And beautiful. Highly recommend.

Cinder by Marissa Meyer (young adult/fantasy) - I'm not much of a young adult fiction reader. I skipped the Twilight series, and liked-but-not-loved the Hunger Games series (Mockingjay was such a disappointment). I borrowed this from my mom after both my sisters tore through it because I was running out of reading material on vacation. This is the first book in a series of four books (called the Lunar Chronicles), and like my sisters, I tore through it. A quick read, and the storyline - I'm not sure if it's meant to be a bit of a twist? Probably not. I hope not - the storyline is hinted at mightily from the beginning, so there are no real surprises. But I still loved it. A take-off on the Cinderella fairytale, it had all the right elements of YAF - a not-too-pretty heroine with a short catchy name, a suspenseful plot, bad guys (or in this case, gals), and romance. It was engrossing and also made me a bit swoony.

Scarlett by Marissa Meyer (as above) - I bought book 2 of the Lunar Chronicles as soon as I finished Cinder. For a second book (they are never as good, don't you think?), it was actually really well done. Cinder's story continues, but intersects with Scarlett's. Took me forever to realize Scarlett was supposed to be a take off on Little Red Riding Hood - I kept thinking Snow White for some reason (stuck in princess mindset? Ruby red lips?). And there are even wolves that feature prominently, so I don't know what my problem was.  I raced through this book as fast as Cinder, and got all excited when I saw the third book available for purchase on Amazon. Only to discover that it was a pre-order purchase, and the next book (called Cress) isn't due out until February of next year. I was sad. Want more now.

So I went looking for more young adult fiction, because it's cheaper and a quick read and gah, fine, I just apparently really like it.

The Fault In Our Stars by John Green (young adult) - This was really, really good, but also really sad. What possessed me to read a book about teenagers with cancer? Only a small part of me held out hope for a happy ending, so it's not like I was blindsided. And I guess the end is a bit uplifting? Very good, but bring tissues.

Divergent by Veronica Roth (young adult) - I had heard the name of this book before, something along the lines of it being the next Hunger Games, etc. That's not why I read it, though - I bought it because it was super cheap on Amazon, and I needed something to entertain myself during jury duty. It IS another "dystopian future" book, with a female protagonist with a short, catchy-but-tough name (Tris). There were so many parts of the storyline I found implausible. What's with all the empty trains that circle the city, just so that the Dauntless faction can jump on and off of them? Why don't they have cars, or at least bikes? They'd at least be cooler than taking the bus, I suppose. Plus, the whole scale of things was mystifying. How many people live in this fenced-in, destroyed version of Chicago? Why do none of them seem to know each other by sight, but it seems like there can't be more than a couple hundred in each faction? Why are is everyone allowed to choose their own faction, when everyone is supposed to exhibit all the same qualities (though I guess maybe that's sort of the point, now that I've finished the second book? Jury still out on that)? Wouldn't you just give everyone an aptitude test, and then stick them in whatever faction they line up with?

I could go on. But plot implausibilities aside, I was so INTO this book. I don't even know why. Oh wait, yes, probably the romance. Sucker. I am apparently a sucker for it. Reliving the angsty teenagehood I never really had, perhaps? Anyway, read this book. It's really good.

Insurgent by Veronica Roth (young adult) - Book 2. Not as good as Divergent (see above, re: second books never as good), but did  I care? Nope. I didn't care. I was NOT going to be able to get anything done until I had finished it, that much was clear, so after I finished my jury duty and faced the prospect of no more gobs of undisturbed reading time, I made M. watch football one night while I sat next to him and read to the end. The next day, I pre-ordered the third (and final) book, Allegiant, even though I think pre-ordering is lame, especially for a Kindle. But it's out next month, and I WILL be reading it, so whatever. I figured it can only get MORE expensive, not less (bought it for $9.99) for the foreseeable future.

Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell (young adult) - Most of the books in my Amazon wish list are books that Princess Nebraska has recommended. She reads A LOT (probably as much as you, Stacey, or maybe EVEN MORE, which I never thought possible), and is not easily impressed (unlike me), so if she likes it, it must be good. Eleanor and Park is one she recommended highly. I bought it because I had a Divergent-sized hole in my life to fill. But I didn't want another series - I had to get back to normal, controllable, only-a-little-bit-of-reading life. This is just a single book, so I figured I would be safe. How engrossing could it be?

I started reading it on Monday, about 10  minutes before I had to get ready to head down to my meeting in Viriginia. Just a couple of pages, to have something to look at while I ate lunch. I started, and within minutes I couldn't put it down. I brought it up to the bathroom with me, and read it while I brushed my teeth, and in between each makeup step. If I could have brought it in the shower with me, I would have. I don't even know why it's so engrossing, but it is. When I was reading it, I would get this weird buzzy feeling in my hands, which - I don't really know what that was about, but I think it's just a testament that I just felt this book so hard. I had FEELINGS about it. So, yeah, I absolutely loved, loved, loved this book. I'm so sad it's over.

And now I am reading nothing, despite my long Amazon wish list. Because I should probably take a break from reading for a bit. Definitely. The rest of my life is missing me.

But just in case I don't - what are you reading lately?