The story of the microwave and bad afternoon naps

After re-telling this story to my sister the other night, I figured it was worth typing up because I found it so hilarious after-the-fact. One important fact to note: I am super-cranky when I first wake up from any sleep lasting longer than 40 minutes. I need 10 minutes to lay there and come to my senses before dealing with problems. Otherwise, you're getting the beastly side of me. Ben and the kids don't prefer this side.

We received a microwave for our wedding, a pretty nice one in fact. And while Ben thinks it takes up too much counter space, I guess I am a little attached to it and the fact that it still runs fine keeps me holding onto it. The only flaw it has is the broken LED screen which fried sometime during our first move, and has rarely worked since. Hence, you really have to pay attention to the buttons you're pushing.
Recently, Jilly has learned to make her favorite snack, chocolate chip peanut butter burritos. It's a flour tortilla, with peanut butter spread on one side and sprinkled with chocolate chips. Heat it in the microwave for 16 seconds, roll it up, and it's yummy, warm, gooey goodness.
A few days ago I was on the couch dozing just after lunch and the kids exclaim they're all hungry despite having just eaten. So Jilly offered to make herself and Gordon a burrito, which she did in fine fashion, no messes or mishaps. Evelyn wanted to get in on this (while I am mostly asleep), and then this conversation unfolds:
Mom!
Me, groggy: What?
My tortilla is stuck to the paper towel in the microwave! (Does anyone else keep a paper towel on their microwave plate?)
Me, trying to wake up to properly deal with this problem. Well, just peel it off.
No! Then the paper towel will stick to the tortilla and I'll eat it!
Me, thinking why in the world is it stuck, it never gets stuck. Maybe you didn't heat it enough, put it on for ten more seconds. 10 more seconds.
Mom, it's still stuck! Me, getting annoyed at this point. I go to the microwave and find burned, solid chocolate chips sitting atop bubbled, dried out peanut butter, atop a large tortilla-like cracker. 
Uh, how long did you cook this for?
Well, Jilly said sixty seconds so I pushed one, six, zero.
Um, Ev, it's sixteen seconds. Not sixty. You cooked yours for 2 minutes.
Oohh. Sheepish smile.
Make another one, and push one, six, and then 'start.' Okay? I go back to the couch to finish lazily dozing. Probably 5 minutes later: 
Mom, what do I push?
One, six, then start.
I'm scared to Mom!
What? Why?
Because if I push the start button, it says 'minute plus' and that means it will add minutes and I don't know how long to count!
Me, totally confused and grouchy: What in the world Evelyn? You've run the microwave before, what's the deal?
I don't trust the microwave! (She begins entering Evelyn panic mode) 
Okay, if you're worried about time being on the clock, just push clear a few times and it will reset everything.
I don't know what a few is!!
Beastly exhale from me: Push it two times! Then push one, six, and start!
But mom, I can't push start because it will add minutes!!
No it won't! Don't you trust that I know how to run the microwave?
Noo!!!
If you want your burrito, push the right buttons!!
I can't!!!!
Now really frustrated, I go back to the kitchen and try to help her gain trust in my microwave skills. 
Look, I promise, that if you push one, six, and then start, it will not add minutes. Okay?
But how do you know Mom?!!
Ugh. I push them for her. She watches her burrito spin. 
More panicking: Mom! No! No! No! The tortilla is blowing up! It's blowing up!!!
Evelyn! It's okay! It does that! The timer's almost done!
No!! The other one did that and then it turned all burned and hard and yucky!!!
Beeeeeep. Out comes warm, gooey goodness.
Oh. Sheepish smile. Thanks Mom.

Oh, the morals of this story. I pick "I should not nap in the afternoon."

The 200th post

 Is dedicated to Jillian and her love of taking pictures recently. I think she did okay for a camera whose LCD screen is mostly broken and un-viewable outdoors. 

Typical Jilly hairstyle: slicked smoothly down the front, hair in the face, and a headband. She has since had a haircut which looks quite nice when I blow-dry it (which is maybe once a week). 

 Part of my kitchen. 

 The light fixture that was hanging over the dining table. 

 Until a pipe upstairs started leaking and dripping down the afore-mentioned fixture, resulting in the loss of the light all together and a ceiling full of holes. It doesn't look too bad here, but this was only half-way through the "where's this leak coming from?" process. Think swiss cheese, and you get the idea. 

Evelyn probably didn't know she took this. Evelyn asked me to cut her hair that short. So much easier to fix in the mornings. 

 Now we head to the community garden for photos. This was early May. Those sunflowers are now gone and the tomato plants are triple the size seen here. Gordon is covering up his eyes cause he's a stinker. 

 A photo of the sun, because when you're five, you don't know you shouldn't look at the sun and Mom wasn't paying attention. 

 Said inattentive Mom. Sidenote: I love wearing floppy sun hats, but they definitely impede my peripheral vision, thus hampering part of my "mommy radar." Not sure what to do about it, but not too concerned either because my children are beyond the "may die or seriously injure themselves every five minutes" stage. 

 Calendulas in the garden. A much prettier relative to marigolds. 

 Exhibit I: Jilly's hand. 

 Exhibit J: Jilly's hand with dirt, because dirt makes everything more interesting. 

Exhibit K: Mom has five kids! Not really, I baby-sit the seated sassy little miss roughly 4 days a week now. It's actually not bad at all, mostly because I'm not sleep-deprived having to care for kids through the night. One of Evelyn's neighbor friends is pictured to the left.

Jilly is so ready for kindergarten, and to be in-the-know (as far as school goes) like her big sister and friends she plays with. Jilly really doesn't have friends that are her age, they're either a year younger or older than she is. Right now she's at a really logical, polite, and helpful stage. It's really nice considering Evelyn is in a mood-swing stage complete with attitude. I thought kids weren't teenagers until they turned 13. 

April Re-cap

April was a busy month for us: Evelyn's Spring Break, Ben starting the last quarter of the academic year, Easter, a birthday, and then all the regular stuff that goes on. 

 Ben took the kids to the mall for free scoop day at Ben and Jerry's. 

 Ben scopes out new parks and viewpoints on his bike rides, and this was a fantastic park we found for flying kites. The ocean breeze comes right over the top of this hill. 

 We also practiced softball skills with the kids.

 Playing after a softball game. 

 Ben's favorite dessert that we mostly gave away this time. 

 The kids were big on Playdough in April. Jillian especially can sit there and create for quite a while. Gordon likes to mash all the colors together, much to the girls' chagrin. 

 Evelyn loves making pictures for people, here's one for her cousin. 

Jillian likes being in control of the camera, and this was one of the few decent shots she took on her last "photo shoot." Lots of blurry pictures, one of Gordon's underwear-clad bottom, pictures of "The Cat in the Hat" show on PBS, etc. 

The first-graders were asked to sing "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" for their last school assembly. Ev's in the back with her hand raised. There are nearly 100 first-graders. Crazy. She has really grown up a lot this year and learned quite a bit. I wish she'd slow down on the growing part though, she's already got the mood swings to match a teenager. Ugh. Only 7.5 more weeks of school, I can't wait! 

Easter did not produce many good pictures at all; Gordon was fighting off the chickenpox, and so we kept Easter small this year. We did the goodies on Saturday (all the other festivities were that day anyway), so on Sunday we could better focus on the Savior instead of chocolate bunnies and jelly beans. I think it's a tradition we'll keep. 

My garden is a big source of satisfaction lately. I'm grateful to have somewhere to dig in the dirt. I got my garden all ready and planted for this spring/summer, and it's looking to be a much better growing year than last year. Most of the seeds have sprouted, and are continuing to grow instead of just staying tiny seedlings. I still had lots of trouble with my spinach (something ate the sprouts), and then a package of lettuce seed failed to sprout at all, leading me to think it was bad seed or something. My Calendulas and Bert's button flower mix are growing fantastically, as are the tomato plants, sunflowers, bunching onions, and radishes. We planted "Martian Sweet Corn," and Sugar Baby watermelons, which I will attempt to trellis due to a lack of space and mildew problems here. We'll see how the experiment goes!

Happy Birthday Gordon!

 This miniature Buzz Lightyear turned three early last month. He's most definitely no longer a toddler, he likes being rough and tough and can keep up with kids much older than he is. In the last month, he's been able to pretend play with Jilly and Ev in their make-believe games, which is a huge development beyond walking in and destroying whatever set they've built (still does this occasionally). He loves to play in the water, as evidenced by today's partial flood in the bathroom (two sink counter-top, one sink is really clogged, let that faucet run for a while, you can take it from there...). He really enjoys digging in my garden plot and making mud, and splashing in rain puddles to find the snails, slugs and worms that abound in our "May Gray" weather (personally loving it). He sang the beginning section from the "Imperial March" (Star Wars) for the 20 minute car ride home from a store yesterday. He loves Bob the Builder shows and Wonder Pets. 

He picked out Fruit Loops cereal for his birthday breakfast (sugar cereal is rare around here), and asked for maple syrup for lunch. Just syrup.....and then a little while later he added that he wanted "little squares cut up" with it. Jilly translated and said that meant waffles. So that's what we did. This boy LOVES brownies (takes after his mom he does) and so we did a big plate of brownie squares with scoops of vanilla ice cream on top, with an Oreo pushed into each ice cream scoop. The video below demonstrates my complicated technique. Uncle Dan has not missed a birthday yet I think, and he was with us for the afternoon. Gordon loves Uncle Dan. 

 Batman. (Sorry for fuzzy pictures).  

 He got a new baseball glove, and he's opening Great-Grandma Green's present here. 

 "Uuhhuh! More tissue paper?"

He was rewarded with a new pair of jeans. Gordon loves his jeans and when it hits 85 degrees later in the summer, I will have to say the winter fairy stole them until the weather cools off or something. Other random facts: He's been potty-trained for nearly a year now, he is no longer waking up before 6:30 am regularly, but still climbs into bed with me a few times a week. He's been the only kid I've been able to stand having in the same bed, he doesn't squirm around much. He drinks water like a fish, and goes to the bathroom just as much. When we're out in our garden or just playing around the landscaping in our apartment complex, I often find him relieving himself on a bush, wall or rock. Or the girls just yell loud enough for anyone nearby to hear, "MO-OM! Gordon's peeing on (whatever)." Today I wondered if some animalistic territory-marking gene has been activated.  I love my ticklish, squishy, rambunctious boy!

Kids Say the Darnedest Things

This little guy was watching a children's program in which they showed several videos about skyscrapers, parking garages, and other buildings that are made primarily of re-bar and concrete. I don't think he quite understood the message of the show, or maybe he did. Soon after finishing the show he asked me to take him potty, after looking at his handy work in the bowl he said, "Daddy, that's concrete, it's concrete."

The kids

One night when Dad was taking pictures of Evelyn in her softball uniform, Jilly wanted in on the action. She wants to play softball now too, just like Evelyn. We're probably going to buy baseball gloves for her and Gordon, so they can practice alongside Evelyn. 

This is Jilly's bed "set-up." It's been like this since she got her Littlest Pet Shop toys for her birthday last fall. All of her precious things are on the bed somewhere, and she gets quite upset when Gordon or some other unauthorized individual begins re-arranging or cleaning (ahem) this stuff up. She's got about half of her mattress to sleep on. She's finally excited about going to kindergarten this fall, telling me last week that she wishes she could go now. The other thing of note is the way she pronounces R2-D2 from Star Wars. "Ar-tar-dee-too." I think she's corrected it recently, but every time I think of this I smile.

 Evelyn is the softball girl and is really enjoying it. She's improved quite a bit since she started and was really bummed that her game yesterday was cancelled due to rain. She worries about being injured "for the big game." I predict we'll be doing this again next year.

 Here is some of Evelyn's art work. She likes to draw and write letters and lists of things. I can usually count them as homework. She's a diligent student thus far. 

 Some pictures from her first game. The games are about learning skills, so the entire lineup will hit each time they are up to bat and there are no outs. The score for the first game was 33-33, the Mighty Mermaids vs. the Banana Splits. 

 Gordon and his buddy dressed up Toy Story style. Sorry for the bad back-lighting.

Taking a nap one afternoon (rare these days) when they were both feeling under the weather. Ben loves it when Gordon will snuggle up next to him to sleep. 

 Gordon helping out during an FHE puppet show. 

 So who's heard of a show on National Geographic about extreme emergency preppers? I hadn't, until last night when I came back from the gym to see it on the TV and my kids ripping the couches apart and constructing a shelter. Ben finds the show fascinating, in part because the people on the show structure their whole life around this notion of prepping.

The episode that was on was about a guy in Colorado who had invested more than $300,000 in a mountainside bunker 12 hours from his house. He's preparing for what he believes is an impending shift of the earth's poles, which, of course, would cause a lot of grief. The show really struck a chord with my kids, they've rebuilt their "shelter" today. 

 Random shot from Ben. We've been able to see some really bright stars recently, which thanks to an app, we've figured out are planets. The only downside to the app is the fact that we can also see all the stars we're missing due to the light pollution here. When we were in McCall, Idaho last summer, there was no light pollution and Ben and I went outside at midnight to check out the moon-less night sky. It was amazing. 

 We've got church at 9 am this year, which means we have the whole afternoon to relax and find ways to keep the kids busy. This is a temple they built one afternoon, complete with a petting zoo in the back (the rock and tree area) and a place for you to pose for pictures. I'm surprised Gordon didn't knock it down 1/4 of the way into construction. 

The yearly Grandparent visit

Grandpa and Grandma Cows made their way down here for President's Day weekend, hoping the weather would be a little warmer than it's been the last two Januarys they visited. It wasn't. :) At least it didn't rain though. We did a lot of stuff while they were here, something every day I think. 

 We took one day to visit San Diego. We stopped to see the Historical District, where the Mormon Battalion Museum is housed. It's gone through a complete makeover in the last few years. This wagon sits right over the street, and you can climb through it. 

 After going through an interactive tour inside the museum, you can head to the courtyard to pan for fool's gold...

 ...or play with the water hand-pump...

 ...or wash clothes the old-fashioned way. I asked Evelyn if she liked washing clothes this way and she said, "Nuh-uh. I like washing machines." Ben told her his clothes were washed this way when he was on his mission. I definitely learned a lot about the historical importance of the Mormon Battalion and the kids said this was their favorite stop of the day. 

 Seven historical homes that have been preserved sit on the property next to the museum. There's a walking tour to see the exteriors, you can only go inside two of them. 

 Very distinct and colorful architecture though. 

 We also stopped to see the San Diego temple which we've only had time to drive by in the past. We learned there will be a visitor's center here in a few years. 

It was hard getting it to all fit in the frame. 

 My parents tried to get a shot of us, but the kids were just feeling too silly I guess. 

 We also visited Crystal Cove State Park and the tide pools they have there. The tide wasn't as far out as it could have been, but we still got to see lots of big starfish, a few big sea slugs, and many small hermit crabs. 

 A couple of starfish here. 

 Gordon going barefoot everywhere, he wanted to be held because he was afraid the water or the little crabs might get him. 

The girls checking out some hermit crabs with Grandma. 

We also rode the train and visited the Orange County Zoo at Irvine Regional Park. The kids really enjoyed that short little outing. We also made the short trip to see the progress on the Great Park. It gets bigger each time we visit it. It was fun having Grandma and Grandpa visit and go see a few places I've been meaning to see with the kids. Hopefully we'll be the ones doing the visiting this summer!