Lydia had zero accidents today. Count’em: Ze-ro! We are just beside ourselves with joy. At the same time, I am terrified that the candy corn potty treats plugged her up and set her up for some, um, nighttime trauma. So we end the day on a note of proud trepidation.
Aside from the loveliest of phone calls with Clark and Swathi (and also a sweet, short call with my mom and Uncle Steve), here are the best parts of our day, in pictures:
This is where I spent the majority of my day. How about you?
Lydia left her undies on the front path in her haste to make it to the potty. Our undie-less toddler single-handedly dragged down the property value of homes on our block tonight, but we were so proud of her nonetheless.
Eating apples, shucking corn, and playing chalk on the driveway. We loved our lives tonight.We found a caterpillar in the corn!Lydia spent a looong time picking apples off the tree and throwing them down our street. We live on 12th avenue, which means the apples rolled down twelve blocks before they reached level ground. Quite a thrill for these worm-filled pome fruits.
Our apple tree, because we love it so much.
Mary started doing these trust falls in India when she could not contain her excitement. She still does them whenever she is over-the-top happy, which she apparently was. We ate dinner outside on the lawn tonight. Maybe that made her happy!And to think this mess would have taken place on my kitchen floor. Why don’t we eat outside every night?
Today was Sunday. Normally on Sunday, we try to be good Mormons and refrain from work. We were inside the first part of the day, and Abe was helping so much that I could not resist getting a head start on this week’s meals. By the end of the day, I had cooked the following:
Roasted squash with giant red onions and balsamic vinegar.toasted almonds for a pesto later.basil, cilantro, almond pesto for lunch. These are leftovers for Abe’s lunch tomorrow, and I hope he remembers to bring it to work. His lunch budget is teeny tiny, and when he forgets to take his lunch to work, by the end of the week his only option left is to drink water for lunch.Um, this is a brownie. The recipe swapped out butter/oil for applesauce and light sour cream. That, of course, is the only reason why I ate half the pan.Tomorrow we are trying out that exciting recipe in Cook’s Illustrated for pasta puttanesca with fresh tomatoes. Even though it’s sacrilegious, I am amending the recipe so that the fresh tomatoes will be…er… roasted. These tomatoes were SUCH a disappointment: Think grocery-store-Roma-in-December disappointing, even though I bought them at the farmer’s market yesterday. So I roasted the bejeebers out of ’em in the hopes that they’d emerge from the oven tasting more like their authentic tomato selves. We’ll see what happens tomorrow when these meet up with all that puttanesca good stuff.This is one of my beloved basil patches in my garden. The plants got neglected and woody while we were away, and so I cut them down today to great effect. Next year I plan on planting NOTHING except for basil and tomatoes in my garden. I am signing up for a church garden plot for everything else. (This year I was greedy and planted too many things in too little space. My tomatoes don’t get enough sun because they are smashed too close together, and I have to do ridiculous things like cut down my cucumber vines to get at my basil.)
