Fish Oil in Peanut Butter? Really?

I wrote this about fish oil and peanut butter and pleasant surprises.

In Honor of Domestic Violence Awareness Month

To the abuser;
If you want to apologize to your victim, I mean really apologize (as in, 'you have genuine feelings of remorse'), here is my advice to you.

1. Do not ever follow up your apology with a 'but...', thus rendering it no longer valid.
   
2. Do not go on to say - yet again - that your actions were defensive. Unless someone was hurting you physically, threatening you with a weapon, or physically hurting another person, your actions were not defensive. 2.a) Chasing someone into a house to violently grab them, shake them, keep them from leaving a room, bruise, batter and choke (twice) does not meet this criteria of 'defensive behavior'.
   
3. #2 actually takes what you may have convinced yourself was intended to be an apology, and turns it into just a really complicated and pathetic defense for your violence.
4. Do not confuse the word 'battery' with 'restraint'. (See 2.a)) I know that's a tough one, but it's not restraint when you chase someone who is trying to get away from you. In any reality.
   
5. Do not confuse the term 'battery' with 'grabbing and/or holding' someone.
   
6. Do not confuse claiming 'remorse' for actions with 'regret' for having a consequence. They are not one in the same.
7. Do not continue to emotionally abuse your victim via following up the apology defense with a novel's worth of manipulative lies.

Sledgehammer

Everything is fine, nothing to see over here.

Yes, I know many of you know we went back to court today.

Nothing happened - there was not enough information offered today for a ruling, so we are going back on Nov 13th, with a bit of mediation sprinkled in.


He used to call it 'the sledgehammer'. He'd bring it out if he needed to...get something done. Or just if he wanted to disarm someone.
He would tell them about Elijah.
Wouldn't talk about Elijah with me, ever. (That's what your blog is for, he'd remind me.)
But the sledgehammer, use as needed, was his weapon.

Today, in court, he pulled out that sledge hammer over and over.
And I feel fucking pummeled.

Nice one, dude. Real nice.

All I want for my birthday is some heat, please.

Bubbles just told me that his birthday plans have changed. I mean sure, we have been waffling between pirate hunt and safari hunt for the time killing events theme of the party, but there's more to it than that.

He realized today, while putting away his piles of toys in baskets and on shelves, that what he really wants, are:

• A bag of groceries, non-specific.
• Enough cash to throw a party for his 8 favorite preschool friends.
  
• Five lbs of nitrite-free bacon.
• Five gallons of organic whole milk.
• One case of Ovaltine, Malt or Chocolate flavor, please.
• Sensitive skin shampoo and body wash, Aveeno please.
• One full case of cereal. Low sugar, please.
  
• Electricity: to heat his bathwater, allow him to practice his new 'mouse skillz', cook his meals, and let him jam out on the keyboard.
• New tires for the car which drives him to preschool.
• A winter jacket, size 4.

This is dedicated to the dad who reads this and pretends that being a dad is all about bribing buying his kids toys. And avoiding, at all costs, paying to support his children.

Chickens Come and Chickens Go

So, yesterday Supergirl stayed home from school, with a slight cold (cough cough). She was spending more time running with the chickens than lying in bed sipping tea, so I kept threatening to take her to school. At around 11:30 I told her to put the chickens away, so we could go get Bubbles and head into town for some errands. The chickens usually spend a good portion of the day running free outside, happily scratching for bugs and terrorizing our cat.
She put the three she could find into the coop. We were late, so I demanded she get in the car. As I got into the car, I saw a pile of feathers in front of it.
Oh.
Umm, a big pile of feathers.
But no chicken.
"Ummm, honey? Which chicken did you say you couldn't find?"
"Tiny."
Oh. Tiny. The plumpest, waddliest, slowest chicken of all.
"Oh. Umm....honey? Come here and look at this..."
We determined that there was indeed, no Tiny to be found, and that the sheer volume of feathers did, in fact, indicate that there was probably no chance of recovering Tiny.
Personally, I was relieved at the absence of visible carnage.

But oh! The tears.....the sobbing and heaving and high pitched sadness. Oh!

With my own upcoming non-fun events, such as court with bad-vibe Xman on Monday, I knew we needed a solution.
New chicks!
I had to call around the county to find chicks at this time of year; used up the family fun budget on their accoutrement, but I think that, so far, it's worth it.

Meet Lilo and Stitch. Stitch is the wild one.



Now putting an emergency call in to the friend who promised months ago to build that damned chicken run. Because hell no I'd rather not go through this again, and whatever it was (bobcat, coyote, hawk?) will more than likely be back, looking for another chicken dinner.


Lilo checks out what she will look like when she grows up:

Definitely NOT Parent's Choice Toy Award Material...

I am in shock.

Bubbles loves his 'guys' more than any other toys. Sure, he loves his rescue heroes, and his trains, but not as much as his 'guys'. Guys are tiny and have many snippety-snappy accessories and come in blue boxes. Playmobil, with its attention to detail and lack of merchandise produced in China, has won our family over.

But today, while searching for 'guys' to go in the castle and boat he has requested for his birthday (he's not getting both, btw), I came across this.

And it is just so so very wrong.


Notice the mask and the scattered (obviously stolen) money.
It's a getaway car.

Apraxia in Action: Again

So, we love to go to the thrift store on Tuesdays, because it is half price day.
We got this totally lame awesome find for only $2.5o the other day, and Bubbles is in love with it's archaic attractions. We start with just the word 'flamingos', which in some way, I would love to never change and always hear in (my mind at least) as 'fingogos, yeah!'....forever.




On the other hand, we have put almost two years into this speech therapy business, and that is almost half of Bubbles' life. Pretty soon he will have been in speech therapy for more than half of his life...
Whatever.

So. Here is the part where I introduce you to what I do approximately 23.8 times per day.




Oh yeah, watch the magic.

Loser Fortune Cookie

Unfortunately this was not my cookie:



Fortunately, my friend let me take a picture of it.....

Chocolate Sushi (will win you friends and influence people)

Re-posted because my favorite foodie site published this today!! (And because I wanted to feel all kinds of fabulous today.)




I am so freaking clever, can I just say that?

Yes, I can.

When I heard about this place, I knew that I had found god. The thing is, I don't think god is always a good place for me to visit -I tend to the obsessive side, and becoming chummy could only lead to one thing: becoming too chummy.

Once I knew where the house of god was, I could be at serious risk of becoming a god-stalker. Better not to go there.

So, even though I was near this crazy chocolate-works-of-art shop the other day, I did not drag my children along to visit god's temple of chocolate. Because truthfully, I would be a bitch-mama to take my sugar-obsessed girl and my chocolate-worshipping toddler into a store where individual pieces of chocolate are $10 to $15. ("NO! NO!" "NOnono!" "NO! NO! NO!")

So, I didn't.

But that didn't stop my obsession with chocolate sushi. And the possibilities. Oh no, not in the least. I wanted to see what other amateurs like myself were pulling off.

And then I decided to devote an entire afternoon to it attempt it in my very own humble kitchen. (Did I mention it was about 95 degrees today?)

Chocolate was the goal, so the 'nori' wrapper had to be chocolate - not electric green 'fruit' leather. I decided to go with a chocolate modeling 'clay' (reminiscent of my preschool teaching days), which is really just whatever quality chocolate you choose, melted and mixed with corn syrup.

MODELING CHOCOLATE:
one 12oz bag semisweet choc chips

1/3 cup+2T corn syrup

melt chocolate over double boiler, let cool a bit and stir in corn syrup. wrap tightly and refrigerate to desired consistency. knead and roll into desired shapes.

I didn't like the marshmallow fluff mixed with coconut idea as much as I liked the rice crispy treat filling. I also thought that the chocolate would be easier to roll around something more firm. I made a basic recipe and omitted one cup of cereal so that it might be more willing to give in to my rolling pin with more marshmallow goodness binding it all together.

I then took handfuls globs of that and rolled it out (between waxed paper) to about 1/4 inch thickness. Or maybe it was more like 1/2 inch. I am not good with estimates.

I had just gone strawberry picking (I made jam; yes I did - suck on that martha) and decided that strawberries would be a good filling in place of hamachi. And it would probably taste better too - with the chocolate and all. Dried apricots or mango would look super too, but I only had fresh strawberries, so I was going with the full-on raw tuna look.

So, I divided my big wad of chocolate dough in half, rolled one piece out between wax paper (the kitchen was out of parchment), continually peeling it off one side and dropping it onto the other side, until it was very thin, but thick enough to handle. I found that if it gets too thin, it will spread (instead of roll) over the crispy treats and perhaps (ack!) break.

I measured an actual pack of square nori sheets over the chocolate and cut a nice square line doing the same with the rolled out crispy treats, making sure that the chocolate 'nori' was longer than the 'rice' on the sealing end of the roll. Then I laid the thin slices of strawberries, some snipped up blueberry filled marshmallows, and some slivers of garden mint down the center closer to the rolling end, and, using a fresh piece of the wax paper to help, rolled it up very tight.

After refrigerating to firm them up, I cut them into approximately 1/2 inch slices. I resisted many poop jokes in front of my daughter. The rolls cut easily with our sharpest knife - but would they really end up looking anything like sushi?

After arranging them on the platter to bring to the neighbors potluck (where they would impress the fuck out of everyone until the posse of young unwatched children happened to descend upon them like a swarm of teenaged hyenas and annihilate them in 30 seconds) (I am not judging. But if my kid was like, 7 or 8 years old and went all berzerk at the dessert table and loaded up on 5 brownies and 6 cookies and 7 chocolate sushis, well I would get a little whoop-ass on her. She should know about that shit whether I am there to police her or not. Oh wait, she does. And she's not even 6 yet. I'm just sayin.), I decided at the last minute to add two details for authenticity's sake. Because I was still just a
little bit worried that perhaps nobody would understand that I was going for a mock sushi. I colored some sugar orange and sprinkled it on some of the rolls, to (hopefully) resemble tobiko, or, fish eggs. Mmm, delicious...fish eggs-n-chocolate!
And, I decided that a 'dipping sauce' would be nice, so I thinned out some dark chocolate sauce (who knew that dove choc sauce lasts at least 7 months longer than your ice cream?!) and poured it into a little sauce bowl. Later (after I was done taking pictures, of course), I tossed some sesame seeds on top of the chocolate sauce. This appeared to really throw people for a loop. They wanted to dip it in the chocolate sauce - they knew it was really chocolate sauce, but it looked like soy sauce. And, just having gotten over the 'is it rawfreakingfish or is it strawberry' thing, it was a huge leap of faith to dip your chocolate sushi roll in that sauce. It was fun to watch, though.

Does it look authentic? It tasted awesome.

Time Does Not Heal ALL Wounds

I'm frustrated. I know he reads this blog (oh, hi there), and because of this I probably post more video of the kids than I would have, pre-split.

But he reads every word as well, and where the blog was originally beneficial for him, it has become now a source of contention. Much in the way that the very things that attracted him to me were the very things that propelled him to attack me. It's no surprise to anyone that I am an opinionated and resourceful person. Nor is it a surprise that I have fortitude, strength, and great mama instincts. All of these things suddenly worked against him (and me) when I didn't agree with what he said, or I didn't simply shut up, so he could continue to be right.

I have more fear of him now than I did the day after he did it. I don't even want to publish those words, because it is like giving him power on a platter.
But it is the truth, because, at that time, there was still a chance. A chance to have remorse. A chance to feel apologetic. A chance to understand that what had just happened was wrong. Even in the aftermath of having him scream into my ear as I lost the ability to breathe, "Someone should have done this to you a long time ago!" - there was still a chance for that 'OMG WHAT HAVE I DONE?' moment to occur. I went for the phone, so he had to take me down the second time.

There was a brief period of 'What have I done, I am so sorry...' followed by another brief (but achingly familiar) period of 'I should put a bullet through my head.'
Then I went to the police and reported it.

That was when it all changed. Now he is the victim. He is a victim of circumstance.
Now, his own statement to the police has morphed out of truth and into his alternate reality. He has gone to great lengths to resist any education because he didn't do anything wrong. His actions were defensible, and continue to diminish in nature. Certainly they had no negative impact on our children, right?

I lived with him for 9 years. I watched him revise and re-tell reality. Or simply walk away from it if he didn't like what he saw.
So now, what he did to me is fine. Not scary, not threatening, not even 'wrong' in his book.

Hell yeah I am more afraid of him than I was then.
Hell yeah.