Instagram Book 2013

Click here to view this photo book larger

Okay, so I'm an Instagram addict these days.  I'm sure this is a phase like so many others before it (looking at you, swing music and water guns!), but I love it.  What makes Instagram especially fun for me lately is that I can capture our everyday moments quickly and easily, and then I can import them into a photo book on Shutterfly.  (By the way, I'm not getting paid to say this, I'm just bananas for these photo books.)  I don't know of the other photo sites allow you to do this, but it's supes easy.  So start posting on Instagram more!  And then make a photo book!  And check this one out, too, because I think it's way fun.  

More later. Miss your faces.

Mother F's Angry Chicken

First things first: I know what I want Charlie and Matilda to call me.  Mother F.  I think it's beautiful and formal and just, well, perfect.  I tried to convince Matt's mom to go by Grandmother F, but she declined.  I guess she has no appreciation of true beauty.

Second things second: today has been an un-fun day with babies.  And I don't want to be too complainy or anything (though I did pat myself on the back like 60 times for finally getting that IUD--no more of these creatures shall be entering our house), but geesh.  Matt said it well when he told Charlie (who seems to be possessed by some demon or something lately), "I just love you so much, little boy.  You know how much I love you?  I love you so much that I still love you today, that's how much I love you."  Anyway, it seemed like a fitting day to introduce you to one of the few new recipes we've made since little Matilda entered our lives.

I can't remember when we first made this, but I do remember that it was an equally un-fun day with two babies and it was before my doctor had so generously prescribed me a healthy dose of anti-depressants.  By the end of the day, I was fried.  Exhausted and cranky, I was wishing for a month-long getaway with just me and my furry firstborn.  And I was so miserable that I didn't even want to eat*, but Matt was all, "What are we going to have for dinner?" and blah blah I have to eat something and here's this recipe for something that's delicious and also buttloads of work to make.  And I didn't even want to eat anyway!  And I got really pissed about basically everything in the whole world, and Matt was wanting us to cook dinner and I kind of hated him for it.**

So I went into the kitchen to try to escape from all of the other humans in my house and I felt like I had to make something, and I did things like slam the cutting board on the counter and close cabinet doors too loudly, just so that Matt could know how mad I was.  And in the end, I created this, mostly because it allowed me to get rid of some of my aggression and also because it was pretty simple.  And then Matt did most of the cooking part while I pouted on the couch with the dog, and when it was done he brought me a plate.  We started eating it and were both kind of surprised that something that was made with such contempt could be so tasty!  And Matt goes, "Wow, this angry chicken is really good!"

And angry chicken was born.  It's not fancy or extraordinary, but it's simple and good and relatively good for you.

Mother F's Angry Chicken

Note: Part of what makes the panko stick is squeezing the shit out of the chicken strips with handfuls of panko.  It's gross because raw chicken is gross, but it also feels kind of good and crunchy and you can pretend it's something you hate.  Maybe make this on a day you're frustrated or angry?

Ingredients
1-1 1/2 cups of panko
2-3 chicken breasts
1 teaspoon crushed red pepper
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
olive oil

In a bowl, mix together the panko, salt, pepper, and crushed red pepper.  Preheat the oven to 450.  Cut the chicken into thin strips and toss in the panko.  Then squeeze the shit out of the chicken with the panko in your hand, giving each strip a relatively thick coat of panko.

In a large oven-safe skillet, heat up a few glugs of olive oil and cook the chicken in the pan.  Cook for 3-4 minutes on one side, enough to brown the panko, and then flip it, cook it for a couple minutes and then put the skillet in the oven until you feel like the chicken's done.  Probably 10 minutes or so, but this will vary depending on the thickness of your chicken.

Serve with some sauce.  Honey mustard, BBQ, ketchup, whatevs.


*Funny thing about me, actually.  When I'm unhappy, I do not eat or get terribly hungry.  I think that my current size is a testament to having had a happy 32 years.

**Also, I'm totally misrepresenting Matt here.  He was being patient and wonderful and everything, but I hated the whole world on this particular evening and he was the one I blamed for our current state of affairs.  Also, I'm the crazy one in this relationship.

Quiet

You know how it's good when nothing's going on because that means that nothing bad is going on, but then it's boring because it means you don't really have much to talk about?  Yeah, that's what it's like here right now.  Things are quiet and we're still figuring out how to be a family of 5.  Charlie's hilarious and a lunatic and the sweetest little buddy.  Matilda's sweet and cute and starting to do more stuff like grab and coo and smile all the time, so that's fun.  Mitch is still dream dog.  We made bacon fried rice for lunch yesterday, and it was amazeballs.  

I'm also way more interested in finding out if Kate and Will have had their baby yet than a person should be.  It's kind of embarrassing.

Oh, and I've solved the world's drought crisis.  Here's what I'll do.  I'll just move to parts of the world that are suffering from drought, and then I'll clean the shit out of my floors.  Within hours of my cleaning the floors, then, it will start to pour down rain.  Works every time.  Supes annoying.  

Okay, check out these little babes.  I'm a fan.

June

Well, well.  Would you look at what the cat dragged in?

 (True fact: when I was little we had a cat named Ninny who was a hard core hunter and also a hard core slut, apparently, because she had kittens like every month or something.  Ninny would go off and kill squirrels and other rodents and stuff and eat their heads off and then either leave them on the front porch as a gift to us or try to bring them inside to her babies.  It was gross and also awesome.  True fact: Ninny went to live at a farm with about 600 of her babies.)

June was a pretty busy month for our little family.  Here's what we did: I went back to work for five days, made some cakes for coworkers who were moving on, watched students graduate (Lots of teachers hate graduation--I am not one of those teachers.  I love it!  And it makes me cry every time.), read two whole books (that's basically a record for me, the worst reader of all time), cleaned the kitchen one bazillion times, did infinity loads of laundry, bitched about how disorganized our house was, packed like crazy for trip to Virginia, drove to Virginia with two babies and a dog (spoiler alert: it was NOT a fun drive), visited friends and family in the Commonwealth, attended AP training so that I can teach AP Language next year (!!!!), played poker and won some cash money (Matt, not me), came home, organized the bejeezus out of the house because I just couldn't take it anymore, ran a buttload of errands, and tried to settle back into our new normal of life with two babies.

And throughout the month, I was struggling with/trying not to admit the fact that I, again, have postpartum depression.  Boooooo.  That shit's no joke.  Mother effing PPD getting me down, man!  But I finally accepted it and addressed it and am definitely on the upswing.  More on that later.

Babies are supes cute, still.  Dog is dreamy.  Husband is patient and wonderful.  I've got one more month before I have to report back to school, and I'm determined to make it awesome.

What have you been up to?

No, We're Not Dead.

Hello, the internet.  It's been a while.

Here's what's going on: not much and so much at the same time.  It's just been really hard, busy, and at times insanely boring..  Working, babies, cleaning the kitchen 200 times a day, not getting enough sleep, spending way too much time watching The West Wing on Netflix.  I'll be honest, I've been a bit of a pill this week.  There have been some tantrums going on in our house.  Charlie has thrown most of them, but I have thrown a few, too.  Charlie's are usually because of things like we gave him milk or we closed a door or we wouldn't let him take Matilda's pacifier out of her mouth [again].  Mine have been more of the omigod-get-me-out-of-this-fucking-house-before-I-explode and the omigod-I-can-never-get-anything-done-when-I'm-holding-a-baby variety.  The good news is that I go back to work on Thursday (even if it is only for five days) and I have AP training at the end of the month, so there are things that I can do coming up that have nothing to do with diapers or holding babies or President Bartlet* or whatever showed up on my Facebook feed that day (PS--Facebook kind of makes me hate the world, yet I'm addicted to it).

That sounded really pouty and annoying, didn't it?  Imagine how Matt's feeling.

I actually want to get back to blogging, if only because I'm starting to become old and forgetful and I want to remember stuff that went on during these years.  And as soon as this newest baby of mine decides that people are allowed to put her down between the hours of 5:00 and midnight, I plan to get back to you.  It's certainly a better use of my time than checking Facebook again, right?  But I'll have to come up with things to share with you, because I refuse to believe that you want to hear daily boring rundowns of our life here.

Oh, and if you have sent us a gift or done something nice for us and haven't received a thank you note yet, blame Matilda.  I swear she has some sort of sixth sense that knows when I'm about to start working on them, and then she decides to scream her head off.  All I can take from this is that babies are really ungrateful.

But things aren't all fussy and bad around here.  Charlie is basically the cutest thing that's ever happened, and Matilda's working on getting there (newborns just aren't as cute--sorry).  He walks and runs and climbs and jumps and dances.  He recently started talking, too.  His little voice is just the sweetest, outdone only by his belly laughs.  Mitch is still my soulmate, and he and I are planning a little getaway together.  And Matilda seems to have red hair and blue eyes, which is kind of scary because it seems like she's exposing that affair I had with David Letterman last summer.

PS--Just heard Alex Trebek say "You are a dirty pirate hooker." Yes!

And, with that, the baby is crying again, demanding milk or whiskey or something.  She'll certainly get one of those.

You get a few pictures, though.

*Oh, I love you babies and President Bartlet, but I'm a little tired of you at the moment.**

**In other news, I've decided that my principal is basically President Bartlet, which is about as high of praise I can give to a boss.  I'm debating whether telling him how I had this realization would be seen as too much of a kissass move.

Hey hey hey.

So Miss Matilda is in a growth spurt which makes her a little crazier than normal (can we say something like "than normal" when talking about someone who's only 3 weeks old?), and I spent a lot of the day preemptively cleaning the house and doing tasks so that tonight when her screaming tapeworm demon reared its ugly head I would be prepared and wouldn't be freaking out because I had to hold her for five or six hours straight when I had tons of other stuff to do.  So right now things are somewhat caught up and clean and I'm all ready to hold that baby--and wouldn't you know it, she's gone back to her "normal" sweet, calm, tired little baby self.

So I decided it was a good time to write a blog post.  Except here's the thing.  I don't have much exciting stuff to talk about.  The babies are good.  It's hard to have two of them when they both need something, but it's not any harder than I expected it to be.  Do I want to scream and throw a fit sometimes when I find myself cleaning the kitchen for a fifth time in a day, and do I want to spout off some cliche mom shit like "why do I even bother cleaning the house?" sometimes?  Yep.  But that was to be expected.  And until I win the lottery and can hire someone to hold babies while I clean (or clean while I hold babies, I suppose--or, hell, do BOTH!), that's what life is going to be like for a while.  Oh well.  I'm trying to savor our moments with these wee ones and enjoy babyhood, even though we all know that babyhood isn't really my thing.

I don't have work drama to share because I haven't been to work in a month and a half (egads!) and because I wouldn't share work drama with you here anyway because I actually like having a job.  And I haven't done any cool home projects (except for Matilda's dresser, have I shown you that yet?) or made any awesome desserts.  I did take a shower today.  And we did cook up some P Cubed for lunch.  And we even went for a walk in our awesome new stroller.  I think those things add up to a pretty big win.

The newest development around these parts is that Charlie is like officially a walking kid.  He'd taken steps like a month or so ago, but never seemed to feel the need to walk because he is basically the fastest crawler on earth.  Then we went to the beach (also, learn from my stupidly overambitious self and don't take a two-week old baby to the beach) and Charlie realized that it didn't hurt nearly as much to walk on the sand as it did to crawl, so he walked.  Just like that.  And every time I try to take pictures of him walking, they come out like this:

Shoot.

I'm enjoying the quiet right now.  While the baby sleeps. . .

And the laundry is mostly done. . .

And the dishes are soaking (my procrastinating strategy to keep from washing them just yet).

And the wine is delicious.  And the Reese's cups were delicious, too. . .

And the pup is cute and snuggly. . .

Later, I will read more of this. . .

And I might even get around to picking up these toys, but probably not.  I mean, why do I even bother cleaning anyway?

  (Note: Matt says that the Fisher Price barn is really Kent Farm, which explains why all of the super heroes are hanging out there.  I always try to make it Animal Farm to teach young Charles about Communism and glue production and whatnot.)