playgroupsarenoplaceforchildren

Carson and Ella will both be in preschool two days a week this school year. They start Thursday.

I am BEYOND EXCITED.

Tate doesn’t understand my excitement at all. “You’ll miss them when they’re gone all day, you know that, right?” He’s said this to me on more than one occasion.

The truth is, I’m not going to miss them while they are at school. They’ll only be gone for a total of twelve hours each week. Out of the approximately 72+ awake hours a week I will continue to spend with them, I think those twelve hours while they are at school will be a long awaited blessing.

My excitement is so much less about being away from them, but instead it’s about being able to accomplish things without strategic, long term planning. It’s been almost five years since I’ve been able to make plans completely on my own. Every thing that I’ve done since having kids has either been when Tate is available to watch the kids, or I’ve had to plan errands and exercise around the kid’s meal and nap times.

I’m going to make hair, dentist, doctor, and eye appointments without having to clear the appointment time with Tate or find a babysitter.

I’m going to go to the grocery store without packing my purse full of snacks, Capri Suns, toys, and a change of underwear for Ella.

I can run errands at lunch time, instead of between the hours of 9:30 and 11:00.

I’m going to browse shops with fragile items.

I’m going to eat my lunch in peace, sitting down for the whole meal instead of getting up to refill someone’s milk cup or clean up spills.

I’ll be able to hop out of the car and just run in (to the grocery store, the liquor store!!!, the convenience store, anywhere I want!) I won’t have to unbuckle one kid from his carseat, then run around to the other side of the car and unbuckle the other kid from her carseat, then hold little hands, and slowly make our way.

I’m going to go for a run without pushing Ella in a stroller and keeping Carson from falling off his bike as he follows me.

I’m going to take a shower without an audience.

I’m going to do it on my time.

I’m going to putter.

I’m going to breathe.

I can be independent again, even if it’s only for twelve hours per week.

And in my independence, I think I can become me again. And when I’m me again, I’m going to love my children even more and be the very best mom I can be.

***********

Speaking of the kids going to school, check out their new back to school duds courtesy of TJ Maxx/Marshalls over here!

I’m not sure if I’ll ever learn, but my husband does not catch on to my hints.  Last night I really didn’t feel like cooking dinner, I felt like eating anything I wasn’t cooking, so I kept mentioning HOW WORN OUT I was.  Hint, hint!  When that didn’t seem to elicit the reaction I was hoping for from Tate, I made sure to say, “Oh.  Wellllll, I guess I should start dinner.”  HEAVY SIGH, HEAVY SIGH, HEAVY SIGH.

I ended up making dinner.  SHOCKING!  Dinner was actually was delicious, a recipe that I used to make all the time, but it somehow fell out of rotation.  Not to toot my own horn, but it’s my very own recipe and it’s pretty fabulous.  (Toot, toot!)

I made Three Cheese Eggplant bake.

This recipe is easy to make.  If you’ve never had eggplant before, don’t be afraid!

What you’ll need…

1 medium to large eggplant
2-3 TB Extra-Virgin Olive Oil
1 C Ricotta Cheese
1 C Mozzarella Cheese, shredded, 1/2 C reserved for topping
1/4 C Parmesan cheese
Salt and Pepper to taste
Marinara Sauce  (homemade or from a jar)

Here’s what you do…

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Spray two cookie sheets with cooking spray. Carefully cut skin off of eggplant.  I hold it upright and with a sharp chef’s knife, I slice the skin off, taking care not to cut off too much of the actual eggplant.  Once the skin is removed, slice the eggplant lengthwise into 1/8 inch strips. (Don’t worry if you end up with short pieces of eggplant, you can combine these pieces together later.) Place the eggplant strips on cookie sheets and drizzle olive oil evenly over each piece. Salt and pepper to taste. Bake for 15 minutes.

While the eggplant is baking, make (or heat) the marinara sauce and make the cheese filling. To make the filling, stir together the ricotta, mozzarella, and Parmesan cheeses.

Spray an 11 X 7 casserole dish with cooking spray. Place 2-3 TB of filling at the end of each eggplant slice and roll up. Combine the smaller eggplant slices to make longer strips if needed. Place each roll-up in casserole dish. Spoon marinara sauce over each. Sprinkle remaining 1/2 C of mozzarella cheese over casserole. Bake for 20-25 minutes or until bubbly.

I serve this with whole wheat spaghetti and a salad of grape tomatoes, mozzarella, basil, salt, pepper, and olive oil.

In case you’re interested, here is my recipe for Marinara Sauce.

1 28 oz. can of crushed tomatoes
1 garlic clove crushed
3 TB of Extra-virgin Olive Oil
1 tsp dried Oregano (if you have fresh, even better!)
1 tsp dried Basil
1/8 tsp pepper
1/8 tsp salt
1 TB Sugar

In a medium saucepan over medium low heat, cook the garlic clove in the olive oil just until the clove begins to brown. Remove from heat, remove the garlic clove, and allow the oil to cool. Once cool, add the remaining ingredients, cover and simmer over low heat until thoroughly heated.

*****

This post is a part of Rachel’s Mouthwatering Monday at A Southern Fairytale.  Go visit her for more great recipes!  HINT, HINT.

So our vacation wasn’t ALL bad. There really was a lot of good.

This was our charming beach house on Tybee Island. The upstairs was cute and beachy.  Built in the 30’s, it still had it’s original wood floors and white clapboard walls.

Here was the “summer house,” advertised as livable, but sadly only for mosquitoes. At least it was cute to look at from a distance.

From the looks of the pictures I took of the kids, it seems like they had a good time.  I guess I purposely didn’t take any pictures of them when they weren’t having fun.  There really is no need to preserve those memories for posterity.

Tybee Island was a really lovely beach, minus the jellyfish. Ella and I are still battling our jellyfish stings. They are now itchy welts and against my protests, Tate read on Google that they usually leave scars.

We LOVED, LOVED, LOVED Savannah. We even got to eat at Paula Deen’s restaurant, The Lady and Sons. At the Roundhouse Museum a few hours after we ate at Lady and Sons, we ran into her son and grandson, Jamie and Jack Deen.  It’s the little things in life, y’all, that I find exciting.  (No pictures of the encounter, none of them turned out.)

The line to get our name on the list for lunch at 9:30 AM.

The founder of the Girl Scouts birthplace.

The Savannah Candy Company. The kids got Ring Pops, of course, since you can get those anywhere.

Thanks for humoring me and looking, I know how excruciatingly boring it can be to look at other people’s vacation photos.  I’m in such a funk right now, hoping that getting the kids back to school next week will perk me up…and perk up this boring ol’ blog.

When I met Tate twelve years ago I vividly recall him telling me that he was laid back.  Of course now I know that this was a bald-faced lie.  Laid back is exactly the opposite of how I’d describe him.  His complaining and pessimism are legendary, so much so that while most couples fight about money or sex, we regularly fight about his constant complaining and pessimistic outlook on life.

He’s quit using phrases like, “this is a disaster!!”, because I’ve threatened to run away from home if I he ever uttered it again.

I’m by no means (completely) perfect, but I do try to look at the bright side of things.   I try very hard not to complain too much, I try to stay positive.  I’m practically Miss Merry Sunshine!

That’s why I feel so awful about what I’m getting ready to complain about.

My vacation could have been better.

It pains me to even utter those words.  SERIOUSLY.  Poor me!  Me and my first world problems!  ¡Que terrible!  It must be so awful to get to go on vacation and have it not be perfect.  So many people in the world without food and my beach vacation “could have been better.”

So yeah, I feel ridiculous complaining about my vacation.  Nonetheless, I can’t help myself.

1.  My children acted like total a-double-s-holes for the vast majority of the time.  They freaked out over things like getting Sprite instead of chocolate milk when we went out to eat and having to ride on a horse drawn carriage through Savannah.   What horribly deprived children!  The constant need to correct their behavior ON VACATION where we were supposed to be having FUN completely drained me.

2.  Ella and I got stung by jellyfish the very first day of vacation.  We then learned that August is prime jellyfish season on Tybee Island and this year has been particularly bad.  Perfect!

3.  Our vacation rental wasn’t exactly what I thought it would be.  The “summer house” with a bed in the backyard was really an unairconditioned shed with a cot from 1940 that held a moldy thing on top masquerading as a mattress.

4.  Despite the beach house being advertised as “fully stocked,” we ran out of toilet paper less than 24 hours after arriving. (It REALLY pains me to complain about that, yet there it is.)

5.  MOSQUITOES the size of Montana.

6.  The sheets on our bed were satiny and stuck to our feet like velcro.

7.  The water tasted like what I’ve always imagine dirty feet to taste like.

I’m so ashamed by these petty complaints.  If I were a priest, I’d assign myself 4,000 Hail Mary’s and an order to volunteer my time at a homeless shelter or donate the equivalent cost of the vacation to a women’s shelter.

I’m no longer a practicing Catholic.  I guess I dodged that bullet.

Instead, as soon as I download and edit the bajillion pictures I took while on vacation, I’ll repent by writing about the good things.

She was pretending to be Mommy.

Purse?  Check.

Stroller?  Check.

Devil horns?  I have no idea.

******

Psst.  I still have a t-shirt giveaway from The Rocking Pony over here...

Cute kids wearing cute shirts, huh?

On any given day, I contemplate advertising my children on Craigslist, “Free to a good home!”  (I’m mostly kidding.)

Those cute shirts they are wearing, though, I’m giving away a shirt of your choice from The Rocking Pony!

Clickity click right here to head over to the giveaway!

We had a fight about four slices of bread.  Anyone with a Marital Communications degree from the University of Donahue, Oprah, and Dr. Phil could tell you that the fight wasn’t actually about four slices of bread.

*******

“What is this REALLY about?”  I can’t say that I simply asked this, I screamed it.  Had a plate and not my MacBook been in my hand, I probably would have thrown it at his head.

*******

He told me what it was really about, but I know that’s not ALL of it.  There’s more bubbling under the facade of bread.  (Please see my credentials above.)  I’m not even certain exactly what it was about the four slices of bread for me, maybe it’s that I feel unappreciated.  Maybe I feel incredibly self-conscious about my role in the family, even though I know that his job and my job couldn’t be successful without the other.  Maybe I just woke up on the wrong side of the bread.

*******

But DAMN.  Those four slices of bread pissed me RIGHT off.  And I’m not going to apologize.

*******

It doesn’t appear that Tate is going to apologize either.

Well.

*******

“I have to go to Chuck’s wake tonight.  You know?  The guy from work I told you about?  I’ll be late, will probably miss bed and bath time.”  Tate called me from the road, speaking politely, as if I were a customer service operator.

“Fine,” I said.  “That’s fine.”

*******

He called on his way home from the wake.  “We can’t fight like this anymore.  It’s so petty and ridiculous.  Chuck was a young man!  Only forty-five.  He was fine six weeks ago.”

Chuck started to feel sick.  They thought it was his gall bladder.  Six weeks later he died as a result of pancreatic cancer.  He is survived by his wife.

*******

I think that perhaps we should forget about those four slices of bread.