Gakey! Gakey! (An Update on Things, Girls Included)

Whew. This might be one of the only times I'm relieved to come into the back room! I was up in the kitchen making dinner and practically had my entire body stuffed into the oven in order to add the cheese that I'd forgotten to our skillet dinner.

Anja is still refusing to wear clothes. Today (as I mentioned in my comment on my previous post) I was begging my blue toddler to wear clothes, but she screams, "Noooo! Gakey!!! Gakey!!!" (Nooo! Nakey! Nakey!) Okay, it isn't THAT dramatic.... but today I was having an especially tough time and she was really looking cold. So finally, I found this box of stuff my sister had sent over. In it was a blue dress with large sunflowers all over it. I hope this doesn't offend anyone, but it was a pretty ugly dress. And a size four--clearly too big for Anja. But, it was knit and long-sleeved and very snuggly looking. So I told her it belonged to Grace.... and OH MY GOSH, she couldn't get the dress on fast enough. And then she held her little hands out very daintily while swishing the skirt around and smiling at herself and saying "Gace. Gace." She is so in love. To her, Gracie is the image of perfection.

Greta has four teeth! She's had her top teeth since about Christmas, but I keep forgetting to mention it on here. They are HUGE, as I guess all new baby front teeth are. She looks very cute and very goofy with them. She zips along the furniture and I sometimes find her in places and think, "how did you get there?" Martin thinks she'll be walking before she's 1, but we will see. She still has awhile yet to fulfill that goal. And other than that, Greta loves everything. Except baby food. She refuses to be spoon fed (much unlike her big sister who still prefers to be spoon fed--by us) and so we've skipped the baby food stage and went straight to small bits on her highchair tray. With this comes a new stage of motherhood, which is the cook-serve-clean up-repeat stage. I swear, I feel like I spend my entire day in the kitchen. Today I needed to make bread and I didn't find the time to do it until after Anja was asleep! But Greta is a good little eater and Anja often shares her own lunch with her sister because she is wonderful. She squishes up the food for her and everything.

I spend a lot of my time thinking up good titles to things. I think "Pinch" would be a good name for a cookbook. Specifically one with recipes like my own, which tend to have no measurements.

And speaking of no measurements, my mom recently gave me our Italian family cookbook, which is completely awesome, and I will be making a dinner from it this week. Although tonight we are having a version of Shepherd Pie which is turning out to be, unfortunately, like a pizza gone horribly wrong.

And speaking of Shepherds, I saw my sixth grade teacher at mass on Sunday! She is not Mrs. Shepherd anymore, but she looks just the same and I hadn't seen her since I was 12. She recognized me right away, which was cool, since I thought I would have to explain who I was and she still wouldn't remember me. But I tapped her on the shoulder and she turned around and said, "ANNIE!" It was really good to see her. She was probably my favorite teacher ever.

I thought Greta would be going to bed early tonight, but it's looking more and more like I was wrong about that. It doesn't matter too much though... she'll eventually go to sleep and when she does, Martin and I will have HYGGE and it will include warm bread & butter with tea. Mmmmmmmm.. Sounds delightful.

I am finishing this post after dinner and I have to say that while the suspcious-pizzaish dinner was kind of bland, it was definitely NOT trying to be pizza and all it needed was a little more zip. Funny, since I had already added spices thinking that the recipe itself looked awfully boring. Next time I'll know to add A LOT MORE.

I can't really think of anything else to say, but hey, look! The dog's puking!