The Cluttered Pantry

It’s that time of year again. Every winter I gather all our favorite soup and stew recipes and bring down the crock pot and restaurant containers and spend the better part of a day making as many different meals as I can fit into our basement freezer. It’s something that I fine tune a [...]

Each week we pick a theme that we reinforce with the art projects, “field trips”, cooking and play we do with the girls. This week is transportation. I asked the girls to go through their toy boxes and bring me toys that help us get where we we want to go.
My favorite of [...]

Earlier this evening, after the girls were asleep, I went back downstairs to finish a painting project (yes, I underestimated the number of coats of paint it would take to make our dining room walls red.)
I’m not certain how long she was calling out for me, but I didn’t hear Elena until after she [...]

After a long day of the Wee Kahunas letting me know, in not so subtle little kid manner, that they don’t approve of this whole Daddy going away for 14 days thing. (By testing every limit and rule – including laws of nature like -gravity.) I gratefully climbed into bed early to try and catch [...]

Main Ingredients:
4 cups Ricotta Cheese
1/2 cup sugar
5 large eggs lightly beaten
1 tablespoon cornstarch
1 teaspoon almond extract
1 1/2 cup heavy cream
1/3 cup finely chopped almonds

Ok, so we don’t want to get ahead of ourselves here….but at this point we are planning on a combination of montessouri pre-school and homeschool for the girls, at least for the first couple of years if possible.
There are lots of ways to do this, but regardless of the “school of thought” [...]

Mark just sent this pic from his iphone to me. I’m at the studio working, and he is in the park with both girls testing gravity. They LOVE the swings so much we sometimes have to bribe them to come back home. We are certain to have to answer for the snowsuits when [...]

So!
Yesterday we set a household record… Not for the number of Dora the Explorer Pullups we changed, nor for the increadible number of times each girl climbed the coffee table to jump on the big sofa (our version of an indoor jungle gym), and not even for the staggering amount of food being consumed.
The record [...]

Tomorrow, we will have been home with the girls one full month.
Last night we followed our usual routine (sesame street watching after diner, some play time with the many toys downstairs, clean up time which is mostly everyone tossing toys back into the baby jail, potty time, change into PJs, sitting/squirming through Daddy reading [...]

You know that commercial for the Marines-”we do more before 6am than most people do all day…”?
Well, unless they have two toddlers in their care, they are just liars!
Today the girls and I played dress up, chase, slide, pretend cooking, had real breakfast, pretend phone calls, dress up again, read books, ate snacks (real and [...]

Ok, I’ll admit it. The routine being routine is starting to get to me.
The girls are still recovering from ear infections and the weather here in Chicago has been blustery (go figure!) so we have been mostly trapped indoors. And I’m running out of things for us to do.
Don’t get me wrong, shredding up the [...]

To be certain it has been a blur. If that amazingly kind judge in Chita hadn’t waived the ten day wait we would have only been home for a couple of days.
The routine is, well, routine. Bed time, wake time, snack time, lunch time, nap time, bath time, diner time…. All relatively predictable.
What is [...]

They told us the girls would gain weight quickly and make up for lost time. I had no doubt, but never expected the first week to result in so much of a weight gain for each girl! Elena has gained a few ounces more than a pound and Zhanna has gained a pound and [...]

So, we’ve been home for a week now, and the man on man defense we started with works pretty well. Two parents – two children. The next stage of settling in requires the real world transition to a routine that involves Mark back working in the studio. On thursday we realized that with the [...]