OmegaMom

OmegaDotter is off spending the night at a friend’s house, so OmegaDad and I took the opportunity to Get Things Done. 

What this consisted of this evening is me wielding a hair dryer to warm up wax paper stuck to slabs of chocolate Rice Krispie treats, and OmegaDad carefully cutting and gluing them together with buttercream frosting.

Why?

It is time for OmegaDad’s Christmas gingerbread house.  This time, he is doing a pagoda on top of a Guilin-esque hill, beside a stream.  The great secret behind many a creation here is the structural use of Rice Krispie treats; in this case, the hill is made of layers of them.  He had made three cookie sheets full, then covered them with wax paper while they “cured”; the problem is that the wax paper had adhered completely.  The first slab, we picked the wax paper off veeeerrrry carefully.  Then OmegaDad had his flash of brilliance, scurried off to the bathroom, returned with my hair dryer, and voila, the deed was done quickly and handily.

Now, I realize that many adult adoptees will cringe at the decor ideas for this year’s gingerbread fantasy, but keep in mind that these particular ideas come straight from OmegaDotter:

There will be pandas made of fondant.  Here’s one of the pandas, already made:

Isn’t he squee-fully cute?!

Then, OmegaDotter insisted that there be ninjas.  She likes ninjas, so ninjas there will be.  She and OmegaDad spent a happy evening researching how to make fondant ninjas on Google images.

There will be a stream of vivid blue rock sugar.

There may be a Chinese-style bridge over the stream.  It is in the plans, but OmegaDad sounds kind of dubious about it.

The pagoda will be a round pagoda, somewhat like this hexagonal one.

OmegaDad told me this afternoon, while surrounded by heaps of dirty dishes and carrying the last slab off to the dining table, that The Food Network was letting everyone down, because their Cake Challenge show never showed the immense work that had to be done in the background to allow the stars to do their stylin’ cakes—the people who made the fondant, the royal icing, the buttercream, the layers of cake.  All you see is the finished pieces being carved and put together, but behind all that is the unsung work of many others.

And while we were doing that, the Senate was voting to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.  It’s about time!  And both of Alaska’s senators voted for the repeal—yay!

Science fairs will be in late March, so OmegaDad decided to get started with some experiments with the dotter.  Unfortunately, the experiments are daddy’s ideas, but, hey, get the kid used to doing it, right?

Firstly, she was very possessive about “MY lab!”  In other words, I had to explain to her that real scientists these days were very open about their research (see PLOS) and, if they’re excited about their experiments, they’re very happy to have people in, show them around, tell them what the experiment is about, etc.

Anyway.  Since OmegaDad has been Doing Bread this past year (and very nicely, too!), and trying out sourdough starters with wild yeast, he thought it might be fun to see if you could get a sourdough starter from varying fruits.  He selected grapes and blueberries because both fruits have a blush on them; apples, because they don’t have a blush; and then we had a control of just plain ol’ flour and water.  Herewith the ingredients:

Then there’s the scientist herself:

Note that she is wearing “goggles”.  She was very concerned that everyone in her lab wear goggles, because, as she explained, “You never know when you’re going to get an explosion!”  Then she demonstrated how things would blow up:

Please note the “lab coat”.  Folks!  Let me tell you about this amazing new costume for your kids!  It’s a chef’s coat!  It’s a lab coat!  It’s two—two!—two coats in one!  OmegaDotter received a chef outfit for herself plus a matching chef outfit for her Karito Kids Ling doll, and has since taken to wearing the pink striped black pants as pajama pants or loungewear ever since, and when time came to do the experiment set-up, she decided it would make a fine lab coat.

What followed:  Placing one cup of blueberries into a Mason jar:

Mushing grapes before putting them into a Mason jar (an action shot!):

Explaining what comes next, and how you need to be careful (note the goggles again!):

Adding flour (we got a lot of flour all over everything, including the floor.  There were also a grape or blueberry or two on the floor, sigh.  Not that I really want you to look at our floor; please edit those shots mentally.):

Adding water:

Stirring (please note that we used different spoons for each jar, so that we had no intermixing):

She has the Evil Scientist pose down perfectly—“I have created LIFE!!!  Bwahahaha!”

And then, the finale, a “Ta-da!” pose:

And then she signed off with, “Thanks for watching Weird Science!”

The chores proceed apace, which is making me happy.  OmegaDad discovered the Internet Bonanza of American Girl doll accoutrements, and the dotter is agog.  And eager to buy, buy, buy!  Which, of course, means money, money, money!  Which leads to chores.

Ahhhh.  So the dotter is sweeping, and vacuuming, and cleaning the catbox, and sorting laundry, and carrying laundry back upstairs and putting it away (I know I mentioned every single one of these things before, but it’s so damn nice to have it done, even if I do have to follow around and give pointers and make sure she does more than a seven-year-old’s slapdash job).

OmegaDad has been making bread.  He recently made two loaves of challah, one for us, one for our next-door neighbor, who just got married.  The late afternoon sunshine just made the warmth and goodness pop out in the picture.  Aren’t they purty?

Also enjoying the afternoon warmth was one of our cats, Wooly.  Piggy, the scaredy cat, rarely (if ever) ventures upstairs, but Wooly is everywhere.  Including on our laptop.  Which means that, after I took this picture, I spent five minutes closing obscure Windows windows and making sure he hadn’t accidentally switched screen resolutions, or turned on Armenian language, or shut off all the keyboard shortcuts.  For reference, this was what he looked like a few years ago, when he was only five or six weeks old.

Our new chickens are laying eggs now–yay!  So we get a wide variety of egg sizes.  The big one is from one of our older girls; the little one is from one of the new layers.  Our Silkies lay eggs only a bit bigger than the little one, but the new girls’ eggs will end up as big as the one on the left in a few months.

Another shot of Cinderella, posing:

She starts second grade tomorrow.  She’s been wandering the house shouting excitedly about school starting; that excitement will disappear very soon.  Right now, she’s upset that her second-grade teacher is male:  “A dude?!  I don’t want a dude for a teacher!!”  There is an implied “WTF?!” in there that she hasn’t taken to using.  Yet.  (I, of course, am quite aware that she tends to get ferocious crushes on young men who are coaches or counselors or teachers, so fully expect her to be [occasionally] sighing about Mr. Snows.  When she’s not complaining about the homework.)

Oh, yes, and in the midst of all the early/mid August stuff, I totally spaced out that OmegaMom, the blog, is now four years old.  Whoa.