a day in the life

Lately I get carried away with all my recipe-posting and life-organizing, and I miss the times we digress together. I thought it’d be fun to jot down what I do in a typical day, which I did yesterday. Shall we?

7:00 a.m.: My day started with the usual; oatmeal and yogurt and “puffs and cheerios,” the girls’ munchy snack–while I stood leaning against the kitchen counter, vaguely listening to NPR and generally staring off into space. It’s a good time, people.

8:00 a.m.: Call Doc to follow up on kids’ antibiotic course. The littles are thankfully over their ugly sick-bug; however, Vivi’s emphysema-ish cough stubbornly marches on. Doc says she has an overactive cough reflex, to which I replied “What in this child is NOT overactive?” I kid. Really, I love her high energy to pieces, and she keeps me going when my hankering is to ensconce myself in a velvet blanket, park my heiny on the couch, and peer out at the world like a lame turtle. However. There are times when her energy has nowhere to go but straight to the part of my brain that causes the eye-twitching.

9:00 a.m.: Free play time while I try to accomplish a little cooking, cleaning, reading, emailing, calling. At times, I sense I’m heading down the road my therapist calls “negative attention begets negative actions.” Whenever this happens, I unfortunately have trouble slowing down the speeding train. Genevieve rips through the house like a crazed, drumming Muppet, and I stammer to keep up. Phrases heard round the household consisted of, “Don’t rip the toilet paper into tiny shreds and then stuff it into every crevice you find” and “Don’t you have any toys you can play with somewhere?” and “Don’t sit on your plastic farm until it breaks!” Don’t don’t don’t.

I am nothing if not civil in all of this dialogue, which I dot with pleases and thank yous and “I would love it if you would read quietly for two minutes while I make a call!”–that sort of thing. Though I am facing Princess Destructo head on, as far as she can see I am as placid as the day is long. That’s because for the most part, I have tamed my inner monster. Alas, there are still times when the prevailing theme of the day is: Mommy is a Russian prison guard who will find some unspeakable form of punishment if you do not listen to her RIGHT NOW.

11:00 a.m.: Lunch time! To which Charlie always yells “YAY!” I do have one trick for surviving The Misbehaving Hours. I stuff the kids full of a gigantic lunch, and lo they become calm as Hindu cows. They cop a squat on the floor and flip through books for a while, after which I can usually lull them into a nap. I am the pied piper of inducing food comas in my children. If successful at the food-book-sleep trickery, I can usually also count on post-nap haze, which if I’m lucky allows me to coast into dinner. If all else fails, I break the emergency glass case housing a Disney princess movie. Oh how I loathe those royalty-themed films

At this point, if you’re not calling me a Bad Mother, you might instead be asking… what do I serve for my enormous sleep-inducing blue plate special? A two-egg omelet! Both kids harbor an insatiable, insane love of eggs in any form, and I find that on the rare occasion I can’t get them to eat veggies or strange textures (such as after a week of “soup and crackers” bland food, like right now), I can always hide them in eggs successfully.

Here I said I wasn’t sharing a recipe today, and now I’m sharing a recipe. I can’t help it, I’ve got the fever! And anyway, this isn’t a recipe so much as a notion of a meal you could cook in your house. You probably can do this without instruction, but Suburban Matron explains the process nicely if you’re interested. I make mine basically the same as hers, except that instead of flipping in half, I like to fold in both sides like a burrito.

I’ve been known to stuff peas, broccoli, stinky cheese, and leftover meat in an omelet, and my success rate is 100% so far. The omelet in the pictures below included cream cheese and shredded jack cheese, and it was supposed to get avocado, but I forgot to cut it up.

Here’s the slideshow of the making and devouring of said omelet:

One flip into cooking. Let it set more, then flip other end in.

Top with more cheese. Of course.

You have egg on your face.

Big girl! She’s using a spoon a good 6 mon. ahead of her sister’s timeline.

It’s not a meal in our house unless Charlie has cream cheese on her nose.

Noon: More play time. I fold laundry.

1:00 p.m.: Nap! I zone out for a while, eat some trail mix, read part of a doula training book, pet the kitty, and Gchat with the hubster.

3:30 p.m.: Off to the library! Return museum pass, get a few movies (read: emergency Disney flicks per note above) and a few books. Highlight so far from this trip is a book in Elise Primavera’s Louise The Big Cheese series.

5:00 p.m.: Daddy is home early so he can eat and go back to work at his boss’ house and then grab beers with him. Somebody has to carry the ambition around these parts.

5:30 p.m.: Dinner! Homemade fish sticks (white roughy, milk & malt vinegar bath, Wondra flour, fry 3-5 min on each side in 350 degF oil), Trader Joe’s french fries, steamed green beans.

6:30 p.m.: Charlie to bed, Daddy to work, and Vivi to watch The Little Mermaid while I make a double batch of breakfast cookies (new recipe! More fat and sugar in this one, so I might be calling these “Sunday breakfast cookies”).

8:00 p.m.: Vivi to bed. I can haz relax? I catch up on some blogs, watch the first episode of The Wonder Years on Netflix (swoon! again!), and eat another simple parfait dessert

10:00 p.m.: I do the nightly cleansing routine and wander upstairs to read a little Jane Eyre before nodding off.