Circles of Neglect

I never quite understood what people meant when they said that they loved an item that entertained their baby for 10 minutes. I mean, what can you really do in ten minutes?

hard at work

The babies are asleep, so I have ten minutes to tell you that ten minutes is an eternity with babies. The list of things that I would do is pretty much endless. Enter: the circles of neglect.

Liam exploring physics with monkeys

Our friends Kristie and Andrew coined the term. You put a child in one, and you can have upwards of fifteen minutes hands-free. If I'm in the kitchen where they can see me, they will sometimes play happily for twenty minutes. This is long enough to make coffee, drink it while it is still warm, and at least start to get dinner going. Or eat some lunch myself. It is a whole new world!

I used to mock these things, these garish plastic monstrosities. That's totally fine by me now. Just the other day, I managed to pick apart an entire poached chicken to put in a pot of soup. Can you imagine how hard it is to pick a chicken one-handed, with a screeching baby on your hip? It is difficult.

always coveting what is on the neighboring circle

Friends loaned us one circle, and then last weekend we ponied up and bought a second one. Sure, it makes walking through our kitchen a bit of a parkour exercise, but I can take that. They will sit in the jungle one and push monkeys back and forth and back and forth. They hop up and down in the green one and smack everything within reach. It is entertaining, especially while I'm drinking coffee.

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Dash rocks his inner Mr. Rogers

Deliciousness

Time to branch out in the food department. After vacationing, the boys got to try their first food. Monday was oat cereal and today was rice. A rosy horizon looms ahead as they will be trying sweet potato sometime this weekend. Thus far they haven't been terribly enthused by the food, finding it more of a game than anything else. I can't blame them....the baby cereal is kind of like licking stamps. Sweet potatoes will blow their minds!

So far feeding the two of them at the same time has been quite the circus. Both want their own spoon, want to cram it in their mouths far enough to gag, then look surprised. Betrayed by tableware! My original plan was to let them feed themselves entirely, but it became obvious that they don't have the coordination to do that at all so for now I'm helping them a bit. (my apologies for the same bib in the pictures. It does make it kind of difficult to tell them apart)

Liam's experience:





Dash:




And my favorite:

Hawaii, you win this time

baby toes!

Hawaii wins in many ways. It's lovely and warm and there are palm trees and exotic foods and parrots everywhere. We tend to go there every spring for Charlie's work vacation. And this year, this year Hawaii defeated us.

Dash wiped out for part of the trip there

I suppose we were optimistic, rakish even to think that over a week in paradise with six month old babies would be....paradise. We did our best but just couldn't last the whole trip. The boys weren't sleeping really and in a hotel you can't exactly relax while they shriek like banshees. It took the two of us full time watching the babies just to survive, which didn't mean any real sleep. Envision this: at 4 am every morning the boys would wake up for the day. We would each take one baby and sit in a chair and try to cuddle our baby to sleep. Sometimes it worked. One morning I had a glorious two hours sleep with Dash on my chest, the most I ever got in a row while we were there. Then inevitably we would end up on our room's patio watching the sun rise and trying to keep the babies from screaming.

Those sunrises were beautiful, really. I usually had Dash, and he loved nothing more than to sit on my lap and watch the palm trees. One morning we ordered a huge pot of coffee for room service. They asked me if I wanted any food and laughed when I groaned no, just the coffee. Lots of it.

taking in the fresh air

Liam's summer shirt

The warm weather was wonderful too. I think the boys were agog to have so many of their body parts exposed. Toes! Legs! Arms! There was a lot of wiggling and toe grabbing. We took them swimming in the salty lagoon a couple of times. Liam really enjoyed the water. Dash, not so sure. He didn't outright scream, but he moaned and groaned.

ready to swim

Liam stayed in a bit longer and enjoyed himself

The final adventure was after we asked to come home a few days early. The people who organized the trip were lovely enough to find us seats on a direct flight the next day, one of the only flights available to get home. The catch: we each had to take a baby in our laps. Middle seat. Six rows apart. Now, on the way out we were spoiled in quite possibly the most crazy way possible. We were on a charter flight, in first class, with four seats. Baby heaven! And for a very first flight it was great. We worried about the babies raising a ruckus, sure, but it was a plane full of our friends. They'd understand if there was a bit of mayhem. On the way home it was strangers cheek to cheek. We managed to trade with our row partners to get the aisle seats (but couldn't sit closer, because you can't have more than one baby in an entire row of the plane and it was packed full). And then we held our breaths. The boys were fantastic. There were a few crying spells but for the most part as long as they were constantly entertained they were quite pleasant.

first-class baby wants to know where his champagne is

By the end of the six hour flight I felt like the court jester to an overlord prone to beheading court jesters at a a whim. Dance, mother, dance! And then we drove home and it was late at night, and the boys went to bed with a bit of screaming and then we sat in the kitchen and ate grilled cheese sandwiches and drank wine. And even though Hawaii won, we still came in second, third, fourth, and fifth place.

winners!

rainy

It's been raining forever I think. I did manage to make another round of pain levain, and it made improvements. I added a bit of dark rye flour and it made a huge difference in taste. The crust was crispier too. Of course there had to be a mishap, and I dorked up one of the steps in the rise process but the loaves didn't turn out leaden. What will happen when I manage to follow all of the directions at once?

On the eve of their six-month birthday, cute boys:

Dash looking out the window at the rain, while chewing on a toy. Always gnawing.

Liam in his chair

I love these wee baby jeans

why, hello

stitchery

I am on a roll! Over the past few weeks I've snuck sewing time in 10 and 15 minute increments and it has finally turned into something.

When I bought my sewing machine a few years ago, I was very excited about it's ability to make awesome buttonholes. I also was keen to try out some free-form machine quilting. I may have inherited my walk and some mannerisms and also a love for olives and cream cheese on english muffins from my mother, but I did not inherit her smashing hand quilting ability.

tipsy owl

Yes, I know that if I quilted as frequently as my mom does I would probably improve. But for now I'm juggling knitting and crocheting and also trying to make that damn bread so getting my hand quilting leveled up is just not going to happen. Enter: la machina. It has this dandy foot that stitch regulates while you glide the fabric underneath. And it is way, way harder than it looks. You can make a serviceable stitch that holds fabric together right out of the gate, but to make it actually look good is proving to be more difficult than I thought.

completely drunken tree

My first project is a blanket for the boys to roll around on while we're in Hawaii. I want to minimize sand-in-baby-crevices, so I used some of my coated fabric for the backing. It's the same stuff that backpacks are made out of so it's water resistant but very malleable. The middle layer is an old Ikea curtain. Then the top is a zany yard of a new Moda print that I love. Owls, yes. I love owls. I basted the layers together (by hand, mom!) and then tried my hand at putting on just enough stitchery to hold the layers together. I tried some outlining, some crazy curlicues, and some sort of straight lines. The end result looks like I sat on my glasses and then proceeded to sew, but it does the job and from a distance you can't really see how crooked and wonky it is. First attempt: satisfactory.

Then because I love having bags for everything, I had to put one together for this too.

other slices

Sometimes I am not covered in babies. It doesn't happen very often, but I try to take advantage of it.

I decided that this year I'm going to master 1) Roasting a Chicken and 2) Pain au Levain.

For the chicken, I have puttered around with a few different recipes but am focusing on the very simple roast from Thomas Keller's Bouchon cookbook. It's a dry roast, just with salt pepper and thyme. I'm not very good at making pan sauces but I am quite good at making mustard so this is perfect. Bake it, let it rest, cut it up, slather with fresh mustard (pink peppercorn is my current favorite). It's not perfect yet, but I think I've gotten skilled enough that it is always tasty.

The bread is a bit more thorny. I've got a reliable sourdough starter living in the fridge, and I've gotten my hands on some french-style high protein flour. I have many bread cookbooks but am using the very detailed Local Breads for instruction. He makes this bread sound more like an animal than a grain, and it feels that complicated sometimes. This type has very precise requirements for humidity, acidity, flour, and the undefined "magic" category. But at the same time you need to roll with the day to figure out how much flour you need and how long it wants to rise. It's a very wet slack dough and I can't work it with my hands so I'm using my mixer. Nice to have my hands free. I think it's actually helping me because I think that the consistency and amount of flour that I would add based on previous experience is detrimental to this bread. You want the dough wet.


First attempt tastes pretty good but is heavy. None of the lovely air bubbles and pockets I was looking for. Made good toast, don't think I would rip off hunks and dip in soup. It's too tough for that. But toasted with butter and honey? Divine.

crumb-y

I enjoy baking bread. We often don't eat it all, and sometimes the loaves come out a little less than tasty because of textural issues. Leftover bits and sometimes those leftover loaves are destined for one thing: breadcrumbs. A basket lined with a tea towel lives behind our bread bin and into that go the ends and stale slices from bread past the tasty point. Last week I baked a pair of loaves and through some vagary of rain or too much kneading the loaves were dry from the get-go. Ok for toast but even I must ration my toast consumption (trivia answer: my favorite food is toast). Part of one loaf and the entirety of another got sliced up and it was past time for breadcrumb making. That little basket was overflowing already.

The usual life cycle of bread-to-crumb is as follows: Uneaten ends of loaves (and whatever may remain of a stale loaf, sliced thinly) gets put in the crumb basket to dry out. Over the course of several weeks, even the hardest thickest end slice becomes a vulnerable dry hunk.

When I have a larger supply (say, an entire loaf not good for eating but fine for crumbs) I slice it thinly and give it a few 10 minute doses in a very low oven. I want to dry it out, not toast it. Then for a few days I spread it out on a clean tea towel on the dining room table to get good and dry. And hope that no one comes over and asks why I have 50 super thin slices of curling dried bread on my table.

Once dry, I employ freezer zip bags and my favorite mallet (a weighted pounder Charlie uses to flatten cutlets) and pound the slices into bits and pieces. I want them relatively small, nothing bigger than a dime.

ready to get out some aggression

Then comes my high tech solution. If you don't have a mixer and a meat grinder attachment, proceed to beat the crap out of your bread pieces until they are small. I use the larger disk on the grinder and some saran wrap to help with the crumbs-all-over problem. This is an effortless way to get your crumbs a uniform small consistency. I used to think that pounding them pretty small was fine, but then realized when cooking that you really want your breadcrumbs to be more of bread dust. The only time you want something larger is with panko, and that's an entirely different creature. So run all of your bread gravel through the grinder and you end up with lovely uniform crumbs.

the white zephyr

Since I'm using homemade bread, I can control the preservative and other chemical content. A bonus is that most of my bread contains a combination of buttermilk, regular milk, flax meal, and frequently a seed mix of flax anise poppy caraway and sesame. The resulting crumbs can only be described as....seasoned. They add zest. They are a secret ingredient in my meatloaf.

the end result

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Liam prefers giraffe meat