Wellbread Mom: September 2007

Monday, September 17, 2007

Hollis Turns 5

Friday was Hollis' fifth birthday. What with his Thomas obsession, he's a pretty easy boy to shop for. He has checked out a book from the library that has a Thomas the Tank Engine shaped birthday cake, and has been talking about one for months. So I thought I'd give it a try. We took pictures so I can use them for leverage when he gets older.

For the cake, I used a recipe from my Joy of Cooking book. It's a quick cake called "Lightning Cake." They say it's a German recipe originally named "Blitztorte," which I actually like better. It's a lemon-flavored yellow cake, but since I forgot to buy lemons, mine was orange instead. I baked a quadruple batch, then put half in a regular sheet-cake pan, and divided the other half between two smaller ones. When they were cool, I just sort of sliced, stacked and carved them, using a ubiquitous Thomas as a model. I used Joy's "Italian Cream Icing" to frost it--at this point, I had to leave to take my first completed quilt to Newtonia to be displayed at the Fall Festival. Laural was here early for the party, so she volunteered to watch kids and mix frosting colors for me.

When I got back, we did a crumb coat in each color (blue, red, black, and a bit of yellow and gray), then slapped the rest on. We call it an "Impressionist Thomas."

Friday, September 7, 2007

Life Again...

Well, another school has started. Liv is in second grade, and next year, Hollis will go to Kindergarten. That's taken up a lot of time and brainpower. Now we have to try to get the kids to bed and up at a reasonable time. Some days we do better than others.

I had the idea to start a group of mostly at-home moms to get together every Wednesday. As a stay-at-home mom with four small kids, I realized that while we may be on top of the things that need to get done every day (or not on top of them), it is really nice to also get a bigger project done occasionally. We recently named ourselved the Prairie Hens, and we've been meeting every week for eight weeks now. I'm very proud of that. We have upholstered, painted, sewed, cleaned and cooked together, and had a great time doing it. Meetings have been much calmer since kids went to school. We went from fourteen kids present to more like six or seven.

I have been able to do some sewing. Yesterday, I fixed up some diapers Lucy gave me that had the FOE (Fold Over Elastic) loose. It took about ten minutes to repair the three diapers. Now I have thirty diapers for two little girls and it is awesome. I no longer wash only when we have the last clean diaper on each bum.

Today I mended some work shorts for Toby. He is really hard on a wardrobe. His shorts always follow a predictable pattern of disintegration: the back pocket where he puts his wallet tears through, the right front pocket edge where he puts his tape measure frays madly, and the back pockets tear through at each top corner, exposing his unders. So, instead of tossing a couple pairs, I did some damage control and hopefully prevention. I made a new pocket for each pair of shorts from a cut-off leg of another pair of jeans. Then I topstitched them into place, putting reinforcement behind the corners where the bartacks are. I also put a small strip on the front pocket edge where the tape measure goes. Oh, and I also hemmed the pair of jeans that were cut off into shorts. I know it's not pretty, but I like the fact that we might get another season or four out of these clothes. It is hard, for some reason, to find shorts or jeans in Toby's size at junk stores, and new is so expensive.