You'll thank me for not posting a picture on this one. Ivy has had some issues lately with keeping her diaper on her little bum. Many is the time that Maggie comes to us and says "Ivy is a naked bum." But it gets worse. So much worse. Sometimes, she takes off her diaper because she has made a "deposit" in it. Then, we play follow the stench to the diaper. Not my fave game, really.

At some point this weekend, Ivy must have pooped her diaper but left it on. Then she wandered into our sewing room upstairs and...stuck boning into it. Ewww. (We use foot-long pieces of fiberglass rod for the edge boning in our corsets). Monday morning, being the eager corset workers we are, Toby and I discovered several...incidents. Any customers, don't worry, it has been scrubbed and disinfected. But WHAT was she thinking?

Monday, my dad had an appointment with the VA for a test, so Toby and I went with him in case he needed someone to drive him home. Also the test was in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Near my beloved Taco Wagon. So maybe we had a little ulterior motive there.

I first ate at the Taco Wagon the summer I was pregnant with Hollis. Toby had a night-shift job, so I spent a lot of time with Laural and Shannon at the church camp, where they were the cooks. I am still so jealous of anyone who gets to use industrial cooking equipment, even in the most minor way. I would seriously be a lunch lady. I'll grow a mole, I promise.

Um, anyway. I think Dad and I first stopped at the Wagon. It was in Lowell, a little town just north of Springdale, on the road that runs down the middle of all those NWA towns. We saw a dingy little food service trailer with a sign out front that said "La Carreta." It was surrounded by muddy pickup trucks and blue-collar working types. Probably half the clientele was Latino. They served up an asada burrito, wrapped in foil, that was nearly as big as a football. And oh, my gosh, they were good. Nothing but illegal drugs or love could make them taste that good. I think I built Hollis out of those burritos.

Below we see a styrofoam plate with a wrapped virgin burrito, a decimated quesadilla, and the last few bites of my burrito. I had eaten that much before I came to my senses enough to take a picture. Do you see the lovely bits of cilantro and tomato, nestled lovingly into rice and refried beans and studded with chopped bits of steak? And those tortillas are homemade and nearly translucent. Go get a napkin, you're drooling.

That was nearly seven years ago, and my Taco Wagon is still in pretty much the same place, in a succession of dingy little wagons, and always busy. Not everyone in my family shares in my obsession. Laural can't get past the idea of buying something from a wagon and actually eating it. But after his first fresh one a few months ago, Toby is a willing convert. Heck, he thought they were good when I saved him a cold one. Now, since both of us work from home, we can go places together sometimes.

It's kind of hard at a little place like this to find food that we can feed the little girls. It's either too unfamiliar or too messy. Enter the quesadilla. They are also Golden Brown and Delicious. I'm pretty sure that pigs were harmed in the making of those quesadillas. Lard is the only way for them to taste so much like a ray of light and angels singing. Anyway, the little girls obviously enjoyed them.

Today is our Maggie's fourth birthday.


I made her a ruffly little apron and some potholders, while Toby is outside as I type, building a little play kitchen out of nice (and overpriced) plywood. I just went outside to check it out, and I wish my kitchen was so cute.


Maggie and I had an easy delivery and things went great for the first few weeks. Then...not so great. I think I have blocked the true horror of it from my mind, but she was one of those kids who would just cry for hours on end. A heartbroken, frantic, panicked cry. One that made me feel like the most useless mother in the whole world. This continued until about her first birthday. Now, though, Maggie is a sunny little girly girl. She loves to sing to herself and play kitchen and with dolls.
(One of her best songs is "Row, row, row your boat,
Jumping down the stream,
Mary, Mary, Mary, Mary,
Once upon a dream.)
Her favorite movie is The Little Mermaid, but she makes us fast forward past the scary Ursula part at the end. She loves to tell us stories about things that make very little sense to anyone but her. One of the most recent involved a giant who was so tiny you can't see him.

We seem to be a nicknaming family. Maggie is really Margaret, after my Grandma (Mom's mom), but Maggie just seemed to fit a little baby better at the time.
Other nicknames:
Maggie-Moo
Magador
Magador-Spartacus
Magaline
Maggie-B
Magalees
Mags
Maig

In spite of our rocky first year together, she is a very dear little thing and I'm just crazy about her.



Maggie wanted a rainbow birthday cake, and I just saw a link to a tutorial for this kind of thing here. Suffice it to say that we will all be "going" many different interesting colors for a couple of days. I told her it had to have white frosting.We made three cake mixes, then divided the batter into bowls and colored them with gel food coloring. I am just enough of a foodie to not want to waste the effort of a homemade cake on technicolors. We ended up with four rounds, a pan of cupcakes, and a small loaf of rainbow cake. Maybe two was enough. Nothin' like tons of mediocre cake, though.

Oh, and the title refers to the fact that baby ? and I are halfway through the pregnancy-thing this weekend. As Mags would say: "Hooway!"

Well, I'm feeling slightly more optimistic today. I'm feeling kind of proud of myself for saving some very spongy apples from the compost pile. By compost pile, I mean the place under a tree in the backyard where we dump food waste, or slop, as my grandparents called it. Both were children of the Great Depression and very frugal. I love the saying from that era: "Use it up, wear it out, make do, or do without."

They would be proud of our applesauce, and I am proud, too. We cored and peeled about a dozen manky apples, added some bottled lemon juice, and set them on the stove to boil at lunchtime. Mashed 'em when soft and added salt, sugar, and cinnamon and nutmeg. It tasted kind of weak and watery at this point, so we went back upstairs to work, leaving it at a slow simmer. It smelled voluptuous, by the way.

I just tasted the resulting thick and light brown applesauce, and it is not only passable but darn tasty. Nutmeg, freshly grated, is my new favorite spice. So go find some manky veggies and make soup, or make some questionable-apple-applesauce.