I'm Gumbo Wash My Hands a Million Times

The following is a true story.

We had a relaxing Sunday going.  One kid was at a sleepover, so we were down to 3.  My hubby slept in, then I took a nap.  It was all so peaceful...

We even went to one of my favorite antique/junk places out near Winchester, and I found a mid-century cheese grater for $2.  I love stuff from the '50s and '60s.

We picked up the missing kid, returned home...

And.  I.  Started.  To.  Cook.  Gumbo.

Not just any gumbo, gumbo from Better Homes and Gardens that I had been planning to cook for a week.  Not only was it going to be my first gumbo attempt, but my first okra experience, AND my second attempt at chorizo.

The first attempt was a broken down, oily, fatty, mess.

New chorizo in hand, more similar to a salami consistency, and I was ready to gumbo.

Now is probably a good time to mention that I'm in love with a smelly grocery store called Food Maxx.  It's one of those "international" stores, but geared mostly towards Hispanic and Asian foods.  The produce is usually awesome.  You can find anything from limes (7 for a $1) to cactus.

Usually awesome.  Remember that.

The gumbo recipe, soon to follow, required not only chorizo and okra, but celery.  Since I was at Food Maxx, I bought the celery there.  It wasn't as large, per se, as celery from Wal-Mart, but it looked good.  I THOUGHT it looked good.

First, of course, I washed my hands.

Since I like to pretend I'm on The Food Network, where they prepare a dish in like 10 minutes because someone has already spent an hour cleaning and chopping everything for them, I started chopping my celery first.

The ends were hollow.  Seriously hollow.  I was slightly perplexed.

According to gardeningknowhow.com, that means that the plant was lacking water.

Well, having never seen a hollow piece of celery, I started cutting off all the hollow pieces.  There was a lot.  Not even thinking twice, I tossed it into the garbage disposal.

Now happy with my celery production, I moved on to cutting up the pepper and onion.

I'm probably at hand wash #3 at this point because I had to let out a cat or change a diaper.

After the pepper and onion, I was on to chorizo, which is oily.

Hand wash 4.  Then I started to cook the chorizo.

Chicken thighs that were supposedly boneless and skinless were next.  Since the chorizo was cooking, I had to probably wash my hands #5, #6, #7, and #8  here in order to go back to stir the chorizo while I was removing some stray fat and bones from the thighs.

Hand wash #9.

Then, once the chorizo was cooked, I added in the okra, onion, pepper, and of course, celery.  I also added the best thing that has ever happened to garlic, Lighthouse Garlic:

It doesn't have to be refrigerated.  You just add some liquid, and it seriously tastes just as good as fresh-peeled garlic.  I don't know what it is out here, but I just can't find any good garlic.  And sometimes I can't use a whole bulb fast enough... so I tried this.  I found it at Food Lion.  I could be paid to promote this stuff.  Love it.

I'm guessing hand wash #10 was somewhere around here.

Then oil and flour to make the roux.  Liquids.  Paprika.  Chicken.

Wash hands again, #11.

At this point, the chicken is cooking in the liquid so it's time to do dishes, right?  I hit the garbage disposal and it shreds all the celery.

Remember that hollow celery?

Then, water starts to fill the sink.  I hit the disposal again, and it turns, but now the sink is filling with shredded celery and water.

At this point, it was time to call in the hubby.  Google took us to The Family Handyman.

It says to plunge the sink.  OK.  Plunge the sink, we can do that.

We get a plunger and start plunging over the disposal.  Air shoots up through the other sink hole, throwing celery bits and grossness up into the other sink.  Water and grossness also starts going into the dishwasher.

So, failure forces us to really read the article:

• Block the other sink hole somehow
• Clamp the hose running to the dishwasher

Seems simple.  I put a stopper in the other side of the sink, and then set a heavy glass bowl on top of it.  Then we realize that we can't clamp the hose to the dishwasher because it's rigid.  My husband has to take it off and shove a rubber glove in the hole, and then hold it.  

Did I mention that he had shoulder surgery and I am in charge of the plunging?

Gag.

I press down on the glass bowl with my left hand, plunge with my right, while my husband sits under my feet, pushing the rubber glove into the hole.

It works.

Celery goes down.  Nasty water goes down.

Hand washes #49 and #50.

Then bleach to clean the sink...

Hand washes #212 and #213.

Lysol wipes to make sure it's all bacteria-free...

Hand washes...

So, we're done, right?  My hands now need some of those dead-skin-eating tiny fish from Asia.  

Then the dog starts puking, so my husband drags him into the kitchen.  

More Lysol wipes, more hand washes.

Oh yeah, and the gumbo was delicious.

P.S., I blame the celery.

Say a prayer for me,

Kristin

My Kitchen is Cleaner Than Yours (Now Eat Your Cat Meatballs)

If there's going to be one part of my house that's organized and clean, it's the kitchen.

Now, don't get me wrong, there's always a pile of papers in a corner somewhere that need to be filed.

  

But when it comes to dishes, they literally eat away at my soul until I get them either washed or in the dishwasher.  And I hate having crumbs on the counters or stove.  It brings out my OCD in the worst way.

I am also an obsessive hand-washer while I cook.  I could literally think of touching an egg and have to wash my hands again - in scalding hot water.  

Why does the kitchen get so much attention?  Probably because we spend so much time in it.  If it isn't clean, then nothing is going to be clean.  Kitchen first.  Other random parts of the house second.

I don't know, I guess the OCD I used to have before marriage and children is grasping onto the kitchen for some sort of life.  My apartment used to look like a model home.  

Sigh.

So it goes.

Now, I've had to give you all this background just so that you know... I have cats.  Three cats.  Shawn, the killer, Gus, the scaredy-cat, and Franky, the grouch.  I also have a dog, Huck, but he gets his fill from the high chair, so he's not important.

Franky pretty much ignores the kitchen (and us, for the most part).  Gus, well... Gus really, really likes sink water.  If there's some sort of bowl or cup in the sink with water in it, he's going to figure out its bouquet, body, and finish.  Shawn is usually out stalking something with a heartbeat, but sometimes he will take an interest in the kitchen, too.  I guess it depends on whether or not he smells something similar to bird, squirrel, mole, or rabbit.

Gag.

So, Gus is the counter-jumper.  This is another reason why I'm an obsessive counter and sink cleaner.  If we leave anything in the sink, he's probably going to check it out.  That's just gross.  No one wants a cat on the counter. 

Let me just say, though, that if you think your cat doesn't get on your counter... HAHAHAHAHAHA!

Your cat is just smarter than you, and does it when you aren't around.  Gus is stupid.  Yep.  Squishy and stupid.

I make a lot of food for families in need, and I've always felt like I want my kitchen to be ULTRA-clean when I make food for them.  You know, just like their kitchens should be if they made food for my family.  I'm so used to fearing the cats on the counter, that I rarely leave anything unattended in the kitchen once I start cooking.  If I do, I cover it.

Fast forward to last night's meal: 

Per Better Homes and Gardens

I prepped everything, and was about halfway done rolling the meatballs when I had to go downstairs to email an insurance document to one of my customers.  

I just walked away.

I came back about 4 minutes later, and Gus flashed out of the kitchen and ran towards the front door.  He literally moved so quickly that I couldn't even tell where he was.  Sink water?  Meatball mix?  Finished meatballs?

Thankfully, they weren't going to be eaten by anyone other than my family.

Executive decision?  Eat them.  Cooking them will remove any cat germs, right?

Sigh.  Again.

Well, just in case you're interested, I doubled the recipe but tripled the sauce:

I really need to work on my plating skills.

It's definitely easy.  My only recommendation, if you're going to try this for dinner instead of an appetizer like we did, is to cut the soy sauce maybe in half.  It's a lot when you put it in a pita.  It makes more sense as one little appetizer bite, but let's be real, how many times a year do you make appetizers?  I'll probably make this again sometime.  It was a good change of pace.

I will file it under "C", for, well... you know.  We'll call it the secret ingredient, because it's a secret as to whether or not it was even in the recipe.

Yum!

P.S. What kind of witchcraft is required to keep your meatballs round?  I just don't understand how to physically do that.

P.P.S. What was the world like before Lysol Wipes?  Did I ever clean anything?

Say a prayer for me, 

Kristin

The Worst Torture

The most common form of torture in our house is simple, yet effective.

Sleep deprivation.

Some sites date the use of sleep deprivation as torture back to the Catholic Inquisition in the 1400s.  I don't think you can really say that any one person invented it, though.  Terrorist #4 still poops in her diaper and can't go up and down the stairs by herself, but she has somehow become an expert at it.

I was up at 5:45am this morning due to moans coming through the baby monitor.  Our alarm doesn't go off until 6:30.  Ughhhhhhhhh.

On Monday night, she began moaning sometime around 3am.  I have the baby monitor turned down pretty low, so I tried to sleep through most of it.  Of course, that still means waking up every 10 minutes just to toss and turn.

I finally got up at 5:30am, deciding that I couldn't handle the moaning anymore and I'd give in to the Terrorist's demands.  She got half a bottle of milk, and went happily back to sleep.  All I could think about was that I only had one hour until the alarm was going to go off.  I got back in bed for about 15 minutes and then decided to just get up.  I knew my night was over.

I really, REALLY hate trying to sleep on a schedule.  If I know that I only have a certain amount of time to sleep, I cannot fall asleep.  Does anyone else do this?  It is literally the stupidest thing in the world.  If I have. say, an hour and a half to nap, it takes me 45 minutes just to fall asleep because I worry that I only have an hour and a half!

It's not the terrorists' fault that I do this, but I can still blame it on them.  They pushed the deprivation on me when I was pregnant 10 years ago, and it never let up.

Every child has taken at least a year to sleep through the night.

Every.  Single.  Terrorist.

Terrorist #4 will be 2 in February, making her almost exactly 21 months old.  She still gets up about 50% of the time to eat half a bottle sometime in the middle of the night.  It definitely helps her maintain her chubby thighs, but it doesn't help me with my sanity.

And if she sleeps through the night, then someone else has a coughing fit. Or pukes.  Or the ghost turns on the bathroom light in the hallway.

According to good ol' Wikipedia, I can blame sleep deprivation on lots of my problems:

Häggström, Mikael. "Medical gallery of Mikael Häggström 2014".Wikiversity Journal of Medicine 1 (2). DOI:10.15347/wjm/2014.008. ISSN 20018762. 

Let's see...

• Irritability - check
• Cognitive impairment - check
• Memory lapses - triple check
• Impaired immune system - check
• Decreased temperature - check
• Risk of obesity - shoot me

What the terrorists don't realize is that torturing us just tortures them in return.  It's not a very good plan for them.  If we're too tired or in a bad mood, that's not going to help get them to Monkey Joe's or Chuck E Cheese.

Maybe one day the terrorists will realize that torturing us is not in their best interest.

Yet, my inner cynic thinks that maybe they've been bought off by the coffee industry.  If that's the case, then they've already won.

I hope that they at least got enough to pay for college.

Say a prayer for me,

Kristin

Not My Mom's Laundry

I hate laundry.  If you like laundry, feel free to come over to my house and go wild.  I'll give you my address.

With the terrorists ranging in age from 1 to 9 right now, I simply cannot imagine what life is going to be like in about 5 years, with adult-sized clothes to wash.  For real... it blows my mind.

I was out of laundry detergent last week for about 2 days.  It's almost like a forced vacation.  Does anyone else get that feeling?  The baby drips milk all over her bed, creating tiny milk bombs with her tiny terrorist hands... too bad!  Can't wash it.  There's a booger on a blanket?  Oh well, just throw it on the laundry room floor!

It's sort of a surreal feeling.

The problem is, with 6 people getting clothes dirty every day, once you stop for a couple days, it's hard to get back into the swing of things.  It's like missing the gym for a week and then trying to force your butt back onto the treadmill.

Yuck.

I've read all sorts of blogs about how to make laundry... [gulp]... "enjoyable".

No matter how many times I watch it, I cannot figure out how to fold a fitted sheet.

And no, I don't iron.  Anything.  Period.  If I can't spray God's gift to mothers (otherwise known as Downy Wrinkle Release) on it to fix it, then it's going to find itself in a donation bag rather quickly.  I can be a Laundry Ninja at times, grabbing things out of the dryer right at the exact moment before wrinkles set in.  Chances are, though, that it's going to sit there for an hour... or a day... and there's going to be wrinkles.

Due to the above, I love synthetic fabrics.  Yep, shoot me.

Note for the record, my mom would iron my t-shirts.  She still routinely strips my children at her house to iron their clothes.

Just.  Because.  She.  Can.

I cannot allow my children to wash or fold or put their own clothing away yet.  They are still too little to manage all of that... or at least, they pretend to be.

I have let go of so much of my OCD since having children, yet the one thing that still drives me crazy is messy drawers.  One blogger said to just relinquish control to the terrorists.  If they want messy drawers, then let them do it.  We tried it for a couple weeks, but I cracked.  None of my children folded their clothes, so each one just had wads of clothing crumpled up in their drawers.  No one could close them.  No one could find anything.  It was awful.  I resumed folding and putting away duties.

I still threaten to make them fold and put their own clothes away once a week, as I have to re-fold half the drawer just to add new laundry to it.  They probably know I'm bluffing though.

So it goes.

My 9-year old and my 6-year old boys are wearing almost the same sizes.  One thing that has really simplified my life, which came from the same blog that said to let the kids put their own clothes away, is to wash everyone's clothes separately.  That's right.  One person at a time.  Now, granted, my husband and I share a basket so I wash ours together.  But for the kids, only one kid at a time.  That means when it comes to folding, there's no sorting!  You can turn on auto-pilot and fold away, not having to figure out whose shirt is whose, or whose socks are whose.

In order to do one person at a time, you do have to let go of some things.  I literally dump the whole hamper in at once.  That means, everything is going in the same water temp and the same cycle.  Of course, there are always going to be things that need separate stain treating or maybe bleach, but for the most part, if it doesn't all go together, then it can't handle being in my house.

I'm sure this would make my mom shudder.  No cycle of darks.  No cycle of lights.  No cycle of whites.  No cycle of just kitchen towels (yes, she does that).

I do have hot water loads with towels and such, but the kids pretty much get cold water, and that's it.

You do have to make sure that there's a good 10 or so days worth of clothing for each child, at least when they are little.  It takes at least a week to fill up a load, so I only wash their clothes once a week.  I'm guessing this will be twice a week once they get older, but then it will become their own chore... and I'll pick up some hobbies.

Reading.

Knitting.

Watching Felicity re-runs.

Let's be honest.  I am no laundry expert.  If some stain treating doesn't work, it's going to either end up in the trash or be declared "play clothes".  I am not one to get super-creative in order to make a pair of baseball pants look like new.

And most of the time, the clean clothes stay in the hamper in my bedroom... until it's time to wash the next load.

So, if you see a kid with permanent dirt stains on their white baseball pants, think of me.  That might be my kid.  Keep in mind, though, I washed them at least twice and stain treated them.

Did I bother with bleach?  Probably not.

Say a prayer for me,

Kristin

THEREHEIS! (aka, I See Dead People)

Let's just say, I believe in ghosts.

How much do I believe in ghosts?  Well, I recently moved our big king-size bed to a really awkward position in our tiny bedroom just so that I don't have the ability to look down the hallway at night.  This was, of course, after sleeping with our pillows at the bottom of our bed for months so that I couldn't see down that darn hallway.

I literally have to suck in to scoot down the wall to get in bed now.  And it's totally worth it.

My husband, Charles, is an extremely patient man.

Why do I hate the hallway so much?  Well, this house was built in the '50s.  It has window units for A/C and gas baseboard heat.  It makes a lot of... noises.  It also has sensor lighting in the bathrooms.  All you have to do is walk in, and the light and fan turn on automatically.

I was hearing noises.  The bathroom light would go on.  No one would be in the bathroom.

Gulp.

My first ghost experience happened during our honeymoon.  We were on a Disney cruise.  We were laughing because it was the last night of the cruise, and they asked us to give them feedback on anything "magical" that had happened during the cruise.

Ha!  Magical!  A hurricane hit Florida right as we were supposed to start our honeymoon.  Everything we had scheduled on our cruise had been cancelled.  No para-sailing.  No glass-bottom boat ride.  No trip to the Disney island, Castaway Cay.  It was basically a crappy 3-day trip to ugly Nassau, and that's it.

When we went to bed on the ship that last night, it was windy so the boat was a little creaky.  My husband also has some clicky joints, so when I heard a click in the middle of the night, I had two choices: either the boat was making a noise or Charles was going to the bathroom.

I looked out past the bed, and saw Charles.

So, I moved to cover back up and my arm hit something.  It was Charles.  Beside me.  Asleep in bed.

I looked back out to the foot of the bed.  The person was staring at me.  He wasn't moving.

Not.  Magical.

I was silently freaking out.  I thought that someone was robbing us.  I didn't know what to do.

After what felt like a lifetime, the stare-down ended and the person went towards the door.  I waited and waited for the sound of the big cabin door, but heard nothing.  I finally woke Charles up and had him check all around the cabin.  I was convinced that we were being robbed by some sort of cat burglar.  I could even tell he had on pants and a collared short-sleeve shirt.

Charles found nothing.  No trick doors.  No person hiding in the closet.

It was something.  I definitely saw something... or someone.

In our old house, I thought I saw a man once in the middle of the night.  I also used to hear voices, but could never rule out the central air.  Our babysitter once said she saw an old woman at the top of our stairs.  Fun stuff.

I used to help out at a local wedding venue on Friday nights for rehearsals.  It is an old plantation house with a new ballroom and commercial kitchen built onto it.  After the rehearsal, I had to lock up all the doors with padlocks and turn off all the lights.  There were literally a half a dozen doors to chain up, if not more, that I'd be working on in the dark.  The place had no exterior lighting in the front, so it was always pitch black with the lights out, minus the glow of Exit signs.  When the ballroom lights were off, birds would fly into the glass.

BAM!  BAM!  BAM-BAM!

BAM!

One night, I went to check something across the dance floor, and as I walked by the women's restroom, I heard the paper towel dispenser go off.  It was one of those ones where you wave your hand in front to get the towel to come out.  I had just checked the room a couple minutes before to turn off all the lights.  No.  One.  Was.  In.  There.

I checked out of that place faster than I had ever moved in my life.

Did I mention that when I was younger, I literally slept through a bomb going off outside my window?  A kid bombed my neighbor's car, complete with sirens and fire trucks... and I didn't even wake up.

Now I can wake up to a mouse fart.

I blame the terrorists.

I need to also mention that terrorist #2 likes to walk into our room and stand beside us, with her hair all in front of her face.  She says that if we don't wake up after a while, she just goes back to bed.  Yeah, if that's not terrifying, I don't know what is.  I'm sure she's going to give one of us a heart attack one of these days.

And, within this past week, terrorist #4 has started to to point into thin air and say, "thereheis!" - i.e., "there he is!"  She used to only do this if you asked where someone was... like, "where is Calvin?"  She'll look for him and then point at him and say, "thereheis!"  Now... she points at nothing.

What the heck?

Say a prayer for us,

Kristin