Some Blog Site

We got our kids new toothbrushes a few weeks ago. It turns out that one of the toothbrushes has a new feature – a suction cup built into the end.

I thought it might have some practical use, but once a 5-year-old discovers what it can do,

your house

will never

be the same.

In cooperation with LaanyKidsMom, here are some entries for this week.

• Quotes
  Our oldest found out that ketchup does not go well with strawberries.
  I said “Ketchup goes well with french fries.”
  Response from the oldest: “Caramel goes on fries”
  And the 3YO chimed in with “And caramel goes on the road if you want it to be brown!”

  Yes, it could.

  What else has brought me joy this week?

• Driving Advice
  I have started getting driving advice from my kids, thanks in part to racing games on the Game Cube.

  “Go faster.”
  “Yeah, turn on rocket power!”
  To which I had to reply with “no, our minivan does not have rocket power.”

  One more

• You Know, That Thing…
  Another thing that made me smile was this conversation I overheard somewhere (park?, grocery store?):
  Parent: You move slower than molasses!
  Child: What’s molasses?
  Parent: Something that … moves slowly.

We had been meaning to make ice cream with the boys all summer, but summer was too busy (or too lazy, take your pick) so we never did that. They did manage to make ice cream with their grandmother, but that was during the day while I was at work, so I didn’t get any of it.

Now that it is the day after Labor Day and school has started, we finally made ice cream at our house. The recipe that we used calls for zip-type plastic baggies, a cheap substitute for the near-indestructible wood and metal ice cream maker that my parents used when I was a kid.

For those not familiar with the plastic-bag method: pour the ingredients into a small plastic bag and seal it, put ice and salt and the small plastic bag into a large plastic bag and seal it, then shake/roll/toss the large plastic bag for several minutes. Here is a picture of the first step.

Apparently, it went fine the first time the kids tried it, at their grandmother’s house. Today, I got to try it with them here, after dinner (“you kids want dessert? Okay, but you have to make it yourselves.”)

Our recipe didn’t say anything about double-bagging the ice cream mixture. I highly recommend using two bags for the ice cream and two bags for the brine solution.

“Why?” you ask.

One reason is that we inadvertently got the extra-pointy ice from our freezer. A couple minutes into the last step, I noticed that the salt/ice mixture was turning brown. I was making chocolate ice cream, and I expected the chocolate to stay in the ice cream. The zip fastener was sealed (I checked), so I just kept going and hoped that the salt wasn’t leaking into the ice cream.

Another reason is that the table was getting wet while I was trying to get the ice cream to freeze. At first it was no big deal – I figured it was just condensation. But the other bag didn’t have that problem. My wife held up the bag and we watched it drip, drip, drip. We double-bagged the whole thing and didn’t have any more problems.

Just double-bag everything beforehand. Or pay extra for the high-quality dull ice. Or just use an old-school, industrial-strength ice cream machine.

One more thing – rinse off the ice cream baggies after you take them out of the brine. The middle child made it about halfway through his ice cream and then was done eating. I hated to see ice cream go to waste, so I started eating it. I took 3 bites, and 2 of them had a granule of salt. Biting into a chunk of salt is not good when you’re expecting strawberry ice cream flavor. I don’t know that biting into a chunk of salt is a good idea any other time either.

Double bagging may help with keeping the salt off the inner bag, but I’d still recommend rinsing off the ice cream bag. Hint: use cold water, otherwise you’ll undo all the work that it took to make the ice cream.

As you may have noticed, I changed the background picture of SBS again. Back to the fall shot of leaves in the yard.

Football has resumed, and has brought with it a thousand pleasant memories of the start of school. I will again be updating the Football Happiness Calculator, so check your mood on Mondays throughout the fall and early winter. Or don’t. I’m not keeping track.

But in the interest of summarizing my summer (would that be summerizing?), I give you these pictures.

First up, a day at the beach.

We had a week at one beach and another week (in a different month) at another beach. My kids had swimming lessons at the beginning of summer, and showed remarkable improvement from before the lessons to after. You can tell it was remarkable improvement because I just made a remark about it. So now my kids wander into the water without life jackets sometimes. They spent most of their time in the sand, building moats, castles, and other formations that were easily destroyed by wind, water, or mischievous cousins.

Next, a parade.

Regular readers of this site will note my displeasure of sirens in parades, and what better picture to show that than this? This picture was taken about a month and a half after I wrote about toning down the sirens. And I didn’t tell my kids to do that. They just instinctively know that loud sirens are bad for them. Just like any adult should also know. Or maybe my kids learned it from watching me.

Finally, the quintessential summer day. I’ll have to look up the etymology of quintessential. Mainly, what does “most representative” have to do with necessary fives?

Anyway, I like this picture because it shows what a good summer day should have. Swimsuits, a sprinkler, and freezy pops. This was one of the hottest days of the year and we, just like a million other people, thought we should go to the local water park. Since the water park was filled to capacity and had a waiting list (i.e. line down the sidewalk of people standing around and praying for people inside the water park to leave), we just went to the back yard and let the kids play while we did a lot of nothing. My nothing involved a nap on a hammock.

Okay, I looked up quintessential. And I got nothing. But it did point me to quintessence, which had a lot. It does mean “fifth element”, and is not related to the 1997 Bruce Willis movie (as someone at work once told me, “I’ll save you some time. Don’t go see the movie – the fifth element is love.”). But according to ancient philosophies, the fifth element is not love, it is ether (or aether or æther but no one really uses the æ thing anymore, much less knows how to pronounce it).

The first four classical elements are earth, water, air, and fire – all natural items seen on our planet. Ether was for the rest of the universe. I haven’t figured out how Earth, Wind, and Fire fits in here and why they shun water.

Since the normal website for this topic is not suitable for all ages, I thought I would contribute things I heard this week at my workplace.

• Employee: “Hahahahaha… I know better than to do this, but I’m going to send this to you.”

  Okay, Ethics 101 here. If you know something is wrong and do it anyway, you are usually worse off legally than if you didn’t know it was wrong. No, I don’t know who it was who said that. Where I am, I can hear the sounds from a lot of different cubicles. I could tell you the general direction (it came from over there), but that’s about it.

• Employee: “You know, if you tell your girlfriend that her dead cat never loved her, that really [irks her].”

  The editor had to intervene on the last part of that sentence, but you get the general idea. My co-worker and I overheard that one and just started laughing. I think it is funny mainly because I was left wondering why someone would say that. What was the background there? I could ask, I suppose, but I think it’s better not knowing.

• Someone brought his kids into work for a short time, maybe around lunch, and we heard a baby or small child crying.
  Child: “waaaaaaah”
  Engineer: “New program manager…”

  When someone brings small children, especially babies, into the engineering office, that usually prompts a number of jokes.

Side note: did you ever wonder about the phrase “a little bird told me”? Today’s verse, below, shows that the Israelites had that same phrase a few thousand years ago.

As you learned from yesterday’s post, I took the kids raspberry picking (this year went much better than last year).

And a week before that, we went blueberry picking.

After having experienced both, I will say, contrary to my longstanding view that raspberries are the best fresh fruit, that if you have your choice you should take kids blueberry picking instead of raspberry picking. Here are some reasons why:

• Blueberry plants are friendly. Blueberry bushes don’t hurt you. Raspberry plants have thorns, which causes children to avoid picking the fruit, leaving you to do all the work.
• Blueberries are sturdier. Kids can easily pick blueberries without squishing them. Grab the berry and pull. Raspberries are too delicate for those with not-so-fine motor skills.
• Blueberries are sturdier. I know I already used that point, but it has another aspect: you can pile the bucket full of blueberries and the berries at the bottom will be just fine. Kids can carry a bucket a lot easier than a shallow tray (“No, don’t tip it!”).
• Blueberries are sturdier. Last one with this heading, I promise. Raspberries almost, almost, collapse under their own weight. Drop a ripe blueberry from the table onto the floor, and it bounces nicely. Drop a ripe raspberry on the floor, and it splats. Now when you get home from your picking and your children want to help you wash and sort the fruit into containers for the fridge, which berry would you rather they handle?
• One vote for blueberries is that they don’t spoil so easily. The raspberries that seemed perfect a picking time were too ripe about an hour later, when I was washing and sorting them. Next time we pick raspberries, I am going to pick the ones that are not quite ripe. That way, they’ll be good when we get home. The blueberries stay good for a week or two at home after picking, but raspberries fade quickly after a couple of days.
• The other vote for blueberries: all the kids like them. Our middle child doesn’t really like raspberries, but he’ll eat a bowl full of blueberries quite readily. Note: If you are in charge of watching him, then don’t actually let him eat a whole bowl of blueberries. It’s not good on the digestive system.
• Oh, and blueberries are cheaper too. Blueberries were $1.60 per pound and raspberries were $3.75 per pound.

And now, some gratuitous close-up shots of fruit, compliments of the macro setting on my camera…