Of kids and lemons

Instead of having fish tonight for dinner we went to Cracker Barrel. No real reason for it other than I was terribly disgusted by the very notion of eating fish and desperately craving steak. It was a mood thing, I guess.

Anyway, we ate dinner and afterward I was sipping a cup of tea when K. started licking the lemon wedge that came with my tea.

Now, when she was a baby we let her lick the lemons because what better way to teach a child that's not the most yummy thing to do, right? Also, the face the kid makes afterward is always funny, and it only gets funnier with the second, third, and even fourth times. It's a learning process and some kids aren't always quick on the uptake. K. was usually pretty quick to decide lemons were not good eating, but for about a year it was always something she had to try again the whenever she saw one.

So tonight A. and I are sitting there looking at K. like she's lost her ever-loving mind, 'cause lets face it, someone reaches over and picks up a juicy wedge of lemon and starts licking it and you can't help but wonder if maybe they have a screw working itself loose. Of course, the eleven-year-old girl child bursts into a fit of giggles and "What??"s accompanied by a few "it's good!!"s.

Now, when she was a baby, it was her father that tormented her as all parents torment their babies. He'd be the one to put the lemon wedges within her tiny little reach. He'd be the one that, after she told him she hit her head on the wall, would ask for a demonstration knowing full well that she'd give it... five times. He'd be the one that would tell her things like pictures were always in color but before a certain year the world was in black and white... and in some areas of the world the color fades, reverting back to black and white until some technician somewhere refilled the color toner cartridges. Ever read "Calvin and Hobbes"? Calvin's dad was the inspiration for many of A.'s amusing little tortures.

Seeing how A. wasn't jumping on this giggling eleven-year-old sucking on a lemon thing with both feet, I figured it was my turn. I offered K. just a bit of sugar on a spoon. Being an eleven-year-old girl deep in puberty, she took it. I told her to chase it down quick with a suck on the lemon she had... and she did it, much to our amusement. After a few minutes I repeated the offer of sugar with another suggestion of a lemon juice chaser... and she took it and did it again. It only happened once more, but only because she'd sucked all the juice out of the lemon and A. really wanted to leave the restaurant.

Well, almost all of the juice. Just before we left the table she took that poor little lemon wedge and squeezed it for all she was worth. It gave her very little juice -- it didn't even fill the spoon halfway -- and what did my darling little girl do? Yup. She stuck that half a spoonful of pure lemon juice in her mouth.

I'm not sure which was funnier, the face she made with the sugar/lemon juice combo or the pure lemon juice.

No, I stand corrected. The face with the pure lemon juice was far funnier.

And now she has requested that I pick up some lemons next time I go to the grocery store. Seriously. The kid wants lemons on a daily basis. And she wants to try a lime, too.

Well, it is a fruit and it's not like she's going to eat too many of them and I can think of far worse things for her to be begging for, so what's a mom to do? I don't know about other moms, but I put lemons on the shopping list for later this week.

A little of everything... update

I want to say hi and welcome to those that have subscribed for mail updates. Hi! And welcome. Thank you for subscribing. I hope you enjoy your stay with me, however long that may be.

Also, I wanted to thank everyone for their recent comments and apologize for not responding. My brain has been a little broken lately. Thanks, and sorry.

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I was digging a recipe out of my inbox on Wednesday when I noticed an email from my mother... only it was routed from my web site. I opened it and found the following words in big blue letters: EXCUSE ME!!! When was "daughter" dropped from your job description?

Come to find out, I've been a daughter for much longer than I've been a wife and mother, so I've changed my occupation on the about me:the basics page to include "daughter". While I was doing that, I made a few other changes, all of which are listed on the updates page.

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Speaking of my mother, a few posts back I said that she had laughed at me for feeding my family beans and hoe cakes for dinner one night. That should be clarified a bit more. She didn't laugh at me, but she did tease me. Normally her good-natured teasing doesn't bother me, and at the time even that teasing didn't. When I said she was laughing at me, I was in a severely bad mood and even the air around me was rubbing me wrong.

Mom did tease, and I did laugh with her, even though she was dreaming about her granddaughter (my daughter) being a malnourished stick body with a big balloon head (something I laughed at my mother for, by the way).

Also, it should be noted that even though my mother teased me about said meal, after she saw the picture of my dinner plate from that night (shown below), she wanted some. She didn't want to cook it, she just wanted me to fix her some.

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Project:movie clearance is progressing right along. In the past few days I've tossed four tapes. It's really funny to pop a tape into the vcr and have the video from one show and the audio from another show play simultaneously. It really is. Two of the tapes that went away were old television episodes. The rest had the movies The Hidden, (most of) Iron Eagle II, (a very badly decayed) Campus Man and Next of Kin.

Only Next of Kin is on the keeper list, though The Hidden was very... very... tempting.

No other cleaning has really been accomplished in the past few days. I've been utterly useless. Today is the last day I'm supposed to use the medicated eye drops, and Tuesday I should be able to wear my contacts again. Tuesday can not get here soon enough for me.

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I did most of the grocery shopping yesterday, and I can say now that I'll undoubtedly go over budget this pay period. On the plus side, my freezer is fully restocked (or will be by Saturday afternoon), so neither I nor A. are complaining.

My only concern is restocking for this year's hurricane season. Though there's very little that I have on hand that I can't cook on a grill (which we need to get, husband) should the power go out, I am a little concerned about what to take (food wise) should we have to evacuate. That's something I'll have to work on in coming days, I suppose.

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Yesterday while grocery shopping, I took the canvas grocery bags. Usually I forget them, but yesterday I remembered to take them. I was so proud of myself.

The "I'm doing good" feeling was short-lived, though. Two of the four stores I went to loaded up the groceries in plastic bags THEN put the loaded plastic bags INTO the canvas bags. Even after I pointed out that the whole reason behind bringing my own bags was to avoid the need for the plastic bags, they insisted on doing it that way. One of the baggers told me that it was store policy for all groceries to be bagged in store bags, even if customers had brought their own. Needless to say, I was a little shocked and a lot disbelieving. I've got a phone call into the day manager for that particular store, but he's yet to return my call.