It just goes to show, you never can assume to know what will interest a child. On Saturday Toddler Harbat helped me make our weekly bread. We started off with the whole wheat soaker, and she enjoyed stirring up the flour, mixing in the water and milk, and stirring up the sludge with her own spoon. Then tasting the batter. Then attempting to scoop out handfuls of batter. At which point I suggested that she help out washing dishes. That turned out to be twice as exciting as the breadmaking. She couldn’t get enough of the scrubbers, pots, soap, brushes, and especially the operation of the faucet, all by herself.
Friday was pizza night and we experimented with wilted arugula as a topping. Huzzah! After the pizza was out I topped it with arugula tossed with lemon and olive oil. It provides a perfect tangy counterpoint to the cheese and sauce. This is a keeper, and stem to stern this pizza took about 20 minutes. Considering the no-knead dough takes about twenty minutes once a week or week and a half, and it provides enough dough for 4 pizzas, I’d say this is an unbeatable easy dinner option.
Sunday was rainy, which turned out to be the perfect excuse to stay inside and play with Toddler Harbat all morning in front of the fire. In the afternoon I decided to tackle the garage organizing project again. Four hours later I’d made visible progress, found things we haven’t seen in years, and was again amazed at the stuff we: A)already have but forget it and packed it into a box; B)thought we didn’t have so we bought another and put it in another box then forget both; C)bought when we obviously had loads of discretionary money and no taste; D)bought with a specific use in mind, then the use passed by and we’re left with an unopened and unusable relic. I’d say we could easily jettison a third of what’s in there and never notice or care. Another third is seasonal stuff, and the last third is items of dubious sentimentality. I’ve gone through some but not all of my items, my wife still has plenty to go. Yearbooks, for example, are incredibly heavy, rarely if ever perused, and act as the perfect metaphor for dead weight carted from place to place. Why do we need them? I didn’t care about many of my classmates in seventh grade, am I any more likely to care twenty years later?
Well. Maybe by the end of the year we’ll be able to fit a car in there. Or, I’ll just drive my car in there like a bulldozer and compress all the junk to the far end.
The blog is off tomorrow for bureaucratic maintenance but back on Wednesday with witty anecdotes, pictures of scantily-clad men and women, and thrilling tales of derring-do. Or it’ll be the usual crap.
Writer, architect, father, husband.
Hire that girl out! How much water ended up on the floor–or her? Does it really matter? And the reason we all spend thousands of dollars on toys each year is …why??