one hit wonder mama

Vogue

I wish I'd had a camera with me in the bathroom yesterday morning.

Okay, maybe that needs SOME clarification.  I'm all about TMI, but even I have limits. 

I was helping my son Dylan get dressed and ready for church.  So he went potty (see? TMI!), and I put his clothes on, and we washed hands and brushed teeth.  And then, and THEN, he started striking poses in front of the mirror.  Smiling at himself, tilting his head from one side to the other, folding his arms all rapper-like, then stretching out his hands palm-up and raising his eyebrows as if to say, "Who, me?"  Oh my god, THE CUTENESS.  I died.

Where did all this come from?  Dylan's always been cute (I may be somewhat biased, but most onlookers seem to agree with me), but this whole PERSONALITY thing he's getting now is cracking me up.  Well, most of the time.  There is also the ATTITUDE thing that comes with being 3, but since he can't always express himself quite correctly ("You no talk me that, Mommy!"), it's also sort of funny at times.  His growing sense of manners ("Bless you, Mommy" and "I want to say sorry") is amazing to me--I know we're teaching him some of it, and he's getting more at daycare, but it's so strange, really, to see that stuff sinking in and coming back out of his mouth, in the appropriate situations.  There are connections being made behind that adorable face of his, and watching that learning process as it happens is endlessly entertaining and miraculous.

And then there are the moments of pure melted chocolatey goodness, like when he asks for "snuggles" at bedtime, or when he runs up, jumps in my lap, hugs me and tells me I'm beautiful (this would be a stretching of the truth, but I appreciate the thought). 

If I can only have one child, I am so, so glad that I got Dylan.  I can't imagine being any happier.  (Well, he could sleep in past 6AM on weekends, I guess, but I figure that will be resolved eventually.)

She wouldn't stop shaking the bag

We're watching "Finding Nemo" for, oh, the seventeen thousand, four hundred and thirty-sixth time.  Or something like that.  Who's counting? 

Not that I don't love this movie, or all the other movies we watch constantly--I do love them.  (I take care to covertly remove, permanently, any DVD that I cannot stand.  Fifi & the Flowertots, I'm looking at you.)  But I feel like it's sort of unnatural that I can recite nearly entire scripts from any Pixar film.  I think Dory is my favorite character (Ellen Degeneres stole the show!), but Mater is a close second.  And whoever WRITES these scripts is brilliant, because there's really not a dud in the bunch. 

I guess there's one big benefit to my script recall capabilities:  my son, who's 3, thinks I am terribly entertaining.  If all else fails, I can start singing, "Just keep swimming, just keep swimming, just keep swimming, swimming, swimming, what do we do, we swim. . ."  Or I can break out the whale talk.  Either way, he cracks up.  Very helpful skill to have when nothing else is working to break the current tantrum.

Not that we have ANY tantrums around here, or anything.  But I might be having one myself shortly, because a Teletubbies video was just requested.  I haven't managed to get rid of those yet, because while I hate them, my son LOVES THEM with a passion.  Time for Teletubbies, then, I guess.  Thank god for coffee.

Biscuits for breakfast

I made homemade biscuits for breakfast this morning, and they were rockin' good.  At least as good as the ones you'd get at Hardee's or Bojangle's, when they're fresh out of the oven--sky-high, fluffy, buttery, melting in your mouth.  Mmm-mmm.

I used a recipe my mom gave me last week, while I was visiting her new bed & breakfast in Abingdon, VA.  She had some paying guests on the last night I was there, so my son and I got the leftovers from the full-on B&B breakfast she prepared for her guests:  fruit, pork sausage, eggs (all locally grown/raised), homemade muffins and biscuits with butter and her own homemade jam.  YUM.  The biscuits were phenomenal and WAY different from what she'd made when I was a child.  The biscuits of my youth were, um, not so hot.  Small, dense, tough, dry.  Sort of stone-like, really.  I'm not sure if they were a different type of biscuit that's just not supposed to be fluffy, or what.  But whatever she did last week was fabulous, and I asked her for the recipe.  No big secret, really--just a Southern Living recipe from November of 2007.

It's pretty simple:  self-rising flour, butter, and buttermilk.  If you know your way around a kitchen at a basic level and aren't intimidated by a pastry blender or a bit of hand-kneading, you'll do fine with it.  I pretty much followed the recipe with two exceptions:  I halved it, since for a family of 3, we didn't need two dozen biscuits (because trust me, you WILL EAT every single one while they are still warm from the oven); and I didn't chill the butter & flour combination for 10 minutes before adding in the buttermilk.  They were great, and we ate every single one.  Heck, my 3-year-old ate two of them all by himself.  (My husband, who LOVES biscuits and rarely gets them, put away four before they ran out!) 

So give it a whirl.  You can thank me later, once you've finished eating them.  You're welcome.