Author: franciscanmom

Barb Szyszkiewicz is a wife, mom, Secular Franciscan and freelance writer and serves as Editor for CatholicMom.com. Mom to three young adults, she enjoys writing, cooking, and reading. Barb is a music minister at her parish. She is also an avid Notre Dame football and basketball fan. Barb blogs at FranciscanMom.com and shares her family’s favorite recipes with nutrition information for diabetics at www.Cook and Count.wordpress.com.

The Very Hungry Caterpillar

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Tonight for his “bed night story” Little Brother chose his favorite library book, about a robot who builds a dog out of shapes.

He told me that this was his almost favorite book, and that he can’t find his favorite one–The Very Hungry Caterpillar. I looked on his bookshelf and found it for him. I left his lamp on so he could look at the book before going to sleep.

He decided to “read” it to himself. He did pretty well up until the end, where “the caterpillar made a raccoon for his self and turned into a butterfly!”

Pretty soon he will be a schoolboy learning all about what caterpillars do and how they turn into butterflies, and that raccoons have nothing to do with it. Today, I’m going to let it go.

TheDad finds the big “rites of childhood passage” hard to take: first days of school, graduations, things like that. For me, it’s the smaller things, like the day when Middle Sister stopped saying “wotel” instead of “motel” or the day Big Brother learned to correctly pronounce “ambulance.” I enjoy the big days and am proud of my children’s accomplishments. It’s the little moments where they show how grown-up they’re getting–those are the ones that get me.

How to Give SFO Mom a Heart Attack

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I walked into the house about half an hour ago. I no sooner had sorted through the mail than the phone rang. Caller ID said it was my great-aunt.

“Hello?”

My mother yells at me, through the phone, in a very raspy voice, “Why didn’t you call me back?”

“I didn’t know you called.”

“Yes! I called! I left you TWO messages on your answering machine. Why didn’t you call me back?”

“I just walked in the door.”

“But I left you TWO messages!”

“I haven’t had time to check the voice mail yet, Mom. I just came in.”

“OH, you just came in.”

Meanwhile I am thinking that my great-aunt, who had a stroke 18 months ago, is in the hospital or worse, since my mother sounds like she has been crying all morning and now is going all hyper on me….

“So what’s the matter with Great-Aunt?”

“Nothing. She wants to know how you can sell furniture on eBay.”

(She’s moving to an apartment in a retirement community and needs to downsize the furniture from her 3-bedroom house.)

I get extra points for remaining calm and not screaming at my mother for scaring me into thinking that Great-Aunt is having some sort of health crisis, but only wants to get rid of a late-1950s chair and a vintage stereo.

“Call an antique shop, Mom….”

The Melded Books Meme

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Jean at Catholic Fire tagged me for this one. I love books AND word games, so this was a lot of fun.

Here are the rules: Blend two book titles together by using the last word of one title and the first word of the second title. If you want, you can blend the authors’ names too. (I am assuming that I don’t have to actually OWN the books listed.)

Cold Sassy Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Olive Ann Smith

Notes from a Small Island of the Blue Dolphins by Bill O’Dell

When Crickets Cry the Beloved Country by Charles Patton

Their Eyes Were Watching God on a Harley by Zora Neale Brady

How Green Was My Valley of the Dolls by Richard Susann

North of Hope for the Flowers by Jon Paulus

The Coalwood Way of the Wolf by Homer Bell

A Time to Kill a Mockingbird by John Lee

Peace Like a River Runs Through It by Leif Maclean

and my personal favorite:
The Habit of Being and Nothingness by Flannery Sartre

That’s what HE thinks

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Little Brother and Adventure Boy just stomped through the front door after clocking off their regular Worm Maintenance shift.

Little Brother headed to the bathroom to wash his filthy hands, announcing loudly, “We’re not doing any hard work any more.”

Vintage Apron Contest!

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Visit Not Quite June Cleaver to participate in the Vintage Apron Giveaway.

Thinking Ahead to Summer

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One of the things I want to do this summer vacation is really get the Big Kids involved in cooking and meal planning. Sort of “Mom’s Home Ec Class” without the sewing. I want them to learn how to cook simple and healthy meals so that when they are grown and on their own, they can feed themselves!

Middle Sister is very excited about this idea. She already has made a list of 7 “dinner” and 7 “dessert” things she wants to learn to cook:
Chicken pot pie
Pork roast
Pepperoni bread
Homemade pizza
Steak
Spaghetti
Stuffed peppers

Parfait
Apple pie
Lemonade pie
Cake
Ice cream cake
Cupcakes
Homemade onion dip (she classified this as a dessert. That’s my girl!)

Memorial Day

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Visit the group blog, G.I. June (Cleaver) for some thoughts on this observation. I hate to call it a “holiday” because that connotes picnics, not color guards.

Tagged Again!

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The Kitchen Madonna has tagged me for the 8 Random Facts meme. So I will have to think of 8 MORE Random Facts. Bear with me here. I am now going for entertainment value.

1. My favorite color is blue (no surprise there, right?) When I was in college, all the Sisters wore blue. Any student who spent more than an hour a week in church and wore anything blue was immediately targeted by what we used to call the “Sisters’ Committee on Recruitment.” So I stopped wearing blue for 4 years, except for jeans. Now, I go overboard in the other direction. It’s a pretty rare day that I’m not wearing something blue.

2. I am currently “ripping” the tracks from this CD to add to my MP3 player: Millennium Soul Party. Found it at the library. This CD has 20 great tunes!

3. I’m usually cold, so I hate to turn on the air conditioning in the house. I’d rather have all the windows open. However, I am married to my “south polar opposite” so I have to give in on this one. So, I turn on the air, and put on my sweats (blue ones, of course!)

4. On my first date with TheDad, I beat him playing Trivial Pursuit. My friends told me it was a very bad idea to beat a guy at a game. But he married me anyway, 1 year later.

5. I hate to swim. I hate to put on a swimsuit, and not being a good swimmer, I don’t feel confident in the water. This summer Little Brother is going to want to swim in the big pool at our community pool, and I’m dreading it.

6. Even though I hate shower doors, I did not break mine on purpose. We no longer have shower doors.

7. I had one year of Home Economics in grade school. I did very badly in that class–even the cooking part, and I love to cook! But I am more of an instinctive cook, and the teacher didn’t want to work that way. We’d have gotten along a lot better if it were a baking class, since I do follow directions when I bake. And the sewing was a total failure. My sewing ability is limited to attaching merit badges to Boy Scout clothing.

8. I have more recipes and cookbooks than I can use in a lifetime and yet I cannot stop collecting them. Every so often I go through my stack of torn-out recipes and wonder, “Why did I save this one?”

Adventures in Housecleaning: an IM conversation between me and TheDad

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[10:57] I think I just broke the shower doors off their track and can’t figure out how to get them back on…That’s what I get for cleaning the bathtub….

[10:57] We’ll figure it out
[10:58] they are a little fussy. I knocked them off the track once
[10:58] so unless the rollers are broken, we should be OK.

[10:58] It’s off on the bottom, not the top
[10:59] Is this the part where you say “Don’t clean ANYTHING ELSE till I get home”

[10:59] are both doors off or just one?

[10:59] Just one; the other one will not move at all

[11:00] wow…impressive

[11:00] they were looking really clean too

[11:00] is the one off completely?

[11:00] It’s hanging on at the top, and the bottom is definitely out on the one end. Can’t tell on the other end.

[11:00] how did you do that?

[11:01] Windex

[11:01] just rubbing it?

[11:01] Well, there’s a lot of back and forth when cleaning those doors; first I did the inside and then the outside. Fortunately I was on the outside when this happened.

[11:02] reminds me of when you almost fell through the attic in our old house

[11:02] Are you saying that I should not clean unattended?

[11:02] just stay out of the attic!

Night Work, and Why I’m Not Cut Out for It

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I’ve always been a “morning person.” It’s a bad idea for me to hit that snooze button too many times because my best time of day is the morning. Today I made very sure to be up and at ’em at 5:15 because the neighbor kids were coming over at 7, so I needed to jump-start my day a little. (TheDad is supposed to get up at 5 so the alarm was set no earlier than usual–but I had to be inflexible about that snooze button.)

It was a busy day today. I babysat until 10:00 while tidying the dining room and washing the windows, and working up two practice worksheets on the subjunctive mood in Spanish for the student I am tutoring. Then I packed Little Brother’s lunch and we headed to Middle Sister’s school for our lunchroom duty, where I spent two hours tossing slices of pizza onto paper plates, hauling crates of chocolate milk out of the cooler, and wiping tables. I had a little down time after that, until it was time to pick up Middle Sister, take her to the nursing home for her class’s visit with the residents, shop at Walmart with Little Brother until she was done, and bring her back home in time to make and serve dinner and deliver her to her softball game. 15 minutes later I left for my tutoring job.

At that point there wasn’t enough caffeine in the known universe to keep me really alert. It was 6:30 PM and I’d been going, going, going all day. Big mistake. HUGE–as Julia Roberts said in Pretty Woman.

I meet my student at the public library. He’s a senior in high school. Every day that I have tutored him, he’s had curly hair and worn a baseball cap.

I walked into the library, looked around at the crowd and did not see my student. I sat down at the only empty table, behind a young man with very short hair. His back was to me. I picked up the books on reserve for me, started a crossword puzzle, and waited for him to show up. I waited 15 minutes. Just as I was about to get my cell phone out to walk outside and call his home, the young man at the next table turned a little bit–it was my student, with no hat and a very short haircut.

It’s going to take a long time to live this one down. Lucky for me, he graduates in 3 weeks so I will only see him twice more.

Boy, do I wish they’d allow us to bring coffee into the library. Either that, or I wish my student would meet me at 6:30 AM when I’m all kinds of awake and alert.