love you!

we're pretty sure owen comfortably speaks thousands of words and his receptive understanding of sign language is pretty phenomenal. i'm his mom, so i get to brag, but really i'm just statin' the facts. he's a bit more reserved when it comes to his expressive signs but recently he's been testing them out more frequently. here is one of my favorite signing moments thus far:



and here's owen watching rachel, alex and leah "favorite things":

Pasta with Marinated Tomatoes and Mozzarella

this simple recipe (featured in the "sign of summer" collage to the left) was my favorite from last week's entourage of fresh fare--i used whole wheat linguine for an extra boost and it added a nice nutty flavor and texture.

"pie."

my peaches finally reached the succulence needed to make the peach-blueberry cobbler i'd had tabbed in the july cooking light all week and so without haste i mixed up the perfectly simple recipe and cooked it over at bridgetwest's house as a sweet end to a lovely bbq. here is owen indulging while his best friend... well, watch for yourself and you tell me this isn't one of those moment's you file away and pull out at the wedding reception right before the best man does his toast:

vegas snapshots

here are some highlights from our fabulous vegas trip with the fidlers!

aah. road signs on road trips. what could be better? getting there, of course, and having owen be part of 4 generations of fidlers!


poolside at mandalay bay with grandma isn't so bad either:



and having grandma and grandpa means that anniversary dinner (and picture) and seven years later standing in the spot where without a doubt i said I DO; eat gorgeous sushi at the mirage and indulge in designer truffles with our sister missy at ceasars.

papa's turtle

"look at him go!"

owen went to his first wedding last weekend--at elysian park in los angeles--and he took right to the dance floor the second it filled with all the tipsy bridesmaids:



and then he just went right for the skirts:

shhhhhh.

owen is sleeping in his big boy bed all by himself tonight!

ode to blueberry scones (and of course a bit on choo choo trains)

i'm browsing through the july cooking light with the fresh berry-peach cobbler on the cover and tabbing pages that sound yummy before we go to the farmer's market tomorrow morning. b & w are coming over for coffee first--because michael's french press in the green stelton beats the heck out of the bucks stand in the pavillions or the six dollar sludge at pacific whey-- then we're piling the boys in the red wagon and walking the mile or so up the road to buy fresh peaches and whatever else tastes like summer.

i had so much fun planning the "tea luncheon" for mom's retirement party with my brother and sister in law that i'm eager to get baking and cooking again. martha would be so proud--i dusted off the hors d'oeuvres handbook which is always inspiring and we decided on curried egg salad sandwiches, sesame chicken salad sandwiches and of course those cute little cucumber and cream cheese yummies. sal and jenn assembled the latter with some gorgeous rye bread and perfect sprigs of dill and i made the chicken salad and eggs and we did a pretty impressive assembly line sunday morning. michael was a superstar on owen patrol and even managed to get owen to share his new harvey choo choo train with another two-year old. it was a gorgeous party all areound--dad turned the backyard into a garden resort (which didn't take much effort as i'm pretty sure he has any i.e. botanic garden beat) complete with half a dozen canopies, misters, and fresh cut gerber daisies at each table. i'm kicking myself for not taking pictures of the spread!

per request s & j baked no less than 8 goat cheese, spinach, pine nut, tomato quiches (jenn uses the joy bible and i made about 8 dozen blueberry scones from the cooking aficionados at cooks illustrated. and once again i considered ditching this dissertation thing to bake scones 73 different ways and write witty little food essays to accompany each recipe i brilliantly "rescue." here's the blurb on blueberry scones:

The Problem: Real British scones are like British humor—steeped in tradition, dry as a bone, and often tasteless. The American versions run the gamut from misshapen muffin-like objects to big-as-your-head cakes.

The Goal: We wanted to bring together all the best qualities we found in American versions of scones: the sweetness of a coffeehouse confection; the moist freshness of a muffin; the richness and fruit of clotted cream and jam; and the super-flaky crumb of a good biscuit.

and you want that goal too--so much that you'll follow every painstaking precise step just to come close. but then I like my kitchen gurus a bit bossy--martha, marcella and even jamie back when he still bought groceries on his scooter. Plus, I love a reason to pull out those beautiful kitchen gadgets that have been getting a bit dusty (really though, you should have seen those cucumbers sliced on my matfer mandoline)--my favorite of which is my dualit scale which makes measuring for baking a breeze (mostly i use it to measure cheese for my baked mac & cheese and pasta or rice) as i hate to deal with scooping or spooning flour.

so the best trick--the one i'll try when i make the peach cobbler--is to freeze the butter and then use a box grater rather than cutting butter cubes and dealing with a pastry knife. it worked amazingly well. the only trick is that you have to freeze twice as much butter as you need--peeling the paper off half of the stick so that you have a half to hold while grating.

but i think the secret is in the final prep -- you fold the dough "like a business letter" and then roll flat, spreading the blueberries on top and slightly pressing in the dough. finally you roll the berries up like you would for a cinnamon roll and then flatten and cut into yummy triangles. the pic up at the top is the final result -- golden, sweet, flaky and although the test kitchen promises you won't need clotted cream or preserves they were quite tasty with some lemon curd and then crumbled on top of some vanilla ice cream. but the real sign of approval came from mom herself who sent me this on gtalk about the scones: "it was soooooooo delicious!!!!"

we're home!

exhausted but happy after a crazy but fabulous l.a. wedding - riverside retirement party - vegas roadtrip extravaganza week. but we're home, here in the other oc and not just for a stop-over. michael gets to enjoy the benefits to working with norwegians -- a month holiday! well, more or less. we think of it as an even trade for our twelve weeks abroad he gets four at home (usually he's on a 3-1 schedule: three weeks gone, one week home). just wanted to update the blog from "we're all there" to "he's there and we're here" to a finally "we're all here!". i anticipate many more adventures but of the domestic and local kind ;)

owen plants a garden

... and redecorates the patio. this morning we went out into our "great outdoors" and owen noticed i had our old big round patio table behind the weber and said "mama--put the table here." and really, it seemed like a good idea. so i dragged it out and slid our bench over and it made a lovely coffee table and all that was missing was a few pots of herbs. so i told owen "now we need some soil and herbs." so he sang "soil and herbs" for the rest of the morning until we headed out to get some gardening supplies.

here we are checking out with (sorry sweetie--couldn't resist) some new pillows and gardening gloves to go with our soil and herbs:


back at home, digging soil with the red shovel:

adding decorative details:


and watering:and now it's so cozy out there that i'm nearly inspired to do some gardening at night. i think i'll be content with this bit of nostalgia and watch some foodtv instead to see if there's anything inspirational to do with all our herbs.

waves

somehow my melancholy yesterday must have seeped into the house because when we all woke up--me, sierradog, owen--the whole house was just funky. the bathroom door (the one with all the tp and diapers) had somehow mysteriously locked itself and while i was trying to stick various pointy things in the doorknob (some of which now live there permanently) owen was moaning about the house crawling into all the "naughty" nooks and going down the list of "no, nos" and on my way to intercept i nearly slipped in an early morning couldntwaitformywalk puddle of sierrapee. that was it. it was time to quit moping and mucking about the house sorting through drawers and labeling boxes.

we met b&w at the starbucksformerlyknownasdiedrichs in dana point and grabbed some yummy coldbrew iced coffees, vanilla horizon milk in a box for the boys, some 'bucks picnic catering (pretty impressive actually in a bristol farm's kind of way--nice curried turkey salad, tarragon chicken salad sandwich, very sweet fresh pineapple, and an italian style pasta 'chop') and headed for the "tall ships." and right away it was exactly where we needed to be. after a 2-toddler car crawl and swap along the dock ("west hold pj and hotrod"; "owen going backwards like towmater"; "where is red car?") and many many "peet stops" we made it to the picnic bench perched over the waves--more amazing then any postcard i'd sent home. within minutes we had seen two dolphins, noticed that the water was really seaglass green, and were four on a bench bathed in seaspray. then both boys chased pigeons and drove their cars on the massive rocks (thought of grampa here: "look at that geology!") and we packed up to go through the green cage to the beach.

and here's where all the waves are. really, right in that little cove in dana point--the wave paused, and then drew out again, sighing like a sleeper whose breath comes and goes unconsciously (yes, from that vw masterpiece, the waves) and owen and i threw off our shoes (well, stashed them carefully on a rock lest the tide sweep them away) and ran in and out of the sea screaming "here come the waves! wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!". yeah, we really yelled whee and laughed and jumped and didn't mind a bit when the bathwater ocean soaked us up to our belly button. and we were really happy. and so it didn't matter that owen had a total pre-nap, post sun and salt exhaustion breakdown on the way back to the car because he slept like an angel all the way home and for two hours afterwards. and i cleared away those piles and filled the house with the jars of flowers freshcut from my bursting iceberg roses. and then when he awoke we watered those roses and ourselves and shared frozen stonyfield farm organic strawberry yogurt squeezers (which a fabulous treat even if you don't buy things labeled "squeezers"). and after he went to bed and i came downstairs it seemd like if i didn't open that copy of the waves i'd carried back and forth across two oceans it would all be rather anti-climatic. and so i did!

wow

just checked the michael cam @ 6:48 aalesund time and wow, forgot how bright it is ever so early in the morning (at at midnight, and three am, and four am, and five am)! good morning sweetie!

not so much about ravioli

i was enjoying my trader joe's ricotta spinach ravioli and was thinking about blogging how fabulous it is with one of their heirloom tomatoes for a classic tomato-basil-olive oil combo (and i am now anyhow) but then what's really more interesting than the tomato-kalamata olive oil combo (which again, is quite "delish" as owen's learned to say) is that owen isn't eating any of it. he's pushed his plate aside to play with skarloey and then jumps off his highchair to go get red car and mr. the king and is having cross-dialogue between thomas & friends and cars and then tells me, "mommy, owen wants something else to eat." and i say, "what would you like?" and he says "the station" which means he's done eating here and wants to go back and play with all of thomas' friends, including the station house and cranky the crane and the sodor bridge. and his play amazes me. and i burst into tears. because really it's all too much--right now owen is just right before my eyes becoming this brilliant strategist, this creative genius and just watching him is amazing and i find myself keeping a running list of phrases that surprise me (yesterday, after waking up from a nap he looks at our bedroom wall and says: "that wall is kind of olive green." and i say, "why yes it is!" and he revises his statement with confidence: "mommy, that wall is olive green.") and i want to capture it all on video because i don't want michael to miss a moment (while i was cleaning out the kitchen junk drawer he was sorting his own "junk" and had made piles of like things--three plastic lids lined up: two tupperware, one sippy cup; two mickey mouse icons: one balloon weight, one metal watch case cover; and six plastic forks and spoons in a row). and i know that's the hardest part of it all. it's not me here, walking the dog while owen toddles, jumps, spins behind, ahead, in the bushes ("that's where bees live mama.") because i've figured out how to make coffee, feed the dog and get strawberry and oatmeal going. it's that michael misses it. and then these pictures from bergen pop up on my screensaver slideshow (on my laptop in the kitchen--where our phone used to go) and they're the "now" part of the "here, now" pictures that are my favorites. and i can't stop crying because i remember how after mommy ordered her lemon drop martini and daddy ordered his beer owen ordered himself: "eplemost" (applejuice -- the good kind in the glass bottle, not that icky sugary stuff packaged for kids in the green box) and then said "tusen takk" when he got a green straw in his glass. and it all seems so ridiculously fabulous and yet it all seems to come at such a high cost. the "there" cost. and i want to say all these things at once: how much fun i'm having deciding what train we'll get next as we flip through the "thomas yearbook" and notice that rosie is a new lavender train and no, we don't yet have annie & clarabell; how wonderful it is to have six different melons to choose from at trader joe's and how nicely the orange flesh melon--a not-too-sweet cross between a cantalope and honeydew--cleans up the tomatoey-olive oil left over from my 5-minute ravioli meal; and how we still get the teeniest trace of ocean mist when we set off for our morning walk and how this reminds me of virginia woolf and how i'm looking forward to reading now that i'm actually getting a little bit of evening to myself. and these are the things that make the "here" doable, make "here" where i want to be right now. but then, "here" all seems flat without michael here. and i know it's that the last few days of twelve or twenty days are the hardest. how, just like when owen changed our lives it wasn't the stuff like missed movies and fancy dinner dates but how you'll never ever be able to go to the bathroom alone again or the unbearable guilt and failure you feel when you don't write five pages a day while he's napping. so it isn't about figuring out how to walk and chew gum while he's gone, but just walking and chewing without michael. and now this post has spun out of control, partly because i want to say it all, always, and still be able to do it all, and owen has run in, suddenly dropped his trains and screamed wildly with the joy of figuring out exactly what it was he had wanted: "mommy! owen wants carrot cake!". and as kurt vonnegut would say: so it goes.