Delicious summer food

My mom sent me some recipes from the ABC website that sound delicious: Ribs, Slaw, and Coffee Cake from the Deen Brothers (Paula Deen's sons). I could tell the ribs would be delicious when I saw the first ingredient, dark brown sugar. Yummy.

This got me started looking around for yummy recipes, and I found a delicious one from Southern Living for Spinach-Stuffed Squash. We've had a lot of fresh squash lately, courtesy of my aunt's vegetable garden, and I can't wait to try this one. It has three of my favorites: spinach, squash, and onion.

I need to dig around and find the recipe for my (other) aunt's black bean and corn salsa. It's delicious, and I tried to track it down on the Southern Living site for easy linkage, but couldn't find it. I'm pretty sure she got it from the magazine. They must have a limited number of recipes online to keep people buying the magazine. ;)

Bat houses

I bought Hubs a bat house, and while I am not the sort to want a pet bat AT ALL, I am eager to have bats around, for several reasons. We had a couple of bat houses mounted outside the apartment where we lived right after we got married, because we had a serious mosquito problem outside there. It was miserable because I got bites every time I went out, to get the mail or walk to the bus stop, and bats would have helped. Bats love tasty mosquito snacks! We left those bat houses behind when we moved, hoping that the apartment maintenance guys would recognize what they were and leave them, but no - of course not.

Anyway, I've wanted to get more bat houses since then but haven't been able to find them until I saw some made here, locally, when I was searching etsy. My second reason for wanting bat houses - and bats - is that Hubs thinks they are really cool. That's excellent unless he wants me to pet the baby bat (he tried this once when we were dating - I declined). I like to watch bats as long as they keep my distance. The bats under the Congress Avenue Bridge in Austin, flying out at sunset, are more my style. But the bat houses would be interesting for Hubs, and the kids would likely enjoy the whole thing. Big Girl is already intrigued by the bat house we bought yesterday.

So, the single bat house I bought is great, but I would love to have more, and beyond that I think it would be great for my dad to put some up on the side of the barn and encourage bats to take up residence there. My aunt would FREAK (and I would laugh - because while I'm a bit skittish about bats, she's far beyond that and would be afraid of the bats banding together and conspiring against her or something), but I think it would be great to have them there to help with mosquitoes and provide a good habitat for them. From the reading I've done, I know that good habitats are hard for bats to find, particularly with regular logging and forest management taking out trees where they might live, and I'm in favor of making my environment as friendly to its natural inhabitants as possible.

So, after that long-winded diatribe... I got the bug to find plans for a bat house online, and it looks fairly straightforward. Hubs is busy with school stuff at the moment, and I have surgery next week, but perhaps I can get Hubs and my dad on board for this project in a month or two. This page from the National Wildlife Federation has a great first-person narrative about a woman who built her own bat house, and she really clears up a lot of misconceptions - now I know why bat houses should be placed on poles or buildings, not trees, and why they should be painted dark colors. She used the Economy Bat House Plans from Bat Conservation International, which I'll likely try as well. I also found another site with plans, but I think I should try the simple route first.

Quiet day at our house

The kids and I are enjoying a quiet day at home. I'm planning to do some work on ye ol' dissertation, and Big Girl has some serious coloring plans, as usual. Two was busy stealing her crayons and looking for trouble before I sent him to his room for a nap. It's gray outside, so maybe we'll get rain. Big Girl's herb garden could use it. So far she has harvested two jalapeno peppers and three cherry tomatoes. The cilantro is dying - it started blooming before I noticed and nipped that in the bud, and so now it's dying off. I may try to replace it if there's any more left in the stores. This happened last year as well, but I wasn't able to find any plants this late in the season.

I have the cutest little leotards and pink ballet tights hanging on the drying rack in the kitchen. Big Girl starts dance camp - and another swim camp - next week. I'll have to figure out some way to make sure she gets there on Thursday, since I'll be having my surgery that day. Her little pink leather ballet shoes are adorable, and I'm making her some cute bows to wear in her hair (with her bun!) using some bears wearing tutus. I'll post pictures when I finish them. I need to post a picture of the bow I made her for the 4th of July as well - I was very pleased with how it turned out!

Yesterday the kids and I got a birthday gift for my mom, plus an early anniversary gift for Hubs. We found a local couple who sell on etsy - she sews things, and he makes bird houses and bird feeders. I got a ladybug house for my mom, and a bat house for Hubs, plus a bird feeder for Big Girl to paint for our backyard. Everything seems really sturdy and well-made - I was impressed with the workmanship. The man had several bird feeders that he had already painted, in the colors of various college sports teams, plus a cute John Deere one that Two would have wanted had he seen it. I need to read up on ladybug houses before deciding if we'll paint it, too. I'll be back later to share that information, plus some info on bat houses, with you, dear readers.

This looks (deceptively?) easy - handmade coffee cozy

This flickr set is a tutorial on making a coffee cozy, and I really want to try making one now. I think these would be very cute Christmas gifts! I'll have to try them (you know, in all of my copious free time) and report back with results. This is an ideal combination of my favorite beverage and a crafty-creative procrastination project.

Slow news day here...

We've been big bums so far this holiday weekend. Hubs smoked some delicious ribs yesterday, and we enjoyed some earlier in the day before heading over to my cousin's for a party. Good food and fantastic fireworks there - the fireworks were better than a lot of professional shows I've seen! Big Girl and Two had a fantastic time playing with all of the other kids in attendance, and as usual they think that their cousin has a superb toy collection. She has one of these which they just love:

Mid-post interruption: Big Girl came in, looking sleepy and disheveled, to tell me that her (toy) cat can't go to sleep. I took her back to bed and she told me she would go to sleep, but her cat just didn't want to sleep. I told her she needs to tell him that it's bedtime - hopefully both she and the willful cat will stay in bed now. This is not the first sleep-resistant pop-up visit from her this evening.

So we had a grand time at the party, and Hubs kept Big Girl busy so I could sleep in this morning. She likes to crawl into our bed in the wee hours, but Hubs lured her to the den with the promise of food, and I went back to sleep for two more hours, which was divine. Sometimes he is extremely good to me.
Today we lounged around. Hubs watched programs that did not interest me while I watched a movie on my laptop during the kids' naptime, and aside from Hubs spending some time on studying, we were all generally lazy. We've had a lot of busy days lately, and that combined with the heat tends to wear me out, so I was grateful for a day of rest. Tomorrow promises to be fairly low-key as well. Aside from possibly taking the kids swimming after church, no plans, and that's such a nice thing to do sometimes.

My daughter, a danger to her own health and safety

Big Girl has become a bit wild with the furniture-climbing and bed-jumping lately, and today her antics - trying to climb on my mom's back while my mom and I were wrestling with Two and trying to change his diaper - led to the inevitable injury. She fell off the bed and hit assorted parts on the dresser and floor. It was loud, and very frightening, but she says she feels okay. She has a nice knot on her head, so I'm watching to make sure she doesn't have signs of a concussion - and since she's tired and wants to sleep, I'm annoying her considerably by waking her up to ask her questions, like what her name is and how old she is. We were all scared by her fall, and while my mom and I were tending to Big Girl, Two (in clean diaper) wandered around looking concerned and wondering aloud why his beloved sister was "cwying." For all of their sibling abuse and wrestling, they also can be very sweet and affectionate toward each other.

Fun Read

I raced through a book yesterday, and it was a fun, easy read. Academy X: A Novel is written from the perspective of a male English teacher at an elite private prep school in New York, and while I couldn't exactly relate, a lot of the themes - academic politics, grade-grubbing students, sex-obsessed teenage students who wear skimpy clothing - sounded very familiar. Some of the classroom descriptions sounded a lot like the groups I encountered at my last teaching job, and the academic politics, while a bit more sinister that most of what I encountered, were pretty amusing. It's a short, fun read, and there were a lot of allusions, to Jane Austen and Charles Dickens novels as well as others, that made things fun for me. I have a bit of a weakness for postmodern novels that recycle and/or reimagine classic novels, and while this wasn't the finest of that genre, the way that the central character taught his students Emma while simultaneously using it to question the events in his life, to see if there were parallels, was a neat device. On the whole, I recommend it to anyone with a passing interest in any of the themes I've mentioned.