krisalis

The internet taught me how to make cake in a cup. So I did.

Tastes pretty good! I think my microwave only needed 2.5min instead of the 3 recommended in the recipe. Also, I added a dash of vanilla to my cake. Mmm.

Mark’s mum gave me a great cake-making book back in February, and I’ve been having fun with it ever since. Here are a few pictures of some recent creations, as well as a couple of shots from Alexander’s birthday cake from March.

I made the bride cake for Natalie, to kick start her batchelorette weekend, and the big pink K was for Kem to celebrate her 50th birthday. The way things worked out, it ended up being best to present both Nat and Kem with their cakes at the gym, right after our morning workout. We earned those early morning slices of cake!

Probably my favourite thing about these cakes is that they actually taste good (if I do say so myself). The recipe is simple yet delicious. A definite hit.

Next time an occasion calls for it, I want to try my hand at making a giant cupcake!

Alexander continues to grow and learn.

This month, he decided that riding in the stroller while we take Rosie for her afternoon walk is completely overrated. The first time he pushed his little truck out the front door while I was getting the stroller ready, and proceeded to walk down the driveway, I thought it was so cute that I just let him keep going. We made it about halfway down the street before turning around and heading for home. The next day, he was adamant that he walk with his truck again, and we made it a little further. And so, day by day, Alexander has walked a little further and further, and now he will walk all the way around the block! He doesn’t always take the truck, and we definitely move faster without it, but no matter how hot he gets or how tired his little legs may be, he won’t let me carry him home. He will sit down on the curb for a little while and have a rest, and then get up and keep on moving again.

Alexander is still obsessed with cars. He greets me when I get home from work with cries of “Car! CAR!”, and does the same to Mark when he arrives home, and to my parents whenever they stop by to visit. He knows that the car needs a key, and will shout “key! car! key!” and point at the keys. He has learned to differentiate cars from trucks (”tuck!”) but sometimes he will call trucks “boats”. When we walk with Rosie in the afternoon, there are often helicopters in the sky nearby (I assume they are headed to Camp Mabry?) and Alexander will point up at them and say “ticka ticka”, which is his word for a ceiling fan - or “car” - his go-to word for all moving objects.

He’s talking more and more. Sometimes I can’t really understand what he is saying, but it always make perfect sense to him, and is often accompanied by little head nods or arm gestures, just like we use when we talk to each other and to him. His retention seems to be increasing too. He points at the clocks and the stars and the cow and the moon and so on when we read “Goodnight Moon” before bed. He will point at the fireplace in the book and say “hot!” and at the kittens and say “doggie”. I keep telling him they are kittens, not doggies, but he just smiles and says doggie again, like, ’silly Mummy doesn’t recognise the doggies’. It’s funny.

Alexander started voicing his appreciation for Elmo this month. He calls Elmo “MELMO!”. He watches the Elmo segment on Sesame Street most mornings while he drinks his morning milk, and I guess the show has made quite an impression on him. We are taking care of Katie’s red fish while she and Marc are in Japan. The first day we brought Crimson Dynamo home, we put him on the dining room table. Alexander was playing in the front room, and I was sorting through the mail when I heard Alexander shouting “MELMO, MELMO, MELMO” over and over again. I walked through to the dining room to see what was going on and found Alexander shouting at the fish, trying to tap against the side of the bowl. He was very decisive that this fish was Elmo. It took me a while to figure out that Elmo has a goldfish, similar to Crimson, featured on every episode. Elmo’s fish is called Dorothy. I think Alexander thinks we have Melmo’s fish!

This month, Alexander finally decided to start eating pasta. He’s generally a good eater, and it has never made any sense to me that he didn’t like/wouldn’t eat spaghetti or lasagna, but figured he’d probably come around eventually. Eventually happened two Saturdays ago, when Alexander decided he wanted to eat my lunch of leftover spaghetti bolognese rather than his sandwich. Since then, he’s eaten all kinds of pasta creations, which is great because it makes it easier for me to feed all 3 of us from the same dinner and also easier to stuff him full of veggies on the sly. We make our spag bog with onions and carrots and mushrooms and spinach and sometimes we’ll put eggplant (aubergine) or other random veggies inside, and we often use wholewheat pasta. He’s also been chowing down on homemade oven baked sweet potato chips and loves drinkable yoghurt. He’s still mad for peaches and strawberries and melon. He likes to eat oatmeal square cereal for breakfast - sometimes he even eats a few pieces off a spoon before tipping the contents of his bowl onto his tray and eating with his fingers.

Alexander loves to play “Piggies”, as in “This little piggy went to market”. He will lift up his feet and wiggle his toes and say “piggy!” to get us to say the rhyme for him, and he starts laughing as soon as we get a couple of words into the final line of “and this little piggy went wee wee wee wee, all the way home!”.

I’m sure there’s more. It seems like there is something new everyday at the moment! But this snapshot will have to do for now.

Here’s a cute video of Alexander stomping around the house in one of his Daddy’s shoes.

Dinner
Originally uploaded by krisalis.

Fish fingers, baked sweet potato fries and peas with a side of ketchup. He even ate some of the peas.

Go Dietgirl Go!
Originally uploaded by krisalis.

I cannot say enough good things about this book.

Shauna’s story of her weight loss journey to healthy living strikes a careful balance between raw emotion and comedy gold. I was instantly drawn to the warmth and honesty of Shauna’s writing, and found myself cheering her on from chapter to chapter, wishing I could step into the book and give her a giant hug as she made progress and faced setbacks.

I read the book from cover to cover in a matter of days, and then re-read it again at a more leisurely pace, savoring my favourite bits. My particular favourite parts revolved around Shauna’s arrival into Edinburgh and also her return visit to Canberra, probably because I lived in Edinburgh for 5 years (a fellow graduate of Edinburgh University’s EE department, like Shauna’s husband Dr. G - just an MEng though, not the grand PhD!), and my husband was born and bred in fine Canberra town, which is where Shauna was living and working before she moved to Scotland.

The Amazing Adventures of Dietgirl was a fun, inspirational read with a serious side. Shauna spins a great yarn, and it was such a pleasure to read her story in full. I know Shauna has reached her original Dietgirl goals, and that make me happy, but I’d rather like to see some sort of sequel! Dietgirl Takes Manhattan, or something! Onwards and upwards Dietgirl! You’re a true hero.

Anti Stroller
Originally uploaded by krisalis.

Alexander does not want to get in the stroller any more when we take Rosie for her evening walk. He wants to walk too, pushing his truck. He can go pretty far too! After a while he gets tired of pushing the truck, but he’s still happy to walk (or run!) all the way home.

Noodle! Boat!

My Firefox 3 has stopped playing embedded videos. I’m running Vista OS. Videos work fine in IE, but I don’t really want to have to open IE each time I want to view a Flickr, YouTube or Facebook vid.

I did a bit of googling, and came up with some suggestions to disable IEview extension. But that solution makes no sense to me, since I don’t believe I ever installed this extension in the first place.

If you have any other suggestions, I’d appreciate your input!

Update: Ooh! Ooh! Installing this media wrap add-on worked - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1879

This has been the month of “car!”

It’s the first thing Alexander says when he wakes up. It’s his greeting whenever he sees Mark or my Mum or Dad. He points them out on the street, in the carpark, on the television. His favourite bedtime story book is the Thomas the Tank Engine book about Thomas’ race with Bertie the Bus. Everyday, he asks to go in the car. He wants to go for a ride to somewhere, anywhere. (Hard to believe this is the same child who used to hate the car!). And he loves to get inside the car, clamber into the driver’s seat and stand behind the steering wheel, pressing all the buttons and levers. He likes to play with his toy cars too, but they pale in comparison to the real deal as far as Alexander is concerned.

Cars are “car!”, buses are “car!”, planes are “car!”, bikes are “car!”. In short, all moving vehicles, all objects with wheels are CAR!

We went on holiday to Chamonix earlier this month, and Alexander really enjoyed his time in the mountains. The journey across was challenging. Alexander was so intent on taking in all the new things going on around him in the airport and on the plane that he stayed awake for 15 hours straight. I don’t even like to be awake for that long. It ended in tears, for both Alexander and me. He was so sad because he was so tired, and I was so sad because he was sad and I couldn’t get him to sleep, and it downward spiralled into us both crying for about 5 minutes until he finally fell asleep in my arms. Once he was asleep, he was completely OUT. It was a fairly short-lived melt down, but felt awful at the time! Poor boy.

Apart from that incident on the outbound journey, Alexander did great on the trip. No real problems with jet lag. He loved all the outdoorsy stuff we did each day. We rode bicycles and did little hikes and clambered all over an assortment of climbing frames and swing sets throughout Chamonix. He seemed to thrive on his temporary holiday schedule that had him heading to bed around 9pm and getting up around 9am (there are full blackout shutters in his room!), instead of his usual 7am-7pm. The shifted schedule meant we were able to eat dinner as a family most evenings. Lovely.

Credit/blame goes to his grandparents for introducing him to the delights of croix de savoie (giant vanilla pastry thingy), french fries, ice cream after every meal, whole peaches, chicken nuggets and Orangina.

Alexander is getting so tall! He’s now tall enough to comfortably open all the doors in the house without standing on tippy toes. He wears all size 2T clothes and his shoe size is a 6.5 or 7! There are 2.5 yr olds in our church playgroup that are the same size as he is at 16 months!

His vocabulary is starting to explode. It seems like he’s using new words each day. Last weekend I went through to the bedroom to get dressed so we could take Rosie for her morning walk all together. Rosie followed me, and I shut the door behind me. Alexander must have followed me too, because he started banging on the door shortly afterwards, shouting “Mummy! Osie! Door!”. Smart kid! He can mimic words we say to him with surprising accuracy when he feels like it. Yet he still chooses to use one word above all others.

CAR!

We went to the Navigli district one evening in Milan for dinner. We sat down at a crowded restaurant, surrounded by native Italians, and proceeded to have one of the most disappointing meals possible. The salads weren’t fresh, the pizza was blah and the wine was undrinkably bad. We needed dessert….