I'm sitting and eating potato chips with Cat Vomit Dip (no, you don't make it with cat vomit, it just looks like cat vomit - recipe to follow), and I offer some to Sunny, who has come over for one of her Mommy Re-charge hugs.
"No, Mommy, but can I have some broccoli instead?"
Really, the dip tastes good, and is reasonably healthy, it just looks unappetizing as hell. But I did make her the broccoli, which she and Nemo promptly devoured. Wish their bigger sibs would follow suit.
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Take two cups of baby carrots and slice them very thinly, so that they resemble dimes. Don't slice off your fingers. Top with 3/4 cup of low fat small curd cottage cheese and Catalina salad dressing to taste. Stir well until it resembles, well, something a cat might throw up. It looks hideous, but it does taste good, a point that my college roommate eventually had to concede when I caught her taking a bite behind my back after turning up her nose at it for a year and saying "ooooh, that's good!"
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After test driving and haggling and debating and whatnot, we decided on an 8-passenger Toyota, so we won't have to take two cars any time we need to take my nieces someplace with us. The Honda handled like a dream, more like a sporty car than a minivan, but I didn't fit very well inside it and had a lot more problems with blind spots and with seeing the gauges while I was driving, something I like to do (silly me). So we went with the Toyota. We WANTED one with the upgraded sound system with DVD and bluetooth, but the earliest we could get one is the middle of January, and, well, my transmission is shot now, and I need something earlier. The 8-passengers are going like crazy. So, we are getting an 8-passenger in the proper color without the upgrade stereo, and if the dealer's quote to put it in isn't to our liking, we will, as BigDaddyFish says, take it to Thugz R Us and have it tricked out. So hopefully I should have something safe to transport my kids in sometime around the weekend.
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I had a blue, blue Christmas this year, though I got nice presents and two of my kids proclaimed it the "Best Christmas Ever." I'm just missing my grandfather so very very much and wasn't in a festive mood. My family always gathered at my grandparents' house on Christmas Eve, because my grandmother was a postpartum nurse and always volunteered to work on Christmas Day so that those with young children at home could be there with their kids. This was the first Christmas with them both gone, and last Christmas was so very very painful without my grandmother. I did pull it together enough to stay up til 3 am wrapping presents (what, you think I have time to wrap presents with 4 kids in the house? are you smoking something?) to make it fun for the kids, but not without a river of tears on my part. Next year, to honor my grandfather's memory, we plan to buy a 60lb. bag of peanuts in the shells, put scoops of them in paper sacks, and pass them out to everyone we know and anyone we don't who isn't allergic to peanuts. See here for why. We did get our cans of peanuts this year.
We hope you had a lovely Christmas if that's what you do, and a peaceful day of rest if you don't.
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