Exhausted Parents' Rant Against Standard Time (EPRAST)

Let's take a trip back in history, shall we? Circa 5 years before kids. End of daylight savings time? No prob. In fact, an event not unanticipated with some degree of hope: the magical extra hour of sleep, combined (at least for some time) with not waking up to such complete darkness every morning.

Let's now shake off those memories and come back to today: the official end of daylight savings time. It goes something like this:
5:23 am. Vasco cheerily walks into our bedroom. I sob (my turn to get up with the kids today), and try to convince Vasco it is still the middle of the night (it feels like it!!! it looks like it!!), and Mike bravely walks him back to his bed. Mike returns in a few minutes, sanz Vasco, and a delicous quietness settles in, which makes me drool from excitement as I fall -- no, plummet! --back to sleep.
6:33 am. "Mommy?" I fall out of bed, decide against the extra effort of grabbing my glasses, and stumble-run-Elaine-dance over to the kids' room and flop myself on Vasco's bed. "Honey, 10 more minutes and you can get up." The stealthy surprise attack must have confused him for a few minutes (which I gratefully use to happily sleep-drool on his stuffed animals I am cleverly using as a pillow!), but then he recovers: "Mommy, can I get up?" I ask, desperation and hope intricately mixed in my voice: "You are not sleepy? There is no way you are falling back asleep?"... 2 minutes later we are in the kitchen, pouring cereal. As I set the clocks back on various timers in the kitchen, back to 6:59 am, I quietly weep.
What follows is a list of what transpired next: baking a cake layer (tomorrow is Mike's birthday), cartoons, Sunday school, a long run (me), hardware store trip, lunch, random tree/bush climbing, a long run (Mike), my pure genius potato stamp crafts (which would have been much more successful had we not run out of paint to dip them in 3 weeks ago!), run to the store for eggs, second cake layer baked. Club houses constructed from dining room chairs and blankets, the destruction of the couch, and an apparent relocation of every single book from the bookcase.

I look at the clock: it winks and it mocks me: 3:15???!!! ARE YOU KIDDING????!!!

At 5:10pm, as we are already enveloped in midnight-quality darkness, I am making dinner as Mike prepares our "comfort juice" (aka Mike's homemade ROCKING margaritas).

So here I am at 6:15, said dinner and margarita consumed, sharing a rant, and half-laughing, half-sobbing at Mike's attempt at humor: "Okay, kids, only 69 minutes till bath time".

Happy Halloween!

The kids have been going full force since 7:14am...and I am not kidding.. fell asleep as soon as I turned the lights off in their room. 14 hours of Halloween! :)

Financial Markets, High School, and Pumpkins

Yipes! It's been too long to even try to catch up... Financial crises have been keeping me busy at work, as our division is shrinking even as work is tripling..Today I witnessed the following conversation:

Boss 1: "I need her to work on my project for today and tomorrow full time!"
Boss 2: "But... (to me) how much more time do you need to finish my project?"
Me: "Ummm.... 40 minutes?"
Boss 2: "Can I have 40 minutes between today and tomorrow?"
Boss 1: "I guess.... but only 40 minutes!"
Boss 1 and Boss 2: "Maybe we can split her in two! Ha ha ha!"
Boss 2: "But I want the right hand! Ha ha ha!"
Me: "Help!"

And its not that I am so irreplaceable, it's just that 1) we are so crazy short-staffed, and 2) the world has gone so completely crazy. Our projections seem to have a shelf-life of exactly 243 minutes lately.

But back to the conversation that made me log on today.
We have since graduated to separate baths (which is a separate story), so while I was giving Justine her bath, the following conversation transpired:
J: "I'm going to be in Kindergarten next?"
Me: "Yes, but next year: now it's winter, then it will be spring, then summer, and only then it will be time for Kindergarten"
J: "Why?"
Me: "Because you need to be 5 to go to Kindergarten."
J: "Oh. I'm going to be 5 in Kindergarten, and 6 in first grade?"
Me: (totally impressed at her sequential ordering skills) "Yes!"
J: "And then high school?"
Me: (fainting at the concept of Justine in high school): "Um... let's not rush that yet!!"
J: "But where is high school? Long drive?"

It seems like yesterday that they were learning to walk! Today they say goodbye to me by the car at the curb as they run into school all by themselves, with their friends, and their school lunches, and their grown up language and goofy jokes (Vasco's favorite is "Why did the cookie go to the hospital?" you should ask him some time). Luckily I still get a giant juicy smack-on-the-lips kiss before they run off, but I suspect that by the time they make it to high school that will no longer be cool...

***

Banitsa

Given the enormous amounts of Bulgarian feta cheese (sirene/сирене) consumed during our vacation, we needed to wean ourselves from it ever so slowly. So, despite stuffing my face with banitsa practically until they were closing the doors on the plane (Cabin crew, cross-check doors and lady in 4B, stop with the cheese already!!!), we had to just whip up another batch.
Here is the pictorial:

You'll need:

1) 4 eggs, 1 teaspoon baking powder, 6 oz of plain yogurt (eye of 4-year old optional)

Beat the eggs in a largish bowl. Beat the baking powder into the yogurt, holding the yogurt container over the bowl with the eggs, because the yogurt will start to seep over. Add yogurt to egg mixture.

2) 1 stick of butter or margarine, half a cup of flour, and 8-10 oz of Bulgarian feta cheese.

Melt butter, crumble the cheese. Save about 1 tablespoon of butter, and then add remaining butter, cheese, and flour to the egg and yogurt mixture. It should look something like this... The cheese should be lumpy.


3) 1 package of phyllo dough, that has been sitting at room temperature for about 30 min (if it is too cold, the sheets will not separate properly).

Separate each sheet of phyllo dough, spread a tiny amount of the reserved butter, and then spread a few tablespoons of the filling near the top of the sheet (see demonstration on the right by my lovely assistants). Then roll the sheet up, and place in a baking pan. If you have a round one, you can get all fancy and make concentric circles (click here for an example). Spread the rest of the butter on top.



Bake at 375 degrees, for about 25 minutes, until it looks nice and crispy.

Usually eaten for breakfast, but there are no rules.

First Day of Pre-K! EEEK AAAAAAAAAAAAAK

I CANNOT believe our little babies are going to school!

We went to an open house on Friday, so that we bring all the supplies, see the classroom and meet their teacher:



And today we actually had to drop them off. At school. Can you believe it? :) They actually did really well: there was no crying when we left. I, on the other hand could barely hold it together. And then Mike made me drive to work by myself :) All this time when I was hoping and wishing for a day when I would have a quiet drive to work without having to referee 72 fights in the back seat over the course of 20 minutes... it was quiet all right... and today I wished it were not.. :) But all went well. Pre-K. I can't believe it!

We were on Vacation!

I'd like to blame the delay in posting to the technical difficulties I experienced with my awesome slideshow last night, but that would only account for half a day of the delay. We spend 2 and half very relaxing weeks in Bulgaria, and came back over 2 weeks ago ! In the meantime, our bag was hopelessly lost and miraculously recovered, we have had cement trucks in the driveway and climbed over construction workers and through a hole in the fence to get to work while our driveway and drink-wine-at-night side porch was being built. And now Vasco appears to have croup. Which, he is dealing with with a totally angelic disposition, even though he can't stop coughing. And he melted my heart this morning when I said "Vasco, I'm so sorry you have this cough", and he replied "It's okay, mommy".
Anyway, my slideshow is cooperating. Enjoy! Part I:

Part II:

One.. two.. three.. FOUR! Happy Birthday, Kiddos!

The kids are overtired and hopped up on icing. The presents have been unwrapped, the candles blown out, said icing has been hosed off. Twice. Justine is singing "Happy Birthday" to Vasco in bed. They have come a long way from the teeny tiny way-too-early babies that they were (pictures and NICU journey), and they amaze us every single day.

Speaking of amazing, remember how we discovered that 3 was not the magical age, but the magic is scheduled to start at 4- 4 and a half-ish? Well, you decide for yourself, but literally 3 minutes after they blew out their candles, the following highly mysterious things happened:
1) they spontaneously and neatly arranged the entire pile of books on the bookcase
2) they cleared out a space for their new toys, and neatly arranged the new toys in the cubbies.
3) they got undressed for a bath on the first request, and made sure all the clothes were in the laundry basket
4) in order to go take a bath, they went straight to the bathroom. As opposed to running naked past the bathroom into the living room, twice around the kitchen and back right past the bathroom into the bedroom.

I'd write more, but I'm going to go celebrate this magical new universe with a glass of wine (and my Spanish homework) (normally it is tequila that helps my Spanish along, but it IS a school night after all!) :)