Saturday, August 07, 2010

26

 Happy birthday to me... a few weeks ago. I had a lovely birthday. My good friend S came down for the weekend (can you believe we've known each other for 20 years?), and on my birthday we all went to the zoo. S took some rather adorable pictures of the baby.

It was the baby's first trip to the zoo, not that she'll remember it. She enjoyed the monkeys and the fish, and seemed to notice a few of the large animals, but mostly she enjoyed looking at the other babies. So many babies! So many strollers. I was totally getting a bit of stroller envy. Our Graco works well enough (and has a nice big basket underneath where I can carry the groceries), but it definitely isn't the lightest, most awesome thing around. We'll have to look for something lighter when we're shopping for a double stroller, as two times the weight of our current one would be a mighty heavy stroller indeed.

Being my birthday, I also made a couple of recipes that I probably wouldn't have made in my everyday cooking, as I knew R wouldn't have liked them. For my birthday dinner I made a zucchini and ricotta galette, which, I'm sorry to say, was definitely more work than it was worth. Mine also leaked butter like mad and make the oven very smokey. We ate it, and the baby snatched a chunk of it off my plate and stuffed it into her mouth, but I wouldn't deem it fantastic. I also made broken jellied wine with summer fruit, which, if you're looking for a mature version of jello shots, is right on the money. Of course, I forgot that anything gelatinous makes S gag, and R doesn't care for wine, so I was faced with the prospect of eating all the wine gelatin myself. Over the course of several nights I made it through about half, but one can only eat so much alcoholic Jello.