Happy Thanksgiving

I made two things to bring to Thanksgiving dinner.

1. Apple Cider Jelly Candy - Tasty, but would have been much better had I gotten better cider. I meant to, but forgot, so I had to make do with grocery store brand apple cider, which was scarcely better thank store brand apple juice. It made for pale candies.

2. Hot Jalapeno Popper Dip - Delicious, but add more cheese. I mixed in some Parmesan and I think it could still use more cheese. It was really good just on bread, but it was also good spread on the ham that my sister insisted on bringing (not that I don't love ham, or the ham bone my step-mom was kind enough to let me have, but it definitely was not a family tradition like my sister was convinced it was).

A fun coincidence

Dreamed about seeing my godmother again (I haven't seen her in a decade or so). The next morning, a friend called to ask if I would like to be her son's godmother.

Countdown

I'm moving this weekend. This week has felt very much like I'm camping in my own home. Meals were planned, and anything we wouldn't be eating was packed. Appliances have been slowly disappearing, which means that tasks I used to take for granted are suddenly difficult or impossible. I've made toast using the broiler twice now. Lesson 1: Don't go off and take pictures of the kid in her Halloween costume while broiling toast. Lesson 2: superficial blackening can be scraped off into the sink.

Happy Birthday!

The baby is now one year old, which officially makes her a toddler (though I think the walking precipitated the name change, as she's definitely been toddling around the place for a while now). She got to celebrate her birthday twice. Once with a cake, in a joint party with my dad. He's been doing his best to turn his home into a beach hut, so I thought it would be fun to make a tiki cake. I also made a little tiki cupcake.

Let's talk about the cake briefly. I got the tiki idea while looking at this monkey cake. I didn't really feel like randomly making a monkey-shaped cake, but the shades of brown also work nicely for a tiki. The cake itself... well, it was okay. Part of it was my fault. I put it in the oven, went upstairs, and totally forgot about it. The cupcake, which I removed from the oven on time, was nice and moist. The cake itself was denser, more like a banana bread. The other issue was the frosting. Very delicious, but I found it to be way too sweet for the cake.

Alright, back to the fun stuff. Celebration number two was just the three of us at home, on the baby's actual birthday. R's family would traditionally go to an ice cream parlor, but since there are no longer any within San Diego county (I checked), we decided to make sundaes.

When we gave her the sundae, the baby just dipped her finger in the whipped cream and ate the cherry off the top. We eventually dumped it out of the bowl onto her tray and broke it up a little bit so that she would have an easier time eating it. She doesn't really like getting her hands messy (sometimes), so she decided the best way would be to lick the ice cream off the tray.

Oh, and an update on the first word. Apparently it stands for any food, as a few nights ago I was getting ready to nurse her and she was making hungry noises then said "cheese" before latching on with relish. Silly baby.

All the excitement, in one run-on sentence

The baby has said her first word, "cheese," though it sounds like "chsss," and she thinks anything square on the chopping block is cheese, which was very funny when I was cutting up some tofu; with all the baby news flying through the internet via Facebook, R has finally got himself a page; also, we're buying a house!