The mean mummy

I am caught between a grin and a cringe as I type this: Jade turned 1 on May 16th. ONE!!! My baby girl is a year old. *sniff sniff* And all this time I thought the expression "time flies" was a tired old cliche. Turns out it's shockingly true.

My doctor warned me not to give her any egg whites before she'd had her last set of shots, which are scheduled for May 20th, in order to avoid an allergic reaction. Which meant that for Jade's birthday treat, I had to come up with an eggless cake recipe that didn't taste like sawdust and wouldn't draw the scorn of my brother-in-law.

I didn't realize what a challenge it would be to have an anti-refined sugar/food philosophy when raising baby Jade. I mean, there is freaking refined sugar in EVERYTHING, from a humble loaf of bread to so-called "healthy" baby food. I've always been one of those annoying, obsessive label-readers, but it comes in handy when you're trying not to stuff your kid full of sugar and crap before her first birthday.

It's not that I'm anti-sugar. Believe me, I lurrrrve a good chockie cake, a fizzy glass of coke, velvety ice cream or as many cookies as I can cram down my gullet. I'm just anti-sugar for wee kiddies with developing palates. I figure she's got a whole lifetime to eat crap, so why not feed her the good stuff before she a) knows the difference and b) gets vocally proficient enough to complain?

A few of my in-laws routinely accuse me (semi-jokingly) of being a "mean mommy" when we're over there for meals. My hubby's neice is a year older than Jady and eats whatever she wants on holidays and special occasions, which is mainly cake, ice cream and chocolate. Which is completely fine...for her. I'm not into the whole "your parenting skills are wrong and mine are right" judging extravaganza. But it doesn't mean my girl needs to eat Jell-O at six months, ice cream at eight months or cheap Easter chocolate before she's a year old.

So I quietly feed her broccoli, meat, tofu, salmon, Greek yogurt, beans, avocado and the like while my in-laws and various friends tsk tsk and say, "Pooooor Jade." Sometimes it gets tiring, but I've learned to trust my instincts and go with what feels right for us, mean mummy comments be damned. She's a pretty good little eater, and that's all the incentive I need to keep feeding her healthy stuff with minimal sugary snacks.

I hunted up a vegan mango cupcake recipe for Jady's first birthday treat, since mango is her all-time favourite fruit, and I whipped up a pretty tasty buttercream icing to go on top so no one who tasted them would gag. I think they turned out pretty well, although they were heavy little suckers on account of no egg. I figured I could throw them at anyone who made one "mean mummy" comment too many!

They looked like this:

And she seemed to enjoy them, which is all that really counts. Happy birthday, Jady Lady! May you live a long and healthy life and enjoy all the good things...sugary or not.

Does this baby make me look fat?

Well, does it? (0;

The rumours are true: Baby Lowry, version 2.0, is due to arrive on September 22nd 2010! Place your bets now - we're not finding out the flavour (boy/girl) ahead of time.

And yes, I've heard it all: I'm crazy, I'm brave, I'm gonna be soooo busy, I'm nuts, say goodbye to sleep for another year... Believe me, I'm aware of the drawbacks. But I have one in diapers, so why not two? We've got all the baby gear already. We have a big ol' house. I qualify for a second mat leave. We're not getting any younger. And we have open hearts waiting to welcome another wee one into our lives. So I say...bring him/her on!

I've also heard that babies born close together develop an excellent sibling bond, so I'm hoping Jady Lady and her new brother or sister are good pals for life. My biggest worry? Finding another name as cool as Jade's for the new sprog. Suggestions are welcome!

A rite of spring...that doesn't involve manure!

Okay. 'nuff said about all the nastiness of a country spring. Wanna know the truest sign of my favourite season? When the rhubarb patch is finally high enough to yank out enough stalks to make the first rhubarb cake of the year.

As I've mentioned before, I'm not a baker. But rhubarb cake is the one thing that I can make and it never goes wrong. EVER. And the bonus is that both D and his brother are mad for it! Whoo hoo!

I can't remember where I got my tiny printed recipe from, but Mom used to make a rhubarb cake that was very similar, only she called hers "lava cake" because when it was done, the top looked like crusted over lava, and the inside was always moist and hot. I bless the person who printed that recipe for me though - it's my no-fail dessert, and I make about two a month until the rhubarb goes to seed.

The trick is to have nice crisp rhubarb that's not woody or too old. The stalks have to be juicy too; none of that hollow grocery store crap! Find a neighbour with an overgrown patch or a Mennonite roadside stand and you'll have exactly what you need. All it takes is about 6 good stalks to make one cake. Even if you don't really care for rhubarb, this baby strikes the perfect balance of sweet and tart. And - oh bliss - eat it warm with some vanilla ice cream on the side, and you'll never go back to plain old coffe cake again.

D is sick with a cold, but he stoically mounted the lawn tractor tonight to finish off the lawn before the next deluge, so I thought the poor man deserved to come in to the rich, brown-sugary smell of his favourite cake. Not to mention the lovin' arms of his favourite wife.

Kimber's Rhubarb Cake
2 cups flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 cup butter
1 1/2 cups brown sugar
1 cup milk
1 egg
2 1/2 cups sliced rhubarb (I sometimes use 3 cups)
1 tsp vanilla
sugar and cinnamon for sprinklin'

1. Preheat oven to 350. Grease and flour a 9x13 pan.
2. Mix flour, soda and salt together in a small bowl & set aside.
3. Cream butter and sugar together until fluffy. Add egg and milk and mix well.
4. Add flour mix gradually to butter mixture until blended.
5. Stir in vanilla and rhubarb.
6. Pour into pan. Sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon if desired.
7. Bake at 350 for 40 minutes. Cool in pan on rack (but make sure you try some when it's still a bit warm!)

Manure Blues: The sequel

To add manurey insult to manurey injury, my dog discovered the freshly dumped doo-doo in the fields yesterday afternoon. Not only did she gallop and cavort through the steamy stuff, she decided that eating it would present a new culinary adventure.

When I let her into the house and bent down to dish out her supper, I almost gagged. She had bits of manure hanging from her snout and sported brown smears up beyond her bony ankles. GAH!!! Thank heavens she's not the type of dog that likes to give kisses.

I banished her to the mud room for the rest of the night, where she moaned at me through the closed door every twenty minutes. It was too cold to put her outside in the doghouse all night, and since her hips are so sore lately, I didn't have the heart to leave her in the mudroom either. So inside she came, stink and all.

My reward for allowing my disgusting pet to sleep inside? A desperate 3am wake-up call - Neko scratching at the door for dear life - that I didn't get downstairs in time to answer. Note to self: NEVER run downstairs to aid a barfing dog in your bare feet. GAH GAH GAH!!!!

Manure blues

Ahhh, springtime. Finally. What could be more magical than springtime in the country? Violets and crocus peek their purple faces up to make sure the snow is all gone before relaxing into bloom. Forsythia and magnolia burst into yellow and pink magnificence to celebrate days that have grown longer and warmer. The finches have returned, and I can finally take the suet down before it starts to melt. Wrinkly green and ruby nubs coming up by the garage remind me that rhubarb cake-making time is just around the corner, much to D's excitement. Springtime is a luscious reminder of how good it is to be alive.

And nothing quite reminds you of how alive you are like robins chortling and bluejays arguing outside the bedroom window at 4:30am, or the return of marauding raccoons staking out the compost pile. Not to mention the fragrance of freshly spread manure wafting in through all the windows you left open before you went to town. Mmmm, country living in springtime: it's a whole new experience in aromas, and definitely not for the faint of nose.

Today, for example, I hauled Jade's exersaucer outside so she could soak up some April sunshine while I planted my frost-resistant pansies. I dressed her in a warm sweater, wrestled her hat on and sprinkled some cheerios on the saucer. Then I hunted up my gardening gloves and new trowel and hunkered down to do my first planting of the season. We were happy as two little clams, Jade and I.

And then we heard the rumbling.

We turned to see my brother-in-law tearing across the south field in the big tractor, hauling my father-in-law's newly acquired manure spreader behind him. The poop was still steaming.

Jade was delighted. She adores anything that makes a lot of noise and began waving enthusiastically at my brother-in-law. I just sighed. I calculated that I had approximately ten or fifteen minutes to get planting before the smell hit us and absorbed into our hair and clothes.

It's not that I'm averse to poop; I understand the necessity of well-rotted manure when growing crops and gardens. After two years of living here, my nose is finally growing accustomed to the sour, familiar fragrance that floats through the Bruce at this time of year. No, I'm not a wimpy city girl who can't handle a little doodie. It's just that I had a bad experience with it last year and haven't quite forgiven my brother-in-law yet.

"D'you want some sh*t for your garden, Kimmy?" C asked me last fall. He'd just climbed down from his tractor and ambled across the lawn to where I was pulling out the last vestiges of my tomato plants from the garden. I eyed him - and the giant load of crap he was hauling behind the tractor.

"Is it well-rotted?" I asked. "I don't want anything that's going to attract bugs or be too smelly."

"Oh, it's good sh*t," he assured me, knowing full well that I couldn't possibly tell the difference.

"Wellll....okay. But not too much!"

"Don't worry, I'll dump off enough for your garden. It'll be fine.."

I took my best school-marmish pose and shook a warning finger at him. "C, however much you think you should drop off, give me a quarter of that."

He shrugged and went back to his tractor. I went back to my garden, then went inside to make supper and forgot all about my scheduled poop delivery. Until I went outside the next morning and saw the GIANT PILE of crap C'd dumped on the edge - not even the middle - of my garden!!! What part of "not too much" did that boy not understand? ARGH!!!

It took my husband and I over two sweaty, back-breaking hours to dig the stuff into the garden, and even then it barely got mixed in. "Don't worry," C assured me, "it'll break down over the winter. It's good sh*t, I told you."

Yeah, right. This spring, my garden is still covered in a thick, un-broken-down layer of manure that is going to take an industrial sized rototiller to plough through. Conveniently, my brother-in-law is "too damned busy" to help. So I'll have to resort to cajoling my husband, or enlisting one of his cousins to somehow get the poopy garden under control with some serious machinery. But at least we'll be able to enjoy the birdies chirping, the apple trees blooming and that faint, beguiling scent of spring manure while we do it.

The Sunday Drive: Saugeen Bluffs Maple Syrup Festival

If there's one thing I get antsy for around this time of year, it's fresh, dark, sticky, delicious maple syrup. Having grown up in a small town where one could see tapped trees on one's bus ride to school, and where annual visits to the sugar bush were a given, I can't help but have an instinct for sugaring-off time. Warm days, slightly frozen nights, and the blood in my veins starts flowing in a decidedly spring-like fashion right along with the sap.

I have a friend in BC who may actually rival me in the maple mania department. In a recent email, he confessed to loving all things maple: maple ice cream, maple cookies, maple candies, maple perogies. Okay, I'm making up the perogies, but I KNOW he'd eat them if they existed. If he lived closer, I'd have invited him along on our Sunday drive a few weekends ago to the "Maple Madness" festival (disappointingly renamed this year as "Old Thyme Maple Syrup Festival") that takes place near Paisley.

Taking Jade there was something I'd been looking forward to all winter. There are all sorts of displays, lots of folks dressed up in costumes from pioneer days, live music, and several opportunities to watch sap being collected, boiled and turned into precious, precious syrup. And hey - there's a petting zoo! At the very least, Jade enjoyed her encounters with live chickens, sheep, llamas and goats. It was probably a welcome change from Mummy acting them out at home.

It's a good opportunity to get some fresh air, take in the forest surroundings, and eat copious amounts of locally made sausage and hotcakes smothered in that year's first syrup crop. Oh, how I love eating outdoors...

Anyway, that was our latest Sunday drive. I came home pleasantly weary from all the walking and with a very satisfied tummy from all the pancakes. What more can you ask from a Sunday drive?

She's back, and she's....old.

You'll have to excuse my recent bloggy absence. Between Easter visit with the rellies, turning the big four-oh and trying to find a fitting way to honour the second anniversary of Rose's birth, it's been a helluva couple of weeks.

I've been thinking that I'd like to set up an annual award of some kind at the local public school in Rose's memory. Something that an average kid can win, nothing hugely monetary, but something worth having. I just have no idea what it should be or how to go about doing it. The ideas flitting through my mind seem to revolve around giving the award to a child who demonstrates an environmental conscience, or a child who tries to make her or his school a better place. But that's kinda vague. Then I started thinking it would be an award only female students could apply for, but then would I be fostering an attitude of unfairness? Hmmm. If any of you out there in bloggerland have experience in this kind of thing, or even some suggestions, please post 'em here.

Turning 40 seemed like it should have been a bigger deal than it was. I think having my big day sandwiched between Easter and Rose's birthday made it flow by quite easily. Several of my friends' experiences with achieving their fourth decade have been less than pleasant. I've heard stories from other 40-somethings who obsessed about their birthday to the point of anxiety or depression.

I suppose it's one of those milestones where you're supposed to look back on your life and figure out if you're where you wanna be, if you've achieved what you've wanted to achieve, blah blah blah. Frankly, I think my best years are still ahead of me. I get to grow older with a delicious man who challenges and satisfies me; I'm living in a place I adore with a lake that isn't going anywhere; I'll watch a baby girl who makes me giggle every day grow into a beautiful woman. I'm relatively healthy, not struggling financially, and I have been blessed with family and friends who truly care about me. So what if I'm "half-way to dead," as one poignant birthday card stated? At least I'm having a good time getting there.

To me, 40's just another number. 20, 30, 40 - whoop-dee-do! Now, knowing my younger sister is going to turn 40 in a few years and that my older sister is going to turn 50...THAT kinda freaks me out.