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• Disgusting Worm Salad
• How to make Disneyland Gourmet Caramel Apples

One of my favorite Halloween traditions is roasting the pumpkin seeds after my family carves their pumpkins. It’s a delicious and healthy treat that everyone will love.

How to Roast Pumpkin Seeds

1. After you remove the seeds from the pumpkin ( the ooey-gooey best part of carving pumpkins, in my opinion) rinse pumpkin seeds under cold water and pick out the pulp and strings. Do this right away before the pulp dries.
2. Place the pumpkin seeds in a single layer on a baking sheet, stirring to  sprayed with non-stick cooking spray.
3. Sprinkle with salt (garlic salt and seasoned salt are also delicious options) and bake at 325 degrees F until toasted, about 25 minutes.  Stir seeds about half way through cooking time.
4. Let cool and store in an air-tight container.

Enjoy!

The chaos began about 8:15 last night, with a call from my brother:

“Is Colton still up? Why isn’t he in bed, yet?”

First, I’d like to point out that even on school nights, Colton is never in bed by 8:15. But I played along.

“He’s on spring break this week – burning the midnight oil.”

“Uh… you may want to  double check that.”

What did he meeeaaaan “double check that”?!?!?

It seemed my brother’s wife had been talking to a teacher at one of the district’s other schools, and the subject of spring break had come up.

“Spring break is next week,” he said.

How can that be? I’d planned for spring break to be this week for …. well… weeks, now. I had it in my smart phone calendar and everything. I’d wondered what we’d do all week, because Colton is a.) on crutches and b.) the weather forecast is calling for unseasonably cold temperatures. I’d planned to take him to see Rango today, and the first showing of Hop on Friday.

I’d looked forward to sleeping in. I’d looked forward to no homework, except for reading. I’d looked forward to a well-deserved break from what has been a really tough school year, quite frankly. And a change in spring break plans wasn’t going over well for me. I imagined how well it would go over for Colton.

Phase 2 found me calling Summer. Not that I don’t trust my brother or anything ( ). But this had all the makings of an April Fool’s Day joke coming a few days early. Except that Summer confirmed everything my brother had said: Spring break was still another week away.

This whole fiasco has me wondering what else I’ve mis-scheduled. And whether or not we could actually pull off an extra week of spring break…

-Liz

We think this post from a few years back is worth a Second Glance, especially since it’s spring break and we’re off frolicking with our kids. Enjoy!

Ahhhhh…spring break is finally here. Seems like we’ve been waiting for it since the day after school began last year.  A break from the routine of alarm clocks, bed times, endless homework, car pools, nagging.   I am as excited as the kids are.  It’s hard work to parent school children.  A lot of stress.   A lot of responsibility.  A lot of effort trying to  keep up with the  perfect parents who are probably busy trying to keep up with a whole other set of perfect parents.  It’s a vicious cycle…one from which I am ready for a break.  I went to bed last night with “visions” of  relaxation, going to the park, eating sand coated sandwiches  at the reservoir,  soaking up the first glorious rays of the summer soon to come.

It seems that my ‘visions” were slightly off, as I am now, on the first afternoon of spring break, staring forlornly out my window at snowflakes. Three inches of snowflakes to be  exact, and I fear there is more to come.  How could this happen?  How could Mother Nature be so cruel as to  single-handedly destroy MY spring break?  MY time to sit outside and read a frivolous paperback while the kids frolic. There will be no frolicking this week, only whining bored kids and a frustrated mom.  Snow has long ago worn out its welcome.  That happens at about the same time as the after Christmas sales wind down.  I have lost  count of how many times I have already heard today, “Mom, what can I do?”  It’s the same phrase I’ve been hearing for the past 3 months.  I want to say, “Go outside and frolic in the sun!”  Oh, wait a minute…there is no sun!

Thankfully, there is a little angel in the form of a 9 year old girl, who lives down the street.  She came over minutes ago to rescue my son from the gloom and doom pervading  my home.  They are now outside in full winter gear: snow pants, puffy coats, snow boots, hats and gloves.  I’m not joking! If I didn’t know better, I would think it was the middle of winter, not the first day of spring break.   I can see them playing outside in the snow.  Their cheeks are rosy.  They are laughing, throwing snowballs and generally having a great time.  Dare I say they might be frolicking?

Maybe I should take a lesson from the kids.  Maybe it’s time to roll with the punches, even if the punch means one more blast of winter.  If a couple of 9- year-olds can do it, so can I.

I say if  Mother Nature can break the unspoken spring break rule  of warmth, sunshine, and frolicking, well then it’s high time I break some rules as well.  Drastic measures are now called for.  I am now putting on a Michael Buble Christmas cd  in an attempt to lift my spirits.  This will mean breaking my set-in-stone Christmas music rule.   (I made a rule years ago that Christmas music could only be played from Thanksgiving Day until New Years Eve in an attempt the keep the music “special”. ) Strains of  “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas” are now flowing through my house. Liz suggested presents and Santa cookies might be in order.  I say “Let’s not go nuts, here.”  Perhaps Liz does not realize what making sugar cookies entails. I mean it is Liz we’re talking about.  She’s probably on a first name basis with the employees at the local bakery, so how could she know!

I think chocolate chip cookies are a suitable substitute, and perhaps I can find some hidden for a rainy (snowy)  day dollar store treasures in a closet somewhere.  Maybe we’ll even blow up a beach ball and toss it around in the snow.   It’s spring break, after all…might as well have some fun frolicking!

-Kate

Since April Fools’ Day is coming up in a few days, we decided this post from two years ago is worth a Second Glance...

It’s finally here.  The day when I get to release my pent up immaturity…the day when it’s perfectly acceptable for me to feel mischievous and sneaky…the day when I get to be all the things I try to teach my kids not to be.

I must confess, when I was writing yesterday’s ridiculous story, I kind of creeped myself out.  Talk about a prank gone awry.   I’m still paying for that one and will be for many, many more years. Just kidding about the whole awry thing.  It’s a prank that went wonderfully right.  (See yesterday’s post)

Anyway, here’s my prank for this year. I decided to play is safe and work with food.   It’s a TV dinner of a drumstick, mashed potatoes & gravy, peas & carrots, corn on the cob, and a brownie with sprinkles for dessert, all in a disposable store bought foil tray.  Here’s the catch…it’s all made of cupcakes.

Here’s how I did it…

Brownie – It’s just a cupcake frosted in chocolate swirled frosting with sprinkles on top.

Peas & carrots – It’s a cupcake frosted in green frosting.  The peas are green runts and the carrots are orange starbursts cut into 4ths.  Just place both randomly on top of the frosting.

Mashed potatoes and gravy – It’s a cupcake frosted with white frosting with a dip in the middle like real potatoes would have. .  The gravy is caramel ice cream topping.  The butter is a yellow starburst.

Corn on the cob – This is 2 cupcakes frosted with yellow frosting.  The kernels are various yellow Jelly Belly’s placed in rows.  The butter is another yellow starburst.  Finish off with corn picks in the ends.

Drumstick – This one is a bit more tricky, but still doable.  Put a donut hole on top of the cupcake then cover the cupcake top & the donut hole with the frosting, filling in the spaces.  Then cover the frosting with crushed graham crackers.  The bone is white chocolate.  Just melt some white chocolate chips in the microwave and put into a zip lock baggie.  Cut off one tip of the bag and squeeze the melted chocolate onto waxed paper in the shape of a bone.  Once it cools,  just stick it into the cupcake.

Have fun fooling your family with this one!

Also, check out this other fun April Fools’ Day Food Prank:

More April Fools’ Day Food Pranks

- Kate

Sometimes, even that ritual visit to see Santa gets put off until the last minute. So this year, I figured I’d be one step ahead and actually plan the day for our visit. We headed to Lexington Green before 9 a.m. on Saturday. The plan was simple: I’d pick up a few things from the bookstore, and by the time we were done there, Santa would be arriving, Colton would divulge his wishlist, and we’d be outta there before millions of other Lexingtonians were even awake. (OK, so there are a million people in Lexington, but that’s hardly the point. Any city that has to put up “Caution: High accident risk. Do Not Block Intersections” signs in this area lends the appearance of having at least a million people in the vicinity of the mall.

Just so we’re clear, the Santa at Lexington Green is not your average run-of-the-mill, typical mall Santa with a fake beard and suit stuffed with a pillow. Oh, no. He’s the real deal. You can even pull on his beard. If ever there was a Santa who more closely resembled Miracle on 34th Street, I would be shocked.

My scheduling was working without a glitch, and by 10 a.m., we were walking toward Santa’s temporary headquarters.

“Here we are!” I said to Colton. “Ready to go see Santa.”

“Nah, I’m good.”

“What?!? What do you mean, ‘you’re good’? We’re here to see Santa! Christmas is a week from today!”

“No thanks,” he said, while peeking in to try to catch a glimpse of the old man. Santa’s “organizer” overheard the conversation and tried to help out, while getting the first of the GOOD little boys and girls – the ones who WANTED to talk to Santa, lined up for their turn.

“Are you kidding me, Colton?? You aren’t going to talk to Santa?”

“Nah – maybe tomorrow. Besides, I don’t really want toys like the little kids. I want cool things, like a bluetooth for the PS3.”

“So you don’t think Santa makes those too?!?!”

“Yeah, it’s just that I’d rather come back tomorrow.”

I wondered if he really meant that. Or if, in a dark stroke of fate, it meant he deemed himself too old for the Santa stuff. To hear him talk about it, he’s the last true believer. But how can that be if he doesn’t want to go see him? Is the age of innocence over and gone? Never to return??

Well, maybe for him (although I’m holding out hope). As for me, I’m headed to Lexington Green to get a couple of last minute requests to Pere Noel. I’m no fool… Santa’s Coming!

• Are Ticonderoga really the best pencils? (Turns out that  yes, they are. And much to my child’s chagrin, mechanical pencils are still off-limits.)
• Does our county actually have a large enough stock to supply each child with one large bottle of hand sanitizer?
• Will this be the year we discover whether or not demerits are issued if we buy a 48-count box of crayons instead of the 96-count box?
• Is the request for a set of ear buds just a lead up to the near future, when the school list includes a nice laptop computer?
• Do we really have what it takes to make it through fourth grade while maintaining our sanity as a family?
• Would home-schooling really drive me that crazy?

As it turns out, some of these questions will be answered tomorrow. Meanwhile, I’ll be doing my nails while I wait to see how the back-to-school shopping trip goes. Because my dad, in a gutsy show of courage, offered to take my son and my nephew shopping. I say,  “never look a gift horse in the mouth”. And why bother telling Dad beforehand that while my nephew’s list has a whopping five items on it, my son’s list has 21 items. That’s right – 21 (twenty-one) items. And that’s just the list from the fourth grade in general. The individual teacher lists have yet to surface.

So maybe it’s time to tweak this year’s back-to-school questions, in honor of my dad’s unflinching bravery:

• Was his offer to supply shop a knee-jerk reaction? Or did he really think this one through?
• Will he be able to maintain his own sanity more than 45 minutes in?
• Will he tell stories of walking five miles to school, uphill both ways, in three feet of snow?
• Will he still be speaking to any of us after this male-bonding adventure?

I have the strangest feeling that my second set of questions will be much easier to answer than the first. I’m just sayin’.

-Liz Follow @lizrants

As is typical with my daughter, she arrived in North Carolina making quite the grand entrance. I should’ve seen it coming I guess. The first sign that she was off to a rocky start came before she’d gotten out of the county: she’d forgotten the “welcome home” sign that she’d worked on so diligently. So she’d just have to hope Adam could pick her out in a crowd.

The night of Hannah’s arrival in North Carolina, she somehow managed to fall off the hotel room bed and wedge herself between the bed and the wall. Thankfully Lee and Cheryl were there to pull her out of the predicament. How she got there to begin with is anyone’s guess. And quite frankly, we’re probably better off not knowing the details…

All seemed well on Sunday, though. Until my phone rang about 6:30 p.m.

“Whatcha doing, Mother?”

“Um… nothing… what are you doing?”

“Um, well, I just got out of the emergency room.”

I’m sure you all know that in that moment, my head went wild with possible scenarios. Jelly fish? Sting Rays? Shark bite?!?!?! No. She’d been too calm for that one.

“I passed out,” she offered before I could start rattling off my theories.

They’d just left the beach after a day of fun and sun and made it as far as the outside shower area when Cheryl felt Hannah grab her shoulder. As Cheryl turned around, Hannah hit the wooden boards hard and fast, face down and out cold. Heat exhaustion.

Enter the stretcher, a neck brace and joy ride in the ambulance. I’m tellin’ ya, no one knows how to kick off a vacation quite like my daughter, huh?

Now awake and regaining her senses, she felt a tug on her hair, where the EMT was attempting to pull something out of her hair.

“You have a bird feather in your hair,” she told Hannah, who laughed and replied that she’d actually paid someone to put it there. (True story – and just for the record, dear reader and friend Niki says it’s a ring-tail lemur. You be the judge.)

She arrived at the emergency room in her swim suit (as did Cheryl and Lee) leaving enough sand along the trail for a decent castle. Some vital-sign testing, blood drawing and three hours later, she left the ER with orders to drink more water (who knew? right?). A lucky little soul she was that the fall didn’t knock out every tooth in the front of her braces-straightened pearly whites. That would’ve been a real sight for Adam’s homecoming…

Nevertheless, she’d (hopefully) reached No. 3 in the rule of threes. And about 9:15 p.m. Monday night, the moment she, Cheryl and Lee had impatiently waited on for months came, as Marine Lcpl. Adam H. arrived back home on U.S. soil. All was right in the world for my baby girl. Of course, they still have almost a week left in North Carolina, though. Let’s just hope Ms. Entertainment has done enough for one vacation.

-Liz
Follow @lizrants

Yesterday afternoon, while browsing the weekend’s tweets, I came across a new product, brought to my attention by Cool Mom Picks. The product? Breast Milk Baby. That’s right. Forget the days of the little plastic bottle with the milk that magically disappears. This baby doll doesn’t drink from a bottle. Oh, no. It’s a pseudo-breast-fed baby. Now, your little girls (or boys, I suppose) can don a halter with fake breast-o-flowers, pull the doll close,  watch the doll’s mouth move and listen to the sounds of a nursing baby.

Before we move on, let me be clear (cough). I’m all for breast-feeding for any woman who chooses to breast feed. I was one of them. And after reading CMP’s post, I probably could’ve let it go with a slight chuckle and a roll of my eyes. But oh, no. I had to click on the link and see the product’s website for myself.

According to the maker, “the whole purpose of The Breast Milk Baby is to teach children the nurturing skills they’ll need to raise their own healthy babies in the future.”

Wow. How have the children of the world survived for all these thousands of years? Talk about your miracles…

Anywho, the more I read about this doll and the zillions of comments it provoked on every website that covered it, the more I saw that the discussion was geared less toward the doll itself – at least for those who supported such a doll -  and more toward  anyone who dared to say that the doll was, quite frankly, in no way appropriate for a child. Anyone with the audacity to speak out against the doll was automatically thrown in the “anti-breast-feeding” category, cast aside as a big uninformed boob (pun intended) – a sorry drag on what many of the doll lovers would consider an otherwise “enlightened” society. Hate the doll, hate all breast-feeding mothers. Don’t you just love the logic? (sarcasm intented).

Parentdish.com ran a story on the doll and posted a poll, as well. Like many polls, it’s skewed before anyone can answer. The question posed was simple: Would you buy a nursing doll for your daughter?

Harmless enough, right? Take a look at the three options and how 14,345 people voted:

• No. That’s just gross.                                                        70 percent
• Maybe. it would depend on how old she was.        15 percent
• Yes. There’s nothing wrong with breast-feeding.  15 percent (emphasis mine)

From that, one could deduce that 70 percent of those polled do not approve of breast-feeding, but how accurate would that be? Not very, if you ask me.

So let’s try to make sense of this whole thing with a question that couldn’t be more straight forward if it tried: Would you buy the doll? Why or why not? Leave a comment below. Don’t let me down. I’m just sayin.

-Liz

FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER! @lizrants

This week’s cheater recipe…

Easy Peasy Lemon Freezy Pops

What could be better than this ultra easy, healthy and delicious  summer treat? It’s the perfect way to cool down on a hot summer day!

Easy Peasy Lemon Freezy Pops

Ingredients:

• 1 cup finely diced fresh fruit
• 1 cup plain or pink lemonade frozen concentrate
• 1 cup water
• ice pop mold or small disposable plastic cups

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Directions:

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Cut fresh fruit into small pieces.

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Fill each ice-pop mold (or cup)  half full of cut fruit.

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Mix lemonade concentrate with water. Pour into molds.

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Cover with tops and freeze for about 5 hours. If using plastic cups, freeze partially for about  1 1/2 hours, then insert stick and finish freezing.
To serve, run molds under warm water for a few seconds and pop out.

Enjoy!

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My first hint that something was wrong came a few nights ago, when I came out of Hannah’s room with her basket of 847 bottles of nail polish, to see if somewhere in the mix there might possibly be a bottle of bright red (the perfect color for the 4th of July).

“What are you doing, Mom?”

“I’m going to paint my nails. Do you mind?”

“Yes. Don’t paint your nails. You’re perfect just like you are.”

Oh is that right? I thought.

“So what’s up with that? Why do you have issues with me painting my nails? Hannah paints her nails.”

“Yes, but I’ve known her all my life and she’s always painted her nails.”

“You’ve known me all your life, too, knucklehead.”

“Well that’s different.”

Why we continued this discussion was beyond me – I know better than to reason with the unreasonable . So I dropped it.

Enter yesterday’s trip to the store. Colton was helping me get everything out of the cart and on to the self-checkout, when all of a sudden his whole demeanor changed.

“What is your problem, son?”

“I’ll tell you in the car,” he said, with his face looking like he’d just seen a ghost.

Once we got to the car, he dispensed with his usually helpful attitude and hopped straight in, never saying a word. Until I got in and started the car.

“Is that fingernail polish for Hannah?”

“Nope. It’s mine. Isn’t it pretty?”

“Mom, I told you I didn’t want you to paint your nails.”

Here we go again, I thought.

I spent a  good five minutes trying to figure out what his issue was. Was he attacked by a giant display of nail polish in another life? Had someone with painted nails been mean to him? Is he allergic to the smell of fresh polish? Am a raising a MALE CHAUVINIST PIG?!?!?!

I mentioned all the women we know who paint their nails – especially women in the family.

“Even Nan paints her nails?” he asked looking like he’d just lost his best friend.

“Yes, even Nan. So look here, mister. You’re gonna have to come up with some solid reasoning if you want me to even consider your request.

“Look at it this way, Mom. I don’t mind that you wear earrings.”

“You’re darn right, you don’t mind. And I have half a mind to go buy a pair the size of basketballs, just because I can. You don’t make these decisions.”

Stumped for any  rhyme or reason for his hatred of me with red nails – or any other color, for that matter – I once again dropped the whole discussion, at least where he was concerned. Now, I’m on my own quest to find out what possible reasons he could have for the anti-nail polish stance, and I don’t care who I have to consult.

“Oh, and Mom, don’t tell anyone I said that about you painting your nails, OK?”

“OK, Colton. I wont say a word…”

At least not until this bright red nail polish dries…

-Liz

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