Living my simple life

We have a new addiction in our house — Caramel Corn Puffs.

A local bakery sells small bags of these for outrageous prices. I knew I could make them myself for much cheaper. It’s really easy. There are only a few ingredients.

An 8 oz bag of corn puffs (just like cheez puffs w/out the cheese (yeah, right, as if that bright orange stuff is really cheese)
1 cup of butter
1 cup of brown sugar
1/3 cup of corn syrup
1 teaspoon of baking sods

Put the butter, brown sugar, and corn syrup in a pan and bring it to a boil. Boil for 1 minute and then add the baking soda.

Dump your corn puffs into a large bowl (or pot as I did). Pour the hot caramel over them. DO NOT try to photograph yourself while pouring the SCALDING hot syrup over the corn puffs. OOOOUUUUCCCCHHHH!

Mix it all together really well. Pour the carmelly puffs onto two cookie sheets.

Bake at 250 for 45 minutes. When it comes out of the oven, stir it a few times so it won’t stick to the pan. Let it cool. Go crazy.

This stuff is sooooo good we’ve been calling it crack around here. It’s addictive. My 6 year old woke up early to sneak downstairs and eat some before breakfast. I caught him. Then we sat down together and polished off a couple handfuls together. It’s our secret. Shhhhhh!

I love halloween. I’m a little late this year in getting out all my decorations but I am finally doing it. Over the weekend, I finally dug into my boxes and started decorating. Each year, I wind up with a few “new” favorite items. This year, this one is at the top of my list.

My neighbor was pitching the bird cage and it was perfect for my little witchie. She is sitting on an armour behind my desk with my birthday sign below her. We make a perfect pair.

The other morning, we heard a sound we are in dread of hearing in our yard —– “Cock-a-doodle-dooooooo!” Yes, another bird turned out to be a rooster and had to go. In the past I had luck finding places for them to live out the rest of their natural chicken lives. This time, I needed to act quickly since we were leaving town. The only place I could find for him to go was a Wild Bird Sanctuary. He will be part of their, errrrr, feeding and nutrition program, if you catch my drift.

The kids will be happy to know he went to a favored place. We visit the sanctuary often and marvel at the birds they keep. When they ask if they’ll be able to visit their chicken, well, I guess I can tell them “Yes.” It’s true. Though they won’t be able to see him strutting around, he’ll be part of all those magnificent raptors they look at and admire. Fare the well, Fozzie Rooster.

I’ve been doing a bit of sewing lately. This was particularly fun to make and just in time for creepy halloween wear.

We joke that it’s perfect to wear in our house with the myriad of spiders we having living here. If we can’t exterminate ‘em, we might as well celebrate ‘em!

It was gorgeous earlier this week and I was a lucky momma to go apple picking with the first graders. There were lots and lots of apples.

The orchard had a fun play area. Oli liked the hay-bale maze.

I liked taking pictures of my littlest guy.

And everyone liked the pie that we made (and devoured) when we got home. How I love fall!

I saw this on the shelf at the grocery store.

I just about fell over laughing. I’ll bet it’s “spicy.”

Some women, they decorate with beautiful new furniture. What do I get?

A 4ft X 8ft plywood lego table smack in the middle of my family room. It’s time for First Lego League. DNA, Mojo, and a group of kids are competing this year. They have been gathering, building, programming, and practicing several times each week. This table is dominating my room and a bit of an eyesore, but I’d venture to say that a new couch or some other pretty piece of furniture would not bring nearly as much joy or excitement into the room.

Oli is now a first grader. This has been a big and scary transition for him. Many tears have been shed along the way. He seems to, finally, be settling in and actually looking forward to school. It helps that his teacher is loving and fun. She seems to know just what makes my boy tick. Yesterday he came home and proudly showed me his “pointing finger.”

My beginning reader has to wear it to point at words as he reads to me.

The finger is getting lots of use and Oli is looking foward to going back to school to get more books to point at. Who would have thought that a scary, gory finger would make the long and scary school day so much fun.

That would be John (the nerdy part). Not me. In celebration of his 48th birthday, we went on a Segway tour. I anticipated this tour being fun and it was! Perfect weather, a beautiful park combined with this ingenious device and we had one of the best afternoons of the summer.

A friend clued me in to this Weird Al music video (sorry, time is short so I couldn’t mess with embedding it in the post).. We were ROTFL.

I find it hard to believe that I’ve celebrated 22 of John’s birthdays with him. I remember the first one clearly — he was turning 26. I drove to Boston to visit him toting along a microwave lemon cake. We ate it under a willow tree — the same tree that (many years later) he proposed to me underneath. I searched the grocery store for microwave cake mixes and they are no longer made. It would have been nice to have a taste of the cake that started it all even if it probably would not have been as good as we both remember it to be. I guess that cake is kind of like a metaphor for our relationship. I whipped that original out in a few minutes and we devoured it together — simple, sweet, easy, perfectly sized for two. Now, I make complicated cakes from scratch, cakes that take an hour and use a thousand bowls make giant messes. We eat them with our family, amidst the messy kitchen. But you know what? It’s even better. Bigger, sweeter, with more layers, and extra filling — just like our love. Happy Birthday, John! I love you because you are so white and nerdy.