Posy Wants Cream, Preferably Whipped & Sweetened

I have created a monster, and this is she:

Posy has always had a sweet fang:  she loves licking icing off a finger, and it is absolutely impossible to open the freezer and scoop ice cream into a bowl without her suddenly appearing by your side to help eat it.  She has never once tried anything savory as an extra– not cat treats, and not even tuna water.

So about a month ago I had a can of whipped cream in the fridge, which I don’t usually do, since I prefer the homemade kind.  But I had gotten it to eat with a salted caramel sauce on ice cream, and since Posy was there for the ice cream, I gave her a squirt of the whipped cream in her own dish.

That was a mistake.

She literally did not leave the kitchen for about 48 hours after eating the cream.  She slept on the mat by the sink, and whenever anyone came in the kitchen she would start begging for cream.  Here’s a pic.

Owen gave her artwork to keep her company:

This meant that every time I cooked or prepared a meal, I had a five pound fluff ball begging at my feet and trying to trip me up.  So did I make her go cold turkey?  No, no I did not.  Like a good enabler, I gave her a little puff of whipped cream each day, thus further entrenching her addiction.

It turns out Posy is STUBBORN, and Posy Does. Not. Give. Up.  She’s basically become a kitchen cat, except when she gets too exhausted and simply is forced to waddle away and find a better place to get some shut-eye.

And I keep buying the cream now!  So she can have her daily squirt!  How can one resist this face?

Boo at the Zoo

We hadn’t been to the zoo in perhaps a year – long enough at any rate so that Owen was claiming that he had never been to the zoo, despite all the pictures we have to prove it.  So with a lot of sun on the roster for Saturday, we headed out early to the zoo and arrived – for the third time, second time unplanned – at Boo at the Zoo, the annual event in which zoo patrons wear costumes and can stop at trick or treating tables for candy.  Owen was not wearing his costume, but he didn’t seem to mind, and in fact wanted nothing to do with the trick or treat tables, despite the fact that they were clearly manned by cheery folk handing out candy.  I’ll chalk it up to a temporary lapse in judgment.

When we go to the zoo, we always arrive about ten minutes before it opens, because that is how we roll, try as we might to NOT be early.  Of course, since the zoo is a huge attraction for the stroller brigade – many of whom get up at 5 and nap in the early afternoons – it tends to be crowded from the get-go.  The neat thing about our trip this time was that Owen had his heart set on seeing the sloths, so instead of following the main path, we veered off to the left in search of the small mammal house.  When we got there, we had the whole place to ourselves!  It was great!  The sloths don’t have cages because they are too slow to escape, so you can stand right in front of them.  One sloth was sleeping in, but the other one was heading slowly towards his breakfast.  You can see him in the shadows right behind Owen.

And across from the sloth was an aardvark frantically searching for her breakfast.  The keeper was in the aardvark’s area fixing a ramp, and the aardvark was sure that her breakfast was there somewhere, she just hadn’t found it yet.  An aardvark is a very strange looking animal – it has the body of a swollen bulldog with a long thin head and nose only about two inches wide.  I regaled (some might say annoyed) the keeper with questions about the aardvark, and discovered that they have the intelligence of a dog.  Who knew?!

We then continued our reverse route and enjoyed a good forty or so minutes of solitude in front of the polar bear and the otters and the hippos and the giraffes before finally meeting up with some strollers going hither to our thither.  We made sure to visit my favorite gorillas and did see the year-old baby who was having fun with his people audience.

Owen ended up with a stuffed sloth as well, which he’s been carrying around ever since.  He is obsessed with the Wild Kratts PBS TV show – an excellent show for animal facts – and will tell anyone who will listen that “a sloth might be slow, but he isn’t boring!”

Indeed.

Fruit Ninja

To say that Owen is not very adventurous when it comes to food is putting it mildly.  At five years old, he still eats about seven things.  (How crazy does this drive me?  Very, very crazy.)  But one thing he does love is fruit.  And he is willing to give any fruit a try, because doing so has generally had the positive result of adding something else to his like list.  A month or so ago I was in the grocery store and near that odd section between the fruits and vegetables that has fruits that aren’t common in this country.  Owen and I stopped to peruse and we decided to get a dragon fruit.  We brought it home, looked up “how to cut dragon fruit” on YouTube, and then Owen proceeded to snarf down the whole dragon fruit with moans of ecstasy.

Feeling emboldened, we then went on in successive weeks to try:  star fruit (delicious! Although we added a tiny sprinkling of sugar, like we do to our blackberries); passion fruit (I liked it!  Owen thought it looked too much like a sneeze, but he did try two substantial bites); dragon fruit with white insides instead of magenta (good!); pepino melon (on YouTube they said this would taste like a cross between a cucumber and a honeydew; it did; bleck); pomegranate (not only did he love it but he wanted to bring the seeds in a baggie for a snack on our walk); and horned melon (very odd looking on the inside – basically all wet green seeds – but it did taste exactly like the YouTube video promised, like a banana and a kiwi; Owen ate it with a spoon and relatively with gusto). 

Next up is a mango, which Owen actually had a lot of as a toddler but doesn’t remember.  We’ve told him often that he is like my father, who is also a fruit lover, and one day Owen had me text Pa to ask him if there was any fruit he did NOT like.  It turns out Pa is not a big fan of mangoes, which he found to be too sweet and too sticky.  So Owen already plans to try this mango with a fork, so as not to get any of the sticky on his hands.  He still has an open mind about it though, and is very impatiently waiting for the mango to ripen.

Of course I am hoping that his trying fruit will transfer over to trying other foods.  It hasn’t yet, but a girl can hope.  In the meantime, I am keeping my eye out for an ugli fruit; apparently right now is not the season.

Owen looking melancholy with a bowl of horned melon.

See what I did there?

September 2017 Book Reviews

Echoes From The Dead by Johan Theorin.  I liked this mystery so much that upon completion I immediately started reading the second in the series.  It’s one of four books known as the Oland Quartet, since all take place on the island of Oland off the coast of Sweden.  This one was about the disappearance twenty years in the past of a 5 year-old boy, Jens Davidsson.  His mother, Julia, returns to Oland to help her aging father, a retired fisherman, Gerlof.  Gerlof has been trying to solve the mystery of his lost grandson, and the more he discovers, the more he and Julia get caught up in a series of murders and crimes on the island.  The writing is excellent, as are the characters, and it was a treat to follow along with Gerlof’s simple unraveling of several long-past events.  It was all very well done.

The Darkest Room by Johan Theorin.  This also takes place on Oland, and shares a few of the characters from the first book, although they do not play a central role.  A young family has moved to the mansion by the lighthouse on Oland and has started to renovate it, when a tragic death occurs.  Most of the police treat the death as an accident, but Tilda Davidsson, a new policewoman on the island and Gerlof’s niece, has her suspicions.  The chapters alternate between Tilda, to the family at Eel Point, and to a group of thugs who are burgling the summer houses on the island.  It was a good read too; my only criticism was that the Eel Point part of the story contains a lot of ghosts and spirits, which somewhat work in the story and somewhat do not.

The Marsh King’s Daughter by Karen Dionne.  This was an excellent and suspenseful read that was hard to put down.  In a nutshell, it is about a woman Helena, who was raised out in the wild marshland in Michigan by her parents and didn’t discover until age 12 that her father had kidnapped her mother as a teenager and was holding her hostage.  When the book begins, Helena is an adult with children of her own, and her father has just escaped from prison.  Helena decides to use her excellent hunting and tracking skills – learned from her father – to find him before he wreaks more havoc.  The book switches from the present back to Helena’s childhood in the marsh and is really fascinatingly done.

What Happened by Hillary Clinton.  I wasn’t sure if I wanted to read this at first – I thought it would be too painful – but it wasn’t and I am very glad I did.  It was really interesting to re-live the campaign from Hillary’s point of view, and see what her reasoning was for certain decisions.  The book is certainly infuriating, in that once again you see how hard the press worked to make Hillary into everyone else’s criticisms of her, but she is a very funny writer, and of course so intelligent that I read the whole  thing quickly and wished I had bought a physical copy instead of a kindle copy so that I could more easily go back and peruse.  If you are or were a Hillary supporter, I recommend the book.

How To Not Hate Your Husband After Kids by Jancee Dunn.  I have always admired the writing of Jancee Dunn, and although the title made me snort a bit, I was curious to see what she had to say.  And she did not disappoint.  It is basically a relationship book and primarily about communication, and as such I found it extremely helpful, and definitely one of the best of its kind that I have read.  Well, actually, I don’t think I have read any relationship books, but I was very impressed at the usefulness of her advice, and wish I had heard a lot of it years previously.  She is as funny and as down to earth as ever, and the book is a mixture of her own experience, combined with the consultation of experts ranging from marriage counselors to organizers.  It tends towards the gist of how men and women hear things differently and communicate differently, and is basically all about being forthright and direct.  I thought it both wise and entertaining.

The Long Drop by Denise Mina.  Denise Mina is one of my favorite mystery writers and is known for her Scottish noir.  She tends to write series, but this book was a stand-alone and about a true story:  a serial killer named Peter Manuel who was charged and convicted of killing at least eight people in the 1950’s.  It’s an interesting and quick read:  Mina uses court transcripts, but then also gets into the heads of her characters and creates back stories.  The writing is sparse, and she alternates between the trial itself and a night Peter Manuel and another suspect, William Watt, spent on the town a few days before Peter’s arrest.  There is nothing cheery about this book, but it is nonetheless a good read.