I think Mary located a brief window in time where the thought of cooking meat didn’t make her want to barf, so she ‘celebrated’ by cooking everything in the house. Thanks to between one and many gallons of spaghetti sauce, gumbo, chicken chili, and chicken and dumplings (yum!) and a giant freezer, we have enough ready-to-reheat food for weeks. Yay!
We are generally pretty (or very) lazy people when it comes to food. I really don’t like to cook at all. The inertia we have to overcome for either of us to come up with something for dinner is often too great to result in a real meal, especially if it involves any real degree of cooking. So, we tend to eat poorly, to put it mildly. Now between all this freezer goodness and a decent pile of vegetables hanging out in the icebox with them, we might have half a chance to eat well for the next month. Go Mary!
My role during these big cooks is primarily to keep the J-Man from introducing his own brand of danger and excitement into the cook-fest and do random kitchen things when she needs me to. So J-Man and I tried various ways of entertaining each other and catching up on some father-son time. I also took a few hours – mostly after we put him to bed – to clean up the wasteland our downstairs had turned into (thanks to He-Who-Makes-Wastelands).
A leaf blower would have been a better tool for this. Between our kid’s fascination with paper and dumping every container of everything into the floor lately, it looked like our house had been ransacked by angry, starving mountain goats. (I have no idea what goats actually do when in that state, but it sounds like a promising analogy.)
I sorted endless numbers of blocks, shapes, puzzle pieces, flash cards, cars, little people, and stuff I didn’t even know what it went to. I decided to pre-emptively prepare for the next time he felt the need to do all this by putting away the things he doesn’t really play with anymore but rather just leaves all over the floor. We’ll see if that works.
All this reminds me that sometimes you have to force yourself to take a day or two and try to restore at least some order to some even small part of your life, even if the rest of it stays a mess. Our living/kitchen area doesn’t feel like a total junkyard anymore, and we have food to eat that didn’t cost much to make. There are plenty of other things we’d rather have been doing obviously, but this is something you have to do every now and then to stay sane.
We even squeezed in a bit of sleep and a nice visit with the grandparents. All in all, not a bad way to spend a weekend.
Posts that hopefully are similar:
- The Big Cook: Adventures in the Kitchen
- Of Grandmothers and Fruit Salad
- Weird behavior of the week
- What My Hero Taught Me About Parenting an Autistic Child
- Surviving a Long Trip and a Baker’s Dozen of Things We Learned
- Happy Mother’s Day to My Best Friend
- Why We’re Not GF/CF
