All Rileyed Up

A conversation between Husband and me yesterday morning:

Me: Honey, remember how I told you B’s going away party was cancelled?
Husband: Yes.
Me: It’s back on.
Husband: Okay, so where is it again? W’s house?
Me: Well, that’s where it was going to be. But now, it’s going to be here.
Husband: (blank stare)
Me: At our house. (points to the ground for emphasis)
Husband: (laughter) Okay.

And that’s how I wound up having a party at my house last night. It wasn’t a big party. In fact, it was rather small. It was supposed to be 8 adults and 4 kids with a possible 2 more adults and 1 more kid and wound up being 6 adults and 2 kids. (I feel like I just wrote a word problem. So how many people did not attend the party? Please show all your work.)

The party was in honor of B, who is moving to Atlanta at the end of the month. By nature, I only clean when I have a party, so my plans for the day went out the window as I swept and dusted and vacuumed and scoured, and ultimately gave up on the cleaning because it was time to start cooking. Good thing I had just gone grocery shopping, and had tons of food.

We gave our friend her going away present, which included a book for her kids, P is for Peaches, an alphabet picture book all about Georgia (and fortunately, says nothing like C M ED BD Is O L I B M R Snakes).

I had planned to make B’s going-away card, which was to be humorous tips on living in the South, since she’s never lived there. But I spent all the time I would have spent on her card cleaning my house. I purchased her a Simpsons card instead, which was probably funnier anyway. While we were eating, the subject of their moving company came up, and they mentioned (with irritation) that their mover told them he wanted to get them moved into their house by such and such date and time because he didn’t want to miss the game, and oh, how I laughed.

That was my tip number one: Welcome to the South. They love their college football.

Ten Years Old:

I went to the store with my dad. Food Lion, Winn Dixie, or Publix. We had lots of coupons. We bought generic or store brand mac and cheese, bologna, pork sausage, rice, enriched white bread, and flavored drinks (ie, not real Kool-Aid). I often asked for Golden Grahams and Cookie Crisp. On occasion, I got them.

Twenty Years Old:

I spent most of my money on non-food items. But the food items I tended to buy would be Kraft mac and cheese (only the good stuff!), oven pizzas, string cheese, rainbow sherbert, hot dogs, dry pasta and jars of tomato sauce. And Golden Grahams and Cookie Crisp to my heart’s content.

Now:

The kids and I went to South Coast Farms this morning, where we picked out locally grown, organic fruits and veggies to eat for the next week. We spent the most time at the box of brandywine tomatoes. If you haven’t seen these kinds of tomatoes before, you are missing out. Brandywines are always vividly colored and interestingly shaped, like scrunched-up faces of green, orange, yellow, and red stripes. After South Coast Farms, we moved on to Henry’s Farmers Market, where I needed to buy tempeh, quinoa, amaranth, Lara bars, hemp milk, Amy’s no cheese frozen pizza, and goat milk cheddar.

I hadn’t been to Henry’s in a while, so maybe I just forgot what products they stock. They were out of tempeh and Amy’s no cheese pizza, the only hemp milk they carry contains brown rice syrup, and no amaranth. They did have the quinoa, Lara bars, and goat milk cheddar, but I can get Lara bars and quinoa at the Trader Joe’s down the street from my house and I would happily have given up the goat milk cheddar for tempeh and amaranth.

I should have just bucked up and driven the additional twenty minutes to Mother’s or the extra thirty minutes to that glorious Whole Foods in Tustin, where they definitely would have had the things I need, but the kids were starting to get hungry. So we went home and made a lunch of our newly purchased fruits and veggies. Now I’m planning dinner, and I’m craving tempeh stroganoff because I know I don’t have the ingredients for it. I hate doing this to myself. I think I’m going to drive to Mother’s after all.

In other news, my transition to being a total Californian is complete.

First, a reminder to stop by my CD giveaway

So I went to the San Diego Zoo on Tuesday. It was two moms and four kids. First off, I fully respect all the moms of more than two children out there. I have no idea how you do it. Four kids between me and my friend was PLENTY. As for the San Diego Zoo, it’s been a couple years since my last visit. I can’t wait to go back. The zoo is so big, we only got around to half the exhibits. Here are some of the things we did and saw:

1.
Poor thing. Who named him? A drunk frat boy?

2.
“So then I says to him, what do take you me for, a llama!!! HAHAHAHAHA!”
Camels. The stand up comics of the animal kingdom.

3.
This was pretty cool: the orangutan befriended the kids through the glass. He tried to give them that little stick of hay and played peek-a-boo and put his hand up to the glass to their hands a la the gorilla in Return to Me.

4.
Speaking of gorillas, here they are at feeding time. We arrived to see the gorillas just as the food was being thrown to them. It was kind of like the flying cabbages at the St Paddy’s Day parade in New Orleans. Only the gorillas were adept at catching the throws, unlike drunk humans.

5.
The exploding toilet bowl. How nasty is that? My friend flushed the toilet and the water shot up and onto her. Horrifying.

6. (Imagine a cute picture right here)
The sea otters were awesome. They frolicked. They played. They kissed. They bit. Yeah, that’s right. They’s freaky.

7.
This little baby warthog (at least, I think it’s a warthog) mesmerized my kids.

8. I have no pictures from the snake exhibit but I saw a ginormous albino Burmese python and an equally ginormous Anaconda, a shedding King Cobra, and a Band Lizard hanging upside down in his terrarium.

9.
Dr. Zoolittle’s Amazing Amazon Adventures. Really, not that amazing, and not that much about the Amazon either. But the kids liked him.

10. I also have no pictures from the insect exhibit because they creeped me out a little too much to pull out my camera. Hissing cockroaches, stick insects, leaf insects, dead leaf mantises, bird eating spider (Little No Limit didn’t even want to stand too close to the glass with that one)

11. (imagine a picture with absolutely nothing exciting going on in it)
Koala bears: somewhat anticlimactic. They chilled out in a tree while a wallaby slept in the shade.

12.
Siamangs love popcorn as much as my kids do.

13.
But the kids love cotton candy even more.

Taken yesterday at the San Diego Zoo.

Also, I’m doing a CD giveaway on this post.

There are some new music CD’s and DVD’s roaming about my house, courtesy of the Disney Music Block Party.

Let’s start with They Might Be Giants’ Here Come the 123’s, by far the favorite. I guess the kids are following in their mama’s footsteps. Choo Choo Soul is the second most beloved disc, possibly because it includes a DVD and the kids love to watch it.

Ralph’s World The Rhyming Circus is a lot of fun because in addition to being entertaining, they do a cover of Folsom Prison Blues called “Folsom Daycare Blues” with such lyrics as “I pushed a toddler over / Just to watch him fall.” As much as I’d like to call it a ridiculous song, I can’t help but laugh. “Happy Not My Birthday” is also pretty cute.

The official Disney Music Block Party CD features music by a various Disney artists singing famous hits, like The Doodlebops singing “Under the Sea.” They Might Be Giants sing “The Ballad of Davy Crockett” and Wayne Brady sings “The Tiki, Tiki, Tiki Room.”

All in all, the kids enjoy these CDs enough that I looked up the tour the check if they’re coming to a venue near me, but alas, no such luck. I thought I’d content them with singing aloud in the car and pretending it’s a live show, but they asked me to stop so they could “listen to the real music.” No one appreciates my talents.

Now, on to the “giveaway” portion of my title – since Disney was kind enough to send me 5 of their Block Party CDs, I thought I’d pass one on to you: The Imagination Movers Juice Box Heroes. Leave a link to my blog on one of your posts, then leave a comment below letting me know you did so. Next Friday, Aug 15, I’ll pick one commenter at random and provided they are willing to give me a US mailing address (apologies to my international posse), I will send them the Imagination Movers Juice Box Heroes CD, still wrapped, along with some They Might be Giants stickers and Disney block party activity books. Enjoy!

I spent a great deal of last week at the beach. I kicked it off with a day at Crescent Bay where the waves were ginormous and crashed right on the shore, scaring the bejeebus out of me because I was convinced my children were going to get sucked underwater and pulled away. I spent the rest of the week at Oceanside, where a friend of mine had rented a condo for the week. With its friendly rolls of water, Oceanside’s beach did not scare me at all. What did scare me was the boogie board that The Boy used:

What’s scarier than a shark in attack stance? A shark in attack stance amidst fire and brimstone.

This was the boogie board at the condo where my friend was staying. I don’t know who purchased such a boogie board, but I’m wondering what the other options were that led them to believe this was the board to go with? Were the other ones decorated with piranhas? Crocodiles? Giant squids? Killer sea urchins? Yo Gabba Gabba?

Hmmm. I guess the shark isn’t so bad after all.