lotion making secret

For Christmas, I received kiwi scented lotion from Brooke and Micah and Jr. It smells awesome! I have wanted to capture the smell so I could have it longer that just that one bottle. It is one of those consumables that I don't use because as soon as I begin to use it, it is gone. But, I end up never enjoying it because I know the enjoyment will dissipate too quickly. It is a personal conundrum and I am getting over it.
The feeling reminds me of traveling. I would hate the beginning of a trip because I knew it would be over before I was ready for it to end. Sitting in our family van, leaving the driveway, knowing all too clearly that I would see that driveway again before I was ready to see it. I would almost ruin my adventure in the anticipation that it was going to end. So, I would tell myself, "Obviously, it will end! Why not enjoy it?" Then, in vain attempts at enjoyment in trying to experience everything, I would overdo it and forget to actually enjoy myself! Again, I repeat, I am getting over it!
Back to lotion, I decided to make the lotion recipe from my mom and use the kiwi lotion instead of baby lotion. WOW! It totally worked! The vitamin e skin care cream behaves like an unscented base (knowing that, I am going to try small amounts of essential oils next). Now, I have triple the amount of the good scent and even got to add a few extra ingredients.
I added 1 tablespoon each of vitamin e oil, castor oil, and solid cocoa butter and broke out the stick blender. (I mean, come on! A stick blender is just so fun to use and there isn't enough cooking reasons to use it.) After whipping it up to a nice, thick fluff, I began packing it back into the cream pots. What a messy situation; hands all covered in lotion as I scooped it in the containers. While doing this, I felt bits of solid cocoa throughout the mixture. That was not going to work! Argh, put all the lotion back into one of my many plastic, arthritis approved Folgers container and think of a solution. Ah ha!
It was so easy, and I was so glad to be using that coffee container! I got my big craft-use stainless steel stock pot and heated some water. Into that went the lotion in its container. Best part, the plastic container floated on the water perfectly and the depth of the stock pot kept it upright. I could stick blend up the mixture as it approached body temp.
Once the cocoa butter bits were melted, I prepped to pack the final pots. Even better: the temperature made it just thin enough to easily pour, plus it didn't stick to the container! The Folgers container and stick blender cleaned each other with a bit of dish detergent and water.
I love it when a problem turns into a new, better way of doing future projects.
All future lotion projects will now be done with my Folgers bain marie!

Chef Wok

Renée gets introduced to the best Chinese food ever!

Renée's entranced

I guess PBS is going through a drive as Sesame Street is not on.
Actually, Sit and Be Fit is on. Renee loves that slow moving, soft spoken woman. And to be totally honest, that workout with those bands is fo' real! I was stretched and tired and smelled none too pleasant once completed.

Paparazzi

Oh, please, give me some space!

Cold rainy mornings...

require a nice, hot bath.

Say Cheese!

I made mozzarella and ricotta cheese for our lasagna. The cheese was awesome, but I over did the garlic in the layering. It was potent! Even worse than the garlic chili that was later used as starter. For leftovers, a bit of plain sauce and it should be good to go.

To make the cheese, I started a city wide trek to find rennet and citric acid. I thought the rennet would be hard to find. Nope, exactly the opposite. The grocery clerk at HEB knew exactly what I was talking about when I asked for rennet! It was on the top shelf of the ice cream makings and toppings. I would not have thought to even look there, but it is used for custards and ice cream making. Never knew.

The first batch was weird and never really made up into cheese. I used a recipe from the internet.

For the second batch, I used the recipe that was included in the box of rennet. It tasted great, but I couldn't get it to stretch out and get semi-hard. It stayed rather smushy. I also made ricotta with the remaining whey.

Here is the mozzarella curd cut up in the pot floating in the whey. It was fun to actually see what Little Miss Muffett ate!

Making cheese was so easy, but definitely took some time. I will do it again in a heart beat, but want to get a book to know a bit more about the chemistry to troubleshoot as I go. The best part was using cheese cloth for its intended purpose! It felt like the universal forces of cheese aligned in my kitchen and patted me on the back and said, "Whey to go!"

Future Wii Champ

Post reading excitement: Indiana Jones on the Wii.

Sisterly reading time

Renée is going to be so smart with a big sister like Phoebe.

Corpus visit

A good friend, Tim, from Mike's Navy days came for a visit in February. We all headed to Corpus so they could visit the USS Lexington that is permanently docked there and us girlies went to the aquarium. We had so much fun!

The parking area is under the overpass and Tim figured out the best way to remember where we parked. I hope you can make it out in the next photo; an orange road construction barrel was lodged in the steel cabling along the side of the overpass ridge way above the car. Crazy! Notice in the photo how confused Phoebe is trying to find the barrel.

The indoor dolphin house is pretty darned neat. Even the iPhone had enough underwater light to capture the coolness factor.

This dome lets you see what it must look like to underwater animals when we look at them.

Multiple uses for the Bumbo

Helmet to fight off the enemy or to pretend you have a big nose!

Mangosteen, more, please!

You heard it here first folks! The new rage in fruit goodness is the mangosteen. First seen as fabric, then made up into crafty and utilitarian projects, now it is the must have nectar to complement your noni and acai juice. Ahh, refreshing.

Can't tell you what it tastes like as the other juice flavors were present. Phoebe was desperate to get a bottle of this stuff, though! Geez, kid, no you can' have the $16 a bottle juice. Let me get you a nice 59 cent super-caffeinated Pibb Extra.

Pause in bloggin'

Pardon the recent pause in posts. I have been enriching myself with
the joys of motherhood.

Family's Twisted Evil Genius

I finally downloaded Picasa and am very impressed. iPhoto has been bugging me. I like to organize my pictures into folders and whatnot. Now, it is nice that iPhoto will do that for me, but I really wish it would also just leave stuff alone.

I have also wanted a way to blog with my pictures easier than through a browser. Picasa has that! I integrates that blogger interface and makes it easy to post. There are some things that it doesn't do, such as post options and easy text alignment. Maybe soon. So, onto the post!

When Phoebe was a baby, I learned that you pushed down between your eyebrows to produce an evil face. Now that I have an 8-year-old going on 13 (I refuse to go any higher on that age), I now understand that it isn't evil face. It is actually the face you get when your child is being a total smart aleck and all you want to do is rip their lips off (of which I was afraid of when I was a child). This is what Renée will look like in her hey day of driving me nuts.

I love the second picture. It is as if Renée is saying two things: 1) "Why are you doing evil baby face to me, Momma?" and 2) This is the surprised look Momma & Poppa will get when I try to get out of being in trouble. "Who me? Innocent me?"

iPhone again

While visiting the doctor today, my iPhone fell and quit working. Not quite 20 days old and dead. I realize I dropped it, but just hear/read me out.
I miss my Edge iPhone. It was indestructible until I found out that toilet water will kill it. It fell from the top of our truck while driving. I saw it tumble in the road pebble and thought for sure it was going to be useless. Oh, contrare, monfrare! It had a little bump on the corner but none the worse. It later got a cracked screen while in my purse because my keys lodged in the speaker hole. It had a little part in the upper right that was fidgety, but still worked just fine. It took a lickin' and kept on tickin'. It just couldn't hold its liquor.
This 3G isn't the same quality at all. 2 totally different planets. I am disappointed with it and just get sick that I ruined my Edge one. I miss it. I miss the money I spent for this new one.
Apple gave me a new one and I appreciate the no hastle swap I got at the store. I didn't like that I had to wait all day long without a phone until my Concierge appointment. I tend to be very cranky when I have no communications.
I decided that I am going to make a little hip purse similar to this one. It will zip up to hold my phone and wallet, Renée's pacifier, and sunglasses. Nothing should fall to the ground even when I go to the bathroom. I have some tea towels I got on clearance that are too cute to be towels. Hip sling it will be!
I'll let you know when it is done.

River cleaning boat

 During Tim's visit we walked the downtown Riverwalk and saw what Tim called "the most coveted city job"-the river cleaner. That little boat is just way cool. I want to clean the river! The boat had arms on either side the ended with a tire. As it got into the straight, the arms extended, the tire rode along the sides, and net bags collected floating debris.

Artisan kaiser rolls

You guys all know how much I love my book, Artisan Bread in Five. Jeff, one of the authors, is having a kaiser roll dilemma. Here is my experimentation to make them. I just used my master boule recipe since I had it ready to go. I didn't want to make the kaiser roll recipe and possibly miss the opportunity to put my two cents in an get an autographed copy of the book!
I have made 5 different options for creating the look of the kaiser roll. Starting at the top and going clockwise:

• I sliced through with a knife. Problem is there are six lines since it was easier to make symmetrical straight cuts across the entire roll;
• I made a long log, twisted it like a donut, and then circled it back to make it a roll. Looks lumpy and cock-eyed;
• I made a ball, flattened it, cut 5 times to the center, and then folded each cut back to the center. Looks too much like a star instead of a kaiser. This might prove to be attractive for an astronomy event;
• I got out my trust set of biscuit cutters and mushed it in five times danged near to the bottom of the roll;
• Last, is the one I feel will be the best. I used my Tupperware scraper's circular section to mush down five times. It was easy to line up the center each time and make five symmetrical cuts.

For this experiment, I am going to coat them with egg white, but leave off any poppy seed topping.

60 minutes of rise time later. They don't look like they did a whole heck of a lot of raising. Maybe a little bit of kaisering, though:

Baked:
Knife cuts:

Donut Twist:

5 Cuts to center then folded:

Biscuit cutter:

Tupperware scraper curved edge:

Okay, I am a bit shocked that the donut twist one looks the best. I was for sure the scraper was going to be it. The biscuit cutter one is my winner for edibility because it pulls apart like a croquembouche. Our cousin, Katie, had that at her wedding for the groom's cake. Wow! What an impressive display it was! Spun sugar was all over it so it looked like it was 4 times the actual size.
This was a fun lunch time experiment to prepare for an afterschool snack. Jeff, good luck with your upcoming kaiser roll attempts! I can't wait to see what your final kaiser rolls look like.

Nursing unmentionable alteration

I hate bra shopping!
Absolutely hate it!
I hate it so much that if you need a bra, I will go shopping with you just so you don't have to hate it so much. Go with me and you will never have to leave the dressing room. I will hunt through racks to find exactly what you need. For myself, though, it is an outing in futility.
There was a parody song made about my bra shopping experience once: "I like big cups and I cannot lie..." Well, I can lie, they suck! I also have lost enough weight in the last 2 years that trying to find my size band with my cup is futile! "Shopping is futile," said the Borg Queen. Sure she did, she wasn't nursing and her outfit had built in support.
That being said, even conventional nursing bras are hard to come by. That is why I altered my existing non-underwire underwear. I got some swim suit bra hooks at Hancocks and sewed them on! I also picked up some extender that attaches to the hooks in the back. I can really adjust for whatever my water retention is for that day. Plus, it gives me plenty of play to fight fat back.
Best part: cost me $1.19!

40 Inspirational Speeches in 2 Minutes

beady floral decor

I am not a big home decorator. I just can't picture the way I want things permanently and am afraid to install or spend money on anything that won't fit the ultimate bill. Plus, the thought of having to fill in holes from hanging stuff on the walls makes me cringe. Just my quirk, I guess, and I am getting over it!
The hole in the kitchen ceiling was repaired by my dad and I. That was a major accomplishment. I bring this up only to demonstrate that I will have a hole in my ceiling forever, but cringe about a nail hole! Seriously, I am getting over it.
So getting over it, I put in matching hangers in the kitchen. One holds Momo's pot and the other holds a flower arrangment glass thingy from our wedding.
I have been changing out the flowers for the seasons. The leaves stay the same. It looks cuter each time I do it. Michaels had 40% off some seasonal decor and I picked up $3 worth of beady-type floral things.
That $3 worth was too much for the kitchen so Phoebe crafted up her own arrangement to put in her room! It was so much fun because we hadn't crafted together like that in so long. She is a busy girl with school, chess club, Girl Scouts, and earning all her AR points. She needs less than 150 points to make it to 500 for this year. She made the goal herself to get to 500 and has dedicated herself to accomplishing it. I can't wait for her to hit her goal!