Brownie recipe

This is not, as a rule, a cooking blog, but these brownies rock! I cut the recipe from the newspaper; the original source is the Baltimore Sun.

S'More Squares

12 graham cracker squares It came out 15 to me, to cover the pan.
1 20-oz. box brownie mix
3 cups mini-marshmallows
1/2 cup chocolate chips
1/2 tsp. vegetable oil
Note that you'll be preparing the brownie mix as directed on the box, so you'll need whatever ingredients it calls for, probably oil & eggs.

Preheat oven to 350. Grease a 9x13 baking pan. I used butter-flavored cooking spray. Line the bottom of the pan with a single layer of graham-cracker squares. Faith did this part. I had to cut just a sliver off the end of one on each row to make them fit the pan.

In a large bowl, prepare the brownie mix according to directions on the box. I used Duncan Hines Fudgy Brownie mix. Carefully spread brownie batter evenly over graham crackers. Bake for about 25 minutes. Do not over-bake.

Remove brownies from oven. Immediately sprinkle with marshmallows; gently press marshmallows into hot brownies. I buy marshmallows once a year to make a cup of hot chocolate and then never use them again, so when I opened the bag, mine were all stuck together. I just threw them on top in sticky clumps to cover most of the surface of the brownies and didn't worry about pressing them in. Return to oven and bake another 2 minutes or until marshmallows are puffed.

Meanwhile, in a small saucepan, combine the chocolate chips and oil. Stir over low heat until melted and smooth.

Drizzle the melted chocolate over the marshmallows. Cooks who drizzle must have some miraculous spouted non-stick equipment that I don't. I just kind of spooned the melted chocolate on. It makes for a nice marbled-looking top. Cool completely. Use a knife dipped in hot water to cut into bars. Makes 24 bars.

I'm excising the nutritional information, as it's ridiculous to expect a brownie to be nutritious. Let's just say they're empty calories and leave it at that.

Birthday girls

I had a birthday last Sunday. As I'm the family photographer, I have no pictures from the occasion to share, but Faith turned 6 last month, and I do have photos from then.

Faith specifically wanted a party with streamers, hats, and noisemakers. She wanted a pinata too, but I vetoed that. Here she is with her Mawmaw and Poppy, all wearing party hats.

She loved Eric's Cookie Monster cake last year and requested one for her birthday this year. Everyone had blue teeth and tongues, and I had blue fingers just from cutting the cake!

There were also balloons. Faith got a Cinderella balloon, but with two children in the house, the sibling of the birthday kid gets a balloon, too. (It saves chasing and screaming and fighting over the balloon for days afterward.) Here is Eric with his Lightning McQueen (or, as he says, "CarQueen") balloon and a red noisemaker.

And here is Faith with her new doll. She also got a Dora DVD, a horn for her bicycle, an "I Spy" board game, and some new clothes. When I was a kid, clothes were a boring present; I always felt I'd been tricked when I opened a wrapped package and found it was only clothes, but Faith loves new clothes and likes to try them on right away.

The Facebook Quandary

(A generation ago, that would have been a title for an episode of "Star Trek" or "Doctor Who.")

So, anyway, here's my quandary. My nephew is on Facebook. So are a lot of other people I know/knew. (I looked people up on his account.)

On one level, I find the possibility intriguing. Everyone has someone they were great friends with years ago and lost touch with, and the thought of reconnecting with some of those people is enticing.

HOWEVER....

As evidenced by the amount of time since I last posted on this blog (and the number of people I owe e-mails to), I am obviously terrible at keeping up with such things. Adding Facebook would only spread my already limited time thinner, not to mention adding a whole other layer of things-to-waste-time-on-online, a category I am far from needing to pad.

More importantly, as I read in an article on Facebook and such phenomena a while back, the truth is: There is a reason people lose touch with each other in the first place. I have a hard enough time keeping up correspondence with the people I have been bound and determined to remain in touch with all along. If I didn't have the time or inclination to maintain a correspondence with people years ago, where do I expect that time and inclination to come from now, when I am busier than ever I was when I was single and childless? There is little more awkward than searching out an old friend, only to abandon the effort to keep in touch once again.

So there's my quandary: to Facebook, or not to Facebook? I'm leaning towards not, for the above reasons. Any of you on Facebook may try to convince me otherwise.

Getting lucky

The first time I won anything was when I was 5 years old, and our local McDonald's had a drawing for a big Easter basket full of toys and candy. It was supposed to be awarded on Easter by the Easter bunny, but we were going to church on Easter so I picked up my basket a day early and never saw the bunny.

It was the prelude to a rather lucky life: I've never won the lottery or anything (I understand one's odds are better if one buys a ticket), but I've won more than my share of skill-not-required prizes. I won $100 twice in bingo games, once collecting pieces from the supermarket and once in a school fund-raiser. I once won a case of motor oil at my dad's company picnic (not very exciting, but winning, nonetheless). I've found a $10 bill and a $100 bill, just lying in the street. (The $100 bill was in California, which seemed appropriate.) Within the last 8 years we've been in this house, I've won an address book, a birdbath, and a "Charlotte's Web" DVD.

So I wasn't overly surprised to be told that Eric had won a drawing at a local restaurant we frequent for "The World's Largest Christmas Stocking," 6 feet of various random toys and games. They all seem to be overstocks -- things that the manufacturers were having trouble getting rid of -- and the 4 board games included are too old for our familiy as of yet, but Faith and Eric each got a few fun things out of it, not to mention (for Faith, anyway) the excitement of winning in the first place. (We assured her that while it was Eric's name that was drawn, the toys were for sharing.) Faith got 2 dolls, one of which is the slutty kind I'd never buy for her but which has brushable hair, and a kite, which she's been wanting for a while. Eric got Lightning McQueen crayons and a NFL-themed counting board book. (His favorite page is the 9 football helmets, or, as he calls them, "ball hats.") Also included was Aang's Battle Staff from the "Avatar" series that makes swooshing sounds and pops out wings when you push a button, and there's a big, green stuffed frog at the bottom that they both enjoy. After we finished emptying the stocking, it looked like Christmas morning almost a week early at our house with new toys all around the tree!

It's beginning to look a lot like bowl season

The Christmas season is in full swing around our house, and not a moment too soon for Faith. She knew that Christmas was on a Thursday this year, and she knew that it wasn't until after Halloween; so the first Thursday in November, she woke me up with an excited, "It's Christmas, Mommy!" There were many tears that morning after a clarification, and it had to be repeated many times before Thanksgiving. ("Are there lights on the houses? Is there a tree in our house? Do you see any presents? Well, then, you'd better hope it's not Christmas, because it would be a pretty poor one.")

Things are much more holidayish now, particularly my stress levels. I did have all my shopping done by last weekend, until Amazon threw a monkey wrench into the works by announcing something I ordered wouldn't ship before Christmas after all, so I had to rush around the internet finding a substitute (shipped from Lubbock via Fed Ex tonight, so should be golden). I have also been lamenting the fact that I haven't gotten many cards this year, although I didn't get around to doing ours until today so I was being rather hypocritical. Tomorrow is wrapping day (except for the shipment from Lubbock, of course). I didn't get around to my usual holiday baking, though. I really need that extra week between Thanksgiving and Christmas! I think we get it back next year.

We put up the tree the day after Thanksgiving, and after I hung the fragile ornaments, Faith and Eric put up the unbreakables. It was Eric's first time to "help," and he would get an ornament for him and one for Faith, rush over to the tree, hang his on a branch, run back to the table for two more ornaments, hurry back to the tree, and try to hang his on the same branch. Sometimes I was able to find him an empty branch, and some I just moved when his back was turned.

Jennifer sent me this Wake Forest ornament several years ago, featuring the Deacon in all his bared-teeth glory, and when I hung it on the tree, Faith asked me, "Why is that man so angry?" After thinking about it for a moment, I told her it was mostly because his teams were no good. The University may be pleased about a third straight bowl, but I'm glad I bought ACC championship and Orange Bowl T-shirts two years ago because I'm certainly not interested in an EagleBank Bowl shirt, win or lose tomorrow. As I write, the basketball team is clinging to a top 10 ranking, but conference play doesn't begin until after Christmas. After the disappointing seasons they've had the last two years, I'm not going to raise my expectations until I see what they do against ACC competition. If they don't even make it into March Madness, I have no opportunity to doom my bracket by inking them in all the way to the championship!

One holiday behind

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! Now that we've all eaten turkey, it's time for me to get around to posting Halloween photos.
As you can see, Faith was Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz this year. She'd still wear the ruby slippers every day if I'd let her.

Faith doesn't have an acrophobic bone in her body, as evidence when she was 2 and climbed to the top of the McDonald's PlayPlace structure without a qualm. Last Halloween, our church had a 20-foot-tall slide she spent all night climbing to the top of and sliding down. This year, she had to settle for the inflatable rock-climbing wall. We found out afterward that one of the other sides of the "mountain" had its footholds closer together for smaller climbers, but despite the fact that she was on the "big people" side, she made it to within 5 feet of the top.

Here she is at the petting zoo, in a shot that shows off her French braids. I hadn't even tried to French braid anyone's hair since high school, and it took me about a half an hour and a lot of hair gel to get hers done. I told her before I started that I wasn't a very good braider. She was very still and patient, but part of the way through, she said, "I think you're right, Mommy. I think you're not a very good braider."

And, yes, we do still have another child, but we don't have any Halloween pictures of him. Eric is at a difficult age photogenically: If he sees me point the camera at him, he immediately stops whatever he's doing and runs toward me to point at the camera. So most of our pictures of him here recently are either when he's sleeping or out of focus as he quickly approaches.

In which the blogger criticizes the way other people raise their children

The kids and I went to a newly-opened McDonald's for lunch and playtime today. (Probably won't be back, as there's no door at the PlayPlace entrance, which means Eric felt free to race out into the restaurant proper where I had to chase him down, but Faith enjoyed the different playground.)

I rarely actually eat lunch at the McDonald's, but it's a great place for me to sit and read the newspaper or get caught up on magazines while the kids get to Play Well with Others. They're contained where I don't have to worry about crazy people or traffic, and it's all climate-controlled so it's an all-weather, all-season playground with reasonably-comfortable seats and free refills. What's not to love?

Plus, of course, it's the perfect venue for that perennial favorite parents' game, "I'm Sure Glad My Kid's Not That Much of a Brat." At our usual McDonald's last month, I enjoyed a banner day in the sport, when a four-ish boy came in dressed like a miniature sk8r-boi, complete with black T-shirt, baggy black jeans, and a curly asymmetrical haircut a la the late Heath Ledger circa "10 Things I Hate About You." His surly pose was spoiled by only one thing -- the baby blue pacifier that never left his mouth except when he ate.

Now, I know the pacifier habit is a hard one to break. We made Eric go cold turkey shortly before his 2nd birthday, and I felt so sorry for him. But given that your kid is running around with a pacifier not long before kindergarten, why dress him like a 15-year-old? It makes for a jarring juxtaposition.

Now you can probably go find the sk8r-boi's mom's blog wherein she criticizes something my kids were doing at McDonald's last month. The game goes on....