Mother’s, Owls, Cross stitch and Baking

Happy Belated Mother’s Day to all.  Mother’s Day is bittersweet to me.  While I am a mother it takes a backseat to me missing my own mother.  My mother passed away in 1996, she was only 3 years older than I am right now — certainly brings perspective to age — and I think I miss her more rather than less as the years go on.

And while I could wallow in grief for a long time I choose to focus on my own Mother’s Day.  I have two wonderful children — a boy and a girl.  They aren’t children, clearly anymore, and they have children of their own who are growing quickly — we even have one teenager! Yikes!  In this difficult time, though, they managed to make my Mother’s Day probably the best I have ever had.  Saturday evening the doorbell rang and there was my son and family standing by the car — they had brought me a photo and a card made by the kids.  I just love these sorts of gifts — they mean so much because they come from the heart and the hands of those giving them.  My daughter called and said she wanted to bring us dinner.  Now, my poor daughter has been having to listen to me grouse about being tired of eating my own cooking so she and her family went to a popular barbecue place and brought us dinner.  She knew how welcome this gesture would be.  It was wonderful.  They were both so thoughtful and came through even though this Covid thing is definitely making things more — challenging.  I have really good kids.  I am blessed.

We are also blessed with an owl.  About a month ago I was outdoors at dusk with the Chunky Monkey (aka Trixie) and I heard this wild flapping of wings and watched an owl swoop down very close to her.  Now, bear in mind that I am a total city girl and having owls dive bomb the dog isn’t something I am used to.  Since the dog is like twice as big as the owl I guess it thought better of trying to grab her up and rested in the tree above where we were standing.  I have never seen the owl again but I did find an owl pellet in the yard which was an exciting thing for Trixie to try to get ahold of.  So, since the owl is clearly still around I might get Hubs to build an owl house for it. I don’t know too much about owls so research is in order.

I am still working on my cross stitch project and making a bit of progress.  At least I am past the beige on beige bit — green on beige is a little easier to do!  I am going to work on it today in between laundry and vacuuming up all the leaves the Chunky Monkey brings in.  My life has sort of morphed into a weird little routine not of my design.  I have the cross stitch on the kitchen table and every time I put a load of laundry in or load the dishwasher I sit down and do a few stitches.  The book I am STILL reading — The Little Shop of Found Things — is there as well so sometimes I sit and read a couple of pages between doing the laundry or the dishes or taking cookies out of the oven which brings me to my newest activity — baking.

I used to bake a LOT.  Bread, cookies, muffins — but we also ATE a lot and none of it was good for Hubs diabetes so I sort of put it on the back burner so to speak — no pun intended.  You know how they say don’t grocery shop when you are hungry?  Well, that goes for ordering groceries as well — one of my orders had a copious amount of cookies in it and I ate them.  Not good.  Really not good.  So, I decided that any sweets I might have I will make myself.  So, the other day I pulled out the mixer and the measuring cups and mixed up some chocolate chip cookie dough.  I usually drop them with a little scoop like an ice cream scoop but I found it made my hands hurt so I went back to the double spoon method.  I got a new cookie sheet for Christmas that is ridged for even cooking and I hadn’t used it yet so I pulled it out and I can’t tell you what great cookies it made.  They were crisp on the outside and soft in the middle — really nice — so I am pleased with that.  My husband also bought me some cookie stamps and an etched rolling pin to make elaborate cookies with and I am going to try those out — I think you have to use a springerle recipe for those.  When I do I will add photos but I didn’t think to take photos of the plain ol’ chocolate chip cookies.  So, anyway, I am back into baking and most of it is going into the freezer but better the freezer than me!  You have heard of the Freshman 15?  Well, I don’t want to fall victim to the Covid 25!

My knee has been giving me a lot of trouble lately so I think today I am going to try riding my exercise bike some.  I know it will help but self discipline isn’t my strong suit.  But, I have the time so......no excuses.

With that, I think I will go get some laundry done.  I am finding life to be much easier if I do things in smaller batches and more often — I really hate large loads of laundry — and dishwashing — not waiting until so many things need to be washed — do it and get it done.  My younger self could have learned so much from my old lady self.  Eye roll.