On the long weekend we went to Phillip Island.
We saw koalas and penguins.
It was very cold.
We all got sick.
The End.
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Frogging & Friands
How can this be? I actually have time to myself in the middle of the day! Niamh is sleeping (she has unfortunately caught the Cold that begat the Croup, thanks to small-boy-kisses). Finn, who is much, much better, is reading in his bedroom – occasionally calling out to find out what P-R-O-B-E spells, or A-M-A-L-G-A-M! (After the first, I was puzzled, after the second I figured out he was reading ‘Emma goes to the dentist’).
So anyway, I’m frogging. Well, before I was blogging, I was frogging. I decided (after you all said I should 🙂 ) to stick with the ‘Fantasy Blues’ border on ‘You Were Hatched’, but I’m definitely ditching the metallic backstitching it calls for – that just looks right out of place to me, so I’ll just backstitch the border and eyes with dark blue floss instead. Sometime this weekend (I hope), I’ll be posting a happy dance.
When Niamh wakes up, we’re off to buy flour to make playdough. And more friands. Let me tell you about friands. They are the Best. Things. Ever! Even for my baking-challenged self, these are fail proof. They are 100% delicious, if not more. Here’s the recipe I found on the back of my icing sugar packet – we have since experimented with Raspberry friands from another recipe, but I liked these ones the best. I might try lime zest in today’s batch though. Yum.
I’m too lazy to imperialize the measurements – and besides, Metric rulz! :giggle:
Orange Almond Friands
150g butter
100g almond meal
1 1/2 cups icing sugar
1/3 cup plain flour, sifted
5 egg whites
grated rind of 2 oranges
Preheat oven to 200°C. Lightly grease 12 (1/3 cup capacity) muffin pans*.
Melt butter in a small saucepan over medium-high heat for 3-4 minutes until very hot. Remove from heat, cool for five minutes.
Combine almond meal, icing mix and flour in a large bowl. Add lightly beaten egg whites and orange rind and mix gently to combine. Stir in melted butter.
Pour mixture evenly into prepared pans so they are two thirds full. Bake 20-25 minutes or until golden and firm to touch.
Serve warm or cold.
*If you want to be a cool kid, you can buy friand pans – café friands are usually oval in shape. But muffin pans work just fine, truly.
Good Mum, Bad Mum
For every problem, there is a solution – blog about it! Since that post, Niamh has of course reverted back to perfect angel :giggle: Actually, I’ve discovered something rather nice – if I let her sleep on me (either in the sling, or just lying on my chest) in the early evening, rather than struggling to get her in bed then, she settles much better into bed later on. And by much better, I mean that I take her into the bedroom by 8.30 or so, give her a little top-up feed, a cuddle, pop her into bed, and turn the music thingy on, and leave the room. She sleeps – it’s like magic! I don’t remember Finn going to bed fuss-free until he was several months old. It won’t continue, of course :giggle:
That’s the Good Mum bit of my story. Sadly, there’s a Bad Mum bit. Confession – I have a crap bedside manner. I am not good with sick people, not even with my own family. Finn has had a persistent cough over the last few days, lingering from a mild cold a week or so ago. I kept him home from preschool today, of course – despite my crapness, I couldn’t in good conscience expose all the other kids to his germiness. But even as I did, I have to admit to feeling somewhat resentful – three hours a week when he’s at preschool is the only break I get, after all.
Um… well… turns out he has Croup 😥
I’m such a bad mother.
Thankfully, my GP is wonderful, and squeezed us in today when Finn became dreadfully distressed by it all. It’s a relatively mild case, he should be okay in a few days.