She is seconds away from crawling.  She only seems interested in crawling when there are electrical cords in her line of vision.

But her car is mobile.  Mostly just backwards, but it’s mobile.

This is a giant bottle of wine that was a gift years ago, that we assumed would taste like ass, and therefore it exists for decoration only.

Still intact.  To be destroyed another day.

Just sick enough that I longed for comfort food.

I don’t know what it is that changed in my brain when I had Ada, but when she is sick, or I’ve had a hard day with her, I crave hot dish and casserole and things I don’t normally eat – the food of my rural/midwestern childhood.  Where I would normally immediately discard a recipe that features any sort of canned soup, it becomes a burning need.  This isn’t even my comfort food when I am sick myself.  Takeout Chinese cures my colds.

I wrapped my little girl up in her blanket and put her to sleep for the third time and made Pigs In a Blanket Casserole, a recipe from the McLean County Independent Cookbook.  It references my definition of pigs-in-a-blanket, which is known elsewhere as Cabbage Rolls.  I’ve learned that most in Illinois define pigs-in-a-blanket as hot dogs wrapped in crescent rolls.

This isn’t a hotdish I specifically remember from my childhood in North Dakota, but it’s definitely the *type* of food I remember my grandmothers serving.  I thought of them both as I put it together, especially after Ada woke up again and was sitting in her high chair pulled up to the kitchen counter while I chopped. I tried to imagine the same scene, but with multiple children.  There were five children on my father’s side and eight on my mother’s.  I know they wouldn’t all have been underfoot at the same time, but even just two or three would have complicated the heck out of my day.

It goes together pretty fast, then bakes low and slow for a long time.  Yesterday’s version was made with pork sausage instead of hamburger, because it was on hand.

Pigs In a Blanket Casserole

Print recipe

Ingredients

• 1lb Hamburger
• .5 cup Onion (chopped)
• 1/2 head Cabbage (small)
• 1 can Tomato Soup
• 1 can Cream-of-Something Soup
• 1 cup Rice (raw)
• Salt & Pepper (To Taste)

Note

From the McLean County Independent Cookbook, contributed by Kathy Huettl.

Directions

Season and fry meat and onion.

Add rice.

Shred cabbage and mix with other ingredients in a baking dish (9x13inch)

Combine tomato soup and creamed coup and pour over the top.

Bake at 300 degrees until the rice is done.

Today is her last day at the big daycare center.  I’m so excited to get back to the regular schedule and her regular provider on Monday.  Ada will have a new baby pal and I will be able to get back to the gym every morning again (and be serious about it.  I wrote it on the internet, therefore it will happen.)

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If you use Facebook to keep track of when new content is posted here, please make sure that you Like the Lambic Pentameter Facebook page.  There is already content, and there will soon be more, that I don’t cross-post to a personal Facebook page.  Plus I like being liked.  LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME.

I can also be found at all of these places:

Really, I just wanted an excuse to use a new plug-in that drops that little row of icons freakin’ anywhere.

So.  G+.  I have started using it pretty heavily again, but in a different way.  When G+ was born, Google killed off the Share function in Reader.  I was a *very* active Share user.  I only had a dozen or so followers, but those people were LUCKY, because I curated an awesome little magazine for them every single day, containing a lot of raging against the patriarchy and even more exotic cars.  And then Share was killed off and I wasn’t sure I liked this G+ version, but I miss it.  So my G+ profile will become what my Reader Shares used to be – my collection of things I find interesting on the internet that I think you should read.  My shares have so far been public, so even if you don’t use G+, you should be able to see everything.

I’m also dipping a toe into the LinkedIn water, despite how much I hate their 20 emails a day.  I’m not posting a link here yet, but I should be super easy to find.  I’d be especially interested in connecting with any of you that I’ve ever worked with, be it in the HVAC field, or that one time I installed WordPress for you, or even that time I gave you advice about which air conditioner to buy.  My next big internet project is an HVAC-related site.

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Lots of questions lately about auto racing, and I have no set schedule.  Dad and David and team will be spending a lot of time at Grundy County this year, which I’m really excited about, so I’m sure I’ll be there a few times.  I’d like to get to Knoxville this year, but not sure when.  And I’m sure I’ll pop up to Angell Park at least once this summer.

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I hope you all have a fantastic weekend!

1.  The gift Ada “made” for me at daycare.

2.  Mother’s Day wishes from people who aren’t my kid.  Man, that’s awesome.

3.  A weekend with nothing on the schedule except cuddling that little turkey.

You are hereby challenged to find the joy in small things, because life is short and love is large . . . Grace in Small Things

Hello from me and the Baby G, who was telling a pretty lengthy story when I snapped this.

Not much new to report from our corner of the planet.  She will be heading back to her regular daycare provider on Monday, which is going to be great.  I’ll be able to get back into my normal schedule and Ada will be able to have a schedule.  Any schedule.

The big daycare center was nice for a few reasons, but not a good fit for her long-term for many many more reasons. 

I present Exhibit N:  Nap Report Card.

And yesterday.

Oh, yesterday.

We finally reached the boundary of her overstimulation.  They tell me “She just doesn’t want to sleep.  It’s like she has to play with every toy in the room before she will sleep.”

PLAY WITH ALL THE THINGS!!!!

I wonder where she gets that.

We had a weekend that I thought would be really low key but wasn’t, ultimately.  On Saturday, we went to Kenosha, Wisconsin for the Wisconsin Marathon.  Mexican food and movies at GL’s on Saturday night. 

Sunday morning, breakfast + cheer on Andrea at her 5k + breakfast + drive around + breakfast again.  It was a good day for pancake-makers. 

That is Ada in the Mountain Buggy, which is such a great stroller that I need to never ever use it again.  I love my little Chicco but every time I touch the Mountain Buggy, I am reminded that it is made out of metal and indestructible things and I want to use it all of the time and it’s so cumbersome that just isn’t smart.

I didn’t get a photo, but Ada likes to put both feet up against that roll bar and lock her knees, like she is perpetually bracing for impact.

There’s very little on the schedule this weekend, and I’m really excited about that even though I know it will get filled in with things.  Hopefully things like naps and more movies and maybe more pancakes.  It is Mother’s Day, you know?

We celebrated Pipes’ decision to go to grad school and Ada’s lack of object permanence with a game of peek-a-boo.

On Friday, we headed to the Dayton, Ohio area for a 50k for GL, which Ada and I skipped to hang out with Ludakristen, who looooooves babies.

And then she fed the baby Cheetos.

We picked GL up later that afternoon, in dreary weather.

From Dayton, we drove to Lansing, Michigan, via Ada, Ohio.

Ada was a little out of the way, but worth it!  When she starts resenting me for giving her a name that is not available on souvenirs, I will pull out photos like this.

A little less out of the way was Zingerman’s Deli in Ann Arbor, where I loaded up on rugelach and ginger cookies and Blenheim’s Ginger Ale.  GL, who often gets teased for taking baguettes to ultramarathons, took a challah to his 50k on Sunday.

Again, while GL was out running, Ada and I opted for less outdoorsy fun.  Our Sunday morning started with Amy and I splitting our usual growler of Biggby’s, a tradition that started with my first visit.

Then Ada met the big puppies, Corky and Amy’s springer spaniels, Hobart and Sunday.

Amy tried to turn my baby into an iBaby.

Corky treated Amy and me to appointments at a local health and wellness center for 90 minute massages on Sunday, which was just amazing.  While Amy and I were getting pampered, he took the baby for a walk around the MSU campus, and she came back wearing this. 

Based on the social media debates after I posted this photo, with everyone chiming in with their team that Ada should represent, we have decided on a new rule:  Ada will wear any college gear you give her, provided it is accompanied by a donation to her 529 plan.  The cute pictures of her in Big 10 gear will just be sad when she’s working her butt off at the hovercarwash to try to pay for college. 

Our trips to Lansing are often very food-centric, so this trip had us eating at Woody’s, El Azteco, a burger joint whose name I didn’t catch, and grabbing some sweet corn ice cream a the MSU Dairy.

As we frequently do, we stretched our weekend out an extra day and didn’t come home until Monday morning.  The trip home was fine, except with travel blahs and time changes, getting home at 1 pm still felt like about 6 pm.

We went out for sushi with Andrea on Monday night, as she was just returning from a trip where she held a baby and stood in the same Starbucks line as Jason Stackhouse, and we needed to discuss both of these topics in depth.

As Marc suggested, we stopped eating when we got to the baby.

She was only mildly amused with the sharp pointy stick, but very excited about GL’s cup of green tea, which she even sipped from.  I’m super impressed with her knowledge of how cups work.  Which might be the dumbest thing I’ve ever written here.

Anyway.  Happy Thursday, friends!  I’m looking forward to a lazy weekend with little to no travel.  What’s on your agenda?

Almost 2 weeks ago now, Ada and I hitched a ride to North Dakota with my dad, who was headed to Williston (THIS Williston, a long read but it expresses everything I try to explain when I say “It’s like freakin’ Deadwood up there, you guys”.) 

It is an 11-13 hour drive and Ada was an absolute rock star.  She woke up at rest stops and gas stations (identical Kwik Trip bathrooms must have made her feel like we weren’t really moving).   Otherwise she slept or played quietly with her toys.

We stopped at Charlie’s in Freeport, MN, which is a favorite that my parents hit on almost every trip through.

The cafe was the centerfold of a recent National Geographic magazine and book entitled, In Search of Lake Wobegon. Garrison Keillor of “Prairie Home Companion” lived South of Freeport when he first started writing and worked at St. John’s radio station. He would be a daily customer and still stops in when he is in the area.

We weren’t that far into North Dakota before we saw the signs that we were part of a big parade towards the oil fields.  Trucks loaded down with tanks and construction vehicles made up a large portion of the traffic. 

We stopped in Bismarck to see some family, and then Dad dropped us off in Garrison.  Ada got quality time with her Great Aunt while I had some knoephla soup.

Her Great Uncle tried teaching her how to crawl.

We took a road trip to Minot.

Almost lost the baby in her cousin’s giraffe collection.

Went to Underwood to catch up with the other side and take photos of the blonde army.

Ada met one of her two double-second-cousins-once-removed. 

Dad returned and we took a trip to Max to check out the old farm, which hasn’t been occupied for years and spent most of 2011 under water due to the giant flood.

Side trip through Douglas on the way back.

Party on Saturday night for lots of great aunts and great uncles and second and third and fourth cousins to meet the baby.

And baby doll Peggy, Great Aunt Peggy, and Ada posed for some photos.

We hit the road at 11 pm on Saturday night and it worked out very well.  The first 8 hours of the trip was time that Ada would have been sleeping anyway, so the trip home was even easier on her.

Big thanks to Glen and Amanda for letting us camp at their house, for tracking down a crib for Ada to sleep in, for loaning me a vehicle for our time there, and thanks to everyone else who hosted us, entertained us, and loved up on my baby girl.  

I still can’t get over how well she travels.  It’s almost like she realizes she doesn’t have any other choice, huh?

We watched last night’s game at the race shop with friends, and while my mom was putting together food, I had Ada sitting on the table in the kitchen.   After she very nearly successfully picked up a full, brand-new glass jar of salsa (and very nearly smashed her finger), I gave her a plastic cup to play with.

And was promptly terrified by how close she is to figuring out how to “drink” out of it.

I eventually added her name so that nobody would accidentally mix a drink on top of her 1/4” of drool in the bottom of her cup.

First person to quote Toby Keith in the comments gets IP banned.

She didn’t make it to the bitter, disappointing end of the hockey game.  It’s probably best this way.

So just watch this a few dozen times.

The Preemie Grad School testing was mostly focused on motor skills today.  She spent some time on the floor with a bucket of toys getting judged.  On the Bayley scale, she scored an 11 for fine motor skills and a 15 for gross motor skills – they consider a 10 or 11 to be good scores for both. 

In gross motor development, she’s considered 6 months old, and in fine motor skills, she is 5 months old.  They are measuring her against her “chip time”, her adjusted age, which is 4 months, 24 days.  She has a perfectly shaped head, which shows the experts that she is very active and doesn’t spend a lot of time laying in one place.  She babbles a lot, which also reflected well on us, because she demonstrates language and cognition development.  So I made a baby with a big round head who talks a lot.  Stop the presses!

At 13 lbs, 4 oz and 24.75 inches, she is in the 25th and 50th percentiles, again for her adjusted age.  Just like her last visit, she is on schedule and ahead in development, and still a peanut.  They didn’t even give us her percentile ranking for her real age.  She was pronounced a “super hot rod” and we were sent home with some exercises to try to get her to sit up and engage her core more before she starts crawling. 

The clinic follows her weight gain pretty closely, and all of their focus is on calories – get the milk and the vitamins in, as baby solid food is pretty light on calories and not the focus right now.

We went from that appointment to her pediatrician’s office, who said limit the milk and try to push solid food more.  So . . . that’s handy.

(Getting multiple instructions from different healthcare workers has been the norm since she was born.  Even the NICU nurses were giving us conflicting directions.  We go with our gut feelings and/or the person we like more.  In this case, she’s eating solids really well and hasn’t had any problems gaining, so we’ll likely strive for more solid foods and not stress about the calories unless her weight gain slows.  Her pediatrician tends to treat her like a 6 month old baby rather than a 4 month old baby, and we trust him.)

She didn’t gain any weight from one office to the next.

She did get two vaccines, which she howled through, and the expression on her face directed at the nurse afterwards gave me some serious foreshadowing to her teen years.  It was cold hard anger.  If she could have spoken at that moment, I think she would have said “Get out of my sight, I have no use for you.”  The nurse listened.

We took a nice long drive to help her calm down and get a little bit of sleep, and we ended up at Georgio’s for a painkilling Mt. Georgio cookie.

Not pictured:  spinach dip and cheesy bread.  We killed a LOT of pain.

We are home now and doing laundry and otherwise getting ready for Wednesday’s road trip to North Dakota. 

Happy Monday, friends!