Recipe of the week

You will thank me for this after you try it....

Crab Boil Potato Salad
courtesy of Food Network's 50 Potato Salads

Mix together:
1/2 cup corn
1/2 cup chopped celery
1 cup mayo
1 T lemon juice
1 and 1/2 teaspoons Old Bay

Toss with:
2 pounds boiled, cubed red potatoes
1 cup crabmeat

Chill and serve, assuming you don't eat it all yourself while making it.

Truth be told, I never measure for this sort of thing.  In my last batch I forgot the celery, used more lemon juice and less mayo, and had a greater crab-to-potato ratio.  Still great!

Be prepared

“Be prepared” is a motto we hear a lot.  Two simple words.  In every facet of your life, there is something for which you need to prepare.  You’ll need to eat sometime today, right?  Have you been to the store?  Do you have money in your account?  You have a conference call coming up in a few minutes that will last two hours.  Have you been to the restroom and filled your water glass?  Nobody needs to remind you to do little things like this.  It’s automatic.

If you’ve mastered these essentials of daily living and working, then it shouldn’t be difficult to extrapolate these concepts to being prepared for the more challenging curve balls that come your way, but I am seeing a lot of difficulty with this.  Maybe you were never taught how to plan ahead.  As a parent, my job is to prepare my kids for life without me.  Lessons are learned most easily at a young age when the consequences are small. 

For example, I am doing my best to coach the boys through their summer projects.  You might say, but school just let out a week ago, give them a break!  I disagree.  The last message I want my kids to get is that it is okay to wait until the last minute to complete a project when you have the ability to do it now.  We didn’t know how long we might be on the waiting list at the library for the books to come in, so we put the books on hold as soon as we got the assignments.  We talked about how the reading would need to commence as soon as the books come in, because you only get to borrow them for three weeks.  A renewal might not be available since lots of kids need to read these same books.  Since we talked through these contingencies, when the books arrived, the boys were ready to go.  Dodge finished his today and Hank is almost there.  Now we have time to enjoy the summer and maybe even check the books out again in August as a refresher.  Better safe than sorry.  The boys understood all this.  They never complained.  Each morning and afternoon trip in the car this past week has been spent reading.  It was automatic and it made sense.

It’s not so easy to coach an adult to be prepared.  There are so many excuses – I have other priorities, it can wait, I’ll get to it tomorrow, that’s someone else’s job, I don’t like that task, maybe it will go away.  Well, tomorrow is here, and you still have to do what you always needed to do.  Is it going to be any easier now that you’ve waited until the last minute?  Will you have time to do your best?  Do you know how many people are relying on you?  I'm not sure how well Love & Logic works on adults, but we're about to find out.

Grow up! You live in Texas!

For the past several weeks, I had the joy of driving by fields of beautiful Indian Paintbrush wildflowers.  One day I even pulled over and made my kids wade through them for a photo opportunity, which may or may not make its way into a Father's Day gift for Christopher (the kids spilled the beans within about two minutes of said photo session).  Yesterday my flowers were gone.  Mowed down.  Obliterated.  With intense fury I marked my mental to do list to call the city and demand to know why my flowers were chopped down in their prime.

The answer was surprising.  The Parks Department didn't want to mow those fields.  They were forced into it by residents in the surrounding neighborhoods.  I said surely they couldn't have been complaining about those gorgeous flowers, right?  No, they were complaining about more mice and snakes than usual and demanded that the wildflowers be mowed to curb the problem.  The gentleman told me he really appreciated my call because it gave him some hope that there are still residents out there that appreciate the beauty of nature, but for every call like mine, he was fielding ten complaints about the mouse and snake population.  He had already delayed mowing well past the normal schedule because our relatively cool and moist spring has allowed these flowers to blossom longer than most seasons, but finally the resident demands became too much to handle.

Listen, I am as anti-critter as they come.  I don't even like most domesticated animals.  You will never catch me camping, hiking, or swimming in anything other than a highly chlorinated pool.  I like my animals safely contained at the Dallas Zoo.  However, we made a choice to live in Texas, in a suburb, where in the neverending battle of man vs. nature, you are going to lose.  You can't totally dominate your weeds.  You can't make it rain.  You can't determine whether your pest of the month is going to be the fire ant, coyote, rat snake, or armadillo.  You grow up and deal with it.  You accept that for whatever reason, Noah put those creatures on the Ark, and you put out a mouse trap or two if that's what it takes for the community to enjoy some flowers.

Fifteen

Fifteen years ago tomorrow Christopher and I got married.  It was a warm and sunny day in Fredericksburg, Virginia.  I tossed flowers to little cousins who are now in college.  My grandmother lectured me about hills and valleys and bumps in the road.  We went home and wrote thank you cards and finished packing for our European adventure.  Beggars stole the bread off our table in Paris.  We drove overnight on the "wrong" side of the road.  Every honeymoon picture has me in my favorite sweater that I wore for years until it had holes.

We have some pictures but no videos.  No tweets or posts or blogs.  Yet we can remember details from those days more clearly than most others.  The next day that I could recount minute by minute would be Dodge's birth, and then the younger kids.  Our wedding was the birth of our family.

So, go with me here for a minute. If the firstborn is the marriage, did you care for it like the typical overprotective new parent?  Did you buy it a wipe warmer?  Did you call the doctor when it sneezed?  What about now?  How are you nurturing your now teenage baby?  As for us, we will celebrate with Mickey D's and baseball practice....but never fear, mommy/daddy tasting menu lunch date part two is coming up soon.