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Hello Kitty Lucky Star Candies

Saturday
Our plan of getting up at five to get to the border early and avoid the inevitable long weekend lineup worked TOO well- we only had a half hour wait and ended up getting to Seattle at 9:30 in the morning! Since we couldn’t check into our hotel yet we spent the rest of the morning and early afternoon hanging around the Olympic Sculpture Park and eating donuts at Top Pot.

Kichou used to live in Seattle with Taylor and he was thrilled to be back


lol I’m squishing his face back

I was weak with hunger at this point and SO MAD at Taylor because he kept stopping to take pictures when I just wanted to get donuts


outside a glass-blowing place

Kichou ruins a picture by lunging at other dogs

Every time we go to Seattle we try to stay at a different hotel, and this time we went with Hotel Max, at the recommendation of a couple different people. The location was great, the price was more than reasonable, the hotel was cool and the bed was comfy. It was all perfect except for one thing: the bathroom had the world’s teeniest tiniest shower stall and no tub. I hate teeny tiny shower stalls. How are you supposed to wash yourself if the shower keeps rinsing all the soap out of your scrubby puff before you can apply it to your body? How are you supposed to shave your legs if you can’t bend over or sit down? This sounds crazy but honestly, if I’d known in advance about the terrible shower stall I might not have chosen this hotel!

Anyway, after relaxing for a little while we went shopping and had a grandma-style early bird dinner at The Cheesecake Factory. We’d basically missed breakfast AND lunch so we were starving by 4:30, and it worked out perfectly because there was no wait when we arrived, but when we left there was a huge line of swarms of prom teens waiting. I know some people don’t like The Cheesecake Factory because it’s a cheesy chain restaurant, but it was worth it jsut for the way Symphony shrieked “THE CHEESECAKE FACTORY IN SEATTLE??? THEY WENT THERE ON ICARLY!!!” when I told her (the restaurant on iCarly was actually The Cheesecake Warehouse, but same diff).

The rest of the evening was spent lazing around our room reading, napping and eating the cheesecake we’d gotten for take out and ordering pillows of the Pillow Menu (we chose not to order anything of the Spirituality Menu).

Sunday

We slept in on Sunday morning and after walking Kichou we went in search of brunch. We were going to go to this place we’d been on our last visit in October, but they had a 45 minute wait, so forget that! After some wandering we ended up at the Cherry Street Coffee House, where we had delicious, huge and burning hot bacon, egg and cheese pita wraps. We both burned our mouths on them, but I think it was worth it.

the mug had English writing on the other side

At one we were meeting up at the Pike Place Market with a bunch of people from the general discussion forum I’ve mentioned before. We were supposed to be at the pig at one, but we were a little early so we stopped at the toy store (this was when we bought Symphony’s pugs).

they also had a case full of creepy Dolls-of-the-World

I’d only met one of the girls before, very briefly last February- I had my wedding shoes shipped to her house to save $100 in shipping. There’s always the possibility that these things will be weird or awkward, especially if you aren’t drinking! but it was fun. We visited the gum wall (barf) and left our mark, looked at the life-size cardboard celebs at the comic book store and then everyone got food and we hung out in the little park and watched an annoying street performer.

why. WHY.

I know some people will get this


one girl had a little instant camera

this guy came up to us and was like “YOU KNOW MY NAME? IT’S MUFASA. TAKE MY PICTURE, IT’S GONNA BE WORTH BANK SOMEDAY.”

When everyone left Taylor and I did some more shopping and then went back to the hotel. We didn’t want to go out for another meal, I didn’t want anything of the room service menu, and trying to find somewhere good to get takeout from seemed like too much work. We ended up just getting junk food and lying around again. lol, we are so not cool, at the meet up everyone kept asking what we’d been doing in Seattle and we were like “… nothing.” I like doing nothing though. I do too much something all the time, I need a break!

Monday
We woke up a little earlier on Monday morning and went downstairs to the Red Fin for breakfast, and then it was time to pack up and leave. We wanted to get on a the road a little early since Taylor had to work that night (boo) and I wanted to stop at the outlet mall and Target on the way home. Both stops were really quick, and the border line was only five or ten minutes, so we were back in Canada by around two-thirty and home before three-thirty. A total travel time success!

I bought some royal blue acrylic tumblers at Anthropologie this weekend and it’s put me one step closer to completing the ~Rainbow of Dishes~ I started amassing last year. Before this I had a huge collection of vintage Corelle Spring Blossom dishes that matched my Pyrex, but were starting to look pretty shabby. I have to give thanks again to all the girls in a certain general discussion forum who contributed to my wedding gift, which I used to buy the plates and bowls that were the seed of this awesomeness.

top shelf: boring plain CLEAR glasses; assorted Starbucks “city” mugs (Taylor’s) and my travel mug that I never use; white pasta bowls that desperately need to be replaced with red pasta bowls; brown bubble glasses from Urban Barn; hot pink acrylic Guzzini tumblers from Homewerx

middle shelf: orange Waechtersbach bowls from Chocolate Mousse Kitchenware; yellow glass dessert bowls that I found in the garbage (can you believe it???); yellow Waechtersbach dinner and bread plates from Chocolate Mousse Kitchenware, lime green Waechtersbach dinner plates and bowls Chocolate Mousse Kitchenware

bottom shelf: dark green Starbucks mugs; teal “grape” goblets from Anthropologie; sky blue Waechtersbach bread plates from Chocolate Mousse Kitchenware; new royal blue acrylic tumblers from Anthropologie; purple glasses from Ming Wo

Taylor chose all the presents we got for Sym in Seattle. Does that make me a bad mom… or a good delegator?? Anyway everything he picked out was perfect.

Tiny toy pugs (she named the black on Lucky and the fawn one Puggy) from the Dragon’s Toy Box, and Hello Kitty lucky star candies in a tin takeout box.

Wisenheimer: A Childhood Subject to Debate33/104; Little Bee: A Novel34/104; The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun35/104

I’m too tired to come up with long-winded thoughts about these books. Wisenheimer was just okay, Little Bee was good and The Happiness Project was somewhere in between.

Last Friday I didn’t make this for dinner. I actually made it on Wednesday and LET ME TELL YOU it was delicious. I’m not quite at the point where I’m making my own pasta sauce from scratch, so it actually came out of a jar. I added broccoli, orange pepper, baby corn and chorizo, plus a ton of garlic because I neglected to look at the label and see that it was ROASTED GARLIC tomato sauce. Oops. It was still super yummy though!

Today I had the day off from work and while it was awesome to not have any daycare kids around, I still had my own kid around because it was also a professional development day at her school. I was going to spend the day cleaning and packing because Taylor and I are going to Seattle for the long weekend, but instead I mostly just ran errands (picked up dog food and packing supplies, had some of my planet paintings scanned* so I can get prints made) and ate things (greasy diner breakfast, 3/4 of a pecan pie oh my god). Now it’s 9 pm and I still have to clean the whole house and pack, plus get to bed early because Taylor wants to leave at FIVE A.M. to try and avoid border lineups.

*Okay this was SO ANNOYING. The Jupiter painting is 12″x12″, which is too big for my regular-sized scanner. yesterday I called Kinkos to ask if they scan, up to what size, and how much it costs, and I was told that they could definitely do something 12″ and it would be $15 for the first scan and $5 for each additional scan. I was like, “great!” so I went down there after work and the INCREDIBLY RUDE man working the counter told me it would be $15 for each scan and anyway they couldn’t do anything larger than 11″. Ugh thanks for wasting my time! Since I REALLY needed to get this done asap, today I went to this repro place on West 4th Ave, TR Trades, and they were SO AMAZING. The woman there put a huge rush on it so I could pick up my paintings & disc this afternoon so I could ship everything to Florida this weekend, and even though it was more expensive, I think it was worth to have DECENT CUSTOMER SERVICE. I will definitely be going there to get my prints made from now on!

Finished all the paintings.
Sprayed with picture varnish.
Nailed hangers to the backs of the canvases.
Bolted the magnet board onto the sun.

Done. DONE. DONE.

I am SO THRILLED a) with how everything turned out, and b) to be finished! I think I’ll be taking a leetle break from painting for a while, before I start work on my self-portrait. I need some time away from paint!

Sometimes during the day if I feel sad and lonely, I wait until all the kids are napping and all the chores are done, and then I curl up next to my sleeping husband and cozy dogs to read and it always makes me feel better.

I once wrote about how hard it can be for parents to choose an appropriate daycare that suits their needs and the needs of their child. On the flip side of that coin (my side) is how hard it can be for a child care provider to find suitable clients.

I’m actually pretty lucky- the part of the city I live in is filled with families and there’s generally a shortage of childcare. Usually I have full- or near-full enrollment and a waiting list. Last fall, however, there was a mass exodus of babies from my daycare and at the start of this year I had to build my clientele back up from nearly nothing. I had a lot of meetings with a lot of potential clients, some of whom I booked, some of whom I never heard from again and some of whom I WISHED I would never hear from again.

As I said in the aforementioned post, when I try to sell someone on chosing to enroll their child in my daycare, what I’m actually selling them on is me, and in a way this is also true for parents- THEY have to sell ME on the idea that they’ll be the sort of people I’ll want to deal with on a daily basis. I’ve often said that one of the most difficult parts of daycare is dealing with the parents, and the more a person comes across as crazy, annoying or demanding in our initial meetings, the less likely it is that I’m going to say “Yes, I TOTALLY have space for your child! Let’s get your paperwork started!”

I recently had a woman come by who was looking for daycare. She showed up unannounced, without calling first. In fact, we’d never even spoken before. She wasn’t sure when she wanted her daughter to start daycare, but she did want to begin with just eight hours a week. At one point she observed that it was quiet in my house, and when I told her it was nap time and all the kids were resting, she said “I don’t know how you’d get my daughter to get to take a nap, she still nurses for an hour before she’ll sleep!” Then she looked pointedly at my chest O__O

As far as selling me on the idea of having her as a client, she did almost everything wrong! Let’s look at her mistakes:

Mistake #1: SHOWING UP UNANNOUNCED
While I’m sure some child care providers don’t take issue with this, I find it intensely annoying. There are certain times of the day when I’m busy with the kids, or about to go out, or all the parents are picking up their kids and I need to talk to them, my current, paying clients, not some stranger who just showed up. Even during nap time I have stuff to do- maybe I’m cleaning the floors or the hamster cage, or maybe I just want to relax in my sweatpants eating Hickory Sticks and wasting time on the internet. When people call me for the first time I tell them they can come by whenever is convenient for them BUT they need to make arrangements with me first, even if it’s just giving me a couple of hours notice so I can make sure the house is reasonably clean, crate the dogs and psych myself up to meet someone new.

Mistake #2: WASTING MY TIME
This particular woman was looking for just eight hours a week. EIGHT HOURS. That’s what a babysitter is for, not a licensed child care provider. Maybe that’s all the child care she wants or needs or can afford, but for me, it is a colossal waste of time. That’s just one day a week. I would either have to squeeze the kid into my part-time space, or wait until a full-time space opened up, but booking a one-day-a-week kid into a five-days-a-week space makes literally no financial sense.

Additionally, the reason she wanted just eight hours is she wanted to ease her child into daycare, but doing it that way is like trying to pull a Band-Aid off slowly- it hurts more than just ripping it off in one fell swoop. K, one of my current part-timers, used to only come two half days a week, and he cried and was miserable every time he came here for a year. A YEAR OF MISERY FOR EVERYONE INVOLVED. It wasn’t until I stopped offering half-days and he started coming more regularly that he settled in.

Conversely, Baby M, who started four days a week in March, is now completely comfortable here, even with the setback of my going on vacation three weeks after she started. Now when I open the door she tries to leap out of her mother’s arms and as soon as she’s put down goes barreling into the living room to play, with nary a glance at her mother. She has to be tricked into coming back to the foyer for a goodbye hug! And this was a kid who, when she was first here, screamed hysterically for hours every day. If you want to get your child used to being in child care you have to just PUT THEM IN CHILD CARE, like hard-core. The more infrequent and sporadic their attendance, the more likely they are to have a terrible time.

Mistake #3: NOT REALIZING THAT SOME PARENTING CHOICES JUST DON’T TRANSLATE TO DAYCARE
Heaven forfend I should criticize another person’s parenting choice. If people want to cosleep or put their child in a crib, breastfeed for an extended period or bottlefeed, use cloth diapers or use disposable diapers, then they can go right ahead and do whatever! None of this affects me in any way- unless that child starts coming to my daycare.

Your child won’t sleep without nursing first? Then they are going to have a terrible time in daycare, because a child care provider is not a wet nurse. Some people carry their kids around to get them to sleep. With five other kids and a schedule to keep, I can’t do that. Some people lay down and nap with their kids. Again, I can’t do that. Some people let their child roam around the house with handfuls of Cheerios and some people put their child down for a nap with a bottle of juice. No and no!

When a parent makes the decision to put their child into daycare, then they need to make the effort to start changing things at home so the transition in to care isn’t completely traumatic. For example, before Baby M started her mom started adjusting what time she took her naps so that when she started here, having a shorter morning nap and a longer & earlier afternoon nap wasn’t a total shock to her system. Although her entry wasn’t totally smooth it was certainly easier than if her mom hadn’t done anything at all, which was good for me, the mom AND the baby.

There are some other things a potential client can do that make me run screaming in the opposite direction:

Potential Mistake #1: BEING CRAZY
One time I had a guy show up unannounced at the end of the day when the kids were being picked up. This was annoying enough, but he also parked his truck illegally, blocking the entire alley and several of my neighbors’ cars. When I realized this I said I would email him the information he wanted and made him leave, but I later found out that once he got out there one of my neighbors had words with him and the guy freaked out, started screaming and they got in a fist fight. WHAT. Then my neighbor complained to the management office and I got in trouble! Please remember I DIDN’T EVEN KNOW THE GUY, OR THAT HE WAS COMING. I ended up just emailing him that I would be unable to meet his child care needs but best of luck in his future endeavors, etc etc, because I didn’t even want to call such a whack job!

Potential Mistake #2: EXPECTING SPECIAL TREATMENT
In the years that I’ve been doing childcare, I’ve come to realize that the people who are most demanding are the people who, when you acquiesce, are the least appreciative. If you give them an inch with regards to scheduling or fees they will take ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND MILES.

One family said they desperately needed child care four days a week, but I only had three days available and they couldn’t afford the 4 day fee anyway. They begged and pestered and cajoled until I relented and gave them 4 days at the 3 day rate and waived the deposit. I helped them fill out all their subsidy paperwork and explained everything to them. After all that, they only brought their daughter five days in two months and then withdrew her with no notice. When the subsidy was finally approved (after they’d stopped coming) they expected me to claim it for the full 20 days each month so they could get all that money back, even though that would mean I was defrauding the government. I was like, “Let me get this straight: you dicked me around after I did you a favour, and now you want me to do you another favour? An illegal favour??? I don’t think so!“ I filed a claim for only the days their child had actually attended, and when they didn’t get back as much money as they’d wanted they kept calling and harassing me for months.

Another woman, fresh out of a bad relationship, gave me a big sob story and begged me to waive the deposit and accept only her portion of the fee until the subsidy was approved- the client is supposed to pay the full amount of the fee and I refund them the subsidy portion. I felt bad for her so I agreed, but when the subsidy WASN’T approved she just vanished, owing me $1,500. Ouch. OUCH!

A lot of people seem to think that because my job involves cute little babies, I’m doing it out of the goodness of my heart, but this is a business, not a charity. I’m doing this to make money so I can pay my bills and give my daughter piano lessons and buy fancy shoes if I want! I made some mistakes in the past by being too nice and too flexible, but now if someone wants more for less, I tell then that unfortunately, that isn’t possible, and if they are a crazy annoying freak I say “I’m sorry, I don’t have anything available at the moment, but if you’d like I can add you to my waiting list and call you if anything opens up.” But I never call them, and you know what? I’m okay with that.

I’ve been meaning to make these since FOREVER and last night I finally picked up the last couple ingredients I needed. This is another recipe from Crepes of Wrath, although I mini-ized it since we all know I’m obsessed with tiny food. The recipe makes 24 mini brownie cupcakes and all the instructions are the same except obviously I used Junior Mints instead of York Peppermint Patties, I used a teaspoon to fill the cups instead of a tablespoon and I only baked them for 15 minutes. They could have probably stayed in for a couple more but I didn’t want to risk burning them because I used up all my butter and baker’s chocolate on this batch, and I ate all the spare mints (AN ENTIRE BOX AND A HALF I’M SO GROSS).

Anyway I’m always nervous when trying new recipes for the first time but with minimal ingredients, these were really easy to make and turned out perfectly. I had asked Sydney (from CoW) if she thought making them with Junior Mints was a good idea, and while she was totally on board, she mentioned that because of the gel-like consistency of the mint filling they might turn “soupy,” but luckily that didn’t happen- I think this was due in part to the ultra-short baking time.

I was worried Sym wouldn’t like them (they aren’t very sweet) but that definitely wasn’t a problem!

It’s been a while since I made a food post! I skipped making the planned meal on Friday night; I had to go shopping with Symphony after work and by the time we got home I was too tired to make anything more complicated than scrambled eggs, and we didn’t have lunch at home on Saturday because of the birthday party and wedding situation.

Sweet Soy Glazed Chicken and Onions with Steamed Broccoli and Rice

However, I more than made up for it last night with this delicious meal! The chicken recipe is from Crepes of Wrath and it’s one of my favorites. The only :/ thing was the rice wasn’t perfect. I mix together white & brown rice and getting the cooking time right is a little tricky. Overall though, a totally awesome dinner.