A$$ Cake

Growing up my mom made the BEST cake. It is called Harvey Wallbanger Cake and it is fantastic. We call it "Harvey" for short. I absolutely love it.

Fast forward numerous years and my mom made it a few times when my in-laws were around. They too became Harvey Wallbanger Cake addicts - seriously it is like crack. So I got the recipe from my mother and made it for my father-in-law's birthday one year. It was horrible, I mean truly disgusting. I'm not a great cook, believe me, but I can follow a simple recipe. This one did not work out. It tasted like ass and thus became known as "Ass Cake".

We were all very perplexed and decided my mother had done what Marie Barone did on Everybody Loves Raymond when she left out one specific ingredient for a recipe she gave her daughter-in-law in order to remain the only person who could make her recipe delicious. Didn't seem like my mom's MO but what else could it be - it couldn't be my fine culinary skills, could it? Oh yeah wait, it could, I suck at cooking.

I tried to make Ass Cake on several occasions over the next few years - and successfully I might add - but I was not so successful in making a delicious Harvey. My mother in law even used my recipe and tried it a few times and she is a great cook - but alas - Ass Cake.

If you want to try it - and really who wouldn't want try something called Ass Cake??? - here is the recipe:

Ingredients

• 1 (18.25 ounce) package yellow cake mix
• 1 (3.5 ounce) package instant vanilla pudding mix
• 1/2 cup vegetable oil
• 5 fluid ounces Galliano liqueur
• 2 fluid ounces vodka
• 1/2 cup orange juice
• 1 cup powdered sugar

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease and flour one 10 inch tube pan.
2. Combine cake mix and pudding mix in a large bowl. Blend in eggs, vegetable oil, 4 ounces Galliano, 1 ounce vodka, and 4 ounces orange juice. Mix batter until smooth and thick and pour into prepared pan.
3. Bake at 350 degrees for 45 minutes. Let cake cool in pan for 10 minutes then remove and place on cooling rack. Spoon glaze over cake while it is still warm.
4. To Make Glaze: Combine the remaining 1 ounce Galliano, 1 ounce vodka, and 1ounce orange juice with the powdered sugar and blend until smooth. Spoon over warm cake.

If you want to try making a Harvey - use the above recipe only add 4 eggs. Yeppers, we weren't putting eggs in the recipe each time we tried to make it - wow DUMB.

I didn't realize that until this past Thanksgiving. I was at my in-law's house and my father-in-law had requested Ass Cake. Sweet man, he had faith that one day I could do it right. Okay truth be told I actually think he was thoroughly entertained by the fact that it kept coming out so horribly. So I decided to give it one last shot. I sat down with the recipe and started to gather the items.

"Um, Valerie?" I asked

"Yes, darling?" My mother-in-law said.

"Do all cakes need eggs?" I questioned.

"Well, yes I think so. I have never run across a recipe that didn't need them." She answered.

"This recipe has no eggs in it! There is our problem." I shouted

Wow, impressive! We had both make the cake probably 4 times or so and how we never noticed that it didn't call for eggs I will never know. I had written the recipe down wrong!!!

It is sort of like the time I bought some boots, wore them for about a year, and then noticed that one boot was a size 6 and one boot was a size 8 - and strangely I wear a size 7. But that is a whole other story.

So I went online grabbed a Harvey Wallbanger recipe (why I didn't look into the magical world wide web for the recipe years ago to check my recipe I'll never know) which calls for 4 eggs and made a delicious cake! Ass cake no more!

Sometimes I'm a special kind of moron.

Potty training is not such a saga anymore!

A friend of mine has been talking about how she is going to start potty training her son who is about a month younger than Z man. I was in awe of her because in my head we were not even remotely close to potty training Z. Outwardly I was her greatest cheerleader and asked her to let me know how it goes - inside feeling DEEP envy. Visions of the potty training boot camp I was going to have to conjure up for Z in August right before pre-school floated into my head.

If you have read my blog in the past you know how not successful we have been in the potty training arena with this kid. Things ranging from him wearing the toilet seat on his head, thinking the pee pee comes out of his finger, his sister trying to train him and other sagas have not given me much hope.

But on Sunday Z was taking a bath and told me he wanted to get out and get a diaper. I saw this as a great sign that he knew the signs his body was telling him. I took him out of the tub and told him to just sit on the potty while I looked for a diaper. I faked looking for a diaper and said I couldn't find one so maybe he should just try the big boy potty - and he did it!

You would have thought he just graduated from Harvard by the big deal I made out of it. I was truly that excited but really more shocked than anything. So far so good, he has gone several times since them and I think we are on the road to potty trainedeness. You could never have convinced me that this road would be traveled down before he even turned 3! We have a long ways to go until he is fully trained, but I'm thrilled.

Is it weird that I am kind of sad about this because it confirms my little guy is growing up?

I'm Stealing It #11

When I was in 6th grade there was a statewide competition for kids to develop an ad about seatbelts. This must have been about the time it became a law to wear one. It is so crazy to me that people ever got in a car without putting on their seatbelt. I feel naked without one - which leads me to the awesome ad that I developed back then:

"You're never fully dressed without your seatbelt." - Can you tell I was Annie obsessed at that period of my life?

Sadly, I didn't win even though that was fantastic ad copy - just ask my mom, she thought I should have won too!

So with seatbelts in mind, I had to share this. I just saw this seatbelt ad on Facebook and it honestly made me cry. No doubt that I'm a huge sap and cry over everything since I had kids - but I stole this from my friend Pren's Facebook page and wanted to post it here:

click here

Ask and you shall receive

This weekend we went to Smoke 'n Fire BBQ store as a family. Usually we try to avoid taking both kiddos to places that have large expensive items - but didn't have a choice on this one.

We walked in and for some reason Z decided he needed crackers and began announcing this in an above appropriate voice level. The thing about this kid is that when he gets something in his head he does not let it go. About every 15 seconds he announced to the store "I want kwackers, kwackers where are you? I can't find you."

I explained to him that just calling out for something does not make it appear and that as soon as we got home I would be glad to give him crackers. I then was able to tune him out (as I do it about 287 times per day) and continue shopping.

About three minutes later a very nice man who works at the store came up to me with a package of crackers. He said he had heard the call and thought he should do something about it. I was pretty sure that we should have been booted out of the store for our disturbance but instead they couldn't have been more friendly.

My daughter's response? "Well, I guess you can just call out for things and make them appear."

Boy this is not a good thing for them to believe.

I know I am supposed to correct them, but it is just so cute

Like all children, my kids have some things that they say that are just too cute - even if they aren't technically the correct way of saying the word or phrase. I realize the good mom thing to do is repeat what they said in the correct manner so that they will learn - but is it bad that I just want to hold on to a few of their adorable phrases? I will probably find out that answer when they head to college still talking like toddlers. But for now I am going to enjoy them. A few of my favorites:

"Goose forward please" - this is Z's way to ask someone to scoot forward

"Glittering is bad" - this is E's way of talking about litter. As I have said many times, our world would be much prettier if people were glittering instead of littering.

"All the singalallies" - E's version of singing Beyonce's song All the Single Ladies. I prefer E's version

"Sank you" - E's way of saying thank you. I know this is one I should really correct considering she is 5 1/2 but it is really sweet.

"No kank you, no kank you, no kank you" - Z is the politest mad kid in the world. When you do something he does not like such as put him down for a nap, insist he takes a bath, or suggest he stop hitting his sister he uses this phrase. We get comments from people all the time about what a polite angry child we have.

"I'm going to hit you now mommy!" Z has the grammatical portion of this phrase down pat but I just love how he gives us warning each time he is going to hit. It is a good thing because he is a pretty strong kid and usually has some sort of object in his hand that will maim you if you don't move out of the way.

"I wub you mommy" - Both kids have used this same one and I say it back to them - how can I not? Clearly this is my favorite.

100th Post

So this is my 100th post. I've been sitting on that thought for two weeks now thinking I had to share some major truth or amazing insight to my readers for this momentus post - and nothing has come. But today I realized maybe that is the point. Blogging for me is just that - for me.

There are some amazing people out there who blog. They have made it into a business, have huge followings and it is their livelihood. That is awesome for them and to be honest, early on I had aspirations to be those people but alas, life got in the way. I'm okay with that.

In the 11 months that I have been writing this blog, I have spent a lot of time thinking about my what I am going to write and how I am going to make it funny. Doing that puts a lot of pressure on my brain and with a full time job, 2 young kids, a workaholic husband and 2 crazy dogs, I don't have time to for unneeded pressure (of course who does?). Now I do love to write funny - it is in my genes - and my kids and husband are extremely entertaining. If I wrote every funny thing they did, I'd have blisters on my fingers from all the typing.

With this 100th post I am going to now relieve myself of the pressure. SWOOSH - gone.

Blogging to success (if you consider followers a success) takes a lot of work. Not only do you have to keep your blog up but you have to continually read/comment on other people's blogs. There are many blogs that I enjoy and like to comment on but I am no longer going to troll the Internet for people I can read and comment on only to hope they will return the favor.

Don't get me wrong, I certainly hope people enjoy what I write and I would love to have many many followers. I know there are numerous people who read my blog but do not comment per se (meaning they don't comment online, they often do let me know that they read the latest entry), and that is fine because just like I don't want to pressure myself I certainly don't want anyone who reads my stories to feel pressure either.

So what I am rambling on about here? Who knows. But for now on, pressure is off. If I feel like writing, I will write and if nothing comes to my head I won't - or maybe I still will and it won't make sense but I will not stress about it. The other goal I had for this blog from the very beginning was to have a collection of snapshots from our life that my children can enjoy for years to come. Mission completed there.

Thanks for reading.

I have nothing to say

The weather has been beautiful and the kids and I are enjoying it immensely! We have been outside as much as possible. Several trips to the park, rides in the wagon, picnic on our front porch and much more.

I haven't had time to blog because I am having to much fun enjoying this weather with my kiddos. The novelty will wear off soon I'm sure and I will have time to organize my thoughts into some writing of some sort.

Hope you are enjoying lovely weather too!

Poor No-man

This past weekend it snowed 7 inches in one day. Love that unpredictable Kansas March weather! My poor little guy was sick and couldn't go outside to play but our sweet daughter decided he would feel better if she built a snowman by the door for him. She went to work with her 5 year old hands and built, what in my opinion, is the most glorious snowman ever.

Z loved looking at it out the window and kept saying "beautiful no-man!" - he leaves the "s" off of snowman which makes it all that much more cute.






Like Kansas does, it was 65 degrees the next day and our snowman didn't take too kindly to that. It looked very much like a snowman crime scene when you looked out our front door. When Z saw the melting mass of snow, he began to yell "poor no-man! poor no-man!"

Once he recovered from that, it actually proved to be entertaining to see how much our no-man melted each day and I had high aspirations of taking a picture yesterday of only the scarf, hat and gloves laying on our lawn.

However, when we got home from running errands someone had set them on our porch. Apparently the neighbors don't take too kindly to us leaving our outerwear all over the front lawn.

Victory is mine!

Although it is March Madness, I am not speaking of a basketball victory (although I'll throw out a Rock Chalk Jayhawk!). I am talking about a much more important victory, one that truly matters - I won the argument of the race car bed!

V-I-C-T-O-R-Y

If you don't know what I am speaking of, click here and it will bring you up to speed on the major battle that was brewing in our household. It's all kind of a blur now and to be honest I'm not sure how I did it. I wish I could remember what exactly was said by me that put the ball 100% in my court and led me to win, but I don't - which really stinks because I'd like to use those argument skills again in the future. Oh well, I'm just glad it happened.

Here is where we netted out with Z's big boy room. The only thing it is missing is new window coverings but I gotta say I think it is adorable. I was taking the pics in a hurry for something else so when I have a minute I'll tidy his room a bit and take some better photos and post them. Wait, who am I kidding? No I won't.

Oh and I have to say that although I had purchased bedding for my son's big boy bed about 5 minutes after he was delivered, when I got to the actual designing of his room 2.5 years later, I bought all new bedding. My husband really loves it when I do things like that! It definitely isn't the first time and I can't imagine it will be the last. Oh well, that is what Craigslist is for. Anyone in the market for some cute boy bedding?

KC Parent magazine

As some of you may know, I write articles for a local parenting magazine called KC Parent. I just started doing this last year and I really love it! I have done research on things I would never have thought about before and I have been able to share some of my best parenting tips to people around the city.

The magazine belongs to the Parenting Publications of America and this past week they had their big award ceremony. More than 110 magazines and websites were competing for these top honors.

KC Parent received 9 awards including Most Improved, Website General Excellence, Investigative Reporting, several Front Cover awards and much more.

A direct quote from our editor "this was our first year to ever win an editorial award for the magazine in the 6 years we’ve been competing as we won in the Personal Essay category as well as the Investigative Reporting category."

And this was the first year I was writing for them - coincidence? I think not!

Okay, none of my hard hitting stories on things like "Transitioning Your Child to their Big Kid Room" and "10 Steps to an Organized Refrigerator" won any of the awards - but still I am very excited to be a part of such a great magazine.