curses, books, etc.

Chocolate cake curse: 42
Whimsy: 0
YES THE STREAK CONTINUES. I made the cursed chocolate cake on Sunday and screwed it up YET AGAIN. This time I forgot to add the water during the proper step (cocoa + butter + water heated together). I was also low on sour cream. So I substituted. With YOGURT. Ha! In addition, when I made the icing I added what was, apparently, the lumpiest powdered sugar to ever lump - so the resulting icing was, um, lumpy. The good news: the chocolate cake is impervious to my screw ups. I added the water at the end and it was still brilliant! You can't tell that it's a sour cream/YOGURT cake! The lumpy icing might be lumpy but it's still delicious! Yay for chocolate cake that refuses to die!

My favorite part of The Latest Chocolate Cake Experience was when I made the water screw up and muttered a somewhat irritated (okay, VERY IRRITATED) CRUD! Chip overheard me from the living room, and he goes, "What did you forget?" Because he knows about The Curse.

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Our most exciting moment of the weekend is when Alice took her very first actual unassisted totally voluntary STEPS. She waited until Chip had been home for five minutes on Friday afternoon. We were sitting on the living room floor, Alice standing next to the couch. Chip had taken off his watch and was holding it in his hand when wouldn't you know, Alice really wanted that watch. So what does she do? She WALKS OVER TO IT. Chip kept backing up with this wide-eyed crazy look on his face as Alice took tiny step after tiny step to get to him. It was fantastic. In total she took about six steps. Since then, we can get her to walk between us, but really she doesn't notice that it's that great of a trick yet. I keep waiting for it to dawn on her that she can move herself from point A to point B in the middle of the room without assistance or the need to get on her hands and knees. Once that happens, I know we're going to be in for crazy hands-in-air waving Frankenstein girl.

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Something else Alice spontaneously started to do last week was to bring me books to read to her. The kid loves a good book, just like her mother, and really I can't complain about it. What mother would complain about her kid wanting to READ, right? It's just that she loves the same books read to her forty-two times. In a row. So any time I'm sitting on the floor with Alice, she'll come lug a book over and then crawl directly into my lap (really, it's so adorable I want to die) and then she sits there waiting for me to read about the pigs going LA LA LA and the mommy that hides under the covers and the hippo that holds a very successful hippo party and the baby animals on the farm and the little girl that waves bye bye and the hippopotamus that doesn't do anything with the other animals until the very end of the story. You know, like that.

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In other news, I dreamt last night that I was riding a golden elevator up and down a bunch of floors and I kept trying to land on this one floor that had some kind of very special baby clothing boutique, and when I finally got to that floor, I spent a great deal of time trying to find the perfect baby carrier for Alice. Which was so weird, because she doesn't need a baby carrier. And also, who the heck dreams about shopping? And a golden elevator, REALLY?


How was your weekend?