Noah gnus with Gary Gnu

So the in-laws came to visit last night. I did in fact make beef (sorry Lonna). Mark’s Dad only really likes beef – he’s a beef and potatoes man. Well, he likes pork too, but his wife doesn’t – I unfortunately found that out last time I made a pork tenderloin. Oops. So as you see, my options are limited. Anyway I didn’t reinvent the wheel or anything – I just served my favorite pear and gorgonzola salad, pine nut couscous made with beef broth, a beef stew and pumpkin pie.

I can never find an ideal beef stew recipe so I kind of melded one from one cook book and one from my crock pot manual with a pinch of making it up as I went along. It turned out decent and was easy so I’ll share the details. Maybe you can tell me how I could have improved it. I cubed 2 pounds of chuck and then browned it in a skillet with olive oil and a crushed garlic clove. Then I put the beef and juices in the crock pot with red wine, beef broth, a can of diced tomatoes with green chiles, potatoes, carrots, onion, garlic cloves, salt, pepper, thyme, and a tiny dash of curry powder. I cooked it for 6 hours on the medium setting and 1 hour on high. The beef was pretty tender but if I do it again I’ll use a better cut. The peppers in the canned tomatoes made it a tad spicy which is good for me because my biggest fear is always that my cooking will taste bland. And my only real complaint is that I wish I did something to make the sauce a bit thicker before serving. Oh and I forgot to get horseradish at the store – and though the beef didn’t really need it I missed it because I like horseradish. So there you go. This sort of one pot made ahead of time thing is the best thing to do when you’re having guests and you have to baby wrangle while preparing food – at least for me since I suck at baby multi-tasking.

Anyway the visit went well. I don’t think anyone was put off by the meal and I know they enjoyed watching the little man. He was being quite congenial and entertaining. But I have to ask why older people are always making pronouncements about babies not liking them. Both Laima and my Oma will say that Noah doesn’t like them merely because he doesn’t just smile at them endlessly and enjoy being held still in their laps when he could be crawling around. The boy won’t sit still in MY lap without squirming to get down – he’s got places to go, things to learn. Francesca’s mom says the same thing of her mother-in-law, that she seems hurt when Francesca doesn’t want to just be cuddled and held indefinitely. I feel like saying “How long do you like to be restrained?”

Yesterday Noah started talking on the phone. Or more accurately pretending to talk on the phone. He was holding the cordless phone upside down and backwards and rattling of a long line of “Da Da Doo Digga Da Do Da” gibberish. Funny thing is that he won’t do this when someone is actually talking to him on the phone – then he pushes the phone away from his ear and stares at it in wonderment. He’s also discovered the computer mouse and has taken to grabbing if off of the desk even when it is in use. Unfortunately for me. This morning when he got a hold of it he held it up to his ear and started talking into it like the phone – which makes sense because our phone and mouse actually look quite similar.

We still don’t have a lot of unassisted walking going on here – but he has become a whiz with his walker. He runs around his room and hallway with it at top speed and has learned to turn it around and back it up. That is a huge relief because before he mastered that he would just run it into the wall and squeal for me to turn it around for him so he could run it into the next wall and squeal again. He’s also cruising a lot more and has begun walking sideways in the hallway with his hands running along the wall for support. Problem is that sometimes he’ll attempt to take a few unsupported steps but he often wants to do that sideways too.

We have plans to meet Francesca and Susan in the park for lunch and then later in the afternoon we have to go to the Saturn dealership to get the bumper repaired. It’s hanging low on the driver side because Mark had a run-in on Sunday with one of those concrete parking space partitions in the Target parking lot. I wanted to just tie it back up with some wire because that’s how I deal with things – just half-ass rig it so it’s seemingly no longer a problem. Mark however said the safety of the vehicle was compromised by the altered structure of the bumper and needed to be repaired – which makes sense but sucks. I had to laugh though when I told my friend Janette about the damage and she said “Do you have any duct tape?” Thank God we’re not married - we’d be driving our babies around in duct-taped and tied together jalopies.