Hello! Many things have happened in the past month! I am using this extra hour from daylight saving time to try to update you on them. Very first of all, we added another living being to the family – Liz Lemon, the bearded dragon.
She was super tiny – Jack picked her out of a tank full of little bearded dragon siblings. He liked her because she was sweetly sleeping, and he agreed to humor me and pretend it was a girl (we have no idea) and name her Liz Lemon after Tina Fey’s character on 30 Rock. We brought Liz home, along with a carton of live crickets, a tub of mealworms, and some powdered calcium. Jack ceremoniously placed her into her new home and she didn’t move, just froze there in the middle, and so I told the boys to leave her alone so she could adjust and get some rest after her traumatic move.
That night, she entered into her Eternal Rest.
Jack called me over in the morning and asked if I could help him gently pick her up. I opened the cage and reached in, picked her up, and realized in a second that she had shuffled off this mortal coil – she was stiff as a board. I blinked and said “Jack, I — well, I — Jack I think she died?” He laughed in shock, and then got increasingly sadder through the morning, mostly feeling guilty that she was so small and he couldn’t save her. She never moved much, and I think she was just ill from Day One. Jack’s emotion was very reasonable, a “normal” amount of sad (whatever that means), but the sight of him sitting on the couch, pondering death, a few tears dripping down his cheeks, was quite heartbreaking.
We took Liz’s corpse back to PetCo and they refunded us and gave us another, after worriedly asking about our setup. I had taken some pictures of the cage, anticipating their concern, and they agreed that everything looked fine – we had thermometers that showed the temp was fine, we had a humidity gauge and knew that the humidity was fine, there’s a heat lamp and a UV lamp and lots of things to crawl on and under.
So now we have our second bearded dragon, Rex – and they also let us keep Liz’s body so that Jack could plant it in a pot and put a flower in it, which is what he requested. We had a second homecoming for Rex, and ever since bringing him home we have worriedly roused him from deep sleep at least 100 times a day, making sure he isn’t dead. Lizard PTSD.
Rex is much hardier than his predecessor, and is actually quite cute. We love Rex so far. He’s getting used to being handled – we’ve slowly acclimated him to being picked up and hand fed. Jack feeds him every day, and he’s a really gentle lizard-dad. So far so good – Rex gets bigger every day and snaps up those meal worms. And he bonus! He doesn’t like the crickets, so we don’t even have to buy those anymore!
In addition to the Lizard Days of Our Lives soap opera, at the beginning of October, we put up our Halloween decorations. Craig calls these the boy skeleton and the girl skeleton. 😉
The little boys’ school had a fun night at the local amusement park (just a few small rides), and we had a great time aside from briefly losing Liam (he went with a pack of friends to play hide and seek and they all hid pretty well). The boys all were true to form – Craig insisted upon riding every ride, and clutched each roller coater car in abject fear for the entirety of each ride. Jack immediately found friends and ran around in packs, but declined to ride most everything. Liam rode the scariest rides again and again. There are my three sons. We had a great time!
In other quick updates – I got my hair dyed for the first time ever. I just wanted to remove some of the gray – not all, just some, since I have some pretty dramatic sprays at the temples. They color-matched pretty well! I’m quite pleased. We also celebrated an anniversary with a wonderful meal at GW Fins, which I spent half of taking Portrait mode photos of the food. Mmmmm.
I had a bit of a nightmare weekend in mid-October – billed 20 hours on a Saturday and Sunday (unexpectedly), which really wore me out and slowed down my costume making. The next weekend, then, I had to spend almost 20 hours on sewing! (I never rest, like most parents in America.) The boys decided they wanted to be characters from Super Mario Smash Bros., and I took on the challenge with glee.
I pieced together costumes for Princess Peach (me), Link (Jack), Sonic the Hedgehog (Liam), and Kirby (Craig).
We had a great time with trick or treat – and Craig even lost his first tooth while sneaking a Milk Dud from his stash.
My in-laws came to visit over Halloween, and trick or treated with us for part of the night (then went home to heat up dinner). The boys got tons of candy, and have eaten most of it, thank heavens. Just get rid of the stuff!
I’ll wrap up with some of our latest meals. It’s soup season and I’ve embraced it mightily. What I love about soup is how easy it is to make ahead and then just reheat through the week!
I made the apple version of this simple butternut squash soup for us to have next week. I tasted it at the end before cooling it for the fridge, and man is it good. Very easy also.
I roasted some cushaw squash and we will have it with roasted broccoli, rice or quinoa, maybe some eggs. I wasn’t quite sure what to do with it but at least now it’s cut up and cooked.
This slow cooker Korean beef was excellent, as was the slow cooker rosemary garlic beef stew.\
Chicken scampi was a total home run.
I like this chili because it mixes both ground turkey and ground sausage – interesting mix of meats.
I made a couple types of spaghetti – taco spaghetti and this crockpot spaghetti.