Saturday Early Morning Meal Planning

I had the strangest dreams last night.  I was helping a laboring woman get to the hospital – and then suddenly she shrunk and was inside a chicken egg I carried, and she birthed a miniscule baby along with a gush of yellow egg yolk.  I could not fish the baby out of the yolk and get it breathing, I tried all different ways, but it was too tiny to get on the tip of my finger.  So I carried the whole egg up a terrifying staircase, trying to get help.  It was not so much a staircase as a teetering, extremely tall obstacle course, where I had to climb and clamber and occasionally leap over chasms that yielded a thousand foot drop below.  At the top of the staircase was a door that opened onto a window-ledge on the outside of a tall building on top of a mountain that I could not get down from, and I just stood there, clinging to the side of the building and still holding onto this cracked egg with the tiny baby and mother inside, not knowing what to do.  I often dream of tall sets of stairs, like in a parking garage or the fire stairs in a tall office building, and they are pretty much impassable and yet I have to get to the top.  Symbolism much?

I woke with a start at 5:15, shivering because the Professor stole all the covers (we are blessed to have a king bed, but only a full duvet cover, so we often fight over it, unless I remember to bring my own blanket).  Out I came, to the front room, to putter around and be alone for a while before the boys wake up and we have chaos til 8 pm.  I never used to be an early morning person, though here lately I’ve been waking up with a start at 4 am, sweaty and anxious about meeting all my deadlines at work.   I try to go back to sleep if it’s before 5am, but if it’s 5 or later, I get up and savor the quiet in my own house.  There are so few hours of the day where I can be left alone – I am constantly interrupted by partners needing something, or by children, or on particularly heinous days, by both.  The only time I can get any flow to my thinking and doing is in these wee quiet pre-dawn hours.  So, voila!  Morning person.

We have a long weekend ahead of us, and although I have work to do I plan to put it aside for most of the weekend and just be with the boys.  (And do the work of the house, which is not a negligible amount of work, of course.)  We have iffy plans with various local families to hang out at some point, though nothing definite.  I am grateful for the opportunity to re-charge, at least as much as these boys (especially the one year old) allow rest and re-charge – which is not much.  

Craig is at that stage where, at any moment, I might find a pair of socks stuffed inside a cup in the Tupperware drawer, several mismatched shoes under my pillow, and I’m always finding his big brothers’ Skylanders toys in the pantry, inside boxes of crackers or cereal.  Fishing in my purse for my wallet at a restaurant or grocery counter usually yields some kind of fun surprise – sometimes the surprise is a small toy or item of clothing shoved in there by chubby hands, and sometimes the surprise is that the wallet isn’t in there, and when I get home I’ll find it under the couch or sitting on top of a downstairs toilet.  He is in the redistribution phase of life.  If he is awake, the Professor and/or I are up and chasing him.  Very occasionally, he and the big boys will go upstairs to their room, and we have some quiet.  Otherwise, though, the Professor and I both enjoy the heck out of Craig, and also LIVE FOR NAPTIME.

Here is the meal plan for this week.   Some summer fun – grilling, pasta salads, fresh veg and fruit  . . . I love summer cooking.

Creamy spinach tomato tortellini

Stuffed zucchini – but with turkey

Sticky sesame sorghum chicken kebabs with grilled corn on the cob and watermelon

Turkey and pepper lasagna (left overs – made this last week and froze)

Two blue apron meals: crispy chicken cutlets with sugar snap pea and radish salad, and seared salmon with asparagus-new potato hash