What a sight to come home to!

PS: there's a plane overhead. Jack wanted you to know.

Jack started it all with a seeping nose. Two days later Ben and I woke up feeling crappy. It's been 5 days of high tissue use now. I had to be on call all weekend. Glad that's over. We're too hot and lazy to take Jack to a park today, so I bundled up some toys and found a shady patch in a drainage ditch nearby. Tonight we are going out for pizza. It's a new place to us, where they are hosting a special geeks who drink quiz all about the works of Joss Whedon. Ben will stay for the quiz, I'll go home and resume knitting and sleeping.

Isn't every rainy day a good day? Yesterday I ended up working 16.5 hours without a real break. Blech. But when I came home friends there with pizza. We watched old Movie Saturdays and reminisced about how skinny and naive we were.

I had a good sleep in, then Ben went for a run. After lunch-where Jack actually ate some spinach!- we went swimming. The rec center pool is great for kids and I've been dreaming of taking Jack for a while. He was over the moon! They have a toddler friendly area; gentle slope down to just 2 feet deep, water fountains that bubble gently up over the surface, buckets that fill and dump from above, sprayers, and a mini slide down a frog's mouth. Jack played joyously until we dragged him out with blue and chattering lips.

Later we dropped him off with a sitter so Ben and I could eat out. I stuffed myself with spinach salad and pork scaloppine drenched in Gorgonzola cream sauce. Abrusci's never disappoints. I picked up Jack and Ben went to see a scary movie.

Now I'm curling up with some luxurious knitting and a fresh disk of The West Wing while rain softly falls. Doesn't get much better than this.

Jack says it's a dog! I love that he identifies his pictures without suggestion from us.

I'm posting my altered recipe so I can easily look it up.  My last batch didn't have the nooks and crannies I'd hoped for, maybe too little rise?  But it was still delicious sandwich bread and Ben remarked that he wished I had made two loaves!  Still, this is the recipe for a single loaf (the original recipe makes four), although I rounded up the quantities where math wasn't clean.

1 1/2 cups very warm water
2 teaspoons yeast (see original recipe note)
1/2 tablespoon salt
3/4 tablespoon sugar
2 3/4 cups water

I follow the instructions as written, but find I have to add a little extra water to make the dough as sticky as it is in her pictures.

 Jack's first egg hunt. I had to show him what to do.  He caught on fast, though Amanda and I had to give heavy hints for finding the eggs.

That's the age when Jack called me Mama. Heart = melted.