Attack Robins, Dinners This Week

We have been plunged back into winter. I don’t mind winter – in fact, I adore winter, and we had far too little of it this year. What I do mind is the vacillations between winter and spring. Turns out I prefer the seasons to progress as intended, rather than swinging back and forth willy nilly. Well. Perhaps “seasons” no longer exist, in this iteration of the world, and I should enjoy the beautiful snow falling all around the house while I can. 

The robins, however, have decided It Is Spring. One of the new delightful (no) quirks of our new house is that we seem to be neighbors with a bunch of attack robins. As of this weekend, we are constantly startled by the unpleasant sound of a robin flinging himself bodily into our windows. All. Day. Long.

Robins are not, as I originally assumed, getting distracted mid-flight by daydreams and blundering into the glass. No. I have seen them perch on the lintel outside the window and then flap violently at their reflections. There is also belligerent pecking. A small robin can manufacture quite a lot of racket and I no longer need an alarm clock.

My understanding from a very cursory google search is that the robins are not trying to systematically deprive me of my home and sanity. Instead, they perceive their reflections as rival male robins and attack them. Seems to me like this would be a fairly easy trial and error sort of experience. You see a male robin on your home turf, you flap in his face, but instead of scaring the intruder robin away, you are rebuffed by something smooth and hard between you. I mean, maybe it takes a couple of times to realize that the other robin is in some alternate dimension that in no way intersects with your own. But no. The robin returns and returns. And then when I shake the window blinds at it, it flies away for a few minutes and either returns to that window or a different window. Maybe future iterations of robins could benefit from additional brainpower and a smidge less territorial rage hmm????

My daughter’s brilliant idea of setting up a giant stuffed Pikachu in the window has not been the deterrent she hoped it would be. It seems that our options are a) stick a reflective decal/tape on the window, b) get an owl sculpture to police the windows, or c) close the blinds, although closing the blinds doesn’t seem to work. I am hoping this frenzy of possessive bluster is tied to mating season and ends soon. My husband and I both wonder why this was never an issue at our old house. I guess the new neighborhood’s robins are fiercer/dumber than the old ones.

Robin attack team aside, we must eat. 

Dinners for the Week of March 18-24

• Guinness Beef Stew with Homemade Egg Noodles: To be fair, we made this meal on a whim yesterday; such was the extent of our St. Patrick’s Day observance. But the recipe made such an enormous amount of stew that we have plenty for upcoming meals, so I’m counting it. The egg noodles were my husband’s idea, and much easier than I anticipated. I think of stew as soup, with bigger chunks of things in it. But he was anticipating something thicker, like maybe a beef stroganoff or a chicken paprikash type of texture. This stew is closer to soup, despite a couple of cornstarch slurries. I followed the instructions for making it on the stove, but once the beef was seared and the onions/garlic were deglazed with the beer, I put everything in the crockpot for six hours. I also added about 10 ounces of mushrooms, a tablespoon of balsamic vinegar, and quite a lot of salt. Delicious. 

• Lemon Feta Sheet Pan Chicken and Veggies: I will obviously be excluding the tomatoes.

• Oven Baked Pork Chops and Steamed Broccoli: Easy and peasy.

• Spiced Chicken Kebabs with Salad and Yogurt Dressing: I cannot abide ground chicken, so I will use chicken breast, cut into chunks, and roasted in the air fryer. So not kebabs at all; I know, I am one of Those People. The marinade sounds delicious, though (I am very intrigued by sumac) and the rest of the salad and yogurt sauce are highly appealing.

That’s all I have on the meal plan for this week, Internet.

Has winter returned to your neck of the woods? What are you eating to cope with the ongoing Kate Middleton drama?

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Five for Friday

It’s Friday and I am posting this on Friday, March 15; you may not see this until June for all Feedly cares, but I don’t think I have any control over that. This is kind of a cranky way to begin a blog post, so, as I say to Carla: Let’s try that again.

It’s Friday! I am coming off a night of broken sleep (child coming in at three, returning to bed around four, husband waking up for the day at five thirty), so let’s have some Friday bullets. 

1. Are you as steeped in the Kate Middleton drama as I am? If you have no idea what I’m talking about, a) bless you and b) here is a really thorough explainer. If you are In It, I highly recommend finding a friend who is similarly obsessed so you can text her memes and links to conspiracy theories at all hours of the day. My personal opinion is that Kate is recovering from surgery, probably doesn’t look or feel her best, and just wants to recover in private until Easter as previously planned and communicated by the Palace. BUT, simmering in that dark gross part of me that enjoys drama, especially when it feels very removed from my own boring non-royal life, I am kind of hoping that someone is pregnant with someone’s love child.

2. What kind of snacks do you keep stocked in your house? I ask because we have become friendly with our new neighbors and they invite us over all the time for all manner of things. While I am a little intimidated by reciprocating with A Real Meal (they are incredible cooks and bakers, and every time we’ve been invited to their house the food has been astonishing in both quantity and quality), I am ostensibly fine with having them over for drinks and snacks. The other day, the kids went sledding and we had them over for impromptu cocoa. Luckily, we had cocoa mix in the pantry, and even more luckily the mix had tiny marshmallows, and even more luckily, we had an unopened bottle of spray whipped cream because one of the neighbor kids informed me that he really likes whipped cream on his cocoa in a tone so grave I understood him to mean that something dire would happen if no whipped cream appeared. But then there are all these kids and their parent in my house and I realized I DON’T HAVE ANY SNACKS. It’s not that I don’t enjoy snacks; it’s that I enjoy them too much. We managed to scrape together some muffins I had in the freezer and some individual bags of chips and veggie straws that we had leftover from some party or other, so no one starved. But it made me feel like I need to have at least some snacks on hand. But what?!? I’m not crazy about having a bunch of cookies around, because they either go uneaten or get devoured in two seconds. If we have chips, I will eat the chips. Cheese and crackers aren’t big among the elementary school set, and it’s not like I can have an emergency brie on hand for last minute guests (or can I?). Fresh fruits and veggies, yes, great, and I try to have those around as much as possible, but we don’t eat enough of them to have a ready supply in the fridge at all times. Occasionally I panic buy a bag of clementines, but at least a third of them inevitably go bad before we can eat them. So: shelf stable snacks that appeal to kids and adults but are not so appealing that my family will eat them before we have guests. Is this a thing? 

3. In vanity news, I have been Influenced to buy several things lately. I really like this very inexpensive multi-use highlighter stick. Of course I cannot find the video that originally persuaded me that this was an essential tool in my (non-existent) makeup game, but I like dabbing it on the inner and outer aspects of my eyes and swiping it below my eyebrows for a little bit of lively glow. Totally worth $2.94. The other thing I’ve already tried enough times to recommend it is this bronzing mousse. The weather is edging ever closer to summer, and I don’t want to scare the new neighbors with my fish-belly legs, so I’ve been practicing in the hope that I can add a little lifelike color to my skin before I appear in public in running shorts. I am always on a quest for the perfect fake tan, and this is the closest I’ve gotten. The things I like best about it are: a) It’s dark when it goes on, so you can SEE where you are applying it, and you can also see if you are introducing streaks to your thighs or stomach before the streaks have become one with your skin. b) While it has a scent, as all tanning products inevitably do, it strikes me as much fainter and less objectionable than any other tanning product I’ve ever used. c) The resulting tan is darker than my normal skin tone, but not so dark that it screams FAKE TAN. (I use this tanning mitt to apply it to my body which works really well and helps prevent streaking.) Once again, I have no idea which account suggested this tanning mousse, but I am a fan.

4. One of my current parenting goals is to provide more opportunities for Carla to spend time with her friends. I think I’ve mentioned before that I hate playdates. They fill me with anxiety, because they are both forced social time – sometimes with parents I don’t know well – and because I have no idea how to deal with more than just my one child. For better or for worse, that’s just how I am, and so we haven’t had a ton of playdates. But now that Carla is older, playdates presumably no longer require that social element AND the kids are old enough that I can give them a lot more independence. I used to agonize over how I was going to entertain two whole children, and so I’d gravitate toward things in my comfort zone, like baking projects or crafts. Unfortunately, those things require a lot of prep and supervision and clean up, so they aren’t relaxing or easy. But now I can pretty much let the kids go off and play together. Sometimes we all take a walk outside, and I’m always happy to take a walk, even if the kids ask me to pretend I’m not with them.

Even though playdates are, in many ways, easier now, I still of course have anxiety about them. I find myself fretting about planning An Activity, just in case. I find myself worrying about what happens if the kids get into a fight or misbehave or want food (it always comes back to snacks!) or want to be on screens the whole time.

This is so silly! When I was a kid, I don’t think my friends and I EVER had An Activity. We just went and played Barbies or roller skated in my basement or played school or ran around outside or played house. I can’t even imagine asking my mom or a friend’s mom for ideas. And snacks were not provided by the parent! We scrounged up our own snacks, and I don’t even remember a parent being present for any snacking. In fact, part of the fun of going to someone’s house was checking out their snacks. (Not as fun: eating any sort of meal at a friend’s house, because they had different foods than I was used to and different rules. THAT filled me with anxiety.) I loved my friend J’s house because they had an entire drawer full of candy, and you could just… eat candy when you wanted to! J, notably, was pretty uninterested in the candy. I loved my friend R’s house because her garage freezer was STOCKED with popsicles. At my house, we always had little bags of chips or Zingers in the pantry and Dilly Bars in the freezer and pickles in the fridge. (R and I used to each eat a pickle when we were at my house.) So I am guessing that kids DON’T CARE either what they do or what they eat at playdates. They will figure it out. And yet. We have two playdates on the schedule in the next few weeks and I am already stressing about it. I am planning to be Mean Mom and put a ban on screens, but beyond that… I don’t know what to do or what not to do. Wow, I wish I could chill out about this. 

5. You know something that always feels like magic to me, even though it’s science? Topology. Various algorithms keep serving me videos of topological experiments – because I keep watching them when they appear in my feed – and my mind cannot grasp the mathematics/physics. My dad taught Carla how to make a mobius strip and even seeing him create it with my own eyes doesn’t help me understand how or why it works. It’s witchcraft.

What are you up to this weekend, internet? And, more importantly, what kind of snacks will you be eating?

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