Sleepless night, almond joy inspired ice cream a'coming

Jack ended up sleeping with me last night, and as such, it was not a remotely restful one. When Jack sleeps, he is like a windmill in gale-force winds crossed with a quidditch bludger wrestling mightily to escape the straps securing it in its box. He's also noisy. At one point, he groaned loudly and heaved himself over me perpendicularly. Leg kicks, arms shooting with abandon, exclamations and rolling- all in all, it was a miserable night of sleep for moi, and I had a really bad dream which I cannot even bear to write down. I feel really rough today and am definitely lacking in both patience and zest. T doesn't know it yet, but I am sleeping in the basement tonight! Inspired by the ease and success of my recent honey and spiced fig ice cream, I decided to make more but this time thought chocolate, almond, coconut and the slightest bit of cardamom might make for a delicious combo. Let me tell you that so far it is really, really good. The chocolate-cardamom egg-custard base is chilling now, and tonight when the end of churning nears, I'm going to stir in some toasted, shredded coconut and some toasted almonds. Yowzers, eh!?

Before that, however, I'm taking J to Tae Kwon Do belt testing- hopefully he returns home an Orange Belt!!

Superheroes, ice cream, lusty love

The boys are really in the throes of superhero pretend play, and they utilize outfit ideas, tools, phrases, mannerisms, villains and weapons from both actual books and films as well as their wildly active imaginations. Today I said that if they'd take their quiet time seriously (read: stay upstairs, be relatively quiet, and let me have quiet time), they could spend it together. When they came downstairs an hour later, both had underpants over their jeans (Jack) and shorts (Oliver), per old-school Batman and Robin costumes, belts on to serve as utility belts, and Oliver was wielding a kobee (a make-believe explosive device). Being that Ol had on underpants that say "vroom, vroom" and are covered with cars OVER plaid shorts, it was somewhat hard to take him seriously. But I tried. They said they were saving me from the step of fire and that I needed to see the part of the wall in the stairwell that opens at their command because it held their assortment of guns and other weaponry. I feigned amazement and thanked them for their supervision. Funny.

Today has been another one chock full of cooking. A double batch of spelt-cherry-cardamom scones, fresh ricotta, homemade ice cream with caramelized figs and honey and now some Lusty Sungold Love which I'll serve over grilled bread and fresh ricotta as the centerpiece of our Meatless Monday meal. Doesn't that all sound fabulous? Is your mouth watering? Mmm!

Neat find in nature

The boys are really enjoying their playhouse but have decided that the mailbox be used as a repository for left-behind cicada skins rather than mail to each other. We went on a walk this afternoon to find more and found a real trove across the street. On the way home, we found the coolest thing: a cicada had just finished molting and was still hanging onto his former exoskeleton. Check this out!