there is no substitute...

for a mother's arms. except of course, 2 pillows, a swaddling blanket, a pre-fold swaddler, and a mom who has s**t to do.

so we bought a nursing pillow which turned out to be garbage for nursing, but makes a pretty awesome ground-control-it's-major-tom command centre for the boobla:

here he's all like, "whaat up?!"/kicking it old school and doing the mashed potato. we love it when he's all eyes open, toronto. it's the best. i can't believe he decided to turn into a white guy though. he started off so asian and now he's shedding it the way his belly button is slowly shedding its appearance of being a secondary mouth.

big d insisted on hosting a family one-month dinner for the boobla. it was pretty boss. shark's fin soup and eggs dyed red and lobster and other kinds of goodness:






the dotytron's movember 'stache is looking very fraaanche.

all the profs in my program (well, the 2 of them) are being super-nice about giving me extensions and i think the program director has washed his hands of me. i emailed him as a courtesy to let him know that i was going to be coming to the saturday class this week, but after lunch, because it's not the best use of my time away from the little tiger direct to show up for class at 10 for an hour's recap of last class and then sit through lunch and he was all like "sort something out with the professor to make up for your absence" and the prof is like, "we'll discuss this later" - sweet!


i made cinnamon pecan buns on the weekend - probably my most successful attempt to date - i'm going to throw out all my other recipes and just keep this one. i got it from food and wine magazine (fluffy, buttery, cinnamon rolls) and did some small tweaks to make it less fussy (ie. only dividing the dough in half instead of in quarters and skipping the parchment paper step) - the recipe was a little confusing - i'm not sure how you would have fit all the buns into one 10" springform pan. i split the dough in half and baked off two 9" springform pans and wrapped one and froze it to take to my sister when we finally get to see her and introduce the new cousins to one another.


tonight for dinner i made us a baked mac'n'cheese with a random crumb topping - i just smushed up a bunch of pretzel crackers, ritz crackers, and other hard, bread-like things and mixed it with butter and thyme to top the mac'n'cheese with. served alongside that fennel, radicchio, romano bean and parsley salad that we love in the winter.

fin.