Interactive

Today Jen flew out to Salt Lake City for a work trip. If you're thinking this doesn't sound fair you are right. However it could be said that this is similar to the time that I flew out to San Francisco for a work trip and left Jen alone with the babies.

Personally I think that's comparing apples to oranges. That time was much easier for me.


I'm getting pretty good at feeding the boys by myself but they do get a little rambunctious. It's a little challenging to get them to focus on the feeding instead of on slapping, poking, and scratching each other. It's somewhat heart-warming when I consider that they really had no clue (or care) that the other existed for the first four months of their life. However it would be nice if they could continue to ignore each other through a feeding so I could actually get some food in their mouths without them trying to eat each others' toes.


After dinner we had a FaceTime chat with mummy. She was very happy to see them but it was a short-lived conversation as both Wombats decided to start losing their minds.

This would continue over the course of the next hour where I attempted to juggle both of them. As I thought I finally got them both to settle down I went into the kitchen to begin the process of washing huge numbers of dishes. After a minute a feeling came over me that something wasn't right. My Daddy-Spidey Sense started tingling. I went in the room to see Martin looking distressed. I touched his belly and it felt like a rock. As I went to pick him up an enormous fountain of regurgitated butternut squash shot out of his mouth into the air, dirtying everything within a ten foot radius.

This had never happened before with Martin so I could only assume he had been saving it for the moment Jen left. I brought him into the bathroom, disrobed him, and left him lying on the bathmat as I ran back to the room to give his shrieking brother his pacifier back.

After a quick bath and pajama change I rocked him for a while then returned him to his crib and rolled him over to his side where the exhaustion of the night's events caused him to quietly fall asleep.


With the boys asleep I had very little time or energy to make myself dinner. I brought a pot of water to a boil while I did the huge amount of baby-related dishes, then made this shells and cheese from a box.

In college I am afraid to say that I lived on Velveeta Shells and Cheese. It's worth mentioning that I got my degree in culinary arts. Even still I made this most evey night. I used that training to doctor up the standard recipe by adding dried basil and hot sauce to the batch. That really kicked it up a notch.

One time one of my chefs lectured us about cooking crap at home while we learned all day about cooking technique. That made me feel guilty. I went home and made a roast chicken with asparagus and made Bearnaise sauce with tarragon I picked from my mother's herb garden.

The next night I returned to Velveeta Shells and Cheese.

Tonight I returned to those roots but used a popular organic brand which contained actual cheese in lieu of Velveeta.


To go with this culinary delight I poured myself the seasonal Brownstone from Sixpoint Brewery in Brooklyn, NY. This was a really tasty dry hopped nut brown ale that actually went quite well with my $0.99 dinner. The maltiness complimented the cheese sauce packet quite nicely.

It's all about culinary excellence.