Jigsaw

Like his great-grandfather Tom and great-grandmother Diane, Silas loves to do jigsaw puzzles. We found a set of four wooden farm puzzles with about 25 pieces each that he is able to put together all by himself. I watch as he looks at the pictures and matches up the different parts of the animals or tractors and looks for the edge pieces. Like great-grandma Diane he always taps the puzzle piece as he gets it to fit, as if drawing attention to his success. It is bittersweet to think maybe he inherited this love of puzzles from two relatives who never got to meet him, or spend an afternoon engaged in a favorite shared activity with a great grandson. But it is nice to be reminded of two of my beloved grandparents every time he asks to do a puzzle.

Laura's Visit

This weekend we were treated to a visit by my cousin Laura. She s up in Dublin doing something really fun called "internal audit." Eek! So you can't blame her for wanting to escape, even if she was escaping to the land of three year old whining and 9 month old pterodactyl screams. She took the train down to Kilkenny, and we all drove up to meet her.
I wish I could say we spent an exciting night out that Friday, but after we got both the boys to bed we sat around watching the Olympics, drinking tea, and reading. Pretty stimulating stuff, sorry we aren't better hosts.
Saturday we breakfasted on pumpkin pancakes with blackberry syrup- a combination of maple syrup and smooshed blackberries and Silas, Orrin, and I picked from the hedge rows last week. Then we made a quick tour of down town Clonmel- through Irish town, the Western Gate, the Main Guard, stopping at the Farmers Market, and Aldi for milk. So, at least Laura got a realistic, if boring view of a day in my life.
The Kilkenny Art Festival was on over the weekend so we drove back up there after lunch of barley and butternut squash. The weather was pretty miserable, but luckily, Laura came prepared. She toured the castle while the rest of us played on the newly opened playground. I promise, Silas played too, not just us. We wondered around the city, looking at the various art displays, trying to stay dry. We missed a couple of the performances. Went to one, Entanglement Witness, which sounded really exciting with infrared cameras, lights, interactive, dynamic, blah blah blah, but was really pretty terrible. But we did manage to catch Baladeu'x juggling and acrobatics performance. AND Orrin was even part of the musical parade. So. That was pretty exciting. Silas kept telling us he was hungry through the show, and then marched, danced, wiggled, sang, shouted across town how he loved noodles and he was going to eat noodles for dinner. We arrive at Zuni's and he wolfs down two pieces of brown bread and butter and half a glass of milk and then disappeared under the table for the arrival of his noodles; braised oxtail open ravioli (what is open ravioli you ask? Sheets of pasta lay red with filling, more like lasagna than ravioli if you ask me). Emmet played with cheerios and grapes from my fruit salsa and nursed himself to sleep while I devoured my seared tuna and sweet potato and goat cheese pancake. Laura had a tasty looking seafood linguine and Orrin had turbot with lobster potato pancakes. When Silas emerged from his tablecloth fort he did end up eating almost all his dish, aside from the two bites Orrin and I stole to sample. Then went on to devour half of Emmet's Cheerios while we waited for dessert- rhubarb creme brulee with vanilla ice cream and orange mocha torte with marscapone ice cream.
After dinner we walked back to the car, and passed by the carousel, which by this time had been turned on and was offering free rides. Silas and Orrin hopped on, but I was holding a sleepy Emmet and we couldn't convince Laura to take a spin.
Sunday morning, Laura and Silas made donuts for us. Laura did the rolling and icing, Silas handled the cutting and sprinkles, and I did the frying. Perfect way to start the day. We drove down to Lismore to visit the farmers market, castle, and do the towers walk. It was cloudy but dry when we left so we hoped for the best. The boys slept in the car on the way down, so Orrin stayed in the car while Laura and I checked out the market. There was a very cute booth with wooden toys, a very tempting crepe wagon, and the smell and sound of sizzling sausages. In the end we just bought a container of mushrooms in sour cream and herb sauce and a selection of cheeses. Laura tried to get me to buy the St. Brigid cheese but after tasting it I decided on a different kind. The smell of the cheese wagon was so delicious and smoky it was difficult to pick only a few. I don't generally like smoked cheese but the stuff here was really excellent. I'd make the drive down to Lismore on another Sunday just for the cheese. And while I'm there, might as well sample a warm nutella and cherry crepe too.
We drove over to "The Towers" walk for our picnic, and of course it had started to rain. But we were under some trees and didn't get too wet while we ate. We took our little hike, all of us getting pretty wet in the process. It didn't help that we accidentally took the wrong path. We noticed right away that it was different but thought it ended up in the same place. Nope. We had to turn around and tromp back through the wet weeds and down onto the lower path to get back to the car. Silas didn't seem to have any problem with stomping through more wet muddy puddles though.
Orrin wasn't content with our current level of rain saturation and so drove us to Mahon Falls for a forced march through the wind and rain. It had been raining a lot in the past few weeks and I think he wanted to see the falls at what he expected to be maximum strength. Unfortunately, the mist and fog made it almost impossible to see the falls and the mountains they are situated in, so it was a bit of a bust. Except that every last inch of us was wet. Except for Emmet. He had been bundled inside my rain jacket most of the day.
Laura was such a good sport and didn't complain at all. So I took up her slack and doubled my whining efforts. We made it back to the car, cranked up the heat, and steamed up the inside, so we could barely see out.
Back at home Orrin turned on the gas fireplace, we made tea and hot cocoa, dried Laura's pants and shoes as best we could before her train that evening, watched a couple episodes of Curious George, and I made pizza dough. Laura and I gobbled down the red pepper and chorizo pizza, I packed up some hazelnut chocolate chip cookies for her journey, then we headed off to Kilkenny to catch her train. We had a nice, kid-interuption free, conversation up to the the train station, arrived with plenty of time and said our goodbyes in still more rain.
That evening when I took Emmet into the spare bed with me to nurse I discovered that she had even left us a box of chocolates as a thank you gift!
Sorry it has taken me so long to get an account of the weekend up-an entire week! We had a great time and are looking forward to any more visitors. Promise we won't march you in the rain too!

Pictures

So I am uploading some pictures to Picasa, our trip to America, the pictures from the Spraoi festival, our miserably wet camping trip last weekend, some other stuff that I should write hilarious posts or at least captions about, but at least you can look at the pictures. So, if you haven't clicked on that link over there to the right in a while, you can click here.

Best Intentions

The nice thing about having Nathan here, well one of the nice things anyway, is that I can casually mention something that needs to be done, or would be nice, or funny, or whatever, and when I get up in the morning, *poof* it's done. Ok, this usually applies to things like fixing Silas's hammering bench, or photoshopping a picture. But it counts. Plus when I turned on the computer this morning this is what I saw.
It's kind of nice when you have an idea, and it's actually made into reality instead of fading away into oblivion.

Donut Whole

Because the donut delivery truck apparently doesn't visit Clonmel until 10:30 or so, I was forced to take matters into my own hands.
Viola! The wholegrain western style donut, made with whole wheat and barley flours, cinnamon and nutmeg, with a molasses glaze, and finished with Silas's personal selection of sprinkles to suit your personality.
Infinitely better than anything that would have been on offer in the multitude of shops we stopped in looking for donuts. And when you factor in the buckling into car seats, driving, walking, parking, listening to squabbling; quite a bit easier too. These cake style donuts really only took about 45 minutes start to finish. I guess there is clean up too, but I'm delegating that.