As long as I have my Cheerwine, I happy grilling in any weather!
I was working a little late at work last night, till around 8:30ish. When I finally got home Toya had a funny story of what Nariah did.
“Why is daddy working so LAAAATE?!?!”
Nariah then picks up the house phone and pretends to dial my office number…
“Hello daddy? Yeah… Why don’t you sneak down to the lobby. Then go to your car and come home… NOW! OK, bye!”
“Did you just tell him to SNEAK to the lobby and then come home?”
“Yeah!” and then Nariah busts out laughing.
For the longest time, Nariah has asked me every time I cut my hair to shave my whole face, my eyebrows, and my head… but… leave a dot of hair on the top.
What?
So I’m up late as usual on a Sunday night and I decide to cut my hair a little bit and shape up the beard. I don’t know if its sleep deprivation, or what, but something was very twilightish about the night. I had my hair nice and even on top, and was getting ready to fade the back a little. My mind said “switch clipper guards to the lowest one“, but my body… my body said “just take of the guard“.
So as you can imagine my first pass caused a bald strip on the back of my head. “SHOOT! SHOOT!” I yelled in a loud whisper not wanting to wake up Toya. Now Toya’s story is pretty funny as she heard the double “shoots”, thought something was wrong, but since she only heard 2 shoots, she faded on back to sleep. I guess I needed more “shoots”. Little did she know I was in store for another hour of agony. Looking at myself in defeat, as I’ve never been bald except for when I was inside my mother’s belly, I acknowledged that this was the moment… I had to go all the way.
What is the first thing Nariah says when she sees me in the morning?
“Daddy! You shaved your head! Wait… how come you didn’t leave the dot of hair? I like it though!”
The dot, she’s worried about the dot. LOL
We walk into daycare later that morning and the director and one of the assistant directors look at me with a shocked look. Understandable and expected. “Wow! So Nariah… did your daddy get a haircut?”
“Nooooo”
I look at her confused.
“Nariah, you mean daddy didn’t cut off his hair?”
In a “come on guys, work with me” type of attitude and with her head tilted to the side she says : “Noooooooo, he SHAVED his head“.
And she turns and walks on to class like normal. To me however, it looked like her brain was saying “See what I’m working with everyday?”
A short and sweet one.
Since Toryn has been here, Nariah has lost the ability to sleep alone in her room. We’re slowly making positive strides back in the right direction. So last night I’m tucking Nariah in bed and pulled the sheets up over her.
“Daddy… I really wanted to sleep in your bed tonight. But since you already tucked me in I guess I know my answer huh?”
I smiled affirmatively back at her. I’m sure saying “Pretty much” would’ve been cold here wouldn’t it? But since she laughed after saying it, I thought that was pretty cute, funny and very intelligent all at the same time.
Sorry, I don’t have pics, they smelled too good and got eaten too fast.
During the blizzard of ’10, we dealt with cabin fever, what better way to survive than to cook right?
I started with the Delmarva Crabcake recipe as the base and modified it with personal flair in the spirit of being snowed in from the blizzard.
Ingredients
1 pound lump crab meat (or the bluefin clawmeat that was on sale this week at safeway for 4.99, still was the bomb, aint no shame in my game!)
1 cup bread crumbs
a few generous shakes of Old Bay seasoning
2 capfuls lemon juice
2 tablespoons mayonnaise
1/4 cup milk
1 handful of chopped chives (didn’t measure this, lol)
1 egg
a few shakes of garlic powder
1/3 cup chopped red onion (if you like extra twang)
dash of nutmeg
Directions
1. mix all ingredients together.
2. Shape into good size crab cakes.
3. Fry in butter or margarine or oil over medium heat, flipping quite frequently
Let rest over paper towel to absorb grease, serve plain or with this bomb sauce called “Lousiana seafood sauce“
#Simplicity#
So awhile back, I learned my lesson on trying to figure out your kid’s artwork. That it was safer for them to just tell you what it is instead of guessing. If you missed that catastrophe, see : Daddy On Artwork
So today I pick up Nariah and she tells me : “Look daddy! I made you another picture! Wanna see???”
“Sure baby! Lets check it out!”
So she grabs her picture from her cubby and shows it to me. Now using my new parenting skill, my spider-parent sense talks to me and says “Unnh unnh Ryan! This is a trap! Just nod and say ‘its awesome’!” But I really was stumped when I saw the picture, I actually wanted to know. Take a look :
After trying to figure out what this picture is of in my head for a few seconds, I did the safe thing… I said “This is awesome Nariah, what is it?”
She looked at the paper and looked back at me with this “you’re joking right?” look on her face. She looked back at the picture one more time in a “Are we looking at the same picture” type of way, and then looked at me again and displayed a “You really can’t be serious” face.
“Well?”
“Daddy… Its dots… Its just a bunch of dots…”
Now I’m not sure, but I could’ve sworn I heard “duh” come out of her mouth, but I really think it was that spider-parent sense thingy talking to me.
grillsidestories 