flavor of the week

Well, it's that time of year again. Haven't I done this before? Like, a couple of times?  I know that this kind of thing is part and parcel of the school experience for kids these days, I'm sure as hell glad I didn't have any "Person of the Week" type stuff when I was a growing up. I was super shy and I had all this anxiety about speaking in front of the class and performing and just generally breathing in public. If I had to present some posterboard about myself in front of everyone, I probably would have just cried the whole time. (I think I cried every day at school for the entirety of first grade, as a matter of fact.)

Cal's a little older now, so we just kind of gave him free reign with the poster, handing him pile of markers, the posterboard, and a pile of loose pictures that we had lying around from Christmas card season. Have at it, Cal. Of course I think that 80% of the things that my kids do are magical and delightful (75%?  Fine, 68%) I do find it particularly adorable that for his own Person of the Week poster, of the nine pictures he chose for the poster, fully seven of them are of Mack. Which proves that though the dialogue in this house seems solely to consist of:

"Stop it!"

"No YOU stop it!"

"No, YOU stop it!"

(continue ad infinitum or until I intervene with some suitable distraction--TV, snack, Ketamine dart, louder yelling, what have you)

...the kid really does love his brother.  How gratifying.

I'm on call tonight, which means that tomorrow I'll be post-call and therefore able to go in to give that "cooking class" that I'd mentioned before.  You guys had given me so many good ideas--I was originally going to go with vegetable dumplings, because I figured it was different and culturally relevant and fun, what with the dumpling skins and whatnot.  But then I was looking at the ingredients on the dumpling skins and I remembered that there's at least one kid in the class who is gluten-intolerant (not that it'll kill him or anything, but he does get a pretty bad rash).  So in the interest of making the activity fun for everyone, and minimizing the unknowns (I also realized I had no idea what kind of heating elements, if any, I would have access to--very Top Chef Quickfire Challenge) I decided to go with something simple and easy and healthy.  Healthy-ish.

Cal and I made a test batch yesterday (what, you don't think I would go in cold, without practicing, do you?  If so, you don't know me very well--before the Oral Boards, I took a test drive to the exam location at least three or four times, and it was only ten minutes away) and it turned out pretty well.  We even put jalepeños in--turns out they're not really that spicy if you scrape the seeds out.  And if some kids don't like guacamole (Cal doesn't like avocado himself, but he does enjoy guacamole) I got, like two giant bags of chips.  KIDS LOVE CHIPS.  Except for that no-gluten kid.  I will just give him a spoon and a bowl of guacamole.

(Hey wait, I'm looking at the poster again, and I think Joe helped him cut out the Statue of Liberty figure.  Cheater!)