On Tuesday of this week, I went with my girls on a little outing. Actually, it was a pretty big outing for me, one that involved a hotel reservation and a dinner reservation. The occasion? Simply that Yo-Yo went to camp and I wanted to do something special with the girls, my girls.

I never had a sister, though I wanted one desperately, and ever since Sweetsie was born I’ve reveled in the fact that I have daughters and that each of my daughters has a sister. I have girls in the plural. Life is thrilling.

They are so different, my girls. Miss Becca Boo looks like my maternal grandmother, the same hooded eyelids, but her build is just like her father’s, lean and muscle-y. Sweetsie looks more like her papa, and she has what my mother calls “Marilyn lips” (Marilyn Monroe, of course)—though Mr. Handsome’s lips do not in any way resemble Marilyn’s, capeesh?—but she is built more like me, which is to say without any notable muscle definition whatsoever. Miss Becca Boo is, for the most part, easy to please and eager to please, industrious, and the family peacemaker, which is pretty much a description of Mr. Handsome’s sister Sarah. In fact, I think of Miss Becca Boo as Little Sarah. Sweetsie is, at least right now, downright cantankerous and crotchety, which pretty much reminds me of Mr. Handsome, though she occasionally turns into a little angel, agreeable and spunky, with the ability to charm the socks off the most thickly-heeled, black-buttoned, boot-wearin’ women in all of New England (don’t even try to tell me that New England women don’t still wear corsets and bustles ’cause I won’t believe you), and then she reminds me of myself.

So a couple months ago when I signed Yo-Yo up for camp, I started making plans for our mother-daughter outing. And then Tuesday swung around and we went.

You must understand, this is most unusual for me because I don’t go places. More specifically, I don’t go to new places without Mr. Handsome, places that require me to read maps and find parking and pretend to know what I’m doing when I really haven’t a clue. When I go to new places with Mr. Handsome I take the role of detached observer and Mr. Handsome takes the role of frazzled, impatient, stressed father, crashing into curbs and blowing out his front tire when executing high-speed u-turns (a spiffy stunt he pulled while on DC’s back streets on July 4, 2009). While he fumes and fumbles and frets, I stay cool as a cucumber in my comfy passenger seat, generously pointing out his failings and my golden halo (“you do realize, don’t you, honey, that I have never blown out the car’s tires, ever. Hmm?) Going somewhere on my own would mean that I would be in charge and any finger-pointing could only be aimed at myself.

I was a little stressed and slightly addled, but I kept telling myself it was An Adventure and that helped me to feel a little better. I also vaguely recalled a certain college spring break when I led a work team to San Antonio. Fourteen other students and I crammed into the fifteen-passenger van, we attached a large trailer to the hitch, and then we drove fifty hours, round trip. Once we arrived, we divided into four groups and I chauffeured them around the city, dropping them off at their respective work sites. (The rest of my time, when I wasn’t unflinchingly maneuvering the one-way streets or doing the food planning, was spent missing Mr. Handsome, my then-boyfriend who was, at that same time, on a Catholic pilgrimage to Bosnia. I wasn’t crying because he was in Bosnia though, I was crying because I was back in the sultry city where he and I had met on that fated June day, and I could hardly stand being there without him. Every time I thought of him, I dissolved in a theatrical bundle of snot. I was pathetic.)

In comparison to that spring break trip, my little excursion to a medium-sized town with only two little girls was peanuts, but still… However, it all turned out fine. I only got lost several times, but then I got unlost by asking questions, studying the map, and talking out loud, loudly. We got everywhere we needed to go. We even had fun.

I intentionally did not bring any reading or writing material for myself on the trip. I wanted to be fully present to the girls—the purpose of the outing was to be with them. In case you haven’t figured it out yet from reading this blog, this plan was totally out of character for me as I am forever seeking ways to snatch some alone time, those infamous five minutes of peace. To plan to spend extended time with my children, without getting some of my work done, was not like me at all. But I decided it was the right thing to do—thirty hours without my own agenda wouldn’t kill me, I reasoned. (I only regretted my decision once, when I found myself lying on my hotel bed watching yet another inane “educational” cartoon: Can you help keep the prairie dogs safe? When you see the wolf, yell “hide.” Ready? Yell “HIDE!” Good for YOU! YOU helped the prairie dogs!… Now let’s count the prairie dogs in Spanish: uno, dos, tres,… OH NO! There are only EIGHT and we are supposed to have TEN . How many are missing? That’s RIGHT, we’re missing TWO…! At that point I was seriously lamenting my noble plan.)

The other thing I didn’t take along (intentionally) was my camera. But I did manage to take some pretty spiffy mental snapshots that I will now attempt to convert into words.

At the deserted hotel pool:
*Racing each other, back and forth and back again. After a couple laps I thought I would die; swimming is hard work.
*Both girls lying face down on the hot, white pavement to warm up, then flipping onto their backs for even toasting.
*Sweetsie discovering the cooler of water and the cone cups that are so fun to pull out, one by one by one.

A three-course meal at The Melting Pot, a high-end fondue restaurant:
*Sweetsie lets her displeasure be known, most emphatically, when the main course consists of little piles of raw meat, whole mushrooms, broccoli and wedges of potato.
*Sweetsie accidently knocks over her glass of water.
*The tired-looking middle-aged waitress (with as much personality as a toad) forgets to turn on the heat under the pot of bouillon and I signal to a passing waitress to help us out. “Who is your waitress?” she asks cheerfully, and then we get a chatty visit from the manager herself, and then another waitress gets a head start on our dessert, and then the original waitress brings out the dessert and tells us that the manager is giving us a two-for-one deal on the dessert because “she’s a generous woman.”
*The chocolate-marshmallow fondue is lit on fire and the girls are enthralled. Or maybe it’s me that’s enthralled. Anyway, the chocolate is to die for and I scrape clean the pots and every single pewter plate.
*We are handed fancy mints sealed in black wrapping, and as we cross the street on our way back to the van, Sweetsie’s falls out of her mouth and into some grating. I say, “Yeah, it’s important to keep your mouth closed when you’re eating.” Amazingly enough, there are no tears.

Back at the hotel:
*We go directly to the 24-hour coffee station and I fix the girls small cups of decaf coffee with a cream and a sugar each. Then I fix my large decaf coffee (two creams, no sugar) and we head upstairs where we change into pajamas and then drape ourselves across the beds and watch the food network.
*I turn the TV off and we all climb into bed together. Once the girls are asleep, I move to the other bed and watch “Chopped” (a cooking show, nothing gory) before falling asleep myself.
*The girls are up at 6:30, wanting to watch TV. We pad downstairs, still in our pjs and with bed-head hair, fix more coffee, toast a bagel and get a Danish, and go back to our room where we climb into bed and stay there for three hours of the afore-mentioned inane TV viewing.
*They store clothing and papers in the mini-refrigerator, bounce on the beds (just a little), fiddle with the air-conditioner, kiss the full-length mirror, press their noses to the big window, and splash in the tub. My tongue gets sore from biting it so much.

Breakfast in the hotel lobby:
*Miss Becca Boo eats three yogurts, Fruit Loops, a banana, an orange, a cup of apple juice.
*Sweetsie eats a yogurt, Fruit Loops, an apple (I finish it), a banana (I finish it), an orange (I finish it), a Danish, and apple juice.
*Miss Becca Boo tries to suck her yogurt out of the container like the woman in the TV commercial. She smiles sexily, coyly darting her eyes off to the side and licking her lips. She gets yogurt all over her face.

Self-revelation:
I have two young girls and no wedding band on my finger (my fingers swell in the summer, so I take it off for the hot months)—how do strangers perceive me? Not that it matters, of course, but I’m in a different world with a new role, half my family missing, throwing away money like it grows on trees. It’s fun to see myself through strangers’ eyes. Makes me want to write a novel.

At the ice park:
*After one time around the rink and a couple gentle spills, Miss Becca Boo takes off. She skates with her arms out, her right leg extended behind her. I’m impressed.
*Sweetsie slowly pushes around the upside-down five-gallon buckets they pass out to beginners, her fingers gradually turning purple. She stumbles, the buckets flip over and she lands on top of them, straddling them helplessly.
*We watch, slack-jawed, as the figure skaters (real ones!) do their spins and leaps. We listen in on the private lessons being taught in the center of the rink and then we clumsily practice the moves.

On the pedestrian mall:
*We stop by a table filled with rows of sunglasses. The Asian saleswoman gives us a hand mirror. “For the girls, these glasses they can have for one dollar off,” she says. Miss Becca Boo chooses green ones, Sweetsie some silver-sparkly, cat-eyed ones (regular price because they aren’t children’s glasses), and I get a pair of regular glasses. We traipse down the brick walkway. Heads turn; people smile.
*Pizza by the slice, gumballs from a machine, café Cubano, a quiet, wood-floored, second-hand bookstore, a carousel merry-go-round.
*The girls want to go home; they are tired, and they miss the male half of the family. Miss Becca Boo misses her guinea pig. We head home.

So, was it worth it? It’s hard for me to answer questions like that, pitting an experience against a dollar sign. Did we have to leave home and spend money in order to have that type of experience? Wouldn’t it have been better if, instead of spending money, money that Mr. Handsome has to leave home to earn, he just took a couple days off and we all hung out together, working in the garden, inviting some friends over, reading books, watching a movie?

On the other hand, there is value to be found in striking out and doing something different. Just the act of stepping out of one’s element into a different life not only gives the adventurer a little boost of self-esteem, it also encourages the person to see the world in a different way, to ponder and reevaluate life. And that’s worthwhile.

But I don’t know if it’s worthwhile enough.

Right now as I type this, Sweetsie is lying on the sofa complaining that her head hurts. She says, in a sad, gravely-voiced whimper, “It’s cause of that trip. It makes me sick to go on trips.” Really, hon? We got back two days ago! Do you mean to tell me that last night’s sleepover at your aunt and uncle’s doesn’t figure in to your tired headachy-ness?

But the child does have a point. I feel like I’m still recuperating, craving extra alone time after the concentrated together time, needing space to process, to think, to write, to sleep. Still not back in the swing of things, my house turned into a barn, living on leftovers, I’m trying to make heads and tails of the whole venture, my brief affair with Extravagance.

What do you think?

One Year Ago: The Baby Nickel living life to the fullest, and other matters.

I’ve never before seen a chick hatch out of an egg. Have you?

First you notice that the egg has a little hole in the shell (sometimes you can see the beak pecking through), and over the course of the next several hours the hole grows slightly larger.

The egg rocks from side to side and you can hear the high-pitched cheeping coming from inside the shell.

As it gets closer to fully hatching (I can’t help but think of transition here) the hole extends into a line, a chasm, that gradually widens.

Bits of shell break off—I saw one piece separate with such force that it cleared the tops of a couple neighboring egg before falling to the floor of the incubator.

Finally, at long last (and with much urging on my part—“push, baby, push!”), the chick spills out, all wet and gooey and stunned.

It lies still, resting, then chirps wildly and flails about clumsily, trying to lurch away from the shell and towards the anticipated-but-not-there mama hen.

It rests again, still as death itself, and then suddenly flails about some more.

After about fifteen minutes of drying time in the toasty incubator,

we transfer the baby to the holding box on the dining room table where it joins its half siblings.

We’re hoping for a decent crop (flock?) of chickies, but since we certainly know better than to count our chickens before they hatch, we’re counting them as they hatch, nice and slow, and egg shell bit by egg shell bit.

One Year Ago: Cooked Oatmeal (I feel like sobbing when I see those luscious, frosty blueberries—next year we’ll be sure to get some).

We are in the middle of zucchini season. In case you didn’t know, zucchini season has three stages. The first stage is marked by obsessively checking on the zucchini plants, followed by squeals of delight when the first zucchini is ready to be picked, hoarding of said first zucchini and the next five or six glossy-skinned precious babes as they trickle in from the garden, and a flurry of favorite zucchini recipes.

You know you are in stage two of zucchini season when your refrigerator crispers—both of them—are loaded with the small to medium-sized green clubs (no longer thought of as “precious babes”), you’re spending extended periods of time chopping the vegetables to get them ready for the canner or freezer, and you’re perusing the web and flipping through cookbooks in search of variations on the zucchini theme.

Stage three is the stage that usually comes to mind when people think of zucchini: country church parking lots full of locked cars, zucchinis the size of small baseball bats that get heaved over the fence to the farm animals, and unabashed relief when the bore worms attack the plants and they suddenly collapse in a yellow-brown heap of stinky foliage. Then, finally, we all heave a great sigh of relief and thank our lucky stars that zucchini season is over for another year.

Right now we are in stage two. I have zucchinis in the crisper, a bag of zucchinis, a gift from my sister-in-law, on the counter (I accepted a gift of zucchini, a sign that we have definitely not reached stage three), and more just-picked zucchinis on another counter. Oh, and there’s one other zucchini on top of the bowl of fresh green beans—a hidden one that I found when watering the plants. (I was watering the zucchini plants—more proof that we’re not yet in stage three.)

What do I do with my zucchinis? I shared the first ones with my mother, and while it was hard, I knew I had to do it—I’ve got to be a good daughter and take care of my mother dearest, you know. I can only hope that I raise up my daughters as well as my mother did me. (How’s that for masked self-adulation?) I’ve made zucchini skillet and I’m preparing to make a big pot of zucchini-sausage-brown rice soup that I’ll (bless my poor nervous soul) pressure can. But, upon assembling my first decent collection of zucchinis, I promptly made a batch of zucchini relish.

Zucchini relish is like pickle relish but with zucchini (obviously) in place of the cucumbers. My friend Amber gave me the recipe a couple years ago and I loved the stuff, especially on hot dogs. In fact, I can hardly bear to eat a hot dog without it. We had just finished up the last of the relish (I only suffered through one or two hot dog meals without it) when the zucchinis made their welcomed entrance.

I searched through my files for my recipe but had to call up Amber when I couldn’t find it. However, her mother Ann answered the phone instead (Amber was out frolicking at some beach, Ann reported), and it was Ann who helpfully paged through Amber’s recipe collection while I waited.

“Hm, ketchup, salsa… I must be getting close,” Ann mumbled to herself, and then, “Okay, here it is!”

She ran through the list of ingredients, explaining the procedure as she went, elaborating on the tricky spots (“make sure to stir it the whole time because it does have a tendency to stick to the bottom and burn”). I asked her where the recipe came from and she told me that back when they had a roadside vegetable stand (I was just a baby then) a customer, a woman from Middleton, told Ann about her fabulous zucchini relish recipe and then upon Ann’s request, gave her the recipe.

“It is good stuff,” I said to Ann. “I like it even better than pickle relish.”

“Oh my, yes,” said Ann. “It’s really very good.”

Zucchini Relish
From Amber, by way of her mother Ann who, in turn, got it from the customer from Middleton.

If using the large, boat-sized zucchini for this recipe, remove the seeds first; otherwise, if the zucchinis are small, use the whole thing.

I shredded my zucchinis and onions in the food processor. I tried to shred my peppers in the same manner, but the processor merely mangled them. Therefore, I tell you to chop the peppers, and it’s really not that big a deal, chopping three measly peppers.

Ann highly recommends using the full five cups of onions.

10 cups shredded zucchini
2 sweet red peppers, small dice
1 sweet green pepper, small dice
4-5 cups shredded (or chopped) onions
5 tablespoons salt
2 1/4 cups cider vinegar
5 cups sugar
1 teaspoon celery salt
½ teaspoon black pepper
1 tablespoon nutmeg
1 tablespoon dry mustard
1 tablespoon turmeric
2 tablespoons Therm Flo (or cornstarch)

Day One, in the evening:
Toss the first four ingredients together in a large bowl and sprinkle the salt over top. Stir to combine. Cover the bowl with a cloth and let it sit at room temperature over night.

Day Two, in the morning:
Drain the vegetables, rinse them well (I put them in a bowl and swished them around in some water), and drain again.

Put the vegetables and the remaining ingredients in a large, heavy-bottomed kettle. Stir them well and bring them to a full boil, stirring constantly. Reduce the heat and simmer for another ten to fifteen minutes, stirring steadily.

To hot pack the relish, put the hot relish into clean canning jars and seal with rings and lids. Allow the jars to cool at room temperature; once cool, check the tops to make sure they have properly sealed before removing the rings, wiping off the jars, labeling them, and transferring them to storage. (Or, if you want to can them in a hot water bath, put the relish-filled jars in the canner, cover them with water, and bring the water to a boil and process for five to ten minutes.)

Yield: About seven pints

One Year Ago: Red Beet Salad with Caramelized Onions and Feta (only read this if you’re in the mood for some old-fashioned aerobic exercise).