<p>No Trader Joes. May need to join Costco.</p>
<p>ShawSon and ShawD are good cooks. ShawD likes to make desserts – she makes Turkish delight and Pavlovas etc. We have Iron Chef competitions with other families over New Year’s Eve (and other times) and ShawSon will make exotic improvised dishes (sauteed chicken with mango and Asian spices). He often makes pasta with some kind of sauce and chicken sausages. He thinks vegetables should be honored by not eating them. However, when meals have been made in the past, the kitchen has been a disaster area.</p>
<p>missypie, lots of good stuff that kids can make themselves at Costco (salmon burgers, various kinds of ravioli, chicken tikka masala, Mystic Pizza, …), although Trader Joe’s is the favorite.</p>
<p>There is NO getting out of Costco cheaply. Just sayin’. :)</p>
<p>S2 and Shawbridge’s S would get along with the cooking. Perhaps he could teach S2 to clean up?!?!?</p>
<p>That’s one thing the culinary arts teacher drilled into them: CLEAN UP!</p>
<p>my D1 has the book “how to boil water” but burned the eggs the other day. D2 cooks better than D1 more practical sense.
My house is finally being painted it looks awesome! oven is still on the fritz needs a new element, at least it doesnt need to be replaced like the fridge!!! It will be fixed next week.
NM congrats on the weight loss its hard to do.
analyst that job is so cool!
Shawbridge I dont think your son really exists but he will make some lucky woman a good husband some day!</p>
<p>DTE, he is an incredibly sweet kid but is intensely focused on success – has to be focused given learning disabilities. During the school year, he didn’t make it over to the next building to pick up a care package that his godmother had mailed – lots of mold collected. The floor and all other surfaces in his room at school and at home are covered. Decaying stuff found in backpack, etc. At the same time, the success focus means that if cooking is a task he has chosen to take on, he will do it to succeed/win also. </p>
<p>So, if future is like the past, he’ll be extremely successful given his definition of success and will be a caring father and husband but won’t likely cook lots of dinners or clean. Nonetheless, I suspect his wife will consider herself lucky as long as his definition of success includes enough money for lots of housecleaning help. I think it will. </p>
<p>One interesting thing he told me. He said, “It seems like money lasts a lot longer in the summer than during the school year” despite the fact that he spent about $400 and no more than $500 for the whole academic year excluding books. Why? He’s makes money during the summers playing poker. He made $75 playing poker with seniors on admitted students weekend last year, but hasn’t had time to play poker for money at college.</p>
<p>CountingDown, I agree on the amount one spends at Costco, but when we have the horde of large teenage boys in our house (and we’d rather have them in our house than somewhere else), there is no other place but Costco to shop. Our monthly food bill literally drops in half when our son is at school.</p>
<p>yes, but missypie - eating like that once a month isn’t going to harm them and think how nice it is that you get the evening off? If they can drive, they can clean up so that shouldn’t be an issue.</p>
<p>Oh and by the way, CountingDown, the spotless kitchen was a once in a lifetime event (at least do date). ShawWife and I were nearly moved to tears. Can someone teach something he’s done only once?</p>
<p>And I’ve just noticed that our grocery bills have shot up now that D is home. Got to get her back on the plan though – when you use something up you HAVE to put it on the grocery list.</p>
<p>Shawbridge, S2 is 6’4" and 255. They WOULD need a trip to Costco!!!
When S2 has his poker and Risk overnight festivities here, we buy enough food for a large army. I will miss that next year. We also expect the grocery bill to plummet this fall. :)</p>
<p>Wow, CountingDown, if it is possible to eat more than Shawson, who is the same height but “only” 215, I suspect your son would do it. ShawSon and friends played poker and especially Diplomacy. Costco was the order of the day. We haven’t had a confab like that this year, but over the last couple of years, when we did, they never cleaned up in any meaningful way.</p>
<p>Last night DS and friends landed at our house for guitar hero and camaraderie. Apparently the menu included Taco Bell, Whataburger, Olive Garden, leftover pizza, eggrolls from our freezer and pretty much anything else that wasnt tied down. And I am not even sure what else they ate after I went to bed.</p>
<p>Not a one of these boys weighs over 150, but they can really pack it in.</p>
<p>DH cleaned up in the morning because I refused to.</p>
<p>Shawbridge, he used to get flak from the other guys on the football team that he didn’t eat enough!! Those wide receivers and running backs must have the metabolism of hummingbirds, because I’ve seen them load their plates at pre-game dinners.</p>
<p>Going back to missypie’s d’s bf hair-don’t: S’s baseball-playing friends on both coasts sported mohawks for their college baseball playoffs. They get it mowed down to a buzz cut after the season’s over. </p>
<p>It’s fun to see the kids come home for the summer. S has a great job as a beach lifeguard (renewed after last summer) but is much more of a slob than he was when we shipped him away to college last fall… work in progress… will report back on my planned summer reformation before he moves to an apartment next fall.</p>
<p>Haircuts: Last year on the run to the boys lacrosse finals, those on the team who had grown their hair particularly long started cutting it after each play off game so that by the time the state games rolled around they were mostly all sporting the most godawful mullets you’d ever want to see. And yes… this occured during prom and not one of them caved to the pressure of the GF’s or whatever their date’s status in their lives. The upside was in the pictures they all looked equally stupid. Fortunately, my son’s hair does not grow long as much as it grows wide. He prefers it fairly short, but currently it is the longest it’s ever been in his life.</p>
<p>Grocery bills: It has indeed doubled (minimally) since S’s returned home and I am back to buying a gallon a milk every couple of days (he’s the only one that drinks it). He also has been hugely helpful in eating pretty much every leftover he can get his hands on so that we no longer have leftovers. I haven’t had to throw one thing away since his return. He will eat anything you put in front of him and while “only” 6’2" and 200, he is pretty solid muscle and I honestly think he burns it up as fast as he can put it away. Costco is THE place to go for large quantities of fruit like berries etc. Best quality too! Massive quantities of avocado and frankly, their cake for some reason is delicious. Water, Gatorade etc… Costco is the only place to go.</p>
<p>Girls won their section last night and are now in the state tournament next week. SOOO proud of my D as she played awesome. Today was their last day of finals and it’s time for me to face the fact that my youngest child is now a junior in HS. Seriously… where has the time gone??</p>
<p>Nightmarish evening. Tried to send D pictures from my home email account only to find it had been deactivated. H admitted to receiving an email on the deactivation which he double-deleted. I’m now thinking that’s what must have happened with the Gores…Al must have let Tipper’s email account be deactivated and she lost it…I know I did!</p>
<p>Oh, missypie, that’s hysterical!<br>
I’m so sorry about your e-mail, but thank you for solving the Gore mystery.</p>
<p>Wow, interesting morning. We picked up ShawD yesterday evening from the family who had taken her to Martha’s Vineyard and took them all out to dinner. Uneventful rest of evening. ShawSon called from Europe this morning (waking me up at 8:20) to ask if I could change a reservation as he can’t get to Paris tomorrow due to the French Open. ShawWife was downstairs when I came down for coffee and insisted that I see these youtube photo-montages of a photographer Sebastio Tadao (I think), whose photographs are spectacularly good. I went to fix the reservation and while I was doing so, ShawWife then began making pancakes for ShawD and me (and her too). Very nice. </p>
<p>At the end of breakfast, ShawD insisted on playing a few youtube clips from the latest Glee episodes, bouncing from song to song (something she is wont to do in her ADHD style, but notice the resemblance to ShawWife). Her stated request for today was to go shopping, though she doesn’t need anything. We are putting her on the plane to Appalachia for her service trip tomorrow so we sent her upstairs to get the packing list to see if the shopping could actually include something she needs. When she was upstairs, ShawWife shut off Glee but did so not by hitting pause or by closing the tab but closing the window which had 7 tabs open. </p>
<p>ShawD came downstairs and was unhappy about this as she would now have to restart various things she was doing in those windows and search for stuff, etc. ShawWife did not apologize and instead blew up and said she wouldn’t be treated disrespectfully and threatened consequences if ShawD continued to be disrespectful (e.g., no shopping today, other unstated consequences over the summer). Way over the top as ShawD was in this instance not being disrespectful. ShawD often comes with an extra dose of adolescent teen attitude, especially to her mother and especially in the morning, but in this case, I thought she was well within limits. I tried to call a time out but was unable to stop the conversation. ShawWife then stomped from ShawD to me as we were supposed to do a bit of yoga and then go bicycling before she took ShawD shopping. </p>
<p>I pulled her aside (out of earshot of ShawD) and told her she was wrong in this case, that ShawD was not being especially disrespectful, and her tone may have grown that way only when a) ShawWife unnecessarily shut things down; and b) didn’t acknowledge or apologize (this has been an issue for ShawWife since I’ve known her, the fundamental attribution effect in social psychology lives alive and well in her – if she did something in error, the situation forced her to do so). ShawD had raise her tone somewhat after getting no acknowledgment from ShawWife and ShawWife jumped all over her. When I tried to get ShawWife to reverse what she’d done, ShawWife started to get mad at me and stomped off to go cycling by herself. So, I did my yoga poses and have to decide what to do. Wait. Take ShawD shopping. Go for my own bike ride or go to the gym. </p>
<p>ShawWife was clearly having some biochemical thing going on – she needed to get going and get endorphins – and was also reacting to a past history of teen girl eyerolling. It just wasn’t happening today. I try to be her coach in this but she was too far gone to hear me, especially because from the outside, this didn’t seem to even be an issue. She got made at me, saying, “I got up early, made a nice breakfast, and nobody thanked me” but in fact, I had explicitly thanked her. Not clear how to respond. I’m sure this will all blow over, but the fun never stops, I guess.</p>
<p>Shawbridge… </p>
<p>I have been known to behave exactly as shawWife. Thanks for putting it a little bit in perspective but there is something about teenage girl eye-rolling that is akin to nails on a chalkboard… rather, it’s like talons!</p>
<p>Yesterday I texted D asking what her plan was since we hadn’t heard from her and hadn’t heard any plans. YEs, it was the last day of finals and the end of her sophomore year, but just because she has a car doesn’t mean we don’t get a phone call to say what she was doing… I got a text back saying, “Why do you care?” Well… that’s actually worse than eyerolling and texted her back saying, I am your Mother and if you continue the attitude there will be no car privileges. About 6 minutes go by and then I get… “You’re right… I am sorry and I love you. PS we’re at Pannera” I have found that if I tell her exactly what pushes my buttons and threaten with car and/or no money… I get better results. 
Not that I like to threaten, but… it works! So… it happens.</p>
<p>PS… if Mom said no shopping, I would definitely NOT take shawd shopping. No matter your good intentions, you will be undermining. There is time to shop AFTER ShawWife gets home, endorphins are back in the groove. If she comes home and you’ve already gone? Umm… you’re on your own. :)</p>
<p>Wow shawbridge- my H could have written that about me. It’s much easier to <em>hear</em> it from you ;). I may even show it to him, as a way of saying "okay, maybe you are right sometimes about my over reaction to the girls.</p>
<p>But I do agree with Moda - to take D shopping now would be adding fuel to the fire.</p>