I feel like I’ve lost my blogging mojo a little bit. So I’m going to try to get back into it with the Patented Blogger Brain Dump. YOU’RE WELCOME.

After a lovely, warm week, today it is pouring rain and chilly. And my youngest, who has been home sick for the past two days, has an all-day outdoor field trip.

OF COURSE SHE DOES.

My middle kid turned 12 on Wednesday, and I was going to make her cake from a mix, with icing from a can. I rarely do this – due to food allergies around here, I usually make an egg and milk free cake. But for my husband’s most recent birthday he requested that for once, we have a “real” cake, with eggs and butter and everything, and OMG, it was like HEAVEN IN MY MOUTH.

So now we will have lovely real cake on birthdays, with a small side vegan cake and/or pie for the Captain.

Anyway, I got partway through mixing up the cake mix when I double checked the ingredients, and turns out it contains cottonseed oil, as did the icing, which my daughter is allergic to, so, I would have to say, less than good as a birthday cake solution.

I threw it out and turned to my grandmother’s classic Red Plaid Cookbook for help, and managed to make a plain vanilla cake that was pretty good. But the big news here is that when I turned to the frosting sections, there was one for Caramel Icing, and so I made it, and OMG, it was like HEAVEN IN MY MOUTH TIMES TWO. Seriously, the best icing ever.

Today as she was savouring leftover cake for breakfast, my youngest said to me, “Why don’t more people make caramel icing?” and to that I have to say, “I don’t know, what the hell was I doing with the first 45 years of my life?”

Great mysteries, people.

Recent parenting wins:

I went to have headshots taken for my web design business a couple of days ago, and the youngest was home sick, so I had to have her tag along. I told her to bring a book to read, and she brought our big book of the Elements of the Periodic Table, so she could read about the elements. The photographer noticed my nine-year-old reading about Praseodymium and Astatine and I gotta say, I thought we were making a pretty kick-ass impression. Later my kid used the book to quiz me as the Captain and I have been trying to learn all the words to this song like the mega-geeks we are:

The next day, a guy came over from our roofing company to claim payment – we had our roof replaced a couple of weeks ago – and he was impressed that a) our oldest son had hair even longer than his, which was up the classic man bun, b) we had our latest family game, Stockpile, all set up ready to play, and he was also a gamer, and c) while we were talking the two oldest asked if they could watch John Oliver videos while waiting for the game to start.

I’m sure both the photographer and the roofing guy came away with the idea that are model parents with brilliant, unique, super-cool kids. HA HA HA HA. Five minutes after both these incidents we returned to our usual state of kids begging for video games while I read Entertainment Weekly and serve cereal for dinner.

But still: parenting wins.

I’m still getting into the swing of back-to-school. The older I get, the more I find these transitions to be difficult – moving from the school schedule to the summer schedule, then back again. I always spend the first two weeks of September just frantically trying to catch up on a million things that I let slide, thinking I’ll have so much time to work on them once the kids are gone all day.

It really is amazing how fast six hours can pass.

I’m hoping by next week I’ll have my head above water when it comes to the design business, and I’ll finally remember that Thursday is laundry day, and I’ll figure out how to find time to be creative in addition to being productive. Time marches on and I feel like it is slipping away from me a little bit and I need to just come up for air, take a deep breath, and have a good look around. Then, line up my planned projects like ducks in a carnival game and knock them off, one by one.

Step one: breathe.

Also: don’t forget to pick up the kids. School’s out in 10 minutes. GAH.