Pretty Pretty Dinner

Wow.  I'd call myself a slacker if I hadn't been so busy.  It turns out, the pursuit of higher education is time consuming.

For the last couple of weeks, we've been rather inundated with the double whammy of Things Going Wrong coupled with "Professionals" Who Make it Worse.

Take my car.  I was on my way to school when the car in front of me starting spitting plastic auto parts all over the freeway.  I had a fraction of a second for a decision, and figured straddling the (rather large) piece was probably my only option - my tires don't belong on a monster truck, and there was no room for me in adjacent lanes.  The terrible noise as I drove over it was frightening, but I made it the rest of the way to school without smoke, explosions, or ninjas bursting from the backseat.  When I came back from school (MUCH later in the day, totally ready to go just go home already), I discovered my car wasn't turning over.  I initially thought I'd left something on and called my roadside assistance service to get a jump.  The marvelous fellow who showed up managed to put the jumper cables on the wrong terminals, totally frying out a bunch of cables and fuses.  He left fairly promptly, citing "another call" and frantically having me sign paperwork that said he wasn't liable for the mess he just caused.

So my husband has been handling our tyrannical daughter, who is in the middle of a disastrous sleep regression.  Despite not sleeping at all last night, he left early this morning to fix my car.

This afternoon, while he caught up on some well-earned sleep, Monster and I talked about what a good daddy we've got.  I asked him what nice things we should do for him, and he suggested pretty pretty flowers. So we got out some poster paints and the ton of coffee filters I've got left (we've switched to a reusable one) and got a-painting.  After they dried, I threaded a few beads on a sturdy wire, punctured three painted coffee filters, and made a sturdy loop behind them (to stand them up a bit).  I cut some slits into the filters and crunched them up a bit, and they wound up looking pretty cute.

For my part, I had a few spectacular ribeye steaks doing time in the fridge, and a giant pile of spinach and swiss cheese.  By adding a few oven-roasted rosemary potatoes, we had ourselves a pretty decadent little faux-steakhouse dinner.

I asked Monster if that was good enough, and he suggested we make it a "Pretty Pretty" dinner, which I took to mean "bust out the china."  So I did.  Frankly, it doesn't get used enough.  I also busted out these fantastic towering crystal pilsner glasses we got for our wedding that I think make totally awesome water goblets.

Then we all scampered off to wake up Daddy (probably actually the cruelest aspect of our thank-you dinner, but at that point it was 8:00 and I was FAMISHED), who seemed to think our thank-you was pretty okay.

Most of all, I thought it was awesome that we managed to get Monster involved in thinking about ways to appreciate the people around us and the nice things they do.  The bulk of our afternoon was about making things with our hands to show our loved ones that we noticed that they'd done something special, and based on Monster's eager responses, I think it clicked.