I third the pot roast advice and add: it tastes better when you cook with wine that's good enough to drink. Although I just about died when Gordon Ramsay made fruit soup with Veuve Clicquot.

I attempted food for the first time in 16 hours...pb&j on a toasted English muffin. Wish me luck.

So, clearly, I'm a monster who deserves neither a parenting book contract nor a cupcake.

I think dealing with all of that is exactly the definition of deserving a cupcake.

Wish me luck.

Good luck!

Also, you might want to avoid roller-coasters for a while....

Also, you might want to avoid roller-coasters for a while....

I also tried to make her wear the wrong kind of diaper, made her watch TV, made her turn the TV off, ate nine bites of the crust of her cinnamon toast when she only wanted me to eat eight, gave her fizzy water when she wanted milk which I should have known even though she'd just asked for fizzy water, put the milk in the wrong container, didn't give her enough, gave her so much it made her tummy hurt and made her More Sick, and cruelly insisted that it was bedtime at the outrageously early hour of 9:15.

See, after all that she's still alive, so clearly you deserve a parenting book contract, a cupcake, and a medal.

My varietion. Put potatoes and carrots with wine, tiny bit of honey, boullion cube, garlic, olive black pepper and as much water as I feel like in slow coooker. Cook on high an hour and a half. Add onions, celery green pepper or mushroom if I feel like it and chuck. Cook until tender. If I'm feeling fancy, brown the meat for a few minutes with soy sauce and olive oil before adding to slow cooker. Result pot roast stew/one dish meal. Browning first really does make it taste better, but it tastes fine even if you do not brown.

Since there doesn't seem to be any way to totally block the absorption of princess culture via daycare osmosis, I've taken to explaining to Matilda that a princess has to be try her hardest to be smart, kind and brave, because a princess will someday be a queen and have a whole country to take care of, and queens who are stupid or mean or wicked tend to get eaten by dragons or tumble down rocky crevasses in the middle of a howling storm. The only bratty princesses are wicked stepsisters, and they too tend to get eaten, or turned into stone or sometimes merely banished for life.

When I was a wee Teppy, I had a book called, quite naturally, The Princess Book, which is full of stories about smart, brave, funny, resourceful, kick-ass princesses.

Here's the introduction:

"Many princesses are pink and pretty and protected. They don't have much to do, really, except gaze out tower windows, sew fine seams, or comb their long, golden locks. But then there are other princesses—princesses like those in The Princess Book.

"In this collection of nine stories, there is a princess for every mood or occasion. One princess races about in wild pursuit of cheese-napping mice. Another manages to look beautiful, even in a patchwork gown. A princess made of paper cleverly breaks a wicked curse, while still another outsmarts a powerful, bad-tempered North Wind."

Of course I still have it.

tummy~ma, Kristin!

I've got buffistas in my kitchen! Well, technically you're in the laundry room because the entire kitchen is a splash zone when I'm cooking. I'm making roast beef with purple potatoes, baby onions, carrots, mushrooms and thyme.

Oooh, thanks, Tep! Added it to her Amazon wish list (not that I ever ask anyone to buy anything from Amazon; I just point family members there and tell them to get something off the list at a local independent bookstore, because I'm all lefty and crunchy like that). I totally remember reading and loving lots of similar princess stories in Cricket when I was a kid.

Vaguely relatedly, I've been obsessed for the last few weeks with a fairy tale I'd never ever heard before, Kate Crackernuts. I'm just smitten with a story of a beautiful princess with a wicked stepmother and an ugly stepsister, where the ugly stepsister not only doesn't take part in the stepmother's sabotage, but runs away with her beautiful accursed sister, finds a way to break the curse, and rescues a prince while she's at it.

My mom knows a bunch of children's book illustrators in the area, and I've been badgering her to talk to one of them about working on a picture-book edition, but she hasn't done it yet. Dammit! It's the most excellent fairy tale nobody's ever heard of!