Shake It Up

We have all been staring at the same four walls for about 3 weeks now due to illness. On Saturday, I threw everybody outside whether they wanted to go or not. Everybody.

Mrs. Nod confided to me: "I'm mad at you". Join the club, signups are over there. (But then she took a nap and felt much better.) In fact, everybody felt better just to be soaking up some Vitamin D and running and playing. One thing is for certain: nobody in this family will be signing up for a 5-year trip to Mars in a tiny capsule.

Dab made his long awaited debut at Mass this weekend, despite the rain. It always amuses me to see the people that we barely know or don't know at all come out of the woodwork to congratulate us on the baby. Not that I'm complaining about it -- I'm pleasantly flattered.  I guess we're just that visible, even when we're doing nothing and sitting quietly in the back.

I decided to shake things up a little more on Sunday afternoon by declaring that we would be making our own pizza from scratch. My mom used to do this when I was growing up, and it's not that hard especially if you own a pizza stone -- which I do.

Now the Nodlings are that kind of crew that historically turn their noses up at anything but cheese pizza. I don't listen to those mewlings and force them to eat all kinds of crazy dishes that I make up -- and they love.  I won't force Blynken to eat mushrooms unless they're really well mixed into something, because she looks like a cat horking on a furball, but other than that I generally don't make exceptions.

But today was Pizza Day. We made French bread style for lunch as a warm-up, and then we got out the rolling pin and made pizza dough for dinner.

I asked them to pick pizza-like toppings and they could put in on the pie themselves.  Well! This cheese-only crowd put on pepperoni, black olives, green pepper, garlic, minced onions, mushrooms, and oregano.

Nib was hilarious! Every time I'd shift the pie to the left or right to work on the next part, she would jump down, move her step stool to my other side, and clamber back up so that her nose was level with the pizza. "Daddy, I help you?"

For our second pie we made deep dish which included ham, pineapple, green and red bell pepper on half. My half was more exotic: pepperoni, olives, feta cheese, mushroom, diced tomatoes, garlic.

They ate it all up with relish! Um, no, not relish-relish, they just liked it a lot. I had five kids hovering around my elbow as we mixed and rolled pizza dough and clamoring to be allowed to put on the next topping.

Hmmm, I wonder if that would work for other kinds of dinners? Hmmm.