Cabin Fever

This week started off with a hurricane that pretty much dwindled down to a few gusts of wind by the time it hit Lancaster. Chou took off work on Monday so as to not get stuck at work when the wind started to whirl. That never really happened, but we enjoyed an extra day to our weekend. Chou stayed up all night on Friday with his middle schoolers from church, and the rest of our weekend was packed, so he took advantage of the extra day off to try and catch up on some much needed sleep.

Chou and Cali sneaking a nap. Perhaps I should have been paying more attention to what E was doing. #fail

By Monday afternoon I was about to lose my mind, sitting and waiting. I ended up baking this, which was delicious and used up some of our seemingly infinite supply of frozen pumpkin puree. I subbed sucanat for the brown sugar, whole wheat flour for the all-purpose, and our homemade creme fraiche for the sour cream. I skipped the glaze altogether. I'd show you pictures, but the streusel melted into the cake and wasn't all that pretty (I think the combination of homemade pumpkin puree and creme fraiche made my batter a lot looser than it was supposed to be).

The storm brought cold air and rain throughout the area, so we've pretty much been stuck inside. I'm going to need to start coming up with indoor activities outside of my home or I may not make it a month, let alone all winter. Normally I'd grab E and a dog and walk to the park or market, but this frigid air is making that impossible. So instead of walking today, I actually cooked dinner (usually Chou's job) while E assisted from her high chair, and then up-cycled an old sweater of mine into a dress for E. There are a few things I'd change for next time, but overall I'm pretty happy with how it came out.

I traced one of her dresses onto newspaper, added about 3/4" for seam allowance, made a quick scrap dress out of an old t-shirt just to make sure my pattern was the correct size/shape, and then cut and sewed the dress. It only took a few hours, even with the assistance of an 11-month-old.

My original sweater

Final product