The Westmonster Daily

My niece likes to talk. A lot. Of course, it’s a little hard to understand what she means at the moment when everything she says sounds a lot like “da da da”, but there are two distinct words she is already using appropriately. Those are “please” and “thank you”.

Over the Easter weekend the whole nuclear family gathered and I had two days to observe her. She likes giving things to people and getting them back. It goes like this:

She picks up something and holds it out for you to see. But when you try to take it, she won’t let go. You have to say: “Would you please give this to me? Please?” before she actually gives it to you. And she repeats the “please” back to you. When you say “thank you” she repeats that as well. Of course, the next thing you do is give the item back to her, saying “there you are” (which is the same word as “please” in German) to which she usually replies with her version of “thank you”.

How cool is that? Can’t talk yet but she’s polite like a pro!

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On  a different note: She also imitates a certain animal. While other children may know what the dog says or how the cow goes, my niece knows what the hedgehog says! Unfortunately, that curling of the nose and snuffling and lip-pursing can’t be put down in writing… *dying of cuteness*

My, but they grow so fast! My niece is one year old now. While I’ve stopped showering her with gaudy toys when I figured my brother’s house couldn’t take any more and she’s successfully climbed the first mountain set in her way by life, health, and fate (those bastards) she’s managed to stay the cutest little button the world has ever seen! Seriously, this is not an aunt’s subjective assessment at all! Everybody says so! And yes, I know that everybody always says so, no matter how ugly or egg-shaped the respective baby actually looks. But in this case… well, never mind, I don’t have to prove anything to you! *hmph*

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Anyway, she started being shy with strangers a couple of months ago. While Hubby is a constant source of joy and wonder to her (she’s flirting with my man! Always has!), me, not so much… Since I’ve never really had a lot of contact with a lot of small people she wasn’t usually very thrilled with my carrying her awkwardly around. I guess she sensed my general insecurity with babies and didn’t like the feeling, since she herself hasn’t had the opportunity yet to build much confidence in her own ability to keep herself alive. Whenever I’d pick her up she’d start wailing pretty much right away and fling her little hands toward the next best grown-up nearby. Settling into safer arms, she’d stop crying and smile again.

So that crushed me a little bit.

I knew, rationally, it didn’t have anything to do with sympathy or lack thereof. But it made me question myself anyway. Would I stand a chance with children of my own, if they ever happened? Or would they prefer their more experienced (and obviously more attractive to babies) daddy over me because I’m generally insecure with kids? Rationally, I knew that those questions, too, were nonsense. But emotionally… whole different story!

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Then, one day, shortly after her first birthday, I went over to my brother’s to have dinner with the three of them and take my bro out to the movies. As I walked in the door, my sister-in-law and my niece were home alone, sitting a couple of meters away from the door on the floor. When my niece saw me, she took me in with that quizzical look of hers, then started to grin and gurgle, and actually scuttled toward me! She didn’t stay with me long because she had to go pick up another load of confidence from her mom, but she returned often and seemed generally comfortable in my presence. And it has stayed that way for a couple of weeks now. I can actually make her laugh, and she watches me all the time and grins when I look at her. What A Feeling!!

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Rationally, I know that she probably has overcome her shyness of strangers or maybe I’ve been over there often enough so she knows I’m harmless now, but emotionally, I’m partying inside.

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Easter is over, I do realize that. But I cannot blog about my making easter eggs myself before the fact, now can I? There you go.

The Saturday before Easter Sunday was spent in my tiny kitchen with the unfathomable carpet in it, spreading melted chocolate over half of my kitchen equipment as well as some dark chocolate, white chocolate lemon, and coconut easter eggs. The latter taste a lot like those Bounty (in the US: Mounds) candy bars, which is not bad at all.

I may or may not post a plethora of pictures of the easter eggs later but I will tell you that I am eating another one of those delicious coconut candies right from the fridge this very moment.

In the meantime, one may follow my chocolatey endeavors on Tasty Kitchen, where I got (and reviewed) two of the recipes and posted the third.

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Look!…

Lemon Truffle “Eggs”

Coconut Eggs (see my Review for the changes I made). Here is a picture of them still naked and awaiting their chocolate coats:

Chocolate Truffle Eggs (again, see my review; I also added honey which was hardly traceable in the finished candy)

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For this time of year, I think the dark chocolate truffles are a bit heavy, but the lemon truffles are really dreamy and so fluffy and light… Yum!

This is my sister-in-law’s mother’s recipe, and the former passed it on to me during the time the two of us shared an apartment with my brother. That sentence sounds weird but I’m pretty sure it’s grammatically and factually correct.

Anyway, this is tasty stuff and very easy to whip up. When I made the batch pictured here, I was going to “soften” the butter in the microwave and ended up liquefying it completely. Turns out the only thing hurt by this was my nuke-timer-setting-pride. And I’m sure she’ll be okay.

So anyway, here’s what you do if you want a change from all those herbs and garlic in your rad bread spread:

Get…

1 Onion
2 cloves Garlic, or more to taste
Fresh Basil – to taste
½ cups Tomato Paste, more to taste
4 sticks Butter, softened (NOT necessarily liquefied, but, you know, whatever floods your boot)
Salt And Pepper, to taste

Wow!

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I know I am, as always, a couple of decades behind, having just now finished reading The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. But – oh! What a book! What a writer! What a poet!

I keep telling people how Rilke breaks my heart with his way of weaving the same words I use every day into beautiful, heartstrings-tugging works of art. But Margaret Atwood? I mean – is she even trying? Yes, the story is compellingly interesting. Yes, I wanted to know what was going to happen in this strange, yet eerily familiar world she had fabricated. But what really had me hooked were the words! The same type of words I use (okay, maybe not “palimpsest” [p.1] and the like, but I swear, it’s mostly everyday vocabulary), but combined SO gorgeously that I had to smile and gasp and marvel all the time at the sheer force of poetry chasing me to page after page.

My favorite quote about the handmaids having to live between the lines of society (or something like that) is lost somewhere in the book (*kicking myself for not writing it down when I had it right there before me*), so the last lines will have to do for now (here be no spoilers):

“As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our own day.

Applause.

Are there any questions?”

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Bookmark check: You need to search everyone for the individual spot in which they are unique [Man muß an jedem Menschen solange suchen bis man den individuellen Punkt findet wo er originell ist]. J. Paul