Adventures in bread making

As we speak dinner is in the Crock-pot and It smells divine. A spicy roast Fiance loves. Round roast rubbed with dry italian dressing mix with a whole jar of pepperchini's and their juices, slow cooked until it falls apart. Place it on a roll or hoagie bun and dip it in the juice its made for an unbelievable "french dip."
Wait...
Where are the hoagie buns!? Oh no I forgot to buy some during the monthly shopping trip. Crap! Now what do i do?

The easy solution would be to go to the store and buy some but when do I ever do things the easy way? I'll make some...yes, that sounds like a fabulous idea! Only theres one little catch:

I've never made homemade bread before.

Ok I lied, I made banana bread once but that doesn't count. Making bread is intimidating, scary, and time consuming. I'd have to use Yeast. Yeast is the scary part. What if it doesn't activate? What if I kill it? What if my bread doesn't rise? What if the yeast explodes!?

Does yeast explode? I don't know but it was in the realm of possibility this morning when I went to the grocery store.

Upon arriving in the baking aisle and looking at the top self I see: Dry active yeast, instant yeast, rapid-rise yeast, quick-rise instant dry yeast, yeast in jars, yeast in tiny packages...

Initial response?
GAHHH!! RUN AWAY!!

Thank goodness I didn't do that. I think I would've received some pretty odd stares from Lil E and Miss Priss and the rest of the store would've wondered what drugs I was on.
After calmly consulting the recipe I bought Dry active yeast in the little packages (less commitment that way) and quick-rise instant dry yeast (just in case). I could've at this point gone to the bakery and bought some rolls or buns or french bread as back-up in case this little adventure into baking failed but I did not. I live on the wild side like that. I have no back-up plan so this HAS TO WORK.

I followed the directions, set it out to rise, and crossed my fingers I didn't mess up the yeast part because everything else was stupidly easy up to that point. After an hour (and to my complete astonishment) it had doubled in size. I seriously wanted to jump up and down yelling "I did it, I did it!" WOO!
Now to form loaves or buns or rolls or whatever and...
Let it rise for another 40 min.
What!? You've got to be kidding me. This is more stress then this mamma can take. Ok, I can so totally do this. Cross fingers, pray to the kitchen gods (s), and wait...

While we wait why don't I show you a little project I did 2 weeks ago

That, my friends is a can of formula. Ok, it WAS a can of formula. I have a ton of these things floating around due to Lil E's growing appetite so I decided to recycle one of them into a coffee holder. I pulled out some craft paper and my handy-dandy Modge Podge and voila! Instant makeover. Do you have these tubs lying around too? What did you do with yours? I need some crafty ideas to transform these into something spectacular.
....
ok time to check on the bread.
O.M.G It's like magic. My mini loaves of bread have once again doubled in size (mainly width). Baking bread is kinda cool. Chemistry can be fun! Now time to bake these suckers and hope they don't turn out dense or hard as a rock or doughy in the center. Or God forbid after all this work (when I say work, I mean sitting around drinking coffee and blogging) I burn them!
Praying to the kitchen gods again.

25 minuets later we have SUCCESS! I have officially made bread. Ok, well, technically I made Sandwich rolls but whatever. They aren't perfect but I'd say today was a successful day.

Hands

You can see part of my bandaid

 Its quiet. Very quiet. The only noise in the house is gently sucking, breathing, and cooing of the feeding newborn. It's the middle of the night and I'm doing what I do most nights at this time, answering to Lil E's feeding needs. As I sit in the nursery rocking back and forth in the glider holding my beautiful baby boy I tend to do a lot of thinking. There is no noise to drown out the thinking at this time of the night. Tonight I was thinking about my hands. Yes, Hands.
Today I decided it would be a good idea to try to open packaging with a knife instead of scissors. I'm clumsy so I should've known better. As I'm opening the packaging my wet hand (yes, yes, I know. I don’t need a lecture) slips and I stab the oh so sensitive spot between my thumb and pointer finger. I didn’t cut it...I stabbed it. It was such a beautifully clean stab that it took the pain a few seconds to reach my brain. But when it did, Oh GODS did it hurt! The throbbing in my hand has yet to cease. I didn’t realize how very useful certain parts of me were until I could no longer use them. Tonight it was my palm and my thumb on my left hand that I had no use of. Making a bottle and changing a dirty diaper in the middle of the night is extremely difficult with only 1 ½ hands...especially when the half I'm missing is the thumb.

*sigh*

As I'm thinking about the nagging, throbbing ache that is my left hand my mind turns to the history of my hands and all that they have done for me over the past twenty-something years.

Tiny baby hands

In the beginning my hands were carefree. They were for holding hands bigger then my own. They were for swinging on trees, making mud pies, throwing random objects at my sister, and squishing spaghetti between my little fingers. They were for dipping in finger paint, holding crayons, markers, chalk, and writing on walls.

Writing on walls soon turned into writing on paper. My hands became nimble and agile enough to write numbers, letters, words, sentences, and then paragraphs. They wrote math problems and stories. They painted pictures and made gluing art projects together a breeze.

Lil E's hands are so small

In more recent years my hands seem to have forgotten their carefree life. These are important hands with important jobs now. These hands of mine have a more noble duty. They are now used to hold bottles, binkies, burp rags, and babies. They chop, slice, dice, scoop, and stir countless family dinners. They fold laundry, do dishes, and scrub bathrooms. They pick up children when they fall down, brush off dirty little knees, and wipe away tears. My hands give loving caresses, pats of encouragement, and high fives for a job well done.

My hands have been bloodied and bruised, slammed and mangled, broken, misused and abused. Most of all my hands have been under-appreciated. But yesterday the amazing man in my life showed my hands they were appreciated and loved. Yesterday he recognized all the things these hands do for our family and in honor of that slipped a ring on this injured hand of mine.

It's so shiny!

Introductions

So I guess introductions are in order.

Hi, I'm Melly.

Now that that’s out of the way, onto the important stuff.

Things you should know:

I love to paint but I do not consider myself creative.

I like the color pink, glitter, shiny objects, rainbows, and thunder storms.

I'm addicted to Oreos and karaoke.

I hate small talk. The awkward silence drives me nuts.

I like to cook but I'm not very good at it. I am a very Sandra Lee Semi-Homemade sort of cook. If its complicated or takes longer then 45 min, I probably wont cook it...unless it's in my crockpot (I love my crockpot).
I am a big giant nerd. I like epic fantasy novels, I used to play D&D, I have dressed up for a nerd convention...twice, and I studied ancient norse relgious pracices and various pagan mythologies for 5 years.

I am smart but I only know a lot about a few select subjects.

I have 2 wonderful (most of the time) kids. Miss Priss is a stubborn tweenybopper who thinks shes smarter then me and knows everything. Then there's Lil E. He doesn’t do much (yet) besides eat and sleep and poop

and cry

a lot

at 3am.

In fact as I'm typing this, he's crying. Its 3am. I'm holding him, trying to get him back to sleep and typing one handed. I'm talented like that

and sleep deprived.

I am new to this whole stay at home mom thing. I have always held at least 1 full time job sense I was 16 so this is uncharted territory. I thought I'd have a lot more time on my hands then I actually do (did I mention Lil E cries a lot?). I'm also new to this whole blogging thing. I'm not very good at talking about things...and stuff... and I'm mostly a boring person so I'm just testing the waters with this.

I suppose that's it...for now.