The Search for Miss Direction: Fort-Tastic

When I was younger my parents had this great dining room table that my siblings and I would throw blankets over to make our own fort. I distinctly remember hiding out in the fort and eating fruit snacks. Lemon fruit snacks. Forts are awesome, every kid should have one.

Including mine. So while we have a pedestal table that makes it a little difficult to have an experience similar to mine, today we set out to make a fort for Noah and Kayla to enjoy.

I am not the engineer in the family. As I told the kiddos "I'm the artist, I have the dream. You're Daddy's the engineer, he makes it happen." We decided to make the best attempt we could with the three of us and let Grant mastermind it later.

And honestly, the kids could have cared less what it looked like, they had a blast. I pulled out some huge comforters, we draped them over a bunch of furniture and our fort was born. I think they may have found every pillow and blanket in the entire house to put underneath in their hideout. I even let them have lunch in there as a special treat. They're already begging me to put it back up tomorrow :)

In unrelated news, Happy National Chocolate Souffle Day. My day had been going swimmingly well until I remembered I had to make chocolate souffles. I have hemmed and hawed and wavered over what exactly to make for days now. I couldn't find a recipe that I knew was 'fool proof' that didn't require at least 8 eggs. I couldn't find one for a type of chocolate I already had in my pantry. I couldn't find one that would let me make them ahead and bake later. Or I could find one of those elements but not all of them. I've been a wreck about it.

In the end, I decided to totally cheat and do it my own way. A bit of research showed that for the most part you can 'swap' typed of chocolate for each other. I took it one step further and decided to use some Andes mint chocolate pieces I had left over. (Probably not the wisest decision) Then I found a recipe that only called four two eggs, made four 'mini' souffles. It didn't say anything about making it ahead but again, I decided what the heck, I'm going to make it and refrigerate it like some of the other recipes I came across allowed you to do. I knew I was messing with it and might effect the outcome of my souffles, but oh well.

And honestly, it wasn't any of those things that led to the 'pouf' going out of my souffles. I made one really dumb mistake that I KNEW was a mistake as I was doing it. It was almost one of those out of body experiences where I'm doing something and in my head I'm screaming "NO!" I popped my tray of souffles in the oven as we sat down to dinner, anticipating they'd be about perfect by the time we finished. Then, for some odd reason about 3/4 of the way through the bake time I decided to check on them. Instead of flipping on the oven light I pulled a classic No-No and opened the oven to check on them. DUH! As the blast of hot air hit me I knew that when I pulled them out at the end of their bake time they were already going to be a bit caved and would continue to do so.

Oh well, they still tasted the same :) And considering how many other swaps and changes I made, we'll take it. Noah loved them and everyone else gave them a 'meh.' All that anxiety for a meh :-p I don't think we're really souffle people anyway. Bring on the forts. We like forts.

National Peanut Butter Lovers Day and Fruit Compote tomorrow. And hopefully school for my four year old who is missing it! Until then...