Petite Confessions - Vicki Lesage (read dune .txt) 📗
- Author: Vicki Lesage
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Book online «Petite Confessions - Vicki Lesage (read dune .txt) 📗». Author Vicki Lesage
1. Fill a large wine glass 1/3 full with ice.
2. Pour in Prosecco, then Aperol, then soda water.
3. Garnish with an orange, and show a little leg. Just a little.
Makes 1 serving
Five minutes.
Five glorious minutes.
It’s how long I get to sleep in this Saturday morning. My adorable little noisemakers wake me up at 6:05 instead of 6:00 and it makes all the difference.
They immediately start chirping for food like baby birds, so Papa and I drag ourselves out of bed to prepare it for them.
The two-year-old reaches into the silverware drawer and steals a spoon, then proceeds to bang it against the cabinet in a four-beat staccato that echoes my thoughts:
Go-ing-cra-zy
When-will-it-end
Way-too-much-noise
For-six-a-m
Then his one-year-old sister copies, because she copies everything her big brother does:
This-is-so-fun
Do-what-he-does
Drive-Mom-cra-zy
Don’t-ev-er-stop
We finish breakfast and head to the living room. Leo spots his wooden crane, one that you can pull with a string, and drags it around the apartment with the most innocent expression. “La-de-da, I’m just playing with my toy and I have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA that its wooden wheels are breaking the sound barrier as they roll along the hardwood floor. La-de-da.”
Stella has brought her spoon with her and is now pounding on a toy pot, which is unfairly made of the same material as a real pot and therefore makes just as much noise. She’s like the street performers we see in the subways in our lively city of Paris, hammering out a tune and hoping for spare change. If I thought a few coins would get her to stop, I’d gladly pay.
The Deafening Duo moves on to Legos. Playing with Legos is fun, sure. But dumping the whole tub of them onto the hardwood floor is infinity times more fun. The sound of each little piece of plastic hitting every other little piece of plastic is the sound of my sanity being buried under the pile of colorful blocks.
If my son walks past a fan, he’ll turn it on. To Thunder-Level High Speed, of course.
When my daughter wants to read a book, she’ll first knock all of them off the shelf in one clamorous swoop, then select one from the mound on the floor. Usually the one on the bottom.
BANG, BANG! On the bathroom door as I’m trying to pee.
SPLATT, SPLATT! As they rip open the shower curtain mid-shampoo, splashing water all over the bathroom.
WHOOSH, WHOOSH! As they flush the toilet while I’m in the shower, sending a cold chill up my spine.
HA, HA! As they laugh at all the trouble they’re causing.
Five minutes. I just need five minutes without all the noise. The cacophony is splitting my ears, and my nerves along with it.
Then naptime rolls around. The baby goes down to sleep. The toddler dozes off soon after. Papa snoozes on the couch in front of the TV.
I find myself with a few minutes of alone time. Me time. Quiet time. I sprawl out on my bed and dive in to the book I’ve been meaning to read for months. The window is open and I hear kids laughing and playing outside—other people’s kids, the neighbors’ kids, kids I don’t have to worry about—and I try to relax.
I look up every five minutes, amazed I have this much time to myself. And I realize that I kind of, almost, a little tiny bit, miss the noise.
A loud fart. My son, waking up from his nap.
I needn’t have worried. I can count on my little noisemakers to snap me out of my reverie before I get too comfortable.
I made it to page 14. I’ll pick up where I left off the next time all three of my angels are quiet at the same time, even if it’s just for five minutes.
Five glorious minutes.
Iced Coffee Delight
When you only have five minutes to sit down with a good book, you might grab a cup of coffee. When you only have five minutes because you’ve been running around the past few years after your kids, you deserve this decadent coffee cocktail instead.
2 oz. espresso
1 oz. hazelnut liqueur
1 oz. Irish cream liqueur
3 oz. milk
1 cup ice
1. Add all ingredients to a martini shaker.
2. Shake a few times, then pour into a highball glass (with ice).
3. Drink it before the kids find you.
Makes 1 serving
Petite Eats
Daycare: Would you like to stay for the nutrition meeting?
Me: Sorry, we’re in a hurry (to get to McDonald’s before it gets crowded).
“We’re doing a joint Christmas party and going away party for Brigitte,” my office’s busybody informed me. “So don’t forget to bring something special!”
Are potato chips and hummus special enough? Because that’s what you’re getting, lady! I was pregnant with Baby #2 and perpetually exhausted from chasing my toddler around, so I was in no mood to make something fancy.
Being in the “I eat everything I see” stage of my pregnancy (that stage lasts about nine months), I showed up early to the party.
My coworkers have this annoying habit of not letting anyone nibble until it’s all prepared. I have this annoying habit of not caring and eating anyway. Sorry, but a potluck for 40 people takes way too long to set up. You think I can resist dipping potato chips into hummus? Show me the person who can. SHOW ME.
My friend Fanny popped in with homemade pizza squares and asked me to heat them up while she finished something for work. No problem! If by “heat them up” she meant “eat them up.” (See what I did there?)
A nanosecond after the microwave dinged, I shoved a pizza slice in my mouth and carried the rest over to the couch, where I parked my ever-growing butt and dug in.
“Attention, il y a un doigt dedans!” My co-worker Camille’s warning—“Watch out, there’s a finger in there!”—made no sense. I shrugged off her comment and continued stuffing my face.
What had she meant “there’s a finger in there”? Was it a French expression? I often misunderstood those. Or maybe it’s like if you only want a little whiskey you say “just a finger.” So maybe she meant there weren’t that many pizza slices? As in, there wouldn’t be enough for me? Oh, maybe she meant not to eat them all because there weren’t that many and other people might want to eat them. I guess that was it. Still, a roundabout way to say it.
And also, way too late, honey. I’d already made it more than halfway through the Tupperware container before I’d worked out what I thought she meant.
Colleagues trickled into the lunchroom as I avoided their gaze. I should have been embarrassed about how much pizza I’d hogged but I was more afraid they would take it away from me.
“Where’s my pizza?” Fanny asked.
Busted.
“Over here, Fanny!” I said, licking my fingers after polishing off the last slice. “Sorry, I couldn’t help myself.”
“Ha, no problem. Glad they were so tasty! So, did you find my finger in there?”
“What’s this everyone’s saying about a finger? There wasn’t actually a finger in there, was there?” I looked down at the empty container and then my pregnant belly. Was a severed digit floating around in there?
Then Fanny stuck out a bandaged finger. Oh my God. I felt the bile rise in my throat.
“I cut it last night making the pizzas. A huge piece came off, actually. Don’t worry,” she quickly added, noting my horrified expression. “It happened while I was chopping a pepper to put on top. I don’t think the finger got in with the pizza slices. At least, I hope not. I brushed all the peppers in the trash without looking.”
“Are you OK? And, more importantly, how could you not look?”
I would be way too curious to see what a no-longer-connected bit of my finger looked like to just brush it in the trash without a backward glance.
“Oh yeah, I’m fine.”
“Can I see your finger?” I was concerned for my friend but I also had to see how much of her finger was missing. It couldn’t be too bad if she hadn’t gone to the hospital.
“Sure,” she said, pulling the bandage off.
The amount missing was just enough to make me lose my appetite. I tried not to show it, for fear of alerting her to the fact that she now only had 9 and 7/8ths fingers.
“That doesn’t look too bad,” I said. “I’m sure it will heal in no time.”
Yeah right! There was like a quarter of an inch missing! Which meant a quarter of an inch of finger was possibly cart-wheeling around my tummy.
On the bright side, at least there’s a lot of protein in it.
Whiskey Nog
No many how fingers you have, this drink is sure to please, though it’s best enjoyed during the holiday season.
1 oz. whiskey (also known as a “finger” of whiskey)
4 oz. store-bought eggnog*
dash of vanilla syrup
nutmeg for garnish
1. Pour the whiskey and eggnog into a martini shaker filled with ice. Add a dash of vanilla syrup.
2. Give it two good shakes, then strain into the glass of your choice.
3. Dust with nutmeg to make it look fancy. Drink with your pinky out to look even fancier (and to show off the fact that you still have all your fingers).
* What, you call that cheating? Trust me, you don’t want to drink eggnog I’ve made from scratch!
Makes 1 serving
10
I enjoy champagne but I also dine on the occasional McDonald’s dinner. I like puttin’ on the ritz but I like dive bars, too. However, I blanketly detest poncy posh places (of which there are zillions in Paris).
Unless someone else is paying.
One evening, I was invited to a business dinner at Costes. Here’s the type of place Costes is: cocktails are €19, my friend once thought she saw Sienna Miller in the restroom, and the hostesses seat ugly people in the back of the restaurant. I’m not even kidding—there was a whole media storm about it.
I splurged (since I wasn’t paying) on a Bellini. I was pregnant at the time, so I only allowed myself two miniscule peach-juice-diluted sips. Meaning each sip cost €9.50.
Yowza.
The service was OK, the food was fine. Our total bill for six people was over €3,000. And it would have been €4,000 if I’d been drinking like the good ol’ days. A bottle of wine plus a bottle of champagne could easily cost that much, and in my pre-pregnant days I easily downed that much on my own.
By midnight, I was beat. My all-night-long partying days were behind me; my new pregnant-mama bedtime was 9:30. Add two sips of Bellini to the mix, and I was about to crash.
“Well, I’d better get going before I fall asleep in your lap,” I awkwardly joked to our business partner. My absence from the social scene in recent months had clearly made me
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