Better than "Better Than Sex"

I knew the title of the post would catch your attention!  From my previous blog entry, you may be aware of my undisguised disdain for the book A Reliable Wife that I read for book club this month.  I'm hosting the meeting tonight and normally the hostess attempts to tie in the snacks and dessert served with the book.  Sometimes the book has food featured in it and sometimes not so it's always interesting to see what people come up with.

This month I was really struggling.  This book was just sex, sex, SEX (some champagne and oysters too, but I didn't really want to go there).  Then it hit me --- Better than Sex dessert!  I had never made it before, but I had heard of it.  After perusing a bunch of recipes online and realizing that one of the key ingredients is nuts (knowing full well I can't digest nuts and I want to eat the dessert at the meeting too darn it!), I tabled the idea.  Instead I decided to make my mom's chocolate eclair cake.  Her version uses 1 package vanilla pudding and 1 package of chocolate and splits the Cool Whip between the two so the layers are two different flavors.  I think it's tastier that way anyway.  If you're going to eat a dessert that's quite frankly a processed food bonanza you may as well go all the way!  I even used the whole can of frosting.  One hot tip from my mom is to pre-frost the graham crackers for the top layer, lay them on top of the pudding layer, and then fill in the cracks with more frosting.  It's faster and less messy too.

Needless to say, the kids helped.

Red was in charge of the vanilla layer.

Tom Thumb was in charge of the chocolate layer.

(Thanks to Red for the photography while mommy helped!)

They both were in charge of licking the leftovers out of the bowls.

Then after lunch, Red came up with this cute dessert idea made with 2 butterscotch chips, a grape, a banana and some whipping cream.

I like the one with the raised eyebrow. :-)

On a separate note, Tom Thumb is now fully potty trained.  We're still working on the fine art of wiping after #2, remembering to flush the toilet and wash his hands, but overall YAY!  We never thought it would happen.  Well, we did, but we didn't know when.  About 3 weeks ago on a Saturday, he woke up and said his diaper was "ouchy".  I said, "Why don't you put on some underwear instead?"  He did and about a 1/2 hour later went to the bathroom.  Since then, he's had three accidents.  That's right --- three in the last three weeks and they all happened in the first week.  He's even dry through the night!  It's a potty training miracle I tell you!

The other thing that's occupying a lot of my time is raising money for the PTA.  Back in January, we realized that we had $6390 to raise and hadn't done anything yet.  We have since had a bowling fundraiser that raised $311.  Over the next two months we have planned a sale of stainless steel BPA free bottles and a dinner out gala at a local hall.  I'm the chairperson for the bottle fundraiser so if you've been planning on buying one to replace your disposable plastic bottles, let me know.  Here's the selection, although our fundraiser prices are a tad lower than their website and the school will make about $8 profit per bottle sold.  I'm particularly fond of the Vincent Van Gogh's Starry Night one they have.

Back to cleaning and cooking for the meeting.  I still have a spinach artichoke dip to make (yum) and lots of stray library books to pick up.