"Coo-pongs"

One of the pieces of Doug's routine we have continued since he came to live with me is cutting out "coopongs." The Saturday paper had coupon sections in it, and Doug always cut the coupons out and took them up to Catherine. She and her husband run an organic dairy on the former family farm, and she always graciously received the sacred envelope of "coopongs" that Doug brought to her. (Thanks, Catherine!!) When Doug moved in with me, we needed to get the daily paper for the weather reports (also near and dear to Doug's heart!), so now I had "coopongs" in the Saturday paper, AND in the Sunday paper, which my dad delivers to our house and leaves on the front porch. While I do use coupons, I don't need ALL of them from two papers, so we had to revise the "coopong" procedure. Now I go through the "coopongs" and highlight around the ones we would use and would like him to cut out. That becomes one of the jobs Doug does while I am at school during the week--cutting out the "coopongs" that we will use when we go to the store. Things have been a little hectic here, and I was way behind in my highlighting job. Doug was ok with that the first week, a little less ok the second week, and getting downright crabby about the growing "coopong" pile by the third week. So I finally sat down on Sunday to go through three weekends of "coopongs" and start highlighting. Apparently Doug did not feel I could be trusted to follow through on this task unsupervised, because he joined me at the dining room table. Honestly, I wish I could have videoed the commentary that followed! As my pile of discards of "coopongs" we won't use began to grow, Doug started to go through them. Now, you know that one of his very favorite things is food, of all kinds!, and so now I was party to a running enthusiastic narration of all the types of food in the discard pile. "Oh, dis looks good!" "I love this stuff!" "Fruit is good for you!" "Dis cereal too sweet. I cane eat dat stuff!" "Hey, I like dis!" "How about some day we try dis?" etc., etc., etc. We now have a list of things he would like to try someday, and fortunately, he has already forgotten most of them. We still need to make hot dogs with cheese and bacon wrapped in "dem good lil biscuits" (I think this sounds like a coronary waiting to happen, but as a treat some night, I'll pull it off for him!) because Valerie, his sister, "made them in Florida one time." (Which she does not remember, but Doug sure does!) We finally got our folder of "coopongs" waiting to be cut out and the leftovers in the recycling. I thought. When I came home from work that night, nice and neatly cut out and laying on the counter waiting for me was a recipe!! One of these nights it looks like we will be having Onion Chicken, which is chicken breaded in those french fried onion rings. Doug absolutely loves onions, and apparently this recipe was just too good to pass up and toss in the recycling. I think I will try to keep up with the "coopongs" better from now on!