By Sheri Hopkins
Lifestyle Contributor
Hello everyone! Such beautiful fall weather we are having, but it’s dry as dust.
Some of you already know this but my son, Jacob, is color blind. Mind you I didn’t find this out till right before he started kindergarten. He started having migraine headaches at a very young age, so they did a cat scan to make sure he was ok. That’s still debatable. So, we decided to get his eyes checked to make sure that wasn’t causing his headaches. We go to Booneville to good old Dr. Tate. He does the exam and he puts up a green light and a red light and he asks Jacob what color they are and he gets them wrong. I said, “if I didn’t know better, I would think he was color blind.” I was just joking around. The kid was smart as a whip but he did not know his colors and I always got so frustrated trying to teach him. Dr. Tate said, “we have a test for that.” Needless to say, he did the test and Jacob is color-blind. I would go to school and explain to the teachers why he didn’t know his colors. Then, when he started reading, he could read what color they were. As he got older and started picking out his clothes, that was a catastrophe. Once he got out of school, he would go shopping and buy clothes and he would come home with all kinds of stuff. But this one day in particular, he brought home these purple shorts and let me tell ya, they were PURPLE. Sooooo, he brings them in the house and I see them and I asked him “what color are those shorts?” He says, “they are gray.” I said, “Jacob those shorts are purple.” He does not believe me. Let m tell ya I was sure hoping he wouldn’t wear those shorts in public. I mean Jacob is a pretty bland kind of guy and the visual of him in those purple shorts made me laugh out loud.
The reason all this came up is we had a yard sale at Jacob and Loren’s house and low and behold the famous purple shorts were in the yard sale. I almost bought them just to have them for the memories.
I was at their house one Saturday and Jacob comes through the house asking Loren where his red shirt is and she says, “you don’t have a red shirt.” The crazy thing of it all is he thinks he’s right and he says we make fun of his “disability.” Well, I’m not going to lie, I do make fun of him. I’ve always kind of been a bully. So if you see Jacob out and about and he doesn’t match, it’s because he is colorblind and he never matches unless Loren picks out his clothes.
My daddy was colorblind and I remember as a kid, he would always have me pick out his dress socks to match his slacks. I sure miss my daddy.
A little bit of knowledge, only boys are colorblind. The mother is the carrier, so if Jacob has a little boy he won’t be colorblind. My brother’s boys are not colorblind. Enough about Jacob and his disability.
This week’s recipe is a wonderful cake and it is probably my all-time favorites. I got it from Wanda Black and it is delicious.
DREAMSICLE CAKE
1 box orange cake mix
1 box (3 oz) orange Jell-o (small box)
1/3 cup oil
1/4 cups water
3 eggs
1 tsp. orange extract (I didn’t have this and it was fine)
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease and flour two 9-inch cake pans and set aside. Blend all ingredients and pour into prepared cake pans. Bake at 350 degrees for 20-25 minutes. My oven cooks fast, so I would check it at 17 minutes and just kind of watch it. After the cake cools, slice each layer in two to make four layers.
ICING
8 oz. sour cream
1 1/4 cups powdered sugar
1/2 cup orange juice concentrate (in the freezer section)
12 oz. Cool Whip
In a separate bowl, add sugar to orange juice (use a whisk) and stir until the sugar is dissolved. Combine that with sour cream and fold in Cool Whip. Spread some icing between each layer and put the remaining on top. Keep refrigerated. This cake is not hard at all and it tastes so good. It really is one of my favorites.
