Mommy's Martini

Taking a Moment

2009-11-26T14:40:00.004-05:00

This morning, three small perfect pumpkins, the color of a child's orange crayon, sat on my counter.

Five hours, two pounds of butter, eleven apples, and a lot of dirty dishes later, the pumpkin and pecan pies are cooling on the counter, and the apple is just finishing up its stint in the oven. The house smells like cinnamon and love. My hands, I realize as I sit here typing, are t.i.r.e.d. from all the chopping and rolling, mixing and patting.

I sit here, thankful for my warm house, snug against the raw rainy day. For my children who are playing a game happily together. For my husband who brings me lunch when I am having a work crisis, and who cleans up after our ailing dog with perfect calm.

Even thankful for the moments of crabbiness that punctuate long days of wrangling rambunctious little ones . Mine is, after all, a crabbiness that exists still in luxury. My children are healthy and whole, comfortable and kind, empathetic and creative. I could have it so much worse.

My daughter runs into the room. "Mama," she says winningly, looking at me in that way she has, out from under her lashes and slightly to the side, "Mama, would you like something?" She has a container in her hands, though I cannot see clearly what it is. "No thank you, sweetie," I say. "Would you like something?" She grins. "I thought you'd never ask," she says with satisfaction holding up the lidless raisin container. And through my laughter, I squeeze her tight. And then dole out the raisins.

And then sit, overwhelmed with love for this little monkey. It awes me sometimes, how much it is possible to love one's children. For that, I am most grateful of all.

Happy Thanksgiving from our silly family to yours.

Pie: A Love Song

2009-11-24T10:47:00.005-05:00

I love everything about pie.

The plump fresh fruit. The rolling out of crust. The weight of a beautiful pottery pie dish, deep, with fluted edges and shimmering designs in glaze. The smell of cinnamon and nutmeg, or toasting nuts, or caramelizing sugar, or slowly softening apples or berries.

I love the way pie marks seasons.

Peach is summer, in all its glorious deep orange days, sticky from the heat and the exercise, breathless with the sugary goodness of freedom from obligations. Pumpkin is fall, spicy with the scent of dry leaves, rich and warm and comforting as a crowd gathered around a kitchen table, laughing. Pear and cranberry with homemade caramel is winter, when cozy sweaters wrap us in their caramel arms and lull us into contentment by the fire, when soft, sedentary days need the punctuation of something bright and tart and red. Raspberry is spring, bursting with sweet promise and filling your mouth with the sudden luxury of fresh fruit that is not orange.

I love the process of making pie.

The cool smoothness of the marble rolling pin and the deft wrist movements you need to peel the crust up from the counter and gently lay it into the dish. The wonder in my son's eyes as I peel the apple in one continuous curl. The "helping" that dots the floor with flour, the counters with butter, the noses with nutmeg. The anticipation of small hands and faces pressed up against the oven window, the scent of cooked goodness wafting around the kitchen.

This year we are going to visit family for Thanksgiving, and we are bringing the pies. Three pies. All to be topped with the most decadent whipped cream you ever tried, flavored with orange and cardamom. We have three small pie pumpkins, lovingly chosen a few weeks ago, and left in the cool of the garage to mellow and sweeten until we can roast them tomorrow and puree them and turn them into heavy disks of pie perfection. This morning, around the breakfast table, we had our final, serious conversation about Just What Kinds of Pie To Make. Tomorrow, we roast pumpkins for Son's favorite, peel apples for Daughter's, and break up pecans for Husband's. And then, we bake. Our family, all together. Covered in flour and spiced with laughter.

We bake together, and then we eat together. Thankful that we have a family that can laugh together even when, inexplicably, the pie turns out terrible as it did on one memorable Christmas. Thankful for the ritual of pie.

How do you learn that stuff, anyway?

2009-11-23T07:02:00.002-05:00

The kids are getting old enough that we are starting to have (or overhear) some great conversations around these parts. Here's a little sampler from the weekend.

Over lunch

Son: "How come chicken is the only meat that doesn't have a different name when it's cooked?"

Me: "Well..."

Son: "I mean, cow is beef when it's cooked, and pig is pork. How come chicken is just chicken all the time?"

Me: "That is an excellent question."

*crickets*

Yet another Mama-stumper. Score one for Son.

In the car

Son: "Don't sing so loud. It's too loud. PLEASE! Don't sing so loud. You are singing tooooooo loud!!!!"

Daughter: [pausing in her extremely loud singing of "Sweet Escape" by Gwen Stefani and pointing to Husband and I in the front seats] "I have to sing loud. I like to. It makes them laugh."

As Husband and I try to control our completely out-of-control snorting with laughter at this very perceptive response, all I can think is: score one for Daughter.

While playing Trivial Pursuit

[As an aside, this is either a horrible game or a perfect game to play with small children, depending on your patience for creative thinking. We have the original edition, which seems perfectly pitched for someone born in 1939. As a result, neither Husband nor I can answer a solid 50% of the questions. You can imagine how the children would fare. While they are great with the ones about fairy tales, Disney movies, and first-grade science, everything else is pretty awful. So I make up questions for them when we draw cards that of course they will be unable to answer.]

I drew a card this weekend for Son that contained a question that brought back a flood of happy memories from my childhood. The question was, "What ran through the briars and ran through the brambles and ran through the bushes where the rabbits couldn't go?"

I knew those song lyrics immediately, and was instantly transported back to being nine years old and dancing and singing loudly (perhaps because it would make them laugh?) to a whole bevy of funny songs: "He's a clown, that Charlie Brown" and "Monster Mash" and "Purple People Eater."

So when I pulled the card, I knew Son wouldn't know the song, but I could not resist smiling and reminiscing, and telling him that I remembered the song it asked about. Of course, he wanted to hear it, so I sang a bit of it for him, up through the lyrics on the card. I paused.

"HOW do you know that song?" he asked wide-eyed.

"Oh," I replied. "Your aunties and I had a record with this song and lots of other funny ones on it, and we used to sing and dance to it all the time."

His eyes, if possible, got even wider. I thought he was trying to imagine my sisters and me as children not much older than himself, singing and dancing our way around the family room.

Practically breathless, he asked, "What's a record?"

I almost fell over laughing.

Score one for Mama.

Here's a video of the hilarious/politically obnoxious/totally random song in question, and believe me when I tell you that although it's been approximately 30 years since I heard this song, I still know every single word and can sing along.

So now that I've fessed up to this absurdity, please tell me that there is some goofy song from your childhood, or odd skill, or hidden talent from way back when that you still possess.

And then, please to enjoy imagining me dancing around the family room at age nine, yelping and yodeling and practicing my Southernisms full-throttle to "The Battle of New Orleans."

Party Treats on School Days

2009-11-19T07:54:00.000-05:00

When my son was in his first daycare (the one we had to replace in an instant because it was shut down without any warning one evening by the state, but that's another story), they had a Birthday Treats Policy. And the policy was not "no candy" or "no high fructose corn syrup" or "no giant sugary balls of goodness." No, the policy was: nothing homemade.

When I first heard that this was the policy, I started to giggle because I thought it was a joke. However, the giggle quickly turned to nervous laughter that petered out, and in my awkward silence, I could see that the daycare director was totally serious.

We could bring anything we wanted for Birthday Treats. As long as that anything did not contain nuts and had not personally been made by us. We could bring giant, fist-sized sugar cookies coated in 3/4" glossy green icing and each one sprinkled with 1/4 cup of oversized colorful decorating candies. We could bring garishly yellow cupcakes studded with fake M&Ms. We could bring Peeps or buckets of candy or brownies the size of small children's heads. We could bring goodies saturated with fat, sweetened with gallons of high fructose corn syrup, colored with torturously neon shades of red and blue that would dye children's lips and cheeks for 48 hours or more.

And believe you me, people did. In the toddler room, as the children started turning two, my son started coming home with goulish lips and stained fingers from the shocking colors of icing that routinely substituted for "snack time."

His birthday rolled around, and it nearly killed me that I could not make his favorite banana mini-muffins to take in for his birthday treat.

The school's logic? Too many children with allergies meant that it was not safe to have foods on hand for which one did not know precisely all of the ingredients. Therefore, the Birthday Treats Policy had been put into place to ensure that all Birthday Treats would arrive with a convenient ingredients label.

Nevermind that store-bought treats are routinely supersized and present a serving that is probably four times what would be reasonable for a preschooler's empty calorie intake on a given day. Nevermind that there have been studies documenting the connections between HFCS and weight gain. Nevermind that many parents swear their children's behavior problems can be clearly linked to the intake of artificial colorings. Nevermind that when there are 24 toddlers turning two within a four month period, that will perhaps mean an over-abundance of sugary treats in their little tiny toddler bodies.

No, the only requirement was a pre-printed list of ingredients.

I tried to suggest that I could make the banana muffins and then bring them in with the recipe attached.

If they could have excommunicated me for my suggestion, their shocked looks said, they would have.

So we brought the hideous fist-sized cookies that my son was magnetically drawn to when I took him to the store's bakery section to choose a birthday treat.

Our second daycare has no such rule. Oh, they have a Birthday Treats Policy, but the policy basically is Birthday Treats are Gooooood, and they let us make things as long as they don't contain nuts. So we've done brownies (cut into reasonable, 1" squares, which in my opinion is all a three-year-old really needs) or rice krispie treats.

Now, in elementary school, we are encountering a new Birthday Treats Policy. This one is Birthday Treats are Baaaaaad. Apparently taking a page from my book about how children don't really need to consume giant handfuls of sugar which will only make their blood sugar plummet in 45 minutes and make learning even more difficult, the school does not allow the bringing of edible birthday treats. (Stickers, we have learned, are an acceptable Celebration Substitute.)

Not to worry, there are still the requisite Halloween Party, Thanksgiving Feast, and (I'm sure coming up) a series of other feast days during which the children will be allowed to imbibe sugary goodness with all the abandon of special treats. I don't actually think I'm opposed to this policy, for many reasons.

But I don't know what to think about the fact that we have also reentered the Land of Nothing Homemade. The official school policy is that homemade goods are not allowed on any of these feast days because homemade goods do not contain an ingredients list and teachers of children with allergies therefore cannot tell if the items are safe for certain children.

While I completely understand the dire consequences that can befall a child who eats something to which he or she is allergic, this does make me want to revert to my original question: can't I just bake the pumpkin muffins and attach the recipe when I send them in?

If I bake them, I will tell you what they will NOT contain: nuts (I'm not stupid), high fructose corn syrup, red dye of any number, yellow dye of any number, chemical preservatives to prolong freshness, unpronounceable chemicals for purposes unknown. They will contain eggs, but my recipe will tell you that. And since the sign-up sheet was sent out requesting muffins, and it's nearly impossible to make muffins without eggs, and certainly unlikely that anyone would be purchasing vegan muffins, it seems a pretty safe bet that any store-bought muffins would contain eggs too.

So I proposed the muffins-with-recipe-attached alternative to my son's kindergarten teacher, and she said she thought that sounded like a very good plan. I am delighted. So is Son, since he has been asking to help make pumpkin muffins to take to school for the Thanksgiving Feast for several weeks now.

But this individual teacher's compromise with me still begs the question: is it a better policy for schools to require store-bought goodies? Are children with allergies better served by an ingredients list on a packaging label than they are by my taped-on recipe? If so, how? If the issue is one of trace elements, I will tell you after having lived for a few years with this policy in the past that it is next to impossible to find ANY baked goods or similar suitable treats that do NOT say somewhere on the label that the item, while not containing nuts as an ingredient, may have been prepared in a facility that once had a nut as a guest on Bring a Nut to Work Day. So, I don't think that items coming out of my kitchen, in which nuts have occasionally existed, are any more or less dangerous than those store-bought baked goods for a very severely allergic child.

Unless all the feast day treats are going to be unsweetened applesauce, there are going to be things containing eggs, gluten, and produced in places that might result in trace exposure to nuts.

How is that different than my kitchen counters? And isn't it better that in my kitchen, there are no ingredients whose names contain numbers, or 28 letters, or unpronouncable combinations of syllables? Overall for the health of children, if treats are going to be had, aren't homemade things better than store-bought ones? Or at the very least, certainly not worse?

These are honest questions, not sarcastic ones. I don't have a child with food allergies. I do worry about junk food (Fruit Loops cereal is an option at snack time in the after-school program, for goodness sake). And I don't know what the norm is in terms of school policies. What's it like where your kids go to school? And what kind of policies do you think make the most sense, assuming we are still going to let our children be children and celebrate with occasional party days in the classrooms?

Anissa Would Want This Post to Start with a Joke, But I Can't Think of An Appropriate One

2009-11-18T09:23:00.005-05:00

UPDATE: There is an official Caring Bridge site up for Anissa now, where her husband is posting updates and you can find out more about how to help, if you are interested.

Some of you may know Anissa Mayhew -- loud, funny, hug-you-the-moment-she-meets-you Anissa. She is one of those Forces to be Reckoned With. In a good way. She will defend her friends, keep them laughing, and work harder than anyone you know at anything she takes up. She's a mom of young kids, a friend, a blogger. She could be me, or you, or one of a dozen other people you know. Except she's not. She's Anissa, gloriously herself and supremely wonderful as an individual.

And right now, she's in the ICU after having had a stroke yesterday afternoon. The news circulated on Twitter, and now posts are starting to pop up about her. This one is just to say: if you think of Anissa as a friend, and you want to leave a comment sending her some love, or keep her in your thoughts or prayers, or do something to help out her family, here are the links that will help. There's a P.O. Box set up for anyone interested in donating things like gift cards for food or other necessities. And if you don't know Anissa, but you know that feeling of dread that something could happen to you or your children, perhaps you'll send some healing thoughts in her direction too. Right now, I think she can use all the help she can get.

So far, I don't know any more about her condition except that she did manage to squeeze her husband's hand last night. If I hear more, I'll post an update here.

Charitable Giving Could Get You This Brand New Cozy Sweater

2009-11-12T20:16:00.006-05:00

Or a totally different one, in another color, if this isn't your thing. I'm completely serious.

From now until Sunday, November 15, you can print a coupon online that will save you 30% on ANY in-store purchase at the GAP, Old Navy, and Banana Republic. And in addition, if you use the coupon, those stores are donating 5% of your purchase price directly to DonorsChoose. The coupon is good for multiple uses, and there are no restrictions limiting you to using it only on full-price items. It's even good at the GAP Outlet and Banana Republic Factory stores!

How cool is that? as Daughter often says.

Don't know DonorsChoose.org? It's a fantastic site that serves as a collection point for worthy proposals from teachers in needy schools. Donors who would like to help out schools can fund all, or even a tiny portion, of any project that interests them. If you are looking for a place to do a little charitable giving this holiday season, and you are interested in eduction, I can't think of a better way to go. You know exactly where your funding goes, and you can see how your contribution adds to the growing pot to fund the project you adopt. You'll find projects for everything from buying books and journals for elementary classrooms to science equipment for high schools to basics like a white board for urban schools in terribly underfunded districts.

And, in case you forgot. Here's another cool way you can give to education: go shopping.

So, if you need winter clothes for yourself, or have a friend's brand new baby to outfit, or a husband's holiday present to buy, or a birthday present upcoming, or you just got a raise, or you ruined your only nice black skirt last week, or whatever...if you have any reason at all to shop retail clothing this weekend, why not do it with a giant coupon full of savings for yourself, and help out some deserving school kids in the process?

Holiday generosity seriously couldn't get any easier than this.

(This is not a sponsored post of any kind. I've done fund raising for DonorsChoose before because I really believe in the education cause and the small-grant model, and so I was emailed this news and thought it was worth passing on. After all, who doesn't love a 30% off coupon any time of year?)

Sometimes the Universe Conspires to Send You a Message

2009-11-11T15:09:00.005-05:00

I just got an email today from an organization's rep who wrote:

I volunteer to help spread the word about a new free Urinary Incontinence online support group. As I know this falls within your interest I thought that you might want to help us in the quest to reach as many people as possible.

At first, I laughed out loud. Then, I got a little creeped out: HOW does she know this falls within my interest? I've never mentioned incontinence on this little blog, so she obviously didn't read the blog to find out about this area of my interest. And, in fact, I've never mentioned this topic to anyone, so she must have been reading my mind to find out about this area of my interest.

And then I realized that apart from those nightmares that all extremely pregnant women have that their water breaks while they are up front teaching a class in a lecture hall full of 300 students (what? you didn't have those?), I've never had any serious interest in incontinence in my life.

Which only makes me wonder what this rep knows about my areas of interest that even *I* don't know.

And in other disturbing thoughts: did you hear that Melissa Gilbert is starring in the musical stage revival of the show Little House on the Prairie? As Ma. Now, obviously, she's a leetle bit too old to play "Half-Pint" Laura. But there is something more than a little saddening about realizing that the idol of my youth, the girl whose romantic life as a homesteader filled my girlish dreams of adventure, is now old enough to be that pretty, care-worn, always-a-little-exhausted Ma.

Which means, of course, that I am now old enough to be that pretty, care-worn, always-a-little-exhausted Ma.

Got it, Universe. Thanks.

Melissa Gilbert is a middle-aged mom + ominous reminders that I really ought to take an interest in problems of incontinence = a very clear message.

It's obviously time to do something juvenile and foolish just to prove that I've still got it.

If only my memory weren't so patchy, and I could actually think of what something appropriately juvenile and foolish might be.

Swine Flu: A Primer

2009-11-09T09:24:00.006-05:00

See Mommy. See Mommy cough. *cough* *cough* *cough* Mommy is coughing. Now Mommy is sleeping. This is not fun. Go find Daddy. He is not coughing. He will play football with you. Yay! Daddy! Fun Daddy! Run, run, run in the fall leaves with Daddy!

Seriously and for real, swine flu is less fun than having your wisdom teeth removed. Ice cream doesn't even sound good when you feel like this. In case you haven't yet had friends come down with it, here are a few things I've learned in the past week in the haze of hacking that is this delightful strain of flu.

1. H1N1 does not necessary start with a high fever or come on suddenly. It's pretty common for seasonal flu to hit so fast that you can be happily out to lunch with friends at 1pm and lying in a puddle of your own aching exhaustion on the couch, completely beset with all the worst flu symptoms at 3pm. I can tell you from experience, though, that a few days of coughing, coming from deep in your chest, without any fever or other symptoms, can be the opening act of H1N1. The CDC website notes that "People may be infected with the flu, including 2009 H1N1 and have respiratory symptoms without a fever." I wish that line had been in bigger, bolder type, though, because I assumed for those first three days that of course I didn't have the flu, since I had no fever. So I pushed myself to keep teaching, running errands, and doing all the other things that a busy mom does, until I got to the point where I felt like I couldn't take a deep breath and was worried that the "cold" I thought I had was turning into pneumonia. Then I went home. THEN, four days in, I spiked a fever. A whole group of graduate students at my university have since told me that when they got the flu in August, that's precisely how it started for them: three days of coughing, which got progressively worse, and then the fever and headaches set in.

2. Tamiflu can do a great job with the headaches, body aches, and fever. Two hours after taking my first dose of Tamiflu, my headache and neck aches were almost completely gone. They say you should start Tamiflu within 48 hours of the onset of flu symptoms for it to do any good. I started Tamiflu the afternoon of the first day I had fever, which was on day FOUR of the coughing, and it still worked like a charm. I know that Tamiflu is pretty heavily guarded right now: your doctor won't prescribe it if she isn't pretty certain that you have the flu. It has done little or nothing to alleviate the cough, the gunk in my lungs, or the feeling that my chest is tight when I take a breath. But given how horrific I felt at the doctor's office, I'm very grateful for the relief it did provide for the aches and pains.

3. Nothing is better than rest. You already know this, but it's much easier to enforce for our children than for ourselves. One commonly-listed symptom of flu is "extreme exhaustion." Here's what that means: you will be home in bed, not that sleepy, but feel that the process of using the remote to scroll through all those annoying menus is simply too much work, and that perhaps keeping your eyes on moving images on the television will be too much work, and so you will not watch a movie. That's right: you will be too tired to face the extreme effort of turning on the television set using the remote control that is lying next to you. What should you do? Sleep.

4. Your family has already been exposed to you, so you don't have to wear that mask they gave you at the doctor's office in the house. Assuming they aren't super-high-risk people with compromised immune systems, you can be around your family while sick, since they were already exposed to contagious you before the symptoms manifested. That said, use separate dishes, glasses, and towels; wash your hands every time you blow your nose or cough into your hands; do not kiss them; and do your best not to purposely/carelessly hand them extra germs.

5. The rest of the world has NOT already been exposed to you, so stay home. Send someone else to pick up that book you need at the library. Let your husband drop the kids at daycare. Get a substitute to run that meeting. Eat that box of pasta in the back of the pantry instead of running out to the grocery store. Especially while you have a fever (just because it's reduced due to Tamiflu or ibuprophen doesn't mean you don't still have a fever), try to limit your exposure to other people.

6. That nose swab test that they do to confirm that you have the flu? When the nurse says, "this won't hurt; it will just be a little uncomfortable," she is lying through her teeth and with every fiber of her being. Here's what that test feels like: imagine you are an ancient Egyptian, and the nurse is the person whose job it is to collect your brain before you are mummified. You know how they used to do that, don't you? With a sharp stick poked up through your sinuses. The only difference is that the brain collector with the sharp stick back then was working on a conveniently DEAD person who could not feel, while you are very much alive and have sinuses that are already tender from all that nose blowing. (A neti pot worked wonders, by the way, for clearing out and soothing those sinuses pretty rapidly after the near-mummification experience.)

On the up side, having swine flu means you get to have constant reaffirmation that you picked the best husband in the world, as he spends lots of extra time doing the drop-off and pick-up of both of your children who literally could not go to schools further apart and still be in the same district, and then comes home and cooks dinner and cleans up after it too, and then takes the kids to the zoo for five hours on Saturday so that you can sleep. You will get to see how quickly your son is becoming a better reader, as you watch him read to his little sister in the indoor tent. You will learn that you have done a good job working on empathy with your children, when your three-year-old makes you endless cards and messages saying (in scribble which has to be translated), "I heart love you" and your five-year-old tells you on the day you feel your very worst that HE will cook the breakfast for everyone so that you don't have to--and then he proceeds to make scrambled eggs and set the table.

I won't tell you to enjoy the flu. Because you won't. But it might make you grateful for your wonderful family, as it did me. I wish you all well!

P.S. If you or yours are suffering from the flu and need an easy distraction, may I recommend the re-released Snow White? Check out my review here. It's a darker, grimmer movie than you might recall, with a happy ending that makes it perfect for days when you are feeling lousy. And if you can bear to read, the review gives you a link to a totally fascinating history of cartoon making at its inception.

APRIL is the cruelest month?

2009-10-31T20:55:00.002-04:00

T.S. Eliot's poem, The Wasteland, famously opens:

APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

But I think he got it wrong--for two reasons. One is that it's pretty clear Eliot never lived in Michigan. Because if he'd made it through the six months of the weather that is late fall and winter here; if he'd lived through October, November, December, January, February and March while only seeing brilliant sunsine for eight days total; if he'd shoveled snow every single day for two weeks straight, or bundled two preschoolers into hats, coats, scarves, mittens, snowpants and boots, only to have to take them to the potty immediately thereafter and then re-dress them; if he'd done all this and then stepped outside one April day to find warm tendrils in the breeze and buds on the lilacs...he would have blessed April as the kindest month of all twelve.

But the other reason is that I'm pretty sure Eliot didn't have to live through October in academia. I don't exactly know why October is so difficult, but it never fails, every year, to be hands-down the cruelest month I have to deal with.

In this particular October, I have done the following:

* written one sabbatical proposal (21 pages)
* written two conference proposals
* written one small grant proposal
* planned the teaching schedule for the coming academic year (19 faculty x 3 classes each x two semesters, multiplied by various idiosyncratic needs in terms of times of day and courses available to be taught, compounded by the needs of the program to offer a particular range of courses at certain times of day equals exponential quantities of headache)
* planned a series of curriculum meetings
* made a ghost costume
* learned to be an "art mom" at school
* supervised the school Halloween party
* dressed the children in Halloween costumes FIVE times for different parties and events ("I changed my mind; I don't want to be a pirate today; I want to be a cowboy, and I want to wear THE SAME THING she is wearing!" -- which is, of course, impossible because (a) SHE is wearing it; and (b) it is three sized too small for HIM)
* carved five pumpkins
* removed all 24 doors from the kitchen cupboards, cleaned the kitchen like there was no tomorrow, primed and painted the walls and all the woodwork and cabinets (no, we haven't re-hung the cabinet doors yet)
* made a series of paper mache balls, in scale to each other, so that Son could build a Solar System Project (not an assignment at school, just something he wants to do for fun)

All of this on top of the normal things that happen in my day-to-day life, such as working at a full-time teaching job, trying to remember which of the three books that come home each week with Son are due back at school on this particular day (yes, each goes back to school on a different day), doing laundry, and remembering which week Daughter's ballet class has been switched to another location (yes, I got it wrong one week, and we missed class).

I do realize that I didn't have to pick this month to take on the kitchen project, but in that deceptive way that September has of seducing you with its crisp back-to-school-ness, I thought way back then that it would be fun! and satisfying! to finally get the kitchen that light and airy blue color I'd been dreaming of. I totally forgot, back when we bought the paint at the end of September, that every single deadline in the academic year comes in October, and that there might be a few other things going on as well.

And so here I am on the last day of October, feeling as if I've been living the last month at warp speed. I have raked and painted, sewn and graded, emailed and negotiated, presented art and put little girl hair up into the sweetest pink bun warmer you ever saw. I have mailed birthday presents and helped plan the neighborhood Halloween cookout.

But I have not managed to get Aunty a picture of Daughter in the sweet little hairdo because I haven't been able to find four minutes to rub together to devote to downloading photos from my camera.

Today, I took the last photo my TWO GIG flash drive will hold. I have been deleting the bad photos like a maniac every time we go anywhere, so that I have space to take more photos, since I haven't had time to download what is now about 500 pictures -- many of which have already been culled to remove the junk.

My blog reader has 880 posts in it.

I'm not complaining, honest. Just marveling that I've made it through October in one piece without losing my mind. I swear November has to be easier (if for no other reason than that the kitchen is nearly done). I might even be able to find time to write a blog post occasionally.

...as soon as I finish copy-editing my manuscript, running those curriculum meetings I scheduled, grading the most recent stack of papers, and figuring out what we're doing for Thanksgiving...

I hope your Halloween was as fun-filled as ours, and your family busy-ness is full of joyful commotion.

Learning to Read

2009-10-22T09:43:00.003-04:00

As someone who teaches literature, loves all things words-related, and gets excited about eloquent turns of phrase, I wish I had a great story about the day that the frustratingly independent lines of letters on a page miraculously resolved themselves into words that I could suddenly read.

But I don't.

The fact is that I don't recall learning to read at all. I remember that when I got bumped up from four-year-old preschool to kindergarten halfway through the year, I was sent home with a giant stack of worksheets to complete, so that I could catch up with the rest of the class. I remember that these were mostly sheets to practice my writing of letters. (And I remember being completely delighted that I would no longer be subjected to the tedium of naptime!) I remember the thank-you note that my first-grade teacher wrote to me, in very careful printed letters, when I took her a plant on some occasion: I was so proud that I could figure out the word "coleus." I remember writing a longing note to that same first-grade teacher that read, "Please give me some homework." And I remember my deep disappointment that her response was, "We don't have homework in first grade."

Somewhere between being handed worksheets that taught me to recognize and write individual letters and being able to compose a note to my teacher begging her to save me from my own boredom, I obviously learned to read. But I have absolutely no recollection of the process.

Which is why the last few months at our house have been such an utter delight: Son, since mid-summer, has been learning to read. And last week, he read Green Eggs and Ham from cover to cover, by himself, aloud to all of us, as we sat in the doctor's waiting room. It is fortunate that Green Eggs and Ham is a long book ("Mama! I read SIXTY-ONE pages!!") because when we called ahead to the after-hours clinic to find out if there was a wait to see a pediatrician about an allergic reaction Daughter was having to her antibiotics, and we were told that No, there was not anyone waiting at that time, we made the mistaken assumption that that meant that we would actually get to see a pediatrician quickly if we zoomed right over and planned on having dinner afterwards--because, of course, children do not have allergic reactions to their antibiotics at any time besides 4:45 on a Friday afternoon--and so we DID zoom over, only to find out that while there were not a lot of families ahead of us, the pediatrician herself had not arrived because of car trouble, and thus we were forced to wait for nearly an hour and a half before we ever saw a doctor. But, you see, this leaves lots of time to be filled by slow readings of Green Eggs and Ham, so it's not all bad.

That evening, Son said to us with a sigh of deep satisfaction, "Dr. Seuss makes the best books for kids to read to theirselves." "Theirselves" aside, it was a sentiment I could totally get behind. And then, the next day, I heard a murmur from the backseat as we sat at a traffic light, "no...turn...on...red...Mama? What does that sign say?" I started to laugh. "It says 'no turn on red.' You just read it!" And then I realized that as a phrase, that makes no sense if you don't know something about traffic rules, so I explained what it meant.

Even so. The boy can actually read. Not all words, certainly, and sometimes the process is just too exhausting. But he is getting to the point now where he can read with just enough rapidity that he comprehends whole sentences instead of simply sounding out words. That leap has happened just in the last two weeks. Not so long ago, he could have read a Dr. Seuss book, but it would take him so long to get through each laborious word that he (and even I) would forget the first part of what he'd read by the time he got to the first period on the page. He would read all the words, one by slow little one, and then ask me to "read the whole thing fast now," so that he would know what it said.

And then suddenly, it's as if words are magically beginning to speak to him. The patterns of letters are making more sense, and he is recognizing more words on sight (it, had, was, he, the...) so that reading a whole sentence is more efficient. His delight at being the one who got to read the funny jokes in the books has been palpable. His smile as he works his way through a page with a lot of words on it has been glowing.

I've been trying to teach him about vowels, and last night we were playing a game where I was giving him a three-letter word and asking him to tell me what its vowel was. He had to figure out how to spell the word and then identify the vowel. "What is the vowel in mop?" I asked.

"MOP!" His eyes lit up. "I haven't spelled that one before." He thought for a minute. "O," he said, with a little question in his voice.

"You got it!"

He pumped his fist in the air. "YEESSS!" he shouted, bouncing with excitement in his chair.

Of course, it does my heart good to have a child who gets excited by his ability to spell words he hasn't tried before. Of course, I love having a child who is understanding the concept of vowels. Of course, it makes me happy to have a child who thinks it's fun to play rhyming games and do quizzes to see how many three-letter words he can write down on a single piece of paper without help (forty-four!).

But even more than that, I adore having a child who is this eager to learn. One who I can see already wanting to devour books. One who takes delight not just in the thing he can already do but in the process of learning to do a new thing.

I don't know if, when he gets older, he will remember learning to read. Perhaps it will simply be a thing that happened one day when he wasn't noticing, somewhere between the two weeks he spent eating "new foods" in New York City and the day Mama came for her first art parent visit at school--or whatever milestones mark this past spring and this fall in his mind.

But I've noticed. And it has been amazing.

Glad Not To Be Victorian

2009-10-20T18:59:00.005-04:00

As you may know, I study and teach about the 19th century for a living. Every time I read heart-wrenching stories of people losing their children to illnesses that common antibiotics now easily cure, or tales of people who spent their whole lives being able to see clearly only 12" in front of their faces, or descriptions of the process by which type was set to produce books, I am unendingly grateful to be living in the time of penicillin, easily-affordable contact lenses, and computers with word processing features.

But today, in five minutes at the dentist's office, my whole world changed in ways that I am pretty sure will make me a better human being--and it's all to do with modern technology.

My dentist has been taking a class on this new procedure for treating TMJ. (Don't know what TMJ is? It's a problem in the joints of your jaw that leads to charming crackling and popping noises when you chew, and sometimes the added delightful bonus of being unable to fully close and/or properly open your mouth at all. Also, it comes with regular dull pain, occasional stretches of intense ache, as well as headaches, neck aches, and even tension in your shoulders. Apparently, along the lines of that old song, "the ankle bone's connected to the leg bone..." all those things are connected to the nerves and muscles in your jaw, so the pain eminates outwards.) So, I've had TMJ since I was in early high school (read: twenty-five years), and there have been points in my life where the pain was pretty unbearable.

One dentist tried a night-time mouth guard, of the kind that you wear to keep you from clenching your teeth too much. His logic was that he could see a wear pattern on some of my molars that suggested I was grinding them at night. It didn't work. Other dentists basically told me there was no cure for TMJ, but I could take 400mg of ibuprophen at a time, if I liked. But this dentist I have now suggested that there have been studies linking TMJ to problems with your bite -- you know, the kinds of things that orthodontists fix with braces -- and that if I wanted to do the whole adult braces thing, that might help. Never having worn braces as a kid, I considered it. But I've always been just too busy to get myself to an orthodontist to get it sorted out.

And then today, at my routine cleaning, I told her that I'd had a recent bout of pain from the TMJ. She had me do a series of exercises with my jaw, to let her see if I could bite down and then slide my lower jaw from side to side. Short answer: I couldn't. My teeth wouldn't slide on each other because at a few points my molars were sticking up too far. In essence, I CAN'T grind my teeth because I can't slide them back and forth on each other at all.

Which probably explains why the mouth guard I was given long ago to keep me from grinding my teeth at night did nothing to help my jaw pain.

Know what my dentist did instead? She shaved down a few key points on a few of my molars, just by a millimeter or so. It took about 5 minutes. Then she told me to bite down.

It was like a miracle. My mouth closed, and my teeth met, in ways they had never met in my whole life. I felt like when my mouth was closed, it was relaxed. Closed should be a relaxed position for your mouth, apparently. But every time I closed mine, my jaw muscles were having to work overtime because my bite was misaligned.

In five minutes, she fixed what would have taken 18 months and a giant orthodontist bill to fix with braces. And she tells me that in a few days, once my mouth gets used to this new bite, all the stress should melt away.

The headaches should disappear.

The jaw pain should go away.

The neck and should tension should melt off.

In short, I should be a person in no head and neck discomfort for the first time in 25 years.

And I'm pretty sure this will make me a better mother because it's certain to make me less cranky. Right?

It hasn't done anything for the still-crooked front tooth that I've never had fixed. But I'm pretty sure that if the mouth pain is gone, no amount of vanity in the world is going to get me to fix that tooth with braces. Why on earth would I start over with what I just finally got rid of?

And that's why, tonight, I am once again reminded how incredibly grateful I am to live in the 21st century.

Excellent ways to keep the kids occupied when you have a rotten head cold and feel like someone has pumped swamp water into your sinuses

2009-10-13T10:59:00.004-04:00

1. Have them count the money in their piggy banks. This is especially effective if they don't know a lot about how much coins are worth, since it will take them a really really long time and involve many restarts.

Pitfall 1: The money snatchers are likely to start trying to sneak coins from each other's piles, leading to shouting squabbles, crying, and the necessity for extremely loud interventions on your part and threats to reclaim all the money as your own.

Pitfall 2: Because they need help remembering the value of all the coins, and they are more than a little sketchy on the whole "four quarters make a dollar; so do ten dimes, or twenty nickles or 100 pennies," you will have to help them calculate the dollar value of the giant pile of dirty coins that is probably covered with hideous germs that will certainly compound your horrendous head cold and turn it into something even worse.

Bonus 1: The spitting fights might produce enough liquid to wash all those coins.

Bonus 2: Someone might learn how to count by tens.

2. Have them read each other stories while you lie in bed next to them with your eyes half closed. This works less well if neither of them can actually read, but between the books they've memorized and the ones that they will make up as they go along, it can be effective.

Pitfall 1: You will have to listen to a lot of stories punctuated with references to the planet Cybertron.

Pitfall 2: ...or poop.

Bonus 1: The alligator tears and incessant wailing over whose coins are whose has stopped.

3. Create a craft project table with markers, crayons, paper, scissors, glue sticks, and fuzzy little pom poms that can be bunny tails.

Pitfall 1: You will have to clean up all the slivers of paper from under the table in half an hour.

Pitfall 2: Someone may ask you for help drawing something complex, precise, and detailed that you do not have a clear mental picture of (such as the planet Cybertron), and that someone may or may not have a melt down when your drawing is not photo-realistic.

Bonus 1: The talk about poop will have stopped.

4. Turn on the evil box in the corner on which magic pictures will dance in front of your children's eyes, mesmerizing them completely, so that they are still, quiet, and content.

Pitfall 1: [crickets] Really, I have to come up with a pitfall to this plan for blissful silence?

Pitfall 2:The whole point of the penny counting, creative storytime, and desperation glue sticks is that your Son is banned from TV until tomorrow for bad behavior over the weekend. So you can't in good conscience turn on the evil box, even though all you really want is for someone to offer you a head transplant, which you would gladly accept without anaesthetic because your current head is ringing so badly. Failing the head transplant, content children would be a nice consolation prize, but apparently you can't have those either.

Bonus: At least you can feel virtuous that you made good on your threat that if the fighting didn't stop, all those coins would be yours. Plus, you must be about $50 richer.

Give or take 218 nickels.

Wardrobe FAIL

2009-10-12T13:01:00.003-04:00

Today was picture day at Daughter's preschool. I forgot.

She wanted desperately to wear a little summer sundress to school (it was 38 degrees out when we woke up this morning). It is a sweet little teal dress with a royal blue ruffle at the hem. It's made of soft t-shirt cotton. It has spaghetti straps. I tried to convince her that this was not the dress for today -- not because it wasn't right for school pictures, mind you, but just because I didn't want her to freeze to death on the playground. She, in the way that only three-year-olds can be, was adamant.

Finally I resigned, pulled out her bright pink tights that have royal blue stripes interspersed with purple-and-blue butterflies, added a pale turquoise turtleneck, and then put the sundress over the whole. Strangely, the outfit looked harmonious enough, especially with the addition of a turquoise barrette in her hair.

She skipped happily into school, nominally dressed in a sundress, but really wearing summer clothes in the way that only children in winter climates can: as one layer in a much warmer outfit.

I, of course, was confronted by the giant "School Picture Day" posters as soon as we walked in the front door. Groaning inwardly, I realized that she will be there in her teal, royal blue and bright pink outfit, posing amongst artfully arranged piles of red and orange autumnal leaves. In short, if ever there were a day to wish that no one had invented that fancy new-fangled process for making pictures in color, today would be that day.

And in other news, I would like to provide the following PSA: when you buy maternity tights (yes, brands that you buy in regular tights make them) and they are not labeled as such on the label that's in the seam, and you curse the fact that they are not labeled because they get mixed up with your regular tights, and then there you are, eight months pregnant, at work for 10 hours, wearing NON-maternity tights that look just like your maternity tights but feel like a tourniquet or a boa constrictor around your middle, it would be in your best interest not merely to separate the maternity tights out and keep them in a different drawer, but actually to label the darn things with a Sharpie "M" or something.

Because if you don't, the day will come when you go to work distinctly not at all pregnant, and realize on the long trek to the building from your car that the like-new, inky black, totally-forgot- you-owned-these tights which you discovered this morning and put on in happy realization that it was time to break out the warmer clothes are in fact maternity tights.

And they will slide right off your body all. day. long.

If you give a preschooler an inch...

2009-10-01T20:17:00.006-04:00

**with apologies to Laura Numeroff, whose wonderful book I read twice at story-time tonight because BOTH children picked it**

If you give a preschooler an inch,
chances are, she'll want a mile.
You'll compromise, and let her wear her tutu to the grocery store.

She'll probably clamor to "drive" the grocery cart with the car attached to the front.
She does look cute in that car, so you'll agree.

When you pull out the green car cart,
she'll probably insist that only the blue one will do.

You'll have to pull all six of those unwieldy carts out of the line to reach the only blue one at the end.

Riding through the fruit section in the blue cart will remind her that
she LOVES! PEACHES! and STRAWBERRIES! and BANANAS!
She might want to get out of the car to help you choose them.

She'll want you to let her do it all by herself.
She'll start grabbing fruit off the displays--bruised apples, peaches hard as rocks.

Then she'll flit off towards the deli section,
and you'll have to race to catch up to her while pushing the behemoth car cart.

While she's in the deli section, she'll poke her fingers at all the salmon packages.
Hard.
She'll probably make a hole in at least one of them.

When she's done examining the lobsters,
she'll offer to race you to the "honey O's."
You'll oblige with your best steering efforts,
and she'll dash her pink-tulle-clad self up the cereal aisle.

Then she'll want you to buy yogurts.
So you'll have to back up the blue car cart while she hangs on its handle.

When she sees the yogurts, she'll ask you to buy "monkey drinks" too.
Then she'll want to choose different flavors for each member of the family.
You'll have to help her pick who wants what
and pay for it all.

On the way home, she'll see the purple playground, which will remind her of the brown playground.
She'll want to go there just as soon as the groceries are put away.
So you'll have to get her out of her tutu and into the stroller with the car horn.
When you start off down the street, she'll want to "go faster!"
She'll ask you to sing while you run and push her up hill.

When you turn the last corner to the brown playground, she will catch a glimpse of the library.
Seeing the library will remind her that she wanted to read some new books about ballerinas.
She'll probably ask you to take her there after the park.

And chances are,

if she asks you to help her find ballerina books,

she's going to want to wear her tutu to the library.

Seriously, It's My Best Work

2009-09-29T13:26:00.005-04:00

Son produced a large but fairly crumpled art project with a flourish this morning, and used two hands to smooth it out on the table. "See what I made at Kindergarten the other day?" he asked proudly. "It's a tree." It was indeed a tree, and I exclaimed appropriately over it. "It's a little squooshed because it was in my backpack," he explained.

Even though it wouldn't lay flat, it was impressively large. He'd taken two 7x10 pieces of green construction paper and glued them together along their short ends to form a long rectangle of green. Then he fringed the sides of the green, added multiple stems of brown paper artfully overlapped to form a trunk and branches, and glued on cut-outs of fall leaves. The leaves were clearly photocopies provided by the school, which prompted me to ask of the giant project, "Was making this tree your own idea, or did they give you directions?"

"Oh, I did it all by myself. No one telled me how. I thought of it, and then I made it." He looked up at me smiling, "Seriously," he said (in a quite serious voice), "it's my best work."

I could not control my laughter.

"SERIOUSLY," he repeated, somewhat sternly. "It IS. I mean it."

"I know, Sweetie," I told him, choking back the remaining giggles. "It is certainly your best work."

* * * * *

At the doctor's office getting flu shots, the kids of course ended up with lollipops. "I finished mine in two bites," announced Son from the back seat of the car on the way home. "And when we get home, I'm going to plant the lolly stick. And it will grow into a lolly tree, and then I can have lollies whenever I want!"

* * * * *

After Sons gets on the school bus, Daughter and I go upstairs.

"Mama, dance with me," she says. "Do you want to practice our pirouettes?" She starts her very first "ballerina class" on Friday but has learned this lovely word from watching Max and Ruby, and she is ready for anything. So I get up and we begin to dance.

"But wait. We need music," she announces, stopping. I spend two minutes poking around online and find a Detroit radio station that streams classical music.

And we dance.

Her arms are surprisingly graceful and she sways and points her toes and jumps and tries to spin. I teach her First Position with her feet. And then Second. And Third. We try little leaps. We pretend we know how to do an arabesque. The music swells and we spin some more. Her feet are joyful. My heart is light.

There is, I think, no better way to spend a chilly, grey fall afternoon than dancing blithely around in one's brand-new, very first pair of ballet slippers and the loudest striped-and-flowered tights one owns.

* * * * *

There is something magical about these two afternoons each week that Son is away at school and I am home with Daughter. It is the first time in our lives that we have had each other to ourselves on any regular basis. We do not always do whimsical things. Sometimes we go grocery shopping or run errands. Sometimes we go to the park. Sometimes we scrub bathrooms. Always we have a prolonged story time. And always, we are together, just the two of us.

These last few weeks have made me appreciate so very much how important it is to make the time for focused attention when one has more than one child. As he is learning to read, mastering graphs, learning how to measure volume, she is growing in confidence, skipping through her days, leaving me with treasured memories of her loving heart and constantly flitting feet. She may grow up to be a dancer or a lawyer; he may be an artist or a scientist. But either way, they are growing in ways I could scarcely dream of, and in directions that make me delight in each new day.

Seriously. My children? They're my very best work. Even though I only deserve partial credit for what they are becoming.

Weekly Accounting

2009-09-25T09:56:00.004-04:00

Items on the floor I recently vacuumed:
* 3 pairs shoes
* 1 enormous can Lincoln Logs (thanks, Costco!), empty
* 8 gazillion individual Lincoln Logs (picked up very quickly by children, to their credit, when threatened with the idea that I would simply vacuum up said logs)
* 1 bright pink rubber monster finger puppet
* 1 pair eyeballs for Mr Potato Head
* 1 tiny plastic crouching soldier, in desert fatigues
* half a dozen random wooden blocks (mostly the simple bridge shape, which makes an excellent telephone; apparently the soldiers need command centers under each table in the house)
* 1 wide purple rubber band that used to hold broccoli stems together ("So handy for making bow and arrows out of Lincoln Logs! We can't throw it away, Mama!")
* 8,000,000,000 crumbs, assorted

Times I've vacuumed the house in the last seven days: three

Times I've picked the hand towel up off the floor in the bathroom this morning: three

Song and dance routines Daughter has performed this morning while practicing her "ballerina twirls" for the ballerina classes she will begin taking next Friday: three

Number of cherry tomatoes harvested off our very late plants this week, which Son has proudly taken for his snack time at Kindergarten: nine

Times I've called the school bus transportation office to try to remedy the fact that Son is not on their list of children who need to be picked up for Kindergarten: five

Weeks we are into school: three

Times the bus has actually stopped at our house to pick up Son: zero

Hours until the bus arrives for the very first time to pick Son up: two

Quantity of elation this produces in a five year old: immeasurable

Quantity of relief this produces in a mother who was not looking forward to dressing everyone in snow gear, and loading and unloading the preschooler into the car just to drive Son one mile to school several days a week all winter: immesurable times 100

Number of mouse traps purchased: none

Number of mouse traps to be purchased this weekend, in an effort to turn our house into a Hotel California for mice: two frillion ("you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave")

Number of air pizzas I've eaten while writing this post: one gajillion (according to the small pizza makers in my house)

Number of home-made cinnamon-sugar doughnuts I intend to eat this weekend while on our annual field trip to the cider mill and pumpkin patch: as many as it takes to make the day absolute perfection.

May you have a happy autumn weekend in your neck of the woods.

"There's No Such Thing As Only One Mouse"

2009-09-22T23:54:00.005-04:00

What would you do if you were sitting on the couch one night, watching some TV, and suddenly this guy
bounded into your peripheral vision, stood completely still in a pose that can only be described as "sudden terrified recognition of having made a gross miscalculation," then glared defiantly at you and dashed under the pink Flintstones-esque molded plastic car that your daughter loves to drive around the house? (Photo thanks to these guys.)

You'd send your husband over to investigate, armed with a giant plastic container and lid, obviously.

Of course, the mouse would be long gone by the time he got there, seeing as mice travel at near teleportation speed.

Also, they can make themselves invisible.

Or at least, they can fit under any doorway and through any crevice that is big enough to admit the thickness of a pencil. Which effectively means they can make themselves invisible because that pretty much describes every door and cupboard in my entire house, not to mention every piece of furniture, bit of hanging decor, and raft of Hello Kitty jammies on the floor. Crevices and easement GALORE in a house with two children, I tell you. Not to mention a particularly goodly assortment of crumbs, certainly enough to keep one or two continents worth of mice alive for long enough to get through a few breeding cycles (which are only 21 days!!).

So, back to the what would you do.

You'd ask Google what to do about a "mouse in house." And then you'd learn all sorts of cheerful facts, such as that female mice can produce up to ten litters of 5-6 babies per year, that their pregnancies are so blissfully short that you won't even have watched all the season openers of the shows you couldn't wait to start watching again before that one defiant wretch under the pink car has produced offspring, and that they are all notoroiously hard to get rid of.

Awesome.

And then you'd read some more about traps (both the death and live varieties) and bait, and in weighing the disgustingness of removing dead mice from traps, you would also learn that releasing live mice back into the wild of your backyard has been studied and PROVEN to produce a greater likelihood of increased mouse activity inside your house. Sort of a rodent combination of "you guys aren't going to believe the treasure trove of warm yummy things I just found" with "AND they tried to kick me out...we'll show them!!"

This site will tell you that "Although cats, dogs and other predators may kill mice, they do not give effective control in most circumstances." Which, duh, my dog and I already know.

It also refers to the presences of a mouse in one's house as an "infestation" -- a word I have to say I'm not that excited to embrace.

I would like to think that the guy I saw was a rogue. A fearful deviant. A unique specimen. After all, I lived in an apartment with mice before (oh, yes, in the plural), and there was much evidence of them to be seen all over. (If you prefer the polite euphamism, skip this aside. If you want the gory details, I'll just tell you that mouse poop is, unlike mice themselves, NOT invisible.) But there is no evidence yet in our house. There are no teeth marks on the wooden utensils, no tell-tale droppings anywhere in the kitchen.

I want to believe that what I saw the other night was the exception that proves the rule. It was the ONLY ONE MOUSE who accidentally wandered into our house and has already beaten a hasty retreat. (These helpful folks are totally laughing at me right now for believing this.)

But some small part of me knows that in the next day or so -- before these recent immigrants can bear the first generation of offspring in this, their new country -- I will have to buy mouse traps. And bait them. And put them all over the house in places where the mice might go but the children will not. And then listen for their sharp snaps. And rinse and repeat.

Anyone who has any advice on the matter, please feel free to squeak up. I will take all the help I can get.

It's International Talk Like a Pirate Day!

2009-09-19T12:30:00.004-04:00

What an excellent day to celebrate. Trot out your eye patches, mateys, and suit up in yer rags, it's International Talk Like a Pirate Day.

I told that to Son, expecting him to be really excited when I explained that perhaps we should try to talk like pirates all day long.

His immediate response, perhaps occasioned by his recent entrance into school, where there are many many rules about right and wrong, was, "But I don't know all the words! How are we supposed to talk like pirates if we don't know what we're saying. We might say "you're stupid" if we don't know what we're saying. Or we might say, "you're dumb.""

Whereupon, I immediately began typing his anxieties into the handy-dandy pirate talk translator, so that I could show him how easy it was to talk like a pirate.

And then I read out the following, in my best piratical voice, with appropriate roars and guttural inflection, and especially raised voices on key phrases.
But I don't be knowin' all th' words! How be we supposed to speak like a band 'o pirates if we don't be knowin' what we're sayin'. We might shout "ye're stupid" if we don't be knowin' what we're sayin'. Or we might shout, "ye're dumb."

He and Daughter were delighted, and I had to read the paragraph three times.

So, if you've got nothing better to do today, may I suggest asking the pirate translator to tell you how to shout yer thots in scurvy pirate? Or read your kids How I Became a Pirate. Or make tiny eye patches for all the ark animals you own. Or go to your local library dressed as a pirate, as if that's totally normal.

However you do it, Happy Pirate Day!

The Man Who Could Build Anything

2009-09-15T22:28:00.010-04:00

When we were preschoolers, he built a small white table and three diminutive stools for my sisters and me, so that we would have a place of our own at which to color or play when we came to visit. As we entered our teen years and began to care about boys, he gave us vanity tables for our bedrooms, precisely measured to fit the odd corners of our available spaces, and so sturdily built that twenty-five years later, they still serve as reliable, unshakable stands for 30" television sets. When the middle one of us married, he created a unique domed hope chest, lined in cedar, for the foot of her bed.

He understood why, when I moved into an apartment of my own for the very first time, I wanted a drill and toolbox for my birthday. And so he sent them to me.

He could repair lawnmowers and bikes, cars and dishwashers, install doors and floors, make beautiful turned lamp bases on a lathe.

In a lifetime of loving handiwork, the most impressive things he constructed were two gorgeously crafted wooden-hulled boats which he could use to take his children water skiing in the summers of the mid-1950s, and one semi-underground, environmentally forward-thinking beautiful home for himself and his wife.

And when I say that he built boats or a house, I don't mean that he hired architects and designers, bought plans, and generally paid for the construction.

I mean that he took over when his builders went bankrupt and nothing was done but the pouring of the concrete exterior walls. For six years, he went every day to that house, inch by inch building it himself. He not only acted as his own general contractor; he did drywall, cabinetry, staircases, and flooring, sometimes redoing what he'd paid someone else to do because he couldn't bear that the finished product was 1/16 of an inch off-center. If it couldn't burst and flood or electrocute him, he would tackle it and do it well. So well that the "professionals" would just shake their heads and murmur that they'd never seen anything like it in their ___ years on the job.

They always meant that line as a compliment.

He repaired airplanes for the Navy during the War. Was something of a prodigy at Ford in engine (carburetor, I think) design. Only had a high school diploma.

He loved spaghetti dinners with garlic bread, the turning of the summer to fall, and the smell of salt-air near the ocean. Having grown up in the Depression, he abhorred orange marmalade (the predominant flavor of those lean years at his house) and the notion of purchasing anything on credit of any kind. He was a meticulous man with a firm handshake and a penchant for stories about the power of mind over matter.

He was a man of few words, except when we three girls were dandled on his knees begging for a story about three alligators (or three kangaroos, or three tigers, or three you-name-its). He always obliged, telling us outlandish tales of three sibling creatures who got in and out of the most thrilling adventures. It was a wonder to me as a small child that anyone could just invent like that. Spin a story without warning. Make it up right there on the spot. Despite his own preference for three-dimensional work over books, I am sure that his endless story-telling helped foster in me my love of literature of all kinds.

He taught me the important adage that, in any kind of construction, one should always measure twice and cut once.

He taught me, through his relationship with my grandmother, that love can last decades and still make you hum lightly when you kiss.

He taught me that with patience and precision, one can learn to build anything -- from a story to a marriage to a three-story house.

He was my grandfather.

And the world has contracted a little since he's gone.

Hint: First, You Hold It Up by the Shoulder Seams

2009-08-31T08:28:00.000-04:00

I am the sort of person who gets all teary at weddings. Over the emotion of it all, of course. But also over the fact that SOMEONE should have done SOMETHING to let those poor bridesmaids know that they look like they slept in their dresses. Would it have killed them to run an iron over that silk before they put it on and traipsed down the aisle in it?

I notice things like this because I have spent decades sewing--everything from wool skirts to Halloween costumes to slinky little numbers for evening. Currently, I possess the perfect, torturous combination of enough skill to make many things myself without the actual time to do so, which leaves me horribly loathe to pay full price for anything--because, of course, I know precisely how much that fabric would cost, and if I could do it myself (not that I will, but I could), how can I justify spending that much on it? I can also spot bad tailoring a mile off, and cheaply cut clothes don't hang right, but do you know what they pay professors who work in the Humanities? So what I really want is clothes that should be expensive but aren't.

Hence, I frequent the large discount stores (you know, the ones whose names rhyme with BK Flax and Narshall's). Perhaps you, too, are too cheap to buy Tahari off the rack at Nordstrom's and instead prefer to buy it at 1/10 the price when you luck into finding it on the rack at your local ______ (fill in the blank the with TJMaxshall's name of your choice). If not, and you think these stores are a high proportion of junk, I will grant you that. But I will see your junk and raise you some perfect Calvin Klein jeans ($10!), sporty DKNY summer tops, cashmere sweaters, gorgeous camel wool retro 40s skirts, or the sweetest pale blue-grey sweater dress you ever saw by Michael Kors ($25!).

Here is what I have noticed about these stores. First: they are torture to shop in because the Good, the Bad, and the Atrociously Ugly are jammed into racks indicriminately and require tremendous patience to untangle, particularly when your children are doing their utmost to add confusion to the racks by playing inside them and stirring up the clothes even further. Second: every single employee in these stores has apparently taken a required course in Incompetent Folding of Garments of All Sizes and Descriptions.

I defy you to find a single employee in any of these stores who can fold one single solitary pair of shorts. The degree to which they all, universally, butcher the process of folding something very simple like a basic sweater is astonishing. It's gone from driving me completely batty to leaving me utterly fascinated.

No where else on the planet, I am sure, does the act of folding clothing precisely mimic the hand gestures for "Pat-a-cake." Don't know what I mean? Sing your way through to the "roll it and roll it" part, and then you'll know precisely how they fold things at these stores. It's like the instructor for these hours-long folding classes stands up at the front of the room loudly singing "The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round" while demonstrating proper folding technique for an evening gown.

My three and five year old children can fold better than these folks.

Now, before you go all, "what do you expect from minimum wage employees, poor buggers" on me, please remember that all of us, no matter our day jobs, have to do laundry. And at some point, one assumes, we take that laundry out of the drier and put it into the drawers. And between those two clothes-resting locations, there is typically a little process that most of us like to call F-O-L-D-I-N-G.

Folding.

Isn't it just a basic life skill? Doesn't everyone, at some point in his or her life, need to learn how to fold a t-shirt? So how is it possible that the employees at these stores can unfailingly manage to put thick, cotton-and-wool sweaters into such tremendous disarray while "folding" them as I check out, that garments that are made of practically un-wrinkleable fabric look like wadded up bird's nests when I get home? And are wrinkled?

The other thing that is almost miraculous is their sleight-of-hand. I can't tell you how many times I've tried to help them out by doing the folding myself. But unlike at the grocery store, where any move towards loading your own bags will automatically result in the evaporation of any and all bag-boys, at TJMaxshalls, the cashier does some tricky hand work what with the removal of the security tags and the ringing up so as to make it completely impossible for you to fold anything yourself. And so, you stand there, helpless, while your brand new soft and yummy sweater dress is unceremoniously treated like a meatball, and rolled into a wad that completely disregards the necessary appendages of arms and turtlenecks.

Seriously, if they weren't so disingenuous about the whole thing, I could understand it better. If they made no pretense of folding, and just shoved items into bags, I could understand. They are in a hurry, perhaps. This is what comes of discount shopping.

But they TRY. They make actual folding efforts. They take time with the folding. But the time involves staring off into space, and rolling their garment-filled hands over and over each other like some kind of basic dance move that will end in jazz hands.

It's like the folding is a reminder: don't feel too empowered by your recent purchase of deeply discounted cashmere goodness; wadded up, you can't tell it apart from a Target turtleneck.

And yet, once you take it out of the bag, you SO can tell the difference. Which makes even the maddening folding worth it, don't you think?

"You keep using that word...I do not think it means what you think it means"

2009-08-27T21:10:00.001-04:00

"Let's have dreams," my daughter says to me, in a winning and breathy voice. She wants us to "have dreams" every night when I tuck her in, which means that she wants me to snuggle down, and whisper soothingly to her some beautiful image of what we will dream about that night. For a long time, the image was of us swimming in a pool of water at the bottom of a waterfall, while birds and butterflies flitted overhead. Whatever the scene, I have to describe it in great detail, with colors and sounds, and not omitting to mention the feeling of the wind rushing through our hair as we ride on the backs of our unicorns towards the rainbow.

Tonight she wanted something new. "Flowers," she said, nestling closer to me.

So I began to set the scene for her: "we are in the middle of a beautiful meadow..." I began. "Do you know what a meadow is?" I asked quietly.

She sat bolt upright in bed. "Meadow? Oh, yes," she said, matter-of-factly. "I think it's when you get stuck, fwozen, on a mewwy-go-wound and can't get off."

She clearly wasn't sure why I was laughing so hard, but she was happy to laugh right along with me. So I explained what a meadow was, and all about our picnic that we took there. ("But we don't step on any of the flowers," she said, "because that would smoosh them." "Right," I said.)

And then I tucked her in and gave her the special kisses on her eyelids and came downstairs.

But now I can't stop giggling over her definition of "meadow," and thinking that really, this child would be extraordinary if I could get her to play Dictionary with me (which I might try next time we have a rainy afternoon).

We've had funny pronunciations of actual words before, of course. The current one is that she insists on referring to her armpits as "armpets," and no matter how many times her brother tells her that they are not "pets" of any kind, she insists that she knows that, thank you, but they are armpets.

He's hardly one to call her on it, given that he continually refers to our movies-in-the-mail service as "NetFlake" and that a week or so ago, he gleefully told me that he knows why Ritz Bits are called Ritz Bits.

"Why?" I asked.

"Because they are Rits, and when you take a bite of them, then you spit some out."

"What?!" I said. "You do not spit them. What are you talking about?"

"Well, not in the car," he admitted. "You don't spit them in the car. But," he was serenely confident, "they are Rits and you do Spit them. Rit Spits. See?"

Truly, moments like these are hilarious.

But there is something even better about the definition inventing that Daughter had been doing lately. (Her effort with "meadow" is not the first time she has done such a thing, but of course it's the first time I've been in a position to be able to write it down immediately so that I wouldn't forget.) It comes with such complete confidence in herself. She has a quiet and absolute sense that she knows what words mean. All words. Any word you ask her about. And she has an almost uncanny ability to make up crazy definitions on the spot without apparently thinking about them at all. I hope that confidence follows her as she grows, and the creativity too, and the joy in the play of language.

And so I try hard not to laugh at her, to chuckle gently, to laugh only with her.

Who knows? She could turn out to be the next Lewis Carroll, inventing whole universes full of Jabberwocky to entertain us all.

Professional Conferences Can Be Highly Illuminating

2009-08-25T10:05:00.003-04:00

I'll come clean: it's been a few years since I've been to a professional conference. I've been a little busy with the babies and the diapers and the bottles and the potty training and somehow haven't been able to get my act together to apply, write a paper to deliver, and then be away from the family for a long weekend. But, this past weekend, I finally jumped back into the conference waters, and let me tell you -- it was fantastic.

I'd forgotten how exciting it can be (dork alert! dork alert!) to be surrounded by a giant batch of people who are passionate about the same subject as you are, who do research and have ideas you've never thought about but are very glad to consider, who will give you feedback and professional advice.

In short, this conference reminded me that a couple of days of intense conversation can be really rejuvenating to one's own research, which otherwise often feels as if it happens in something of a vacuum.

I learned a lot at this conference, stuff about the history of India, about emerging online resources for doing nineteenth-century studies, about the periodical press. And, I learned the following, which nuggets seem worthy of sharing.

1. Good towels are like manna for your skin. In fact, they are such a very good thing that if you have forgotten just how good they are, it means you should probably do yourself a favor and buy a few new towels. There was never a better towel in a hotel than those at the Doubletree Guest Suites in downtown Minneapolis: bath-sheet sized, thick and plush as a schmancy spa robe, pristine white. I stayed at a "W" hotel in New York once (and THAT is some swank hotel where you don't want to take your children, let me tell you), and even they -- with their amazing Bliss body butter and other out of this world bath products -- didn't have towels that could compete with Doubletree.

2. Patrone Silver is serious. If you like scotch and don't really like tequila, you will like Patrone. And if someone insists you should try it on the rocks with a lime, you should not believe her little song and dance about how she's had all kinds of tequila and THIS tequila produces no hangovers, and it is like magic tequila or something because she can drink eight shots of it in one evening and still be sober and happy that night, and well-rested and happy in the morning. Because while eight shots will no doubt make someone extremely happy, there is a high likelihood that the sadness of drinking too much will certainly follow. So just go all "la la la la LAAAA, I can't hear you" on her when she tries to get you to order a second one. Because truly, one of these drinks is a beautiful thing. Beyond that, I take no responsibility for your happiness.

3. Light rail that actually connects where you are to where you want to go is the awesomest thing a city can provide. $1.75 from downtown to the airport. I dare you to beat that.

4. When you give a table full of academics a few pints in a pub, you will hear a lot of funny stories involving celebrities and animals. Not usually in the same story. But sometimes, yes.

5. Super famous academics, the kinds whose careers you can only dream about having, wear their hair in braids on off-days, just like everyone else.

I'm pretty sure there are some words to live by in that last one -- something about not being afraid to talk to people who seem so far beyond you on the career track, about having confidence, and so on. All of that is true, and she was very nice to me, and not condescending at all, and treated me like a true colleague despite the vast chasm of difference in our levels of famousness. But, for the next few days at least, I'm going to remain stuck on the fact of the braids themselves. Long silvery braids on a highly distinguished Professor Emeritus. Most excellent.

I Don't Recommend Licking the TV Screen

2009-08-20T08:03:00.001-04:00

Son's current favorite tv is anything on the Food Network. He loves Chopped and Ace of Cakes and Food Network Challenge. He watches Paula Deen with serious concentration. He actually spoke the following sentence the other day: "no, not that show; I don't feel like watching Guy Fiere right now."

In case you've forgotten...Son is five years old.

At the end of a long day of playing, swimming, going to the library, drawing pictures, running errands, playing Hot Wheels, and taunting his sister, Son likes nothing better than to settle down for half an hour of Food tv between dinner and bed.

There are certainly far worse things that he could watch. Food tv is G-rated, creative, and hardly likely to give him nightmares.

But I will say this: Food tv is completely addictive. I find that after I read stories and tuck in the kids, it's very difficult to turn off this compelling television. WHO will win the throw down -- Bobby Flay or the sushi chef he challenged? (the sushi chef) Will Robert finally fail one of his impossible challenges? Will today finally be the day when I stop being distracted by her makeup (hello insanely high purple eyeshadow and high-school-bubblegum-pink lipstick!) and can pay attention to what Giada is cooking? Why exactly is Alton Brown so weird?

And apart from the personalities, there is the food...perfect Asian dumplings, espresso crusted sea bass, key lime pie, coconut shrimp, burgers made with chocolate in them...you name it, I want to cook nearly all of it.

Of course, it's ten o'clock at night, and I'm not cooking anything. But this doesn't stop me from wanting perfect dumplings right this very second. And because I can't have them, I make myself a little bowl of popcorn, or an ice cream cone, or a plate of cheese and crackers, or an apple with peanut butter.

Or all of the above.

Okay, I don't actually make myself all of those things at once. But I find I am utterly unable to stop myself from snacking while watching shows about food on tv. And maybe that's their point. Perhaps they are trying to make me gain a pound or two per week, so that they can then pass me on to some exercise tv channel to combat this problem. But I doubt it, since that loses them one more viewer.

And yet I cannot figure out how on earth to enjoy watching Food tv without any plans in the immediate future to eat something delicious. It's like Food tv is crack for your eyeballs...luring you in with the siren song of well-plated meals, giving you a giant rush of empowerment through the sense that you can access the recipe and directions online and then make this yourself at home, and then letting you crash on the fact that you really can't and won't make this food right this second and thus, once again, are denied. Denial, obviously, breeds snacking.

What I need is some kind of will power or motivation that is bigger than a plate full of steaming, perfectly pan fried gyoza.

I just have no idea what that would look like.

Home Ec Never Prepared Me for This One

2009-08-17T21:03:00.004-04:00

I think when you buy your first house, you should automatically receive an Operating Manual for Grown-Up Life. (Perhaps subtitled: Congratulations, You Own a Home! Here's how not to kill yourself in it, accidentally, in the first few years.)

It should contain all those tidbits that we are somehow expected to glean over the years. You know, the "commons sense" things like that you should never EVER mix bleach and ammonia together in an effort to concoct your own more powerful shower cleanser. You shouldn't repair the kitchen sink disposal without turning off the power first. You should know that water will spread rather than douse a grease-based fire (read: most any kitchen fire), and that baking soda is the only safe way to smother such a fire. And that you should always use separate cutting boards for your salad tomatoes and your raw chicken. And so on.

And it should contain a short but important section, emblazoned with high red WARNING letters, spelling out some basic facts about the gas grill that is located out on your deck.

Such as, for example, that if you carry a platter of sausages out there to grill during a party, and you have been assured by someone else that the grill has been pre-heating, and you smell gas...you should proceed with caution.

You should NOT, hypothetically, open the grill, quickly note that none of the four burners is actually lit, immediately see the obvious fact that the burners have been turned on but the pilot has blown out, and then promptly push the starter button.

Because, you will have undoubtedly assessed the situation very quickly (being the possesor you no doubt are of a gas stove, and therefore wise to the ways of the finicky pilot light). VERY quickly.

So quickly, in fact, that when you do press the starter button to light the pilot, all the gas that has been building up under the closed hood of the grill for the past fifteen minutes or so will have had nowhere near enough time to dissipate, and therefore the little spark that normally ignites the lighter burner will in fact ignite a stunning fireball the size of your entire grill.

And the fireball will rush up towards your face and singe the hairs completely off your upper arms, and turn your eyelashes into eyelash stubs, and produce a frizzle of mane around your face, and scare the speech right out of you.

And hours later you will break down in tears (after washing a lot of burned hair down the sink with gallons of cold water, and then spending the rest of the evening trying to calm yourself) because if you had been just a few inches closer, or one of the children had been standing next to you, or the flame had traveled back along the line towards the full tank of fuel under the grill, or... you can't even put it into words...

The warning page should remind you that gas building up in a small closed space for tens of minutes is not quite the same thing as gas slowly hissing from a momentarily unlit burner on your indoor stove, and thus should be dealt with differently. It should spell out in no uncertain terms that the default move of lighting the pilot as quickly as possible so as to shortcut the emergence of unlit gas is precisely the wrong move to take with a large gas grill that has been "on" for a while.

Perhaps it should tell you, in very teeny tiny letters that you will be fine even if you are not smart enough to think through the obvious implications of lighting the burner as quickly as possible. But I'm not sure.

Personally, I think that the more utterly terrifying the description is, the better.

It might make you think more slowly in an emergency.

Because sometimes, in an emergency, your instincts can be dangerously wrong.

(And yes, I'm physically fine. My eyelashes will, according to Dr. Google, take up to 3 months to look normal again. That is small potatoes compared to what could have happened.)

Parenting Through Boredom

2009-08-14T09:24:00.000-04:00

I've been thinking a lot about boredom this summer, and I have decided that it might be the single most useful parenting tool in existence. After patience, obviously.

Let me explain.

Waaaayyy back in the 1970s, when I was a child, summer looked like this: wake up, eat breakfast, clean up your dishes, go outside. On Saturdays, there was an hour or two of chores to do before being set free, and periodically, there were requirements to weed or mow or mulch or some such in the yard. But otherwise, we went out into the fresh warm morning and found something to do. After lunch, we did the same. Sometimes I stayed indoors and read. Other times I wandered across the street to listen to records at my friend's house. There were days when I went next door and helped Teresa make the sock dolls she sold at the craft market (I only did the non-skilled bits, like stuffing their tiny legs or sewing on their buttons). I did a lot of babysitting. Then I climbed the giant magnolia down the block, book in hand, and settled myself in the crook of the tree to read some more.

One summer, we wrote, rehearsed, made costumes and sets for, and then performed a play. Another summer, we collected seeds from our mother's prodigious flower garden, packaged them, and labeled them for sale to all the neighbors. We went to the swimming pool, when we could convince someone to give us a ride -- but no adult stayed with us to supervise. We sewed things: clothes for ourselves, scarves for friends.

I wrote stories.

After dinner (again, kitchen help required, and then we were set free), we ran outside to play Kick the Can and Tiger and other games with kids up and down the block.

The only rules about how we spent our time were that we had to finish our chores before we walked out the door, we had to give mom a vague idea of where we'd be ("outside playing" was considered sufficient), we had to let mom know if we went inside anyone's house (for the simple reason that then we would not hear her when she opened the front door to shout that it was time to come home and help with dinner), and we had to come home to go to sleep at some point. We moved into this neighborhood when I was 11, and my sisters are both younger than I, so it's not like we were independent teenagers at this point.

And yet, we were left mostly to our own devices for several months on end.

It was glorious.

Now, of course, it is hard for most of us to imagine just letting our kids roam around neighborhoods unsupervised. (Unless we are radical mothers.) And yet, despite our fears for their safety, I think we are largely doing our children a disservice by not giving them some measure of the independence we ourselves had.

I am convinced that our freedom in the summers made us all pretty self-sufficient. My sisters and I are very good at devising projects to keep ourselves occupied. We are all pretty resilient. We are creative. We are perfectly comfortable being on our own for stretches of time.

I want these things for my own children, which is why, this summer, I have been sending them outside to play, unsupervised, in the back yard. Before you call Social Service on me (my kids, after all, are only 3 and 5 1/2 years old), here is the situation. Our backyard is small and fenced. Its biggest danger is that someone could fall off the climbing structure, but they could do the very same right under my watchful eye on the playground. I check on them every few minutes, and I can hear them playing through the open window, but, and I think this is the key, they can't see me and don't think of me as involved in their games.

Over the course of the summer, I have seen them develop tremendous fortitude for entertaining themselves. Back in May, they needed me to guide almost any game they played. Or they felt incomplete if I wasn't witnessing their efforts. Now, they can create the narrative arc of a playtime story all on their own. They still have small, bickering dilemmas, but they are beginning to learn how to resolve them (mostly, Son just pulls some kind of goofy antic to make Daughter stop pouting).

They have, in short, grown to the point where they are no longer dependent upon me for every single activity and idea they have for how to spend their time. I, personally, think that is healthy.

The corollary to this is that, as they are now reaching the age to be enrolled in activities and classes, I do not want their every minute to be scheduled. I will happily enroll Son on a soccer team, which he's been begging for. But he won't get to do t-ball until the soccer season is over because I think it is really important for him to have some time every single day in which he could potentially be bored out of his little mind, and during which he, not me, not a team or coach or teacher, will have to figure out how to stave off that boredom.

We recently had some friends over who were clearly very nervous about the idea of leaving the kids outside to play alone. I can appreciate that. I did not get to this point without lots of discussion and "practice" sessions with my own children. I'd go out to play with them, then leave them alone out there while I came inside to answer the phone or make lunch, gradually increasing the amount of time they could be outside alone to the point where I now trust them even in the unfenced front yard. (They know the rule is that I have to retrieve any balls that land in the street.)

I know not everyone would be comfortable with this. And even my kids, on their quiet, relatively safe, suburban street, will not be allowed alone beyond the boundaries of our yard for a few more years. But it is my hope that by the time they are older, I am confident enough in them to let them go on bike rides through the neighborhood without me trailing along behind.

It is a tricky balance, protecting our children and nurturing their own self-sufficiency. But for me, it's vital to find that line.

And, I'm curious: where is that line for you?