Mommy's Martini

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?

It's All Marinka's Fault

2009-08-13T09:32:00.005-04:00

So I'm sitting here, sipping coffee and munching toast and promising myself that I'll only read blogs until my fried eggs are all gone, when blamo! there it is, Marinka going on and on about Entenmann's and how their website is so hypnotic, especially if you are home in bed, feeling all ~~hypochondriacal~~ sick with a summer cold.

Ever the sucker for allure of baked goods, and mildly nostalgic about my childhood adoration of all things Entenmann's, I of course go to the site, and yes, it really is mesmerizing. (Go ahead, click over. And when you're fully hypnotized by swirling pastries, come on back.)

The giant tag line under the carousel of sugary goodness reads "Everyone's got a favorite. What's yours?" and immediately I think BABKA! with more than a little glee. Honestly, I couldn't describe babka as a food in any kind of detail at all. Babka is the sweet Entenmann's treat you get on the special occasion when you visit your Jewish grandparents in New York. Babka is not breakfast or lunch, not dessert or danish, but something sweet and pastry-ish, perhaps with some jam or some cheese or some chocolate--you don't know--that tastes perfectly of Things Not Usually Allowed On Your Plate At This Time Of Day, Young Lady. Babka is toothsome and wonderful, packaged in that long white box with the fancy navy blue letters, and carefully chosen by you and your father to have for breakfast the next morning with your scrambled eggs--a secret delight that Mommy would never allow but won't know about because this is your weekend to stay with Daddy.

Obviously, I read "Everyone's got a favorite. What's yours?" and I immediately typed "babka" into the Entenmann's search box. Entenmann's told me:

Your Search Results

Sorry, there are no results that match your search criteria.

So, I Googled babka, thinking that it was probably a Yiddish word that had some hidden "h" in it or something, and that if only Google could tell me how to spell it, Entenmann's would hand me the pastry of my youth.

And that's when it got really weird. First of all, I was spelling it right, but my indignation that Entenmann's would stop carrying what was clearly the best pastry it ever produced was quickly eclipsed by what came up in the search results.

Several problems are immediately apparent. First, the confection is described as "a very tall, delicate yet rich yeast-risen cake," which, if you've ever seen the Entenmann's boxes in my mind's eye (or on my grocery store shelves) makes no sense at all. How does a "very tall" cake get into one of those distinctive long, low boxes, the shape of which I so vividly remember carrying?

Second, babka is almost schizophrenically described as a "Jewish recipe" and as a "traditional Polish Easter cake" in alternating entries on the list of Google hits. Both camps seem quite firm in their designation. Yet while there were historically a lot of Jewish people in Poland, I'm pretty sure they rarely baked special cakes for Easter, so this is a somewhat baffling Old World traditional food.

So, what exactly am I blaming on Marinka? The fact that I have spent the last half hour researching babka instead of grading MA exams, certainly. And the longing and mournful feeling I have inside because I will apparently never taste an Entenmann's babka again. I think it's probably stretching things too far to say that it's Marinka's fault that Entenmann's discontinued babka; probably, they don't carry it any more because they couldn't figure out whether to market it at Easter or to Jewish grandmothers who like something sweet baked into their bread. However, I give her credit for the disquieting feeling I have that perhaps I NEVER tasted an Entenmann's babka because very tall cake + very short box = one of those invented memories that people sometimes discover they have forty years after the fact, once they've spent all that time feeling bitter about something their little sister said to them on Christmas Day back in 1969, only to discover that on Christmas Day in 1969, that particular sister was recovering from laryngitis and couldn't talk at all.

Also, the more research I've done, I've discovered that it's really not a cake so much as a brioche. And that it is typically graced with chocolate. Which goes a long way towards explaining my own intense love of all things bread-with-chocolate. (Even though I still have a vague idea that we ate cheese babka or fruit babka as children.)

So, basically, anyone out there who loves Marinka as much as I do (and I really do adore her) needs to come to her rescue and vindicate my memories. DID Entenmann's used to sell babka? Was it short? Can babka have things in it besides chocolate? Is it bread or cake? Am I crazy?

And, for good measure, if you can diagnose Marinka's Sudden Onset Summer Illness, I would be very grateful (as, I'm sure, would she). I would be very very sorry to lose her to the Slow Withering Away with Inferior Pastry that is her current fate.

PSA: I Do Not Live at the Comcast Call Center

2009-08-11T20:38:00.004-04:00

I reached my wit's end the other day when I answered the third phone call for Comcast. We happen to have their internet and phone service, but we get daily phone calls for Comcast not because we are satisfied customers, not because we have some "in" on the billing or packages, not because we can answer questions. Oh, no. We get daily calls for Comcast because our phone number happens to be one digit different from one of the many call center numbers Comcast has in operation.

Hence, our phone rings during dinner: "Could I please speak to Monica at extension 4567?"

It rings during bathtime: "Is this Comcast? I need to upgrade my..."

It rings during art projects: "Is Terrence there; we just got disconnected...?"

It rings while I'm covered with raw chicken because I'm cooking dinner, and someone leaves an irate message: "This is Sheryl. I've called you people three times to settle my bill. You need to call me back TODAY."

It rings at 5:50am -- yes, A.M. -- and panics me into thinking someone beloved from afar is calling with terrible news. So I scramble out of bed only to reach a hang-up. And then the phone rings again one minute later because the person on the other end got our home answering machine, assumed he misdialed, and then dialed again.

Because, you see, it's not that all these people are dialing their phones incorrectly. Oh, no. It's that someone (or several someones) at Comcast is giving them our phone number by mistake.

How do I know this for sure? I have started striking up conversations with every caller.

For a long time, I just screened the calls. But we were getting multiple calls from people who were clearly sure they had the right number. And then, we got that irate message from Sheryl on our home machine trying to arrange payment for her overdue bill.

Our home machine has an outgoing message with a cheerful greeting, a mention of our names, and the phrase "we aren't home right now, but..." It routinely gets messages from people who are trying to disconnect, reconnect, reconfigure, add, cut down, or pay for their Comcast services.

So, in desperation, I decided to run a little experiment and find out if this many people were misdialing or not.

"Hello," I say, picking up the phone to a caller id number I don't recognize.

"Um," says the voice on the other end, clearly confused by the non-professional greeting.

"Are you calling for Comcast?" I ask pleasantly.

"Yes!" says the voice in some relief.

"You want 555-1234. You've dialed 555-2234."

"Oh, I'm so sorry," says the voice, about to beat a hasty retreat.

"Do you mind me asking: did you misdial, or were you given this number?"

"I was given this number. 555-2234. That's what he said."

"Do you happen to have a name or an extension number for the person who gave you this number? Someone at Comcast keeps giving out our number, and I'm trying to figure out who so that I can get them to stop."

"Oh, man. That's too bad. Yes, I have it right here...It was John at extension 9876."

"Thank you so much."

"No problem. Thanks for giving me the right number."

But here's the problem. So far, since I started having these conversations, every single person I've talked to has given me a different name and a different extension from the last. Sometimes they don't know the extension, only the name. Other times it's the reverse. But since I started collecting this data, there haven't been any repeats.

Which leaves me a little perplexed. Either these people are hearing 555-2234 when they're actually being told 555-1234, or half the Comcast call center has the wrong number to give out. Given that we get at least three of these calls per day, the cynic in me thinks that the fault lies with people at the call center and not the customers.

I have tried calling back Monica and John and Terrence (not their real names, obviously), but of course, their extensions are always busy and the helpful phone service offers to direct me to the "next available representative" -- who no doubt will be one that knows the Comcast phone number and doesn't give out mine by mistake, so I always just hang up.

My latest strategy has been to change my outgoing answering machine message and quit picking up the phone all together. Now, the message says:

You have reached DaddyTime, MommyTime, Son and Daughter. We can't take your call right now, but leave us a message, and we'll call you back.

If you're calling for Comcast, the number you want is 555-1234. Please don't leave us a message. You have reached a home, not a business.

Thank you, and have a nice day.

I tried very hard to keep any hint of snark out of my tone. After all, it's not the callers' faults that someone is giving them the wrong phone number. The real test of whether this works or not, of course, will be that no one leaves us messages any more.

As for stopping the o'dark a.m. phone calls? That I haven't figured out yet.

Easiest Zucchini Bread Ever

2009-08-07T07:26:00.000-04:00

I am working on a new, meatier post that's taking me longer than I thought it would, so for those of you weary of health-care discussions, please to enjoy the following toothsome morsel for today. And, if you're not a recipe person and would prefer to chew on something more serious, feel free to scroll down to the post before this one, where the really interesting perspectives on health care reform just keep coming.

I adapted this recipe from the Bread-Lover's Bread Machine Cookbook (an indispensable bread-making book, I think). I would not have made any changes to it except that I had put together most of the recipe before I realized that we only had 1 cup of flour in the house -- and with the eggs and other ingredients already languishing in the bread machine pan, I had to improvise.

If you have a bread maker, just dump all of the following ingredients into it, in order. Then set the bread maker on the cake/quick breads cycle, and walk away. DO pay attention in the last 20 minutes of cooking. This makes a small loaf (you could easily double the recipe and have it still fit into a 1 1/2 - 2 pound bread machine), and in my bread maker, I had to pull the bread out ten minutes before the cycle was done. Check the bread as you would any cake: stick a toothpick or skewer into it, and if it comes out pretty clean, with just a few damp crumbs on it, the bread is done.

If you don't have a bread maker, I would recommend putting all of of this into a food processor or blender because you really want the oats to be chopped up pretty fine to make the texture of this bread nice.

2 eggs
1/2 cup oil
1 1/3 cups grated zucchini (about two medium store-bought zucchini, or half of one of the forearm-sized specimens your friend's garden is producing this year)
2/3 cup sugar
1 cup flour
3/4 cup oats
1/4 cup corn meal
1 1/2 tsp. cinnamon
1 tsp. baking soda
3/4 tsp. baking powder
1/4 tsp. salt

If you're baking in a traditional oven, grease muffin tins or a small loaf pan, and pour in the well-blended batter. Bake at 350 degrees for as long as muffins/a small loaf usually takes in your oven. (This could be anywhere from 15-22 minutes for muffins, depending on their size all the way up to 50 minutes for a loaf.) Bread is done when it's a rich nutty brown, very fragrant, and the top looks set but still tender. Stick in a skewer at this point; if it comes out pretty clean, with just a few clinging crumbs, you're all set.

Whatever method you use, remove bread from pan immediately, and cool on a wire rack.

This makes an excellent variation if your garden is exploding with zucchini right now. I expect if you made a large batch, you could freeze some, as zucchini bread typically freezes well -- but around our house, we can't get this to last long enough to find out for sure. (Hence, the lack of photo. The entire loaf disappeared in one day.)

Have fun trying not to eat all of it in one sitting!

In Which I Take A Stand on Health Care

2009-08-03T12:05:00.001-04:00

When I was 13 weeks pregnant with my first child, I was teaching a summer course in Italy. One day at the Vatican, I was trailing at the end of our group, trying to make sure that the dawdling students (and how can you do anything but dawdle at the Vatican, when there's so much gorgeousness to see?) didn't get left behind by the very fast-paced leader of our tour. Busily ensuring we weren't leaving any students behind, I quickly got very far behind. While zooming to catch up, I tripped over something, went completely Superman airborne, and then crashed onto the marble terrace so hard that it knocked the wind out of me. Of course, my group was already so far ahead that no one noticed -- and they had divided in half to go to two different locations, so no one would notice I was missing, since each group would assume I was with the other. Gasping for breath, aching, and panicky, I rolled over and tried to sit up but could not. Some very nice Spanish tourists stopped to help me, and as we eventually walked slowly to the first aid station, my broken Spanish and their broken English managed to converge around the mutual understanding that I was pregnant and deeply concerned that I'd hurt the baby.

Within a few minutes of talking to the nurse on call, I was being escorted into an ambulance (which I didn't expect). A grandfatherly doctor who spoke no English was apprised of my situation, and for the entire ride to the hospital, he patted my hand and murmured gently to me in words I could not translate but which were clearly meant to be reassuring. The ambulance jolted over cobbled streets, siren wailing, and soon I found myself in the institutional-green hallways of a Roman hospital, stretched on a gurney, and trying to rest and calm myself until the doctors in OB could see me. See me they did. A very kindly female doctor gave me a complete exam and an ultrasound. The first strains of my child's heartbeat, thump-thumping strong over the monitor, finally quelled my panic and made me forget my already aching ribs and my developing bruises. The doctor told me everything would be just fine, handed me two small ultrasound pictures, and sternly forbade me to do anything for the remainder of the day but take to my bed.

Grateful for good news, I was only worried about one more thing. Where, I asked in a timid voice, where did I go to pay? The doctor looked at me confused. Was this a bill? I wanted to know of the blue sheet printed all in Italian that has issued from their computer. Where was the office to pay the bill?

The doctor finally understood what I was getting at, straightened her shoulders a little proudly. "Oh no," she said in heavily accented English as she waved me off, "not in I-taly."

And that was that. I took the bus back to my (bed-bug-infested) hostel, climbed into bed, and told no one what had happened. For the next few days, I walked more slowly, was extremely careful not to jostle my very tender midsection, and breathed serenely at the thought that the little life I was carrying was going to be just fine.

I have not read the current health care bill (all 1300+ pages), but here's what I do know: in a country without a national health care system, an ambulance ride, emergency visit with a hospital OB, and an ultrasound would have cost me many thousands of dollars. If I had been an Italian in the United States? The bill would probably have topped $10,000.

I know that people here who have pre-existing conditions will have to spend thousands of dollars each month on health insurance, if they can get insurance at all.

I know that there are millions of uninsured children in the United States (the last figure I can find quoted on a reliable website is 8.1 million, which is 1 in 9 children).

According to the last government data available (from 2007), nearly 46 million people in the US have no health insurance.

I know that many people without insurance cannot afford preventative care (like vaccines), and often avoid going to the doctor at all until the situation is desperate, in which case they are far more likely to end up in the ER and/or needing treatments much more expensive than either preventive care or timely doctor visits would have cost.

I know that hospital expenses are absurdly high, and the current system doesn't help matters. Because hospitals cannot turn away emergent cases on the grounds that people can't pay (read: if you show up with a compound fracture from a car accident, they are bound to fix your leg regardless of your insurance), the people who can pay are charged more. (This is not the only reason for absurdly high hospital costs, but it is an important one, I think we need to remember.)

I know that we spend huge amounts of money in this country on expensive tests and treatments that have a very small likelihood of succeeding, but doctors order them anyway because the way the system is structured, the financial incentives are greatest for trying anything and everything rather than curing people quickly. (Read: doctors make more money the more procedures they try, rather than getting a bonus for curing you.) This is not at all meant to imply that doctors don't try to cure patients as efficiently as possible, but rather to say that a system that has an incentive built into it to try even very expensive treatments that are very unlikely to work, rather than an barrier to authorizing such folly, is a problematic system.

I know that people who lose their jobs through no fault of their own also lose their health insurance -- at the very time when they can least afford the expense of an unexpected health emergency because, um, they just lost their jobs. And then, of course, when they find new jobs, they may find that they are not eligible for coverage through their new employers because now that thing that was being managed quite well, thank you, by their previous doctors and insurance (say, a pregnancy halfway through, or an asthma that needs regular inhalers) is suddenly a pre-existing condition.

I know that a system in which my insurance has negotiated a rate for a routine hospital stay (such as labor and delivery) that is 1/4 of what the actual bill says -- and therefore 1/4 of what someone without insurance would pay -- is absurd and criminal. Why should the bill be different for me and for the woman in the next room?

I know that I am one of the lucky ones. I have a secure job that comes with a great and extremely affordable health care plan.

I know that if a national health care plan is passed, the costs of my health care will certainly rise because right now, they are artificially low as this benefit is part of my compensation package (like salary and other benefits).

I know that if a national health care plan is passed, my taxes will probably rise, since something needs to give if all the people currently denied health care in this country are to have access to it.

But I also know that I am somewhat ashamed that I benefit while others suffer because we live in the only first-world country on the planet that does not consider the accessibility of health care to be a basic human right.

I know that I am horrified when I hear stories of people whose children's illnesses bankrupted their family.

I know that something must change.

I do not know if the current health care bill has all the answers, and somehow I doubt it does, since I would imagine that an overhaul of our current bureaucratic system will take more than one try.

But it is a start. And we must have a start.

Because every single day, and every time my kids get strep throat, or fall on the playground and might have broken their wrists but turn out not to--and I can be sure of that because they got x-rays within hours of the fall, or get their teeth cleaned or their eyes checked, or get vaccinated, or have a dresser fall on them and need to be examined for internal injuries...and I get to see a doctor that very same day because I have insurance...I am thankful that I am one of the lucky ones.

And I mourn for those who are not so fortunate.

My taxes will go up. It will cost me, personally, more. But I passionately believe we must have a national health care system.

Because I feel that among the privileges of living in one of the richest nations on earth comes the obligation to be sure that those among us who are not the richest never have to watch a child die from something preventable because they were afraid the rest of the family would not be able to eat after the hospital bill was paid.

It needs to be a system carefully devised and executed. It needs to be a system that will actually work as intended. It needs to be a system in which health care is not a condition of employment and in which pre-existing conditions do not make you ineligible for care. It needs to be a system that I am not well-informed enough to design, but that I am willing to pay for.

Because, quite honestly, it is morally problematic that anyone should be able to write, as I do:

I am one of the lucky ones.

Being healthy should not be a matter of luck.

The Humble Peach

2009-07-29T20:01:00.007-04:00

Do you remember the summer of the perfect pie?

We laughed and cooked in your parents' kitchen, an enormous meal for extended family who had congregated for your upcoming wedding. We were to meet the groom's parents for the first time. That afternoon, we had chosen peaches heavy with fragrance, artistically painted by the sun with a swath of deepest red that faded to a pale tangerine. But with peaches, looks can be deceiving, and so we were prepared merely for pie. We did not expect perfection. As they emerged from the scalding pot, and we slipped off their skins, the astonishing brilliance of their glossy flesh, firm and slippery, tempted us to a taste. Juice running down our arms, we could hardly believe there had ever been better peaches in the history of the world. In the far-too-hot kitchen, we blanched pounds of peaches, marveling over their ripe weight, their astonishing satin fruitfulness, their toothsome yielding to our many many tastes. In the far-too-hot kitchen, we laughed at our own exquisite stickiness. And we made pies. A row of lush, crystalline odes to the golden days of summer and the jubilance of youth.

Do you remember the backyard open house?

It happened in my thirteenth summer. John sat in his shirt-sleeves in the shade, his ageless face peering intently at the heavy metal crank he turned. Was he 65 or 80? We never knew. Teresa emerged from the house bringing him more ice and rock salt and sweet tea. We, the children of the neighborhood, gathered around strangely quiet. Our coltish legs and incessant movements were stilled by the solemn sight of confection in the making. "I think we're 'bout ready," John said, his voice gruff and low. And Teresa brought the peaches, chopped small, and poured them into the vat John was churning. How many hours had it taken her to peel and chop those peaches? The question did not cross our minds. Instead we simply watched, anticipating the moment when John would pronounce the ice cream finished. And then we ate. Deep bowls, bowls that could be refilled as many times as we liked. Bowls and bowls and bowls and bowls of sweet cream softly frozen into perfect peaks and punctuated with plump tree-ripened fruit. Later, when the street lights came on and the June bugs congregated in the puddles of brightness, we leaned on the hood of the car and watched the sparkles in the asphalt twinkle like stars. The lightning bugs filled the trees, and the hum of your voice filled my head, and I realized that peach ice cream and longing tasted identical.

Do you remember your son's first peach?

We had walked over The Farm, and you had pointed out the packing shed where you once spent long late-summer days, and the fields--now houses--that had held your family's groves. You told me your father had kept himself a "little piece" of land, just ten acres, and that he still had a few fruit trees. "But they're mostly peaches," you said with some contempt. I could hardly believe that you did not like peaches, but the fuzz, you said, the fuzz used to get so thick in the packing shed that sometimes you had to wear a mask. All that fuzzy furry skin...to this day, you didn't want to touch it. And so, I waited until you were preoccupied, and I quietly went out to the trees nearest the house to choose some peaches. Enormous fragrant globes, paler than I'd expected, but promised to be ripe, hung silent, waiting. I made my choices slowly, carried them inside. And when I cut into them, I felt foolish for mistrusting a farmer's word on the ripeness of his fruit. Your son and I sat, juices running down our chins, grinning at each other, and eating peach after peach at the table where you'd grown up. Satiated at last, he looked at me and chortled as only babies can. And so I mashed him one more bite of golden summer and we shared a glimpse into your childhood.

Do you remember the wretched cobbler?

Bitter beyond belief, it was ruined by a mis-read recipe. All the promise of seven sweet peaches, all the anticipation of an afternoon, dissolved on the very first bite. "I was going to take one for the team," you told me, "and try to finish mine. But I don't think I can." Of course you could not. It was inedible. "I cut up the butter," our son said, "and sprinkled the sugar." Our daughter piped up, "I poured the milk." And my deep disappointment also began to dissolve. We three, so intently fixed on making our family dessert, had stirred and spread, tasted and collaborated, breathing deeply the aroma of a sticky summer afternoon. "I don't want to eat this cake," said our daughter. "You don't have to eat it, darlin'," I told her, "it's terrible cake." I looked ruefully at the dish of cobbler, and then up at you, "I wouldn't feed this to pigs," I said. And as I scooped her more ice cream instead, you smiled sympathetically at me and replied, "Oh, sweetie, I would give this to pigs." Hooting with laughter, I picked out a slice of still-warm peach to eat with my ice cream.

Did you know?

Peaches are the taste of love.

The Real Question: Who Will Tie-Dye Whom?

2009-07-28T08:01:00.002-04:00

You may think, if you contemplate a tie-dye project with your preschoolers, that the obvious question is "what should we tie-dye today?" but I am here to tell you the truth. Because the fact of the matter is that what to tie-dye is pretty obvious: t-shirts are the simplest (though you should do the extra five minutes of work to buy 100% cotton ones, since they will take the dye much better than the cotton/polyester blend ones). I suggest that you get more t-shirts than one per child, or be prepared to let your kids do one each for the grown-ups in the family, or think creatively about what else you might be willing to sacrifice to Ganja Fashion, since the process of dyeing one shirt is too fast to satisfy the degree of anticipation leading up to it.

When to tie-dye is also easy to answer: whenever you need an excellent distraction for your three-year-old to keep her from messing with all the tiny orange bandaids plastered over her torso to cover up the skin treatment effected by the pediatrician that morning. Or any time you are hankering to clean up endless amounts of highly-staining product from every available horizontal and vertical surface in your kitchen/bathroom. Duh.

How to tie-dye is easy or complex, depending on your skill level and patience. You can find tons of great information about twists and dyeing methods here. Given children's desire just to squirt vast amounts of dye at fabric willy nilly, however, I am of the opinion that a few basic folds/twists/rubber band methods is all you need.

With what dye to tie-dye is controversial. (Who knew?) There are the fabric dying purists who will tell you that Rit and other brands of cheap and easily accessible dye will not really "stick" permanently to your fabric without boiling the garments in the dye for a solid 3o minutes, and even then will be prone to fading. Of course, you can boil the t-shirts for half an hour if you want. But that sort of negates the kid value of the project, since allowing small children to use long wooden paddles to stir clothes in large boiling vats pretty much went out of fashion with the advent of the washing machine. Not to mention the fact that the boiling pot method only allows you to dye a shirt with one color -- and what kid do you know who will be happy with that?

The purists thus recommend ordering "real" cold-water dyes online from specialty shops, so that the children can have a party of squirting many colored dyes at t-shirts. But that kind of ordering takes much longer than is permissible if you've been promising a tie-dye project to your five year old for two weeks and really MUST make good on it this morning. And quite frankly, if you're not planning to stock a new Etsy shop full of fabulous tie-dyed creations, I'm pretty sure the cheap "Groovy Tie-Dye Kits" at craft stores (on sale for $6.99!) are just fine for your purposes. (Sorry, purists.)

So that's what we bought yesterday morning. And we did okay by our t-shirts, if I do say so myself.

The best question to ask of any tie-dye project, then, is: who will tie-dye whom, and where? Daughter started it off by unceremoniously plunking her compactly coiled t-shirt into a bowl of her favorite dye and effectively splashing Son's chest with boiling hot pink spots. Then Son managed to dribble something onto his chair and dye a nice blue streak down his knee. Then Daugher leaned into the table while making Daddy's shirt and covered her whole naked belly with blue and green. Then Mama's glove leaked and produced two magenta fingertips. Then Daughter's thoroughly dyed hands left a perfect green fingerprint on the bridge of her nose. We washed and scrubbed, showered and lathered, but apparently even the cheap "will hardly stick to your fabric" versions of dye do an incredibly good job of staining skin.

Hence, my children will be heading to daycare this morning proudly sporting their new shirts. And I will have to make my excuses for the bruise-like amoebas decorating vast swaths of their bodies. (Here's a tip: instead of thinking that asking them to take off their good shirts is a great idea because they won't accidentally dye them, try asking them to put on a painting smock so that they don't dye their skin.)

And if you've made it this far in this post, I can offer you a bonus tip that has nothing to do with crafting or messes. If you have a hard time remembering when to use who or whom in a sentence, just remember the key question here: Who will tie-dye whom? Who is always the subject of a sentence or clause. Whom is always the object. The easiest way to remember this is that you use who anywhere you would use he or she, and you use whom anywhere you would use him or her. He would tie-dye her, or she would tie-dye him, but him would not tie-dye she. Get it?

Just don't go thinking that at your house no one would tie-dye him or her because that is a fantasy that is simply incompatible with putting dye into the hands of any little he or she in your house.

A Luddite Walks into a Conference...

2009-07-26T10:26:00.009-04:00

I took exactly seven photos at BlogHer this past weekend. Two of them were of me with Frankie, the mascot from the online gaming world called JumpStart, because I thought such a picture would tickle my son. Two more contain me sporting my trademark Most Unphotogenic Human on the Planet face, which involves half-closed eyes and a half-open mouth and an awkward stance halfway between a pounce and a faint. For the rest of the weekend, despite the leaden weight of the bag on my shoulder, I kept forgetting to pull out my camera. So this won't be a post full of pictures of grinning people in tiaras (yes, there were tiaras).

Also? I went to BlogHer without my laptop.

I do not own a Blackberry or any device that starts with i and ends with Phone.

As a result, I sent precisely one tweet the entire time I was in Chicago. (Thanks, roomie, for letting me jump on your computer!)

I did learn how to text people. Sort of. Nearly all of my messages were some version of "Where are u?" or a garbled answer to that question, as in "i cant come into book panejkj l where r u" -- because of course my cell phone does not have a letter keypad, and it was not until I was in the airport on the way home that I figured out where the "backspace" button was, so any mistakes I made while texting simply stayed in the messages. Also, I didn't figure out how to add punctuation until I was waiting for the interminable delays of my home-bound flight to be over.

Hence I texted questions like: "call me after ok" and simply hoped the recipient could read my mind rather than my text and understand that I was not issuing a royal command.

So, I am a blogger who went to a blogging conference at a schmancy hotel with wifi everywhere*, and I basically spent the entire weekend as un-wired as if I'd gone camping (plus indoor plumbing and really really nice beds).

And let me tell you: It was fabulous.

Instead of being all bloggery, I talked myself hoarse. I came home last night with a scratchy voice and a dozen new reusable faux-canvas shopping totes**, bouyed rather than tired from the incessant conversation.

The only thing I regret is that my plane home was late, and I could have stayed in the hotel lobby and talked some more, and met a few more of the people I was hoping to run into but never did, before I dashed off to the airport.

Here's what happens at a blogging conference: there are panels, some of which are thought-provoking, others informative, others deeply moving. But in between and around those panels, and sometimes in place of them, you meet people. People whose faces you have up until now had to invent and whose voices you have only imagined. You are swooped up into the strong-armed hugs of women whose writing you adore. You have quiet chats with people who swear they are nearly incapacitated by social anxiety, and you want to never stop talking to them because they are so real, so sincere, so friendly, even though they are famous and you are anything but.

You laugh. A lot. You sit up until three o'clock in the morning laughing and only go to bed because all the lights are coming on in the bar.

You talk. You cannot stop talking. You talk with people who sort of feel like old friends whose life stories you know but who also feel a little like first dates with the most desirable single guy in high school. It is incredible the grinning high you feel over the simple act of sitting across the table from someone you've had a writing crush on for months (or years) and talking.

You meet new people whose blogs now glimmer on the edges of your mind like a shelf of carefully chosen but still unread new books. You already know the cadence of their voices; now you will get to lunch on their prose.

I know there are some stories from the weekend worth telling -- ones that involve chocolate fountains, green paper bracelets, random encounters with potato chips, and promises to run a remote Iron Chef competition.

But for right now, I simply want to celebrate the sense of community, the exhilarating exhaustion that is friendship forged over the internet and solidified in a marathon of conversation. Everyone who makes a connection online should be so lucky as to be able to hug those people in person.

* a debatable assertion in that the wifi didn't work very well, and was clearly not equipped to handle 1800 people all trying to send Twitter messages over the network at the exact same moment

** yes, it is true that there is vast amounts of "swag" (free stuff) being thrown around; it is equally true that at least half of it is product placement, and another quarter of it is in such limited quantities that it's only available to those willing to leap over less agile members of the crowd to get it; that is not me. I came home with a small pile of kid toys and a giant pile of reusable shopping bags, which I call awesome.

To Do List

2009-07-22T16:32:00.006-04:00

Hem skirt (because I didn't buy this dress)

Grade student response papers (12 papers x 11 students = many hours of reading and commenting)

Locate everything the kids need to take to preschool tomorrow and Friday

Charge cell phone

Make local arrangements for wedding we're all going to in two weeks

Transcribe cell phone numbers for and/or make lists of all the people I'm dying to see in Chicago
(the list is much much longer, but I ran out of words to link)

Comment on a thesis chapter

Pick up kids

Cook them dinner

Snuggle them outrageously during bedtime to make up for missing the coming two nights of bedtime

Pack

Get on a plane with her

Walk into rooms full of hundreds of people I've never met in person, hug them, and grin a lot

If you're going to be in Chicago this weekend, and I should be keeping my eyes peeled for you, leave me a comment. (Hint: I only have a lobby pass, so I won't be at any panels.) If you aren't going to The Conference That Shall Not Be Named and wish you were, just know that I was you last year, and I will miss you and wish you were there too. If you aren't going and are sick of hearing about it already, I apologize and promise not to be all gushy-gushy for days.

But for just a minute? Indulge me. How often in this life do we get a chance to step a little out of our comfort zones with a really good chance of coming away from the experience with some really good friends who don't only reside in our computers (though such friends can be invaluable) but who are huggable, real people with infectious laughs that we can now identify?

Not too often. I feel very very lucky.

And a little panicked.

Because those papers aren't going to grade themselves, and my plane leaves in a mere 18 hours...