54 posts tagged “the kid”

A conversation in the car today:

Son:  Do Liopleurodons have gills?

Me:  No, honey.  Liopleurodons aren't fish.

Son:  I know that.  They do, however, have gills.

Me (trying hard not to laugh):  Well, no, you know they're reptiles.  They have to breathe.

Son:  Yes.  But they have gills.  Well, only the males have gills.  The females don't have gills.  Males are always more fancy.  They have gills on their hips.

...Sorry, I just had to write this down somewhere.  I love when he uses "however."  What the heck kind of 4-year-old talks this way?  Why are gills considered "fancy"?  Why on their hips?  By the end of this, I was really struggling not to laugh.  He doesn't appreciate being laughed at when he's being scientific, though.  It didn't help that shortly after this conversation, he wanted to sing that Sammy Davis, Jr., song "Candyman," and he suggested we sing it together by saying to me, "You be the men part, and I'll be the ladies part."  He then sang the part of the backup singers in an *extremely* high-pitched voice, at times coming dangerously close to what one might call a shriek.  God, I love the way he talks.  I've been videotaping him a lot lately, trying to just capture his normal speaking, because it's incredibly awesome.  Four years old is such a great age.  I keep telling my husband that I wish we could keep a copy of him at this age that would never grow up; the real him could go on growing, but we'd just have this one copy around who could go on wild tangents about gills forever.  *sigh*

On a related note, I've always wondered why males of the human species aren't the fancier sex.  Unless by "fancy" we simply mean, "not soaked in leaking breast milk."  In which case, I guess they are pretty fancy.

Normally, we're not busy people in the sense of having stuff to do outside the house.  My husband works and has a two-hour commute, so he's out of the house a lot, but because we only have one car and also just because of the sort of people we are, my son and I are home a lot.  Just home, doing our thing.  We make play-dough and cook lunch and hang out with the dogs and about as exciting as most of our days gets is taking a nice walk to the post office with grandma (my mom). 

Lately, though, there's been this flurry of activity.  For one thing, the school here started a preschool program for 3-year-olds.  It's just twice a week, for an hour and a half each time, but it's big for my son.  He loves going there and having other kids to play with.  I'm guessing they don't lecture him on the evils of wasting food.   He also takes a tumbling class once a week now that we have to drive into "town" (the nearest city, about 50 miles away).  It's been so good for him to start to get out.  He loves me a lot, and I love him, but being home with mom all the time has got to be freakin boring.  So, he's happy.

I've heard a lot of people say that kids with stay-at-home moms have a hard time adjusting to being away from their moms, that they get clingy and needy when they have to go off to preschool.  That has not been our experience.  Before he started preschool, he did go through some times when he was scared and sad about it, but the first day, he walked into class and said, "Mama, all the kids are here!"  He never even looked back to watch me leave, man.  The little traitor.  No, I'm just kidding.  I'm glad. 

Then, I finally had my first prenatal visit (I know, it was long overdue).  At 14.2 weeks old and 8.25 cm, this kid is a feisty one.  Good lord.  I can already feel the kid doing somersaults and breakdances in there, and lo and behold, on the ultrasound, the doctor could hardly get a freeze frame to measure the kid in due to all the movement.  But, I am currently assuming that friskiness is a sign of good health, and there is a strong heartbeat and an obvious zest for amniotic fluid, so I think we're good.  Due May 20.  I'm not sure if intrauterine activity levels are a reliable indicator of postnatal rowdiness--with my son, there was a distinct correlation; in the womb, he seemed to never rest, and he has been resistant to things like naps since the day he was born--but I just have this feeling that we're in for another lively, rambunctious monkey around the house.

The same night I found myself watching Love Actually and crying and crying.  I am not normally a person who cries at Hugh Grant vehicles.  You're just going to have to take my word for it. 

And today we went to what may be the biggest social event of the year in our town:  The Turkey Shoot.  Much to my son's disappointment, this does not involve shooting actual turkeys.  The primary event at this is a shooting competition, and the prizes for the winners of each round are turkeys.  It's a fundraiser--for our local Lions Club, I think.  Anyway, there's also bingo and a pellet shooting contest for kids under 11 (kids 11 and over can shoot in the regular contest).  They raffle off a quilt.  There are hot dogs.  That kind of thing.  Last year, my husband, who likes shooting, was not able to attend because of his work schedule, but this year he came, and he was impressed by the very idea of shooting real guns with real bullets inside a building (the community center).  The guns were just .22 rifles, and they had some kind of stuff behind the targets to catch the bullets.  There were no accidents; nobody went crazy and started shooting people; nothing went awry.  Men and women alike competed, just like boys and girls competed against each other equally in the pellet shooting contest (my son actually shot in the pellet shooting contest, despite the fact that he couldn't hold the gun on his own.  He won a small prize for his trouble, which was more than enough to thrill him).  We won a turkey, although we won ours at a dice game.  My husband is a good shot, and in my opinion he should have won his second round, but I guess someone else's was a millimeter or so closer.  Whatever.  We got our turkey.

After the turkey shoot, we had to spend 10 minutes wetting my son's hair and taming it into place with the aid of "styling lotion" in order to dress him up in his suit and go get the Christmas card picture taken.  Once a year--another fundraiser, this time for the PTA--an excellent photographer comes into town and sets up shop in the elementary school cafeteria so everyone in town can get their Christmas card photos done.  And so approximately once a year, my son gets his hair combed.  We usually just let him walk around with bedhead, though we do keep his hair fairly short.  My son is such a ham in front of the camera, and the photographers love him and take about 20 pictures of him, and then I have a hard time deciding.  They're all so cute.  In one of them, he's got his one foot up on a little stool, and with his hand, he's straightening out the bottom of his vest with a kind of serious look on his face.  He looks just like a little gentleman.  I, of course, know that he's actually a hoodlum, but he hides it well.  Anyway, Christmas cards ordered.

Thankfully, tomorrow is a day of rest.  My husband does have to work, but not until 4 p.m., so we'll get all morning as a family to hang out in our PJs and maybe make some pancakes and bacon.  Delightful.    

I meant to write about something else tonight, but instead I'm going to talk about my dad and my childhood.

See, my husband and I started talking about my dad and my childhood tonight while our son was playing, and in talking about it, I came to think that my childhood was somewhat unusual, mostly during the time I spent with my dad, although having a Republican archaeologist and a vegetarian/Democrat anthropologist raising you is probably also somewhat unusual, but they strived to offer me normalcy.  They may not have quite got there, though.

What brought this up is that my husband asked me, upon seeing some security guards, if that was a well-paid position.  I said I didn't know, and then I went on to mention that my dad was a security guard for some years.  He was a security guard, specifically, for a Game & Fish museum in Little Rock, Arkansas.  As you can well imagine, there were not a lot of break-ins or other problems--apparently, no one wanted the stuffed trouts on display.  My dad used to take me with him to work in the summers, because our time together was so short and he felt he had to make up for lost time.  So, when I was about 9 and 10 years old, I would spend all night locked in a darkened museum with my just my dad and another security guard and lots of those vending machine cheese-n-crackers.  There wasn't really anyplace to sleep, so I would go around and check out the displays and push all the buttons on the ones that would tell a story or whatever.  My husband can now see clearly why I have such trouble with insomnia.

My dad had two other jobs at various times that he would take me with him to do.  First, he was a salesman of agricultural oils and greases.  I had no idea, really, that so many types of greases existed, but apparently different farming implements require different lubricants.  Some of them are fuchsia, for some odd reason.  My father was an amazing salesman.  He was one of those guys who loved to talk to people, loved to schmooze, and could make anyone feel like a close personal friend within minutes.  He could make virtually anyone trust him.  He could make you feel that, by golly, if you say I need the fuchsia grease, then I must really need the fuchsia grease.  It was amazing to watch.  He took me with him a lot on this job, so I spent a lot of the summer traveling around northern Arkansas listening to my dad sing "Battle of New Orleans" and "Blowin in the Wind" and even "Tennessee Stud" talking to farmers and eating Frito pie.  We also spent a lot of that time holed up in honky-tonks, taverns, and VFW bars.  I don't know if in Arkansas they still let kids into bars, but they did then, and I would sit with a glass of cold tomato juice listening to all these seemingly old men talk about the weather and sports. 

Then, later, my dad became a milkman.  Yes, he drove a truck around and delivered milk and other dairy products to people's homes.  Again, my dad got to use his salesmanship to win new customers and encourage Miss Polly down the road that she really needed a quart of ice cream this week.  I couldn't actually drive around in the truck with him, but he would come get me after he finished the deliveries to help him do inventory and then we went back to the office to do his books.  I did his books for him while he drank coffee and schmoozed.  He pointed out to every person in the room every single day that his daughter, who was only 11, was doing his books for him because she was so smart, so smart that she could get them done faster than anyone else.  It was true that I usually got them done faster than anyone else, but that's probably because I did less coffee drinking and schmoozing.  It felt pretty good to hear my dad brag about me that way, and afterwards we'd often head out to either a Waffle House or another bar.

There was one summer when my dad bought a pool hall (a bar with a lot of pool tables) that was in this ancient building in Newport, Arkansas.  There was an old and probaby condemned hotel on the second floor, and that's where we lived.  He was married that summer to some bar chippie (I had no fondness for the woman), and she had her four kids with her, so we all lived in this 100-year-old hotel we were convinced was haunted.  That's the summer his drinking really got out of hand, and he failed to pay the electric bill or the water bill, and we kids had to take turns hauling water.  It wasn't a great summer.  He really made an effort to keep the drinking somewhat under control while I was there, but that summer he just couldn't, I guess. 

The thing is, I loved all those times with my dad.  I loved spending all night with stuffed deer.  I loved all the Frito pies and Johnny Cash songs.  I loved driving all over northern Arkansas schmoozing farmers.  I loved the VFW bars.  All of it.  My dad was a funny man, always with a joke and a wink, always with a silly song.  He would also get really quiet and scary sometimes, but that isn't the part I want to remember and so mostly I have decided not to.

Then I'd go home, back to New Mexico, and there would be much consternation.  My mom doesn't actually consider Frito pie to be a balanced meal nor Dr. Pepper an adequate substitute for water.  But, while my mother always provided me with a healthful diet, things weren't exactly normal.

My mom went back to college when she was 30, and I was 7.  To go to college and raise me, she took classes (pre-med at the time) full time and also worked full time on the graveyard shift (interestingly, she worked at White Sands Missile Range doing something with computers, and she was involved in some missile testing which I thought was tremendously cool at the time).  She didn't sleep.  She wasn't home much, either, given all that.  She would talk to me in her sleep or half sleep and often call me by the names of her coworkers instead of my own.  She would sometimes find a way to both study and spend time with me by reading to me out of her textbooks.  I would curl up next to her and listen to her read about zoology and microbiology and toxicology and gawk at the pictures of flagella and such.  Not exactly written for kids, those things.

Then my stepdad came along, and he is significantly younger than my mom (9 years to be exact) so he was just a pup, very much still interested in partying his way through college.  And he did.  We did.  Many of the parties were actually at our house, and I would hang around and make chit-chat with all these college students while pouring them beer out of a keg.  I wasn't allowed to stay up past my bedtime or drink any beer or anything terrible like that, and to me, looking back, the most remarkable thing about it is that all those college students would make time at a party to talk to a 9-year-old girl.  Sure, I was conversant in microbiology, but still.  They didn't just make time for it, they actually liked me.  I still see many of them, and they still feel like surrogate aunts and uncles to me.  They cared about me and talked to me like a person instead of segregating me with other children (though to be honest, there were no other children; all my parents' friends were much younger than my mom, and none of them had any kids yet). 

All of this is just to say that I think a lot of our ideas about what kids need and what a normal, good childhood is are overly narrow.  All kids have different personalities and needs, but the life I had suited me just fine, even though I'm pretty sure the authorities would not have liked it much.  That's also why I think our education system just has the wrong idea in forcing children to spend so much of their time sequestered with those their own age and level.  I learned so much more from my interactions with adults than I ever did in school.  Namely, I learned how to talk and act like an adult.  Eventually that translated to being an adult and having some idea of what that entailed.  I also learned a lot from my mom reading books that were way over my head to me, especially because I would ask questions about the pictures (mostly) and she would take the time to answer them, even though an 8-year-old is hardly expected to understand microscopic organisms.

For sure, this is informing the way we raise our son.  I read him books and explain concepts to him that are clearly way over his head--anything he asks about from how clouds make rain or why clouds are white to (with John's help!) why magma is hot.  We take him on trips whenever we can, even if it's just driving around to look at old farm equipment that likely needs lubrication.  I had heard that kids can be so inflexible, but ours isn't so he fits right in.  He's lived in three states so far (New Mexico, Alaska, and Idaho) and knows that he has connections to Japan.  I don't want him to ever know what it's like to have a parent who lets your water get shut off or to spend too much time sitting around a keg, but I want him to know what all is out there, to know how big and full the world is and all the things that can happen in it. 

The other day he was jumping on the couch and he shouted, "I love to live a crazy life!"  That's good, because that's more than likely what he'll get.  Our life right now, in this town, isn't especially crazy (although, like me, he has a mom who works at night and is often very tired--I don't work full time at night, though, thank god), but it won't stay that way forever. 

A conversation yesterday between me and my son, age 3.5.

(...while hugging each other...)

Son:  Mama, you're crushing me!

Me:  I have to.

Son:  Why?

Me:  I'm trying to push all the love from my heart into yours.  All my love for you is in my heart, and I have to hug you tight to push it into yours.

Son:  (pensively touching my sternum)  Oh...hmmm.

Me:  Do you understand?

Son:  Well, yes. 

Me:  And?  Did I push all the love from my heart into yours?  Is all of mama's love in your heart now?

Son:  (pensively touching own sternum)  Yes!

Me:  And what does it feel like?

Son:  Tentacles.

...I do not hesitate to note that this is not quite the answer I was hoping for...

What is something that can always make you feel better?
Submitted by meehshell

Well, I suppose there are several things, but the one thing that's really working right now is the Stoddard Creek Campground.  Some days, I just can't stand any more time in the kitchen, and I have to get out.  But we're broke.  Right now, in fact, we're really broke.  So, going out to eat isn't really an option.  Instead, I parboil some potatoes (from our garden, multicolored).  Then we pack up the cooler with the potatoes and whatever other veggies we get from the garden that have been tossed in olive oil and salt, some kind of protein, and some beverages, and we head for the hills.  Sometimes we go fishing before dinner at nearby Beaver Creek; sometimes we just go there and start our fire and run around trying to catch chipmunks while the coals are heating up.  Sometimes we take along beer and potato chips, if we've got 'em, and a big jar of pickles and a tomato ripe from the vine that we liberally douse with salt, and we snack our way through the ritualistic building of fire.  It all works.  Then we eat, and we know the smoke is supposed to be carcinogenic, but fuck it.  Last time we went, when we got there, there were 6 or 7 deer grazing on the hill right behind the campground, 3 of which were still-spotted fawns.  The time before that, we sat around talking and watching the fire for so long that it got dark, and we watched with real gratitude and awe as a giant, full, pumpkin moon rose over the mountains. 

Yep, some days, you just have to get out of the damned kitchen. 

Oh, which reminds me.  Have you all seen that fucking paper-plate commercial where the woman says, "I want a paper plate that's as strong as I am."  I am so sick of that bitch.  Way to totally trivialize yourself, by comparing your strength to that of a paper plate.  You know, there is no paper plate on earth that's as strong as I am, nor will there ever be.  Possibly that is why we do not purchase or use paper plates.  Then she goes on to say, "and I'm proud to use whatever brand of paper product if it means fewer dishes and spending more time with my family."  She makes me want to punch the TV.

What do we use when we go to the campground to eat, if not paper?  Obviously, we have purchased a set of plastic plates and bowls for the purpose.  They're real plates and bowls, just plastic.  We take however many we need; when we get home, we scrape the leftovers into the garbage and put the plates into the dishwasher.  We just take along our normal cutlery, because it is not breakable and we figure we are alert enough to make sure it all comes home.  This isn't hard. 

I've been thinking lately about how things that are not hard seem hard until you start doing them and get the habit.  This occurred to me the other day as I was making salad dressing.  I didn't always make my own salad dressings.  I am not sure quite how or why I started doing it, even, although it was probably some combination of urging from Alton Brown and Mark Bittman and running out of store-bought at an inopportune moment.  And I just started doing it, and now I do it every time we have salad.  I make a new salad dressing pretty much every time we have salad, just making enough for that night's salad, even though I could make a batch and keep it for a while.  The other night I made a salad of smoked (smoked by us, no less!) salmon, poached egg, arugula, and tomato, and I topped this with a creamy lemon dressing, and it was brilliant.  I can remember back to a time when I felt sure that the additional time it would take to make the dressing would just be a hassle and impossible to fit in, but it's not, once you get the habit.  It takes time to really get the habit, but once you do, it's just there, part of the routine.

I can remember, too, when I first started canning.  I started with jam--marmalade, to be precise, and it started because of a particularly wonderful cookbook, The French Farmhouse Cookbook.  The whole Farmhouse series (there are 3:  Farmhouse, French Farmhouse, and Italian Farmhouse, and I have them all) is fantastic, and my copies are all splattered and dog-eared, and much loved.  Anyway, they all have some recipes in them for jams and other preserved foods, since that is a typical part of the farmhouse cook's routine.  The French Farmhouse Cookbook, indeed, has a recipe for orange marmalade that intrigued me.  I love orange marmalade, but a lot of commercial marmalades disappoint.  She made it sound pretty easy in the cookbook, so I thought I'd give it a whirl.  I made that, and then the orange-lemon marmalade.  Then I made the Basque-style plum-vanilla jam.  And the rhubarb-raspberry.  All from the same cookbook.  And then, once you start, the store jams just don't taste very good anymore.  You can taste their deficiencies, that you could never taste before, just by comparison to the real, amazing deal.  So, you won't settle for them anymore, so the next summer (well, now I do orange and orange-lemon during winter, since citrus is in season and cheaper then--we most certainly do not grow our own citrus here in Idaho) you just do it again, because of that hankering for the goodness.  You do it often enough, it gets to be a habit.

I don't remember exactly when I started in on the pickles.  I do remember that once I had the canning bug, my mom gave me her old canning cookbook.  It's the Farm Journal cookbook from the early 1960s.  It's kind of hilarious, in the way that books aimed at housewives in the 1950s and '60s are.  But it's also full of pickle recipes (it's also full of fucking bizarre recipes, in the way that cookbooks from that time period are:  "salads" that consist primarily of mayonnaise and canned mandarin oranges, for example.  Lots of molded Jell-O things, too, of course.  It's also funny in that it implies that zucchini is still mainly a vegetable grown and enjoyed by Californians and Italians.  Oh, those wacky Californians!), and I think my first attempt was beets.  I never liked beets until I learned how to pickle them myself.  I always thought those tinny, unspiced things you get in the store were "pickled beets," but it always seemed to me that the beet had potential to be great.  And it certainly does.  I've played around with my beet pickles and found a couple of pickling methods that I like.  One adds the traditional cinnamon and clove to the vinegar solution.  The other, and I made this one up, is pickled and flavored with fennel instead.  I sliced fennel bulbs and Chioggia beets up last year to make a really pretty little salad pickle or pickle salad, and it was tasty.  This year I'll probably do it with golden beets instead of Chioggia, since the Chioggia beets lost some of their stripes in processing.  I'll save the Chioggias for applications where their colors are shown off to better effect.

The next habit I'm going to try to acquire is making more of my own soaps and shampoos and stuff like that.  After that, I'll be moving on to cheese-making.  I've already started making my own laundry soap and most of my own household cleaning supplies; why not shampoo?  And I believe Barbara Kingsolver completely when she says that cheesemaking can fit into your normal routine.  I feel sure of this, because I have already acquired other habits that I felt sure I would never have time for.  It is true that now any time I am watching TV, I am also doing something else:  chopping onions for relish, pitting cherries, pulling dill seeds off their heads.  But that's alright.  If you're going to sit on your ass and drool over Bear Grylls anyway, you may as well be doing something constructive with your hands.

Anyway, you get the habit, or I do, and then you want to do more.  I make chokecherry jelly or syrup more years than not, since chokecherries are so plentiful around here.  This year, I had some wild raspberries (or, probably, thimbleberries) sitting in the fridge from our last picking excursion, and I threw them in for a chokecherry-thimbleberry jam.  Something new, something delicious.  Today, admittedly, I did something odd even for me:  I dehydrated cucumbers.  I was surprised to find that in their dehydrated stated, they still taste cucumbery.  I will attempt rehydrating them tomorrow to see how well they fare in various applications:  in a gazpacho, in a curry, and possibly even in a raita.  If this works, I shall be very happy, because I get to missing cucumbers in the winter.  I am also dehydrating tomatoes tonight.  These ones will get ground up eventually to a tomato powder, which then serves as an excellent thickener of sauces and stews, much like tomato paste, only without the boiling down and canning processes.

You get these habits and routines and make them part of your life, and then you want to learn more.  My forays into pickledom have now taken me to a place where I find myself reading up on molarity and buffering as they apply to pH levels in pickled vegetables.  My diddling around with wild plants led to research on traditional medicinal applications for those plants, and now I'm making homemade cough remedies and fever-reducing teas (and, yes, I am quite aware of the potential dangers and am doing thorough research and taking all necessary precautions, etc.).  It's really remarkable how you get to be 34 years old with a Master's! Degree! and thinking you know a little something and then you find out that, really, you don't.  You have no idea what the fuck "molarity" is and why it should matter to your precious cucumbers, but it does, so you have to find out.  Despite the fact that I can discourse at length about Heidegger and Chomsky and the grammatical complexities of Navajo, I don't know shit.  Except that I know that I don't, so I think that's a good place to start.

I guess I went way off topic in this post, which is not unusual for me, but in a way it brought us full circle, didn't it?  The forest is a great place to go to remind yourself how little you know, especially if you take along a 3-year-old.  Frankly, I think our society would be a lot better off if more people realized how little they really know.

What does your flag mean to you?

It means it's my birthday.

Well, Flag Day means that anyway.  Seriously, what has Betsy Ross done for anyone lately?  Flag Day is all about me.

This year:  34.  White cake filled with peach jam and frosted with an almond buttercream (I made it) and generously sprinkled by the kid with star sprinkles.  Salmon cooked on the grill at my parents' house.  New Mexico sparkling wine of some sort.  Top Chef cookbook received and read cover to cover.   Husband's birthday is two days after mine (well, 2 days and 6 years); my parents gave him a gun.  Now, obviously, we are never moving back to Japan.  It's funny because my husband and I talked about him getting a tattoo, and he was all, "Oh, I can't get a tattoo because then I can't go in the public baths and hot springs because they'll think I'm a yakuza."  Sure, he can't get a tattoo, but he can get a gun?  WTF?

Anyway, it was good. 

Son,

You've reached the age where you're figuring out how to manipulate people by hurting them.  Specifically, when you're angry at me, you tell me you want to live with Grandma, and you want me to go away and so forth.

I will admit that the first few times, this caught me off guard.  For these three years, you have been a very sweet-natured and sensitive kid, always wanting everyone to be happy and never wanting to hurt anyone.  Except that thing you do to the dog.  Anyway.

The first few times, this hurt my feelings.  But I need you to remember a few things.  The most important of those things is that it is not my job to be fun all the time and spoil you.  That is your Grandma's job, and she's good at it.  While I always like it when we have fun playing together, my job is different.  My job, really, is to take care of you.  It is my job to make sure that your teeth are clean and healthy, that you get enough sleep and fluid intake.  That you know how to be polite and use cutlery.  That you learn how to read and do arithmetic and spell your name.  It is my  job to make sure you realize the vital importance of putting your goddamned shoes where they belong because if I trip over them one more time, you will be grounded for the rest of your life. 

It is also my job to wake up in the night if you have a nightmare or need someone to assist you on the potty.  To be there to hold and comfort you and apply copious amounts of Neosporin every time you fall down and cut yourself.  To provide you with your favorite fruits and to help you clean up when you spill the juice because you're just learning how to pour.  It is my job to be both there at all times to give you all the love and support and teaching and encouragement and, yes, discipline that you need to succeed in life and also to step off and let you figure out how to do things by yourself, who you are, and what you want out of life.

I promise you that I will do all of those things to the very best of my ability.  I promise that I will be here every night, with juice and huggles and an ear to listen to you.  I also promise you that, while it is never fun, I will lecture you and send you to your room when you do wrong, because--I know, I know, it sucks--you have to learn some things before you're really ready for public consumption.  This will always make Grandma seem like more fun and like the better of the two of us.  I have now accepted that.

In other words, kiddo, that's a button you can't push anymore.  I know Grandma is more fun.  That's her role.  Mine is a different role.  We'll go through this issue again, I'm sure, as we go through life.  Someday, perhaps, as I did when I was in high school, you'll have a friend whose mother is very persmissive and lets her children do things that we don't let you do.  And you'll hate us for it.  I know.  I remember.  In the end, though, I think you're going to find the pleasures of literacy and healthy teeth more than enough reward for all the deprivation of soda pop and the constant oppression via educational toys.  In other words, someday, you are likely to realize that, whatever our faults as parents, the cliche is true:  We do this shit because we care.  It isn't always a lot of fun for us, either, man.  But at the end of the day, we're your parents, this is our family, and we're the ones you will always roll your eyes at.  It's our shared lot in life. 

So, buck up, kid, because there is no way in hell you're getting more Chunky Monkey.  That's for mama.

Love and kisses,

Mama

What are your first thoughts upon waking?
Submitted by Cher Cabula.

What is this 43-pound weight on me?  Why does it thrash and holler so?  Why does it crush my kidneys?  And above all, why is it so bloody happy?  Good god, has anyone made coffee yet?  No?  Oh, for Christ's sake, do I have to do everything in this damn house?

Yeh.  I'm not a morning person.

So, my son, probably not unlike other 3-year-olds, has a habit of inventing new words.  Often these are mishmashes or mishearings of words he has heard in other contexts and just thought were interesting, and sometimes we just don't what the fuck he's talking about at all.  Many times he uses these invented or half-invented phrases as interjections and expletives. 

Today he came up with one that I cannot figure out.  It involves two words that I cannot think where he would have possibly heard them, let alone heard them used together.  It was this, shouted at high volume, repeatedly:

Yarmulke puta.

Where did he meet foul-mouthed Mexican Jews?  Can I meet them, too?  Is a yarmulke puta a special kind of puta for a very specialized clientele?  I'm baffled, but I assume it involves large quantities of Manischewitz and, quite probably, Adam Sandler. 

Holy swizzle sticks.  Last week it snowed.  Seriously.  Not a lot, but it did snow.  Today it was 85 degrees F (let's call it 30 degrees C, for you foreign communist types).  I shake my fist at the heavens. 

Oh, oh, first some good news:  I don't think I told you people, but I totally got a teaching job again.  I am adjunct faculty now.  Their plight is now mine!  I will be teaching medical transcription (yay?) and English for a Montana college.  I will work entirely online and entirely asynchronously so that I can do the work around my other schedules.  It's going to be so fantastic.

We got our "economic stimulus" money today, and it was...puzzling.  There are two adults in our household and one child, so we believed we would be getting $1500 ($600 per adult, $300 per child).  But we actually got $900.  Now, I realize it's stupid to complain about suddenly receiving $900, but we are puzzled as to whether I don't count for $600 because I only work part-time or if T doesn't count because he isn't a citizen (though he is a legal permanent resident, a full-time worker, and a taxpayer).  T thinks it's probably him because it isn't the first time that he hasn't counted for something since he came here.  We think the American immigration system is wack.  But anyway.

Oh, I have to make one comment (or possibly more) about Top Chef before I continue.  This week Antonia made the comment, and from the tone I am assuming she meant to disparage, that Dale only cooks "Asian food."  That's like insulting someone for only cooking "European food."  In fact, in this one episode he made a Japanese-ish salad and then a Vietnamese lunch.  I would venture that there is more difference in flavor profiles and ingredients between Japanese cooking and Vietnamese cooking than there is between Italian and French cooking.  Get over your Occidentalism, bitch.  Besides, in the last episode, Dale actually made a ragu that was one of the only things the judges liked on that team, and so far as I know, Italy is not in Asia.  Sorry, I just really hate it when people think that all "Asian food" is alike (or, worse, that all "Asian culture" is alike).  It really ruffles my feathers. 

OK, OK, onto the good stuff.  Hum de hoodle.  The weeds proliferate.  The weed problem here is never going to be really under control because we have two large fields that are entirely uncultivated and uncontrolled near us, and the seeds blow in from there.  But the number and tenacity of the weeds blows my mind every day.  Fortunately, we eat some of them (dandelions good), but today I pulled up a dandelion that had a taproot of roughly the same diameter as my wrist.  Obviously I didn't get all the taproot, which means it will come back, and when it does, I'm going to break out the big tools and get that taproot and roast it and drink a cup of Victory Chicory.  Yum.

My son is on a kick where he wants dandelion muffins all the time.  For those we use the flowers.  I pull all the petals out of their base and only use the yellow petals, then I just fold them into a regular muffin recipe, and they give a light honey-ish flavor to the muffins.  We like them a lot, and my son is a devoted picker of dandelions when he is offered muffins.  Later this season, I am going to make "poor man's capers" by pickling miscellaneous edible flower buds, and I have dandelion buds on the list.  If we keep picking the flowers now, we might actually have some flower buds again late enough in the season to try it, but we'll see.  I've heard the "poor man's capers" are quite good, and I do have a recipe of sorts, but I haven't made it in the past.  I'm growing a lot of edible flowers this year, so I should have a good variety to choose from, each with its own flavors, and then maybe I can choose a favorite.  It is unlikely that I will ever live in a climate where I can successfully grow real capers, and we can't afford them at the store, so I have my fingers crossed.

I'm finding myself somewhat baffled, also, by the sporadic germination going on in the beet and daikon areas.  I have about 8 daikon that are just growing like mad, and they're all clustered together in this one little section of their designated growing area.  Same with the beets.  I cannot for the life of me figure out why the other seeds around and near them are not germinating.  However, I am a big believer in Darwin, and I will keep seeds from these few, these proud, these survivors, because clearly these seeds have what it takes to survive the harsh conditions in which they find themselves.  I feel like I need to do a Stephen Colbert fist pump now.  I'll bet seeds are much happier in California.  Damn this weather.

Let's see.  My son keeps snacking on herbs before they've really had a chance to grow.  He is especially partial to sage and thyme, although the various mint plants are taking some hits, which is fine because you can't kill mint once it's there.  Raw, straight off the plant.  Am I the only one who finds this odd?

(In other good news, the kid is now entirely diaper free!  Yay!  It took a while to get him off the night diaper, but we let him set his own timeline and do it when he felt ready, and it's worked like a charm.  It's so cute when he wakes up all sleepy-eyed to go potty in the middle of the night and then demands a "huggle."  You can have a huggle anytime, kid.)

Operation Shubbery is also coming along grandly.  I don't know if I mentioned before, but when we bought this house, there was very little in the way of shrubbery or shade trees.  Our gigantic hounds promptly killed off the backyard grass, too.  And last summer we baked.  No shade, bare dirt, white house--our backyard was a fucking convection oven.  This year, we put rosa rugosa all along the south fence (that's where most of the wind comes from, and the roses should look good and offer some wind protection).  We also installed three baby trees--no, four.  Three paper birch and a black walnut, though they're all just one-year-old saplings right now.  Along the back of the house, we have put two rose bushes and two blueberry bushes and we're going to add one red-twig dogwood.  My husband has cut sod out of the places where we have the vegetables and the new flower beds and installed the sod in the backyard.  The dogs are sequestered in a portion of the yard.  They have shelter there and very nice shade, and when we are back there with them to mind that they keep out of the veggies patches and refrain from eating the rose bushes, we let them out to roam around the backyard, but so far the sod is living and looks good.  I am really hoping that between the grass, the new bushes (which are admittedly still small) and the sunflower forest we're going to plant, this year won't be quite so bakey back there.  It was truly intolerable last year.  Next year, we are going to put in several more lilacs.  For one thing, we need some screening in the front yard.  We live right across the street from the elementary school, and I often find myself groggily watering my rhubarb in pajamas and cursing at squirrels, and the kids don't need to see that.  For another thing, we need to screen that giant damned propane tank in the back yard.  We have one new lilac there this year, but we really need two to properly screen it so that we can enjoy our flower beds and corn field without having to look at that hulking sign of dependence on fossil fuels that are not only unsustainable but also originate largely in countries whose governments I don't particularly wish to support.  God, I hate the propane.  I love that my cook stove is gas, yes, because electric stoves are stupid (unless it's one of those super induction stoves that I covet so, as if such a thing were ever going to be financially within reach for us), but I hate everything about our heating system.  We have taken note that we need more wood this year, and we will get it and burn it and try to get off the Saudi teat, but damn. 

People, right now, and this is no joke, the plants are eating up all of my available free time.  I even do things with them (repotting, watering, what have you) while I'm watching Stewart and Colbert.  I feel like I am eating, breathing, and sleeping dirt.  It's not entirely awesome, and I'm ready to just get all the little babies planted and get it all mulched so that I can occasionally take a breather.  Bleh.  But official last frost date here is Memorial Day (sure, it could frost after that, but you have to bet that it won't--the only month frost is truly unlikely here is July), so a lot of things can't really go out until then.  I may well die before then.  And now I'm all frantic because I'm actually going to be gone on Memorial Day weekend, and not much will get done (we're going to Austin, TX--my son, me, and my mom).  I alternate between feeling like there's only so much I can do and it will all get done eventually, if not in the most ideally timely manner, and freaking out because it's not all already done now. 

Oh, I need to get some pictures up, don't I?  Eh, when I get back from Austin, I'll figure out how to get the pictures from camera to computer, I promise. 

Anyway, I'll be writing more when things get a bit more sane around here.