Embarking

I'm sitting here in the airport, using the free wi-fi, backpack at my feet. The last whirlwind trip I took was the one with my sister, back in January. This time, I'm alone - flying out to Seattle for a Nintendo event with a mess of other bloggers. Two nights in a hotel - alone. A visit to Nintendo headquarters, with a chance to try out the new 3DS. Dinner out in Seattle And three visits with friends on Saturday before I fly home on the red-eye.

It's a chance to escape my life for a bit - no child to read to, no work to do, no laundry to sort.

I feel lucky today.

But I'll love getting off the plane on Sunday, to the big hugs from my little family.

How often do you get your hair cut?

Oy. Between now and about April 15th is like some kind of clusterfuck, and it’s not even that I’m a CPA doing other people’s taxes. Just too much work, too many volunteer obligations, too much child and family and friends stuff. And a trip to Seattle, even.

At the end of last week, I decided that my hair needing cutting - in advance of all of these various events - so Saturday morning I hauled myself over to the cheap salon. You know, the big boisterous local salon, the one that caters to little kids and blue-haired old ladies and everyone in between. I go there because it amuses me, and because you don't need an appointment, and because it's $24 for a women's hair cut. I've never had a bad haircut there. Undistinguished, sure, but bad? No.

Until Saturday.

I walked in and said I needed a haircut, and the receptionist asked whether I had a preference for a man or a woman. I said I didn't care, and ended up with the old man. The old man usually sits around, perched on one a vacant chair, peering eaglelike at the goings on, and not actually doing anything. I've always assumed that he owns the place, but I really don't know. I sat down, and he cut my hair. And it was crooked and I made him fix it. And I left, and I looked in the mirror when I got home, and I thought "this is the worst hair cut I have ever had". Old man. Don't let the old man cut your hair. Damn it.

I groused about it to myself, pissed off that I'd just wasted $24 (plus tip!) on a terrible haircut, until I remembered that Heidi had a hairdresser friend in the town where I was headed. Heidi texted me the phone number (and texted Ilene to warn her), and at 5:15, I settled in for the second haircut of the day.

You have to remember: I never learned how to be a real girl. I don't wear make-up, and I didn't get my hair cut by anyone but my mother until I was like 40. So the idea of two haircuts in ONE DAY was really just over the top.

But Ilene was great, and there wasn't anyone else there, and the late afternoon sun was streaming through the windows, and she had jelly beans.

The next few weeks are still going to be a clusterfuck, but at least I got a nice haircut to face 'em with.

Talismans

For years now, since before the girlie was born, I've had a little stack of parenting books by my bed. They come and go - all of the baby care tomes are gone, and I'm slowly replacing them with books like Reviving Ophelia and How to Talk So Kids Will Listen - but until the other day, there were three in the pile that we really didn't need: Weissbluth, Ferber and Satter.

It was like some kind of magical thinking: As long as the sleep books are under the bed, the child will sleep. As long as the sensible eating book was at hand, the child will eat.

Of course, she doesn't sleep, except with me. Oh she went through a period of sleeping in her own bed every night right after we got her a heated mattress pad, but she fell back into her old ways soon enough, and now every last stuffed animal she owns is on the floor of her room and she only goes in there to fetch clean clothes. I've given up.

And she doesn't eat, except with ketchup. The other night she ate salad for dinner - hallelujah! a green vegetable! - with a dressing that she'd made by stirring equal parts of ketchup and vinaigrette together. She eats rice with ketchup for lunch. Rice cakes with ketchup for snack. Hard-boiled eggs dipped in ketchup. She's discerning: only Heinz will do. Frou frou organic ketchup from Whole Foods? Feh. Homemade stuff from the Greenmarket? Feh.

I know that one day she will go into her room and close the door and blast the stereo and refuse to talk to me. I know that one day she'll eat something other than ketchup.

But I finally gave up those books, those talismans, and passed them along to my brother and sister-in-law. Maybe they'll do someone else some good, under another bed.

Whoosh!

One of the many delights of raising a child is living through her language development.

Last week, she had a dentist appointment. I asked her how it went, and she told me "It hurt. She poked my gums and fondled my teeth". Yeah. Fondled.

Then, lying in bed this morning, we saw the early bus go down the hill - the middle & high school bus. I said to her "It's a good thing you're not in high school; you'd have to be out there getting on that bus." She went off into a monologue about her bus driver and how he does the early run and then the elementary school run, and then "he puts the bus in the parking arena" until after school. Yeah, parking arena.

It's so ephemeral, this growing up thing. The best I can do is take a few pictures, write down some of the awesome phrases, and hang on for the ride.

Disaster

All week, I’ve been turning over disaster in my head. Here’s the thing: natural disasters are just that. They’re natural. You can try and anticipate them, build to ameliorate them, insure against them. But they’re going to happen and it’s no one’s fault when they do. You clean up the mess, mourn the dead, feed the hungry and shelter the homeless. Japan could recover from the one-two punch of the earthquake and tsunami. But the nuclear power plant problem? The one that gets scarier and more unmanageable by the day? It’s a man-made disaster that didn’t have to happen.

Three years ago, when we officially enrolled the girl in kindergarten, we had to sign a blanket permission slip to allow the school to administer potassium iodide in the case of an “event” at the nuclear plant that sits about 12.5 miles from our house. Let me tell you, it frosted my ass. I so wish I hadn’t had to sign that slip – not because I have some concern about the school system medicating my kid, but because that plant shouldn’t be there.

And now we’ve got Ann Coulter going off half-cocked that “radiation is good for you”. OMFG.

I sent that link to my husband and got back this:

Maybe she could go do a news segment from the top of the spent fuel pool in Reactor Building Four -- the one that's got 35+ years' worth of brightly glowing spent fuel-rod assemblies in it. When she points her camera into the pool it will help responsible scientists see how much water there is. Then we'll know that some radiation is good, because she'll be dead in an hour.

That husband of mine got himself arrested protesting a nuclear power station, back in the day. I think it might be time start protesting again. Who’s with me?

Memento mori

I took a picture of a dead bird yesterday, and I’m trying to figure out why.

I was late, rushing to the subway to go meet a friend for a drink before heading home. I saw the bird out of the corner of my eye.

Step.

That bird was there on Friday.

Step, step.

It’s Monday. How is it still there?

Step.

I’m late.

Step, step.

If I don’t go back and take its picture, I’ll regret it.

Step.

And then I turned around, and walked back the 15 feet to where the bird was, and I squatted down and took its picture on the sidewalk in front of the church, where it had been lying since I’d seen it on Friday afternoon.

It was a little grey bird, body about the size of my thumb. Three days on the sidewalk had left it somewhat the worse for wear. Its belly had been neatly opened, exposing its guts. Lungs? Liver? And its gaudy orange legs – had they been so vibrant on Friday? I can’t remember. And why is there a band on its leg? I hadn't seen that until I pulled the photo off of my phone.

I took a picture of a dead bird last summer. It was on the beach, a big gull, equal parts dried, decayed and eaten, yet it maintained a majesty. Head tilted just so, wings arrayed as in a zoological museum display.

But yesterday’s dead bird? I’m trying to understand why.

I was late because we’d been clustered around someone’s computer in the office, watching sobering, heartbreaking videos of the Japanese tsunami – boats splintering like balsa wood toys, buildings floating away, cars tossed around as though Styrofoam.

Somehow, in an instant, that little bird crystallized for me the horror of the triple punch that Japan just received. I can’t do much for Japan beyond a donation to the Japan Society, but I can think on natural and manmade disasters, and remember that we all must die – a bird flying into a window, an elderly Japanese man in the path of a tsunami, my mother felled by lung cancer.

I took a picture of a dead bird yesterday, and I hugged my girlie hard when I got home.

More Griping About Homework & Schoolwork

On a regular basis, I get all bent out of shape about the second grader's homework. Herewith, three examples:

MATH

@Magpiemusing When Mommy has to dump all of the change out of her wallet in order to play the math games homework, Mommy will be grumpy.

The instructions were to roll a pair of dice and then to take that many cents out of the kitty. We were to take turns, until one of us got to 50¢, swapping out coins to end up with the fewest number of coins possible. Honestly? Not a stupid game, and I was happy to see that her change-making and adding skills were pretty good. BUT. First I had to find a mess of change, and then I had to raid the Monopoly game box because who has dice sitting on the kitchen table, and then I realized that in more than a dollar's worth of change, there was not one single quarter. Without the proper tools, it's hard to support the kid's homework, but if you don't know what tools are going to be required, it's hard to have them on hand.

SPELLING

She has a spelling test every week. That's great. Last week's test came home marked "Perfect"! That's awesome. Unfortunately, the girl wrote down PRIASE when it should have been PRAISE, and the teacher failed to notice. So out of my mouth is coming praise at her for doing such a good job, until I realize that the teacher screwed up. So what do you do? Undermine the teacher, or keep your mouth shut? Oy.

GRAMMAR

In class, they do quick little grammar tests - drills for things like capital letters and nouns and punctuation and contractions and verb tense. The tests come from a published workbook - this isn't something that the teacher whips up in her prep time. Because I'm a diligent mom and a cranky nitpicker, I always read through the questions (and answers), and recently found one of the worksheets that really annoyed me - three of its ten questions had no right answer. I think that second grade grammar worksheets ought to be black & white and not subject to interpretation - which means that the answer should be present tense or past tense, not both! Save interpretation for a discussion of Mrs. Cantrip's motives in The Kingdom of Carbonel.

Patchwork and Denim

Besides ribbons, I picked up a bunch of other weird bits in the aftermath of the costume shop going under: fabric glue, zippers, 75 iron-on roses and a odd swath of cotton patchwork that no one recognized.

I turned the patchwork into a cover for a throw pillow, and was left with a strip of material about 5" wide.

Then the girl demanded a new outfit for Ivy, so I made her a black skirt out of the sleeve of a shirt of mine that had ended up in the rag bag. And then she wanted a bag to carry around thus and such, but it had to look like Ivy's denim bag. I keep way too many old blue jeans around, because one day they're going to come in handy - like when you need to make a denim bag! I cut the end off a leg, just below the knee, stitched it closed at the cut side (with a box bottom even, though you can't tell from the photo), folded over the cuff end and used Velcro for a closure. What to use for a strap? Aha! The leftover strip of patchwork turned into an admirable strap - perfectly in keeping with the "San Francisco in 1974" era of her two American Girl dolls.



Oh, and now I have 74 iron-on roses left.

Ribbons

The costume shop in my building went out of business, a casualty of a bad economy, bead-work outsourced to China, more shows in street clothes, and expensive labor. It's a damned shame, and makes me wistful on a number of levels.

On the other hand, I'm never buying Christmas ribbon again, and my packages will be the best dressed ever.

Sugru

So, the sweater error. I decided to punt and put in a zipper, so I wouldn't have to learn to make the damned buttonholes. I lucked into a zipper from the costume shop that was downstairs in my building, but, you get what you pay for: it was too long. So I cut it off. Alas, I cut it off without enough room to turn it properly so that it would form a stop at the end, meaning that the zipper pull was liable to go flying off. That'd be one thing for a sensible grown-up, but a chance not worth taking with a seven year old.

What to do? Sugru!

I read about Sugru sometime last fall, somewhere on the web*, and I promptly sent the link to my husband thinking his tinkering self would love it. Time went by; I forgot about it. But! Bestill my heart - I found some in my Christmas stocking! It is the coolest. It comes in tiny little packets, each holding a couple of teaspoons of this stuff that's sort of like sticky Play-Doh. You form it as needed, and over a day or so, it cures into silicone.

So, I made stoppers at the top of the sweater zipper so the zipper slide won't fly off.



And then, because once the packet of Sugru is open you need to use it all up, I made feet for a little ceramic bowl, to replace the felt feet it had - because the felt feet can't go in the dishwasher and the Sugru can.



And I made two pins - brooches? - out of cobbled together bits and pieces of stuff that was kicking around, just because I could!



It's insanely wonderful, the Sugru. It's only problem is that the packets have a shelf life, and mine has to be used by mid-May. I have more than enough left to fiddle around with, so if you'd like to try it, say so in the comments, before the end of the week. I'll send three packets out into the world, so more people can experience the joy of Sugru.




* I can't find the reference, but I think it was something that Katherine Belsey wrote about.

The Sweater

I finally finished the sweater for the girl. Well, I actually finished it about a month ago, but then I did something stupid - something that I managed to fix, but I'll tell you all about that tomorrow*. In the meantime, here - at last - is the sweater on the girl, the girl having put together one of her inimitable outfits.

The reason the stripes look kooky is because the yarn was multi-colored, and it's a top down sweater pattern, pretty much knit all in one piece, and I was basically knitting back and forth from placket to placket. Oh well. Another lesson learned: multi-colored yarn behaves strangely unless you are knitting in the round.

In any case, I am happy to have completed another item off my FIFTY list.




*It's craft week here at the ranch. I'm in a flurry of projects.

Best Friend

I have a friend.

Wait, that’s lame, I have lots of friends.

I have a special friend.

Oh, that’s not right either.

I have an old friend, a dear friend, a friend from freshman year of college. We lived in the same dorm that first year, and in the same suite during our second year, and near one another after that. And we’ve stayed friends ever since. We were pregnant at the same time – she with her fifth child, me with my first and only. Somewhere, I have a funny picture of the two of us at my baby shower, both of us in black shirts with big bellies, back to back.

My dear old friend is extraordinary. She’s wise, and smart, and kind of unflappable, even in the face of difficulties. And her life is complicated, with bright wonderful highs, and dark unthinkable lows, and not nearly enough hours in the day. Five kids will do that to you!

I’m hugely proud that she's just edited a book - Daily Guideposts: Your First Year of Motherhood - which comes out at the beginning of April. It’s a book of devotionals, for first-time moms. As she says:

'This book is a guidebook of sorts, a travelogue written by those who have already gone down the sometimes rocky road of becoming a parent. The twenty moms (and one dad) you'll meet here will regale you with tales of love, frustration, exhaustion and humor. They open their hearts and lives so that you can walk with them through the daily challenge of growing in faith and parenting wisdom.'

You're probably wondering why I'm plugging a religious book, given my avowed atheism. My friend is a person of faith, deep and abiding faith. It's an important part of her life - as it is for many people. But to me, she's one of the most lucid parents I know. When my daughter was old enough to be in the bath by herself, but not old enough for me to be in the other room, I used to call Julia to chat. She was my touchstone, my "am I doing this right?" person. Still is, in lots of ways. So I know in my bones that any book on parenting that she's involved with is going to be a good one.

If a devotional is something that you could use, or share with a new parent, check out Daily Guideposts: Your First Year of Motherhood. And if you just want an astute parenting blog to visit, add Lotsa Laundry to your blogroll.

She's the best.

And she could use a hug right now.

Guardian

For Christmas, the girl got an Alien Spy Camera. It has bendy legs and suction feet, and I recently found it wrapped around her iron bed, gripping her DS firmly against intruders in the night.

It's also been found protecting her doorway from those who might wish to enter, and keeping Daddy away from the baked goods.

I wonder where it'll turn up next.

A Physics Lesson

Grey day. Rainy, drizzly, damp.

A bit of color sparked up from the sidewalk – a patch of oil shimmering on a puddle.

I took physics in high school. Everyone did, we were nerds. Do non-nerds take physics? Maybe everyone takes physics; I just don’t remember it that way. Our teacher seemed always on the brink of losing control of the class. Notes winged across the classroom, chaos erupted in the corners. He wore coke-bottle thick, black-rimmed glasses, and couldn’t see very well. “Legally blind”, we heard. And, “has tunnel vision”. Ah, tunnel vision – that might account for his inability to see objects tossed blithely from one side of the room to the other.

I remember nearly nothing from high school physics. I can’t remember what I got on the Regents. I’ve internalized some core piece of the first and second laws of thermodynamics, but that could be from having grown up listening to Flanders and Swann singing “heat is work and work is heat”.

You know that song? It’s excellent. Here, have a look:




Back to physics class. I guess I learned something about waves and periodicity. Surely we talked about gravity and velocity. Amps and ohms must have been on the syllabus, along with Planck’s constant.

Picture by John,
from the Wikimedia Commons

But the only thing I really remember? Thin film refraction. That’s what you’re seeing when the rainbow glints off the oily splotches in the road.

I said it to myself this morning – “thin film refraction” – as I walked from the subway to the office, and I thought about Dr. Goutevenier and his thick glasses, and about how you may learn things and you may know things, and how it’s really about the learning, not so much the knowing, because if you know how to learn, you can figure out the knowing.

Because honestly, I don’t really know what’s going on in that pretty oily rainbow – I just know what it’s called. But I can look it up.

The Table of My Memory

What makes a memory?

When I think about my childhood I remember the beach, the ice-skating, the neighborhood block parties. The day Wally – a grown-up! – dropped the bread peanut-butter side down, and then jumped on it. Sailing. My sixth grade teacher. The children’s librarian at the public library. The annual pig roast, and the day my father brought the suckling pig home on the Long Island Rail Road cradled in his arms and dressed in baby clothes. The long long grass in the backyard of the house we moved into when I was eleven – it hadn’t been mowed in years. Kittens. Our jungle gym. The Christmas party. My fourth grade phonics workbook. Stinky cheese and poison. Going to the ballet, the circus, the Museum of the City of New York.

Trips to the city usually included restaurants – special occasion meals, pre-theater meals, lunch in the city meals - storied places, now largely defunct. Like Sloppy Louie’s and Sweets – fish places down by the Seaport, near my father’s office, where he’d take us to lunch on those rare days when we got to go to work with him. The Auto Pub – a kitschy car-themed restaurant in the basement of the GM building, where the Apple Store now is. Pearl’s – a fancy midtown Chinese restaurant, known for the lemon chicken incongruously flavored with lemon extract. The Xochitl – a cheap Mexican restaurant in the theater district where I remember daring my siblings to dip a toothpick in the little open ramekins of hot sauce that were permanent fixtures on the tables. Luchow’s – the huge German restaurant on 14th Street – we went there for my birthday one year. And Keen’s – the chop house with the clay pipes on the ceiling.

Of them, Keen’s is the only one still around.

Last night, we took the girl to a one-man circus, which she thought was hilarious. We needed to eat beforehand, so in some fit of madness, I suggested Keen’s. It’s on 36th Street, where it’s been forever. We couldn’t get a reservation in the main part of the restaurant, so we took a chance and landed a table in the pub. Dark wood paneling, wood-burning fireplace, framed pictures and handbills tiling the walls – it’s like hasn’t changed in the 125 years since it opened. 125 years! It’s been around since before any of my grandparents were. I had a “mutton” chop with a side of sautéed escarole and it was so good that I picked that bone up and gnawed on it, even though it turns out to be lamb. The girl had a hamburger, most of which came home with us, though she ate the whole bun and drank all of her Shirley Temple and polished off a piece of chocolate cake. Before we left, we traipsed upstairs to the bathroom, through the brass embellished rooms with their oriental rugs, past the portrait of Abraham Lincoln and the entrance to the Lily Langtry room and the display case of novelty pipes. “Look, Mama, that one’s shaped like a lady’s leg!”. And then we left and walked uptown to Times Square, through the crowds, past the lights, under the enormous signs, to the one-man circus in the jewelbox theater.

And I wonder, what will she remember?

Eggs + Rice + Panko = Breakfast

I like to cook, and my husband likes to cook, and we both do a reasonable good job of it. Because he’s the stay-at-home parent and I’m the commuter, he does far more of the cooking than I do, but I do a lot of the inventing. I’ve dubbed myself the “executive chef” – I invent a dish, he makes it happen.

Somehow this morning the cupboards were bare of our usual breakfast fare. No bread, no Cheerios, no “snap, crackle, pop with brown sugar on top”. We could have had oatmeal, good real oatmeal (and I digress but if you haven’t read Mark Bittman’s piece about McDonald’s oatmeal go read it now) but I found a cup of cooked rice in the fridge – leftover from last night’s dinner – and the little wheels in my head turned 'round.

"How about little pan-fried rice and egg cakes?"

My husband looked at me sort of skeptically, but got out the rice and two eggs and beat them together. He paused, and added a handful of panko because the “batter” looked too thin. Then he melted some butter in a skillet and fried up two perfect little cakes using the silly little round silicone rings that he'd bought one day.

They were soft and crunchy and salty and delectable – a perfect little breakfast, for two. Alas, there were three of us, so I had to content myself with a half a grapefruit and some stolen forkfuls of goodness.

The moral of the story? We may need three of those silicone rings.

Wordless Wednesday: Bath Aftermath

"I feel left out."

It’s the saddest thing she’s ever said to us: "I feel left out".

Everyone else has pierced ears.

I know that isn’t true, but they were making earrings in her after-school jewelry class and one of her friends is in the class and has pierced ears and wore her new earrings to school the next day. So of course she felt left out – because she doesn’t have pierced ears and we don’t think that 7 year olds should have pierced ears so it isn’t even on the table as a discussion point.

Everyone else buys their lunch.

Again, I don’t think that’s true. We let her buy lunch once a week, occasionally twice, but mostly she brings her lunch. And she brings good things, like risotto and spaetzle and meatballs and gnocchi, things she likes. Furthermore, the day she brought the meatballs, she said everyone else thought they smelled yummy.

All the girls want to do girly things like play hopscotch.

I don’t know what to make of this. Until the "I feel left out because everyone else has pierced ears" bit came up and was then elaborated on, I’d never had an inkling that she felt left out on the playground at school. I kind of think she’s making this up.

All the other girls have twenty American Girl dolls.

Yeah, right. In our materialistic town, I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a kid with twenty, but the kids we know and that she plays with have one each, or maybe two.

All the other girls wear lipstick (said while peering in the bathroom mirror instead of brushing her teeth and simultaneously telling me she’s a tomboy).

Gah. This child-rearing thing is hard.

Pence

You know what? I hate that you can't email members of Congress anymore. Nope, unless you're in their district, you can't just fire off an email. If you're in the district, you have to fill out an on-line form, which is bad enough, but if you aren't in the district, you need to call or write an old-fashioned letter.

I'm all cranky about this because of the Pence amendment business. My representatives in Congress aren't people I need to worry about - I voted for them, I mostly like how they represent me - but the doctor in the district next door was on the fence. But for a few miles - hell, my zip code is split between two districts - that doctor would be my Congresswoman. The medical practice she came from is the one my family uses.

I'm seething about this because I feel powerless. So I'm telling you - maybe you can make a phone call, send an email, jump up and down.

Separately, you could sign a petition on behalf of Planned Parenthood:

Did you hear? The House voted to bar Planned Parenthood from federal funding. They cut funding for HIV tests, cancer screenings, birth control, and more, putting millions of women and families at risk. We can't let it go unanswered. It's time for you and me to stand with Planned Parenthood. Sign the open letter to the reps who voted for this bill — and to the senators who still have a chance to stop it. http://www.ppaction.org/IStandWithPP

This still has to get through the Senate, which looks unlikely, but that's not the point. I feel hopeless because there are elected officials out there who are trying to dismantle programs that save lives and there are unnecessary barriers to communication.*

You don't believe in abortion? Fine. Don't get one. But don't take Planned Parenthood down too.

---

*According to a congressional website, the "Write Your Representative ... Reduces the heavy burden placed on the House mail servers by the high volume of emails sent to Congressional offices every day - over 15 million emails per month."  Maybe they could get beefier mail servers, so people could talk to them.

Wordless Wednesday: Coneheads

Yeah. This is what I find on the coffee table. The Pollys got new hats.