Betrayed!

So, yesterday, I'm on the train with the kids on the way to The Muppet movie (which, by the way, was a little sad -- when did Kermit get so sad?) and we're reading Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger, by Louis Sachar. Now, I'd gotten the book because my daughter had asked for Sideways Stories from the Wayside School, and the bookstore didn't have it, but they had Stranger stories. And, I'd recently read Holes, also by Sachar, which is a lovely book (until the end, when it's a little too much good news even for a kids' book). But, I have to say, in Stranger stories we got to a chapter about one Mr. Gorf who has three nostrils and uses one of them to steal children's voices and then calls their moms and tells each mom how much her son or daughter hates her. (Mr. Gorf said he did this because these students "took his mommy away and he's going to take their mommies away." His mommy turned students she didn't like into apples.) In any case, this didn't feel like the cruel, fascinatingly horrible things that happen in fairy tales, or in, say, A Tale Dark and Grimm (which I loved). Nor did it feel like the bad but you know it's not serious kinds of things that can happen in books when the author is being "funny". It just read as mean, gratuitously mean. Granted, we didn't get to the end of the chapter because we arrived at our subway stop, but I have to say, I was pretty disappointed in Mr. Sachar. When choosing books for kids, we trust authors we know, authors we've read, and while not every story has to be like the others, I wasn't expecting revenge via prank calls. Boiling evil magicians, now that I'm OK with. Prank calls that make children cry? Not so much.

Update: I just asked Helen if she finished the chapter with her dad. She did. She liked the ending when a pepper pie made Mr. Gorf sneeze out all the voices and then Mr. Gorf's whole nose flies off. I admit it, it's funny. But funny enough to make up for this stricken faces in the middle? I don't know. Maaaybe.

On the Homepage

No big deal, but a certain 7-year-old I know pretty well is on the New York Public Library's homepage holding up a library card. At least she's there today, January 2nd, in the afternoon, when we're just back from seeing The Muppets (she was underwhelmed) and drinking too much hot chocolate at City Bakery. (Well, the girl didn't like the hot chocolate, nor did her brother. The preferred the pretzel croissant and chocolate chip cookie respectively.)

To Sleep, Perchance Just to Sleep.

It's hard to express the level of identification I felt with the article in today's New York Times Sunday Styles section on women and sleep. Or, more accurately, women in their 40s who don't sleep.

It's not as though I didn't know that I wasn't alone in my sleeplessness. A few years ago I made a new friend when we started emailing each other about books and sleep aids. And, truth be told, the sleeplessness of motherhood didn't surprise me. I've never been a great sleeper. Even in my twenties I'd fall asleep quickly and wake around 3 or 4. And can I just say, if you're awake at 3 or 4 AM and not inebriated or engaged in some kind of salacious activity, you're quite certain the world will end because you forgot to take out the garbage. But, at 3:37 AM, when I think about taking out the garbage I also think about everyone else who takes out their garbage, and how all that garbage will pile up into mountains, just like in Wall-E, and not just because the City won't collect it all. Because that's what life is like lying awake at 3 AM. In fact, last night I was awake worrying about an assignment for school and whether or not David Leonhardt was right about climate change being worse than we could imagine, just like the financial crisis of 2008 was. (This was in the Times Sunday Magazine years ago, but I can't find it now, and if I try any harder, I'll add to my sleeplessness tonight, when I'll be wondering why I was blogging and not working.)

So my question is why did I have such a strong response to that article in today'a Styles? Why didn't I just turn to my husband, who told me about the article, and say, "Tell me something I don't know." After all, I was up pretty much all last night, even though I was exhausted from not sleeping for several nights this past week and working all day. Plus, when I read the article itself, it didn't really give me any new insights. For example, the article suggests that technology creeps into our night-time wind-down. Yep. It says that women are perfectionists and want to put out a five course meal every night. Nope, that's ridiculous. Most people I know are amazed I spatchcock a chicken once a week. Still and all, even if the reasons for sleeplessness are run-of-the-mill, even if the fact of it is an accepted part of modern maternity even outside of New York City, it's so awful and cruel, it's somehow better to feel companionship in insomnia. Maybe knowing I'm not alone will help me sleep better tonight.

What Not to Buy

I don't mean to be all judgmental or anything, but I'm not sure why someone would buy pre-printed notes to put in his or her child's lunchbox. Isn't the whole handwritten connection kind of the whole point of the lunchbox letter?

Time is Short: Spatchcocking!

This week will be completely bananas. There's lots and lots to do on the family and work front The list of what has to happen includes exciting things like cupcakes for birthdays and writing a long term plan for a student I'm tutoring and not-so-exciting things like a midterm about which I'm trying really, really hard not to be nervous. Still, I must share something. It's called Spatchcocking. Say it out loud and you will blush. Try it in the kitchen and you will be delighted. Melissa Clark tells us all about it here.

Promises, Promises

It's almost my kids' birthday. Their seventh. This morning, Helen pointed out that it's just one more year until she turns eight. "Oh," I said, "Does something special happen when you turn eight?"

"Yes," she said, "I get a puppy."


Right. Because when my kids were four, which was yesterday, I told them they could get a puppy when they were eight. Which is tomorrow. Essentially.

The Cozy Lining

My son likes to play violent video games. On the iPad, his games of choice usually have an avenging superhero who smashes up bad guys. Often, but not always, they are bad guy aliens; sometimes, they look human. But it doesn't really matter if they're made from flesh or bolts, they get destroyed by my boy's nimble fingers and you know I worry about these games, both because I'm supposed to and because I really do, but I also feel somewhat resigned to them. By the time I had a son I had read enough stories of moms who banned guns only to have her kids (some of them even girls) make weapons out sticks and fingers that I knew a gun ban wouldn't matter. Besides, I'm not good at bans. The day I decide to ban something -- say, alcohol -- is the day I can't get through the pre-dinner hour with a big Campari and soda. (Don't judge.)

Still, the fighting games are the iPad are problematic for all kinds of reasons. A Terminator game my boy has (and yes, I know I'm the person who bought it for him, judge if you like, that's not my business) is very realistic. Sure the good guys are human and the bad guys are robot aliens, but the dystopian city they're fighting in is distressingly vivid, as are the guns, which have the added bonus of being large.

And yet, and yet. A few weeks ago when Elliot was busy playing the Terminator game with me sitting next to him, he showeed me how all the humans, except for the one doing the shooting, had been locked in prison. He pointed to a man in a cell and the bunk bed behind him. The top bunk was made up neatly with what looked like a standard issue army blanket. "See," he said, "he's got a really comfy blanket for his bed. That's lucky, right?" Sure just beyond the prison walls there's a city crumbling after an invasion of violent, evil, robot aliens, but inside, the men have their comfy blankets, their cozy cells, and that's pretty lucky. That's the detail that matters.


(Note: We are iPad-free in this house for the month of September. So far, so good. The only down side, really, is I can't read anything on the Nook in front of the kids, because Doodle Jump is on there, too.)

Lemonade for the Library

Helen had a lemonade stand yesterday, I helped! We sold lemonade, of course, and chocolate chip cookies and we raised $85.00 for the library, which was terrific. There's more to say because it was September 11th, but now's not the time. (Since I'm watching Dead House,a Goosebumps movie, with Elliot, and it's creepy even with very low production values.)

Oh! And the best small world New York thing? Someone who works for the library happened by and now we're on the New York Public Library's blog, too!

Orangina on the Map

OK, so I usually don't go in for posts about cute things my kids say, but I haven't been writing enough and my sense of humor has disappeared down the rabbit hole dug by Rick Perry, Eric Cantor and the five classes I'm taking, so here goes:

Helen: "Is there such a place as Orangina?"
Me: "No, why? Where you reading My Father's Dragon?" (In which there is a place called, I think, Tangerina.)
Helen: "No." Here Helen looks at her shoes and furrows her brows. "Didn't Caroline (my niece, her very glamorous cousin) go to Orangina?"
Me: "Ahhhh....that would be Argentina."

See, kind of cute, but on reflection, not that funny. Still, I'm going to hit "publish post" on this one just maybe because I can.

Full Metal Branding

While we were on vacation we stayed in a house with a TV but without 24/7 PBS kids. We stayed in the house during a long rainy day, too. As a result, my kids watched Disney shows they'd never before, and now when my son asks to watch TV, he says, and I quote, "Can I watch Disney Sizzlin' Summer?"

The Schedule and The Child

Coming up on a new school year, wondering, again, if I'm not doing the right thing by my kids with their after school activities (neither plays a sport and our music lessons have not involved any practice), I was greatly relieved by reading this article. It seems that kids will find their way and learn to love things they do when they grow up, even if they didn't do those things as children! Phew!

W to R

Helen, my daughter, who today turns six and three quarters, has a very particular way of speaking. She always has. Take the word "comfortable." She says it like this: "cuhm-ftibul," and when you hear her say it, because she sounds like an 83-year-old nice Jewish lady who lives in a rambling pre-war on West End and 87th and has since before everything got all shiny, thank you very much, "comfortable" takes on a kind of gravity. Instead of state of being you don't think about too much if you're lucky, in Helen's mouth, it takes on an essential if ineffable quality. "Are you cuhmftibul?" she'll ask when I lie down next to her in her bed. And if she knew how many ways one could occupy a state of comfort or discomfort, she'd mean them all.

But comfortable isn't the only word Helen pronounces idiosyncratically; that's because she, like many young children, doesn't have a full grasp of the letter sound for r. When Helen says a word with an /r/ it either sounds like a /w/ or a long vowel with an h attached. At least that was true until the day, maybe a month ago, when she very distinctly made the /r/ sound in the middle of a word. I wish I could remember what word it was, but I can't. Instead, I remember commenting on it. "That was a very nice 'rrrrr,'" I said. She repeated the word in the next sentence and ever since, she's been saying more and more rrrrs. She says them, oh, maybe 50 percent of the time, and when she does, she slows down her speech and emphasizes the sound. It's like watching someone learn to ride a bike very, very slowly. When she's mastered her /r/, my girl will have learned a new skill, one she'll need. Still, I know I'll miss those extra /w/s and long vowels, they make every word an adventahhh.

Come and Have a Look at a Worm

This weekend, we took the kids to Mystic Seaport in Connecticut. At the end of our day, after a visit to a reconstructed Amistad and taking in a casual set of seafaring tunes played by a pony-tailed man, after boarding a cod ship and watching my daughter happily wash two bandannas on a scrubbing board and hang them out on a line to dry, we went over to the last wooden whaling ship in America, the Charles W. Morgan. Looking like an enormous ark all propped up and land locked like in the movies, we climbed up 32 steps and wandered around the enormous ship that saw over 1000 sailors work its deck over the course of several decades of service killing sperm whales. On our way out, we took in the exhibit explaining the renovation, and there, under a microscope, was a worm of the kind that ate all the wooden whaling ships.

"Come and have a look at a worm," an Englishwoman told her daughters, who were maybe ten and seven. Her voice was tired, her cheeks sunburned, her kids' legs had a sheen of sweat on them. They came over and had a look at a worm under a microscope. And that, I thought, is the condition of parenting kids long done with strollers but not yet in bras or braces. You schlepp them somewhere, down 95 or across an ocean, and you visit a place that's genuinely interesting and also quite tiring, and you urge them to look at an insect up close. All the while twenty dollar bills are burning holes in your pockets, waiting to be swapped out for deeply fried fish or fudge. Such is the summer family trip. The food is hit or miss, and there are rarely aperitifs, but these trips are, all in all, quite fantastic.

At the Farm Market

Today at the farm market I was at the fanciest of the farm stands trying desperately not to blow my whole farm market budget on tiny eggplants and exotic greens when a woman with two kids, maybe they were eight and seven or thereabouts, dropped buckets of stuff on the counter. Looking at her pile of verdure I wondered what her kitchen looked like and if I walked into it would I instantly forget that I'm incredibly privileged because even with the many blessings I do have, I don't have a wide expanse of counter space punctuated by high-end appliances.

But the real psychic injury wasn't inflicted by what she was buying. No. The real injury came from what her kids were doing while she was shopping. One, a girl, was eating a zucchini and the other, a boy, a cucumber. Just like that. Raw. Like they were lollipops. Then, the boy grabbed one of those darling little peppers that you can get in tapas restaurants char-grilled and salted and started chomping on it. "Mom!" he exclaimed, "This is really good!"

"Good," the mom answered, hardly paying attention for fear of dropping her seventy-five dollars worth of braising greens, "good."

"Yeah," he went on, "It's really spicy, but I'm eating it with the cucumber and it's really good!"

For the record, last weekend I made zucchini and corn fritters on the off chance that Elliot would take one bite of a vegetable if it also offered a deep fried experience. He did take one bite, of the oil-soaked edge. "I like the crunchy part," Elliot told me. He left the rest on the plate. Maybe the next time I should just lay a shiny raw pepper next to the fritter. Maybe the salty-spicy combo will be just the ticket. And that pepper? It won't take up any counter space at all.

What's the Matter with Lunch?

What is it about lunch? When I ask a parent -- check that, when I ask a mother of school-aged children who are out of school how things are going, she almost always says, "What a relief it is not to make lunch!" And when I talked to a friend whose child is a toddler going to his first drop-off camp, which requires a packed lunch, she said, "I think about lunch all the time." As for me, my kids are now in a camp where they're given lunch. Not only are their food horizons expanding ("Today I had meatballs for lunch! And apple and peas and carrots!"), each morning I pace the kitchen in a state of easy contentment murmuring, "I don't have to make lunch...I don't have to make lunch...."

What's going on with lunch?

Like every other meal, lunch has to happen, each and every day. Unlike those other meals, you can't wing it with your kids. You can't run out and pick up a salad for them, or a turkey wrap (which, after reading The Ask, I can no longer eat anyway). No, none of that applies to lunch for your kids. Instead, it goes to school with them, and many days, it comes right back home. Its return, in full or partial format, is hard evidence of culinary failure. Sometimes I think I'm in some kind of pitched battle with my kids: Would it kill my son to eat a yogurt squeezer? Why won't my daughter try sunflower butter? Why won't my son eat bread? But, if the sandwich containers come home empty, I repeat the successful sandwich, over and over, until I run out of bread, throw away the bag, and can't remember which type of bread got eaten. Once, my daughter, who typically ate three bites of her grilled cheese, told me I wasn't sending enough food in her lunch box. "I want five things," she told me, "and a break from grilled cheese."

So for me, at least, not only does lunch mean the constant assembly and cleaning of plastic containers (which we use instead of snack bags and tin foil), it means exposure of my worst food habits, my ruts, my lack of creativity, ingenuity, verve. I'm beaten down my lunch, except, it turns out, during the summer, when, made by someone else five days each week, it's the perfect meal.

Judy Moody and the Total Bummer Summer Movie

The New York Times said Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer was great. Well, I saw the moving on Saturday with my kids, and the New York Times was wrong.

Here's one thing: Judy's annoying. Watching her face you could practically see her thinking, "Now I have to make my eyes really wide!" Another thing: Everyone in this movie wears a lot of lipstick (except Judy's brother Stink, who was pretty terrific, in fact, but doesn't have much in the way of lips). A third thing: Everyone, save Judy's teacher who drives an ice cream truck for a summer job (no comment on the socio-economics of that) is white, white, white. Maybe in the opening last-day-of-school classroom scene there are some kids who aren't white, but otherwise,there's not an Asian kid, a South Asian kid in sight, never mind a Latino child or African American. Finally, nothing happens. I mean nothing emotional happens. Judy's parents leave, enter wacky, artsy aunt, Judy pursues "thrill points," has a little tiff with the one friend she's left with after her other friends leave, then there's a big car chase. The fight with the friend is unresolved and there's no heart-to-heart with the aunt about choices and opportunities or friendship and what makes something fun meaningful, too. There's no moment when Judy, or anyone else in the movie reflects on anything. I know such a scene would've been totally predictable, but still, I missed it, kind of like I missed Bruce Willis when I watched Keaneu Reeves in Speed.

Sure the movie had cute animation and was colorful and it might just be that I was feeling super cranky when I saw it, or.....it might be that Judy Moody is a total bummer of a summer movie. But, I have high hopes for Winnie the Pooh.

Tina Fey's Praryer for Her Girl

I'm having mixed feelings on her awesomeness Tina Fey, but I'm, like, so with this:

"Lead her away from Acting but not all the way to Finance. Something where she can make her own hours but still feel intellectually fulfilled and get outside sometimes And not have to wear high heels. What would that be, Lord? Architecture? Midwifery? Golf course design? I’m asking You, because if I knew, I’d be doing it, Youdammit."

(Here's her prayer for her daughter.)

Hats for Birthdays!

This year, my niece Caroline turned 18 while her sister (also my niece) Melissa turned 16. Not knowing what to get the teenagers who have all kinds of things, I made them hats. Here they are, in all their gorgeousness -- my nieces, that is, in their hats. (Caroline is on the left, and for the record the top of her hat is the same green as Melissa's.)

Was I Right About That?

Funny thing, I keep thinking about whether or not I was upset by the cruel twists in biblical stories (see the post on Moses just below) as a child and I can't really come up with an answer. I remember my teachers getting very serious when approaching one of these stories, taking on a tone that said, "This has a reason, this will be OK." And I think I remember being wide-eyed at some of what I heard. And of course, bursting into tears at school because of a chumash (Hebrew bible) lesson would've been all wrong. Maybe my emotional responses to these stories were all about context and not content? School vs home? Morning vs bedtime? All this could've kept me from feeling quite as much in response to stories I learned in school as I might have had I heard them first at home. In any case, it's been a funny line of thought shooting through my head these last two days, making me wonder about emotion and context and teaching and how that all fits together. Right now though, I have nothing more on that then a kernel of a question. And now, it's time for some Matzah Brei!

Moses

The other night, we were reading the Tomie DePaola book My First Passover. Granted it's for kids younger than mine, but since we've never made it all the way through the Passover story and the last time we talked about it, we stumbled upon the problem of God not being so nice when it came to those plagues, I figured the easy road was an OK road to take. So, we're flipping through DePaola's book and there's Moses. Moses! Helen said, "Mommy tell me all about Moses." So, I do.

I start to prattle on about how when he was a baby his mommy, who was a slave, put him in a basket and sent him down the river and sent his sister along to watch and I took a breath and then I looked up and at Helen's face. She looked devastated. Looking at me her face crumpled and she said, "But mommy, that means Moses' mommy abandoned him! That's so sad!" Then she burst into tears.

I tried repeating, "His sister was Right There!" and I trotted out, a bit woefully, "But she knew he'd have a better life...." All Helen could say was, "Would you ever do that to me?"

Can I just say? When I was a child attending a Jewish day school every day and shabbat services every week, it was like Moses in the bullrushes, la la la. Was it any worse than Abraham pulling a knife on his son, his only son, the one he loved best? Or Jacob tricking Isaac into selling him Esau's birthright? (Never mind Jacob knowing how much more Isaac liked Esau. What was with all that favoritism anyway?) Or Leah and Rachel's father tricking Jacob into marrying Leah first, even though he'd worked for seven years to marry Rachel? Or Joseph's brothers selling him to a band of traveling Egyptians? And never mind Dina. And that's just Genesis! (For the record, I didn't know about Tamar until graduate school.)

So I heard them all, but for me as a child those bible stories were not a big deal. Sure, they were weird and the parents weren't nearly so nice as mine, but I don't remember getting upset about them. Maybe none of it was that big of a deal because it's not like any of it was the Holocaust. Now the Holocaust, that was something to cry about. (And oh did I cry, because I read Holocaust books all the time.) Baby Moses in the bullrushes? He turned out FINE! Even with the lisp! (Here's the lisp story that I remember: When God told Moses to go talk to Pharoh he said he couldn't so Moses' older brother Aaron had to do the talking for him. The rabbis said it was because Moses had a lisp, or something, which he got from sticking a hot coal in his mouth when he was one and, in a test rigged up by the Pharoh and/or his advisers, had to choose between hot coals and gold. An angel "helped" Moses "choose" the coal because if he had chosen the gold that he had reached for first, Pharoh would've dispensed with baby Moses and you could just forget about all that Let My People Go business. It's quite a story, that one.)

But for Helen, whose exposure to both bible stories and the Holocaust is much more limited than mine was even at her tender age of six, there's hardly anything to mediate the Passover tale. We've had seders, but they haven't been elaborate and the story telling has been limited. We haven't talked too much about the rest of the bible, either. So as the facts come drib drabbing out, they (rightly) horrify her. We talk, and will talk tomorrow night, about freedom, and slavery, for sure. But who can focus on that when mothers are sending sons downriver and Gods are killing firstborns? All I can say is we've got to start somewhere. I just need to remember when it comes to bible stories, we're not talking about Edwina, even if both require some suspension of belief.