Monthly Archives: February 2011

The village it takes

1 Reply

I spent the morning at the open house for our nursery school, partly chatting to prospective new parents (I mean, parents of prospective new pupils), partly watching Mabel flit from one favourite play area to another – now the playdough, now the babies, now the watercolours – and mostly snaffling cookies and other nibbles to keep up my blood sugar. I’d brought lemon scones along, and I had to check out the competition.

I love our school. Because Monkey is still there, Mabel gets automatic entry for next year, so I didn’t have to worry about beating the crowd in some undefined way to get a hotly contested place. They don’t interview the kids, or test them or anything, so it’s not competitive in the manner of NYC preschools, for instance, but I know several people who turned in applications last year and yet didn’t get in. As far as I know, they’re offered on the basis of age and having a gender balance in the class, and it’s a great thing for the school to be oversubscribed, but I have several friends who will be biting their nails down to the cuticles for another month or so as they contemplate one more year at home with their darling two-year-olds.

To be honest, we didn’t even look at any other nursery schools when Monkey was two. I had heard good things about this one, it was local and didn’t require the kids to be potty trained. That basically accounted for all my criteria. We went to the open house and it just felt the way I expected a nursery school to be: not all that different from when I was three. There were easels to paint on and playdough to squish and lots of toys and dolls and a play kitchen and little tables and chairs, and coathooks down low along the walls. Each kid had a tub with their name and photo on it under their hook, and the walls were covered in daubed, crumpled, or glittery artwork. I’m not really sure what more you could look for.

Today I watched lots of new parents come in the door for the first time, many of whom I already knew from the classes and playgroups we participate in locally. If all our friends are lucky, Mabel will probably be on first-name, hair-pulling basis with more than half her class before they even begin the year. And I’ll be lucky to have another great group of mums (and dads) to co-op with on the days when it’s our turn to help out at school.

The other parents really are my co-workers, whether we’re at school or in the playground. They’re the people I see more days than not, who form my social circle and are my real-life peers in this game of parenting. (As opposed to my online peers, whom I cannot discount as an important influence and vital other support system, both those I know personally and those who have never been more than names – and sometimes photos – on a screen.) We let our kids bogart each other’s snacks, we pull the agressor off the agressee, we grab a passing runaway and return them gently but unceremoniously to their owner, we provide a push or an observing eye or a help down on the playground, we eat lunch together on Wednesdays, and once or twice we might even get to shed our workaday persona and have a night out, where we go crazy with a beer or a margarita and some nachos, and converse without juvenile interruption for the first time ever.

Puzzling

2 Replies

Monkey is finally getting the hang of jigsaws. We took out a 24-piece one today that he got for his last birthday (if not the one before that; it’s marked age 3-7) and with a little help made it three times.

The trick, I realised, or problem if you look at it another way, is that he can’t understand what I mean by “straight edges,” so telling him to separate out the edge pieces first (as Special Agent Oso taught us to do back when we had the Disney Channel) is useless and frustrating to him. He looks at a piece and sees straight edges all over it, wherever it’s not a definite curve.

So I stopped talking about edges and saw that he had already put together two sets of two pieces that were obvious matches. I asked him to find all the pieces of hand next (it’s a rescue guy dangling from a helicopter reaching out a hand, drawn from the perspective of the rescuee, so the hand is huge and the rest of the man much smaller; such an odd picture to expect a child to figure out), as they’re all the same colour. Then we did the helicopter, fitting larger pieces together as we we went along, and then we could easily fill in the last bits. He still tries to fit a corner piece right into the center, but I keep my mouth shut (mostly). Presumably at some point, just like with everything else, it will click and he’ll understand what I was on about all along.

I think observing someone do a jigsaw must say a lot about how their mind works. I could probably work some finely crafted metaphor around it too. But I think I’ll just mention that it’s very nice to watch your almost-five-year-old work out a jigsaw for himself. (Especially while the toddler is napping and you have a cup of tea in hand.)

Forward motion

Balls of meat

3 Replies

I have been hanging around smitten kitchen a bit too much lately, mouth watering at the delicious photography and the beautiful recipes, and as a result I have decided to blog tonight’s dinner.

Usually I disagree with the idea of stealth vegetables, a la Jessica Seinfeld, because I think kids (or adults) should (a) know what they’re eating and (b) not get the idea that a wide selection of cakes forms a balanced diet, even if it does. I also think it’s too much work. I do make black-bean brownies for Monkey’s school lunch “dessert”, but he knows there are beans in them and is proud of the fact. (He also knows there’s a little instant coffee powder in the recipe, and enjoys scandalising adults by telling them that there’s coffee in it. In his mind, I may as well have made them on straight gin. If he knew what gin was.)

Pre-pureed sauce

Anyway, I had a head of cauliflower, and I didn’t have any red pepper, which I would often use to veg-up a tomato sauce. So I sauteed the cauliflower with the onion and then pureed the whole lot with my handheld whizzer device after I’d added two cans of tomatoes. It sort of worked, in that you couldn’t taste the cauliflower, and it wasn’t yucky. On the other hand, it had a bit of an unusual consistency going on, and the colour wasn’t quite the rich red one expects from a straight tomato sauce. I still prefer my cauliflower roasted with lemon, parm and garlic, but that would have been extra work. This made it a one-pot meal.

Meatballs going in – I like little ones

I hadn’t made baked meatballs before, always afraid they’d be dried out and crumbly, but they turned out to be just as tasty as the fried ones, and so much less work. I will probably never fry a meatball again.

I mostly made up the recipe, but it was a pound of (organic) minced (ground) beef mixed with an egg, some breadcrumbs (I used panko because that’s what I had to hand), a couple of teaspoons of pesto, a tablespoon or so of grated parmesan, and some finely diced and sauteed onion. (I did the onion before starting the sauce, which also started with chopped sauteed onion, so it was hardly any extra work, just a little more careful chopping and some extra standing around.) I think it’s a variation on a recipe from the first cookbook.

Then I baked them at 400 F for about 15 minutes, until they looked done, and transferred them to the sauce where they simmered for another 15 minutes or so.

Meatballs, meet saucy goodness

I like my meatballs with rice, as Nigella suggests, rather than spagetti. And my rice is almost always basmati, because it cooks in ten minutes. I use twice as much water as rice, put a glass lid on, turn the heat up till it boils, turn the heat all the way down and set the timer for ten minutes, and at the beep it’s perfect. Five or ten minutes sitting waiting does it no harm at all and lets any excess water steam off.

I don’t know who put that measuring jug at the other end of the table

Dinner is served. There’s enough for tomorrow, and one serving for the freezer.

Girl, interrupting

2 Replies

Car rides with my children can be challenging. (Car rides with my children plus one more, all three in pinching/scratching distance across the back seat, qualify as instant birth control. I finally figured out why minivans are so popular: it’s not that you can’t fit three in the back of a regular car, it’s that you need to allow for buffer zones.)

But on a normal day, Monkey is in his booster seat on one side, and Mabel is in her carseat on the other, and they get along quite nicely, comparitively speaking, and oh dear, all the orange chocolate chips seem to have ended up at the bottom of this bag of cookies and I just keep pulling them out somewhat in the manner of Little Jack Horner…

Sorry, where was I? Yes, all is hunky dory in the back seat except for one tiny problem. Monkey is at a lovely stage where he’s interested in how things work and what things do (no change there) and also old enough to understand more complicated explanations. I love nothing more than the chance to explain things to people, and he loves nothing more than having me or his Dad take the time to explain something to him that he’s genuinely interested in. But. Mabel does not appreciate this. As soon as we pick Monkey up from school, or set off for the supermarket or whatever, and Monkey asks some interesting question like why we get dizzy when we turn around, or where we get food from, Mabel yells. To drown us out. Because I’m talking to him and she’s not involved.

Like this:

Monkey: Mummy, are houses stronger than metal?
Me: Well, it depends on the metal. And on the part of the house you’re talking about. Some metals are stronger than others, you know?
Monkey: Ohhhh. What’s a really —-
Mabel: “Mummmmmmmmaaaaaaaaay!”
Monkey: What’s a —
Mabel: Aaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!
Me: Iron, for instance —
Mabel: Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
Me: Iron is a strong —
Mabel: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
Monkey: What’s a strong —
Mabel: Mummmmaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyy!
Me: Yes, Mabel. Monkey and I were just having a conversation, you know. You could listen too.
Mabel: Mummmmmaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyy!!!!!
Me: Yes, Mabel. Is there something you want to say to me?
Mabel: Ummmm… [has to come up with some spurious subject quickly; falls back on old faithful] Why did the chicken cross the road?

On Saturday we were all in the car, and Monkey was telling us his idea about why we might get dizzy: “Because the air is pressing down on us, from the Earth turning around, and that makes us dizzy.”
I responded, “That’s a very interesting hypothesis, but I’m not sure it’s quite right. I have another idea…”
Mabel, tired of this science, interjected: “Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah.”
“Mabel, Monkey was just telling us his hypothesis about why we get dizzy. Do you have something you want to tell us?”
“Waaaaaaahhhhhh. [Sobs] I have a hi-pop-epis…. “

Naked ambition

1 Reply

Mabel sat up in bed at 6.55 this morning and addressed me as follows:

“Daddy and Monkey have penises.”

I assented without opening my eyes. She continued, reassuringly:

“When you and me have penises, we’ll be able to pee standing up.”

Tell me a story

9 Replies

This blog is anonymous, right? And those of you who know me won’t out me, right? Because there’s something that just tends to bring out the snark in me on a weekly basis, and I realise that if I really hated it all that much, I could just not go, but sometimes half the fun is in the complaining, you know?

It’s Storytime at our local library.

I used to go along with Monkey, way back in the day – in fact, it’s where I met my American Best Friend. At that point it was run by a sweet, well-meaning older lady who asked us to keep our babies on our laps and got a bit snippy if we tried to bring out snacks to distract them with. I know that there’s meant to be no food or drink in the library, but how else are you supposed to keep a wriggly toddler on your lap while they’re patently not interested in the story being told? Some other days there was a nice younger librarian with the fatal flaw of having a first language that was not English. Her mispronounciations of nursery rhymes had us gritting our teeth and wincing. One day I was asked once again to keep my baby on my lap – and this was my Active Baby Mark I, remember, who as a toddler was even less likely to sit still than his sister is now – and I just upped and left. In high dudgeon, no less. We camped out on the grass outside the library and ate snacks to our hearts’ content, and were soon joined by two other rebels (and their mothers; or was it the other way round?) and together we vowed never again to darken Storytime’s doorstep.

But time moves on, people have second children, librarians come and go, libraries close for refurbishment, and when they reopen some naive parents might think that maybe it’s time to give Storytime another shot. Well, yesterday was our third week there, and I think it’s safe to say that things have not improved on Walton Mountain. The current storytelling librarian, well-meaning as always, is totally tone deaf and sings the introductory song as if he’d heard tell of this thing called music but didn’t quite know how it worked. Next he proceeds to suck all the joy out of a couple of well-loved, amusing, and probably award-winning children’s books: yesterday we had Where The Wild Things Are , and I had to sit on my hands and sing One Dozen Monkeys* in my head to stop myself from groaning aloud as I listened to him stumble over the words and inject no emotion at all into one of my very favourite read-aloud books.

Meanwhile, Mabel had six friends (and two strangers) in the room, with their mothers, and all the two-year-olds milled around like a mathematical diagram for chaos theory; now congregating around the tiny baby to sneeze some germs on him, now leaping on one random mum who apparently had covered herself in baby-nip for the occassion, now wailing for mumeet (mine), now watching in amazement as one of their peers nurses (the others)…

So why don’t you go somewhere else, you ask? Because all our friends are there (also carping at the horror of our ritual Thursday morning torture session), because it’s handily situated right between the nursery school and the playground, because it’s local, because we’re gluttons for punishment and can’t believe it’ll be that bad again next week. Also because the kids seem to enjoy something about it – maybe dancing around to the two interactive songs-on-tape that are the same Every Single Week, or maybe just being shut in a room with a bunch of friends and some adults who can’t escape.

Or maybe just because then we can all go to the playground and bitch about how terrible Storytime is. It brings a community together.

* by They Might Be Giants. A friend posted it to Facebook the other day, and my children made me play it approximately 147 times and I went to bed that night with it going round and round and round in my head. Luckily, it’s very good. So you should have a listen. (Just beware before you play it near your kids.)

Top gear

3 Replies

Monkey wants to body-paint himself red. Except his eyes, because he’s very sensible. I’m not exactly sure why, but apparently it will provide camouflage (when he’s on the red chair, I’m assuming) and help him to defeat baddies. He promises to take a bath as soon as the baddies have been defeated. I think we should teach him the word “vanquish” next.

I hope this desire wears off soon, before he goes looking for a paintbrush.

The weather was beautiful today. We went out on the back deck and I fished the easel (warped from being left out in the rain one – or seven – too many times last summer) out of the shed. It was soon abandoned in favour of making trails with the sidewalk chalk all over the deck itself, and then on the driveway out the front. Monkey was drawing long wiggly lines and then having me make a movie on my camera of him walking thrillingly along them. (I know you’d love me to post one of these engrossing pieces of cinematographic genius, but I think I’ll keep them to myself.) Mabel was having an involved conversation with her doll, and her horse, who were sharing the dolly stroller.

I made the mistake of leaning against the front of the car. And then raising my feet so I was perched on the bonnet (hood). Big mistake. Huge mistake. Mabel looked up, decided sitting on the car was the most fun thing ever, and scrambled up to join me. I abruptly removed her, stated that nobody would be sitting on any cars, and she went back to the chalk, or her baby, or whatever it was.

The battery light on my camera started flashing and I took Monkey in to show him how I had to put it into its little holder and plug it into the wall. When we came back out we found in front of us something approximating this (excuse my lack of Photoshop, so I have to do it in text):

BABY
CAR

I would have taken a photo, but I was too busy grabbing her before the neighbours called CPS. Also, the camera was plugged into the wall in the house. But take it from me, you don’t want to find your two-year-old perched like a grinning maniac in between the bars of the roof rack of your pale green Subaru Outback. It’s just not a Good Thing, you know.

Awfully Chipper

Optimists think they have more fun