Monthly Archives: November 2011

Disaster / preparedness

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Mabel is sitting on a blue plastic chair in front of the dollhouse, using a large toy car as a footrest. Every so often her bottom emits a noise, and I look at her, and she looks at me. If I try to take her to the bathroom, she runs away. Then she sits back on the chair and gives me those looks and tells me, “This is your last chance.”

————–

Okay, now she’s napping. I have moved from zero to somewhat prepared in my Christmas readiness – it’s amazing how much you can accomplish in an hour at Target with focus and without children. As I think I rediscover every year, once I let go of the compulsion to buy everyone the Most Perfect Gift Ever, that they will treasure for many years and regale their grandchildren with tales of, it becomes much easier. A present that’s good enough is still a present, and will probably be worn or played with or read or otherwise used at some point, and that’s fine. Getting it to the recipient before Christmas day is also quite important, at least with kids.

(I have to pack a box and mail it to Ireland by December 9th, lest you think I’m crazy ahead of myself. I could use Amazon.co.uk or some other Internet source to buy myself more time, but I do really like just going shopping and picking things out myself. This, presumably, is why bricks-and-mortar stores still exist even in this click-button age. And I could shop for twelve-year-old girls all day. Which is unfortunate for those of my nephews and nieces who are no longer, or not yet, or have no hope of ever being a twelve-year-old girl, but quite happy news for the one who is.)

I have found some Christmas cards, but have yet to print out a few photos to accompany them – my nod to the American habit of sending cards featuring a lovely shot of you and your family, which to non-Americans seems simultaneously a bit pretentious but also very nice because it’s good to see the kids growing up once a year. I have a lead on a present for my Dad, and some thoughts about the remaining people on the list. And when all that has gone to the post office, I might start contemplating gifts for my nearest and dearest and most demanding.

How are your Christmas preparations going? Or are you still hiding under the covers until it’s really December?

Shipwrecked

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There’s an A.A. Milne poem about a sailor who’s shipwrecked, and can’t decide what’s the best thing to do first – make shelter, get water, find a companion – so in the end he just sits on the sand and does nothing until he’s finally rescued. I keep thinking about him, because for far too long, in regards to Mabel, I have been that sailor.

I mean,

  • I want to potty train her (again) but I’m sort of afraid to go there because I don’t want her to best me again.
  • I want to cut down on nursing during the day.
  • I want to night-wean her so I can get some decent sleep.

I know I can’t do all these things at once, because then they’ll be doomed to failure, so instead I do nothing but rationalise my inactivity. Like this:

  • I can’t cut down on nursing during the day and at night at the same time. So I have to pick one. And it’s easier to say no in the daytime, when we’re busy and I have a modicum of willpower and I don’t care if she yells. 
  • On the other hand, sleep is more important to me, so I should start with the night-weaning. And anyway, in a while she’ll stop napping and I won’t have to nurse her down for nap, or give her comfort-boob when she wakes up, so that will take care of itself. 
  • But if I can stop her nursing to sleep at night, then she might stop waking so much during the night because she’ll learn to put herself back to sleep when she rouses, instead of sitting up and wondering where I and my boobs are. 
  • And when she stops taking a nap during the day she’ll be much more tired at bedtime and it will be easier to get her to sleep, so maybe I should stop trying until then. 

And then there’s the sub-list of all the excuses for why it’s so hard to night-wean her:

  • The resources on this subject say things like “Use your finger to gently break the suction as the baby [hah] is dropping off to sleep” and “Gradually reduce the length of time you nurse before they go to sleep.” So when she seems to be almost asleep, I warily press down on the boob and try to slip a finger into her mouth beside my nipple. She sucks harder. I push a little more. She clamps down on my finger with her teeth. Now I’m playing tug-of-war with a three-year-old, and I’m in a very vulerable position. This is not the way it’s supposed to go. She removes my finger with a firm hand. I subside for a few minutes before I try again. Lather, rinse, repeat. 
  • If I manage to win the battle and pull out before she’s ready, she simply sits up and demands the other side. (She is convinced that there are three sides, at least when I’m lying down.) And she always has to latch on to the “big” side – that is, the one that’s uppermost when I’m lying on my side, so it looks bigger. Then I have to heft her, still attached, over my body so that now she’s on the breast nearest the mattress and we’re both lying down again. As you might imagine, this gets tiring in the middle of the night when she just goes from one to the other. (But when you think about it, if you’re switching sides with someone in bed, you either have to go under them or over them, and it’s easier for the smaller, more awake, person to be the one going over. These are not considerations that come into your mind when you first discover how great it is that you can nurse your newborn lying down, believe me.) 
  • So cutting down on the time of nursing hasn’t worked for me yet. My latest tactic is bringing B back into the bedtime routine after stories and nursing – when he’s had his “What did you do today?” chat with Dash and got him his ritual drink of water and said goodnight, he’s going to come into Mabel and give her the same chat, or a song, or whatever she demands of him. And then he’ll leave and say goodnight and she’ll cry for me and I’ll go in and say “Just five minutes of side, and then I’ll stay with you till you fall alseep,” and so far I haven’t actually managed to keep to the five minutes part due to all the excuses outlined above, but maybe some day she’ll get so used to having him as part of it that she’ll forget to cry for me and just fall asleep on his shoulder. Riiiight.

I’m still sitting on the sand. I’ll probably be here until she grows up and rescues me.

Priorities

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I have approximately one hour, and I’m going to spend it with my laptop, briefly, and then a book, and possibly a coffee and a homemade cookie. I am not going to tidy up, clean the kitchen, put on a load of washing, make pumpkin bread, or start making Christmas lists. Doing any of those things might make me feel efficient and that I have accomplished something useful, but I’d still harbour a boatload (harbour, boats, gettit?) of residual resentment at not having got to just sit down and do nothing.

So instead, I’ll go back to my original mantra of doing nothing with this time that I could do when the kid(s) are at home. I can always put on the washing after Mabel gets back, and whip up a loaf of pumpkin bread while she’s napping.

In the car this morning, Mabel and I had an interesting discussion:

Mabel: Mummy, you know, I think now I can go to the top of the big climbing frame in the playground, because I’m older.
Me: Really? Maybe so. You know, I think now you can wear underpants and use the toilet, because you’re older.
Mabel: No, I’m not going to do that.
Me: Well, I think after Christmas you’ll start wearing underpants.
Mabel: Will I be older after Christmas?
Me: Oh yes, definitely.
Mabel: Well, that would be okay.
[...]
Mabel: Why are you laughing? I don’t want you to laugh at me.
Me: I love you, that’s why I’m laughing.
Mabel, grumpy: Well, I love you, and I don’t laugh at you .

Touché.

Dedicated follower

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Always at the forefront of fashion, today I purchased my first ever pair of skinny jeans.

They look sort of okay, considering. The last time I wore tapered jeans it was 1994 and OJ Simpson was driving around Southern California in a white Ford Bronco. And I think I bought those ones by accident, meaning to get straight-leg. Since then, I’ve stuck religiously to boot cut and flared jeans, that hug my curves and thoughtfully balance my top half. So it’s taken a leap of faith to get to the point where I willingly spent money on another pair. (As little money as possible. Today’s pair are from Old Navy, half price for Thanksgiving, with the aid of a $20-worth for $10 groupon. I may have paid little more than the tax, but then I went and got Dash a Superman t-shirt and a pair of camoflauge cargo pants too.)

Now I just have to figure out what to wear them with. My new snowboots , which are admirable more for their bargain-quality than their loveliness, look quite decent with them. I discovered that, if I have no regard for circulation in my calves, I can actually fit them inside my high-heeled tall black boots (the pair that featured in my very first blog post , in fact; I’ve had them a while, it would seem). Then again, I’m not sure I have anywhere to wear that particular look to, and I also quite like the concept of blood moving unimpeded around my body.

On top, I believe a longish sweater, or preferably a chunky knit, is the way to go. Or probably, given the snowboots, a big puffy winter jacket. Oh, but I don’t have one of those. Back to Lands End Overstocks I go…

A new phase

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It’s all but impossible to narrow your own child’s personality down to a few simple traits – they have so many facets, and so many personas – you know, it’s almost as if they’re whole people who won’t fit into little predefined boxes, just like you and me …

So please indulge me as I now do exactly that, just a little bit. Because I seem to see Dash’s personality emerging anew these days, and it’s amazing. I don’t know if this is how he’ll be as he grows up, or if it’s just another step along the way, but I love it. He was an active baby, always on the go, kicking hard from the very start. (And I mean the very start. Before he was even out, he’d take my breath away with the thumps.) He was the sort of toddler who’s like a wind-up force of destruction: put him down and he was off, straight into the nearest thing he could pull down and take apart. He was a preschooler who couldn’t be left alone with a non-board-book: he would just rip them up, because they were there and he could. His paintings at nursery school were huge swathes of black, his drawings were scribbles, his scissor skills lacked accuracy. In short, his fine motor skills had not yet caught up with his gross ones. Which is pretty much the norm for a boy of his age.

Then there was the valley of four-and-a-half, this time last year, when an ocean of self-consciousness swept over him and he was almost swallowed up by the embarassment and terror of just being, especially in public, and life was difficult for a while. This year he’s emerging like that most cliched butterfly from a chrysalis, and contrary to everything I expected as I watched him grow, it seems that maybe here I have the bookish child I always not-so-secretly hoped for, after all.

He’s still active – his favourite thing at the moment is to ride his bike round and round in ever decreasing circles, and he wants a Razor scooter for Christmas. But it seems his fingers have finally caught up with his imagination. He can happily spend ten minutes at a time (which is an age, for him – he runs on dog years, I think; except when in the bathroom, at which point endless aeons telescope into mere seconds as he stares into space and forgets why he’s there) drawing a huge-armed person, or an intricate pattern, and colouring it in carefully, and even labelling it; or painstakingly writing a two-line story, asking at every word how it should be spelled.

[Sample story, intriguingly entitled "How the Hoverbike was Invented". "Once upon a time the scientist invented a new machine. It was a hoverbike." Brief, and to the point, if somewhat lacking in the detail I was so hoping for. Also, "How God Made the World: God made the world by the big bang." Fascinating stuff, from the child of two atheist agnostic ex-Catholics.

Related aside: Mabel came upstairs yesterday while I was getting dressed, turned on the bedside light, and announced, "God created the world!" I was a little startled. I came down to discover Dash had just written the above story, which explains it to some extent, but her let-there-be-light moment was entirely spontaneous. Spooky.]

Anyway. Today we went to the National Harbour, which was very nice, if a little more commercial than I was expecting, what with all the shops, and the frankly Vegas-esque feeling of the convention center, and we thought we might stay for the lighting of the tree. (We didn’t, because they spent so long getting around to it that it was time to go home before they’d started. It was still very pretty, though.)

Tree, pre-lighting; harbour; sunset.

Dash pestered me for a small notebook in CVS, so I shelled out a dollar for his art, and while Mabel was jumping off benches and dancing to the warming up choir, her brother was diligently drawing designs for several options for the mechanism of his immortality machine (to be brought out on limited release, friends and family members only, when we’re old so we don’t die). It will be operated either wirelessly or by a stick. I think. Here, he can explain it to you.

All clear?
I love this kid. I can’t wait to see what he does next.

(And while I’m at it, here are Mabel and her dad, for your further entertainment.

)

Tofurkey or not tofurkey

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I love the days when I have a legitimate reason to make B take the kids out for a couple of hours, turn on some music, and potter happily around the kitchen all afternoon. Even though I always say that Thanksgiving isn’t our holiday, and so we feel no compulsion to celebrate with anything special, the general widespread culinary busy-ness always infects me and it turns into one of those days after all.

A few weeks ago, as I may have mentioned, I saw a recipe for carnitas on Smitten Kitchen, and decided that maybe we should have traditional Thansksgiving tacos, just as the pilgrims did.

On Tuesday I garnered the ingredients I needed, except for the meat, which I couldn’t find in Safeway. Never mind, I thought. Fate will provide. Indeed, in spite of a day sandwiched by a dental appointment for one child in the morning and a doctor’s appointment for the other in the afternoon, fate, in the shape of the local co-op supermarket did provide: there was a large pre-packaged piece of pork shoulder in the meat fridge, and when I asked at the counter they said that the butcher would happily let me have just the three pounds of it I needed, and even cube it for me as per the recipe.

Then there was the question of dessert. Dash has been pestering me lately to make caramel, ever since he tasted some caramel dip for apple slices at a halloween party. He didn’t eat any of the apple, but he very much enjoyed licking off the caramel. I keep telling him that I’ve never made caramel, and it’s very tricky, and I don’t have any cream so I just can’t; but evidently the notion took root because as I wandered around the co-op waiting for the butcher to do his thing, I vaguely remembered that there was a recipe somewhere for caramel apple cheesecake. That sounded nice, and I had ricotta in the fridge to use up. So I bought some apples.

When I got home I found the recipe, in Nigella’s Feast , but it turned out to need apple schnapps and no actual apples at all. As well as cream and other things I still didn’t have. So that idea was shelved. This morning I made chocolate ricotta muffins with the ricotta, which was only about a cupful and not nearly enough for cheesecake anyway. But I still had all those apples.

This afternoon I looked at the clock, asked B when he wanted to eat dinner, and then informed him that they’d better scarper quickish so I could put the meat on right now – carnitas take almost as long as a small turkey after all. Once the meat was aromatically braising in its margarita bath (as Deb calls it), I thought some more about dessert and vaguely searched the Smitten Kitchen website for “apples”. Bingo. A last-minute tarte tatin.

I’ve never made tarte tatin before, and didn’t realise that the apples were actually cooked in caramel before being pastried, but once that became apparent, it was the obvious solution. I ended up using the pastry from the first recipe I found and the apple/caramel method from the second , because Deb said it was more foolproof. And I used my stainless steel pan with a plastic handle for the caramel part, transferring to a glass pie dish for the baking. As the arrangement of my apples was more rustic, shall we say, than artistically exact, it didn’t destroy anything. And the whole thing turned out most satisfactorily in the end.

The carnitas worked miraculously – one moment I was looking at all the brining liquid still in the pan and wondering whether I should cheat and take a scoopful out to help it reduce; then I did a spot of washing up to clear the decks and when I looked again, there was only a tiny puddle left in the bottom and the chunks of meat were starting to brown up amazingly and fall apart just as predicted. (So much so that I took a photo, even though Deb’s is much more appetizing, just to show you that even mere mortals can achieve this.)

We* had our carnitas on warmed corn tortillas, with jicama slaw (about two-thirds of a jicama and one carrot, grated, with three finely sliced spring onions and this dressing ), queso fresco, avocado, and fresh limes for squeezing. It was just like being back in southmost Texas in the hallowed booths of Mister Taco. (And believe me, for all I malign Texas , that’s one of the things we miss.)

And now I’m just waiting, with an extra glass of wine, for B to put Dash to bed before we break out the vanilla icecream and dig in to the tarte. With great forethought, I didn’t try too hard to give Mabel a nap this afternoon, so it’s 7.15 and she’s fast asleep. For now, at least.

*The children, lest I need to comment, did not have any. Dash has had his usual peanut butter sandwiches today, and Mabel, despite being presented with various other foodstuffs, has eaten half an apple for breakfast, three cheesesticks for lunch, and no dinner all all. Oh, and two chocolate ricotta muffins for snacks. Maybe that was an error.

** Mmmm. I have a mouthful of chewy sugary appley goodness as I type. I am a total tarte-tatin convert. A tart for tarte, if you like.  I don’t think I’ll ever make a plain old apple pie again.

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Ambiguity

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Dash has decided that we, as a family, will write and record a song. B will compose it, Dash will play the drums, Mabel will play the guitar and I’ll be the cameraman. I’m not sure who’s going to sing – maybe Dash himself. The lyrics have yet to be pinned down, but the general gist is that it’s a song about a family where the kids are asking the mum to make another baby for them.

This adorableness coincides uncomfortably with one of those phases I’m having right now where I can’t help feeling nudged by whatever – fate, hormones, my biological clock, hormones, probably some more hormones – to get pregnant again, against my better judgment and all good sense . I just have this nagging feeling that two is not meant to be the final number.

“ Not again ,” you’re probably sighing, much as Mabel likes to shout incongrously, every now and then. I know, you’d think I’d have resolved this by now, one way or the other. I would have thought so too, but it refuses to be resolved. I mean, I have yet to persuade either myself or my long-suffering husband to attempt to resolve it in one direction, and I have yet to come to terms with the other direction by deciding for good and for all to nix the possibility.

Last night was one of those nights where you spend far too long on high alert for another cough from another room. As I nursed a very jealous Mabel back to sleep while Dash was comforted through an ugly phlegmy coughing fit by his father, I realised how impossible it would all be if we had a baby as well. Not to mention the extra heart-in-hand-ness of just putting your soul out there all over again in another tiny, fragile body: the more you have, the more you have to lose.

But it’s not that I want a baby, per se: it’s more that our kids are so great, so wonderful and clever and funny and entertaining that it’s tempting to think we should make just one more. Just for the heck of it. And while things I said before still stand, what I hadn’t taken into account was how the older one(s) age out a little: I’m not saying that Dash is done , exactly, but he doesn’t need so much of the hands-on input that he did when he was younger. Mabel, of course, is a different matter.

There are many practical reasons why a third child would be a bad idea: economics, logistics, my age, population control, to name a few. Just imagining the toy explosion that would bury the family room, and all the baby clothes I’ve already given away and would have to reclaim gives me a headache. I’ve sold the Baby Bjorn, for goodness sake. Our bed is too high off the ground for the co-sleeper. We’ve left all that behind, and I’m happy about it.

I am, really.

I don’t even know if I want to post this now. It might stop being true any second.

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First, catch your hare

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Autumn, when the expat’s thoughts turn lightly to Christmas cakes.

For the past month or so, Facebook has provided me with gentle reminders that friends and family at home are busy baking the fruitcakes that will grace dinner tables on Christmas day, and continue to take up sideboard real estate well into the new year, shunned by some and gradually devoured by others, covered first in yellow marzipan and then a thick white layer of royal icing, and decorated – tastefully or otherwise. In our house, a family of reindeer usually trooped across the snowy expanse past a small cottage and a pine tree, with Santa and a snowman looking on, all vaguely to scale and from totally different sources long lost in family mythology.

It was October when it first occurred to me that I might have to make a cake this year. It’s not that I like Christmas cake – I’m more of a pudding girl, myself, with copious amounts of brandy butter and whipped cream – but it ushers in the season, and my husband can’t really imagine Christmas without it. Since we’re not going to Ireland this year, and I don’t have a new baby to excuse me as I did last time, I decided it was incumbent upon me to come up with the goods. Besides, any excuse to bake.

So I found a recipe, made my shopping list, and set forth. The orange and lemon I procured that day have long since been used for something else, because that was the easy part. I was happy to find currants and golden raisins (sultanas, we call ‘em) in Safeway, but mixed peel eluded me. (Glac é cherries we can do without.) Then I realised that I needed a cake tin too, as none of mine were quite the right size or shape.

It turns out that you can’t get a Christmas-cake-shaped tin in America, because Americans don’t make cakes that shape. All their cake tins are two inches deep, three at most: the tin I needed had to be at least four, or all the quantities and cooking times would be off. I considered ordering one , but since it would probably be shipped from Europe anyway, and time had marched on while I did all this procuring and considering, I decided I could import one with my mother-in-law, since she was coming over this week anyway.

I didn’t have to ask her for the mixed peel, or resort to making my own (despite the very helpful recipe a friend at home sent me, saying that it was much nicer than the stuff they sell in the supermarkets; but as B commented, the whole point of the exercise is to replicate the cake we make at home with the stuff they sell in Quinnsworth) because after failing to find it in the speciality imports store in Rockville, I happened across a pack of just the right thing (helpfully subtitled “fruitcake mix”) in our local, magical, stocks everything, co-op supermarket.

So, in triumphant possession of my newly unpacked cake tin, last night I put in motion step one of making a Christmas cake: steeping the fruit in the alcohol. On Nigella’s suggestion, I used marsala, because unlike whisky or brandy, there’s a bottle of it in my cupboard. 

Today, there was just one more thing to find: brown paper. Because a Christmas cake cooks for so long at a low temperature, it needs extra insulation to stop it burning, and a double layer of brown paper is required to line the tin before the parchment paper. (I suspect my mother skipped this step, because her cakes were always a little burned on top and a little gooey in the middle. Which is good for brownies, but not so much for fruitcake. Or maybe it was the fault of her oven.) I assume that in Ireland you can pick up some nice sheets of brown paper in the baking aisle alongside the dried fruit and the ground almonds and the ready-to-roll royal icing, but I had to use my imagination a little to find something suitable here. Halfway through the supermarket, inspiration hit, I did an about turn, headed back to the bakery department, and snaffled three or four of the paper bags provided to put your bagels in. Bingo.

 Yes, it’s supposed to stick up like that. Nigella said so.

And so, with the help of my trusty Kitchen-Aid, I set about making my fruitcake. In fact, though I can’t swear I’ve ever made one before, a fruitcake is perfectly simple and hard to mess up. The most difficult part, once you’ve caught your hare (so to speak), and lined the tin, is remembering that it’s in the oven, because a lot can happen in three hours.

I had some helpers to distract me, of course. They did a great job cleaning up the flour on the countertop, but were disappointed to find that none of it was sugar. Wait till we get to the icing.

 And so, we have a cake. View from above, before cooking.

 View from above, three hours and two (long) bedtimes later.

As soon as it came out, I brushed the top with some more marsala and folded down the paper to keep  in the steam (so the top doesn’t harden), as per my instructions. Then I wrapped the whole thing in two layers of tinfoil, and there it sits, cooling slowly and making the house smell gently of holidays.

Over the next few weeks I will feed it regularly with alcohol  – my mother-in-law told me to, so I have to – and a few days before Christmas I’ll go through some more entertaining shopping roulette finding the right stuff to do the icing. I will, of course, keep you updated with our progress.

Aspirations

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Dash came in to wake Mabel and me up one morning recently, because he thought his father was out running (which he wasn’t, and I would have quite liked to catch a few more z’s, but that’s another complaint). The ensuing conversation, after some formalities like “Go away,” and “Why are you here?” and “Please let us sleep,” went like this.

Dash: Mabel, when you’re a grownup, do you want to be the President?
Mabel: No, I want to be a carpet cleaner.
Me: A carpet cleaner?
Mabel: No, I didn’t say carpet cleaner, I said comic reader.

Sibs

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The other morning, while Dash was doing his thing in the bathroom, Mabel raced up to the door, burst in, yelled, “Privacy!” at the top of her voice, and ran away again. I think she’s got the idea, but her execution is a little off.