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Tuesday, March 27, 2012
The Complaining Box
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Tuesday, March 20, 2012
Spring Break is not for parents
I met a friend at the park yesterday. Since it basically felt like the middle of summer out there, the place was packed with kids. What was intended to be a relaxing morning, letting the kids run off some energy while catching up with another mom, turned into The Great Kid Hunt. Keeping your eye on one was hard enough, but two? Nearly impossible without neon flagging attached to their foreheads. My friend and I were lucky to get 5 minutes of talking in before we each had to run in opposite directions to prevent our 2-year-olds from trying out the fire pole or running into the swings.
I see the point of spring break for kids, but for parents I think it serves more as a warning to get your summer plans in line fast, or else risk 12 back-to-back weeks of spring break repeated.
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
Not fruitcake
She immediately invited us inside the foyer where she kept this mind-blowing bowl of candies. At least that's how I remember it. They were those strawberry hard candies that have the chewy insides. You know the kind.
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So while my brother and I are figuring out how to carry ten pieces of candy in each fist, she disappears into her kitchen and comes back with a bakery box for us to bring home. A holiday gift of her own. We thanked her with our mouths full of strawberry candy and stepped out onto her porch.
What could be inside the box? We carefully brought it home and begged my mom to open it right away. When she cut the strings and opened the box, we found a delicious-looking cake with white frosting inside.
Whatever happened after that has been permanently blurred in my memory.
I think the basic gist is that my mom cut into the cake and as soon as we recognized what we were looking at, we were forever scarred. In fact, if someone even mentions the words "sandwich" and "loaf" together I find myself fighting an urge to stuff my face with those strawberry candies at once. Just to get the memory off my taste buds.
From Wikipedia:
A sandwich loaf is a stacked party entrée that looks like a cake. While rare today, the food was quite popular during the mid 20th century in the United States. To create a sandwich loaf, bread is cut horizontally and spread with layers of filling. Common fillings include egg salad, chicken salad, ham salad, tuna salad, and Cheez Whiz, but other fillings are possible, including peanut butter and jelly and mock egg salad made from tofu. After the layers are assembled the entire loaf is coated with whipped cream cheese, which may be tinted with food coloring.
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Monday, March 12, 2012
Threat
Related.
Friday, March 9, 2012
Cultivating Nordic Appreciation
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So I just realized that I might be doing the same thing to my kids except instead of shortening a word by a few syllables, I'm replacing the names of different types of furniture with IKEA product names. Here are a few examples.
Daughter: Mom, can I have some tape?
Me: Yes, it's in one of the NORDEN drawers.
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Daughter: Where is your chapstick?
Me: On top of the HEMNES next to the stack of laundry.
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Husband: What do you think about switching the EKTORPs?
Me: Or we could just move the white EKTORP over there instead?
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I guess only time will tell whether our kids will start calling side tables, dressers, and sofas by their nordic names. Our kid could very well be at a friend's house someday and proclaim, "This is the most comfortable EKTORP I've ever sat on!". Of course the difference between this situation and my situation with "pry" is that the couch she'll be sitting on actually has a chance of being just that. Nobody I know besides my dad uses the word "pry".
By the way, I only just found out that there's actually a method to the naming madness over at IKEA. Check this out (compliments of Wikipedia):
IKEA products are identified by single word names. Most of the names are Swedish in origin. Although there are some notable exceptions, most product names are based on a special naming system developed by IKEA.
- Upholstered furniture, coffee tables, rattan furniture, bookshelves, media storage, doorknobs: Swedish placenames (for example: Klippan)
- Beds, wardrobes, hall furniture: Norwegian place names
- Dining tables and chairs: Finnish place names
- Bookcase ranges: Occupations
- Bathroom articles: Scandinavian lakes, rivers and bays
- Kitchens: grammatical terms, sometimes also other names
- Chairs, desks: men's names
- Fabrics, curtains: women's names
- Garden furniture: Swedish islands
- Carpets: Danish place names
- Lighting: terms from music, chemistry, meteorology, measures, weights, seasons, months, days, boats, nautical terms
- Bedlinen, bed covers, pillows/cushions: flowers, plants, precious stones
- Children's items: mammals, birds, adjectives
- Curtain accessories: mathematical and geometrical terms
- Kitchen utensils: foreign words, spices, herbs, fish, mushrooms, fruits or berries, functional descriptions
- Boxes, wall decoration, pictures and frames, clocks: colloquial expressions, also Swedish place names
Thursday, March 8, 2012
The future of dog
He's fascinated with dogs of all varieties and has no problem approaching them on his own. I can see that of my two kids, he's going to be one begging for a dog. And the problem is that neither me nor my husband want a dog. It's not that I don't like dogs, I grew up with one and had a fine experience. But I just can't even begin to comprehend adding the doggie responsibilities to my already-towering list of things to do and people to take care of. Is it not enough that I'm already changing tons of diapers - let's add the pooper scooper to the repertoire! And how much money do they eat up in specially formulated kibbles and health care? I'll admit it would be nice to have the dog under our kitchen table for scrap clean up, but that doesn't even begin to cancel out the shedding or the smell. I guess I'm just not enough of a dog person to accept all those other duties that go along with one. And certainly not while we're overrun by small kids. So, given my strong feelings about the matter, why does something about this whole business seem slightly out of my control? Famous last words.
Wednesday, March 7, 2012
Cheese
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Let me take a step back and say that my parents didn't go out to the store and select a partial wheel of blue cheese with me in mind. It was leftover from a party they threw. Although I'm not sure that makes it any better. If they had instead sent leftover plastic forks, my life would have been so different. Because it's not just what that boulder of cheese did to our room, it's what it did to the entire dorm hall.
The mini-fridge I shared with my roommates stunk to high heaven while closed. When you opened the door? The door would only need to be opened a slight fraction of an inch for the odor to fill our room, travel under and around the sides of the shut door to our room, and envelop the hallway with the suffocating stench of ripe Stilton. I was the definition of a bad roommate.
Don't get me wrong - I love cheese! Stilton even. The stinkier the better in my opinion. But you have to be in the mood for this sort of thing, prepared for the onslaught. One of the most ill-prepared I ever was for the stifling scent of cheese was when I was in the first trimester of my second pregnancy. I was walking down the town's main drag and suddenly succumbed to an extremely powerful 1-2 punch in the olfactory department. Look at this line up:
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Then, just one store past the Body Shop, when you are still within the bubble of fruity doom, you are forced to walk right in front of the Cheese Shop. And it is here that the White Musk White Hot Summer Smooth Satin Body Lotion is abruptly replaced by this:
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Monday, March 5, 2012
Unsightly growths in your front yard
Last summer was downright manic with all the outdoor projects we tackled. We'd get the kids down at like 6:30 and then work outside with the baby monitor on until 9. The big stuff included putting a fence in the front of the house, establishing a veggie plot with anti-bunny fencing (they ate right through it), starting new garden beds, and creating a woodchipped play area under a cluster of maple trees for all the plastic crapola (slides, sand tables, ride-on toys) that inevitably comes along with kids.
Plans are already underway to continue the bonanza this coming summer with a few new projects. The first one on our list is to fence and screen the sides of the house so the backyard is more private and secure. I want to be able to personally threaten those bunnies getting into the vegetable garden without worrying that kids are running around to the front of the house (we live on a busy road).
Along with the side fence, we'd like to put in some sort of tree or shrub to give the backyard a little privacy from the road and sidewalk. There are tons of options out there for screen plants, but the most popular ones are the evergreen arborvitae trees:
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I think we're going to skip over these and keep looking for the perfect screen plant - preferably one that doesn't require a special cloak in the winter months. Because it seems to me that all your efforts to create a screen would only backfire as people literally gawk from their cars getting a load of your yard's unsightly growths. Instead of gaining precious privacy, you've just converted your property into Dr. Seuss habitat.
Sunday, March 4, 2012
Stop, Drop, and Roll
Much of the land surrounding those marshes were beautiful rolling meadows of tall grass with high quantities of ticks and low quantities of mountain lions. That's what I'd always tell myself when I was out there alone - the quantities of mountain lions are exceptionally low here! Would you stop turning around every 3 minutes to check if one's behind you? But I just couldn't shake the nagging thoughts that I might see one out there - and be armed with nothing more menacing than a sharpie and some ziplocks.
My mind wouldn't stop, and soon I would move beyond the sighting to the inevitable attack I would endure once I had been discovered by the man-eating cat. How would I respond? What would I do to defend myself besides waving around a few permanent markers? This was where the real fear set in, as I started imagining the sounds of twigs snapping under foot and tall grasses being pushed aside by the stealthy predator. My mind would be swamped with every single safety order I could remember - Make lots of noise! RUN!! Stand your ground. Make yourself appear bigger than you are! MAINTAIN EYE CONTACT. Under no circumstances should you make eye contact. Play dead! Run and tell the nearest adult. STOP, DROP, AND ROLL!! I mean, who in their right mind could actually remember any of these instructions at the time when they are intended to be helpful?
When I was trying to decide on a name for this blog, I thought "Stop, Drop, and Roll" would be a good one because this story of the imaginary mountain lion is a lot like being a parent. There are tons of "recommendations" for parenting that are constantly being changed on us at such an alarming rate that it becomes hard to remember what the current recommendation is anymore. Don't eat peanut butter while you're pregnant! Eat lots of it and start your baby on it within the first year! Don't allow your child to see a jar of peanut butter until age 4! Introduce solids at 4 months! Wait until 6 months! Sleep with your baby! Under no circumstances should you sleep with your baby! The list is endless. And many of these "recommendations" are issued with the same intensity as those intended to save you from a mountain lion attack. I guess the only difference is that while you can rely on your instincts for child rearing, the same will hardly make a difference with a mountain lion.
Saturday, March 3, 2012
Diaper bags
Before I elaborate on this fascinating turn of events, let me start with some background. As most moms would agree, your diaper bag and purse tend to merge into one fairly sizable piece of baggage that you must lug with you everywhere. In certain cases, it may actually require a set of wheels on the bottom for easy maneuvering. Thankfully, I haven't gotten there yet. My bag of late has been this super cool green number that my husband gave me as a birthday present years ago when I would have barely recognized a diaper if it tapped me on the shoulder. That's probably why I brought it out and started using it tote around all my stuff, even though it has no segmentation and immediately turned into a vast stew of used tissues, receipts, cracker crumbs, and other essential belongings. Oh how I will miss digging through this wasteland of debris in search for my keys!