Holiday doubletalk

A typical conversation at our house these days goes something like this:
“I procured the item of festive intent from the Giant Warehouse of Recreational Objects for Persons of Small Stature today.”
“What?”
“The small scale model of a Camelot-type location.”
“Oh!”In other words, I got the castle for Will’s Christmas present today. Even Laura can’t figure that one out yet. The advantages of advanced vocabulary and a good understanding of political rhetoric…

Price of the pan

Will, being at the picky stage of childhood in which he lives only on peanut butter sandwiches, cereal, and blueberry muffins, wouldn’t eat much of anything at dinner today. So I don’t know why it surprised me after his nap when he woke up hungry that he strolled into the kitchen, hiked himself up onto one of the counter stools, broke one of the four corner trees off the castle cake, and then wandered back into the living room chowing down on this huge chunk of cake. That’s worth the price of the pan alone.

Our Fake Thanksgiving

Tis the season to go through a whole roll of Press-n-Seal, that super ultrasonic nuclear (or whatever) plastic wrap that sticks to anything, even wood. It’s a good thing, as Martha would say, because this week I have pulled out pans and bowls and platters I haven’t seen in, oh, at least a year. I’ve cooked my share of what Laura is calling Our Fake Thanksgiving—because we’re not doing it on the appointed Thursday of Thanksgiving. I keep explaining to her that we don’t know what day the Pilgrims had Thanksgiving or even the actual date Jesus was born, but that we’re a really calendar-driven culture, we picked some dates, and now we’re good to go. But there’s no law about what day you eat your turkey and stuffing. This is not a convincing argument to her.

William doesn’t care, of course. He’s so busy wanting to stop at every mall we drive by to see Santa Claus that he’s pretty effectively skipped right over Thanksgiving proper. Her whole life, Laura wouldn’t touch Santa with a ten-foot pole—we have I think one picture of her with Santa Claus, taken when she was almost a year old as we were walking on the quad at Alabama and Santa strolled by. We snapped one picture, me standing next to Santa holding Laura leaning as far away from that creepy red guy as humanly possible. This works out well for Will, for whom his parents have extremely low Santa expectations. He is just fascinated, and has been running around snatching Santa hats off displays to run around asking his sister what she wants for Christmas. What surprises me about is this is that the first time we saw Santa was the Friday before Thanksgiving, a whole week beforehand. You’d think Santa’d have stuff to do this time of year. Yeah, yeah, I know all about that whole elf theory, but still. (Insert obligatory grip about how the Christmas decorations and supplies were out in the stores the day after Halloween, which is after all pretty hard on a family with a three-year old with a really limited concept of when Christmas will come.)

So though Will thinks it’s Christmas practically tomorrow, today’s Our Fake Thanksgiving, and I made the stuffing and sweet potato crunch and “the green stuff” (our family’s version of the southern gelatin salad) and a loaf of sourdough bread to toast and spread with spinach dip and a castle cake. Yes, in a moment of holiday weakness I bought a castle cake pan from William Sonoma for William. I really have got to stop this pan madness. But the cake looks beautiful, except for a little breaking around the bottom, which I’ll know to cover with some ivy or something next time. I ended up making six things instead of the two I promised to make, and I’m sure my mother will have done the same, so it should be a good day for an afternoon nap. Possibly the last one until January.

Making muffins

“You want to use our Christmas tree muffin pans?” In some far-away and barely remembered period of pre-child insanity, I used to buy various seasonal cake pans. I guess I must’ve thought our whirlwind social life of swanky graduate school soirees really required that I make individual Easter egg cakes, which possibly I imagined decorating with fondant and icing? At any rate, I spent years snapping up discount Wilton pans from T.J. Maxx at the first sign of any holiday, and now I’m well supplied, which is a good thing, since my little Will loves to make blueberry muffins.

We wake up before everybody else on the weekends—one of us by choice, the other on request—and the first thing we do is assemble our ingredients. I’m not crazy enough that we make them from scratch every morning, so we use mixes, but still we’re cooking. Essentially I stand in my spot in the kitchen and direct my little sous chef: “Oh no! We don’t have the eggs and milk!” He’ll gather up everything except the muffin pans themselves, which, since I have so many, are wedged too precariously into the cabinet for him to extract one; he brings me the big bowl, the “measure cup,” and my favorite, the “eoyyl” or oil. He loves to break the Humpty Dumpties, although he likes to tap them on the edge of the pan until they’re bludgeoned to death—anything to keep that slimy egg from getting on his hands when it breaks.

We have the most interesting discussions while we’re cooking. I’ve encouraged him a little too much in his cooking skills, I guess, because we also have a running commentary: “I’m a good stirrer!” and “I’m a good cook!” Actually, he is. This morning I told him that if he could keep this up when he’s grown, he’ll have his choice of girls to marry. (Don’t ask why I felt compelled to make this comment. I don’t know. I just know I end up saying the oddest things to try to encourage my little protofeminist to grow up thinking sharing household labor is good!) “No, I don’t want to do that, that would be really disgusting!” We had a good chat about how Mommy and Daddy got married. “And was that disgusting?” No, I didn’t think so. And so on. He doesn’t appear to be reconciled the idea of getting married himself, which is fine since after all he’s only three, but he guesses it’s not disgusting that we chose that option.

Sometimes I wonder if he’ll like to cook as an adult because we made muffins together. More often I wonder if he’ll remember making muffins with his mother every weekend. Either way, I don’t mind cooking nearly as much when I have my helper. For right now—the muffins are ready.

Browser wars

You know, it just occurred to me today as I was working on our computer at home that we all have our own web browsers. I’ve faithfully clung to Netscape over the years, retro as that may be, because I always thought Explorer was so . . . Microsoft. So take over the world. So anticipate everything you want whether you want it or not. Of course, now Netscape does that too, but I can’t bring myself to give it up. Chris, always cutting edge when it comes to technology, has Deepnet. He has his four tabs set up on entry every day: Google, Memepool, Photoshop Contest and Wired News. Before Deepnet, his Explorer homepage was Memepool, but when Laura started using the web often for assignments, he reset it to Google and finally drifted off to Deepnet for good. So Laura has her own kid-friendly browser. I just set her a bookmark for Nimble Fingers, as she’s teaching herself to type now. But we haven’t actually set parental controls on it yet, as she doesn’t use it that often and we watch what she does pretty regularly. I expect that day will come, though, particularly now that she’s asking for her own laptop and cell phone for Christmas. Her chances of getting either are about as good as mine of ever having a completely clean house again, but hey, hope springs eternal. And William has Mommy.com. “Mommy, print me a picture of Batman.” “Mommy, print me a dinosaur.” Or the Incredibles, or a bug, or whatever’s the flavor of the day. And whenever I’m working, “Mommy, what’s that a picture of?” I have my own little parental control built in, looks like.

No hurry (for once)

Chris went off this weekend with my brother, who is having his last baby-free weekend. Shari has three weeks left before the baby’s born, and Matt won’t be able to go any distance between now and then in case she starts labor early, so Chris and Matt and another friend of his went off to Georgetown for their man weekend. It’s too cold to boat ride if you ask me, and since I just got back from my conference last week, I don’t really feel up to leaving home again. I just finished unpacking my suitcase as it is.

So Will and Laura and I are having a low-key weekend ourselves, mostly because I can’t really get anything done with them underfoot, so I just decided well—why bother. Last night we watched Star Trek and had popcorn, which started out well but ended up as a sort of vicious cycle: make popcorn, make chocolate milk (our bedtime beverage of choice, very bad), hound children to sit still on the floor while eating/drinking, vacuum up a thousand kernels of errant popcorn, and finally, clean up the spilled milk. And how do they manage to spill milk under the bed anyhow?? I got a little cranky by the end, but mostly we enjoyed ourselves.

The kids wanted to sleep with me since Chris was gone, so I put poor Kitty out early and we all passed right out. It sounds peaceful in theory, except that Laura coughed half the night, and then I woke up with her behind on my knees and Will's feet on my stomach. It's like wrestling crocodiles all night long! I thought about taking a nap this afternoon with Will (he's much more of the sleep in the sun crocodile type, unlike his restless sister), but he decided he wanted to nap in his brand-new bed—his Christmas present from last year. I am all about supporting independent sleeping, so he’s snoozing away. Laura’s watching some horrible kid movie while she is (in theory) picking up toys in the living room. And I’m washing clothes, so that eventually I can change out of my pajamas. But hey, it’s Saturday. No hurry.

Not a hiatus

Partial list of things I haven’t had time to blog about
Princess Leia, Batman, & Halloween costumes
film realism for ten-year olds
semi-bawdy jokes???
putting coats on upside down
crystal balls and ravens
Halloween party post-mortem
not writing a conference paper
a phone from this century!
a visit to Washington
The National Museum of Women in the Arts!
& The International Spy Museum!
losing cars in airport remote parking lots
post-trip mail-reading and letdown
refusing to change passwords
end of the semester tedium and panic

Some of these I may come back to. Others you just have to wonder about.