Cereal offender

When I first moved to the USA, I was baffled and bedazzled by the supermarket aisles, with their millions of unfamiliar foodstuffs in such enormous quantities. The cereal aisle, in particular, took my breath away. I've always been a fan of cereal - Rice Krispies for breakfast every morning of my childhood, two Weetabix after I came home from school, a packet of Kellogg's Variety mini boxes for a treat every now and then, with Coco Pops as the highlight of the week. As I got older, I embraced Special K - because the very act of eating it makes you thinner; and Crunchy Nut Cornflakes are like Frosties for grownups.

But cereal in America didn't taste the same. Between the extra sweetness of even my favourite old reliables, and the funny taste of the milk - no matter what percentage I got - it tasted weird. The milk here is different from my beloved Avonmore SuperMilk of yore, but I think a major part of the difference can be boiled down to four little letters: HFCS.

When I found out about high-fructose corn syrup, I decided I didn't like the sound of it very much. Call me insular, but I felt it would be better for my palate and my health to try to keep the basics of my diet in the US as much like my Irish diet as I could.

Initially, this was because I didn't want to move home and find that nothing was sweet enough for me any more. Now that I have two small people relying on me for their nourishment (directly and in-), I'm continuing to avoid HFCS as much as I can in our everyday foods. At first I felt that my reasoning was a bit feeble: if I didn't grow up with it, and if they wouldn't get it in Ireland, I don't want them to have it here. Then I read about Michael Pollan's book and discovered that one of his rules for eating is that if your grandmother wouldn't recognise it, it's not food. So I felt vindicated, because I'm pretty sure neither of my grandmothers would have an iota what that sickly sweet stuff was, or what it would be doing in bread, crackers, yogurt, or corn flakes.

I'm not obsessive about what my children eat: they're not allergic to anything, and if there's candy from Easter or Halloween or parties, they can have it; but since Monkey's diet in particular is so limited, I do try to rein him in on the blatantly anti-nutritious goodies while I still can. I've managed to eliminate HFCS from the bread, cereal, crackers, yogurt, ketchup, ice cream, and even the cookies that we buy on a regular basis (the kids don't get the cookies: I do). If Monkey has Cinnamon Toast Crunch or Ritz crackers in school for snack, I'm not going to make a fuss, but I don't buy them for home consumption. When he has chocolate milk, I try to make sure it's the sort without HFCS.

I don't spend hours reading labels: I just find the item I want, and then it becomes part of our regular shopping list. Did you know, for instance, that Kellogg's Frosted Mini Wheats have HFCS in them, but the Safeway own-brand ones don't? Isn't that strange?

So. (That was just the back story.) As you may know, we like to go to IKEA every once in a while. (Though I must admit that since the buying-things-for-the-new-house frenzy has calmed down, I find fewer excuses to go.) Now, it's not that I think of IKEA as a bastion of health food, but they do make a big deal of their kids' food options. The chocolate milk there is HFCS-free, so that's something, and usually, assuming I could run the gauntlet of ice-cream demands, I would get the children a yogurt each and be happy with a sticky bun for myself.

But lately, it has seemed that every time we go to IKEA, Mabel ends up like a whirling dervish, acting like someone who's an hour past her naptime even when there's still an hour to go. The last time this happened, it finally dawned on me that maybe I should be putting two and two together. The yogurt in IKEA is Trix yogurt: a small pot aimed directly at the jugular of youth, with pink and yellow dairy product together in one HFCS-enhanced sludge. I looked it up when we got home. If you google "Trix yogurt," the first two hits after an ad for "Nutrition to help your kids grow up strong" and some images, are a series of blog posts detailing how horrible Trix really is, how it's a big old pile of nothing good for you complemented by totally unneccesary additives and colourings.

So maybe, just maybe, that's what sets Mabel off like an increasingly intractable rocket each time we go there. It could be the HFCS itself, since she's not used to it, but it's more likely the infusion of Red #40 and Blue #1 as well as the unnamed artificial flavourings.

I'd have been better off letting them have the ice-cream, except that now I want to know what they put in that, and it doesn't come with an ingredients list printed on the cone.

Look me in the cleavage and tell me the truth

Guess what I did this week? No, I didn't hoover the upstairs carpet (though I did con B into doing that a couple of weeks ago, so it should be good for another, what, three months?); I called the number about laser eye surgery. My excuse for procrastinating has been that I can't ever make phone calls during the day, because as soon as the children see I'm on the phone, they rush over to yell in my ear or demand impossible things or fall over and hurt themselves or bring the toy shelves crashing to the floor, and only people I'm related to can be expected to deal with a phone call punctuated by "Stop that" and "Get down" and "In a minute" and "Just wait till I'm finished" and "Go! Away!"

So on Monday when I cunningly sent B and the children down the hill to the local egg hunt (postponed from Saturday when it had been raining), ostensibly so that I could ice the cupcakes for Monkey's party that afternoon, I also took five minutes to make the damn phone call.

And guess what? My themes interlock effortlessly, as it turns out I can't have laser surgery till three months after I stop breastfeeding. (Of course, they still want my money, so I'm booked in for a preliminary exam in a couple of weeks anyway, which is free unless I forget to ring them back and tell them that I won't be doing it, and how could I possibly forget that; but it's true enough that I may as well find out whether I'm a candidate up front rather than keeping the notion in the back of my mind for another year and then finding out that it's not going to happen at all.)

The nice man asked me when I thought I'd be done with the nursing.
"I have no idea," I said.
"How old is your baby?" he asked later in the conversation.
"Well, she's two-and-a-half... but she likes to nurse..."

I'm happy to find that I'm not suddenly planning to wean just so I can go and have people stick lasers in my eyes. I think my priorities are in the right place. But maybe this will prove to be the long-term goal I'm aiming for whenever it may happen that I decide it's time to call a halt. (Sometimes you really need a future subjunctive in English, don't you?)

Mabel's half-birthday is next Wednesday, and I've told her that she'll be able to go to sleep on her own after that, like a big girl, like Monkey does. I'm planning to (maybe, hopefully, we'll see how it goes) cut out the mid-morning and mid-afternoon nursing sessions she likes to indulge in if we're at home doing nothing much, and try to cut it down to just morning, naptime, and bedtime - but then to stop after ten minutes rather than nursing her all the way to sleep, and get her to work it out for herself. This will take some doing, and some will power (and frankly, I'm not sure I'm up to her weight when it comes to will power), but if we manage it, my hope is that perhaps she'll figure out how to put herself back to sleep without me when she wakes in the night too.

You can see by all my prevaricationary vocabulary there that I'm not entirely fully on board with my plan. But I have to start somewhere.

She's a big girl, after all.

Wednesdays

I may have mentioned our regular Wednesday lunchtime playgroup thingy before. It's a community group of parents and caregivers who meet up with their kids at the playground if the weather's good, or in a room in one of the community buildings if it's bad. (We get the use of the room for free, as long as nobody else needs it, thanks to some long-ago donation of toys that we and other kids can use.) There's a listserv and a Facebook page too, but the people who show up on Wednesdays are the really the core of the group.

The playdate officially starts at 11.00 and goes on till about 1pm or whenever the last people leave, though there's a major influx just after 11.30, when the nursery school across the road lets out. We bring lunches of varying levels of healthiness, and the kids do what kids do, and we get to talk to other adults; and nobody minds if you have to leave the table mid-sentence to go and disentangle someone from the monkey bars or if your toddler steals all their toddler's snacks. (Well, the toddlers might mind, but the parents are gracious.) Everyone keeps an eye on everyone else, and there's an understanding that the general rules of engagement are the same for all the children.

On mornings like this, when Mabel ran away at least twice and was caught by someone else before I'd even figured out what was going on, I am more than grateful to my village. In return, I introduced a 22-month-old to my pineapple and later headed several two-year-olds off at the pass when they scrambled up the hill and in the general direction of the road.

Every year around this time I start looking at the group and thinking wistfully of the children who won't be with us next year. As a new generation of babes-in-arms grow in to cruisers who can navigate the bottom of a slide or hog the baby swings like their brothers and sisters before them, and this season's toddlers become next season's fully-fledged playground consumers, those who are turning five before September are not long for this world. Next year they'll be gone to the land known as Kindergarden, where the days are long and lunch is always indoors. If they don't have younger siblings to carry the flag, their parents are gone from our group too, to that mysterious world of PTA meetings and recess and homework where we can't follow until our time comes.

Next year I'll be straddling both dimensions, still attending our Wednesday get-togethers, but with only Mabel, who as a three year old, will be right in the middle of the steps-of-stairs of kids (except when she's heading the escape posse). And Monkey will have graduated.

Tales from the boob

One day last week, in a moment of inattention, I asked Mabel if she'd just get off the boob so I could go and do something. Monkey happened to be listening; maybe it was something he'd asked me to do that I wanted to get up for. Anyway, he thought it was hilarious. Somehow, even though as far as he's concerned breasts are called "booboos" and that's perfectly normal and unfunny, he picked up on my use of "boob" and has decided to run with it. So now he keeps saying "Can you get off the boob, Mabel? Can you get back on the boob, Mabel?" and laughing uproariously at the comedy gold of it all.

***********

I was just upstairs putting Mabel to bed a minute ago. (At least, I started to. At time of writing she's "reading" to herself over the monitor and I'll be called back any minute to continue the job.) She was feeling particularly angelic and affectionate, blowing kisses and proffering hugs on demand, and as we lay down she put an arm over my breast in an odd contortion. I asked her what she was doing. "I'm hugging the mumeet," she said.

************

Sometimes when Mabel is nursing in his vicinity, especially just after her nap when we're all on the sofa, Monkey tries to cop a feel. (He's still very much a breast man, and I suspect he always will be.) I used to tolerate it, but more and more it's starting to drive me demented. I have told him that it's just not appropriate, and then explained what that means. The other day I heard Mabel telling off one of her dolls for some infraction: "It's not a-po-pi-et." Then it came up in rear-seat conversation: "You're not appropriate," Monkey told her, a propos of nothing at all. "Yes I am. I am a-po-pi-et."

Five

So now I am the proud co-owner of a five-year-old. We'll see how that goes. So far, I'm cautiously optimistic, although we're currently in a bathroom regression phase, and he's still subsisting on peanut-butter sandwiches and air (and cake; lots of cake), but his heart's definitely in the right place. (Under his ribs, above his stomach, that sort of thing.)

Five years is half a decade, which doesn't sound like very long until it's your whole life so far. But it also means it's five years since I had a full-time paying job outside the home, five years since I slept all night without so much as getting up to pee, five years since my breasts were my own and not someone else's meal ticket, and five years since I sent my metaphorical heart out on a metaphorical limb, whence it will probably never return, because that's what you do when you have children.

Seasonally appropriate musings

On Friday we went to a playdate, and I brought gingerbread muffins, because chocolate chips seemed inappropriate for Good Friday. I decided gingerbread, while not exactly redolent of repentance, was just that bit more sombre.

This year, with Easter Sunday falling handily on Monkey's fifth birthday, any quibbling about bunnies that may or may not leave gifts for other children or demands for luridly coloured marshmallow birdies have been pushed far out of the way by considerations like cake and ice cream and cupcakes and tomorrow's party. I'm pretty sure any notion Monkey may have had that there's anything else going on this weekend has been expunged from his memory. We were going to an egg hunt yesterday morning, but it was rained off.

I think it's at this time of year, even more than at Christmas, that I miss the pomp and circumstance of church. Once again, I puzzle over how to mark the special times of the calendar for my children without reducing everything to a present-grab or a frenzy of candy and chocolate and Red 40. I'd almost like to bring them to church, except that at this age they wouldn't last five minutes in the quiet alien environment, and anyway, it feels hypocritical. Easter Sunday is the most important Sunday of the year to the Church, and the priest always used to issue a special welcome to anyone who wouldn't normally be there (mind you, he'd say that at Christmas too). But even if I just crept in on my own to sit at the back and soak up the atmosphere or listen to the music or whatever I'd be there for, I imagine I'd feel either to a greater or lesser degree like an interloper and a hypocrite. I know they're all for the return of the lost sheep, but maybe not the return and immediate departure again for another year or three.

I do believe that the world works in mysterious ways, whether God is involved or not.

I do believe that there are far more amazing things than we can fathom on heaven and earth, even if I don't necessarily believe in Heaven.

I do believe above all that we should treat others as we would like them to treat us, regardless of irrelevant details such as race, colour, creed, or sexual orientation.

And I definitely believe that my gorgeous family is a gift, a privilege and a blessing, though couldn't say whether it comes from God or karma or the amazing random universe. In a way, it's all the same thing, so it doesn't matter.

Maybe we'll just blast Handel's Messiah on the iPod every Easter and leave it at that.

Snips and snails

Monkey has been thrown in among the two-year-olds quite a bit lately, thanks to the school break, and I have to say that he plays nicely with the younger kids - all that practice with Mabel must be paying off, or something. Though I've noticed that often, while parents are keen to pair kids of the same age off - the closer the better, for some reason - they often interact more happily when there's a bit of an age gap. Monkey plays well with seven-year-olds and two-year-olds - maybe it's because there's less jockeying for position when the natural order of leader and follower is so obvious, and everyone prefers it that way.

Yesterday he wanted to play hide and seek in the back garden. He hid first and Mabel found him pretty quickly. Then it was Mabel's turn. Monkey covered his eyes and counted to some random number - maybe it was twelve, and Mabel crouched down exactly where she was, her dark pink stripey t-shirt contrasting beautifully with the tufty new green grass. When Monkey looked up, he was momentarily discombobulated to see her right there in front of him, but he recovered beautifully. "Where's Mabel?" he asked the world at large. "Where could she be?" He proceeded to walk straight past her and wander round the garden a bit, and then came back and sat down on her. "This is a nice round rock," he commented. "Why is this rock laughing?"

I looked on and was all quite glowy with pride in my great son.

***********

And then, there are times like this:

- Mummy, do you want to see a Scrumbly-Wumbly?
- Wha--Gah! What are you doing? Doesn't that hurt?
- No - look. You just roll it up like this, and then you pull down your scrotum and put your penis inside and squish it in and then ... ta-da! It pops back out. And that's a Scrumbly-Wumbly.
- Okay. Right. Just finish up, please.
- But don't you want to see a Scrunchy-Wunchy?

As was pointed out to me the other day, he may have a great career ahead of him with these people. I'm glad that other options may present themselves if the metal-making for universal jet-packs doesn't work out, but I think I might just keep quiet about this avenue for the time being, lest he start practicing in public.

Spring Busy

Spring Break snuck up on me this week, as these things always do, and it was Saturday or so before the twin facts that all the toddler classes are taking a break and Monkey has no school all week impinged on my brain and I understood that I would be responsible for directing operations for both children all day every day without so much as a gymborama or a music time to distract us. Never mind having to do the grocery shopping and go to the post office and things like that with not one but two in tow.

On Monday morning I got the shopping over with early, and it didn't go quite as well as I'd hoped (child B runs away, totally, to another aisle; child A delightedly chases her, feeling all righteous and justified about it; I prevaricate halfway along the cereals straining to hear which end I should be aiming the giant truck-trolley for; they both appear in front of the milk fridges at the top end, where Monkey appears to be practising his cop moves with a most impressive wrestle-her-to-her-knees maneuver; I hope everyone understands it's all in good fun, and go to restrain the perpetrator in the seats up front, only to discover that this, the supermarket's most-coveted Blue Car, has no functioning straps so I can't keep her anywhere, and the shopping's only half done... anyway, I was a bit frazzled by the end of all that), but we managed to meet up with friends at a slightly different playground from usual and the rest of the morning went well enough.

The afternoon, mind you, was a moderate disaster, since it turns out that the only thing more stressful than getting the kids out of the house in the after-nap period is not managing to get them out at all. There was some dismantling of the sofa, some pulling out of the phone wires, some fighting over stuff, some dumping water out of the bath, some dumping the towels into the bath... it was tedious. I needed some wine.

Tuesday morning was much better: the stars aligned to give me a cloudy morning and no children with colds, and I took them swimming. Monkey got an early birthday present of scuba goggles (he wanted ones that covered his nose as well) and they were so excited they got themselves dressed in record time. We presented ourselves and our sadly under-used membership cards at the reception desk, where Mabel announced "We're going to go swimming!" to the nice lady, who was impressed. Mabel then went on to tell her all about how the doctor cuts the umbilical cord when a baby is born (we'd been talking about such things in the car, as you do) but luckily the nice lady didn't understand a word of that. They bobbled around me in the shallow pool for almost an hour, and afterwards Monkey was still talking about how this was the best day ever. Clearly, I should take them swimming just exactly this often, to engender such enthusiasm every time.

On Wednesday we managed a trip to Target without significant loss or injury, and our usual playground date for lunch, and the weather was so hot we had to break out the shorts and t-shirts. In the afternoon we went to a nearby playground-with-sandbox where a reasonable amount of fun was had, though I did have to go and explain to the father of the sobbing three-year-old that my two-year-old had just stomped all over her sand castles. Never my favourite moment.

Now it's Thursday and I think I'm getting the hang of this, a little. The weather is more seasonal again, so this morning was a different playground and this afternoon will be a quick shopping trip followed by more playground. Tomorrow it's going to rain, but we have muffins and an indoor playdate on the cards for the morning. By the weekend I'll be knee-deep in birthday baking, so at this stage I just have to make sure that I've got all the eggs and the cocoa and the chocolate chips, and Easter will just have to look after itself.

Detritus

I've just made another batch of chocolate ricotta muffins, to put in the freezer, to take out of the freezer, to bring to school next Tuesday, which will be the day we celebrate Monkey's birthday at school (being the first day back after Spring Break); and which is also a day I'm co-opping, so I won't be able to just whip them up after he goes in and bring them down at snack time. How prepared am I? (That was rhetorical. In fact, I'm only a tiny bit prepared. I still have to check I have all the ingredients for the birthday-party cupcakes and probably plan to make a cake the day of the birthday as well, which just so happens to be Easter Sunday. Which is why we have no plans for Easter whatsoever. It has been totally overshadowed by The Birthday, much as dinners have been totally overshadowed by Cake.)

Anyway, as I wait for the muffins and gaze around my - beautiful, gorgeous, lovely - kitchen, I am struck by the amount of sheer crap that takes up a square foot of real estate at the end of the counter. Here is a quick rundown of some of what's there right now:

• One giant water pistol, courtesy of last week's trip to the thrift store with Daddy (he's the expert on super soakers, having spent many useful hours playing Assassin as a grad student; which if you didn't know is a long-drawn-out game in which, over the course of several weeks, you try to sneak up on your unsuspecting friends in the Assassin league table and ambush them with a soaking before someone does the same to you; it's like being a secret agent, only wetter).
• One clean tea towel, ostensibly on its way to being put away; in reality will probably sit there until called into active duty.
• One pink water bottle.
• One children's library book.
• One sheet of stickers, mostly used.
• One tiny skateboard, with associated tiny screwdriver and highly swallowable tiny wheels.
• One mini-tub of pink playdough.
• One roll-up plastic eye-shield thingy from Monkey's first ever visit to the dentist, about two and a half years ago. Despite its ultra-disposable nature, this may never be thrown out, as it is vital to his superhero costuming. It frequently goes missing, for months at a time, due to its small size and transparent nature, and is always re-found with delight.
• A picture of someone else's children, from a Christmas card. This sort of thing paralyses me: I can't put it in the album, but it seems rude to throw it away. But I probably should. I'm sure their mother wouldn't hold it against me now that it's Easter.
• A "chick" in an "egg" in a "nest" that Monkey made at school. On its way to trash as soon as I'm sure he doesn't care too much.
• Three lip glosses, either on their way upstairs to my bathroom or in the other direction to be put into a handbag, therefore realistically just living there near the mirror so I can use one before I go out.
• The prescription eye-drops from the last time someone had pinkeye, which was at least a month ago now. On its way upstairs to the medecine cabinet in case we need it again before its best-before date.
• A pile of pebbles rescued from Monkey's jeans before they went into the laundry basket last night. On their way back outside. I hope.
• Sundry receipts, thank-you cards, duplicate photos, coupons, and instruction leaflets, none of which I can throw out because B might be keeping them for something. 

So I'll just square them up into a nice neat pile, put the bowl of "things the kids can't reach" on top (except Monkey can, so now it's the "bowl of things for Monkey to comb through and find treasures in") move the book and the water pistol, put the pebbles outside, and call it tidy.

Phased

It seems my sweet daughter is going through what I'm going to call a little phase. I'm hoping it's a little phase, and not the phase otherwise known as 2.5 to 3, because six months is a long time, and we're not even officially at the two-and-a-half point yet.

Before now I'd been fairly confident that Mabel was probably not beating up the other kids, unless she was talking them into submission with a detailed monologue. But lately, just to ensure an end to my smugness, she's turned a tad, well, violent. With the hitting and the scratching and the biting, oh my. Poor Monkey is most often the recipient, since he's usually logistically and emotionally closest, and he has that special brotherly trick of provoking her. But then, instead of retreating out of range, he stays where she is and just shouts, "Mummy, Mabel's hitting me." Sometimes this is interspersed with "Hit me again," and "See if you can get me now."

So I'm trying not to make too big a deal of it. If he's idiot enough to (a) poke a known tiger and (b) stay there waiting for more, I think he can deal with the consequences. He's big enough and ugly enough to run away on his own initiative, I think.

On the other hand, of course, Mabel can't be let away with such behaviour. We look her in the eye and tell her in serious tones, "We don't hit, Mabel" - and she faithfully, sweetly, and insincerely promises not to do it any more.

She's not a two-year-old lashing out in frustration or anger because she lacks the words. Mabel has the words to explain pretty much anything she cares to. (Though I do remind myself not to expect too much. She may talk like a three-year-old, but she's still very much two in every other way.) When I (idiotically) ask her why she's doing it, she tells me things like "I want to be bad," or "I'm going to hit him," or "I just want to." I think the last one is key: she can, and she's finding out what happens when she does.

No longer content to do what she's told just because we say she should (as if that was ever a trait of hers), she has made a new leap of autonomy and understood that she has the power to make people happy or sad, angry or loving. She cuddles up to us one minute, plainly manipulative, declaring adorably, "I wuv you", and then dances off with the prospect of mischief lighting up her face. She sits in her carseat and tells me, "I'm happy now. I'm happy because you let me take my toys with me." In stark contrast to before her nap, when she screamed because I had to strap her in.

Her hit is a closed-fisted arm flail: not a deliberate from-the-elbow punch, but not an open-handed slap either. It must come straight from impatient instinct, because it's not a move she's seen anyone else execute.  When Monkey was rougly this age, he went through a throwing phase; instead of hitting out with his hands (teeth, feet, nails), he used whatever object was to hand to express his displeasure. We removed the offending objects and told him not to, and in a while (too long a while, I'm sure, while it was ongoing) he stopped. We can't exactly remove Mabel's fists from her arms, so we just have to remove her from the object of her disaffection; but I do hope that soon enough I'm reminiscing about how this too was just a phase.

Saturday dinner, after all

Seven in a series of (just over) a week of dinners.

Since this is the dinner I was planning for Thursday, and then for Friday, I thought it only fair to give it to you as well, though it brings my total number of nights to eight. To be honest, I've quite enjoyed doing this, and it makes thinking up blog posts really easy, so in a way I'm sad to see it end. But it would stop being interesting quite soon once I started to recycle dinners you'd already seen, so I'll just have to make my children say funny things and go back to my old ways.

This is one of my emergency dinners, which I end up making about once every two weeks or so. Everything comes from the freezer, so it's always there. Yesterday afternoon I had an uncontrollable urge to make a chocolate cake, so dinner was a bit of an afterthought. I added broccoli because it basically functions as anti-cake and lets us have more. (Then I forgot the broccoli and produced it when our plates were almost empty, but let's not quibble.)

Without more ado: vegeburgers and oven fries.

The cake came out of the oven and I turned it up to 400F. Mysteriously, and a little worryingly, it told me that it was immediately at 400, even though it had been at 300 just a moment before. I took it at its word and put the chips (that's Irish for fries) in straight away. Waiting for the oven to get to 400 is usually the longest part of making this dinner, so it was nice to skip it.

I cooked the vegeburgers, which are Morning Star spicy black-bean burgers, and no doubt full of things we shouldn't eat, but I don't care, on the Foreman grill, because they only take about seven minutes that way. Back in the long ago, pre-children, I used to make my own black-bean burgers (they were closer to black-bean sloppy joes really), but doing that would make this much less of a no-effort meal.

I scavenged the last two slices of swiss cheese from the fridge and melted them on top for a couple of minutes. Meanwhile, I split and lightly toasted two sesame seed buns in our handy four-slice toaster.

On a good day, I have half a red pepper that I can grill with the burgers, which really adds to the finished article, but this was just a regular day. I did manage to put a few leaves of baby spinach on top, though.

And served with HFCS-free ketchup, which I was very pleased to find on the shelves. We don't go through a lot of ketchup, because this is basically the only meal we eat it with (I just didn't come from a ketchup-centric household), but Mabel loves it so I'm happy to give her the better stuff.

... And then I remembered the broccoli.

 

Mabel ate a lot of ketchup, conveyed to her mouth with a number of chips, supplemented by a further number of my chips. She also had at least one piece of broccoli, so I was happy.

And then we all had some cake.

Looking at the food we've eaten over the past eight nights, I can sum it up thus:

Protein:  sausage, meat-free, meat-free, chicken, fish, meat-free, meat-free, meat-free
Carb: potato, pasta, pasta, rice, quinoa/breadcrumbs, couscous, rice, potato (fries)

As far as I'm concerned, that's a pretty good spread - I'd say we usually have between two and four meat-free nights a week; I try to eat fish once a week, but it's more like every two weeks; we had leftovers only one night, we ate out once, I ate from the freezer once, and I put a dinner in the freezer for a future date. I went food shopping twice, though I won't try to claim that I didn't replenish milk supplies or pick up other things in Target or the local co-op in between.

I'm sure there are many other scales according to which my week's cooking has failed miserably: you'll note that after the first day I didn't even bother to mention how much of any of this the children ate, and I'm clearly negligent in the area of side salads. We don't really do dessert, but there were some strawberries and there are always cookies with my coffee after the children are in bed.

Friday no dinner

Last night I was going to make the dinner I'd been planning for Thursday, but it will have to wait another day because we ended up going out. This is why I don't do serious meal-planning: I like to be flexible. At least, that's my excuse. Hope springs eternal would be another way of putting it.

One of B's officemates had his doctoral defense yesterday (this is the point where, after years of study and hard work and going out drinking, and months and months of thesis-writing and staying in drinking and eventual last-minute submission, you finally "defend" the thesis by presenting its contents to your committee and any interested parties who feel like attending, and answer their questions, and after some deliberation they come out and tell you, "Congratulations, Doctor X!" and you fall over with relief and immediately head out to get as drunk as possible*) and he and his family and a few people from work were going out to dinner. As his family contains a six-year-old girl and they were going to an Indian restaurant, I let my laziness and love of dal get the better of my common sense and decided we should go. It was a 5.30 reservation; surely the kids would survive. They might even eat some naan.

But no. I am an idiot. A perennially optimistic idiot who lets herself be swayed by her stomach in the face of incontrovertible evidence. "I don't want to go!" said Monkey. "He's just hungry," I told myself. "I'll make you a sandwich. You can eat it in the car and you'll be fine by the time we get there." I gave Mabel an english muffin and an apple (or parts thereof) so that she wouldn't starve even if she didn't like the food. I put on a different, dressier in some indefineable way, pair of jeans and a tiny smidge of eyeshadow and some minutely dangly earrings. I was Going Out, and I didn't care.

We didn't get there till 6.00, thanks to a crash or three on the Beltway and our usual inability to be punctual. (This used to upset me. I hate being late. But two children and one husband who apparently thinks time will move backwards once he gets in the car have worn me down and if it's not my outing, I don't worry about it.)

What I completely failed to take into account was that just because they are quite capable of being wide awake in our own home until well past 8pm, I should not assume that this means they are able to be reasonable human beings who can sit still in a public place surrounded by strangers at any point in the day past, ooh, 10am.

The promised six-year-old girl was doing a lovely job showing up my horrible children, by sitting decorously beside her father, trying new foods, and conversing with me. (We do know them. I wasn't a total stranger.) Meanwhile, my almost-five-year-old boy spent the first 20 minutes trying to pull my arm out of my socket as he refused to sit at the far end of a long table that also had other people at it. I don't even know what the two-year-old was doing. Being cute and not shy, yes; sitting quietly, no. We had to take turns promenading her outside for a run up and down, because she just couldn't be calm. (I know. You're thinking: she's a two-year-old and it's getting on for bedtime. What did you expect? I don't know.)

After I little while I realised that Monkey couldn't sit down because he was dying for the loo: I scooped him up and headed for the Ladies, where I chased him round the small room a few times and finally achieved the desired effect. That calmed him down an iota, and all three children spent a little while happily under the table, until things got too raucous and the food started to arrive.

As I bolted a delicious samosa and hastily spooned basmati and various delectable accompaniments onto my plate, I reflected disappointedly on my totally uncivilised, unsocialized, basically feral children. We're stuck in a vicous circle of never being able to go anywhere nice because they are never taken anywhere nice so they don't know how to behave when they get there. I gave Monkey a few quick pointers on how the other people wanted a nice quiet dinner and not to see him gyrating all over his chair, but he wasn't really in a receptive place, and Mabel was beyond redemption. Besides, she's two.

Thinking back, we would never have attempted to do this when Monkey was two. Or if we had, our expectations would have been much lower. I don't know why we should expect it to go better now that there are two of them: it's not as if he will raise her to five-year-old standards (such as they are); rather, they will both sink to the lowest common denominator, which in this case is tired-two-year-old behaviour.

We ate, we negotiated payment, we took away our horrible offspring and drove home. I just then realised that it was already 7.15 and on a normal night they'd be deep in toothbrushing or stories at this point. And even toothbrushing never goes smoothly.

So that's why there are no pictures of Friday night's dinner. But it was delicious, and I didn't have to cook it, and despite all the distractions I did appreciate that. We may even dine out again, some day, in about three years' time.


* Not necessarily you. Certainly not me. Other people, I mean. I definitely don't have a PhD. I would have been up for most of the drinking, back in the day, but not all that concomitant work.

Thursday dinner

Six in a series of seven dinners.

Monkey usually has soccer practice on Tuesdays, but this week the weather on Tuesday appeared to be auditioning for a part in an upcoming production of Noah's Ark, so soccer was postponed to Thursday.

On Thursday at 5.30, while thinking vague thoughts of dinner, I called B to remind him to come home in time to bring Monkey to soccer. Usually on soccer days I feed the kids beforehand, but B and I eat quickly as soon as they come home, around 7.00. Yesterday B said he'd only eaten lunch about 20 minutes earlier (I know, crazy scientists) and would probably just graze later. So I reformulated my plans and pulled a single-serving something out of the freezer.

I try to use something I've previously frozen once a week or so, so that a week A's leftovers become something new and exciting by week C, or whenever. Every time I make something that produces more than four portions, I usually freeze the rest, because I object to having the same meal three times in a row. I had a single portion of red lentil vegetable curry floating around (metaphorically speaking; my freezer contents do not defy gravity), so I defrosted that and made couscous.

I love couscous because it's even quicker than my regular 10-minute go-to carbs of basmati rice or short pasta, and you don't even have to turn on a burner. Put a quarter cup per person of dry couscous  in a bowl and cover it with the same amount of hot water. Cover it and leave it alone for five minutes. Fluff with a fork and it's good to go.

This curry is quite time consuming, but it makes a ton of servings - ten at my last count - so one evening's cooking does a lot of freezer meals. It all turns mostly to a lovely mush in the freezer, but I'm still very partial to it. It's flavourful and aromatic without being too spicy, and because it's meatless, it's light and hearty at the same time.

I'll reproduce the recipe here as I got it, but I always leave out the cabbage and use the peas. I got it from a friend, but I believe it's a Madhur Jaffrey recipe.

------------------------------

Red lentil coconut curry

1 large onion (minced)
in large soup pot saute in coconut butter or 1 tbs oil over medium high heat until transparent but not browned

then add:
1 tbs garlic (mince)
1 tbs ginger (minced)
2 tsp curry powder
1/2 tsp each ground tumeric, ground cumin, pepper
1/3 tsp ground red pepper
1/4 tsp ground cinnamon
2-3 bay leaves
add and reduce heat to medium-low. Cook and stir constantly for 3 minutes, do not let spices and onion brown.

13.5 oz can coconut milk
1/4 cup soy or tamari sauce
1 cup tomato sauce
add and simmer on low heat for 20 minutes, stirring often. While this is happening, cook lentils, below.

2 cups dried red lentils (rinsed) 
5 cups water
in saucepan cook for 15 minutes. Add, with liquid to soup pot.

1 medium head cauliflower (cut into 1 1/2 inch florets)
1 large sweet potato ( peeled and cut into 1-inch chunks)
1/4 head cabbage (cut into 1 1/2 inch chunks
1-2 cups peas (optional)

add to soup pot and cook over medium heat just until tender. If using peas, add at the end of the cooking time. Serve over brown rice with toppings of (optional) indian chutneys and pickles, fresh diced pears, roasted sunflower seeds, plain yogurt.

--------------------

I do recommend making the brown rice - you'll have time, and its more substantial texture really complements the curry. I find the beauty of this is that if I want to make it, I only have to pick up a head of cauliflower and a sweet potato, and everything else can come from the store cupboard. And if I never get around to making it, I'm not left with anything bizarre on my hands, because I can easily use them up in a simpler way - roast cauliflower, sweet potato fries...

Wednesday dinner

Number five in a series of seven dinners.

I'm all confused now because I did the shopping on Saturday. Normally, I don't shop until Monday, by Thursday I need to make a quick refill trip to the supermarket, and by Friday we're all out of ideas and the weekend sort of looks after itself. So in my head yesterday was at least Thursday, and I was feeling that we needed something a little chaste after all that cheese and pasta and creamy stuff.

(It was pointed out in the comments that a green salad would have rounded out yesterday's meal nicely. Indeed it would have. But I don't like salad much, and it's fiddly, and if I can't get the vegetables into the same dish I'm making anyway, then we can do without the extra vitamins for that day. If it makes you feel better, you are free to believe that I had salad for lunch.)

So yesterday I got some fish, which always makes me feel virtuous, and doesn't go very well with cheese, so it usually ends up being quite healthy. I made a quick crumb topping and cooked quinoa and peas to go with it. These are tilapia fillets. I'd never heard of tilapia before we moved to Texas, but it's a very mild-tasting white fish. (Excuse the darkness of the photo.)

I put some panko breadcrumbs in a bowl with a little lemon zest, oregano, salt and pepper, mixed it with about a tablespoon of melted butter, and spread it on top of the fish. 

Bake at 375 for 20 minutes, or until the fish is opaque and the breadcrumbs aren't burnt. (In retrospect, I should have buttered or oiled the tinfoil under the fish.)

Cook quinoa. If you're not familiar with this grain, it's just like cooking basmati rice: twice as much water as quinoa, simmer for ten minutes. It's an interesting texture, a little chewier than rice and a great source of extra protein. (If only I could get the kids to eat it.)

Nuke frozen peas with some water, about two minutes.

I didn't expect the quinoa to go particularly well with the breaded fish, but in the end the two melded really nicely. I mixed the peas into the quinoa and put the fish on top, and the whole bite was scrummy.

Tuesday dinner

Part four in a series of a week of dinners.

This is when things start to get singularly less impressive. I stop cooking, as such, and start putting things together in such a way that food arrives on the table. We have reached the part of my week called "Ten-minute dinners" and also "What's in the house?"

I took some chicken tenders out of the freezer - half a small package, which amounts to about five tenders, which is probably half a normal American restaurant's lunch serving but stretches to close to two meals in this house. When I make a ham and cheese sandwich I put one slice of ham and once slice of cheese in it: I really hate shop-bought subs in this country where they shove in an inch of each and then the roll won't even close.

We're not vegetarians, but I find large slabs of meat offputting and I try to stick to the recommended pack-of-cards-size serving, augmented by lots of vegetables. If I manage to buy the organic meat, I feel better about it and this makes it go further. If I end up buying the evil meat, well at least we're not eating too much of it.

So. Defrosted my chicken. Browned it in some vegetable oil. Chopped up a red pepper. Opened, drained, and rinsed a can of garbanzo beans (chickpeas). Put them in the pan to heat up. Plopped in, with a satisfying schlurp, my secret ingredient: a jar of Seeds of Change korma sauce (look for it in your local organic market). Here you can see it delightfully retaining its sausagey jar shape, before I stirred it all together. (Reminds me of tinned cranberry sauce, the way Americans like it.)

Made basmati rice. Put the one on the other on a plate. Served dinner. No muss, no fuss, delicious. This is how I like my dinners: two pots - one carb, one everything else.  Not too much washing up.

The korma isn't remotely spicy - sometimes I use the Tikka Masala version, which has a tiny bit more spice to it and might profit from a blob of plain yogurt on top. If I'm really lazy/out of food, I just use the garbanzos and the sauce, and maybe some frozen peas to green it up. Then it only does two servings, but with the chicken and the pepper there's (almost) enough for four in here.

Serve with a nice refreshing beer, if you like that sort of thing.

Monday dinner

Part three in a series of a week of dinners.

Yesterday was an easy-dinner night, courtesy of Sunday. We had the pasta bake again, with some freshly steamed broccoli because the plate would have looked a bit sad and empty with just microwaved pasta on it. Of course, since I microwaved the broccoli too, that explanation doesn't really hold much water, but hey.

I almost always steam my broccoli in the microwave. Chop it up, arrange it in a single layer in a bowl, put a small amount of water on top - maybe half a cup - cover it and microwave for three or four minutes, depending on how much you have and how much bite you like in your broccoli.

You would not believe how much difficulty I have spelling broccoli. My shopping list is constantly a source of spousal mockery.

 

So that was Monday. It's not as if I cook every night. I just put stuff on the table.

I read quite a few blogs, though not as many as I used to when I had jobs that put me in front of a computer all day with no small people hanging out of me demanding stories and nappy changes and food - didn't I feed you yesterday? sheesh - all the time. And I think most people's motivation for blog reading is the interest we find in the minutae of other people's lives (when they're described well and engagingly and without bad grammar) - the things that make you say "Yes! Exactly!" and the ones that make you say "Wow, I'd never have thought of that!" and those that elicit an "Ew. Not in a million years." Dinner is just a very simple subset of these sort of things.

So I'm not doing this because I think I'm a great cook and want to brag, or because I think I'm serving wonderfully nourishing meals that you should all emulate, or because I take beautiful pictures of food (ahem. I don't think so), but more because it seemed like a fun project and on the small chance that some tiny thing I do habitually and without even thinking, in my dinner-providing, might turn out to be a lightbulb moment for someone who reads about it.

Sunday dinner

Part two in a series of a week of dinners.

I have rarely if ever cooked a roast, and Sunday dinner here is usually something quick and easy, but since I'd gone shopping the day before and wasn't in a rush, I made something a bit more time consuming yesterday. It was going to be vegetarian lasagne, but then I discovered that there were only two sheets of lasagne left in the box I'd been counting on, so it turned into pasta bake. A little more effort, but just as yummy. This made a generous six servings: two on Sunday, two for Monday, and two for the freezer.

First I chopped up a large onion, a courgette (zuchinni) and a summer squash, and sauteed them in olive oil till soft. You could easily use mushrooms and aubergine (eggplant) instead or as well; these were just what I'd bought that day.

 

I added a jar's worth of roasted red peppers (I usually use a fresh one, but roasted adds an extra layer of flavour; or at least I like to think so), some halved grape tomatoes I had hanging around, and one very fat clove of garlic, crushed. 

 

Then I put in a tin of fire-roasted tomatoes and one of crushed tomatoes. If I'd had a jar of ready-made pasta sauce I'd have added some of that instead of one of the tins, but I didn't. I seasoned with salt, pepper, oregano, the end of a bottle of red wine that had been sitting in the kitchen waiting for its moment to shine, and a liberal shake of worcester sauce. Apparently I forgot to take a photo of this step, but when you've seen one big pot of tomatoey vegetable sauce simmering on a stove, you've pretty much seen 'em all.

 

Then I made the bechamel sauce. I know a lot of Americans (particularly) use some sort of thinned-out ricotta mixture for the white part of a lasagne, but this is how I learned to make it in Home Economics, so this is what I do. Melt two tablespoons of butter, stir in two tablespoons of flour, season, let cook for one minute, stirring all the time. Gradually add milk, enough to make as much sauce as you think you'll need. (I use as much milk as fits in my yellow-and-white striped jug. Maybe it's half a pint. I never quite have enough sauce.) It doesn't matter if it's too thin, because the cheese will thicken it up. Then stir in a good handful or two of grated cheese. I was virtuous and used cheddar that I grated myself instead of buying the ready-shredded stuff.

While this was going on, I had boiled the kettle and put on, begrudgingly, my pasta. (Begrudgingly because if I'd remembered to buy more lasagne, I wouldn't have needed to do this. But it's not exactly tricky.) I used a mixture of penne and spirals. When the pasta was done (or a tad underdone) and drained, I mixed in the cheese sauce.

 

Then the fun part. Since it was meant to be lasagne, I layered the components instead of just mixing them all together into one big muddle. It doesn't make much difference to the finished product, but it feels good.

 

I started with a small layer of pasta, then tomato sauce, then some fresh spinach since I had it to hand, then pasta again, sauce, spinach, and finally the very last of the pasta on top, and more grated cheese to fill in the spaces.

Bake at 350 F for 30 minutes or until bubbling. Let stand for ten minutes before dishing up, lest you burn your mouth.

Serve, in this case, with a very nice Pinot Grigio. I like my white dry, very cold, and almost completely colourless.

Monsters and sausages

I have created a monster. A two-headed monster that can't sleep without me, whom nobody else can hear or comfort in the dark of the night. A monster of my very own, to love and hug and call George.

I lie in bed with the one, listening to the other toss and turn. When the one is finally asleep enough, I creep away, to lift the other from his repose and direct him towards the bathroom, where he relieves himself and can be deposited back where he belongs. The other one wakes up because I'm no longer there. I go back to her. Lather, rinse, repeat. I crawl into my own bed and lie there for a while, waiting to see what will happen. I hear a cough, in stereo, one from each room.

I wonder how I got myself into this mess, and how long it will be before I remember it longingly and wish for the days when I only had to lie down beside my children to soothe their ills and quiet their restlessness.

*****

This morning, Monkey stood in the bathroom calling to us: "Hey! Guess what shape I can make my penis into! Come and see!"

******

On to more lofty matters. I had a notion that I would blog dinner for a week, just to see what happens. I did the shopping yesterday, so I'm starting there. I have done my usual amount of meal-planning; that is, I have an idea of about three days' worth of dinners, and after that it'll be the seat-of-our-pants all the way. And you can be here to see how it all pans out. I promise to faithfully chronicle what we eat, hopefully with photographic evidence, from last night for the next six evenings. (I will even try to remember to take a photo of the food on a plate, from today on.)

So, without further ado: Saturday - Sausages, Beans and Mash.

I cut some potatoes in half, boiled them for 15 minutes, drained them, and mashed them with some grated parmesan, a couple of pats of butter, a splash of buttermilk, salt, pepper, and a grating of fresh nutmeg. (I highly recommend investing in some fresh nutmeg. It lasts forever, is simple to use, and smells light years more amazing than the pre-grated stuff.) Here are the potatoes before the masher met them.

 

I took my sausages (sweet Italian), poked a few holes on each side, and stuck them in the oven at 425 for half an hour, turning after 15 minutes. Easiest way to cook sausages.

And then I topped and tailed my green beans (which looked a tiny bit the worse for wear as they'd been sitting in the fridge for the best part of a week), and boiled them for 7 minutes. I tossed them with some olive oil and salt and pepper and wished I had a lemon to zest over too, but they turned out really sweet and delicious.

This is where the photo I forgot to take goes. (Sorry. Will try harder tonight.) But it tasted good, if basic and unfrilly.

Child score: 
Success! Mabel, having dined on baked beans, chomped down almost an entire sausage and discovered she likes green beans. She still refuses to try mashed potato. I don't undersand my children, turning their backs on the land of their forefathers.
(Monkey will not be appearing in the child scores, as he would skew the results irreparably.)

Spitting image

Monkey is the image of his father, in many ways. People have been telling me that ever since he was born, but it's taken me a long time to see it. (Apart from their hairlines, which were clearly similar, one coming and one going.)

As a baby, Monkey looked to me the very picture of generic baby, with no particular identifying features. When I look in the mirror myself, I have always seen two eyes neither far apart nor close together, a nose in the middle that is not button-like, and a mouth that opens and closes as directed, under some brown hair. Beyond the fact that the skin is pale and the eyes are green, I can't tell you what I look like. So of course I can't see it if my children look like me, but you'd think I would recognise my husband in them.

And yet. Finally, now, when I look at photos of baby Monkey, I can fleetingly see what they were all talking about. It's the brow, the eyes, the slightly anxious expression in the few photos where he's not grinning delightfully for the camera.

 

I've just gone through all his baby photos twice, and this is the best example I can find. Please excuse the prison-issue pyjamas and escaping foot. (He's about seven months old here.) It's all but impossible to see the boy he is now in these pictures, too; now and then I catch a glimpse of a still-familiar expression in the eyes, but his face shape is so different, now that he's a pixie-chinned imp, that it's hard to reconcile the two.

See? Can you even tell it's the same child? Or is it just me who fails to see the obvious resemblance? (I, even.) (What does it mean when I can't even tell that my own firstborn looks like himself?)


But then. There's the matter of accents. One reason I could never countenance staying in America for long enough to have children here (way back when I thought I had a choice about this sort of thing) was that they would have American accents. How could I love a child with an American accent as my own? Wouldn't they seem like little, twangy, aliens? But life works in mysterious ways, and that's not how it has turned out.

For a long time I allowed myself to believe that my children didn't have any accents. (This is exactly the same delusion that many people have about themselves, or all denizens of the place they grew up in. They think, "We [Californians/Dubliners/Glaswegians] sound totally neutral and speak pure, correct English. Everyone else sounds all funny because they're saying it wrong.") Even last summer, when I overheard some mothers in a playground in England remark of my son, "Oh, he's a little American boy," I thought they might have it wrong. English people don't really understand Irish accents, you know. (Seriously. I spent a summer waitressing in London after college, and more than once had local customers ask me if I was American.)

But yes, they do both have American accents, though an American would probably detect a twinge of other in there. Mabel still says zed (and zebbra), but Monkey is fully assimilated and goes with zee and zeebra. Luckily for me, that's about as much regional specificity as I can detect in them, so as far as I'm concerned my children are the only totally accentless English speakers on the planet.

Priorities

Yesterday afternoon Monkey grabbed a pen and demanded paper and said he wanted to draw a picture of Elongated Man (yes, he's a real B-list superhero) for a story. While such doings are Mabel's constant MO, this is unusual for Monkey, so I provided the materials and waited to see what would transpire.

He drew a long blob and gave it spindly legs and ball feet. Then there was some scribbly stuff between the legs. I wasn't really watching, but as I sat beside him eating a bowl of mid-afternoon Cheerios, I heard him say - to himself or to me, whomever - "...and that's the bum, and that's where the poo and the wee come out..." Then: "I'd better give him a penis." A short line appeared between the legs, above the cloud of scribble. Now I realised what the cloud was.

"Does he have a head?" I asked, curious to see where his priorities lay. He pointed at the top of the blob.
"There's his head." He drew a horizontal line to signify the division between head and torso.
"How about eyes and a nose and things?"
"Oh. I never thought of that." He provided two round eyes, a circular nose, a wide smiling mouth, and goggles. "Now. He's done."
"Arms? Does he have arms?"
"Oh yeah, he needs arms." Arms were appended.

It was interesting to see what he considers the most vital body parts to be.

Then he coloured the whole thing in with royal blue marker, obscuring all the interesting details, and dictated the story for me to transcribe. I will reproduce it here for posterity. (I reworded a little for clarity and to avoid repetition, but I didn't change the story. This version has been approved by the author.)

Elongated Man started to call Batman when he noticed that baddies were fighting and were thinking about their machine that would crush the whole planet. He realised that the baddies were on the case. He tried to break the robot with his hammer while he was on the phone. Elongated Man was in the lab at the time. They fought ("fighted and fighted," he said) until Elongated Man had a good idea: he called Plastic Man to help him make a wall to trap the baddies so that then they could crush them and the machine with their hammers. Crazy Quilt was the person who invented the machine.

The end.

I look forward to many more illustrated stories once he starts writing his own.

Exodus

Last week when five of Monkey's classmates came down with the same vomiting bug on the same night, I felt a bit like the Israelites must have on the first Passover. Except that, unlike the Isrealites, I was fairly sure we wouldn't get to escape our nasty fate for ever. (Not that they did either, really. Maybe this is a bad simile. I don't want to get embroiled in religious wars here.)

The days went on, and my Facebook news feed informed me that others had fallen prey to the evil virus, and still we were standing unscathed. I tried not to talk about it, lest fate clobber me - especially as we'd avoided the last round when it hit the two-year-old cadre too.

You can see where this is going. This morning we were looking for Monkey's shoes (really - have you seen his other red sneaker? I have no idea where it is) when he groaned and held his tummy in a way that had us sprinting for a big bowl and some towels. The moment passed, and he said he still wanted to go to school, and I was contemplating handing the whole sorry mess of potential over to someone else for the morning (as if I would have) when he had another spasm, and I shelved that idea pretty quickly. I called the school (who wished me good luck) and Monkey was set up on the sofa, over towels, under a duvet, beside the Bowl of Doom, in front of the TV. He and I and Mabel settled in for the morning.

I was in a unique position to sympathise since, while I wasn't afflicted by the same thing, Mother Nature had decided to throw some period pain my way at exactly the same time, so while he was moaning about whatever was going on in his stomach, I was downing ibuprofen and drinking tea and being all pummelled about by my uterus. (Which is better, in this instance, than the alternative, which had been no. 2 on my list of things to worry about yesterday.)

Mabel was a bit discombobulated by all this, understandably. But irritatingly. Every time Monkey shuddered and looked like he would really like to be curled up on my understanding lap, Mabel would jump on me and demand to nurse. I gave in, as I didn't really have much choice and I thought the antibodies might be helpful if she has any chance at all of not getting this too, but poor Monkey had to make do with just holding my hand. He wasn't feverish, but was red-cheeked and sweaty and said his head was cold and his chest hurt and so did his tummy and his bum. I wasn't really sure which way to jump (literally) with all that information.

Eventually, around noon, he called a code red to be taken the bathroom, where things came to a head (or a tail), and in very short order he was feeling much better. Coincidentally, my own aches wore off around the same time, making me a much happier camper.

He's just had five slices of dry toast and a glass of water for lunch. (It's hard to follow the BRAT diet when your kid only eats one of those four things, but at least he does eat toast.) I know this isn't necessarily over - and this particular virus seems to have a really nasty recurring phase a day or two after you think you're in the clear - but for now he's feeling much more like his regular self, and I think we'll be able to go out and get some fresh air this afternoon. Which is a relief to me, and to Mabel, who had been reduced to making Lego machines that would help her brother not vomit.

Optimism

I have three things to worry about, none of which I can really discuss here. Thing one is inevitable, and beyond my control; thing two is improbable, and beyond my control; and thing three is really totally unknown, and also beyond my control. I may as well bundle them all up into a big ball labelled "The Future" and lob them into the corner for now. Just as well I'm not prone to anxiety. About once a year I lie awake getting myself into a tizzy over things I can't do anything about, but the rest of the time I'm fairly sanguine about dealing with what comes along when it does.

So. The weather was nice today. Not too hot, not cold. The blossom is blooming forth all over. Monkey flew a kite yesterday for the first time, and the unalloyed delight on his face was worth a lot. (Actually, yesterday might also have been the first time I've ever flown a kite. It's one of those things that makes you smile.) Mabel got new sandals and a new water bottle this morning (thank you, REI dividend) and thus is all kitted out for summer. Spring is sproinging, and it's a good thing.

Old bike, new helmet

Good muffins

Recipe is an awfully strange word. I always want to put an extra i in before the final e, thus: recipie. I actually went to dictionary.com to check it just now. It's much too phonetically pronounced to be English.

Anyway. I made some new muffins the other day. I'll show you my photo but I'm just going to link out to the recipe, since it was a totally random choice rather than something I made up or adapted. I had ricotta to use up, and felt like humouring Monkey (for some reason) who asked for chocolate muffins (hmm, maybe it was the chocolate), so I did a quick search and came up with these: Chocolate Ricotta Muffins from Mollie Katzen's Sunlight Cafe. The picture didn't look very chocolately, but it was nice and simple and I had everything it called for so I went ahead.

And got these delicious articles. They're almost like brownie muffins, they're so densely chocolatey, and they freeze and reheat perfectly. I would go so far as to say you should procure yourself some ricotta to use up (maybe by making that stuffed-pancake recipe; I think that's where mine was from) just to make them.

Since Mabel was wide awake reading a book to me from 3.14 to 4.15 this morning, and only fell back to sleep at 5.00, by which time a thunderstorm was in full flow, I think I'll leave it at that for today.

Flitsper it softly

You know what stems the flow of creative juices? (Phwoarr.) Children, that's what. As much as they give, in the form of adorable lisps and tales of bodily fluids, they take away, in the form of that son of mine who just won't fall asleep tonight and just called me upstairs again to tell me that one of his three little pigs is missing. Since these are cardboard pigs that he made at school LAST YEAR, I'm mostly surprised that two pigs, a wolf, and three houses are still around.

The other one is only asleep and missing the fun because she didn't nap today because she was too tired to fall asleep because she spent a lot of last night being wide awake, culminating in the moment when she went pink-pyjama'd pitter-patter straight past my bedroom door at 1.30am, whereupon I leapt out - I had been lying there unable to sleep, for some reason, who can imagine what; foreboding, maybe - and asked her where she thought she was going. "I was just going downstairs," she said, perfectly reasonably. Perhaps we have to get a gate for her bedroom doorway. Or a bell or something.

************

Last year at his annual checkup I was concerned enough about one of Monkey's verbal tics to ask for a referral to a speech therapist: he couldn't pronouce c and g, so that "car" was "tar" and "green" became "dreen". The doctor said it was common enough, but gave me a number to call, and I called and got the forms and filled them in and sent them off. By the time they rang me up and asked if I wanted to set up an appointment for an assessment, the problem had righted itself and I happily let the nice people know we wouldn't be needing their services.

So his remaining peculiarities of speech are endearing enough that I sort of hope he won't lose them for a while. He consistently spoonerizes remote control to kemote rontrol, and he can't say "whisper". The other day he told me me, "You know that word I can't say? Well, I just said it - listen: Flistper. Flistpfer. Fwipsper. Oh. Now I can't say it again."

Then again, he's coming up with some good new things, like saying "I stand corrected" at irrelevant moments. (I blame Aquaman, who's particularly pompous.) I think he will continue to amuse, just in new and unexpected ways.

Data point

While B and I have only (only!) been married for six and a half years, last Friday our relationship reached the age of majority and can now vote and go out for a drink, at least in Ireland. Yes, it's 18 years since that fateful night in The Yellow House pub in Rathfarnham, County Dublin when I first thought, "He's quite tall", and he thought, "She's a girl", or whatever his rationale was for introducing me to the lyrics of Monty Python's Philosophers Song, which I found hilarious, as is only natural when you've never heard it before and you're 19 and you've had a couple of drinks. (I was a good audience.) I turned out to be a little wrong about his height: he was sitting down and is long of torso, not so much of leg; but heck, he was right, and here we still are.

It's not been 18 unbroken years, mind you; just when we were in the same geographical location, which wasn't as often as you might think, with a period of trans-Atlantic LDR before I finally managed to move to the USA. When we got engaged and had to go and talk to a priest about the pre-Cana course, I told the good Father that we'd been "on-again, off-again, you know." He fixed me with a stern eye and said, "I hope there won't be any more of that now." "Of course not," I replied, shocked that he thought I might not be taking this seriously.

We don't celebrate this particular anniversary with any more than a kiss these days, since it falls only a week after B's birthday, and we have a wedding anniversary in July that we use instead; but I didn't want the occassion to go totally unremarked. I'm not at all surprised to find that I've known him almost half my life, but I am somewhat amazed that I went almost 20 years without him.

Bedtime for Frances

I wore my contact lenses today and was horrified by the filth of the house when I see it unencumbered by my crappy glasses. I really need to call those people about laser surgery, if only to find out that I'm not a candidate and stop wondering about it. I also really need to hoover the stairs.

(Now accepting bets on which will happen first.)

There's a story called Bedtime for Frances, which is an endearing little number (if a tad tedious, but I think that's part of the plan) about a badger who doesn't want to go to sleep. She comes out to her parents as the night goes on with various demands and worries, eventually waking her father to tell him the curtains are moving in the wind. (I particularly like the bit where she comes downstairs to find her parents having tea and cake in front of the TV. As if that would happen.) He is, understandably, not happy to be woken, and tells her that he has to get up in the morning and go to work, because that's his job, and that moving the curtains is the wind's job, and that going to sleep is Frances's job, and that if she doesn't go back to bed, she will get a spanking.

Every time I read it, we do fine until that part, where I cringe slightly and move swiftly onwards. Usually I'm reading it to Mabel, who doesn't comment, but one day recently Monkey was listening in too. "What's a spanking?" he asked, inevitably.

Such a funny moment. Surely at the age of almost five, even obedient, sheltered I knew what a spanking was, and had even been given one or two. Isn't it strange, and nice, and sad, that my son had to ask - and that I had to tell him? It sounded so peculiar and primitive, even as I chose my words, to explain that some parents would hit their children to try to get them to behave. (I didn't say "hit" because that sounds far too violent. I demonstrated by slapping his hand gently and telling him a spanking would be like that only harder, so that it hurt.) He was a little bemused, but took it on board.

I'm not saying there have never been moments when I wanted to thwap him one on the side of the head, or that I'll always manage to restrain myself in the future. I'm certainly guilty of yanking an arm too hard on occasion, and not being terribly sorry if something got bumped on the way. But if a cardinal rule in the house, and the school, and the child's society as a whole is "Do not hit," then hitting them to enforce that or any other dictat is surely illogical. (Jim.) And will compromise our credibility as the ones doing the enforcing.

The next day I was reading The Tale of Tom Kitten to Mabel. When Mrs Tabitha Twitchet finds her kittens in the garden with their fine clothes nowhere to be seen and company about to arrive, she pulls them off the wall and smacks them. "'Spanks,' you mean," said Monkey, knowingly.

How soon they learn. One more balloon of childhood innocence rudely popped by beloved children's authors.

Olive Oyl

Okay, so the tagging project took a little longer than anticipated, but apparently my inner indexer came out, and I am still not satisfied that it's the most perfectly representative, enticing, readership-broadening tag cloud it can be, but it's pretty good. There are some new tags (check out "Death and Sex": I wanted to include taxes, but I don't really have anything to say about those) and more stuff in old underused ones. It's a miracle of modern technology.

Speaking of: in my first "real" publishing company job (as in, not a summer job, but a pay-you-under-the-table temporary deal after I'd graduated), I once spent a week moving all the numbers in a book index nine pages to the left. And then we moved the photo section around again and I had to rejig everything before page 135 to fourteen pages later and everything after page 147 it twenty-eight pages earlier. (Or whatever. Numbers have been obfuscated to protect the innocent.) This was before the days of Word linking your index terms to the page numbers and generating everything itself: I had to do the math, mark it up on a hard copy, and input it to the computer. I started dreaming indexing, so I'd come to work in the morning having been up all night doing it in my mind. Not relaxing. And I'd be very surprised if the finished item was anywhere near accurate.

*************

As I may have said before, if you show me a bandwagon, I will consider it carefully for a year or three and finally jump on, just as it's leaving town forever. I am a sheep. (My sixth-class teacher used to talk about separating the sheep from the goats, but I was never quite clear which of those two I should aim to be. I mean, do I really want to be a goat?)

So when no fewer than two of my favourite bloggers, Linda at All and Sundry and Jessica at Balancing Everything, mentioned that they were washing their faces with oil these days, I decided that clearly I should do the same. (I can't find Linda's specific entry now, but here's Jessica's.)

Remember when you were 14 and you and your best friend would pester your mum to buy avocadoes, or purloin all the porrige oats, so that you could make your own homemade face masks as advised in the latest edition of Jackie, and you liked to think it was because you were all natural but really it was because you had no money to spend on fancy stuff? Well, I feel like I've come full circle. I'm so sick of perusing all the unguents on the CVS shelves and judging what to buy based on some spurious claims and pretty packaging, only to bring it home and discover that it smells like old lady and I can't possibly put that on my face every day; or else just buying the same old same old because even if it doesn't appear to do anything, at least I know it smells nice.

So now I have a jar of olive oil in the bathroom. (I need to find a prettier container, but for the moment it's a ex-peanut-butter jar.) Every morning I pour a little into my cupped hand, rub my hands together, and rub it all over my face, especially into the pores around my nose. Then I step into the shower to give my skin some time to marinate. (This might not work so well if I washed my hair every day, but I don't.) After towelling off, carefully avoiding my face, I wet a washcloth with hot water and put it over my face, steaming off the oil and the blackheads and the leftover makeup, and then wiping it all clean.

Then I moisturise with just a drop or two of oil, as Jessica advises. (The first day I overdid this and my glasses kept falling off my nose. I am more reticent with it now.)

I would prefer to do the routine at night, to take full advantage of its makeup-removal properties and avoid the moisturiser/sunscreen conundrum I've left myself with as the weather gets summerier, but for now mornings are better, given Mabel's appalling unpredictability any time after 9pm. Even if this morning she managed to come into the bathroom, wave at me through the blurry glass (thrice blurry, if you count its natural effect, the steam, and my myopia), pull some big and small bottles out of the cupboard to play mummies and daddies with, and then dump all the q-tips on the floor.

I have dry skin, and since I've finally got to that part of my life where the wrinkles are taking over from the zits (weren't we led to believe that there'd be a space in between? what happened there?), I haven't had any breakouts since I was last pregnant (or maybe post-partum, I can't remember), but the tiny blackheads around my nose had lately caused me to think enviously of Charlotte from Sex and the City admiring her perfect pores in her magnifying mirror. You'd have to pay me good money to get me in front of a magnifying mirror in daylight these days. And extra to open my eyes.

So I've been using extra-virgin olive oil, as Jessica suggested, since she too has dry skin, and because that's what's in my kitchen. The original web site she links to talks about using castor oil and other oils, and mixing up your own custom oil. Which is probably great, but the lure of this for me was that I could grab something from the cupboard and go do it.

I've been doing it for about two weeks now, every day, and I think my blackheads are less black, and my skin feels really soft. It certainly hasn't made my skin oilier in any bad way, so for now I'm going to keep it up and see what happens. And if it makes me feel 14 again, maybe that's a fun side-effect.

You'll tell me if I start smelling like a salad, won't you?