You are currently browsing the monthly archive for January, 2009.
I ate a lot of cake today.
I don’t know exactly how much, but probably at least the equivalent of three pieces…maybe four. It started at breakfast (after a sensible bowl of Raisin Bran laden with sugar covered raisins)…slicing off teensy slivers of cake and eating them. Directly from the serving plate…since I didn’t want to add any more dirty dishes to my disgruntled dishwasher’s sky-high pile.
It’s hard to feel guilty when you’re eating tiny pieces of cake – even if you’re eating a thousand tiny pieces. And frankly, I found this cake so delicious, that I could have probably eaten even more. But, I should probably pretend to have a modicum of self-control. Now that I’m well into my thirties.
Especially since I don’t really want my kids recalling, in twenty years or so, how mom would just sit at the table and stuff herself full of cake while they watched. Waiting for a crumb to drop on the floor.
How did I end up stuffing my face with cake? Well, it started with inviting friends to dinner. I had a turkey in my freezer, so I went back to the November issue of Bon Appetit in an effort to figure out what to make. I decided to stick with the turkey and stuffing recipe I’d made for ‘actual’ Thanksgiving because they were tasty and easy. Which left me in need of a side dish. And dessert.
Well, I flipped through the dessert section and my eyes settled on the recipe for Pumpkin Spice Cake with Caramel Cream Cheese Frosting. ‘It looked good to me’ as my oldest might say. But I’ve gotten kind of lazy about layer cakes, because I rarely have success with them. As I go to flip the cakes out of their pans onto a cooling rack, inevitably a good chunk of cake will stick to the bottom of the pan. Or the cake will break. Or the layers will be ridiculously uneven and lopsided. And globs of frosting will settle in all the wrong places. It always tastes fine – but isn’t necessarily something I want to present to people who aren’t related to me.
So, I briefly contemplated making cupcakes instead, but at the last minute, decided not to. As my other half has pointed out (way) too many times…a muffin tin is much more cumbersome to wash than two round cake pans. And, personally I like having two layers of frosting….not just one.
So I made the cake and actually remembered to take it out of the oven. I released the cakes from the pans and they were perfect. Not a crumb out of place. Call me a cynic, but something had to go wrong. I made the caramel and managed not to scorch the sugar into a black sticky mess. And the cream cheese and butter were actually at room temperature so there were no weird ‘clumps’ in my frosting.
Certain I had to have made a mistake, I mentally reviewed the cake recipe…had I omitted a crucial ingredient. Like sugar? No. BUT..the recipe hadn’t called for any salt, which I thought was odd. Maybe there’d been a misprint and I was the idiot who didn’t figure it out and now I made a salt-less cake that would taste like cardboard.
But, when I sampled a sliver cut off the top to make frosting easier. It tasted just fine to me. In fact, it tasted good. The Hen shoved whole clumps of sliver in his mouth at a time. He liked it too.
So I stopped worrying about what might be wrong and frosted it. I had some extra caramel left, so I even made swirly designs on the top.
When our guests had left, I asked Jason excitedly: ‘what did you think of the cake?’
Silence.
‘It was good enough.’
Of course. He was going to play the ‘I don’t like pumpkin’ card, I could tell. Which is a fine and reasonable excuse, except he consumes entire loaves of pumpkin bread with little problem. And did I mention the burnt caramel cream cheese frosting?
‘I liked the frosting.’
‘Ugh, never mind,’ I put an end to his pitiful attempts at feigning excitement about my cake.
‘I will eat another piece tomorrow,’ he helpfully added.
My youngest doesn’t say much.
He basically utters two words – ‘Mama’ and ‘Dada’ and I’ve figured out he often uses ‘Dada’ to refer to his pacifier, not his dad. So it was noticeable when we walked down the stairs together earlier this week, and he uttered a new word.
‘Mama’, he said as he carefully took a couple of steps. ‘Yes?’ I responded.
‘E-ve’ he uttered. Clear as day.
‘Did you just say E-ve’? I asked him. (As in, the other robot from Wall-E? The movie we haven’t watched since Christmas?)
Odd.
I’d hoped his ‘next’ word might be something useful….like ‘water’ or ‘milk’ or ‘bed’ …or maybe even his brother’s name.
My good intention to make 2009 the year of ‘no clutter’ got off to a slow start. I vowed to be ruthless, but it took about a week for the ruthlessness to kick in. It’s in full effect now. Or, at least pseudo effect.
Rummaging through the detritus that covered our dining room, the other day, I found the main culprits of my clutter problem. It was as I previously suspected: receipts, child art, bills and account statements and then the miscellaneous junk pile. Which consists of random screws, and ‘parts’ to things, broken toys or toys that no one should play with, business cards/ticket stubs, paper clips and other office minutiae. And of course, tools and bits of tools….everywhere.
For some reason I’ve got it in my head that I have to save every single receipt of every single purchase I make. For an infinite period of time. When I told someone this over coffee, she looked at me like I was crazy. ‘You must have a lot of receipts,’ she commented. Yeah. Bowls and bags and boxes full, actually.
I thought the IRS wanted you to keep this stuff?
Strategy 1: research IRS receipt requirements, locate our shredder…and use it.
But aside from the receipts, the main culprit is my husband. Who likes to leave little CD Roms lying all around the house – and flash drives, and notes scribbled on scraps of paper – usually with important phone numbers or contact details that he will inevitably request the day after I threw it away.
I dumped out the contents of a bowl yesterday and handed him a few ‘choice’ items…which he promptly placed in his jeans pockets. The jeans he would be sure to leave on the floor at the end of the night. Which I will wash…finding the aforementioned items in the washing machine or the dryer. It’s a bad cycle that must be broken.
Strategy 2: remove all vessels (i.e decorative bowls) for stuff from eye level…so that there is no place to dump whatever is in one’s pocket at the end of the day.
After tackling the dining room, I moved on to the kitchen where we have two thin wires suspended above the art tables. The wires are so laden with art, they’ve started to sag. What started out as a creative way to display art, has turned into a poor storage solution. I pulled all the papers down and started sifting through them. And the pile of art I found in the office. I’m not exaggerating – I easily flipped through a couple of hundred pieces paper containing scribbles and paints and pastels.
I threw away about half….nondescript scribbles whose artist I couldn’t accurately name….was it big brother or little brother? Or was it me? I’d just finished sifting through the pile and hung up the remaining artwork when G asked: ‘can we paint?’ (You’ve got to be kidding me!) Which he did. No fewer than 4 paintings. Which I kept, of course.
Strategy 3: Unless particularly special or awesome, throw art away. Right away. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200. Go straight to the trash can – don’t even bother recycling. [Alternate strategy....ban art making at home...tell boys it's something only girls do.]
The other big clutter culprit is recycling. This is partly my fault – I could purchase recycling bins but I’m too cheap to do so. Also, I’m not sure where I’d store said recycling bins. So the tables in the kitchen (the outdoor tables in my indoor kitchen) are laden with cardboard, and plastic bottles, and aluminum food cans etc. And it seems wasteful to go all the way to the recycling center more than once every two weeks.
Strategy 4: Stop recycling and throw everything away. Forget the environment and clogged up landfills. Or, spend the money and buy some bins….(and maybe a laundry basket, too).
Then there are the toys and books that cover the house from top to bottom…but unless Supernanny herself has some bright ideas, I think that will just be my cross to bear for the next seventeen years.
Or I could hide everything and allow each kid to pick one book and toy per week. And be the kind of mom my children will remember fondly in years to come.
G found his apron lying around the house yesterday – the one that his Grandma made for him and reluctantly parted with after Christmas when he specifically asked if he could take it back to Calgary.
‘Can we make cookies’ he asked as he put on his apron. ‘No, not today’ I replied because I had zero desire to eat cookies, much less make them. Which is nothing less than shocking, and possible evidence that the world has changed since Barack Obama took office. ‘But I have my apron on’ he said, as if that is the way one conjures cookies into being.
I relented, of course, because by that point he was already standing on top of a stool by the mixer. Waiting for me.
I remembered that I’d seen a recipe in the latest issue of Bon Appetit that had appealed to me. And I actually had most of the ingredients required. I mean, the butter was already at room temperature……the stars were clearly lining up.
So we mixed butter and sugar and coffee and vanilla (I didn’t have the almond extract called for). And folded in flour and baking powder and salt and chocolate chips.
When I pressed the dough into the pan, I had my doubts. Something just didn’t seem right. And when I pulled the bars out of the oven..I knew my suspicions were correct.
Way too much butter.
Once the bars were cut, and cooling on a rack, there were pools of grease on the cookie sheet, giving me the evil eye. I felt my stomach turn and my languishing cookie appetite vanished.
I don’t have a problem with butter in baked goods, per se. I’ll happily eat piece after piece of shortbread and pretend I don’t know what the number one ingredient is. But when cookies are shiny and my fingers glisten from merely touching them…..that’s not anything I want to eat.
Blame it on the altitude. Or the fact that Canada doesn’t sell its butter in carefully wrapped/marked sticks. Or that I had to hold a crabby Hen whilst baking. Whatever the reason for the failure of these bars deemed delicious by the article’s author, I won’t be making them again.
G was chomping at the bit to eat one of the finished products. After taking two bites he seemed close to tears. ‘I don’t like the coffee in these cookies….next time I don’t want to make cookies with coffee in them’ he wailed as he walked out of the kitchen. His dream shattered.
I felt so badly, I almost suggested we make some other cookies.
Except I was tired. And I’d used up all the butter.
We went to the library last week for the first time in a very long time. You know it’s been a long time when your not quite five year old asks ‘do you think we can go to the library today?’
So we went and, in addition to grabbing the requisite Thomas DVD that never works because it has been viewed way too many times, we left with a stack of books. Making up for lost time, I guess.
In the pile, was this little gem which has turned out to be a favorite. G is fascinated with the depicted ‘festivals for children’s growth’ and ’sushi’ and ‘tea ceremony’.
But he’s really fixated upon the ‘yuzu bath‘ mentioned in the book. Which, if the book and the internet are to be believed, is an ancient tradition occurring on the shortest day of the year. Apparently, a steeping tub is filled with hot water and yuzu oranges. The hot water apparently causes the scent of the oranges to be released.
The seven year old narrator of the book opines that the yuzu bath leaves them ‘warm and smooth.’ Two concepts that fascinate our Gort. ‘What’s warm and smooth?’
So, in an effort to be on-the-ball-maximizing-teachable-moments-mom, I came up with the bright idea of approximating a yuzu bath at home, by dumping some regular American navel oranges in the boys’ bath.
G seemed pretty psyched about my idea. Oranges. In a bath? In the end I decided it was pretty wasteful to take a bunch of tasty oranges and throw them in bathwater, so I compromised and suggested we only use one orange and quarter it. To create the effect of there being several oranges in the water.
Which was fine and good. Except, the tepid water could never coerce any orange – yuzu or otherwise – to release a semblance of scent. And the Hen kept trying to grab the oranges and put them in his mouth. And then G set the oranges on the edge of the tub where he may or may not have squeezed them, sending sticky juice everywhere. And when the water had drained, there was orange pulp clinging to the bottom of the tub.
So, ‘warm and smooth’….didn’t happen…and my experiment was a bit of a bust.
Next time I’ll leave the teaching to someone else.
Yesterday, my oldest attended his first bonafide birthday party. Meaning, it was not a party for a cousin and I didn’t stay at the party with him.
Twin boys from his preschool class celebrated their fifth birthdays at a nearby bowling alley. A slight detail that escaped me until hours before the party. I’d assumed ‘Mountain View Bowl’ was just the name of their residence – perhaps the only house on a fancy street. But for some reason, when I took another look at the invitation early Sunday afternoon, it dawned on me that, in fact, it was a bowling alley.
Which means I had to dash G’s dreams of going to his friends’ house and playing with their toys, and quickly prepare him for bowling. [It seems to me that 80% of parenting is trying to manage and adjust kids' expectations.] I reminded him that his Muncie preschool class had gone to the bowling alley where they took the big balls and tried to knock down the pins….you know with Miss Oyer…..
I knew my jog down memory lane had failed when he said: ‘who’s Miss Oyer?’ At one time his favorite teacher and occasional babysitter. Strange, the human memory.
The remaining hours before the party were spent wrapping the gifts he’d carefully chosen for his friends, and counting down the minutes until the party would start. (And trying to convince him that he was not, in fact, going to have his very own birthday party afterwards, at 6pm.)
Apparently he’d gone to school on Friday and ASKED his friends what they wanted for their birthday. One boy replied he wanted a monster truck, and the other said he didn’t know. Which means we bought one monster truck, one utility van and a set of three emergency vehicles with flashing lights and sirens. (I should have included a note of apology to their mom with the gifts.)
When G arrived at the bowling alley, which was dark and featured everything-glow-in-the-dark plus strobe lights, he was greeted with an awkward embrace from his little friend. Which was the cutest thing I’d seen all day. After helping him into his bowling shoes, and trying to convince him not to touch the tiny bowling balls until everyone was ready to play, I dashed off to take the professor to the university, promising to check back within a half hour.
When I stopped in thirty five minutes later, he and six other ‘friends’ were taking turns hurling the tiny balls down the buffered alleys in an effort to hit five widely spaced pins. Frankly, it seemed a little difficult – wouldn’t it be more satisfying to give them ten pins and a greater chance of knocking down a few? I watched him bowl a couple of rounds – taking the tiny ball, walking to the line and swinging the ball through his legs, releasing it ever so slowly to trickle down the alley……. and possibly hit something, or not.
With another hour to go until the end, the Hen and I made a break for the Farmer’s Market, where we shared a chicken pot pie and I released him into the mosh pit that is a jumping castle with nine children older and larger than he. Instead of fearing an ambush and bolting for the exit, crying, he typically just hangs out in the middle, putzing around, unfazed he could be crushed. (His personality, in a nutshell.)
When we picked G up at the appointed hour, he seemed ready to go. For some reason, when he was given his ‘goodie bag’ (which he’d gotten before at other parties), he thought he was being given a gift the boys hadn’t wanted. Which is how he told the story to Jason, later on that night.
He analyzed the bag’s contents in the back of the car – a dinosaur egg, a little book, a plane, and a pack of gum and a pack of tic tacs – ‘lucky, lucky me’ he exclaimed. Which was the second cutest thing I’d witnessed that day.
‘Now, when my breath gets stinky, I can just have a piece of gum!’
It was double digit negative something or other outside yesterday (even colder today), which means my fingers were too frozen to cook. When Jason called asking for a ride home – why he didn’t want to take the bus, I’ll never know – I suggested we have Indian food for dinner. He seemed amenable, especially since he had a tiny little tantrum over the amount of dishes that were dirtied on Thursday. There may have been a count of plates dirtied….and some accusations made that we must have used two or three plates a piece for all meals eaten.
We picked up the professor after class and drove directly to Puspa Restaurant. We arrived at about 5.15pm, which basically makes us senior citizens – eating dinner before the sun goes down. But we have kids, and no energy and no desire to be out more than once on a freezing Friday night.
There’d been a bit of a tiff prior to our departure. I’d tried to drum up some excitement amongst my little troops for Indian food and my attempts were shot down, cold. ‘I don’t like Indian food,’ G replied. ‘I only like Chinese food.’ Apparently he decided a week ago at the Farmer’s Market – when I put a plate of butter chicken in front of him – that he did not care for Indian food. He has carried a torch for ‘Chinese food’ ever since his Muncie preschool class took a fieldtrip to the buffet at the vile Red Sun Restaurant. The buffet that featured hot dogs and pizza and probably macaroni and cheese.
I liked Chinese food in college. But it nearly always makes me feel sick, and I just can’t stop wondering if the ‘chicken’ is actually, chicken. And I’m not yet at the stage where I’m willing to serve or buy two different dinners to accommodate picky eaters. If Indian food is what’s for dinner – then that’s what we’re eating.
Luckily, by the time we got to the restaurant, the objections had been forgotten. Aided, perhaps by the restaurant’s red and white striped mints wrapped in celophane. ‘If you eat all your dinner, you can have one of those,’ I promised. Which worked. Seriously, those mints aren’t even good. Especially not the ones at Puspa.
The ordering process was an exercise in diplomacy. Jason was in the mood for lamb, but all of the dishes proclaimed a level of spice that I feared would exceed my oldest’s tolerance. So J got lamb madras…for one. I selected chicken tikka masala and tharka dal with some rice and naan for the remaining three. Sure to be un-spicy if the descriptions were to be believed.
The proprietor brought out a plate of those thin chip-like disks (pakoras?) with coriander or fennel seeds imbedded in them. G took a few bites and pronounced them too spicy, but the Hen ate his like a champ. Until a few minutes later, when he took the crushed bits and dumped them in his water. But he was being quiet, and not making an extraordinary mess, so we let it go.
Eventually, before the kids got too antsy, the food arrived. And all was well. The chicken wasn’t ‘too spicy’ and, though he wasn’t super excited about the lentils, the G-man obliged me and ate what was on his plate. After all, he had that spectacular mint to look forward to. The Hen ate, and ate, and ate some more. The double portion of rice I’d ordered was consumed mostly by him and his daddy. Ditto for the lentils.
We left the restaurant satisfied and within forty-five minutes of arriving. Double bonus.
As we reflected on the evening, after the kids were asleep, Jason remarked: ‘they did pretty well tonight.’ True, it was probably one of the more civilized restaurant meals we had shared as a family. Possibly because the Hen was firmly confined to a high chair. Possibly because big brother lay with his head on my lap like an obstinate kid in a church pew, until dinner arrived.
Other than the Hen figuring out he could dip his finger in his water glass, stick it in his mouth, and make a ‘pop’ sound….there were no major disasters.
But of course, the story couldn’t end there, otherwise it wouldn’t be worth telling.
Instead, Mr Hen woke up at 2 o’clock in the morning. With no intention of going back to sleep. Call it insomnia, or blame it on the chicken tikka masala, mixed with a few Cadbury mini-eggs.
I was not enthused.
I brought him to our bed, where he lay for a few minutes. Then he got off the bed and hightailed it to his brother’s room. In the dark. I heard him dumping toy cars from the bucket and rummaging around in the bookshelf. All while his brother snored like a sailor. He came back to our room…with a book in hand. I was not going to read the kid a book at 2am.
I rested my head on my pillow as I listened to him avail himself to the contents of the house, alone. Without big brother’s watchful eye, or far-reaching arms. But when I heard him climbing down the stairs, I knew I had to intervene.
I gave him a few sips of water and took him back to his crib; steeling myself against the inevitable protests.
But he didn’t make a sound.
Go figure.
Well, I have to confess 2009 is off to something of a disappointing start. I spent all of the last three months putting my hope in the ascension of Barack Obama to the Presidential throne, and forty eight hours later, not much has changed.
I thought Barack would sell my house. I thought he’d inspire me to exercise more and maybe lose the five pounds I gained during the ‘holiday season’. I thought my children would start sleeping better and act out less.
But he’s been in office for 2 days and my house still has a ‘for sale’ sign in front of it and my jeans are still tight. I don’t even want to talk about the matter of my children’s sleeping habits or their tempers. The Hen was eyeing my water glass yesterday. The one I leave by my bedside at night. The one that his brother (who is coughing more than five sick kids put together) had already drunk from. So when the Hen pointed and grunted to the water, I said ‘no’. The (illness) buck has to stop somewhere.
The kid threw his pacifier to the floor like those angry (baseball) catchers throw the masks from their faces after an outrageous call. Really, it was like we were on a baseball field and he was 25 instead of not quite one and a half. And that was before he tipped his bowl of cheerios onto the kitchen floor and stepped upon each one, deliberately crushing it into oblivion – while holding my gaze.
So it’s apparent to me that if I want things to change around here, I’m going to have to be the change. Not the President.
To that end, I’ve dubbed 2009 as the Year of No Clutter. I’m sick of clutter and it’s all around me. Things we accumulate that I have no idea where to put. Receipts, preschool art, mail, broken toys that I intend to ‘fix’, toys that need to be thrown away, more receipts, gum wrappers, airline earphones, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle playing cards, little tubes of lotion and magazines. Etc.
Every surface of my house has something upon it that shouldn’t be there and I’ve reached my limit. So this will be the year that I either just start throwing everything away that annoys me – or I figure out some kind of clutter control system. It will most likely be the former, not the latter.
We were at a friend’s house for coffee last Sunday. It wasn’t until several hours after we’d left that I realized something. I hadn’t seen any clutter in their house. True, maybe they’d cleaned up because people were coming over. Maybe there were kitchen drawers and closets stuffed to the gills. I really didn’t look particularly carefully – I wasn’t spying on these people, after all. But, their living space was remarkably void of junk.
And that’s when I decided that this would be the year of cleared surfaces. The china cabinet, the mantle, the dresser in our room, the bathroom shelves….all of it will be cleared of that which is not essential.
If the IRS wants to audit me and is mad that I didn’t keep a grocery receipt, tough. If Jason loses an important business card that has been floating around the house for months on end… Even tougher.
I will be ruthless in 2009.
Starting tomorrow.
Watching the inaugural proceedings in all their length and glory, I came to the realization (again) that I have no desire to be President.
Which is just as well since,
1. I was not born in the U.S. and, until Ahnold or Barack himself passes some legislation, I will not be eligible.
2. I am not able to be out in ‘public’ for any length of time without frowning or yawning. Sort of like Hillary’s eye rolling during one of GW’s speeches. Not appropriate for The President.
3. I am unable to coerce the muscles in my face to smile for more than 2 seconds at a time. And the thought of waving more than a handful of times, especially at people I don’t know at all while pretending to know them, exhausts me.
4. The idea of having to endure a 90 minute parade ‘in my honor’ bores me. Not to mention the expectation that I would appear enthusiastic and interested in every single one of the participants that marches in front of me. (Awesome! It’s the State of Delaware marching past.)
5. I am the ultimate committer of social faux pas. If there’s a certain way to greet a person – I will always get it wrong. I have kissed people from Bolivia on the cheek twice, and people from France on the cheek once. It should be the reverse. As they ‘gracefully’ pointed out to me. This could only ruin important diplomatic relationships.
6. I am unable to be in a public situation and not make fun of SOMETHING. Sort of like Chandler-Bing from Friends. There’s no way I could watch a bunch of stuffy politicians, or gold-lame-pant-wearing baton twirlers and not utter some kind of crack. [Which means there's no way my 'better half' could EVER be President. ]
7. I’d feel a little smothered by the Secret Service detail and constantly worry I’d make some sudden, overreactive gesture that would cause them to tackle me.
8. I don’t know the words to ‘America the Beautiful’ or ‘My Country ‘Tis of Thee’. I don’t think mouthing ‘watermelon’ will cut it.
9. I couldn’t take the wardrobe scrutiny, or the world-wide knowledge of my ‘figure flaws’.
10. Because after four or eight years of crazy stress and ageing myself beyond recognition, people will boo me and sing ‘nah-nah-nah’ as my helicopter departs the inauguration ceremony. And call me all kinds of names. Mmh, no thanks!
On a related note, the Hen took in the festivities with great interest. He clapped and raised his hands in salute. Good thing too, since he’s the only one of my spawn eligible for Presidency.
I made sugar cookies last night, because once again the internet tripped me up. G saw some sugar cookies on another blog and said: ‘those look good to me.’ Well, they looked good to me too.
So I made patriotic Obama cookies. Except not really. I just made circles, and the icing looks more pink and turquoise than blue and red. It’s more ‘gender neutral baby shower’ than anything else.
After all, if you can’t be President, you might as well bake some cookies.
Maybe we’ve read the Lorax a few too many times and maybe G is starting to take the ‘I am the Lorax, I speak for the trees’ part to heart. Except, instead of speaking for the trees, he’s decided to speak for his little brother. For all of us, really.
It doesn’t matter what utterances the Hen makes these days, his older brother will proffer some translation which, perhaps not surprisingly, usually parallels G’s own needs and wants.
‘He’s saying he wants to go to bed’ G will report at completely random times throughout the day, usually when G doesn’t want his baby brother playing with his toys.
‘He doesn’t want to get up yet’ G will inform me after the Hen’s nap when he’s crying for someone to come and pick him up.
‘I think he wants a snack’ G will suggest when he is feeling a little peckish.
‘I think he’s just a little frus-ter-ated’ or ‘I think he just wants his Mama’ G offers when little brother is crying after something ‘unknown’ happened during an unsupervised moment of play.
Last night, as the Hen was playing with a game of glass beads, G informed him: ‘If you want to play with that game you have to put your pacifier in your mouth…if you put any of those beads in your mouth, I’m taking the game away.’
Is that what I sound like?
But really, G has, for whatever reason, decided he speaks for the whole family too. We now have our own spokesperson who isn’t afraid to lay down the law, or to make the tough calls.
When the artist was living at the University a couple of weeks ago, G assumed the role of surrogate husband. Sleeping on my bed instead of his own, sacrificing his sleep by staying up late and watching ‘mommy’ movies with me. He sat through more than 2 hours of ‘Silent Light’ which, in addition to spectacular cinematography and a glacially-paced story, is entirely in Mennonite language (low German?). There was also ‘Sleepless in Seattle’, which is a fine movie for kids – except for a tiny shouting match between Tom Hanks and his son where he says S-H-I-T and I couldn’t hit the pause button fast enough.
I’m hoping that doesn’t come back to bite me.
The other night, while Jason was teaching class G was lying on my bed when he made a decision. ‘I’ll sleep on your bed and Daddy can sleep on my bed tonight, so he won’t get us sick.’ Rather ‘thoughtful’ of him, except Daddy had already passed along his coughing and snotting sickness. And Daddy had decided G’s bed was not conducive to a good night’s sleep.
I went upstairs to the bathroom yesterday where G was going about his business. He looked up at me and said: ‘Are you here to clean the toilet? Because it’s really dirty and it needs to be cleaned.’
For the record, the toilet bowl, for whatever reason, acquires some hard water, rusty colored stains which need to be scrubbed away once in a while.
The toilet seat etc. is perfectly clean.
