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Results For "Month: July 2011"

A Day in the Pool

Friday 22 July 2011

The Girl is out of daycare — I am the daycare, which means a number of things.

Her sleeping habits have changed significantly, for starters. When we are all heading out of the door by or before half past seven in the morning, we have to get her up so early that it affects her weekend sleeping patterns: she rarely goes past seven thirty. This summer we’ve discovered that she’ll sleep almost to nine if we let her. Which means a bit of time alone in the morning before she’s up.

Yet there are some negative consequences, most significantly, a lack of interaction with other children and less outside time. We don’t have a playground in our backyard, where as the Girl’s school has several: mornings on the playground were the daily ritual.

So we do the best we can. We take her swimming. Or, rather, jumping.

The Jump

Cheese

Tuesday 19 July 2011

At first glance, it looks like a bit of cauliflower. It is, in fact, a mixture of bacteria and yeasts — a fungus, of sorts. Kefir grains, used to make what Poles call “kefir,” what Russians refer to as “кефир” (pronounced the same) and what we call, essentially, buttermilk.

Fungus

Production is simple: take the kefir grains, wrap them in gauze, drop them in a ceramic container, cover them with fresh milk, and let the mixture sit overnight. In twenty-four hours, you’ll have a chunky, lightly acidic buttermilk, that, an added medicinal bonus, has a slight alcohol content.

From there, it’s just a moment’s heating away from farmer’s cheese: mix the buttermilk with some fresh milk, heat, and strain.

Homemade Farmer's Cheese

In Poland, they do the same essential process with sheep milk, eventually forming it into oblong cheese blocks and curing them in a smoke house.

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Waterfall

Monday 11 July 2011

At Table Rock State Park yesterday, I had to take the obligatory slow-shutter-speed shot of the waterfall…

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1.3 seconds, f/29.0

Table Rock State Park, Part II

Sunday 10 July 2011

Returning to places as a parent provides a yardstick for your child’s growth. The last time we visited Table Rock State Park, the Girl just shy of two years old. Her recently bald head was beginning to have enough hair to make her feminine, and she was beginning to talk. (When we watch videos of her at this age, though, neither K nor I can understand much of what she says sometimes.)

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That first trip, she toddled along for some of the short hike, but most of the time, either K or I carried her in a frame-less child carrier: twenty pounds of wiggle followed twenty pounds of sweat-inducing insulation.

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Three years later, and she is Miss Independence, resisting help on all but the steepest portions of the two-mile loop and occasionally pontificating, “It is time for a break!”

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Last trip, she was barely aware of the camera; this trip, she posed. In fact, we had to tell her to stop posing occasionally: she has a tendency to get carried away.

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Yet some things have not changed in three years: Baby still is a constant companion, having been hiking in the mountains of Poland, photographed on the town square of Krakow, and one harrowing time, left at Target for one terrifying night.

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Imitation is still the order of the day, and fussing-filled frustration will likely be a frequent visitor for years to come.

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Yet the changes. We stopped for a break, and the Girl was curious: “Where are we?” K pulled out the map and showed her. At the next bend in the trail, she asked for the map to try to find where we were. The fact that she was completely off is of no importance: the curiosity is the treasure.

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Curiosity was enough later to overcome fear and touch a corn snake in the nature center. K took a step further in overcoming that latent terror that seems to be in all of us almost instinctively.

Most telling was the conclusion: splashing about the lake with restricted parental supervision (the swimming area was about to close, so there was no time for us to change anyone but the Girl), she gravitated toward the deeper portions.

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She called out, “Look how far away I am from you, Mama!”

 

Games

Saturday 9 July 2011

It’s a lifelong process, learning how to lose. I’m thirty-some years older than the Girl, but I still fight the frustration of loss just as much as she. I could contend that there is a difference: losing at games of chance doesn’t phase me because it’s a question of luck; losing at games of skill–read: chess–does bother me when I feel I made a stupid mistake. Such distinctions are lost on the Girl, though: losing is losing is losing. It all hurts.

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We’ve been working with the learning how to lose (and to a lesser degree, how to win gracefully) with Candy Land for ages. We’ve seen some real improvement: the complete hysterical fits have disappeared, replaced by a temporarily pout and an extended lower lip. In fact, things are going so well that I’ve stopped my Machiavellian parenting technique of stacking the deck to make sure she loses at least once or, if needed, wins once.

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Yet sometimes that dimension of untinkered-with chance provides some amusement: three candy cards within four turns for me resulted in some whiplash-inducing jumps around the board and laughs for the Girl — even when I was surging ahead. Perhaps she knew the next card would bring me back to Earth.

Fourth

Tuesday 5 July 2011

The Girl is a strange eater. In truth, she’ll eat anything if she’s cooked it. For a long time, as a child, her favorite thing to cook while banging around the kitchen was “blue zupa,” a hybrid Polish and English name (“zupa” is Polish for “soup”) for an imaginary, favorite-colored dish. K and I ate countless pots of blue zupa.

We eventually bought L some realistic play pots and pans at Ikea, and she moved from more imaginary to less imaginary. It’s truly amazing what you can cook from blue and pink Play-Doh.

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When it comes to more realistic food, though, the Girl has slightly different tastes. She likes some of the standards: spaghetti and pizza are always welcome on the table. Yet other childhood favorites have always been less popular. For instance, she just ate her first hot dog over the Fourth of July holiday. Granted, she hasn’t had much exposure to hot dogs: we eat them probably twice a year at most, if even that often. Still, she sees them at school, and probably sees how the other kids virtually inhale them. That peer pressure has had no effect (if only that would continue).

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Yet non-typical foods she adores. Exhibit A: barszcz. Her favorite food, without exception, is a traditional Polish beetroot soup. She’s absolutely obsessed: she’ll eat it once a week without fail, more if we let her.

She’s also eager to bring her best friend from school to try it.

“What will you do if E doesn’t like it? If he tries it and says, ‘I don’t like it.’? I ask.

“I’ll tell him, ‘You just have to try it,'” she replies.

“But what if he tries it and doesn’t like it?” I press.

Try it and not like it? Unthinkable.

Reunion

Sunday 3 July 2011

One would think, to some degree, reunions will become a thing of the past in the age of social networking, especially class reunions. After all, part of the fun is to find out what everyone else has been up to; with everyone on Facebook, we already know all of that.

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Yet we’re a gregarious species by nature, and looking at pictures on a monitor and chatting by Skype is still no substitute.

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So we gather together from time to time to look at old photos

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and take new ones. Decades separate the two photos, and children who barely make it to their mothers’ waistline now have children who have children who have children. Even when only a relative handful of them gets together, they fill the frame easily.

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Several of them are, for all intents and purposes, strangers. Grandchildren of great uncles, cousins removed by years and geography. Yet just say the word “family” and strangers are no longer so distant, and introductions come easily.

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If only we could learn that as species.