Swing and Dinner
food and cooking
Comfort
The Boy and I were playing just before bedtime. The miasteczko that T and he made during their visit this weekend is still up, so we decided to make use of it. As often happens when playing, the Boy decided to pontificate a bit. Picking up a convertible, he began explaining, "This is a big car. It can hold a lot. I think maybe 38 gallons." He handed me the car upside down and asked me to read what kind of car it was.
"It's a 38 Gallon Cruiser," I said. He beamed.
"I said that!"
I was expecting such a response, hoping for it at the very least. I like when something I say, something K does, something L makes him, gives him a certain kind of comfortable joy. It was the same with L when she was his age, still working out how everything worked, still not quite sure she had a handle on some of the basics. Of course, I look at her now and think, "You still don't have a handle on some of the basics," and I look in the mirror shaving and think, "You still don't have a handle on some of the basics."
K has a handle on the basics though. She knows what brings a smile to everyone's face: homemade rosół. The Boy leaves his bowl empty; the Girl goes back for seconds; even the older cat is happy to get the dregs in E's bowl.
The basics.
Soup with Papa
The best way to get the kids to eat certain foods is to hide them. No, that’s not quite right. E will try just about anything. He might not like it (as when he commented that a butternut squash soup tasted more like “sea turtle soup”), but he’ll try it. No, it’s just L that we have to deceive. So K puts a lot of onion in a lot of soup, but it’s always turned to a paste that simply adds flavor and thickens the soup. Tonight’s soup: pea soup.
“What kind of soup is this?” she asked.
“Do you like it?”
“Yes.”
“Then you don’t want to know.”
Late October Sunday
With it being the last Sunday of the month, our family had a lazy morning that included a bit of television, a bit of computer, a bit of baklava, and a bit of exploring, all before lunch. The Boy and I went to our normal haunts, though we decided this time to go a bit deeper into the "woods" that consist of vines and bushes on the property behind ours, the house abandoned now for several years. We went deep enough that I had to crawl for a moment. Afterward, there was the usual: swinging, exploring the creek (where we found our lost ball behind our neighbors' house), and lounging in the hammock. We were there when K came out onto the back deck to call us in for lunch.
"We're being lazy on the hammock," the Boy responded.
In the evening, Nana and Papa came by for dinner -- another adventure in "we're no longer worrying about whether our kids will eat what we cook because they can survive skipping one meal from hunger." Of course that won't really happen with the Boy: first, he's too adventurous with his eating for that to happen, and second, when push comes to plate, he quickly reaches a point at which the stubbornness gives way to the hunger.
The Girl, of course, is an entirely different story, and I still wonder whether or not we're doing the right thing by her. That's the eternal worry of parenting, I guess, but I try to keep things in a more global perspective: hungry kids in Africa and all of that. Tonight was not all that much of a battle because it was tortellini: she likes pasta, though she predictably didn't like the fact that it was pasta stuffed with something. Despite the fact that she likes pierogi, which are essentially the same thing.
Sometime later this week, we're planning Indian -- dal with palak paneer. That should be a really interesting night...
Preconceptions
Every year, my students begin Romeo and Juliet with certain preconceptions, both about the play and about the character of Romeo. It’s a Shakespeare play, they reason. Shakespeare’s hard to read, noble and magnanimous and all that. He writes about noble ideas, noble dilemmas, high-minded philosophy. They don’t expect it when the play starts out and within a few lines, characters are saying things like this:
‘Tis all one, I will show myself a tyrant: when I
have fought with the men, I will be cruel with the
maids, and cut off their heads.Ay, the heads of the maids, or their maidenheads;
take it in what sense thou wilt.Me they shall feel while I am able to stand: and
’tis known I am a pretty piece of flesh.
I take them through the text enough to get them to realize that these two characters, like Donald Trump, are fond of locker room talk that involves suggestions of sexual assault. (No, I don’t bring in the politics, but the thought crossed my mind to make the connection at least today.) I don’t point out to them what Sampson really means when he says, “Me they shall feel while I am able to stand,” but I suspect some of them get it.
Then there’s Romeo: He’s going to be a good guy, they reason, because the play is the most famous love story of all time, and the most famous love story of all time can’t possibly have anything other than the ideal man in it. So we begin reading and find this passage in response to Benvolio’s queries about what exactly is making Romeo’s days so long:
Well, in that hit you miss: she’ll not be hit
With Cupid’s arrow; she hath Dian’s wit;
And, in strong proof of chastity well arm’d,
From love’s weak childish bow she lives unharm’d.
She will not stay the siege of loving terms,
Nor bide the encounter of assailing eyes,
Nor ope her lap to saint-seducing gold:
O, she is rich in beauty, only poor,
That when she dies with beauty dies her store.
“How has Romeo tried to win her?” I ask. We mark the text and make a list.
“She will not stay the siege of loving terms?” I ask, and the students figure it out.
“He’s used smooth words.”
“Nor bide the encounter of assailing eyes?” I ask, and the students get it.
“He’s been making eyes at her.”
“Good. Finally, ‘Nor ope her lap to saint-seducing gold’?” Here they stumble.
“Money?”
“No — how do guys use gold to win girls?”
Finally, someone gets it: “Oh, jewelry!”
“Right!” Then the question — should I pursue the issue further? Should I lead them to see just exactly what Romeo’s saying here? Some years, I don’t. This year, I did.
“And what about the rest of the line?”
They look at each other quizzically.
“What do you think he means by ‘ope’?” I ask.
“Open?” a student suggests.
“Correct. Now, she will not ‘ope her lap to saint-seducing gold’?” I see in some of their eyes that they’ve got it, so I suggest what I suggest every year. “We’ll have to behave as adults in this unit and not giggle and be immature about some of the topics. So what’s he saying?”
They get it. They’re mildly shocked. The girls are a little angry and disappointed that this supposed hero of the greatest love story of all time is a fairly typical male and simply trying to get Rosaline in bed — to spread her legs, literally.
“Nothing ever changes,” one student observes.
The Girl tonight hit on her own preconceptions and battled them mightily. Beans are nasty. She’s decided that already. Of course, at her age, I’d decided the same thing about a lot of things, most beans as well. But we have a rule in our house as Nana and Papa had when I was growing up: you have to try everything. In L’s case, it was about three bites of beans.
We jokingly took a picture with a time-stamp (that’s in fact illegible) to see how long it took her to eat them. Although she didn’t have to sit at the table the whole time, she had her final bite around ten minutes before bedtime.
I remember doing the same thing.
Nothing ever changes.
Forbidden Fruit
K bought a bag of treats for trick-or-treaters next week. It was sitting on the counter when E came down this morning.
He’s always the first of the two to come downstairs. We hear his little voice as we’re getting our breakfast ready: “Mama!” He needs his “stinky diaper” taken off, and he needs to get downstairs as fast as possible. Nevermind that often makes it downstairs half asleep and then plops down on the sofa in the livingroom for another half hour of sleep. He has to get downstairs.
So when he came down this morning, he noticed the candy.
“Why is there a bag of treats on the counter?” he asked.
“It’s for Halloween,” K explained.
She went back upstairs to do her hair and I peeked down to find he had taken the step ladder out and set it up to get a closer look. Elbows on the counter, chin in his hands, he just stood and stared.
It would take no cajoling at all to get him to eat the whole bag. Perhaps not all in one sitting, but then again, he might be able to pull that off. Then how he would complain about how his stomach hurts.
“My belly hurts” is his common excuse to get out of finishing dinner. Even when he says he likes it. Even when it’s potato pancakes.
In the evening, the Girl brought up a new concern. I actually brought it up; she worked it to a frenzy. Thursday is a special day for whatever reason, and the kids can take a stuffed animal to school.
“Daddy, I can’t decide which animal to take,” she explained.
Knowing the stinkers she has in her class, I reminded her that they might do something mischievous and to take that into account when deciding. A few minutes after going to bed, she came down to get some advice from K. She explained her concern: “When the teacher is not looking or when I go to the bathroom, one of them might grab the stuffed animal and do something to it, like cut it up.”
K gave the opposite advice: “Don’t worry about it. That probably won’t happen.”
But L was already worked up about it. She probably won’t get to sleep until late, and then we’ll have a rough morning, trying to convince her to pull herself out of bed.
Perhaps I should have thought things through a little more carefully.
Arriving Home
After a long day, arriving home at almost eight because of an open house event at the school, I find my family still all around the table.
“Still eating dinner?”
“No, they said they weren’t hungry, so they saved it for later.”
Creamy cauliflower soup with bacon bits — what’s not to love about that little bowl of goodness? Perhaps next time.
Evening Snack
"I'm hungry." It can come has a plaintive request, a frustrated fuss, or a simple statement of fact, but come bedtime, come bath time, it's always the same.
It doesn't matter how much dinner they ate. It doesn't matter whether we had watermelon, ice cream, cake or anything else as desert. They're always hungry.
The Boy pulls the step ladder we've added to our kitchen due to the high shelves and begins rummaging through the refrigerator. The Girl takes a yogurt, adds a graham cracker, then tops it off with a mandarin orange. The Boy sees the orange and wants to add one of his own.
It's a moment to offer thanks that we have food for our kids whenever they get snacky.
October Sunday
Last week was Polish Mass, so it was a lazy morning. This week, no such luck. With Mass beginning at nine, we have to wake up early; with L singing in the children's choir -- which is, on most Sundays, the primary choir for the morning Mass -- she as to be there thirty minutes earlier, which means an even earlier start. Today, with K still coughing, we decided just L and I would go. The Boy woke up at seven with us anyway, and insisted, as he often does, on helping with breakfast.
With the new church our newly adopted parish is building soon to be completed, the choir is rehearsing for the dedication Mass in November, which means an hour-and-fifteen-minute practice after Mass with the adult choir. So it was a little after twelve when we made it back home for rosół and a bit of relaxation.
Of course, the Boy was busy when we arrived. He'd decided that he wanted to build the ultimate train track, a track that began in his room and ran down the entire hallway. It was a challenge due to the lack of straight pieces in his collection, but he managed to find a way.
"It's a crazy, curvy track," he explained. And as I watched, I saw that he was very deliberate his his placement, always making sure that each piece turned the opposite way as the previous to make a drunken, crazy track in between the straight spots. He wanted to turn it around and head back down the hall, but he didn't have enough pieces.
When it came time to clean up, though, we had an issue. "I need help cleaning up!" was the fussy cry coming from the hall. "You didn't need help making the mess. You can do it!" was the choral response. But he couldn't clean it up the way he wanted to clean it up. He was stacking piece after piece and then trying to pick it all up at once. When the pieces of track tumbled over, his frustration exploded.
L was the same way. It's only recently that she began to see that she doesn't have to solve problems using the first solution that comes to mind. She's realized that she can make multiple trips from the car to the house instead of precariously carrying every single thing at once, to use a fairly common example.
The Boy, though, was insistent. It was only with a threat -- stop fussing and just clean it up or lose it -- that he finally relented and gave in on his original plan. Was that wrong? Should I have helped him realize it for himself? Should I have helped him realize his plan? At the time, I didn't give it much thought -- the soup was almost ready and everyone was terribly hungry. Perhaps I could have done a better job. Maybe next time.
After lunch and a coffee, I took the Boy exploring. I finally managed to ask our relatively new neighbor if he minded us traipsing about his backyard, and his response was at once predictable and surprising: "No, I don't mind at all. But I really appreciate you asking. I really appreciate that." What was I going to do? It's not our property.
I tried explaining all this to the Boy as we returned to our favorite little spot by the creek in our backyard (or perhaps "backyards").
"We always ask before we use something that's not ours."
"This is not ours?"
Last Sunday I'd taken to the street opposite our little hiding place, hoping he'd make a mental map of where he was and figure it all out. I pointed it out to him today, but he didn't see what I was talking about, literally or figuratively.
After we'd had enough of our favorite place, we went to our newest hiding place, which also is not on our property. I haven't asked those neighbors if they mind, though, mainly because there are no neighbors. The elderly couple that lived there no longer do: the husband died, collapsing in the backyard for us to see from our backyard (what a traumatic event that was), and I'm assuming the grown children moved their mother into other arrangements. The house has been empty for a couple of years now, if not more. So the little spot that we carved out of the weeds and brush on their side of the creek might be a problem if someone lived there, but it's so deep in the brush that they likely wouldn't even notice it if they lived there.
E asked a couple of times if it was our property where we were hiding and if we had permission to be there. I thought about trying to explain it, but in the end, I just said, "It's fine." A lie? Yes and no.
And after that hiding place, why not go to our final hiding place, behind the shrubs in the front of our house.
Hiding, hiding, hiding. What is it about kids and hiding places? They love building "forts" on the couch, and I remember how much I enjoyed a good hiding place as a kid. Perhaps it's the bit of independence it implies, even when you're hiding with your daddy. Or perhaps it's the shared secret in such situations.
As with last week, the Girl decided not to join us. She was working on a school project on the computer and then taking care of the tadpole -- Squirmy -- that she's been keeping in a plastic bin for a couple of weeks now. As she grows older, her independence obviously increases. I try to respect that, but sometimes I feel like it's neglect: she wants to be alone sometimes, and then when she wants to be with me, I'm busy grading papers or something similar -- or even something less significant.
This increasing independence also somewhat explains the decreasing number of pictures of her here. "Daddy, you aren't going to put that on MTS, are you?" she sometimes asks, and so I try to respect her growing sense of privacy. What happens when the Boy starts asking the same thing?
The final picture of the day mirrored the first: the Boy helping with dinner -- leftover crepes (or naleśniki as we refer to them) that we fill with leftover chicken from the rosół and some mushrooms we sauted for pierogis later this week.
A perfect day, in short.
Chores, Practice, and Dinner for Tomorrow
