Nostalgia Trip

No lambeosauri in the house.

They do not have inside voices.

I will be glad to join in the efforts to tar and feather the creative staff of Dinosaur Train, but I cannot plan it.

My favorite corner of the yard is also the weediest – the intersection of a pine tree and two rosebushes, mediated by weeds. It fairly hums to itself, and buzzes with life in a way that almost distracts one from the traffic whizzing by. Our garden is planted with pretty things, but by and large they have to get by on a little lackadaisickal affection each May, before we get busy and forget to do anything but mow the lawn for the rest of the year.

But I’m not working this summer, and we’ve noticed some very unfamiliar plants growing in among the roses, so I set out to weed today. I got out the trowel and the clippers and had a Sid the Science Kid-inspired moment of hideous guilt about the habitats that I was destroying. Sid’s parents can’t have been gardeners, or they’d never have held off a minute on digging up an old stump, just because bugs were living on it. If Sid’s folks gardened, that stump would have been mulched when Sid was still a babe in arms, and he’d know all about the mechanisms of various insecticides. I waded out into the yard and began slaughtering things with ambitions to maple trees. I killed some ants for good measure. Gardeners have reputations as quiet, gentle folks – I think their ruthlessness is an underestimated force in our culture.

I began untangling a leafy, sturdy vine from a floribunda, noticing the way it had tendrils like tiny green phone cords wrapped around the bush, and then it suddenly sagged from my hand like it had a three pound weight attached.

The three pound weight is a pumpkin. Or a squash. I’m not sure. My best bet for telling one plant from another is to look at the seed catalog, and we sure as hell did not plant pumpkins, so it might be a squash. It is certainly an aspiring vegetable of some kind, and I could not bring myself to rip it up. I don’t know what we will do with it. Maybe it’ll save us a few dollars around Halloween, if we decide to entertain the children by carving jack o’lanterns this year. (The children’s imaginations outstrip the forces of parental vigilance so routinely that we may choose to be stodgy instead of demonstrating how knives are used in order to have seasonal decorations.)

In addition to this, the tree we know is an apple tree because it blooms has decided to bear apples this year, and there is a vine of cherry tomatoes growing out of the compost bin. Our soil is rumored to be lead contaminated, so I don’t know if any of these things are edible – we should probably get off our backsides and get that tested, so that we can determine whether we can continue to ignore our accidental produce until it ripens.

A few weeks ago, Danger Lad! asked me to sing him a new song at bedtime. And I said sure, but then I couldn’t think of a real new song. So I sang him some alternative lyrics to The Battle Hymn of the Republic.

Last weekend, the babysitter mentioned that he’d heard the kid singing what sounded like The Battle Hymn of the Republic. Since that didn’t seem like our style, the babysitter was curious, and dug the song up on YouTube. Danger Lad! was delighted – he recognized it. He started singing the words he knows.

I know a lot of possible lyrics to The Battle Hymn of the Republic. I know lyrics about burning down schools, about insurrectionists, about diaper rash. I may have a set of lyrics about beer. Danger Lad! now knows the set of lyrics about God’s pajama pants, and the problems with unreliable drawstrings.

Also, he knows a song about the importance of scheduling discussions in polyamorous relationships that is set to the tune of God Save the King.

He can get beat up for mocking patriotic songs in two different countries.

At least I was restrained enough not to teach him the version about murder and arson.

Just at the moment, when I type entries into WordPress, it shows them to me in Comic Sans. I’m not sure I can take it.

We have a new stand mixer, and have been operating on the assumption that we should do our conscientious best to torture it while it’s still under warranty. In an attempt not to die in the humidity, I have been making ice cream. I have a whole new book of ice cream recipes. Their total awesomeness sucked me in to the recipes in small print at the back of the book, and I attempted to make marshmallows.

The lump of sugar plasma on my kitchen counter is certainly tasty, but it is as certainly NOT a marshmallow. It’s more like nougat. In fact, it’s a great deal more like nougat than my last attempt at nougat, which wound up as thirty dollars worth of nuts in a gelatinous goo. (Really tasty gelatinous goo, but definitely not nougat.)

You could rip your teeth out on my marshmallow. I attempted to convert it from one large piece into many smaller pieces and didn’t get all that far. I can’t get a knife through. The kitchen shears can’t handle the thicker parts. The pizza cutter isn’t sturdy enough. I considered borrowing my husband’s heavy duty rotary cutter out of the sewing kit, but I want to stay married.

I’m blaming the candy thermometers. I used two and they gave me different readings, and I think I went with the wrong one. If it wasn’t the candy thermometer, it was either the humidity, or that home production of sugar plasma is not that great an idea. I don’t think it was the humidity, because humidity is what screwed up the nougat and made it un-nougat-y. I don’t really want to contemplate the notion that I should stick to projects that don’t stick to me. Candy thermometer it is.

I have this sick, sick fantasy that I just can’t shake. In my fantasy, I rent a dumpster. I put it in our driveway. And then I take all the things from our house that we don’t want, and put them in the dumpster. I do not sort out the recyclables. I do not save things to give to charity. I do not stop to consider whether this piece of two by four or that piece of tupperware will come in handy down the road. I just throw it all out. At the end of a week, a big truck comes and takes the dumpster away.

My daughter will not recycle. If you give her something, and ask her to put it in the recycle bin, she will look at you like you are crazy, and place the item neatly and decisively in the trash. Generally speaking, I think it’s a mistake to read too much into someone’s actions when that someone is not yet two, but I can’t shake the feeling that the baby is right on this one.

Like everyone we know, we try to be ecologically responsible, which means (in words ripped straight from a Body Shop ad campaign), we reduce, reuse, and recycle. We give away old clothes and toys when we’re done with them. We compost our garbage. We recycle cans, plastic and paper. In turn, we are on the end of a neighborhood chain of hand me downs that assures that a box of someone else’s old clothes shows up on our porch twice a year.

All of this green thinking works out to a set of ethics that requires us to keep trash around the house. Old toys get boxed up in the basement for a trip to the Salvation Army that has to be squashed into our schedules somehow, and consequently does not happen. Papers and cans sit in the front hall until the one day a week that the city sends a truck by to get them. Apple cores and carrot peelings go into a bucket by the sink that should be taken out twice a day, but never is. We don’t even garden that much: in order to grow edible vegetables, we’d have to truck in dirt from someplace not lead contaminated. So our garbage mellows in black plastic bins in our tiny backyard.

I see symptoms of the same guilt in the neighbors. We are not the only family with compost bins. Half the clothes in those old clothes boxes are used to rags before they get to me, as if putting blue jeans into an actual trash can, even after five children have romped them to grass-stained pieces, is too big a hit to the karma.

I want my kids to breathe clean air and drink clean water, and enjoy the wonders of nature for their entire lives. I also want to live in a tidy house. These desires should not be at odds.

Oh Thou breath of the universe, remind me not to scream at my children over the small things. Let me remember to hold back, so that when when I really need it, when they reach for the matches, or climb up the bookshelves, or dare their baby sisters to eat screws, they will still be intimidated by volume.

Forgive us our errors in orthography, and help us to teach our children not to repeat them.

As Thy mystery is beyond mysteries, as Thy power seeks the balance between omniscience, omnipotence and omnibenevolence, may You in Your wisdom decree that when they fall inevitably afoul of physics, they come through with only simple greenstick fractures.

So say we all.

Danger Lad! had his first overnight sleepover last night, with a family friend who is currently staying in a house with cats and snakes and birds and (I am sure) other fascinating things. He reports that he had a good time, and he came home exhausted, actually requesting a nap for the first time in an extremely long time, possibly for the first time in his entire life.

He called us last night to say goodnight, and insisted on speaking to both of us. No halfway goodnights to just Mama, or just Daddy. Because he’s impossibly sweet, this boy of ours, and we encourage that sort of thing because we like him that way.

Some mornings we get off the ground just fine. Other mornings, we flop around like chickens attempting to fly.

Miss Princess (aged 1.5) wants to dress herself. Danger Lad! (age 4) wants me to dress him. DL! wants to wear his (slightly too small) pajama shorts to school; the Princess believes that she can wear two pairs of pants at a time by putting one leg into each of them. DL! refuses all shirts except the Batman shirt that I know for a fact is sopping wet in the washing machine; the Princess joyfully pulls all her shirts out of the drawer, and then bursts into tears when comparative examination reveals that she doesn’t have breasts like Mama’s. At least, I think that’s what she was on about. She uses the same “Bah!” sound to mean ball, bell, bed, and back. A lot of guesswork goes into interpretation.

Danger Lad! wants to know why it’s not a home day. The Princess must be held at all times. Danger Lad! attempts to trade cooperation for crackers. The Princess wants to eat leftover lemony breadcrumbs from dinner for breakfast. We cannot find anyone’s shoes. The Princess tries to use her milk to wash her hair.

Accomplished:
The children are dressed, shod, and in the care of paid professionals who will feed them a second breakfast, and that should bloody well be enough.

The world did not end yesterday, so today I went ahead and had a birthday. There was good food that I cooked, and people in my house to eat it. There was noise and laughter and small children with nerf weaponry. Because I had an epic falling out with my stand mixer over bagel dough, there was no cake until fairly late in the proceedings, but I cuddled both my kids while I blew out a candle stuck in a sticky bun. It was a really good birthday.

(How awesome is it that the SciFi channel, which I refuse to spell as their marketing department suggests, has supplied me with so large a vocabulary of alternative swear words?)

We got over stomach flu. The dryer died, but I found a service to come and fix it the same day and they weren’t even too ludicrously expensive. I got up this morning, and let myself come unleashed a little bit at the grocery store, expecting to come home and have the day to cook. I had just gotten the gravlax into the fridge when daycare called to tell me that they were booting the baby for conjunctivitis.

Despite this hiccup, I have made chicken soup (with interruptions to say things like “See the puppy? Do you think the puppy would like to see what the activity table does?”), there are gnocchi in the freezer (“Is that a picture of a puppy on the activity table? Wow! I bet your puppy really likes that!”), I don’t know what the eventual outcome will be on bagels (“Oh sweetie, mama’s hands are all potato-y, but we’ll read the animal book again in just a few minutes.”), but whatever’s going to happen with them is not going to happen right now (“That doesn’t go in your hair, lovey”). Right now, I need to take advantage of the last of the kiddo’s nap to reheat my tea for the third time. Maybe this time I’ll remember to drink it.