Family Dynamics Defined

Recently, we've been trying to encourage Logan to speak more, which means Hannah is required to give him more opportunities to speak. Imagine trying to get a girl to quit talking so she can ponder what a boy thinks... As you can see, it's nearly an impossible task.

Logan best illustrated this while I was helping him learn his spelling words last week. On one particularly ticklish word, he was having trouble sorting out which vowels to use first in the word "fuel". I explained that we could hear the long U sound, but that U needed another vowel to help him "say his name". I trotted out the well worn reminder, "When two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking...and the second one says nothing at all." He watched as I circled the letter U and softly crossed out the letter E to indicate that E says nothing at all. Pointing to the U, he said, "That one's Hannah" then he pointed to the E, "and that one's me."

Gingerbread House Set Backs

I love the tradition of having the children decorate a gingerbread house during Christmas. The only part I DON'T love is trying to get gingerbread (which I don't even like) to stand up and behave while we're trying to decorate it. To avoid the seething and cursing brought on by gingerbread architecture, I've used a wooden-type structure for EONS and just stuck candy to that. Sadly, I can't find it this year. It's AWOL after our last move from Cheyenne. No worries, I'll just use a small cardboard box as the house, construct a roof, cover it with gingerbread and let the children stick candy to it. How hard could it be?

Using my long lost Bosch mixer, I started assembling the ingredients. When I got to the part about two tablespoons of vanilla extract, I knew I would have to open the new one I had bought a few months back. It's not premium stuff, but I reasoned that by the time we get to eating this cookie after Christmas, it's going to be pretty stale so why bother? I grabbed the plastic bottle it came in and cracked the seal of the cap. As I poured the first tablespoon into my lovely butter/sugar mix, I was shocked to see it was RED!! Who's ever heard of red vanilla extract? I looked more closely at the bottle and realized I had grabbed the little bottle of red wine that I got on my flight back home from England! SNAP, do I throw away three cups of sugar and two cups of butter or do I carry on? My frugal side (which is very bossy) reasoned that I wasn't planning on eating that stale ol' house anyway, and besides, even if the kids ate it, the alcohol would have cooked out...

Raise your hand if you think I just added the proper amount of real vanilla extract to the bowl and carried on.  If you're even contemplating raising your hand, you're right.


Once everything was mixed in their proper proportions, I greased a 9 x 12 jelly roll pan and filled it with the dough...twenty minutes later (about the time I'm typing the part about the wine), I smell scorching cookies. Completely unaware of the disaster I was about to discover, I scurried into the kitchen to investigate. The cookie dough had risen, and RISEN! Then it spilled over the edges of the jelly roll pan, then it accumulated at the bottom of the oven where it continued to bake, and then scorch. Yes, it's very trying being me. And this is the easy part, I remind myself. I haven't even gotten to the part where I try and make this stuff stick to the cardboard.

Maybe I'll just go have a peek in the garage for that gingerbread house form...




UPDATE:  Because I'm me and used to improvising due to my own mistakes, we eventually DID complete a "Gingerbread" house for Christmas.  When my supportive, loving husband walked in the door from work that evening and saw the unfinished house, he crooned, "Oh, it's like a little sod house!"

Sod Christmas Cabin

Tarted up Sod Cabin 

"Much Too Good For Children"

I've never felt any kind of guilt in denying my children top shelf stuff. For example, when having a barbecue, I don't hesitate throwing on some hot dogs for the kids while the grown ups have rib eye-steaks. At restaurants, kids order from the lame children's menu which invariably offers wooden-like chicken nuggets, overcooked mac and cheese and possibly a limp "cheese" pizza as their choices while we adults sample their $15 a plate specialties. They can have the Yoplait fat free yogurt and I get the thick, creamy, Australian yoghurt. Yes, it's even spelled differently, it's THAT good. I know that sounds like I'm a bad parent, but I was given carte blanche to continue in this vein earlier this week.

Our lovely friends from England, the Martins, sent some Hotel Chocolat for the kids. For us peasants who've never heard of Hotel Chocolat (please say with me, "Ho-tel Sho-ko-LAUD"), it is not made in a candy shop. Noooo, the artisans who create these edible miracles are bona fide "chocolatiers"... I know, fancy. Allow me to put this in lay man's terms, it is like high grade crack to those who know their way around premium chocolates. Anyway, I handed over these confectionery masterpieces to the children and Hannah came back to croon, "These are SOO good! They're just like Hershey's chocolate."

Bam. I'm in the clear. I could have kept the high dollar, black label chocolat for myself, handed over a Hershey's bar and they would have never. known. the difference. So parents, keep the steaks, the expensive entrees, the gourmet yoghurt to yourselves and give the kids the sorry substitutions, they are completely oblivious.

A Thanksgiving Story

So, now that it's November, the 2nd grade curriculum has included the Thanksgiving story to share with their impressionable, young students. You know the one, about how the Native Americans befriended the helpless Pilgrims, teaching them how to survive in a strange, new and hostile world (it was pre-Starbucks, if that helps you set the harshness of the environment into perspective).

Logan came home with a picture of what he had learned. I asked him to narrate it for me and he pointed out the pentagon shape and told me this was the house. Inside, one stick figure had lines coming out of his head, which he informed me was an Indian. Okay, I can imagine that those lines are the feathers worn by an indigenous person. Logan then pointed to the other stick figure which hadn't any lines on its head, and I was told that this was the human.

Of COURSE I told him that Indians and Pilgrims are both humans, but he didn't buy it. He looked at me like I was terribly and tragically under informed. After all, he is the one attending school and I am the one who grew up without cell phones, Internet or electronics with an "i" in front of their name. What could I possibly know?

So Children, as you read this when you become older and realize how RIGHT I was and how MISTAKEN you were, please apply that understanding to when we tell you that a certain person is all wrong for you, or that continuing your education is more important than getting a job right out of high school or any one of a number of things we're going to disagree upon. The proof is in this Thanksgiving Story pudding.

A Post Where I Write about Someone Else's Writing

I hate clutter. If it is not vital to my life, it will probably end up in a land fill. I don't save kids' art projects or test papers; anything come to think of it. If there is any scrap or shred of memorabilia in our home, it is because Dan has snatched it from the trash can. However, as I was plowing through the latest pallet of children's school work that threatened to engulf the kitchen counter, I found a paper written by Hannah dated October 10th entitled, "Early Jamestown: Why Did So Many Colonists Die?" I may not ever throw this one out because one day, those people who write Social Studies books will be paying me a king's ransom for the original to put on display in a glass case.

Here it is for your enlightenment:

"In 1607, some colonists from England decided to settle in a place they called Jamestown. It wasn't long before things started to go wrong.

One of the major problems was the water. Because of the way the stream flowed, when human waste was dumped, it flushed away, at first. Then later in the day, the tides came in, bringing the waste with it. Another reason why the water wasn't good, was because, since the stream flowed into the ocean, the water became brackish, which means that salt water and freshwater mixed to make brackish water. Therefore, you couldn't drink it (Mom's observation: Never mind that tiny issue of the water having poop in it).

Another problem; those colonists had NO skills. As in zip, zero, NONE. The(re) was [sic] NO females, and back then the females usually treat(ed) the sick and wounded. They didn't even have FARMERS, for Pete's sake! No farmers, no crops.

There is yet ANOTHER reason why the colonists died. They had a TERRIBLE relationship with the Powhatan Indians. When the Powhatans (Po-HAT-tuns) offered friendship, the colonists declined, then attacked, slaghtering [sic] a chief as well. That is NOT the best way to introduce yourself!

I hope this info answered all your questions!"

I never learned so much so easily! Despite minor glitches with grammar and spelling, the teacher recognized the value of this concise, hard-hitting report and gave her the 100% it deserved.

Public Law Number 843

I know you're busy, so I won't bog you down with the details of how this conversation with the kids started, but trust me, there was just cause. I was expounding a new rule, Pub. L. No. 843 Sec (a)(1)(A) which states:

Any unemancipated party must conduct a full visual search of all interior areas before exiting the residence for the purpose of ascertaining the whereabouts of any adult party, including but not limited to, mommy.

In an effort to illustrate the validity of this new edict, I suggested the possibility that I might be unable to answer them as they called to me from some distant part of the home... For example, I may have slipped and fallen, hitting my head on the hard tile floor and been left lying unconscious in the laundry room, thus the need for a visual inspection before conducting a house-to-house search. Logan gave that some consideration and came up with an alternate scenario. "Maybe you broke..." He paused here for a moment and I waited for him to finish his thought, "...your talking."

I broke my talking? I wonder if he was using irony to mock the ridiculousness of my law with the absurdity of his example.

Or maybe it was just wishful thinking.

Blue Lights

Today as I sat visiting with Hannah, I suggested that we should have a Girl's Night once a month, and the following month she could have a Daddy Daughter Night. She wanted to know if she could pick the venue, because if so, she'd choose going to the movies. Extricating myself as gently as possibly from the possibility of huge financial galas, I suggested it might be a date that involved just going to a shop and choosing a pastry to eat while drinking some chai. Wisely, she nodded, "Like the blue lights."

?

Of course, I had no idea what she was talking about and asked her to explain. "You know, like in Bosnia when we went to the blue lights," she reminded me.

If you have watched Disney's Ratatouille six and a half dozen times like we have in our home, you'll remember food critic, Anton Ego was taken back to his childhood home after one taste of Ratatouille. That totally happened to me; except instead of going back to France, my mind time-traveled to Bosnia. I couldn't believe Hannah remembered something so small from so long ago. "You remember the blue lights!" I asked excitedly. She told me what she remembered: If she was well behaved in school for a period of time, Daddy would take her to the blue lights. She reminisced how in the evening, if you looked out the window of our apartment in Vogošća, you could see blue lights upon the hill. She continued, "I remember when we went to the blue lights, looking into my cup of cocoa, and when I looked up, I remember seeing Daddy's face." Then she asked, "Mommy, what are the blue lights?"

The blue lights could indeed be seen from our apartment window back in 2005 when Hannah was only four years old. They beckoned from the hill and were as enticing as fairy lights to see. Dan and I drove out there once during the day to check it out and found it to be a nice hotel on the hill. So when Hannah had behaved at school for whatever was the required time, we took her to the blue lights one evening. The waiter had on a red jacket and there were white tablecloths and candles on each table. We had no idea it was going to be so posh and weren't really dressed for the occasion. Nevertheless, we sat at a table by the window in the nearly empty dining room and ordered hot chocolate, which, by-the-way, is aMAZing in Europe. I think they actually USE chocolate to make it. And real milk. Plus you get to add your own sugar to taste. MMMMmmmm....

So, go forth and make some "blue light" memories with your loved ones. If they happen to include chocolate, all the better!