Merry Christmas!

Santa came and brought a big play castle and Mario Kart Wii. Nate got a wool coat and the new Neal Stephenson book. Mara got a neck massaging pillow--being home with the kids gives me such a crick sometimes! Oy! :) --and "De Blob", a Wii game. Thomas got a nerf rifle, and a ninja turtle robot fighting machine. Sethie got a bus, a v-tech laptop, and an electric train.

And we all got the very best gift of all:

Corned beef hash and coffee cake for breakfast!

Oh yeah, and getting to spend this wonderful holiday together.

Uh oh. The hash just set off the smoke alarm.

Nerd Musings

I've been using Google's new browser, Chrome, since it debuted and for the most part, I like its far speedier load times than Internet Explorer. It does have some bugs, a few of which are particularly irritating (for one, it freezes out input on open tabs for a few seconds after you close a tab in the same browser window).

But here's a message I keep getting at the bottom of the pane and seems to coincide with a page taking a particularly long time to load: "Waiting for cache..."

Now, I've been out of computer science-y stuff for awhile now, but that still strikes me as huge contradiction.

Other nerds, am I out of my mind? Does this mean what I think it means and therefore makes no sense?

Captain Beard and the Frozen Snow

T and I decorated Christmas cookies this morning (a good inside activity considering the below-freezing temperatures outside right now. The snow on our lawn is frozen. The SNOW! As in, it has gone from nice and powdery to a lattice of solid ice). Actually, I only frosted the cookies in designs at T's behest and he put the sprinkles and whatnot on them. I like to see a kid throwing caution to the bitter winter wind and going random design nuts on a slew of sugar cookies:

Thomas made this one special and called it "Captain Beard". He told me it was specifically for Nate.

Can Someone Please Explain

To Fisher-Price exactly what is wrong with the following advertisement? Let's start with the very first line of copy. Hello, copy editor? You're fired.

Mr. Jam

We got Sethie a "Word Whammer" for his birthday, which is basically a high tech version of those little refrigerator letter magnets they had when I was a kid. I remember arranging those dinky little plastic letters into strings and then asking my mom what word I had made. She'd glance at the fridge and say, "That doesn't make a word." I was extremely frustrated by this. They fit the word-making algorithm I had studied from books! Consonant-vowel-consonant, etc.!

Well, now pre-readers needn't wonder! Put any three letter string into the "Word Whammer" and it will tell you if you made a word. It will also sound out the letters, even if you didn't manage to accomplish wordage (except where, as the manual says, "Certain letter combinations may be found to be offensive", so no danger of Junior learning any four-letter words with three-letter accidental misspellings). Where was this wizardry when I needed it?

Anyway, T. uses it a lot more than Sethie because he's learning this stuff in kindergarten now, but Sethie does like to line up the letters and he does know most of their names and sounds. But in general he spells "GXAHER", "PYEQWNAQ", and that sort of thing. I showed him yesterday that the magnets also stick to the dishwasher, then came back a little while later to find this:

I'm not saying it means something, but doesn't it feel like it should? Cue up the opening music for an Inspector Lynley mystery...

After Sethie saw me get out the camera to photograph his enigmatic creation, he immediately wanted in.

Death to Holiday Schmaltz

Richard Paul Evans wants you to have a very Schmaltzy Christmas

Also, download his free discussion guides, in case his 

heartwarming hammer didn't hit you over the head hard 

enough while you were reading his books.

WARNING WARNING WARNING--this post is very angry and not suitable for everyone. Rated H for Hate. If you have ever read a Richard Paul Evans-style book and liked it, or you're not sure what "Richard Paul Evans-style" means, then I wouldn't read any further. Misanthropists, follow me.

It's that time of year again, what with its roast turkeys, yule logs, tree lightings, and whatnot. I actually love Christmas. It is, hands down, my favorite holiday. The day after Thanksgiving, I break out the Christmas music and listen to it constantly--much to Nate's consternation. We go out to a tree farm the first week of every December to get our tree, singing carols, and warming ourselves with hot, mulled cider (future recipe to be posted!). I actually buy most of my Christmas presents in October and November. I have been known to buy them as early as July. So I am no humbugger! I love Christmas, but this year, rather than put up a wreath, I would really like to take out my nailgun and do like Luther: hang all my complaints on the door, preferably right through their cloying, schmaltzy noggins.

I am referring to a specific brand of entertainment that brings to bear all its tear-jerky, ooey-gooey, "True Meaning of Christmas" hooey in order to shake free from us some form of monetary compensation. I dislike this sort of thing on principle--you may have noticed the posts on exploiting notions of Old Hawaii and the Amish for profit in the past--but I especially dislike schmaltz. I believe the purveyors of schmaltz are a lost chapter of Dante's Inferno. Their level of hell is filled with gold coins covered in vomit, making them too slippery for them to grasp, but eternally try to grasp them, they will.

Okay, for everyone still with me after that last line, let me backtrack. What is "schmaltz" anyway? Technically, the term is derived from the Yiddish word for liquid chicken fat, as in "scoop all the schmaltz off the top of the soup before you serve it". So consider the reaction of a person fed liquid chicken fat: it glides down very easily, but the moment you consume it, you start to feel really disgusted.

A writer's workshop I once attended had this to say about truly effective writing: avoid "emotional grab words", words like "mother", "father", "love", "life", "death", "cancer", etc. These are schmaltz. Anyone can cobble them together into a cliched, tear-jerking product designed to prey on our desire to feel inspired, on our weakness for the gushy and heartwarming.

No worse example of Holiday Schmaltz can be observed than this "#1 Hit!" that has probably started already clogging up radio stations with its liquid chicken fatty goo:

The Christmas Shoes

It was almost Christmas time

There I stood in another line

Trying to buy that last gift or two

Not really in the Christmas mood

Standing right in front of me 

Was a little boy waiting anxiously

Pacing around like little boys do

And in his hands he held

A pair of shoes

And his clothes were worn and old

He was dirty from head to toe

And when it came his time to pay

I couldn't believe what I heard him say

Sir I wanna buy these shoes for my Momma please

It's Christmas Eve and these shoes are just her size

Could you hurry Sir?

Daddy says there's not much time

You see, she's been sick for quite a while

And I know these shoes will make her smile

And I want her to look beautiful

If Momma meets Jesus, tonight.

They counted pennies for what seem like years

And cashier says son there's not enough here

He searches is pockets frantically 

And he turned and he looked at me

And he said Momma made Christmas good at our house

Most years she just did without

Tell me Sir

What am I gonna do?

Some how I’ve got to buy her these Christmas shoes

So I layed the money down

I just had to help him out

And I'll never forget

The look on his face

When he said Momma's gonna look so great.

Sir I wanna buy these shoes, for my Momma please

It's Christmas Eve and these shoes are just her size

Could you hurry Sir?

Daddy says there's not much time

You see, she's been sick for quite a while

And I know these shoes will make her smile

And I want her to look beautiful,

If Momma meets Jesus tonight.

I knew I caught a glimpse of heavens love as he thanked me and ran out. 

I know that God had sent that little boy to remind me

What Christmas is all about

Sir I wanna buy these shoes for my Momma please

It's Christmas Eve and these shoes are just her size

Could you hurry Sir?

Daddy says there's not much time

You see she's been sick for quite a while

And I know these shoes will make her smile

And I want her to look beautiful

If Momma meets Jesus tonight

I want her to look beautiful

If Momma meets Jesus tonight

If you aren't sure exactly what's wrong with this song, you are probably also the kind of person who has been forwarding me "inspirational" (and likely false) stories over email. Let us dissect together all the ways in which this fits the capital-S "Schmaltz" qualification.

Note the emotional grab words: Momma, little boy, ragged clothes, Jesus, "Please sir", "sick for quite awhile", Christmas Eve...the list goes on. We can presume the self-absorbed protagonist of the song would not have noticed an ugly older man dressed in secondhand J. Crew trying to buy some shoes for his flu'ish second cousin, even if the poor man also couldn't come up with the requisite change. He'd be thinking, "Hurry it up, buddy. I got to be at a Handel's Messiah recital in fifteen minutes."

But let's nevermind that. In fact, let's nevermind that the protagonist's act of good will is to finish paying for the shoes, which are, we can presume, not exactly Christian Louboutins or anything, and then to watch the kid leave, thinking to himself, "God sent that little boy here to teach me about the true meaning of Christmas." Yes, sir, that little boy's entire craptacular life is just so you, the cynic, can have a moment to appreciate everything that makes your life super. Now he has served his purpose and can disappear off into the mist from whence he came and you can go home in your Porsche whistling, Do You Hear What I Hear?

No. What I hate most about schmaltz is that it ignores the rules of the real world. It manipulates and distorts in order to wring the most anguish from its subject and, in turn, the most bucks from us. We are buying big fat Christmas Shoes for NewSong, who probably have enough to pay for some themselves and have likely never been in the company of a dirty urchin whose mother is dying of some unspecified illness on the same night Santa is supposed to be delivering presents around the world to luckier children.

Notice that the kid is "dirty from head to toe". Does he not have a bathtub at home? Or even a hose outside to rinse himself off with? As P.J. O'Rourke has pointed out, even the poorest of the poor in Tanzania manage to keep their clothes clean. We'll give the ragged clothes a pass, even though Dicken's London, this isn't. But why is this child even out on Christmas Eve at night by himself? No child of semi-self-reliant age (let's go with 9, 10, or above) would be as rube'ish as this kid is to the fate of his mother and how much shoes are actually going to help when she's writhing around in her last few minutes on this earth. My five-year-old might be likely to conclude that shoes are the way to go if his "Daddy" tells him I don't have much time. He is not allowed out alone at any store, especially after dark. Let's hope a child a little older than that would think, "Oh, medicine! Doctors! Wrongful death lawsuit!" Well, maybe not the last one, then again, these days...

The narrator shows no interest in these questions. Dirty, out alone, mother dying, or at least someone named "Daddy" told him so...well, how can I help? I can buy him the shoes! Yes! As this post is indicating, I'm fairly misanthropic, but I even get nervous when I see little kids by themselves. I want to know where their parents are. If they were to tell me their mom is dying, I'm probably going to get even more nervous. I might phone 911. Or Social Services. Or do anything other than just fork over a ten for some Payless pumps to accompany mommy's death rattle.

Obviously, as these reviews on Amazon show, I'm in the minority on this song. Ditto any and all books by Richard Paul Evans who has had, count them, TWELVE bestselling novels, starting with The Christmas Box which wrung as much "True Meaning of Christmas" as you can out of a dead child. I'm getting tired of ranting here--though I have boatloads of material on Evans, including his "buy my writing and financial advice" side careers--but if you've managed to make it this far, you're probably tired, too, so I'll end it here with a quote from Evans' website which fair-oozes schmaltz:

"Of his success, Evans says: ‘The material achievements of The Christmas Box will never convey its true success, the lives it has changed, the families brought closer together, the mothers and fathers who suddenly understand the pricelessness of their children’s fleeting childhood. I share the message of this book with you in hopes that in some way, you might be, as I was, enlightened.’"

Evans: "I hope you will be as enlightened as I was by my own book." Schmaltz lift thy sceptor! We have crowned your everlasting King!

Long Long Time Ago...

Well, only about a month ago. Since I've already committed the mortal sin of doing a post based on events that happened in the (semi-) distant past, I thought I'd post a few videos of our fall adventures. Therefore you can randomly sample our occasionally-taped family happiness! Or something like that. It's late. I'm punchy. On with the videos:

T. lets his fingers do the dancing at Terhune Orchards

Why do I ask how the cow likes it? I don't know. (@Terhune Orchards)

An existentialist work on the inherent variability in our lives and how 

quickly we tire of our own pleasures. Either that, or I've got meningitis

Halloween

I realize Halloween was a week ago, but for those of you who are still in chocolate withdrawal, here are some reminders of the wondrous holiday where grown-ups inexplicably give you gobs of candy just because you showed up at their door with a costume and a bag.

On that note: our friend Tyler (seen below in all his Billy Mays glory) said that when he was about seven, he wanted to go on a candy bender and decided to trick-or-treat in July. He had the first door slammed in his face at which he point he started to think maybe it really was just the one day that adults lose their minds and give out sugar to any random kid who shows up.

T. the Ninja (hyah!) in the Halloween parade at his elementary school

Our friends, the Jacobs, at our place before trick-or-treating. 

Tyler really does bear a frightening resemblance to Billy Mays and

Marylynn does the emo teenager look pretty well. The little black

witch-shaped shadow in the back is their daughter Cricket, 

T.'s buddy, and the unicorn-do Superman in front is Buster.

Ninja Sethie, Ninja Thomas, Superman Buster, and Witch Cricket.

The green arms are mine, desperately trying to keep Seth from

removing his Ninja mask and revealing his secret identity (that of

angry, over-heated two-year-old who hates stuff on his head).

The kids wait at a door for that most magical event: the

presentation of the candy! Note that S. is sans Ninja mask.

You just can't keep that kid dressed. It did make him SLIGHTLY

easier to see in the dark, especially since he refused to hold any

kind of light source. We should have just strung reflective tape

on his back, I suppose, but that would have, kind of, ruined

that whole "Ninja" aesthetic we were going for:

"Hey, what's that?"

"Don't know. Looks like a ninja."

"But he's wearing reflective tape."

"Guess he didn't want to get run over while crossing the street."

"Yeah, you can't be too careful these days---aaiiigggh!" (destroyed by Ninja star).

New Day

Well, my guy didn't win, but I am always happily amazed every time we finish an election and see what a true democratic process shows the world.  Even in 2000, with all the drama in Florida, people calmly went about their business. There was no rioting in the streets, no threats of a revolution, no fear from either side that the eventual winner would route out his opponent's supporters. These things still happen all over the world, even in places where "elections" occur.

But not here. Today will be the same as yesterday. We fight with votes and we concede with grace. And we pray for our new president, Barack Obama, to do the right thing. 

I feel very blessed to be American. This is the greatest country in the history of the world and we ought to be grateful every day for the opportunity to be its citizens.

God Bless America, land that I love.

My two cents

Well, I just went to my local polling station and yanked the lever for McCain (actually, it was a cool electronic ballot with a computer keyboard for write-in candidates. I almost wrote in "Romney", but restrained myself).

Like my buddy, Grumpator, I wanted to just add my last two cents on the election and will foreswear political postings in the future (there's plenty of that elsewhere for anyone who is interested). This article in National Review describes pretty much how I feel going into the election and while I'm not really excited about McCain, I still feel he is the best choice under the circumstances.

From the article:

"McCain has a solid record of opposing economically damaging tax increases. He has always opposed abortion. He has advanced a creative free-market health-care policy...He is a scourge of wasteful spending and a resolute free trader. He says that he will look for judges who have demonstrated their fidelity to the Constitution as written. We have our differences with McCain, as do most conservatives, on such issues as immigration and stem cells. On each of these issues, however, Obama is at least as mistaken."

I urge everybody to vote. Have a hand in your future! Give yourself the right to cheer or to complain, whatever the outcome. Apathy is our number one enemy.

Does Charlie Kaufman Do Kids' Shows?

After a summer of seeing too much TV morphing our otherwise delightful child into a hyperactive head-spinning, glassy-eyed spazola, Nate and I decided on a new schedule for T. now that school is in session: he can watch TV, but only in the evening and only after he has cleaned up (this may not sound like much of a requirement, but in a single morning this kid can turn a perfectly tidy living room into that scene from Temple of Doom where Kate Capshaw wades through the room of bugs--just insert "Mom" in for Capshaw and "toys/food/food containers/clothes/wrappers/whatever/etc." in for the bugs).

So Thomas normally picks Noggin to watch, but one day, I switched the TV on for him and left the room (he knows how to switch the channels), only to come back a little while later to hysterical laughter. I mean, I know Dora can whip off a clever line or two in Espanol, but she's no Ellen Degeneres, so I had to wonder what he was watching. Turns out it was...wait for it....

America's Funniest Home Videos.

After recording Homicide: Life on the Street for me, the DVR had left it on WGN which apparently shows reruns of AFV after H:LS (who is their program director?). And Thomas--he must have felt he had inadvertantly stumbled onto the greatest comedic spectacle his young eyes had seen since his dad introduced to him the The Three Stooges (or "Stooches" as T. calls them).

I will admit, I am a TV and movie snob. With a few exceptions (I have a soft spot for old school sci-fi like ST:TNG) I like pretty much highbrow stuff and I'll turn off any show that dares even a single male groin injury, especially if perpetrated by balls and/or small children. So I've seen AFV maybe five times in my life and all at other people's houses. Thinking I'd somehow missed some hitherto unseen hilarity, I sat down and watched it with him for a minute.

Nope. Still the same cats falling off television sets and men getting hit in the groin by balls and/or small children. But Thomas was wiping tears of elation out of his eyes, when he could manage to pull himself back off the floor after a particularly gut-busting dog-chases-sock-runs-into-wall segment. 

A friend and I once joked about forbidding our kids from watching certain shows not because the content was too adult or something of that sort, but because they lacked sufficient artistic merit. "Thomas, turn that off! The characterization is embarrassingly shallow and the director is so self-conscious, the shots can't even maintain their sense of ironic detachment!" 

Har. But how much do you lax your standards for your kid's entertainment? For all the people who turn off Barney because of its cheerful brain-washing mindlessness, what exactly do they turn it to? Masterpiece Theatre? I liked Blue Clues when Steve Burns was on it, but once they replaced him with "Joe", the whole show fell out of its "day in a kid's life" motif to a bizarro mock-fantasy that defies its own inner logic. In other words, it sucks now. I still let Thomas watch it during his TV time if he wants to. Creative criticism seems particularly petty and silly when applied to kids' shows which aren't exactly trying to win over the Academy. 

But how low-brow is too low-brow? For a while, Thomas's favorite movie was The Master of Disguise, a Dana Carvey-vehicle that would be considered terrible even if we lived in an alternate universe where Pixar had never existed and the artistic pinnacle of children's entertainment had become Disney's straight-to-video bastardizations of its own franchises ("Snow White VII:Snow White Goes on Extreme Makeover"), but I let him watch it. In fact, I recorded it on our DVR and let him watch it more than once. He has most of it memorized. Ditto The 3 Ninjas.

Per T.'s request, I've started recording AFV so he can watch it during his TV time. In fact, he's watching it right now while I'm writing this and having what appear to be seizures, but are, yay, only full body laughter spasms. Meanwhile, Sethie is running around behind him, laughing whenever he laughs and scrutinizing the television, clearly trying to figure out, on a deeper level, why the paragon of wisdom, his older brother, finds this show so funny (just like how a seven-year-old me tried once to understand the apparently hidden aesthetic quality my older sister saw in Days of Our Lives. Sethie, my little mechanical observer, are you destined to grow up disillusioned?)

If this were a column in a newspaper, no doubt I'd be getting vilified in the comments section. There's a part of me that thinks I should be. But I just love the sound of T's uncontrollable giggling. If the source is harmless but, really, kinda stupid, does that mean I shouldn't let him watch it? 

I don't know. It's hard to concentrate over the sound of his happy hysteria. 

Thomism

Thomas, describing the abilities of the LEGO plane he built: "It's so hard, it could kill your face in just one minute!"

Me: "Oh yeah?"

T: "Yeah, so stay away unless you want to get dead."

No, No, VERY BAD!

Dear Little Kidlets,

Never put anything in your mommy's and daddy's paper shredder, even if it looks like it fits, especially your fingers and toes because they will come out looking like Mr. Quarter here.

Dear Mommies and Daddies,

Stop putting your shredder where little kidlets can find it.

Sincerely,
The Management

Had a Hard Day

Dear Sethie, I know you're having a hard day when you wake up from your nap completely hysterical and inconsolable. What were you dreaming about? Toy price inflation? The drop in the value of our 401K? The fact that it's probably going to be ten years or so until you can grab your things back from Thomas without having to resort to knee-biting?

I wish you could tell me.

Alabama Baby

Nate and I are both the babies in our families--he's the last of eight and I'm the last of six, which means that we both have a few nieces and nephews who really aren't that much younger than we are. So I guess it shouldn't be much of a shock that these previously little kids have grown up, gotten married, and are now having babies of their own. Last month, Nate's niece Julia had her first baby, a little boy named William.

And this month marked the debut of my own grand nephew, Tristan. 

I was ten when my niece, Meg, was born. Since then I've seen her in a few fits and starts as my sister moved around the country (and the world) and it just seems like they kept replacing the model I knew with a bigger, older version. Toddler Meg--Pop!--kid Meg--Pop!--adolescent Meg--Pop!--teenage Meg--Pop!--grown up married Meg!

And then the most dramatic pop of all--Mommy Meg! 

I just can't get over it. I don't even feel that old.

Anyway, here's some baby pics. 

Here's Mr. Tristan in all his black-haired glory. Meg

actually looked just like this as a baby.

My niece Meg with Tristan. Aw! I can't believe

she's a mommy! Still weirds me out a little. But

she's doing a great job.

Meg's younger sister, Amber, with the baby. Amber did even

some more dramatic "popping" between visits. She literally

grew several feet. She's model-tall now and just as lovely.

My sister Alys with Tristan. I hope I look that good

when I'm a grandma.

Me giving Tristan a little smooch on the head. It's been 

two years since I had a smoochable baby! Toddlers are much

less likely to hold still when you want to kiss them.

To My Little Survivor, Happy Birthday!

And thanks to Gloria Gaynor for creating the most widely applicable song in the history of music.

Thomism

Thomas: "My friend Emma said she is going to church tomorrow."

Me: "That might mean she is Jewish and going to synagogue, then."

Thomas: "Jewish?"

Me: "Yes."

Thomas: "But she speaks English."

Squirrelly Business

I'm from Utah originally, so the only time I ever saw squirrels was on camping trips into the wild where their adorable scampering became synonymous with happy, holy nature. When I started school at Bryn Mawr College out on this end of the country, I was amazed at the hundreds of squirrels around, doing their adorable scampering business all over the lawns of my new school. I said to my friends, "Look at all the squirrels! Aren't they so cute? I just love all the squirrels here!"

Of course, they all looked at me like I had developed instant leprosy and were likely also wondering if I had a possible malignant brain tumor to boot. (I had a similar experience once--on the giving end--when my friend Miriam commented out loud how cute she thought cows were. I think we were watching some TV program. I asked her, "Have you actually SEEN a cow in real life?" She admitted that she hadn't. I told her I would give her a tour of their fetid stinky "cuteness" next time she visited me out in rural northern Utah).

The truth is, squirrels are the rats of New Jersey (though, don't get me wrong, we have rats here, too. They are, however, surprisingly less annoying than squirrels). Ah, yes, they are fuzzy-tailed, light-footed bundles of cuddliness, but there's a reason they are all over people's lawns and trees. They are not there to pose for pictures. They are little anarchists. They do not acknowledge your property rights.

More frankly, your house. Come winter-time, squirrels like to nest in hollow trees which are dry and cozy. Your attic is the biggest, nicest hollow tree a squirrel has ever laid eyes on. Your attic is the holy grail of hollow trees. It is not just cozy: it has its own heat source. It's as warm as summertime in there! And spacious, too. This Jersey rat has just landed the squirrel-equivalent of a New York City penthouse. 

And just like a new and annoying young Hollywood starlet occupying said penthouse, it doesn't know the meaning of "bedtime". In fact, that's when the party is just getting started. It's up there, with its little squirrel friends and its squirrel catering service, and just possibly its hordes of squirrel offspring, at all hours of the night scampering here and scampering there, making sure everyone is having a good time and there's enough squirrel drink to go around, while the crotchety old neighbors downstairs (us!) are trying to get some badly needed rest. Banging on the ceiling will cause everything to go quiet for a few seconds, but soon enough, the party starts right back up again and this time, there are no squirrel police you can call about noise violations.

As you may have determined, we currently have a squirrel in our attic. It arrives around 7 pm, just as darkness is setting in and leaves again around 7 am when Nate is heading to work. Attempts to scare it into leaving, such as screaming, stomping, banging, and sticking squirrel dolls with pins, have done nothing other than turn us into screaming, stomping, banging, voodoo'ing lunatics. The squirrel is quite content to live above such chaos. Meanwhile, I had to sleep yesterday with earplugs in, which was great for not hearing the squirrel all night long, but also meant if my children were screaming bloody murder for their mommy, I missed that, too. 

Tonight, Dave, our handyman, is coming by to look for holes in the roof where our squirrel starlet squatter is getting in and tomorrow an exterminator will be coming to live trap the creature and cart it off to someone else's backyard. Hopefully that will be the end of it.

We'll see.

Thomism

Thomas is home from school today and so I laxed a pretty solid house rule of no TV in the morning. He reminded me just how lax when he said, "Mommy, my TV brain is still watching TV!" after I told him a few times that he ought to turn it off.

Well, I finally came down hard: "TURN IT OFF NOW."

To which Thomas replied, "But mommy, if I turn it off, my TV brain will smack me!"

Reading Comprehension Quiz

Instructions: Read the following passage, then answer the questions below. 

Once upon a time, there was a mother who had eight children. The youngest was a little boy, toe-headed and slate blue-eyed, who seemed destined for greatness. As a child, he listened faithfully to the news on his radio and thought deeply about the problems of the world. Astounded adults would ask him questions about Russian and American politics which he could answer in great detail. In first grade, he complained that there was no discussion of negative numbers and as a third-grader, he read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. He drew detailed pictures of Russian aircraft, contemplated the horrors of nuclear fallout in a Cold War era, and wrote a poem entitled, "Where does the sky end?" which won an Honorable Mention in the annual Reflections contest.

Of course, the little boy grew up to be a great man who became schooled in all the hard sciences--Mathematics, Chemistry, Physics, Pharmacology--as well as the liberal humanities of Rhetoric (Business Administration) and Law. But while work, study, and learning have required most of his time, he invests all of his emotional energies in an even higher calling: husband and father. As a result of both his accomplishments and his intense familial devotion, he is loved and admired by all who know him.

Questions:

1) Who is the person referenced in the above passage?

2) How old would this man be today?

3) How do you, the reader, feel about this person after reading this passage?

The Nobility of Motherhood

A few years ago when Thomas was about Sethie's age, I was in a Relief Society meeting, doing a short presentation on the "nobility of motherhood" to the group. Right on cue, the nursery leader showed up with Thomas. The smell from his diaper filled the entire room. Here it is, folks, the nobility of motherhood, in action. 

So this morning, I choose out an outfit that I thought would say "casual sophisticate". I like when the weather around here turns chilly again because I can do layers. I put on a flowy black tank gathered at the bustline over a white cotton button-down shirt with three-quarter sleeves. So for most of the day I've been going around, thinking I looked nice. 

Turns out when I changed Sethie's diaper this morning, he left me a little present on my sleeve and I have been parading around this big brown spot on my arm. What is it the French call it? "Eau de Toilette?"

Just call me noble.

The Day After

I want to thank everyone deeply for the heartfelt birthday wishes. I can't tell you how much fun it was yesterday to keep stopping by the computer and seeing the comments pile up. I often forget in the frenzy of daily life how many good friends are out there keeping tabs on us and the fact that you bother to check this blog at all is a sign of your care. I want you to know how much I love all of you and how grateful I am that you are a constant presence in my life.

Thomas managed both to make it to school (which is not nearly so impressive, since I drove him and dropped him off personally) and home, though the coming home was a little more dramatic. It took about an hour from the time school supposedly let out before his bus rattled onto our street and dropped him off. Speaking of rattled, that was me. I had foolishly left the number for the school back inside and didn't dare run back in to find it just in case the bus finally arrived. So I had Nate call them to find out what was going on. Apparently, it took nearly half-an-hour for the school to sort all the new little kindergartners onto the right buses and then Thomas's bus driver apparently didn't know that part of our road is closed off due to construction and got stuck trying to turn her rig around on a narrow road and come back the opposite way. When she arrived, I went running out to her, asking if she could possibly have my child on board and I was so relieved when she let him off that I thoroughly dampened him with both tears and slobbery kisses. 

You know, I was wondering why I was so worried about him heading off to kindergarten when he's been going to preschool for over a year and I realized it's about autonomy. There are going to be portions of his life now where it is just him getting himself where he needs to go, and he will be facing up to kids that are older than he is in an environment that is often uncontrolled. I know this is a standard parenthood fear, but I realized yesterday that I can look and wait for him, but I can no longer actively protect him all the time. 

The Hem song from the previous post would probably be more appropriate here because I realized as I was taking Thomas to school yesterday, I was carrying everything with me--my entire school experience, positive and negative--and fixating on him the weight of all these memories. I don't know. I'd be interested in hearing how other parents handled their kids-off-to-school fears and how the kids themselves succesfully navigated their newfound autonomy in a new world that is more peers than family.

Mara's B-day and new adventures

A very Happy Birthday to my beautiful wife!
Not only is it Mara's birthday, but it is also Thomas' first day at school. When I was discussing presents with her, Mara said that if Thomas makes it to and from school without incident, that would be the best present in the world. I am sure we will have a report on that soon.
Love ya babe!

Blue Grey Day

So we carry every sadness with us

Every hour our heart was broken

Every night the fear and darkness

Lay down with us

Hem, Half Acre

Unfortunately, I don't have many Intercourse, PA jokes to tell. You know the kind ("Nate took me out for dinner, then insisted we go straight to Intercourse") and I apologize to anyone who looking forward to them (You know who you are, ahem, Kristi ;) ). But we did stop there on our way out of Lancaster, hoping to find some souvenir item to take home. Other than some very lovely Amish furniture, almost everything was country kitsch--more 80's kitchen, than 1800s. And don't get me started on Kitchen Kettle Village which featured an embarrassing assortment of Amish-style fakery that would make even Jakey from the BBQ place tear his beard off.

So, instead, we headed east on Hwy. 30 toward Gettysburg. I'm not much of a Civil War buff, though I heard enough stories and watched enough documentaries with my dad when I was growing up to know the basic layout of the war. I know that Gettysburg was the turning point, that up until then Lee had been stomping his way to victory all over the backs of the union soldiers and that President Lincoln had been firing general after general as each one failed to bring about any change in the war's course. In school, I had seen such frothy period dramas as "North and South" and "The Blue and the Grey" and I'll admit that one of my all-time favorite films is "Gone with the Wind". I have to say if your heart doesn't burn a little with Atlanta during the penultimate first disc scene, then you probably don't have one.

But like I said, this is frothy history. The idea of the Civil War has taken on a certain romantic nobility--the gallant charges, the courageous last stands, the angelic ideals of the abolitionists, and the devil's cloud on the slave owners--it does make for a good miniseries. Unlike the rural Pennsylvania we passed through to get there, Gettysburg and its like have yet to grow derelict. From the somber battlefield memorials to the Central Park statue of Sherman in New York City, we seem recall the Civil War as a beacon on our nation's path to righteousness and regard its turn from confederate to union victory as inevitable, a collective wrestling with our souls that we had to win. Certainly, I have no regrets about it and have always thought of the Union army a bit like a favorite sports team--the fact that I have cheered them on means somehow I helped a little, right?

Anyway, the whole set-up is so familiar to me now that I wasn't quite prepared for how Thomas was going to take it.

First of all, the idea that someone might not like someone else simply because of the melanin count in their skin is so anathema to Thomas, it was difficult even explaining it. He's been very lucky to grow up in pretty ethnically diverse areas, from NYC to Ithaca to here and to him, kids are kids. I don't think he's pointed, stared, or even blinked at anyone who looked different from him because there's such a wide variety of people around him at all times, it hasn't even occured to him that someone could think that odd.

Moreover, for Thomas at this stage of his young life, the world is divided into good guys and bad guys. Everybody is on one team or the other and there is no moral middle. We've explained to him before, usually around Independence Day, that he is an American. Therefore to him, Americans are the good guy team because Thomas would never want to be on a bad guy team. Trying, then, to tell him that some Americans enslaved blacks for financial gain...well, that's a hard idea to swallow in the first place, but Thomas kept wondering, outloud no less, what the slaves had done to deserve it. Were they bad guys? Saying to him, no, no, they weren't bad guys and they hadn't done anything and these Americans had done it anyway...

Well, at some point, we just stopped trying to explain it because, thankfully, such bald-faced cruelty simply isn't part of his consciousness.

As we moved through the museum at Gettysburg Battlefield Memorial Park, Thomas grew more and more quiet. We watched the History channel videos explaining each day of battle, stroked the muzzles of ancient cannons, looked at displays of guns, ammunitions, uniforms, and more. We used interactive displays to show him where the Confederate lines had attempted to overcome the Union road blocks into town and he stood before the wall of pictures of some of the nearly 50,000 men who died in just those three days of war.

Over and over again, he quietly asked, were those the good guys or the bad guys? Again, we tried to explain that while the Confederate cause--keeping slavery legal--was a terrible, wrongful thing, that didn't mean that all the men fighting for the Confederacy were bad men. He struggled very much with that, holding on to us and walking slowly and thoughtfully through the museum (anyone who knows Thomas should see the "slowly" and "thoughtfully" and say, "What?").

We did eventually get outside to tour the battlefield itself and while I thought that might settle on him even harder, it actually lightened his load quite a bit. Even with the monuments and old artillery scattered around, the out of doors is the out of doors and so he went running through the fields, chasing Sethie and letting himself be chased. I was relieved actually. He's too little to be so burdened by someone else's evil. Unfortunately, he has his whole life ahead of him to experience that.

*Tourism exploitation sidenote: In the museum gift shop, I was, frankly, shocked at some of the children's things they had there. They had t-shirts with both Union and Confederate uniforms emblazoned on them: the Confederate one said "Johnny Reb" on it and plenty of grey confederate caps to round out the outfits. Maybe this is just some version of "cops and robbers", but I couldn't imagine letting my kids run around in fake blue and grey, shooting at each other, even though I'm pretty liberal in the play-fighting area ("Thomas, you can pretend to whack your brother...just don't actually whack him"). And the confederate flag has always struck me as a middle finger to the country we pulled together and eradication of slavery by the blood of millions of Americans. Now it's a souvenir? Like I said...some things just aren't for sale.

Here are pictures from Gettysburg Battlefield Memorial Park:

Nate and the kids on Emmitsburg Road, overlooking

the fields where the Union soldiers held their ground

Another shot off Emmitsburg Road

Sethie sits atop a cannon on Emmitsburg Road

Thomas on top the same cannon, looking thoughtful

Thomas and I walking the pathway that marks Pickett's Charge

Thomas and Sethie playing in the fields near Pickett's Charge

Livin' in an Amish Paradox

When I was in Hawaii earlier this year, I wondered at the morality of buying into manufactured "Old Hawaii" experiences like luaus. In general, I think there are very few things people shouldn't be allowed to sell, but these primarily end up being ideas (freedom, virtue, etc.) and not commodities (I know a lot of people are against drugs/vaccines being something you have to purchase but the fact that their manufacturers can sell them is the only reason they exist at all).

So the question was, am I buying the idea of Old Hawaii and therefore exploiting out of it any authority or authenticity it might still have, or am I merely exchanging my cash for its capital, simultaneously enriching me and giving it the means to preserve itself? (The hula dance performed by scantily clad, attractive semi-Polynesian women being Old Hawaii's equivalent of the Sacagawea dollar?)

Or maybe I was just too cheap to pay the $100+ asking price of a luau ticket.

Either way, the same thoughts started rattling around in my skull as we cruised through Paradise, PA in Pennsylvania Dutch country, pointing out (inside the confines of our closed car) "Amish!" each time we passed a horse and buggy (though Thomas said it "Armish!" and Sethie, not knowing what we were doing, had to shout, "Garhlajg!" a few seconds too late). The idea of the Amish is for sale everywhere around here, on restaurant signs ("Jakey's Amish BBQ!") and country kitsch stores ("Authentic Amish quilts for sale!") and in amusement parks ("The Amish Village: Live like the Amish! Until You are Tired of It!") and for buggy rides. The weird thing about it is that it seems to be the Amish neighbors who are selling this idea. Imagine if an entire industry grew up in Salt Lake City of non-Mormons holding pretend Sacrament meetings and offering "missionary bike tours" where tourists can put on a white shirt and name tag then ride two by two down the streets.

So Lancaster county is a type of Williamsburg for Amish-style experiences. Here's where the comparison breaks down, though: Williamsburg offers authentic old world living to its modern day tourists and Lancaster purports to offer the same, except for the fact that the Amish aren't "old world". They're this world. Like I said, we motored past all numbers of them on the roads, our car shimmying around their clip-clopping horses with the "slow vehicle" triangle on their backs. One farm along the road would be ploughed by tractors. The next farm over, ploughed by horses.


So the truth is, you can't really live like the Amish. Oh, you can do their chores, and ride in their buggies, and try out their German dialect, but you can't ever experience what it is like to be Amish surrounded by tourists trying to do your chores and ride in your buggies and sound out your words. The colonists of Williamsburg can only haunt the giddy tourists who ogle with amusement the hard life they used to lead. The Amish are constantly surrounded by slack-jawed outsiders like us.

And then it really gets weird because in Lancaster both Amish and Mennonite people dress very similarly, but the Mennonites seem to be eager for the outsider interaction. They run furniture stores and restaurants, as well as drive cars and shop at grocery stores. I stood behind a fellow in very traditional Amish attire at a little roadside stop-n-shop who was buying, of all things, Klondike bars. Over time, we played the "Amish or Mennonite" game. The plainly dressed woman pulling up to a restaurant in a minivan? Mennonite, I'm guessing. The man standing at a bank's drive-through window while his wife and kids waited in their horse and buggy off to the side? Who knows?

So here I am complaining about the tourist industry set-up to ogle the Amish while simultaneously participating in it. Welcome to the Amish paradox...er paradise. The truth is, we didn't do much Amish-ogling after all. Not only did I feel a little weird about it, but we had a five and two year-old to entertain and doing chores in faux villages, Amish or not, is not their idea of a good time. Instead, we took them to the National Toy Train museum and the Choo Choo Barn in Strasburg and later we ended up at Cherry Crest Adventure farm, which is one of those tourist farms I wrote about last fall. The kids had a great time and only occasionally paused to ask for "snacky packs".

I later mentioned to Nate my Amish-ogling moral quandry and whether or not it was acceptable to pretend to live someone else's life just for the fun of it. He replied, "That is what tourists are. That is why tourists go places: to do and be things they can't at home. If it's a problem here, it's a problem with any tourist attraction, anywhere."

So I'm curious what people think: is being a tourist inherently exploitive, or should we be grateful that the natural curiosity of other human beings makes living a plain life possible, even profitable? Does it just depend on whether or not the Amish woman who made your souvenir quilt actually saw some of the cash you paid for it?

In the meantime, here are some pics of our adventures in Lancaster:

Sethie loved the cats at Rayba Acres, the farm where we stayed.

Thomas on the see-saw at Rayba Acres

Nate and Seth chill out under a tree at Rayba Acres

A sign hung in our room at Rayba Acres. Cute or weird for a B&B?

(Plaque reads: "For Maid Service, Ring Bell...if no answer, Do It Yourself")

For those who think Salt Lake City is too explicitly religious, check out these things from restaurants in Lancaster County, PA:

A place mat at our table

("The prayers of your faith are shown to assist you in saying 'Thank you'")

A wall-hanging across the dining room of the Shepherd's Psalm.

An advertisement outside the door that reads "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and Thou Shalt Be Saved"

The kids enjoy Strasburg's train-centric attractions

Thomas loves the LEGO display at the National Toy Train Museum in Strasburg

The "Choo Choo Barn" in Strasburg pays tribute to Old Glory as part of its 1700 sq. ft. tabletop train display. Sethie danced here to the playing of patriotic music.

A motorized circus display at the Choo Choo Barn

Sethie spends almost all his time at Cherry Crest Adventure Farm in the "wheat barn".

What can I say, he's a cautious kid.

Next up: The Gettysburg Battlefield Memorial

Revenge of the Snacky Pack

So Nate has been off work for the last week and we've been trying to actually get off our duffs and go places. On Sunday, we headed to the beach for the first time all summer and Monday through Wednesday we spent in Pennsylvania Dutch country: Lancaster county, PA (don't do like Mara and say "LAN-CAS-TER" or you'll give yourself away as a rube. It's "LANK-ca-shire"). On our last day in PA, we jumped over to Gettysburg to tour the battlefield and bone up on our civil war history.

It's always interesting to get the adult reversal of one's long time kid-only perspective on certain family outings. Car trips, for instance. Is there anything more frustrating to a kid than long hours strapped in a car seat next to a sibling competing for toys and entertainment while the adults make dismissive remarks such as, "Well, just look out the window and enjoy the scenery", or "Why don't you see how many different license plates you can count?" I think wardens have also suggested the same thing to prisoners whose single-windowed cells overlook a highway. Even prisoners get some exercise time and TV access.

And yet, as an adult, the concerns of kids seem petty. You think, "Ah, cruising through the farms of Pennsylvania: everyone should love this!" and when they don't you say dismissively, "Well, just look out the window and enjoy the scenery," or "Why don't you see how many different license plates you can count?" If Nate suggested I count different state license plates under any kind of circumstance, you'd bet I'd clobber him.

The other problem: food access. The adults have it. Before we left, I bought up some little packets of crackers and cookies for the kids to eat during the long hours in the car. I made the mistake of calling them, "snacky packs" to Thomas. Now Thomas has two particular interests at this stage of his young life: food and entertainment. He is always in pursuit of one or the other or, most often, both. I am his mother. I am the food and entertainment gatekeeper. Most of our conversations during the day go like this:

Thomas: "Mommy, can I (eat X/play Y)?"
Me: "Not right now it's (time for school/time for bed/right after you just ate/the middle of the night/etc.)"

At least during the day Thomas can run off between food requests and do something else. In the car, Thomas was strapped in directly behind me. We could not escape from each other. Round trip through PA Dutch country and Gettysburg was about eight hours in the car total. At least seven of those hours were taken up by Thomas asking, "Mommy, can I have a snacky pack?" Sometimes he would ask if he could have one while he was still eating the last one. So he would say, "Muffle mumble scarf snacky pack?"

Even worse, the more often he asked for them and the less often he got them, the more the term "snacky pack" began to take on a certain nasally whine, the kind of which makes dogs howl and parents go blind.

Thomas on the use and pronunciation of the term "snacky pack"

Nate as designated Dad driver--you know the kind: doesn't turn around and doesn't stop for anything less than imminent bladder expulsions--began to truly loathe the snacky pack. He hated when Thomas whined for one and he hated me even more for having introduced the term. As the trip progressed, his right eye started to twitch. His muscles began to tighten. About an hour outside Philadelphia right after we had actually stopped to feed the children real food (well, service station food which counts as real only so much as it is being compared to snacky pack nutrition), Thomas made the mistake of asking for a "snacky pack" one too many times.

Nate roared, "If I hear the term snacky pack one more $#&@*! time, I will throw every single one of them out this window!"

I started to cry--cry with laughter, that is. I was rolling around the seat absolutely hysterical. Nate started half-smiling/half-grimacing and pinched my arm repeatedly in revenge. Thomas was looking between us, semi-hopeful that 1) perhaps he wasn't in trouble and 2) he might actually get a snacky pack.

In the end, the snacky packs did not meet hot pavement and Thomas learned how to ask, "May I have a snack, please?" in a far less whiny manner. I ended up with only a little arm bruise.

And we have, hopefully, learned our lesson: no more cute food monikers during car trips.

Next up: Live Like the Amish....Until You Get Tired of it

Holy Vocabulary, Batman!

Geez. I've been posting lately about as often as Nate sleeps. Anyway, here is Sethie nearing the two-year mark. He's actually got a vocabulary of over 50 words at this point (I know, I know, that in itself is pretty average for his age, but considering his preemie status, I'm constantly grateful that he is happily average), but I've asked him to repeat just a few of those.

When Thomas was a baby, Nate was always insisting I cut his hair--he didn't like the fluffy baby look on him--but he's changed his mind with Sethie. Maybe we've finally realize just how quickly they are both growing up and so we are happy to keep Sethie looking like a baby for just a little bit longer...

A Hot Day for a Five-Year-Old Capitalist

When I was a kid (this will date me for sure), I played a text game on our Apple IIc called Lemonade Stand. The goal was, of course, to run a lemonade stand and earn as much money as possible while still factoring in such crazy variables as whether it was sunny, cloudy, or raining, how much you spent on supplies and advertising, and such. I was likely only about ten or so at the time I played it, but it didn't take me too long to suss out that Lemonade Stand was the result of a rather lazy programming effort. There were certain key numbers that would guarantee you a maximum pay out. It wasn't random at all, but tied to a specific algorithm that had its golden inputs. The number 53 sticks out in my mind. I'm pretty sure that's how many cents you charged on a sunny day. Any more or less would result in sub-optimal profits.

Later, I got to put this little nugget to good use when my homeroom at school had a Lemonade Stand playoff (this was when computers were still so novel that it was considered good for you to play games on them during school). I took first place by a rather astounding margin as I recall.

By contrast, when I was a girl scout, the inevitable time arrived when I had to sell girl scout cookies. The point was to sell enough to attend girl scout camp--about $75 worth, I think. Now, girl scout cookies are ridiculously easy to sell. People love them. Post a girl scout cookie order form in any office lunchroom and it'll be full by the end of the day.

I sold a couple of boxes to my parents, and some to the neighbors across the street. I think, in the end, I made about $15 total. My dad rather generously made up the price difference so I could actually attend camp. If you're reading this, thanks Dad.

The moral of these stories, I suppose, is that I eventually went into computer science, not business. Algorithms make sense to me. Attempting to get actual people to purchase an actual product doesn't.

Which is why I got a thrill of trepidation today when Thomas declared out of the blue that he wanted to have a real-life lemonade stand.

I'm not proud of it, but I actually tried to talk him out of it. We didn't have anything to make lemonade, and the day was very cloudy (subpar profit margin!), even though it was warm and humid. Also, I felt self-conscious, the same way I felt approaching people for their money when I was a girl scouter. Friends and family: no worries--I will never become one of those people who market random products to their harassed loved ones. You are safe.

But Thomas, good for him, was adamant, so we headed for the store and bought up nearly all their teeny bottles of lemon juice (you know the obnoxiously small lemon-shaped ones). At home, Thomas helped me mix the sugar, lemon juice, and water into something resembling a tasty drink and together we decorated a blue poster board that stated "Lemon-Ade 25 cents". Then we dragged out an old table from our shed, rinsed two hundred spiders and their egg sacs off it, and put up the whole operation in our frontyard.

To get my Bub started, I gave him two quarters, one for me and one for him, so we could each drink a glass of our own product (Future entrepreneurs, take note. This is good business practice). Also, it helps to have a little money in the money jar from the start--then people think that someone else has already vetted your merchandise.

For about fifteen minutes, many cars passed, but we had no action. Thomas started out thrilled at his adventure in business administration, but soon became despondent. "No one wants my lemonade," he said, lower lip making a bit of a quiver. Just as despair was setting in and Thomas was asking that we start going door to door and asking people to buy it, we landed our first customer. A woman in her late fifties was crossing from the Acme parking lot just a little down the street to our table! "My husband gave me this quarter and asked me to get some delicious lemonade from that handsome boy here," she said. I helped Thomas pour and he eagerly presented his money jar for payment. Hearty thank-yous were exchanged around and she went back across the street.

The elation lasted another twenty minutes or so before once again Thomas decided the business was a failure. No one else was stopping. I urged him to give it a little more time and that selling stuff often meant sitting on your heels for awhile, but eventually he crawled into my lap and said he wanted to go inside. I said okay, and he disappeared into the house while I started to clean up the table. Just then, a van pulled into our driveway. A woman popped her head out the window. "Is your little boy still selling his lemonade?" she asked. I called Thomas back outside who looked like he might give her a big sloppy kiss. She gave him a dollar and bought two cups, telling him he could keep the change.

After that, the customers just started to flow. "Maybe you're getting excellent word of mouth," I told Thomas, who studied me in confusion, but didn't ask me to elaborate. Several bike-riders stopped by. A man in a business suit stood in our front yard to drink his lemonade, declare it "excellent", and say he just couldn't resist a little kid trying to make a buck. We served our final two drinks to a beautiful couple in a brand-new BMW that glided, shining, into our little gravel driveway like Apollo's chariot arriving. The driver also gave Thomas a dollar and told him to keep the change. Thomas has no idea what that means. I would have had a much harder time trying to get him to actually return any change.

In the end, he pulled in almost four dollars with his little lemonade stand operation and was an electric bundle of entrepreneurial spirit as we headed into the house. Later, after Thomas had decided--wisely, perhaps--to infuse his cash back into the economy rather than risk losing it in the market, we headed to Target, where he started out wanting several bouncing balls, but eventually settled on a Milky Way bar and some Sour Patch Kids. I wondered if he would notice how long it had taken him to earn the cash versus just how quickly he could spend it, but he didn't say anything. Finally, I asked, "I hope that you're happy with what you bought with your hard-earned profits?"

He said, mouth full of caramel, "Oh Mommy, I really am."