The East Coast Poulsens

Stuff I Know

2011-09-28T16:32:00.000-04:00

Like most adults I suppose, I know a small amount about a wide variety of topics. Not enough to sustain a conversation with another adult who knows more, but enough, most of the time, to still be ahead of my third-grader.

Having kids gives you a skewed view of how good you are at things because, let's face it, they kinda suck at everything. At first anyway. I used to play soccer against Thomas when he was little and think, "Oh yeah, I still got it." I was seriously impressed with how much I remembered from playing soccer for--count them--ONE season as an eight-year-old (back in Tremonton they had a single league and just mixed the girls, what few of us there were, in with the boys at the age when cooties are considered real and so my one and only soccer team picture involves me and the boy next to me standing strategically apart to avoid contracting one another's gender). I'm like, kick with the inside of the sole. And...actually that's all I remember. But it was enough to put me over the top.

Thomas is eight now and he is way better than me. I'm convinced I've lost the ability to dodge with age, but it's probably true that I never had the ability in the first place. Plus, I get tired after about two minutes. Also, I can't run.

But I played soccer against Seth the other day and completely forgot about getting schooled by Thomas. I was hammering them past the little guy into our small backyard net and thinking, Oh yeah, I still got it. Kick with the inside of the sole! Sad, really.

But one thing I feel pretty good about is my math and science bonafides. Much as I didn't especially like math growing up, I took a lot of classes and then got tricked into taking even more when I signed up for a comp sci major not realizing math would be involved. And I've always enjoying random science tidbits, so even though I haven't had a science class in years, I still love to watch NOVA documentaries with the kids and talk about bacteria, atoms, the elements, robots, cells--you name it.

And I love to find out what Thomas is learning in class because I am a blowhard and can expound on topics with which I have only a little depth--because he is a third-grader and he doesn't know yet how much I am making up while thinking, That sounds about right. I'm pretty sure I read that somewhere.

Each week, Thomas gets a reading passage for language arts which he must practice each night for fluency. Last week it was about how snow is great and all, but blizzards aren't safe, so get inside people. This week's is about Mars.

I was bumping comfortably along with Thomas and his Mars passage until he got to this sentence, "People think that Mars was once like Earth."

I started huh-huh-ing. "Uh yeah, that's not right."

We'll get back to my supposed knowledge in a second--but it's just not fair to tell children at this age that sometimes things they bring home from school might not be right. Most children have an uncomplicated worldview of "right things" and "wrong things" with no Venn diagram showing a union between the sets and reasonably so. There's plenty of time to add shades of gray over the years. Why make them cynical and despondent this early? And frankly, this is the place that you are telling them they have to go from now until forever (which is how far away eighteen feels) because it is important and they are learneding and something from school is WRONG? Save it for big stuff.

So of course, rather than pointing out it was a just a reading fluency passage and he didn't need to even understand it, he just needed to read it and who cares how right or wrong it is, he argued with me. It's from my teacher, it is about Mars which is an important subject that I'm sure they would not screw up, and you have never been to Mars what do you know about it anyway?

Not wanting to endanger my scientician cred, I immediately countered with "Well, just because someone wrote it on a piece of paper, doesn't make it true." and I used big words like atmosphere and iron oxide while thinking the entire time, Oh crap. It has been awhile since I learned anything about Mars. What if there is new research? Did they find bacteria? Actual water? What do I know?

In my mind, I was imagining poor Thomas returning to school and telling his teacher, loudly, in front of the whole class, "My mom says this isn't true and my mom knows everything! Well, at least, it seems like she knows a lot from my limited understanding as a third-grader!" Or some such. And then the class laughs because the Mars rover discovered dinosaur fossils on Mars and I didn't read about it but everyone else did and their parents told them and I've caused a great humiliation to come upon my poor child because I am a blowhard! Also, he gets detention. Parent FAIL.

So while he was doing his math homework, I went to Wikipedia (natch) and read all about Mars. Turns out they have discovered that it might be possible for Mars to occasionally have liquid water, but still have no proof of even limited lifeforms. Ha! I am still a scientician!

Now Thomas's brain immediately replaces anything homework related with Star Wars the moment the homework has passed out of his hands, so he didn't care anymore, but it was important to me to go back and reiterate to him that there was no indication whatsoever that Mars had ever been Earth-like, even though it appears to have some water (in ice and gaseous forms mostly, with occasional liquid), and they are still looking for signs of life. He was grumpy because, 1) I'm still making him talk about homework and 2) I'm still pointing out my own rightness, even though by then I was just trying to clarify so he didn't announce anything embarrassing to his teacher and make us both look bad. I got to use big words again like sublimate and sedimentary deposits. He got to stare hopelessly at the ceiling until I got all the blowharding out of my system.

Just like my imagined soccer prowess, I have to admit that I still think, "I will continue to know more than my child, even as he gets older," and I haven't yet been disabused of the idea. The day will come. But maybe not until they find dinosaur fossils on Mars.

Maybe it will be Thomas that finds them. He will call me on his ansible and say "Ha!"

if (!God) then Science() ?

2010-10-13T10:12:00.007-04:00

I know I haven't posted in about a millions years, give or take an age, so probably no one is reading this blog, but a few things have been getting up in my gourd of late and I feel compelled to input my relatively pitiful two cents.

Two particular things have sparked recent tirades from me:

1) People, religious and non, making a fuss over whether or not Steven Hawking believes in God.

2) "The Dancing Wu Li Masters" which I picked up over the weekend, thinking it was a book on physics, and discovering that it's full of all sort of mystical hoo-doo instead.

Can we just stop mingling this religion and science business? This thing is getting old.

Once I was on the sideline of a debate whether Einstein, saying, "God does not play dice with the universe" was religious. My answer to that is, "Who cares?" What does it matter if Einstein believed in God or not? Why do people think that adding a Very Smart Person to the ranks of believers gives religion (or anything really) a leg up? Does it work for other things? If Einstein believed his mother had been kidnapped by aliens and replaced by a otherwise indistinguishable genetic clone, would everyone be jumping on the bodysnatchers bandwagon?

My point is, the reason we have these debates is because God is not within the realm of science and by that, I mean, God is not a testable phenomenon. No one has yet devise an experiment that can produce evidence of God or evidence of not-God. Saying that the universe can exist without God is the same thing as asserting that a mighty breeze caused the Red Sea to part. That is fine. There is a plausible, ordinary explanation for everything. I don't have a problem with people who think we live in a universe where a God figure is unnecessary. Just don't insist to me that means God doesn't exist. Because at that point, you're not talking science anymore, you have moved into the realm of religion and it is as religious to say there is no God as it is to assert there is one.

Let me move away from the God Question to explain what I mean by "religious". String theory is, at this point in time, also religious. It has its believers. For them, it is the heavenly ray of light penetrating the dark at the extreme edges of our mathematical understanding. I recently read a very excellent book called "Zero:The Biography of a Dangerous Idea" by Charles Seife (which, unlike the "Wu Li Masters" I am about to rail against, is an actual book on science and while it discusses the religious proclivities of the various scientists it mentions, it doesn't bother to try to make sense of the God Question). Right now, Newtonian and quantum physics, don't exactly gel with each other. What happens at the scale of the infinitesimally tiny appears to be very different from what happens at the scales we are familiar with (and the scale of the absurdly large, such as those of the plants and the stars, etc.). Notably, Seife points out that Newtonian physics fails not just as the mass of a thing approaches zero, but also as it approaches what we might properly call "infinity", as much as we understand that concept. The idea of a black hole, and why it gives modern physics so much trouble, is that the mass of this object is so absurdly high, beyond even what we can comprehend, that nothing can escape its gravitational pull, not even light.

Why do these things throw Newtonian physics for a loop? Because of the polar ends of computation: zero and infinity. These two "numbers" cause many ordinary mathematical operations to fail. Adding a division by zero into a mathematical proof will allow you to prove anything to be true (Seife includes a proof that Winston Churchill is a carrot in the book's appendices). Reaching the state of "infinity" explodes out operations. They are nonsensical at a scale without limit.

The point of this is that String theory was created to eliminate the zeros. A black hole might rightly be considered an infinitely dense dot, having zero dimension, in space. Those ideas of "infinite" and "zero" make understanding what happens inside a black hole impossible. We cannot calculate it. String theory (and this is an extremely basic explanation) adds more dimensions to something that appeared to have zero dimensions before. When you're no longer dealing with zeros, the math comes out and rather prettily, too.

The only problem is that String theory cannot be tested. It is an experimental void. That is why it is religious at this point. You either believe in it or you don't. No one can yet demonstrate whether or not these strings actually exist.

You can see at this point why someone, using a lack of testable data, would be out of line to call String theory untrue, as opposed to just saying it isn't testable. And it is as ridiculous to say that String theory is bogus as it is to say that God does not exist. Get the idea of non-testable? Cannot be tested. That means it cannot be proved one way or the other.

I am both a religious person and one who is deeply interested in many of the sciences and I get very tired of this debate. Much of the history of science entailed Very Smart People trying to use their current scientific understanding to actually prove the existence of God (Pythagoras, another VSP as most people would agree, pushed the earth-centric theory of the cosmos: it was mathematically correct for the observable data at the time, and required God to be the one spinning the outermost sphere). As you may have guessed, that failed. Now it seems we want to go in the opposite direction, pushing current scientific understanding to disprove the existence of God. A word to nervous religious people everywhere, this will fail, too.

Here is my advice to everyone:

1) Religious people need to chill out. Just because a VSP makes an out-sized pronouncement about the necessity of God, it doesn't mean you have to get worked up about it.

2) Scientists ought to stop poking the religious people and get back to their work.

Enough about scientists who want to inject God, yay or nay, into something that is mathematical and nothing more--Hawking, I'm looking at you--I want to talk now about religious people who want to co-opt science for making pronouncements that amount to religion.

"The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics" by Gary Zukav appears to do just that. I admit that I'm not very far into it and I plan to finish it just because it is unfair to judge a book by a single chapter, but as Nate will tell you, I am having a hard time getting through it because I stop every other page or so to rant loudly about its logical leaps.

There is something about Eastern mysticism that gets really excited whenever "quantum"ness is brought up. Maybe because quantum physics are so poorly understood, it is easy to co-opt its terminology. Quantum simply means a very small thing, something so small that is perhaps not even detectable or observable. But we have detected and observed at least some of these "quanta", what we now think of as electrons, protons, photons, etc. and their behavior is odd. They are so small, they don't appear to obey Newtonian physics as we understand it. In fact, they are so small that just the act of observing them changes them (or maybe even creates them) so that we cannot simultaneously measure all their properties. They are so wacky that it actually appears that they blip in and out of vacuums, creating what is called "zero point" energy that can push two plates together in a place where nothing should exist.

What does any of this have to do with religion? Nothing. That's my point. Just as the Big Bang does not exclude God, quantum mechanics does not find Him. Listen to how Wukav tries to expand even Newtonian physics into some kind of Great Machine that excludes free will:

"Newton's laws of motion describe what happens to a moving object. Once we know the laws of motion, we can predict the future of a moving object, provided we know certain things about it initially...the ability to predict the future based on a knowledge of the present and the laws of motion gave our ancestors a power they had never known. However, these concepts carry within them a very dispiriting logic. If the laws of nature determine the future of an event, then given enough information, we could have predicted our present some time in the past...In short if we are to accept the mechanistic determination of Newtonian physics--if the universe really is a great machine--then from the moment that the universe was created and set into motion, everything that was to happen in it already was determined...Everything, from the beginning of time, has been predetermined, including our illusion of having a free will."

It is true that given enough information about my initial position, the force I exert, the mass of a ball, etc. you can predict where that ball will go if I throw it. But there is not enough information in the world that will allow you to predict whether I'm going to suddenly change my mind and throw it at your head (unless perhaps I'm Elin just finding out about Tiger...) The reason why is because we don't have mathematical laws for behavior. Newton's laws of motion are for motion. When you go past the concept that we can calculate ball trajectory (or planetary motion or anything other such thing) and begin to wonder "Wow. What about free will?" you have left the realm of science and are firmly in religious/philosophical territory. It is fine to philosophize about free will. But don't pretend that you got to that place in Newton's car.

Zukav goes on to talk about quantum mechanics and turns the very real speculation that observation might actually be an act of creation into something overwrought again: the invention of our own "reality", which he doesn't bother to define. Then the book stomps off again in search of metaphysical answers and the reader is forced along, even if all they wanted to know about was particle physics.

It might seem silly to criticize "Wu Li Masters", considering that it is an older book (published in 1979, only two years after I was born(!)) and because much of the actual physics discussed in it is sound (as Zukav points out, he had several physicists review each scientific assertion in his book for its accuracy). The problem is that quantum physics doesn't answer the questions that Zukav wants to explore. It can't. Adherents of so-called "quantum mysticism" might point out that many of the founders of quantum mechanics, such as Schroedinger and Heisenberg, were interested in its philosophical implications. Again, I say, "Who cares?" Then they were philosophers, too. VSPs can be both. It does not give either their science or their religion a leg up.

Essentially, my point boils down to this: we are unique and interesting creatures with a lot of questions about who we are, where we came from, and what the heck is the area under a curve? Science came into being for us to explore the testable questions we had about our world. Religion remains for that which is not testable, which can only be accessed by feeling and thought. Why do we get so worked up trying to tie the two together when they are clearly the matter/anti-matter combo of human experience?

Fairly recently, my son came home talking about "cavemen", which is about as much as a second grader can understand about evidence of ancient primitive humanoids. After some time, he realized the disconnect between what he had heard in school and the Adam and Eve story he knew from church. He wanted to know how they were related. I told him they weren't. "School is about things we have found out through discovery and experimentation. It is right as long as the discovery is real and the experimentation is well-founded," I told him. "Church is about trying to be like God and understanding what He wants for us to do here on earth. That pretty much boils down to loving each other." I told him it was okay to believe both in "cavemen" and Adam and Eve, even if they seem contradictory. "We haven't reached the end of our understanding," is all I said.

Now an explanation like that is likely to get up the hackles of some nonreligious, who think we only ought to only believe in and discuss what can be tested, and the hackles of some religious, who think we ought to fight evolution and any sort of scientific understanding that conflicts with the Bible or some other religious text. I have to believe it's because we are inherently logical and we want to tie up the things we experience in a beautiful mobius strip where one side is science and the other is religion and then they are one continuous band. I'm of the philosophy that someday we will, but maybe not in mortality.

Let me put it this way: if God exists, He is not threatened by science and we ought not to restrict our scientific exploration because we are afraid of where our God will go.

*An addendum*

Now that I've gone through an entire blog post using the term "science" like a catch-all, I really wish we could throw the word "science" away and come up with something new. The way it seems to get used these days is ridiculous, thrown back and forth across political spectrums like a hot potato. One side says, "You're anti-science!" LOB and then the other side catches it and says, "No YOU'RE anti-science", lobbing it back, "science" here appearing to mean "the conglomerate of all ideas that are true".

With the exception of theories that have been backed by mathematical proofs, science does not deal with truth. It deals with what is probable. Science is about statistics and whether or not an experiment has yielded a statistically significant difference, meaning something that is beyond mere coincidence.

Things are complicated. All things--the universe, the earth, people both in groups and individuals....everything is complicated. Devising an experiment that can isolate specific testable phenomena is the hardest part of a scientific endeavor. Correctly interpreting the raw data you gain from such an experiment ranks right below that in difficulty. A big part of becoming a scientist is learning how to do these two things. Some scientists do it well, others don't. Even VSPs can create a faulty experiment, tamper with data, and a defend a conclusion that may not be right.

Science is not a conglomerate and it is not true. It is perfectly fine to be "anti-science" if the science in question isn't sound. But, really, it's silly to lob that term around as if it actually means something. Give "science" a break. After all, as I just pointed out, it can't be God.

Come See the Violence Inherent in the System

2010-03-12T20:11:00.007-05:00

I am letting the poor child finally watch Episodes 1-3 this weekend because they're airing on cable. I haven't been keeping him from them for good parental reasons such as shielding his innocence from the ill effects of witnessing grisly lightsaber dueling. I mean, heck, he's seen more police procedurals than is probably healthy for a seven year-old (hence his decision that a spot of green paint on our carpet upstairs constituted "evidence" of a possible "murder") and he's already seen the original trilogy. Instead, I didn't want to ruin his other kind of innocence: his belief in the inherent artistic excellence of all the Star Wars movies. I'm sorry, kid. You're in for an underwhelming ride.

But anyway, Thomas has been very much excited to have a Star Wars movie-watching day tomorrow, but discovered yesterday that Ep. 3 is, duh duh duh DUUNNNN, PG-13. He knows that generally that's off limits for him. So he asked why it was PG-13 and why I was letting him watch it.

"Well, it's PG-13 because there's some intense fighting in it. But it's on cable. They usually edit most of the scary stuff out, so I'm sure it's fine."

Tonight, still talking about getting to watch the movies tomorrow, Thomas moaned that he really wanted to see the real Ep. 3.

"What are you talking about? It is the real episode 3."

"But mom," he complained. "It doesn't have all the violence in it."

Me: "What?"

Him: "I want to see the violence! I like violence!"

This reminded me of the last time we were at the doctor's office. On the way out after our appointment, Thomas informed the doctor that he loved Star Wars and he wanted to be a TIE Fighter (which is, techically, a ship, but hey, if you're going to use your imagination, you can be anything you dang well want to be).

The doc who is very nice and calm and quiet and probably kumbaya-ya'ed his way through college in the '60s replied, "Oh, wouldn't you rather be a Tie Peace'er?"

Thomas and I just stared at him blankly, so he immediately explained, "I don't like fighting. I prefer peace."

To which Thomas replied, "I love fighting! Fighting is the best!" Then he ran down the hall, jumping up and down and screaming, "Yay fighting!" at the top of his lungs while I paid the bill.

Okay, so the "I want to see the violence!" line disturbed me a little (no really, I'll stop letting him watch murder mysteries with me, I swear), but in general, I have to go with Thomas on this one. I prefer peace, too, but that usually requires people who are willing, maybe even happy, to do some fighting. Yay, fighting!

As long as they're on the side of the green lightsaber.

Sethism

2010-01-25T10:13:00.001-05:00

Seth: "I'm a princess."

Me: "You're a princess?"

Seth: "And you're the Commando."

Doubting Seth

2009-11-11T12:20:00.003-05:00

I had a very strange conversation with my three-year-old last night.

Sethie is still allowed to have a pacifier at bedtime. I learned my lesson when I took Thomas's pacifier away when he turned three and the child never napped again. I'll milk the napping as long as possible. But Sethie is a little too cognizant of his. He hides them around the house. He has special spots for them and if I take one away because it isn't bedtime yet, he will occasionally produce another one unexpectedly. He's like some kind of binky pirate--he has booty stashed all over the house.

The only official spot for the binky is what we call the "bink box", a little tin box that sits on a shelf in his room. It's where I deposit all the hidden binks I unearth around the house. Because the binks get spread out, it's often empty and at bedtime we end up doing the binky scour, so I try to locate at least one before we head upstairs to avoid the binky search-and-rescue operation. Last night, I spotted a bink that Sethie had left by the couch and dropped it in the bink box. As I was reading Thomas his bedtime story, Sethie stopped by the room--it was just like the look-in from the sergeant in all those police procedural shows: he stuck his head around the corner with a hand on the frame and gestured toward the stairs with a thumb, but instead of saying, "Captain, there's someone here to see you", he said, "I need to get my bink. It's downstairs."

I told him, "No--I grabbed that bink and put it in your bink box. Go look in the bink box."

Sethie paused and actually tilted his eyebrows. Then he said, "Mommy, I left it by the couch. It's downstairs. I need to go get it."

Ok, sergeant. "No it's not. I picked it up and brought it upstairs. Go look in your bink box."

Once again the eyebrows. "I don't think so, Mommy."

Mind you, Sethie is under three feet tall and weighs less than thirty pounds. He was wearing superman pajamas and holding his favorite green blanket. And I was having a discussion with him in which he was being SKEPTICAL I had actually acquired the bink and placed it in the box.

He was doubting the veracity of my statement. Is he supposed to even be capable of DOUBT at this age? Where is that developmental milestone listed? Age 3: "Speaks in complete four or five word sentences. Can throw a ball overhand. May doubt you are telling the truth and be determined to follow his own gut instinct."

Thomas was staring at me. I stared back. He started laughing into his shoulder. Finally, I said to Sethie in my Don't-Mess-With-Me-I'm-the-Mom voice, "IT'S IN THE BINK BOX. GO LOOK. NOW."

Sethie shrugged and walked out of the room. "Ok, Mommy, but I don't think so." I heard him head down the hall, uttering a few more, "I don't think so"'s as he went.

Of course a few seconds later, I hear him shout from his room, "Oh, right! It IS in here. Thank you, Mommy."

Next time, kid, I'll take a lie detector test.

Sethism Redux

2009-10-14T10:34:00.002-04:00

Sethie, trying to get himself out of his car seat the other day: "Uh, a little help here?"

Sethism

2009-09-18T09:28:00.003-04:00

Me, in the car, on the way to preschool: "Sethie, do you want to go to preschool this morning?"

Seth: "Yeah!"

Me: "Are you sure?"

Seth: "Yeah!"

Me: "Are you really sure?"

Seth: "Yeah!"

Me, realizing my giddiness at his new adventure is making me annoying, but I can't stop: "Are you sure you're sure?"

Seth: "Mommy, let's not speak anymore."

Thomism

2009-08-20T14:48:00.000-04:00

Thomas came up to me today and said, "Mommy, I saw a cartoon that said math was only for ugly people."

I was a little startled and said, "Well, T, you understand why that statement is really wrong, right?"

He said, "Yeah. It's also for grownups, right?"

Freak out

2009-07-27T12:06:00.006-04:00

To you stay-at-home moms out there, ever have one of those moments where all your kids are somewhere else while you're at home doing whatever and then you COMPLETELY FREAK OUT BECAUSE WHERE THE @#&#%*! ARE MY KIDS? You think for a second that maybe they're napping, but wait, it's morning, or they're outside, but wait the swing set is empty, or OH NO I HAVE LOST THEM! But then you remember. They're somewhere else (like a friend's house or something) and you, while crazy, are not a bad mother who has misplaced them somewhere. I mean, I've tried explaining that one to Nate and boy, it never goes well. "So wait...what happened to the kids?" "Uh, I had them just a minute ago. Let's see--I was in the kitchen and I think I set one of them down on the counter. I could have sworn the other one was in my bag..."

So I'm having a quiet morning here with my poptart while T is at summer camp and a good friend is having Sethie come over and play with her two-year-old and after about every third bite of delicious nutrition-free frosted berry sweetness, the quietness gets to me and I do the WHERE THE @#&^*! ARE MY KIDS? freak-out. All summer, I've always had one of them with me. While T is at summer camp, Sethie is at home. While Sethie is napping, T and I work on reading. After Sethie gets up, the three of us go bike-riding or pool-swimming or backyard squirrel-scaring--you know something appropriately summery--and then we have dinner and they trade bedtime stories for a little extra Wii Lego Batman action and then they go to bed and I take a breath and Nate comes home.

I AM NEVER ALONE.

What do you do when you're alone? I was going to clean my upstairs bathroom this morning. Oh yeah. To be clear, I'm not some kind of clean freak who gets excited to get rid of the kids for a moment so they will stop polluting my pristine environment. That bathroom hasn't been cleaned for at least two weeks. Maybe longer. The bathtub grout mold is sprouting condominiums. The soap has fuzzies. Yesterday, the leftover hair clippings from Nate's razor picked it up and walked off with it Lilliputian-style and I haven't seen it since. So yeah, I should probably clean the bathroom while there is no one around to bug me.

At some point, I am going to be alone a lot more. T is starting full-time school this fall and Sethie is going into a two day a week preschool and I will become, at least for six hours a week, unnecessary to their immediate well being. I can't clean the bathroom twice a week (okay, I probably could, but I'm not going to). Besides, the cleaning never really ends. Clean something once and in a few hours it has become uninhabitable again. (well, uninhabitable for humans over the age of 21. Pint-sized miters can live quite comfortably in heaps of dirty laundry for many months, so long as they have remembered to pack in crackers and peanut butter) So that's a waste of free time. I have other things I used to more aggressively pursue: writing, and reading, and game programming, and pastry-baking, and violin-playing, and etc. and furthermore and whatnot. Is that who I still am?

If so, why in my free time am I still wondering WHERE THE @&%#*@&! ARE MY KIDS?

Groundhog Day

2009-06-10T10:56:00.010-04:00

Last year, we occasionally spotted a sneaky little varmit toddling around our premises. He was so sneaky, we never got a good picture of him, even though we concluded he lived in the woodpile next to our shed. We named him, for obvious reasons, Phil.

See if you can spot Phil in the one picture we managed to land of him:

Well, turns out we prematurely labeled Phil. Maybe he should be "Philamena" or something? Because as of a few weeks ago, Phil and his new household have actually been venturing out on the lawn in broad daylight to munch on our clover. And for once we got some good pics. The kids are all kinds of silly happy that we have these little friends sharing our space.

Good luck, Phil. And feel free to take the fam out for some clover any time.

My Sweet Dream

2009-06-02T11:59:00.002-04:00

Thank you for eight wonderful years.

Thomas and the Beach Boys

2009-05-31T13:20:00.005-04:00

I realize after a long absence, I'm doing a flurry of posts here, but it's mostly because we bought a new camera and then couldn't find it, used the old camera to film a few things, then couldn't find that camera, then used another old camera before finding the very newest camera which had some REALLY old stuff on it and only recently locating the newer, but still old camera. It's been a camera circus! Spam!

Anyway, I took this video at Thomas's kindergarten field day where they had prepared a dance in gym class to a Beach Boy's song. Note that the video cuts out in the middle because my new old camera had a very limited battery life, not because the randomly synchronized jiggling on the part of the kindergarteners is not absolutely adorable. :)

Spam Spam Spam Spam!

2009-05-31T13:13:00.005-04:00

Dad, this is for you. Sethie extols the virtues of spam and even does a spam dance:

Mr. Monk and the Case of the Impressionable Children

2009-05-31T12:33:00.003-04:00

It's entirely possible that my addiction to murder mysterites is beginning to adversely affect the kids.

The actual Monk theme song. Note that Sethie's "interpretation" starts about a third into the song.

The other day, Thomas noticed a small speck of green paint on the carpet upstairs. He said, "Mommy, look! Green paint! Like it came off someone's shoe!"

I said, "Hmmm. We'd better be careful what we track in here."

He said, "Oh no, Mommy. I think it's a clue!"

I said, "A clue? To what?"

He said, "A murder."

Suggestion box

2009-04-06T14:12:00.005-04:00

This is to all the moms (and kids and former kids) out there on what to do with spring break time? We're planning a few adventures this week to places like museums/science centers/etc., but what do you do on a day like today with thunderstorms outside and no planned activities? The kids can only play with their toys and look at their books for so long (i.e. before they start hounding me...)

If anyone has a great suggestion on something unique and fun to do, let me know. I'd love to hear it!

To Each According to His Needs and From Each...

2009-03-29T23:55:00.007-04:00

In a loving marriage, we each take the jobs that best fit our abilities and so reasonably divide our skills that we might both provide AND benefit. For instance, I am the weekend morning breakfast maker. This morning, I made a Challah bread French Toast that was so mind-blowingly tasty it didn't require any syrup. Seriously.

And Nate is the spider killer. Now I actually think spiders are pretty cool, provided they are outdoors and observe the restraining order that says they have to stay outside a 20 foot radius of my person at all times. Pictures and documentaries are okay. In the house, all bets are off. But spiders are clever. They know I am incapable of touching them without getting a serious case of the heebie jeebies. So when they think I'm alone, they start the approach. Most the time, though, they don't get far before the great hand of Nate comes smashing down on them. But Nate spends a lot of time at work during the week. Sometimes I'm forced to track a spider's movement for hours, if not days, until he is available for the killing. So I have to take a chance when I have one.

This is a picture of a spider that I just forced Nate to get out of bed and kill. Now before you point fingers, in my defense, he was going to work super early in the morning so I wouldn't have been up to tell him about the spider then, spiders have been known to crawl in and out of people's noses while they sleep (thank you, to the documentary Arachnophobia for that little tidbit), and this one had freakishly long legs.

Still, he's probably going to kill me when he wakes up in the morning and remembers.

But hey, I'm not totally useless, you know. It's just spiders I can't kill (and also house centipedes. Have you seen those things? Google it. SPAWN OF THE DEVIL). I did put an end to another dangerous vermin tonight, with my bare hand no less:

Keyboy Cares for Evil Baby

2009-03-18T08:43:00.015-04:00

I think the measure of a person can most clearly be taken when they are woken up in the middle of the night by a screaming child.

Me for instance: I transform into a flashing-eyed, gravelly-voiced, snarling beast who growls rambling invectives that have "go back to sleep!" somewhere in them.

Nate actually doesn't get woken up in the middle of the night by screaming children. Sometimes he does get woken up by the Beast who demands to know how in the name of all that's holy he can sleep through all that howling. At least he has an excuse since he has to get up far earlier in the morning than the Beast does, but at 2 am, the Beast is not usually cognizant of or sympathetic to a reality that is still several hours away.

But on with the story: Sethie is claiming his two-year-old territory quite aggressively these days. Nursery at church has suddenly become a POW camp. Grocery shopping is a hostage situation. Maybe I'm just not used to it because Thomas spent most of his two's like Poppy in Happy-Go-Lucky: recklessly blithe. He may have gotten hurt a lot, but you'd never catch him unhappy. For the most part, Sethie is happy, too, and everywhere we go, he charms the pants off everyone (which is a little awkward...). But that's if we going somewhere he actually wants to be. If not, Enter the Dragon.

We call this face "evil baby", which Sethie thinks is hilarious and will perform on demand: "Do 'evil baby', Sethie!" He bunches up his fists and tightens up the muscles in his face and he looks like he's about to go all Chucky on you. It's funny, but sometimes we worry because, well, is Evil Baby really in there? I jokingly call the kids "Children of the Corn" sometimes if they're really driving me nuts, but maybe I'm just encouraging it...

So driving back from tangentville to Main Story Street, Nate and I made a series of mistakes last night that drove our otherwise sweet Sethie to don the Evil Baby mask, sort of like when Bruce Banner warns a group of thugs "Don't make me angry...!", but the thugs just laugh and keep harassing him anyway. Surprisingly, Sethie has no trouble going to sleep, as long as Thomas is with him. They have their bedtime routine with baths and teeth-brushing and a getting-dressed contest that culminates in the winner getting his bedtime story first. And then we have prayers, everybody gets tucked in, and--usually--silence ensues.

Last night, before Nate and I went to bed, we decided to peak in on our boys (Mistake #1), just to make sure....I don't know, they were still in there? Well, Sethie was in there, eyes open. I imagine he's like any of us who occasionally wake up in the night, but if you feel safe and you don't think there are other options than just lying quietly in bed, you'll lie quietly in bed. Obviously the magical appearance of Mommy and Daddy must have seemed like another option to Sethie. When we tried to leave, he started to cry. This was around midnight and our brains were tiredness-addled, so we concluded (Mistake #2) that the best option to get him to go back to sleep was to bring him into our own bed.

There's a reason why tiredness causes more car accidents than alcohol consumption. It makes you stupid. You forget that you have never had a child in your bed who didn't think it was 1) entertaining and 2) not a place to actually sleep. You also forget that you have never gotten a good night's sleep either with any child next to you. Sethie's new thing is asking what everything is/has/does and will repeat the question incessantly until you give him an answer that satisfies him. The heater came on: "What's that, Mommy? What's that, Mommy? What's that, Mommy?" The light on Nate's Blackberry blinked: "What's that, Mommy? What's that, Mommy? What's that, Mommy?" One of us actually had the gall to fall asleep and snore a little: "What's that, Mommy? What's that, Mommy? What's that, Mommy?" I adjusted one-tenth of an inch in bed: "What you doing, Mommy? What you doing, Mommy? What you doing, Mommy?"

Finally, around 2 am, I started to remember all the other times in which bringing this child into bed with us has worked (0). So I gently told him it was time to go back to "Sethie's bed", scooped him up, and carried him back into his own room (Mistake #3).

Had this been a movie, ominous music would have begun to play to a close-up of his otherwise adorable face contorting, malforming into....Evil Baby!

Sethie started crying. Actually, crying is not the word for it. Crying sounds almost cute. This was Unholy Misery unleashed. I looked around to see if angry villagers with pitchforks were going to start storming our castle. I put him in his crib, zipped up his crib tent, gritted my teeth, and decided to leave him there, hoping that he was just tired and the sounds of damned souls emanating from his room would eventually cease. But as I was leaving, I heard a different sound: a tired, confused, and plaintive "Mommy?"

Thomas. Normally he can sleep through anything (my favorite story is of the time we were moving out of NYC to our current place and we had stacked all our boxes in Thomas's room, so he was sleeping on the floor of our room. I got up in the middle of the night, forgetting he was there, and stepped on him. I mean, full on him, with all my weight. He didn't wake up. He said, "Oof." That was it), but I had let loose the Furies into his room, and who could blame him for not snoring through that? So I couldn't just leave him in there with the howling sirens of Doom. I went back in.

Here, though, is the measure of us. My goal was just to get Sethie to a point where I could go back to bed. I admit, I had no sympathy for him, even though he was clearly in crisis, but it was a two-year-old crisis. Not important! Even though it was my fault he had woken up in the first place! But Thomas did. He had been jarred awake in the middle of the night by air raid sirens issuing out the lungs of his little brother and what does he start saying but, "Sethie, Tommy's here. Tommy's here" in a kind and soothing voice.

"I want to see Tommy," Sethie hiccupped. I showed him that his brother was still in the other bed. That at least made the crying stop, but I still couldn't leave or it would start all over again. So I sat on the floor in my skivvies and sang a lullaby that I learned from Nate which is repetitive and sleep-inducing and found myself both shivering and nodding off. But every time I tried to inch out back out the door, Sethie would start to cry again. Thomas seemed to sense my rope was ending (kids always know when you're about to lose it before you do). He said, "Sethie, do you want Tommy to sing to you?" Sethie said yes.

Thomas didn't know the song I was singing, but he gamely joined it, happily bumbling through the words alongside me. When I stopped singing, he kept going. I backed out of the room. I heard him say, "Sethie, do want Tommy to sing you a new song?" Sethie said yes. Thomas started to sing a song he had made up, one about Keyboy, his invented superhero, and bad guys, and saving the day. Sethie stayed quiet. I went back to my own room. I lay in bed for a little while afterwards, listening to Thomas take care of his little brother and thought what broad shoulders he had, on top of which to lay the solace of a little, sad soul.

I never heard another word the rest of the night. Thank you, my brave Keyboy. And I'm sorry, my sweet Evil Baby. You both deserve great things. I'm so grateful that you have each other.

Sethism

2009-03-01T18:21:00.003-05:00

Me to Seth who is repeatedly jumping up and down: "What are you doing?"

Seth: "I'm thinking!"

Me: "What are you thinking about?"

Seth, stopping and throwing his hands up in the air: "I win!"

A Beautiful Envelope

2009-02-05T09:28:00.003-05:00

When we first moved in here, we heard a rumor that John Nash--the famed Princeton professor and subject of the movie A Beautiful Mind, which won Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actress at the 2002 Academy Awards--was actually a neighbor of ours. Someone told us that they thought he lived just down the street somewhere. We didn't really think much about it after that, but yesterday, the proof was in the mail. Wherever he lives, his address is close enough to ours that a Dr. Jackson in France had misaddressed an envelope to him and sent it to us instead.

Nate thought we should try to find out where Prof. Nash lives so we could deliver the letter to him ourselves and maybe have a chance to meet him, but I didn't want to risk losing it or damaging it in some way, so I took right back to the post office.

Prof. Nash, wherever you are, I hope you get Dr. Jackson's papers. I did my best.

Thomism

2009-01-07T11:49:00.002-05:00

Thomas, singing, while I make lunch: "If you give me a sandwich, you'll get a kiss."
I joked, "What if I don't want a kiss? Can I get a car or something?"
Thomas, still in sing-song, "No no no/you'll only get a kiss/that is all we sell at this."

It's the End of the Year as We Know It

2009-01-01T20:31:00.005-05:00

And We Feel Fine. Happy New Year!

*Note, there is a higher quality version of this video on Facebook.

Merry Christmas!

2008-12-25T09:07:00.002-05:00

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

2008-12-23T17:51:00.002-05:00

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

2008-12-22T13:18:00.005-05:00

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

2008-12-15T23:42:00.001-05:00

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

2008-11-18T21:26:00.005-05:00

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

2008-11-12T22:15:00.007-05:00

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...

2008-11-07T22:31:00.005-05:00

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

2008-11-07T13:21:00.011-05:00

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

2008-11-05T07:34:00.004-05:00

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

2008-11-04T10:35:00.003-05:00

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?

2008-10-20T18:07:00.015-04:00

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

2008-10-20T09:13:00.003-04:00

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!

2008-10-14T17:54:00.003-04:00

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

2008-10-14T16:46:00.003-04:00

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

2008-10-14T09:29:00.006-04:00

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!

2008-10-03T09:09:00.000-04:00

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

Thomism

2008-10-02T17:57:00.001-04:00

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

2008-10-01T13:25:00.004-04:00

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

2008-09-30T12:24:00.003-04:00

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

2008-09-29T08:59:00.005-04:00

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

2008-09-23T12:48:00.002-04:00

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

2008-09-05T13:11:00.005-04:00

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

2008-09-04T08:44:00.003-04:00

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

2008-09-01T20:49:00.026-04:00

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

2008-08-22T07:53:00.058-04:00

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

2008-08-21T14:12:00.019-04:00

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!

2008-08-14T13:35:00.002-04:00

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

2008-07-09T19:07:00.014-04:00

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."

Kid Tested, At Least

2008-06-18T11:58:00.002-04:00

I swear, I was upstairs for all of five minutes.

Of course, that's all the time they need.

Father's Day Thomasism

2008-06-17T09:10:00.004-04:00

This last Sunday, Thomas (and his church class) sang "Home is where the heart is" for Father's Day. Afterward, he came down from the stand and climbed onto my lap. I noticed he was crying (just a little), and I asked him if he was okay. He said "Daddy, sometimes you are so happy you just cry. I love you Daddy."

Needless to say (though I am saying it), it was a wonderful present.

7 Years into Eternity

2008-06-02T10:18:00.002-04:00

Seven years ago this morning, I followed through on the best decision of my life - I married Maralee LaBarge. There is no way to express how truly lucky I feel that she decided to be my wife and mother to my children. I have a hard time trying to remember what life was like before I met her, but it was obviously incomplete. I feel very lucky to have found my soul mate.

I LOVE YOU MY DARLING!

Thomism

2008-05-24T11:40:00.003-04:00

A song today on the way to soccer practice:

"Never leave your head,
Never leave your shoulders,
Never leave your mommy alone,
That's why I drink this special drink..."

Nerd Grrl Street Cred

2008-05-19T14:53:00.003-04:00

Okay, so this isn't a real accomplishment, which is why the blog is probably the only appropriate way to crow about it, but I recently beat all 120 levels in Super Mario Galaxy. Oh yeah baby! (Thomas is now trotting out that particular phrase whenever he does something well. Should I feel guilty?) Despite the fact that I play games regularly, I've never been hardcore--in fact if a boss fight seems boring and tends to take too many retries, I'll usually just ditch the title for the next game in my lineup. But something about Mario Galaxy has kept me playing.

Once, you could tell the console pros by their zen stillness during play. Beginners have a tendency to whip the controller around in a desperate attempt to get their little guy pixels to do what they want, despite the fact that the controller can't tell whether it's in your lap or flying through the air. Well, until now. I used to be one of those zen players, sitting in silent, button-mashing ohm-position. But the Wii remote has changed all that. Now I careen around on the couch as wildly as before. I even move the remote in ways totally unhelpful to gameplay. In Galaxy, Mario can change direction midair by shaking the remote and pressing the control stick in the direction you want to go. However, I also yank the remote in that direction, even though I know it's useless. I can't help it. The Wii has unmade me back into that silly kid again who whirled the controller around and yelled at Megaman not to fall off the edge. And that's probably a good reason why I can't stop playing it.

Anyway, beat all 120 levels and you get to play Luigi. Beat all 120 levels with him and supposedly the 121st level opens. Beat that...and I don't know. We'll find out when I get there.

Until then, watch this video of a guy beating one of the hardest Galaxy levels: What looks like an old school Luigi sprite from the original NES game turns out to be a map full of rotating boards, disappearing squares, and green muck that serves up an instant kill. The goal is to collect 100 purple coins (out of the 150 available) and make it back to your starting position all before time runs out. I felt pretty cool finally slogging through it after about 50+ retries.

Obviously I'm still just a grasshopper. Mr. Miyagi, is that you?

Waiting for Godot

2008-05-12T12:24:00.008-04:00

Seth has been a real character study for me after being swept up in the whirlwind that is Thomas for four years prior to his arrival. When Thomas was 18 mos. old, his favorite game was to run across the living room and have us pelt him with pillows. If he got knocked down, he only laughed harder. In fact, I once sent him careening into the wall and as I was running for him, imagining how I was going to explain his head wound in the ER, he emerged from the pillow pile, a huge red spot on his noggin, laughing hysterically.

He's also been a water baby all his life. Readers of this blog know that when we hit the beach in the summers, Thomas flings himself into the ocean, chaperoned or not, and has survived a few near drowning misses. He seems to have no fear, which is good in the sense that he has always been willing to try new things and adventures, and bad in the sense that I have been living with a near heart attack for most of his life as I wait for age and reason to finally overtake his lack of pain sensitivity and tendency to rush headlong into danger. I suspect I've got a number of years to go on that count.

Of course, it's a stereotype that the second child is often the categorical opposite of their first, but Seth and Thomas really do fit that bill. Where Thomas is easily distracted, Seth is methodical and while Thomas is easily pleased, Seth is a little more...discerning, let's call it that. Nothing seems to illustrate their differences as well as the following videos of a little sprinkler-running action in our backyard. Note that Thomas is not running through the sprinkler with such happy abandon just because he's older and is more comfortable with the experience. He was happily dousing himself in jets of water from the time he was a year old.

Sethie is my sensitive baby, the one who checks all the variables before turning the ignition, but I'm proud of him, too, that despite his obvious fear, he keeps going back to face it.

Happy Birthday Mr. T

2008-04-14T09:06:00.003-04:00

I know I'm merely echoing a parental cliche today when I say I really can't believe that Thomas, my little Bubby, is turning five. I looked at him a few days again and said to Nate, "When the heck did he get so huge?" As people, we're aware of the passage of time and yet our children seem to be always be the age that they are, if that makes any sense, and we can hardly remember when they were smaller, nor imagine them bigger.

Thomacito, my burrito, my favorite monkeyhead, my bubby wubby and my schnoot...I'm crying as I write this. I love you so much. You are such a big boy now and I see you headed out to conquer the world. You are fearless and generous, gregarious and hilarious. You are the only you and I'm so grateful to be your mommy.

Happy Birthday.

The Poulsens Went to Hawaii and All I Got Were These Lousy Blog Posts

2008-04-01T16:50:00.003-04:00

I kept this diary during our recent weeklong trip to Hawaii. I will also be posting some pics along with the entries just as soon as I can get them all organized!

-Mara

Chasing the Afternoon
3/16

We boarded the plane about 1:30 pm. Despite the cool drizzle of rain we’d had on the way to the airport, it was sunny now, brilliantly so as we squashed into our ridiculously small coach seats. When we take off the sun is a beacon of immense potency ahead of us, reflecting off voluminous and voluptuous rolling cloud hills.

It will stay that way for 11 hours.

I thought about the stories where a man chases the rainbow for its pot of gold and how he must pursue it without looking directly at it because if he looks, the rainbow will appear to be as far away from him as when he started. So it was with our afternoon. We could never catch it. Across five thousand miles, six time zones, land and ocean, we chased it. The clouds were the land we tracked it over, sometimes generally flat but gently rippled, like fields of the Midwest, other times bulky and spiked with sudden drop-offs into open valleys like the Wasatch Mountain range where I grew up. We flew fast and free over our terrain, but the sun kept ahead of us and like Icarus we groped and groped toward it and eventually fell—touching down in Hawaii in defeat.

And we were really were defeated then. As we descended the sun was growing pink and distant, the cloud volcanoes—grand cones of them erupting out of otherwise flat cloud fields—above Honolulu serving to hide it. We touched down, deplaned and headed for the baggage claim. Behind us the afternoon ended and, in barely a few minutes, it was dark.

Capitalism, the Scourge and Savior of Hawaii, Part One
3/17

This morning, we left the hotel and headed hand in hand down toward the beach which the hotel’s website had promised was a mere twenty-five yards away. I had seen the ocean from the balcony of our hotel room, its placid blue speckled with tiny whitecaps, and thought that maybe we could grab a spot on the beach, break out the books, and spend a relaxing morning acknowledging our feebleness to its immenseness. Why is it that recognizing how much more great and powerful nature is compared to us results in a feeling of pure contentment? Something to explore later, maybe, when we hit Volcano National Park.

Only the beach proved just about as elusive as the sun had yesterday and the resort area with all its tiny shops in bright colors that had looked so cute from our balcony turned out to be teaming with parasites. Five minutes into our walk, we were accosted by an otherwise harmless looking woman in a sundress and enormous eighties hair who wanted to know all about us, where we were from, how long we were here, what kind of things did we want to see and did we know she could get us discounts to things, why didn’t we step inside, etc. Our spider scam sense that New York hammered into us should have immediately kicked in, but hey, this was Hawaii, we were happy to be wandering down to the beach, she looked so nice, blah blah blah. We told her we had come here by taxi, but were looking to rent a car for the remainder of the week and did she know if there was a rental place nearby or did we have to go back to the airport? “You have to go back to the airport,” she said, “but I live right by there. I’d be happy to take you. When do you want to go?”

Scam alert! Scam alert! We told her we were on our way to get some breakfast, but we’d be back up this way later. She said, “There are a lot of people like me down the beach who’ll try to talk to you. Just tell them that Diane is helping you, okay?” I was already hard tugging Nate out of there—I’m a total misanthrope, I admit it. I hadn’t come to Hawaii to chat up strangers. I think she guessed I was the less friendly of the two of us because she weakly tried to win me over by shouting after us, “You have such pretty hair!”

In only one sense did she end up telling us the whole truth—she was absolutely right than this little stretch of otherwise adorable open-air shops and restaurants was overrun by “people like her”. We spotted a sign for a deal on luau tickets and the instant I pointed it out to Nate another Diane-type popped up. “Now the luau tickets are normally 72 per person, but I can get that down to 28 for both of you together,” she said. “And there is snorkeling over at the Kona Resort bay—you can see Green Sea Turtles there—and we can get you set up with all the equipment. And are you going to the volcano? We’ve got a great deal on the airplane tours, that’s the only good way to see it, you know…”

So what did Diane and her many prototypes want with us for these amazing deals? Just a few minutes of our time, really, a small price to pay, just come to our presentation about a timeshare option, no high pressure sales tactics we promise, and then you can have the rest of the week to do these fun things which we will give you for practically nothing! You have such pretty hair!
I think it is possible to get a good deal out of a timeshare buy. Nate’s parents did it for years, but it requires you to deal with a constant barrage of pressure to buy more more more. Like I said, I’m a misanthrope. When I go on vacation, I go to be alone (or in this case, to be with just Nate who, with work and school, is normally gone all but eight days out of the month).

But then again, all of these other things they were hawking really were more expensive on their own. Wouldn’t it be reasonable to go to a little sales tour, reject the pitch, and then get all these great discounts?

I’m a big fan of Capitalism—I think other more communal economic ideals sound great on paper, but in practice become coercive and stagnant. Free markets are the best and only way people can build their own wealth and that freedom has turned America into the wealthiest nation on earth, but it made me more than a little grumpy to spend the first few hours of our vacation trying to navigate the maze of “marketing representatives” who, like the jumping spiders Thomas loves, had staked themselves in the obvious path of their prey and then waited to spring.

But what about the luau, an event I had wanted to do before the sticker shock of a timeshare-presentation-free price hit me? Do we try to trick the timeshare troopers on their own turf to wrangle a good deal or we do we shell out the big bucks? Which is more valuable, I asked Nate, our time or our money? Which option makes us feel the least like suckers?

Capitalism, the Scourge and Savior of Hawaii, Part Two

I don’t know what it’s like to be native Hawaiian. I suspect for those living here now, it’s like being anyone else with an interesting historical background that has little effect on your current way of life, but then again, maybe not. Unlike most other “interesting historical backgrounds”, Old Hawaii is still here, encased in a time capsule, and it only costs 72 bucks per slack-jawed tourist to catch a glimpse of it.

Supposedly, anyway. As much as I want to see fire and hula dancing and a full roasted pig, the idea of a luau turned poisonous to me the longer I listened to these timeshare parasites hawk their discounts to it. I know there are real luaus in Hawaii, but they are private affairs, and a Hawaiian-shirt-wearing tourist can’t purchase his/her way into them—wedding luaus, birthday party luaus (bar mitzvah luaus?!?!?).

Capitalism has saved Old Hawaii in a way. I asked Nate last night if the Hawaiian language is a bit like the various Gaelic dialects in the British Isles, living on for nostalgia’s sake and because there are people like us who have fetishized it and crave a piece of it and are willing to pay for it.
How do you preserve a cultural heritage without selling it? And how do you separate nostalgia from history? Would Old Hawaii still feel as vibrant here if there weren’t tourists to feed it? Is that a good or bad thing? And how much of it is real?

At a wedding reception a few years back, I ran into a fellow from Ireland and got a chance to gush about how I just loved Ireland and how wonderful it was even though I had never had a chance to be there and he replied sullenly, “You don’t love Ireland. You love what you think Ireland is. All you Americans think Ireland is this lovely green magical place, but it’s not. The cities are dirty and stinky and the country is poor.” That was pretty much the end of the conversation.

I don’t think that Hawaii much fits the description of the angry Irishman, but how much of that is from wrapping some romanticized version of its past into a package palatable and priced well for tourist consumption?

Nate and I never did do the luau. The timeshare discount vs. full-price admission turned out to be a zerosum game for us. Either the timeshare people win or the luau marketers do. Instead, we drove about twenty miles north to a pristine and wildly expensive shopping center at Mauna Lani because at 7 pm every night, there is a free hula performance by Traditions Hawaii. In the midst of this tightly stylized pedmall disguised as a Hawaiian village, we watched a dance recreation of King Kamehameha’s secret birth and rise to power among the Hawaiian tribes. It was simple, the dancing was fantastic, and it was only briefly interrupted by a bizarre English pop song performance by the lead that some moron probably thought was necessary to keep the unwashed American masses interested. Was it authentic? Who can say? It was authentic to what Hawaii is now, tourist and tradition intertwined, the two symbiotes feeding and sustaining each other. Afterwards, the viewing audience toured the shops in the compound, which is probably the main reason the performance was free. Nate and I bought some crackers, cheese, and dried mango from the over-priced grocery store and headed home.

Mara vs. the Volcano
3/18

It’s raining tremendously here, but without wind, so I can sit on the hotel balcony, listen to it pounding down, smell the salty residue of an ocean rain. We will be in Hilo today where it has rained every day of the week. The storms blow in from the east and cannot climb Mauna Loa, the Big Island’s grim volcanic summit glowering more than 13000 feet over the rest of the us, so most of the time it drops all its rain on the eastern side, which incidentally is where Kilauea, Hawaii’s last constantly exploding monster has been spewing since 1983. Fire and water, natural enemies, imprisoned on the same piece of the island together.

The volcano is our ultimate destination today, but we started on the Kona side of Big Island, the touristy beach capital where we chose our hotel, partially to escape Hilo’s rain. But that means that in order to see the volcano and to come back home again, we will have to round the entire island in a day—almost a 300 mile round trip—on the Big Island’s single circuit highway which winds sinuously around the perimeter, climbing from sea level beachfronts to 3000 foot elevations and then back down again, all the while twisting like a canyon road and sometimes dropping down to 35 mile an hour speed limits. A scenic way, but not one for getting places in a hurry.

We stop for breakfast at a tiny roadside café that looks like a rickety shack on the outside, but is surprisingly lovely on the inside. It is perched above a cliffside that plunges at least a hundred feet below us over the side, but what a fragrant ride down it would be. The rise is overrun with flowers, long cones of them in red and white, and there is even an avocado tree hanging heady and fully ripe only a few yards away. I love that in Hawaii, all the restaurants are open air. There is no reason to have walls—it just never gets cold enough. It felt a little deviant to me the first day here, that everything is just open and anything can wander in. I’m used to barriers and it challenges my natural inclination toward safety.

Speaking of anything wandering in, a tiny green gecko is climbing the wooden beam near our table. My heart thumps. How much I miss Thomas! He would have loved to see this adorable little lizard sunning himself barely a foot or two away. I have to sneak close and take his picture. I take a video, too, so that when we get home Thomas can see how it looks and moves. I wish I could take something like this home for him. He’s a touchy kid—a flat screen of moving pictures is totally inadequate. He likes texture and weight. Asking him not to touch is like asking him not to breathe.

The food is also surprisingly elegant—silky papaya stuffed with apples and pineapple in a cream sauce and toasted coconut and Nate’s eggs benedict which are served on little crisp biscuits and artistically dripped with hollandaise. Everything we’ve paid for so far in Hawaii has been ridiculously priced and the prices here are as high as elsewhere, but for once, the food actually approaches “worth it”. The single waitress is an older white woman in ragged jeans and a halter top, with long blond hair just loose. She looks like a hippy who just wandered in once and never left. She is pleasant and has a calm glow about her, like the rest of this place.

Back on the road, we don’t have a real schedule, except to reach the volcano by early afternoon, so we decide to stop wherever sounds interesting. We pull off next at Pu’uhonua o Honaunau, the last “Place of Refuge” in Hawaii that the National Park Service has managed to preserve. Apparently in the old Hawaiian religion, kapu was code of conduct—mostly acts that were taboo—so severe that managing to even accidentally break one of its laws meant death. And considering the laws—women can’t eat with men, you can’t walk too close to a chief or even cast your shadow on him, etc.—the chance of breaking one accidentally seemed pretty high. Fearing the gods would punish them if they harbored a law-breaker, the people would chase you until they either caught and killed you, or you reached a place of refuge where the bones of old chiefs are buried and blood cannot be spilt. The priest would absolve of your crime and you could go home again—at least until the next time your shadow fell in an inconvenient direction, sinner!

“Let’s build a wall to protect ourselves from our own ludicrous system of justice!” I snarked to Nate while we toured the grounds. They say that Louis XVI of France had a extreme code of politeness at his palace gatherings—you had to scratch at the door to be let in, you couldn’t knock, etc.—in order to keep his nobles so occupied with etiquette that they couldn’t plot against him. Unfortunately for Louis, it was the peasants who ended up plotting against him, and peasants don’t get invited to those kind of parties.

Unsurprisingly, most of the kapu rules focused on women and what we could and couldn’t do. What is it about us, men? We don’t spend our time coming up with rules that are for you and you only. I mean, yes, you have to pick up your socks and use a coaster, but so does everyone else.

Weirdly, though, one of the laws was that a woman couldn’t cook a meal for a man. Who came up with this rule? Maybe you could also forbid us to do your laundry? I have a few more things on my list that I could be forbidden from. My guess is that for this reason alone the whole kapu business eventually went out of favor. How many years of cooking their own dinners before the Hawaiian men chased the original rule-maker himself all the way to Pu’uhonua o Honaunau? “And stay there,” they sniffed, walking back home to a warm meal.

There was also this guy at the National Park Service site. Nate tried to ask him a question and he barely looked up response. We’re not quite sure if he was actually supposed to be there as a part of the exhibit. Maybe the lightweight NPS rangers were too afraid to ask him to leave. I would be.

Sea turtles are swimming in the shallows here. We get as close as we dare and rapidly snap pictures.

Back on the road. We stop at a cliffside where the wind is rushing violently across the beach and up the hill. It is covered in lush vegetation and the waves below are smashing majestically against the land. Someone is flying foam airplanes on the hillside—we can see the planes but not the people. They look like a flock of some strange local bird.

“Black sand beaches!” I yell at Nate about two seconds before we miss the turnoff to Punalu’u. We have already passed the southernmost tip of Big Island and are working our way up the opposite side now toward Volcano National Park. Nate yells, “Where?!” even as he is slamming the breaks and careening the car around. We bounce onto the exit, our little rental car kicking up in the back like a donkey (Hi Alamo Rental Car Service!), but manage to not to go skidding off the road. We wind down to the beachfront which, unlike almost everything else here in Hawaii, has no entrance fee. People are just parking and getting out. The only real sign says it’s illegal to remove any of the sand from the beach. I don’t really know why until I get a chance to stand on it.

Obsidian. The most beautiful of volcanic rock. What looks like a long swath of mud leading down the water is, in fact, miniscule shards of obsidian, so miniscule that they look like glistening grains of black salt in your hand. The sand is soft under the feet, like any sand, only it’s dark and shiny. I sift it through my fingers in wonder. Nate tries to scratch our initials where the surf has soaked it but he can’t finish fast enough for me to take a picture before the foamy sea obliterates it. He manages to build a little mini-Volcano, though, and we cap it with a fallen yellow flower. Then in comes the water again and sluices the whole thing away.

Finally, Volcano National Park. We’ve come up the Hilo (eastern) side of the island now and into its rain. A fine warm mist is coating the car (and us) as we make our way to the visitor’s center.

All I want—all I have wanted for this whole trip—is to see lava flowing. We rejected the overpriced air tours because we want to see it for ourselves, if we can, hiking as close to the molten earth as we can get and with no panes of glass between it and us (okay and prop plane rides like that make me soooooo motion sick, even when I’m well-drugged. Last thing I want to be doing over the Volcano is erupting myself. Everyone together now, “Ewwwww…”).

Inside we stumble into the park ranger telling a group of hikers that up until a month ago, the only way to see the lava was the take one of those plane rides, but the lava has changed direction and is now actually running into the sea just east of here. The only way to get there is to drive up highway 11 for twenty miles, turn onto highway 130 for another twenty miles and go on past the roadblock at the end of it, follow the remaining gravel road to a small parking area, then break out the flashlights and cross the old lava flows to the sea where, in the near distance, molten rock and water are violently clashing, throwing steam and stone sometimes thirty feet in the air.

It’s easiest to see the lava after dark, so we have time to drive up to Hilo for the last event on our semi-itinerary: eat the very last cheap food left in Hawaii, the Loco Moco. Café 100 is one of Hilo’s oldest fast food joints, having been around since the 50’s. It’s named for Hawaiian’s 100th Battalion from WWII, a battalion full of Japanese soldiers. The Loco Moco is its own invention: a hamburger patty topped with an local island egg over white rice and smothered in brown gravy. Does this sound like Nate food or what? It costs a measly $1.99. We have seen Loco Moco imitations around here in Kona, but their price hovers somewhere between $5 and $9. Not only do we want to try the real thing, but we’re also tired of feeling like suckers every time we break open our wallets.

We know we’ve reached the island’s biggest town because of the Wal-Mart. And three MacDonald’s, all within a two mile radius of each other. Aside from the main strip, though, Hilo is almost all squat little island houses: single-story with steeply tilted, corrugated roofs. We drive through them to Café 100 which looks like it’s still in the original 50’s building (it isn’t: tsunamis destroyed two earlier Café 100’s before this one was built). The café is rough-hewn and looks like any roadside pit stop serving fast food. They have about ten different Locos on the menu, including a salmon tempura loco that I order. Nate gets the real thing. We eat them at one of the many picnic-style benches around the perimeter. My egg is overcooked, but Nate’s is just right: he draws a line through the center of it and thick, wet yolk oozes out to cover everything. I’ve seldom seen him happier.

It’s a little after 4:30 pm by the time we’re grinding the rental car over the gravel road (Hi again Alamo Rental Car Service!) to the lava site. The road is so tight that any car trying to come the other way has to negotiate a careful waltz with us—one tire this way, one tire that, spin your partner around and then go! We find a place in the parking lot where rangers are handing out flyers with safety tips on them. I’m still blown away that they even try to let people do this, what with the tort-happy union we live in. Out on the newest lava flows, the benches are completely unstable. Recently 43 acres disappeared into the ocean overnight. One wrong step and you’ll go plunging into the abyss with it. Not to mention the sulfur dioxide in the air which is toxic even to the average healthy person, let alone anyone who already has breathing problems. The rangers have set up markers to show the best way along the lava flow, but there’s nothing to force you to stay with them. Good luck intrepid tourist! Hope you come back alive!

In the distance, smoke and steam are spurting up in great clouds. The air is practically sizzling—I can see the heat waves warping the black hills behind us. We pick our way delicately over the ripples of cooled magma. This whole area feels delicate, like a frozen pond, that any moment this thin surface could crack and we’d take a sudden and very hot bath.

We reach the end of the bench. Although there is lava flow still beyond us, about an eighth of a mile’s worth that reaches the sea, that part is new lava flow and not likely able to carry the weight of a few hundred tourists tromping back and forth across it day in and day out. We crawl up on a near rock outcropping to better see the clouds of steam that are shooting up from the water about five hundred yards away from us. No lava is immediately visible, but the afternoon is still bright and if there are flows they are too thin to make a dent in the sunlight. Until—there! In the distance the black shore cracks and the earth’s red blood spurts out. Everyone oohs and ahhs and a cacophony of camera clicks follow. We try to take a picture of it, but our little camera barely has a zoom factor of 3. We get a great picture of the steam clouds and what looks like an artifact of red on an otherwise dark field.

For a long time, that is all there is.

Nate and I find a roll of pumice to still on and wait for sunset. A few feet away from us a little boy is tossing lumps of it, watching parts of them disintegrate into dust when they hit. His father comes by to tell him to stop. He stops for a moment until the father wanders away again and then he picks up another and throws it. He’s turned toward us now, completely unconscious of the people around him. The next rock he lobs lands at my feet. His father is back, grabbing his arm and telling him in a harsh whisper that if he doesn’t cut it out, they are going right out of here and there’ll be no lava for him, now quit it! His mother glances sharply over here, too. “Stop that or the park ranger will arrest you and throw you in jail,” she says offhandedly to her son. Nate and I have to snicker behind our hands. Whenever Thomas is doing something even semi-dangerous, I find myself saying whatever possible to get him to stop. “That’s a good way to lose your head!” I’ll say, to which Nate will add, “Yeah and then you’ll have to get a monkey head.” I don’t think I’ve ever threatened him with arrest and possible jail time, though.

The sun is going down so we crawl back up onto the edge of bench as lots of people are arriving by now and we want a good viewing spot. Here and there little bits of red are starting to appear across the otherwise empty field. Unlike our flight to Honolulu, the sun seems to be taking an abysmally slow time to set. But the steam clouds are turning crimson. Now and then the wind will shift a bit and blow them away from the land and there…the shoreline is awash in lava. Wounded, it drips its blood into the sea and the sea explodes. An awe and terror quite unlike anything I’ve ever felt is making my heart beat fast. My chest feels light and hollow, my lungs not quite able to fill up.

All around us, Hawaiians have tossed offerings to Pele, their volcano god that lives in Kilauea: leis and leaf-wrapped bundles. A collective shout goes up from the bench as one daring grandmother is being escorted by a Civil Defense policeman out on the new flow—the one the rangers ordered us never to step foot on—toward the lava. I hear someone saying the Lord’s Prayer behind me. They stop roughly a hundred yards from the lava. Grandmother raises her arms in the air, appears to be chanting. The bench here is quiet, people whispering back and forth. She tosses the lei she has brought and they start back toward us. When they reach the bench, there is a collective sigh of relief.

At last the sun is gone and although everyone around us is raucous with excitement, talking and taking pictures, Nate and I are quiet. He has taken the advice of a photographer near us and is resting the camera on a flattened part of our backpack, pressing the timer then letting it go. But no camera can really capture what it looks like from this high slope above the lava fields. In the dark, the lava is livid. You can actually see the different shades of it as it oozes through the stone of its own make, a shifting pattern of red and yellow and orange, liquid fire on the hunt. For over thirty years it has groped its way toward the sea from Kilauea’s angry mouth. The water hisses and spits at it, then erupts into great mushroom clouds of steam. You feel like if the ocean weren’t so very vast, the lava would have gobbled it up already. Thomas, fascinated by fire like any little kid, wanted to know if there were any fires that water can’t put out. I said yes, of course, and talked to him about grease fires and big forest fires, but this is the real fire. I wish desperately that he could see it. The water seems to be no match here—and yet, like the Union side of the Civil War, survives to triumph on sheer numbers. Down, down the lava drips and the greatness of the ocean devours it at last. The glow dies out and black stone is all that is left. Fire and water. Both win, both lose.

We have a great spot here on the bench—our view is obscured by nothing—and so eventually we decide we ought to give it up to someone else. My leg has fallen asleep. Nate helps me down and we have to break out the flashlights from our pack to pick our way back across the lava flow in the dark. Behind us, the sky is alight, enormous crimson clouds rolling away. The sound of the sea shushing back and forth against the shore is constantly broken up by the erupting hiss of steam. We are lucky to be able to turn our backs on that ancient battle and go home. I doubt we’ll ever see its like again.

Catching up
3/19

After our Big Island adventure yesterday, today is a lazy day. We sleep in (until 6:30 am! This is an improvement over yesterday where we woke up at 5 am. We just can’t shake this Jersey time. Helps us get on the road, though) and grab breakfast a beachfront buffet, but I feel grumpy all over again. The buffet is $8 a person and consists of some hard breakfast burritos, sloppy eggs, freezer-style hashbrowns, and dried-out biscuits. Drinks are extra and limited to a single refill. I’m beginning to feel like my mother-in-law who went grocery shopping with me last Thursday. She had just come from Mexico and made sounds of distress every time she confronted a price tag. My instinct is that ordinarily things in Hawaii cannot possibly cost this much, but that, like anywhere, the tourists are too easy a target. They are also serving a Loco Moco here. It costs $10.

We give in the price-gouging spirit, though, and go shopping along the Kailua-Kona shore. I get a little artificial flower hairclip for a not-too-terrible amount, despite the fact the clip-part is just hot-glued onto the silk flower. Nate wanders into a natural wood open air market and calls me over. We tour the carvings and bump into the owner, a fit tan guy in his forties who is wearing only a pair of board shorts and shell necklace. An old surfer dude who set up shop on his favorite shore. Everything is hand-carved here and there are painted pieces of extraordinary workmanship and even more extraordinary price tags. We find an unpainted piece—an intertwined male and female figure—that looks like it would fit in among other things at home. There are two styles: Nate wants to get the more “voluptuous” one, but I veto it. She looks a little cold to me.

We take a long afternoon nap—the humidity and the heat make sleep deep and delicious. When we wake up, it’s late in the afternoon and we have only one destination left: Sushi En Fuego a Japanese-Spanish fusion restaurant right on the beach. We’re hoping to see the sunset—every night we’ve been here so far, we’ve been off doing something and didn’t have a chance to see the sun go down over the ocean. No luck this time, either, though. The sky is clouded over. There is barely a pink sheen to it as darkness descends.

We eat sushi and tapas and listen to the water lapping right under the balcony. The table umbrellas come down and the tiki torches flare up. Nate sighs. “Every man, everywhere, wants his own tiki lounge,” he says. This strikes me as absolute truth if there is any.

Bachelor Party!
Subtitled: Nate “Comports Himself with Dignity”
Subtitled: I.E. Skips the Strip Club
3/20

Our last day on the Big Island. With a fond melancholy, we take in our last overpriced breakfast (eggs are good, but toast is extra. Toast is extra?!?). I have to admit, we’ve left up our “Do Not Disturb” sign the entire time we’ve been here, just so we won’t have to tip the maid for a hastily turned over room. Nate noticed the first night here that the maid’s cart didn’t have glasses on it. He suspects they just rinse out the old glasses and put paper on them again. After that, the sign went up.

I love the Kona “International” Airport. It consists of four or five open air tiki-style huts just a short walk from the runway for the inter-island jumpers. Planes taking off and landing are constantly making a hideous cacophony, droning out speech as well as the band and hula dancers.

Yep, band and hula dancers. Why not, when your airport is a bunch of tiki huts?

We are back in Honolulu for a night while Nate attends the bachelor party for his good friend, Steve, before we fly to Kauai the next morning for the wedding. Nate’s a little nervous: he’s going to be the only Mormon in the group and, well, it’s a bachelor party. Without booze and scantily clad women, it’s kind of a bust, right?

Nate had a little bachelor celebration himself the night before we got married. He ran around all evening trying to take care of last minute wedding details. Steve kindly followed him around, drinking a beer. Wahoo!

I want to go to the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor while Nate heads to Waikiki for the dinner cruise, so we pick up opposite buses on the major Honolulu highway. I ask my driver if this bus is going to the Memorial and he says yes, so I clamber on, but the moment after he’s closed the doors behind me and started the bus up, he turns a dark eye on me and says, “Well, but it’s almost closed now, you know. You’ll never get in.”

So I have to hang out on the bus until the next stop and walk back to the hotel from there. At least in stingy New York fashion I refuse to pay the fare. It’s only two dollars, but it’s the driver’s fault I got on the bus in the first place. So there.

Nate’s evening goes a little something like this:

After over an hour on the bus, Nate ends up in a cab trying to find the dinner cruise place. They go a block and a half. It costs $5. He finally finds the party on the beach and the “dinner cruise” shoves off a few minutes later, only it’s less dinner and less cruise than initially advertised. The “cruise” ship is a catamaran and “dinner” is Jagermeister. Nate has a water. Steve is marrying a German girl and his soon-to-be brothers-in-law, in true German fashion, are enthusiastically availing themselves of the free liquor.

After the “cruise”, the men head to a tiki lounge for the real version of dinner. The Germans, having imbibed enough to resurrect a long-forgotten Viking heritage, are shouting and singing. Nate gets a Hawaiian prime rib steak, served atop an enormous latke, but the food takes almost an hour to arrive. In the meantime, everyone else goes for the only sustenance available in the interim: more alcohol. Steve is a genial host, making the rounds, but gets grumpy near the end when the bill arrives. Apparently, tipping in Germany is not really standard practice and so he has to shout, “You gotta give more money!” a few times at his future relatives in order to cover it.

The next destination is a place where the waitresses keep misplacing their clothing, so Nate decides it’s time to say goodnight. At this point, Steve breaks away from the group. He and Nate have known each other since they were kids and have crossed the country and back together, often surviving only on Wurther’s Originals and Mountain Dew for the entire trip. That’s the sort of life-changing experience that will bring two men together forever. I have to admit that Steve completely blew me away the first time I met him. I had seen pictures of him, a bit goofy and overtall, as an awkward adolescent, only to discover he had exploded into a hulking muscular brute as an adult. At 6’9”, he’s a gigantic, imposing figure, probably even more so a little drunk. He hugs Nate with bone-breaking intensity and says, “Man, when I told you I was getting married you said you’d be there, no matter where it was. And you did it. When I saw you coming up the beach, I said, ‘Man!’.” Then he turns to the group and shouts, “We’re not going to the strip club yet! We’re going to a regular bar so I can have a drink with my friend!” The group is surly. “No! Strip Club!” they say. Steve: “It’s my bachelor party! We’re going to a bar so I can have a drink with my friend, so shut up!”

No reassurances from Nate can stop him, so the stretch limo, crammed with all twenty of them, heads to a nearby bar. The remainder of group stays in the limo still grumbling about the pit-stop before the strip club while Nate and Steve head inside. Steve has a beer. Nate has a ginger ale. Steve repeats his appreciation that Nate has gone to the trouble of being here with enthusiastic hand gestures that threaten to overtake the entire bar. They clink glasses and it’s time for Steve to get back. Nate watches him climb back into the limo, getting a blast of “Yay! Strip club!” before the doors close. He grabs a taxi, sluicing through a misty rain, back to our hotel.

Tora! Tora! Tora!
3/21

Our plane is not leaving for Kauai until late in the afternoon, so we make a second attempt to see the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor. Thanks to our crazy Jersey brain clocks, we’re up by 5:30 am, out of the hotel by 7:30 am and at the Memorial just before 8 am, which is good because a huge line of people is already melting out in the early morning sun, tourists in their Hawaiian pastel finest, in a sloppy and slowly moving queue that wraps around the block.

On the phone last night, my father told me that when he and my mother were visiting Pearl Harbor so many years ago, they looked up in the sky and nearly had a heart attack: planes with the Japanese rising sun on them were diving in and around the harbor above. Turns out they were filming Tora! Tora! Tora! that day. I scan the sky briefly, chewing my lip.

A lovely park ranger with a burst of brown-gold curls from under her Smokey the Bear hat tells us that the tickets to see the memorial are free, but are only for a specific time, likely to be about three hours from now. We swelter for about half an hour until reaching the shade of the visitor’s center and get a ticket for about two hours later. I suspect Ms. Smokey outside gives the three hour wait time just so when you get your ticket and it only says two hours, you feel like you’ve caught a break or something, instead of thinking, “Two hours? I wouldn’t wait that long for a table at Le Cirque!”

Perhaps the best thing about the Pearl Harbor site, though, is the fact that on any given day, you can find men who were actually there, who saw the Japanese planes coming in and ran to their ships and units, who charged into the smoking chaos and fought back however they could. Two of these fine gentlemen are seated behind a little table just inside the center and another long line of people are waiting for a chance to get their autographs and have their pictures taken with them, as if Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are at that table. Actually, they do look little bit like Walter Matthau and Tony Randall to me. We reach the front and I ask the Tony, “Can we get your autograph?” to which he roars, “Get ‘em while they’re hot!” and whips one off for me. I pose between them for a picture and as Nate and I are walking off again, I think, What adorable old codgers.

Until—

Well, until you realize that sixty years ago they were facing down the guns of a Japanese fleet and watching as one by the one the great Battleships of the United States were reduced to so much flotsam, hanging useless in the harbor. We watch a short film in the visitor’s center and the footage, grainy and ad hoc as it is, makes your throat lump up, your fists clench. I don’t know how much I can say here because the echoes of September 11th are simply too strong for me. I am touched that day in and out here in the harbor people are coming to see the old ship memorials and are remembering in their minds and hearts the brave men and women who were slaughtered unawares in the early morning, but I am stunned at the depth of national outrage here that is almost entirely absent from the WTC site in New York City.

The towers went down when I was still living in Salt Lake, but less than a year later, we moved to the Big Apple and I can say sincerely that I love few places as much as I love that place, uniquely and fiercely American as anywhere. I have been to the WTC site and it’s just construction now, with a few scattered pictures around the perimeter and some memorial sites put together by the surrounding locals, like the church of St. Francis around the corner. Most of what you notice, though, are the people passing by, on their way to work, or lunch, or shopping, or to whatever destination those hordes of fast walking New Yorkers are headed and the fact that once there were mammoth buildings here, the highest in the world, and less than a day later there were not, this no longer fazes them.

I don’t mock in any way the ultimate sacrifice of those courageous soldiers on “The Day that Will Live in Infamy” as Mr. Roosevelt said, but at least they were soldiers, trained for battle and had volunteered to potentially lay down their lives for their country some day, but the attack on New York…they were just people, people like their fast-walking counterparts today and why are we not completely outraged that fanatics aimed several 150 ton missiles at them? Why are we still tossing flowers in the Pacific waters above the sunken Arizona and yet go strolling past our graveyard on the Atlantic full of innocent men and women and children?

I don’t know. I have to hope that it’s about the natural American inclination toward forgiveness. Despite the heart-wrenching feeling in the air around the memorial as we read the Shrine’s names of seamen and marines above the Arizona’s slow-leaking remains, there is no animosity toward Japan here. I have to think that we just don’t know how to stay angry at someone who has wronged us. We want to fix the relationship and move onto friendship. That there are places in the world that hate us and no amount of reasonable reconciliation offered on our part can change that seems impossible.

So we move on anyway. We fast walk around our empty building site and show how little it hurts us. You can rail at us and despise us and try to maim us, but we forgive you and move on. That is who we are.

Our Little Missionary

2008-02-26T19:55:00.014-05:00

On Sunday, Thomas's CTR 5 teacher gave each member of his class a little Book of Mormon in a little bag with their name sewn on it. Pretty impressive. When I was a primary teacher, the kids were lucky to get a blank piece of paper to color on at the end of class.

Well, it just happened that the next day I was scheduled to go to school with Thomas (it's a cooperative preschool where each parent helps out roughly once a month). That also meant Thomas got to bring something for show and tell and he picked his new Book of Mormon. I think it's pretty cool that to Thomas, going to church and talking about going to church is just part of his life. He doesn't think anything about it. The kids in his preschool are from a pretty wide range of religious backgrounds and they're fine discussing it with each other. Go kids! (Though the art teacher could use a little help. I thought her presentation on Hanukkah* this winter left a lot to be desired and I'm not even Jewish).

Anyway, I videoed Thomas's presentation. The full video runs a little over nine minutes and was huge, file size-wise, so I chopped it up into thirds. The three videos are below.

(Note: While I think it's adorable, I'm fully aware that this is the kind of video probably only family could enjoy. The camera work is a little sketchy, there's plenty of background noise, and it contains the extended ramblings of a four-year-old. Like I said, I think it's very sweet, but just be warned.)

*I was the helping parent during Hanukkah on their art day and the school's art instructor was having the kids make construction paper menorahs with gold sparkles for flames. She had brought a Hanukkah book with her, but had apparently failed to actually read it because the story she told went something like this: "Well the Jewish people were fighting with the Syrians and then it came time for Hanukkah and the Jewish people were afraid they wouldn't have enough oil to light their menorahs, so Hanukkah almost didn't happen, but then they discovered they had enough oil for eight days, so they got to celebrate Hanukkah and they called it the Great Miracle."

Thomism

2008-02-01T15:32:00.001-05:00

Thomas: I wish I had four arms and two feet
Me: You already have two feet
Thomas: Oh. I wish I had ten heads, so I could watch every TV in the world.

Gordon B. Hinckley 1910-2008

2008-01-28T18:51:00.000-05:00

I was a high school senior when Hinckley became president of the church and so he is probably the prophet I remember best, but I think that he transcends my mere memory as an extraordinary man. He always exuded moral strength at the same time as self-deprecating humor, spiritual forward-thinking as well as temporal concern with the lives of the members of the church. He traveled all over the world to ensure that he met as many people as possible, that they knew him and that he knew them. He also presented a real outreach of the church to news organizations and members of other faiths, to let them know who we are and what we represent, not the least of which is friendship and fellowship.

My grandfather, E. Keith Loosli, was a year older than President Hinckley, and died just a touch younger. In many ways they resembled each other--strong men of faith who put their family and community ahead of themselves (in Hinckley's case, his family and community comprised the entire church). A year or so before my grandfather's death, we were together at a family christmas party and I was looking at out at my grandfather's impressive amount of progeny. I asked him something along the lines of, "How do you feel having had so much in your life?"

His answer has stuck with me and seems to apply to President Hinckley now. He said, "This is what comes from living the teachings of the gospel" and read to me a scripture from D.&C. 121:

Let thy bowels also be full of charity towards all men and to the household of faith and let virtue garnish thy thoughts unceasingly; then shall thy confidence wax strong in the presence of God; and the doctrine of the priesthood shall distill upon thy soul as the dews from heaven. The Holy Ghost shall be thy constant companion and thy scepter an unchanging scepter of righteousness and truth; and thy dominion shall be an everlasting dominion, and without compulsory means it shall flow unto thee forever and ever.

Baby's first haircut

2008-01-26T23:45:00.000-05:00

Okay, so Sethie isn't really a baby anymore--he's walking and talking and pulling down all the books off the lower shelves, but it was hard to see him in the barber's chair with his little feet only just reaching the end of the seat itself and not think he was just so very tiny. Anyway, we took a quick video of the abuse (does any kid like having his hair cut? Ever?). Don't feel bad for him--he got plenty of cookies to assuage the pain.

The final product:

For Grandma

2008-01-22T12:49:00.000-05:00

My mom requested proof that little Seth is actually taking some steps, so after a few failed attempts to get him to perform on camera (and in a relatively clean house), I managed to capture this. There you go, Mommy!

Thomism Redux

2008-01-17T08:57:00.000-05:00

In the car this morning:

Thomas: "Mommy, you can come see my babies if you want."
Me: "Babies? What babies are you talking about?"
Thomas: "My babies when I'm a grownup daddy. You can come visit them any time you want."
Me: "Oh Thomas, I would love to come see your babies when you're a grownup. That would make me very happy."
Thomas: "If you're not dead yet."

Thomism

2008-01-15T14:05:00.000-05:00

Thomas: "Mommy, when I'm a grownup, I won't live with you anymore, right?"
Me: "I hope not!" Laughs. "But yes, you're right. When you're a grownup you won't live with me anymore."
Thomas: "Because you'll be dead."

Tagged

2008-01-15T10:24:00.001-05:00

My long-time friend Robin tagged me and has only harrassed me a little bit to respond, but I'm easily intimidated, so here goes:

10 years ago (Jan 1998):
I was midway through my junior year of college and applying for summer internships (I eventually went to the University of Iowa's comp sci program). I was breaking up with someone. I was lolly-gagging around my parents' house for winter break (I'm sure they would be glad to get rid of me soon).

5 things on my to-do list today:
1) pick Thomas up from preschool
2) make an appointment to register him for kindergarten
3) do laundry
4) take Thomas to his playdate this afternoon
5) get in a few pages on my novel

Snacks I enjoy:
1) sushi
2) chocolate
3) ooooohhhh chocolate
4) mmmmmmmmmm chocolate
5) did I mention chocolate?

Things I would do if I were a billionaire:
1) pay off our debt and any family and friend debt (note this is family and friends that existed BEFORE the billionaire status. Late emergers need not apply)
2) start a college scholarship program for girls in the sciences
3) get a building named after me at my alma mater (Simpsons reference: "Yale could use an airport").
4) invest in programs like the Gates Foundation that places aid where it is needed and that requires positive progress from those who have received the aid.
5) invest in programs like FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) which help ensure that U.S. Universities live up to their purpose: intellectual (not just superficial) diversity, open discussion (even if some are offended), and preserving the sanctity of individual conscience.

3 of my bad habits (only three? Wahoo!)
1) Resistance to housework
2) Procrastination
3) Uncontrollable yawning when I am bored (apologies to our Sacrament meeting speakers)

5 places I have lived
1) Tremonton, UT
2) Bryn Mawr, PA
3) Ithaca, NY
4) New York City, NY
5) Princeton Junction, NJ

5 jobs I have had:
1) I have not actually had five jobs
2) Pizza maker
3) Temp worker at AT&T
4) Computer programmer
5) Freelance writer (does this really count?)

5 things people don't know about me:
1) I generally hate talking on the phone. I am getting better at it, but I am just not a phone person. I like to get to the point and get off. There are a few exceptions, but they're rare (Slease!)
2) Nate and I met online.
3) I like to read celebrity gossip
4) I once considered becoming Wiccan (chalk this one up to standard college too much time and too little serious responsibility)
5) I still love the movie "The Last Unicorn".

I tag Eddie, Heather J., Anali, Kendra, and Teresa.

Wii wish you a Merry Christmas

2007-12-31T12:57:00.001-05:00

I realize this is very late getting up, but, frankly, so am I. I've been couch-ridden for the last few weeks after rupturing a disc in my back not once, but twice, around Christmas and New Year's. Oy. I can now tolerate sitting at the computer. Yay! Stay tuned for "The Day It Was Finally Easy to Dress Myself" and "Widen Your Stance: How I Relearned to Load My Dishwasher".

Here are some videos from Christmas morning. A big thank-you to faraway relatives who sent packages, especially for the kids. (Note, any intolerable camerawork is my fault. I forgot that while you can rotate the camera to take tall pictures rather than wide ones, rotating the camera to take a "tall" video just results in a sideways one. Sorry Mom and Dad!)

Christmas morning, Thomas coming downstairs to find what Santa left for him

A present from Thomas's cousin Matthew

A present from Sethie's cousin Jessica

A present from my parents

A present from Nate's parents

Presents to the kids from Gram and Grandpa Poulsen

Oh and the title for the post refers to the fact that we also got a Nintendo Wii for Christmas which is now providing many many hours of post-Christmas merriment (which saved me during my couch-ridden days from just staring slack-jawed at the TV. Instead I stared slack-jawed at the TV while repeatedly shaking the "Wii-mote"). I'll leave it to Nate, if he wishes, to post how he managed to secure a Wii during the crazy holiday shortages (Note: Interestingly enough, it was not from the Nintendo World Store in NYC, despite the fact Nate works a mere block away from there).

Sethie plays a mean boxing match on Wii Sports. If I can manage to capture it on video, I'll post that a little later.

A very late Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all!

Santa takes time out for the little guys...

2007-12-21T09:49:00.000-05:00

A few weeks ago, Thomas wrote a letter to a Santa (well, he dictated and I wrote it). Here's a video I took of the event pre-posting.

In case you missed it, Thomas asks for "Geotrax with Eric", which is a new version of the Fisher-price electric train set we have and he also asks for two "Scoopadivos"*, which in the letter he explains are for both him and his little brother, which is bound to win him points with the big guy (can a four-year-old be that calculating?).

Well, we did in fact post his letter. A little while ago he asked me how we would know if Santa had gotten it and I said we would just have to assume the post office did their job and got it to him.

Well did they ever! Yesterday a letter came in the mail addressed to Thomas with the return address "North Pole". Here's a pic:

The letter is hand-written and says, "Dear Thomas, Santa got your letter at the North Pole and he knows how good you have been this year! Be sure to get to bed early on Christmas Eve...he'll be coming to your house! We've been so busy getting ready for the trip! Love, Santa's Elves and the Reindeer"

Thomas almost fell over with delight when he got to open this. Let me just say a very public thank you to Santa's elves and reindeer who took time out of their very busy schedules to make a little boy so happy.

*Thomas is famous in our house for inventing creative names for toys he loves. He currently has a Transformer here that broke, but he wouldn't let us throw it away. He determined the broken Transformer is known now as "Bedaton" (pronounced by him as "Bed-a-tahn"). He also has a small plastic rabbit he calls, "Rescue Apartment Bunny", presumably because it rescues apartments? "Scoopadivo" is his name for small Chubbies truck with a scoop on the back that he got when he turned 3. He lost this truck at the beach this summer and was absolutely devastated. We looked around local stores to see if they had any to replace it, but we haven't been able to find one. He's really hoping the big guy will come through for him Christmas morning.

They're coming for us!

2007-12-11T14:20:00.000-05:00

Nate and I were making dinner last night when we heard a series of loud "pops". Now, most suburbanites would probably assume a backfiring car or some such, but of course, we thought they were gunshots. As they say, "You can take the people out of New York, but..."

Turns out someone was doing an enormous fireworks display somewhere very close to us. We could easily see the fireworks over the tops of our neighbor's trees. I took some pictures, but they turned out terrible because our motion-sensor light outside comes on if you so much as exhale in proximity to it, but it was very nice to stand out on the porch and watch the display.

Especially now that we know no one was trying to kill us.

Let's Not Go to the Poulsens' House

2007-11-04T19:30:00.000-05:00

'Tis a silly place.

Trick-or-Treating on its last, candy-seeking legs

2007-11-01T12:36:00.000-04:00

Last night, Thomas got his first real dose of trick-or-treating. We took him two years ago, when we lived in Ithaca, around the woodsy neighborhood of six-plexes we lived in, but he was only 2 1/2 at the time and the idea was a little fuzzy to him. Last year, we were dealing with a preemie newborn and also, fond as I was of our NYC neighborhood, I'd as comfortably taken him out around there after dark on Halloween night as I would to hand him off to an overly friendly stranger on the subway, saying "Thanks for offering to babysit!"

We figured, though, our new digs in Princeton were more than safe enough for him to do a round of houses with us in tow. You can imagine his excitement. Here is one night out of the year where any random adult answering the door will give you candy, no strings attached. You don't have to earn the candy by doing chores and you don't owe them anything after you leave. They're just giving you candy! For showing up at their house! It's craziness! It's the greatest kids' night of the year!

Here's a video of Thomas's first door-knocking experience (warning, video is pretty dark on account of it being night-time and whatnot):

We weren't the only trick-or-treaters on the block, but we did notice a certain dearth of kids. So, in fact, did the candy-dispensers who gave whole handfuls to Thomas, presumably to get rid of their stashes. At one house, the woman answering offered him the candy bowl and Thomas, being polite I can only suppose, actually took just one. She said, "Oh you should have more than that!" and proceeded to put several fistfuls of Spongebob gummy hamburgers into his bag. At home, we noticed the bowl of candy we had set out on the front porch had lost a certain amount of sugar poundage, but it wasn't empty and once we were home, no one else knocked on the door the rest of the night (it was barely seven o'clock when we walked in the door).

What's going on? From friends and family all around the country, I'm hearing the same news: the death knell of trick-or-treating has been sounded. Most people are speculating that it's a safety issue, which made sense to me in New York, but out here in quiet suburbia, I'm genuinely puzzled at the idea. Is the greatest kid's night of the year actually doomed? When I was a kid (warning, nostalgia alert), I used to roam around my hometown from dusk until...well if not dawn, at least a lot later than 7 pm, usually with a few friends. We'd hit all the big candy givers and avoid spoilsports (like the town dentist) who gave out apples and pencils. Even after we stumbled home exhausted, we'd sit up the remainder of the night scarfing and cataloging our booty.

I'm devastated that this tradition might be disappearing. What do people think? Is the picture the same everywhere? Is there any chance of a revival?

My current, and possibly future, ninja turtles hope so.

Thomisms

2007-10-23T16:07:00.001-04:00

Thomas and I are playing Peggle together.
Me: "Wow, great shot there, Mr. Thomas!"
Him: "Thanks, Mr. Two-Brains."

Enjoying Our Stunted Agricultural Tourist Traps

2007-10-21T07:48:00.000-04:00

Ah, the Northeast American tourist farm. If you live out this way, you know what I'm talking about: the apple orchards and the pumpkin patches where you take the kiddies every fall and pick your own produce. While you're at it, you can take haywagon and pony rides, feed plump goats, navigate through corn mazes, and buy cider donuts. We started going to these places about three years ago when our friends Sarah and Josh invited us out to their parents' place in the Poconos. We visited a little farm there mid-Oct. with its own apple and pumpkin picking, along with a children's playground, animals to be fed, and painted boards with holes in them where your child can stick their head through and you can photograph them being a cow or a tree or some such (every farm is required to have one of these). Here's a few pictures from our first farm adventure:

Thomas didn't really understand the concept then of "stick your head

through", so after numerous attempts to get him to go around to
the other side, we finally just took his picture anyway.

Apple-picking (and eating) in the orchard

Clearly, he wants THIS pumpkin

This is also the scene of my crime. I can't really post the footage here because this was before we owned a camera that could take .mpg movies. We had a clunky old separate videocam then and, in my defense, it required a lot of attention to operate it to avoid ending up with videos that would induce motion sickness. Here's the set-up: the feeding apparatuses for the animals at this farm consisted of a small rubber conveyor belt with a plastic cup attached to them. You bought the food, natch, then placed it in the cup on the conveyor belt. A little crank at your end would "convey" the plastic cup through the fence to the goat-side where said animal would presumably gobble it up. I had been trying to get Thomas to do it from the time we arrived, but two-year-olds are famously difficult to reason with, so right before we were to leave, I decided I would try one last time and capture the magical event on camera. Nate, Sarah, and Josh had all headed to the checkout with our apples and pumpkins, so Thomas and I lingered behind, newly purchased food pellets in hand. The moment swims, hauntingly, in my mind.

The evidence of the events following is probably still sitting around in a box of old videotapes, but the footage goes a little something like this: The camera shows the conveyor belt. The camera switches to Thomas standing off to the side. My own hand appears in the scene with the food pellets, depositing them in the little cup and my voice urges Thomas to come turn the crank. Camera switches to Thomas toddling over to the conveyor belt and my hand taking his and bringing it up to the crank which I proceed to help him turn. Camera switches back to the little food cup starting on its wobbly way to the goat salivating on the other side of the fence.

And then...a little child's scream. Camera goes wild, whirling around. My voice shouts, "Ah! Oh no!" Camera tilts to the side. Everything goes black.

In my effort to capture us rustically feeding goats through some contrivance presumably created to keep the kidlets at a safe distance from gnashing goat teeth, Thomas's fingers had gotten stuck in the conveyor belt. When I turned the crank (which I wasn't watching because I trying to videotape the moving food), Thomas's fingers got turned with it, rolling on the belt around the underside of the metal wheel. He was screaming hysterically. I dropped the camera and tried to pry his fingers out which just made him scream louder. For all I knew, they were broken. Finally, in a gleaming moment of reason amid the panic, I thought to turn the crank in the opposite direction, rolling Thomas's fingers back out. Lucky for us, the rubber of the conveyor belt was relatively soft and so even as Thomas's fingers had become trapped between it and the wheel, it gave way and didn't crush them. In the end, they were okay. Still, more than a little shame-faced, I abandoned my quest to video him feeding the animals and carried him, still sniffling, over to meet up with the others. The goat never got his food.

This story demonstrates a little of the trouble of trying to live an approximation of the rustic life for a few hours on an autumn Saturday. As Daniel Gross points out in this Slate article, these farms really aren't that rustic. Like an amusement park styled up to look like the Old West, these are tourist money pits whose actual agriculture is so stunted, they would be incapable of surviving if not for their annual fall "harvests". And frankly, the set-up is a genius of American capitalism: instead of paying pickers, they actually charge people to come and pick their own. And the people do come. When we lived in Ithaca, we visited a place called Iron Kettle Farm at least four times over the fall (and no children or goats were harmed in the filming of our memorabilia). Even the name is hokily evocative: the only iron kettles at that farm were for sale in its over-priced giftshop.

Yesterday, we loaded the kids in the car (we've got two now! Yay, more fun!) and headed out to Terhune Orchards for more of the fake rustic same. At this point it's reasonable to ask why, if I'm so down on these places, do we keep going? The truth is, I'm not down on them. I love them. I think they're adorable. I happily charged into their cornmaze even though it turned out to be not so much of a maze as just some rows of corn. Sethie's stroller even got trapped as we tried to force our way down one too-narrow aisle and he yelled angrily until I could manage to finally free him. And their food was so overpriced, we forewent all but the cider donuts and opted to pick up some hotdogs on our way home and cook them on our own backyard barbeque (which, dogs and buns included, was cheaper than if we had bought just one hotdog at the farm).

Still, Thomas got to ride a pony and when I told him he looked like a right cowboy, he held up an arm and shouted "Yeehaw!" We managed to find a lovely round pumpkin that's hanging out in our kitchen now awaiting carving, and even Sethie got in on the cider donut-eating action. And not only did it get us out and about in some beautiful fall weather, it inspired us to spend a little more family time in the backyard grilling hotdogs, playing soccer, and turning our faces into the chill and sharp-scented wind heralding a not-too-far-off winter. If it sounds idyllic, romantic even, it was, for all that its rusticness is a veneer. So are carriage rides in Central Park, but snuggle under the blanket with your honey during one, and you'll feel your heart swell.

Here are some pics and videos of our family farm fun (both Iron Kettle and Terhune):

Thomas tackles the cornmaze at Iron Kettle Farm Oct. 2005

Sethie makes a friend at Terhune Orchards Oct. 2007

Thomas "milks" a "cow" at Terhune Orchards 2007

Thomas wants to get in some Halloween fun a little early...

2007-10-18T09:55:00.000-04:00

Today when I was driving Thomas to preschool, we were stopped at a light across from a small Baptist church that also runs a preschool. Thomas pointed out the window at the church and said, "Mommy, I want to go to that preschool."

Me: "Why is that?"

Thomas: "Because they have a cool playground!"

I looked out the window and had to bite my lip. "Uh, Thomas, that isn't a playground. It's a cemetary."

Him: "What's a cemetary?"

Me: "Well, it's a place where people are buried after they die."

Him: "Buried? Where?"

Me: "See those large stones all over the yard? The people are buried under them."

Him: "Really? Can we dig them up?"

Me, trying to dissuade him without creeping him out: "Uh....they are buried quite deep down, about six feet. It would be really difficult to dig them up."

Him: "We could get a shovel."

Me, trying even harder now: "Well, their families paid a lot of money for them to buried there. It would be really rude to dig them up."

Him: "We could put them back when we're done. No one would know!"

At this point the light changed and I stepped on the gas. Next thing, Thomas is saying, "Is Alex going to be at preschool today?" and happily kicking his legs against the seat, having already forgotten all about his plan for exhuming corpses. Yay.

Thomasisms from Dad

2007-10-18T09:24:00.000-04:00

Thomas is becoming increasingly aware of gender differences, both actual and perceived. He is also starting to have fun with wordplay, something Mara and I quite enjoy.

At the diner, munching on a cheese toasty:

"Hey Daddy?"

"Yes Thomas?"

"Boys don't like girled cheese sandwiches."

Freeing Pink

2007-10-15T12:17:00.000-04:00

My friend Grumpator had this link on her blog to an article about reclaiming the color pink for women (and women gamers in particular). Now if you spend a lot of time in children's clothing departments, like me, you wouldn't think pink had gone out of style in any way. In fact, head to the barely-adolescent Claire's store like I did this last week with my nieces and you would think middle school girls might as well be spray-painted from head to toe in pink--it would certainly be cheaper than plunking down cash for thousands of cheerily pink accessories a girl can deck herself out in these days.

But other than identifying semi-gender-neutral-looking babies as XX and as a way for newly pubescent females to advertise their sex to oppositely-pigmented males, pink really does have a bad reputation. It's the brand of girlishness, the mark of blank-eyed giggling, the hue of "math is hard", the stamp of non-threatening femininity. You can see why feminists would snarl at the color: it's an expression of everything they have been fighting to overcome. Pink says, "I am a girl and all the insipidness that that implies."

The article's author tells the story of how she came by her first Gameboy Advance (a handheld gaming device): a boy returned it to the store because it had a pink cover. In fact, he didn't even return it in order to get a new one: at the time GBA's were so popular there were no other ones in stock. The boy was willing to give up his chance at what was then a real advance in personal gaming just because the cover color was, frankly, too girly.

The author's--and just about any woman's--natural reaction is defensive indignation. Isn't this proof that no matter how far women come in this world, we will never overcome this idea of "girl = weak"? A pink-covered GBA plays the same games as a black-covered one. The only reason a boy might give up his chance to own something like that must be a perpetual, deeply-rooted, cultural misogyny.

Well, yes and no. The truth is that, for years, the feminist movement, however flawed, has been breaking down gender barriers--for women. Not for men. The reason: being the "fairer" sex, the "weaker" sex, meant acquiring masculine traits--clothing, careers--as a step up in the world, a move toward equality from the standpoint of an underclass. That means traditional femininity still reeks of that underclass and the cultural landscape that holds it that way is far more ruthless with men who are willing to cross those barriers than women. Dress your girl like a boy and she's an adorable "tomboy". Dress your boy like a girl and he's an embarrassing "fruit".

Truth is, I can only feel sympathy for the boy giving up an awesome new gaming device because likely his only other option would have been to walk into open degradation by anyone who saw him using it. And that's males and females, women and men, girls and boys. Because equality still means masculinity and when we as women aspire to it, we acknowledge that we want to leave femininity behind, as a lesser, a garishly pink reminder of weakness and frailty. No wonder that for all the inroads we've made in a man's world, men are still standing far outside the door to ours.

The song "When I Was a Boy" by Dar Williams starts out as her lament about moving from a free and boyish childhood, where she could climb trees and scratch her knees, into an overly feminized adulthood where she's offered skimpy clothes to wear and has to have a man walk her home to keep her safe. The turning point in the song is where she admits as much to a man, saying, "I have lost and you have won." Instead of ending there, the man gets a chance to also lament the small expressions of femininity that he has been forced to leave behind in order to be considered manly now:

Oh no no, can't you see
When I was a girl
My mom and I, we always talked
And I picked flowers everywhere that I walked
I could always cry
Now even when I'm alone, I seldom do
And I have lost some kindness
But I was a girl too
And you were just like me
And I was just like you

I'm not advocating a gender-neutral world, which doesn't seem possible or even desirable. Our current sexual dichotomy is part of what makes life so very interesting and exciting. But I do think that the human race would be better off if ideas traditionally thought of as feminine--nurturing, kindness, compassion, gentleness, sensitivity, emotion--were as accessible to men as wearing pants is to us. And maybe femininity wouldn't be seen as weakness; something for women to flee and men to avoid any appearance of. This is not an exclusively male bias. Note that the author titled her post as "reclaiming pink". Clearly she once shunned pink for the very reason the GBA-returning boy had, something she was angry at him for. And how often have we said, "It would be nice to have a sensitive man", then watched a man cry and secretly thought, Oh, grow a pair.

Let's not reclaim pink. Let's free it.

One Year Later...

2007-10-02T20:41:00.000-04:00

When I was kid, I found it very difficult to fathom that time would always keep going forward. I couldn't get my head around the idea that I wouldn't just stop aging at some point--say my mid-twenties perhaps--and be able hang on around there for an indefinite period. Seriously.

The inexorable march of time has befuddled me again. Exactly one year ago, I woke up in the middle of the night with a splitting headache. I was thirty-two weeks pregnant and had been sick for all but maybe two months of that. The morning of 10/2/06, a Monday, I told Nate I wasn't feeling well and he spontaneously offered to stay home from work with me, which is a testament to how terrible I must have looked because Nate is not a spontaneous "take-off work" kinda guy. I spent most of the day in bed feeling ill, but nothing specific, just a general malaise. That night before going to sleep, I sat on the bed and put my head against Nate who was standing in front of me. I said to him, "Ever have a feeling that something is wrong, but you just can't articulate what it is?"

Around 1 am, I woke up with the migraine. I've been a migraine sufferer all my life, but this was unlike any headache I had ever had. I woke Nate and he called my doctor who told us to come to the hospital.

Well, most people who might be reading this know the story by now: the headache was an indication of a huge spike in my blood pressure and a symptom that I had developed full-blown pre-eclampsia. Unable to get my symptoms under control, they induced me the next morning and little Sethie was born about two months before his time.

I think, though, that he and I both knew that time would come for him early that year. He had developed enough to breathe room air, and only spent about two weeks in the NICU, barely a week more than I spent in the hospital. He has grown so briskly in this last year that looking at him now, it's hard to believe he was ever so small.

Once again, I just can't get my head around the fact that some day he's going to be a grown man--he acted like a newborn for so long that I half-expected him to stay that way indefinitely, my infant Peter Pan. I still don't get time. Its endless forward push seems as alien now as it did when I was little.

And speaking of little...Happy First Birthday my little Sethie, who fills my heart with joy, who blesses me every day with his sweet temperament, his contentedness in my arms, and the ruthless way he tears into whatever food he can manage to get his hands on. That's my boy.

My wife is the best birthday present I could ask for

2007-10-01T11:56:00.000-04:00

Hello my friends and family:

Thanks for the many birthday wishes - I will be returning phone calls over the next few days on my way home from work/school. Please forgive the late responses - wife and the boys kept me busy busy.

In addition to the beautiful poem in the below post, Mara gave me an excellent birthday celebration. Saturday was full of adventures and delicious food (including a penuche cake), topped off by a walk on the beach. As we sat together watching the blood-red harvest moon rise over the ocean, I was reminded once again of just how lucky I am.

Best to all,
Nate

Ode to Nate, on This Day, the Day of His Birth

2007-09-29T07:04:00.000-04:00

(Apologies to the writers of Star Trek: The Next Generation and of the episode "Schisms" in particular)

Nathan Poulsen is your familial nomenclature
Born to pursuers intellectual, scholarly by nature
Your studies physical, cor-por-ate, and chemical
Have confirmed to you some sulfamides are non-symmetrical

I find myself intrigued by your instant dormant status
When I scratch just right the spot of your muscle infraspinatus
And how you like to press the couch with your latissimi dorsi
to study anthropology ("Cops") and drink an eight-ounce pepsi

On unsuspecting females you have honed romantic talent
But your help with our consanguines small proves you to be gallant
And though I think they love me with their effervescent glee
On weekends they prefer a manly, congeneric knee

Oh Nate, I know that you are erudite, solicitous, and staid
yet the grecian inking on your forearm shows contumaciousness in spades
And though you must be gone a lot to New York up above
I nonetheless consider you my true and only love

The Secret

2007-09-19T08:52:00.000-04:00

Yesterday at the store, Sethie was flirting with the woman at checkout, as he is wont to do. He tried to catch her eye, gave a shy smile pressing his cheek into his shoulder, and giggled when she squeezed his little socked foot. She was quite taken with him, especially his two little bottom teeth that have been very slowly coming in over the last month or so. As we were about to leave, she said, "Let me give you a little secret, something my grandmother told me. If you get an egg and write his name on it, then hide it in your house, the rest of his teeth will come in quickly. I did it. Worked for my son."

I smiled, thanked her, and left.

I'm a fantasy fiction fan--movies, books, you name it--and so I understand the appeal of the mystical, of the fantastic, of magic. I'm also a lifelong Mormon (minus a few years in college there...) and I have always believed in God and that there are mysteries in the universe that humans--no matter how technologically advanced we become--will never figure out. I suppose on the face of it that might seem to make me ripe for hiding eggs in the house in the hopes that somehow this will hasten my baby's orthodontic advancement. Instead, I'm okay with knowing that are certain things over which I have no control.

But I understand where she was coming from. Magic is the answer to helplessness. In fact, the less control we have over something, the more the idea of magic appeals. In fantasy fiction, magic can take many forms: personal powers, the enchanted sword, and so on, but there is usually an aspect that underlies it: its secretiveness. Secret magical orders, secret magical weapons, secret magical abilities. Why secret? Well, if it's not secret, then anybody can have it, and once everyone has it, it ceases to be magic. It becomes ordinary.

We're living in an age of unprecedented technological innovation that has rendered quite a bit of the world under our control. You can call anywhere in the world--talk to someone as if they were standing right next to you, even if an ocean separates you. We can fly through the air like birds. Diseases that once decimated entire populations have been eradicated with vaccines. Diseases that still don't have cures--cancer, AIDS, etc. now have such amazing treatments to fight them that they aren't always the death sentences they were even just a few years ago. These things should be amazing, magical even.

But they're not, not really. They're ordinary because they're ubiquitous. Now maybe income inequality renders some of these things more attainable for some than for others, but that's a discussion for another day. The truth is, the more control we have, the more we're bothered by things we can't control.

In fact, we seem to be tipping in the opposite direction. Despite the phenomenal success of western medicine and pharmaceuticals, there's a growing mistrust of standard doctors, standard treatments. It can't cure everything--people still get sick, people still grow old, people still die. Despite technological advances in agriculture that allow us to produce more than enough food for the entire planet, there are people still going hungry. And despite the tremendous wealth in the world, and in America in particular, there are still people who struggle to support themselves, who live in terrible poverty. And so we become disillusioned with our own power because it has limits.

Someone once said, the more perfect our world becomes, the more glaring its imperfections. If our own technology fails us--and it does, it fails us--then there must be some secret we're missing. Some people believe these secrets are actually known and a vast conspiracy of intellectuals, or government officials, or religious leaders, or name-your-group-of-powerful-collectivists is withholding them from us for some reason. Other people believe that someone somewhere has the secret and if only you could get a hold of their mailing (and send them your $100), you can be in on the secret, too.

The secret is magic and the magic is secret. Magic is appealing because it implies the fix already exists and if only we could access it, our problems would be solved. The truth is, progress is slow. It is agonizing. It takes years and the collective efforts of many people to come to fruition. And we will probably never fix everything. Humans are imperfect and so our efforts are doomed to be imperfect, too.

The idea behind conservatism is there are some notions/actions that have been shown to work and work well and that we ought to conserve these things. That doesn't mean we shouldn't be on the lookout for new solutions, but it also means the old solution isn't bad for being old, for being ordinary. And we should always be skeptical of the secret, of the promise of magic, recognizing that its appeal is in our own impatience to see a problem fixed. The old adage is true: there are no quick fixes.

So the only time I'll be hiding eggs around the house is Easter. Sorry Seth. You're stuck with babyfood for now.

Simple End of Summer Happiness

2007-09-12T21:25:00.000-04:00

Truck Adventures

2007-09-10T08:47:00.001-04:00

My Dad recently fulfilled his longtime dream of owning a really big truck. He spends quite a bit of time out in the back country and driving to my parents' property in Colorado, so it's about time he had a machine worthy of his lifestyle, but every machine has its limits. Here is his first person account of a recent "truck adventure":

On Labor Day (3rd of September 2007) Marcia and I decided to take the day off and head up into the Cache National Forest. I had heard that it was possible to drive from the head of Logan Canyon over to the Hardware Ranch at the head of Blacksmith Canyon via the dirt and gravel roads between US Highway 89 and Utah State Highway 101. So we loaded up the pickup truck with gas and a picnic lunch and headed out about 11:30 am.

By 12:30 we were almost to the top of highway 89 just short of the Bear Lake summit. At that point, just before you reach the Limber Pine trailhead, a wide gravel road takes off into the Cache National Forest. According to the map it is probably 30 to 40 miles to the Hardware Ranch. For quite a ways, the road was wide and well graded and through out the forest we saw quite a number of trailers parked in the high meadows of the forest. There was also a fair amount of traffic on the road in the form of both trucks and ATV's.

After a while, as we got deeper into the forest, the character of the road began to change.

It narrowed to the width of a one lane road and started to have more rocks and eroded spots in it. Still it was nothing a four wheel drive truck couldn’t handle easily. Also the road dropped off from the high meadows into a canyon. At several points we encountered traffic coming the other way and either we or they had to maneuver off the road to let the other fellow pass.

Part way down this road there was a place to pull off. Here the forest looked cool and inviting as a picnic site. Marcia and I set up our folding chairs and had a nice lunch (which we shared with the flies and bees). From time to time trucks and ATV’s would pass our site on the nearby road. Also three cows stopped to moo at us on their way to government spring which is further down the canyon. After a short hike up into the forest we loaded up the truck and headed on down canyon.

Quite a ways farther on and after a couple of narrow passes of other vehicles the road came out of the timber into a high wide mountain valley with little timber. The road itself was fairly wide but had lots of potholes and rocks in it. It stretched off into the distance but appeared to be the way to go to get to Hardware. The speed on this road was 5 to 10 miles an hour depending on how good or bad it was. From time to time we did however encounter Forest Service signs which said, among other places which we had never heard of, that we were headed toward the Hardware Ranch.

For quite a while now we had seen no other traffic. The canyon began to narrow towards a slot which we thought the road would go down thru to the ranch. However, just as we got to the beginning of the slot, the road forked. The right hand continued down canyon, but the left hand turned and started up what looked to be maybe an 800 foot high ridge. And at the fork was a Forest Service Sign with the word ‘HARDWARE’ and an Arrow pointing to the left fork. The left fork was decidedly a much more narrow rocky road which started to climb and disappear around the flank of the ridge.

By now we had been on the Forest roads for nearly three hours, so the prospect of going back wasn’t very appealing, but neither was the look of this road. At that moment down the left hand fork came an old pickup truck with three bow hunters in it. They waved as they passed; and I decided if they could drive down this road I could drive up it. Just as we started up the road we encountered three more bow hunters on ATV’s. I asked the first one how much farther it was to the Hardware Ranch and he replied “Its only 14 miles!” What an answer – we had already come what seemed like 30 or 40 miles. He told me that once you got up on the dug way at the top of the ridge to turn south and it was down hill from there to the Hardware Ranch.

As we started up the road it turned the flank of the ridge and I got a better look at where we were headed. As I looked at the road my heart dropped into the pit of my stomach. Above us you could see on the steep rocky hillside a series of switchbacks which climbed higher and higher and finally disappeared from view. It was apparent that once you started up this steep and narrow rocky road there was no turning back. Putting the truck into 4 wheel drive low gear we commenced out slow crawl up and I prayed that this would turn out all right. Marcia later told me she was also scared spit less by what she saw ahead of us and wondered why I didn’t say anything. I replied “What was I supposed to do – start crying!” Part way up we encountered three more bow hunters on ATV’s, but they were able by careful maneuvering to pass us. Had we encountered another truck there would have been nothing to do but try backing down this nasty road. But thankfully we were spared that ordeal. After what seemed like forever we crawled up onto the top of the ridge. At that point the road visibly improved. And about twenty minutes later we came to the hardtop at the Hardware Ranch.

I was almost tempted to get out of the truck and kiss the asphalt. After a pit stop we headed down Blacksmith Fork to the Cache Valley and by 8pm we were home again, having covered by the trip odometer some 138 miles. Doesn’t sound like much distance, but at 5 to 10 miles an hour a lot of the way it took a long time. Some parts of this area we intend to visit again, but never again will I drive up or down that hairpin rocky track.

Ah! Bugs!

2007-09-08T15:15:00.000-04:00

One change moving from urban to suburban that hasn't been positive is the number of bugs. Naturally you would think that ew, city, very dirty, but while that may be true, the bug level seems to be on the lowside. There are flies of course, and, shhhhhhuuuuddddeeerrrr, cockroaches (big ones!), but other than that, there are really very few bugs that you see on a regular basis and most buildings have an exterminator that comes round usually once a week, so, unless you are a total slob, you don't even really see those very often.

Here it's completely different. This has been the summer of bugs. And I have seen some REALLY BIZARRE creatures, things that I have never in my life laid eyes on. I wish I had pictures of them, but inevitably they catch me offguard as I'm strolling through the neighborhood, or, heaven forbid, strolling through my house and one of two things happens: either I'm outside and I run or I'm inside and I strike out at the wee beastie, squashing it into wee beastie pulp, beyond all recognition, clearly before adequate preservation techniques can be employed.

This morning, however, we headed out the backdoor to pile in the car for Thomas's first soccer "game" of the fall season and nearly walked headlong into this, which a very intrepid spider had built IN THE COURSE OF A SINGLE NIGHT (you will probably have to click on the image to see it in its full glory):

Here's a close-up:

Mr(s). spider was quite grumpy to see us as (s)he was wrapping up a tasty meal in the center of the web and was forced to abandon it to cower surreptitiously up in a corner, hoping we would pass by and not happen to notice the enormous, over two foot diameter web that (s)he had built from the tip of our porch railing to the overhang of our roof. Here's a picture of the intrepid arachnid:

The thing looks to me to be what I've always known as a crab spider, but google image search produced crab spiders that don't really resemble this. The only thing I've seen otherwise is the thorn spider, but those appear to be native to Madagascar, so the chance of one being in our little backyard in Princeton Junction is, hopefully, rare. If anyone knows what this thing is, let me know. I'm pretty curious.

When we returned from soccer, the web was still there, but the spider and its tasty meal were gone. Don't know if the spider is planning to come back, but I hope it's moved on because Nate has promised to take the hose to the web ASAP.

UPDATE: Nate has actually caught the spider and is gleefully taking it upstairs to alcohol it. Up close and personal, the spider looks very different than from its initial wrapped up position. It has a distinctive marking on its abdomen that we're trying now to use to identify it.

Maralee's Happy Birthday

2007-09-04T09:06:00.000-04:00

I realize that I am not a regular contributor -- in fact, I think this is my first entry (other than comments) on our blog. I have prepared a few posts, but I have never published them. For some reason, I am resistant to actually put it out there, but for my beautiful wife, I will do it today.

I am at work today, and with school tonight, I probably won't see Mara until late this evening (provided she can stay awake until then), so I wanted to publicly wish Mara a Happy Birthday, and let her (and readers of the blog) know how much I love and appreciate her.

I am always amazed by how she cares for the boys - when I have had them for even a few hours, I am at my wit's end. They love her so much - Sethie is usually happy to see me in the morning, but will claw his way to mom when he catches sight of her.

Thomas told me yesterday that "it would be fun if mommy went to work and daddy stayed home and we could play transformers all day every day!" When I asked him if he would really like that, he said no, because mommy "takes good care of me." I didn't follow up on the implications of that statement.

She is also very humble - her story that was included in the anthology has been mentioned (along with her name) in many of the reviews of the book, including Publisher's Weekly and the McClatchy family of daily papers. In fact, I may even get in trouble for mentioning this... but as those of you who read this blog know, she is an excellent writer, and I am very proud of her.

Mara is also supportive and encouraging of both my (never-ending) school and work endeavors, and has been my mental and emotional anchor for the last 6+ years. She is the love of my life, and I feel so so lucky to have her. She is my best and closest friend.

Happy Birthday Maralee!

Thomisms Redux

2007-09-03T17:57:00.000-04:00

Nate: "Thomas, you need to get cleaned up. Thomas? Thomas, are you listening to me?"
Thomas: "Daddy, I didn't hear you."
Nate: "What didn't you hear me say?"
Thomas: "That I needed to get cleaned up."
Nate: "You didn't hear that?"
Thomas: "Nope."

Thomisms

2007-08-22T11:53:00.001-04:00

"Wrong answer, punk." Optimus Prime to Star Scream (via Thomas).

Me: "That was very clever."
Thomas: "Thank you. I thinked it in my head."

Me: "Thomas, I have to do laundry today. Do you want to help?"
Thomas: "No, Mommy. I've got a lot of things to take care of this morning. My toys...that sort of thing."

Puddle Jumping Goes Awry

2007-08-21T17:10:00.000-04:00

For those of you suffering around the country (and world, I suppose) from unnatural heat waves, this has really been the summer to be on the east coast of the U.S. Most of our summer temps have been in the 70-90 F range, with only middling humidity. In fact, for the last several days it has been rainy and chilly outside. Today we topped out at a smoking 67 degrees. Right now the temp is about 62. We've gotten increasingly tired of being stuck in the house, so earlier this afternoon, I outfitted Thomas in his rain gear which, I am embarrassed to admit, consists only of waterproof boots and a jacket with a vinyl-like exterior that keeps the wearer dry for roughly ten minutes of outdoor rain action. We really ought to get him some actual raingear, but I only remember that when it's, you know, actually raining.

Of course, Thomas, being Thomas, doesn't do anything halfway, so when I told him he could go outside and "jump in puddles" he interpreted puddle as "any available body of water" and "jump" as a verb covering WWF moves.

I take some comfort in the fact that even if he had been outfitted in actual waterproof items, he still would have ended up soaked. Don't feel bad for him--he loves the cold (he's strangely insensitive to pain, too. Should I be worried?) and he still got to have a nice warm bath afterwards.

Here's the evidence:

"But you need a little Bubby"

2007-08-16T19:42:00.000-04:00

Thomas and I have been singing the "Frowny face" song today, which goes:

No one likes a frowny face
Change it for a smile
Make the world a better place
By smiling all the while

One way Nate and amuse ourselves and (mildly) distress our children (well, only Thomas since Seth is oblivious to lyrical correctness), is to change out various words or lines in songs such as this with one or both of their names. After singing the song through the right way a couple of times, I teasingly sang to him,

No one wants a Thomas face
Change it for a Seth...

At which point, he stopped singing along, blinked, and then said, "But you need a little Bubby." (Bubby has been Thomas's nickname since he was about six months old)

I said with a smile, "Oh yeah? Why do I need a little Bubby?"

"To make things for you."

"Like what?"

"A.....peanut butter and mud cake."

"Ewww. That doesn't sound so good."

"But Mommy, it's your birthday. You don't have to eat it, you just have to look at it. All the time."

Thomas and I can have conversations like this all day. Peanut butter inevitably factors in, just as unicorns did for me when I was his age until, oh, about 15.

Ok, 21.

Ok, last year, but that was, really, the end of it. Really.

Anybody seeing Stardust this weekend?

Rules of Engagement

2007-08-09T14:14:00.000-04:00

Witness the dating ritual of the suburban mother. There is the list of hopeful potentials. The first, awkward, giddy phonecall. The well-rehearsed invitation. Relief at acceptance or forced flippancy in the face of the polite decline--you wonder if their excuse is valid or they don't really feel the same way about you that you do about them. The first group date. Later one of the polite declines calls you back, asks you out this time. You wonder, is this one for real? Is this burgeoning relationship going to grow into something that will stand the test of time?

I'm actually talking about something far more trepidatious than just romance, though it gets a lot less ink in women's media: the making of friends among married women with children, especially those of us who have opted out of immediate careers in order to be our kids' primary caregivers. When I worked, most of my friends came from my job. If your personalities are at all compatible, it's a lot easier to become friends with someone you're forced to be around day in and day out. There are no awkward introductions, no wondering when it's an appropriate time to duck out of a get together. Plus, you always have something to talk about: work. Many years now of moving around and restarting the new friend dance has made me a veteran. I don't know that that means I'm terribly good at it, but at least I know the moves. Church seems to be the easiest way to ingratiate yourself with potential friends. Here are three hours a week where you get a mini-work environment--a chance to chat with people who just might share some common interests and with whom you're expected to socialize. Once you've appeared on the scene and scoped out potential friends, the best thing you can do is casually remark how you ought to get the kids together to play. This is, of course, a front, but it's well-established and the underlying meaning doesn't get lost. If you're pretty gutsy, you can go ahead and try to acquire their phone number or email address on the spot. If you are the newbie and they already belong to a group of friends, you can hope that they will make the first move and invite you along to their next gathering. If that works, you should host the next event to more firmly entrench yourself in their posse.

This is the stage I've reached with a group of women from my ward. I had one false start where a woman gave me a general invite to her playgroup, then told me she would call or email the next time they met and I never heard from her again. Further attempts to chat her up or find a time to get together have pretty much failed. I'd like to think this isn't because she suddenly decided I wasn't her type, but just because sometimes these things fall through. You're too established in your life to make the outreach past the first Christian fellowship moment. The window closes for making the connection permanent and you're left with awkward church run-ins--the newbie's face going from eager and friendly to guarded and polite.

I am that newbie. Today I hosted a little pool party for Thomas's new friends--and by extension, maybe mine. I had gotten pretty comfortable in New York with my group of friends. Thomas had a regular gang of three to five year-olds (including his best pal, the affable and ineffable Desmond P. Jones) that he loved to run around with and their mothers were my really close friends. We hung out several times a week. I had friends to confide in and friends to talk books and movies with and friends who were just good humor company. Now that I've moved, I find myself relying more on distant friends, email and phone friends, to stay connected. But I started the suburban "dating" dance here, too. Virtual friends will do for only so long. Eventually you need someone of flesh and blood or you start to feel unreal.

Sometimes I wish I still worked a 9 to 5 job so I could get all my socialization in automatically and not have to "work the scene". Making and keeping a friend you have to actively engage over and over again in order to stay connected takes so much more effort.

At least, though, if things don't work out, you don't have to performance review that person later.

Gingerism: It's Real

2007-08-05T00:18:00.000-04:00

Nate and I have talked about the possibility of living abroad at some point, usually focusing on the British Isles (not having to learn another language being key here. We're kinda lazy that way). Recently, though, Nate mentioned that we might have to dye Sethie's hair in that case, due to the rampant "gingerism" in Britain. At first, I laughed, thinking the idea of red-haired people being harrassed was simply so ludicrous, it couldn't possibly be true. Frankly, I'd never even heard of such a thing--not even the term "ginger".

Apparently, it is true and seems to stem from England's long-standing bias against the Irish and the Scottish (in Scotland, about 13% of the population is red-haired; in Ireland, about 10%; in the U.S., the figure is about 2%). Of course, once I heard about ginger bias, I started noticing it everywhere in the British cinema we frequently watch. Just tonight, we watched the movie Hot Fuzz (both hilarious and disturbingly gory, just like its predecessor Shaun of the Dead) and during the climactic fight scene, the villain grabbed a red-haired boy and threatened to shoot the "ginger-nut". Earlier this week, I rented School of Seduction, another British comedy. Again in the climactic scene, one of the heroines this time accused another character of being a "four-eyed geek" and a hideous "ginger whinger" who was bullied in school.

Both Nate and I have red-haired nieces and nephews and I had always kind of hoped I might have a red-haired baby at some point. Thomas was born with almost black hair that's lightened now to a mid-brown, about the same color as Nate's (though Nate was a toehead as a baby). But Sethie was born with strawberry blond hair that has both deepened and brightened into a shiny copper. His red hair has always solicited gushing comments from the people around us. How interesting that here in the U.S. red hair is something to be admired and desired, while our nearest neighbor in the western world treats redheads as trash. I wish I had something pithy to say about it, but frankly, it's gotten so much under my skin, I can't think what I could possibly say.

I guess if we do go to Great Britain, we'll have to stick to the "inferior" isles--Scotland and Ireland. No problem here. I've always liked my men in kilts.

Science and bath time collide!

2007-08-03T09:08:00.000-04:00

Normally I would be loathe to embarrass my children with a bathtub pic or video posted to the web, but this one is pretty cute and I think Nate did some excellent camera work in avoiding accidental exposure of anything, uh, important. Note that both Nate and I are in full baby-talk mode which no parent can help, no matter how cynical.

Captain Wonder Crawl

2007-08-03T08:35:00.000-04:00

About a week ago, Sethie started crawling in earnest. This week, he also learned how to sit up (mostly). This makes him my second child who has crawled before he sat up, though Thomas had a much bigger gap between the two: he crawled at seven months and didn't sit up until he was nine months. In Thomas's case, it had to do with his muscle tone--let's just say he's a natural gymnast. He has great muscle strength, but low muscle tone, i.e. he's very very flexible. Because of it, he needed both speech and occupational therapy until he was about three years-old. Now people are amazed when I mention Thomas's speech therapy considering the fact that he talks about as much as he moves, which is to say, all the time.

When I was pregnant with Sethie, I wondered what it would be like to have a child that hit all his milestones on time, like most of the other babies we knew when Thomas was little. I was never embarrassed to have Thomas in therapy; he clearly needed and benefited from it. Still, it was a stress. You don't like your children to suffer for anything. Listening to him struggle day in and day out to make sounds and form words broke my heart. Of course, every little triumph was a cause for celebration. And he is so very naturally happy in attitude, his struggles didn't seem to affect him as much as they did me. Still, I thought, how much better would it be to have a baby who didn't have to struggle?

I recall telling a friend who was worried about her baby being born with birth defects something to the effect of, "Even if they're born fine, they're still going to have problems. You don't get to choose their problems. They might not have any real problems until they're older and it might be problems with school, or friends, or something we can't even fathom now. You just have to help them with whatever it is. That's what being a parent means." I never could have predicted that I would have a baby two months early, which means of course that his milestone schedule is completely off. He is ten months today, so he's off the sitting up by about four months and the crawling by two or three, depending on who you ask. Does it matter? I look at Thomas whose muscle tone issues might actually benefit him now as he starts into sports requiring flexibility. Sometimes problems become strengths.

And sometimes your children are Captain Wonder Crawl and other times, TV Watching Zombie.

Thomism

2007-07-23T14:12:00.001-04:00

Thomas has recently discovered television commercials. While I was afraid in the past that he would start craving the toys and food he saw on TV, in fact it's much worse. He appears to be susceptible to everything he sees advertised.
Thomas: "Mommy, mommy! Can we get that?"
Me: "You want to get a 30-year mortgage with a low down payment?"

Thomas, bringing me a book, "Mommy, can you read this to me? I don't know my language."

Thomas, showing us his hand, "Hey, look what I smell like!"

Me: "Thomas, what's wrong?"
Thomas: "Mommy, I'm pretending to be a king who's crying because he got married."

Thomas is helping me with dinner.
Me: "Thomas, you're doing a good job."
Thomas: "I'm doing a great job, Mommy."

Harry Potter and the Humongous Hype

2007-07-22T21:25:00.000-04:00

This is not a Harry Potter-bashing post. My copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, pre-ordered around Jan., came Saturday and I've already finished it, so count me among his fans. Still, as Marc Antony, via Shakespeare, once intoned, "I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him", even as his speech goes on to remind the Romans why Julius wasn't such a bad bloke after all. What kind of bloke is Harry? Why does the whole planet seem to care so very much?

Tolkien, like Rowlings, was also once vaulted into an instant spotlight, but even he had to have a specific movement and time--the drug-addled sixties--to explain his sudden popularity. Rowlings barely had time to blow her nose before her first novel started disappearing off bookstore shelves in droves. Potter also has Frodo beat on another score: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone has sold more copies alone than all three Lord of the Rings books combined, and Tolkien has been hanging around a lot longer than "the boy wizard". I know these stats won't exactly shock anyone--the Harry Potter Hype Machine has been in full bore since the first book rounded up kids and adults alike into one big cult of four-eyed magic mania--but can anyone explain them? Modern Library's list of 100 Greatest Novels isn't short for science fiction/fantasy writers--it has Tolkien, Robert Heinlein, even Ayn Rand--but J.K. Rowlings fails to make it. And that's not just the Board's list, that's the Reader's list, too. TIME Magazine's list is similarly Potter-less. So why are these tales of a scar-faced, wand-waving adolescent squashing all but a handful of religious tomes as the best-selling books of all time?

Greater minds than mine have attempted this question and it's probably better suited to some comparative lit's Ph.D. thesis, but I can't help but wonder. On the face of it, Rowlings' writing is solid, but hardly splashy and she slides a bit in the later books, probably because no editor dared touch them. She occasionally attempts to use a simile or metaphor when she's actually describing the real appearance of something--in this book she says the ground-up shards of a mirror were "like glittering dust". She overuses a pet plot device--having Harry overhear details crucial to his mission from unsuspecting antagonists--all too often, culminating in the near constant mindmeld Harry shares with Voldemort that endangers Harry only once, but ever afterwards gives him an easy, constant update on Mr. Name Unspoken's whereabouts and activities. She also can't resist the "all is revealed" moment, either, where characters get together to rehash in clunky exposition what's happened and how it all fits together, especially the cliched bad guy "monologue" ending--"Before I kill you, Harry, here's how I did everything prior to this point!"

But wordcraft is not enough to sustain a book--and its lack isn't enough to condemn one, either. The book I finished prior to picking up Harry Potter was a much more literary sci-fi called Life by Gwyneth Jones. Jones' writing slaps Rowlings sideways. It is beautiful, poised, provocative, and requires careful attention. Her characters are sharply and poignantly drawn. The plot is driven less by adventure than by, well, life as her title indicates and it has some uncomfortable and challenging things to say about gender in a modern world. Still, a few weeks out of it and it's mostly slipped my mind. Nate and I had a similar reaction to a movie called The Fountain which we saw because Nate is a big fan of director Darren Aronofsky. The Fountain also has a lot of very pretty packaging--it's a very visual arresting film. But we were strangely unmoved at the end, despite the fact that characters spend most of the film wracked with grief. "Bloodless" is how I described it to Nate and he agreed. We simply didn't care what happened to these people.

And on that score, I think Harry Potter gets a punch back in at its more literary counterparts. Even if many of Rowlings' peripheral characters are more caricature than real (the Dursleys in particular come to mind), Harry, Ron and Hermione, a classic heroic triumvirate, have enough personality for all of them. Through seven books, they've grown up and the magical wonder of the first book is appropriately mirrored in the grief of the seventh book as they (and we) see the things we found so amazing in childhood take on deeper and darker meaning when viewed from adulthood. Rowlings isn't afraid to let them fully experience adolescence, either, even in front of a backdrop--evil maniac torturing and killing his way to triumph--that seems too serious for explorations of young crushes, hormonal-induced depression, and--for Ron--suddenly discovering your childhood girl friend has breasts. In the final book, the three of them are finally of majority and they strike out on their own together, trying to do what they think is right without the reassuring guidance of better-informed adults. The thing they realize is that adults are not especially well-informed either. Every decision is wrought with peril, and often, regret. Courage has been described as not the absence of fear, but going forward despite fear. Rowlings proves that courage is really the going forward despite doubt. Because of these things, the characters endure, grow large in the mind of the reader. We want them to win. We wish we could help them--we read voraciously alongside them as if we could.

And what Rowlings might lack in wordcraft, she more than makes up for in storycraft. I read the first book several years ago and dismissed it as so much fantasy fluff. It wasn't until after the first two movies had come out that I decided to try them again and from there, I read books two through six in a few months' rush (rather dumbly, I didn't wait until all seven books were out, so I was forced into the position of waiting restlessly for its debut, after having rolled my eyes at all the hype and giddiness that accompanied earlier books to stores). Small nuggets in the first few books that had seemed out of place, or too easily come by grew with meaning in each following book. By the seventh book, a carefully laid heroic arc for Harry becomes shockingly clear, building on these little dropped hints across what now amounts to thousands of pages. It reminded me, not favorably, of some other fantasy series I have read where the writers start out clever and smashing in the first few books and then you realize by the third or fourth book that they shoved all their great ideas in early and are petering out now (Robert Jordan, anyone?). Rowlings seems to have infinite patience. Something laid without adequate explanation in the first book might not reappear until book six or seven and to find it again is like a treasure hunt, like discovering on Antique Roadshow that ugly old painting of grandma's is actually worth $30,000. How she managed to keep track of it all should be made required study by all writing students.

Some people have complained that her later books have too much filler surrounding the center action. Maybe so, but the Tolkien that everyone admires suffers the same complaint on re-inspection--clearly the man was more interested in the literary and historical aspects of his own novels than the driving plot (Frodo's destruction of the ring comes very early in the last book and comes off as anti-climatic. Tolkien really needed an editor like Peter Jackson). It's hard to blame Rowlings that she has grown to such mammoth proportions as a writer that editors are loath to harass too much change out of her (would you complain to your money cow that her milk is too creamy?) Tolkien's "filler" was a lot of droning place descriptions and non-sequitor singing. Rowlings maybe spends too much time worrying what Harry is thinking about in between the moments where he's actually doing something. She is invested in him. So apparently are millions of other people.

I'm pretty sad to see Harry go. The seventh book is the best of the series, invested with real emotion and a well-executed bang-out ending--if anyone was worried. It's been a little disappointing for me to emerge back into the real world, where the chance to participate in an epic battle against evil is pretty slim. Here's hoping that some bright young writer is just waiting in the wings to emerge as the next grand storyteller and give us all a reason to stay home on Saturday nights, curled up with a good book.

Sidebar: While reading Harry, I was thinking of the idea of being the protagonist in my own story--how absorbed I am in my own concerns and how narcissistically my own world seems to revolve around those concerns, as if other people are the bit players in my drama. In Harry's world, several characters make the ultimate sacrifice and their deaths get varying levels of attention, but hey, this is Harry's story and Harry triumphs, so it's all for the best, right? I'd be interested in hearing what people think about being the bit player--would you be okay with being a footnote on the way to glory, fighting your tiny square of the fight, if a Harry Potter-like hero needed your minuscule help to accomplish his/her goal? I'm not talking about soldiers in an army, necessarily, but ordinary people who hear the news, decide for themselves what they think they ought to do, and suffer the consequences of those actions, maybe without much acknowledgement either. What do you think?

Wedding Throwdown: Mormons vs. Those Other Guys

2007-07-15T08:11:00.000-04:00

So much has been written about the American Wedding that I'm not sure I've got anything of substance to add. Still, there's something about attending a wedding that makes a person want to psychoanalyze the state of American life and its unions in particular. Yesterday, Nate and I attended the wedding of Nate's cousin, Laila. Nate's uncle, Brian, is the freewheeler of his family, having defied his more traditional father's wishes on more than one occasion: he went to Harvard instead of MIT, majored in English instead of a "man's field" like engineering, he plays the sitar professionally and is married to Shubha, the only professional female surbahar player in the U.S. Laila is his adopted daughter with his first wife, Sandra, and their only child at all, so naturally the event of her marriage needed to be a grand affair.

And grand it was. I wore adult shoes (3-inch heels), ate adult food (caviar and expensive imported cheeses), had adult conversations ("Oh yes, Princeton is a lovely little town"), and did some very unadult dancing (I shook it to "Mony Mony", but declined to do the macarena). On separate occasions, Nate and I each got hit on (his bailed when she found out he was married, mine already knew I was married and waited until Nate had left to break out his line). I declined to have my champagne glass filled several times until an exasperated waiter went ahead and filled it anyway (when I tried to tell him no while he was filling it, he just leered at me).

I've had the privilege of attending the nuptial ceremonies of several major religions: Catholic, Jewish, Protestant, and Mormon (both in and out of the temple) and I've concluded that the Mormons are the most efficient. Most of the time, while the officiator might make a little five to ten minute speech about why marriage is a good thing, it's still just a quick "Do you?" and "Do you?" affair. All these recitations of poems, singing of singers, ceremonial hand-wrapping and/or glass crushing, etc., these don't make it into the Mormon wedding. As a Mormon, therefore, you can feel a bit cheated. That's why the Utah "Wedding Breakfast" was invented, to smash all that stuff back in. In fact, while the Mormon wedding is the most efficient, the Mormon wedding day is usually the longest. Most Mormons get married in the morning, then there's a wedding breakfast, afternoon pictures at the marriage site and at the reception site, and at least one wedding reception in the evening. Mormons can't get over the need to be efficient, though, so unlike the demure sit-down $100-a-head dinner of most wedding receptions, Mormons invite everyone they know (and everyone else they know) to bring a present, walk quickly through a receiving line of bride, groom, and close relatives, then sit at a table for another ten minutes eating mints and drinking sprite mixed with sherbet before feeling compelled to go home in order to free up their seat for someone else. The efficiency level increases as the servers are usually young women from your ward, the platers are relief society members, and the reception site is most likely to be the cultural hall of your ward building, with the receiving line posted under a rented trellis by the basketball hoop.

I suspect it's because with most Mormon families having a multitude of children and with a large population of young adults getting home from their missions all the same time, the procession of weddings in a town with a high Mormon population can get to be a little overwhelming. There are always wedding reception invitations on my parents' countertop whenever we visit them in Utah and the lucky couples are usually the child of someone my parents knew from something, however briefly. "Who's this, Mom?" "Oh, that's the daughter of the woman I stood next to in line at the supermarket." Knowing you only have to go for a few minutes to say hello, then devour your mints and take off enables you to attend four or five weddings in a week. Of course, the gift-giving can get a little prohibitive, but only family and close friends are expected to give actual presents. The 500+ additional reception invitees can usually drop a few bucks in a collective fund for the bride and groom to buy themselves a nice couch. The system is well-established.

Nate and I took the Mormon wedding efficiency one step further by squashing the wedding breakfast and reception into a single event (we ate breakfast with family and friends upstairs at our reception hall, then went downstairs afterwards to start greeting additional guests). We gave our poor photographer a bit of a heart attack, since there was so set picture-taking time--he was forced to follow us around at our reception (efficiency decrease: we didn't have a receiving line), waiting until we stopped talking to people, then dragging us out to snap as many pictures as he could before we escaped again. The whole thing was over by two in the afternoon. Frankly, most of it is a wonderful blur. Two events stick out in my mind: 1) seeing Nate for the first time after our temple ceremony, flanked by his brothers and decked out in his Scottish finest (Nate's ancestors on his mother's side are Stewart Scots). My heart nearly popped out of my chest, and 2) Nate pulling a sword out of his belt for me to cut the cake (and getting to lick the frosting off the sword tip to the appreciative yells of the crowd).

I wouldn't presume to say which wedding style is better: Mormon efficiency vs. Everyone Else opulence. The opulence, frankly, is more fun and when yours is the only immediate wedding in town, you get a little more attention for it. The party is louder and goes longer--and the food is far better. There are first dances and toasts (Mormon weddings, lacking alcohol, also lack the drunken friend salutes that make most weddings so entertaining), multiple courses and wedding singers. The Catholics in particular get to have an entire worship event, audience participation included, to go along with the wedding itself. The length of the ritual begins to wind itself tightly with power, culminating in the well-known recitation of vows that, by their very familiarity, seems to unleash a collective feeling of spiritual joy. There is something wonderful to be said about spending half a day really feting someone you love as they start into a completely new chapter of their life, combining your collective good wishes into a foundation for their marriage which will largely have to continue without your help.

Mormon efficiency is a cultural thing--in Utah, we have made efficiency into a worship art. However, Mormon wedding efficiency has its own unique origin, tied to the same reason most Mormon engagements are so short:

We're anxious to get to the hotel.

A Candle (or five) for a Man

2007-07-07T09:22:00.000-04:00

As I mentioned earlier, my sister Alyssa is here with us until Sunday. Roughly three years ago Alys was visiting me when we were first living in New York. We headed down to 5th Avenue south of Central Park to see the notorious stores: Saks Fifth Avenue, Tiffany's, Bergdorf Goodman, etc. Right across the street from Saks is the very famous St. Patrick's Cathedral which Wikipedia lists as the "largest decorated Neo-Gothic-style Catholic cathedral in North America". It's an absolutely stunning church, and has millions of visitors a year. Inside there are stations for various saints where a petitioner can pay a dollar and light a candle. Those three years ago, Alys, who was having fairly dismal luck on the dating scene (One of her dates refused a piece of gum she offered because, as he put it, "Ah, I'd just swaller it."), lit a candle to St. Andrew, the patron saint of Scotland, and put out her hopes for a decent man to come along.

Well, maybe because we're Mormons and not Catholics (in which case, our actions yesterday may not have helped much), or maybe St. Andrew has a sense of humor, but about six months later my sister met a certain Scottish-descended laddie with whom she began a long and pretty ineffectual romance. Fed-up with the whole thing, she told me before she came out that she had just one wish: that we could return to St. Patrick's and light a different candle to a different saint in the hopes that maybe someone else could get the job done a little better.

I made a video diary of our quest, but unfortunately, the audio appears to be screwed up on a few of the files. I am working on the problem and as soon as I can post all of them, I will. Until then, here are the working ones:

In the end, we spent six dollars (St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes got two dollars) and lit five candles. Slease, I hope you get good one this time. :)

Music and memories

2007-07-03T22:27:00.001-04:00

It feels like we're living in an unprecedented age of being able to revisit our youth through music we used to love. I had a few tapes as a kid, though most of my music tastes ran to the stuff my older brother and sister listened to when they were teenagers and I was impressionable and also desperate to impress. Of course, I used to say I loved '80's music, but I have to admit that I only loved a very narrow segment of it--i.e. whatever was in their tape decks.

At the same time, I had my own private music, stuff no one knew I liked, songs I listened to mostly alone as a kid (a lot of my childhood was spent hiding the things I liked for fear of ridicule or reprisal. My older siblings were--and are--pretty blunt in expressing their views and being the least mature in a lot of ways made my preferences easy targets). Not surprisingly, as an adolescent girl--even as my older brother was introducing me to Pink Floyd's The Wall--I really went for easy listening love songs of the Richard Marx's variety. I thought George Michael had the best voice and there were several Phil Collins songs on my private top ten list of GREATEST SONGS EVER. I didn't have the money to buy my own music and I didn't want to ask someone in my family to sport me the cash (ridicule thing again), so most of the time I listened to the radio fanatically in the hopes that every now and again I could catch a favorite and get it secondhand onto my own tape recorder.

Of course, I grew up, music changed, I changed, old tapes got lost, new ones got made (some even from boyfriends) and I forgot--unintentionally or deliberately--a lot of those private songs that seemed to have so much meaning to me only a few short years ago. In college, I acquired a whole new host of music tastes, mostly through the music collection of my roommate (having never bought music, I just wasn't in the habit and I couldn't stand to waste money on an album before I had heard it through completely and knew I would actually like it). Lots of angry women and their guitars, mostly. Then again, there were still the private songs, a list of which I was starting to keep on my lab computer (I ran a computer lab in the basement of the science building and had staked out a private computer for myself). In the early days of file sharing and mp3's, people on our local network were making music compilations and sharing them over their Apples. My friend Rachel and I spent a lot of late nights in that lab, playing music and doing roley-chair ballet.

Well, I'm an adult now and my CD collection is still pretty lacking (I hate to buy CD's. I really really do). My music collection on the other hand has exploded out, thanks to iTunes (I did a bit of the "free" music sharing back in the day when that was the only option, but you get tired of the sneaking, the bad recordings, the unreliability of downloads and all that). Like I said, you lose old tapes, and then later, old CD's, and you forget. There is a wake of old songs behind us, a musical coming of age history and until now, it was primarily lost, even to us. But just today, I downloaded Savage Garden's To the Moon and Back, a pretty silly song with too much synthesizer and yet listening to it over again, I was back in the computer lab, dancing around with Rachel and the roley-chairs. Here is my history, for 99 cents a piece at a time. Some things I downloaded and eventually erased again--like Billy Joel who was a big part of my childhood, but whose music just hasn't translated well into my current tastes and most of Ani DiFranco who is a very talented songwriter, but I left angry feminist angst at Bryn Mawr. Other songs, however, are wriggling back into my collection, if for no other reason than I like to remember being a little girl, sitting on the edge of my bed with a tape recorder, waiting, just waiting for that song to come on the radio. Yeah, I bought Richard Marx's Hold Onto the Nights. Just because romance didn't turn out to be what I thought it was, doesn't mean I can't remember, and enjoy, my old romanticized version of it.

I love finding my musical past on iTunes. Here's one of the ways I'm finding my musical future: http://www.pandora.com/

Adventures with Blair and Family

2007-07-03T09:41:00.000-04:00

This summer, instead of heading back to Utah, we're hosting a phalanx of family members. The first to arrive were Blair and family. Thomas was practically hysterical waiting for his cousins to get here. I've decided we probably should have given him a sibling a little earlier in his life so he could have someone to really play with all the time. That seems to be what this particular child needs. Every time we climbed in the car to go anywhere, he would ask, "Where are my cousins?"

"They're in the car behind us."

"Are they coming with us?"

"Yes. They're just following us in their car."

Stopping at a light: "Where are my cousins? Don't go, Daddy! My cousins are not behind us!"

"Thomas! Yes they are!" And so on.

Anyway, we enjoyed many an adventure for a relatively short weekend. On Sat. we headed back into New York to eat some authentic NYC pizza, climb the Empire State Building, and take the ferry down to the Statue of Liberty. Even Sethie got in on the pizza eating action. At the ESB, there was a skywriter, but even after much staring at the message, we still couldn't decipher it (It was degrading quickly). I'm posting it here. Let me know if you can tell what it says, cuz I sure can't.

Anyway, on we went to the Statue of Liberty. Long ago when I was college student, my friends and I spent our spring break tooling around the east in Rachel's car (hi chica!). We went to D.C. (where we stayed with Blair, actually) and to New York where we climbed the Statue of Liberty. Back in the day, you could wait an interminable amount of time (like 6 $&#*%! hours) and climb an interminable amounts of steps (like 100 $&#*%! thousand) in order to stand in the the tiny crown space and overlook the city. Okay--that last bit sounds kinda grumpy, but it was a pretty cool experience for all that and something you can always bring up (I think I brought it up at least four times this weekend). After 9/11, they closed the Statue of Liberty out of concern, not unreasonably, that it would be the object of a terrorist attack. Much later, they reopened her, but climbing to the crown is forever a relic of the past. Now you can take an elevator to an observation deck about midway up, but that's all. My time in Lady Liberty takes on a new significance.

This time, though, we arrived too late on the island to even go to the observation deck. The 1 train was under repair and after much flailing around trying to get to South Ferry, we ended up on Chambers St. looking for a van taxi to haul the lot of us down to Battery Park. The driver who finally picked us up looked pretty dismayed as we all piled in (he said later he wasn't allowed to pick up so many people at once. Sorry, dude. Maybe you should have mentioned that a little earlier, eh?) and when I told him we were going to Battery Park, he said, "Do you know how to get there?" Um, YOU SIR, are the TAXI DRIVER. Isn't that YOUR JOB to know where to go? We didn't exactly request a backalley warehouse or something. This is BATTERY PARK, at the bottom point of the island. GO SOUTH! Anyway, Blair gave him a nice tip. Blair's a good guy that way (the van driver we got on the way back not only didn't seem to mind all of us piling into his taxi, but had no problems finding Penn Station. He also got a good tip, but he actually deserved his).

Can I just say how I love New York? Every time we leave there I instantly forget how hard the day-to-day living was in the city and all I remember is how amazing and wonderful it was to live in such close proximity to world-renowned sites. I used to say, "If you're bored in New York, it's your own fault." Even the standing around in Battery Park was fun. We got ice cream. We listened to some classy street musicians. We breathed in the scent of the Atlantic Ocean. On Liberty Island, we walked around to the base of the statue and the adults crashed in the shade while the kids chased each other around (and made some little friends--incidentally the same friends showed up at the beach in Belmar, NJ where we went on Mon. Eerie!)

And here's the coolest thing about New York. You're always bound to run into some old friends (Nate and I were commenting to each other how in Salt Lake, if there was some guy in a spidey suit at the park, you'd be calling the police, not lining your kids up to get their picture with him, let alone giving him money).

As I mentioned earlier, on Monday we drove about 45 min. east to Belmar, NJ, part of the long, sparkling Jersey shore. Admittedly, I have never been a beach person and all those people I've heard go on and on about the allure of the ocean just sounded like crazy people to me (of course, they were from California, so the aura of crazy was on them anyway. Har! Hi Nolan!). But this was a blast. The kids had a great time playing in the water and on the sand, we found little scuttling crabs, we got some much needed sun, and standing there, looking out across the vast ocean, feeling for a moment my pupils dilating and getting a rush in my own smallness, well I think maybe I have an inkling of what they're talking about.

Thomas, especially, seems to destined to be a beach rat. He spent almost our entire time there in the water, despite the fact that it was a chilly 65 degrees and by the time we finally got him out his skin was purplish and he was shaking all over. No matter, he wanted to go back, even though his teeth were chattering so badly he could barely articulate that. He was absolutely fearless, plunging into wave after wave, even ones that were taller than he was, ones that turned him over and dragged him under. Without Nate there to haul him back up to air, he probably would have happily drowned himself. We've been debating what kind of activities he should be doing this summer--I guess swimming is probably what we ought to be investing our money in.

We barbecued in a little park in Belmar and then had to wish Blair and fam farewell. It's so sad--they are moving now to Romania and won't be back this way for several years. It's hard to finally get some family on this side of the country only to lose them again. We miss you already!

More pics and videos of our adventures follow below. Next up on the family adventures list--my sis, Alyssa! (showing up today!)

Rebel Yell

2007-06-28T09:59:00.001-04:00

Ahhhhhh....

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh...

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!

Soccer time

2007-06-28T08:14:00.000-04:00

I don't like the term "soccer mom". It's an innocent enough sounding moniker, but there are so many layers of baggage attached to it implying who you are and what you think that I feel snarly whenever I hear it. Nevertheless, Thomas shouldn't suffer just because a label makes me crazy, so we signed him up for soccer.

Right now, he's in a soccer camp for the 3-5 set. "Coach Danny" seems to understand what it takes to get a four-year-old to actually kick a ball around for an hour. He has them stay on "soccer island" which is surrounded by "sharks and jellyfish", so they shouldn't kick their balls outside of it. They kick their balls through orange cones he calls "dragon teeth" and they often have to get their ball from one end of the "island" to the other, crossing over his "pirate ship" along the way. Thomas goes there all excited and finishes each day pink-cheeked, sweaty, and eager to go back the next day. For me, it's worth the expense to see him getting some exercise that also makes him so happy. However--and this is no dig at men in general, just an observation in a limited subject pool--the dads that seem to come along to the camp have been, uh, less than satisfied with the way the camp is run. "When are they going to do some drills?" one of them asked yesterday. "I took him out of the YMCA soccer camp because they weren't really drilling them and I think this place is even worse!" Another dad saw his little girl get her ball kicked by another kid and shouted at her, "Well, now your ball's gone! Are you happy?" to which his wife replied, "Now that's unnecessary, stop it." He said back, "Well, I think it is necessary. She's needs to learn."

Now let me say again, these kids are between the ages of 3 and 5. Most of them bring little sippy cups to camp as their water source and their shinguards are about the length of one of those rocket popsicles. Am I not expecting enough of Thomas that I'm satisfied with the fact that he goes there and comes home happy and that while his soccer skills will probably still leave much to be desired at the end of the camp, he will still associate "soccer" in his mind with fun and friends? To me, there still seems plenty of time for sports to become intense and competative and I suspect that that will also be fun for Thomas at a certain point, to really test his mettle against other players and have the chance to win something for himself. I don't think that time is now. I think I'm going to wait on his signal to determine when that time is.

Coach Danny is definitely from Jersey. Check out the accent.

Tagged

2007-06-27T14:38:00.000-04:00

Ooh--I really feel like I'm moving up in the digital world here. I've been tagged! I don't know what this is, but I suspect it's like one of those emails people send to all their friends with stuff in it like their shoe size and whatnot. What makes this less obnoxious? I didn't send it to you! You came here to read it! Or maybe not. Maybe you are navigating away, right now--no wait! There's a treat at the end of the post if you keep reading...

8 Random Things about Me:

1) I love sushi. Though I prefer good sushi, I'll even eat bad sushi. Supermarket sushi. Hole-in-wall sushi. I once got a case of full-body hives from bad sushi. Did not deter me. I try to stay away from the raw stuff now if the joint serving it is at all sketchy, but sometimes I just can't seem to help myself. All together now...ewwwwww.

2) I'm a pretty staunch conversative politically, though while I think John Kerry would have made an absolutely terrible president, someone needs give Mr. Bush a serious swift kick. There's a difference between sticking to your guns and stubbornly refusing, like a two-year-old, to notice all the mounting evidence that a particular course of action wasn't a good idea.

3) I used to think two people got married because they wanted to spend all their time together. Sixty thousand work, school, and child-rearing hours later, I've realized that if you've found someone who can make you laugh, is willing to watch a little Star Trek with you, and who doesn't seem to mind your neuroses, then you can be happy even if you don't get to see them all the time, and the time you do get to spend together seems pretty rich.

4) I'm going to be 30 this Sept. Yikes. Time for the requisite, "What have I done with my life?" self-examination.

5) What have I done with my life? I am currently working on yet another fiction novel. No, I have not had any of the previous novels I've worked on published, though I have some nice rejection letters. I love the writing part. I hate the attempting to convince someone else to put it in stores part. Nate has been threatening me to put some actual effort into that part or else (no more sushi for you!)

6) I've only responded once to one of those "about me" emails. It said "Diamonds or Pearls?" I said, "Electronics."

7) I really like cats, but don't have any at the moment. I can't stand dogs.

8) Sethie has been whining for a few minutes while I type on this thing. I really ought to go get him, but I want to finish my own thoughts first! Har! Narcissism, thy name is me.

I tag Dan, Heather, and Kendra

So where's the treat you say? What? Wasn't all of that treat enough for you? No? Then watch this movie.

The East Coast Poulsens

Stuff I Know

if (!God) then Science() ?

Come See the Violence Inherent in the System

Sethism

Doubting Seth

Sethism Redux

Sethism

Thomism

Freak out

Groundhog Day

My Sweet Dream

Thomas and the Beach Boys

Spam Spam Spam Spam!

Mr. Monk and the Case of the Impressionable Children

Suggestion box

To Each According to His Needs and From Each...

Keyboy Cares for Evil Baby

Sethism

A Beautiful Envelope

Thomism

It's the End of the Year as We Know It

Merry Christmas!

Nerd Musings

Captain Beard and the Frozen Snow

Can Someone Please Explain

Mr. Jam

Death to Holiday Schmaltz

Long Long Time Ago...

Halloween

New Day

My two cents

Does Charlie Kaufman Do Kids' Shows?

Thomism

No, No, VERY BAD!

Had a Hard Day

Alabama Baby

To My Little Survivor, Happy Birthday!

Thomism

Squirrelly Business

Thomism

Reading Comprehension Quiz

The Nobility of Motherhood

The Day After

Mara's B-day and new adventures

Blue Grey Day

Livin' in an Amish Paradox

Revenge of the Snacky Pack

Holy Vocabulary, Batman!

A Hot Day for a Five-Year-Old Capitalist

Kid Tested, At Least

Father's Day Thomasism

7 Years into Eternity

Thomism

Nerd Grrl Street Cred

Waiting for Godot

Happy Birthday Mr. T

The Poulsens Went to Hawaii and All I Got Were These Lousy Blog Posts

Chasing the Afternoon3/16

Capitalism, the Scourge and Savior of Hawaii, Part One3/17

Capitalism, the Scourge and Savior of Hawaii, Part Two

Mara vs. the Volcano3/18

Catching up3/19

Bachelor Party!Subtitled: Nate “Comports Himself with Dignity”Subtitled: I.E. Skips the Strip Club3/20

Tora! Tora! Tora!3/21

Our Little Missionary

Thomism

Gordon B. Hinckley 1910-2008

Baby's first haircut

For Grandma

Thomism Redux

Thomism

Tagged

Wii wish you a Merry Christmas

Santa takes time out for the little guys...

They're coming for us!

Let's Not Go to the Poulsens' House

Trick-or-Treating on its last, candy-seeking legs

Thomisms

Enjoying Our Stunted Agricultural Tourist Traps

Chasing the Afternoon
3/16

Capitalism, the Scourge and Savior of Hawaii, Part One
3/17

Mara vs. the Volcano
3/18

Catching up
3/19

Bachelor Party!
Subtitled: Nate “Comports Himself with Dignity”
Subtitled: I.E. Skips the Strip Club
3/20

Tora! Tora! Tora!
3/21