2013
These Colors Don’t Run (They Walk)
Ever since I saw photos of Amber after her Color Run last year, I knew the “Happiest 5K” was A Thing For Me To Do. I’m famously rubbish at life lists, so I didn’t bother declaring it a formal goal, I just closed my eyes and clicked when I landed on the registration page one afternoon. Closed-eyed clicking goes against my very nature, but/and it’s just exactly what I need to do every now and then.
Also equally against my nature and good for me? Running. This is where I’m especially glad for my half-pint tag-along teammates, who I hoped were obviously burden enough to convince the 9,996 other people at the event that I wasn’t “slow” and “out of shape,” I was “accommodating” my children because I’m “nice” like that.
Lordy but I’m slow and out of shape. All told, I jogged a grand total of about two minutes, made up of tiny spurts that lasted just long enough for me to remember that the sinus malady I’ve suffered valiantly for going on three weeks now makes my teeth hurt when I do anything more strenuous than tap at my phone with both thumbs like a science mouse pushing a lever for kibble. Meanwhile, Wombat took a break atop Simon’s shoulders every now and then, Fox fell asleep in the stroller while we were standing in front of a giant loudspeaker waiting for our wave to start (AND YET YOU REFUSE TO NAP AT HOME, CHILD?), and in the end we finished almost dead last, which meant nothing more than that the official color throwers were being extra generous by the time we passed their way.
I thought it was fun. Wombat thought it was the FUNNEST THING EVER. I’d painted our nails in matching rainbows (note his varied look-at-mah-nails poses), and I didn’t let myself think of the laundry until after we’d crossed the finish line as a messy, happy kaleidoscopic team. Afterward, I waited with the baby while Simon introduced Wombat to his first dance pit, from which they emerged drenched in ROYGBIV and joy, hands pink from powder and high-fiving strangers. Fox was lightly dusted with wonder. I was considering dyeing my hair permanently blue because why the hell not?
Sir? It looks like you’ve got a little something behind your ear.
It was pretty great. I don’t think I can honestly add “Ran a 5K” to my list of did-dos after this, but none of what that means–accomplishment, fitness, hipster cred–is what this was about.
Two final words: Technicolor boogers.
2013
Spiral Ham: DIY Spring Hot Dogs
Are you ready to make some spiral-cut hot dogs in celebration of spring? Are you ready to indulge me as I derive a perverse amount of joy in imitating all those shiny lifestyle blogs? Okay!
Step 1. Get you some dogs.
Step 2. Get you a skewer. One is all you need. (Apologies to John Lennon.)
Step 3. Take a deep breath and gently push the skewer lengthwise through the hot dog, staying as close to the center as possible.
Step 4. Use a sharp knife to make one long continuous diagonal cut from one end of the hot dog to the other. Go ahead and cut all the way down to the skewer. You can make the width of the spiral as thick or thin as you want, just try to keep the width more or less the same so you get a nice, even spiral.
Step 5. Pull the skewer out.
Step 6. Cook the hot dog how you normally would. We like to grill ours, but they also turned out great when we cooked them on an unlined baking sheet for the Spring Fourth birthday party. Ten minutes at 350 did the trick. You don’t even need to turn them.
These are great fun for parties, picnics, potlucks…pretty much any time you want to pretend you’re a Very Fancy Person but you still just want to have hot dogs. Here is my Very Fancy Person Hot Dog Lunch on a Random Wednesday. Pinkies up!
When I first heard about this technique (I forget where), it was served with a side order of baloney about how this is a superior way for a person to prepare his or her [gourmet, free-range] frankfurters because the increased surface area of the spiral was better receptive to one’s choice of toppings mango chutney Grey Poupon unicorn tears blaaaaaah, but COME ON. You’re doing this because IT LOOKS COOL, and that, my friends, is reason enough. Hot diggety dog.
One note: We tried this with sausages once and it didn’t work, probably because the consistency of sausages isn’t, well…consistent. Most sausages have bits and chunks of different ingredients speckled throughout (bits! chunks! I’M SORRY!), whereas your regular plain old hot dogs are made up of the same generic meat mass all the way through. Mmmmmmmmmm. Meat mass. Meat mess.
I hope you love these. I also hope they’ll work when cut and cooked on a roasting stick, because goodness knows we do love our campfire food around here. Four more days until the time change and we can try it out!
Bonus for sticking it through to the end: A ver brief pictorial explanation of how it is that my fingernails are painted rainbow colors yet I am neither five years old nor Rainbow Brite.
More tomorrow!
2013
Dependence, Independence, Codependence, Interdependence; Or, My Life as a Blanket
Over the years, I’ve accidentally offended a number of people by asking them whether they ever worried about creating inflexible if not untenable dependence by too-carefully setting certain developmental stages (pun) for their children. I’m talking about kids who can’t sleep without their white noise machines or their blankies or their one special [limited edition and discontinued] stuffed animals, that type of thing. Ever living my life out of the Worst Case Scenario Handbook, I fret on their behalf about the Etna-like hell due to erupt when the white noise machine breaks or the beloved stuffy goes missing at the park, and I can’t decide whether it’s better or worse that the hell is of the parents’ own design. Hell is hell.
With Wombat, we were lucky he took to the “plan” (haaaaaaaaaa) that our child would be a bastion of flexibility and independence, able to cope gracefully with the range of life’s inconsistencies and surprises, pleasant and otherwise. From the beginning, he adapted to our somewhat random schedule, he was able to nap at various times and in various conditions and locales, and he never attached himself so fiercely to something that its absence precipitated a magma blast that incinerated to ash everything within a ten-mile radius. When one of his favorite toys would go missing, we simply told him it was on vacation in Barbados and that was that. This still works.
It was mostly luck, of course. That he didn’t need special sleeping conditions was luck. That he never took a pacifier was luck. That he’s a happy-go-lucky type is both happy and lucky, and, okay, fine, maybe a little bit the result of being related to Simon, but we can hardly congratulate ourselves for our genetics, now can we? We didn’t create an independent kid, we just got one. Happy, lucky us.
I have learned some lessons, though, and here they are: First, I shouldn’t waste time fretting for others about how they raise their children. Next, I should stop asking even innocent, honest questions about parenting that start with “But aren’t you worried about…” because that almost inevitably leads to defensiveness. Thirdly, I should come clean about Fox’s addiction.
What does Fox want? What can he not live without? What will send him into a rage if the object of his desire does not appear within .2 seconds of his call?
Mama. Fox wants Mama. Mamamamamama. And yes, it’s flattering and life-affirming and heartwarming and all that rainbows-and-butterflies stuff, but it also verges on soul-sucking in those times when I just want to…not be Mamamamamama, whether because Dada is home or I want to spend time with my other child, or maybe I’d just like to feel the fresh, cool water lap against my briefly de-barnacled side because, as a wise woman once said, the years are short but the days can be loooooooooong. Frankly, sometimes I’m too sick/tired/asleep/over it to be a good Mamamamamama, but Fox doesn’t care, no siree, and so sometimes I buck up and just do the best I can, but other times I secure him with some apparatus or responsible person and run to the other end of the house and hold really, really still lest any mama molecules escape my body and the little bloodhound catches whiff of my telltale maternal scent and tips back his head and commences to halloo until he finds me again. I am hunted.
It’s nice to be wanted, of course, but it’s also nice to have the option to defer.
Although I know better than to say anything out loud (and here I pretend like blogging it somehow doesn’t count), I still wonder about all those kids with their noise machines who have been trained to sleep only when the ambient sound waves and temperature and lighting and angle of the mattress are just exactly so. I think about what happens when they lose their pacifiers or their special bedtime toys, and I worry for the parents who have to deal with the fallout. Poor suckers, every last one of them. (This is not smugness, this is sympathy, I promise.)
And then I think about my own kid, whose dependence is no better, and actually is worse than all that because he’s hung up on something that can’t be replaced by a trip to the store or a click on Amazon or eBay. I am not something that can be left at home with a babysitter. I worry for myself that I will always have to be here with him and that my heart might never have the chance to grow fonder if I never get a chance to be absent. Not that I don’t love him to the end of the earth already, but I’d still like to test that old adage by, you know, maybe separating from him for longer than an hour and seeing what that does to the magnitude of my adoration. Maybe it won’t work, but it’s worth a shot. Please give me a shot!
It’s not the worst of problems, sure, but it’s less than ideal, and it’s day after day after day after day, which obviously wears on a person when that person is me. When Simon gets home from work in the evening and I’ve been alone with the baby since first thing in the morning and am more than ready to hand off that adorable little diapered baton to my trusty teammate, it pretty much sucks that said baton starts wailing piteously if I even so much as fake a pass. And it has nothing to do with my competence or even his actual preference. I really think it’s just habit. I am the only one that will do because I am the only one who does do. Doobee doobee doo.
Doobee doobee dooooooooooooo.
That’s the sound of me teetering on the edge of sanity at 6:15 p.m. every weekday because I’m just not cut out for full-time childcare. (Guilt, shame, etc.) At 6:15, it’s a free-for-all pounce-and-pull; everything and everyone converges at home but then immediately diverges–each of them, it seems, with a piece of me in their teeth. For the previous hour I’ve been pulled between two children, and when my husband finally comes home, I’m pulled a third direction. I feel like a well-loved but ratty and threadbare old blanket, each corner clamped in someone’s jaws, and sometimes I don’t know whether I’m about to tear, unravel, or just keep stretching and stretching until I’m completely unrecognizable. Who will even want me when I’m in that kind of shape?
Well! This took a turn. I’d intended to steer this post toward a closing quip that said, “Hey, at least the fallout from Fox being obsessed with me is fallout that, by definition, will only happen when I’m not around, ha ha ha! Who’s the sucker now?” but suddenly and quite unexpectedly here I am, transformed into a blanket. How do these things happen? How does one pick up HTML for Dummies one afternoon and then wake up the next day ten years older with a husband, two kids, and a ridiculous identity crisis playing out in strange metaphors on the Internet?
So, fine. I’m a blanket. I’ll be a blanket. I’ll let the little one crawl around on me all day and the bigger little one wear me as a cape and the biggest one roll me into a ball and tuck me under his head when he lays back on the couch.
Say, this is actually kind of nice.
Cozy. Comfortable. Right.
See how I stretch to wrap around all three of them? See how warm I am? See how I smell like home? See how tomorrow I will be a fort and the next day a parachute and the next day a stage curtain and the next day a hammock and the next day a sail? See how I have always been a length of soft material but I didn’t become a blanket until I could tuck people in? Until I had people to tuck in?
