Brenda currently lives in Stoneham MA, but grew up in Mineral WA. She is surrounded by men, with two sons, one husband and two boy cats. She plays trumpet at church, cans farmshare produce and works in software.
Today was the day of our well-child pediatrician appointments. I’d been hoping my husband could come, but he had an offsite meeting this morning so it was me.
First, the stats.
Grey is 38 lbs (70th percentile), 41 inches (70th percentile) and has a BMI of 15.9 (60th percentile). So apparently vomiting twice a day for a month hasn’t hurt his growth. That’s actually a bit on the short side, percentage wise, for him historically so I suspect he may be getting ready for a growth spurt.
Thane is 23lbs 1 oz (55th percentile) and 31.5 inches (90th percentile). I’m actually surprised that his weight is so low. The kid feels like someone stuck lead bars in his diapers. Or maybe that’s just because he squirms so much.
Both boys got vaccines. Grey is, sadly, old enough to anticipate the shots with fear. Happily, he got the nasal H1N1 vaccine. Also the seasonal flu and the standard 4 year vaccines. Sadly, there was no H1N1 available for Thane, him being too young for the nasal vaccine. I need to bring both boys back in four weeks for a flu shot booster, so if I can’t get him H1N1 before then, he’ll get it then. Now if only I could find even a seasonal flu vaccine for myself! I tried and so far I’ve failed.
Developmentally, both boys are fine, which is not surprisingly. There was actually a _moment_ though. Grey has been reading to us for a while. But of course, at some point we’ve read him all the books, or read them to Thane. So it’s very likely that he knows the books from context. (Last night he read us “Pajama Time”.) He can do the Boyntons. He can do Hop on Pop. While I was talking to the doctor about Thane, he picked up a book. When I finally took note of him, he was reading Go Dog Go to himself. Correctly. With even some interpretation in his reading.
He’s never seen that book before in his life, as far as I know.
So that’s it. I’m calling it. Grey is a very beginning reader, of course, but he is officially a reader.
And Thane. Oh my Thane. After my love-song of yesterday, I suppose it would be inevitable you’d be a pill today. I think I miss my baby already. Thane is at that age. The age that you block out of your memory. The “My only goal in life is complete destruction and to eat the cat’s food”. The age where desire outstrips ability and ability outstrips judgement. Every room he enters in our not-badly-childproofed house shows clearly that he has been there, with the detritus scattered throughout. He does not yet know or respect “no”. Today I got angry tears that he couldn’t play with my laptop.
I found labor with Thane harder because I knew what I was in for and could dread it better. I’m afraid this is a similar situation. It takes a long long long time to teach a child to obey your verbal instructions. We’re just starting. Grey is finally, for example, BEGINNING to clean up his own messes. So that means I have three more years of not just cleaning Thane’s, but worse yet teaching him to clean up his own.
A year ago at about 9:30 in the morning, in a room crowded with nursing students and onlookers, my midwife placed a white-covered, howling baby boy on my belly. Through my own tears of joy, I found myself swearing fealty to him, telling him I loved him over and over as they wiped him off and I pulled him up to my arms.
There are moments that stick with you. He will never remember, and I will never forget.
Nathaniel Augustus Flynn — my sweet Thane-boy. What a gift you are, and what a gift our year together has been.
The general outlines of what a child learns in their first year of life are the same. They lift their head. They smile at you for the first time. They reach out to play with a toy. They roll over. They sit up. They stand. They crawl. They walk. They call you by name. For a healthy child, the outlines are the same — like lines in a coloring book. But oh the vivid differences that show up!
Thane is my book-reader and belly-sleeper. He’s a nose-crincher and cat-lover. Thane is my thumb-sucker. Thane is my independent son. Thane is my patient child. I hear him tell himself stories in the morning in his crib. When he plays, he’ll every-so-often come over and grab on to your leg, lay his cheek against you and suck his thumb. This lasts for a few seconds of love and reassurance, and then he is back to his play again. At night when he goes to sleep (which he does like an absolute dream, night after night), he refuses to lie down until he’s turned on his crib bubbler. If you turn it on, he’ll look reproachful, turn it off, and turn it back on again. Car rides are far more peaceful than I remember them being at 1, as he gazes out the window, reads his books, and removes his socks.
Thane is, I think, destined to be a gentle giant. For all his quieter ways (and quieter is a comparison — he’s not quiet), when Thane makes a decision he’s very hard to stop. I fear dirty diapers, because Thane twists like a muscular corkscrew on the changing table. He’s far more interested in the “Ba! Ba!” (book) over there than lying down! He is so strong, it’s hard to credit.
Thane follows the cats through the house and eats their catfood if not supervised. The other day in just a moment’s inattention, I came to find him drinking (surprisingly skillfully) out of the cat’s water dish while eating their kibble as though it was popcorn. The cats were rather put out.
Thane is persistent in his skills. I watched him try no fewer than 20 times to both put the Weeble on the Weeble-horse AND spin it, until he finally mastered the effect he desired. He was patient, thorough and unhurried.
When Thane smiles, his noses crinkles up.
Thane is being cautious with language. We will hear a word once or twice and then it will disappear. The consistent words are “Book”, “Mama” and “Dada”. When I ask him to say his own name, “Can you say Thane?” he gives me a reproachful look and says with great emphasis “Mama”. I’m sorry son. I like your name. I know that only native English speakers over the age of 7 can say it, but I still like it.
Thane loves loves loves water. He has no fear of it. He loved swimming this summer. He loves taking baths. He will stay in the water until his skin is blue and he’s all shivers, and weep bitter tears when he has to come out.
Thane gets this amazing expression on his face when he’s trying to explore something by tasting it. I’ve seen him bring his mouth down to experience the busy ball bopper or the carpet or the bathwater, with this same intent expression.
Thane and his brother get along wonderfully, although they do still seem to inhabit largely separate worlds. Grey makes Thane laugh with the least thing he does. Although they periodically have their differences over toy-possession, Thane and Grey seem to really like each other.
Thane learned to walk so he could carry toys in his hands as he wandered from room to room. I’m pretty sure that’s the only reason he saw a point.
Thane’s favorite food in the world is cheese. He also loves yogurt, but wants to feed himself. He loves bits of meat and enjoys gnawing on pizza crust. He’ll inhale a pair of fried eggs. He finds Cheerios vaguely insulting and expresses his disapproval by sending them all to their fate on the floor.
Thane enjoys fingerpainting with the milk from his bottles.
Oh Thane. How I love your golden curls, your disproportionate smile, your crinkled nose. One year has been wonderful. May we be mother and son for many, many more.
A lot of parenting and parenting advice revolves around saying no. No, you cannot open that cupboard. No, you cannot watch tv right now. No, you may not hit your brother on the head with a book, even if he’s laughing. No, you cannot have a lollipop. No, not chocolate milk either. No no no no no.
That’s part of the job. The kid’s job is figuring out what they can and cannot do. Flying – nope. Jumping on my bed – only at my house. Building with tinkertoys – yes. Your job is to make sure that the results of their experimentation are non-fatal and comply with the rules of your house.
As a parent, you get in the habit of saying no. And you spend a lot of time working with your children to handle “no” in an acceptable way. You start with tantrums and crying (that’s where we are with Mr. I Find Cat Food Delicious Thane), move on to (in our case) stomping and pouting, and eventually try to get towards a graceful “ok”.
In the process, you stop remembering WHY you say no. You get in the habit of no. You work so hard on acceptable post-no behaviors, that you forget that your job as a parent is NOT actually to make sure your children don’t get anything they want. It is, actually, ok to say yes to things they want, especially when they ask for them in an appropriate manner.
That may sound like an “oh duh” but that was one of my revelations recently. I’d gotten in the habit of “no”, for no good reason. Really, is it going to kill my son to get that 15 calorie candy cane? (Let’s not discuss how I still have candy canes for Christmas, eh? It actually supports my thesis that I don’t end up giving my children nearly as many treats as they’d like.) I like giving my son treats, but I don’t actually like letting him have them.
So now I’m trying to teach Grey how to ask for things in a way which delight the asked and are more likely to result in him getting what he wants. I’m trying to teach him effective, polite strategies for obtaining his heart’s desire. Obviously, he can’t always have it “Mom, may I please, please, pleeeeeeeaaaaase withsugarontop have my own car?”. But the goal of parenting is not to convince children never to want anything, and it’s not to make sure they know their desires will never be fulfilled. I need to be teaching my son good ways to get what he wants (within reason) in a way that is pleasant and satisfying for all involved — and to say “thank you” afterwards.
I’d like to know who’s brilliant idea it was for my entire family to have their birthdays in a 5 week period right before Mocksgiving and Christmas. Sheesh. How did that happen?
But hey! This weekend, we held a joint birthday party for Adam and Thane! We had the iconic baby-encounters-frosting-for-the-first-time moments.
You mean I get cake? With sugar? Channeling the festive birthday spirit Let's see what this squishy stuff tastes like... OMGOMGOMGOMGOMG
Adam and I had a philosophical discussion on whether a one year old would even notice that they were having a birthday. I discovered that I have deep-seated equality anxiety. I’m a middle child. My baby brother is six years younger than me, my big sister two years older. I remember that my parents were very careful to make sure that especially my sister and I were treated the same. I recall that they asked HER forbearance when they let ME drive to high school, since she had never been allowed to. I imagined this scene where an impressionable 9 year old Thane is looking through his baby book, perhaps while 11 year old Grey reviews his. There, at Grey’s party, is the Elmo cake, the balloons, the rejoicing. A sad, blank page in Thane’s baby book, testament to second-child syndrome. Thane becomes emotionally devastated due to this evidence of my lax attention to his young self, and eventually leaves home to become a stylite monk in the Nevada desert. All because I couldn’t whip up a few streamers for his birthday.
Funny how your own issues show up, eh? I never once remember feeling like I was any less loved for being the second born. But I’m terrified that Thane might, for the slightest moment, feel that way.
Anyway, happily this fate has been avoided by this party! Now if he wants monastic life, he can at least join one of the normal orders, you know, Benedectines or Carmelites or somethin’.
While I didn’t stoop so low as to have a Halloween/Birthday party (yet… I can’t imagine that with a birthday on the 28th that won’t happen eventually), we also celebrated my husband’s natal day in the way he likes best: board games. From about 6:30 until about 12:30, they played. Since I was on boy-duty for a good portion and then somehow ended up being schooled in Mario Kart Wii, I can’t report on the games. But I can tell you there was one that sounded terrifying: it actually has a docket. And a senate. And you negotiate legislation. They apparently thought it was awesome. How Adam celebrates
I spend most of my family-blogging words on my sons. There are several reasons for this. For one thing, they tend to say and do funnier things than, say, the cats. Also, they will not correct me if I apply selective editing to tighten up the tales of their goofballery. Finally, they do not claim that just because I was an English major, I am not permitted to use words in whatever way I deem fit. Like goofballery. So generally they make easier targets for writing about than, say, my husband.
However, my SONS are not turning 33 today, so I will risk grammatical corrections and the fact my that my target will actually read what I write to tell you about my husband.
First if all, he’s 33 today.
Which is divisible by 11, in case you’re curious.
Give me the camera
My husband claims that before he met me, he was innocent of sin. He did not know what the “Snooze” button on the alarm clock did. Long before he met me, however, he was deeply immersed in the world of the RPG – Role Playing Games. He spent his childhood reading supplements and devising fantastic adventures with intricate maps and completely consistent world-views. When he grew to adulthood, he put aside such childish things in order to focus on more mature pursuits: rules systems. He wrote several of his own and has an entire bookcase of rules systems, which he’s generally read cover to cover. I remember he once turned to me and said, “Brenda, I think I’ve actually read everything on the internet about these games.” Granted, that was when the internet was a smaller infinity, but still.
I mention role-playing first because when I think about what makes my husband who he is, it’s right up there. But that’s hardly comprehensive.
Adam loves delving deeply into arcane problems. He’s currently being tempted, non-ironically, by a book called “Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided By Tests”. He used to complain that no one would ever play obscure gaming systems with him. Now he complains that he doesn’t get to do test-driven agile programming. Previous deep-drinking has included medieval sociology (where he’s more knowledgeable than I) and aikido texts.
His #1 repetitive complaint is that he doesn’t have a photographic memory and can’t remember everything he’s read. Adam and sons
This might make him sound like a distant academic. He’s nothing like that. I love, love watching him with our sons. He’ll cook with Grey and hold one-sided cooing conversations with Thane. While I was watching baseball, Adam was sending pitches across the back yard to Grey. There is a lot of tickling, chasing and zombie-noises when the boys are all home.
If you’re met Adam, you were probably dazzled by his smile. He has a great smile, which always includes his eyes. I don’t think he knows how to fake-smile. His dazzling smile
He makes an amazing chocolate cake.
Adam is an optimizer. He’s always looking for ways to make things better; for the most efficient and most logical way of doing things. Once he arrives at what he thinks is an optimal solution, he’s happy to stick with it until and unless data presents itself that there is a better solution. I love variety. I’ll go out one way and come back another only because they are different. This boggles his mind.
He listens to techno when he programs.
His body is composed of 60% pretzels, 30% iced tea and 10% trace elements.
He mixes three cereals in the morning in order to arrive at the optimum combination of texture and taste.
Adam loves songs. He has a beautiful warm tenor and he’s not afraid to use it. He specializes in Celtic/Irish songs and folk ballads. When we were in Saudi Arabia and Washington State (you do not want to KNOW about our phone bills that summer), he used to sing me “Road Go Ever Ever On”. I thought he was an English major when I met him, because he quoted Kipling and Byron at me until I was bedazzled. I never stopped being bedazzled.
His actual degree was in Biochemistry, Cellular and Molecular Biology — but he hated Chemistry.
He has an astonishing ability to fall without hurting himself. Usually he hurts himself doing things that you couldn’t possibly think you could hurt yourself doing, like walking down the hall.
He reminds me to pray.
He is a remarkable husband. He supports me when I choose to do something, advocates for my needs when I subsume them, compliments me even when I feel unlovely, never fails to look me in the eyes and tell me he loves me, and holds my hand as often as he can.
This is the 14th time we’ve celebrated together on his birthday. The first time I got him a wax dragon candle thingy.
I could run through a thousand more bullet points and still fail to capture just who he is. He is my husband and I love him. How I will always see my husband
PS – Watch this space for the comment from him with corrections or clarifications! 😉
I’d like to start out by saying that I am clear that I’m the weird one here. Everyone else SEEMS to be in line, and I’m the one who just doesn’t fit in.
That said, I simply DO NOT UNDERSTAND why people like depressing media. For example, through a miracle of babysitting, my husband and I got to go see “Where the Wild Things Are” on Friday night. (I would post a spoiler warning, but sheesh. If you haven’t read the book, which spoils the plot, then go get it right now!) The movie is sad and depressing, and does not cease to be sad and depressing. You have a lonely kid, an all-too-human and overstretched mom, a teenage sister in a loving but rather grim world. Then you get taken to a fantasy world where …. things are just as bad. In fact, bad enough to make the real world where people break your igloos and your sister ignores your pain and your mom is dating some guy seem much better than your fantasy world. So we conclude feeling just as crappy as we started. Actually crappier — I was in a good mood going in. But hey, it was visually lovely.
It’s a box office hit.
Why?
I get it: other people really like reading books and watching movies that make them feel horrid. I know I’m the weird one because I don’t. I just fail to fathom what about it feels good and makes you want more?
See, I understand WHY it is important to tell and hear stories about real things that are awful. I will sit down and read about the holocaust to understand how humans can be so brutal to each other and work to prevent it. I understand why it’s important that we know and see that humanity is capable of great evil. I listen to the news, even when I’d rather never heard again how some person strapped in a bomb-vest blew themselves up in a crowded marketplace full of sons and mothers and beloved uncles. But I turn on the news anyway and look at the world as it is, to the best of my abilities.
I do it with the same amount of joy and enjoyment that I have for dental hygiene, without the sparkly teeth afterwards. I do it because it is important and necessary and part of being a good citizen. I do not enjoy a minute of it.
So why on earth would I choose to watch movies that inspire the same sense of impossible despair? Why would I want to read books where people are horrible to each other and hurt each other and terrible things happen and at the end of the book, it’s still horrible and no one has learned and the sun will die someday? Why do people spend so much time imagining ways that we could be awful to each other that don’t really exist? What about this is satisfying? I read those books, and am usually glad I have, but I never desire to read them again.
It makes it very difficult for me to find media that suits. It’s hard to explain to friends. I often sum it up by saying that I don’t like violence. (I nearly vomited at the Serenity movie — I actually left shaking and crying.) But that’s not actually it. I’ll get through violence (as long as the folks writing it/showing it don’t seem to enjoy it too much) to get to redemption, learning and hope. I found Firefly generally fantastic. The body count in the Lord of the Rings is high, but so is the hope-count. One of my favorite books of the last decade, “The Curse of Chalion” by Bujold starts with a beaten, broken man who has experienced utter betrayal. But it ends up with redemption, healing, hope, love and victory. There are very bad things in it, but the people who ENJOY doing horrible things to other people are a minority, and they get theirs in the end.
I guess I feel that the world is sufficiently grim without imagining more worse things in it than actually exist. I choose to spend my imaginative time on seeing the world as, perhaps, a better place than it is, and humanity as generally loving and redeemable.
If you love those kind of movies or books I’m talking about — the dark depressing ones where it all seems futile — can you please explain to me why? What it does for you that makes you want to come back?
Last Thursday night I made Apple Butter. I find that my hobbies — the things I do for myself — have to fit into smaller and smaller spaces. Moreover, like so many workers in corporate America, they need to be more productive. The boost I have to get out of doing something for myself has to be considerable to be worth the price in sleep loss, opportunity cost, or making my husband work harder. This summer, I found that canning fits the bill. It doesn’t take a wild amount of time — one evening plus thinking ahead. It’s very different than what I do all day (computer hobbies, for example, have the downside of being just like work). And it’s intensely satisfying, both right after you’ve completed it and throughout the year as you watch happy people nom down on your cooking. So in an indirect response to my life time-crunch, I did a lot more canning this year.
The cook in the kitchen
Which brings us back to apple butter. It was an obvious choice. One of our yearly traditions is apple picking. Abuela gives us apples from her tree every year. And the farmshare has also provided us with a hearty harvest. Added all together, and we had a ton of apples. Worst yet, although I make a mean apple pie, none of the men in my house like it. So although I’ve never eaten apple butter in my life, I figured it was worth the effort.
For my birthday, my mommy bought me the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving and some canning toys. I used the Cider Apple Butter recipe. The recipe
Without a doubt, canning apple butter is best done with a chatty best friend working with you. (Now taking applications for next year!) It took me nearly an hour and a half to peel and core the SIX POUNDS of apples the recipe called for. I’m not a novice peel-and-corer, either. It was rather tedious. It was interesting to see how different all the apples were. Since my apples came from a wide variety of sources and types, it’s a mutt of an apple-butter — never to be reproduced. I liked seeing how different all the apples were. Here are the results of my peeling-and-coring extravaganza:
That's enough for four or five pies, by my reckoning
I dumped them all into my biggest pot (note to Santa: I need a bigger pot if I’m actually going to do more boiling-canning. None of mine were large enough to fit the canning rack I got.). I added the two cups of cider. This seemed woefully inadequate for such a large “cider soup”. My biggest pot
I also got the jars going. I’ve aided in making jam since I was 8 or 9 years old — mostly in the squashing raspberries and stirring departments as a young child. But only once have I been around canning where you boiled the cans afterwards, so I paid careful attention to the instructions. Please note an important idea: you preheat the jars filled with water, but you better have enough room/not so much water so that when the jars are filled, the pot does not overflow. Happily, I caught that one before I found out the hard way. I thought the jars were pretty in the pot. Did I mention I need a bigger pot? Cider soup stage
Then I pureed the apples, attempted to food-process my whole cloves to ground cloves, failed miserably, and ground them in a mortar and pestle instead. Despite carefully measuring the POUNDS of apples, I didn’t have the volume the recipe called for. I added apple cider to make it up. I’m pretty sure that was a mistake — since I wasn’t adding pectin, it wasn’t as necessary to be precise. I bet that added significantly to the cook time. However, strike 1 for the recipe. It offered no guidance. I added the pureed apples/cider and spices back to the pot for the Long Cook.
The stovetop during the Long Cook
Included in my birthday present was this clever device (upper right). Just one problem: it uses about 10x as much water as boiling the lids flat and using the neat magnetic lid-grabber-thingy I also got. So…. very cool but I’m not sure it’s worth it.
The apples cooked and cooked and I stirred and stirred. Since I’ve never EATEN apple butter, I wasn’t quite sure what it was supposed to look/taste like, or what the consistency was supposed to be. Here’s what the cookbook said:
Testing Fruit Butters: Butters are cooked until they thicken and begin to hold their shape on a spoon. To assess doneness, spoon a small quantity of cooked mixture onto a chilled plate. When liquid does not separate, creating a rim around the edge, and the mixture holds a buttery, spreadable shape, the butter is ready to ladle into jars and process.
I think I read that about 18 times. I never decided if the clause “creating a rim around the edge” was something that it was or was not supposed to do when it was ready. I thought of my sister, the tech-writing cooking-savant and how she would blanch at this obfuscatory help. Clearly, assessing apple-butter-doneness is the sort of thing you have to learn at the apron of someone who knows it. Here was my attempt at being a good little recipe-follower:
Chilled plate and buttery texture?
I’m pretty sure it didn’t cook long enough, but I was running out of time. When the butter started “spitting” and burning me, I decided that I’d better start jarring it. Here’s a picture of what happens to your hand when you wash it as often as I did making this butter. I expect sympathy, people. Cracked knuckle skin = not fun!
It was time to start the canning bit. I’ve done this a gazillion times with jam. I advise you to move the jar right next to the pot. A funnel is one of the few truly critical pieces of jamming equipment (you CAN do it without a funnel but it’s HARD). If you are doing jam, use your jars in a bell curve: smallest known jars first (they are hardest to get to seal), then middle, then big, saving a few small jars for the remnants in the pot that won’t fit in a big jar. In the middle of jarring
At that point, the recipe gets a HUGE strike 2. They had helpfully told me how many jars I would need. I prepared equivalents (I like to use three jar sizes: sampler, medium and big) and added a few extra for safety margin. They were WRONG. I needed three medium jars more than they called for. That’s huge. I actually ran out of prepped jars and had to use an unprepped jar, which I marked with an “X” because I didn’t want to trust the seal on it. ALWAYS HAVE WAY MORE JARS THAN YOU WILL NEED (and enough lids for all the jars you have).
Because of the additional jars, I had to boil them in two sets, making me even later for bed. Post-boiling process
It took me roughly 3 hours, start to finish, to make the apple butter. The good news? It’s delicious, especially on cornbread! The bad news? It’s really sugary, spicy applesauce. We definitely didn’t achieve buttery consistency! The fruits of my labor
The kitchen is where it’s at. The heart of my family has always revolved around the kitchen. I’ve never wanted granite countertops or designer appliances. I am thrilled, however, to have a kitchen table. The kitchen table is where meals are eaten, homework is done, playdoh is played, books are propped, and the world’s most meaningful conversations happen. The kitchen in the home we bought is perfect. Well, mostly perfect. It has a great kitchen table — intact from the ’70s. The table and chairs were probably bought around the time I was born. They’re vinyl and metal and laminate and indestructible.
When we bought the house, we added a butcher-block counter and shelves for tea, spices and cookbooks. There’s a load-bearing wall separating the kitchen from the mud room (and the ‘fridge). Through the window above the sink you can watch the seasons expressed in the leaves of the trees.
A few weeks past when my mother-in-law came to visit, her big project was to tackle the kitchen. Her motivation was a passionate hatred for the burgundy lace curtains in the kitchen. The kitchen — like most of the house — was paneled. Not, mind you, the SAME paneling in any two rooms. Stop talking crazy talk. The kitchen had a light-wood paneling of very poor quality. It was impossible to clean off, which is an issue for a lived-in, loved-in, cooked-in kitchen.
For ONCE I remembered to take before pictures. Here ya go: The view from the dining room
From near the coffee maker - note bread rising and top of curly moppet headThe kitchen table areaThe new view from the dining roomView from the pantry
The Ikea island - you would not believe how much we use that sandwich press This needs to be framed in and painted, but that's corkboard and metallic paint
There’s still plenty to do. We need curtains. The color theme for the first floor is sage and lapis, with the living room mostly sage, the dining room a combo (we bought new fancy-dishes since the ones I got for my wedding just have not held up to normal use), and the kitchen mostly white-and-blue. Laureen also painted the mud room, bathroom, entrance hallway and halfway up the stairs white instead of cream. (She did get through the entire 5 gallons of paint!)
We’re also working on this sort of correspondence center. The wall that’s currently black and cork is intended to be magnetic paint on the bottom (currently black) and then a bulletin board framed in with molding at the top. I think we need a whole additional can of magnetic paint. The bottom has about 7 layers, but it’s not enough to hold up the boys’ magnetic toys, which was the point. Once we’re done painting, the whole think will be painted white. I’ll put things like cards and art work on the bulletin board and the bottom can have magnetic letters, etc.
We also plan on putting an overhead fan/light where the old chandelier thingy is — which will mean we will have overhead fans in every single room in the first and second floors. We’re also going to put in a magazine rack on the small shelf, and maybe really narrow shelves to hold my teas.
But I really like it. It’s clean and cleanable. It’s a light, airy room anyway, and this made it lighter and brighter.
This is the room where the living of my family will take place over the next 17 odd years. May it be filled with heavenly scents, laughter, and memories.
Adam and I play a lot of board games. They’re our “go to” activity for date nights. After a long spree of “Roll Through the Ages” and “St. Petersburg”, I was finally up for a new game. Adam has been trying to talk me into Odin’s Ravens for well over a year now. It was marketed as a good two-person games.
Fun two person games are actually harder to come by than you might think. There are classic games like Chess and Go. But most of the builder-games I most enjoy work best for 3 – 4 people. Games that are meant for 3 – 4 people may claim that they work for 2, but rarely do — which is why we enjoyed RTTA and St. Pete’s so much.
The conceit of Odin’s Ravens is good — you’re two of Odin’s, er, ravens, trying to traverse the landscape of the North quickly. To accomplish this, you mess with your competitor, line up your travel route, play some politics on the side and put down a cache of cards to be used later. When one person has accumulated 12 points (12 spots ahead of the other person) the game ends.
The artwork was really lovely. The rules were clear and simple. Simple enough, actually, that we’re thinking about modifying it for Grey. If we stripped it down a little further, he could get it.
But if you have two relatively evenly matched players (which my husband and I usually are), you tend to have close races. And close races means no one gets many more points than the other. So a game that was billed as a 30 minute match took us closer to an hour and a half. I have to admit that, towards the end, I was getting a bit bored. There just weren’t infinite possible strategies, like some other games seem to have.
Odin’s Ravens seems like a good intro game — the sort you play with a younger player, or someone who is unused to board games and needs to be coaxed into the fold. Unless we both totally missed a strategic element, it’s probably not the board game for a pair of hardcore players.
I had one of those weekends that should’ve been awesome. Saturday we drove to New Hampshire, as planned, to the Fall Festival at the Shaker Museum. We did have fun, but it was about 15 degrees colder (and windy!) than it had been at home. The Festival was rather smaller than I expected. Our tour guide seemed to have a highly unsympathetic view of the Shakers, and spent most of the time on various scandals within the order instead of the cool things about it. Still, there were great points. Grey spun a piece of yarn from wool he helped card. Thane danced to a live band singing “Mountain Dew” (yet another sign that Shaker influence had, er, waned). Grey and daddy rolled down a tall hill they climbed together. Thane investigated bright autumn leaves. The wild apple cider was tart and brilliant.
Grey climbed and rolled down the hill behind us
Then to the State Park. All I can say about that is apparently “closing the weekend of Columbus Day” means closing BEFORE the weekend, not after it’s done. No poking sticks into a fire for us.
Grey didn’t vomit Sunday at church, and we were given some awesome beef barley stew. (I kept saying that I’d gotten pregnant just for the care packages. I didn’t even have to get knocked up this time!) I even found some time to sit on the couch and watch the Red Sox vs. the Angels while Adam played baseball in the backyard with our eldest. I watched the Sox come within one strike of getting to game four… twice. I watched Papelbon give up his first post-season hit, and do his first postseason blown save to end the Red Sox year. Next year, it’s entirely possible that there will be only one man left from that miracle bunch of idiots in 2004: our own Greek God of Walks. But some of the players suffered who may leave have been my favorites: Jason Varitek. David Ortiz. Tim Wakefield (who’s been playing for the Sox since I was in high school) can hardly walk. Maybe Mike Lowell? Getting swept sucked, and it’s a long way until March.
Then I made dinner, which turned out ok, and bread pudding, which turned out ok. Followed by bills, which turned out ok.
Monday, I took a vacation day. Grey’s preschool was closed. Adam was off work. I packed us into the car for the second time this weekend to Experience Autumn on a bright, brisk day. We went to Honeypot Farms in Stowe. It was a zoo. You were hemmed in at every corner, denuded of your cash and caught in a crush of crowds. I don’t know how else they could’ve managed the hordes that had descended, but it was much less bucolic reconnecting with nature and much more standing-in-line. Plus, we hadn’t brought a singe Thane-conveyance-device so we had to carry him the entire time. But. Yet. The skies were brilliant blue. We ate Empire apples picked with our own hands in the shade of the trees which had borne them. We had cider donuts crisp from the cooking. Grey saw a pig for the first time. It was not without consolation. Both Thane and Grey love apples
When we came home, I’d had dinner cooking, so I let Adam (who was feeling run down) veg while I took the boys to the park. They were FANTASTIC. Grey played wonderful imaginary games with other kids and ran around and was chased by dinosaurs and swam in the imaginary ocean. But on the way home, he refused to come. When I insisted it was time to go home, he pitched one of his most epic fits to date. I actually had to call daddy to please come rescue me and carry him home. I put him to bed without dinner because I couldn’t get him to stop swinging at me. I’m quite sure he was tired past bearing and hungry – those were my fault. But it devolved so fast, I didn’t see it coming. You always wonder, thinking back, how you could’ve used humor or something and made it work out. He was so wonderful and then he was such a stinker.
Dinner, which I prepared with great hope ahead of time, was so-so. After the boys were in bed, I celebrated by losing at Odin’s Ravens.
After that, I realized it was my father-in-law’s birthday and called my mother-in-law to let her know I was thinking of her as she suffers through missing him.
I spent the time after that holding Thane while he screamed for 1/2 hour until either the Tylenol took or the constipation eased.
I woke up this morning to a dark, cold world.
Moments of glory, joy and memory all packed around by the dismal and drear. I suppose that’s the way life goes.
My Truant Pen 