A Calendar of Mistakes

I like to keep a paper calendar. Several, in fact. I have my work calendar. I have the family calendar.
I have my personal calendar. It starts out every month like this.




Just a few birthdays.










 I will eventually fill in my days off. Then I fill in any doctor or dentist appointments, teacher conferences. I'll fill in Girl Scouts, Cub Scouts, after school activities, sports events. Finally it looks like this. This is just the necessary things that I have to be aware of. If I'm lucky, I can add something like a girl's night out, a date night, or a short trip to somewhere fun.


I'm not unique. I'll bet that every mother or father has a calendar somewhere like this. Maybe it's just in their heads, but it exists, and it's important. It keeps us from forgetting things and making mistakes like dropping the wrong kid off for swim lessons, or forgetting to pick up another one from an after school club.

I started keeping a calendar because of one notoriously "Bad Mommy" mistake from my life. I forgot to take Hannah to preschool. I forgot to take her on her first day. Her first day of preschool. This huge milestone in both of our lives, and I forgot it. I felt like failure. On first days of school, parents take photos, cry a little... I just forgot. It's not like you can take pictures on the second day, even if it's your first day, because that's just admitting that you forgot to be there in the first place. I forgot. I cried. I beat myself up over it. My little girl was growing up (she was four) and I was already tuning her out. She was blissfully unaware of my Mommy Drama. She had no clue what she had missed (in retrospect, not much.) When I recently admitted to her of my failures as a parent, Hannah looked at me blankly. "I went to preschool?" she said.

I've always remembered my mistakes. I remember turning off the timer when my mother was making kolaczkis for my dad on their anniversary when I was five or six. The timer went off. I wanted to help. I turned off the timer. I'd seen Mom do it hundreds of times. I knew what I was doing. I was making her life easier while she was outside in the garden. The kolaczkis burned. Burned to a nasty crisp. She yelled at me because it was a present for Dad. It was the only present she had for him, and I'd ruined it. She might have cried. I know I did.

I recalled this story thirty two years later to Mom, and she looked at me blankly. "I don't even remember that," she told me.
"Seriously?" I asked. "Because I remember it so well."
"No. I don't remember it. Are you sure?"
Was I sure? I had deep seated guilt about this for my entire life. I had royally screwed up my parents' anniversary. I was sure they would get divorced, or at the very least sell me to gypsies. I knew that this was why I wasn't a favored child and was cursed with acne. This is the reason for my deep seated ambivalence towards baking. "Yeah. I'm sure."
"Oh. Well, I'm sorry."

My calendars are an attempt to alleviate the mistakes in my life. They don't always work--especially the family calendar. Other people have to look at it for it to be effective (not that I'd complain, but if you need gym shoes at school one day a week, check the calendar for what day that might be!)
Mistakes are transient. We don't always know what sticks or what will be remembered once an event is over. I just have to remember which kid to drop off at the park and which kid to drop off at the pool. It's not that hard.

To be honest though, I've never let the kids near the timer on the stove. I don't want to scar them with the same mistakes I made.

Have Glue Gun, Will Travel (AKA Spaghetti bridge, part 2)

After our rather demoralizing defeat at the hands of the kittens, it took us a week or so so get back to bridge building. When we did, we used the same template (hence the same picture above. It's not your imagination.) The bridge had to be totally rebuilt. There was no salvaging the pieces of the prior bridge.



Here is the finished bridge. We had some fun with it before we tested its strength. After all, we test to the breaking point. So once the bridge is "tested" it's no longer any good for playing around with. The floor of the bridge is linguine noodles. We removed the linguine for the testing. In the meantime, it took a bit of time for this traffic jam to clear up.

Finally the test. We hung a bag on the bottom of the bridge, supported by an unbent paperclip and a craft stick. We weighed these. They would be part of our final test weight after all. Then we began to fill the bag with quarters. I figured that it would be easy to measure quarters. You can just weigh one and then multiply by the number of quarters in the bag, right? Just for comparison, we broke one strand of spaghetti prior to building the bridge. It took 32 pennies to break one piece of spaghetti. We moved up to quarters because I didn't think I had enough pennies to break the bridge.

 



the wood brace you see is the table brace. It has nothing to do with the bridge. The angle is just weird.

empty bag.

quarters

more quarters...

It turns out, we didn't have enough quarters. We added other change. Nickles. Pennies. Dimes. We had to add a second bag.

We ended up with this bag and a different hook. We unbent the large s-hook I'd created with the paperclip and used an industrial strength hook finally. The bridge broke eventually, but it took a long time, all the change in the house, and finally the matchbox cars.

The test-broken bridge.

This is what it took to break Caleb's spaghetti bridge. The hook on the outisde of the bowl is what we hung everything from. It was just over 8 pounds of stuff.

 

Now, I know that physics classes do this kind of thing all the time, and that there are contests out there for high school classes. I've seen balsa bridges that support 200+lbs of weight. And damn, I'm impressed by those things.

 

But I'm impressed with Caleb's spaghetti bridge and its 8 lb. test weight. The bridge weighed just over an ounce. He designed it. He built it. He tested it. I helped with the weighing and the breaking of the spaghetti and the control of the hot-glue, but I didn't alter his plans. I didn't push my agenda. We talked about architecture. We talked about geometry. We talked about physics. He read some books, and then he designed his bridge. This is Caleb's project. Even when he complained about everything involved, he still took responsibiltiy for it. And now he wants to design more. He wants to build more. He wants to try arches next time. He wants to get over a 10 lb. test on an ounce bridge. 

 

As his teacher, I'm thrilled.

As his mother, I'm proud.

As a driver, I hope that we can find more durable material than spaghetti when he makes his first real bridge.

Happy Easter!

The plain, old fashioned food coloring with vinegar in hot water served to decorate our eggs this year. There was nothing fancy about it. Nothing except for the colors when I gave Hannah and Caleb a free rein in deciding what colors to make their eggs. Each could pick six.

"What would happen if we put some blue and red--like fifteen drops of blue and five of red?"
"How about fifteen red and five blue?"
"Red and yellow make orange...but what if we put more yellow in. Lots more yellow!"
"Great!"
Said I: "Don't you just want to make a blue egg? How about red?"
This was met with looks of disappointment in my lack of imagination. Blue? Who makes a blue egg when you can mix and match to your hearts content?
"That's kind of boring," Caleb said semi-tactfully.
"Really boring," Hannah noted with no tact at all.

So, I cleaned out four ceramic mugs several times to create the twelve colors they came up with. There are no two colors that are alike. Several are similar, but none are exactly alike. The children were content. I was cowed into acknowledging their superiority in deciding colors. "Maybe adults just don't see the same amount of colors kids do," Hannah theorized with a gentle pat on my arm. Condescended to by a ten year old. My Easter egg coloring experience was complete. I see the same colors they do, I just had laundry waiting in the basement. I didn't think I had time to create twelve different colors. I was wrong. The satisfaction of my children at the successful completion of the job well done told me that I was dead wrong.

 

Now we will eat the egss for lunch, I suggest the day after Easter.

 

 "Ew." Wrinkled noses and frowny faces regarded the suggestion doubtfully. "Eggs are okay as long as you don't have to eat the yellow middles," I was informed.

I have a dozen hard-boiled eggs to eat at home. Yum.

Nacho Night

The kids picked dinner today. I don't let them do this a lot. I learned very early that giving children too many choices is not always a good idea, and putting them in charge is even less so. I never have asked them, "Is that okay?" because it doesn't matter if they think it's okay. I'm their Mom. I make the choices. I make choices that will keep them healthy and whole throughout their childhood. Not that all of my decisions are correct or even good all of the time; however, my job is to keep them alive long enough to be able to make their own decisions as adults. Right now, I will make choices, and I don't care if it's "okay" with them.

(But here comes the bad part about being a decision maker) I'm not really a good meal planner. The biggest stress in my day, most days, is deciding what to prepare for dinner. (I know, I know. If that's my major stress, what do I have to complain about?) From the time I wake up in the morning to the time we sit down at the table in the evening, I'm worried about dinner. Will they eat it? Will I make enough? Will I make too much? Will I have the time to finish it? Will I have the ingredients? Will I like it--because I have to eat it. It's not an option for me to refuse to eat something I cooked. A chef who won't eat her own cooking isn't a chef you can trust.

Sometimes I luck out. Turns out my kids like edamame. Who knew. They just sucked those soybean pods dry and asked for more. I don't get that with a lot of vegetables. I've also learned that they don't like quiche, which I find funny because they both like scrambled eggs although Caleb prefers sausage over bacon.

Another reason for my unreasonable stress is that dinner, being the one meal of the day when we all sit down, is the meal that I use to teach table manners. We use napkins. We use utensils. We don't slurp. We behave. Dinner is a test for me as a mom, and for the kids as savages. It's a rite of passage for them from the kids' table to being able to dine with adults. I don't know if I ever passed it when I lived at home. When I was growing up, dinner was a successful meal if no one was dismissed from the table for making nose jokes.

Conversation circa 1980-1990 in the Kusar Household:
One of us kids: "What's green and goes backwards at a hundred miles an hour?"
Mom: "You can be excused now."
Dad: "Leave!"

Once when my kids were little, in an effort to foster their interest in dinner and hopefully to encourage them to behave, I gave them the privilege of choosing the dinner menu. This only happened once because they decided that they wanted 'corn' for dinner. We had corned beef, corn bread and creamed corn. This is why three and five year olds don't run restaurants; the themes are a bit simple. Honestly, it wasn't a bad meal, but  they refused to eat it.

But today I was feeling adventurous, and "corn day" being five years past, I once again let them choose the dinner menu. Today was Nacho Night at the Brohlin household. We had blue and yellow chips, taco meat with black beans, re-fried beans, salsa, and queso with jalapenos. Hannah and Caleb set the menu. I did the shopping and we all sat down to eat. I'm always thrilled when they eat things. They've become much more adventurous lately. We've come a long way from 'corn' night. The only thing left uneaten was the salsa because you could actually identify the vegetables in it.

And I had fun. I relaxed. We dipped our chips and laughed at the towering layers of cheese and beans and salsa and more beans. Hannah made a refried bean road on her plate and created hazards with black beans in the road, and then scooped up the hazards with chips. Caleb did a blind taste test to see if he could tell the difference between yellow and blue chips. I didn't harp on napkins (although they were there.) I didn't nag about slurping (although there was surprisingly little.) or using utensils (it was nachos for pity's sake!) Of course, it wasn't the healthiest we've ever eaten. There were no green vegetables, and I forgot to put out the baby carrots to snack on. But, when the studies are published that show that eating dinner with your family stops kids from getting into drugs, getting into trouble, getting kicked out of school, driving drunk, joining the circus, becoming carnies, or majoring in art history, this is probably the kind of dinner that does the most good.

I'll give them a crash course in table manners when we're invited to the White House for the award I'll win someday for being a good Mom. Until then, I think we'll build some more refried bean highways and take them to a stress-free place...until I have to decide what to eat tomorrow night.

Spicy!

The whole house smells like I'm making chilli, and this is okay, because I am making chilli. It was odd then, that when I went into my spice cabinet I found three little containers of cloves (two of whole cloves, one of powdered cloves), three different kinds of pepper (red, black, white) three containers of paprika (two small, one large) and one large bottle of smoked paprika, ginger, basil, curry (yellow) tarragon, alum (I guess I was planning on canning), dill, sea-salt, regular salt, flavored salt, cream of tartar, parsley, basil, oregano, thyme, marjoram for pity's sake ...and yet no chilli pepper.

My spice cabinet is a testament to the power of disorganization in my life. I'm sure that I wound up with so much paprika because I baked something with paprika and then decided to do it again, and couldn't find the paprika, so bought another...and again...and so on. I'm not sure where the cloves came from though. I can't think of anything I've ever made with cloves. Maybe cloves are like odd socks and just reproduce when you're not looking.

But more than disorganization, the spice cabinet testifies to my frustrating journey through cooking. I'm not a natural cook. I don't really enjoy cooking; I enjoy the final product of cooking well enough, but cooking itself is a frustrating trip though the perilous waters of "I thought I had that in here somewhere." It never fails. I'm in the middle of cooking up an elaborate dinner when I realize that I need something stupid and essential that every chef who ever wrote a cookbook naturally has on hand. Something like olive oil (two open containers in my pantry at the moment), or white wine vinegar (got it), or oyster juice (ugh),or truffle oil (not a chance) or leeks (aren't you supposed to stick those in your hat or something?) The problem with buying such crazy, exclusive, and yet supposedly needed items is that I will use them once, and then they sit in my pantry, or in my spice cabinet as a silent, accusatory reminder that I don't try hard enough...and no matter how much I beat my children, I can't force them to eat my culinary masterpieces.

George will eat my cooking. He really appreciates a good home cooked meal because he's rarely home for dinner, and doesn't cook in any case. I eat my cooking, and even like it when I'm sure that the meat hasn't turned on me. I've been told that I'm a good cook on occasion. But when all your kids want to eat when you make Chicken Marsala is the wine-drunk mushrooms, you question the necessity of cooking at all. Perhaps I should just marinade some fungus and fry it up and serve it on a paper plate. The kids would probably be happy with that.

Even something as simple as chicken fingers has caused me trauma. I like chicken. Kids like chicken. They especially like chicken if it's unrecognizable (nugget or strip form) and so,  I found a great recipe (or so I thought) for chicken fingers. These little beauties  were tasty, flavorful, homemade and (important!!!)relatively easy to make. What's not to love? I even whipped up a batch of honey-mustard (yes, I know you can buy it) and when I was done, there were enough left over to freeze some for future meals.

There's a reason that these tasty treats are often referred to these days as 'chicken strips.'

"EW! Chicken fingers? That's gross, Mom!"
"Those poor chickens....Wait. Chickens have fingers?"

Chicken fingers were not a rousing success. The kids would rather eat KFC and not have to worry about what part of a chicken the "tender" is.

But whatever part of the chicken a "tender" happens to be, if the Colonel ever runs out of his eleven herbs and spices, he can probably find them all in my spice cabinet. I'm not using them at the moment...unless he finds the Chilli Powder. That one is mine.

FOUND IT!!!!

Arts Week - Ending with a whimper

The whimper is mine because I think I scratched my cornea with glitter. My left eye is seriously hurting. I tried calling my optometrist, but he might be on vacation for the holidays. Grrrr. I have to wear my glasses now and my glasses, while sufficient for seeing in a "big picture" sort of a way, really lack the finesse of my contacts when it comes to fine vision. For example:
Without glasses or contacts - I can see a large grey object hurtling towards me. Is that an elephant or a car?
With glasses - I can see a large grey quadruped running towards me. Is that an elephant or a rhino?
With contacts - Who the hell put the roofie in my drink? There are no elephants or rhinos loose in the city!

So I think that it snowed last night. I mean, the ground is white. I'm not sure if it's still snowing. Damn glasses, but I will find out soon, because it is swimming lessons today, and while George unusually takes the kids, I volunteered because a) I don't work today, and b) he will be with them the rest of the day at the Christmas Pageant rehearsal. Update later. Gotta see if the rhino wants to drive today.

11:15pm
Kids are in bed, and I am back on the computer. I should be jogging, or knitting. There are always other things that I should be doing, but I noticed something this morning, and I just had to share. I now have 2 followers. Becky is #2!!! Two apostles, acolytes, disciples, minions...I need to turn off the thesaurus now. I'm planning a blowout for #100, so don't hesitate to sign up to follow!! (what, too ambitious?)

I am also getting a kick out of checking this blog and seeing what ads Google believes are appropriate to put in between things and in the margins. I did this thing where I signed up to have ads put on and they will send me some percentage of a penny for every time someone clicks on an ad.  I thought it would be funny to see what they came up with, and if I didn't like it, I'd just cancel the service. There are a few conditions to this "service" they provide. One condition is that I can't click on ads that appear on my own blog. I can't make money for myself, in other words. There is one problem. I WANT TO CLICK. I was talking about food the other day, and an ad showed up for a breakfast casserole. I LOVE BREAKFAST CASSEROLES. I could eat the Breakfast Pizza Mom used to make for three meals a day. I love quiche and strata, and all kinds of breakfasty goodness. AND I CAN'T CLICK! It's teasing me, I swear.

Ah well, back to dreaming of food and trying to make three more pairs of mittens and a scarf before next Saturday.

Arts Week Day 4-Pancake Supper-1 Follower

 These are the ornaments that we have spent the past few days making. We have done other things like math, spelling, science and history, but I think that these ornaments will be remembered by all of us as way too much work tons of fun! I mean, they took TWO DAYS, and they are still not quite done. Most of the finish work will be mine, however, so we can do something that Mommy all of us consider fun tomorrow. I hope we can get out to the Art Institute, but that all depends on how I sleep. I've had some really awful insomnia lately and by the time I actually get to sleep, it's late. Or early. It kind of depends on which side of the clock you are used to waking up on.

I cooked pancakes for supper. It's kind of funny, but a friend of mine said "Oh, Breakfast for dinner," when I told her this, but that's not quite it. Breakfast for dinner in our house means "Pick a cereal, kid. I'm too tired to cook." Pancakes are actually me cooking. See--I stand in front of a stove, I cook. That makes this dinner. Not that I don't know how to cook. I can do almost anything except bake a good cake (they always stick.) I cook wonderful dinners with vegetables from the garden, marinated meats, homemade bread, pies for dessert (homemade too--I make a great crust.) But I don't always enjoy it. I'd rather spend my time knitting, or making ornaments, or something that I think is fun. Occasionally I feel obligated to cook, and then I'm grumpy for the rest of the day. George has learned to feed me wine with dinners I cook and he cleans up afterwards. Am I lucky or what? Someday I will cook an elaborate dinner just so that I can sit at the table afterwards with a glass of wine and watch him wash up. (I do this on Thanksgiving. It's one more thing for me to be thankful for...and George is so obliging.) Someday he will discover this blog and my fun will be over.

But pancakes...pancakes are a homemade dinner, and don't let anyone tell you differently! It's a bit more prep work than hot-dogs, but the payoff is so much sweeter.

And I have one "follower"!!! Thank you Gretchen. Eleven more to go and I'll draw even with Jesus. (No, wait, that was apostles. Want to be my apostle, Gretchen?)