Conversations with Peter.

Pure Peter:

1. In the car, on the way to school yesterday: "Mommy, do pets fart? Because I have never smelled the fart of a pet." (Much hilarity ensued when we repeated this question at the dinner table.)

2. Same car ride: "Mommy, I want another baby in our family. And then another, and then another! Then we would have five kids in our family! Why can't we have five kids in our family?" (Can you tell a three year old, "Hell to the no!" or is that too emphatic?)

3. To Grace, who is examining the 1$ that is her latest tooth-fairy related largesse: "Did the Tooth Fairy bring you a whistle? Because you are the only person in the family who cannot whistle."

4. "Mommy, what happened when da comet hit the earth and it got cold? To da dinosaurs? Dey got DEAD." (Much interest in "getting dead" these days, and also shooters and shoots and what happens when your shooter runs out of shoots.)

5. "You know what I'm going to call Popeye from now on? [dramatic pause] I'm going to call him ... Pop!"

Peter paints

Back when Grace was wee, "big paints" (tempra paints used with the easel) were a pretty regular pasttime. (The corresponding category is "little paints," or watercolors.) My dad sent me the easel he made when I was little and we've gotten a lot of use out of it. But somehow, with two budding painters, we used big paints less often because the cleanup is more complicated and you've got two kids to keep track of while washing out the paint cups, etc.

But today, Peter wanted to paint, so we got the easel out and did big paints. His style is very different from Grace's - she's more about color, he's more about layering the paint, and he's very fond of the round sponge brush that gives you nice fat dots. He also painted hearts in the corner of the paintings, starting with one he did for Grace. He asked if I would help him make a heart "for showing love to Grace," which is such a sweet awwwwwww moment.

Suburban anthropologists, we are!

So we were amused witnesses today to a prime example of annoying suburban living. At Grace's elementary school, although I usually park and walk to the playground to meet her as she leaves, many moms wait in line in their cars until the custodian opens up a special pick-up lane behind the school. The moms drive into the lane, park, the kids find the appropriate car, and it's a pretty efficient traffic pattern. [It happens in the inverse in the morning, in a different location, for dropoff, which seems to lack much of the aggressiveness of pick-up for whatever reason.]

Except, today, the custodian was gone. No one could find the keys to the gate. This meant that in both directions, moms were lining up as usual, but the gate wasn't open. SUVs and minivans started to stack up. I walked by a very frustrated assistant principal, picked up Grace, and walked back to find that for a block in each direction the streets in front of the school had become unruly parking lots. This was where it gets funny: what happens when entitled suburban mamas find that a. they can't get to their precious darlings RIGHT THIS SECOND and b. every one of their neighbors is driving an SUV as huge as theirs and c. no one has any concern about any car/child/person except her own? The little vingettes were so classic: look, there's Mom Who Wears Her Full-Length Mink to Elementary School slipping her Jag [yes, really] in front of someone's driveway so she can hop out and get her kids on foot. Look at her expression of distaste when she realizes that she can't thread her way through the cars in her high-heeled, impractical boots because cars are parked in the crosswalk! Or look at Fancy Sunglasses Mom in the Range Rover nearly bash her huge vehicle into the SUV in front of her in her determination to be the First One Out, now that she's got her kids! Listen as Mom in Minivan bellows to everyone within hearing range that "Someone should direct traffic!" because, you know, it's not like we're adults doing something that's fairly low-urgency. No, this is High Drama! Check out the speed with which various SUVs are propelled down the street - because, you know, if you're just fast enough, you'll get through! And then there's Mom Who Honks When Forced To Wait [not making this up - one of the dads saw her and rolled his eyes and said, "Jeez, she always does that!"], doing her thing right at the front of the line, because that's how you make keys materialize out of nowhere, you know. Best of all was the slightly perplexed look on the face of the guy who is a stay-at-home-dad and walks to drop-off and pick-up every day. Yes, sad to say, these *are* your neighbors.

We just hung out in the car until traffic cleared, which took about five minutes. I felt sheepish about having stopped by Starbucks' drivethrough on my way to pick Grace up (in my defense, it's pretty cold out, and Peter wanted a snack, and we bought something for Grace), but it felt a lot more cheerful in our car, with our almond whatever bars and our Chai latte. We watched the parade of tense and irritated neighbors and listened to our obnoxious rock music extra loud and then made our way peacefully home.

That is all.

Indoor fun with outdoor theme

We went to a biggish newish Cabella's today, where Mike and the kids have been previously but I have not. To my surprise it had elements that strongly resembled both the Field Museum (dead stuffed things, although at Cabella's they were often in the throes of attacking each other) and the aquarium (lots of fish in tanks.)



We wandered through the tents, found a great stuffed fish for the upcoming third birthday of a certain beloved girlcousin, declined to dine on the various odd wild game burgers in the cafe, and avoided the pretend shooting gallery (wait, firing range? whatever) for which the kids were given tokens on entry. Grace talked a lot about fishing and how she caught five rainbow trout once (true story!) and Peter was mostly in awe of all of the cool camping equipment. We tried to determine which animals in the life-sized dioramas were actual dead animals and which were pretend dead animals. (Lion? actual. Elephant? pretend. Or at least that's what we're hoping.) For a very cold day, it was a fun free outing, and has made us eager for spring.

Thinking about the calendar.

This week was the first week of the semester for me at work. I updated my syllabus and prepared a first-day exercise and a handout on hermeneutics and went to work. The first day is always fun: you can look through the syllabus, picture where you'll be in the spring, and (if you're the student) evaluate whether you want to stick with the class or not. There is a certain satisfaction for the teacher, too, to be able to tell a big group of people that they'll need to be somewhere specific on May 1st in order to take the final exam. There's a great novel by Ferrol Sams called "The Whisper of the River" in which the (very young) hero goes off to college and has all sorts of interesting and profound and profane adventures. He meditates at a certain point on one of his syllabi, thinking to himself that it would be impossible to get behind in this man's class: it's that well-organized and laid out. I'd quote the passage but am having trouble locating the book, which of course just makes me want to read it, and I'll spend a week hunting for it before it turns up and then I'll get to settle in with it for a few nights of reading. I'm not confident that my students are half as excited, or that they'll find it impossible to fall behind, but I have high hopes. And the rest of the spring is falling into place nicely: a couple of conferences, a few deadlines which seem managable, the fun of Easter (for which I also get to cancel class one week, having been informed too late that my class falls within the Easter Break period. Alas, I will have to spread Luther and Calvin out a bit.) Anyway, there's something energizing and motivating about paying attention to the year that's unfolding, and marking the dates, and planning ahead, and reading good novels on the couch while the wind blows outside.

Editing to add that I *found* the book, although not "Bultmann: Retrospect and Prospect" which the library needs back. The passage I was thinking of reads, "There was something about sitting in a sunny classroom in September and looking at what one would be doing all through the winter and on into March that brought to Porter's attention the beauty of a businesslike approach to education. There was no way one could get behind in this man's class. Of course, one would be six months older, but one should be filled with a wealth of information."

The Cheese Eaters

So today I was reading the book section of the Chicago Tribune, which I like to do so I can add new books to my library request list, and happened upon a review of a novel called "Bleeding Kansas" by Sara Paretsky. The reviewer, Amy Gutman, is also a novelist, and her excellent review made me want to read her books, too, so the library list is growing a bit. To complicate matters further, in the review she quoted a book by Thomas Frank called "What's the Matter With Kansas?" and the bit she quoted made me want to read that, too. He writes that hard-line conservatives think "that liberals are identifiable by their tastes and consumer preferences and that these tastes and preferences reveal the essential arrogence and foreignness of liberalism... [i]n particular the things that liberals are said to drink, eat, and drive: the Volvos, the imported cheese, and above all, the lattes." And, by gosh... Volvo, check. Lattes, check. But we were sorely, sorely behind the times in our consumption of fancy imported cheeses.

Enter dinner: it seemed like a great night to make the excellent Four-Cheese Rigatoni recipie passed along by a (strangely, not necessarily liberal) friend. Here's the recipe, copied directly, so sic and all that. I find that I need to add a bit more flour to make the sauce thicken perfectly, but it's fairly easy and very, very good.

Baked Rigatoni with Four Cheese

1T salt
1lb dried pasta such as fusilli, penne, rigatoni, or ziti
6T (3/4 stick) unsalted butter
1/2 flour
4 cups milk
2 cups evaporated milk
Fresh ground pepper to taste
Freshly grated nutmeg to taste
1 1/2 cups each

* shredded Gruyere
* shredded Emmenthaler
* shredded sharp Cheddar

1 cup grated Parmesan-Reggiano

1) Stir the 1T of salt into a large pot of boiling water. Boil pasta until tender but still firm. Drain and rinse under cold water. Set aside.

2) Preheat Oven to 350 and grease a 9x13 baking dish

3) Melt butter over low heat and whisk in flour and cook; whisking or stirring almost constantly until bubbly and fragant. ~5 minutes, but do not brown.

4) In another saucepan, combine milk and evaporated milk and bring just to a boil over medium-high heat. Pour all at once into butter/flour mixture and whish until smooth. Season now with salt, pepper, and nutmeg. Place the pan over medium-high heat and cook for 5 minutes or until the mixture has thickened. Pour over the pasta and spread the pasta evenly in the baking dish.

5) Combine the cheeses and sprinkle evenly over the pasta. Bake for about 25 minutes until the cheese is melted and the pasta is heated through.

6) Transfer to the broiler to brown the cheese, about 3 minutes.

Voila! The best 4 cheese pasta! For this recipe, I recommend highly the TJ's Penne that comes in the yellow bag.

Dinosaurs say roar!

We went to the Field Museum this weekend with friends, including Tyrannasaurus Beck. It's so fun to hang out with a little baby again! Peter was somewhat suspicious of Beck's capacity to attract attention that he thought should rightfully be his own, but he came around. Grace loved the dinosaurs, loved the many, many stuffed birds and medium-sized mammals, loved the baby, and loved being able to read all the signs. Peter talked up a storm about the dinosaurs but was a little overwhelmed by them - it was more fun to push buttons that made dinosaur noises than to actually look at the huge, looming skeletons.


Afterwards we went out to dinner and played "what's in Mommy's purse?" which turned out to be a pair of sunglasses, a magnetic letter L, and Peter's plastic dinosaur from the machines at the museum.

Trouble in River City.

So I have begun Phase I of my plan to instantiate a love of the musical "The Music Man" in the kids. This involves frequent, one might even say near-constant playing of the soundtrack to the Broadway version. It's such a charming set of songs, and so forward-thinking: the smart girl with a past is the heroine! That's brilliant. The song between Marion and her mother ending in the line "There's not a man alive who could hope to measure up to the blend of Paul Bunyan, Saint Pat and Noah Webster you've concocted for yourself out of your Irish imagination, your Iowa stubbornness and your library full of books!" - it's just really fun. And I like that Marion glosses over all sorts of possible tricky illicit adult situations with the line, "You'll find it in Balzac." I loved the play and the soundtrack, and thus played the music, so much as a child that I can still sing along with each song, which (let me assure you) never gets annoying *at all.* Phase II is going to involve watching the Matthew Broderick/Helen Chenowith made-for-TV movie, which Santa was kind enough to put in my stocking this year. I figure that if we all grow to love the actual play as much as I expect, we can track down a stage production and it will be all sorts of great good fun.

Sweet birthday girl.

So Grace is seven, which defies logic, because it was just yesterday when she was so teeny and new and utterly dependant and now she's practically an adult. Peter got her some headbands, and she got lots of great clothes and toys and art supplies, which Peter helped her open by assuming a supervisory role.



We had chocolate cake which is the household standby for birthdays. It was slightly lopsided, but to really perfect layer cake one would need to make a lot of layer cakes, which would require either distributing one's lopsided practice cakes throughout the community or eating a really lot of cake, neither of which seems practical.

The cake recipe:
1/2 c. shortening
2 c. sugar
1/2 c. baking cocoa
1 c. hot water
1 tsp soda
1 c. hot coffee
2 c. flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1 tsp vanilla

Cream shortening and sugar. Add eggs and beat. Add cocoa which has been dissolved in hot water to creamed mixture. Add soda which has been dissolved in hot coffee; mix again. Add dry ingredients and vanilla. Beat 1.5 minutes. Bake in a 9X13 or 2 round pans at 350 for 30 minutes.

And enjoy: this is a great cake!

New plant!

After leaving the art museum yesterday, we trundled around the city for a bit, and stopped in at the Smith and Hawken garden store. Among the various interesting and overpriced plants and "garden accessories" we noticed this cool ivy topiary that was 85% off the regular outrageously inflated price. So I talked Mike into it while keeping a mostly negligent eye on the kids, who did no damage but expressed great interest in the fragile and expensive garden stuff. The employees were frosty to the point of iciness to us (the kids, maybe? Or was it that we're not up to their usual yuppie standards? We couldn't tell.) Once we decided to buy the plant, one employee volunteered that we had gotten a bargain (since the original price was a mind-blowing $150! we had indeed) and the other offered us some care tips for the plant. Now, note, we didn't do anything to suggest that we were rock-bottom stupid, but she suggested misting the plant and then cautioned against overwatering, saying that we didn't want to use "a regular size cup, but maybe a sippy cup full of water" weekly. Um, lady? Just because I've given birth to these two charming children currently ransacking your store doesn't mean I'm unfamiliar with standard measures of volume. I appreciate the directions, but the whole interaction was bemusing. I much prefer the cheerful folks who work at my favorite fancyish nursery down the street - they presume that I'm more or less able to keep a plant alive, and talk to me like an adult, and don't mind small garden enthusiasts when I bring them. But I digress. Anyway, we now have this very pretty ivy topiary in the living room and when I dutifully gave it its weekly cup or so of water yesterday I noticed that the smell was something between earth and a lemon - whether this is a fancy Smith and Hawken plant additive or the ivy's natural scent remains to be seen.