From the Milford (Mass.) Country Gazette.
A Maple Street man called police on Saturday, Dec. 18 about 4:30 p.m. to report that an unknown woman was sleeping in his bed, according to police. After checking his bed again he told police he believed it was his mother, then stated he wasn’t sure. Police went to the house where the man finally definitively identified the woman as his mother.
May 11th, 2006
Ben has been a big brother for almost a year now, and has behaved throughout in fairly predictable ways.
For instance, regression? Check: the day we brought Eli home from the hospital, Ben announced, “I’m going to pee and poop!” “Hurray! ” we cheered, pleased at his new body awareness; “Let’s go to the bathroom!” “No,” said Ben, “I’m going to pee and poop right here in the living room!” And he did.
Jealousy? Sure. Our early days with Eli brought lots of cries from Ben of “Put that down!”
Mimicking my behavior? Oh yes, as Ben would pull up his shirt and “nurse” his baby doll against his belly button.
For the most part, he’s alternated between ignoring and delighting in his baby brother and that’s worked pretty well for us.
Now as Eli has begun to crawl and have more of a direct impact on Ben’s life, it’s been fun to watch Ben find ways to deal with “Eli monster,” rampaging around his room and wrecking the megablocks creations, the train tracks, and the intricate patterns of playing cards.
The best recent development , since our trip back east last month, is a game Ben invented called Travel. He sets up his collapsible mesh fire truck – the airplane—next to the collapsible mesh house – the baggage compartment. Ben fills the baggage compartment with every toy in the house, while Eli crawls in and out of the airplane. Every so often, to Ben’s great delight, Eli crawls back into the baggage compartment. “Uh-oh!” shouts Ben, “Eli suitcase!” The role really suits Eli’s chunky size, though he’s way too wiggly to play the part of a suitcase very well. Still, it’s nice to see them playing “together” at last.
2 comments May 10th, 2006
Ben and his buddy M were heading out to ride bikes. We walked into the garage, which would be big enough to park two cars in if we didn’t have so many boxes and bookshelves and leftover renovation materials (floorboards, tile) and other dreck stored there. It’s a bit of a disaster, really. But M’s eyes lit up when he walked in; “Cool!” he shouted, “Let’s play here in the junkyard!”
May 9th, 2006
There’s a lovely essay by Rebecca Steinitz in Andrea Buchanan’s new anthology, It’s a Girl (more on the anthology later this week). Called “Tough Girls,” the essay opens by describing bike shopping for her four year-old daughter and being confronted at the bike shop, surprisingly, by contemporary American gender stereotypes. Boys and girls both ride bikes, of course, but there was a pink one and a blue one: one for girls, one for boys. “Luckily,” she writes, “the bike clearly meant for boys [black and blue with green pawprints] could be framed as neutral, especially to a four-year-old girl who just wanted off her tricycle.”
I was thinking about the essay this weekend when we went bike-shopping with Ben. We walked into the store and he climbed onto the first bike he saw, announcing, “This one!” It was pink. It might even have had pink streamers attached to the handlebars. I did that little mental check you do when your child tests social conventions: can I back this up? My little boy on a pink bike? And of course I could. My hairclip-wearing, lipstick-loving boy is too young to know how fixed, and how limited, our culture’s ideas are about gender, and I guess in some ways I’m too old to care.
The pink bike, in the end, was too small, so he’s now the proud owner of a blue and yellow bike with yellow flames on the frame and a banana-eating monkey on the handlebars. And all he wants to do is ride his bike.
1 comment May 8th, 2006
We’ve had 3 or 4 days of warm sunny weather, so when I promised a salad for Ben’s preschool spring festival this weekend, I dug out Nigella’s watermelon salad recipe. People might look at it and, mistaking the pale pink watermelon for lame supermarket tomatoes, think it’s a bad Greek salad, so just assure them that it is something delicious and new. They’ll be so pleased.
1 small red onion
2-4 limes, depending on their juiciness
3 1/2 pounds watermelon
9 oz feta cheese
1 bunch fresh flat-leaf parsley
1 bunch fresh mint, chopped
3-4 T olive oil
4 oz pitted black olives
black pepper to taste
Peel and halve the red onion and cut into very fine half moons. Put in a small bowl to steep with the lime juice. Two limes should do it, unless they seem dry; you be the judge.
Remove the rind and seeds from the watermelon and cut into large bite-sized, triangular chunks. Cut the feta into similar sized pieces and put them both in a large, shallow bowl. Tear off the sprigs of parsley so that it’s used like a salad leaf, rather than garnish, and add to the bowl along with the chopped mint.
Now add the onions (with the now oniony lime juice), olive oil, and olives, and toss gently so as not to break up the watermelon and feta too much. Add a nice grinding of black pepper and taste to see whether the dressing needs more lime. Keep at room temperature till serving.
4 comments May 8th, 2006
I love breakfast. I love it so much I’m happy to eat it for dinner (though dinner for breakfast? Except for a brief period in high school when I ate minute steaks for breakfast –I’m sure I was just trying to get a rise out of my mother, but it didn’t work–that’s not my thing.)
I’m a traditionalist about the meal. Eggs, muffins, pancakes, all delicious. Still, just as dinner isn’t dinner for some folks without meat and two veg, breakfast isn’t breakfast for me without a bowl of cold cereal, and I’ll eat that happily before moving on to something egg-y or a baked treat.
Part of breakfast’s appeal, for me, is you’re allowed to eat the same thing day after day in a way that we don’t approve of at dinner time. When I lived in New York City, I ate cereal at home and then picked up a toasted bagel or roll on the way to work every day; my mouth still waters at the memory of those buttery rolls, toasted on the griddle next to (and certainly absorbing some delicious grease from) other folks’ bacon and sausage. I ate Special K through graduate school, oatmeal and wheat germ through my first pregnancy, and now for the past several years I’ve been eating a mix of Trader Joe’s O’s and granola, most recently homemade granola.
Lately, Ben and I are eating breakfast at the same time, and it’s fun to see what he’ll assemble for his meal. In the past, he’s eaten whatever I put in front of him, even a hippie-mom mix of oat and wheat germs, flax and other grains that I rolled into lumps we called sludge balls. Last summer, his breakfast of choice was a graham cracker and a bowl of sundried tomatoes — not the fancy ones packed in oil, but fruit leather-y dried ones that he chewed and chewed. Often he’ll eat o’s and granola with me, but now he’s starting to innovate the cereal and milk model. Yesterday, he ate Special K with sliced banana, dried apple rings, and cashews with milk; today it was Special K, banana, strawberries, dried blueberries and peanuts with milk. I wonder what he’ll put in the bowl tomorrow?
May 3rd, 2006