dogs and monsters

I made spaghetti hot dog monsters for the family last night, but only Max had them for dinner. Sarah tasted one – it was a favor to me, since I needed someone to verify that the pasta was cooked through – and she probably loved it, though she didn’t say so explicitly.

Mia also tasted one. Shortly before dinner was served, she announced that she didn’t like hot dogs anymore, and anyway Mommy served hot dogs the night before, so she wanted something else, and she got it. But she did ask for one of them, late in the meal, and then she smothered it in catsup and turned it into a bloody spaghetti hot dog monster.

Max, though, he ate them and enjoyed them, as you can see. I too enjoyed them, far more than I expected to, though I didn’t eat them. Next time they’ll have eyes, if I can figure out what to use and where to put them. Capers on the side of the dog? Peppercorns? Penne? Perhaps.

As entertaining as Max’s meal was, it wasn’t sufficient to keep him glued to his seat. That’s a thing – neither kid seems willing to sit down in a chair, in front of their plate, during a meal. Mia is the worst at this – I have seen her stand on one foot, bent sideways at the waist with one elbow on the table, stretching her body a good three feet in order to eat a plate of macaroni and cheese. With her bare hands.

I thought it was just our kids – perhaps Sarah visited a barn while they were in utero? – but I’m told by good friends that they’ve seen the same thing play out with their children. It’s not easy to understand, this insistence on raising the degree of dinner difficulty. The pile of macaroni on the floor after every meal, on the other hand, is.

We’ve long known that Max leans vegetarian, spaghetti hot dog monsters notwithstanding. He regularly skips the chicken fingers or hamburger patties or meatballs on his plate, opting to stick with the pasta. Now from Sarah comes news that he made her shoo a spider outside rather than swat it, pointing out that spiders are, after all, living creature.

Just a data point. Maybe it’ll mean something in hindsight.

  

 

the book of joob

She keeps a journal. It’s in one of those old composition notebooks, the ones with the black and white mottled covers. Sometimes she lets me read it, sometimes she doesn’t, and I always respect her feelings on that. Kills me to do it, because all I want to know in this world is what’s going on in that little head of hers, but I do it all the same. I have to.

Sometimes it’s about what she did over the weekend. More often, it’s about what stickers or books or toys her grandparents bought her. And then there’s this one:

I love my dad.

I love my dad

becus he has no

joob and wen he

has no joob then

he sumtimes can

pic me up from

scool urly.

***

Sunday is Father’s Day – my sixth, incredibly. Each is better than the last, because each day the kids get more magnificent. Couple weeks ago they held a debate on the question of robot poop – Max says they poop cannonballs, but Mia says it’s more like screws and bolts. I think it depends on the robot’s diet. The jury’s out. And Saturday, Max drew a frog and named it Snort, and this is how he explained the name to his sister:

“My frog’s name is snort because he snorted one of his boogers into the ocean. He had a booger that was really good, and he snorted it, and it fell into the water.”

And in fact, there’s a really good booger in the water. See for yourself.

***

Mia learned to tie her shoes this week.

Max ate a 64-ounce clamshell of blueberries watching Caillou.

Max still comes into our bed at night, but not every night.

Max is uncommonly polite. He uses please and thank you like they were Skittles. He also farts a lot, and this makes him laugh. A lot.

Mia’s favorite food is Skittles. I have never given her Skittles.

Max doesn’t like pizza. It has sauce, and he doesn’t like sauce. He also doesn’t like ketchup, or white sauce, or spaghetti with red sauce. The only sauce Max likes is syrup.

And Fig Newtons. Which he described to me as “the thing with the sauce with the bread around it.” He likes Fig Newtons.

Mia and Max only eat the heads off broccoli.

Mia read a whole book in bed tonight. She called me in to tell me about it. Her smile kept the room lit even after I made her turn out the light.

Max is coming around on shorts.

Every night before bath, Max chooses a plastic animal or dinosaur to bring into the tub. And every night, he asks me if that particular animal or dinosaur swims, and if it swims underwater too. Every night, I say yes to both questions.

Max draws dogs. He draws cats. He draws bunnies. He draws mice. Yesterday, he drew a dog chasing a cat. Chasing a bunny. Chasing…no, not a mouse. A ball of yarn. The ball of yarn was chasing the mouse. The mouse was chasing an ant.

Mia refuses to tell me about her day. It’s because it’s her day, not my day. That’s what she told me.

Max still gets tired of walking. I get tired of carrying him.

***

And then there’s this: I got a joob. I’ve been working at it for five months, and right now I’m thrilled, but I’m not.

I’ve not gone to work for five years. I’ve worked, but I’ve not gone to work. I’ve written. And though this job is insanely close to home – close enough that I’ll commute on foot – it’s not at home, which means I can’t watch kids and still work. Which brings with it all sorts of complications involving daycare and after-school care and babysitters and juggling and I don’t know what else. I don’t know. We’ll figure it out soon, though. We’ll have to. I start next month.

It’s good. I’m happy. This is what I’ve been working toward. And it’s as close to a perfect situation as I could have imagined. It’s just.

Well. I like picking her up urly.

 

good for her

They only go half day in kindergarten, which means that they don’t have a proper lunch period, which means that they don’t have a proper lunch at all. At the wrap-around daycare, they do a hot lunch if you give them three dollars, which I hate doing, no matter how much Mia begs, because, well, it’s generally crap. Three dollars worth of crap. 

Instead, I pack a bag for Mia — peanut butter on wheat, carrots, some fruit, maybe some Wheat Thins or Fig Newtons or Ritz Bitz, and maybe a hard-boiled egg. She usually brings the carrots back intact, as if she’s not sure they’re food. Which maybe she’s not.

Today, though, is open house, so she went early and got home early. Short of time and ready for the long weekend, I slid three folded ones into Mia’s hoodie pocket and waited for the squeal and the jump, both of which came as expected. Mia ran to school, the extra exercise perhaps offsetting the lack of nutrition to come.

Today is also Christina’s birthday, which means that the kids got an extra treat. Chips, Mia told me. Christina’s mom had brought chips, and cupcakes, and strawberries for the class, which Mia referred to as “lunch.” Later, after class but before I picked her up, Mia ate three dollars worth of Pizza Bites, along with a chocolate bar and animal crackers.

Tonight’s menu: steamed broccoli with a side of multivitamins.

Update: Steamed broccoli, apple slices, brown rice, sweet potatoes (with cinnamon), and… fish sticks. Both kids joined the clean plate club. Sez Max: “Daddy, you made a dish delish.” I am redeemed.

 

Also: tattoos!

 

 

squirrels

Mia brought home a bean sprout that became a bean plant, and that inspired us. So we planted forget-me-nots, and marigolds, and poppies. And chives and cilantro, and something else that I forgot to label, and since it never took, just like the flowers never took, I’ll never know what it was.

We’re learning.

And then we planted cucumbers in a big bowl, and they thrived, and then our gardener told me to take them out of the bowl and put them in the ground, which I did, over near the front of the house, behind the wall, near the apricot tree, and they struggled in the 100-degree heat, but made it through, until sometime between yesterday morning and this morning, when a squirrel, or maybe a team of squirrels – probably tweaker squirrels – came and ate them. All but one. Which will probably be gone by morning.

Damn tweaker squirrels.

Also: We went on a hike, and we brought along Max’s cowlick.

  

 

back with eggs

Thursday was Mia’s first science fair, and mine too, at least that I can remember, and so we crushed some eggs to celebrate. Other kids made volcanoes and grew lettuce and fussed with magnets, and one kid extracted DNA from an onion, which his mother insists is not really that difficult, but she’s a biochemist. Someone even took bacteria samples from around campus and let them get fuzzy in Petri dishes, and the results were sufficiently horrifying that Sarah could barely stand to look at the pictures, but that was a second-grader, I think, and those kids are smart. Us? We crushed eggs. And loved it.

It was more than it sounds, and maybe less. We put a cookie sheet on a two-by-four and rested one end of it on a raw egg (free-range, if that matters, which it doesn’t) encased in play-doh to keep it upright. Then we started piling books on top, one by one – first Mia the Beach Cat, then Goodnight Max, then 10 Little Rubber Ducks. By the time we got to Lady Cottington’s Pressed Fairy Book, the egg was clearly scared, and when we slid Once Upon a Princess on top, gentle like a maternity nurse, the whole thing came crashing down, yolk and whites and shell heading for separate exits.

It sounds like fun and it was – fun and edifying and surprising, since who knew that the same 9.2 pounds of children’s books, stacked in the same order under the same conditions, would crush an egg whether it was standing upright or laying sideways? Certainly not Mia, who pointed out that the horizontal egg should be easier to smash “because it’s already a little flat,” and anyway, everyone knows the shell is thinner around the fat middle. I, for one, thought she was right on the money. We were both wrong. 

   

 

 

here’s something.

So Danny sent some of his people this way to help us with our fundraising, which is beautiful, because I mean, Danny has a lot of people to send. If you’re reading this and didn’t know, Sarah and I are training for a marathon, and we’re raising money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. Want to help? Go here.

Meantime, I offer you a little something in return. It’s a recipe for a cool summer soup, sort of like a gazpacho, but with a melony twist. Mia invented it on a lazy Saturday a couple weeks ago – we’d spent the morning in the pool, and Max was napping, so Sarah made sandwiches and Mia made…

Watermelon Water Bisque

3 cups water
one string cheese
2 slices of watermelon
A handful of toasted soy nuts

Mix all ingredients together in a large bowl. Let it soup sit for 20 minutes to allow the nuts and cheese to begin to soften and decompose. Enjoy!

Or not. Truth be told, it didn’t taste quite as good as it sounds (and I know how good it sounds), but good for Mia for trying – she’s a creator, that one. Still, she really wanted us to love it, so I had a spoonful and made a big deal over it, and a while later, after some very effective badgering, Sarah pretended to take a taste as well. She made an even bigger deal over it, then wolfed down the rest of the batch while Mia was in the other room. She stood over the sink while she ate, lest some of the soup spill. Unfortunately, I think a lot of it spilled. A lot of it.

Sometimes you love your kids so much you lie to them.