family sleep

I meant to write — ages ago — this bit more about our Ohio visit. Somehow, imagine!, I seem to have gotten distracted by a major holiday or two, along with the general melee that constitutes daily life at Casa Fraught.

My parents, as I wrote earlier, moved back to my home town of Yellow Springs in 2001. In 2002 they bought — for the first time in their lives — a house. They paid cash for it, which amuses me, given their penurious lifestyle. It’s a few doors up and across the street from the house of my childhood best friend, one block from the library, and three from the very quaint downtown. Prime location.

We’ve always stayed with them when visiting, but because of some developments in the past year too heartbreakingly complicated to go into, on both our 2008 visits we stayed instead with my brother and his wonderful wife, a mile or so away.

The upside to this, the silver lining in the very dark cloud of its necessity, is that we saw a lot of the two of them. (As we grow older, I have to say that my brother is one of my favorite people. He’s brilliant and funny and kind; what’s not to like?)

Our accommodations are in the petite apartment connected at the back of the house. Originally one large room, it’s been set up as two small rooms with an accordian divider between them. We don’t close the divider, and Megan gets her own bed in the smaller room while Kira’s portacrib sets up nicely in the space where the divider would cut across.

For a variety of reasons, we’ve never practiced the Family Bed. It isn’t just that I can barely sleep with my husband in close proximity, though that certainly factored into our decision, but more that I’ve simply never felt any desire to share that space with our children.

But there we were, the four of us, all occupying the same room if not the same mattress. And you know, I have to say there’s something deeply joyful about sleeping in the same room with the most precious people in your life. Something lovely and special about snuggling into bed and drifting off with the girls so close by, all of us sharing the same nighttime space.

where’s that chicken recipe anyway?

One of my more popular posts by hit count is the one titled A Little Break, not because it’s any great masterpiece of literature or commentary but because it is home to the recipe for Rave-Worthy Moroccan Chicken. Which apparently has its own little fan club and is, I will blushingly add, being served at not one but two New Year’s Eve dinners this week that I know of.

I’m writing here not to encourage you to try it if you haven’t (though you should), but to point out that there is now a handy-dandy search feature over there on the right. You can search for “chicken” or for “adult fun” or for whatever you’d like. If you search for “naked breasts” you will not get a chicken recipe, nor will you see a post on adult fun. But you might get something. You never know.

Just a little something to make life easier. Because we’re all about the love here at Fraught.

tradition, part 2

We’re adding to our Christmas traditions yearly, but the longest-standing and certainly one of the most meaningful to me is our Christmas Eve dinner, which we’ve done for 8 years now, sometimes as a company affair and sometimes simply with family.

Throughout the year we say a blessing before dinner with our girls. Its precise wording and content shift according to mood or season, but the end remains constant: “… and we think of those who don’t have as much as we do.”

So on Christmas Eve we put our mouths around that in a tangible way as well, sitting down to a repast of beans and rice — in solidarity with the millions for whom one or the other, or perhaps both, constitutes the whole of their daily diet.

It’s a meal that makes me happy. Not to mention ready, on Christmas Day, to enjoy a major holiday sit-down spread.

tradition, part 1

As we all know, smell is the strongest memory trigger. These pepparkakor, a traditional Swedish ginger cookie enhanced with cardamom, have a wonderful aroma; one that I hope says “Come home for Christmas!” to my girls every year once they move away…

Each year on Christmas Eve afternoon we walk around the neighborhood and deliver festive bags of these to some doorsteps. (In Sweden, the traditional shapes are pigs, hearts, and little men and women, but the trees, in bulk, fit so well onto a baking sheet. Plus I’m not sure a pig would seem so terribly appetizing in my signature red-white-and-green icing motif.)

And of course the girls cut out all different shapes to decorate too, for our personal consumption. I love me some tradition.

on the road

While the bizarre yet apparently lingering rumor that I grew up on a commune is indeed greatly exaggerated, I’d have to say that Yellow Springs, population something near 4000, comes as close as any town reasonably could. While it’s gained a great deal of cachet, not to mention astronomic property values, in the last few decades, it largely manages to remain a place where unusual and faintly freakish are the norm.

I came back from time to time over the years even when no one in my family lived here, brought in by other ties. But my parents moved back in 2001, after Dad retired, and as of June or so now my brother and his wife officially reside here as well. So this visit has a feel of coming home about it, and it’s suiting me well.

One of the things I love to do when I’m here is go running. Depending on the shape I’m in, I can take in just about every site of personal significance in the town limits, with the exception of the Glen, a nature preserve that’s an outing of its own.

In better runnin’ shape than I’ve been in a number of years, on this visit I hit it all: the school I attended for all but one of my primary years; past the dorm I lived in the year I matriculated at Antioch, then along the edge of downtown, out past the two ponds we ice-skated on as kids, through the ‘hood where my dear friend Marty lived and I spent a lot of time, past my old teacher’s house and then on by the house I grew up in.

It’s surrounded by homes now, instead of fields and pastures, but I can still triangulate the location of the pear and apple trees that we plundered in the adjoining field and the lilac grove where as a teenager I buried our beloved cat after she was hit on the quiet road there in front of the house.

I’d intended to turn right at the next block to head up to the high school I graduated from (more than 25 years ago, my GOD), but the wind was coming from the west and had taken on a nasty bite as the clouds rolled in thick, so I wimped out and took a pass on the headwind, turning east to run instead the route I took the year I attended the public elementary school, walking it daily with a friend I never tired of.

From there I meandered on, inadvertently ending up cutting through on the footpath, now paved, where a man exposed himself to me from the door of an abandoned house once when I was about 10. The house isn’t there any longer, of course, but the memory lingers, decades later. Back in those days, I didn’t know to know that what he did was wrong, but I knew it made me feel very creepy, and I never told anyone.

And then on past the house that was my second home from the time I was 12 until I left town, and then my first home when I came back for a time in fragile need. I’ll stop in for a visit before we leave, but yesterday wasn’t the time; I needed to get on home to give the MPM a break from grading and get in a run himself.

It’s a lot of years condensed into 6 or so miles, and after immersing myself in the long-ago it felt good to come in the door and back to my where-I-am.

iso sustainability

It’s finals week, and although the MPM is technically home, having only one obligation on campus this week (being to pick up the exams he must grade while we’re making the trek back to my Ohio hometown), he’s been shoveling fast and furious at a mountain of grading that’s been making ominous rumbling avalanche-type sounds for the last week.

Or maybe that’s just him, as this semester finally, please god, comes to a close. It’s been a challenging one for all of us, as his load has been heavier and all the duties of home seem to remain the same. The running joke around here (whoo-ee, ’scuse me while I wipe my eyes laughin’ so hard) has been isn’t it funny he’s teaching about sustainability, because notice our pace of life right now is about as sustainable as, oh, our great nation’s thirst for fossil fuels.

Our together time has been on the limited end of scarce, to put it mildly.

In any event, yesterday morning it was gorgeous outside and I noodged and nagged and told him he needed to get out in the day and get a run in. Which he pointed out he’d have to manage to fit in after grading and before leaving to pick up his dad for their quarterly lunch out and then more grading. Which made me give him the look that translates to, “And your point is??” Which made him realize instantly how brilliant (and fetching) his wife is and what a good idea it really was.

Well, it must have, because at exactly T-minus-1-hour he came sprinting up the stairs from his dungeon desk, on his way to change into running gear, and tossed out, “Hey, you and Kira should come too!”

Well, by gum, yes we should and so much for brilliant; why didn’t I think of it? But I’m not the spontaneous one in the family for nothing so I followed him up and we had a little race to get our togs on and then headed out the door and down the hill. Together. Glory be.

Handicapped with the jogger, running at my pace he can still carry most of the conversation, and it was a pretty spectacular thing, serendipity and togetherness and a soft misty-not-quite-cool morning. Five miles later I took over the jogger and he sprinted for home and a shower and the rest of his day.

It had a pretty sustainable feel to it.

tools, toddler style

Kira has discovered in the last week or so that it’s quite fun to hit her sister. She doesn’t hit anywhere near hard enough to hurt, but Megan makes a certain (very gratifying, apparently) noise when she does it. It’s not a true squeal of pain, but sort of a “she’s-hitting-me-so-tell-her-to-stop” squeal, with a sidelong glance at whichever parental figure is in range.

I can tell from her response that at this level it’s pretty clearly a game to both of them, but because I don’t think hitting is ever okay or to be ignored on any level, my refrain has become, “People are not for hitting,” and Megan has taken to saying it to Kira on her own now. That usually does the trick; if it doesn’t I can and do get pretty loud with NO HITTING! and things of that sort, geared toward more of an impact.

Today I could hear some walla-walla taking place in the living room while I was trying to cook dinner, and though I was pretty successfully ignoring it, eventually Kira came in to me.

“Meg’n BOUNCED on me!”

Having made my way through most of Siblings Without Rivalry in the last week, my response was not, “MEGAN! Don’t bounce on your sister!”, but “Hmmm. It sounds like you don’t want to be bounced on. What can you say to Megan if you don’t want her to bounce on you?” (The idea being that if I intervene, it not only perpetuates the tattling, but cements the general “victim” role for the younger sibling. And no, I’m really not a paid spokesperson for the Faber/Mazlish collection… I swear.)

So she trotted off, and in a few seconds I heard, “Meg’n… [pause for thought]… bouncing isn’t for people!”

By jove, I think we’re ALL getting it.

shiny new tool

I didn’t go into a lot of detail about the shiny new tools, and I apologize for leaving anyone hanging, but honestly I didn’t have the time, energy or focus to do it justice. But here’s a story, of the illustrative sort:

Saturdays, when we’re home, are the MPM’s night to cook, and tonight he’d tackled roasting one of the five happy chickens I bought this fall from some very cool women who run a “poultry co-op” up the road a piece.

This was no puny organic chicken such as you buy at the store, where they take them to the block before they hit much over 3 pounds (which they do intentionally, so you won’t drop it splat on the floor when you see its pricetag). No indeed; this was a strapping 5-pounder, which meant it took a little longer roasting than we’d planned. Which I mention because it meant that Megan — well, all of us — were pretty hungry by sit-down-to-dinner time.

I get a little, or a lot, grumpy myself when I’m hungry, so I can hardly blame the girl, who has no fat stores whatsoever, for the downturn in her behavior when her blood sugar starts to slide. And it’s that hour anyway, right? Everybody’s getting a little frayed around the edges; she just takes it to the next level, coming completely, utterly, unraveled. At the merest glimmer of provocation.

So. She’s not what you call a good eater. I’ve resisted the “picky” label, because I don’t think it serves any good purpose, but even I am hard-pressed to come up with another adjective in its place. We try to go with “very selective,” which could be mistaken for a compliment, like when it’s uttered between clenched teeth by your mother who has just prepared whatEVER it is you ate last week yet proclaim inedible today.

But I digress. Baked potatoes have just recently broken onto her favored-food chart, so there was a good-sized one in the oven for her (and some baby ones plus carrots and yams and leeks roasted in the pan alongside the chicken for the rest of us, yum). And she was in the kitchen, watching intently as the MPM sliced it open before setting it on her plate to go into the dining room.

Well. It had one of those black middles. You know this phenomenon: By all appearances it’s a perfectly good potato, but when you cut into it, the center looks like some strange alien creature has taken up residence. I heard her intake of breath and my stomach sank, because if you have an Intense child, these are the sorts of things that Take Them To The Brink, and she was hungry to begin with. In that split second I could feel the chasm open, with the wailing descent to come all too familiar.

And then? Then I reached for that shiny new tool, the one that says “Show her you understand by matching the intensity of her reaction.” So before she could even utter a sound, I said, “EWWWWWWWWWWWWW!!!!!! LOOK AT THAT!!! WHAT’S WRONG WITH THAT POTATO??? IT’S ALL DARK AND ICKY INSIDE!!!! You’re not going to want to eat that!! EWWWWWW!!”

And she said: “Yuck.” Which was, after all, about all there was left for her to say, since I’d said everything else. So then I could say, “You know, sometimes if you just scrape out the very middle — yes!! LOOK!! — the rest is perfectly good! Look at that!!”

And she took her plate to the table while her father and I exchanged a leaping full-contact high five (in the form of a passing glance), and we all had a lovely dinner.

Make that a lovely, DELICIOUS, dinner. To my MPM: You are a god of roasting. Those three birds left in the freezer? I think — wait, let me look — yes, they do: they’ve got your name on ‘em.

december — sort of

My run today, squeezed in between kid obligations and rainshowers: 50-some degrees, moist air, wet leaves and damp pavement, all the scents and sensations enveloping me in the feeling of fall as I covered my 45-minute route.

Yum. There’s more winter cold headed our way, so it was a major treat.

chaser

I figured it might be a good idea to get the slightly dark taste of my last post out of your mouth by following up with some breezier fare, so here’s a quickie from this evening:

Of the three book clubs I belong to, I have to say my favorite gathering is the one I just came home from. First of all, the member who hosts it (now in its second year, and she’s going to have to work really hard if she wants to escape it turning into an annual affair) has a truly lovely home, so comfortable you can almost manage to forget how incredibly elegant it is, and is an amazing cook and hostess.

Secondly, the husbands are encouraged to come, and that’s like way fun. It’s not too surprising that the spouses of this group of interesting, fun, bright women are well worth spending time with. And after the wine has flowed and plates have been emptied once or twice, we assemble for the evening’s centerpiece: the book gifting, of a book you’ve read or want to, done in a “dirty Santa” format, where stealing is not only permitted but encouraged. Take twenty or so intelligent and amusing people and this is a recipe for some solid entertainment.

Last year I came home with the same book I’d brought, a collection of short stories by Dan Chaon, so it seemed only fitting to bring it back this year for someone else to enjoy. (It ended up in the hands of the host husband.)

The MPM got covetous of another husband’s book, “Twilight in the Desert” — about finance and the oil industry; riveting I’m sure — and after losing both Trillin’s “About Alice” and “Unaccustomed Earth,” by Jhumpa Lahiri I finally brought home Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road.” (It was described by its gifter — a philosophy professor — as “jaw-dropping,” so I’m really looking forward to cracking it.)

All in all, an evening filled with good food and good company, with the bonus of a good book to look forward to at the end of it.

I love the holidays, yes I do.

a Saturday ramble

Getting in bed after midnight isn’t something I do often, which is probably a good thing given that few things make me feel worse for an entire day than too little sleep the night before. Happily Friday’s late lights-out wasn’t preceded by an overage of adult beverage consumption, so at least I wasn’t dreading the departure off horizontal demanded by the phone ringing at 8:30 this morning.

It was the confirmation call for our target departure for the grand Hunting & Gathering o’ the Tree, to commence at 10a.m.

It should be said here that I’ve been working for about five years now on putting my inner Grinch to rest, which has entailed coming to terms with the genesis of my humbuggishness. After all, I’m hardly a grumpy or uncelebratory person by nature, so wherefrom this vast disdain for the season’s tidings?

Well. If you remove consumption and Christianity — neither of which were observed in my family of origin — from the Christmas season, there really isn’t a whole heck of a lot left to build on. Perhaps a very focused attention to the other observations of the season, a mindful building of traditions, could be put in place instead, but, well, that wasn’t done.

My parents didn’t set out to make the holiday season a time of vast disappointment for my brother and me. They were and are loving, kind-hearted, caring people. However, you simply cannot live in American society — even without a television — and manage to miss the glaring fact that there is a lot of celebration and fun and gatherings and cool stuff, not to mention Stuff in the form of gifts, that you are completely cut off from if your family essentially ignores Christmas (/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa, et al.).

I won’t go into my mother’s occasional attempts to make something of the holiday. They are really too sad, and pitiable, and I don’t want to picture her in that light by detailing them.  And frankly I don’t feel like thinking about them too much because while I understand, as an adult, that she was trying to make it better — for us, certainly, and for herself, too, perhaps; she had a great deal of despair in her own life — I also know how completely she failed.

I do not blame her today for the choices she made in those years. But I will serve witness here that some things, by their very meagerness, serve only to make the chasm between what you have and what you do not even more evident.

And out of that chasm arose my Grinch, with whom I kept company for decades. Aesop’s fox would be familiar with the sentiment: If you disdain the season, and all its accoutrements, you might not grieve its absence, its disappointments, in your child-life quite so much.

(And this is SO not where I meant to go with this post, which began in my head as a paean to the wonderful day we had on the tree-cutting mission, shared with good friends.)

So. Well. It was a wonderful day, shared with good friends. We dressed warmly, with persistence found our destination, marveled at the biting cold, took photos, laughed, watched the kids tear around (one sans mittens, which was the biggest marvel of all), and cut trees, a total of three, and drove back down the mountain.

And stopped and had lunch on the way home and took longer than necessary at the task, enjoying company and the relaxed atmosphere. Unloaded our girls and our tree from friends’ car, glad of its 8-seater capacity which had made the outing just that much more festive.

You see, we’re making a conscious effort to build our own traditions, ones that have meaning to our family. We don’t have a ton of them, yet, but the process of embedding them into our lives gives me joy, and I hold tight to the thought that our girls’ holiday memories will be woven from the comforting fabric of those traditions.

Anyone have favorite traditions they’d be willing for us to steal?

in the presence of greatness

Raising children is a tough gig. Maintaining sanity — yours and theirs — in the process is even tougher.

Like most parents in my world, over time I’ve read right many books on the topic. The one that I really consider in a league of its own, that hasn’t ever made it to the downstairs bookshelf from my bedside collection, is “How To Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk,” by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish.

I sort of wish it had a shorter, snappier title, because that’s one hell of a mouthful and a pain to type when I link to it as I’ve done several times now, but there you are. I’m here to attest, this stuff WORKS. Silly stuff I would never have dreamed could make one whit of difference, like granting in fantasy — “I wish I had a magic wand and could be TWO PEOPLE right now so I could play with you AND cook dinner!” — has incredible power to derail conflict and improve your life.

So. Although she is our lovely, bright, funny, sweet child, we’ve had some deep challenges with Megan in recent months. Oh, hell, who’m I kidding; we’ve had challenges with her for several years, going so far as to cancel vacations and trips out of our sheer unwillingness to subject others to her behavior. When she’s good, she’s very very good, but when she’s bad, oh man can she ramp up the unpleasant.

And because she’s this quiet kid who generally behaves the way you hope kids will, it’s the kind of thing that no one believes unless they’ve seen her in the throes of her awfulness. Her teacher was astonished to hear at our conference that she has these fits, as we call them, where she loses all sense of reason and screeches and hits and kicks and throws things and screeches some more, and then some more for good measure.

After Thanksgiving’s number, over the fact that Grandma wasn’t cooking a turkey — it took me 15 minutes sitting in the car outside their townhouse to talk her down from the edge — I was feeling pretty damn hopeless and desperate and turned, of course, to the internet for help, at some point thinking to see if perhaps the authors of HTTSKWL&LSKWT had any suggestions.

And found their website, with a link for email questions. “Have a question for Adele and Elaine about communicating with children? Although they cannot respond individually to the overwhelming flood of email to them, they will use this page to answer questions they feel to be most useful to the largest number of parents.” There were quite a few questions asked and answered, but none dealing with six-year-old tantrums.

So, in desperation, penned an email.

And the following morning got a response. From Adele Faber. With a phone number and the best times to reach her.

Color me floored.

So. I got Kira off to school, got myself organized with a few thoughts, and, a little nervous, called her this morning.

She said, “Oh, Amy! I was wondering when you would call.” And we went from there. It was like a conversation with one of my wonderful aunts — the identical trace Long Island accent, and the laughter.

And can I just say, she was brilliant. She asked me a few questions, and then I think she nailed exactly why my approach, which on paper looks pretty good, hasn’t been working. And what to do instead, in about three sentences. Color me completely in awe.

So I feel hope right now, instead of the daily dread that I’ve been lugging around for a good while, and I’m looking forward to implementing my shiny new parenting tools: Bring it on, Megs. Mommy wants to try something better.

Wish me luck. I’ll keep you posted.

tonight’s sky

My brother, who has an astonishing capacity for information — be it filtering, conceptualizing, absorbing, retaining, disseminating and/or explaining it — reminded me via email that tonight’s evening sky will be worth making an effort to observe: A slender crescent moon, just 15 percent illuminated, will appear in very close proximity to the two brightest planets in our sky, Venus and Jupiter. A very cool visual.

Take the kids out, or just take a minute out for yourself. And for more information about this stellar celestial show, you can click here. Or just give my brother a buzz.

the changing o’ the header image

Yes, it’s true: I just get bored of the same old one. I used to change my voicemail greeting seasonally too, back when I had time to think about those sorts of things.

I’m a little behind here, but I love these fall colors and I wasn’t ready to careen from purple-drenched late-summer hues straight into a winter theme.

So’s you know, I cadge all my header photos from the MPM’s forays into our yard with the camera. Our jpeg files show a pretty clear breakdown: I take the vast majority of the people pictures, and he’s got almost exclusive domain over the landscape/skyscape/nature shots.

Hmm…. what does that say about us? And anyone else wanna fess up? Who drives your digital?

And for the bloggity peeps out there: if you have a custom header, how did you choose it?