rivka

Dude. It's been an awfully long time since anyone called me a man-hater.

Is it wrong that, instead of feeling pissed off, instead I feel vaguely nostalgic?


(Someone else's journal, so I'm not linking because I don't want to unleash my hordes of flying monkeys. Perhaps later I will write more about this, in a post tentatively entitled "Anyone Who Informs You That He Is Chivalrous Is Giving You An Advance Sexism Warning.")

This morning Alex and I went out to brunch with roozle and jonsinger and several of their friends. A good time was had by all, I think. Jon brought lots of pottery for show and tell. The Reed College grading system came up in conversation for the second time in two days, but this time I didn't rediscover a long-lost friend thereby.

Afterwards I took Alex to the mall for a massive Shopping Expotition. She got two pairs of sandals. What can I say, they were buy-one-get-one-half-price, and it does kind of make sense to have one sport pair and one slightly dressy (but still eminently run-and-playable) pair. She became aquainted with one of my few rigid rules about gendered clothing: she can try on anything she wants, but I will not buy shoes that don't permit running. "I'll just walk slowly, Mama," she assured me as she shuffled along in slippery-soled hard-plastic Barbie thongs with electronic light-up thingies. Yeah, no kidding. That's why you can't have them.

We bought invitations for our housewarming party and cards for Alex's thank-you notes. I bought a pair of khakis and two V-neck T-shirts. I failed to find shoes at the Clark's outlet. We bought some cloth napkins for everyday home use, because we aspire to make that transition. And! I bought the absolute best new purse ever, which is to say that it's almost exactly like my old purse, with the only changes being slight improvements.

I don't think I'm hard to satisfy when it comes to purses, except that I must be because I have a hell of a time finding them. Here's what I like: black, structured, large enough to hold a paperback book and/or a couple of small toys in addition to my regular equipment, and plain. I don't want flashy fittings or little doohickeys hanging off it or a pattern on the leather or, well, anything. That's hard to find.

I've been carrying the same black, structured, extremely tailored and sleek Liz Claiborne purse for at least five years now. It's held up beautifully, and it's just exactly what I like, so I was pretty traumatized when the straps began to fray where they hang over my shoulder. I tried a few stores, including the Liz Claiborne store at the mall, with no luck. But then! There was a "Liz Claiborne shoe outlet," and I noticed that they had purses. And there, in a corner, on a rack labeled "take an additional 40% off"... one that was almost exactly like my old purse, only newer. They've moved the external PDA/iPod pocket to the inside, which strikes me as a good idea. It's slightly larger - big enough to hold a small trade paperback, not just a mass-market paperback. And the lining is a sort of a dull red color, which I think will make it easier to find stuff inside. But otherwise? It's my old purse. Observe the restrained black structured lack-of-decoration. Yay.



We finished off the shopping trip with ice cream and came on home. I took a nap. Michael and Alex weeded the yard. Then we had sushi to celebrate Michael's final night as the First Unitarian Church of Baltimore's treasurer. And Alex? You know, Alex the underweight and picky toddler whose favorite words at the dinner table are "I don't liiiike..."? Twenty-eight pound Alex? Ate eight pieces of nigiri and a piece of salmon roll. They weren't the biggest pieces of nigiri in the world, but they weren't the smallest, either. Three pieces of shrimp, two pieces of maguro tuna, one piece each of salmon, red snapper, crab stick, and salmon roll. The only thing she turned down was the eel. This is a kid who won't eat potatoes. Or hamburgers. I don't think she was supposed to have been born to Americans.

Tomorrow's schedule: church, church annual meeting, church Seder. Due to my unwisdom in posting to LJ about being able to cook well, acceberskoorb assigned me a complicated recipe to bring. I guess I'd better hit the supermarket and get right on that. It seems unlikely that there will be time to make it tomorrow.

Anyone heard from geminigirl?

Updated to add: Yay!!

Okay: I know that it must have been a robot that did it. I'm sure that the person responsible never saw my post and probably couldn't have read it if they did.

But somehow it still really bothers me to find Cyrillic comment spam on one of my agonized posts about miscarrying.

Lo, how my parenting principles have crumbled: for Alex's birthday, we got her a pink molded-plastic dollhouse. (Alex: "it has yellow sides, though.")



In my defense, they make lovely wooden dollhouses with beautiful, realistically detailed wooden furniture for children who are much older than Alex. Wooden dollhouses for rampaging three-year-olds tend to have ugly, blockish furnishings. They are also quite expensive.

Harder to defend, on the crumbling-principles front: I allowed my parents to get Alex a (1) molded-plastic toy (2) based on licensed characters (3) which makes noise. A lot of noise. Loud noise.



I'm still kind of kicking myself about this one, because I didn't realize just how obnoxiously loud it was going to be. But Alex loves the Little Einsteins (*sigh*) SO much. And she's so delighted with the toy that she's slept with all four of the hard little plastic figurines for the last two nights. I suspect she'd take the rocket to bed if we let her, and at 3am we'd hear a burst of classical music and a chipper voice shouting, "Now Rocket is flying fast! Allegro!"

Our other present to her was a four-foot-square play dome tent from Ikea. Which is awesome. She expressed some concerns about wolves being able to get in because the door doesn't close, but otherwise she seems to love it.



This morning we had her party. I feel a little embarrassed about how low-key and simple it was (although perhaps I shouldn't) - we just had four friends come over and play with our toys. There was one game (I put on some bouncy kid music and had them dance, and then freeze when I paused the song), but mostly the kids were playing so happily that there seemed to be no reason to disrupt them with organized activity.

acceberskoorb was kind enough to let us borrow a preschool-sized table and chairs from church. When the kids arrived, I had markers and stickers on the table and let them each decorate a brown paper bag with their name on it, which we later put favors in. I served fruit kebobs, cheese and crackers, and homemade chocolate cupcakes with their choice of four Dr. Seussian shades of frosting. And I got an extremely goofy six-compartment Wheel Of Sprinkles at Safeway, and let each kid choose their own cupcake topping. There was juice for the kids and coffee or lemonade for the parents.







All the kids seemed to have fun, but the whole thing went quickly - we had put "10 to 11:30" on the invitation, and the last kids left at 11:15. I hope that doesn't mean that their parents thought it was a lame party. To me it seemed like just the right thing for three-year-olds, but the main other birthday party we've been to this year was held in a gymnastics facility and involved nonstop movement and excitement as professional kid-frenziers whipped the kids into a frenzy. ...Okay. I'm pretty sure this is just my social anxiety speaking here. That does tend to come out every time we entertain.

The other Major Birthday Event: on the morning of her birthday, Alex put her pacifier in an envelope and mailed it off to the baby elephant at the Maryland Zoo. We had suggested this plan of action about a week before her birthday, and given how attached she's been to sleeping with a pacifier I was amazed at how excited she was to go along with it. She had a little trouble falling asleep the first night, but she hasn't said a single word about missing her pacifier. She thinks the baby elephant probably loves it.

Three years, three hours, and ten (or so) minutes ago, Alexandra Calvert Wald came into the world and everything changed forever.

As I've done for her previous birthdays, I put together a photo montage of the past year.

( a year in pictures )

I forgot that I owed you guys an update after complaining about my antibiotics yesterday. I wound up waiting to call my doctor this morning, figuring that if she wanted to see me it would have to wait until today anyway. Instead, she just called in a prescription for Levaquin. (Not a drug name to Google if you're prone to hypochondria.)

Hopefully that'll have me on the mend soon, because today my ears continued to hurt and also my sinus symptoms started to get worse again. So this was definitely a case of resistant infection rebound.

How long into a course of antibiotics would you wait before you decided that they weren't working?

I've been on Augmentin for an ear- and sinus infection since last Tuesday. My ears still ache and still seem to be full of fluid. I still feel run down and not my normal self. And I still have what seems to be sinus-related coughing (no deep chest symptoms). I don't feel as bad as I did, and I'm not particularly congested anymore, but I don't feel well.

If I wait out the full ten-day course before deciding to go back to the doctor, it will be the weekend.

From the results of my poll, it seems that I am not a space alien - but neither is my friend. Which is about what I would have expected prior to our conversation.

What she found so incredible was that, most nights, I make a full cooked dinner for my family. ("Do you just really love to cook? ...Don't you ever just eat something bad? ...I just can't believe that you do it.") We sit down and eat at the table together, usually with a glass of wine for Michael and me, sometimes with candles lit. (Lest you think we're totally June-and-Ward Cleaver, the other end of the table is usually piled high with mail, books, nursery school projects, and miscellaneous cruft.)

I do really enjoy cooking, although I have to confess that when you do it almost every night there are times when all it is is work. I do find it satisfying to feed my family well. When I make something particularly tasty, I really glow. Part of what I enjoy is the sense of doing something concrete, hands-on, and real, which makes people feel good right away. Mostly the things I do with my time are a lot more nebulous than that, and the rewards or benefits are less clear.

The food I make is pretty simple. I don't use Rachael Ray's cookbooks, but I know a lot of recipes that take about a half-hour to make, and we mostly cycle through those. Some of them are pretty damn fancy (salmon with tropical fruit salsa, say, or pan-fried tilapia with soy-ginger sauce), but other meals are pretty much the sort of thing my Mom learned to cook in her 1950s-era home ec classes: say, broiled steak with mashed potatoes and peas.

Part of what enables me to cook at home nightly (or almost-nightly) is that I don't adhere to foodie-level standards. I use canned chicken broth, canned tomatoes, and spaghetti sauce from a jar. (It's the fancy kind of jar, at least, and I add meat and vegetables. But still.) We eat a lot of frozen vegetables. I buy tubs of pre-grated parmesan cheese.

I plan meals and do a major supermarket shopping once a week, with additional forays to a small neighborhood grocery store as needed. I shopped today. I was feeling stressed out at the time, so there's nothing particularly complex or adventurous on the menu. This week's meals:

Sunday: Michael had gaming, so it was just me and Alex. I don't really cook for just the two of us, because it drives me crazy to put in a lot of effort to make something and then have her refuse to eat it. Tonight we had frozen fish sticks, organic tater tots, and a choice of sauteed fresh spinach (me) or raw spinach (her). I haven't had fish sticks since I was a little kid, and was surprised to discover that they're actually kind of tasty.

Monday: Smoked-gouda-stuffed hamburgers, sauteed fresh spinach with sesame oil, steamed frozen corn.

Tuesday: Baked chicken thighs with garlic and herbs, mashed potatoes, steamed frozen peas.

Wednesday (teaching night): fried ham slice, Pillsbury biscuits, steamed frozen green beans.

Thursday: something with chicken breasts, to be determined later. Popular favorite cooking methods in our household include spreading them with dijon mustard, wrapping a slice of streaky bacon around them, and grilling them on the Foreman grill; or else dredging them in flour-and-parmesan-cheese, sauteeing them, and serving them with a lemon-parmesan pan sauce. Probably we'll have basmati rice and steamed fresh asparagus on the side.

Friday: Special dinner for Alex's birthday. Shrimp scampi pasta, probably a salad, and homemade cupcakes for dessert.

Saturday: The day of Alex's birthday party. After corralling five rampaging three-year-olds and entertaining their mothers as well, we'll probably want to order takeout for dinner.

Alex: peeling a stamp off my stamp book, which I carelessly left on my desk. I need an envelope.

Me: Hey! Stamps cost money, so you can't use them without permission. takes it back.

Alex: But I need a stamp. I need an envelope that we're not using, and some stamps.

Me: Why do you need them?

Alex: Because I need to send a letter to my great-grandmother.

Me: Who is your great-grandmother?

Alex: She died.

Me: Honey, you can't send a letter to someone who died.

Alex: Why not?

Me: Because when someone dies, we don't know where they are and no one can see them or be with them anymore. That's why it's so sad when someone dies.

Alex: Oh.

I feel like I bungled that one, inadvertently giving the impression that death is like being swept away to one of the CIA's secret prisons. It would help if she gave me advance warning that I was going to need to come up with a sensitive explanation of life's great mysteries.