rivka

We got home from Memphis last night. I'm in the office - the only day I'm coming in this week - and I must admit I'm kind of enjoying the peace and quiet.

I finally snapped at Michael's stepmother. As we were packing up to go she kept very persistently trying to get me to take Michael's bronzed baby shoes. I smiled and said nice things the first several times. "Oh, we'll definitely want them eventually, but I don't want to take them away from Bill." "Yes, but I really think Bill likes to have a reminder of Michael's babyhood around." She kept insisting: "Oh, don't worry about that. We've got plenty of reminders of Michael around." (Like the picture she hung back behind a cabinet, I guess.)

So finally I just looked at her without smiling and said flatly: "Betty, if you want them out of the house, then yes, we will take them."

So of course she backpedalled. And had the nerve to try this one out: "You just insulted me, saying that I want them out of the house." Uh huh.

Michael's father came in to talk with us about it. He said that he wouldn't take any amount of money for those baby shoes, but that we could have them if we wanted them. Although he would worry about them getting broken in transit. Anyway, he just wanted to make sure that we understood that they weren't trying to get rid of them. I felt bad because I really try not to put him in the middle, but.

Our flights home were beautifully uneventful. There didn't seem to be any increase in security at the main screening lines, and when I got pulled for secondary screening (I always do, because my artificial hip sets of the metal detector) the TSA who screened me seemed perfectly relaxed and easygoing. They had a TSA at the gate pulling some people aside for random pat-downs, but it was the most ludicrous security theater imaginable: he only stopped men, didn't stop anyone who had a ton of stuff to carry (presumably so he wouldn't inconvenience them too much), and only patted them down above the waist. He would've found someone carrying a gun in a shoulder holster, but that's about it.

Our kids are beautiful travelers. When I see other people dealing with screaming tantrums on a plane, I feel very lucky.

I did learn an important lesson about Colin and traveling, though. (Did I know this when Alex was his age and then I forgot it? Maybe so.) Yesterday I gave him solid food for breakfast at my in-laws' house, and then I nursed him throughout the day as we traveled home. He got frantically unhappy in the car on the way home from the airport; I nursed him again and he cheered up, so I decided to give him some solids even though it was already 8pm. And that boy ate: a full slice of deli cheese, three handfuls of Cheerios, a jar of baby food (chicken-apple compote, one of the higher-calorie options), and at least a quarter-cup of mango bits. He was starving. I think of solids as being kind of optional to his diet, replaceable by nursing, but it's now obvious to me that at this point they really aren't.

I have a big important meeting in an hour and a half, and I am nervous. To give you an idea of how important a meeting it is, I am wearing a blazer to work - something I do about twice a year. Some of you will be coming along in the form of a silver otter pin which you chipped in to give me at alt.polycon 12, so, thanks. It's nice to feel like my friends will be with me.

Now that I have a webcam on my work computer, I can show you what I look like when I'm trying to appear professional! Here I am:

My parents are visiting this weekend. They came down for two reasons: Colin had his child dedication service at our church this morning, and on Friday my father had an appointment at the National Federation of the Blind to learn about screenreading software from Michael's old colleagues.

It's been a joy of a visit, without the emotional stress that's hung over my relationships with my family for a while. They're just hanging out, enjoying the kids, helping, being good company. The kids adore them. My father has taken Alex to the park two days running now - it's a great partnership; Alex has vision and he has good judgment, so they help each other across the streets.

Colin's child dedication was just beautiful. When Alex was dedicated, our ministers gave us a big booklet of potential liturgy elements and let us choose what to have. This was our new minister's first dedication, so we didn't know what to expect. The only input we had into the ceremony content was asking for Alex to be included, and asking that he not use his favorite child dedication hymn because I hate it. He and acceberskoorb put together a lovely service. I'll share the text of the ceremony, and the pictures our friend Adrian took, if/when I can get them.

He was a preturnaturally good baby for the service, too. Saturday he was cranky all day and cried a lot, and I worried that his dedication would be a nightmare. But he went perfectly happily into the minister's arms to be blessed and paraded up and down the church aisles, and afterward he crawled happily around on the floor of the sanctuary, and after that he entertained himself happily for an hour and a half while we entertained a few close friends for his dedication lunch. What a good boy.

We spent most of last Saturday packing for SUUSI. Things got seriously derailed when I LOST MY PACKING LIST, which still hasn't resurfaced, and spent too long looking for it instead of just starting over with a new list. But eventually we got the car loaded up with stuff and kids and headed out around 8:15.

Our entertainment for the first part of the drive was driving through downtown Baltimore right past the Otakon hotel. (Alex: "When I grow up, I want to be an Otakon person.") Then we drove off into the sunset, west around DC and out I-66. The kids dropped off somewhere around Fairfax. My hope had been that they'd sleep solidly until we got to Radford, but instead they took turns waking a little and whimpering. I discovered that I can actually nurse Colin in the carseat without taking off my seatbelt, but it's not what you would call "comfortable."

By the time we hit Roanoke, just before 1am, we figured we'd gone as far as was practical. We checked into a Days Inn. Of course once the car stopped both kids woke up and cried in earnest, but they settled down quickly once we were in the motel room. In the morning we drove the rest of the way to SUUSI, arriving at 10:30. Wow is check-in simpler when you get there that early. We flew on through, paid the balance of our bill, got our pictures taken for the Mugbook, signed in with youth programming and the childcare co-op, and managed not to notice the workshop leaders' sign-in table. Oops. We unloaded the car and got our room put to rights fairly quickly, had a really bad dining hall lunch because they hadn't switched over to their SUUSI menus yet, and just hung out with the kids and our friends, being mellow. Laura, Michael's birthmother, showed up in midafternoon and Michael helped her get settled in.

This year, for the first time, Alex was really old enough to run with the pack of SUUSI kids. Any time we were in our room she wanted to go out in the hall or outside in the quad, where she'd run around and play with a big mob of other 3- to 7-year-olds. Several times, she and her friends even established "kids' tables" in the dining hall where they ate separately from us. It was really fun to see her dive into a peer group like that, with no shyness or drama.

We went to dinner with Laura (an official SUUSI meal, so the quality was 1000% improved) and then got our banner for Ingathering. Laura made herself a "First Unitarian Church of Oakland" sign on posterboard. The banner parade was organized to loop around the campus in an inefficient pattern, I guess so that there would be more of a march. It was tiring. As always, I loved the part where, after everyone was seated in the auditorium, the banner carriers paraded in accompanied by drums. I ditched Ingathering early because Alex got tired and cranky and Colin kept startling every time there was applause, so I can't really comment on the program content.

Afterward came Opening Circle. The thousand-odd SUUSIgoers formed two giant rings, facing each other. The circles were broken at one place and the inner and outer rings joined at the break, so that as we circled around we passed from the outer to the inner ring and came face-to-face with every other attendee. It was fun to see folks we hadn't seen in a year.

Then I took the kids back to the dorm for bedtime. It was late, and when we'd gotten our room together beforehand we hadn't fixed the beds. (Radford has unnaturally high beds, and I wanted my mattress on the floor so that I could co-sleep with Colin, which meant putting my bedframe on top of Michael's bedframe to get it out of the way.) I waited and waited for Michael to come back to the room. It turns out that a person who has never raised kids or had much to do with them (i.e., Laura) has very little idea of the powder-keg nature of a delayed bedtime; she had recruited Michael to do some stuff for her, and it took a long time. Fortunately, once he returned, he and the Wild Women had our beds set up properly in about ten seconds.

The best thing about parenting at SUUSI this year is that Alex never protested being put to bed. She stayed up very late looking at books most of the nights, but she didn't come out of our room and rarely called us, so I didn't mind. Michael and I just hung out on camp chairs in the hallway, drinking wine and chatting with our friends. Colin nursed like a nursing thing, got passed around for admiration, and eventually fell asleep in my lap.

All in all, the first day at SUUSI was much, much more pleasant than it usually is. I think we're going to try to drive the night before from now on.

This time I'll tackle the food questions.

ailbhe and minnehaha K: Your dinner.

Tonight we had baked chicken thighs, Southern-style biscuits with butter, and carrot sticks, and ice cream for dessert. Dinner was cooked by Michael, who is getting to be a better cook every day. (Usually the cooking is my responsibility.) The chicken skin wasn't as crispy as I like it (my fault, not Michael's, because he was following my directions) - we probably should've upped the oven temperature. But overall, it was very good.

hobbitbabe: Do you have any kitchen appliances for mixing stuff up, and what do you make with them and should I buy one or more of them? (giant immovable mixer, food processor, immersion blender, old-style blender, etc).

I have a Kitchenaid stand mixer, a generous gift from wcg a few years back. It is, as you say, giant and immovable. Unfortunately, it has to live in the pantry and be carried out every time I want to bake.

I use it to make cakes, cookies, and other desserts. It replaced an ancient underpowered hand mixer. The difference is most notable with stiff batters like cookie dough. I made pumpkin cranberry bars to give as Christmas gifts this year, another very thick-battered recipe, and found that my mixer could easily handle double batches. It's also excellent for things that need to be really, really, seriously, impressively well-beaten, like this gingerbread cake roll.

Oh, and the other difference I almost forgot about: because it has a paddle that is cleverly positioned in the bowl, rather than beaters, you almost never have to scrape the sides and bottom of the bowl when you're mixing. Which is very nice. Should you have one? If you bake regularly, yeah, you probably should.

bcholmes: You seem to have a lot of things to say about food: different recipes, liking exotic vegetables, eschewing chef-boy-ar-dee. What kind of relationship did you have with food growing up?

It was uncomplicated, for which I am extremely grateful. My mother was a good cook in what I think of as the classic home-cooking style of the northern U.S.; her meals were simple (usually meat-starch-veg)
but well-prepared and tasty. Food was never in short supply, and we had free rein to help ourselves except for the hour before dinner, which was known as "starving time." I don't remember negative comments about people eating too much or too little or the wrong things, except in the context of taking more than your fair share of a scarce resource like leftover cake. We did have to accept on our plate at least a "no-thank-you helping" of everything served at dinner, and we were expected to at least taste some of everything on our plate. Oh, and we were required to have milk at dinner, but I loved milk so I didn't mind.

We had family dinner together every night. My mother would start watching out the kitchen window for my father's car at 5:55 every night, and the minute his car pulled into the garage she'd call us to the table. We rarely went out to dinner and almost never had fast food - not as a whole family, anyway. Just if we were traveling somewhere.

I ate a lot of junk food as a kid, and was really skinny anyway. I used to spend my school lunch money (65 cents a day, as I recall) on candy at the 7-11. I'd split it with kcobweb, and in turn she'd share the dessert from her packed lunch with me. That horrifies me today, but obviously I survived it and was reasonably healthy. My mother didn't buy tons of junk food - mostly for budgetary reasons, I think - but we always had cookies, chips, and ice cream in the house and it wasn't rationed. I remember being surprised to go to friends' houses and be told "you can have two cookies."

I have a lot of happy childhood memories about food. Holiday dinners, church potlucks, cookouts and picnics at the lake, standing on a chair to help my mother bake.

Grandma Susan: Given that there is so much conflicting information about nutrition and health, how do you decide what to believe and/or what to feed your family?

Honestly? I spend very little time thinking about nutrition and health. My impression is that this is an area where a lot of people, including health professionals, have very strong opinions - yet the data backing up those opinions is often weak. I think the whole food-as-medicine thing is hugely oversold in American culture. So I decide what to feed my family based primarily on considerations of taste. I try to avoid language about "good" and "bad" foods. I strive vaguely for balanced inclusion of a broad range of foods - proteins, carbs, veggies and fruits - but I don't worry about fat, carbs, sugar, etc. I wouldn't eat pork rinds 24/7 because it would make me feel like crap, but I'm not going to worry about the components of my reasonably balanced and varied diet.

I do try to feed organic foods to babies (Ack! We've veered into parenting territory!) based on the vague idea that pesticides may be more of an issue when concentrated into a very small form, but it's even more heavily based on the fact that Earth's Best organic baby foods taste so much better than Gerber. Oh, and I was careful about introducing potential food allergens into Alex's diet because of our strong family history of food allergies, and I'll probably do the same with Colin.

My grandfather, my mother's father, was the son and grandson of coal miners. He went to college and graduate school and became a professor of mining engineering at Pennsylvania State University.

It was the custom of his department to send a letter to every young man who was the valedictorian of a Pennsylvania high school, offering a scholarship to Penn State to study mining engineering. One year - this would've been in the 1950s or early 1960s - the responsibility of sending those letters fell to my grandfather.

My grandfather did not know that there was a difference between the name "Francis" and the name "Frances." And so he inadvertently sent a letter offering an engineering scholarship to a young woman, and she wrote back accepting it.

The general feeling in the department was that the scholarship offer had been made in error, and should be withdrawn. But my grandfather dug in his heels. It had never occurred to him that a woman might like to be a mining engineer, but now that the evidence proved him wrong, he was going to stand by her.

Frances came to Penn State, was mentored by my grandfather, did well, and graduated. Over the years he mentored other female students, and in his will he established a scholarship for women in mineral engineering.

I like this story because it reminds me that sometimes it's possible to blunder into doing a good thing, as long as you keep your eyes and your mind open.

So, on Christmas afternoon we flew to Memphis to spend the long weekend with Michael's father. That had always been in the plan. Somehow what didn't make it into my mental picture of the plan was that we would have essentially zero time on Christmas to do anything other than family presents and then making the trip happen. Like, for example, answering people's e-mails, or warning anyone that we were going to be away and out of contact, or any of those kinds of things. So: sorry that we dropped off the face of the earth like that.

It was a pretty hard visit. Michael's stepmother was in the hospital when we arrived, with diverticulitis, and wasn't released until Saturday. Michael's father isn't doing very well either, although I suppose he's doing better than one might expect given all that happened last August, when we thought Michael was potentially rushing to a deathbed. He's very weak and tired. His blood count keeps dropping inexplicably; he had a transfusion of two units of blood the week before Christmas, and told us that was the only thing keeping him on his feet.

I cooked some monster Southern-style breakfasts and tried, mostly fruitlessly, to keep Michael's father (and his stepmother, when she got home) from exerting themselves on household responsibilities. I tried to create and protect opportunities for Michael and his dad to be together. Alex was much more open and friendly with her Poppy than she has been before, which was nice to see, and I did what I could to promote that. I did a lot of playing with Alex's Christmas toys. I did get a fair amount of rest, at least. Michael's father and stepfather typically went to bed at the same time as Alex, so our evenings were very quiet and relaxed.

I tried to make more allowances than usual for Michael's stepmother, because she was ill and tired and in pain. But really she just seemed like her typically unpleasant self. For the record, in case anyone around here is unclear: it is not okay to predict that a pregnant woman is about to go into labor prematurely. It is even less okay to harp on it to the extent that it begins to prey on the pregnant woman's hormonally-fragile peace of mind even though she knows that she shouldn't pay any attention to you. And when you know that the pregnant woman's last pregnancy ended in disaster? It is really absolutely even less okay, if that's possible.

I'm just saying.

So we're home, later than expected because of some baggage snarls at the airport. The house is a disaster area because we didn't have time to pick up before we left. Alex didn't get to bed until almost 11 - who knows when she'll be up tomorrow. And I got home to a stack of increasingly upset e-mails and phone messages from Lydia, who apparently forgot that (a) I was going to be out of town until Monday, and (b) she had previously expressed no problems with my travel plans and, indeed, had not seemed particularly concerned about whether I was going to be in this week at all.

So, you know, I think tomorrow's going to be a bit of a mess. But it's going to be okay. We have great plans for later in the week, including friend-visiting and dinner-date-with-babysitting and, potentially, couch-buying.

Michael called me this morning and said that his father was having some final tests preparatory to being moved to a regular room. If all continued to go well, then maybe Michael would come home tomorrow. He asked me to look into flights.

This afternoon, he called again. The surgeon had been by. Apparently, one of the problems that led to one of the emergency surgeries was that a piece of Michael's father's bowel was caught up in a hernia. They thought that was what was causing an intestinal blockage. But they fixed the hernia, and the blockage is still there.

They're going to try physical therapy, in hopes that things will become unblocked if Michael's father gets up and moves around. Apparently sometimes that happens. The surgeon is willing to give that 24 to 48 hours to work. If it doesn't? Major abdominal surgery, opening the whole belly.

I know from my research assistant's experience that trying to unblock the intestines is often a multistep, multisurgery problem. Because things that have been operated on tend to adhere together, and adhesions can re-block what was just opened up.

So Michael won't be coming home tomorrow unless a miracle occurs. The best-case scenario is that he'll stay another couple of days until the physical therapy can be proven to have worked. Alternatively...

...let's just focus on the best-case scenario for now.

You know, Michael and I have been married for nine years, together for eleven. And lately I've thought of our relationship as... very comfortable, and kind of mundane. Domestic, loving, friendly. But now it occurs to me: fish probably describe water as comfortable, mundane, domestic, and friendly, too. And the absolute essentiality of it probably isn't evident until it's gone.

I miss Michael so much. I'm coping fine with what needs to be done, but I feel like something's been amputated. And he sounds so tired and stretched on the phone. We need each other.

Michael got in to see his father last night. He apparently looks like hell, and is continuing to run fevers they're not fully able to control, but he was conscious and in his right mind. And very, very surprised to see Michael walk into the room.

In an exceedingly typical Michael's-father move, he suggested that Michael should have waited a few days to visit, so he'd be back on his feet and able to do things. Uh huh.

So he's not dead, which is what both of us had been thinking during the long stretch of no news. But he's still pretty sick.

This is a different hospital from the last one where we visited Michael's father in the ICU. They apparently have liberalized visiting rules, so Michael will be able to see a fair amount of his father today. Yay.

Alex and I are doing fine. She painted a get-well picture for her Poppy, and another one that's a coming-home picture for Michael.

Alex is talking about death a lot these days.

I posted a few weeks ago about having to explain to her why we can't send a letter to someone who has died. Since then, she's continued to raise the topic several times a week. I'm not sure why.

I think the topic initially came up because she was asking lots of questions about relatives. She likes working out the details of relationships: Grandma is her grandmother, and she's my mother. That led, inevitably, to questions like, "Who is your grandmother, Mama?" And I would answer something like: "I had two grandmothers - Grandma's mother, and Grandpa's mother. Their mothers were my grandmothers. But I don't have any grandmothers anymore because they died."

Once she absorbed the idea that she had a grandmother who died - Michael's mother, who died in 1997 and who we call "Grandma Nancy" when we talk to Alex - she kept returning and returning to the topic. "Grandma Nancy died," she'll inform me at random times. Sometimes she'll add, "Papa was so sad. He cried and cried." (I think that was initially something I told her.) And once: "I'm so sad that Grandma Nancy died, because I want to play with her."

She's constructed a logical story about Michael's family relationships: "Grandma Nancy was Papa's mother, but she died. And then Gran was Papa's new mother." I can see where she got there, and in the chronology of Michael's experience she's not entirely wrong. Gran is Laura, Michael's birthmother; Grandma Nancy was his adoptive mother. We didn't meet Laura until after Michael's mother died. (We haven't tried to explain adoption yet.)

Death talk is not limited to Grandma Nancy. She held up one of her Little Einstein dolls and informed me sadly, "Annie's mother died and her father died. She doesn't have any parents." The other day she said casually, "When my doctor dies, I'll get a new doctor."

Death, death, death.

"A child's mother and father usually don't die," I told her once.

"But Grandma Nancy died." She didn't sound especially distressed, just thoughtful.

"She died when Papa was a grownup. She stayed alive and took care of him the whole time he was a child."

"Oh."

I want to promise her that we won't die, but I haven't. I can't. Fortunately, she hasn't asked. She doesn't seem to worry about that, and she doesn't seem to worry about dying herself. She mostly seems to be trying to figure out death-the-concept: what the heck is up with death?

acceberskoorb - and let me say right here that all children should have an acceberskoorb in their lives - helped us find some books to read to Alex. There are quite a few picture books about death out there, but most of them fall into the category of "books to buy when someone significant in your preschooler's life has just died." Very few people seem to write "indulge your preschooler's philosophical curiosity about death" books. We wound up with two.

We've already gotten the first one from the library: When Dinosaurs Die, a comic book-format guide to basic questions about death. ("What does alive mean? Why does someone die? What does dead mean?") The text is general; the focus in the pictures and speech bubbles shifts back and forth from a dead bird some children find in the park to beloved pets to unconnected people (a soldier, an accident victim) to close relatives. I skip over a lot of the intense details about grieving when I read it to her. She loves it.

During tonight's reading - and OMG I am going straight to Parent Hell for reading a book about death and dying as a bedtime story, but she specifically requested it even after I suggested it was Not Quite The Thing - she came out with a couple of new comments: "Goodbye, Grandma Nancy" (said in a sad voice), and "I want to light a candle for Grandma Nancy." So she's obviously taking in quite a bit from the book, and reorganizing the way she thinks about having a dead relative.

The other book I ordered is called Lifetimes. From the Amazon reviews, it seems to focus on death as a natural process, a shared characteristic of all living things. That seems like it might be even more to the point, if her interest really is mostly philosophical.

It's hard to figure out where the line is between meeting your child's sincerely expressed interest in information about death and encouraging her to be weirdly, precociously morbid. I don't think a preoccupation with death is particularly normal for a three-year-old. And yet, if she's thinking about it and asking about it, obviously we can't cut her off completely. I'm hoping that these books will help settle her mind on the issue, and we can go back to her plans to become a veterinarian by age ten. ("Ten is old," she has informed us.)

We decided to go ahead and make the trip. It seems clear that we won't get out of here on Sunday - the storm is supposed to start tonight and last through the day tomorrow. My only remaining question is whether the roads will be okay on Monday. This is supposed to be a pretty slow storm. We'll see.

It's a nice visit so far. We've only had one brief opportunity to visit with my sister Judy and her family, because it's such a crazy booked-up time of year. But the brief visit was nice. We exchanged Christmas presents. The almost-11-year-old immediately spread her Sculpey kit across the restaurant table to examine all the pieces, giving a running commentary on what she was going to make and how far away her siblings would need to stay. The 13-year-old kept lovingly fondling his new Scott Westerfeld books. Alex got promptly and deeply to work with the wooden sushi set they gave her. And my sister delighted me with a reprint of the American Girls' Handy Book, a sort of a craft-adventure-advice book for 19th century girls.

It was very, very cold this morning (17 degrees F), but we went out to play in the snow anyway. It was Alex's first encounter with deep-ish snow (we've got about 6 inches on the ground), and she loved it. Climbed, crawled, rolled (!), got Grandpa to pull her all around the yard (which my poor urban child calls "the park") on a sled, and finally took several sled runs down an extremely gentle hill. It was wonderful.

I introduced my father to the singer-songwriter Peter Meyer, and also (I may at some point regret this) to Jonathan Coulton's "Mandelbrot Set." He's listening to it again and again, trying to figure out all the words. (He doesn't see well enough to use lyrics sites.)

For Christmas, along with some smaller things, my folks gave me the most amazing picnic set. It's a backpack. The front compartment holds a complete set of picnic tableware: dishes, polycarbonate glasses, metal silverware, mini salt and pepper shakers, a cheese board and cheese knife, a corkscrew. The rear compartment is heavily insulated to keep food hot or cold, and has a completely removable liner for easy washing. There's a separate small front compartment that's insulated as well, so you could have a hot-food section and a cold-food section. And strapped to the sides: an insulated sleeve for a wine or water bottle, and a large picnic blanket that's flannel on one side and waterproof nylon on the other. O. M. G. This is one of the coolest things I've ever seen.

So all is well, even if we may be a tiny bit marooned for the next couple of days. At least we have plenty of goodies to play with.