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Archive for the ‘Parenting’ Category

Somewhere Out East

Friday, July 18th, 2014

We are . . . somewhere in Boston. Somewhere Priceline could find you a deal, missy, which turns out to be an inconvenient distance from the airport or any attractions we might hit before joining the rest of our party and heading north. Our actual destination this trip is Maine, but the six daylight hours in Boston could be put to vacation use, too, right?

For a spatially oriented person, that “somewhere” turns out to be anxiety producing. I don’t know where we are, my nerves are all telling me. How can I do what needs to be done next if I don’t know where we are? I’m itching for a map, something to spread out on a table or suitcase or browser window and find north, orient the hotel and the harbor and the–do we want to go to Beacon Hill? The aquarium? Tell me, kiddo, what are your druthers, and here it is, in this quadrant here in relation to our current location.

The itchiness started in the airport, where one is already forming lists of what needs to be done next and plans of attack. But we had arrived late, and decided to grab the bird-in-the-hand dinner option from a Dunkin’ Donuts kiosk–welcome to New England. We ate our sandwiches and reviewed the options to get to this hotel that was too far for a courtesy shuttle. We sat under a map of the subway. (more…)

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Local Hazards

Friday, May 30th, 2014

My grandparents lived in suburban Chicago, and one of their solemn duties when the small-town kin came to visit was to warn us of the dangers of trains. My grandfather took a train to an office in the city most days, and we’d go to the station to pick him up. Or we’d take the train in ourselves to sight-see, museum trips with a little extra thrill, launched as they were with warnings.

Don’t stand near the edge of the platform, of course, but also–and long before any of us were driving–don’t stop on the tracks, don’t drive across tracks at an angle, look both ways before crossing even if there are lights and a signal. Then some cautionary tale, always a different incident–although we heard more than once about the mother who could only get one child out of their stalled car.

freight trains along the Missouri

freight trains along the Missouri

Where I live now, the trains are freight and out in the country. Instead we tell tales about the river. The Missouri sluices past gravel bars and snags, muddy eddies made less opaque where creeks join the flow, but no place transparent enough to see the fish, rocks, or tree limbs underneath.

Don’t dive in. (more…)

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Posted in Genealogy, Parenting | No Comments »

Big Snow

Tuesday, February 26th, 2013

We went for dinner out last night, in case it was a while before we could get out again. Kid the Younger's "hey, I am getting ready to go" task turned out to be building this snowman.

Kid the Younger does some shoveling but also yard art.

Kid the Elder, the one who can do some serious yardage with a snow shovel, and I just devoured lunch. Central Missouri has had its second big snowstorm in less than a week, and we’re dancing out that “Food is fuel” tune. I’ve cooked for every meal, baked cake and panettone, in part to have an excuse to turn the oven on but also because my usual strategy–leftovers for lunch–doesn’t work when you don’t have any leftovers. That’s one part kids home all day due to canceled school, but the other part snow shoveling is hard work–even more effective than standing by the open oven door.

This second snow was not as thick as the forecasters thought it could be, but it’s at least as heavy. The storm started as rain and switched to sleet, then to big gloppy flakes; in the early hours of the morning the temperature was 32, and during my first round of shoveling I was enveloped in a thin Scotch mist. We share a driveway with college-kid neighbors who have had classes canceled today as well. One was up to clear their back stoop–as it turns out, so she could get into the downstairs apartment. (more…)

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Posted in Parenting, Play | No Comments »

Backyard Adventures

Wednesday, January 30th, 2013

We did not burn down the garage in the course of this cleaning project

We did not burn down the garage in the course of this cleaning project

I’ve been to Bali. I used to eat lobster for lunch. I had a Filofax. Today, the thing that excites me is that my new vacuum cleaner has a nozzle that fits between the ribs of the radiators. I am dusting spaces that haven’t been dusted in years, and I finally have a vacuum cleaner with a nozzle that fits (I’m of an age that I’ve owned several vacuum cleaners; I’ve lived in this house for more than one vacuum). Under the hall radiator, I found a screwdriver with interchangeable tips. In the living room, I found a quarter. (more…)

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Data

Thursday, October 4th, 2012

Column headers: which eater. Column data: which color do you like.


With the help of a coupon, I ordered a sampler of different-flavored macarons for an after-school-snack adventure.

We have a household of three in a two- or four-per-box world, so we have tactics: I cut everything in half so everyone gets “one,” and then we can negotiate for the leftover halves. Invariably someone likes one better than the other, or isn’t that hungry, or is willing to trade for other goods. I started carving and told the kids to notice which color macarons they liked: they were all different, and we could look up what flavor each color was–did they really taste like that, and we might want to try making some.

While I’m trying to remember if the green ones are pistachio or the yellow ones are mango (I knew there was one in this mix I was allergic to), the chart to the right is going up on the new chalkboard wall. The younger has just started middle school, and they’ve been learning about the scientific method and recording observations in lab notebooks. Have data? We’ll collect it.

Exasperatingly to the data collector, older brother liked them all.

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The Harder Part of This Summer

Saturday, September 1st, 2012

my aunt and my grandfather

my son

Also this summer
We did another underwater photo shoot with different wardrobe. We ran through some of our usual “up in Michigan” activities—climbing the Big Dune, biking around the bay. But in between heat waves, car repairs, and mysterious illnesses, my aunt collapsed and died.

My mom rushed to Nebraska help her niece and nephew manage the details, and we took care of the pets and otherwise held down the fort at the house their grandfather built. My mom had left behind a photo album, and I told my kids stories about being at the lake with my grandparents and showed them pictures—these in black and white of different sand babies on the same shore, kids bundled up after swimming on the same front porch (now with big trees!) hamming the same ham for whatever relative was holding the camera.

These trips were not entirely easy. The overlapping households were run by smart women whose only venue for the exercise of power was the house, and their ideas of appropriate behavior–on vacation or otherwise–and effective management often clashed. (more…)

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Posted in Genealogy, Parenting, Travel | No Comments »

Mother’s Response

Friday, November 4th, 2011

Time to sleep. The night is well started; she reads her daughter’s letter with worry, care, hope, bracing herself against the rushing in of shapeless fears. These, she admits, are grown colts. The pasture is no longer mine to guard, my watch as mare shadowing the leggy, tipsy foal is over. This foal stands strong. The son’s letter is harder to parse. Reading in dim light, she wants to know the ends of both stories, impossibly: those sections haven’t yet been written.

Dogs breathing, fridge purring, a squeak from a bird and a click in the heater sound the broken gait ending the day’s action. Corralled in her kitchen, she reads. Night hours are the hardest, the anguish rides in on the backs of old memories or sticking to still-fresh details of today. She rises and knocks around boxes and jars of verbena, spearmint, slippery elm, lemon balm, some she picked leaf by leaf and dried in the still atmosphere of her cellar, knowing she would concoct the sleep-gift combined from these. She searches for an herbal-induced calm. Through the window she lists the colors in the halo of the streetlamp; she rereads the letters; she remembers wind in her hair, a gallop, the free rein she believed was her automatic gift to her offspring. She knows there’s no open range, there’s no grassland, there’s no herd.

———————–

Reply to “The Storm” by Julie Youmans. Read other responses to the prompt.

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Tags: it's just fiction
Posted in Parenting, Play | No Comments »

Kids in the Kitchen

Friday, August 12th, 2011

We went blueberry picking with the gang: a reluctant but competitive crowd of teenagers, toddler, non-fruit-eaters, and adventure buffs, plus a few adults who compared the prices of already-picked berries at various stores around the Midwest.

After an hour or so, we had 17 pounds of berries. (We should have weighed a couple of the kids before and after.) We’ll freeze most of these, but for the rest of the weekend, blueberry everything. One of the kids suggested blueberry pie, and I suggested this recipe. (more…)

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Posted in Parenting, Play, Travel | 2 Comments »

Chess

Thursday, February 24th, 2011

In A Novel in a Year, Louise Doughty alternates exercises with discussion. The first exercise is to finish the following sentence: “The day after my eighth birthday….” It’s an interesting launch: can you differentiate your childhood birthdays? What would happen that you would remember the day after, not the day?

The day after my eighth birthday, my father told me that his brother had also been a chess player. My father had started teaching me at five: we had a set of pieces that looked like medieval soldiers, not abstract blocks, and my brother and I played with them like dolls before he decided to show me the game. He handicapped his side of the board, starting with mostly pawns and slowly adding back bishops, rook, and queen, to show me beginnings and endgames. (more…)

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Teenage Boys and Reading

Thursday, September 23rd, 2010

When I was in high school, some of my favorite books were the Mrs. Pollifax mysteries. If you’re unfamiliar, the 65-or-so-year-old Mrs. Pollifax was feeling put out to pasture, thought needlework was for the birds, and so she got herself a job as a courier for the CIA. None of the courier jobs stay simple, of course, but she disarms the bad guys with a mix of little old ladyness and karate. In between I read Cold War spy thrillers by Helen MacInnes. After the seventeenth one, I complained to my dad that “Anything could be in those briefcases. I can’t believe you’d really kill somebody over it!”* I switched to Rex Stout and Agatha Christie and shared books with my grandmother; I loved Archie Goodwin and thought Hercule Poirot was a twerp. (more…)

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Posted in Parenting, Reading | 13 Comments »

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