I read this post over at Flotsam today and had one of those bobble-head nodding moments, because Alexa makes some very good points about how we women get ourselves trapped, coming and going, in expectations related to our gender.

I think about this a lot in terms of the values I want to pass on to my child. Although obviously I have ideas of right and wrong and values I want to pass on to her, mostly, I want her to stand strong in being true to herself. Watching her go about her three-year-old weirdness, it occurs to me that if I can just remember to stay the hell out of her way, she’ll be just fine. 

She is a magpie for sparkles, but she thinks dinosaurs are cool (favorite kind: parasaurolophus). She lets Jim’s mom paint her nails, but she comes with me to get dusty and grassy picking fruit at the farm. Whenever she sees a pairing of baby and adult animals, she assumes they are Daddy and Baby, but I am the one she comes to with Mommy Mommy Mommy.

And my husband, who initially admitted that his one regret about having a girl was that he would not be able to teach her guitar (whatnow?!) has taught her exactly that. They sit around poring over pictures of telecasters and stratocasters and now, in a crowning moment of straddling the gender divide, she wants a Hello Kitty Stratocaster that she saw in a shop on one of their recent musical outings.

It’s too early to really understand how all of these outward markers will translate into values in the end, but I hope that she is always this bundle of contradictions, that she can figure out how to be strong and healthy without slipping into body-hate, that she can revel in the trappings of girlieness and not be thought less of for doing so — either by feminists or conservatives.  

Annals of Mommy: Small Person woke me at 6:53. By 7:20 we were at 40 mommies, and that includes the 10 minutes she was silently cramming bunny-shaped cereal into her maw. She has gone from Mommy Mommy MOMMY! to Mommy Mommy Mommy MOMMY! If this keeps up we will be at Mommy Mommy Mommy Mommy Mommy Mommy MOMMY! in time for the Fourth of July, which will at least make things more festive when my head explodes.

***

I hear jingling in the hallway. “What are you doing, sweetie?” I ask.

“Mommy! I’m playing money toss!” And indeed, that is EXACTLY what she is doing, flinging pennies down the stairs.

***

This afternoon she requested that we play “Here We Go Round the Unicorn,” which is an exciting game wherein we place a stuffed unicorn in the middle of the living room rug and run around it singing, “Here we go round the unicorn, unicorn, etc.” to the tune of “Mulberry Bush.” I suggested that we clear the living room rug a bit first so we wouldn’t trip on things.

“OK,” she says, and hustles over to shelve a Dora book. “I’m in charge of that book.”

***

Later we are discussing what Una the Unicorn has done today. As usual, she is ordering me to be the voice of Una and feeding me lines of dialogue. 

“Una should talk about eating dinner and taking a bath and going to bed and all that business,” she says.

***

I really need to ask the Y if they could give me a treadmill that doesn’t have a TV in front of it, although then the rest of the exercisers would lose the entertainment of watching me scowl and/or catching myself about to flip the bird at whatever asinine ridiculousness masquerades for entertainment these days. I am turning into a crotchety old man TV-hater. I watch about 30 minutes of TV a week at this point — usually the tail end of Numbers. The plot makes no sense at that point but then, I’m not really watching for that anyway. Note to the people in charge of that show: Less math guy, less dad, less physics sidekick, less cutesy girlfriends, MORE FBI GUY. Thank you.

Anyway, I try to pick the treadmill in front of the least offensive show (and Dr. 90210 is NOT it, let me tell you!), and then try to avoid looking up, which is harder than it seems, what with all that movement flitting about in my peripheral vision. 

The other day, though, I saw an ad that reached new lows: A stick insect, to borrow a term from Bridget Jones, is reaching for something in a cupboard over her head, when a button pops off her red dress. She mimes embarrassment, then reaches for the Kellogg’s cereal (I think it was Smartstart) and starts eating. I wish I could find it online so you could see for yourselves how obnoxious this was. The whole, “Oooh, I am soooo fat my dress is popping off, best eat some cereal so I can stop embarrassing myself with my fatness,” message was pretty repulsive anyway, but given the woman who was acting it out, I almost had a treadmill mishap. 

1. My friend A told me the other day that her sis, who has two little kids, bellows a ceremonially operatic “Whaaaaaaaaaaat?!” when the kids reach the 100th exclamation of “Mommy!” every day. I am thinking of instituting the same policy, although I am currently deriving some satisfaction from answering Eliza’s “Mommy Mommy MOMMY!” with “Eliza Eliza ELIZA!” 

2. Fresh from the Department of GET OFF YOUR @$$, the following inspirational tale: My friend C has loved to sing her whole life, and as a high school and college student, did her time in choral groups and other musical endeavors. Work and marriage have gotten in the way since, and aside from the occasional karaoke rendition, she hasn’t sung much since I’ve known her. After several years of saying to herself, “Self, I should really get back into singing,” C spotted an announcement to audition for the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Tanglewood Festival Chorus (for those who aren’t out our way: Tanglewood is the BSO’s summer performance venue, and performances there are big events with audiences in the 1,000s). She wasn’t sure what kind of a shot she had, but she went for it anyway and hey, guess who’s singing in both concerts on Tanglewood’s opening weekend? In French? From memory — 400 pages of it?

Jim and Eliza and I will be there, since Tanglewood is about as kid-friendly as classical music gets. There is a shell for the serious concertgoers, but the lawn is huge, and people bring picnics, read newspapers, nurse babies, play wiffle ball or even nap in a beautiful pastoral setting to the sound of gorgeous music.

3. Jim and I watched Control, about the doomed singer of Joy Division, this weekend, and I recommend it, in spite of its downbeat ending (Psst, spoiler alert: he DIES). We vacillated between sympathy for and annoyance with Ian Curtis — troubled doesn’t begin to cover it, but who gets married and has a kid at 18 and THEN joins a rock band? Isn’t one of the points of being in a rock band to be able to sample the best groupies have to offer? Jim expressed much righteous indignation, also, over the scene where his wife has just given birth and he’s all, “I’ve got to have a cigarette!” “Like he did all the work!” Jim said. As the guardian of accent accuracy I was pleased to have correctly called it that the actress who played his mistress was German, not French-speaking Belgian. A minor quibble, though. Beautifully shot, although I wouldn’t expect any less from Anton Corbijn, who is one of my favorite photographers and proved to be something of an actor’s director as well, because he got great performances out of everyone involved. He was also smart enough to play up the wit of their manager to leaven some of the gloom. At one point, he promises someone money, and when the person comes to collect it, he says, “It’s right here, in my fuck-off pocket!” I don’t know, maybe you had to be watching it, but this amused me to no end, and I am determined to work it into a conversation as soon as possible.

4. Eliza refers to my current haircut as “Mommy’s sticking-up hair.” The other day, she called it, “Mommy’s silly sticking-up hair.” I told Jim about that this morning, adding, “I don’t think she likes it much.”

Eliza heard me and said, ”No! I LOVE Mommy’s sticking-up hair!” 

5. Wall-E was really good, y’all. I am not ashamed to say that I got seriously choked up at several points. I took Eliza to see it yesterday since Jim was having a golf day. She was mostly into eating the popcorn and the seats that fold up if you’re not sitting on them, but she made it through the entire movie, which is an improvement over last summer’s attempt at seeing Ratatouille (I was also smart and arrived as the previews were wrapping up, since she has no use for those). I think it may actually be a little over the smaller kids’ heads, and certainly the broadside against consumerist culture will be largely lost on them, as will its fairly apocalyptic overtones, but amid all that, it was a very sweet, heartwarming, ultimately hopeful story, both for the robots and the humans involved. I give it the thumb!

Eliza has picked up the habit of starting every single sentence she addresses to me with “Mommy, mommy MOMMY!”

This is simultaneously the cutest and most irritating thing in the world. Depending on where on the spectrum my mood happens to fall, my response ranges from “Yes, sweetie, what’s up?” to {clenched teeth} “What?” {/unclench}

The last two days, she has requested that we cuddle on the couch in the afternoon, a time during which I am treated like a jungle gym as she requests information on various matters including Cinderella, bras, and Bambi. I don’t know how the bra thing started, but she is intrigued by the function of said item and keeps probing for details.

“Mommy Mommy MOMMY! You should talk about BRAS! Mommy Mommy MOMMY! You should tell me the story about CINDERELLA! Mommy Mommy MOMMY! BAMBI was inna FOREST!” etc.

In addition to deploying the Mommy Mommy MOMMY! tactic, she has discovered the power of the sad woebegone voice and has developed a FAKE sad woebegone voice. “Mommy Mommy MOMMY!” she whispers, her voice cracking artfully on the last syllable. “You should cuddle with me some more inna bed.” This usually at about 8:30 when storytime is over and I am tucking her in for the night.

Last night I told her no more and so she wailed piteously and completely insincerely for 10 minutes until she managed to make herself become sincerely upset, at which point real sad woebegone was deployed and hey, it’s 9 p.m. kid, GO TO SLEEP! No more cuddling!

At 3 a.m., fake wailing was deployed to wake me up. When I consented to snuggle with her for 5 minutes, she chattered cheerfully about what she would have for breakfast. “Mommy Mommy MOMMY! I want a HONEY sandwich! And WATER!” I tried to leave, and fake woebegone whispering voice kicked in. “Mommy Mommy MOMMY {voicecrack} cuddle right HERE (patting pillow next to her).”

Lather, rinse, repeat every 10 minutes.

By 4:30 a.m. I was all, “Do you have a BIG PROBLEM? No?! Then go to sleep! Mommy needs to sleep! Daddy needs to sleep! YOU need to sleep! You are NOT upset. You are just making a RACKET FOR NO REASON! DO YOU NEED A TIMEOUT?!”

She stumped me by answering “Yes!” in the fake sad woebegone voice, no less.

So I picked her up out of bed and made her stand up by the changing table for 2 minutes, which accomplished nothing except to elevate the ridiculousness of the situation.

I fell asleep to fake wailing, figuring she’d tire herself out, but at 5:18, there she was at my bedside, chirping away about that damnable honey sandwich again in a stage whisper. “Mommy Mommy MOMMY! I’m going to have a HONEY SANDWICH for BREAKFAST!”

I carried her downstairs and for the first time since the Dora debacle*, let the electronic babysitter work its magic for a good 2 hours while Jim and I attempted to make up for our lost sleep. My hope, which proved in vain, was that she would conk out in front of the TV. Meanwhile, I had a horrible nightmare that terrorists crawled in through the sunroom windows and kidnapped her and held her for ransom. 

For breakfast, she had a zucchini muffin.

I am afraid to call home, because I am sure that she is completely nuclear with sleep deprivation by now and trying to set things on fire with her mind.

___

* The time she got up at 5 a.m. on a weekend and Jim put her one Dora DVD on permanent repeat. By the time we came downstairs 2 1/2 hours later, she knew all the colors in Spanish, cold. 

Food geekery coming up!

With 2 days to go until our next truckload of veggies from the farm and almost everything eaten and/or incorporated into a dish, here is an accounting of what we did with this week’s allotment.

We received:

3 quarts of strawberries

4 fennels

4 beets (with greens)

2 garlic snapes (no, NOT an allusion to Harry Potter! They look like long green worms, which is why we ended up with them in the first place. I had no idea what to do with them but Eliza was captivated and insisted that we bring some home with us.)

Bag of arugula

Bag of chard

Giant lettuce

Half head of Chinese cabbage

2 small baby bok choys

8 Asian turnips

2 yellow squash

2 zucchini

1 kohlrabi

3 radishes

First, I made a stir fry with the chinese cabbage and baby bok choys — the flavors and textures of the two greens contrasted nicely. I added (non-farm) carrots and tofu, both of which Eliza likes (she won’t have anything to do with greens, which makes her beloved miso soup a fishing expedition for me as I spend the first 10 minutes of any meal at the Japanese place picking out the seaweed), tossed the whole thing in a sweet and sour glaze, and called it a day. Very tasty.

For dessert, I made Eliza a strawberry shortcake with a tiny pre-made angel food cake and local ice cream. Predictably, she ate the cake and the ice cream, but not the strawberries. I did, though, and they were delicious.

I drug out an old recipe for a blueberry cake, swapped out diced strawberries for the blueberries and healthied it up a bit with whole wheat flour, and ended up with a delicious coffeecake for breakfast of which Eliza ate copiously, not realizing that the moist, yummy flavor was FROM A PLANT.

Saturday morning, I melted some white chocolate in a doubleboiler (with some half and half) and we dipped strawberries, then rolled them in dark chocolate chips for dessert the next evening.

For dinner that night, I cut up the snapes and used them in place of garlic to make a vegetable broth (I also added in the remainder of the thyme and sage from last time’s allotment), then added diced tomatoes and tomato paste for a thin tomato soup. I topped it with a handful of arugula and home-made Parmesan-cheese croutons, which gave the whole thing a very hoity-toity sculptural restaurant-y look. Also, I want to marry arugula. Is that allowed?

The main course was a chick pea souffle, which did not souffler comme il faut, but was delicious nonetheless, with a sweet mustard sauce. I served it on a bed of arugula, with a side of sauteed fennel and roasted beets, tossed in more Parmesan. And then my eyes rolled back into my head and I died of Happy Food Coma, the end. That dinner was worth every bit of the effort I put into it, and everyone, including she who is suspicious of PLANTS, liked the chickpea souffle, and she even tried a beet. It is worth noting at this point that perhaps it is psychological, but I have roasted many a beet in my time, and none of them were this good; they were sweet but packed with flavor. Perhaps there is something to this idea that organic food tastes better.

And then I came back to life and had umpty-gazillion chocolate-covered strawberries. And then I died again.

Monday I ate the Asian turnips as a dipping vegetable with lemon-hummus, which is not a combination I ended up being that fond of — the bite of the turnips wasn’t quite the right complement to the hummus that I hoped it would be. They seem like such a good dipping veggie, though, that I am going to keep trying. I know cheesy is wrong for them, and I can’t see anything sour-cream-based working either, but there most be something out there that works. Suggestions appreciated.

I made salads with the giant lettuce, radishes and some (non-farm) peppers, which have been good so far, and will probably use the kohlrabi for that purpose tomorrow, although, since it is the size of my HEAD, it may take a few days to eat my way through.

Then last night, Eliza and I made black beans and rice, only we added in peppers (not from the farm), yellow squash, and the beet greens and chard. And then she asked for creamed corn instead and I gave it to her because hey, at least she requested a PLANT. I ate the beans and rice with a bit of pepper jack stirred in.

Has anyone noticed how Eliza hasn’t actually eaten any of these things I made with farm share veggies? Except for the soup (minus the arugula) and some of the yellow squash that she was convinced to try under threat of otherwise losing dessert privileges, the get-Eliza-excited-about-vegetables-and-fruits element of this whole thing has been a total failure.

Aside from getting organic veggies cheap (and having a reason to go hang out with our farm share buddy, A, once a week), part of my reason for doing this was the hope that being more involved in our food supply would spur Eliza to try some of the food. As excited as she is about helping me select our vegetables from the bins set up at the barn, and as delightful and delighted as she was about picking her 12-strawberry contribution to our 3 quarts, if it’s not melon or corn or carrots or possibly zucchini, she remains uninterested in eating PLANTS, god forbid

We’ll see what this week brings. The farm promises broccoli, peas and even cantaloupe for the coming weeks, and I am hotly anticipating an opportunity to make pasta with peas in cream sauce. I may even suspend the vegetarian thing for an evening, if I can find a pancetta that isn’t made from factory-farmed pigs. (Yep. Still reading Omnivore’s Dilemma.)