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.)

First, to debunk the common myth of organically-grown vegetables being little and mangy, I would like to show you this photo of Eliza holding a head of organic lettuce we got from the farm this week:

***

Seven hours of sleep is superior to 3.

***

Now, onto the subject of the day; I was going to send this to Awesome Former Babysitter K (AFBK) in an email, but it’s too funny not to share with the wider world.

Remember when we de-binked Eliza and she got to go to Build-a-Bear and she chose this astounding pink and white poodle thing she dubbed Jolly, whom she then dressed in pink leopard-print lingerie? Here, read all about it. I’ll wait. {twiddle}

When we visited AFBK last month, we brought Jolly with us, so AFBK got to experience the wonder and glory first-hand. When she sent a birthday card to Eliza earlier this month, she included a gift certificate to Build-a-Bear, with the suggestion that perhaps Jolly might like a new outfit, an idea I found both sweet and ingenious.

Yesterday, Jim’s mom visited, and the lousy weather scotched all her outdoor play plans for Eliza. Before I left for work, I suggested that perhaps as an alternate activity, they might like to take Eliza to Build-a-Bear and purchase the aforementioned new outfit together, and handed them the gift certificate.

Jim called me from the store to warn me that things were not going according to plan. Despite extensive pre-store brain-washing r.e. pretty! outfit! for Jolly, Eliza had decided to go in a different direction and wanted another stuffed animal.

“I thought I had convinced her to get a tasteful black bear,” he lamented. Alas, he underestimated our child’s eyeball-searing aesthetic, because THIS is what she came home with:  

In case you would like to appreciate the Stars and Stripes bear in its full glory (which, tellingly, I just mis-typed “gory”), here is a link. 

She then convinced Granny to buy a pink bathrobe for him (her?), and dubbed her new friend “Gluppa.” I must say that we didn’t quite achieve the eyesore-reduction intended by AFBK’s original gift, but Eliza was happy — Gluppa slept in the place of honor on her pillow last night — and that’s the important thing. 

I have been awake for a very long time already today. Since 2:09 a.m., to be exact. I blame the G&T. And also the 3 glasses of wine, which was roughly 2 1/2 servings of alcohol too many, by my calculations.

Jim and I went out to one of our favorite fancy-pants restaurants last night for a belated Father’s Day celebration. Since we were early, we stopped off for a drink first at a bar, where I followed the advice I had read of someone, somewhere, who had written that all the cool kids are drinking G&T’s with Hendrick’s Gin this summer. Since I have been meaning to bust out of my vodka gimlet pattern for a while, I decided that I would do as the cool kids do. I enjoyed my G&T mightily. Gin with tonic = not drano, unlike gin martinis, which have excellent nasal-passage-clearing properties but suit me not as an actual item to imbibe. Jim keeps telling me that you just have to drink through the pain and then it gets good, and I don’t know WHY that ringing endorsement is stopping me, but perhaps I am just a big liquor pussy. 

Anyhoodle, G&T with Hendrick’s quaffed, we headed restaurant-wards for a prix-fixe Moroccan dinner. I hereby give props to any culture that can combine cinnamon, powdered sugar and chicken and not come off weird, which is what we’re apparently dealing with up there in northern Africa. Good for them. Also, preserved lemon peel and olives on chicken. And pastries with strawberries, because OMG the 3 quarts of strawberries we picked this week at the farm as part of our share was not enough. Jim and I actually burst out laughing when they showed up with dessert. (Did you know, by the way, that it is possible to eat chocolate-covered strawberries without actually eating the strawberries? I served them as dessert on Saturday thinking that Eliza’s love for all things chocolate would overcome her suspicion of the plant kingdom, but sadly, it became an exercise in gymnastic incisors as she delicately but with brutal efficiency flayed the chocolate skin off each strawberry. Curses! Foiled again!)

Although I expected to get some wine with dinner, I did not expect to receive a whole new glass of a whole new wine with every course. Thank god they limited themselves to three courses, or I would be seriously indisposed today. I am not a 4 drinks kind of girl (anymore).

As it was, my nerves, invigorated after the nap they took earlier in the evening (alcohol is a depressant, a depressant, a depressant…  which is a quote from one of my favorite cultural experiences ever, a poetry slam I attended in 1997 with Jim and 2 friends in Orlando, Fla., which was so astoundingly, over-the-top-ly BAD that the four of us were still howling over it 2 years later. It included an emcee who cheerfully announced, “The next poet up, is: ME!” and then intoned in free verse about the depressant qualities of alcohol for roughly 20 minutes.) sproinged into hyper-alertness at 2:09 a.m. and have remained thus ever since.

During my time awake I meditated on “Wanted,” for which I saw a preview recently and which I WILL be seeing because James MacAvoy! Is! Super! Hot! (If I marry two people named James, does it still count is bigamy? Because I would like him to be my second husband, but I would like to avoid criminal charges.) I also fretted about how our window air conditioning unit is way too loud for me to hear the zombies in the hallway, solved 2 important childcare problems with a series of brainstorms, and wondered if that was lightning or a visual hallucination. Several times.

At 5:20 a.m., it got light out and so I decided, “Nuts to this, I’m getting up.” I assure you I was fully sober if sleep deprived when I arrived at the next decision, which was, “Hey, I should go running!” which is how it came to pass that I had gallumphed my way through a drizzle to 10K by 6:40 this morning. Weirdly, I am still jumpy as a matriarch-fornicator, which is a bummer, because I sort of hoped to run that out.

I ran decently well, fueled on by my usual selection of music, the glow of self-righteousness that comes with passing by the Dunkin Donuts which was elbow-deep in sugar-shocked commuters, and the thought that drives me beyond all others when I run: “When the zombie apocalypse comes, I’m going to WIN!”