An Important Public Service Announcement

Should your two year old be quietly amusing herself in the next room, do NOT presume that she is playing happily with her toys. Rather, run like the wind because she's probably into your makeup:

The lipstick washed off nicely, by the way, leaving her with a healthy, fresh-scrubbed pink hue.

That was just miserable.

My husband, to begin this story, is the one who gets up with the kids at night - he's a much lighter sleeper than me, for one, and he's generally already in their room by the time I groggily wake up. He's also scarier than me for some reason, bearing generations of fathers' authority on his mild shoulders and so the children tend to obligingly go quietly back to sleep when he checks on them, instead of begging to "sleep in your bed, Mama, PLEASE!"

The Baby decided that last night was going to be one of her rare sleepless nights. I realized at one? two? in the morning that my husband had been up several times with the little creep and so I took her downstairs to sleep on the couch. How cozy! She kicked and squirmed and complained and I froze and hung off the side of our narrow couch. So it was such a restful night. I think I had maybe an hour of solid sleep, and it was of the shivery, nightmare-plagued kind.

I've always had bad nightmares, a combination of being an early and unsupervised reader and having an extremely vivid imagination. People often talk about having a vivid imagination as though it were a good thing, something that should bring happiness but really, not so much - when combined with my naturally fearful, overcautious nature, it's like a nonstop technicolour parade of Bad Things That Might Happen, Possibly. And my nightmares are a near-constant offshoot of all of that - in grade two, we had the assignment to draw pictures of a recent dream, and the other kids drew things like "I am riding a horse" or "I was at a birthday party." My drawing was a carefully rendered picture of a family cowering in fear while the father dashed up the stairs brandishing an axe. "HE IS GOING TO KILL THEM," I wrote at the top, which caused my teacher to pull me aside and ask me if everything was okay at home. But really, I'd just read "The Shining" and had been rather freaked out by it BECAUSE I WAS SEVEN. And continuing the tradition of letting little kids freak themselves out - my eight year old daughter has recently discovered the Goosebumps series, although she told me this morning that they're not very scary at all, which she decided after laying awake all night, not being scared out of her wits.

The whole idea of age-appropriate horror amuses me - how do they KNOW? Is there some sort of expert who has a measuring stick for scary kids' books? I've suggested to my daughter that she read other books, but she makes a beeline for the scary ones, for the very things that I've spent the last eight years shielding her from. The world is scary and children know this in their bones, I think, know that if they're ever going to make it through life as anything other than guileless toddlers, they'd better settle in for the night with some book that promises fear and stolen sleep, the heavy price we pay for stepping one pace closer to the dangerous world.

No worries!

I'm not going anywhere, although I seriously doubt that I'll be doing this when I'm 90.

Today has been a lovely, sun-dappled day. We spent this afternoon at a friend's house and The Boy and her son jumped on their trampoline like a pair of shrieking maniacs and then played on their wooden play gym for ages, running around in a sunny backyard with Popsicles and looking just like the ultimate small town dream, like this is exactly why we moved here. Now The Baby has fallen heavily asleep, after a strenuous afternoon of watering my friend's garden, blowing bubbles, lolling around on the trampoline and running UP ladders and hurtling DOWN slides. It's tiring work being a toddler, you know. And now I get a few minutes to write.

I'm always bemused by the google searches that lead here - perhaps because they're so g-rated and innocuous and so often involve toad care tips. And so now I will answer my most recent searchers' questions:
1) Sage green looks good with what colour?
Um, ivory or pale yellow would be my guesses.
2) Frog Cupcake recipe (my most searched-for item)
Look here. I will personally vouch for those cupcakes - we've made them several times and they're VERY cute.
3) All about baby toads needs
The good people at 4-H have a quite comprehensive page on that very subject.
4) Frog And Toad Are Still Friends
Found it! Hi! If you're looking for Arnold Lobel's books, check out your local library or bookstore.
5) Birthday cake decorations in 1950 for a 12 year old boy.
I think that cakes back then for kids that age just had candles, but I'm no expert. For all I know, they might have had elaborate Davy Crocket cakes shaped like Raccoon Skin Caps, but I don't think they did.
6) Toad like person.
I'm not going to suggest anyone who looks like a toad, because some people were a little bit huffy when I suggested that Meredith from Grey's Anatomy looked like a turtle. Turtles are cute, people!
7) Unusual kids decorated cupcakes.
Do you noticed a baked-goods theme here? I certainly do. Go to the Family Fun website - they have lots of them.
8) Crazy Frog I've been married a long time.
Yuck. This is where I COULD post a you tube link, but I just outright refuse. YOU TUBE. GO THERE.
9) Where to keep the money frog toad in the front room.
I was a bit baffled about this question so I looked it up myself and found out that it was about feng shui. Ah. My guess would be: in the mystical vortex located on the coffee table. Or on the china cabinet shelf. The shelf of power.
10) I win the internets
Good for you! Hurray!
(edited to add- look way below my site index on the right and you'll see a little green box that says "sitemeter". It gives me information on my blog stats - who has visited, their isp addresses, how long they read my page and how they got to my page. So if people are coming to my page because of a purient search that I might not like, I would be aware of it. If you want to install it on your page, go to www.sitemeter.com.)

Happy birthday to you, Little Blog

It's hard to believe you are one already. It seems like only yesterday that you were brand-new, and I was posting the recipe for The Best Muffins in The World, to complete disinterest and the mockery of my brother Brandon:

Awesome! (he's fine in this photo - he was just goofing around.)

Katherine, Kim and Carol were some of your very first visitors and with their kind comments, I was hooked on blogging. I wrote about my favorite cookbook, trips I took, mood swings, memes that people tagged me with, my birthday, The Baby's health problems, and getting hit on at McDonalds by a guy who had just gotten out of jail.

I posted pictures:

Pictures of people who are NOT Miss Marple.
Pictures of people (and their monkeys) that my children adore obsessively.
Pictures of the record that I loved most of all in the whole world when I was ten.

I also posted pictures of my kids (even though that makes me nervous):

The Boy!
The Girl And a Pineapple-Upsidedown Cake!
The Baby, searing off my eyeballs with her sartorial elegance! And I've also posted the occasional photo of myself but I'm not going to today because my ego is plenty big right now, thanks.

Recently, I haven't been able to keep up with my blog reading as much as I'd like - my bloglines subscriptions have become unweildy and huge and my time is suddenly much more cramped. I still love blogging though, love hitting publish and waiting for those magical comments to start coming in. It's been a fun year. I don't know if I'll be blogging indefinitely into the future, but it's really been a blessing for me and a way of finding my voice as a writer. Thanks for reading and commenting and for your friendship.

Pentecost Sunday

I would have liked to have fixed this picture - straightened the curtain, adjusted that Chinese lantern - but a) life is imperfect, ESPECIALLY mine and b) I'm lazy. So, that being said, here is the garland of 12 paper doves that the kids and I made this morning for Pentecost. The kids decorated cupcakes in Sunday School and sang Happy Birthday; we're making dove-shaped sugar cookies and a cheesecake for supper. We were going to go on a picnic this afternoon, but the sheets of rain and heavy wind suggest that perhaps we're just going to stay home and watch movies while raising our blood sugar levels. There you have it - another holiday.

I was thinking this morning about Philip Larkin's poem, "Churchgoing", particularly the lines:

For, though I've no idea

What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,

It pleases me to stand in silence here;

A serious house on serious earth it is...

And I was thinking about it while I was in my church, a small, beige-panelled church with a roof that needs fixing and a chilly basement and felt banners all over the place. Like many liberal Protestant denominations, the congregation in general is aging and declining - although my congregation is actually quite young, thanks to the vigorous reproductive contributions of several families, and surrounded by little girls in their clompy Sunday Mary Janes and little boys with clip-on ties, it's easy to feel like this will continue forever, that my great-grandchildren will be shushing their babies in the church vestibule, scrawling down "mk 2 cheesecakes bakesale May/9" on their church programs.

A friend of mine is a wistful atheist and has said to me that she wishes that she believed because she would love to go to church - would love to sing hymns, mingle with other congregants after service, would love to go to church pot-lucks. This strikes me as the saddest hunger, this feeling that something has been lost and that she can never return, her lack of belief and her fear of superstition keeping her from something she can no longer name.

Since someone will forever be surprising

A hunger in himself to be more serious,

And gravitating with it to this ground,

Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,

If only that so many dead lie round

Hey! I got my haircut!

I like to think about my blog as "hard-hitting investigative journalism." So, from the same blog that brought you such hard-hitting newstories as "Who keeps eating all the pickles?" and "I swear, I am going to sell my kids if they don't stop yelling", let me present MY EXCELLENT NEW HAIRCUT: Morticia begone! I do that pose whenever anyone takes a photo of me and if they snap the picture before I can do that flirty sidelong glance, I make them delete it. I'm reasonable like that. That's also my totally natural undyed hair colour for the first time in years and I can see some white in the front which really, really is not helping me in my quest for natural, dye-free living. This time next week, my hair will no doubt be some unnatural colour, something that suggests eggplants or Bombay Company furniture.

I totally want to pinch my round cheeks and then I want to slap myself upside the head for letting myself get that heavy. Yeesh. I've been exercising every day and so I'm really hoping that soon, soon the weight will magically just fall right off.... wah wah. I'm in my 30s and I gained weight after having kids. This is the worst thing to ever happen in the history of the world. Also bad: the coral pink wall I'm standing in front of, the result of my home decoration project last weekend.

Coming up tomorrow: a tour through the 1921 sewing book I bought today!

FINE.

Here you go: January, 1997. You'll note that I didn't use much in the way of capitals, because capitals would get in the way of my intense FEELINGS.

the wooden bridge has
mold growing on its
bottom and a stream that
doestn't run
full of leaches
that grow on my skin
a tiny rock island
that I slid off in my underwear
and earless cat-headed otters
that slid down on the muddy banks
you could drown in it
or grow gills,
be a fish
if you could hold your head under
the cold water long enough

Last night, my husband decided that we should clean out the myriad mystery boxes in the laundry room, prompted mostly by my gentle whining on how nasty it was. Thus spurred into action, he grouched a box into the living room and we set to sorting the contents into:
1) Keepers
2) Yard sale..ers.
3) Stuff to throw out. Like the broken coffee grinder, although my husband disagrees with me on that one: SOMEDAY HE MIGHT FIX IT. And then we can grind coffee beans, thus proving our independence from the big ground coffee conglomerates. A man can stand up.

So. Lots of junk later (come to our yard sale!), I was happily reacquainted with some missing treasures: O, scrubbing pad lady! How I have missed your ceramic self! I also found a notebook chock full of my writing from when I was 24 and, um, troubled. Flipping through the notebook, I found myself growing more and more alarmed. I was heavily influenced by Sylvia Plath (well, of course) and really thought that writing gritty, nasty poetry made me extra-writerly. Oh, and lots of short stories which I would write and then stick into a drawer, feeling like a VERY clever girl. Anyhow, after reading the whole notebook worth of grim scribblings, I realized with a sudden shock that less than two years later, I was a mother. Exclamation mark. Honestly, I wouldn't even let that girl BABYSIT my kids, let alone carry them. And here is where I should put a nasty poem from when I was 24 but I really don't want to blight your day. My dad popped in while I was "enjoying" my find and I read him a few choice poems, which caused him to announce that he was going to go home and kill himself.

Something else that turned up while we cleaning was one of the magazines that I read in the hospital while I was in labour with The Baby. It was a special on cakes, which makes me think that the Super Labour-Focused Attention I read it with warped the poor Baby's digestive track. Scientifically speaking, of course.

Speaking of cooking: at breakfast I made a white sauce that should put any rumours of me being a good cook to rest. I made it with tapioca starch, experimentally, instead of flour so that the aforementioned Gluten-Intolerant-Tot could have mama's creamed peas on her poached egg for breakfast. The sauce didn't seem to be thickening so I cautiously added some more tapioca flour, at which point the whole mess congealed into an oozing glop, much like some sort of thick chemical polymer. Doesn't that sound appealling? My kids were suddenly convinced that they never needed to eat again, that they would live without food from this point on. So much of what I think goes into making a house feel like home revolves around the sorts of foods that people eat within it, the smell of something baking in the oven - so I don't know what it says about my philosophy of home when I make something quite that revolting. Ick.

A Land Where The Squirrels Roam Free

That trapping squirrels comment was a joke, by the way - we're going to look into our options about said squirrels and they will be moving on shortly, but right now they're fine, living in my roof and screaming at the passer-bys. Apparently, that's Squirrel Heaven.

I've been busy with summer plans for the past couple of days - the kids made their own suggestions last night and I thought their ideas were cute: let's open a lemonade stand! Let's put on a show! LET'S HAVE A YARD SALE! Yes, there is nothing more fun, really, then having a yard sale. Whoopee! And to add to the fun, apparently I'll be hosting said yard sale with wee Judy Garland and teeny Mickey Rooney. Or a pair of Victorian capitalists, little scheming proto-Rockerfellers - the two of them have big plans: they're going to sell all their toys! They're going to sell brownies and lemonade! The Girl, in particular, always has big money-making plans. She's not saving up for something - she just likes having lots of money.

Hey, I'm going to be in Toronto in June! Really! I'm going away for the weekend WITHOUT MY CHILDREN! I can't quite imagine it, right now. I'm looking forward to it - the weekend away, the chance to be on my own for a few days and the chance to miss everyone. I DO need some time to myself pretty desperately right now - I'm not sad, not exactly, but I'm close to sad.

Anyhow. Off to another busy day. I don't have any pithy wrapping up paragraph today, but The Boy, behind me, is giving me a loud musical accompaniment, a somewhat misheard version of Justin Timberlake's "My Love." Wish you could hear it.

My living room is full of dollhouses right now - the one my dad made me when I was four, The Girl's Little People Dollhouse from her infancy, a fancy schmancy dollhouse give to her by her uncle and aunt this past birthday and a very fancy handmade one that Bonnie brought over - her daughter had outgrown its dollhouse-y charms and very kindly wanted The Baby to have it. So now I have a knee-high village to stumble over in my living room and should I ever shrink down to 5 and a half inches tall, my living accommodations will actually be quite a bit better than they currently are, with the exception that none of the dollhouses have working toilets. The Baby spends much of her day crouched down, moving little couches and televisions around, often making catastrophic piles of tiny furniture in the center of the living room, like something very bad has happened in dollhouse land and now everything must go.

We have a mean, crazy black squirrel in our backyard. I'd never seen black squirrels around here until two or three years ago and now they've chased away our own endearing brown squirrels and taken up residence in the roof of the addition. One yelled at me when The Baby and I walked by this morning, en route to the backyard - it made like it was going to chase me down, which made me more than a bit nervous. Nervous, and at the same time thinking "HA! A squirrel is threatening me! What a stupid squirrel!" So the Baby and I made our way to the backyard and we were hanging out, blowing dandelion fluff, when I heard a weird sound, looked around - and there was The Squirrel, standing on its hind legs and growling, making a stiff, jerking progress towards me. I stared at it for a heartbeat, realized that I was significantly freaked out and so I dashed into the house, The Baby up in my arms and well out of reach of The Demon Squirrel.

My husband says he's going to set traps for the little jerks. That'll show them.

Last night, The Baby kept waking up. My husband and I took turns getting up with her until I took pity on him and brought her downstairs to sleep with me on the futon in the office. What a great night that was! She apparently has her very own little furnace, because she slept blanketless and bare-legged while I stayed awake and shivered, wide awake and tired in the unfamiliar downstairs darkness, thinking inky resentful nighttime thoughts.

It's not a bad life, not at all. I would not change much of it - where I live, if I could, but that's not do-able, unfortunately, and it's not the end of the world to be here. Some days, though, I feel like I'm endlessly rearranging small things, that my world is made up of tiny precarious things and that some big unforseen catastrophe is just seconds away.

"The whole world is covered with buttons and not one of them is mine!"

Happy birthday, Arnold Lobel. You were a nice man. I remind myself, somewhat poignantly, of Toad - I have a bad temper, I eat too many cookies and I DO look funny in my bathing suit. My husband, of course, is sweet, even-tempered Frog and I am SO glad that he is back home again. He had a lot of fun camping, even though it snowed where he was (several hours north of where we are and we are already quite north) for the whole weekend. SNOW!

Today is a very pleasant, ordinary day: I took The Boy for a haircut. I bought The Baby some sandals and picked up some groceries. My dad came over my lunch. I'm going to do laundry this afternoon. We're barbecuing tonight. The usual. It is a nice life, a gentle, well-loved life full of funny, interesting people and there is no reason why I am often so glum and sulky about things, or no sensible reason, anyhow. But sometimes the very pleasant confines of my very pleasant life still feels like A BIG STUPID TRAP and even when I can't think of anything I'd rather be doing, it can still feel horrible to be in a rut, even if it is my beloved rut of my very own making. It's the knowledge that I've made choices that have led to my being here and that different choices might have made me happier, even while knowing that this - this rambling house full of children, this pleasant small town, this kind husband - is pretty much a home run in terms of what would make me happy, what I want. Right now, though, I'm happy in the fleeting way that happiness is - and who would want to be happy all the time, anyhow? Happiness is for special occasions, with a certain pragmatic contentedness being the best we can ask for the rest of the time, I guess. And wasn't that a Toad-esque speech?

Edited to add: my husband had a non-reaction to the red room. I had to point it out to him, he was so tired, and he was basically "Oh." He is the most mild-tempered of men.

Happy birthday, Queen Victoria

These were incredibly delicious, by the way. I used my usual one-bowl buttermilk chocolate cupcake recipe, and a pretty spiffy cream cheese icing. I wanted the icing to be more lilac and less purple, but apparently it didn't dampen my desire to eat five of the freaking things.
Which is why I now look like this:

But that's okay. My goal has never been lifelong hotness, which has always struck me as the most foolish, ephemeral and pointless of goals. I want to be a ferocious old woman, kind to young children but bearing no fools and I think looking like Queen Victoria will go a long way to helping me attain my lofty ambition.

I enjoy having Queen Victoria's birthday (or close to it) off: good for us Canadians. I only wish that we could establish more regal holidays:

April 21 - Henry VIII. Eye up spouse, thoughtfully.
June 3 - George V. Organize stamps.

November 19 - Charles I. Wear scarves or turtlenecks. Cultivate moustache. Avoid Puritans.

Those are just for starters.

On to age differences between children - I think it depends on the family. All of my kids are three years apart and the older two now play together quite cheerfully, but it took a while. Friends of mine have kids 18 months apart and those children are practically twins - a good arrangement for having children who are friends with each other but a bit hard on the mother, I'd say. So my final answer is that it depends on the family and what your priorities are as parents - ideally, I'd have liked to have had my children closer together and to have four now, not three, but this isn't an ideal world and we've done the best we can. Three kids, for the record, are awfully noisy.

My older two like to take off together to play upstairs, to float toys in the tub or just to get away from The Baby in general, which always sends her dashing off in search of them and whatever tempting game they are playing.
"BOYGIRL!" she calls. Actually, she calls them by their names, but smushed together like that. Hisnamehername. This one unit, these older siblings that she still cannot play with. The spaces between my kids grieves me - those three years were too long, really. Ideally, I'd have had all of my kids within five minutes of each other, a litter of kids who could keep each other amused with no one small and always left behind. Ideally.

Someone my husband knows had triplets this year. TRIPLETS. That's a lot of babies all at once. I mean, we feel like we are full up of kids (someone asked my husband how many children he has the other day and he answered, grimly, "A hundred." Oh hush.) but really, we only have three kids and that's not so very many, especially because the older two are quite independent little sorts, but it's been a long, tiring nine years, especially when you calculate that I've been pregnant or breastfeeding for 70 months of those nine years. Which goes quite far in explaining why I've accidentally burned my hands or arms on the stove several times in the past few days, I think: my brain is just tired.

My husband is STILL camping. We're surviving pretty well, I say cautiously and quietly, lest I tempt the terrible Gods of Irony. I totally expected to accidentally burn down the house in the first 24 hours and to have him come home to a smoking ruin, with me and the three kids standing arms folded on the sidewalk, glowering at him for DARING TO GO. Isn't that mature? Aside from painting part of a room an incredibly unpleasant shade of deep pink, the house is exactly as he left it. Except for being messier. And uglier.

The Baby likes singing these days. Her favorite song is Row Row Row The Boat, except she skips to the chorus, which in her lingo goes "Moly, moly, moly, moly/Bean bean bean bean BEAN." She sings that unless she's pretending to be a little meowing cat. She announces when she gets into the bathroom "Pee and poo in da POTTY!" and then promptly leaves again, the declaration apparently being more than enough.

Fancy That

We're having a Victorian Tea Party tomorrow afternoon, at my children's request. Fancy dress-up clothes are optional, but highly recommended. So I'm going to spend today making fancy cupcakes and little bitty sandwiches as well as tracking down fancy teacups and seeing who I can round up among my kids' friends to be proper guests. And I'm leaving off painting/wrecking any more of the house for the time being.

Important Update About Paint

I decided to paint the office a cheery red JUST LIKE MY HUSBAND WANTED as a surprise for him when he got home from his fishing trip. How very loving of me, especially because I've fought him on the whole red room front for FIVE YEARS, which is why the office is still bondo-coloured.

So I got part of one wall painted.

Wait for it.....

IT IS THE UGLIEST COLOUR EVER! Good work, me! Another fine home renovation project! The blood that my husband will weep upon his return will likely be EXACTLY THAT COLOUR.

Camping Schmamping

Guess where my husband is on this lovely Victoria Day weekend? Is he safely within the bosum of his family or is he way back in the freaking bush catching fish and shivering in a tent? Just guess.

So, I am seizing this opportunity to paint the kids' bedroom. Photos possibly to come! Have a good weekend, everyone.

A quick post about Boston Cream Pie

Edited to add: yes, it's a long recipe, but it's not a hard one AND you do it in three steps that can be HOURS apart - one very simple little cake, the ever-so-slightly fussy pastry cream and the final filling of the cake and making the chocolate glaze. Easy!

The recipe that I use is really, really long, so I won't post it, but Boston Cream Pie is an eggy yellow cake (one layer) that's split down the middle and filled with vanilla custard. You then cover the whole deal in chocolate glaze. It's VERY good and is really helping with the whole fat problem I've been having.

Okay, here's the recipe, which comes from my beloved copy of Richard Sax's Classic Home Desserts:
I make the base from a single layer of hot water spongecake. I LOVE single-layer recipes for cakes - it makes a nice amount of cake for Sunday night supper (sprinkled with icing sugar and served with berries, perhaps), and this recipe is nicely frugal (it's made from nearly nothing) and easy.
Preheat your oven to 350. Grease the bottom of a round 9" cake pan.
Sift together:
1 cup of all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt, or even slightly less.
And set them aside for now.
In a bowl with an electric mixer, beat:
2 eggs
until they're light.
Add 1 cup sugar
Beat until light, fluffy and lemony yellow.
Beat in 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract.
Fold the flour mixture into the egg mixture. Pour VERY GENTLY
1/3 cup of boiling water
down the side of the bowl and fold in gently, deflating the batter as little as possible. Quickly but gently pour the batter into the prepared cake pan. "Swirl the pan to smooth the top without deflating the batter" my recipe says, and good luck with that.
Bake until the top is golden and springs back lightly when touched, about 30-35 minutes. Cool in the pan on a wire rack for 15 minutes. COOL THE CAKE COMPLETELY on the wire rack before doing anything with it, because it will fall apart if it's still warm.
It's an easy little cake, honest.

Okay, so onto the vanilla pastry cream.
Get a heavy saucepan and rinse it with cold water. Bring to a boil over medium heat:
3/4 cup milk
1 tablespoon sugar.
Meanwhile, in a bowl, whisk together:
1/4 cup milk
1/4 cup sugar
pinch salt
2 tablespoons cornstarch
2 large egg yolks
and mix for 1 1/2 minutes or until everything is pale and light and the cornstarch isn't lumpy.
Remove the saucepan from theat heat and whisk some of the hot milk into the egg mixture. (you're doing that so you don't end up with scrambled eggs in milk) Scrape the warmed egg yolk mixture into the saucepan and return to medium heat. Bring to a boil, whisking CONSTANTLY. Boil for one minute and do NOT STOP WHISKING. This sounds really dire, but I find it meditative and almost zen-like, really. It's going to thicken astoundingly at the end of that minute, and you're going to remove it from the heat and whisk in
2 teaspoons cold unsalted butter
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Pour the pastry cream into a clean bowl (and my recipe says to strain it, but for the record I have never done that and it's been fine). Press some waxed paper directly on the top to keep a skin from forming and cool it in the fridge for two hours.
You're done the hard part!

So. Now you have a cool cake and cool pastry cream. Carefully brush off the excess crumbs from your cake, and split it in half with a serrated knife. (horizontally. Do I need to say that?) Place the bottom layer of your cake on your loveliest cake plate and spread the pastry cream evenly over the cake, reaching nearly to the edges. Replace the top cake layer and press gently into place.

All you have to do now is to make a chocolate glaze and chocolate glazes are the easiest things in the world. Melt together over low heat:
3 ounces semisweet chocolate, finely chopped
1/4 cup unsalted butter, cut into pieces
(and my recipe also calls for 1 1/2 tablespoons light corn syrup but I ALWAYS skip that. You can add it if you like.)
Remove from the heat and set aside to cool and thicken until you can spread it. Or you can do what I do and pour it over the cake right away and eat it while it's molten. Either way, let the glaze set for 10 minutes or so on your cake, and save any leftovers in the fridge.

Holidays All The Time

Today is suddenly much warmer and also the Feast of the Ascension*. We made paper butterflies last night and hung them from the bay window near the table (the paper lanterns are there all the time now, apparently), which is apparently our holiday window. After school, the kids are going to make some kites AND we're going to have our First Picnic Of The Season followed by our First Boston Cream Pie Of The Season. I make a FREAKISHLY good Boston Cream Pie and whenever it's one of these sorts of non-mainstream holidays, The Girl always, always suggests Boston Cream Pie for dessert.

I love holidays. Not the stupid kind of holidays, not "National Short Sleeved Sweater Day!" or "Take Your Proctologist To Lunch Day", the kind of holidays which seem to have been put together by a board of marketing directors. They suck. Give me a good holiday, though, something that suggests drunken medieval peasants dancing around in a field combined with deep religious solemnity and I always get atwitter with excitement because I CAN DO A CRAFT ABOUT THAT! And also bake something. Good times.

To switch gears suddenly: yes, we have thought about homeschooling and did, in fact, always plan on homeschooling our kids. Our reasons for eventually not homeschooling still seem pretty solid, but we had ANOTHER school-related misery-session last night with The Girl, which led to her staying up and watching American Idol with me. She really enjoyed Maroon 5's performance, and commented that the lead singer was wearing "an attractive suit." Those kids today and their haberdashery... So anyhow, homeschooling is once again seeming like a good idea but I'm sure a summer together will change all of our collective minds again. Or maybe not. My kids are pretty spiffy and I want them to be happy, smart and unbroken by childhood, but sometimes happiness seems as fragile as paper, this brief flash of colour in a dark, mean world.

*Which means that it's forty days after Easter Sunday, thus being the day that Jesus ascended to Heaven.

It's cold out today and it's rainy. Apparently we've passed right over spring, skipped summer utterly and now we're in late October again. It would be a lovely day for staying home and drinking yet another delicious mug of sugar-free, low-fat hot chocolate (stupid diet), but instead I had to rush to the school, Baby in tow, to observe The Girl's speech therapy session. Her therapist, you see, was worried that I wasn't making R sounds correctly. But of course I was! All my years of piracy have given my R sounds a guttural heft that's quite pleasing to the ear while being terrifying to landlubbers.

SO anyhow. The Girl has been in speech therapy since she was three, but I knew almost from the her first words that something was not right. I could understand most of what she said and so I acted as her translator - she wants a cookie, she wants to go home, she wants you to stop asking her questions. Her vocabulary was great, her grammatical structure was completely normal, but she spoke this garbled, incomprehensible speech. I felt guilty, of course - what had I done, what had I not done to have made her like that? And then there was the terror, the fear of having to send her off to school with her whispery, slurring speech. How could this baby, this little speechless child, cope with a loud school stuffed full of older kids, full of teachers who had no way of knowing how smart she was?

I underestimated her, underestimated her pragmatic courage, her fearlessness, her very intelligence. She's done very well - she's popular, and has an ability not to take crap while still being a kindly, sweet girl. She is also the class smart kid, every teacher but one recognizing her wily cleverness. Her speech has improved vastly - although that stupid R is still giving her some problems - and she was never the child I should have spent my piercing worry on. No, my sweet, sunny Boy was the child that should have had my tears when he went to school because my baby is floundering, is unhappy. How could I not have seen this coming?

He comes home from school quiet, distressed and pale, miserably pulling at his hair. He's bright and lovable and sweet-natured and is in a class full of little redneck boys and kids from foster homes and some kids, he tells me, are mean. He never complains - he's as brave as a little lion, going back every week into this loud, chaotic place without whining, but in my fantasies, we live someplace with a great Waldorf school and he is happy, in a class of other little boys just like him. But we're here for now and that's not an option. I don't know what I can do - do I switch him to the other school in town, away from the friends he HAS made, away from his grandmother and sister? Do I keep him home for a year? Do I run away and join a crew of brigands, not caring one whit that horizontal stripes make me look like Miss Dairy 2007? None of these choices are exactly great, and my poor little boy is sadder every day.

This is where the title would go, if I had one.

I spent all day yesterday cackling over my comments from my silly colour post and then I'd remember, oh wait. I'm depressed. That's the problem with writing about depression - it becomes the equivalent of when I used to make very, very sad faces at myself in the mirror as a child, while humming the theme song to The Young And The Restless (I think. It was very sad and involved pianos), which was my babysitter's favorite soap. At first, it would be fun - "Oh look at Becky! How sad and yet how hauntingly lovely she is!" but eventually I would be bawling my eyes out because O THE SADNESS.

I'm much happier today. The Boy and The Baby drew big chalky scribbles on the sidewalk so we can admire them after the rain, which is still drizzling down. We have big afternoon plans involving doing some painting and perhaps watching some Scooby Doo movies that a lovely friend loaned me (thanks!). So there's that, making some supper, helping The Girl with her speech homework and then watching American Idol while the World's Best Husband loads the dishwasher. It's not a hard life and I really have no call to be mopey, especially when my children's fleeting childhoods are fleeting right by.

One of my friends has the ability to make any house gorgeous - her house haunts me with its antique crockery bowls filled with wooded spoons, shelves filled with preserves and old books and everything just beautiful and made from nothing, this beauty she has pulled out of the air, almost. I don't have the ability to make things around me beautiful, honestly - I have a lovely house, but we've stuffed it full of junk and piles of toys and old bookshelves filled too full, lacking whatever essential eye for beauty that other people have so effortlessly. This friend pointedly does NOT read my blog: she read it once and found it upsetting, this deliberate exposure of my own privacy. I assured her that the really private stuff was still private and it was only an illusion of exposure - only what I wanted to expose - but she still did not like it. Another person who does not like my blog is my son. He is standing behind me right now, urging me to type in some words, press the button and then play Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 with him, RIGHT NOW. And on that unfinshed note, I'm going to end because childhood really is that fleeting and my boy wants me to play with him.

The World Of Colour

I was amused by all of the surprised comments about my pink MP3 player. I love pink! If it didn't make me look like I was dying of some sort of horrible disease (something that involves really bad diarrhea, for example), I would love wearing it, too. I am totally girly like that. Pink is great for lots of things - nailpolish, the paint in my bedroom which used to be my oldest daughter's but is now mine and I am NOT repainting it because it is THAT cute, smocked dresses on little girls - all things that are excellent and pink.

I'm ambivalent about the colour green. It's a colour that is too prone to unfortunate fads - I was a kid in the avocado green 70s, a decade which brings to mind the smell of pot, nasty p0rno magazines left out in the open, everyone I knew getting divorced, and the clomping sounds of a mom chasing a kid while wearing wooden sandals. All your fault, colour green. And then there's that sage-y light green that everybody painted everything a few years back - you'd walk into a house and there That Colour would be, again. My bathroom is light green, but in a good, antiseptic way, hinting mildly that if you licked the wall, it might taste subtly of mint.

I have nothing but good feelings about the colour blue. I love you, blue. I look good in navy and is there anything prettier than those cornflowers that grow on the side of the road? That's a rhetorical question because, no, there is not.

Yellow. A good colour, so long as one doesn't stray into the baby poop/mustard territory. My living room is a slightly greyed yellow - if you can imagine what I mean - and the light right before dusk in here is heavenly, just like being in a book-filled Maxfield Parrish painting.

Brown is nasty. (edited to add: SOME browns are nasty. Okay, brown-lovers?)

I'm just going to skip over red. I don't like red. Although on Saturday, when my husband and I left all of the kids with my poor, poor parents and took off to Big City for the day, I found a pair of red and black heels that made me press my face up against the window. I love you, beautiful shoes. Tragically, they were over $200 and so my love and I were parted.

It's a rainy day. The sky is that dull, metal grey colour that promises wind and drizzle all day, which can be pleasantly melancholy if you're in the right sort of mood, and just regular depressing melancholy if you're not. I'm wearing a grey sweater, looking outside at the grey world and feeling somewhat sad, to be honest. Sad because I am on a diet, which is a sad, sad thing and sad because of some stuff about where we live and none of it's very DEEP sadness, if you know what I mean - just the sort of sadness that suits a grey spring day in a not unpleasant sort of way, the kind of day where I might just put raincoats on me and The Baby and head out into the cool spring rain, feeling all noble and melancholy. And damp.

Happy Mother's Day, Me

The Boy gave me a coupon book for Mother's Day that he had made at school. Most of the coupons were pre-printed and the kids just cut them out, with two in the back that were labouriously hand-written. I read them aloud, and The Boy grew more and more quietly distressed as he realized what they said: He was going to CLEAN HIS ROOM? HELP CLEAN THE HOUSE? WASH THE DISHES?

It was funny.

His additions were "Make the bed" and "A day in bed" A day in bed! He certainly knows his mother - he also promised to run me unlimited snacks and new books as needed. I can't use my coupon today, because it's also my mother's birthday (wasn't that handy of her to be born on Mother's Day?), so I promised to use it next Sunday. Utter slothfulness - here I come!

One of the things I'd always looked forward to about motherhood and my life as a stay-at-home mom was utterly knowing my kids, but something that I hadn't realized would happen as well was that they would also utterly know me, for good and bad. It's disconcerting to realize how much of myself I've been inadvertently revealing all this time - my grumpy laziness, my mawkish sentimentality, my love of candy and dumb detective novels - all these things that I'd like to have kept a secret, and all those things so obviously totally known even to a kid in pre-kindergarten.

A few months ago, my elderly MP3 player (older than The Baby!) died. It was very sad. We were much too poor to replace it, so I just resigned myself to life without one. Guess what my husband gave me for Mother's Day? It's pink, too! Oh, I'm pretty happy. When I went up to bed last night, I checked in on The Girl who was miserably still wide awake (stupid allergies), and I showed her my new MP3 player, which she admired immensely. She exclaimed that it was "perfect for you, mom!" and then asked if she could sleep in my bed. So instead of spending the night with my adorable, MP3 player-gifting husband, I got to sleep (more or less) with my oldest child, all knees and elbows. It was fitting, this uncomfortable wakefullness, while beside me slept the very girl who made me a mother in the very first place, like my very first Mother's Day ever.

The Talk

I have two brothers. One of them occasionally reads this page - hi! - and the other one never has and gets my children should my husband and I perish together in some unfortunate manner. The other brother - the reader - would get the kids but he's 13 years younger than me and still might be at that unfortunate age where he would think it funny to rename my kids Mario, Zelda and Duke Nukem.

When The Girl was a few months old, millions of years ago, we got some life insurance things together and realized that we'd have to officially name a guardian for her. It was horrible. We carefully went through all of our relatives and narrowed down our list to my then 24-year-old brother who was still in university, working all the time and dating lots of the ladies. We cautiously asked him if he felt like he could do it and he was WAY too enthusiastic about it - within days, he had it all planned out: he would take a few months off school to help her adjust and then put her into the university daycare program and he would buy a jogging stroller. It was both cheering - he certainly loved The Girl - and unnerving, but we knew that we had made the right choice. When he got married two summers ago, we cheerfully told his new wife the good news: Guess what! If we die, you instantly get three kids! Lucky, lucky her. I also should let her know that I expect her to keep up my blog, too. It's only fair.

When I was first a mother, I was friends with another first-time mom and both of us were slowly driving ourselves to nervous breakdowns by carefully and in great detail imagining every single horrible thing that could happen to these new, insanely vulnerable people in our care. I laughingly told her that I believed, in the middle-of-the-night way of these sort of things, that imagining something kept it from actually happening - my nightmarish thoughts of the baby falling over the stair railing, for example, drew a big red X on it someplace, made it impossible. She denied that this was magical thinking: it was, she told me, higher level physics. Oookay, then.

Now that my kids are older, I reserve most of my worries for the Baby - she might, logically, run into the street if I'm not watching her closely enough, so it makes sense that I fret the most about her. The other two are somewhat sensible and aware of dangers to their own selves, so much of my worries for their physical well beings has faded away. I worry about other things for them now - are the Boy's super intense emotions normal or is Something Wrong? are we hurting our astonishingly bright oldest child by keeping her in a small rural school? Should I homeschool them and keep them from picking up more words in their increasingly colourful vocabularies?

My mother tells me that mothers never stop worrying, that this is something I will now carry with me for the rest of my life, a phantom limb that hurts. I still believe, in that middle of the night sort of way, in the magic of worrying, still believe that those papers we signed eight years ago were actually a contract with God, that we had imagined this awful thing and now it would not happen.

homefree

A couple of weeks ago, we took the Baby to her specialist, where it was decided that her growth and weight issues had been explored enough and that she was going to be released from her doctor's care. The consensus now is that she is small - second percentile for height and weight! - but healthy.

Last summer, they tested her for Mitochondrial Disease, Cystic Fibrosis, this long list of horror, these death sentences. Her head had stopped growing. She was falling behind developmentally. Her weight gain had never been good - she had always been a skeletal thin baby and had been brought in weekly - sometimes more frequently - to the doctor's office, my stomach this constant knot of fear. We had suspected Celiac Disease since the first time we had given her solid food but our concerns had been brushed off. We were suspected of child abuse, of withholding food from our child. The doctor would speak to me using small, simple words. I would leave the office and retch in the parking lot, be distraught for weeks afterwards. Even the suggestion that I had however inadvertently done this to my child had made me suicidally despondent, had made me feel like an utterly unfit mother. I have no idea what sort of nightmarish hillbilly parents the doctor must have to deal with on a daily basis, these people who couldn't actually take care of their children, but the small simple words she used with me gave me an idea.

So last summer, we found out that she had Celiac Disease. Yeah. Which we'd suspected for a year prior to her diagnosis. Within a month of having all gluten taken out of her diet, she was pretty much caught up developmentally. A friend asked me right after her diagnosis if we were upset because of it and I was like ARE YOU KIDDING? The doctors thought that our baby was going to die and now we find out that she just can't eat bread! We were jubilant. Not only was what was wrong with our baby controllable but it wasn't my fault. The doctor apologized to me for ever having suspected otherwise, and even started talking to me like a normal mother.

She is small, my little girl. If you stood her next to an average child her age, she would be nearly a head shorter. But she will likely catch up or catch mostly up and anyhow, she's a girl and can wear heels someday, and what is that compared to being able to live a whole life? There are odd little pockets of sadness - the other day I felt almost uncontrollably weepy because The Baby, she will never be able to eat ice cream cones. And then I realized that I do have the ability to make ice cream cones and I could certainly make her some gluten-free ones this summer and so I got over it. She might miss out on little things here and there but she will have all the sweet things of childhood, as much as I am able - which is, in the final diagnosis, quite able.

Time's wingèd something-something

Two years ago this very day (which was not her birthday. That was back in late April):
Insanely early this morning:
And later on this afternoon, post-bangs trim and post-hair brush:

Quotidian

I WAS going to write this long drivelling post about how I was GOING to do a photographic essay of my daily activities and then didn't because frankly, my daily life is kind of boring (for example: today I caught up on the laundry and read a detective novel and took the baby for a walk.) unless it's your own life and in which case it has the same compelling nature that most lives have. But just now, The Baby - as she was being carried upstairs to bed - yelled:
"Night night, Mama. I love you."
May 7, 2007, 7:41 p.m. First time my youngest child told me she loved me. One for the record books.

Earlier tonight, while my older kids participated in their Athletic After School Activities, I was bit by a black fly and a small line of blood ran down my arm. It seemed at the time just symbolic of how dull my day had been - first NOTHING HAPPENED and then I BLED ALL OVER MY SHIRT. But let me now rephrase it: the same blood that nearly killed me a year ago now carries the blood to my still-beating heart with a miraculous dependability and do I ever think about it? Nope. Still just ungrateful old whiny me.

My oldest child used to draw pictures of home, with her house a careful triangle balanced on a square, and me always standing beside it, always, as big as the house, my head brushing against the sky. It's funny thinking about myself from their perspective - me as archetype, me as home - but just like my blood, I don't think about it much. Too busy singing Baby Beluga, too busy trying to find the stain remover, too busy trying to convince The Baby to keep her diaper on for 15 minutes, the usual mess of life. It's good to remember that I'll be the first person they love and that I should live up to it, be something better than myself for this short time while my head seems to brush against the sky when they look up at me.

Remind me to never do that again.

Good grief, that was AWFUL - not for the girls, but for me. The girls all had fun which is an accomplishment in itself, I think - I had mentally prepared myself for comforting the one poor child who was being excluded but they were like the Four Musketeers of Evil and really stuck together until one in the morning, at which point I had to assert my maternal authority:
"Go to sleep," I hollered. "AND STOP FARTING."

One particular girl, you see, has the idea that flatulence is the funniest thing in the world, which was just vile. I often manage to fool myself that I'm modern and hip and then someone does something like that and I turn into Queen Victoria. The other day, when I said the ideal year was 1981? I lied. It's actually 1881. Sorry about that. Nobody - and this is a matter of historical record - farted in 1881.

Something that's pleasant is my pleased realization of how much I prefer my own daughter over other girls - not just as the person I made, but as an ACTUAL HUMAN BEING. So much less vulgar! So pleasantly self-contained and self-reliant! (she made AND DECORATED her own birthday cake, which I would show you but she also wrote her own name over it so I can't. It rocked, suffice to say.) So polite and bright and kind-hearted! She is currently absorbed in one of her birthday presents - a magic kit we gave her, which she is reading with the sort of focus of someone who knows that all things will be answered, shortly, with the focus of someone who knows that soon they will put one over on people and stand there, full of secrets.

Eight years ago Sunday

Nearly eight years ago I was laying on a table while they pulled you from me, an experience that I vainly couldn't express until I read "I Don't Know How She Does It" (of all things) and the narrator describes her c-section as feeling like an oak tree being pulled out by its roots. Ah ha, I thought. That was indeed the feeling.

And then you were gone, taken away by worried nurses because of your distressing silence, a roomful of people focused on this one little grey person who suddenly wailed and turned red and were left alone on a table in the corner of the room. If I looked into the large round light fixture above me - a nurse tipped me off to this pre-c-section - I could see you, this tiny red spot in a giant sea. I don't think, in retrospect, that you were actually alone, because you were quickly wrapped up (complete with Relic the Fisherman cap) and brought over to me, propped up in my arms which were strapped down and covered in tubes and monitors.

I looked at you, all black hair and smushy wrinkled red face and felt that I should say something. "Hi baby," I said, more than a bit inadequately. And then you were gone, your dad standing torn and unsure of where he should be. I told him that I was fine without him and he was gone, too. Then they increased my morphine and I babbled to the anaesthesiologist (who had seven kids!) until I was taken to the recovery room.

A little girl - a toddler - was in the recovery room too, and she had Down's Syndrome and was crying and crying post-surgery (she'd had her tonsils out) and her father was obviously just beyond distraught that his baby was suffering and he kept cooing to her and patting her hair, and trying to console her in a shaking voice, while her harridan of a mother kept snapping out "Caitlin! Stop crying! Right now!" and I was so upset by this mother being cross with this poor little child that I burst into tears and the nurse who was monitoring me stroked my hair and told me that I was already such a good mother.

A mother. I was a mother.

Last night we were at a school event and I was looking for you in the school gym, wanting to go home. I asked your teacher if he'd seen you, and he pointed right in front of me where a lanky schoolgirl was standing, back to me, doing a puzzle on the wall. I hadn't recognized you, looking instead for some smaller girl, some little child.

Your dad asked you the other night what the best thing about being seven had been, and you thought for a while and then came up with The Time You Broke Your Arm, which cracked your parents up pretty seriously later on. I know that I write a lot about how time changes things and how I want to return to some perfect pre-change time (1981, perhaps), but I don't think I've ever mentioned how proud I am of you, just for being this straight-backed girl, this person who wants to be a cowgirl and dislikes ponytails and mushrooms, how proud I am of the unimaginable distance between then and now. Time has brought me you, the broad smile on your face last night when you turned around and saw me, and the quick dash you made across the gym to me. Hi baby, I said.

Help me out, please!

I'm doing a treasure hunt this weekend for my daughter's birthday party and I am drawing SERIOUS blanks for clues. It's going to be in the yard, which has trees, rocks, a swingset, a climber, a turtle sandbox and all the regular little kid things like that. All I can think of is:

"On the stump near the willow tree

Is where you'll find clue number 3."

Pretty kreppy. And that's all I'm coming up with. It's going to be fairy themed (the clues will be written on parchment paper in a fairy-esque font) and there will be prizes along the way. BUT! I can't think of any more clues (I'm thinking that there should be ten, in total), and what should the prizes be along the way? And just to make things even HARDER, the clues have to be at about a grade 2 level.

Everything else about the party is going to be easy - the little girls will assemble pizzas when they come over, and then after they eat, it's the Big Stupid Treasure Hunt, then back into the house to decorate cupcakes. Opening presents, a few party games (freeze dance! limbo! piggly wiggly!), and then time for movies and snacks and hopefully sleeping. The Girl is REALLY excited about her first sleepover. I'm so stressed out about everything I have to get done that I've stopped being able to think coherently. But hey! After the stress of throwing a birthday party is over, I get to have the relaxation of having my mother-in-law over for supper! And then I will drink.

Good Things Come In The Mail

This has been a terrific mail week - Monday saw us get THREE packages: a book order! a toy order! some shoes that do not fit me!

And look what Kim sent The Girl and me yesterday:

Bookmarks! Beautiful hand-lettered and painted bookmarks! You can only see part of The Girl's - it's personalized and just gorgeous. Thank you so much, Kim! Now I may finally stop dog-earing all of my books. I can't promise to stop writing mean comments about the authors in the margins, though. (and in all seriousness - they're lovely! I love them!)

Today, we got our tax return and a postcard from China. Hurray! If the mail keeps it up, this will be the Best Week Ever.

In other news, I'll be starting a new blog anyday now called "Hey Everybody! Tell Me How Cute I Am!". It's going to rock. Also something that rocks: I just got an email that I've inherited $70 million dollars from some guy in Africa or something. It's all a bit unclear, but anyhow, as soon as I send this guy my social insurance number and bank account information he's going to transfer all of my excellent $70 million into my account. I'm planning on spending it all on gum - 70 million packs of gum.

And in closing: The Baby only wants to eat toothpaste today. Thank you and see you tomorrow.

The first of May

I woke The Girl up at close to dawn and sent her dashing outside to gather dew, which has been promised to keep one youthful and lovely all of one's days, if gathered this morning. The Baby also partipated, solemnly patting her face with some dandelion leaves. "Pretty!" she announced.

Adventures in Babywearing is hosting a Bloggers Without Makeup event, which I was not going to participate in. Honestly, it's horrifying enough for the people in my daily life to have to see me without makeup without me showing it, theoretically speaking, to the entire universe.

But I dunno. Something about seeing The Baby's uninhibited sureness of her own beauty made me a bit ashamed of how mean I am to my poor face.So here I go - me without makeup:

Eyebrows that need grooming? Check.

Scary bad acne scarring? Check.

Deep, exhausted undereye circles? Check

Strong resemblance to teenaged male singer of a band called something like "The Smells"? Check

Anyhow. There (I was. THe picture is gone now!). Me without makeup. AAAAAH, my VANITY!