We Haven't Noticed Anything Strange at Our House Since Eating the Rye Bread

Today Nutmeg and I made some rye bread with the machine. It turned out so-so -- it didn't cook completely on the inside, but I finished it off in the oven and I'm hoping it will be better later.

It's funny that we got out the rye flour for the first time today, because I read in today's obituary of the inventor of LSD that the hallucinogenic drug is derived from ergot, the fungus that can grow on rye and is blamed by some for the Salem witch trials and, indeed, all supposed witchery.

I remembered that a high school teacher had told us about ergotism, and how witches are depicted riding brooms because in reality women were using broomsticks to topically apply drugs to their hoo-hahs. I always kind of wondered if my teacher -- a party guy himself -- embellished this or even totally made it up.

Sadly, there was no Google when I was in 10th grade. Happily, there is today. And even more happily, I found plenty of evidence of witches riding the hell out of those brooms anointed with "flying ointment."

Funny, isn't it, that you can tie the let-it-all-hang-out counterculture of the 1960s to the supremely repressed puritans of the 1690s?

Funny, too, that despite the many negative side effects of dropping acid, the man who took the world's first acid trip not only survived, he lived to be 102. Bye-bye, Albert Hofmann. Hope your long, strange trip was a good one.

The Menu Channel

Several times a week, Nutmeg gets to watch a video while I put Pebbles to sleep. If I don't use the video to immobilize her, she will insist on coming into the bedroom while Pebbles nurses, getting her sister all riled up, or, if I shut the door, pounding on the door loudly and calling, "Mommeee, Mommeee, hey Mom..."

Epu came home the other day and said, "Nutmeg, watcha watchin'?"
Nut: "The menu screen to 'Charlotte's Web'!"
Epu: "Well, let's go down and set the table."
Nut: "Pause it for me!"

I had given her the remote and told her to press Play when the menu screen came up, but apparently she saw that step as superfluous.

Pebbles: "I totally go to preschool. It's 5 minutes a day, 4 days a week."

Lately Pebbles has really started to enjoy dropping Nutmeg off at preschool. They have a little wooden rocking toy sort of like a rowboat there, which she loves to get in and say, "whee!"

Today I was Snack Mom, so Pebbles got to be at preschool for about an hour. Times have changed since earlier this year, when I would nurse her and put her down in the stroller to sleep or carry her on my back while doing Snack Mom duty!

Pebbles sat at the table with the other kids and ate the snack -- Dunkin Donuts Munchkins. She may not be a big eater, but she knows gourmet when she tastes it, and she gobbled up the whole thing.

During Circle Time she kept toddling up to the front of the class to point at the calendar like Nutmeg and the teacher were doing, and shout out sounds that kind of sounded like numbers. "Toooo. Deee!" She got right into it when the kids sang some songs. Then Nutmeg held her on her lap for awhile, until Nutmeg got too roudy and started rolling around the floor with her and I had to confiscate the baby.

At school the kids call Pebbles "Nutmeg's baby." I love that. They all thing Nutmeg has her own baby.

This fall, Pebbles will still be at home with me, of course. But the next year, when Nutmeg starts (all-day) kindergarten, Pebbles will be able to go to the Park District's playschool for 2 hours at a time. I have a feeling she will like that.

Party People Say ... Whew

When I chatted with Nutmeg's preschool teacher on the phone Friday about today's party, she said, "You'll get through it."

Get through it? I thought. I LOVE parties!

Yes, we loved it. And we got through it.

It is REALLY TIRING to have more than a dozen preschoolers in your home for 2 hours. Everyone was very good, but it just takes a lot of effort to get them moving in the right direction, to convey to them what is going on, and to solve little problems that come up.

I also picked up a few pointers that I will use in future parties for young kids:

1) The reason people usually give the goody bags at the end is that otherwise the kids will never know which one is theirs when it's time to go.

2) Put down a tarp under your pinata. This will not only keep the candy from getting lost in the grass, but it can serve as a boundary to keep the kids from standing right in the whacking path.

3) 4-year-olds are too little to get the concept of a relay race. But it's pretty hilarious to watch them try.

4) Help your 4-year-old stuff the pinata. How is she supposed to know that you have to hold it upside down to get the head full, and that you have to take the paper out of the legs?

The Chef and Hostess:



As expected, Mama had to beat that horse till it gave up the candy. Actually, I accidentally decapitated it. I have to say, I felt bad viciously thrashing this innocent pony. Isn't this whole pinata thing kind of sick?



You can't really tell, but every single kid but 1 is in that cottage. That's like, 13 kids???



OK, need to have a glass of wine and lie down now. Epu is already asleep in his chair.

OMG, Pony!

At a conference earlier this year, a friend in the mobile phone biz was told that the future of text messages sound something like this: OMG, Pony!

The idea is that younger and younger kids are adopting all the latest social technology, and the kind of things little girls will send one another is pictures of cute ponies.

That is not happening at our house today. Today, at our house, what is happening is, well, ponies! Nutmeg's birthday party is tomorrow and we are preparing.

Epu drawing pin-the-tail on the pony:



(Nutmeg, who is drawing a huge bandaid, is a little excited).

Epu and Nutmeg painted a Little Tikes cottage we were just given red to resemble a barn. Here's the before shot:



And, almost done:

Birthday Ice Cream and the Best Things About 4

So far, these are the things I like about my 4-year-old:

1) Has gotten unusually lovey-dovey with me. This includes cuddling with me in bed after Daddy gets up with the baby.

2) Takes some responsibility for helping care for her sister. Like, tells me when she's poopy and reports on her location in the yard if I can't see her. However, this can quickly get out of hand, like today in the grocery store when she picked her sister up, and when I ordered her to put her down, dropped her flat on her face. Ouch.

3) OK, the constant whining and frequent tears are still there. But is capable of sucking it up if reminded (frequently) about future reward, such as that birthday ice cream.

4) Dresses self, occasionally remembering underwear.

5) Sight-reads a surprising number of words. Can add small sums, i.e. 2+2.

6) Actually put all the pieces of a game back in box, once without even being asked.

7) Is most angelically beautiful sight in mortal world while sleeping. Blond hair brushed to side, barely-there eyebrows, crescent of tummy showing under pajama top, pinky fair skin. OK, this was also true at 3, 2, 1 and 0.

8) Actively participates in planning and preparing for birthday party. Of course, this is also a drawback, as in today when she suggested scrapping elaborately-planned-for pony theme in favor of a dress-up party.

So. One of the lovey dovey things she has done with me lately: We got her a DVD of one of my favorite kids' movies, "Annie." This version came with two little "broken lockets" on chains. She immediately got the idea and had us each put one on. 10,000 times a day, she wants me to drop everything so we can put our heart-shaped locket pieces together. The locket pieces, when joined, read "Best Friends."

So I thought this was pretty great. Until she informed me I was just the interim "best friend."

"When we go to San Francisco, Eliot's going to wear that half," she told me, all smiles.

Ah, Nutmeg, thou hast cleft my heart in twain.

Vernal Resuscitation

We are coming back to life here with the springtime. It really feels that dramatic, and having a toddler with us experiencing spring for the first time makes it all that much bigger.

Suddenly the trees all have little clumps of light green leaves, and having the windows open makes reanimates the house. The kids have a couple of helium balloons here in the living room and they are swaying in the breeze. Every hour or so kids from the junior high school are herded down the street to our park and their conversations drift in.

This morning Pebbles woke up and as soon as Epu opened the door to the foyer, she toddled right in there and sat down by the screen door. She loves the sound of birds and she whistles right along with them. My dad taught her how to do this.

The only way I could stop her from hanging out all alone in the foyer was to open the curtains and windows by a chair in the living room and set her on the chair. She spent the rest of the morning watching the birds and the neighbors pets go by. She stood up and yelled things out at them.

The front of our living room used to be the porch, so as I sit on the couch drinking my coffee it's almost like I'm outdoors. This is like camping, I told Epu. We watched Pebbles fall in love with the world, and we remembered that the world and we had had some pretty good times ourselves, and that if we had to sue for custody, we would probably sue for custody.

Ride, Nutmeg, Ride

I dearly wish I had some video right here of Nutmeg riding her new bike to school this morning. She was wearing a white dress with polka dots that she received for her birthday yesterday. The bike, also a birthday present.

After school, there was more bike riding. Then I made her put it away (Here's me, bawling out from the front porch: "Nutmeg, if you're not old enough to put your bike away, you're not old enough to have a bike.") Off to swimming lessons. As we pull into the garage after swimming: "Mom, do you mind if I ride my bike for awhile?"

Who took my itty-bitty preschooler and left this hardy kid in my car seat?

When Epu got home she had him watch her ride up and down the front walk. As we ate, she told him she wanted to ride bikes with him after dinner, "in the twilight, holding hands." Epu chuckled to think that the kid who can barely steer her first two-wheeler was now going to do it one-handed.

Nutmeg never learned to pedal her trike very well, so I wasn't sure if she'd be able to master the two-wheeler-with-training-wheels. She can. She has her rough spots -- she's just learning to push it around, if she gets the handlebars turned onto the grass she's stuck, and her braking skills are iffy -- but she's definitely into it.

Images of this momentous milestone will be published, never fear. I just have to wait until my camera battery charger (recently located at Epu's parents' house) arrives in the mail.

School and Home

I. Today was Nutmeg's visit day in the nursery school classroom she will attend next fall. We got to meet her teachers and several of her future classmates, as well as the class fishes. I am really excited about this school and Nutmeg is too. She happily played with the sand table, painted watercolors and checked out a bin of rubbery snakes.

Because she's still feeling tired and low from her illness (and maybe all the meds, we're not sure), she was uncharacteristically low key. She even buried her face in my dress when we first arrived and she met the teachers, and those of you who know her know that was the first time that ever happened.

We'll see the teachers two more times before next fall. They'll be having a picnic in August, they said, and the teachers will come visit us at home once. Wow. Like I said, I love this school.

Here's one of the things that make me feel like it's a good choice: One of the room teachers told me she first came to the school as a parent. Her daughter is my age. The teacher was teaching grade school at the time, but she loved this nursery so much she took a job there instead. So yeah, her teacher has been there for THIRTY YEARS. And she's not the only one.

II. My in-laws' dear Shetland Sheepdog, Indy, passed on yesterday. Despite his (at best) ambivalence to her, Nutmeg loved this dog more than any other animal on earth. Every time we drive to this set of grandparents' house, she chatters about seeing Indy and how excited he will be to see her.

We're going there tomorrow. So I thought I'd better drop the bomb today. We were gardening this afternoon. I gave her a worm, and she named it "Somerset." I thought, this is a good time to talk about how we love pets but they don't live forever.

So I talked about how worms might only live a few days (in the custody of Nutmeg, that is), how dogs live 10 years or more, and that people live a long, long time. But we all die.

She was with me. Then I said that an animal we know had died.

"Who?"
"Indydog died, honey," I told her, giving her a hug.
She laughed.
"You're joking," she said.
I asked if she wanted to call Grandma to talk about it.
"No," she said. "Somerset doesn't want to hear about that."

And that's how we left it. I think she knows I'm not joking, but she doesn't want to deal with it now, or can't, so we'll let it go until tomorrow.

And we'll miss you, Indy. You were a good dog.

Might This Be Spring?

After living through this last winter, I so get the planting bulbs thing. It's an act of faith. Just as the sky is darkening and the ground is getting hard, you dig holes and stick these little onion things in the ground. You walk by your flower bed when it's under a foot of snow and you think, there will be flowers there in a few months. And you laugh because that is impossible.



But look at that. A flower.

And another one:



This week we finally had these two nice days. Today was even better than yesterday because there was no wind. Nutmeg is in her post-sickness, possibly antibiotic-fueled tired and bratty stage, and getting outside makes it all so much more bearable. Actually Pebbles and I got outside; Nutmeg (thank you, thank you) gave in to fatigue and took a long afternoon nap.

I did a lot of weeding and cleaning up roots and crap out of the backyard flower beds. I cultivated two small areas and sowed wildflower mix. We'll see what comes of this.

Pebbles played in the sandbox and occasionally shoved her plastic spade at my mouth so I would say, "num, num." She played a good long time with hula hoops, she sat in the freshly weeded dirt and played with that. We played a little ball. She played climb up on the lawn chair and then fuss to be helped down. She played say "Hi!" to the neighbors cat and pet it. And when she seemed tired of everything, I brought out a toy stroller and a doll and she had to be dragged in kicking and screaming because she would have never stopped pushing that thing around the yard.

Pebbles is going to have a fun summer.

Since yesterday's nice weather brought the attending eye misery, I finally got my eye prescriptions today. I was putting it off even though I live so near CVS, because I wanted to get them filled somewhere else in order to get paid $25 to transfer them to CVS.

So today I took the full compliment of medications: the eye drops, the nasal spray and the Allegra tablet. The result is: Somewhat better. Not misery free but definitely functional.

I'm hoping it will work even better when I take the Allegra first thing in the morning. The doc says that antihistamines work best when you take them before the allergen exposure begins.

Here's hopin'.

This Is What I'm Talkin' About, Storytime Crazy Woman

I just checked out Babble today and found a great piece on how overparenting is today's version of "whiter whites" housewifery. Yes, in some ways we are better parents than parents were in past generations. We know more, and we consider it a more important job, therefore we put more into it.

But still, as Katie Allison Granju says in this piece, we are making it waaaay harder than it is. And that is hurting us and our kids.

Pneumonia, Ballet and Munchkins

Poor Nutmeg got sick on Thursday night, and has been swinging between miserably lying on the couch moaning with a fever and running around like her normal self. We think she has pneumonia again; we'll see what the doctor says when I (hopefully) bring her in tomorrow.

We took Nutmeg to Milwaukee to her grandparents' house as planned Friday during the day. We were meeting up with all three of Epu's siblings, a rare event these days since one lives in Russia and one in northern Minnesota. We had a good time visiting with them and showing off the kids.

But then Nutmeg got sick again, so sick that we did not drive back to OP as planned for her very first ballet recital.

That's right, the Nut was a no-show. At the hour she was supposed to be prancing around a local school stage wearing a glittery red tutu and little frufru things on each arm, she was sound asleep in bed at Grandma's, over 100 miles away.

I'm a bit disappointed, although I thought the whole recital thing was a bit silly considering that she's 3 and doesn't even know the positions yet.* But Nutmeg doesn't seem to care at all, not in the "normal kid" phase she went through this morning, nor in her current "sick kid" phase. So that's good. It would just break my heart if she were sick and crying about missing her big debut.

* Speaking of ballet, I watched "The Wizard of Oz" for the first time in years with Nut while she was sick. Do you know that during the big munchkin number, members of the Lollipop Guild actually dance en pointe? Seeing this movie as an adult, I had so many questions about these actors playing the munchkins, but most of all: Were these professional little people ballerinas? Did they perform in a company full of little people, or maybe even play special roles in normal ballets? Or in some kind of circus performance? Or did they learn to dance en pointe just for this movie? Because doesn't that take an awful lot of training?

Anyway, it's not all boohoo around here. Pebbles is in a perfectly good mood. In fact, this evening she did something extraordinary: I was looking at a picture book with her before going to bed. She pointed to a picture of an airplane and made her "what's that" noise. I said "airplane." She very deliberately turned to the only other page in the book that also shows an airplane, and pointed at that. I think she even tried to say it.

Love that little munchkin.

Parenting, Inc. Review

I wrote about Pamela Paul's eye-opening new book, "Parenting, Inc." on ParentingSquad.

In the context of what I've written about here, there's something I want to add: The book contains professional reinforcement of several things I have come to believe about childrearing:

• That "we don't actually need to promote (baby) skills; they just happen." (I left a local dance studio never to return when the instructor decided to show me how to exercise and stroke my baby to encourage her to start crawling. Why??) That means we can go to baby classes if it helps us fill the day and we have fun, but for god sake, we don't have to, any more than we have to "stimulate" the baby every second of the ding-dang day.
• Trying to teach tots academics too soon distracts them from the very important things they're quietly doing, like figuring out who they are and how to solve big problems like getting a cookie out from between the couch cushions.
• Baby Einstein is stoopid.
• If you hire an expert to sleep train, potty train and debippy your child, obviously you lose something there.

Anyway, it's a good book. Buy it on Amazon, why don't ya?

Why I Haven't Been to a Baby Storytime in 6 Months

Mom to 1-year-old: "Belinda, Mommy doesn't want you to crawl. Big girls walk."

Hey Mom, just in case Belinda didn't get the message about how stupid and jerky it is to crawl, could you repeat that 8 or 9 times? Otherwise I'm afraid that eating disorder just won't take.

Thanks.

The whole experience is particularly amusing after reading the chapter on baby classes from Parenting, Inc. The book includes lots of gratifying and reassuring quotes from psychologists and child development experts confirming what I long ago began to suspect:

1) You don't have to "help" your baby reach a milestone. Milestones just happen. There's no teaching required.

2) Just because the rapid pace and constant "engagement" of a baby program -- whether live or video -- keeps them from toddling off, that doesn't mean they're "paying attention" or "learning." More like, they are attuned to newness, and since you keep putting something new in front of their face every couple minutes, they can't wrest their attention away.

3) Parents of every previous generation were qualified to assist their babies in developing speech and all that. We are the first generation to think we need outside "educators" to help us do this. We don't.

4) Your baby and young child is busy learning all about the world, her family and herself. If you are constantly trying to drum the ABCs and 123s into her, it might actually interfere with the important work she's quietly doing.

That said, Pebbles did have a good time going to the library today and squealing "Hi" at other people her size, bouncing to a few songs, and grabbing some rubber balls in the end. Best of all, she didn't seem damaged at all by the fact that I was the only mom not enthusiastically doing every hand motion along with the librarian.

It's not just that I'm lazy, although, God, am I. It's that Pebbles is staring at the librarian. I don't see how it will help Pebbles for me to compete with the teacher for her attention, or for me to do those little bunny ears with my fingers unobserved, a maternal tree falling in the pedagogical woods with no one to learn from me.

More on Parenting, Inc. as soon as I finish it.

Oh, Lord, Already?

From across the playground today, I yelled to Nutmeg that she needed to put her shoes on.

She turned to me and yelled back: "What are you doing to my life??"

A Sunny Day in Happytown

This weekend I took the girls to my parents' place in Wisconsin while Epu stayed home and worked on the house. He took down the Christmas lights (too soon -- it's supposed to snow later this week), and he even managed to remove and mostly strip the paint off of one of our PoisonPro brand heat registers.

We got a lot done too. We opened HappyTown for the season. That's the little playland of Little Tykes stuff in my parents' large backyard, which used to be known as Nutmegtown. Nutmeg very graciously saw the injustice of this now that Pebbles is old enough to play there, and she approved this new name that my dad thought of.

Pebbles especially loved the doorbell on HappyTown's only house, as you can see above. She would walk across the yard toward that doorbell, index finger extended, saying, "beep, beep, beep." Meanwhile, Nutmeg hit a few balls with the golf set she'd received for Xmas.

Pebbles hung out a lot with my dad over the weekend, and she's become so tight with him that when he tried to hand her off to me, she protested and wrapped her arms around his neck. Dad has been showing her birds, and if you say "bird" to her, she looks toward the window, purses her lips, and sometimes manages to get out a little whistle.

If Pebbles' development is anything like Nutmeg's, this period of extreme toddler cuteness can be known as the sunshine before the storm. Which is just what we're experiencing outdoors today here in Oak Park as well. It's lovely out there, although cooler than the weekend, but rain and then snow will follow this week.

Which will actually serves as a nice reprieve for me to go and get my new allergy prescriptions filled, because after enjoying the sunshine outdoors for just a day or so this weekend, I ended up with that old mucousy misery by Sunday night. Thanks for the warning flash, Midwestern weather.

Oh, and Nutmeg had a good time with my dad this weekend too. Since she discovered her love for Dolly Parton through Bert's iPod on our Tahoe road trip, he played her that record, one so beloved in my own childhood that I had written "I (heart) Dolly Parton" in pencil on the album cover. Then she discoverd that she also loves "Bridge Over Troubled Water" and John Denver singing "Grandma's Feather Bed." Yay for Grampytime!

Oh, and happy 14 months today to Pebbles!

Baby Beluga

Today we had the good fortune of being invited to the Shedd Aquarium by Mommylu and EJ. We had been there before, but never been to see the Oceanarium, which is really the best part. We'd been using the Chicago museum pass that you get free at libraries, which doesn't get you into the Oceanarium part, but the membership which our friends have does get you in.

Anyway, after the dolphin show we checked out the beluga whales. We were delighted at the chance to see a baby beluga nursing from his mother. Here's a picture of a different Shedd baby beluga at the teat.

After we got home, Nutmeg wanted to know if dolphins nursed too. We Googled up a picture of that. On the Shedd Web site, we also viewed the little filmstrip-like Flash presentation in the righthand column of this page.

I'm not big into kids using the computer. But I have to say, as the kid gets older and starts to have questions about science and stuff, it's pretty awesome to have a huge box of pictures and information in my living room.

By the way, here are some tips on taking kids to museums for less on my frugal living blog.

New Season, New Blog

In case you can't tell, this is a picture of the tulips or whatever it is we planted last fall, finally poking up out of the dirt. And those white sploches? That is sunshine, people. Sunshine. I know, because I had to look it up in Wikipedia to be sure.

Besides trying to shoehorn my entire body into one of those little strips of sun in our front dirtpatch, another activity competing for my free minutes lately has been my new frugal living blog, which will be called "Shoplifting With Permission."

Don't worry, I'll still be writing this epic serialized masterpiece here. But I wanted to start this new blog for several reasons:



1) To chronicle my efforts to frugalize our family and give voice to my angst over turning into a coupon-clipping nursing home resident as well as my CVS triumphs (without boring you all with them).

2) To show how being frugal can be an Abbie Hoffman-esque F-U to capitalist society. Or at least to show that I can look cute in $4 Goodwill skirts while "buying" free Pediasure* and baking bread in my $4.99 bread machine.

3) I have started to make a tiny amount of money blogging, and I want more, more, more!

Anyway, I've been fooling around with setting the blog up on Typepad, and here is what I have so far: shopliftingwithpermission.typepad.com. However, I don't really like the way Typepad looks and have a hard time seeing why it is worth $7.50 a month when Blogger is free. I know Blogger smacks of "amateur" (as if "professional blogger" is really a title I aspire to). I tried out Wordpress and Vox, but they don't allow ads, whic sort of cockblocks the money lust alluded to in No. 3.

Any suggestions on the blog software front? I really like the way Web sites like this one look on Wordpress -- I could really use a front page on which to post my publications with tabs to both my blogs. But again, no ads. I could download the non-Web version of Wordpress, but then I'd have to pay to have it hosted and that sounds like a pain.

So I won't be publicizing my new blog much for the moment, until I settle for sure on a host. But I know y'all are just desperate for frugal pearls of wisdom straight from the source, so go ahead and check it out.

Here is a picture of Pebbles petting our neighbor's dog.

* So far, Pebbles seems mildly interested in drinking Pediasure. Nutmeg, upon seeing the $12.95 six-pack in our CVS basket, studied the label and asked me, "Where is the H? You said Pediashur and there is no H in this." I love reading!

Stick People the Way They Do It These Days

Nutmeg drew this picture of her and her friend at a suburban children's museum at school. Don't you love it? Her period of connecting arms directly to heads was terribly brief. Now, apparently, her people have visible ribs and pelvic bones. Or are those lots and lots of arms a la that Indian goddess? After all, the friend depicted is half Indian.

No, the artist told us. That's just our tummies.




Meanwhile, Pebbles has just about dropped the morning nap, opening up all kinds of new day configurations. I just got back from over an hour of swimming at the gym while the cleaning lady was here, Nutmeg was at school and Pebbles was in the gym childcare. Awesome! But then the baby fell asleep in the car on the way home. Oh no! But then she rolled over and went right back to sleep when I put her in her crib. Awesome! But then Nutmeg didn't want to come home from school with me to the cleaning lady -- who would soon want to go home -- because it's too nice out and she wanted to stay on the playground. Oh no! But then, one of the other moms offered to deliver Nutmeg home when they were done playing.

And here I am, alone in a clean house, with sunshine streaming in my windows.

That's gonna be one more awesome, right there.