The Barefoot Kitchen Witch

You Don't Know What You've Got Til You Think It's Gone and You're Going to Have to Spend a Lot of Money to Replace It.

I couldn't connect to the internet for the last, oh 24 hours.  From home.  Can connect just fine at work, but can't really blog from there.  (I'd do SO much more posting if I could post from work...where the phone can go to voicemail and no one wants juice or a cookie or needs their diaper changed or just needs attention...ah, the peace and quiet I could have...if I didn't actually need to do WORK at work...)

Anyway - though I am by no means dedicated or disciplined or well-rested enough to post on a regular basis - my mind is usually clogged with stuff I want to write about.  Little things about the kids, mostly, or just...I don't know...whatever.  I don't get to post as often as I'd like - I don't get to sleep as much as I'd like either, and if my kids weren't pretty cute, this would all really bother me a lot.

But anyway - yesterday I decided to come home on my lunch break to do some typing.  Nothing blindingly earth-shattering or important - just some little posts about my kids...stuff Alex has said...Julia's new nickname at daycare ("Cujo")...that sort of thing.

And I got my laptop and turned it on and couldn't connect.  And couldn't.  And I'm thinking WHAT DID I DO NOW???? Because I'm nowhere near being the computer geek I would like to be.

So I tried going onto the main computer in the house.  Could not connect to the internet there either.  Plus the computer is old and sluggish, and I am tired and impatient and just really wanted to smash the thing to pieces on the floor.  I've been hanging around toddlers too much - I've adopted their anger management skills.

I didn't smash anything, but you know what? I was so mad about it.  Here I was, all set and ready to post something, and I was being PREVENTED.  By some hideous PROBLEM that I didn't know how to identify or how to fix.  Other than turning the computer on and off a couple of times, I was pretty much at a loss.

I watched most of the ball game last night.  Julia woke me up around midnight and I saw that we had actually WON (Go Sox!), so that was nice...but still...not enough.  This morning I tried going online again and COULDN'T.  Had to get the kids to daycare, had to get to work...grrrrrrrrrrr.  NEVER ENOUGH HOURS IN THE DAY OR ENOUGH OREOS IN THE PACKAGE.

So I took a long lunch break, came home, and called tech support and THANK THE COMPUTER GODS, I am able to post again.  I was so happy I nearly cried.  I'm such a...I don't know.  Fill in the blank.

Here I was - at work - thinking, okay, fine, then, we'll just DITCH THIS SLOW DINOSAUR of a computer and get a new one.  With a flat screen monitor.  Yeah!  That'll make me happy.  And while it would still make me happy to replace this whole sluggish system, at least I don't HAVE TO DO IT RIGHT THIS MINUTE.

It's funny, every now and then, I think - I'm so lousy at posting on a regular basis, I make all these vows to myself to get up early and write before the rest of the household needs to get up...but when morning arrives I'm usually tired because Julia (Cujo) is going through a not-sleeping-well phase and it's certainly affecting my sleep by interrupting it several times through the night, so when the alarm goes off, I think bad swear words that my mother wouldn't like to read on this blog at the alarm clock, hit snooze, and tell myself sleep is way more important than anything else in the world at that moment.

And so - to get to the point I meant to make in that last incredibly long run-on sentence...I think, maybe I should just forget about this blog.  I have about 5 readers anyway...I never seem to have time or the strength of will to forego sleep and MAKE time to write...I need to trim all the extras so I can...I don't know...focus on maintaining a tidy home and learn how to do cute girly things with Julia's hair. 

But then, when I couldn't have access to this little internet site...I actually went into a panic.  That could also be sleep deprivation and too much caffeine...but I don't think so.  I think I realized that it's not enough just to want to see Uncle Henry and Auntie Em...it's that...if I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own back yard...'cuz if it isn't there, I never really lost it to begin with...

Oh, wait, that's not it either.

I don't know.  I'm sure I meant to make a point.  Maybe not.  Maybe I just wanted to type a bunch of stuff and post it - BECAUSE I CAN.

Anyway, must get back to work now and be a productive member of the work force and earn my paycheck and do my part to keep us out of the poorhouse.

I'll talk to you later - you, my faithful few...

Fresh Corn and Soybeans

I'm making dinner...fish tacos and roasted diced sweet potatoes and a cold bowl of shelled edamame and corn sliced off the cob.  Sort of a succotash, only cold.  Not exactly a salad.  It doesn't need anything else. 

As I stood slicing cooked corn off the cobs a few minutes ago, I was whisked back to when I wasn't tall enough to wield a knife or work at the counter.

When we were little kids, my sister and I (and whatever friends happened to be at the house that day) were pressed into labor in August to shell peas or snap beans or shuck corn. 

My mother was one to can things in tall mason jars that were stored upstairs in the glass-front cupboards of the "back kitchen."  The kitchen had once been a functional kitchen but eventually it became the laundry room and storage room and gateway to the place to hide the Christmas presents  (the hiding place - at least one year - was in what we called "the back bathroom" - a room mostly used to bathe the dogs - in a glorious free-standing claw-foot tub.  I wish I could have taken that tub before the house was sold, but, of course, where would I put it here?) 

Anyway, I remember rows of canned peaches and tomatoes up on the shelves - high up where my sister and I couldn't reach them. 

My mother was also one for blanching and freezing things.  That's what I remember her doing with the peas and beans and corn.  Especially the corn.  I wasn't nuts about the green things...but I liked it when she did the corn.  We'd shuck the corn and pile it onto platters for her, and she'd drop a few ears into a big pot of boiling water, just for a minute or two, I imagine, and then once they'd cooled, she'd stand an ear on end on the cutting board and slice off the kernels in long bands.

I loved those.  I'm sure my sister did too.  We'd probably hang around hoping to either steal or be given a little section of kernels before being shooed out of the kitchen.  Then after all the corn was sliced off the cobs, Mom would pack freezer bags full of broken sections of kernels, twist the tops of the bags and tie them (back in the days before ziploc bags...when we lived out on the prairie...heh heh heh) with the little twist tie things...and Dad or one of us would bring them down to the big freezer in the basement and place them on the shelves with all the other frozen produce.

We didn't grow all these - Mom would go to one of the local farms and buy things in bushels.  We groaned about the work at the time - the shucking and the snapping and the shelling...but I think back to how good that corn tasted when she opened up a bag of it in January, and I tell my complaining younger self to shut up.  It's worth a little effort in August.

And so, to a lesser degree, I'm doing the same thing.  I've roasted tomatoes in olive oil, salt and pepper until most of the water is gone and all the fresh tomatoey sweetness is condensed and mixed with the oil...and I've frozen these in batches to make sauce with this winter.  We've roasted beets as well, and they are frozen too.  Eggplant as well - I sliced it up and baked it, and now I can throw together some eggplant parmigiana pretty fast too. 

I figure each year we'll put away more...and when the kids are older, I'll probably go buy a bushel of corn for them to shuck, and I'll blanch it and pack it away for the winter too. 

You Don't Wanna Mess With the Women in My Family

Last night Julia was sitting on my lap facing me when she suddenly yanked my glasses off with her left hand and jabbed me in the eye with her right index finger.  She smiled really huge and asked "Dat?" as I writhed in pain.

My left eye still hurts today, and there's a red area just below the iris.

Today when I picked the kids up at daycare, I was carrying her out of the building, Alex gallantly pushing the doors open ahead of us, and she bit me.  Twice.  Just below my left shoulder, right above my armpit.  She warned me first - "Bite!" - and again, she grinned all the while.

She has been "written up" at daycare for biting.  Alex went through a biting phase too, but somehow it's different with Julia.

She seems to understand and embrace her power.

One day she bit a kid 3 times.  Twice because (according to the note on her incident report) he was looking out the window and she wanted to look out too, and she wanted him to move.  So she bit him. 

Not one to suffer fools gladly, she bit him again, just to make sure he understood.  That's two.

Later that day, Julia was playing sweetly and innocently with a toy or a ball or a machete and this same boy (I think) was beside her, and he invaded her personal space by gently resting one hand upon her shoulder and leaning a bit closer to see what she was playing with.

Clearly his motives were impure, so she bit him.  That makes three.

She hasn't been written up since then, so apparently he has learned from his mistakes.

And then there's my sister, Meredith.

She is also not one to put up with fools, but as an adult, she understands that biting is a no-no. 

So she takes karate instead.

Last Friday night I finally got myself down to see one of her belt promotions. 

I went by myself - one of my rare nights out.  Drove the half hour singing along loudly with my "Journey's Greatest Hits" CD and delighting in not being told "Stop singing, Mommy!"

Meredith was already inside, and her kids and husband arrived a little after I did.  I sat on one of the benches in front, and my niece, Natalie, sat with me.  Calvin and Jacques were somewhere in back of us.

(Natalie, by the way, takes karate too, and, interestingly enough, also used to bite when she was small.  One day my sister was standing at the sink doing the dishes and from behind her came Natalie's little voice announcing "I'm a bite you!"  And she did.  I believe it was the LAST time she did it.)

I took pictures during the night with a really irritating disposable camera - fortunately it was fast film, because (I discovered later) the flash would only work if you held the button down WHILE taking the picture.  Stupid camera.  Should have brought my REAL camera.

Anyway, there were students of all levels there, and after doing a series of warm-ups, they started doing their katas.  After each student or students reached the limit of what they had learned so far, they bowed and took their places at the other end of the room.

My sister and another kid (he looked like a kid, anyway), the only two getting their 2nd kyu brown belts, were last.  (Mere did I get that right?  I somehow don't think I did...)

All through the evening, with the exception of the goofy look she gave me at the very beginning, before they started the jumping jacks, she looked very focused, very calm.  In control.  No sign of butterflies at all.

She is so cool.  I really am proud of her.  I admire her for taking the first steps a couple of years ago, and for sticking with it and just being so matter of fact about it.  I overthink everything.  She is the Nike ad.  She just does it.

And she kicks ass.  So don't get in her way either, if she wants to look out a window.

Go, Mere!!

Maybe next time they'll let you wear one of the Samurai helmets!!

Not my table

Yesterday morning at some point Bill and I were in the kitchen and Alex and Julia were downstairs getting their weekend morning movie fix of Brother Bear, and all of a sudden, through the quiet, came the call of a little manly man voice:

"I need some toast down here!"

Jet Lag

This week has been pretty tough for Alex. 

Mornings especially.  More specifically, when it's time for me to leave him at daycare.

It didn't used to be this hard.

Well, no, that's wrong.  It's been this hard.  At various stages, various ages.  He's gone through periods of time when, for whatever reason, the fact that I'm leaving is cleaving his little heart in two. 

Which has the same effect on me, of course. 

I know in the past some of it has been just normal little-tiny-person attempts to make me do what he wants me to do.  I know that once I've left him behind, after the daycare staff have peeled him off of me, he's fine, and that once I disappear he stops sobbing, claps his hands together and demands crayons and paper because, dammit, he wants to make some pictures. I know he's fine.

But this week he hasn't been as fine.  He's been really crying.  Red face, tears rolling, drooling, loud, crying. 

It rips me apart, you know.

I know he eventually settles down, and when I come to pick him up at the end of the day, he's busy playing or singing or coloring or playing with clay or running around with his friends.

But still.  I feel like crud when he cries like that.

I sort of was wondering if maybe it's because usually when I drop him off in the morning, the teacher for his room isn't in yet and he's got to join the other (mostly bigger) kids in the preschool room for a little while.  Sometimes some of the other "early preschool" kids are in there already, but it doesn't seem to matter.  So I thought maybe he's just timid around the bigger kids.  It's louder in there, it's a big room, and first thing in the morning is a little chaotic at times.

And I was a shy, timid kid.

And so I'm thinking, have I somehow influenced him to be shy?  To be a little afraid of bigger kids?  What have I done to make him afraid?  Does he sense my nursery-school shyness?  Has he picked up on it somehow, and now he's doomed to be...(painful gulp)...like me all through school????  Oh, please, God, no.  Don't do that to him.

I don't know if Bill was shy at that age.  I suspect he might have been.  But I don't know and he wouldn't remember.

But then I figure I'm being silly.  How could he pick up on that?  I'm not afraid of these preschoolers NOW, after all.  I'm WAY bigger than they are, and if I really wanted to, I could take those Legos away from them like THAT.

So...is it genetic?  Is this just the way he's wired?

Or...is he going through a phase?  Like being afraid of the talking tree at the Bugaboo Creek Restaurant that we've gone to with him a few times and probably won't go to again with him until he's thirty and we can just leave him outSIDE if he doesn't want to come in past the talking tree.  (Or talking tree-man, as he refers to him.)  There's a talking bison head in there too...and a moose head too.  Now, if you think about it, it's disturbing enough just because these are just HEADS up there.  Throats and bodies are gone, so how these things would make any kind of a sound is beyond explanation.  But that doesn't seem to be what freaks Alex out.  He accepts the fact that there is a live bison HEAD ONLY on the wall.  He's just bothered by the fact that it will suddenly speak.  He likes his animals to be seen and not heard.

Julia, on the other hand, thinks they're pretty exciting.  "Kitty!!  Kitty!!" she shouts gleefully, pointing at the talking disembodied bison head up on the wall.  She'd like one in her crib, I think.

Of course, she's too little to have the overactive imagination of a three-year-old.  Her time will come, I figure.  And his will have past...so he'll have a grand old time scaring her with talking bison heads and talking tree men...

I digress...

So anyway, after being concerned for the past several days about Alex's extreme crying when I try to drop him off, I did something uncharacteristically sensible - I asked the morning preschool teacher about it.  I asked if he keeps crying after I leave...and she said this week he's been more upset than in the past, especially yesterday.  He stood (this breaks my heart...I'm a horrible, horrible mother) staring at the window after I'd waved bye bye to him, bawling, and yelling "Mommy, come back!" over and over.

I can hear it.  I can see the wet, red face and the awful open crying drooling mouth. 

How do you spell "guilt"...it's spelled E M P L O Y M E N T.  It's spelled M O R T G A G E.  It's spelled C A R  P A Y M E N T. 

Anyway...I'm glad I talked to her because what she said next made sense, and if I wasn't so busy flagellating myself for my horrible parenting skills, I might even have thought of it myself...she asked if last week was his first entire week of not being at daycare.

Ah.  Yes, it was.  It was a hugely different week.  Two flights on an airplane, not to mention all the irritation and stress and down time before each flight...and then spending several days and nights in a completely different place...and then coming home and just being home for a few days - and then being plunged right back into full time daycare.

At three, that's a tremendously disruptive thing. 

So I'm glad tomorrow's Friday.  Last day of the week to have to peel my son off of me and slink away guiltily and reluctantly to my job...wanting to say to him, "Alex, I don't want to go to work any more than you want me to leave.  But I have to, and so you have to, and it sucks at this moment, but you will be fine and you will have fun today and by this afternoon you will have forgotten all about right now."

I tried shrinking that down this morning, and telling him that sometimes when we don't want to do something, we have to be brave and do it anyway.

"I don't want to be brave!"

Sigh.

My job is my job.  Motherhood is my adventure.