Duck weather

  *

Today was the first day all week I woke up and wasn't immediately wishing for (Sunday and Monday) or turning on (Tuesday and Wednesday, thank God we finally got it installed) the air conditioner. The weather was nice, not too humid, and I hustled the kids outside to play.

Of course, it had rained the night before and no one wanted to play on the grass. Yesterday when it was boiling and I was worried about them being in the heat too long they were DYING to play in the sprinkler and dump the wading pool and roll around the lawn, but I guess it's not as fun if it doesn't result in a dramatic spike in the water bill. When the mosquitos started in, I asked who wanted to go inside.

"Me!" Mary said, abandoning her attempts at making a "fairy garden" out of sticks and clover in my as yet unplanted corner garden. (Tomatoes. Someday. Maybe.)

"I go inside" Lily babbled, heading for the gate. "I go inside. SHOES! SHOES! SHOES!" 

"I want to stay out here," Anna said. Now, our yard is totally fenced and Anna can't work the gate on her own, so I gave my consent, reminding her that the door to the house was open and I'd be watching her through the window (so for the love of God, leave the hose alone). 

We weren't in the house five minutes before I heard Anna come in, stop, and then open the door again.

"Anna! Enough with the door!"

"I gotta get Ducky!" she called from the yard. "Ducky needs to get warm!"

"Ducky is a stick she found," Mary informed me. "A little stick."

Fine, okay, whatever. You have rooms of toys but you want to play with twigs, go for it. The other day Baby G licked the fireplace. You learn to roll with it. 

I should have seen it coming. Anna came in with Ducky. Mary and Lily then decided all of the toys in the house paled in comparison to Anna's arboreal offering. I was down the hall but I could hear the arguing begin and it wasn't even lunchtime.

In case you were curious, no, we do not in fact live in an area devoid of trees and foliage. Ducky was not the only stick in the yard, but it was THE only stick worth fighting to the death over.

The other two lost interest relatively quickly but Anna ran around for 15 minutes making quacking noises before curiosity finally got the better of me and I wanted a closer look. 

"Anna, come here for a sec," I called. I had already posted on Facebook about Ducky and wanted to take her picture. She came down the hall, proudly holding her twig aloft. 

"Quack quack," she crowed. (That sentence looks like it shouldn't make sense but it's totally what she did.) I looked. And damned if that stick doesn't look like a duck after all.

Sorry, kid. Mommy just thought you were nuts. I know I'll be going nuts when, inevitably, at some point today the wail goes up: "Where's DUCKY?" Because these are my kids and Mary still mourns her missing fava bean from November. 

Quack quack, kid.

Don't call us

"Mommy, can you play with me?"

I looked up from my Very Important iPad Time and regarded Mary, who had just whirled into the living room like a tiny blonde tornado. It wasn't even noon yet and she and her sisters had already been outside for hours, had a snack, destroyed two bedrooms (my God...the toys...I swear they're breeding at night) and gone through the bookshelf.

"Sure, honey, what are we playing?"

"Princesses!" 

I smiled. "Princesses" with Mary still mainly revolves around saying which princess you are, talking about your dress and then forgetting the game entirely in favor of something else. (Goldfish crackers, puzzles, tinfoil...)

"Okay, who am I?"

"You can be Rapunzel! And I will be Ariel. Do you know the Rapunzel movie really, really well?"

No, honey, that was someone else who sat through "Tangled" seventy five thousand times before you finally turned your affections to "Brave."

"Sure, Mary," I reply, thinking, well, maybe this time we're actually going to play something. 

"Okay, because you have to do the right things, just like in the movie." Okay then!

"In the movie, Rapunzel's hair glows," Anna said, eyeing me critically from her position at the other end of the living room, where the Little People princesses were sitting around a toy table, upon which several of the Seven Dwarves were perched in a bizarre tableau. 

"Her hair. It glows." I could see her assessing my shoulder length red hair for long, blonde or glowing qualities and it coming up lacking.

"It's okay, Mommy, you don't have to do EVERYTHING like the movie," Mary assured me, tilting her head and smiling sympathetically. Lily and Gigi continued playing with the toy house, ignoring this casting session gone awry. 

"Thanks Mary," I said, as she skipped off. "Um...where are you going?"

"I'm gonna go play Hi-Lo Hamsters," she said brightly.

Game over. 

Cake Wars

  *

Real talk here: I'm not about to start calling myself Betty Crocker by any stretch of the imagination, but in general, I'm pretty decent in the kitchen, especially when it comes to baking. I'm not the world's most intuitive cook, but give me a recipe or some basic directions and what comes out of the oven is probably going to look and taste basically like it's supposed to.

I'm in a play right now and have rehearsal three nights a week. One of those nights - tonight - is Tim's birthday. So I planned an early dinner at a place he really enjoys but that we rarely visit because it's out of the way and not really my cup of tea, but the problem remained with the cake. I had planned to bake it with the girls this morning, but then realized that we were probably going to have to do the whole cake singing extravaganza after lunch in order to get to dinner on time. Plus, I have Baby G today. I decided to make the cake after rehearsal on Tuesday and make the frosting with the girls in the morning.

I got home around 10:30. By the time I had straightened up a little, assembled my ingredients and said goodnight to Tim, it was 11. I pulled out the recipe and realized that I had very little cake flour.

Now HERE is where I should have stopped, decided that I could hit the supermarket in the morning and just called it good. But no. That would imply a degree of reason and forethought that I just don't possess. Well, no, to be honest, I did consider that possibility, I just rejected it outright because I had decided to bake that cake right then, dammit. Instead I went online and found a web site that would give me the cake flour to multipurpose flour ratio and converted away.

I should have known something was up when the cake batter seemed too thick. It was almost...gelatinous? I have no idea. "Cake is done when the top is springy and the edges are pulling away from the sides of the pan," said Recipes for Dummies. Pulling away? My batter seemed loathe to even touch the sides of the pan. It jiggled and mocked me as I attempted to spread it. SPREAD IT. When was the last time you had to spread cake batter? But it tasted okay and it smelled fine - amazing, even - as it baked and in the proper amount of time it rose and looked just great, so I considered the whole thing a success. I pulled the cakes out of the oven and waited for them to cool a bit so I could pop them out of the pans.

Oh, right, that takes a long time and here it was around midnight. I sat on the couch and surfed the Net. My eyes got heavier and heavier. The pans were still warm. Finally I just covered the pans with Saran Wrap, put them up out of the way and fell asleep.

You can see where this is going, can't you? This morning when I went to pop one cake out of the pan...it refused to budge. At all. Even a little. I ran a knife around the edge over and over. Tried again. Nothing. Turned the pan over onto the desired surface and gave it a good hard whack, trying to evenly distribute the pressure over the bottom of the pan.

Three pieces of cake fell out, one big, two small. I glared at it, then at the pan, where a sticky film of cake clung stalwartly to the yes-I-DID-grease-and-flour bottom. I decided that would be the bottom layer. 

The second pan yielded worse results, if that was possible. 

"DAMMIT!" I yelled. A little blonde head peeked around the corner, just up from bed. Tim came into the kitchen behind Mary.

"What happened?"

"YOUR CAKE FELL APART AND I DON'T HAVE TIME OR INGREDIENTS FOR ANOTHER," I ranted, dropping hunk after hunk of cake into a large mixing bowl. "I can't frost it, it's too dense, and I ruined the whole thing."

"It's fine," Tim said, trying to hug me and backing up when he caught the look in my eye. "It's FINE. We're still going to dinner, we can do cake another time..."

"Mommy next time it'll be fine!" Mary chirped. "We can make it again. I can help you! We can try it again and I'll help and then it will be-"

"Mary, don't talk to Mommy right now," Tim advised sagely. 

"Your cake is in a bowl!" I raged.

"Yeah but it still tastes good," he said, helping himself to a small piece, then a larger one. Mary, and now Anna and Lily, eyed the bowl. I gave up and put a small piece on three small plates.

"Cake for breakfast," I sighed. I sensed a trip to the grocery store for an ice cream cake in my near future.

"YAAAAAAAY!" Mary and Anna squealed. 

"I like bowl cake," Tim said, wandering off to get ready for the day. "Let's have it every year."

It takes a village in light up shoes.

  *

Mary's last day of school was last Friday, but thanks to a series of commitments and work, today was the first day I didn't have to be both awake and presentable by 6:45.  (Don't worry, the kids took care of making sure I was up at an eye-blearing 6:15 or so.) I enjoyed a lazy morning - feeding the kids oatmeal in my scrubby pajamas, leisurely cleaning up the kitchen, and eventually making my way to the shower at 8.

At approximately 8:01 I remembered I had a 9:20 appointment on the other side of the highway, which requires at least 40 minutes of driving for what would normally take 15, and therefore I had 29 minutes to shower, dress, get the kids dressed and brush their hair and teeth and somehow wrangle a snack for them (Dunkin' Donuts to the rescue).

I hopped out of the shower at 8:05, which must be some kind of record now that I'm no longer sporting a haircut that would make K.D. Lang look like the feminine one, pulled together presentable outfits for the kids, made sure everyone was brushed, washed and had gone to the bathroom and somehow got out the door by 8:30. They even had matching socks, which is a real accomplishment around here. (If anyone really likes pairing up socks, I have a laundry basket with your name on it and all the coffee you can hold.)

Somewhere around three minutes into the drive, my pulse returned to a somewhat normal rate, despite Anna and Lily in the backseat gleefully kicking the back of the front seats to make their shoes light up. Mary looked at Lily's "new" shoes, hand me downs from Anna?

"Do Lily's shoes have light ups too?" she squealed as only a five year old girl can.

"They do!"

"Oh," she sighed sweetly. "I love those little shoes." I couldn't help but smile. The rain was letting up, the sun was starting to peek through and here was my oldest, acting like a kid from those chapter books I always hated because the little girls were always so much better behaved than I was. 

"Mary, you're a great big sister, you know that?" She beamed at me. "You get so happy for your little sisters, it's so nice!"

"Yeah..." she said reflectively. "But sometimes I get mad at Anna."

"That's okay," I responded, embracing the Teachable Moment. "It's okay to get mad. She gets mad at you, too. And one day, you'll probably get mad at Lily."

Mary paused.

"Mommy...I do get mad at Lily. A lot. You know why?"

"Why, baby?"

"Because she's the littlest and so she's the hardest to control!"

At that point I almost lost control of the car and drove off the road. I bit back laughter and tried to keep a neutral face. It almost worked.

"Who told you that, hon?" The cadence of kicking feet continued in the backseat. The line at Dunkin Donuts was too long and I mentally calculated the amount of time it would take to hit the next one.

"Mom-my," she laughed. "No one had to tell me that! I've been working with Lily for a long time now!"

Kick, kick, kick.

The next Dunkin Donuts had a long line but since traffic had been okay, we waited it out and were rewarded with fresh donuts, which in turn rewarded me with a chocolate covered two year old upon pulling into the parking lot. 

When we got to the doctor's, my blood pressure was a good 20 points higher than normal.

I have no idea why.

Herding cats

Going someplace with four children under the age of six is always an adventure, particularly when two of the kids are alarmingly close in age and infants. Sometimes you get polite comments, sometimes you get stares, very occasionally you get outwardly snide comments. My Facebook friends know how I dealt with the last one - a big dumb smile and a cheerful "Boy, I wish I knew what caused that!" I don't mind the social commentary but regardless, schlepping four kids anywhere is a chore I prefer to avoid at all costs.

Sometimes, though, you have to bite the bullet. Today I realized that despite a run to the grocery story the day before, I had forgotten to buy bread. I also had to get over to the elementary school and pick up a packet of information for incoming Kindergarten students (which - can you believe it? NO). Neither of those could wait until Baby G went home or Tim arrived after work, so away we went.

I considered driving to cut our time out of the house, but it was a mild day and there were two other contributing factors: I had a quarter tank of gas to last me until Friday and the scale has not budged since I closed Sweeney Todd a month and change ago. In fact, it may have crept up a pound or two. How long can I blame that on "just water?" So we started walking.

Walking anywhere with four kids is an exercise in multitasking. Mary wants to run ahead and is built like I was as a kid - tall with all her height in her legs. Anna wants to run ahead and "race" but she's built like a spark plug - tons of energy in this compact little body that doesn't stand a chance against her older sister at this point. So eventually she gets annoyed and walks next to me, or lags behind, or wanders out into the middle of the road before I can frantically call her back, at which point she will turn to me dreamily and start dawdling back to the sidewalk before I grab her arm and yank her to safety.

"Hey, don't pull me!" she snaps indignantly, as though not wanting her to become a cartoon pancake version of herself is an unreasonable goal for motherhood. 

It's true, though - I'm quite unreasonable. Don't walk through the puddles in your light up sneakers. Stay on the sidewalks  - don't walk on people's lawns. Unless there are no sidewalks, then yes, on the very edges of the lawns but DON'T try to balance on the curb (whyyyy?) and stop picking the leaves off of people's trees. Yes, even if you can "really really!" reach them. Don't make eye contact with the man smoking pot in his garage in the middle of the morning. When I pull you off the street for the thousandth time as a BMW goes roaring by at 40 mph, pointing and saying "hey, Mom, look, a car!" is really just stating the obvious, my darling.

So the older girls raced and Mary won 99 percent of the marathons between stop signs and cross streets. Anna only won when I happened to tell them to stop for some reason. She would listen, wait until I was done, and then yell "Go Mary!" and take off before Mary could stop staring at the grass, or her shoes, or the stroller, or absolutely nothing. 

Lily co-operated today and did not protest her clothing, her shoes, her socks or the indignities of being strapped in a stroller. She did sit there like a tiny dictator and mimic me by yelling "STOP" at the girls when they ran ahead and arrived at the next stop sign. The hand wave and finger wagging was a nice addition to the repertoire.

About halfway through the walk, or The Point of No Return, Anna will invariably announce she's sick of walking and demand to get in the "cawwidge." The "cawwidge" is full of babies I wouldn't trust walking down a sidewalk if you gave me a million dollars so I deny her. She sulks for a moment and then will run ahead, legs akimbo, red faced, arms flying free, until the next stop sign, where she will reiterate her desire to not walk, be home, be in the carriage. 

This will last, in quiet fashion, until the grocery shopping is done and we are leaving the store. Then the following happens:

Mary: Where are we going now, Mommy?

- Home, to make lunch.

Anna: BUT I DON'T WANT THE WALK TO BE OVER!

Mary: Can't we go someplace else?

- No, we need to have lunch now. Come on, hold hands until we get to the sidewalk.

Anna: BUT I WANT TO WALK! I WANT TO RUN! LET'S RACE, MARY!

Lily: Stop! STOP! STOP! STOP! STOP!

All the way home. 

If you like pina coladas

  I have three small children. (If you are surprised at this you have clearly not been reading this blog well.) My furniture and walls, despite my best efforts, are "loved." So while our living room sofa had decidedly seen better days, I was hesitant to shell out any kind of money for decent furniture, at least until the smallest ankle biter is past the "crayons for all surfaces!" stage. My fear of bedbugs keeps me from buying used unless I know the person already, so I had resigned myself to our living room furniture.

Lucky for me, my parents, having no ankle biters in the house and only well-behaved animals, decided to replace their family room furniture and today my dad drove up, leaving me the proud recipient of two extremely comfortable pieces of seating and making the girls thrilled at the visit from Boppa. In fact, the couches were scarcely in place and lunch had barely been eaten before they were begging my dad to take them for a walk. 

"That sounds fun," I said. "I'll put Lily down for a nap and you guys can have fun." I took the baby into my room to rock her and the girls headed out. 

In no time, Lily was fast asleep and I ventured out into the main part of the house, where I saw a CVS bag on my dining room table. Next to the bag were, in no particular order, a whole coconut, a small awl and a Gymboree coupon my mother had received in the mail. I smiled at the sheer randomness of the items and waited for the kids to return.

"Boppa said he has a treat for us!" the girls squealed as they ran up the front steps. We made our way inside where my dad proceeded to use the little awl to poke holes in the coconut and drain the milk. I actually like drinking coconut milk, but this looked a little cloudy to me. Thinking nothing of it, we made our way outside with a hammer, where my dad proceeded to sit the now-drained coconut on the front step and bash it with the hammer.

Immediately, the outer shell flaked away, the coconut split in half and the white, round coconut slithered out of the shell.

Yes, you read that right.

No, coconuts do not "slither" under normal circumstances, in fact, one of the ways you can justify consuming all those "good fats" is the fact that you have to perform an aerobic workout just to get to the meat normally.

"That doesn't look right," my dad said. He hit it one more time, the rest of the shell flaked (yes, flaked) away, revealing a greenish gray mottling on the white meat.

"Ew," I said.

"COCONUT!" the girls cried, clearly knowing no better but trusting their mother and grandfather would not give them the runs just in time for Easter.

"Sorry," my dad said. "We can't eat this. Boppa wanted to bring you a nice treat but this one is no good. We'll try again another time."

I looked at the dismal faces of my two oldest and decided to play Supermom.

"Dad, watch the kids for two minutes," I said. "I'm going to the grocery store."

"YAAAAY!"

I go to the car, drive to the store, fight the Good Friday crowds, remember I needed apples for a baking project, grabbed an on-sale pineapple because I am horribly easily influenced, selected a coconut and got out of Dodge. 

"Homemade pina coladas tonight?" the cashier asked, seeing my purchases. 

I walked into the house and the girls cheered - quietly, because Lily was still somehow asleep.

We went back to the kitchen, Dad cleaned the awl and jabbed at the coconut. 

"That went in awfully easy," he said. He tipped the coconut and a few drops of cloudy liquid dripped into the glass.

"Hm," he said. I sniffed it.

"God, that's pungent," I offered diplomatically.

"Round two," my dad said, and we headed out to the front steps, where by this point the neighbors were glancing at us sideways. My dad struck the coconut.

My dad struck his thumb.

My dad managed not to introduce my kids to any four letter words (I would not have been so controlled) and struck the coconut again, which split easily, cracked easily, and revealed a gray-green fruit.

"Ugh," I said.

"Sorry kids," my dad said. 

"Screw that, I'm returning it," I announced, grabbing the putrid fruit, ignoring the glass of what I was now calling "coconut vodka" and trying to find which plastic Shaw's bag under the sink had my recipet before deciding it didn't matter and heading back to the store.

This time I walked up to customer service.

"Hi," I said to the twelve year old behind the counter (okay, I'm just getting old, she was probably 19 or something obscene like that). "I just bought this, I don't have a recipet, but I need to exchange my coconut," I announced, handing her the bag.

"You...just want a new coconut?" she asked.

"Right, because this one looks like this," I said, yanking back the shell and peforming a Phantom of the Opera-esque reveal. She recoiled.

"Ew!"

"Right, I can't cook with that," I said. She told me to get another, and when I returned, a small crowd was gathered around EbolaNut. 

"She just bought it," one whispered.

"Ew," echoed another.

"Have a nice day," the girl said, bagging my new nut.

Return home, Dad finds it harder to get the awl in the coconut, which we find reassuring. We return outside, where Dad has a hell of a time getting the shell to crack, and hey, who'd have thunk it, non-rotten coconuts don't slither.

Back inside with our prize, the girls proceeded to eat it like it was going out of style. 

But I saved enough for a homemade pina colada.

We earned it.

In the name of the Father

For a variety of reasons, Mary attends a parochial preschool a few days a week. We wanted something full-day because she missed the Kindergarten cutoff by about three weeks and the child was ready for a bit more school than the two hour, two day a week program we'd had her in. By the time I realized that the readiness test that used to allow Kindergarten admittance to those with later birthdays had been completely abolished in our city, it was June or so and the only preschools that didn't laugh us out of the coatroom were religious schools. 

We're not Catholic, but I went to a great Catholic high school and loved it, so when a Catholic school fit our scheduling needs and budget constraints, I didn't hesitate. It's March now and for the most part I've been very happy with things. Mary has apparently gotten her father's love for all things church (not that I don't have faith, but this child actually begs to go to church when it's not Sunday, whereas when the Seventh Day rolls around, I am picking out tights and dresses and hair bows but longingly eying the cozy bed) and has embraced the Catholic rituals with open arms.

To wit:

There was a school-wide Mass in December, and out of hundreds of kids through eighth grade, when the priest asked, my five year old is the one who knew the answer to the question. I found out when I went to pick her up and one of her teachers accosted me in the cubby room.

"And Father asked who knew what the pink candle meant, and Mary is the only one who had the answer!" she crowed, watching my face for the joy she was waiting for.

"That's great!" I said enthusiastically, frantically trying to recall my religion classes from high school and failing. "I don't know how she knows that, because I sure don't."

Wrong answer, Mommy. 

"Joy!" the teacher and Mary answered in perfect unison.

Well, joy to the world!

Then there was the time at dinner when Mary asked if she could say grace. Of course we said she could, and she promptly taught her three year old sister how to properly do the sign of the cross. 

"Bless us O Lord, and these thy gifts..." she sang. It's cool, we'd already heard her cantoring one night when she was supposed to be asleep, so it wasn't *that* impressive. (Sarcasm doesn't translate well in the blogosphere, so insert a little winking smiley here or something so you know I'm not a bad mother.)

But nothing beats this afternoon. I picked Mary up and we came home, at which point the girls settled down to color at the table. All was well until Mary and Anna got into a knock down verbal war over who got to use the yellow crayon at which point, culminating in Mary being quite rude to her sister and getting sent to her room.

"I DON'T LIKE MY ROOM!" she yelled from her prison down the hall. "Can I come out now?"

"You still have three minutes," I said, checking the clock. 

"I don't want three minutes more! I want it shorter!"

"You're five, you get five minutes," I replied in as neutral a tone as possible.

"Well God made me and God made me to want less time SO YOU HAVE TO LET ME OUT."

Ave Maria, she'll either be a nun or a lawyer at this rate.