Don't know, can't reach

Children should do chores, right?

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It is important for them to know they contribute to the family plus it teaches important life skills.

And of course, I get awfully tired of doing it all myself.

We don't do any kind of chore charts these days.  I tend to just nab any child who isn't actively doing homework when a job needs doing.  Not surprisingly this system leads to a lot of suddenly remembered homework.  Which is great because if said child was just goofing off prior to being nabbed there is obviously plenty of time for him (or her) to do the chore and then start on the homework that I am now aware needs doing.

Yesterday, Imagination Boy unloaded the dishwasher.  I was sitting at the table reading the newspaper (one of my important daily chores).  I glanced up and saw an amazing sight.

The dishwasher was empty and IB had the final dish in his hands and was opening all the cupboards looking for the proper place to put it.

I nearly had to choke back a sob.

My baby is growing up.

For years, IB would declare himself finished with the job of unloading the dishwasher and I would find it still half full of dishes.

"Those are the ones I don't know where they go or I can't reach to put them away" he would say.

Over the years, the phrase got shortened.

"Have you finished unloading the dishwasher," I would say.

"All but don't know, can't reach," he would reply.

The most annoying part of this is that usually Music Girl would be tasked with loading after IB had unloaded.  Rather than put away the clean dishes left behind or even alerting me to the situation, she usually just added dirty dishes to the clean.

But yesterday, yesterday my little boy not only was tall enough to reach any dish location in the kitchen, but he even took initiative to look for the proper place to put a dish he wasn't sure about.

I'm so proud.

Noodles in Xi'an: Memorable Meal Monday

Over the years and during our travels, we have had many memorable meals, some good, some bad, but on the whole more good than bad.  I thought Mondays might be a good time to remember some of those meals.

One such meal was a dish of noodles in Xi'an, an old city in China.

Xi'an is most famous for the Terra Cotta Warriors and that is what brought us there.

But when we headed just a wee bit off of the beaten tourist path, we began to wonder if maybe we were the greatest attraction in Xi'an.

In Bejing our pasty white family of five was constantly being stopped and asked to pose for pictures by Chinese tourists.  "Three children!" they would say to me or the Professor, "So lucky! So lucky!"

After thinking about the one child policy and the fact that our three are quite close in age and have strawberry blond hair, perhaps this attention wasn't surprising.

But in Xi'an the attention rose to a whole 'nother level.

When we walked down the street, we pretty much stopped traffic.

People at road side cafes stopped with food held halfway to their mouths.  Couples stopped their conversations to stare open mouthed at us as we walked by.  Small children followed us down the road.

It was an interesting experience.

So, getting to the meal.  It was dinnertime and we were hungry after a day full of sightseeing.

Choosing a place to eat while traveling is often not one of our finer moments.  The Professor and I are both cheap frugal so while we enjoy good food we don't want to waste money on a bad experience.

In our European travels, the question usually was, "Do you think this will be a good place to eat?"*

In our Asian travels, the question became, "Do you think this IS a place to eat?"

So, there we were, hungry in Xi'an, searching for a place to eat.  We had already rejected one option because they had no pictures on the menu (expecting English would have been way too much to ask for but we can make do with pictures).

We found a little place with people inside eating at small tables.  There was a picture menu (all writing in Chinese of course) so we decided to give it a try.

We stepped in the door and a woman rushed over to us and began chatting away.  Rather than seating us at one of the empty tables she motioned for us to follow her as she lead us through the dining area to some stairs.  We followed her up the stairs going past another floor which also had people sitting at tables eating (with plenty of empty tables) and up to the third floor where they was yet another room full of tables but this one had no other people in in.

After flipping through the menu perusing the pictures while the waitress stood by waiting, we pointed at a bowl of noodles and hoped for the best.

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When the food arrived it looked absolutely nothing like the picture we thought we had ordered. Perhaps the staff determined that what we had ordered was unlikely to appeal to Western tastebubs.  Perhaps we had ordered wrong.  Perhaps all the dishes looked nothing like the photos.

In any case we picked up our chopsticks and dug in.

Now, let me just state for the record that we had been living in Asia for three years at this point.  We were all accomplished with chopsticks.

But not with this dish.  These were the widest, slipperyist noodles I have ever encountered.  You would lean forward and think you had one captured on your chopsticks.  You'd lift it cautiously up to your mouth, open wide and at the last moment it would slip through the chopsticks to fall back in the bowl with a splash.

We were all eating out of the same bowl, so soon all of our heads were practically touching in the center of the table as we positioned ourselves so as to minimize the distance the noodles had to travel from bowl to mouth and maximize the chances of getting the delicious noodles into our mouths.

Because, make no mistake, these noodles were absolutely delicious.  The best noodles I have ever had or ever expect to have in my entire life.

And all five members of the family loved the noodles.  Do you know how often in all of our travels all five of us have enjoyed the same dish?

NEVER.**

It didn't take long before we realized that we had an audience.  After the waitress set our food down, she backed away and stood against the wall of the room and watched us eat.  She was quickly joined by a few other waitresses who also stood watching us.  They were soon joined by the kitchen staff.

It wasn't long before at least a dozen people in restaurant uniforms stood silently around the perimeter of the room and watched us eat our noodles.

Which might have been intimidating but in truth, the noodles were so tasty, and actually getting them into our mouths so challenging and the whole situation so absurd, that we were all just a giggly joyful mess.  And may I point out that laughing does not enhance ones chopstick handling abilities.

We finished the bowl and ordered another one and then another until we were satisfied.  It was one of the best and also one of the cheapest meals we ever ate overseas.

It was also the most entertaining.

For us and for the restaurant staff.



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*Translation:  "Will it be affordable, tasty and have food the picky children will eat?"  I ate the most expensive albeit also the most delicious grilled cheese sandwich of my life in Paris after Imagination Boy rejected what I figured was a sure fired child pleaser.

**Unless you count Gelato, which I don't since it is desert and even there we all had to have our own flavors.

Diet Bet: Friday Favorites

4 years ago I lost 60 lbs.  Maybe someday I'll write about that journey.  It was both hard work and very easy.

I have also beat the statistics by keeping the weight off.

Mostly.

It's that mostly part that bothers me sometimes.

The truth is that in the last 4 years I have never gotten anywhere near putting all the weight back on.  I have found it easy to keep at least 40 lbs down from my top weight.

It's those last 20 lbs that have a tendency to creep back on when I'm under stress.  And then I have to get all disciplined with myself and work them back off again.

The thing is, it was easier to stay motivated to lose weight the first time when the results were dramatic and everyone around me was encouraging me.

No one notices when I am struggling to take off those final 20 lbs, again.

But I found a great tool to keep me encouraged and on track

I have now completed 2 month long diet bets and have doubled my money.  Basically the way it works is you put up a certain amount of money to enter a bet.  You then have four weeks to lose 4% of your body weight.  Everyone's money goes into a pool, the diet bet people take their cut and at the end of 4 weeks the pot is split between everyone who managed to lose at least 4% of their body weight.

I knew that losing 4% was very doable for me but that I would have to work on it.  I knew myself and knew that if I put money up, there was no way I was going to let myself fail.  

For me diet bet was the perfect way to keep myself accountable and on track.  The last day before my last weigh in I was at a March Madness party and I know I would have overeaten if it wasn't for the bet.

I'm not getting paid by dietbet or anything, I just thought it was a cool concept that worked for me and some of you might want to know about it.

You can get a group together and do a bet or you can just join in one.  You can do up to 3 at a time.  I just joined a public one.   

I put up $60 originally for 2 different $30 games that ran at the same time.  I then plowed some of my winnings back into another 2 games the following month.   When I won those games also, I decided I was too close to goal weight to want to do more bets so I cashed out at $131.  

Not bad.  

Want to know what exciting things I did with the winnings?  Paid for Oldest Girl's SAT test. *

Yup, I live on the edge.

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*Mostly just because the winnings are paid out via paypal and when I went to pay for the SAT I saw the paypal option and thought, why not.

Don't Sing Mom

"No sing," came the emphatic voice from the carseat in the back, "No sing."

Image courtesy of photostock / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

It might have have been Oldest Girl's first sentence.*

It actually started before she had words.  We went to a "Mom and Me" class at the library once a week. All the babies sat on their mom's laps and we sang such classics as "The Wheels on the Bus" and "The Itsy Bitsy Spider".

Some of the babies grinned and giggled in pleasure waving their arms.  Some sat there bemused as their mothers manipulated their hands to do the motions.

Not my baby.

I tried to help her do the motions.  She pulled her hands away.

So I did the motions myself.  She turned around in my arms and swatted my arms down.

At least I can sing, I thought, singing out a little louder.

Nope.  She turned around again and put her hand over my mouth.

Okay.

It was years before Oldest Girl let me sing without protest.

Now I'm no concert vocalist but my singing voice isn't that bad.  They let me sing in the church choir and I haven't noticed anyone wincing at my voice.  Babies are supposed to delight in their mother's voice right?

I blame it all on sleep training.

I got pregnant with Music Girl (who has never complained about my singing voice thank you very much) with all the morning sickness and exhaustion that entails while Oldest Girl was still a wee little thing who wasn't sleeping through the night.  I decided that for all our sakes this situation had to change.

I read all the many conflicting books on how to get your child to sleep from the "let them scream it out forever and lie in their own vomit if necessary" to the "just let them sleep with you and nurse constantly and learn to love it or you will damage them permanently" points of view.  Then I did what I always did in the end with conflicting parenting advice, whatever worked for me that I could live with.

So first I night weaned.  When Oldest Girl woke up in the night I would walk with her and sing until she fell back asleep.  Then I moved to singing without picking her up.  Eventually she was sleeping through the night.

Which. Was. Wonderful.

Except, it apparently lost me the right to sing to her.

The irony of it all is that my current job involves singing to small children.  I teach Creative Movement and my day is filled with me singing, often acapella to preschoolers.  And, if I may be so bold, I am good at my job and the kids love me and my singing.

Take that Oldest Girl.


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*I can't be sure because I'm not the kind of mom who carefully wrote these things down in a baby book.  Instead I'm writing them down now, haphazardly, as I think of them.  This has the disadvantage that I don't remember everything perfectly but the advantage is that I can remember it the way I want too.

Grandma 'Rene

It was Grandparent's Day recently at the preschool where I work.

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The program was cute with the kids singing for the grandparents and then joining them at tables for snacks and playtime.

And I found myself fighting back tears.

I'm not really that much of a crier but my tears are much closer to the surface again these days.  I feel like I'm back in those earlier days after my dad's death when each day I wondered if it was safe to put on eye makeup because it was just so unpredictable what might set me off.

I tried to figure out where these particular tears were coming from.  Was it my children's loss of their grandfathers, one before they were ever born and one more recently.  Or was it the many grandparent events my kids missed out on because we lived too far away from their remaining grandparents.

Then I remembered that when my kids were the age of the preschoolers I work with not only did they have more living grandparents (and even great grandparents) but they also had a bonus grandma who lived only two blocks away.

Grandma 'Rene.

Grandma 'Rene was my great aunt.  My mother's mother (who died when my mom was in high school) was the oldest of a large family.  Her youngest brother, in what was probably the wisest decision of a wise life, married Irene.  Unfortunately I never got to know him as he passed away before I moved to the area.

So technically Grandma 'Rene wasn't even a blood relation.

But she was one special lady.

When I think of hospitality I think of her.  She opened her doors and took us in when we needed a place to stay even though she had never meet us.  The Professor, Oldest Girl and I moved in with her when Oldest Girl was only six months old.

Oldest Girl is now a delightful young lady who I am always happy to spend time with.  As a baby however, let's just say she didn't break me in to motherhood easily.  As a young mom I felt like I was surrounded by advice, mostly contradictory, on how to handle this baby.  Most people, well meaning as they were, made me question my ability to parent this child properly.

Grandma 'Rene didn't see a difficult baby.  She saw a delightful baby with her own personality.  And she genuinely enjoyed interacting with my child.  As a result she set me free to delight in my daughter for who she was.

When Music Girl and Imagination Boy came along, Grandma 'Rene delighted in them too.

When we walked Oldest Girl to school for the first day of kindergarten passing near her house, Grandma 'Rene was standing at the corner to give her a hug and wish her well.  When we walked home that day we stopped at her house to tell her all about the first day.

Whenever it was time to leave Grandma 'Rene's house she would encourage the kids to visit the cookie drawer, a large drawer at perfect child height that was always filled with delicious cookies.  "Take a cookie for the road," she would say.

When Oldest Girl was in first grade and Music Girl in kindergarten, Grandma 'Rene visited their school for Grandparents Day.

When we learned we would be going overseas one of the hardest people to tell was Grandma 'Rene. There were many people we knew we would miss, including all the grandparents but we knew Grandma 'Rene's age meant she might not be alive when we moved back.

She wasn't.

We were able to visit Grandma 'Rene several times during our trips back to the states but by the time we moved back she was gone.

Oldest Girl remembers Grandma 'Rene fondly.  Imagination Boy remembers her vaguely.  But I will never forget the gift she gave me that was so much greater than the cookie for the road.  She gave me the gift of freeing me to delight in my children.

Why the Professor Should Come Home for Dinner

They say that girls have a tendency to marry someone like their father.  In a lot of ways I did just that.  But apparently I also married my mother.

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When I was growing up money was tight so my mom was always looking to pinch pennies.  One of her strategies was to buy the cheap peanut butter, the kind that had a rock hard mass of peanut sludge on the bottom of the container and a thick coating of oil on the top.  To be even remotely edible this product required a good half hour of stirring before it could be spread on bread.

Nowadays people call this organic and pay extra for it.  They may even argue that the stirring is good because it give you a good arm workout thus counterbalancing the calories and striking a blow against childhood obesity.

Recently the Professor came home with this kind of peanut butter.  He was quite pleased that he found peanut butter without any palm oil.  "It might need a little stirring though," he warned.

Tonight at dinnertime the jar got opened for the first time.  Imagination boy looked at it in dismay.  He stirred for awhile.  Then I took over to give his arm a break.  I didn't last long either but not because my arm got tired.  I had an idea.  Why use muscle power when there is a kitchen full of gadgets to hand? Am I not my father's daughter?

"I have a great idea!" I said.

This made the children nervous.  I can't imagine why.

I pulled out my handy dandy stick blender.  "Here, plug this in behind you" I said to Imagination Boy as I started to put the blender in the jar in the middle of the table.

"No," three voices chorused.

"You'll make a big mess." (Like they would be the ones cleaning up any potential mess)

"At least do it on the counter where it won't splatter all over us."  (Okay, they may have a point there.)

I was pleased to see that the jar was just wide enough for the blender.  What it wasn't, was deep enough to hold all the peanut butter and the submerged blender.

The kids shouted in horror as the peanut butter overflowed.

"This is why Dad needs to make it home in time for dinner," Oldest Girl said.

In my defense the peanut butter was nicely mixed when I finished (apart from the chunky bits I scooped up from the outside of the jar and stuffed back in) and Imagination Boy did make and eat his sandwich.

Surprise Party #4

This is the last one, honest, but I just thought of another good surprise party story.

This was a party for the Professor's 16th birthday.  I wasn't actually involved in this party since I didn't know him yet at the time, but I've heard the story many times and think it is worth sharing.

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The Professor's parents decided to throw a surprise birthday party for the Professor when he turned 16.

The challenge for most would be surprise party throwers is how to get the birthday person out of the house while you set up and everyone arrives and then get them back in for the surprise.

The Professor's parents didn't bother.

They sent out the invitations for a party beginning at dinner time telling the guests to come on in without ringing the doorbell.

When all the guests had arrived, the Professor's mom called up the stairs to her son that it was time to come down for dinner.  He came down and was utterly shocked to find the house decorated and full of all his friends.

My favorite part of this story is the fact that his parents had great confidence this plan would work. They were so secure in their knowledge that their son would be hanging out in his room doing homework or whatever else it was that he did in there for hours and hours on end that they didn't even bother to get him out of the house.  They knew there was next to no chance that he would glance out of his bedroom window and see his friends coming up the walk.  They knew it was extremely unlikely that he would wander downstairs before dinner and notice the balloons and birthday cake.

And they were right.

So, here is the 4th and final tip.

Successful Surprise Party Tip #4:  Throw the party for someone who gets so absorbed in his own project he won't notice what the world around him is doing.