And Just Like That

We are in the thick of THE HOLIDAYS.  I kind of hate this time of year.  I'm in it to do fun stuff for the kids, but anything to do with traditional holiday stuff for adults makes my skin crawl.  You're into Christmas? You're GROWN.  Get over it!  The most important thing is spending time with family, right?  And also, almost more importantly, it should be about KICKING BACK.  Chilling out, maxing, relaxing all cool.  But will anyone let you shoot some b-ball outside of the school?  No!  Because there are a million holiday parties to go to and concerts and blah blah blah time sucks that keep you from doing what you really want to do, which is sit in your jammies and watch Netflix and ignore the outside world.

Unless that's just me.

The holidays have gotten harder ever since Poppa D passed away.  I think there was a natural contraction that was going to happen anyway - as the kids got older (we're all in our thirties!) and when we added the Big Yam, it wasn't going to be the present bacchanalia that it had been in the past.  Great Nany is getting on in years and has a reduced income, we're all grown and the "presents" we want cost a lot more, etc., etc.  I think that the move towards making the holiday less about us and more about kids the Big Yam's age coincided with Poppa D passing away, and it makes everything seem a lot more quiet and restrained and sombre.  Staying in town doesn't help - Poppa D had so much childlike glee and silly enthusiasm that he really injected a lot of fun and spirit into the whole process.  When we try to replicate things here, his absence just seems all that much more stark.

AREN'T I JUST A BARREL OF FUN?!  I'm actually not feeling all that down about things, really.  Just trying to articulate why things feel a little different.  My sister asked me what cookies I was making so we wouldn't duplicate (which never happens anyway), and I was like, "is you tweaking?!"  As if I have time to make cookies!  Usually by this point I've been slowly amassing a store of frozen cookie dough balls in the freezer, to be pulled out and baked à la minute so that I could give people warm boxes of like, 9 different varieties.  Newsflash: THAT AIN'T HAPPENING THIS YEAR.  I can barely get dinner on the table each night, and to top things all off halmeoni quit on me!  The day that she was coming to help clean the house wasn't working for her any more and like, I'm sure she probably wanted to spend her time looking after her own kids and grandkids and not the neighbours.  I'm taking it a little personally and getting all up in my own head about it.  Like, was it because she was appalled at our house?  Did she find my general housekeeping disgusting?  Did we not express our gratitude enough?  Did she feel like she was being taken advantage of?  I know all that probably isn't the case, but it's hard to think rationally.  I'm feeling really rejected here, people.

Now I'm thinking about if I can still catch up and bang off a batch or 9 of cookies.  TALK ME DOWN OFF THE LEDGE, PLEASE!  

What's been going on over here?  Two weekends ago we went to Cleveland and visited our buddies, H & A.  Good lord, do we ever loves us some Cleveland.  It was so nice.  They have a new baby girl who was 9 weeks old when we went there and they are kind of getting rocked by the new parent thing so it was a perfect weekend away - just lolling around the house and eating and smushing babies together and taking the Big Yam to the odd playground:

Doughnut's from Jack Frost Doughnuts.  We have pumpkin pie, salted caramel, buckeye, lemon curd - all of them really delicious and the whole box (plus a GIANT cinnamon roll) cost $12.  TWELVE DOLLARS.  This many "fancy" doughnuts would cost like, $30 in Toronto and not be half as tasty.

No trip to Cleveland is complete without a visit to Happy Dog.  Hot dogs with unlimited toppings and tater tots and dipping sauces and craft beer.  What more do you want?

Then we came home and made the ill-advised decision to try to eat low-carb for a while.  We used this diet called the "4 Hour Body" and in classic us fashion, didn't read anything but just listened to our friend H's description of how it's done.  Ummm...IT WAS HELL.  I love carbs.  As the Dotytron repeatedly said: "I feel hollow inside."  And that's with us cheating!  We kept fruit!  And we kept dairy!  I'm not cut out for restrictive eating.  I actually did better than the Dotytron, who promptly got "sick" at the end of last week but I think it was more likely that he was suffering the ill effects of carb withdrawal.  Anyway, we ended up eating meals like these:

A curried butternut squash red lentil soup (from the freezer) with a big salad of roasted Brussels sprouts, apple, celery root, bacon, hazelnuts, and shaved pecorino in a remoulade type dressing.  The salad was really good.  We still felt hollow inside.

Baked maple squash, roasted pork and merguez sausages and a "mash" of cauliflower, celery root, and sunchokes.  This was also delicious.  We still felt hollow inside.

I guess our "action items" from this terrible and half-arsed experiment is that we don't necessarily need carbs to complete a meal (even though they are delicious) and should be mindful of how many carbs we generally consume in a day.  Maybe.  But probably not.  

This past weekend was reasonably chill.  We hung with SMckay and Lolly and watched Who's the Boss and the aunties soothed the babies to sleep with a rendition of Stay by Lisa Loeb.  We also watched the new Flowers in the Attic trailer a million times and read the plot synopses and were thoroughly scandalized.  I had the Big Yam's buddy over for to play where I basically used them as free labour and made them rake and bag frozen piles of wet, slushy leaves with the promise of hot chocolate as the enticement.  The Big Yam has a buddy named Felix who is a year younger than him (just turned 2!) but they are so sweet together.  They hug each other like, constantly.  When they put their winter coats on: hug; when they come inside: hug; when they transition to playing with something new: hug.  It's pretty cute.  They have a special connection - their temperaments are very similar and they're both sweet, quiet, and pretty easy going, all things considered.

On Sunday I took the Big Yam to this model train club in Scarborough that was having an Open House where they run the trains.  The Big Yam loved it, even though it's basically just a giant cement bunker that these dudes have rented out and rigged up.  It was very bare bones.  I'm also 99% sure that everyone there was on the autism spectrum.  They also don't do a great job of "selling" it.  WAY TOO MANY FACTS ABOUT TRAINS CIRCA 1948, GUYS.  I guess the interest of the club members is historical accuracy and not so much broadening the fan base.  They could definitely use some PR help.  Let's capitalize on some of those train puns!  There was an old dude who was wearing a trucker hat with pictures of train crossing signals that lit up and the slogan: "One Track Mind" (get it?)  I actually think we need more of that and less talking your ear off about who manufactured what train and what the painting specs were.  But that's just me.  WHAT DO I KNOW.  

The Big Yam is pretty hilarious right now.  He's gotten into this thing where if he disagrees with you, he uses "no" as a place holder until he can tell you what he really wants.  It's pretty cute though kind of Aspberger-y.  Like, I'll say, "You can't watch that movie right now," and he'll stammer, "No no no no no no no no no...but Baba said I could!"  He also likes to say that he's "more hungry" apropos of nothing when he sees something he likes to eat, like if we pass by a tray of cookies at the grocery store.  "But Mama, I'm more hungry..."  

Then there's this:

How cute is it that my kid is into Mary Poppins?!  Pretty darned cute, I tells you.  The Dotytron watched How To Train A Dragon last weekend and the Big Yam was so scared but really trying to face his fears on his own terms.  He basically sat on one of the topmost steps on our staircase and "watched" it from there, peppering the Dotytron with questions the whole time.  He wouldn't come any closer.  It was pretty freakin' adorable.  I know he will eventually, but his innocence is so charming right now.  Like, all he wants to do is quietly "read" from his Robert Munsch collection, bare-bummed, by himself.  This stage where he can occupy himself for long stretches with quiet activity is kind of the best.  I never thought we'd get here, but now he'll totally just hang out in his bedroom, flipping through the pages of one of his books.  He LOVES "Wobert Munsth."  In his own words: "I love Wobert Munsth.  I do.  I weally weally do."  !!!!!

Then there's the Wonder Twins.  Prof. Gantok rolled from front to back last Saturday for the first time.  He was doing tummy time on the playmat, looked over, saw that the Great Gazoo was already on his back, realized that was an option and just went for it.  The Great Gazoo pretty much rolls onto his back any time you put him in tummy time.  Like, as you're putting him down on his front he's already tucking his shoulder under to roll onto his nice, cozy flat spot.  The Great Gazoo has also found his voice recently and it appears as though his voice is equal parts Mogwai and baby dinosaur.  This is him "cooing":

This also happened:

I feel like they look really alike, here?

This Lindsay Lou-Lou expression kills me.  This photo kills me.  That look!  Those toes splayed out!  That Run DMC shirt!  

All over their hand-holding lately.

More low-carb times: braised brisket (from December of last year!  It was still delicious!), slaw, and baked beans I also pulled from the freezer

Korean jap chae and marinated flank steak

Fin.

I Dreamed A Dream

My dreams are usually distressingly pedestrian and easy to interpret.  Like, I'll have a dream that my brother, Bruce Wayne, is trying to "sell" me cell phones that he probably got for free that are two generations behind with dubious battery life.  Because it's awesome making money off your blood relatives?  Then, when I ask him if he'd give me a refund on said phone if I find that the battery life is just as crappy as my current phone I'm looking to replace, he'll say something like, "No. If you were to buy the phones privately, you wouldn't get terms like that."  WHICH IS SO NICE AND CUDDLY AND ISN'T HE THE SWEETEST, MOST GENEROUS PERSON, OMG HE'S THE BESSSSSSST!!!

Wait.  That's really happening.  Let it be put on the record that in my family, somehow, I'm known as the cheap and selfish one.

The other night I had a dream that I broke up (amicably) with the Dotytron and had started dating Loki from the Thor movies.  Who looks like this, by the way:

A-mazing.  In a dream storyline ripped straight from Friday Night Lights, the Dotytron had started dating a pretty Mexican girl.  Even though the break-up was friendly and I was on good terms with the Dotytron and didn't wish him any ill will, in a page ripped straight from my damned self, dream me was still petty enough to call immigration on the Dotyron's new girlfriend and get her deported.  LOL!  I'M THE WORST (Dotytron, when I told him about the dream: "So, you're literally DATING A GOD, but you were still psycho enough to call immigration on my girlfriend?")  Then, I was hanging with my work girls MHui and G and we were getting all hyphy in  the back of a cab on the way to a New Year's Eve party wearing homemade white t-shirts with Animal from the Muppets' face printed on them.  Finally, Loki was going to meet us there because he lived in a rural area and was waiting to get a lift from his parents.

So good.

Fin.

Friendsgiving

This past Sunday was our 12 year anniversary.  We didn't get to celebrate or mark the occasion in any way on account of the whole, "Our Lives Are Crazy Because We Have Three Kids, Two Of Whom Are 5 Month Old Twins" thing we're trying on for size over here.  

Our neighbours were nice enough to invite the Big Yam over on Friday for a pajamas/pizza/movie party with some of the other rugrats and so, faced with a night (well, 2 hours) with "only" the babies with us, we had big plans to go out to eat at a nice restaurant and have some one-on-one time (technically, two-on-two).  I was all heart set on going to Kingyo Izakaya because I've been craving Japanese food and I love izakayas and I also knew that the place was spacious enough for two babies not to be a big deal there (unlike Guu), but I left things too last minute and they were all booked up.  I tried a few other restaurants but in the end, I had been so into the idea of re-trying Kingyo that anything else didn't measure up and all the ideal candidates were booked up solid anyway.  So we got takeout from Pizzeria Libretto and moved the coffee table (currently a landing spot for cloth diapers and cloth diapering accoutrements) into the living room and lit candles and ate pizza to the melodious sounds of two wailing babies.  It was fun? Maybe?

I had been dealing with maybe 2 or 3 nights with interrupted sleep, totalling only 5 hours or so and when we went to bed, I was spiralling into a massive, sleep-deprived, existential crisis depression/mortality moment.  I felt a huge ball of anxiety in the middle of my chest and was basically unburdening myself to the Dotytron to the tune of such cheery and romantic numbers as: "What's the point? We're all going to get cancer and die anyway."  "I don't want to die young." "What's the meaning of living." "I'm scared of dying." It was pretty grim.  The Dotytron was trying his best - really, he should have gotten a medal of valour for how hard he was trying to diffuse the situation, "Well, worrying about dying isn't productive," etc., etc., but I was not to be dissuaded!  (I had also made the mistake during the day of clicking on a Facebook thing of this photo essay this guy took of his partner who died from breast cancer.)  Me: "I've been feeling like this for a long time.  Maybe I'm having depression?  Should I go see a therapist?" The Dotytron, "Seeing as how this is the first I've heard of this, I'm pretty sure you haven't felt like this in a long time, why don't you sleep on it." 

So I did.  He let me sleep in the next morning and I basically bounded out of bed with all Nietzschean thoughts dispelled, replaced with thoughts of croissants and soft-scrambled eggs.  

The long and short of this is: SLEEP DEPRIVATION IS FOR REAL, PEOPLE.  IT IS NO JOKE. 

I mean, I also told the Dotytron (patronizingly) that "precautious" is not a word and that, "I think you mean 'precocious.'"

In all seriousness though, I wasn't at my best all Friday.  I made the ill-advised and overly ambitious decision to pack up all three kids and take them to the Royal Agricultural Fair - in the words of famed prostitute-with-the-heart-of-gold Vivian from Pretty Woman when she returns triumphantly to the Beverly Hills boutique with cash in hand and is told that the salespeople don't get commission: "Big mistake. Big mistake. Huge."  So - little sleep the previous nights + 3 kids + Royal Winter Fair = s**tshow of epic proportions.  It's loud! It's busy! It's expensive! It's full of dirty livestock that are vectors of disease!  There's nowhere to sit and it's not all that kid friendly!  It was the worst.  

So we stayed for about an hour and a half and returned home defeated (me) and buzzing with funnel-cake-derived energy (the Big Yam).  Then I did something I'm not proud of, and that haunted me for the rest of the weekend, and still kind of does today.  The Big Yam was all up in my face all day and was ornery and fractious.  I was finally spent, staring at the clock and waiting for the Dotytron to come home and relieve me.  I finally had a bit of quiet time and was lying with the Great Gazoo on the couch, breathing in his sweet baby smell and trying to catnap and the Big Yam (who also has a cold) was just ON ME.  Climbing all over me, trying to poke at his little brother, kicking, being gross.  I repeatedly told him not to and tried to distract him, discipline him, get him to stop, but he wouldn't.  And after one too many times, I said, "STOP. IT." and shoved him off of me and he stumbled off the couch.  I felt (feel) awful about it.  I mean, I'm an adult.  He's a kid.  It's not up to him to learn to control his anger, it's up to me.  I gave myself a hard time about it all day and still replay in my head the image of him half-falling/stumbling off the couch and his accompanying cry of distress.  I've got a lot of self-disgust for that moment.

My deadbeat dad was a physical disciplinarian.  So were some of the nannies I had when I was younger.  I've always thought, "well, I turned out okay" and while we never incorporate physical discipline into our parenting style, I don't necessarily think the odd spank is worthy of a call to CAS.  I know how I felt when I pushed him off of me though, and I know that for me, the general ickiness of that feeling is enough to make me want to try to never give in to that impulse.  For us, it just feels wrong.  There have been times when we've had to physically restrain the Big Yam when he's in time out and lashing out at us, and even that feels wrong.  I get it.  Believe me, I do.  There are times when the Big Yam is so aggravating that I want to lay him out (and there are times when I've whispered or muttered as much under my breath), but the Dotytron articulated it best - when you use physical force against a child, the "ickiness" you feel comes from how unfair it is.  You can easily physically outpower them - it's not an exchange that's happening on equal footing.  I think for me, it's also taking the easy way out and I don't really think it accomplishes anything.  No eff the Big Yam can be willful and aggravating and easily frustrated - those are all traits he gets from me.  It troubles me that for all that I tell myself that I'm a reasonably mature, rational being, that I can allow a 3 year old soul to get me riled up to the point where I am capable of entertaining that degree of control loss.  

If I'm being completely honest, when I think back on times where I'm in the discipline spiral where I allow the Big Yam to goad me and I get into the 3rd or 4th "this is your last warning!" or start getting into the irrational spiral of "I'M GOING TO TAKE EVERYTHING YOU POSSESS AWAY ONE BY ONE!" or even reactionary shouty, that also feels icky.  Ultimately, I don't think that mode of being is effective, models good behavior, or has the desired result.  We just end up feeding on each other's heightened energies to the point where we're both in an unreachable, intractable place.  If I were to really examine the effective modes of discipline, I would say that - ignoring, rationalizing, staying calm, fireside chats, and the odd time out with appropriate displays of hugs and affection interspersed when needed are the ones that yield the best results.

I can't undo what happened last Friday.  I can feel guilty about it and I will, but that's not productive either.  What is useful is trying to remember the icky feeling and channelling that into better control, so that I can curb reactionary irrationalism in myself at the same time as I'm trying to teach my kids to do the same.

The long and short of it still is, though: SLEEP DEPRIVATION IS FOR REAL, PEOPLE.  IT IS NO JOKE. 

Saturday we had a lovely visit with R & R and baby M who has the longest lashes of any baby I've ever seen and who is in that babbling stage that I find so hilarious.  Sunday we our actual anniversary and we celebrated with a Friendsgiving dinner with Supper Club and the Discerning Coyote and GF who somehow ended up meeting some Markhamites through their design work and now we have friends in common.  There were 18 people there?  It was a combined effort that yielded much in the way of deliciousness.  So good to see all those folks.

The best was that our friends R & P, brought their son D who is 4 months older than the Big Yam.  He and the Big Yam were "sharing" the iPad most of the evening on the couch while we sat around the table and ate.  At one point, we went around and everyone said what they were thankful for.  We all sat silent while D's mom explained the question, and watched as he thought of a response.  "What are you thankful for, D?  What do you love?"  He thought for a long moment, then his eyes brightened, he pointed at the Big Yam, and said, "COLON!"  LOL!!!  Never not funny!  He a) thought the Big Yam's name was Colin, and then, b) called him Colon instead.  So good!

Here are some random snaps to make up the rest of the post:

Great Gazoo looking increasingly like a weird, old man and Prof. Gantok looking like a plumped up chubalub

Just chillin' - I feel like this is a window into their future selves - Prof. Gantok will be the fat, protective one and keep tabs on his nebbishy twin brother

Epic train track times

5 month pics.  Getting pretty upset that next month they'll be 6 months old!  NOT ALLOWED TO HAPPEN!

Prof. Gantok's current thing is making a fist and staring intently at it for minutes on end.  It's pretty darned cute.  Junior revolutionary.

When you raise a girl on mostly non-suburban white people food, she ends up with cravings for Campbell's soup can recipe tuna noodle casserole

Venison stew with venison hearts and a sunchoke/yukon mash

I had my friends from the old Canoe days over and made them a delicate squash, sage, bacon & cheddar quiche and a really bitter kale salad.  Hot tip that I learned from my cook friend: late season kale tends to be kind of tough and bitter, so if you want to use it in a salad, you should massage the cut leaves with lemon and garlic to help macerate them a bit and break down.

A freezer meal of frozen chorizo, bean & corn chilaquiles mix with some leftover pozole - served without eggs and with pozole fixin's: shredded cabbage, sliced radish, guacamole, broken tostadas

I made these to go with a mat leave ladies lunch I hosted yesterday - they're brown butter almond-hazelnut financiers.  SO. FREAKIN. GOOD.  I'm obsessed!!!  They're like a cross between a chewy macaroon and a nut cookie, but all jumped up with the caramel notes from brown butter.  

Will post the recipe below.

Fin.

--------------------------------------------------------------

Brown Butter Financiers

makes approximately 40

adapted from Bon Appetit

12 T. unsalted butter

1 c. sliced almonds, toasted in the oven until lightly golden (or, what I did: 1/2 c. almonds, toasted and 1/2 c. hazelnuts, toasted and skinned, or 1 c. hazelnuts, toasted and skinned)

1/2 c. all purpose flour

1 1/2 c. confectioner's sugar

5 large egg whites

1/2 t. salt

- put the butter in a saucepan and cook over medium heat until the foam subsides and butter smells nutty and is a deep golden brown (do not let burn!)  Take off the heat and set aside, stirring and scraping up the browned bits from the bottom of the pan

- process the nuts with the flour in a food processor until finely ground.  Add the confectioner's sugar and pulse until the sugar is evenly incorporated.

- whisk the egg whites to loosen in a bowl and stir in the nut mixture, then fold (I just stirred) in the browned butter and salt

- spray two mini-muffin tins with cooking spray.  Put a heaping tablespoon of dough in each mini muffin cup and bake the financiers in a preheated 375F oven 15-20 minutes or until golden brown.  Let cool in the pan for 10 minutes, and then remove from the pan to finish cooling on a plate or rack.  Serve warm or at room temperature.

You could also fold in some berries or chopped fresh cherries into the batter, but I prefer them straight up like this.  

They See Me Rollin'

Big tings a gwan - the Great Gazoo learned how to flip himself from front to back today!  Meanwhile, Lindsay up there is too busy being a fatso to bother working on his muscle tone.  We started calling Prof. Gantok Lindsay this past weekend and now it makes me laugh so much I can't stop.  The etymology goes something like this: we call him Lenny, which sometimes gets turned into Lenny the Lighthouse (a character from a story), which then got turned into Lindsay the Lighthouse, and has now been shortened to Lindsay.  I'm semi-jokingly actively campaigning to have a future daughter baby (because I'm the baby craziest of all baby crazies?!) and so the Dotytron is trying to head me off at the pass by telling me that I should just consider Lindsay/Lenny my daughter.

The Big Yam finally cottoned on to the real spirit of Halloween this year and took trick-or-treating very seriously.  At first, he wanted me to come to the doors with him, but about 10 houses in, I was getting the stop-hand at the sidewalk, and a stern, "No Mama, you stay there."  He would have kept going on and on and on, but the rain was killing my horny so I steered us home.  We had the Big Yam sort the candy (with some debate on the classification of Tootsie Rolls - chocolate or candy?), awarded the prize for "best house" (the one that gave out McDonald's coupons for free fries and free apple pies), and then the Dotytron proceeded to raid the bucket as soon as the Big Yam went to bed.

So here's a question for you: have you ever heard of Mike and Ike?

Apparently I'm the only person in Canada who hasn't?  The Dotytron gave me a look of incredulous disgust when I picked up the packet and was like, "Mike and Ike? What's that?" Then, when I said, "I'm not a fan of Aero" and began explaining why, the Dotytron cut me of with an abrupt: "Nobody cares what you think about candy. You're ignorant and you're a blasphemer."  LOL!

Kinda slept on Dia de los Muertos this year - I got my act together enough to make pozole

A hot tip from my RMT has yielded my current favorite croissants - they're baked by Epi Breads and they're huge!!!  Love them.  Not quite as flavorful as Bonjour Brioche's but they're so big!

Hidden beauty of Toronto - Taylor Creek, a tributary of the Don River. This was taken just before we dropped our camera and the Big Yam peed his pants and had to walk back in pee-soaked shoes.  

We had a lovely, lovely weekend.  Friday night posole rojo, Saturday hangs with SMcKay featuring a phallically themed evening of Fancy Franks and watching that new showtime show Masters of Sex, and then Sunday we went for a walk to check out the fall colours through Taylor Creek Park and ended the day with a visit from Dr. Rei and Hanbo and takeout of the best Persian food - kebabs, rice, and salad.  Also, this happened:

I don't usually go for baby message t's - but I couldn't resist this one.  Awww, Lindsay!

This is actually a more tender moment than it appears to be - the Big Yam was giving the Great Gazoo kisses - even though it looks like he's being shut down with a classic,  throwback, "talk to the hand"

The Dotytron was initiated into this Trinidadian restaurant called Mona's Rotis in Scarborough.  2 LEGIT 2 QUIT, guys.  So, so good.  He brought it home for us for takeout tonight (it was a crazy day).  That's a goat roti, a chicken roti, and a double up there.  They obviously make their own hot sauce and their roti shells on site.  The spicing and flavour is spot-on.  We've finally found an alternative to our deep-Etobicoke roti go-to.  That plate up there makes me so, so happy.

We recently watched Star Trek: Into Darkness which gets a big, fat, "meh" from me.  I hate Chris Pine's glassy weirdo eyes and I'm not a Benedict Cumberbatch fan.  The best thing about this movie was discovering that the Dotytron apparently spends a not-insignificant amount of time riffing on the name "Benedict Cumberbatch".  Periodically throughout the movie, I'd hear him say, "Bend them back, you're a b***h" or "Cummerbund, Bake a Batch"  LOL!!!  I can see how he finds it fun.  It's such a weird, fantasy name.  Anyway, I'm not as big a JJ Abrams fan as I am a Joss Whedon fan.  JJ Abrams is a pretty nerdy sci-fi geek guy, but he lacks the insight into the human spirit/condition that Joss Whedon possesses.  Also, I don't find him as funny as Whedon.  Also, he's not as vocal a feminist.  

Way back in June, I read Caitlin Moran's How To Be A Woman for Academic Book Club.  It was part of a feminist-themed double-header with Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In.  This is a collection of essays by Moran, a British writer and radio/television personality, who is known for being a music writer and a self-deprecating, brassy, bold, sexually liberated frank lady.  The essays are kind of memoirish and follow a rough chronological trajectory that traces Moran's growing awareness of herself as a woman and a feminist.  It was quite refreshing and funny in spots, but also fell victim to a particular British-femme self-aware/self-congratulatory bawdiness that I wasn't a fan of.  She's quite likeable, but sometimes gets a little repetitive with her, "I'm just one of you ladies!" familiar self-deprecating tone.  One of the things I appreciated was how she talked about her sexual awakening and how, in the age of ready access to internet pornography made by men for men, the representations of sex are really quite narrow and geared only towards getting (heterosexual) guys off.  She's not anti-porn, but she's anti-hegemonic porn, which I can totally get behind.  Especially as a mother to three sons, it's important to me that I raise respectful, feminist males who are aware that women's sexual pleasure doesn't exist solely to support and in service of their own.  

This book was hugely controversial when it came out - as all articles/books/think pieces that discuss women/motherhood/career/balance seemingly are.  This and the Anne Marie Slaughter piece were grist for the "mommy/career war" mills to the nth degree.  I read it with an open mind and I didn't think it was worthy of the vitriole that was heaped on it.  Sandberg takes pains to attenuate her message - she acknowledges her class/race privilege, she doesn't try to say that her path is the path for everyone, and she's not (overtly) trying to hammer home a capitalist message.  Having said that, yes, Sandberg worked really hard but she doesn't really acknowledge the specific boosts that have given her an edge (like, having Larry Summers be your mentor and champion?).  I think that she has some important tips for women on how to navigate their career and stay in the game - one of the notable ones (for me) is that women tend to insist on being an expert on something and second-guess themselves for positions of authority/management, whereas men are more likely to sell themselves whether they have mastery of a subject or not.  I also liked her advice that you should view your career not as a ladder, but as a jungle gym - it's okay to make choices and moves that aren't linear.  She also stresses that at a certain point, your ability to learn things is more important for a job than having the exact skill set required in the position.  I did find myself guilty of some of the behaviors she points out preclude women from advancing in their careers - I'm such a giant ballbuster in my personal life but for some reason at work, I'm okay with taking on extra tasks without demanding the credit for them - stuff like that.  Also, the book is TINY - like, most of it is endnotes.  I don't think what she's saying is right for everyone.  But if you're criticizing her because she's not doing enough to fix the gender relations that have created the systems that place women in a second tier below men, that's not the project of this work.  She's not trying to dismantle the system, just point out ways in which women can work within it and still get what they want.  All that being said, she is EXTRAORDINARILY privileged (private jets! Larry Summers as your mentor! Headhunted by Mark Zuckerberg! Personal net worth of $1-1.6 billion!) and that's a jarring note underscoring the whole work.

Also, if you take the book at face value, she doesn't have a lot of fun, but I think it's because she knew that if she talked about how "work-life balance" included trips to the Maldives or private islands in Hawaii or having Sir Richard Branson on call as a babysitter it would be hugely problematic for the audience and undermine her "I can has career and so can you!" message.

My sister got me the latest Sarah Dessen book for my birthday.  Reading Sarah Dessen is a bit of a habit now, but one that I'm getting increasingly willing to break.  Her last 4 or so have been really ho-hum and not doing it for me.  It's just more of the same - girl at a crossroads, who learns a little about herself and her family over the course of a summer, with a boy along for the ride.  This one was very formulaic, the characters were non-entities, and it was just all around a snoozer.

Academic Book Club (I should really shorten that to "ABC"!) had me reading Crazy Rich Asians, which is a sudsy, summer read about the exploits of the uber-rich in East Asia.  I think it's supposed to be like a Judith Krantz-type Scruples but with subbing Hong Kong for Beverley Hills.  It follows a few rich Singaporean families and is supposed to be a dishy read.  Here's the thing: if you're going to do a Judith Krantz-type novel, IT BETTER BE AS GOOD AS JUDITH KRANTZ!  Judith Krantz, Jackie Collins and the like are all about doing flashy, Dynasty-style, super-fun beachy reads full of scandalous exploits like: drugs! sex! murder! double-crossing! all while name-dropping the playthings of the richest of the rich (it's a little dated now, since the references are to like, Halston and like, Bill Blass, but you get a sense of the swaggy 80s excessiveness of it all just from those names alone).  First of all, Kwan is not nearly the writer that those other ladies are.  SO. MUCH. EXPOSITION!  And so clumsily written!  The key to good exposition is not making the reader realize that you're doing it.  As opposed to having characters say to each other, "Ai-ya! You know how obsessive we Singaporeans are about food!  Why, we can argue about which hawker stall has the best egg custard tarts for days!"  SHOW ME, DON'T TELL ME.  It was a fun enough and breezy enough read and perfectly suited to the mind-fuzz that accompanied the first few months after the Wonder Twins were born, but I wanted more from it.  What I did enjoy was how he got some of the cultural stuff right - like the snobbery against Mainland Chinese people, and how cheap some of the richest people can be, and how into knock-offs - and hearing about the Hong Kong locations made me nostalgic for my time there.  I want to go back so bad!

The ABC ladies went apeshiz for this collection of short stories but I wasn't feeling it.  You know when you read/see a short story or film that's full of pregnant pauses about the mundane (in this case, stuff like: a couple preparing for a dinner party, a student caught cheating on an essay), and you're like, I know I'm supposed to be getting something Deep And Important from this, but I'm not sure what that is (if anything?)  This was one of those.  At the end of each story I was like, ooookaaaayyy.  If I took the stories at face value, it was like, nothing happened!  So I ended up racking my brain trying to parse the subtext, only to be told by my ABC ladies that I was probably "reading too much into it."  I didn't get it.  The quote on the book cover there likens this collection to Alice Munro and we're reading her next, so I anticipate a lot more head-scratching from me.  I'm a cultural studies/English major, people.  I need my deconstruction!

The 5th Wave is solid dystopian YA.  The backdrop is an alien invasion that wipes out most of earth's inhabitants.  Now, I say that, and you're already rolling your eyes getting bogged down by the set-up and the dystopian-ness of it all.  However, Yancey grounds the narrative through the eyes of teenage female protagonist who isn't as steely or as headcase-y as Katniss Everdeen but kind of more like a regular teenaged girl with some normal teenage girl problems living in an extraordinary time.  I really dug this book.  It was a gripping read and there was a satisfying two-boy love triangle at work and there was enough action an suspense to keep me invested.  I'm excited that this is going to be a trilogy.

Reconstructing Amelia clearly got greenlit based on the success of Gone Girl.  This is like Gone Girl lite.  Kate, a busy lawyer with a few skeletons in the closet tries to find out what actually happened to her daughter Amelia the day she allegedly committed suicide by jumping to her death from the roof of her private school.  The story is "reconstructed" through texts and Facebook status and Kate's investigation and it all unspools in a kind of clunky, amateurish fashion.  The denouement is highly anti-climatic and unbelievable.  Gone Girl does a good job in keeping the reader invested through changing points of view culminating in a surprise reveal, whereas this was just like a slightly modernized Murder, She Wrote episode.

Do not read Tangles if you're not prepared to be thoroughly depressed at how cruel life can be.  Sarah Leavitt's graphic memoir details her mom's diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer's and the effects of her mom's rapid decline and subsequent death on Leavitt and her family. This is grim, harrowing stuff.  Alzheimer's is a mean, mean disease - one that robs you of all the intimacies that make you yourself.  The simple, sketchy line drawings that illustrate this memoir mimic the scribbly, incomplete, and transitory nature of a person with Alzheimer's and the nature of memory itself.  This was almost unbearably sad and left me up a few nights thinking about how we really need some kind of compassionate termination-of-life options to give dignity to those who are dying (see, I told you: depressing!)  

That just about catches me up!

Fin.