You Actually Can Teach An Old Dog New Tricks...

...as it turns out.

Did I ever tell you guys about my fantasy career as a food stylist/researcher for television shows?  The genesis of this idea came about 2-3 years ago, when the Dotytron and I started our brief (too much Claire Danes ugly crying and CRAZYEYES) dalliance with Homeland.  There was an episode in the first season when she goes to her sister's house where Danes' dad (who also deals with mental illness) is staying after a recent trip to a psychiatric institution.  He offers to make her a turkey sandwich, and at that point, my suspension of disbelief was severed.  I went on a long rant about how NO ONE EVER EATS A TURKEY SANDWICH, and how implausible it was (he basically just slapped some sliced deli turkey between two slices of bread and called it a day) and how shows needed someone like ME to consult on how PEOPLE ACTUALLY ATE.  Other subsequent shows have triggered a similar response.  I haven't eaten a ham or turkey cold cut sandwich since I was in grade 5.

Cut to me, last week, at my friend K's house.  We had tried to get takeout but nothing was open so she graciously served me a a turkey sandwich, on whole wheat, with lettuce, tomato, mayo and sliced havarti, and GOD DAMN IF IT WASN'T THE BEST THING I'VE EATEN IN FOREVER.  I'm literally thinking of ways that I can add a sliced turkey sandwich into my weeknight meal plan, and the Dotytron has given me mad side eye because I don't think he can quite believe the turnaround.

People are capable of change.  It's a beautiful thing.

Last week I had the opportunity to visit the mock reactor at Darlington which was hella cool.  A bunch of us from work went and it was the best work field trip of all time.  Hands down.  My job is so cool.  I didn't have to pretend to be interested once!  Haha.  As it turns out, I also fundamentally misunderstood nuclear energy.  I thought the fission generated heat that was captured.  I didn't realize there was the intermediary step of the heat being necessary to generate steam which in turn gets the turbines moving.  I always thought the water needs were to cool the reactor, but not also as a component of the energy generation process.  This lead me down a rabbit hole of reading up on Fukushima and Chernobyl, and remembering the stories during Fukushima of the Japanese government asking single, old people to volunteer to help clean up the reactor and how that was so moving at the time, but now that I had something tangible to hang my feelings on, was even more poignant in retrospect.

One half of a scale recreation of a reactor

The other day I was walking somewhere with the Big Yam and we stopped to smell some flowers (literally), and he said, "These flowers smell damn good."  I was like, "Ummm...you're not allowed to say that."  I think we can chalk that down to reverberations from letting him watch Jurassic World on repeat.  The other night at dinner he asked us if we knew what "capiche" meant.  His kindergarten teacher says it to him.  It's quite cute seeing an almost-five-year-old say "capiche," let me tell you.

Otherwise, we've had a bit of a busy week (aren't they all?), and this is even BEFORE our programming starts in a couple of week.  One of the neighbour ladies was asking about art classes for her daughter, who is also five, and then I started remembering how most of the kids I know are in organized (not city parks and recreation offered) sports and I started spiraling about how reasonable people are supposed to manage all this programming?  We have the Big Yam in Chinese school on weekends, followed by a math class (because we are monsters), and then we're putting him in swimming and gymnastics, because the Dotytron believes it's important for kids to learn basic coordination and how to tumble and stuff.  We also have him doing piano lessons, at our house, thankfully.  I'm willing to pay a premium for someone to do piano lessons in my own home.  This is him killing the more pensive theme from Jurassic World:

Anyway, just thinking about that series of activities for just ONE of my three children and thinking about what would happen when we have all three in something made me blow a gasket and I had to have Dr. Rei talk me down from the ledge.  I have peeps asking me about what soccer club I prefer and I know people who have their kid in a different organized sport (or 2!) a season and I was freaking out because, as with all things parenting, you're wondering if you're IRREVOCABLY DAMAGING YOUR CHILD by not having them do what a million other whack-a-moles are doing.  Like, I have people asking which art studio they should send their five year old to!  Then Dr. Rei reminded me that kids get good at art by sitting their butts down and drawing and I flashed back to my own experience being a creative, artsy kid, and I was like, oh yeah.  I made pop up books out of printer paper and toilet paper tubes.  I was fine.  It's all gonna be okay.

I do have a tendency to get whipped into a froth when it comes to parenting stuff and then regain perspective.  The twins are in this mode where they cry themselves to sleep. EVERY NIGHT.  It basically started after we came back from camping.  Something about us all being in the tent together finally triggered the need to experience the awesomeness that is sleeping in your parents bed and it's been a bitter pill for them to swallow that they can't do that every night.  No matter how quiet it is, now matter how drowsy they are, no matter how many times I kiss their hands and their feet (somewhere along the way, I got into this routine where they proffer me a papal-like palm and I kiss it and then I kiss the soles of their feet - also papal - and now part of the bedtime routine is me scrabbling from toddler bed to crib, kissing alternating proffered palms/soles), there is an inevitable chorus of wailing that starts up as soon as I click the door shut.  I don't know what it is, but I know it won't (can't) last.

It sucks because it mars what is otherwise a very sweet time of the day.  There is something that I hope I'm imprinting on these unformed little nuggets,  I want that hazy feeling of their little bodies giving way to sleep, the feel of my hand smoothing their hair to the side, the rhythm of their eyes falling just a little heavier shut with each pass, attempting to cling to consciousness so that they might hear my whispered affirmations of love but feeling so secure and enveloped by the coziness to be okay with giving up to slumber - I want all of that deeply embedded in their subconscious.  I want them to be able to remember that feeling of security.  Mostly so that when I am old and infirm, they will do the same for me, and not begrudge me a single minute.

Just when you get your kids under control, you end up having to look after your doddering parents and they are so out of touch and out of it that it really does feel like a thankless task.  Dr. Rei and I have marveled at this before.  You love your parents, but not nearly as much as you love your kids, and the grand tragedy is that THEY WILL NEVER KNOW AND WILL NEVER UNDERSTAND the depth and breadth of your love for them.  It's tragic.  It's why looking after your parents who can't figure out simple technology is so frustrating (but seriously.  YOU USE A COMPUTER EVERY DAY AT WORK, DO YOU NOT?!?).  That moment where you felt you could sleep because you were safe and secure in the cradle of your parents' love is inaccessible to you as an adult.

                    

I checked The Brief Thief out of the library for the Big Yam.  I tend to do that to test out stories before making a permanent investment in our distended collection of children's books.  I didn't know anything about this, other than the fact that it has been generating "buzz" and has been circulating on the lists.  Ultimately, this is a story about a chameleon, who uses a pair underpants he finds conveniently hanging on a tree to wipe his butt after a poo, and then is bullied by his conscience into doing the right thing (washing them thoroughly and returning them).  There's a funny surprise ending and because it comes right out and uses the word "poo" is obviously a HUGE hit with the under-65 set.  I would recommend this.  It is also a good starting point for launching a conversation about a person's conscience.  Although, if your kid is anything like the Big Yam, the conversation will go something like this:

Me: "Blah blah blah, describe a conscience, blah blah.  Do YOU have a conscience?"

Big Yam: "No."

Me: "Are you sure?  You know when you do something wrong and then you feel sorry, or you know that what you did wasn't the right thing?  That's your conscience."

*pause*

Big Yam: "Oh yeah!  I do!"

Me: *gratified*

Big Yam: "YOU'RE my conscience!"

Me: *smh*

LOL!  This conversation came at a very opportune time.  Our caregiver randomly spilled the beans the other day that the Big Yam has been teeing up his brothers and hitting her and acting up like crazy (spitting, kicking) when he doesn't get his way with her.  So we had to have a big sit down with her and figure out a game plan and give her some tools to cope and discipline because she's not very adept with that kind of stuff.  I was mortified because he's apparently been doing this at school and I can't imagine what the other parents think of us.  

Anyway, we set up a chart and laid out some ground rules.  If he doesn't hit/kick/act violent or misbehave in a noticeable way (like, these have to be indictable offenses), then he gets a smiley face and accruing 4 consecutive smiley faces means he gets to watch something that he wants that's a bit more sophisticated than our usual fare (which lately has consisted of Wonder Twin-appropriate programming like, nature documentaries, Cinderella, and the Halloween episode of Yo Gabba Gabba).

When you implement a system of reward-based discipline like this, it's important to do a few things:

1) make the increments easily attainable.  Don't set this impossibly high bar/time frame: "You have to do X, Y, Z for a whole month or else!"  Kids' sense time on a whole different level and if it's too stretched out, you lose the immediacy of the reward.

2) don't turn the reward system into a catch-all for any and all bad behaviour.  It has to be tied to one discrete thing you're trying to correct.  Like, if it's about not hitting, keep it to that.  If you start throwing everything under the sun under the umbrella (talking back, having to be asked more than once to do something, showing their frustration in a different, but equally annoying way), then a) they're never going to get their reward, and b) you're not adhering to the rules of the system you've established, which is demoralizing for the kid and they lose the drive

3) you've heard this a million times before, but it's a lot easier (and more fun) to reward and praise good behaviour, than to come down on them for the bad stuff.  They're just trying to make it in this workaday world, just like we are.  It's employee engagement,  man.  I am way more motivated when I'm not being micromanaged and when my boss shows they value my effort and work, even if I might have mangled the final product - same goes for your kids.

This post has been a week and a half in the making, so I'll end this here.  

Stay tuned for: What I've eaten! Quilts!  How I am fed up with casual racism!  How I'm over white women (related to the previous)!  How I loathe the lack of original content on Facebook!  My thoughts on problematic hyper-masculinity in Straight Outta Compton and Narcos!  How I accepted a new job!  What I'm reading!  Big Yam school drama!  And more more more!

Fin.

Running the Gauntlet

What a week.

It's cool and drizzly out and I can't tell you how much I'm loving the Saturday we've had so far.  We were under the impression that the Big Yam was starting Chinese school so we hauled a** to get out of the house and to the school in time, only to find that the mad scramble was in vain and we were a week early.  Is there anything worse, when you're a parent, than a mad scramble for naught?  Not really.  So much wasted coordination and energy.

Faced with an unexpectedly free Saturday, we did our grocery shopping, hung around in the park, then we had quiet time and I started Roxane Gay's already-excellent Bad Feminist and died a few deaths at how good it is (to give you an idea of JUSTHOWVERYGOODITIS I'm only halfway through the introduction).  The heat has broken, it is easy to believe that we're slowly slouching into fall, and the rain means that you don't feel guilty for cozying up at home.  The best thing about fall and winter is cozying up at home.  Luxuriating in your home and your family.

I wasn't one of those kids who imagined what my adult life would be like.  Like, I had lofty goals about maybe being a writer, or an academic, or a perhaps some high-powered 80s lady, but the idea of having a family of my own didn't register.  Remember: for a long, long time, I didn't think I was going to have kids.  I associated having kids with some kind of betrayal of radical feminism.  When we decided to start a family, I still didn't spend time trying to picture what that might be like.  I never imagined how much I would covet and enjoy an insular weekend afternoon spent with my own family.  How an open afternoon with nothing pressing to do, perhaps making dinner, definitely lying on the couch reading while my boys careened around me, would be so fulfilling.   How I could so enjoy seeing just these 4 faces engaged in the mundane.

Edit: fast-forward to Monday evening - I reveled so much in my free afternoon that I abandoned blogging

Summer ended in a roar of activity and culminated in last week's insanity.  We hit summer, HARD, and we're wringing out every last drop of goodness.  We went to the CNE, we went to the beach, had one more glorious swim in the outdoor pool, and hit up some nature walks with some of the people we love best.

 These two photos make me laugh because you can see various stages of Quincess trying to scale that log.  He's trying so hard!

Big Yam didn't want to sit in the front because he wasn't sure how he would "drive" this thing

School started last week and chaos of the first day was given a thematic supporting assist from some truly hellish weather.  I dropped the Big Yam off at his new school and it was hot, humid, muggy, oppressive.  His new school made the tactical error of letting the parents into the kindergarten area to drop off their kids which obviously resulted in a smaller-scale recreation of that Civil War scene from Gone With the Wind.  There were people strewn about the halls, widespread pandemonium, tears.  The Big Yam had been on board with me up to that point but when he walked into his classroom, he went AWOL on me.  Flipped right out.  I tried everything.  I spoke calmly, I was upbeat, I tried distractions.  He was having none of it.  Finally, I had to do something I'm not proud of - which was to shame him into snapping into it.  "I've been very nice and calm with you up to now, and you're leaving me no choice.  I'm going to have to get stern with you and cross.  Do you want me to get stern and cross in front of all your new friends?"  I re-live that moment and squirm inside every time.  But you know what?  IT F**KING WORKED, okay?  And there's a small part of me that doesn't regret the fact that I was able to deposit my kid in the system and get to work *only* an hour late.  You do what you gotta do, desperate times, etc., etc.

  

 This guy's ridiculous, crooked-mouth, old man, elvish face kills me

Sunday we intended to do a hike in the Rouge Valley Conservation area, but it was raining so we skipped to the city's first ever Kothu fest.  We picked up Kothu and supplemented with Babu for the kids.  It was a bit of a bust, but we wanted to show our support for kothu and Scarborough.

Also, every other day since then has been beyond fine.  He's found himself some homies, he's adjusting well, this new school - first day tactical error notwithstanding - has been head and shoulders above the previous one.  They just have their s**t together and are inspiring a great deal of confidence in us.  We're happy with the transition over all.

I mean, it probably wasn't helped by the fact that  I had three consecutive interviews last week.  By the time the week ended we were all DONE.  So the lazy Saturday described above was exactly the reset we needed.

I'm hoping that one of those interviews results in something, but even if it doesn't, I'm happy with my current job, I'm happy with my home position - so I think I'm in a pretty good spot, overall.  All the preparation and work that went into the interview process was harrowing, but it's behind me, and I think I know better now than to sign up for back-to-back-to-back interviews again.  Although knowing me, and the my masochistic need to put myself in the line of fire, I wouldn't put it past me.

Every day, I come home from work, put away my bike, take off my shoes and bag and put the finishing touches on dinner.  Within 10-15 minutes of me being home, the Wonder Twins cotton on to the fact that I'm in the building, and they clamber up the stairs and I get this exact same greeting:

Every. Single. Day.  "Hi, mama."  It kills me.

We started watching the new Netflix series, Narcos on the weekend and blew through 6 episodes.  I didn't think I'd like it.  I'm only so-so into drug movies.  They can get kind of repetitive after a while - the tropes, the delivery.  This series has a killer first episode, but I do recall wondering how they were going to sustain it for 9 more.  For me, they don't do a good job of delivering.  This is "history comes to life" type of watching.  It relies on some narrative clichés and some clunky exposition, but it's anchored by a compelling score and charismatic performances.  Like, how do I end up having the hots for Pablo Escobar?  Granted, he's a bawss.  But he's also a really, really, really bad person?  That does terrible, terrible things?  Yet when you watch him, as embodied by Wagner Moura, you can see how you fall under his thrall.  It's good for watching while you're knitting (*raises hand*), but I only half pay attention.

Quincess has been using the placeholder, "Ummm..." before he answers a question.  It's friggin' adorable.  Lindsay doesn't have time for placeholders, because he's too busy aiming at my head with a baseball bat and saying, "shoot mama?" "No, we don't shoot people."  "Shoot baba?" (and so on, until we go through the entire list of everyone he knows, who he's NOT allowed to shoot), or trying to wrestle a giant couch cushion, UP the stairs.  

End of summer means blueberry pudding cake.  Blueberry pudding cake means blueberry pudding cake and whipped cream breakfasts, with a boiled egg for respectability.

Smitten's hazlenut plum tart.  Which I may have talked about already?  I doubled the hazlenuts but would reduce the butter and omit the custard filling, so all you have is toasted hazlenuts, crunchy around a thin layer of plums turned jammy in the oven.  

Meal templates to the rescue of busy week/school days!  Taco Tuesday: salad edition

A pound of zucchini, thinly sliced, fried in olive oil with minced garlic, some sliced basil, and tossed with artisanal pasta, topped with grated ricotta salata and a fried egg

We hung onto summer hard this past weekend - lobster rolls on buttered brioche buns, fried pickles, and this roasted cabbage salad that I've been obsessed with, ever since Dr. Rei made it at the cottage.  Thinly sliced cabbage, tossed with oil, roasted and turned every now and then at high heat in the oven until crispy, tossed with a spicy mayo dressing.

Smitten's crispy peach cobbler.  This was a HUGE hit.  You sprinkle a generous amount of sugar on top of the cobbler topping and then sprinkle that with water.  It makes a shellac that bakes up in the oven until it shatters.  A nice mix of textures against some fresh, juicy, yielding peaches.

The textbook Lagerfeld late-summer pasta - fried eggplant cubes, cooked with minced garlic, some grape tomatoes thrown in and cooked in the pan with the lid on until they burst, with some kalamata olives and basil, tossed with pasta.

Fin.

Your Regularly Scheduled Post

My new posting routine is going to be upended this week because I have back-to-back-to-back job interviews on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.

I'm basically a giant ball of anxiety and nerves right now.

It's awesome having a high-stakes job interview, on the first day of the new school year, after a long weekend, when your partner is a teacher and is similarly a ball of nerves.

I will leave you with some quality reading I've come across lately:

Mindy Kaling's Guide to Killer Confidence

Patrick Ness, who is one of my favorite YA authors, started this fundraising campaign to help Syrian refugees because he was tired of tweeting his despair.  A bunch of authors (at first limited to the YA community, but now expanding) pledged matching 10,000 pound contributions and now the campaign is up at 500K pounds!  This makes me so happy

Bill Hader and Fred Armisen and Seth Myers are doing this spoof on documentaries in the series, Documentary Now!  It is so, so, so funny.

This article on Amazon was depressing.

Speaking of refugees, I came across this poem on a blog and it totally moved me.  The author is London-based, Kenyan-born, Somali poet and author, Warsan Shire.

Home

by: Warsan Shire

no one leaves home unless 

home is the mouth of a shark

you only run for the border

when you see the whole city running as well

your neighbors running faster than you
breath bloody in their throats
the boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory
is holding a gun bigger than his body
you only leave home
when home won’t let you stay.

no one leaves home unless home chases you
fire under feet
hot blood in your belly
it’s not something you ever thought of doing
until the blade burnt threats into
your neck
and even then you carried the anthem under
your breath
only tearing up your passport in an airport toilets
sobbing as each mouthful of paper
made it clear that you wouldn’t be going back.

you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land
no one burns their palms
under trains
beneath carriages
no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled
means something more than journey.
no one crawls under fences
no one wants to be beaten
pitied

no one chooses refugee camps
or strip searches where your
body is left aching
or prison,
because prison is safer
than a city of fire
and one prison guard
in the night
is better than a truckload
of men who look like your father
no one could take it
no one could stomach it
no one skin would be tough enough

the
go home blacks
refugees
dirty immigrants
asylum seekers
sucking our country dry
n*****s with their hands out
they smell strange
savage
messed up their country and now they want
to mess up ours
how do the words
the dirty looks
roll off your backs
maybe because the blow is softer
than a limb torn off

or the words are more tender
than fourteen men between
your legs
or the insults are easier
to swallow
than rubble
than bone
than your child body
in pieces.
i want to go home,
but home is the mouth of a shark
home is the barrel of the gun
and no one would leave home
unless home chased you to the shore
unless home told you
to quicken your legs
leave your clothes behind
crawl through the desert
wade through the oceans
drown
save
be hungry
beg
forget pride
your survival is more important

no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear
saying-
leave,
run away from me now
i dont know what i’ve become
but i know that anywhere
is safer than here

Fin.

MOAR BOOKS, MOAR!

Remember when people used to say (type) "moar"?

As I look back through my notes, apparently I went through a summer/fall of YA books when the Wonder Twins were wee bairns.

Since You've Been Gone showed up on some Goodreads lists and it pops up in relation to liking Rainbow Rowell on Amazon.  This is pretty generic YA.  Mousy wallflower type has a best friend who is manic-pixie-dream girl type (think Rayanne Graff to Angela Chase), and the best friend goes missing and leaves all these "challenges" for mousy friend to fulfill over a summer.  During the course of finishing said challenges, mousy friend comes into her own, gets a man (boy), etc., etc.  It went down easy but was completely unmemorable.  

Y'all know I love me some E. Lockhart.  The Ruby Oliver series is one of my favorite YA series of all time.  OF ALL TIME.  Her other YA books (she also publishes children's fiction under a different name) have been similarly good - off-beat vaguely riot grrl-ish protagonist, theatre oddballs, etc.  This represented a radical departure in terms of tone.  This is like a YA psychological thriller with a M. Night Shyamalan twist ending.  It has all the hallmarks of things I would be into: rich, waspy family that summers on the east coast, a group of cabalistic childhood friends with secrets.  It was readable, but the tone was such a departure that I didn't like it.  It's very serious, and quite grim, and it didn't flow or read as easily as her other novels.  I get that she wants to stretch herself, and I applaud her for it, but I just didn't enjoy this.   

I LOVED this, and I've recommended it widely, even though the people I've recommended it to haven't been as into it (e.g. my sister and SMckay).  This is about a loner metal, gamer dude who meets a fairie, Nordic, manic-pixie-dreamgirl and they strike up an unlikely romance.  There's some gender-bending stuff that I quite liked, and it all builds to a suitably soapy series of events, but I think what drew me to this is that I KNOW THESE KIDS.  I was friends with these kids - I hung with a group of people who were generally referred to as "the Mansons" (as in Marilyn, not Charles, thank GOD), and a bunch of girls in my art class were vintage-wearing Kensington thrifting druid, Tori Spelling types.  I liked this book for playing with gender conventions and for celebrating true oddballs and people who don't fit in, for a change.  I tried reading Steve Brezenoff's other works, riding the high from Guy In Real Life, but I couldn't get down with them, in the end.  They are worthy books - one of them, is written entirely in the second person, with a homeless, ambiguously gendered central figure, but I felt like the thought experiments trumped the story and the writing, and so that's where they ended up losing me.

The 5th Wave series is good, good stuff.  It harkens back to the sci-fi of my earlier years in tone and writing.  It's a post-apocalyptic tale of humanity wiped out by a phased alien invasion and the a rag-tag group of human survivor's attempt to make it against impossible odds and with a Nazi-esque Moriarty-type army general as the locus of evil.  I loved the continuation of the series in The Infinite Sea.  There's a bombshell revelation - one that I feel warrants a re-reading because other people who've read it didn't pick up on it, so I want to make sure that what I read was correct.  I'm chomping at the bit for the third installment, which is coming in 2016, darn it.  

I might have saved the best for last.  Jandy Nelson's I'll Give You the Sun was pitched for people who love Rainbow Rowell (present!) and John Green (here!).  This book, as you can see above, won a Printz award and is a Stonewall book award winner, which is an award I'd never heard of before this very moment, but which I endorse (I'm assuming it's for books that are LGBT-sensitive).  This is about twins Jude and Noah who are tight as tight can be - the mirror half of the other.  Then family tragedy strikes and they drift off from each other.  It's about how they find each other again and how they grow amid grief and loss.  I loved reading this.  It's not as heavy and thinky as The Fault In Our Stars but it's not entirely light either.  It really is similar in tone to Fangirl or Eleanor and Park, but it's really about family over heterosexual love.  It had a kind of winsome, Stand By Me type vibe, in terms of how it reveals the secret banalities of young adulthood.  I immediately went out and got Nelson's previous book, The Sky Is Everywhere, but it turned out to be almost exactly like I'll Give You the Sun, but not as good.  She really dialed in the formula with this one.  I hope the formula isn't so formulaic with her next.

Fin.

Things That Have Made Me Laugh, Lately.

NEW BLOGGING SCHEDULE SAY WHAT WHAT WHAT.

The Big Yam saying, "If you put a bag that says 'popcorn' in the microwave, you get magic."

The Dotytron threatening to take all the gimmicky board books away from the Wonder Twins, (gimmicks are stuff like, lift-the-flaps, really simple, non-narrative driven books) because they're too "indulgent" and "hedonistic" (!)  At one point, he pointed over at Quincess and said, "See!  Look at how gratuitous and hedonistic this is!" - cut to this scene:

Yup. So indulgent.

The Big Yam saying, "Yowza" while watching Jurassic World.  Apparently Jurassic Park franchise movies turn him into a member of Our Gang (you'll remember how he said "Goll-lee" watching the first film.)  When the Jurassic Park theme came on during the new film, ever so faintly, he said, "They have my favorite song!  How did they know it's my favorite song?" 

The Big Yam asking the other kids from the neighbourhood during our camping trip, "DOES ANYONE LIKE JOHN WILLIAMS???"

The Big Yam explaining the birds and the bees to me on the way to the grocery store: "If a woman who is a girl wants to be a mummy, she has to find a boy, tell him her name, and have birth."  [Since I straight-up never refer to mysel as "mummy" I at first he was talking about a preserved human.]

We went camping a couple of weekends ago (more on that later), and Lindsay learned a new skill - climbing out of his crib.  This lead to our return Sunday night's sleep being pretty brutal.  We were up and down all night picking him up, putting him back in the crib and telling him: "It's bedtime.  Lindsay sleeps here." Last night, as I was putting him to bed, I put a few layers of thick blankets on the ground so that if he fell, he wouldn't get hurt.  I checked in on the twins later and walked into the room to find Lindsay lying face down, head turned away from the door, one arm up over his head.  As I opened the door, he said, (without turning his head): "sleep here?"  It was so slovenly it was gold.  I was like, fine, whatever buddy...if you want to sleep on the floor you can until we sort out converting the crib to a toddler bed. 

This video of the kids slow-motion running towards some giant bubbles:

Slo-mo video in your pocket is the best thing to happen to life.  I can't wait to get it when I upgrade my phone in T-minus 8 years.

Camping, camping, camping.  Is it a surprise to anyone that I took to camping like a fiend?  We did a big car camp with our neighbours (five families - 24 people total) to the Warsaw Caves conservation area.  One of the main pros of car camping is that you can be as hedonistic (not in the Quincess quietly reading himself a book sense, in the "you can bring as much s**t as your car can take" sense) as you like.  Space and weight aren't an issue.  So we had blowup mattresses and I brought my cast-iron pan and I bought us a giant, 8 person tent which is about the same size as our living room in Lil' Ugmo, and we ate like kings.

It was a really nice long weekend.  The site was large so we weren't on top of each other, the fire pit was huge.  The good thing about our street crew is that the kids know each other so well that they can all entertain themselves and the adults can chill.  The other good thing is that we're all so used to being around each other's kids that we are all at ease with parenting (read: disciplining) each other's children.  We see each other's kids alot, in a "home from work, bra off" kind of setting, which means that a lot of the social barriers and "fear of imposing" have long gone out the window.  When you're outside after dinner as much as my street is, you rapidly get to the point where people are getting testy with their spouses and screaming at their kids with impunity.  It's easy for me to ask one of my neighbours to take the Big Yam to brush his teeth and not worry that they're going to be put out or worry about not taking his s**t.  We're also all used to monitoring a herd of small children, so whereas some of my friends are still in their "entirely focused on my one child" phase, and adding another kid into the mix would be adding to their plate unduly, with the neighbours it's effortless.

Like cottaging, camping is an extreme form of grown-up sleepovers.  Once the kids had FINALLY gone to bed we could sit around the fire and chat.  I mean, it would have been EVEN BETTER with some of my real homies.  Don't get me wrong, I'm relatively unfiltered around the neighbs but it's still gonna be different than hanging with people who've known me for 20 years.  I came home fired up with plans to do it again with our Markham crew, or maybe the Roomie et al.  This inaugural trip was all it took to open the floodgates.  I'm up for a canoe-in site.  I up for driving to Kilarney to see Ontario in all its wild, untamed, pump-up-the-volume glory.

Do I think I'm going to become one of those gear-heads who goes on a epic portages deep into the bush and dehydrates food?  Uh, no.  I don't ever want to be so constrained with having to "pack light" that I don't get to eat deliciousness and I'm eating astronaut pouches for dinner.  Part of the whole fun is setting up camp, and then cooking, because really, what else is there to do?  Food tastes better when you're outside.  We were lucky in that we had no rain...I can imagine that it sucks pretty hard when it rains the whole time, but it's still something you'll remember and that brings a family together.

So yeah, I went away a camping neophyte and came back a Griswold.

Scenes like this certainly helped:

Look, I like nature.  That's a legacy from my deadbeat dad (remember how I have a DAD?!  WHO HAS NEVER MET HIS TWIN GRANDSONS BECAUSE HE'S A GIANT REPRESSED WEIRDO PSYCHO WHO CHOSE HIS WIFE OVER HIS OWN BLOOD?!).  My dad taught me how to fish, and took us cottaging, and took us to cottage resorts when I was a kid.  I have really good memories of those experiences with my sister and Bruce Wayne.  Anyway, I like nature.  I'm a Romantic at heart - I dig my sublime, okay?

We took the kids to Bluffer's beach last Friday.  A little piece of urban paradise, a 15 minute drive from my house, deep in Scarborough.  Fine sand framed by towering rugged cliffs and warm, idyllic lake Ontario water rock-free, and knee high for a good 30 feet out.  We didn't go prepared but you better believe we will next time - set up our umbrella and laze the day away while the kids bank their sand-drenched sun sleep.  I dumped a metric tonne of sand out of water shoes on my way home (solo!  Imagine packing up 3 little ones from the beach, solo - the Dotytron broke off and went to school to set up for the year ahead), and it was one of those drives where I was frantically looking in the rearview mirror and entreating the Wonder Twins to stay with me, please please please, just stay awake and answer my inane questions about what noises animals make, until we get home so that you can serve your full nap in your own beds.

We also went on a hike through the Don Valley on Saturday, post-Evergreen Brickworks Farmers' Market.  All this was in lieu of visiting our friends S & P.  We went to our local farmer's market on Sunday, smoked 3 racks of ribs and had a feast with our friends B & G, and had a Micelli Monday on Saturday, so it was still a full, active weekend, but one where there were lulls during nap time when I could lie on my own couch and read a book and drift in and out of sleep to the sound of cicadas in the trees and the smoke from my neighbour's brush-burning fire drifting in.  It was perfect really.  I can't remember when we've had that kind of weekend in town...not since early July?

That lazy, drifty, frowsy kind of  Sunday is the exact opposite of my day today - when I took the kids to the CNE and there but for the grace of the neighbours who came with me, would probably have ended up buried under the sand sculpture, my face frozen in mid-disciplinarian "that crazy mom" shouting mode.  I made it out, but just barely.  CNE with kids is the perfect example of Einstein's theory of relativity.  TIME SLOWS DOWN THERE, AND THERE'S NO WAY YOU CAN TELL ME DIFFERENT.  I lived about 10 lifetimes today.

My work hosted a "kids day" which was an employee engagement initiative spearheaded by my lovely colleague.  I would prefer my employee engagement in the form of a respectful, not-stifling work culture fostered by senior management, but maybe that's not always possible?  Heh.  The Dotytron brought the kids and it was pretty stressful because I have such a low tolerance for unacceptable behaviour and of course the kids were going buck.  Anyway, we ended up at A3 Napoli for dinner - which is a Naples-influenced street food spot brought to you by two of my Toronto favorites: Porchetta and Co and Pizzeria Libretto.  I thought it was going to be a gong show - Yelp said unequivocally "good for kids: NO" and the dining space was all those super-high bar-height tables that always have me inelegantly clambering stools like a bullrider being helped aboard an especially ungainly bull.  However!  We got there and they had two extra-tall high chairs and some colouring and the food was delicious.  We had a pizza, their gran fritto misto (which is a mixed bag of stuff from the fryer, served with pesto, mayo, and marinara).  Our fritto consisted of: fried zucchini (bliss!), fried scallions (like verdant onion rings!), fried meatballs (bogarted by Quincess!), fried arancini (oozing with cheese inside that was more cream than cheese!), calamari (as you would expect!), and frittatini (their version of macaroni and cheese, fried! Think: macaroni carbonara - then fried !!!!!).  We also had their batt, which is half a pizza fritta (touted as for one, but if you're ordering other stuff, totally enough food), which made me go in paroxysms of ecstasy.  Imagine if you will, the most perfectly thin-crisped fried, ungreasy dough edge, giving way to a Naples style pizza chew, the perfect bread-to-filling ratio giving way to the most creamy, unctuous, pure tasting essence of dairy (it's stuffed with buffalo ricotta, provola [I'm assuming provolone?] and cicciola [I had to look it up - pressed cakes of fatty pork.  OH YES].  The service was quick, they had decent beers on tap, and feeding our family of five cost about $60, which all combines to a win for me.

We went to visit my sister a few weekends ago and had a good time, (Dotytron found a bottle of rarer bourbon, we went to an indoor trampoline place, we avoided buying things because of our s**ty dollar, I taught my niece how to style her hair a la 50s rockabilly), and on our last day we hit the local veterans' food truck rodeo fundraiser thingy (they were raffling guns!).  Our crew is mostly pictured above.  As we were walking back to the car, I turned to the Dotytron, who had Quincess in his arms and the Big Yam by his side, "That was fun, do you want me to drive home?" at which point he turned to answer me, and then said, "UMMMM...WHERE'S LINDSAY?!????!!!"  S**t sons, I almost home-aloned my kid, in some village in New York State!  Thankfully the rodeo was tiny and I found the little miscreant standing under an adjacent tent to where we had been eating, shaking an open water bottle and cackling with glee.  I got lucky.  

The other night I made Marc Vetri's pappardelle with corn crema and charred scallions and it was deeeelicious.  Like the best creamed corn you've ever had.  I doubled the corn in the recipe because my kids are cornholios.  I served it with my go-to late summer salad of baby arugula, grilled peaches, and fried haloumi.  

I made Smitten Kitchen's sesame noodles (with Chinese thick wheat noodles) and served it with seared salmon (which my kids gobble up) and smashed cucumbers with tahini dressing.  Honestly, smashed cucumbers are all the rage, but I didn't think the smashing really did anything here, other than add time and effort.  

Back to school means that there's more Scarborough goodness back in my life.  Last week's takeout night was Babu.  Mutton rolls are my life.  

I made Smitten's hazlenut crumb plum tart for our dinner with B & G.  I doubled the hazlenuts because I love toasted hazlenuts, but should have upped the flour accordingly to absorb the extra fat.  My crust edges were crisp but the bottom got soggy from being too buttery (didn't know there was such a thing!).  I also would omit the custard next time and just throw in lightly sweetened plums, and perhaps more of them with a bit of something to bind the juices.  The custard got lost and the plums (I used Italian prune plums) didn't shine through against the toasty nutty strength of the hazlenuts.  I would make this again, but would tinker with it.  Hazlenuts should go in all crisps and crumbs though, as far as I'm concerned.  

Finally, the Big Yam has been OBSESSED with the concept of Taco Tuesday, so I've been trying to make that happen for him because it makes him so happy.  We had a taco salad tonight - lettuce, cabbage, leftover slaw topped with taco beef and black beans, guac, pickled onions, shredded cheddar (this is kind of a key component), sliced olives, sour cream, and salsa with some crunched up tostadas for added texture.  A very satisfying dinner salad.

Fin.