Admin

This week so far has been all about admin. Calling contractors, calling deck/fence people, calling daycares, calling school daycares (you know, for when Master T is FOUR YEARS OLD!!! - daycare in Toronto is mental), and maintaining and updating all my files pertaining to the above. It's insane. Daycare rates in Toronto range from $1300/month to $1800+/month. Luckily, we're on the waiting list for a fee subsidy, thanks to the fortuitous timing of the Dotytron being a student in recent memory. We're fortunate that we can afford to pay full fee as well, I know many other families don't have that option. At that rate, you're pretty much working to pay for daycare. At that rate, you might as well open your own home daycare.

Calling contractors is similarly disheartening, but at least I know there's going to be a significant return on my investment. I know I'm building equity. With your kid, it's a crapshoot on that score.

I say all this, but every night, we lie in bed and the energy emanating from that little body snoozing away in the next room worms its way into your heart and envelops you in a warm wash of memories of happy smiles and chuckles and baby babble. At the end of the day, lying in bed, there's a certain Darwinian trick that results in your ability to only recollect the good stuff and not the crying, the screaming, the poopsplosions, or the particularly demeaning moment when you found yourself seething at your child through gritted teeth, "shut up, shut up, SHUT UP!"

The Boobla (or the Bubby as I've been calling him of late) is SO FREAKIN' CUTE! i love him to pieces. I love his soft skin and showering his chubby belly with kisses and tickling him and making him do his silent, open-mouthed, one-note laughs. I love it when we're reading the nighttime story and the Dotytron is holding him and you can see the Bubby fighting sleep. I love how he's starting to talk more and more and how his favorite place to hold court is on high on the changing table, where he loves to tell us his thoughts on all topics big and small. I love how one of his favorite things to do while eating is to break off from the boob and coo at me to test me to see if I'm listening and will repeat back what he's said, and I love the big grin of satisfaction he gets when I do. The Dotytron and I still look at each other sometimes and say, "we made this!" with equal parts wonder, pride, and incredulity.

Funny moment with our Portuguese contractor (one of many names I keep on file) the other day. I had him in to take a look at a leak in our kitchen ceiling that's been happening when we take a bath. Well, apparently, "bath" means a different thing to Carlos than it does for me. "Bath" for Carlos is inclusive of showering AND running the tub, so he was a bit startled when he started checking the shower and I said, "no, it only happens when we take a bath" and he said, "every time?" and I said, "well, we only take a bath at most, a couple of times a month." I was wondering why he paused for a bit before gamely going on to ascertain the problem - only realizing that he thought we were disgusting pigs when after a few more false starts he finally said, "oh, you mean it only happens when you use the TUB?" HAHAHA!

We watched Winter's Bone the other night - a story about a girl in the Ozarks looking for her meth-cooking MIA dad. Anchored by a strong, steely performance by Jennifer Lawrence, it's a story that I found enthralling because it shows you a piece of America that you don't normally see - what it's like in the Ozarks for people growing up dirt poor, addicted to meth, on the fringes, and far from the urban comforts of which I'm so familiar. The film is gorgeous and the story has a tense urgency that makes you invested in her increasingly dire situation. There is something beautiful in the craggy, lined, faces and sunken mouths of people in the film...the performances were all exquisitely good, especially the actor who plays the dead beat dad's menacing uncle, Teardrop. There's a beautiful scene featuring some banjos and fiddlers and bluegrass music - I love that stuff - it's so strange that such a beautiful music could come out of such abject poverty. I'd highly recommend this flick.

This means that we've seen 9 out of 10 of the best picture nominations for this year's Academy Awards. We just have to see The King's Speech and this might be our best record yet for the Oscars.

Monday night we had that kale and ricotta pie with a caesar salad:

Last night I made us cauliflower soup with a grilled zucchini, eggplant, roasted pepper, provolone and pesto panini.

Fin.

Sarah McLachlan Public School

...now accepting students!

On Thursday night we wandered over to the open house for this alternative school that's opened up recently in the school that we're in district for. The Dotytron was nosing around a few weeks back and was doing some research on schools in our area and found out about the open house, so we figured we'd walk over and check it out just to see what it's all about. A bunch of our neighbours who have kids entering JK next year were going too.

WELL WELL WELL. We were greeted at the door by the Chair of the Parent Council who was giving out name tags. There was also Starbucks coffee on hand and some home baked goods and samosas provided by some of the local businesses in little India. The woman who provided our prenatal training was there. One of the baked goods was labeled, "organic sugar, organic flour, organic butter" which I found immensely annoying, and the ginger cookie I sampled was terrible. Strike one. Technically, the bad cookie was strike two. Strike one happened when we walked in and saw all the other parents and their kids who were overwhelmingly: white, privileged, and vaguely hippity dippity in the way that I loathe. The Dotytron gave me a sidelong glance - we were definitely on the same page.

We went down into the gym and heard the presentation, from the principal of the school (who actually wears two hats, as principal of the alternative school and principal of the larger school in which the alternative school is housed), and one of the teacher founders of the school, another teacher, and the chair of the parent council.

Guys, it was AWFUL. So smugly self-righteous! So full of empty, arbitrary, 60s mother-earth counter-culture appropriation of eastern cultures signifiers! They apparently base their practice on John Miller's book, The Holistic Curriculm, with some Waldorf mixed in and Reggio. The woman founder name-checked all the above buzzy terms and talked about how they base their school on being in touch with nature, building community, narrative/arts-based learning, experiential learning, project-based learning, blah blah blah. All of which I'm generally in favour of. And yet! The presentation from the founder woman was TERRIBLE. Full of lip-service, entirely too proud of how they have equinox and solstice harvest festivals, of how teachers try NOT TO READ FROM BOOKS but make up stories (which was accompanied by a power point slide of a TEACHER READING FROM A STORY BOOK!) and all this mumbo jumbo that I couldn't get behind, and a list of potential skills my child would learn on one of the weekly visits to a nature reserve that culminated in the line, "for example, your child might learn to identify edible plants, or track a coyote to its den" (with COMPLETE sincerity!)

Can I just say that I REALLY don't need my kid to learn how to track a coyote to its den? This woman was completely incoherent, but she was loads better than the teacher that followed who was one of those super-soft-talking teachers who wears long, ankle length full skirts and earth tones and infantalizes her charges, pedagogy, and herself in the process. Her presentation (she is a grade 1/2 teacher) went off the rails rapidly, with a particular low point being when she was so hopped up on her own juice that she spiraled into a personal reverie recounting in excruciating detail the song-device they use to get kids to learn the alphabet, which of course meant that she had to SING THE SONG TO US (prefacing it with a giddy, "forgive me if I just sing the song for you") and which went on for far too long. I was like, lady! We are adults! The she talked about how the kids do Shakespeare every year and that's "her " baby. Ugh.

We left after the Parent Council lady spoke and skipped the classroom tours. At that point, I was pretty sure that it wasn't our style. I'd rather send Master T to school in Scarborough (and I'm not saying that in a way that's supposed to be pejorative to Scarborough. I mean that I believe the quality of the experience he would get exposed to the income and ethnic diversity of school in Scarborough would be far more beneficial to his overall well being than going to an alternative school surrounded by 99% Caucasian kids with parents who are overly invested in the idea that their child is a special star. )

I was pretty angry when we left and was bubbling over with righteous indignation. It was all so very self-congratulatory. What was most galling for the Dotytron, as a teacher in the Board, is that they thought they were so different from other schools. As he said, any school you go to in the board is going to say the same things about community, Reggio, etc. This school was no different - paying lip service to these principles. I thought the application of the theory was so half-arsed and so arbitrary - creating false dichotomies between nature and the city, this false idea of an idealised, reified, pastiche of Eastern cultures (one rapt parent next to me breathed, "that's so awesome" when the teacher showed a slide of kids doing yoga with the accompanying line, "of course we believe in nuturing the inner self and all our students conduct daily yoga and meditation practice." WHY? WHY IS IT AWESOME? Why is it more awesome than doing team sports?

As the Dotytron said, if you're conducting an open house, you're going to put your strongest people forward as presenters - if those were the heavy hitters in the school, that speaks VOLUMES. We both thought that having these lofty, ideals so indifferently and poorly applied does a disservice to the whole methodology. You know what I want in an alternative school? I want them to teach my child the ability to question and critically engage with these kinds of ideologies, not substitute one ill for another. It was fantastically disappointing. Although I'm rueful that I won't be able to join that Parents' Council and start a ruckus. It's worth it to enroll Master T just for that purpose, although the Dotytron said it wasn't fair to him to subject him to having those kids be his peers. Also, if John Miller is an advisor at the school - why not have him speak, instead of having dummy disciples who are probably garbling the heck out of his scholarship run the show? If you came up with a pedagogical theory, wouldn't you want to see it applied and presented in a way that does it justice?

Blargh. The neighbourhood scuttlebutt is that if you're a minority, you have a better chance of being "picked" in the lottery because they're trying to introduce some diversity. For eff's sake. Also, they have no budget for special education, so my question is: how are you producing children who are capable of fully integrating and feeling a part of a "community" when the community being represented doesn't reflect minorities, those in different income brackets (obviously, it's a self-selecting pool of educated, income secure individuals who send their kids to these kinds of schools), or those with special needs? How does THAT do anything for a child?

It was galling.

We've had a pretty low-key weekend around here. Friday night was our first dodgeball game - super fun to get back into things. It was a bit of a shellacking, but I like our team and it's just fun to get out. A woman on our team who is herself a mother of two said that I was the most laid back first time mom she's ever seen, which I took to be an enormous compliment (this as I was nonchalantly tucking the little Boobla up on stage in his car seat so he wouldn't get an errant dodgeball to his soft spot.)

This is the last weekend until about late February where we didn't have any social engagements planned so we cleaned house and worked on our respective school and went for a nice long walk and had family naptime - it was lovely.

What we've been eating lately:

Wednesday night was beef barley soup with a warm baby spinach salad with a bacon-mustard vinaigrette and a poached egg.

Thursday night dinner was spaghetti in T's meat sauce with grated grano and a caesar salad.

Saturday morning breakfast was boss. Sweet potato & yukon latkes with sour cream and apple sauce, peameal bacon, and fried over easy eggs.

Saturday dinner was also boss. A "white" lasagne of mushrooms, spinach, nutmeg-scented ricotta with fresh pasta sheets (bought) and a romano-spiked bechamel sauce. More caesar salad because I love croutons.

Our Saturday walk consisted of a mission to check out the Canadian Pie Company on Queen East. I make pretty fan-freaking-tastic pies (both custard, fruit, and savory) if I do say so myself, but sometimes, it's nice to have a backup for baked goods when you're feeling lazy. We got a sour cherry pie to go. The texture of the pastry is nice, touted on their web page as a cross between "puff pastry and a croissant" - which is true. It's very flaky with a bit of the yeasty elasticity and brawn of a croissant. That being said, it was seriously lacking in flavour. I was really disappointed. The whole thing tasted kind of flat. The cherries were sour, but that's about it, the filling had too much starch in it to bind it and was very bland. The whole thing was unmemorable, which is disappointing.

Sunday morning breakfast was a bit inspired. A bacon, roasted garlic, and cheddar omelet with roasted garlic oil-croutons on top (I really do love croutons.) Delicious!

We caught up on our Top Chef: All Stars. I won't bore non-Top Chef fans with my slavering, overly-enthusiastic paean to its greatness, suffice to say it's definitely the highlight of our week.

We watched The Fighter over 2 nights. It's a bit of a predictable story anchored by a strong Melissa Leo and a strong Christian Bale performance (Marky Mark is good, but not great.) The movie overall was kind of ho-hum and tired with a well-worn arc that's made fresh by the window into lower-class Massachusetts and the hard-scrabble, rough Irish clannishness that prevails there. I thought it lacked the oomph of other under-dog sports stories, but maybe watching it over two nights diluted the urgency of the story. My vote for best pic is still Toy Story 3 or True Grit.

We tried watching 127 Hours but couldn't get into it. The Dotytron had no sympathy for Aron Ralston's plight and my fervent love for Franco couldn't push me past knowing what's going to happen and then just sitting there, waiting for it. Danny Boyle keeps the tension high, but I don't know if that's just because the whole world knows the real story, so it feels artificial.

We're having dinner with my mum and her crew tonight at AYCE hot pot. Wahoo!

Fin.

Ahhh, life.

What a tough slog it can be.

I have a best friend. Her name is Dr. Rei. I know the term, "best friend" sounds incredibly cheesy and juvenile, like "boyfriend" or "noogie" - these are words that after a certain point should be left to gently moulder in a dusty corner, relics of our youth. But more than "boyfriend," and certainly more than "noogie," there is no other nomenclature that speaks to what she is to me, and how the slog would be so much more grey without her presence.

She is both my best friend and a best friend, possessive and singular. She is the best friend that I, Karl Lagerfeld could possibly have and she embodies the qualities that one wants in a friend the very best.

We didn't start off this way. This friendship has been growing and deepening for over 10 years - maybe 11? Forged in the fiery depths of TorontoJungle.com, nearly incinerated in a stupid squabble (in which I provided 99% of the stupid fuel) over a stupid, disposable boy, we rose like a phoenix from the ashes (more specifically, like Dumbledore's phoenix, Fawkes, from his ashes) bound by the simple truth that we found a way, over time, to be able to look back on the fact that I once famously threatened to punch her face in, with rueful, mutual, belly-aching laughter (have I mentioned sufficiently on here that I used to be crazy? It bears repeating.)

We have traveled together, literally and figuratively. We've witnessed and supported each other through life's touchstone moments and we've built a bank of memories that's so rich I can greedily withdraw any number of recollections that will have me laughing out loud in the present, laughing as hard as I did at the time we made and deposited the moment. We have a shared language, a shorthand of events, instances, characters to draw from and that we're constantly adding to. I will always remember Dr. Rei's tears when she came and visited us in the hospital after the birth of Master T, the catch in her voice, the way it seemed that she comprehended the enormity of the paradigm shift in our lives Master T's arrival signaled more than we did.

We've grown together and changed together and have arrived at a free, easy present that could only come from the most profound understanding and hours logged.

You can be more unguarded and generous with your best friend than with your partner; you don't have to hold anything back, the stakes are a little lower. Dr. Rei offers thoughtful, frequently hilarious counsel and I look to her to help me muddle through any number of problems, large and small. She's been an observer and a participant in my life with the Dotytron, to the point where so many of the memories I share with him are punctuated by the sound of her laughter in the background. I will also always remember lying bewildered and confused in the dark in some horrid, squalid, tourista hotel room in Rome on our last night in Italy, woken at some ungodly hour by the Dotytron thrashing about in our bed next to me, talking (more correctly: yelling) in his sleep about some nonsense, and having the whole surreal experience punctuated by Dr. Rei's muffled giggles in the next bed.

I look forward to palling around with her in our old age, cackling and talking smack about our kids and grandkids and (fates willing) our great grandkids, and going to see Kanye West at Casino Niagara and complaining about how overpriced the buffet is.

I love that girl to pieces. I'm lucky to have her around to make the slog that much less sloggier.

Here' a photo of the Boobla Khan in his Bumbo, in a rare moment when he had the strength to support his own head and wasn't slumped over under the weight of his own noggin and cheeks:

Monday night's supper of whole wheat penne carbonara with peas:

Last night's supper of beef, barley, mushroom soup and a panini of roasted red peppers, white onion, and brebis cheese:

Fin.

Only in my world

Just a quick anecdote before I get down to the business of some serious Constitutional Law reading (Hey! Wake up! Stay with me!)

The scene: last night in bed. Boobla Khan snoozing away in his crib, me and the Dotytron doing our nightly before-bed reading.

The Dotytron: "AHHHHHHHHHH!!! I think you seriously just almost maimed me with your toenail"

Me: *smug silence*

A few minutes pass, finally, I turn to him and ask, "Can I borrow a nail file?"

The Dotytron: "Which one?"

Note: only in my house, with the Dotytron, would the answer to the question of borrowing a nail file be met with a follow-up, clarifying question as to the TYPE of nail file one requires, instead of a simple, "yes."

Me: *laughter*

The Dotytron: "Well, it matters! What are you using it for?"

Me: "To file my nails, what do you think?"

The Dotytron passes me a nail file and instructs me to use the black part of it, and when I start to go to town on my big toe and he notices, RIPS IT OUT OF MY HAND and tells me in no uncertain terms that this particular nail file is not be sullied and cheapened with use on my foot, of all places. Then he rummages around in his NIGHTSTAND DRAWER FULL OF NAIL FILES OF ALL TYPES AND PERSUASIONS and chucks one at me in an unceremonious fashion with the withering comment, "here, you can use this one on your toe, I don't use that one ever."

LOL. Yet another chronicle in the on-going saga of living with a guy with an unnatural interest in his nails and hand care.

Beef barley mushroom soup for dinner, with either salad or a sandwich.

Fin.

Sorry, SMckay!

Apologies to Smckay, who noted that I omitted the quantity of butter in the Baked Brownie recipe (it's widely available on the internet, but I've fixed the recipe anyway). Thanks, eagle eye!

We had an amazingly full weekend here - we're so lucky. We had dinner on Friday night with R and R and Bwong at Chako's and talked about the school yard game REDASS and Sir Francis acon and turning teenagers into nihilists, all whilst grilling up quantities of delicious beef, pork, lamb, and chicken and loading up on mango pudding and red bean pudding. We're thinking of starting an adult REDASS league. I think it'd be pretty hilarious. Picturing The Dotytron cringing in terror facing a school yard wall is pretty funny stuff. The bonus part of eating in York Region with these guys is that my mum and Big D get the chance to babysit Master T. And by "babysit" I mean that my mum has an opportunity to then berate me for all the things I'm doing wrong (namely, all my hippie, mama dread stuff like the cloth diapers, the itchy knitted clothing, the bulky pacifier clip, etc., etc.)

Saturday morning we woke up to another snowstorm, which means that we hung around the house taking the tree down (sad!) and worked on our respective projects (me: reading for school; The Dotytron: report cards) and I had a giant breakdown and lost my s**t when The Dotytron spilled his gourd filled with mate (what SMckay refers to as his "sludge) all over the living room floor and on our yoga mats and on my tree skirt. It was a MESS. That sludge is not kidding around. It's like green dust and it gets on everything and STICKS. The Dotytron is notorious for always putting down vessels filled with his special drinks on the edges of tables. This in itself is not really worthy of notoriety were it not also for the fact that he is also well known for being a bumbling, clumsy, gangly oaf with a propensity for knocking things over. The two character traits working in tandem means that he knocks over a lot of beverages. Notable fact: it makes my outlaw bro lose his mind when people knock over drinks. Hilarity ensues.

Then we all went to our friend Lolly's birthday party, where Master T was a total trooper and charmed everyone with his droopy cheeks and the fact that he was totally un-shook and calm when everyone yelled "SURPRISE!" at the top of their lungs. He was incredible. He was also almost the same size as another baby at the party who was almost 6 months old. I mean, the other kid's head was bigger, but in terms of body length and mass, approximately the same. Ai-yi-yi! I've packed away all his 0-3 month clothes but he's almost busting out of the 3-6 month size!

We also set up a gmail account for him this weekend. We've been meaning to do it for a while. Came up with the idea a month or so back...I thought it might be a good idea to lay claim to his online identity before some other person took it and I also thought it would be fun to send him weekly emails that he could read when he was older. Stuff like, "you were being a royal pain the arse today, because of x, y, z" or, "you had your first taste of udupi dhal today!" At Lolly's party her mom had her baby book out and it was cute to read through - her mom was intensely thorough! Waking, sleeping, eating (time and which boob!), Lolly's mood - it was pretty sweet. I didn't mention that her mom is the cutest and totally made a giant Moroccan feast for about 30 people! Who does that?!!? We have a baby book for T but we're going to have to reverse engineer the thing - apparently you're supposed to be keeping a log THROUGH your pregnancy and now we keep letting it slide so we have to back-date a bunch of stuff and guesstimate dates for things.

Sunday we did some more work and then dumped Master T at Momma and Poppa D's house and went to see True Grit. I LOVED this movie. Unlike Aronofsky, the Coen brothers retain their directorial stamp even as they venture into different genres. This film fell somewhere between the madcap slapstick of Oh, Brother and the sombre, near-nihilistic violence of No Country for Old Men, with the heart of The Big Lebowski. They love their sun-bleached, arid settings and this salty, whip-quick Western depicted the wide, no-nonsense landscape of the frontier States beautifully. The warm, softening glow of fireside talks gives way to the harsh, stripping light of day. The whole film is anchored by a lovely performance by new actress Hailee Steinfeld, who handles the fantastic, intelligent dialogue with a preternatural aplomb and grace. I'm going to say it, her performance in my view, is far better than Natalie Portman's in The Black Swan. I kind of thought Portman over-acted a touch, in much the same way as Jeff Bridges, as the "Rooster" here adds a touch too much drunken listing exaggeration to his role. All in all, I thought it was near-perfect and immensely enjoyable. So far, of the Best Picture lock-ins, I'm rooting for it over The Social Network and The Black Swan, but I think Toy Story 3 should win over them all. Have yet to see The King's Speech (don't really feel like I have to - I can pretty much already see the whole movie in my head), Blue Valentine, Somewhere, and The Fighter.

I'm feeling exceedingly lucky button-ish lately...surrounded as we are by so many dear friends, both old and new...our social network is rich, not to mention the incredible support we've been getting from our families. We're so grateful to have both our parents within the GTA for the ready babysitting (ha!) and that Master T gets to grow up with so much love around him.

Sunday breakfast was over-easy eggs with chimichurri (where were we before chimichurri entered our lives?), bacon, and challah toast.

Tonight for dinner we're having pasta carbonara with a simple salad.

Fin.

This is a throwdown...

Look at this little toughie, in his camo hoodie:

The effects of the toughie are mitigated in the following photo, when he's a chastened lion with teary eyes:

That article I was commenting about has certainly blown up on the interwebs! The debate and discourse around it has been very polarizing, and extremely interesting (possibly more interesting than the article itself). My sister has just read the book from which the article was excerpted (apparently without the author's input, see here). That article there goes more in depth with Chua and discusses how the excerpt in the WSJ glosses over her own journey in realizing that the "Tiger" methods she employed might have been to her detriment - and it is in trying to force them on her willful, stubborn and feisty second daughter (first daughter was dutiful and compliant) that she comes to realize this.

The San Francisco Gate article also discusses how it's important not to essentialize "Chinese" vis-a-vis "Western" which I think is a point that's so obvious, there's no point even mentioning it. I also think a lot of the furor over the WSJ article (especially the hysteria over how Chua's methods constitute "child abuse") are based on a willful misreading - I thought that her self-deprecating, rueful tone came through loud and clear. There wasn't a single point when I read it as proscriptive.

Ultimately, I find the whole discourse around the article to be the most fascinating and revealing thing. People feel so judged in reference to their own parenting styles - it reveals the not-so latent anxieties about parenting and parenting as manifestation of self that bubble beneath the surface. Parenting as competitive sport?

All that being said, my sister has been reading the full memoir and came down on the side that (as is always the case) the entire story is way more nuanced than that itty bitty excerpt indicates and that Chua comes across as way more cray-cray AND way less cray-cray than the discourse would have you believe. I think I'm going to suggest it as my next book club title. Our current theme for the next meeting is marriage - why not follow that up with parenting?

I would also like to clarify that my parent's parenting style isn't really "Tiger" in the strictest sense. My mum and Big D kind of created their own idiosyncratic, inconsistently applied, and ad-hoc version of parenting-by-proxy. They both worked very hard and there were definitely times when I felt neglected and overlooked. I don't think they really knew how to parent me - but as in all things and with all cases, you try your best with what you know. Luckily I'm the most self-reliant person, like, ever, so I flourished in that environment, but there were moments of my childhood that were miserable and filled with boredom as a direct result of their hodgepodge of irrational rules and class issues. I also count on my siblings. S-dawg, my sister and I (C-hova was a late addition to the party and the rules were considerably different by the time he came along) were three kids who were largely left to raise ourselves and make up our own rules in the absence of emotional guidance from the elders in our life. I think the reason we turned out the way we did (and by that I mean, exceptionally well) is because we had and still have each other, and a whole wack of crazy stories about our off-the-wall upbringing.

In the end, until I write my own memoirs, it is too hard to distill and condense my own reflections on my upbringing and attribute the complexities of my eventual self to one style of parenting or another. I think the degree of wackadoo-ness in your childhood reminisces is ultimately the symbol of how far from "Western" that you strayed, but that's always in relation to an idyllic, imagined, floating-signifier "Western" that is more always going to be more construction than fact.

Last night we had S-dawg and his gf over for dinner. I made a very controversial S-dawg meal, in that it was vegetarian and not from Milestone's or Moxie's. We had those black bean & spelt burgers with rosemary sweet potato and regular potato oven fries with chili mayo:

Ladies and gentlemen, throw out all your other brownie recipes, because if you're a fan of disgustingly rich, dense, dark, and fudgy brownies, then the baked brownie is for you. The recipe is all over the internets, but I'll post it below. So for dessert I made brownie sundaes with warmed up baked brownie, a scoop of vanilla ice cream, salted caramel sauce, and whipped cream:

Now we're headed up to Markham to drop off the Boobla with my parents while we have AYCE Korean BBQ & Japanese sushi at Chako with R & R and Bwong.

fin.

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

The Baked Brownie

Makes a 9x13" pan, from there, it's up to you how crazy you go with it in terms of serving size

1 1/4 c. all purpose flour

1 t. salt

2 T. dark cocoa powder

11 oz. bittersweet chocolate, coarsely chopped

1 c. (2 sticks) unsalted butter, cut into pieces

1 t. instant espresso powder

1 1/2 c. sugar

1/2 c. brown sugar

5 large eggs

2 t. vanilla extract

- preheat oven to 350 F. Butter the sides and bottom (I use cooking spray) of a 9x13 glass

- in a bowl, whisk the flour, salt, and cocoa powder together

- melt the chocolate, butter, and instant espresso powder in a bowl together (your choice, I do it in the microwave, you can do it in a double boiler if you want to make more work for yourself) until the chocolate and butter are melted and smooth. Stir in the sugars, whisk until everything is combined.

- add the eggs to the chocolate mixture and whisk until combined. Then add the vanilla and stir. Do not overbeat the batter!

- Add the flour mixture, and stir until almost all the flour is incorporated (some streaking is okay).

- Pour the batter into the prepared pan and bake in the middle of the oven (rotating halfway through) for about 30 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out with moist crumbs attached (note: in my oven it took closer to 45 minutes). Check them frequently! Over-baking is a brownie's worst enemy.

- Cool, cut and serve.

- On the off chance that there's anything left, they will keep in a tightly covered container...but it's really in your best interests to eat them as soon as you can.

In which I embrace...

being a tiger mom and capitalization. Yup, 2011 is the year in which Lagerfeld embraces proper punctuation and grammar again. Or at least attempts to. We'll see how long this will last.

Much has been made in recent days of Amy Chua's memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother following a recent slate of interviews to promote the book and a polarizing excerpt, entitled, "Why Chinese Mothers are Superior" in the Wall Street Journal. I had no less than 4 different people send me the link to either the excerpt or sites referencing Chua and the fallout from her essay and book yesterday.

In short, I pretty much think Chua is bang-on. "Western" parents are waaay too lax on their kids and totally let them quit too early. It's a fundamental truth that things aren't fun until you get good at them and getting good at them entails practice, perseverance, and dedication. Whether it be music, knitting, cooking, whatever. You get good over time and it's inevitable that things are going to suck for a while. I think that Western kids are generally over-scheduled. What's the point in enrolling them in 10 billion different activities? So that they can be poor at all of them? What's the point in setting the bar low so that you can rejoice when they meet minimum expectations? I was raised in a way similar to that. My mum is notorious for offering frank (some would say, tactless and bordering on mean) criticism of my face, clothing, hair, and "thunder thighs."

My mum and Big D were both pretty strict with me, after being pretty lenient with my sister. I was discouraged from participating in extra-curricular activities (mostly because we lived far from public transportation and they didn't want to drive me) and hanging out with friends was also kind of frowned upon. Having a boyfriend made them apoplectic with worry about my virtue and my ambition. I really think they thought I was going to end up pregnant and working at a gas station with some of my less savory high school beaus. They didn't really drill me or oversee my homework the way Chua did with her kids, but failure to produce good grades would result in long, weekly, "family meetings" about how I was on a downward spiral towards welfare and they enrolled me in Kumon math.

I do think there's a happy balance, which Chua reiterates at the end of the article. In talking it over with the Dotytron yesterday, he said that he's definitely come around the Tiger way of parenting, seeing first-hand the aptitude and drive of the Asian and Southeast Asian kids he sees in the primary grades who are raised that way. He says he has a hard time applying it, but I think I'll be strict enough for the both of us. Big D drilled it into my head from a very young age that there is a right way of doing things and a wrong way (none of that namby-pamby, soft, "just give it your best shot" lowest common denominator pap for him). The Dotytron also thinks you should start off tough and then ease off once you've established the work habits and dedication and valuation of scholastic achievement when they're young. Set the foundation and then let them understand that you have faith in the foundation and trust them to have some autonomy and conduct themselves accordingly.

The thing is, this parenting style is an embodiment of the tenet of "do your best" - a tenet that so frequently gets perverted and mis-applied both in parents' expectations of their children and in the school system. A differentiated learning model at its best should be about expecting kids to do their best, but I really think all too often "do your best" becomes a cloak for the acceptance and valorization of mediocrity, which to me, is completely unacceptable. As a parent, I think you know what your kid is capable of, and accepting anything less than their best under the auspices of being "kind" is doing them a greater disservice in the long run, both individually and to their ability to participate and contribute to the greater community at large.

I mean, obviously I'm not going to force my kid to pick one of two potential instruments (if we're going stringed instrument, I would definitely prefer the cello) but I do expect my kid to apply themselves and understand that things being difficult and challenging are all building blocks to your mastery of a craft. I say this now - who knows what I'll be like or what Master T will submit to. Having said that, I do believe there is too much autonomy and agency given to the child. University is not being presented as an option in this house. Not while I'm paying the bills and not while I gave you life! (See...sounding like a Chinese mom already.)

My mum came over on Monday and helped with the boobla. It was so nice to have a visit with her. She was speaking Cantonese with him, which is something I've started doing at home. He seems to perk up a bit and really clue in when I do - maybe it's the change in the sounds he's used to hearing. My mum thinks he should learn Mandarin, but that's tough, since I don't speak Mandarin, but I guess we can learn together. The Dotytron downloaded the Rosetta Stone so that we can work on it, and one of the Tiger mom classes I'll send the boobla to is going to be Mandarin. So he'll do a summer sport, a music lesson, Mandarin and a martial art in the winter.

For dinner on Monday I made that tilapia braised with grape tomatoes and chorizo and arugala that I do all the time, served on orzo tossed with roasted garlic oil:

I also added some sliced red pepper and saffron to give it even more of a Spanish vibe. Last night I made us turkey and dumplings, with dilled cornmeal dumplings, adapted from this Gourmet recipe:

My changes include using boneless leftover Christmas turkey, using leeks instead of shallots and adding mushrooms, parsnips, celery, carrots, fresh thyme and sage to the poultry mixture. I also added chopped dill to the cornmeal dumplings. The dish was delicious.

Tonight we're having leftover freezer chili and cornbread. Because it's a snowy day I want to do some baking - I'm thinking either cookies or trying my hand at the Baked brownie recipe. The problem is, I don't have very nice chocolate with which to try it. My outing today with the Boobla is to the library and the grocery store, so we'll see if I can find some nice Ghiardelli squares or something there.

Fin.

the snowy weekend

oh me oh my, what a lovely weekend we had here. it started on friday with a nice walk in little italy with the boobla snuggled up in the ergo with our friend S. we stopped at the sicilian cafe and ate tartufo and then we spent an unseemly amount of money on new glasses from rapp optical. my old glasses (which i haven't seen hide nor hair of since the summer) are about 10 years old so it was time for an upgrade. was it time for an upgrade to something that cost 1/10 of what our car cost? that i don't know. i will say though that rapp has some of the most unique frames around and the salespeople are top notch - really focused and experienced and offer quick, unbiased advice and opinions.

i had gone in wanting those updated hipster-y vaguely academic frames...the slightly larger buddy holly style in a tortoiseshell. and i found a pair that looked pretty good on my face, but then she whipped out this other pair, and i dunno what happened, but it was instant match made in heaven. there were a few other things at play that day. i wore my hair down, which i almost never do, because i have bushy, thick, unmanageable, horse hair that doesn't do what i want it to do, but for some reason, friday it was behaving and framed my face with lovely waves. i also put on a bit of makeup to go out and went i went into rapp, i looked like a person again, a real, live, potentially pretty person. someone who could be considered attractive and not wan, pale, harried and over-tired. i don't know if the salesperson at rapp played me like a fiddle, but when she said that i was easy to fit with frames and that you could throw anything on me and they would work, it certainly made coughing over wads and wads of cash on frames easier to swallow. playing to a new mom's long subsumed sense of vanity will do that for you, i guess. it also helps that my vision care will foot half the bill.

so we did that, and then i came home to the dotytron and cooked up a meal of meatloaf (pork, beef, veal) with ginger maple carrots, and mashed acorn squash. the meatloaf was perked up with some of my cranberry, apple, pear relish:

saturday morning we awoke and wonders of wonders! almost a foot of snow lay blanketed across the city. it was completely unexpected (i have no idea what's going on in the wider world these days) and so the dotytron called in to his saturday lesson and i baked us blueberry muffins and make fried eggs with english bacon and chimichurri on a pita for breakfast:

then we headed out on the slushiest grocery mission ever, followed by back to back massages, followed by epsom salt baths, followed by the discovery of a small leak in the bathroom into the kitchen. thankfully, our kitchen is a write off and is not long for the world, but i still gotta call a guy to come and take a look at it.

le sigh. on sunday morning we headed to the weston golf and country club to have brunch with nany. how lucky is master T to have the opportunity to be kissed and cuddled and to get to know his great nany? pretty damned lucky. she also taught me the basics of crocheting and we recorded her reading "the night before christmas" in one of those hallmark recordable storybooks i love that lady. look at the two of them, best buds 4ever:

we had l'army and the roomie over for a simple dinner of seafood chowder (salmon, mussels, shrimp, clams), bread, and salad:

and the roomie told stories from the birth of master T that i had completely forgotten/blanked out. the most notable one involved me turning to my lesbian midwife, when i was 7 cm dilated, looking her straight in the eye and saying, "S, do me a solid, and fist me open to 10 cm. c'mon. just do it for me." lol!!! so crass and offensive! the roomie was trying to say that when they placed the boobla on my chest that it was love and first sight, and i was like, ummm...no. it's gross. they're covered in that waxy white goo and they smell like skanky undies.

but then look what happens. that wriggling, fat pair of skanky undies turns into this sweet-faced little pudding pop, who is about to turn THREE MONTHS OLD on tuesday. where is the time going?!??! how can i make it stop?!?? stephen hawking, i'm looking at you, here! the little guy is fully busting out of his 0-3 month sized clothes but i'm finding it hard to put them away and move him up a size, so instead i've got him in 3/4 sleeve sleepers that his little toes are wearing away holes in. just kidding. almost that, but not quite. why do they have to get bigger? why can't you always have a delicious, yoghurt-y smelling, smiling, yelping, cooing little mass of soft skin around?

blargh. i feel like time is running away from me.

good thing i had the incredibly STUPID idea to do school while on maternity leave instead of just leaving well enough alone to soak up every minute of the little booger's growing awareness. so dumb.

back to the grind.

fin.

the comfort of routine

a somewhat frenzied, depressed, scattershot and piecemeal start to 2011 has now settled into something of a routine that seems to be working for all parties in the dotytron lagerfeld household.

the babe has been going to bed around 10-10:30 and staying down until around 6am or thereabouts. the dotytron and i, in light of our respective responsibilities and creative pursuits, have settled on a divide and conquer approach. the dotytron wakes up at 6 and barring any supply teaching responsibilities, does his lesson planning, life-stuff, guitar playing in the morning while the boobla snoozes with me after his 6am feed. when the dotytron comes home at night, we eat dinner together and then he takes over baby duties so that i can work on school, and then we converge again at 9ish to bathe, read, sing, and put master T down.

this is all working so far, but things are going to change. monday and tuesday nights the dotytron isn't home until 8pm, after teaching his private lessons. wednesday nights i have school, and we've all signed up for friday night dodgeball. so it's working for right now, but once things ratchet up, it'll be tough to keep that nice and tidy division of labour going.

my day is divided into two rough chunks of productivity centred around naptimes. in the morning i do my administrative housey type stuff: making phone calls, answering emails, house cleaning. then we either go on an outing or stay in. afternoons are for dinner prep and school work. i wish i wasn't so busy, but i guess that's just our lives right now. i sometimes find myself gazing covetously at ipads and iphones, but then i realize i don't really have the free time to occupy myself with apps. i'm not an app person. there isn't a ukulele practicing app, or a knit a scarf app, or a make a quilt app, or a cook a dinner app, or a have brunch with friends app...so until there is, i don't think i'd get my monies worth. we barely watch tv in this house...our cable bill is a complete wash.

the boobla has started doing this thing which is beyond awesome. well, there are a few things. first: he's super-fixated on me right now. if me and the dotytron are both vying for his attention, he inevitably zeros in on my face and saves a lot of his special smiles for me. he is smiling A LOT. and so much of my day is spent engineering and coaxing out the big, hearty, open-mouthed lappy grins that turn his cherubic face into a conferences of semi-circles. eyes squinting with joy, his little mouth open and gummy, his cheeks lifted and further rounded into edible smooth peachy bites. the other morning, i was feeding him and he looked up at me and made one of his cooing "aahhgahh" noises, that i repeated to him. he looked at me, and you could really see that he was comprehending that i was matching his sound and it thrilled him. we talked back and forth for a while and my heart broke into a billion rainbows. each time i repeated back his noise, he would pause, and you could watch the dawning awareness of his understanding that he was being heard and mimicked...watching the synapses fire and watching his little brain soaking it in was incredible.

i've sent an email off to this organization, roots of empathy, to see if he and i can volunteer to be a "seeds of empathy" family. it's a non-profit organization committed to building community. you basically bring your baby into the classroom of kids on a regular basis so they can watch a kid grow and feel a sense of empathy with others and build a sense of reflexivity. we'll see if i get picked.

we're also going to the open house for the alternative school in our neighbourhood. i know, i know. so flaky and mama dread! the thing is, the alternative school is in the same building as the school we're in district for...so if the kid is heading out that way anyway, why not at least check out what the alternative school is about? the dotytron has been put in charge of "checking out schools" duty and he said that the school has their own facebook page and is SUPER white and flaky-waldorf-y about it. which to me, is all the more reason why they need an inter racial wu-wear-wearing little o.d.b. and his cray-cray, curmudgeon, contrarian, loud-mouth mum. just to mix things up a bit. i've already determined that i'm going to be the scourge of parent council anyway. might as well be tussling with other mama dreads. is there something to be said for your kid toughing it out in public school with the great unwashed? hells, yeah. it worked for me (although going to school in the burbs is a great equalizing factor). but i also thing there's something to be said for your kid going to school and not being overlooked just because he doesn't rest at either end of the spectrum.

anyway, we'll see what we think post-info session. it's a lottery system anyway (how, "waiting for superman"!)

so my mom is reading my blog all the time...and sent me an email with the subject line: "chinkglish" about how i accidentally wrote "one an award" instead of "won an award." lol! thanks, mom. p.s. i'm writing these posts in a frenzy during T.V.'s nap time! cut me some slack!

random story: over the break, my deadbeat dad invited us all over for breakfast at his house with his crazy jacked up wife, lucy. so obviously, my sister feels guilty and obligated to go, s-dawg feels sad for the guy and obligated to go, and i emphatically could care less and am ambivalent about going (i'm mad about wasting a meal while in markham and i'm also mad that my deadbeat da' has suddenly decided to feign an interest in his grandchildren, borne out of retirement boredom and the fact that he married a woman who is an idiot and probably makes exceedingly boring company for the long years of your dotage.) the day before, i had pretty much rallied the troops to make sure we could make our excuses and not have to go, or at the very least, meet him at a neutral location (mcdonald's - our usual meeting spot, where he is notorious for a) not paying for breakfast; and b) ordering and eating his breakfast before we get there).

anyway, i called him and was trying to make our excuses, but he said he'd already bought the stuff for breakfast, and specifically mentioned, "ham, sausages" so then **i** felt bad and said we should go. well, well, well. when we show up, we are treated to a totally insane, immigrant spread of: deli ham (like, not even black forest ham...like the cheap, flaccid, pale, blotchy pink stuff in paper thin slices that's been formed into a rectangle), OVEN ROASTED HOT DOGS (immigrant "sausages"?!?), toast that was toasted easily 45 minutes prior, kraft single slices, juice, and peanut butter that has separated into cemented peanut goo on the bottom and an oily slick on top. the dotytron and i were the first to enter, and lucy was bustling around asking us how we wanted our eggs. because it was a whole heap of us (including all significant others AND c-hova) i suggested scrambled eggs because it would be easy for a crowd. "no, no, tell me how you want your eggs, i can do any kind you like," she insisted. the dotytron and i exchanged a wary glance and then put in our usual, over-easy. when the plate of eggs finally emerged from the kitchen to be passed around, i almost vomited. i doubt that a blind manatee could have butchered eggs more. it was comically bad.

master T, showing infinite wisdom, slept through the whole ordeal. the dotytron swears that at one point, he saw the boobla open one eye, take a look around, realize he was still there, and then promptly decide that feigning sleep was his best defense. he was right.

tuesday night's dinner of baked macaroni and cheese was scrumptious - very carb-heavy and cheesy:

last night we had freezer turkey noodle casserole, which had held up amazingly despite being almost 3 months frozen. i sided it with sautéed brussel sprouts and roasted parsnip chips:

bonus shot of the boobla looking like a baby pope:

and now i have to frantically go dust the entire house before he awakes from his morning slumber.

fin.

wracked

two things are making me feel guilty se jours (in my head i think this means "this day," but i'm not 100% on that.)

the first is that over the break i was having a confab with my niece and i told her that panda bears are marsupials and then i got all "teachable moment" about it and asked her what other animals are marsupials that are also called bears and that aren't (ie. koalas) so my sister emailed me yesterday and told me that miss ramona went to her teacher and told her that panda bears are marsupials and her teacher said that they're actually bears and my sis and uncle rico looked it up and they are bears. so i totally got my poor niece pwned by her teacher. i feel awful! mostly because she trusted me and then relayed that info to her teacher. i've lost all credibility with her.

the other thing making me feel bad is that for the past two nights we've been trying to implement a ferber sleep system for the little boobla. the idea is that you basically let the baby cry it out and don't pick the baby up so that they learn how to self-soothe. this is all very well and good, but the little boobla is fully capable for crying for a full hour and it's pretty tough to sit by and not comfort your baby when they're crying themselves hoarse and their face and body are transmitting pure anguish. i mean, according to the ferber method (or the synopses that we've read online), you CAN go into the room and pat them and talk to them, but you can't cuddle them to sleep. so we did it on sunday night and he bawled his eyes out until finally i went in and stroked his head and talked to him until he fell asleep. then last night it was another hour of him freaking out until the dotytron came into the bedroom where i was anxiously sitting up trying to distract myself from the baby and told me that actually, you're not supposed to try ferberizing BEFORE SIX MONTHS. because the baby CAN'T UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU'RE TRYING TO ACCOMPLISH. so we both felt like giant a-holes and sprinted into the room and picked up the boobla who promptly sucked on the boob for a bit and then conked out.

ugh. i think the main problem right now is that one small thing manifests itself and we kind of freak out. so he rejects the bottle one night and then we spiral off into him never wanting to bottle feed again and try a billion different things. update: he takes the old, non-space-age bottles fine now! or, he's a little fussy about going down to bed one night and then we up and decide that we have to sleep-train him right then and there because that ONE night is a slippery slope and before you know it we're never sleeping again. i think we just have to relax a bit and be a bit more macro about everything. i mean, obviously babies and people are creatures of habit, so you don't want to indulge slippery slope activity, but one night, or even a couple, isn't enough to establish a fixed pattern so we got to let up on things. plus, babies are changing all the time. plus, he's actually really good about going to bed in the crib and giving us an extended "night time" stretch of sleep, so we just have to remember that and treat this like the small blip it probably is.

i'm also feeling a little guilty about dressing my kid like this to go on a walk yesterday:

hehehe. the kid looks like a cross between a cirque du soleil participant, carrot top, and i don't know what. i bundled him up in like 4 different layers. the socks go on over the pants because that's the only way they stay on, and he's wearing this lion hat UNDER his hood. lol.

P didn't end up staying for dinner last night so we had that spicy grain soup with fred's olive chipotle bread and butter:

the spicy grain soup is a recipe for post-holiday-excess virtuousness. it's got bulgur, farro, and barley in an ancho-chile spiked tomato broth with chopped carrot, zucchini, and sliced shitake mushrooms. the recipe is from food and wine is available here. one of the most full-flavoured and tasty vegan soups i've ever had.

okay, book reviews.

in the last few months, i read all of suzanne collins' "the hunger games" trilogy. this series is already the next HUGE young adult phenomena, and is touted as the next "twilight." that description does the series and the author an incredible disservice, as it's a trillion times better written, has a more progressive female protagonist, and is altogether a more sophisticated piece of writing. it's hugely addictive and has sold like, 2 million copies. my sister hepped me to it. they're also making a film adaptation. i'm not sure why it hasn't generated as much buzz in canada, but maybe it has and i'm just not up on it.

the story takes place in a future version of the U.S. in what used to be known as america, after an epic uprising there are now 12 districts controlled by district 1. to publicly illustrate its control over the other districts, district 1 demands that each district put forth 1 girl and 1 boy to compete in the hunger games, which is a publicized fight to the death with one victor. the book is kind of like a young adult running man. the main protagonist is a girl, katniss everdeen, who steps forward to take her sister's place in the hunger games and over the course of the 3 novels, unwittingly sets off a chain of events that leads to a rebellion against district 1.

of course, there's also romance and it's a good one, with peeta versus gale, easily eclipsing the whole jacob versus edward malarkey. i can't recommend this series enough.

my book club read dionne brand's "what we all long for," which one the city of toronto's best book award in 2006. it's a love letter to toronto and it's multicultural diasporic make up. it tells the story of 4 friends, different ethnicities, in their early 20s making a life in this strange, swirling, identity-bleeding metropolis. the central character is a vietnamese girl trying to make it as an artist, in love with her best friend carla, and whose family accidentally left her young brother behind in vietnam when they were leaving the country. the book is intensely poetic, with beautifully descriptive passages that create a sinuous and intoxicating portrait of toronto's grimy exoticism. it was a very contentious novel for book club though. it resulted in one woman QUITTING the club over some heated discussion that happened before i arrived (late). crazy, huh? i think that some of the women were put off by the depictions of raving and drug use and general early-20s bohemia. it didn't ring true to them. my book club is made up of women who are primarily very straight and narrow, so they found it a little too indulgent. personally, i think i've read too much diasporic post-colonial literature to really appreciate the book. it's fine, but nothing i would willingly pick up again - almost too literary and rote for that genre, but still beautifully executed.

finally, i finished "the immortal life of henrietta lacks" last month. this is a non-fiction story of the "immortal" cells of henrietta lacks, a poor black woman from the south, whose cells were taken without her permission and ended up proliferating and used in countless research studies. apparently there are trillions of her cells that have replicated through the years and cell companies routine sell her strand to researchers and hospitals around the world for use in clinical trials, cancer studies, etc. meanwhile, her family and children had no idea about their mother's legacy and grew up beyond poor. it's a pretty fascinating account of medical ethics, race, and economics, through the aperture of this one woman's cellular legacy. i did find that it dragged a bit in the middle, but the author does a really fantastic job of bringing to life her extensive research.

so that's what i've been reading so far. it doesn't sound like much, but i think it's pretty good considering how little time i have for everything. i'd probably get a lot more reading done if i had an e-reader. but despite my numerous hints, no one got me one for xmas. i had been leaning towards the kobo, just because it's so cheap, but i'm not liking the lack of search functionality. i'd get the kindle but i'm worried about the proprietary format bizness...i want to be able to buy books from anywhere and read whatever the heck i want on my reader.

fin.

resignation, resolutions

post-holiday doldrums accompanying the resumption of normal life? present! there's nothing worse than going back to "work" after the frenzied whirl and bustle of the holidays. i always think the best time to have a vacation would be for the two weeks AFTER new year's. that way, you could always plead work as a way of getting out of holiday obligations and you get that extra time to decompress. christmas and new year's are way too buck inevitably to offer much of a respite. you really only get a day or two before you're feeling the winter blues at the prospect of returning back to the grind.

i am welcoming the return to some semblance of a normal routine. my resolutions for 2011 involve:

- being better at engaging my child
- spending less time dicking around on the internet (direct correlation to the resolution above)
- incorporating daily doses of school into my schedule instead of slacking
- daily walks with the boobla
- more local, seasonal veggies in our diet
- finding a balance between socializing and home time
- getting a new pair of glasses
- printing and putting the worthwhile 2009/2010 photos into albums

i'm not going to bother recounting what i've been up to for the past two weeks, suffice to say that our holiday was very very busy and filled with lots of adoration of this little guy, who made out like a bandit in the xmas prezzie department:

that's him in one of the multiple sweaters that great nany knit for him. so cute! she also crocheted him the most amazing blanket and pillow set that we're going to cherish forever and ever:

there's nothing better than homemade knitted baby gifts. no question.

we've been dealing with a bit of a fussbudget lately around here. he's been having super bad toots that scare the bejeezus out of him and consequently result in a lot of tears and wanting to be carried to settle his stomach. this all means that we've been baby-wearing like whoa. i'm pretty sure i've found my favorite baby carrying device. it's called a cross weave wrap, with the most popular and widely available one made by the german company, storchenwiege. they're not cheap. but apparently they retain their value well and you can sell them often for more than you bought them for, as people like used ones. we borrowed ours from the dotytron's hippie friend. this wrap is pure hippie. his friend is pure mama dread and the smell of patchouli impregnated in the wrap is only now starting to fade. out of all my baby-wearing devices (and i have 4 now), it's tops on ergonomics and versatility. but there's a pretty steep learning curve and it's not for the faint of heart, especially if you want to do the back carrying, which is the most useful carry of all. in a lot of wraps, you can't put newborns and babies on your back because of the lack of neck support...with the storch, it's totally possible and is the chief selling point. wearing a baby on your back is a million times more comfortable than doing a front carry AND it allows you to do things like cook, eat, clean without having a 14lb turkey hanging off your front and throwing your balance off (not to mention the inherent danger of frying bacon and having a forward facing baby as a grease splash guard.)

here's a photo of the dotyron "carrying my inca child" (which is what he calls wearing the boobla in the wrap):

i can't believe what a mama dread i'm turning into. i mean, i've always had hippie tendencies, but the wrap makes those tendencies visible to the naked eye. the reason why i like it better than the moby wrap or wraps similar to the moby, is that the storch doesn't have stretch. when you fit a baby into the moby, 15 minutes later, you find that the stretch in the cotton allows the baby to sink down, down, down, until before you know it, he's hanging at your knees, and that is a recipe for back disaster. the aforementioned ability to carry even newborns on the back is an additional point in the storch's favour, as is the fact that when the boobla is asleep, there's no maneuvering to get him out. i just crouch with my back towards the bed and tilt back while untying the wrap and depositing him on his back onto the sleeping surface. 9 times out of 10 he's still sound asleep. so yeah. this + cloth diapers + homemade baby wipes + plans for elimination communication (aka early potty training) + baby led weaning = mama dread is in the house!

last night for dinner we took leftover christmas prime rib and served it on top of fred's bread's chipotle olive bread (lightly toasted) topped with a welsh rarebit (think, cheesy, beer-y, mustard-y sauce) and ate that with sliced salted tomatoes and quick dill-cucumber salad:

my friend P is visiting from egypt so if he stays for dinner tonight it'll be macaroni & cheese with toasted garlic breadcrumbs and salad, and if he doesn't, we'll be having spicy grain soup with bread and butter.

saw a few movies over the break...not as many as i'd like to (i've been waiting for "blue valentine" to come to theatres for SO LONG!) but here are my reviews:
i'm one of the few people out there that didn't unequivocally love "black swan." my principal complaint was that it required a bit more directorial restraint. i agree with david denby's review that the film insists on bludgeoning you over the head with cheap, thriller tricks and consequently tips over into the lurid and schlocky. the story is rife with meta-symbolism and duality - th story of swan lake itself, natalie portman's nina's psychological doubling, the virgin/whore dialectic, mila kunis's character, the stage mother played with brittle mania by barbara hershey that present a high-minded take on the visceral, bodily and mental masochism of the ballet world specifically and of artistic creation generally. however! aronofsky doesn't know well enough to leave symbols alone and thus likes to over-play his hand, troweling on the message so thickly the film slips over the edge of good taste and true brilliance, in my opinion. which isn't to say that i disliked it - there are beautiful scenes (in particular, the whirling, tight dance sequences provided a wonderful stage-eye view of what it's like from a performer's point of view) but the overall effect is like some kind of baroque soap opera - helped along by some over-the-top performances (winona ryder's aging ballerina being the worst.) i love mila kunis but i don't think she deserves a best supporting actress nomination - barbara hershey does a much better job and kunis' role is under-written.

"the town" is a decent genre film that's undone by the poor story. overwhelmingly great performances from all the leads and the directing keeps things going at a satisfying clip, but there are some wasted characters (jon hamm's FBI agent, blake lively's floozy oxy addict) and the movie ultimately fell apart for me with the implausibility of the central romance between rebecca hall's unwitting bank manager hostage and ben affleck's trying-to-reform boston bank robbing neer do well. when a guy from the wrong side of the tracks is looking for redemption, then the gal providing the catalyst has gotta make it seem WORTH IT. hall's character is kind of flat and stupid and lame and that was a major issue for me. the movie is definitely entertaining and worth a rental fee but i'd give it an okay vote.

"easy A" is trying to be a john hughes sexy, funny teen film but falls WAY off the mark. what it's missing: heart, endearing characters, believability, a story. that's a lot of stuff to be missing from a teen film, folks. not even a believable villain! no message!!! ugh. i wanted to like it - the dialogue has a snappy feel and i liked patricia clarkson and stanley tucci as the parents of emma stone's olive, but at the end you're just, meh. emma stone is gorgeous and did give a breakout performance - the problem is: it's kind of hard to believe that a girl that gorgeous, funny, and smart-alecky would be a friendless, virginal loser.

tomorrow will be a book review omnibus post - i'm using entertainment weekly's "best fiction of 2010" as my guide, but i can't keep up. i've got 3 out of the 10 top picks from the library but have to return them as i can't read them fast enough.

finally: did anyone notice that i gave birth to alfred hitchcock?



definite winner in the best cheeks of 2010 category.

fin.