On this day four years ago I was freaking out big time.I was fourteen days overdue with a baby boy. The Princess was four and a half. And Mr. MG had left to join the crew of a commissioning ship that morning. We didn’t know for sure when he would be back. As it turned out, with the exception of a couple of visits, he wouldn’t be back for 18 months. I am so glad I didn’t know that at the time.
He was my biggest baby, and the longest birth. That was a foretaste of things to come; he still takes his sweet time to do anything. He didn’t care to sit up. (He still will stop what he’s doing throughout the day to lie down on the floor and just rest, as if gravity is getting the best of him.) He was in no hurry to move from my bed to his crib. And let’s not even get started on the potty training thing. This is a boy who likes things to stay how they are.
Even though he is all boy, all the time, he loves to snuggle. To him, there is no wrong time to curl up in my lap, nuzzle his head under my chin, and just relax.
Lately he has discovered the magic of books and has started to decode words. He comes at it from an auditory angle and will play with sounds and hash out how something must be spelled by the sounds it makes. He puts it in reverse, too. (“GAP spelled backwards is PAG, mama! Paaaaaaag!”) When he can read through an entire Bob book, he gets to keep it, and fans them out proudly like playing cards.
He is very set about food. He doesn’t care to eat much breakfast, but will scarf down three gigantic pieces of pizza for supper. Come to think of it, he is always in the mood for pizza. He wants to like avocado, but he is a texture eater and can’t abide the feel of it in his mouth. The same goes for boiled eggs. He loves any kind of cheese from aged, moldy chevre to American processed cheese food. And he will slurp down miso soup until his poor tummy is distended if you let him.
All these little details add up to a big boy in a little body kangaroo-jumping across the living room. The biggest hugs, the widest eyes, and the cheesiest grin.
Happy fourth birthday, my sweet Bear.
I am not a bread person. I love to eat it, but for the longest time, despite being able to conquer a myriad of other baking projects, I could not do bread.
I tried for the first time in my college days in Colorado. I thought that owning a copy of The Laurel’s Kitchen Bread Book and a jar of yeast was all I needed. Then I found out that high altitude + whole wheat = an inedible brick. So I dropped the whole bread thing (not on my foot, thank heavens) and concentrated on my first love. Cookies.
But lately I have had a yen for making good bread. Nothing says home like a warm loaf fresh from the oven. So into the fray I went. And… Success!
I began to get familiar with some favorite recipes, but then I wanted a real challenge: sourdough. Not just any sourdough, though. I wanted to make sourdough bread leavened with only wild starter and I wanted whole wheat. The one I have been playing with takes four rises, two rests, and pretty much all day babysitting – but oh, baby – it is so worth it! The Princess and the Bear don’t want to eat anything else. (“Please, Mama, can we have just sourdough and goat cheese for lunch?!”) This is what I have been searching for all these years. Soul nourishing bread!
One of the many rises:
A final rise in jury-rigged brotforms:
The payoff: beautiful, yummy bread.
A crumb shot. Happy yeasties, happy gluten.
Oh, just one thing… At the end of the day I got great bread. But I also got to clean this:
What you don’t see is the flour strewn everywhere (There is a reason they used to use flour for paste – it is impossible to scrub off!) and the fact that the dishwasher is already brim full.
Still, it was worth it. Yum!
Picture Snoopy, his head thrown back, legs working overtime. Yup, that’s me.
I tell you, God answers prayers. Even desperate, crabby, sarcastic blog prayers. The day after my previous post, I had to go in for my semi-annual blood draw so I could renew my thyroid scrip. I always gripe when I have to make the appointment because my levels haven’t changed for years. Can’t they just phone in some refills and let me be? And the vast majority of lab techs make hamburger out of my vein so I go around looking like a very clumsy junkie for a week afterward.
Ah! But not 24 hours after my draw, the nurse called me back to say that I was way off. They needed to bump up my scrip by a full third of my previous meds. (The rapid response time is how you know I have been going to a civilian practice.)
All this time, I thought the hair falling out, radical lethargy, weight gain despite busting my buns 3-4 times a week, and brain fuzziness was a combination of post-partum stuff and stress. Well, that applies as well, but I’ve been doing it all while stuck on low throttle. Hallelujah! Help is on the way. Even though it has only been two days at the new level, I feel better mentally because I know there is a light at the end of the tunnel.
Ain’t it great that God reads Blogger?
Hello, God. It’s me, your daughter. First off, I want to thank you for this beautiful day that you have made. It is so gorgeous outside with the tulips and birds and sunshine.
But, Lord, I am so tired. I mean down to my toes, prop my eyelids open with toothpicks tired. I should be taking my kids outside on a day like this, running in the grass and laughing that we are not like the eastern part of the country that is living through rain and ice and wind. I would, but those children have flat worn. me. out. The whining. The litigating. The crying at very small things. Filthy looks when I say no. Picking at each other out of boredom. I have simply had enough.
Mother’s prayers are supposed to be all loving and begging for their children’s well-being. I suppose this is no different. I am pleading with you to shut their pie holes for just an hour or two because if I don’t get a little peace around here, I swear I am going to put all three of them on the curb in a cardboard box with the word “FREE!” scrawled across the front.
I know I asked you over and over for each one. And they are truly gifts from you. Right now they are the kind of gift I would give for revenge, like giving someone’s three year old a Barney drum machine.
So, please God, a little quiet. Just a small break. Thank you.
You know how fast you are growing? So fast, I can’t even blog as fast as you grow. So I’m posting this four days late.
It has been some month! You are still patchy with pox marks, but it is nothing like it was, thank God. I never ever want to live through that again. I know you don’t, either.
You really like to be held sitting up. When I lay you down on the floor, you curl up into a baby crunch with your head, arms, legs, and tukas lifted off the floor. You are also the master of rolling onto your tummy, although you are annoyed once you get there.
By far, the best thing is your ability to suck on your first finger. I love you, Moo, but it is very freeing to not be your pacifier any more. AND it has made it possible for you to (cue the fanfare) sleep in the Amby! The only reason I don’t belt out the Hallelujah Chorus at this point is because I don’t want to wake you up. I will miss your little warm self next to me, but I can sleep a lot more soundly now.
Ah, sleep. I remember sleep.
Ah, life is funny. One week I have a spate of things to write about, and then as soon as I devote an entire post to pig poo, I get writers block and the silly thing sits there at the top for days.
So lets talk about my freezer, shall we?
I am going to have to find another coping mechanism besides storing and cooking food. Yesterday I got my order from our wonderful, fabulous food co-op and began unloading the van, only to find that there was no room at the inn, sister. There I stood, hands on my hips, with eight pizzas and twelve bags of organic french fries melting into oblivion because the chest freezer was full. The kitchen freezer was loaded, too, so that wouldn’t help. It took three tries of unpacking and puzzling together the whole thing before I got everything in there – just barely. It was like playing Tetris, only really, really cold.
But honestly, how wonderful is my life that my major problem is how to fit all the food into my house?
Sometimes there is a synchronicity in the universe that is impossible to ignore. Worlds collide, the stars align, your chocolate got in my peanut butter, and disparate elements combine to work together for good.
Bear with me.
To begin with, did you know that we are reaching an environmental breaking point because of factory farms? Did you further know that 9.5 tons of hog manure are produced every year in North Carolina alone? Seriously people, it’s killing the fish, poisoning the ground, and the stench of the manure lagoons would knock a buzzard off a gut wagon. And because a pig creates four times as much waste as a human, the stuff just keeps on coming.
And then there’s the problem of terrorists cavorting unhindered in the Middle East. I mean, really, they are just scampering around blowing up our fine service people and training their children to be Jew-hating barbarians right and left. Bin Laden and his ilk, Ahmadinejad, all the little creepy-crawly nobodies with C-4 suspenders, they are simply ruining everyone’s chances of living a decent life over there. What we need is a way to pummel them into submission with zero civilian casualties.
We need to wage Jihog.
We need to make use of our renewable resources and paint those bastards with pig poo. If a militant Islamic shudders at the thought of even touching a pig, think of the possibilities of poo.
Taliban hiding in the hills? Truck that poo in and pump it into every cave in sight. Terrorists taking refuge in the local mosque? Well, it’s going to raise a few eyebrows, but hose it down until they boot the fugitives out the front door. British embassy besieged by rioting students? That’s not boiling oil they’re pouring over the walls…
We’ll be fighting terrorism. And cleaning up America, too. It’s time to give feces a chance.
Bombs away.
