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| Stanford Dish |
To say we were disappointed would be to understate grossly the general sense of disgust--there is no milder word for it--with which we left the place. Our kids ate pizza and soggy plain pasta, along with canned beans, canned corn, canned peas, and "chicken salad," all polished squeaky clean and laid out in a dazzling buffet spread, awash with the neon colors of food that clearly does not come directly from nature; for dessert, they had chocolate "ice cream," which had NO milk in it and was made mostly of corn starch and food coloring. Yuck. We swore never to go back, even if that meant eating five-day old leftovers or else cooking our own plain whole-wheat pasta with a dash of olive oil, garlic, and parsley.
So call us food snobs.
The experience motivated me to work extra hard at using every last ounce of those beautiful bunches of seasonal vegetables we get weekly from our CSA and to prioritize adventure and exploration in my planning of lunches and dinners. A dash of the "French parenting" attitude, expecting kids to eat adult food without too many complaints, helps in that sort of enterprise.
I love cooking (not baking sweets), and I find that even though it is hard to plan in advance and then execute elaborate dishes involving two root vegetables, one bean that needs pre-soaking, and a green that requires meticulous washing and chopping, the extra effort almost always pays off in the end product and often even in the process.
While it used to be hard to pull off those sorts of meals some months ago, with Raya toddling about and courting injury by negligence every couple of minutes, we all bask in the general sense of relief now that the children do not need round-the-clock supervision. Sava and I can play Gobblet Gobblers while I chop carrots and Raya naps (or, better yet, I can trust him to wield a small knife and help chop the veggies), or I can be starting a soup and roasting some beets while I keep an eye on their mostly amicable water/mud play in the backyard.
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| if not for the buildings in the background, she could be in Montana! |
I can answer Raya's question about what's in the soup with a casual "collard greens and black-eyed peas," as though these were chicken dog and french fries, and I can count on her mostly eating the stuff without too much protest. Even Sava, who used to gag at things that were too slimy, too broadly cut, too green, you name it, now mostly succumbs to eating whatever's on his plate. Mostly. A chunk of fresh bread on the side never hurt a kid either.
I'm writing all this not to boast about how well my people eat but rather to reaffirm the wisdom of a truism which has been nesting in my mind lately: when there's truly a will, there's inevitably a way. The aphorism is patently relevant to our food choices and eating habits, but it also describes accurately one way to approach parenting.
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| McClellan Ranch Park |
If I make a willful choice to pause and make eye contact with my children while he tells me a "crazy story" from school or she recounts a trip to the park where she met her new friend Charlotte, I likely will pause and make the eye contact. If instead I choose to wash dishes while they talk or, worse, interrupt them and tell them to clean up their legos, I likely will miss out on the sort of spontaneous, intimate, gritty human conversation that, in the end, may be the very best part of having children.
So, eating our vegetables is about more than food. It's about inserting the small pauses in time which allow us to plan meals, chop carrots, eat collards, read books, talk nonsense, give hugs, make eye contact, and laugh together.
:::
Sava's birthday party came and went, not without some serious six-year old drama. We'll remember the good parts, along with the joy and pride of marking six full years of life.
As I sit here in a rare moment of daylight freedom, I can overhear little voices engaged in adult conversation, drifting into the kitchen from the living room, where Sava and his best friend from school are constructing a train-side town out of plain and colored wooden blocks; this is the same girl whose mom emailed last night to tell me that while reciting a poem from school her daughter had proposed the idea of collecting all poems from kindergarten in a little book so that when she and Sava have little children they can read them the poems at the start of kindergarten; it's the same girl also with whom Sava is already planning a honeymoon, and the same one whose name peppers so many of his conversations. A disarmingly cute love affair, if there ever was one.
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| tearful after a lost card game |
:::
We marked Easter in the half-embarrassed, half-delighted way that I suspect is typical of all people who don't subscribe to the religious stuff but who still can't resist the allure of the whole coloring eggs, hiding them, and watching kids squeal with delight when they discover them rigmarole. Sava requested a small egg hunt inside and outside our house, and the Easter bunny delivered.
Raya didn't get as intrigued by the whole thing as we had anticipated, but this only left more loot for big brother.
:::
There is much more I wanted to put down here, but time--and the lack thereof--calls for brevity. So, on to
Stuff They Say
With the warm weather upon us, the water table and the easel are once again out in the backyard.
Sava is really into painting concrete things now, like the airplane below, while Raya is very much in the smudging phase.
So, an overheard conversation after a painting session went like this:
Sava: Let me see your picture. Wow, nice! What is it?
Raya: I don't know. Just colors!
:::
Raya's nanny has been talking to her about preschool. There is a good deal of confusion here about what you call places that take care of children before kindergarten (daycare, nursery, preschool), and when you add in the fact that Neva is most familiar with the educational system in Israel, Raya is a bit muddled as to what is happening next year (she begins preschool). So, we've had many iterations of the following conversation:
Raya: I'm gonna go to nursery school, then preschool, and then kindergarten!
Mom: Well, you know, nursery school and preschool here are the same thing.
Raya: Nurseries are not schools! Nurseries are most importantly daycares!
My little language pedant. Never let fine distinctions go unacknowledged.
:::
I've mentioned a few times already that Sava is obsessed with military airplanes. The obsession extends to every aspect of daily conversation, including mystifying remarks that leave us in stitches and quickly assume their rightful place as icons of our family's linguistic lore.
This at the dinner table:
When tati dies, we'll put him on a horizontal stabilizer!
Then when I asked him two nights ago whether, like Pippi Longstocking and her friends Tomi and Annika, he wanted to stay a kid forever, he gave a definite no and then explained, Because being a Blue Angel would be more fun than being a kid.
Yes, his new plan for life is to become a Blue Angel pilot.
:::
Sava has new rollerblades and Raya is dying to have a pair of her own. Thankfully, we have a spare set of pads that our kind neighbors gave us, so she wears those and walks alongside Sava whenever he practices rollerblading:
She's finally figured out how to ride her tricycle, and her speed when scootering is almost high enough to send her into orbit. So, when I recently took away her scooter after she refused to slow down following repeated warnings, she listened to my lecture about being safe for about fifteen seconds, then answered with a stomp of her foot:
I am not going to answer!
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| checking out a not-so-dead bee on the road; yes, she touched it, despite being warned otherwise; it moved |
:::
We're making a most purposeful effort not to bug Sava about food too much, but every now and then our cup of patience overfloweth. So, on a morning when his complaints before he sat down to eat were already too much, I said Oh, spare us the moaning, to which he replied cheerfully, I am not going to spare you! I've already spared you three times!
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| yes, she pulled him all by herself between our house and the playground |
:::
Rado says Raya suffers from ASD: Attention Seeking Disorder. It's really hard to convey how much the kid never shuts up. It's as if her brain is on a constant high from some unknown substance, and what's required from us is constant input so that her output would not diminish. If the conversation wanes, she always finds ways to steer it in a new direction. If someone is looking for peace and quiet, they need to go outside a fifty-foot radius from her. If no one has anything to say, she'll fill in with a random quote.
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| yes, she's waving at and accosting a stranger |
In one of our recent favorite books, called How Groundhog's Garden Grew, groundhog takes lessons from squirrel on how to grow a garden. When he finally sees the fruits of his labors, groundhog exclaims: "A tiny tomato! A tiny cucumber! A pepper! An eggplant! A pea pod! A zucchini! So this is how a garden grows!"
While I was putting Raya to bed one night, she looked at the decal on the wall in her bedroom, inherited from previous renters, which features a pattern of five or six animals. She stared at it for a second, then exclaimed: Here's an elephant! Here's a giraffe! Here's a hippo!...So, that's how a room grows!
A perfect example of her making reality through language.
Later that evening as I prepared to put her in bed, she also declared, quoting creatively another book:
I'd like not to sleep and mooch in the mud like a hippopotamus.
:::
Speaking of books, it warms our collective heart to see Sava opening up and reading out loud to Raya from time to time. Pirate School, for those of you out there going through Kindergarten or anticipating it, has apparently been a huge hit with his whole class at school. I bought it, and he read it to Raya several times during a long car ride.
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| excellent view of the brightest part of her hemangioma |
Since she'll now sit through pretty much any picture book, regardless of how long or complicated the text, we are having more and more occasions to read to both of them. It's magical, I tell you.
Alfie and Annie Rose, One Morning in Maine, Blueberries for Sal, and any of the Berenstain Bears are only a few of the big sibling favorites.
They do fight a bit about who reads to whom at night, as during bedtime we still practice "divide and conquer," and while loyalties change depending on the week and day, there is a slight rivalry going for who gets to read with mom. So, on a night recently when it was Raya's turn to have me, she announced triumphantly: Tonight tati reads to Sava! We're swapping big grown-ups reading to little grown-ups!
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| Mommy, take a cute picture of me and Raya! |
Other than that, they still adore each other. Amen.
:::
Raya's fascination with the alphabet continues, and she often indulges the peculiar habit of seeing letters in ordinary objects; not long ago, she noticed that a gate at a park looked like an H. Then a few days ago, after a minute or so of sitting naked on her potty and peering down into her private parts, she got up excitedly and declared:
Mommy, there were two lines sticking out like V!
When slow-poke mommy asked her what she meant, she explained in an exasperated voice that she was referring to her private parts and they...duh...looked like the letter V. I leave it to your imaginations to figure out exactly what she was looking at.
That same day at the park she also exclaimed, upon seeing a plane and its contrail in the sky, Look, mommy, a plane on a string!
:::
And favorite quote of these past couple of weeks? Sava, upon arriving at a park: We're always around nature. Nature's kind of fun.
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| Seal Point Harbor; see the red-winged blackbird? |
Summer is almost here, and we itch to head outdoors is almost painful.
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| two ladybugs doing the deed |
Happy late hump day out there. Happy almost-summer, too.
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