Oh, that's what a boner is!

Thanks to a playdate this afternoon, I now have insight into the perils facing fourth and fifth grade students on public school playgrounds. I've been enjoying my dialogue driven blogging of late, so to continue in this vein:

[Frost (8), his friend (10), Wren (3) and I are sitting around the kitchen table playing Top Dogs. After a spirited final round, his friend won the 14 point trophy.]

Frost: You boned us!

The friend and I look surprised. The friend guffaws a bit. Wren snaps elastic bands onto the peg-board.

Me: Do you know what that means?

Frost: No.

Friend: Guffaw

Me: Its a rude word for having sex.

Frost: Huh?

Me: Like.. well... it refers to ... when a penis gets hard. Its like it has a bone in it.

Frost: Ooooh! Yeah?

Friend: I know the proper word for that!

Me: Do you?

Friend (speaking as if announcing the winner of a derby): ERECTION!

Me: Yep, its called an erection. So, boning is a bit of a rude way of saying having sex.

Frost: Oooh, that's what a boner is!

Friend: At school, at recess, the boys in my class run up to 4th graders in the playground and

just say "ERECTION!" and run off.

Me: [cracking up] They do WHAT?

Friend: I don't do it. Of course. I don't. But some kids in my class run up to 4th graders and say

EEEERRRECTION!!!!

Me: Do the fourth graders know what it means?

Friend: Dunno. "ERECTION!!!!"

So, now its up to you. Are you going to tell your kid what an erection is or tell them its just a way kids say "I want to be your friend."

Symmetry

Wren likes to play with pattern blocks. Last week he made a surprisingly symmetrical pattern. I think he called it a bird but it could have been a dragon or something else entirely unexpected.

Here he is with his pattern, wearing the popular sweater.

A grave is a thing dead people hide under

Even the most rational person gets a bit superstitious when they become a parent. Perhaps its the need to imagine elves with a preschooler, or to hear thunder whenever a jet follows a flightpath above you. Add a heart defect into the mix and I start tapping wood to glue the good things in place, and to make a quick avert sign when someone says something inauspicious

(like Frost, who was trying to reassure me when Wren was born and said "Don't worry, he will be fine. He will live to like, 15!")

I had to do a lot of averting yesterday, when a long walk with Wren took us past a grassy cemetery with a broad vista of grave stones and evergreens. I am not sure whether it was Wren's fascination with Plants Versus Zombies on the iPad, or just novelty, but he wanted to get out of the stroller and look through the fence at the graveyard, just like Frost at his age. When Frost was 4 we walked around this graveyard while Frost asked questions and pointed at graves asking about each dead person until I was teary (which he was curious about, as well).

After looking through the fence a bit, Wren says:

"I wish we had a little tiny graveyard in our garden"

"Why do you want a graveyard?" He can't see my incredulous expression because I am behind him in the stroller.

"I love graveyards."

I think I get it. Wren does not know what graveyards are for. To test this so I ask "What is a graveyard, Wren?"

"A grave is a thing that dead people hide under so people don't see them."

Appreciating his answer, I decide to use my research techniques to explore in more depth.

"But why don't we want to see dead people?"

Now, Wren realizes I am really dumb and has to make it a bit more explicit.

"So people don't see the blood coming out or their faces broken off!"

"Oh."

Is he a sociopath? He is very matter of fact about this. Is it an omen? So, I continue.

"How do you feel when you see a graveyard."

Like any true sociopath he tells me what he thinks I want to hear.

"I feel ... sad."

"Uh huh."

Then he senses I am quizzing him in an odd way and wonders whether this is a test or an email. Sometimes I transcribe emails from him.

"Is this a letter for Granny?"

"No, do you want to say something to granny?"

"Yes. Say.... Dear Granny, We saw a graveyard. There are DEAD PEOPLE under the ground and nobody can SEE THEM! And tell Granny I feel GOOD!"

"Okay, I'll write it for Granny."

"Maybe there are some bats underneath too."

"I don't think so."

But the thought of bats under there has changed the mood in a way that blood and broken faces didn't.

"It would be bad if I was under a gravestone... Lets go. I don't like Graveyards."

"Why don't you like them now?"

"Because of the deadness ....and stuff."

We leave and in a moment he has forgotten the graveyard and is dusting his nose with buttercups and pointing to a robin and a starling and wondering when he can GET A COOKIE while I try and avoid dark thoughts like if Wren died before me I would have to make sure he is never in a grave because of the deadness and stuff.

Almost 100% on the road to somewhere

I asked the assistant for her recommendation when I stopped in at thrive [small t] for a mid-afternoon lunch.

"Are you 100% raw?" she asked.

Apparently this is not only a vegan place. Its an almost-raw-vegan place!

"No" seemed the best answer.

"Then I recommend the [small 'a'] awaken."

I follow her recommendation and add a 'magenta love' juice. I am now sitting enjoying an utterly delicious bowl of steamed bhutanese red rice and quinoa tossed with marinated kale, avocado, toasted nori, marinated (raw) mushroom, grated carrot and sesame-ginger sauce. The juice (of beets, ginger, apples and cucumber) is going to make me pee pink for a week, but its worth it.

As you can see, my new Almost-Vegan lifestyle has led to me to discover new things in our neighborhood. Who knew we had an almost-raw restaurant a mile from our house? Who knew there was a vegan pizza parlor (where we whisper sweet Almost-vegan nothings wearing whisps of velvet).

Sorry, that was just an aside. I am often taken by the awkward ambience of words. You know, the exotic connotations of a parlor versus the reality of cheese and gluten. Another one I encountered recently is 'manure lagoon'. This term is a euphemism for a football field sized swimming pool of animal shit but evokes somewhere you sip cocktails out of green coconuts while wearing a bikini.

So, anyway. Getting into the vegetarian thing is very easy in Seattle. Plus, since I was a vegetarian for 6 years in my 20s (and a vegan for 2 years) this is not really very hard for me. Frost is still confused about the change. He said to me:

"Its strange. When I wouldn't eat meat then you wanted me to eat meat and now I like chicken nuggets you don't want me to eat meat!"

He speaks the truth. I am fickle. Sometimes. I'm not feeling fickle about this food though. Must return. Must feed children raw food.

Uh oh.

PFST

We had a long weekend of chilly rain in Seattle but the sun broke through on Memorial Day afternoon, providing Frost and Alex with their first outdoor swim of the season. It must have been freezing, but both boys swam in Greenlake. Alex wore his footy wetsuit but Frost just had a swim-shirt.

This morning, heading out the door, Frost asked me what the weather would be like. I told him it would be like yesterday.

He immediately returned to his room and fetched a fleece. This was unexpected. Frost never leaves the house with a warm layer. Even in the rain, he just likes a long sleeved shirt.

"Are you cold?" I asked.

"It was very freezing yesterday in Greenlake," he said. "It looked sunny but it was like ICE! I couldn't even do crawl stroke on our challenges because I didn't want to put my face in the water."

So, Frost is suffering from Post First Swim Trauma - otherwise known as PFST - and has gone to school in fleece pants, long sleeved shirt and coat.

Wren and I were wearing sandals, insisting on a walk to the playground this morning.

"That's a ripoff! That's a total ripoff!" shouts Wren from the iPad (its iPad half-hour in the morning )

"Why's it a ripoff?"

"Because I did not win and the bad team won. Its a ripoff!"

He is iPadding while I am on hold to PSE to try and get a refund of that $6000 dollars I paid them by mistake. Oh, you don't know about that? I switched to our credit-card billpay and forgot to enter the decimal point when paying our electricity bill. The bill, for $59.89 was paid to the amount of $5989.

I now learn it will take five days to issue the refund which will be mailed to me. I wonder if this counts towards our reward points?

PFST also stands for Payment Fuckup Shock and Trauma.

Almost-Vegan Love For Sale

"Mommy, I LOVE YOU" announces Frost (8), at breakfast.

"Why?" I ask, immediately on guard. Love is one of the child's greatest points of leverage in the family and often accompanies a request in some form.

"What?" asks Frost, having lost his train of thought playing sword poker on the iPad [1.]

"Why do you LOVE me?"

"Oh! Because we are now Sort-of-Vegan [2.], we bought the iPad and you bought us new sugary breakfast cereal!"

I am relieved. Apparently love and joy can be bought.

Frost is very happy we are now Almost-Vegan. He has become a mini food activist. Since I explained that the book Eating Animals had shown me how badly animals are treated when raised for food, and we would not be eating them, he has declared that vegetarian chicken nuggets are "even better..."

Yesterday, Fred took him to Trader Joes and they stopped at the snack bar. Apparently Frost found that there was pork and chicken in the snack samples and told the store employee that he would not eat it because he was Almost-Vegan and that it was not nice to eat meat because animals were treated very badly.

"Animals are nice, how would you feel if you were put in a small fenced off area with only a little space and you knew that later they were going to kill you and even if you didn't know, when you are being killed then you know."

Me: "Wren, do you eat meat?"

Wren (Age 3): "Yes!"

Me: Why?

Wren: Because I JUST like chicken!"

Frost [speaking very slowly] "But Wren... Don't you want to eat fake chicken that is just vegetables and tastes very good or real chicken which is a badly lived animal. They don't get a nice home like we do they only get a very small bad space. So, do you want to eat pretend chicken that tastes good or real chicken that is not happy?"

Wren: "Argh, stop talking, this is annoying."

Frost: Just say "yes" or "No."

Wren: YES!

Apparently, small children are not yet active in their moral choices - or my small child is a tenacious omnivore. As is my prerogative, I shall make choices for him.

We have found that Trader Joes Organic Whole Grain Drink is actually pretty good as a milk substitute and is cheaper and less sugary than the Coconut milk drink (which we love too).

1. Sword Poker by Frost: "Its sort of like a bit tic-tac-toe on a grid and you try to make poker hands on the grid and they do damage to the enemies"

2. Sort-of-Vegan / Almost-Vegan : This means we eat eggs from our hens, have not yet used up other animal product from the freezer and may continue with some dairy products if their farming practices are exemplary (not for me, but for some other family members) but are seeking animal-free alternatives.

Saturday morning

Frost is checking his email while Wren squeezes flubber into a small juice glass to make farts.

"Can you hear this?" he laughs. Absolutely delighted with the results. He has the technique perfected:

1) Insert flubber with hand.

2) Press it in firmly with fist.

3) Prod it with spoon to release farts.

4) Remove and rearrange

5) Repeat

He has been doing this for about 20 minutes with dialogue like:

"is that YOU farting?"

"Did Mummy FART?"

"LISTEN... listen"

Apparently, its very very amusing if you are three.

Suddenly, it occurs to me that Frost (8) is typing an email.

"Who are you emailing Frost?" I ask. I'm supposed to monitor this sort of thing, aren't I?

"Fred."

"What are you emailing Fred for?"

"Reasons....... SEND."

"Like what?"

"Argh.... can email addresses have spaces in them?"

" No"

"Argh... it doesn't work!"

"Lets see. OH... "at" is not written a-t its a symbol @"

"oooooh. Good. SENT!"

Frost now chortles wickedly at his cunning. I later find the email invites Alex to a PLAYDATE I know nothing about and have not sanctioned.

Its raining. My corn is overgrown for the window-box but would get shocked outside. I have no plans beyond indulging this farting, emailing kind of day.

Rainy Day

Wren is watching the water gushing out of our downspout into a bucket he asked me to set there. He didn't like to see the water going into a big puddle in our herb garden.

After a while he called me:

"Mummy, mummy come and see. Something strange is happened and I a little bit broke it."

I come out to the deck and find the downspout dangling at an odd angle with a large gap between the guttering and the next length of pipe.

"What happened Wren?" I asked.

"I was pulling it back and forth" He demonstrates with his hands, one of which is covered in a sock because he was "fighting". "I didn't know it would do that" he points up to the break. "I really didn't know it did that!" "I was shaking it back and forth and it was keeping it in the middle so it [the water] didn't hit the herbs the outside!"

Clearly, we do need to get the roof and guttering done, eventually.

PS. Wren wants to "TELL IT TO GRANNY - I LOVE YOU!"

Volcanic experiment

Recently, Frost and Wren have been playing together with more commonality of purpose that before. Where there was once tolerance there is now collaboration. I am not sure this is in my interests in the medium term, but overall I value their complicity.

Last sunny day they both wanted to do scientific experiments.

"We want to do EXPERIMENTS," they announced.

My gut level reaction is "no." Actually, its more of a shriek of denial "nooooo." I find it hard to find the educational benefits of simply mixing things to make a mess of fizzing goo which they then leave... on the floor.

However, before I could defend my denial one of them added that they would particularly like to make a volcano.

Bless whoever it was who figured out that vinegar, detergent, food coloring and baking soda could make an eruption. Its the lowest impact scientific experiment and is great because it involves benign ingredients that are freely available in the average kitchen. Also, Frost is old enough to have done many of them and can run the whole show himself.

Here, the boys make a volcano - together.

Wren pours in the vinegar.

Frost watches as it erupts.

They both watch as it erupts. BUT it doesn't erupt fast enough or with realistic lava so they add more of everything and some red food coloring and "WOOOAH!"

Wren stirs to make sure all the baking soda has 'rupted.

The incredibly favorite dinner

After a long period in which the children would not eat anything without threats and cajoling, tonight I scored a home run.

Frost started by saying:

"OH MY GOD, this is the best gravy I HAVE EVER TASTED!"

Wren soon followed with "This is incredibly my favorite dinner EVER!"

After a long period of silent eating... yes, you read it, S-I-L-E-N-T E-A-T-I-N-G, they had a conversation with each other about how wonderful it was and how they would like to eat it every night.

Their shared appreciation of dinner started to spiral in a rhapsodic fashion. My obvious pleasure led to even more goodwill. They both finished their meals and they had a small glass of mango juice and one maple syrup cookie for desert.

Frost remembered to clear the table, without prompting. He then THANKED ME for cooking dinner. In the bliss of goodwill, Frost asked whether he could give Wren his cookie and Wren said "thank you."

Ten minutes later, Wren has just added to me "Thank you Mum, that was the BEST dinner I have ever tried."

So, here it is in all its simplicity.



The Incredibly Favorite Dinner

Trader Joe's Chicken Gyoza [This is being used up until I switch to a vegetarian one. Hope that goes down as well]
Steamed white sushi rice.
Age-dashi tofu gravy [made with clear stock, mirin and soy sauce then thickened with starch] over rice and veg.
Steamed broccoli & sliced carrots.
Shelled endamame