abc family

Way Too Much Rambling About Cooking

So normally my mother cooks Thanksgiving dinner, but this year for the first time my sister Branwen and I shared the cooking and the hostessing. My parents are in the midst of moving out of the house where they've lived for twenty-five years, so it seemed like a good time for us to take this one on.

We used Branwen's house, since mine doesn't have a dining room, and we used my china, crystal, and silver, since she didn't marry the son of a jeweler and receive all those things as wedding presents.

(Note: if you don't already know what those things cost, don't click the links unless you're ready to be a little bit shocked. I sure was when we were registering for our wedding! Yikes.)

(But also: beautiful, heirloom, incredibly glad to own them, etc. We'll still be eating off this lovely dinnerware at Thanksgiving when we're 70.)

My mom has a set-in-stone Thanksgiving menu, because she is a Person of Tradition. You might think you know people who cling to their traditions, but if you've never met my mother or her family, you might not know what a Person of Tradition REALLY looks like.

But Branwen and I decided to mix up the menu somewhat, partly because we didn't want the pressure of trying to see if we could cook Mom's exact meal as well as she does it (answer: surely not!) and also because we like to try new recipes.

We did not, however, mess with the turkey or the stuffing or the gravy that my parents make. Dad is responsible for the first two and does an excellent job, and Mom's gravy is TO DIE FOR. I've never tasted better. So we planned to follow their recipes/procedures for those things. And Thanksgiving Day found our generous, always-helpful parents actually making the turkey/stuffing/gravy themselves. They were delicious, natch.

Branwen's and my experimental recipes were successful in varying degrees. Of the ones for which I was responsible, I don't recommend this marinated vegetable salad (although Miriel did love it). I do highly recommend this sweet potato casserole, which I believe - if I do say so myself, and shouldn't - was the most highly-praised dish at the table. I adored it, although not, obviously, in an idolatrous way. And it's very easy to make.

The Thomas family dessert tradition is to have six pies: two apple, two pecan, and two pumpkin. Branwen and I each had our own idea for a new variation and we ended up agreeing to make seven pies: two apple, two pecan, one regular pumpkin, one fancy pumpkin that I wanted to try, and one pear-peach streusel pie that she wanted to try. We had eleven adults and two preschoolers eating, so seven pies was clearly WAY too many, but we love leftovers. So it worked out. I didn't hear anyone complaining.

Oh, and I highly recommend this pumpkin pie recipe, which got several rave reviews including from my husband. (Although it seems to me not so different from the sweet potato dish. Anyone else think it's weird how you can take something that is normally dessert out of a pie crust and put it in a casserole and suddenly it's dinner? Bizarre.)

It was a huge amount of work, but ultimately our dinner turned out to be worth it. I guess that's something to be thankful for.

Guest Post! By my sister Tirienne!

Dear Readers,
You may not know this about me but I am a very outrageous person. I like to fling my arms around when I talk to make my point and I guess I kind of convey that in this post too. So I apologize in advance for the use of; italics, quotation marks, perenthses and capital letters.

I've been living with Arwen and Bryan for almost three months now and it is *nearly* (<--- Arwen thing!) paradise. I know you all have been reading her blog for forever and are like "I WANT TO LIVE WITH ARWEN, SHE SOOO COOL!" and yeah, you should be jealous of me but there are some...I guess I should call them quirky...things about living with my dear sister.

1. She is very picky about her tea. Meaning, you have to know just how to warm up the mug (pre-tea bag mind you), what type of tea she wants at that hour of the day and, of course, you have to know exactly how full to fill it. Acutally, you can't fill Arwen's tea mug too full, if you had a never-ending pot of hot water and were pouring her tea for her she would have you keep pouring it until the room was half way full of hot water before finally saying; "just a little more... ok, stop!"

2. Arwen makes noises when she types. Seriously. Her eyes are all bugged out at the screen, her fingers are moving too quickly to be seen by the human eye and her mouth just goes mlah, tih, mlah. I don't know if it is an unconcious thing or if she is talking to the higer alien race that she belongs to, but it's pretty hiliarious.

3. The "List". I like to think I know Arwen pretty well, but sometimes I'm not sure. She's always saying things like "Tirienne, you left your coffee mug on the end table, AGAIN! Ugh! You are on my LIST!" Now, I don't really know if she keeps an acutal list or not. Maybe one day you all will find out, say if I die before her and at my funeral she drags out this ancient and excruciating list of all the things I ever did she didn't like, just to venefully humiliate me postmortem. I would proably sit up in my coffin and scream in outrage that she actually kept the list. Except that I'd be dead. Or, maybe, anyone who is on her list is going to recieve a massive wedige in the next 24 hours. It could go either way.

4. If you ever have a story about her kid, tell it to her immediately, otherwise you are on the aforementioned "list". Example "Tirienne, look! Blaise can go right from sitting to crawling!" "Oh, yeah I know he did that yesterday when I was babysitting." "AND YOU DIDN'T TELL ME?? You are on my LIST!" Yikes. So from then on, wishing to avoid both a wedige and postmortem humiliation, I have tried to share everything that happens with the kids when Arwen isn't around. I figured she would eventually just get tired of me telling her every single little detail about her children's lives but nope, she eats it riiight up. Shoot.

The wierdness goes on but I don't want to wake up dead tomorrow.

So thanks for reading my "guest blog post". I hai'nt got a blog of mine own but maybe I'll get one, I kind of liked doing this. :)

T-day Blight

I missed posting Saturday for NaBloPoMo, and normally I'm such a frustrated-perfectionist type that missing a day like that would cause me to throw in the towel altogether. I am tempted, but I am resisting because I have determined to fight the frustrated-perfectionist side of myself and become a person who keeps on keeping on, even when the results are grim.

Speaking of grim, I've developed a theory: for me, the days before Thanksgiving are cursed.

Three years ago in 2006, Camilla was a fiendishly fussy five-week-old, and Bryan had to go out of town for Sunday AND Monday nights during Thanksgiving week. I'm an old hand at managing nights without him now (though I still hate it) but then I was an exhausted brand-new mother who couldn't figure out why her baby cried all the time. I stayed with my parents while Bryan was out of town and they took turns pacing with little wailing Camilla, but it was still a rough time.

I can't remember Thanksgiving week 2007, so it must not have been too awful, but I'm sure it wasn't great. Except for the year Camilla was born, Bryan has spent the weekend before Thanksgiving up north "hunting"* with his dad. So at the very least he was gone for a couple nights before Thanksgiving 2007.

*He hates it when I say this, but my contention is that Bryan doesn't actually hunt. I argue that since he doesn't even own a gun, and spends the hunting time sitting in the woods with a book, he's really just spending a weekend eating venison roasts and possibly winning poker money from some potty-mouthed old dudes so that he can come home two days later smelling like he's been rolling in a den of rabid raccoons. He disagrees, and says that it is too hunting. He has yet to convince me.

Thanksgiving 2008 was horrendous. Bryan was working 80-hour weeks on a big proposal that was due the day before Thanksgiving (and which he had to fly down and deliver). I was 30-ish weeks pregnant and on sole toddler-care duty and then on Tuesday night I came down with a vicious stomach virus. I couldn't even keep down sips of water or even, for a couple of disgusting hours (overshare alert!) my own saliva. I was lying in bed at 4am Wednesday, unable to sleep in my misery, when poor Bryan got home from the office (where he'd been since the previous morning), showered, and went back out the door to catch his 6am flight. A couple hours later Camilla woke me and I had to get both of us packed up and drive the ninety miles to our parents' town. I spent the day utterly drained. Fortunately it turned out to be a 24-hour virus and Bryan arrived around midnight so our actual Thanksgiving was quite nice, but those days leading up to it were miserable.

Then comes this year. Thanksgiving week 2009.

Bryan: Business trip Thursday, 5am to 10pm. Up north Friday-Saturday, gone 2pm Friday until 10pm Saturday. Business trip again, gone 7pm Sunday until 9pm Tuesday.

Me and the kids: staying with my parents Friday through Tuesday, thank heavens.

However, Blaise: not only going through a super-clingy stage, but also apparently has decided to stop sleeping. Not only does he wake and nurse every 1.5-ish hours, but my count he's had at least one long (1.5-3 hours) nighttime wakeup for eight out of the past fifteen nights.

Therefore, I: am exhausted beyond reason. And poor Bryan, who pulls his weight and then some, is not far behind.

Oh, and also, I: appear to have developed a case of mastitis. Possibly also with a recurrence of my recent sinus infection. My completely wimpy inability to sleep when I have a fever combined with my son's horrendous sleeping habits meant I was awake from 1:30 until 6:00am today.

My parents and sister do their best to help out but coping with all this while feeling like a truck hit me and without my husband around for love and support... well, as of right now I think 2008 still wins the Thanksgiving Week Horror contest, but 2009 is closing in fast.

The bright side: Bryan will be home tomorrow evening, and I'll have been on the antibiotics more than 24 hours by then, and hopefully all will be well in time for us to celebrate Thanksgiving happily.

I hope I hope I hope.

Someone Should Take Bets On How Many Of These Will Be The Same

My sister Miriel and I are together right now at our parents' house, so we had the fun idea of guest-posting on each other's blogs. We started with the same prompt and wrote our posts simultaneously without talking about it, so this is just how they came out, unedited. You can read my guest post at her blog here. Pretty funny. Here's what she wrote:

Three Ways that Arwen is Just Like Me

1. We’re both Nazis about spelling, punctuation, grammar, and syntax. Come to think of it, I probably learned this from her. Sometimes, when I encounter a particularly egregious violation of the rules of good English in an advertisement or a book, I will call her just to tell her about it. I also derive great practical benefit from this shared characteristic of ours; Arwen is basically the only person in the world who can edit my papers for me.

2. I hold myself to very, very high standards of achievement. So does Arwen. Some people call this perfectionism. I call it perfectionism when I’m telling her to cut it out. When she’s telling me to cut it out, she calls it perfectionism and I call it Highly Motivated Person Syndrome. She’s probably less of a perfectionist than me in most areas, but we definitely share an aversion to asking people for help, even when we’re sick and sleep-deprived and our husbands are going out of town for the third time in two weeks…hint hint.

3. We look. A lot. Alike. It’s less noticeable now that she has a Stylish Mom Haircut (please note that this is very, very different from a “mom haircut”), but we have very similar features and have, in the past, been accused of trying to trick people into thinking that we aren’t twins. (Yeah. Try to figure THAT one out.) Sometimes when I’m going through the giant box of family pictures from our childhood, I can’t even tell whether a given picture is of my sister or myself. It’s pretty crazy.

Three Ways that Arwen is Very Much Unlike Me

1. She can cook without a recipe. I lived with Arwen and Bryan and Camilla in the summer of 2007, and in the course of that three months, we discovered that we have very different kitchen styles. I require complete neatness, I set out all of my ingredients before I start, and I measure everything. Arwen is much more relaxed and therefore pretty laissez-faire about things like “recipes” and “tablespoons,” which definitely enables her to be more creative with food than I will ever be. Interestingly, we are both sort of control freaks about our particular kitchen quirks.

2. With respect to clothes, hair, accessories, and makeup, Arwen is (a) actually cute and (b) way more adventurous than I am. The aforementioned Stylish Mom Haircut is a chin-length bob with bold highlights; my biggest hair change in the past five years has been getting (gasp!) bangs, and it took me about a week to decide that I liked them. Arwen watches Project Runway and she owns boots and skinny jeans. I started wearing dangly earrings for the first time during my junior year of college. I aspire to be as cute as Arwen someday.

3. Arwen doesn’t like chocolate all that much. When I lived with her, and whenever I visit, pretty much any time we made dessert it was something fruity: lemon bars, peach cobbler, blueberry pie. I love all of these things, but I love them in a different way than I love chocolate. Arwen loves them instead of chocolate. This is very strange to me.

Bleargh.

I did not think I was going to manage to post here today, and had resigned myself to that fact, figuring that my sanity is more important than NaBloPoMo. But now I find myself in bed with my iPod with both kids asleep and still a few minutes to go until midnight, so I figured: why not?

Bryan is gone tonight and will be out of town Sunday and Monday nights too. He's also not arriving in town until 10pm-ish tomorrow and Tuesday, and he got back from a day-long business trip around 10 last night.

Those of you counting along at home have already figured out that means I'm doing SIX bedtimes in a row without him. I am currently staying with my parents and have plenty of help with Camilla, thank goodness. But Blaise is at the Accept No Substitutes age right now and the only person besides me that he will tolerate after 6pm is Bryan. Which means when Bryan's gone, I am always on duty.

I am trying to think positively and offer it up and all that but the truth is that sometimes I just get discouraged. The past two evenings have been very rough (baby reawakened and not down for good until after 10; preschooler consequently not down until after 11) and I am dreading the next four.

And it's nearly midnight, so I'll leave you with that happy thought. Man, NaBloPoMo really brings down the quality around this place.

A New Low of Phoning It In (Now with Idea Plagiarism!)

In honor of Annika, whose comment on yesterday's post has got me brewing another post that will come sometime soon when I've got more time to write, I thought I'd post some comparison pictures just like she did today.

(Oh, who am I kidding? I'm just ripping her off. But "in honor of" sounds better.)

Camilla at 3 months and at 3 years old:

 

Blaise at 3 hours and at 9 months old:

 

Tempus fugit is a cliche for a reason, huh?

I'm Embarrassed Especially by #4

We all have things in our lives that we wouldn't necessarily want to share with everyone, things that mar our images, so to speak. (Right? I'm not alone here?)

So obviously the natural thing to do is to think of those things and post a list of them on the Internet.

It goes without saying that this list is not a list of ALL the embarrassing secrets about me. It's just a few.

1. I drink my tea REALLY sweet. You'd probably think it tastes like syrup. I have on occasion given up sugar in my tea for Lent, and I can drink tea and still enjoy it (somewhat) with milk, but the truth is that I like my tea the best when it's nice and sweet, and I probably always will.

2. Despite not having a television, I am following four-and-a-half shows that are in their current seasons. (I say four-and-a-half because technically Bryan and I watch 30 Rock together, but we're sort of tired of it and haven't caught up in a while.) (The other four are The Office, Glee, Dancing with the Stars, and Project Runway.) I like to say that we don't have a TV, but thanks to Hulu I watch four hours of television every single week. AND I enjoy it heartily.

3. My goal for 2008 was to get a laundry system in place that enabled me to stay on top of the laundry. 2009 is almost over and currently there's a huge pile of dirty clothes on my laundry room floor. I failed.

4. I like to read books that are... well, let's just say they're not literature. Most notably I have a taste for young adult novels (some of which I would not dream of letting my daughter read when she's a young adult, and I've actually amassed a collection of young adult novels from the 50s and 60s for this exact reason - I want her to be able to read books about boys and dating and all that kind of teen stuff, and I'm truly scared of what will be around in 2020). I love, for instance, the early works of Paula Danziger and Meg Cabot.

5. At least one day out of seven, I stay in my pajamas all day. Sometimes Camilla does too. Blaise would too, probably, if he weren't so messy that he has to have clothing changes several times a day.

Now I have to go to bed early to hide my bright red cheeks. Yikes.

Nursing's Downside

NaBloPoMo necessitates a certain amount of Phoning it In here at the old blog, but today I am going to take it to new levels. This is a warning, so that you can jump ship now if you don't want to hear about the incredibly scintillating topics of:

Caffeine
My Baby's Sleep Habits
My Aching Head

See? I told you. It's hard to say which of those qualifies as Least Interesting, but they're all vying hard for the title.

Quickly (and only because I have to post SOMETHING here) I'll tie them all together for you:

About two weeks ago, after months drinking nothing but decaffeinated tea, I added a cup of regular tea back into my daily schedule. I'm super caffeine-sensitive and my kids appear to have inherited that from me, but blessing of blessings, this time the caffeine in my one cup of tea did not appear to be affecting Blaise's ability to take naps.

BUT. Out of the past nine nights, during five of them he's been awake for at least two hours at some point during the night. (He seems to prefer the 12-2am slot, with 3-5am coming in a close second.) And when I read this post of Jamie's in which she mentions the effects of residual caffeine on nighttime baby sleep, I had an AH HA moment.

And since Blaise was up from 12am to 3am last night, this morning I was almost dead and opted to have decaf for my morning cup of tea in order to hopefully avoid a recurrence tonight.

(If you're thinking that it is SO PAINFULLY IRONIC that when I most need caffeine, I can't have it: yes, I noticed that too.)

But apparently my caffeine-sensitivity is such that going cold-turkey from just one cup of tea, weak lame little tea which has, like, 1/3 as much caffeine as coffee, is enough to give me poundingly painful withdrawal headaches. Which I've had all day today, despite the fact that I'm popping ibuprofen like it's candy.

So, to summarize: I gave up caffeine (again) to try to get my baby to sleep better and I'm suffering because of it.

If that child does not sleep tonight, well. I have no idea what I'm going to do.

Wet Topic

So. Potty training.

First of all, although I use the term "training" like everyone else, I don't think about it that way. "Potty learning" makes more sense to me because that's what it is. It's not like training an animal - you can help a child learn about paying attention to her bodily functions and using the potty to do them, but ultimately the child herself has to have an independent desire to make it happen. Being potty "trained" doesn't just involve a response to stimuli; the child has to make a personal act of the will. They learn to do that. They're not "trained" to do it.

Plus it bugs me when people say, "Is she trained?" when they're talking about potty use. That REALLY sounds like they're referring to a pet.

Anyway.

We bought Camilla a potty (the Baby Bjorn one, which I highly recommend) when she was around eighteen months, not because I thought she'd be using it soon, but just because I figured she might develop interest and we didn't want to miss any opportunities. It sat in the bathroom for about a year. I might have gotten her to try using it a few times; I don't really remember.

When Daniel turned three in June my sister decided to start trying harder to get him using the potty, and I seized the chance to get Camilla into the idea of the potty as well. I had no interest in pressuring her, and since she wasn't heading to preschool in the fall (the preschool topic is one for another day, maybe?) we had no particular time line. But since changing diapers on a toddler is not the world's most pleasant thing, I figured having her be potty-independent could be a very good thing. So we started talking up the potty.

We did not institute a candy-for-potty-use system, not so much because we're above bribery (we're not, as you'll see later in this story) but because we figured that she seemed pretty happy with just the extremely-excited-and-vocal praise we offered her every time she so much as sat on the potty, so we didn't need more than that.

So over the summer I mentioned the potty when I thought of it, and if she was willing to sit on it I praised her effusively, and if she actually managed to accomplish anything while sitting I acted as if she'd just won a Nobel Peace Prize.

(Granted, those things seem to be pretty easy to win these days. But I still haven't heard of people getting them merely for taking care of their bodily functions.)

We didn't do anything drastic like pants-less days or that thing where you put them on the potty every fifteen minutes all day, mainly because I am way too lazy and distracted for anything like that. I kind of just asked randomly if she had to go, and praised her mightily when she did, and reminded her that we'd be So Proud of her if she actually realized she had to go and told us about it herself.

It shouldn't have worked, probably. But against all odds, it did: by early September Camilla was pretty much using the potty for peeing every time. (I refuse to call it "#1". It's just urine, for heaven's sake.) (Unless I'm at a fancy dinner party or in other polite company. Then I'm all about the euphemisms, and would really just prefer to avoid the topics all together.) (Yes, I'm a lovely study in contradictions.)

Pooping was a different matter. She'd achieved it in the potty only once or twice, and seemed to actually prefer using her diaper.

I should mention that potty training is another part of life that is improved by the use of cloth diapers. I think I would have felt more stressed about the process if we were having to buy more diapers for her every couple weeks. Since all we had to do was keep washing the diapers we already own, it wasn't a big deal.

But around early September I noticed that when I did happen to have Camilla wearing underwear (which was randomly, because again: lazy and distracted) she wouldn't poop in them. She would ask for a diaper, but if I told her she couldn't have a diaper, she'd agree to use the potty for pooping.

Also about this time, inspired by an idea of Branwen's, we bought a sticker book to use as an incentive (read: bribe; I told you we weren't above them) and told Camilla that every time she pooped in the potty, she could place two of the stickers in the book.

So with the twin guns of "no, you're a big girl, you don't wear diapers anymore" and "you'll get to do stickers if you poop in the potty" we attacked the poop problem and achieved success pretty quickly.

Since she was already out of diapers at night - she'd quit wetting at night about a year ago, just like I did at her age by my mom's account - this meant that Camilla was able to go completely diaper-free. And she did!

And on October 1st I posted this Tweet:

That "all credit to her" part is, I think, the key element of our potty-training experience. It was easy because, in the case of this particular child, all we had to do was nudge her a little, make sure not to screw anything up, and wait for the results. She doesn't like to try new things, so that was the main hurdle, but she responds beautifully to praise and incentives. We are just fortunate with her on that score.

I think - in my admittedly limited experience with the potty thing - that the other key was that Camilla was READY to be potty-independent. She was physiologically ready; she could and did routinely go several hours at a time without needing to use the bathroom. And she was psychologically/mentally/emotionally ready, as evidenced, IMO, by how quickly and easily she took the lead on her potty usage.

And who knows? If we'd started earlier and taken a more hard-core approach, perhaps we could have had our daughter out of diapers six months earlier. But the way we did it was low-stress for all of us, and it worked. I have no regrets.

(Does anyone want to make bets about whether, in another two years when Blaise is learning to use the potty, I'll come back and read this post and want to smack my Now Self for not appreciating how good I have it? I'd say there's a pretty good chance of that.)

He Also Made Many Happy Noises

Last Monday was a balmy, beautiful day. 65° on the 9th of November is unusual for Michigan. So of course we had to take the kids outside to play in the leaves.

We'd been out for a while when I realized that the leaf-covered yard and the four happily-playing children gave the perfect opportunity to take some pictures, so I ran in and grabbed the camera.

And then my sister and I had the task of trying to get the kids to sit STILL for the pictures. After more than three years of parenthood each, she and I are pretty good baby wranglers, but this task was a little much even for us.

Weirdly, the ONLY child who sat still (and clapped with joy the entire time, no less) through the whole thing was the nine-month old. I wouldn't believe it myself if I hadn't seen it.

But the proof is right here.