It Ate It
I wrote a whole post: the entire thing. And I clicked save, and I started to add the metadata, and it was suddenly gone.
I hoped that it—it being wordpress—would burp it out again this morning.
It did not; there is no trace, no draft, no nothing.
Happy Tuesday. No post.
I’ll recreate later.
Happy
My son is in the thick of his first singing experiments. He sings in an impassioned voice, somewhat loudly and tunelessly—though he’s gotten much better even over the last week—while skipping around. Though to be clear, he is also still learning just how to get his legs off of of the ground in the choreographed patterns he either wishes to imitate, or that come naturally to a heart-happy human.
He is tiny, he is two, he is happy.
He’s also difficult, yes: he shrieks ouch! when I put sunscreen on him; he lays down on the sidewalk when my main objective is to get into the house with him and the sixteen dollar watermelon I am carrying; and he collapses his weight onto my arm on the subway platform. He won’t listen; he climbs everything that is dangerous to climb; and he’s passing out fewer kisses these days. But when I’m not trying to figure out what a good parent would do in those situations, and rolling my eyes around, I am so happy that he is happy.
I mention it because, he didn’t seem all that happy when he was born. He seemed to be healthy, which was a relief. And he seemed to be somewhat calm for the bulk of the time. But he had a fast and furious ramp-up to rage and tantrum when things weren’t going his way. And while he did smile and giggle, he wasn’t off-the-charts laughy, like an eight month old I saw on the subway platform earlier today.
Like all parents, we wanted very much for our child to be happy.
In the first days, we read that book that everyone reads: the one about the swinging, the swaddling, the swooshing, the swordfighting, and the samurais.
Actually, we watched the video, because who could read with all of that screaming?
There are 5 esses to making one’s baby the Happiest Baby on the Block, but maybe only two of them worked for us. When he wasn’t in our arms, he certainly wasn’t going to agree to be laying down anywhere, so our child spent a lot of time in a white-noise-making battery powered swing. The bad thing about the swing was that you couldn’t safely swing him in tandem with our other crutch, which was a swaddle. I mean, with his arms are bundled up and unable to fit into the restraints, he might have flown out.
But we did weigh the odds of him flying out, is how desperate we were to help him even sleep more, and cry less.
Aside from his parents and my friend Kevin, he didn’t want anyone to hold him when he was little. He didn’t want to go to mom and baby yoga with me and have me, god forbid, do yoga instead of hold him.
It took him a while to warm up to living on earth. I can see that. One of his pediatricians once told us that the first six months are all about proving to a baby, “it’s not that bad out here.” When I told someone about that once, I actually teared up. It’s so simple, and yet it’s a really thoughtful plan.
It took a while, perhaps longer than six months, but he seems to have been convinced. He does very well at the “school” where he spend a few mornings a week. He is as accepting as anyone of us dropping him off, and he plays well independently, and he’s starting to play well with other kids. He’d ditch me in a heartbeat to hang out with his grandparents. He has beloved cousins and friends and classmates and has cultivated his own friendships with certain of my adult friends.
He has his songs and he counts a whole bunch and he makes up wishes about sleeping on our neighbor’s balcony, and once he told me that he’d just seen Donald Duck floating past in a cloud. He’s a bit shy about dancing, but occasionally he’ll make up his own move, and I’m not sure anything pleases me more than that. Yesterday he rode a ride at Coney Island, one where he believed that he was driving a little white monster truck. He told me that he was so happy that he thought it was his birthday.
There isn’t much too this, but I just wanted to say: I am so happy that he is happy.
Failed Sponge
It was once again time for me to make snack for pre-school. Stone fruit, I thought. It’s a great season to do something with stone fruit.
I looked up plum muffins. Muffins are baked and yummy, but within the realm of acceptability for children. Some plum muffins call for nuts, which are illegal. Or milk: illegal. Others called for jars of plum baby food, and instant oatmeal. Ick.
After a moment’s hesitation, I looked up plum cake, and came up with a beautiful picture from this site called Zoom Yummy, which has recipes and photographs and crafts.
pretty pretty plum sponge from zoomyummy.com
I had everything I needed except for the plums, so I picked some of those up when I was out. They were on sale!
I commenced the recipe. It was easy. My husband came home from work, saw me baking after Henry was in bed, then remembered that we were on for snack duty.
He noted my actions, and commented, “So you’re making the children a cake.”
Hmm. That did not seem like the right thing to do.
“Plum bread,” I said. “It’s like a plum bread.”
He smiled a tiny, pleased smile, turning so that I couldn’t quite see it.
“Well, Henry will assess it in the morning,” he said, “and he will tell us what it is.”
The next morning, I had a good idea in my head when I woke up. I rolled over and told Matthew. “Plum sponge,” I said. “We can call it ‘plum sponge.'”
Henry galloped past the kitchen in a pair of pink whale shorty pajamas. He pointed at the baked good that had appeared overnight, yelling, CAKE! MY CAKE!
The beauty of the thing is that the plums are halved, and then put cut side down in the batter. And then the batter grows up over the plums while it’s in the oven, and the whole effect is like thumbprint cookies, but cake.
I mean sponge.
I was very happy with it. And of course we had to restrain Henry from the pan. It’s a good thing that he loves raisins so freakishly much. For some reason, he’s easy to distract with a tiny bowl of raisins.
We also brought grapes to school, because you need to bring two snacks, and if one of them is cake, then one of them damn well better be a fruit or vegetable.
My husband and I decided to split the 3 hour shift of assisting the teacher. I had a lot of work I needed to do, and he had to go to work midway through, and the truth is that an hour and a half of nine preschoolers is, you know, enough.
We realized that if we cut the snack I’d baked like the picture from Zoom Yummy, the pieces would be far too large for a group of two and three years olds to eat. I decided that we could solve this by cutting a tight square around each plum spot, leaving a lot of residual cake trim in the pan. Each kid would get a small yellow square with a purple eye in the center: not too much cake.
Honestly, I could think of nothing finer than being two and being presented with such a thing.
Matthew and I did the changing of the guard right around snack time. He put the sponge on plates, along with some grapes, and said his goodbyes as I passed them out.
I kept my eye on William, who had been the greatest baked-goods enthusiast the last time we’d brought snack. He had asked for seconds of the little pumpkin muffins, and I had complied. But then, when I was not looking, dear William had co-opted every last pumpkin muffin.
But today, William was focusing on his grapes. Only when they were gone did he turn with disdain to the yellow and purple square on his plate. Then he asked for more graps.
All of the kids ate their grapes first, as it happened. Then they started in on the cake, except . . . they didn’t get very far.
Each of nine children was wholly disgusted. Some, perhaps, by the one glossy purple eye gazing up at them. Others may have balked at the fact that it was two things combined, which children often do not approve of. And I admit that the joy of the cake — the sponge — is that the juicy plums are sourish against the sweet of the yellow sponge cake, and this contrast appeals greatly to my adult palate.
My own child had his finger firmly in my belly button, where he is sure it belongs. And he was trying to climb up my right leg, yelling “Want more cake!” Upon inspection of his plate, however, he still had his entire piece intact. He had deemed it inedible.
I need to teach him to yell “Want alternative kind of cake!,” because that is what he actually meant.
Cake, bread, or sponge: call it what you will, children do not appreciate this foodstuff.
One of them even asked me if he could have some hummus instead.
But if you want this cake — and you probably do — you should make it for yourself. If you have children, it may be your chance to at least have a full piece of something to yourself.
This recipe card is credited to Petra at Zoom Yummy. Thanks for the cake, Petra!
La Retour de la Llamadog (The Return of the Llamadog)
llamadog and its musical frogsquirrel friend (quite possibly the star of someone else's nightmare)
When I was 22, I worked as the receptionist at a very large architecture firm in Texas.
I decided to do this instead of getting a “real job.” I quickly realized that whatever your job it, is get unfortunately “real” pretty fast, since it is yours, and you have to do it.
For the most part, I loved being a receptionist. I often tell people that I was better at being a receptionist than I will ever be at anything again, professionally. I was just good at it. I am genuinely happy to meet people, I light up naturally when someone walks into the room, I like to talk on the phone (well, I used to), and I got a kick out of transferring calls around from the company’s 27 phone lines.
And though they only paid me $15,000 a year, that was absolutely enough to live on.
Things were good, for the most part, but not everything was good.
There was no dress code for the office, but I was supposed to wear dresses and makeup. This drove the 22-year-old me, who wanted nothing more than to be barefoot and barefaced, absolutely crazy.
And sitting like a figurehead behind a huge desk in a Texas office, I had to fetch coffee for some real backwards-minded male clients. Don’t get me wrong: I happily got coffee and ordered lunch for lots of people — engineers, the principals, and many lovely clients. And lots of the architects went out of their way to make me comfortable: one brought me an iced tea every single morning and never let me pay him a cent, and others always asked if they could grab me lunch when they were out. These guys may have realized before I did that I was, for the most part, trapped.
There was a rule that I couldn’t leave to use the bathroom without finding another woman to sit at the desk. Let me be clear about the details of this. This woman could be an architect. She could be the personal assistant to the president. She could be the marketing manager. She could be one of the two office runners, who brought plans back and forth around town. But she just had to be female runner.
If I had to use the bathroom and I was talking with the male office runner—which I confess to spending most of the time I wasn’t greeting clients or engineers or on the phone doing—I’d have to wait. He was not allowed to fill in for me. He was not female, or nor was he wearing makeup, or nor was he wearing a dress.
And regardless of the job I did there, regardless of my education and general proclivities and writing samples, I was not allowed to transfer to a position in the marketing department, where I would have had a chance to write, uh, marketing proposals, which I seemed to want to do at that point. Eventually, the office manager offered to pay me what I would have been paid to be a marketing copy writer — so long as I would stay on the phones. I was good at the phones, and good at being happy when people came in. It was a weird, stymying kind of compliment, but I was urged to think of it as a compliment.
But eventually, all of the details together made me mad enough to spit, and spitting is just the deft transition I need here to start talking about, uh, llamadogs.
As I acclimated to my first set of challenges in an office, I had a dream. I dreamt of a llamadog. A huge, spitting combo of a llama and a dog on a chain.
In the dream, a client came into the office—he was one of the bad ones who made my job less fun than it could have been. And to the meeting, he brought a large and frightening animal combo: the llamadog. The client told me that he couldn’t bring it in with him, that he needed to leave it chained to my desk. I was not able to say no to such requests from clients. So He left me trapped behind my huge marble desk, intimidated by this strange, looming llamadog.
I told my friends about it at the time, and over the years we’ve talked about the llamadog, on and off. There even is a little song about the llamadog.
I have not sung it in a long time.
But last week I opened the New Yorker. Immediately I saw an extensive marketing campaign for the city of Montreal. It included a lot of hybrid animals. The most striking was the llamadog.
Someone has finally found the llamadog, and drawn a picture.
It is apparently in Canada.
New Page: Evergreen
Hey! In case you haven’t noticed: there are some new pages up in the banner where I’m aggregating content. One is about ALS & Grief, another is stories from when I was pregnant. Today I’m launching a page of reader favorites, called “Evergreens.”
I’ll also do a recipes page and a parenting page at some point. Oh and an advice column page. And a tacos page?
You are going to need a wider computer, as am I.
Other content you seek can be searched within the search bar, or through the fun cloud, or in the archives list. Or you can ask me for help if you are looking for something.
Church Avenue Chomp 