Can’t Think of a Title
Finally, a moment to write. First we were scrambling to get into contract on a co-op apt. that we found 12 days before the federal tax credit expired — and we weren’t at all ready to buy when we found it, so it was / is a ton of work.
The moment we got the contracts in the hands of the lawyers, we packed for a brief vacation to Austin. Being on vacation with a baby? Delightful, but not the loungefest I think of when I think “vacation.”
While in Austin, I learned that my sister had been hospitalized for pneumonia. Not a pretty thing for anyone, let alone someone without the strength to cough on her own on a good day. So we jumped on a plane, me and Henry.
Now Henry is with his dad and I’m in the Family Lounge at the hospital waiting to be let back into Beth’s room, where we might just sit, or I might read aloud to her. She’s much better off when she is sleeping, and she is sleeping a lot.
If you are a praying sort, it’s time to pray for Beth’s comfort and sense of well-being. If you’re just a thinker and a wisher, these things work, too. Thanks.
Where Else Could We Get Milk?
Don't even try it.
Last week I read a New Yorker story about 2 guys in LA with a restaurant called Animal.
If I read correctly, their chocolate pudding has pork in it, though the form was not specified. I may not have read correctly, and I’m not motivated enough to go back and check, but it seemed like it would be in character for these guys, and based on the generalized pork mania sweeping large metropolitan areas these days, I would not be surprised.
It got me thinking.
We animal (eating) lovers all know that animal fat, in whatever form, can make things taste really good. Witness ice cream, spaghetti carbonara, duck confit, the edge of a strip steak, a plain spoonful of butter. Dairy is such a good vehicle for animal fat, and pig fat is so good, that I began to wonder why we don’t ever drink milk from pigs. (I hear a big collective “ewww” right before a big collective “wait, yumm?”)
Pigs are mammals, yes? So what about pig milk? Well, I’ve done the research for you.
Apparently pig milk is tasty, but pigs are difficult to restrain. If you do manage to restrain them, it’s still a challenge because they’ve got more teats than say, a cow, plus the angling is different since pigs do all side-lying nursing. In short, the getting of the milk is harder to do, unless you are of course a piglet.
Humans also apparently have a pretty well-ingrained tradition going of only drinking milk from things that eat leaves and grass. As opposed to scavengers, who eat everything. Pigs are scavengers. So, probably, are people whose interest is piqued by pig milk. Discerning scavengers, perhaps.
Scavenging has its delights and its limits. Years ago I went lobster fishing with someone in Maine. It was just the two of us on the boat, me and the silent manly fisherman, and since I couldn’t be trusted to navigate, or drive the boat, or pull anything heavy out of the water, or not get mortally wounded by the lobsters if I touched them—it seems that they are not born with the rubber bands on—the chore left to me was to stuff the bait bags with rotting mackerel. Since that day, I’ve been able to detect the whiff of rot in a lobster. Not a bad thing necessarily: we do pay extra for our stinky cheeses, don’t we.
If it works, weirdness is a delight rather than a hindrance. Then an idea that was once unthinkable becomes mainstream. Then you find yourself sitting in the Dunkin’ Donuts drivethrough barely even noticing the extra modifier: “Can you get me a small decaf skim pig latte? No sugar. Thanks.”
Thanks to The Pug Father on Flickr for use of the photo.
Babies Are in the Air!
What, if when you wanted a baby, you just plucked one FROM THE AIR? Instead of “TTC” or an accidental pregnancy, or the planning and expense and emotional and hormonal roller coaster of reproductive technology — or the forced private grief of a miscarriage — you’d just pluck one from the air.
Instead of the endless testing and the clandestine (or not so) throwing up on the subway . . . instead of the stretch marks, and insomnia . . . instead of having to spit everywhere including on your own foot, and devising strange ways to elevate the head of your bed because of heartburn.
Forget those things! I’m getting a floating air baby.
These air babies, we wouldn’t worry that they were too big and that their giant hard heads would wears our rib bones away, or that they were too small and that someone would utter the terrible phrase “failure to thrive.”
With our real babies, we worry, what if it comes out too soon, or: what if it never decides to come out? And let’s not forget the actual birth, which I won’t even get into, here.
Our babies: they do not just come from the air. But without the challenges of pregnancy, we wouldn’t have the same appreciation, would we? It’s often said that “it’s the journey, not the destination.” In the case of a relationship with a child, the journey, pregnancy, gives gravity and appreciation to the destination: the birth and charge and awe of a son or daughter. You’ll never love like you love someone who you made from your bones. Your aching, unable-to-have-a-goddamn-cocktail, I’d do anything at all for you, my sweetest little love, bones.
Lots of people I know are having babies this week. So I’m reflecting on pregnancy and birth stories.
To the new young friends: come out, come out, whenever you will! We can’t wait to meet you.
While we wait, some stories of pregnancy and birth.
A Personal Compendium of Nausea-Related Policies, Coping Mechanisms, and Fun Facts
What People Say When You’re Pregnant
If Hobos Had Couches . . .
This could have been Henry! Except that this is a child I've never met with a black eye. I found him in a creative commons photo on Flickr.
We are growing up. As evidenced by: the futon frame is finally gone.
In college, futons signaled freedom. I had my own room. I wanted my own bed. I wanted it not to be a single bed! Enter the first futon.
He was so attached to the disintegrating frame that he’d do anything to prevent it devolving into a cloth and wood puddle on the floor — which was apparently its dying wish.
He’d procured and then screwed in some crazy metal braces to hold the thing somewhat together. To complement the braces, he arranged the world’s largest rubber band around the mattress so it wouldn’t flumpf to the floor.
But Friday night, he methodically dissembled and then got rid of it. That’s because Thursday night, Henry had dived, eye-first, into one of its sharp edges. I wasn’t overly concerned, since that accident paled in comparison to the diving-onto-the-tiled-bathroom-floor accident that Henry had accomplished earlier in the day.
But Matthew didn’t have the bathroom floor stunt for contrast, and this one did look sort of horrifying, taken on its own. The fate of the futon was finally sealed. Regardless of the prior emotional attachments, things are changing, and Matthew certainly isn’t going to stand by and defend a failing and cheap couch while it passively attacks his firstborn son.
If I had known that all it took to get rid of the futon was to throw your eye against it as hard as possible, I’d have a lot of audiobooks on the shelf.
Thanks to wjarrettc on Flickr for use of the photo.
Which Favorite Flavor Is Yours?
sprinkle sprinkle little salt
People as Flavors
The nickname my parents gave me when I was really tiny, before they were, or I was, cognizant of my personal preferences, was Little Vanilla.
This was owing to the visuals: to the fact that I was nearly translucent, with tufts of white hair coming off of my head.
Right. So I don’t look like that anymore. But for my entire life, I’ve never really left the house without some sort of high spf unguent on.
I’ve always joked that I’d like to breed with someone with more aggressive coloring than I have, and it has been pointed out by various that unless I sought out someone with actual albinism, I’d be hard pressed not to do so.
People Who Are 4 & People Who Are Much Older Than That
The first time my now-husband met my family, it seemed . . . weighty. It was around the same time that my parents were stocking up on funeral plots for everyone in the family at a charming little cemetary in town, so they got one for me, and they also got an extra, that was unmistakably for my new boyfriend, this Harvard grad they’d never met. You know, *JUST IN CASE* we decided that we wanted to be together for all eternity, even when we were dead, me and this ivy-leaguer.
That is unrelated to the story, but I believe that it helps to set the tone for the meeting. Let’s just say that expectations were running high, as they always are when you are in your 30s and you introduce newly significant others around, and it wasn’t the most comfortable I had ever been.
Besides which fact, I had anticipated all sorts of personal questions coming from the mouth of my little tow-headed four-year-old nephew who looked largely like I had looked at the age of 4, which is to say, somewhat like milk tinged pink from Apple Jacks.
But I was prepared: I’d forethought reactions to all of the possibly weird questions: sex questions, questions about living together, all sorts of stuff, until . . .
In the middle of the Spiderman puzzle he and my now husband were doing together, my nephew looked up and plaintively asked:
“Are you black?”
My husband is a combination of German and Polish and English, and he does tan rather well, but racially, there’s no question of anything but plain old white.
“Well, no one has ever asked me that before,” he responded.
The episode indicated that if this slightly tanned individual was the the darkest-skinned person that this 4 year old had seen, that the 4 year old probably needed to get out more.
Which Favorite Flavor is Yours?
When my friend Heather and I were in high school, waiting on some ice cream cones in the “to-go” vestibule at Friendly’s, a different four year old, also awaiting some ice cream, wandered over to our part of the 8 x 10 area. She prodded at a button on my shirt, looked up at me, and inquired, “Which favorite flavor is yours?”
Heather and I were taken both by the charming sentence construction, and by the idea behind it: that every flavor is a favorite. Your job is simply to identify the one that is your favorite.
Ironically, vanilla is my least favorite flavor. Don’t get me wrong: vanilla is indispensable to my lifestyle, but I see it as more foundational. Like, a cake recipe needs vanilla, but if you’re offering me vanilla ice cream with cake, to cut the sweet and rich, I’d rather have a glass of milk. As for ice cream flavors, I’d prefer a chocolate or coffee base, or a mint base, or really any sort of base.
I’ve been pretty successfully avoiding sweets but it became clear the other day that i needed dessert. No. Needed. And we didn’t have milk so there was no sense in making brownies. We did have some vanilla ice cream that had been lingering for a while. Except: sigh.
But left with no other choices, I put that into a bowl and thought — pistachios? jam? chopped up chocolate Easter bunny from Jacques Torres? Some combo of these things? None of it was really doing anything for me.
Finally I settled on a sprinking of this black salt (HIMALAYAN!) that I’d gotten a while back.
It made my vanilla ice cream look, and taste, just beautiful.
It’s possible that my favorite flavor is salt. Contrast is key.
Church Avenue Chomp 