Just About As Easy As Tracing Your Own Hand: a Valentine’s Saga
At first, it seemed like I’d gotten off pretty easy for Valentine’s Day.
My good friends from high school had been complaining about the Valentine sweat shops that they were forcibly running for their own children who are slightly older than Henry, but it was seemingly going unnoticed in our pre-school. All I did was order a heart-shaped stuffed pizza for my Chicagoan mate, and have it shipped on dry ice. Baby Ivy and I brought home a dozen hot pink roses for the y-chromosomes in our lives.
It was about all I could muster at this juncture: Ivy was only 3 weeks old and Henry’s 3rd birthday is the day after Valentine’s Day. In other words, in addition to the Valentine kerfuffle we were trying to celebrate in other ways. Low key ways, perhaps, but ways.
But then, one of the parents from one of the other preschoolers in my son’s class emailed the class on Tuesday or Wednesday night of Valentine’s week and suggested that it would be fun to bring in Valentines on Friday, and did anyone else want to do that?
Many of the crafty mommas in our group replied and said yes. Everyone is so much more cheerful and together than I am, I grimly thought. I didn’t respond, but it’s not like I wasn’t going to do it. It’s not like I wasn’t worried about getting it done.
A few days pass. Thursday night after a family trip to the Brooklyn museum, the Valentine deadline looms closer and darker than ever, like a storm two blocks over but cruising quickly towards our building.
It was clear that we needed to start. I’d been thinking that we just needed a stencil of a heart on some construction paper and that we could fill in the inside with glitter glue, but then a more involved idea started to develop.
Perhaps inspired by our trip to the museum, I decided that we should cut out cardboard hearts out of a corrugated cardboard box we have, and then glue colorful tissue paper we have in the recycling bin to the hearts.
Surely some lightly decoupaged cardboard hearts made from recycled materials would be acceptable Valentines in this DIY, green, and Etsy-ish era, right?
So while we are all at the kitchen table that evening, me sitting around nursing the baby, Matthew paying bills, and Henry futzing around with Legos or playdoh or something else I don’t remember, and no one at all making dinner, I look up decoupage on my old friend The Internet.
I quickly find a pdf that explains the procedure. I was nearly ready to steward the Valentine-making project, but I needed some tips.
I had only managed to read that decoupage was a process whereby a person could afix some things to some other things when I started to share my ideas out loud, an act which I would immediately regret.
“I looked up decoupage,” I say to my husband. “I’m thinking of doing decoupage.”
“I saw that you looked up decoupage,” he teases.
When he says it, it is in italics, just as Montclair effortlessly becomes well-pronounced when we talk about visiting our New Jersey friends. This is because he is French speakinger than I am. For the record he is also Spanish speakinger, German speakinger, and if we run into someone from Ancient Greece, it is he who will be able to give them directions, not I. To be fair I have a bunch of French, I can count to ten or something in Italian, I’m better able to decipher a Glaswegian accent and I minored in Japanese, but these things don’t tend to come in quite as handy in daily life. To return to our story:
“But is decoupage a thing you really need to look up?” he continues. “Isn’t it sort of like looking up tracing your own hand? Or making a stick figure?”
I gaze at him, weighing whether I should point out that it lies wholly within the realm of possibility that I would look up tracing my own hand on the Internet, realizing that such information might cause me further trouble.
In terms of my own childhood Valentine’s Day experiences, I’m sure that some were more complex than others, but I remember sitting at the kitchen counter and filling out cards that we’d gotten at the store, public-school style. I don’t remember being four and giving dissertations — probably in French — about decoupaging and how easy it was to the rest of my worldly classmates, which is what he may have done. (Because we are married homo sapiens, some of the things that are the most charming, funny, and distinctive about my husband, for instance his suggested expertise with Florentine-style crafts, are just the ones that make me roll my eyes when I set out to make the world’s best Valentines on the clock with my tired three year old on an empty stomach with a baby in my lap.)
Anyhow, while I am plotting the Valentines but have a suckling Ivy in my arms, my husband decides that he will grab the reins and start to make the Valentines out of construction paper, running with the original glitter glue idea, sans the heart stencil, forgoing my complex and yet somehow delicious plans of decoupage.
But I don’t want construction paper valentines anymore. I want good ones.
I will settle for nothing short of Florentine-style crafts made from locally sourced recycled materials.
The hardest part about decoupaging Valentines turns out to be cutting out the corrugated cardboard hearts. The 3 year old is really happy to tear up tissue paper and smear glue around. The baby is happily oblivious enough to marinate in a thin coating of Elmer’s; in the way of newborns, she is, quite frankly, always developing some sort of white crusty stuff all over her, anyhow. And after an initial tug of war over who will do the Valentines, the husband is willing to let me torture myself and Henry while he heats up the leftover Chinese food for us.
I finally have enough cardboard hearts cut out. We make a few Valentines and it works out well. I love the way they look.
A challenge comes when Henry decrees one Valentine to be for the tooth fairy rather than for the classmate we’d set out to make it for. And then the next one we make, he likes so much that he refuses the idea of giving it away.
He also screams about it a whole lot.
The one we couldn't give away.
And then we get into an argument about whether he will get up and hand me the next heart to work on.
And then dinner is ready and my husband wants to clear the table.
But there aren’t that many kids in the class and we get them done.
And the next morning when I get up and wander blearily into the kitchen, baby (still? again?) in my arms, it is my husband sitting at the table decoupaging the world’s most perfect and lovely Valentine, far nicer than the ones I’d thrown together. And who is it for?
I will let you guess.
Being valentines: it can be just about as easy as tracing your own hand.
Epilogue: The people who suggested that we make Valentines for school? They did not bring Valentines.
Hola Ivy! Wherein I Introduce My *Daughter*
This brief post will not nearly capture all of the awe and coziness and exhaustion and delight and fear and everything else that we feel when we consider our new and lovely and velvety soft and sleepy little star, Ivy Elizabeth.
She was born nearly three weeks ago at St. Luke’s Roosevelt Hospital — my favorite hospital for getting babies; you should try it! — after a scheduled C-section.
Pregnancy cripples me. However, I make fantastic babies.
But instead of deciding they are ready for their debut and that it’s time to come out, these babies cling to my ribs like stubborn monkeys, never descending into my pelvis to be delivered in the old-fashioned way. Well, thank goodness that Caesar and his mom shot us forth into modernity, what with unusual surgeries and delicious salads and snippy snip snipped haircuts named after him.
Ivy was born without complication, thanks in part to a fantastic obstetric, anesthesiology, and nursing team. She was held up for me to see doing her first little lion roar and oh how I laughed and cried to see her out in the open for us to get to know for real, rather than getting to know just through the knees and elbows and hiccups!
One distinguishing characteristic of this baby is her petite size. Her fabulous bruiser brother was nearly 9 lbs, which may have been slightly exaggerated because he’d been pumped full of liquids and pitocin while they tried and failed to induce him out of me in the more typical way, but still: big.
Ivy weighed a mere six pound and five ounces, a fuzzy headed blue eyed slip of a thing. But she’s a super eater — constant, efficient, happy — and she’s gaining like wildfire and pleasing her mother no end.
She doesn’t have eyelashes or eyebrows, in stark contrast to her brother, who was born in high definition, looking manly, like a captain of industry. This is my sweet delicate little baby baby baby, sleepy and squinting and meowing questions about why she’s been brought out into the light.
More Ivy trivia: her toes and fingers are extraordinarily long. She might be a pianist, everyone says. With her hands and with her feet, is what they don’t say. If you want someone to grip your finger with their toes, Ivy is your gal. She already has talents!
We took her to the doctor and this was certainly a freak accident but she rolled over on the table. When she was less than a week old, she rolled from her tummy to her back. Great: tiny or no, we wish for her to be strong and healthy and stubborn.
Welcome to you, our new and beautiful little love!
The Weird Sandwiches of Youth
In second grade, my favorite sandwich was a peanut butter and cherry: peanut butter spread with sliced maraschinos. I think that my dad might have made it up when my mom was out one day, and for an entire year, that is all I wanted to eat. And then, just when I was starting to glow from the inside out, I tired of it.
My husband, at unpredictable intervals, acts like it is acceptable to eat peanut butter and cheese sandwiches. I have never seen him do it, but regularly he’ll stroll into the living room late at night claiming that he just ate one. It is possible that he does this to push my buttons. He has also mentioned putting strawberry jam into an American cheese omelette. He is quite possibly a gastronomic enemy of state: not to be trusted.
Our son’s favorite sandwich is called a “prune quesadilla.” Like the peanut butter and cherry, it was created in a moment of parental desperation (my own) and has caught on like wildfire. I know that a quesadilla, by definition, implies cheese. But peanut butter can make tortillas stick together as well or better than cheese, and so we use the term loosely.
Unlike the sandwiches of our youth, or my husband’s current roster of sandwiches, it has a pretty good nutritional pedigree.
Prune Quesadilla
Ingredients
2 corn tortillas (Though, who is to stop you from using flour or some sort of hybrid? Not I.)
Peanut butter (Do everything in your power to get the kind that is ground peanuts and a bit of salt without sugar or replacement oils. If you are used to the processed kind, it will take next to no time to get readjusted to the good kind.)
Honey (We prefer the kind who lives in a bear, naturally.)
Prunes (There have been leaps forward in prune technology, and they are actually a moist, delightful, iron and potassium rich food. And it’s not like their sole purpose is improved gastric motility, so don’t be afraid of prunes.)
Procedure
Take 2 corn tortillas. Moisten both sides before putting them into the microwave for 30 seconds.
Transfer to a clean plate (one without condensation on it).
Spread with peanut butter. Drizzle with honey. Using poultry shears (or prune shears or a knife) snip bits of prune onto the peanut butter. Top with the other tortilla. Clap the quesadilla from hand to hand until it’s cool enough for a child to eat.
Slice, present, and wait for him to demand one the next day.
Another Sleep Invention: The Cannoli Saw
So, our lives are about to change. A baby will come and live with us. Whee! Scary, though, right?
Henry’s birthday will happen right after the baby is born, and I can’t help but wonder: how are we to go about celebrating normal / special life events through these life-changing events?
Last year, when he turned two, we had a pretty big party. It was held in a space down the street that we rented. Wait, was that in a wholly different economy? Wait, was I a part of the 1% then? Also, I made about a jillion different sorts of cupcakes with many sorts of creatively conceived and executed toppings. Fluff frosting with black Himalayan salt, lemon buttercream, chocolate ganache. I made a truck out of a poundcake. God, I hope he doesn’t remember how good life was when he was turning two, and we were rich, and birthdays were littered with poundcake trucks everywhere.
This year, we must keep it simple. These are the ways in which I hope to do this:
1. It will be at home, so we don’t have to go anywhere, and almost no one will be invited. Should you not be invited, please reference the blog post on this topic in order to mitigate your feelings of rejection. Should you be invited, please try to limit the communicable diseases you bring over, since I’ll have a 2 week old.
2. Lower your expectations regarding myriad, well-planned snacks. This time around, I will serve only round foods that someone else has prepared, with the possible exception of cupcakes, which would be cooked by me, but still will still be (hopefully) round.
The other foods will be bagels and their accoutrements (like SMOKED FISH, which I intend to eat by the fistful the moment I give birth), served in the round containers we will buy them in, as well as donuts from Peter Pan donut in Williamsburg, but I don’t even know if we’ll manage to get out there in order to buy some of the fabulously round, made-by-other people donuts. These are the donuts that you read about on the Internet. These are the donuts that you dream about. These are the porn donuts. These are the donuts that the other moms with two children manage to have at their kids birthday parties, where they also only serve bagels and cupcakes — perhaps a smidge of fruit. I do hope to be able to pull that one off.
When I’m nervous about something, I like to have a plan brewing in my brain. Sometimes I brew plans while dreaming. Last night I dreamt about the birthday party, and this is the menu I’d selected:
- lentil soup
- salad
- cannolis
The cannolis were cannoli shells covered with dark glossy chocolate, filled with ricotta cream, and decorated with berries. Wow, were these cannolis were a thing of beauty. I was delighted to be able to serve them at the uber casual birthday party. But there was a problem, in that the cannolis were too long for one person to comfortably eat. And you know how you can’t really cut a cannoli because that bumpy shell stuff will just crumble? I mean, even biting one is a problem, in my experience.
I sound like I think a lot about cannolis: I don’t, actually, when I am awake. But this leads us to my brilliant invention. In my sleep, I dreamt up a small, specialized serrated knife called a cannoli saw. It allowed you to slice the shell (chocolate-covered or not) cleanly so that one cannoli (cannolo?) could be subdivided between multiple party guests. And you could put the bumpy shell in your mouth one bite at a time, and any shattering would be private, and not down the front of your shirt.
Zoaster, move over. Another award-winning dream invention.
Yes, a Recipe: Shameful Chicken
One thing that I’ve discovered in the past few weeks is something I am simultaneously ashamed and compelled to tell you about. It’s a new (to me) way to bread and oven-fry chicken. One gets the sense that it would have been popular in the Better Homes and Gardens set in the 70s, though everyone was probably too busy buying Shake and Bake, because something in a box probably seemed easier at that point in time.
First, I was at Target and found some boneless, skinless, somewhat inoffensive looking (no hormones, the word “natural all over the package, etc.) chicken breasts. You know, in the grocery section they’ve wedged in among the toys and clothing and scrapbooking materials.
I cannot get over grocery shopping at Target, and yet I do it when I am there.
Anyhow, somewhat sustainably produced chicken breasts for $3, and I bought them. A few days passed. I don’t often cook chicken breasts. I find them boring and easy to ruin, though I do have a few fantastic go-to recipes for them. One of my favorites is with onion, almonds, and lots of butter. Another is with sage and prosciutto, which, let me tell you, I never have on hand.
“Austerity is the new abundance,” a friend recently said, and then said “or is it that abundance is the new austerity?” Anyhow, this is a sentiment I can get behind and I wanted to use up those Italian-seasoned bread crumbs before they lingered in my cabinet, uselessly, for too long.
What could I do with chicken and breadcrumbs? Surely something — it sounded like a winning combination.
I started googling and found that there is a popular recipe template using the following ingredients:
chicken
mayonnaise
bread crumbs
parmesan cheese
Whoa. The idea is that you mix mayo in with parmesan, dip the chicken in the mixture, coat with breadcrumbs. and cook briefly in a super-hot oven.
I lacked parmesan cheese but I had some shreddy Mexican mix, and I shook in a smidge of cayenne pepper, too. I started to coat the chicken. Then I realized that I hadn’t made enough mayo mixture, and I added an egg and some olive oil and a bit of salt. A little lemon for acid. I figured I was putting in the mayo ingredients without emulsifying them.
Basically, I’m on the road to the message that you can’t mess this chicken up. It was fantastic. I made it again last night with boneless, skinless thighs. Chicken thighs, that is.
With the breasts, I’d started them at 450 for about 12 minutes and then gotten scared and turned it down to 350 for about 10. They were perfect. Tender, juicy, and yet cooked through. Browned on the outside. With the thighs, I did 400 for about 22 minutes. And I used romano cheese that time. Both were perfect. It’s like secretly frying chicken in mayonnaise. Don’t tell anyone. But pass it on.
Church Avenue Chomp 