We Are All Total Losers Compared to #Farmer Boy          

I am obsessed with  "Farmer Boy"--Laura Ingall's Wilder's book about her husband Almanzo's childhood in upstate New York.  (Spoiler alert: it never explains where  they got the name "Almanzo"--possibly, there is a missing chapter about a traveling circus?) This book has me convinced that our culture is totally, completely going down the tubes. Whenever I am feeling really inadequate—because I hate cooking and my kids have played way to many video games and I just can’t bring myself to mop up muddy dog footprints again, I think about Farmer Boy’s mom, and feel worse. For instance: this is what I make for dinner--

Open jar of Ragu
Open package of pre-cooked chicken sausage
Open bag of frozen gnocchi
Make all of this stuff hot and combine. 
Congratulate myself that I snuck an entire raw onion into the sauce! This counts as a vegetable. 
Add cheese.
Serve. 

This is how my son eats:

He approaches stove with trepidation. From his demeanor, you would think he is routinely held down and force-fed haggis, or wichity grubs. In fact, he is on a rotation of about six foods, none with vegetables, spices, sinister chunks, or more than 3 ingredients.  He eats each of these foods only after coating them exhaustively in parmesan cheese. (In fact, the food is only a vessel by which parmesan cheese can be more efficiently ingested; much like the relationship between toast:cinnamon sugar, or waffles:syrup.) He peeks in saucepan. Sees that the gnocchi is bathed in sauce. Distorts face. (I close my eyes, count to ten, and tries not to think about wine.)  I dish up a plate. Boy coats food with so much parmesan cheese it looks a lot the front lawn, which is frozen under two feet of snow. Boy delicately picks parmesan cheese off the top of the food with one tine of his fork and proceeds to eat parmesan cheese, one granule at a time. 

This is what Farmer Boy’s mom makes the family of six, plus a visiting teacher, for dinner:

There were slabs of tempting cheese, there was a plate of quivering headcheese, there were glass dishes of jams and jellies and preserves, and a tall pitcher of milk, and a steaming pan of baked beans with a crisp bit of fat pork in the crumbling brown crust….and a big willow-ware platter full of sizzling ham. 

This is how Almanzo ate:

He ate the sweet, mellow baked beans. He ate the bit of salt pork that melted like cream in his mouth. He ate mealy boiled potatoes with brown ham-gravy….He demolished a tall heap of mashed turnips, and a hill of stewed yellow pumpkin. He ate plum preserves, and strawberry jam, and grape jelly, and spiced watermelon-rind pickles. Slowly he ate a large piece of pumpkin pie. 

And, I’ll have you know, Farmer’s boy’s mom made all of that from scratch—including the head cheese, and the watermelon rind pickles—with no electricity, running water, or refrigeration. She did it all by lantern light!  
I wonder where I can buy some headcheese. 

(Ok, I just Googled "Almanzo." According to thinkbabynames.com, in one of the Little House Books, Almanzo told Laura his name was passed down from an ancestors in England whose life had been saved in the Crusaded by an ancestor named Al Mansour! Well, how about that!) 

#Mommy Fashion


For some reason I am getting Marie Claire magazine. I loved this magazine when I was like, 22.  This month I enjoyed the article on women entrepreneurs in Syrian refugee camps. I also found the fashion tips incredibly useful, because now I finally know what to pair with my son's soccer shorts!

This next photo was a little more challenging for me, as, sadly, I got rid of all my legwarmers--it seems so foolish now!--in about 1984.  

And this last suggestion for, well, all can say is OMG--my 13 year old son will be SO psyched when I wear THIS to his freshman class orientation!! I had been wondering what to pair my  transparent Parental Advisory space smock with!! #momissohip

Now if I could just find shoes like that in New Hampshire!!!

Worst Snow Day Ever!

That reminds me of our all-time, flat-out, hands down worst snow day ever! 

Actually, there was no snow--we were living in Oklahoma--it was an ice storm.

At 8 am the morning of the storm, a neighbor called to inform me that my older son was ice skating down the middle of the street. Complete with helmet and hockey stick (and least he put on his helmet!).  For people in Norman, Oklahoma, this was kind of like seeing aliens land in in the parking lot of Sonic. Shocked drivers were gliding past him, their faces transfixed in horror. I ran to the front door and yelled for Palmer to get out of the street right now! He waved "Oh, hi, Mom!" and happily skated right onto the front walkway and up to the door. I told him that under no circumstances could he leave the back yard!

An hour later, while I was getting both kids into the tub, the glass shower door shot back and shattered into a million tiny pieces of safety-glass jigsaw. I hustled the kids out of the bathroom and spent 45 minutes cleaning up every tiny shard of glass--then I hauled the jagged, glass-dribbling doorframe out to the utility area behind the garage, where I stuck it behind the trash cans.

Meanwhile, I had noticed that the cat wasn't looking so hot--he'd been in another fight with the white cat ("Bad Cat") who lived behind us and had a nasty abscess on his leg. I made him a vet appointment for later on that day and made a mental note to keep him inside.

After I finished vacuuming the carpet outside the bathroom for stray glass shards, I came in the living room to check on the boys, and there was Palmer, ice skating again--this time, in the back yard as requested, but with the broken shower door draped around his neck! As he skated around, merrily talking to himself about Sponge Bob, little fragments of glass rained onto the ice.

I threw open the door and yelled at Palmer to stop right there (this was something I said a lot). He kept skating and just looked at me, completely mystified. I carefully slid across the ice in my socks, lifted the door frame off his shoulders, and brushed a dozen shards of glass out of  his hair.

"Can you please stay out of the utility area?" I said with gritted teeth. As far as I knew, Palmer had never even noticed the utility area--why he chosen this day to go in there are liberate the door so he could skate around with it on his head was beyond me (but then again, after seven years with this child, I was not actually that surprised).

I hauled the door back to the utility area and locked it. Then I suddenly remembered--the cat. I yelled back at the house, "Boys! Quick--shut the door!"

Both boys stood in the open door and stared at me. The cat hovered behind them.
"What door?" they yelled back. "Which door do you want us to close?"

Before I could reply, Palmer said importantly: "Mac, go close the garage door."  As Mac dutifully ran off to close the garage door, I yelled, "NO! THAT DOOR! THE ONE YOU'RE STANDING IN! YOU'RE GOING TO LET THE--"

And the cat bolted out from behind Palmer and took off.

"Oh my god," I gritted my teeth again (in a few years, and I am not kidding, I would need a root canal for child-induced teeth grinding.)  Behind me, the garage door creaked open, since Mac had hit the button without noticing whether it was open or closed. It was just as well--I  ran into the garage, grabbed my boots, and stepped back onto the ice to go after the cat. The ice was so lethal all I could do was shuffle a few inches at a time (in retrospect, I should have asked Palmer to go after the cat in his skates!).

The cat staggered awkwardly around the corner of the house. I made my  way after him in the slowest possible, not-picking-my-feet-up-trying-not-to-crack-my-head-open ice walk. It was like an extreme super-slow-mo chase scene.  The cat, who was surprisingly fast despite his infected leg and the ice, gimped toward the front door and darted behind the holly bush. I scootched up to the holly bush, reached for the cat, and then, wham--my feet went out from under me and I landed on the holly bush--now a razor-sharp frozen death shrub.

The boys, intrigued by my agonizing walk around the house, chose that moment to open the from door.

"Mom, what are you doing?"

"Grab the CAT!" I yelled. They grabbed him. I picked myself up--OMG, ow!--I had landed really hard on my hip, and was bleeding from several bloody scratches from the hollycicles. I hobbled back inside.

We got the cat to the vet.

Seven months and a very large amount of money later,  I had spine surgery for the herniated discs which had dislodged in that fall on the ice.

The good news is, the cat was fine.

Snow Day

Second snow day in a row!

The first snow day is stay at home all day, force the kids out to go sledding instead of playing Minecraft for 8 hours,  make brownies,  and avoid making eye contact with the dog. The second day is--OMG! I have to get out of the house!

I force myself to think about Ma Ingalls in "On The Banks of Plum Creek. "  Here I am with central heat, a Jacuzzi and Netflix streaming, whining about cabin fever--and there was Ma, with dirt walls, a Bible, and no running water. They lived in a hole (Laura referred to as their snug little home or something) dug out of a riverbank in South Dakota (and what's more, her husband was home all day every day!) Despite the cheery gingham curtains, the little china shepherdess, and the all-engrossing  fun of penmanship practice--it must have gotten tedious, even for the amazing Ma.  Of course they were probably too preoccupied with "not freezing or starving to death" to worry about being bored--it probably took half their time just to keep the fire going and melt enough snow to make porridge. Or Maybe Laura just conveniently blocked out the times when Ma went out to the frozen outhouse and screamed in desperation.