Devil Inside

It seems as if I must have already covered this topic from top to bottom but having observed yet another kiddie party this weekend, I'd like to say a few more words about piñatas.
First of all, according to Wikipedia, no one knows the true origins of the piñata. You can bet, however, that a game in which blindfolded children wield sticks wasn't invented by a mother. Can't you see us all standing around wringing our hands and yelling, "stop! you'll put your eye out!"
One piñata hypothesis is that the piñatas itself once represented the devil and the goodies inside represented the blessings he is withholding. This makes the idea of beating the crap out of the piñata a little easier to stomach. "Take that you Beelzebub, you!" Wham! Wham! Wham!
There's still a bit of the devil left in the seemingly innocuous piñata birthday bash. This is true even when parents go in for the non-violent, pull-the-individual-ribbons-till-the-loot-falls-out-style piñata. On Saturday I witnessed 15 birthday-party attendees all lined up to pull piñata ribbons. It's amazing how straight a line a group of five year olds can form when there's candy to be had. Not able to stand to suspense, or perhaps because he was possessed by the devil, the fourth kid in line proceeded to grab all the ribbons at once and give them a good yank thereby dislodging every ribbon but the one which would release the candy.
Once the candy started being shaken onto, ironically in the case of this party, the floor of the church parish hall, all hell broke loose. In a nanosecond, those orderly, lined up kids, morphed into something out of the Lord of the Flies. I'm just thankful my kid's nickname isn't Piggy.

song: Devil Inside • artist: INXS

Two Out Of Three Ain't Bad

Has anyone heard this? At Courtney and Carolyn's post road race party I met a woman who told me that as far as the number of children in one's family goes, three is the new two. I took that to mean families are getting larger. It's a little confusing with 40 being the new 30 and all. Am I 40 with four children or 30 with three children. She didn't tell me what four is the new equivalent of. I assume four is the new three. But maybe if two of your four are twins then that's really only the new equivalent of two and a half, or maybe it's more like the new two, plus a puppy.
Recently I froze five containers of pesto made from Coonamessett Farm basil and three containers of spaghetti sauce made with our own big boy tomatoes. You'd think I grew up during the great depression - squirreling away food like that. My aunt grew up during the great depression. She used to squirrel away all the restaurant take out packages of ketchup, salt, and pepper, along with the extra creamers.
Four, three, or two and a half, if I had been a parent during the depression, my fellow mothers would have wanted to know why I had such a small family.

song: Two Out Of Three Ain't Bad • artist: Meatloaf

Having A Party

If there was a t-shirt that read "I survived my son's birthday party," I would own it.
It all started when C requested a piñata for his birthday. He didn't actually ask for a full-fledged party. I suppose if Ken and I had been willing to take turns hitting the thing ourselves we could have avoided the festivities all together. It seemed unfair, however, to punish a kid by withholding a party of his peers just because of his parents' hang ups.
C asked for either an elephant-shaped piñata or a star. So off I schlepped to Party America in Hyannis. I had the twins with me, one in the back pack and one in the Baby Bjorn. We were quite the show. Party America claimed to have over 130 piñata styles, and doubtless they did but what they failed to mention was that 95% of them were character driven: Disney Princesses, Cars, Winnie-the-Pooh (who's going to hit Winnie-the-Pooh with a stick?), and Spiderman.
That brought me to my next problem. I forgot to ask C whether he wanted the beat-the-heck-out-of-it-with-a-stick type of piñata, or the pull-the-individual-ribbons-till-the-loot-falls-out style. There were neither elephants nor stars. The store did have some cute doggie-shaped piñatas but none with ribbons. I couldn't see him beating the crap out of a cute puppy - at least it wasn't something I wanted to see.
After much (way too much) consideration, I went with a plain old number six. I figured he, and I, would be okay with seeing it smacked to smithereens.
That done, I moved on to the equally stressful task of filling the piñata which left me standing catatonic in the candy aisle of Shaws Supermarket picking up and putting down endless variety-pack bags of candy. Should I go with the the bag that contained the Sweet Tarts or the one that contained Smarties? Finally I choose a bag of something that looked like Juicy Fruits and a bag of the only thing that was even remotely healthy: Raisinets. When I got home with it C looked everything over and said disapprovingly, "at Sam's party the piñata had gum in it."
We went with an Olympic theme and planned many appropriate games such as the Olympic Paper Airplane Toss (which was by far the most well-received event), relay races, tug of war, and the Olympic Eat-A-Doughnut-Off-A-String Event. This theme also afforded limitless opportunities to go around the house saying things like, "put your Olympic shoes on the stairs," "where's the Olympic watering can?" and "do you have to use the Olympic potty?" And though that lightened my mood leading up to the big event, I had more anxiety over hosting the party than I had over having to deliver a baby six years ago.
At one point during the party I asked another mother to count the kids to make sure I had enough Olympic booty bags for the Olympic Pin˜ata Bashing Event. She tallied them up (no easy task as they were all moving targets) and announced there were 16. "Are you sure?" I said, "it feels more like 50."

song: Having A Party • artist: Sam Cooke

Say It Ain't So Joe (II)

Here's a confession. I think that Jimi Hendrix is overrated.
Of all the songs they play on WMVY, including the ones that they ruthlessly overplay, I could be content for the rest of my life if they never again played, "Hey Joe."
Hey Joe, where you goin' with that gun in your hand
I'm going down to shoot my old lady
You know, I caught her messin' around with another man ...
And I gave her the gun
Not a classic in my book.

song: Say It Ain't So Joe (II) • artist: Roger Daltrey

Suddenly Last Summer

Some last minute party necessities sent me to Mashpee Commons yesterday via Route 151. It's a road I've driven repeatedly since being issued my driver's license 23 years ago.
On this end-of-summer trip I was reminded of the beginning of summer, when driving this road meant having my car pelted with cicadas.
In June they were everywhere on this stretch of highway, cluttering both road and sky. So much so, that like one's high school boyfriend, you just couldn't help obsessing about them.
Now they are gone, those bugs that looked and sounded so much like creatures from another planet. Not a trace of them remains, which makes it easy to forget they were ever here at all. And maybe we should forget about them. Why not? Seventeen years is a long time to go on remembering such a short-lived phenonomen.
In my periphereal vision, however, I see patches of brown leaves among the green on the oak trees, and I know that the cicadas were here after all because they left something left behind. The trees were touched, literally, by those big, clunky, noisy, bugs. I was touched, figuratively, by their ephemeral nature.
Things that are short-lived often have far-reaching effects.
Life, and locust, are like that.

song: Suddenly Last Summer • artist: The Motels

Baby You Can Drive My Car

Why do we make baby toys in the shape of car keys? Isn't handing the car keys over to one's teenager one of life's most terrifying thoughts? And yet we readily give plastic toy keys to our babies to chew on. Where's the logic in that?
Speaking of keys - I couldn't find mine on Monday. Back in the olden days, loosing my keys would have upset me - I always hated losing things. But now that I lose my mind on a regular basis misplacing the keys is no big deal; after all, unlike my sanity, I do have a back up set.
So I used the spare keys all day and that night, when I took N out of his car seat, I found them. He had been sitting on top of them. Guess he wants to get started with the real McCoy even before his teens.

song: Baby You Can Drive My Car • artist: The Beatles

No Time

I have to admit that I didn't watch much of the olympics. Sure, I heard about Mike Phelps, Even a stay at home mother of four couldn't miss that buzz.
I could be snobbish and say that I didn't watch because there was no figure skating, my sport of choice; but gymnastics is more or less the summer olympics equivalent of figure skating and still I didn't watch.
I could say that I didn't watch because I was making a one-woman political protest over the way the communist-run Chinese government treats its citizens; but I've never gotten up on that high horse before so it's unlikely I'd start now. I'm the type of person who is more annoyed by people who idle their cars than by human rights violations in China. My priorities seem to be askew but that's the way it is isn't it? One can't really help what one is passionate about can one.
I could say that some of the summer olympic games are just ridiculous - too ridiculous. Olympic beach volley ball for example. Just how does one progress up through the ranks to become a member of the olympic beach volley ball team? Are the playoffs sponsored by Budweiser and held during spring break in Miami?
Then there's team handball or excuse me, Olympic team handball. Sorry folks - I can't be the only one out there thinking that handball sounds like a sport lonely college males participate in late at night in the privacy of their dorm rooms; perhaps while they're watching the women's olympic beach volley ball team compete.
But alas, the real reason is far more mundane. It's the same reason that the library copy of the movie The Namesake remained unwatched on the tv console for three weeks - I don't have any free time.

song: No Time • artist: Guess Who

That's Life

One more on gardening.
Others have expressed this idea far more eloquently than myself but I love how the garden is a metaphor for life.
Here is one way that my garden imitates life. In the spring and early summer, it's all neat and tidy, lettuce, peas, and kale in orderly rows, tomatoes inside their cages. Life is like that. When we start out things are less complicated even though we image we are already creatures of great complexity. Life starts out orderly and we foolishly think that it will remain that way. Then life throws surprises at us - the unexpected or the unthinkable happens and suddenly, despite our best efforts, everything is a bit of a mess. Around mid July things in the garden become dishelveled. Carefully laid out plans fall apart. Pole beans grow taller than their poles. Sunflowers topple over and need to be staked up. Tomato plants grow suckers and reach out well beyond their cages, falling into the middle of other rows, bush beans turn out to be pole beans and start attaching themselves to everything within reach. Pest invade looking for their piece of the pie.
Then come weeds which are to the garden what television and People Magazine are to life: mindless distractions. Popping up everywhere they seduce us by begging: "pay attention to me." How many hours do we spend weeding when we should have stifled them at the onset by putting down seaweed thereby saving our energy for more important tasks?

song: That's Life • artist: Frank Sinatra

Chances Are

When I was pregnant with C I suggested we name him Chance after the protagonist in the book Being There (it's Peter Sellers if you've seen the movie). Remember how he's hit by a car and when they ask his name he answers that he's Chance the gardner and they call him Chauncey Gardiner and elevate him to high rank and status? Everyone thinks he's being profound when he talks about the garden or ruminates on things he's seen on TV. Kind of a Clark Rockefeller circa 1970. If we'd have used the name we would presently have a five year old named Chance Gartner, about as close as Chance Gardiner as you can get. Ken vetoed it and I acquiesced, figuring not that many people would have gotten the joke and I'd have to expend a lot of energy explaining it. Chance is such a prep school name anyway, which was sort of the point in the book, but what are the chances any of my four kids will be going to prep school? So I suppose it's all for the best that we didn't go with that.

song: Chances Are • artist: Johnny Mathis

Come Back When You Grow Up

Gardening and kids just go together. What else could explain the analogy, "children grow like weeds?" Every garden plot, no matter how small, contains dirt and bugs, what more could a five year old want? I upped the gardening ante this summer by signing C up for the Little Sprouts gardening class at Coonamessett Farm which met every Monday from 1:30 until 3:00. Initially he couldn't understand why. "I already know about gardening," he informed me.
Instead of a prolonged discourse on how people spend their entire lives learning to become better gardeners and how that's really the beauty of the activity - it's something you can improve at with age - I merely told him to wait and see if he liked it.
The final class met this week. He must have liked it because Sunday night his younger brother asked if he could sleep with him and C told him "no" because he had gardening class and he had to wake up "by one o'clock."


song: Come Back When You Grow Up • artist: Bobby Goldsboro

Grow Some Funk Of Your Own

The gardens look pretty good this season. They looked great in June but then we harvested most of the original crops and some of the new things we planted didn't grow so well.
This year we tried some new vegetables in addition to the onions that we planted last fall - which turned out to be garlic.
We weren't above taking donations from friends. Carolyn's tomatoes and peppers did well and for the first time ever we grew decent basil from plants Carolyn passed along. Shawna's Swiss chard grew fabulously. The lettuce seeds we saved after letting the lettuce bolt and go to seed on purpose last year grew better than the new seeds I bought.
We tried a different variety of carrots. A shorter variety. Perhaps you saw them at the county fair - they won a blue ribbon. C was crushed to learn that he wasn't old enough to enter an exhibit in the fair's youth exhibits. You have to be eight. His reaction to this news was, "Eight is almost a grown up!" And so we entered the carrots and just like Mike Phelps, though without much chance of future product endorsements, they they brought hold the gold.
There were, however, some set backs.
I picked all the kale from our community garden plot and gave three quarters of it to the service center. The rest I brought home but accidentally left in the car for four hours, rendering it lifeless. I suppose it's better than leaving a twin in the car but nonetheless I was disappointed to be out a big bowl of kale soup.
Rabbits infiltrated the community garden fence. They ate all the buds off my purple bush beans and all the leaves off my cabbage plants.
This summer I learned that if I read the package of seeds carefully, maybe next summer I won't mistake bush beans for pole beans. I kept planting rows of beans in the back yard and not understanding why they kept sending out all these shoots, grabbing on to each other, and becoming hopelessly tangled.

song: Grow Some Funk of your Own • artist: Elton John

Summer Days

I know what you've been wondering. It's not how is H's potty training going or how are you managing with the twins. It's how goes the gardening and the campaign to eat more locally grown produce this summer? Well I thought I'd take this week to tell you.
This summer it's been easier to work locally grown foods into our meals than last summer. I don't even have to obsess over my one item a day gimmick. I think I'm easily using locally grown foods in all our dinner meals because I have dubbed this "the summer of the salad."
It has been my goal this summer to keep a variety of salads in the fridge at all times. Not limited to green leafy salads, I've made taboulis, barley salads, beet salads, a ridiculously spicy moroccan carrot salad, chicken salad, and tuna salad. I think that this is the turning point I contemplated last summer when I realized that in order to incorporate more local foods into our diet I would have to change the foods we ate. It's not easy to get local produce into a baked mac and cheese, or a tuna casserole. It is easy to get them into salads and pesto.
It also helps that I'm not pregnant this summer. Last summer looking at lettuce made me nauseous.

song: Summer Days • artist: The Partridge Family

I Go To Pieces

Everyone knows how kids can play for hours with just a cardboard box. Who needs toys? But did you also know that kids can play with broken toys way beyond the point at which an adult would consider the toy to be trash. The particular toy I have in mind came into our house via one of the routes by which cheap plastic toys infiltrate my home - inside a goodie bag. It started life (most likely in China) as a slide whistle. Quickly though, the slide piece was separated from the whistle and it became just a whistle. It went on as a long flute-like whistle for some time, and then, after being used as a drum stick once two often, it broke in half at the point where the red mouthpiece met the yellow cylinder. You'd think that would be the end of it but since the broken stump piece still whistled it hung around the house for a while longer. Today I noticed that the mouthpiece was cracked on both the right and left side meaning that the top of the mouthpiece was collapsed down on the bottom maybe even to the point that, like a straw that gets chewed up beyond repair, no air will go in when blown into. I was going to test the theory by blowing into it to see if it worked but then I feared that I would be the one to cause the cracked sides to separate - then I would be accused (and rightly so) of breaking C's slide whistle.

song: I Go To Pieces • artist: Peter and Gordon

Love at the Five and Dime

Glue Stick
5" Blunt Tip Scissors
Crayons
Markers
Eraser
Tape
Antibacterial Hand Soap
Colored Pencils
Handheld Pencil Sharpener
These are some of the items on the suggested Kindergarten supply list handout helpfully provided by Staples. The list also gives the in-store locations of the suggested items. Antibacterial Hand Soap is on aisle four, same as tissues (another suggested item).
Soap and Kleenex? What kind of school supplies are these? Not only are these items not fun - we already own all this stuff. What's the point of sending your child to school if you can't go on a back to school shopping spree?
How can you go back to school without agonizing over what color three-ring binder to buy? And what about all those pocket folders? And dividers? Not to mention the 500 sheets of three-hole punched lined paper, a solar-powered calculator with trigonometric functions, a protractor, a leather-bound thesaurus, CliffsNotes for Julius Caesar, gym shorts, a box of No. 2 pencils, a French/English dictionary, Sharpies, and a mini clip book light (for doing homework in bed).
Now those are school supplies.

song: Love at the Five and Dime • artist: Nanci Griffith

I Ran

Among the small but determined group of folks who've run every Falmouth Road Race, I've heard there's some dissension as to what actually constitutes running the race. Does it count if you walk the entire way? Does it count if you use crutches?
There's a lot of pressure for them to stay in the game. Can't you see these guys a decade from now? All of them being pushed on gurneys for seven miles just to hang on to their bragging rights.
There are the select few who have run the Falmouth Race all 36 years and counting and then there's the rest of us who have all run a handful of races, but I wonder how many members of the Falmouth Track Club have never run the Falmouth Road Race? Probably not too many. The pressure to run Falmouth and thereby take advantage of those guaranteed numbers set aside for town residents, often proves to be too much. Even ordinary non-runners get caught up in the moment, saying to themselves, "I really want to run it, just once." Then they go out and do just that, breaking their streak without even knowing it.
Giving credit for not running the Falmouth Road Race should be like playing 10 numbers in Keno. Because the odds are against it, it pays out if none of your numbers come up.
There was at least one staunch nonconformist at Courtney and Carolyn's post race party who has weathered the peer pressure and managed, year in and year out, to sit out the most famous race in town.
My hat's off the Steve who knows how to just say no. Thanks for watching my kids while I went for that second (and third) glass of wine.

song: I Ran • artist: A Flock of Seagulls

You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth

Coonamessett Farm sells a vegan Worcestershire sauce. Now there's an oxymoron - vegan Worcestershire sauce. Isn't Worcestershire sauce something that your pour on top of a steak? Sure wouldn't want any animal products used in the sauce with which we plan to smother our dinner meat.
I suppose one could use vegan Worcestershire sauce to flavor up those freshly picked farm blueberries; if it weren't for the fact that the berries are all being eaten out in the field.

song: You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth • artist: Meat Loaf

The Long Run

Over the years I have both run the Falmouth Road Race and watched it from the sidelines. To be honest I think it might be easier to run the darn race than to have to stand on the sidelines as a spectator. Firstly, I wasn't in any great shape when I ran but I could usually slog through the race (if my sister was there telling me jokes) in about an hour. If you watch the race, it's a time commitment of at least 90 minutes, even longer when your three year old decides he wants to stay and help pick up paper cups.
Secondly, when you are running the race it's acceptable, if not expected, that you will tire as the race progresses. As a spectator it's your duty to cheer wildly for everyone who goes by, from those in the lead pack to the chubby guy with the iPod who's walking the whole way. Sometimes runners even accost spectators trying to get us to cheer louder. I encouraged the kids to pack as many noisemakers as they could find and during the race even told them to "yell louder," a request I rarely make over the course of an average day. But even my children of boundless energy eventually grew tired of the constant cheering, leaving me with a noise shaker in one hand and a baby in need of nursing in the other while they went off in search of trees to climb.
At one point a woman running the race turned to me as she went by and yelled "congratulations."

song: The Long Run • artist: The Eagles

Breakfast in America

Maybe you do this too. Whenever my kids won't try something I always launch into this quote by the venerable Dr. Seuss, "You do not like them. So you say. Try them! Try them! And you may."
For my efforts, I can usually get them to take a (tiny) bite. In the story, Sam-I-Am is, of course, referring to green eggs and ham. And though I like to throw this nifty phrase around my dinner table, I myself had never tried green eggs and ham.
All that changed last week.
I can't take credit for the idea. It was C's. I can say that it's a good rainy day activity (we also made red eggs and ham and tried to make blue eggs but only ended up with darker green ones.)
The green eggs came out a brilliant shade of green, fluorescent almost; like nothing found in nature. The color reminded me of Sandy Skoglund's photograph, "Radioactive Cats."
Curiously, even though I knew the eggs would taste like regular eggs, the repulsion reflex was strong. H flat out refused to try any - smart boy. I think the repulsion reflect is located just in front of the gag reflex. My theory is that the repulsion reflex is a last-ditch effort to stop ones self from eating something that will be regrettable later. Early man must have counted on it for his survival, having learned that non-vegetable foods, once they'd turned green, tasted putrid and rotten. Red flags must have started going on in the primordial brain whenever said food was encountered.
I subdued my repulsion reflex in order to appease my five year old and now I can say with certainty, "I like green eggs and ham. I do. I like them Sam-I-Am."

song: Breakfast in America • artist: Supertramp

word of the day (a tercet)

Gentlemen callers left in limbo
As Brandi stood with arms akimbo
Asserting she was not a bimbo

Unbelievable

Ken's going to Highfield with C on Friday. The musical is How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. The show contains one of the most politically incorrect songs of all time: "A Secretary is Not a Toy." It's second only to that little ditty, "Everybody Ought to have a Maid" from A Funny Thing Happened on the way to the Forum.
Then there's the most misleading song of all time: "Marry the Man Today (and Change His Ways Tomorrow)," from Guys and Dolls.
Ain't going to happen ladies.

song: Unbelievable • artist: EMF