Raising WEG

I wanted to like this show

Last week, I flirted with confessing that I have been watching "Grey's Anatomy."  It started about two months ago, and I've felt a little embarrassed about this new habit.

The show drips in chick-flick sensibility.  Calder sat through an episode, turned to me in disbelief at the end, and said: "you enjoy this?"  Well, yes.  I did.

So, okay, the writers haven't met a medical-drama cliche they don't like.  No one could possibly have watched five seasons of "ER" without learning, for example, that the chatty lady accompanying her friend from the crash scene will be silently suffering from massive internal bleeding.  In fact, it's hard to imagine any ER viewer failing at any time to predict the medical scenarios on Grey's Anatomy.  But I didn't care.

I liked the cast.  I liked the melodrama.  I liked being snarky as I predicted the beats on each scene.  I figured, who cares if the medical stuff is a mess?  I can't tell, and Sandra Oh rocks.  Also, I think I might be reverting to my youth, because Patrick Dempsey is, indeed, starting to look a little dreamy.

The honeymoon is over.  The bubble has burst.  The curtain has fallen on my infatuation.  Time to retire the cliche.

Let's review a few salient details.  First, the official episode description:

Meredith is mortified when her "one night stand" shows up at the hospital suffering from priapism and needing medical attention; a woman carrying quintuplets is overwhelmed by numerous medical issues as she navigates her high-risk pregnancy; and Alex's shortcomings frustrate Izzie.

Then, a quick explanation of the episode's theme, courtesy of the writers' blog:

We started thinking about this episode by asking ourselves, can you actually have too much of a good thing? You start with the obvious food, alcohol, drugs and soon realize these aren’t such funny or uplifting stories. They’re addiction stories and not really good things.

Then we read about this woman in Australia who had given birth to a set of quadruplets, got pregnant again and gave birth to a second set of quadruplets! Wow, what are the odds, right? That made us think, having a baby is a good thing, but what if you’re this Australian woman, didn’t you get a bit more than you bargained for with a second set of quads? Out of that came Dorie. Three boys are great [the character has two-year old triplets], but she wanted a little girl. She ended up with five girls [quintuplets], all with serious medical conditions [in the episode, only three have serious medical conditions]. What seemed like a good thing, suddenly became too much of a good thing.

You're reading this and thinking that it was the whole assinine approach to high-order multiples and ART that drove me crazy.  But you're wrong!  I was so overwhelmed by irritation and impatience with the medical management of the fictional pregnancy, I barely noticed the heavy-handed multiples theme.  Fact is, Grey's Anatomy is all about the heavy-handed theme.  I was ready to let that pass.

It was the rest of it that had me sitting there yelping in disbelief.

Where to start?  Patrick Dempsey's character Derek has a wife, Addison Shepherd.  She's just reappeared and been hired by Pacific Grace Hospital for her top-notch reputation as a neonatalogist.   In this episode, however, Addison comes out as a dual specialist, tackling maternal-fetal medicine while (I presume) her NICU patients sleep.  That's right, Addison Shepherd not only cares for neonates and their myriad health problems, she also handles high-risk pregnancies.  Never mind that neontalogists are pediatricians who pursue advanced research and training in newborn medicine, while maternal-fetal specialists start their medical careers in obstetrics/gynecology and then pursue their own board certifications in high-risk pregnancy management.  Addison can do it all, going from ultrasound monitoring and cesearean delivery to neonatal care.

No wonder McDreamy took her back.  The woman's a medical phenom.  Not to mention, with all that extra work she's doing, her compensation package must be off the charts.

Then check out that wonder-intern Izzie.  Sure, she's working at the hospital as a first-year surgical resident, but she's not letting pesky little details like intensive years of specialization stop her.  Under Addison's eagle eye, Izzie will skip all the trouble of learning pediatric medicine and advance immediately into neonatology.  Because of course there's no such thing as intense competition for neonatal fellowships among the doctors who actually study pediatrics. Izzie the intern -- the surgical intern -- gets to plunge right in.

Then again, maybe we shouldn't get too carried away by the combined speciality-transcending talents of Doctors Addison and Izzie.  After all, neither one of them appears to have learned the first thing about multiple-birth pregnancy.  Neither one of them seems to know that the average quintuplet pregnancy only lasts about 30 weeks.  In fact, none of the doctors at Seattle Grace takes action based on the idea that a 32-week quintuplet pregnancy represents a spectacular stroke of medical luck.

Of course, reaching 32 weeks barely scratches the surface of Dorie's gestational jackpot.  Not only has she remained pregnant this long without (we infer from the dialogue) any hospital admission prior to this point, she's also managed her pregnancy almost entirely without medical supervision or intervention.  How else to explain the many medical surprises she receives, once under Addison's superb care?

Here Dorie lies, 32 weeks pregnant with quintuplets, and over the course of a single day, she learns that one baby has hydrocephalus, another has hypoplastic left heart syndrome, and a third has an omphalocele.

Dorie's had the first quintuplet pregnancy in history to reach the third trimester without a single level-II ultrasound scan.  Now that's amazing.

Almost as amazing as that 32-week quintuplet-swaddling belly, which looks smaller than some singleton bellies I've seen, and also happens to be entirely free of stretch marks.

Or the way that the 32-week babies, when delivered by emergency c-section while their mother lies awake on the table (someone having taken the time to call for an epidural), manage to look like the 26-weeker dolls used with such abandon over on ER.

Or the way that five surgical interns will, next week, pull duty in the NICU.  Because NICUs aren't staffed with some of the most specialized caregivers in the entire hospital.  Surgical interns will do their jobs!

How thrilling!  How easy it shall be for me to suspend my disbelief!

---

Wow. I just go on and on, don't I.

Here, with slightly less snark, is a run-down of the the narrative problems on Grey's Anatomy this week:

Addison Shepherd is a neonatalogist.  She might meet with a mother of quintuplets prior to her babies' delivery, especially after one or more babies had been diagnosed with complications in utero.  Then again, she might not.  I asked to speak to a neonatologist and got a couple of first-year residents, because the attendings were busy taking care of actual neonates.  Regardless, the management of the pregnancy would be handled by a maternal-fetal specialist, and that person (probably in consultation with the relevant specialists for each baby's condition) would be the one making decisions about preterm labor.

Izzie is a surgical intern.  She can't specialize in neonatal medicine.

Okay, that's not entirely precise.  There do happen to be pediatric sub-specialties for most surgical specialities.  For example, hypoplastic left heart syndrome would be managed by a pediatric cardiothoracic surgeon.  Hydrocephalus would be managed by a pediatric neurologist.  An omphalocele would be handled by a pediatric surgeon, possibly with the input and certainly with the follow-up of a pediatric gastroenterologist and a pediatric plastic surgeon.

Izzie could decide to pursue a pediatric surgery sub-specialty -- in three years -- and thereby work with premature and sick infants.  But neonatology?  If that's Izzie's goal, she better withdraw from the surgical program and start her pediatric residency immediately.

Of course, pediatric specialists sometimes care for adults, as well.  Elba's pediatric plastic surgeon this summer was the chair of the ped plast surg department while also working the [adult] nose-and-boob-job curcuit.  Nor must all these complicated medical conditions be handled by pediatric specialists.  In an emergency situation, of course a cardiothoracic surgeon would perform surgery on a child.  But hypoplastic left heart syndrome?  That's a three-stage cardiac reconstruction (barring transplant) and requires a lifetime of follow-up care.  The only people doing those surgeries and providing that care are pediatric cardiothoracic surgeons and their pediatric cardiologist colleagues.

Did you know that newborn blood vessels are the width of spaghetti strands?  I learned that while watching the Discovery Health Channel.  The Grey's Anatomy writers should try it sometime.

Unless Derek Shepherd has a pediatric sub-specialty we don't know about, he's not handling a baby diagnosed with hydrocephalus in utero.  And I can't imagine he has that sub-specialty, because no one, least of all Dr. Google, would ever claim that prenatal hydrocephalus "just needs a shunt."  Hydrocephalus that develops in utero indicates a brain or structural problem beyond the "mere" presence of excess fluid in the ventricles of the brain.  Same thing with the omphalocele -- when a baby's internal organs form in a sack outside its abdomen, that almost always indicates further congenital defects.  Certainly no chief resident of general surgery would ever handle an omphalocele case -- but that's how they handled it at Seattle Grace.

As for the delivery-room scene?  Neonatalogists don't deliver babies.  I would have laughed if I hadn't been so pissed off by the general narrative craptitude by then.  OB/Gyns do cesearean sections.  Even my semi-emergency triplet delivery was handled by OB/Gyn residents, under the supervision of the attending perinatologist on-call that night.  Also, an emergency cesearean performed after a placental abruption during a quintuplet pregnancy?  That's going to happen under general anesthesia.  No one's going to take the time for an epidural to work, people.

As for the chaotic delivery scene, the scene conjured by the writers to demonstrate Addison's wicked skills for Derek's pleasure?  NICU teams handle the babies at and after delivery.  The folks rushing from the surgical field to the rescuscitation cribs?  Those would be NICU nurses, probably two for each baby.  Respiratory therapists and the neonatal attendings and the various pediatric specialists would all stand ready at the cribs, waiting to get to work.  Surgical interns wouldn't even be in the room, unless they'd managed to bribe someone (not likely in the crowded conditions of a quintuplet delivery), and if they did manage to sneak in, their sole responsibility would be to stay the hell out of the way of the folks doing the work.

I'm either going to have to skip next week's episode, or self-medicate, because I will not be able to stay calm as an entire episode revolves around the surpassingly stupid conceit that five surgical interns are all assigned NICU duty.

Surgical residents don't do nurses' jobs: they don't have the knowledge or the skills.  I was no fan of our NICU nurses, but those people do a wicked-hard job.  What surgical intern would know the equipment, the warning signs, the thousand subtle pieces of wisdom necessary for a nurse to knit life to body as a newborn baby struggles?  It's the nurses who know, almost by instinct, when to call for the specialists: and it's the specialists they call, not surgeons, certainly not interns.

Next week's episode is going to suck.

Worst of all, now I have to assume that all the medical stuff on this show sucks.  This was just the first storyline where I knew enough to detect it.

Maybe there's still hope.  Maybe Addison and Derek will crash and burn sooner rather than later.  I'm agnostic on the the romantic troubles Addison causes for Meredith (I'm protected by my late arrival to the storyline), but I cannot bear any more assine forays into the world of high-risk pregnancy and neonatal medicine.  If Addison sticks around, and keeps getting plots like this one, I'm going to have to give up my brand-new guilty pleasure.

Damn.

We interrupt our normal ranting

I have to find something to give Calder for Christmas that costs a hundred bucks, so I can ask for him to buy me the amazing new treasury.

And then I have to find an extra two hundred bucks to pay for those gifts.

How Rude

Here's a late-breaking news story from the New York Times: today's parents suck.

To be specific, we're facing an epidemic of "Kids Gone Wild."

The topic at hand?  Why todays' kids behave so poorly not just in coffeeshops and at parties, but everywhere you find them.  The careful analyst of this disturbing trend?  That famed defender of overworked contemporary parents, Judith Warner.  Her methods?  Quote a variety of experts about the laziness and suckitude of contemporary parenting practices, then throw out the comforting reminder that it's not truly the kids at fault, it's the "the social, educational and parental ills " of America, instead.

I'm starting to worry that I've slipped into an alternative universe.  No, seriously, I'm starting to worry that four years ago, we were in a terrible car accident, all the kids were killed, and I've been creating a parallel universe in my catanoic coma to avoid facing the truth.

I've never seen a child roller-skate around a restaurant table.  (Is this because I have never eaten at a four-star restaurant?)  I've never read a mainstream parenting magazine that didn't have at least two articles about discipline highlighted on the cover.  I've never gotten through a single playdate without someone providing the wearisome details of their new chore chart or repeating a tragic lament over table manners.

Also, can someone please explain what it means to "use [your] kids like Prozac"?  Because half the mothers I know are using an SSRI to handle the pressures of motherhood.  Will there be some nasty drug interactions we need to consider?

In my reality, every mother I talk to worries endlessly about whether her child's behavior will reflect badly on her.  Parents hiss at their kids in the grocery stores and carry their infants out of restaurants rather than disturb the other patrons.  They ask other parents for recommendations about discipline all the time and buy enough parenting books to overwhelm LibraryThing.

In Judith Warner and the New York Times' reality, teaching your children "to play by the rules and cooperate" belongs to Once Upon a Time.

Why is the New York Times publishing all these stories?  Do Times readers simply enjoy reading stories about how much they suck?  Does the publisher hope to increase readership in the South and Midwest, and the editors figure that confirming everyone's [false] stereotypes about those craven crappy East Coast elites will do the trick?

Blue-state voters: they don't just hate America and love the Evil-doers.  They're rotten parents, too.

And of course, blue-state women work too much.  If only we weren't all so worn down by work, our kids wouldn't be such terrors.

Does Judith Warner even read the studies that consistently find two-thirds of American parents support spanking as a discipline tool?  Do any of the experts she cites read those studies?

Who knows.  Warner draws such interesting conclusions from the studies she does cite, I'd hate to let her loose in the spanking data.

Warner cites a 2002 study by Public Agenda that found "only 9 percent of adults were able to say that the children they saw in public were 'respectful toward adults.'"  Warner doesn't mention that the Public Agenda study examined civility among all people in America.  Nor does she mention the full findings.  First, the question at issue:

Thinking about kids you personally know well and those you see in public, would you say that they are respectful of adults, should things be somewhat better, or should things be a lot better?

Here are the actual findings:

• Thinking about kids they knew well, people reported that 31 percent were respectful of adults, 35 percent thought things should be somewhat better, and 32 percent thought things should be a lot better.
• Thinking about kids seen in public, only 9 percent were perceived as respectful of adults.  39 perecent of respondents reported that things should be somewhat better, and 52 percent reported that things should be a lot better.

The study pollsters also asked, "How about people who are rude or disrespectful?  Do you see this often, sometimes, or practically never?"  88 percent reported that they often or sometimes saw people acting rudely and disrespectfully.  So: 91 percent of people thought that children could behave better.  88 percent of people thought that all people could behave better.

Given the typical poll's margin of error, we can reach this astonishing conclusion: all people in America, regardless of age, could behave better in public.  Rude adults are raising rude children.  Public civility has declined, people behave badly, standards have slipped, and we all wish it were different.

This is serious.

Truly, it is: the decline of good manners genuinely bothers me.  For example, I was called a "rude bitch" on Wednesday because I tried to reach into the milk fridge at the grocery store before the guy standing in front of it has finished selecting his milk.  I didn't realize it was a one-at-a-time experience, reaching for the milk, and was stared down and humiliated for my mistake.  (The guy started with, "no, I wasn't standing here picking out milk."  Then he shoved the door to the fridge at my hand.  I'm sure I looked like an idiot, because it took me a minute to figure out what was going on.  I wasn't actually called "rude bitch" until I slunk away near tears -- without the milk, of course.)  I'm such a rude bitch that I was red-faced and shaky and scared to see that guy again for the rest of my abbreviated trip through the grocery store.  I kept thinking, "thank God the kids didn't see this."

Which raises the question: why can't I be that thick-skinned person who doesn't care what other people think about me?  Why don't I ever call someone a rude bitch?  Because it seems like those people enjoy their lives a lot more.

Someone call the New York Times.  Because I'm pretty sure this must be all my parents' fault.

Happy Thanksgiving

What to write about Thanksgiving.  There were some minor skirmishes with the kids, and my in-laws are irritating me a bit more than previously, but I took a two-hour nap after dinner.  What's not to like?

Also, the meal went well, and was on the table at 12:45pm, only fifteen minutes later than anticipated.  Everything was more or less done together and still steaming when we sat down, another small miracle.  The kids' hair smelled of cold wind and dried leaves, because they'd just spent a half-hour exploring the woods with their dad and their grandparents, and they only whined a few times when we insisted they eat the rest of their food before getting a second helping of pretzel salad.  They're a very great miracle.

I've cooked Thanksgiving turkey every year since 1993, with one exception.  In 2000, I was on bedrest and Calder was on the road, driving his grandfather's truck back from Minnesota where we'd parked it on our way home from Wyoming the previous summer.  My sister and then brother-in-law came all the way from California to keep me company.  They brought a turkey dinner from Boston Market.  Let me just report: yech.

But other than that year, I've always made turkey.  In 1993, I was in England, the turkey came with little feather quills in the skin, and I fed fourteen people.  At the end of the meal, I discovered that the bottom of the bird was still raw, but no one died, so no harm, no foul.  Right?

After England came the California turkey years.  My special highlight: a frozen 20-pound bird in 1994 that I predicted would be finished at 1pm and that we finally ate at 6pm, after consuming the entire snack aisle of the 24-hour Safeway across the street.  Calder and my dad and my brother all made sure to mention that one yesterday.  Calder said, smiling: it's good to have this storehouse of family lore.

I miss the California Thanksgivings, because so many people didn't have the cash or the time to fly home for the holidays, and so I always had a full apartment.  I rented a table, even, and extra plates and silverware.  I made people play a lot of silly games -- Taboo, for example, and Pit -- and enjoyed myself thoroughly, even with all the stress about turkeys.

Then there were the Connecticut turkeys, including the 2001 turkey that my MIL wanted to roast at her house and then drive five hours to our place and reheat.  Uh...no.  After that whole Boston Market turkey experience the previous year, I was desperate to resume the tradition.  Why did she not understand this?  I'm still mystified.

There's not much to say about the Connecticut turkeys: everyone on the East Coast seems to go home for the holidays, so we've only ever hosted our parents, and that's just not as much fun.  I grew up attending Thanksgiving with my mother, her siblings, their cousins, and all the second cousins.  We were up to 35 or 40 people by the late 1980s.  My aunt roasted two 25-pound turkeys and installed a separate oven in the basement just for that holiday.  That's a Thanksgiving.

It's the same problem here in North Carolina: there's not that much challenge to preparing a grand meal for seven people.  A 12.5-pound turkey?  Amateur leagues.  My father and my step-mother roasted a 24-pound turkey for the two of them, to keep in fighting shape.

As for the menu, we're traditional folks, although I play a bit with the recipes.  Calder and his mother both thought the yellow Yukon gold mashed potatoes were weird enough to mention, for example.  This year, besides ditching the russets, I also skipped the scalloped corn and made dilled carrots and Julia's broccoli recipe, instead.

Then, for another twist, I tried basting the turkey with lemon instead of butter.  I read that this would still brown the skin, but lose the fat.  Eh.  The turkey skin wasn't as crispy or brown as Wilder and I like (Wilder: little boy who would live on nothing but poultry skin if available) and there were none of those nice dark drippings in the roaster when I went to make gravy.

I baste the turkey with chicken broth after the first hour (then the drippings every thirty minutes after that), so when I go to make the gravy, there is plenty of savoury juice in the roaster.  And usually there are those little blackish brown bits of crunchy fat.  I missed those bits.

For the last few years, I've been making the giblet gravy recipe out of the Joy of Cooking for the base.  But I've never been entirely happy with the wine and brandy aspect (don't like the taste) so this year, I simmered the giblets and onions in four cups of broth with a little thyme and clove and bay leaf, but skipped the rest.  Also, I use cornstarch as a thickener, which my MIL tells me is odd. 

My MIL brought her gravy separator with her this year.  I ignored the implicit commentary on gravies past, choosing just to enjoy the slightly less fatty gravy.

I think it's fair to say that after 12 years of experimentation, I have found the long-term stuffing recipe.  Bake one 3-cup loaf of white bread with a tablespoon of sage.  Tear up on Tuesday night and mix on Wednesday, so it gets suitably stale.  Cook wild rice on Wednesday, enough to add 1.5 - 2 cups in the stuffing.  On Thursday morning, saute two medium onions and two stalks of celery in a half-cup of butter, add half a carton of chopped mushrooms, and then the rice (so it's all warm).  Mix with the bread, then add an egg plus 1 tsp of thyme, 1/2 tsp of nutmeg, and 1/4 tsp of cloves.  Stuff about half in the turkey, save the other half in a greased casserole in the fridge.  Stick the casserole in the oven half an hour before the turkey comes out.  After the turkey comes out of the oven, mix the turkey stuffing into the casserole and return to the stove.  We ended up with this nice mixture of crunchy-top stuffing and inside-the-bird stuffing and it was perfect.

Two or three Thanksgivings ago, I went to the cupboard for the sage on Thursday morning only to discover that we had no sage.  I used a lot more cloves and nutmeg than normal, added a little extra wild rice, and a few slices of whole wheat bread that I toasted up in the oven.  Everyone loved that stuffing.  I was shocked: stuffing without sage?  It still seems like sacrilege.

Now I make sure to buy extra sage around Halloween.

Bread stuffing is more or less what Thanksgiving dinner is all about, for me.  If there were nothing on the table but stuffing and those green Spanish olives with the pimentos inside, I would be content.

This Thanksgiving, I'm content.

More in that vein

When rapidly painting over lovely deep purple slashes of wine on cream walls, do not ignore following dialogue:

Wilder: "Mommy, can we put the gerbil back into its cage now?"

Me: "No, I need to finish this quick paint job first."

Wilder, mumbling to himself: "How do I get the lid of this bowl off?"

Me: "Wilder! Leave it alone."

Wilder: "Oh, well, it's stuck."

Because a few minutes later, you will ask yourself, and then your children: "Where's the gerbil?"

And the children will go into the dining room, where the gerbil's little rolling bowl last came to rest, and tell you cheerfully: "He's gone, Mommy!"

And you will think, somewhat insanely, "Hey, Wilder put the gerbil back!  All by himself!"

And then you will realize that you're insane, and that Wilder loosened the lid on that little rolling bowl torture device enough for the gerbil to escape.  You will think, all in a rush, that you've had the gerbil home with you for the holidays for less than four hours and already you've allowed it to escape into the ductwork.  You will try, in the span of ten seconds, to determine whether everyone will be consoled by your observation that the gerbil had been looking old and scraggly and that it was time to buy a new one, anyway.

You will wonder what baked gerbil in the ductwork smells like.

On the plus side, you will discover that the kids do not instinctively lose it every time you yell.  When they appreciate the gravity of the situation, they will utter not a peep as you yell, "Quick! Look for the gerbil fast!  And furious!  Now!  Now!  Now!"

Then the gerbil will scurry back into the dining room, slipping between boxes not yet shipped and donation bags not yet donated, and wondering what hellhole he's found himself in, and how soon he'll be returned to the peaceful surroundings of the preschool.

Speaking of rodents, and also in keeping with the overall theme:

Remember the bulbs?

They're mostly in the ground.  Or, rather, I should say: I mostly planted them in the ground.

There may be a few dozen bulbs still lingering in the garage.  Or not.  I'm not telling.

As for the bulbs in the ground?  Some of them have, undoubtedly, disappeared.

Into the gaping maws of voles.

That's right, voles -- who showed up a week after I got the crocuses into the ground, and whose tunnels under the grass have now reached the base of the birdfeeder.

Query: do I attempt to poison these particular voles, knowing as I do that there are more voles living in the woods and that I cannot poison them all?  Or do I wait for the snakes to find the voles?

Our neighbors found a 2-foot long copperhead in their garage on Halloween.

Maybe the hawks will find the voles first.  We can always hope.

Happy Thanksgiving

I'm having just the worst 24 hours.

The electrician turned off the power for two hours yesterday to hook up the new generator, so we had no running water and no heat and no stove for cooking the ham I bought on Saturday.  I had to make something else at the last minute and we didn't eat until 6:15 and the kids didn't get to bed until 8:30 and Calder cleaned the entire kitchen while I sat brooding on a chair and the kids disassembled their rooms.

While cooking dinner, I blew up at the kids because they melted down after I threw away two of their infinite supply of capless markers.  After watching "The Amazing Race," I blew up at Calder when he slipped down the stairs while carrying the dregs of a glass of red wine, an accident I learned about 20 minutes after the fact when Calder came into the attic to suggest that we "just repaint" the purple-drip-painted stairwell walls in our open-floorplan house.

I've screwed up some stuff that irritates people I would not have chosen to irritate.

Someone I like suffered a devastating loss, and I hung up on her voice mail when I called because I didn't want to say "I'm so sorry" to a machine.  Also, I should have brought her a hotdish already, and I haven't.

I can't seem to get my mind in order to take care of all the stuff that needs taking care of before Thursday.

I'm resorting to a to-do list as blog material.  Why?  So I can check "write something on the blog" off my list, and I also then I will have a list.

Will I complete this whole list, having blown both mornings that the kids were in preschool?  Knowing that we have only an hour between preschool and swimming, and need to be home by 3:15 to cook the ham today, and we never get home from swimming before 3:30?  No, I will not complete the list.  But at least I will have the list.

Every single thing I've ever put off doing ends up feeling ten times bigger than it is, just because I put off doing it.  If I took half the energy it takes to remember my to-do list and re-allocated it to doing the stuff, I'd live a happier life.

Knowing that doesn't change my behavior one tiny iota.

This has to be the most boring blog post ever written.

To do:

1. Find an appliance repair shop that can stop the dishwasher from shedding its rubber insulation into the machine and specking every plastic spoon and dish we own with immovable miniscule pieces of rubber
2. Buy three coatrack thingies so we can hang kids' coats at kids' level by the backdoor and provide better storage for the dress-up clothes
3. Buy Wilder new church clothes, including an outfit suitable for the annual JCPenney portrait / Christmas card bonanza
4. Mail the checks to Scholastic for last month's order
5. Figure out how many prints we need of the marginal-quality school photos taken at preschool last week.  Try to anticipate the layout of annual school photos at high school graduation parties in 2019.  5x7s or 3.5x5s?  Holographs?  Centimeters?  Gack.
6. Bake another loaf of bread and pre-cook the wild rice for stuffing.  A few years ago, I realized that I could bake sage right into the bread we use for stuffing.  At first, I tried making bread with whole wheat flour, but this year, I decided to ditch the glycemic index and embrace my refined, nutrionally-empty heritage and stick with white bread for the stuffing.  Although technically, thanks to the sage, the bread is a tiny bit green.  On Thursday morning, I'll mix the wild rice and the stale bread -- the kids and I will tear up the bread tonight and leave it out to get stale under a dishtowel embroidered with a cat doing today's chore (Tuesday is Ironing Day) -- with sauteed white onion and celery and mushrooms.  I'll drench the whole thing with butter and chicken broth and stuff the bird.  Yes, I stuff the bird.  Sue me.
7. Make and freeze ham and scalloped potatoes, so we have another freezer meal for the weekend.
8. Fume inwardly about mother-in-law's passive-aggressive stance re: Thanksgiving weekend foods.  Every year, MIL brings three or four interesting casseroles frozen solid, all of which will have frozen lumps in the middle as we wait to carry the turkey etc. to table.  This year, she suggested adding the mashed potatoes to the mix.  Query: are my mashed potatoes too lumpy?  Does MIL need me to use margarine and skim milk instead of butter and cream?  Is there anything less difficult to coordinate with turkey timing than mashed potatoes?  Perhaps MIL has simply returned to default stance: hating me.
9. Finish sewing hair on back of Wilder's doll so that MIL doesn't make snide comment about unfinished doll I promised her I would have finished last Christmas (thereby preventing her from buying Wilder a different doll).  Wilder plays with doll, thinks doll's hair funny.  Doll's hair totally irrelevant to upcoming festivities.  If I don't finish it now, for this visit, I may not finish it before Easter, when MIL comes to visit again.
10. Exchange three-week old Magic Cabin order (my on-line screw up) and ship boxes of clothes to cousin before her children outgrow the sizes.
11. Drop three years' worth of shoes (many bags) and outgrown clothes (one bag, because new Goodwill Center doesn't have rag-bag donation) to charity shop.
12. Drop three disassembled toddler beds at Habitat Shop, to "get the damn things out of the garage."
13. Suck it up and post photos of triplet stroller on-line so we can "get the damn thing out of the garage."
14. Drop library books at library.
15. Clean house.
16. Do laundry
17. Figure out final menu for Thanksgiving, not forgetting that people like to eat breakfast and dinner, too.
18. Shop for final menu.  Preliminary thoughts: more onions, more tomatoes, more sage.
19. Plan enriching and exciting events for children and grandparents to enjoy this weekend.
20. Shower

I'm off to tackle: shower.  After that: pick up kids from preschool.  After that: who knows.

Bleh.

October Library Books Part I

Wow.  We're really behind on the library-book posts.  Sorry about that.

One excuse, miserable as it may be: too many new books from Scholastic.  Turns out there is a considerable downside to running that operation for the preschool.  Nine "Littles" books for $12.95 in a teachers-only internet sale?  Who can pass that up?

We do read still read library books, yes, we do, but they're facing some stiff competition.  I adored the Littles when I was little, and now the kids are loving the Littles, too.  Tonight, we read five chapters about the Littles' Rescue of Aunt Lily in the woods.  It's not just the Littles, either.  Two weeks ago, we read Flat Stanley twice in one day.

Back in 1999, my cousin Andy and his second-grade class read Flat Stanley and then had to make flat versions of themselves and send them out for adventures.  Andy picked Calder and I as the hosts/guardians, and we took our little Flat Andy all around Leafy New England campus and then down to DC.  Flat Andy visited the Cathedral at Catholic University, examined dioramas at the Natural History museum, and posed in front of the White House at the end of his exhausting day.  He nearly blew through the fence onto the lawn, narrowly escaping confiscation by the Secret Service.

At one point, I was worried that Flat Andy was going to become a double-amputee (he got pretty crumpled in my purse on the train between New England and Washington) and I just barely resisted the temptation to take Flat Andy to the local tatoo parlor for a photo op and a back-alley Sharpie job.  I sent Flat Andy back to Big Andy in a three-ring binder containing a photo essay and all the tourism brochures (remember: I was an infertile PhD candidate avoiding her dissertation) and for a brief moment, I was the Coolest Cousin Ever.

Now Andy is 16 years old and I couldn't be more of the dorky cousin if I tried.

Well.  Here were October's first library selections.  I picked them all out myself, back at the beginning of the month, when I was being more productive with my preschool hours.  I sat on the floor in the picture books shalves, in front of the K's, and had a grand old time.  I love libraries.

• The Boxcar Children by Gertrude Chandler Warner
• From Dawn till Dusk by Natalie Kinsey-Warnock; illustrated by Mary Azarian
• The Firekeeper's Son by Linda Sue Park; illustrated by Julie Downing
• Huge Harold by Bill Peet
• In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak
• Kermit the Hermit by Bill Peet
• On Your Toes: A Ballet ABC by Rachel Isadora
• Outside Over There by Maurice Sendak
• William's House by Ginger Howard

I picked out the Boxcar Children because Phantom was reading it to LG.  It lead to this long discussion about who would take care of Elba and Gemma and Wilder if Calder and I both died, but once we got past those early chapters, the charm of independent living in the boxcar overcame their anxieties about being cast adrift in the universe.  And at least now we're clear on the order of succession if Calder and I were to expire simultaneously.

I borrowed the Peet books because our library, for reasons I cannot comprehend, doesn't have a copy of The Caboose Who Got Loose.  I got onto that train of thought because of ... er, trains.   I remembered loving Katy the Caboose when I was in grade school, so I went looking for it.  Our library does carry The Wingdingdilly but I remember being seriously upset by that book, so I went with Kermit and Harold instead.  Once we finished Boxcar, the kids paid more attention.  Maybe they liked Kermit more than Harold, but both got laughs.

It's quite delightful to watch the kids laugh now.  Each of them is learning to recognize humor, it's not just giggles over silly sounds or stomach-raspberries -- although they've held onto that, of course.  I noticed this for the first time last Halloween.  We watched It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown after trick-or-treating, and all of a sudden, the kids were laughing at Linus with that huge pumpkin at the beginning, and noticing Snoopy's antics in his imaginary French countryside.  This year, their responses were a little different, but there was still this undercurrent of delighted discovery: so this is what humor is.

My father would tell me I'm overdue introducing Laurel and Hardy.  My brother would want to know why I haven't started playing the DVDs of the Muppet Show.

Getting back to books: I'd never read In the Night Kitchen and I thought we should.  The book-banning galoots were right, the kids noticed that you can see Mickey's penis, and they thought it was hilarious.  Tut tut tut.  Outside Over There freaked them out so we only read it once.

Does anyone else's kid cover their ears when they're scared of something?  That's been happening for years and it still mystifies both Calder and me.

The ballet ABC just bored them.

From Dawn to Dusk sat on the pile for a long time, ignored, until finally Gemma rescued it from oblivion.  Then she asked for it two or three times in a row, enjoying the straight-forward account of Vermont farm-living in the 1950s.  I have this idea now that we sledded off a barn roof in my childhood farm days, too.

The big hits, the daily offenders, were The Firekeeper's Son and William's House.

William's House is a story about New England settlers in 1837, who start off building a house "like William's father's house, in England," but who keep having to change things -- dig a cellar, make a bigger clearing, expand and relocate the chimney, replace the thatch with shingles, re-pitch the roof -- because life in America isn't like life in England.  All the time the family is changing their house, the two boys are having adventures in pen-and-ink drawings on the opposite pages.  We have to build a lean-to in the woods now, because of those nameless boys.  It's rather a clever introduction to some ideas about American colonization, but of course the kids noticed none of that, and I really couldn't tell you exactly what charmed them about this book.  Maybe they like the idea of doing things differently than your parents?

The Firekeeper's Son tells the story of a little boy and his father, who live in a quiet village by the sea in Korea.  The father lights a bonfire on the hill each night, to start a series of bonfires that run all the way to the king's castle, telling him that there is peace in the land.  One night, the little boy has to light the fire, and he hesitates, because he would like to see soldiers. It was much easier to see why the kids loved this story: there's something romantic about the idea of bonfires stretching across the countryside, sending a message.  The little boy has a very important job, and he sees visions in tongues of flame.  It's an excellent story.

A few days after I borrowed these books, I took the kids to the library.  Wilder had his fateful encounter with the easy-reader chapter book classic, Star Wars: A New Hope, and everything I just discussed disappeared off the radar screens.  I'll save that discussion for another night.

I can't believe Zigman didn't mention Mrs. McGee's seranade

Last weekend, Calder and I went to a gay wedding and it was fabulous.

Be Not Too Free All At Once

I don't think I trust this one.

To which race of Middle Earth do you belong?
brought to you by Quizilla

Then again:

My name is growing all the time, and I've lived a very long, long time; so my name is like a story. Real names tell you the story of the things they belong to in my language, in the Old Entish as you might say. It is a lovely language, but it takes a very long time to say anything in it, because we do not say anything in it, unless it is worth taking a long time to say, and to listen to.

Being wordy does rather fit the bill.

[That all having been said, and my surprise at Ent notwithstanding, this would be an especially easy quiz for someone to game.  If you have a particular race in mind, you'll nail it in one go.]

[On second thought, the quiz maker has made a serious error in failing to consider sex and gender.  Most of what we know about Ents emphasizes that female Ents have their own set of traits, few of which they shared with their male companions.  Now I'm feeling a bit of Entish peevishness at the oversight.  I may just pick up my apple trees and leave.]

Wanting a Boy

I'm so stupid.

Last summer, I received an invitation to trade my blog space for a free book.  I had to read the book (whose topic sounded fascinating), let the author answer a few questions about the book here, and that was it.

I decided that I'd look a little cheesy, if I did that.

Oh, yeah: it looks really cheesy to trade blog space for a book.  None of the "real" blog writers are doing it.

I'm an idiot.

I'm especially an idiot because it's crystal clear that I will enjoy reading this particular book, It's a Boy.  Between the blog reviews and the excerpts on Andi Buchanan's website alone, I've had a lot to think about.  Of course, there's not a lot of point in detailing my thoughts because I haven't read the book yet.

I am, however, hijacking my comment to Elizabeth's review for my own space.  Elizabeth writes,

I'm afraid I found the first [section], about what Andi calls "boy shock" or "prenatal gender apprehension," the hardest to relate to. ... When I was pregnant with D, we didn't find out what gender the baby would be until he was born, and I truly didn't have a preference.  I was under no illusion that I would understand a girl any better than a boy, or be able to provide any more guidance through the treacherous shoals of junior high school. ... It somewhat bothered me that so many of the authors were ambivalent about having sons, and none of them were univocally happy about it.

I'm with Elizabeth on this one: I had very little preference for a boy or a girl when I first found out I was pregnant, or for any second of time after I left the RE's office in the first place.  Sex preference was a luxury I thought I couldn't afford.

But if you had to push me on it -- and wow, do people push pregnant women on this topic -- I would have confessed sotto-voice that I wanted a boy first.  Growing up, I wanted a big brother: Brian in the Trixie Belden books was probably my original ideal.  In my own extended family, mothers seem to have more relaxed and easy relationships with their sons than with their daughters.  It just seemed like a good place to start (because I wasn't paying attention to my own infertility, and thought I would get to try again someday).

Calder wanted to start with a girl.

When we found out at 13 weeks that the U/S tech was 85% sure that one of the babies was a boy, we didn't share that fact with the family (the RE had been 98% sure we were only having a single baby after his first U/S scan, after all) but I was tickled.  Calder, meanwhile, held out hope for the other two babies, who didn't give up the goods until 22 weeks.  And in a lovely demonstration of why there's no way on earth to raise your child in a world free of gender expectations, my mother announced that the girls' failure to spread their legs for the U/S scan at 17 weeks was proof that they were girls.

Because it starts in utero, folks.  Not culturally-defined gender behaviors, mind you, just the imposition of cultural interpretation upon biological fact.

[I'm always a little amused by the "boys play with trucks and love the color blue" theory of gender interpretation.  Little boys in pre-industrial societies didn't play with trucks.  Until the 1930s, blue was a little girls' color.  Growing children have a developmental imperative to play with gender traits, and some of them exhibit the fruits of that imperative at a younger age than others.  Little kids imitate their grown-ups, and infants know how to earn grown-up praise.  It's a survival mechanism: this behavior gets me noticed, that one gets ignored.

No child however young picks up his or her gendered sex traits in a vacuum, so let's stop pretending that they do.]

I've written before about my unexpected discomfort at Wilder's gender-bending behavior, about how strange it can be to discover that your gender-neutrality convictions actually had some effect.  I think it sucks that little boys can't wear pink dresses and get teased when they ask for a bridal Barbie for Christmas, but little girls look adorable wearing blue overalls and their grammas cheerfully give them tractors for their birthdays.  For all that, I'm thrilled to have my boy.  Since he was a thirteen-week old fetus, I've never felt anything but joy to know he's part of my life.