MOXIE MOM on Life & Kids
Dinner Successes
For some reason, I have been raking in the compliments on dinner menus this week. Truly, I have never experienced this phenomenon in all my years of parenting, and I have grown a hardened shell when it comes to comments on dinner.
Normally, the first thing I hear is, “I won’t eat that. I can’t stand [fill in the blank].” Or “I hate [fill in the blank].” Sometimes there’s just a teary face on one side of the table as the dinner attendee thinks about how hungry he’s going to be because he doesn’t like the menu. Another attendee tends to be loud about what she won’t eat, and while her feedback bothers the other adult in the family, it only registers with the cook when that other adult complains.
However, compliments on the food do register. They’re just so surprising.
Don’t know if there’s much of a secret except unwittingly appealing to a kid’s palate. The other night it was vegetable fried rice with lots of teriyaki sauce and oil and scrambled egg mixed in like the Asian restaurants make it. The kids told me it was as good as Supon’s veggie friend rice, which we had just eaten a couple nights before. I’m pretty sure that was the compliment of the decade. And all I was trying to do was use up the extra rice in the fridge.
The next night it was breakfast for dinner, which we never do, and I have no idea why because it was such a hit. Note to self: breakfast for dinner often. Throw a simple frittata in the oven, fry up some breakfast sausages, convert a melon into fruit salad, and you’ve got yourself a happy family. Actually, I think you could just serve breakfast links and they’d think you were Julia Child.
Last night? Leftover spaghetti sauce converted into a casserole with a lot of mozzarella cheese. Who knew it could be so easy? But here’s what I heard: “We have been having a lot of good dinners this week. They are yummy.”
I couldn’t help basking in the glow of satisfied, complimentary kids. I guess positive feedback does make a difference. And here I had thought I was immune.
Now the trick is keeping the streak going.
leave a comment!School Routines
So you know how you’re supposed to start your kids going to bed early a week before school starts so they’re prepared for the shock of the early schedule? We don’t do that. In fact, on Labor Day weekend, our kids typically stay up later than almost any other time during the summer, and they start school absolutely ragged. Their teachers would throw up their hands if they knew.
Here’s the thing: every year we get together with a group of friends, originally mine, some of whom date back to my high school years, one of whom goes all the way back to my toddlerhood, and it’s just so fun to see everyone. Each year is different. The group waxes and wanes, sometimes large, sometimes small, some folks traveling from England or Hawaii, others from nearby Seattle. This year was smaller, the Seattle crowd only, but still there were six kids ranging in age from eight to fourteen, along with lots of good food and wine and conversation. The adults stayed up late talking while the kids either got wild with each other or slumped in a corner chair waiting for the powers that be to see the necessity of bedtime. (When your kids are begging to go to bed, you know you’re a slacker parent.)
I feel a little guilty starting the school year this way—Leah would much prefer to stay home and put her already ordered things in a finer-tuned order. But the adults love it so much, many of us try to make it every year.
On the upside, my kids come home from school each day ready for bed a little earlier. Tonight bath and shower time started at 7:30, no reminders from me whatsoever.
I figure the routine happens whether you start the week before school or with the first day. It’s all good.
2 commentsFamily Exercise
Last night at bedtime Leah asked if we could go jogging in Whatcom Falls Park today. “Can we go in the morning?”
Are you kidding?
This morning, Leah and I don our running gear and pack Ty’s bike into the back of the car. This is our summer mode of exercise—she and I jog and he rides ahead. It works pretty well. We don’t do it nearly often enough, but on the way to the park Leah decides she wants to start running more regularly. Girl after my own heart.
We hit Whatcom Falls just as the rain starts up, but under the trees the ground is still dry. We take the route Leah had run at the end of May—except in reverse—during the middle school challenge, an event for kids from any of Bellingham’s middle schools.
“The steps are really bad,” she tells us maybe fifteen times. “I’d rather run down them.”
As we jog, I realize I have never explored this park. Not really. Sure, I’ve been to the bridge and the surrounding trails numerous times, but as Leah directs Ty ahead of us—“turn left, stay right, go straight, Ty”—I realize the network of trails is way more extensive than I’d thought. How have I missed these beautiful trails? I feel sheepish.
The air is cool, smelling of rain and leaves and damp gravel, a Northwest summer rain smell that I love. Ty rides ahead, pacing us, until we arrive at the steps. Ah. I get it now. Steep. Hmm, good for stair training, I can’t help saying out loud.
“No way,” Leah says. “We had to run up these steps in the middle school challenge. It was awful.” Okay, maybe no steps. I make a mental note to come back on my own. Today, we are going down, and I heft Ty’s bike for the trek.
Beyond the steps we begin hitting the hills, mostly up, and the kids groan. “Come on, you can do it, Ty, you too, Leah, to the rock. Let’s run as far as that rock, and then you can walk.” I sound like my high school track coach, and you know what? They go for it. Ty busts up the hill, and Leah laughs and keeps jogging. This is her idea, after all.
Before I was a parent, I was not a baby person, nor did I ever want to go through pregnancy, but at the same time I couldn’t imagine life without kids. I always pictured myself with school-age kids, never babies or toddlers. Old enough to join in, but not old enough to opt out.
I’m there. I’m in that picture. I wish I could freeze time.
At the end of our run, we walk to cool down, each of us breathing a little harder, each of us a little sweaty. “Can we do that again sometime?” Leah asks.
But of course.
2 commentsMovie Conflicts
**Warning: this entry contains movie plot summary.
So, here we are on a rainy afternoon, the perfect kind of day to go see a movie with my kids in the theater, but no one can agree on what to watch. Or rather, the kids can’t. Ty and I think Star Trek would be fun, but Leah doesn’t like sci-fi, so she decides she’ll invite a friend to the mall while we go to the movie (at the mall). Alas, no friends are to be found. So Ty decides he’ll play with a friend instead while Leah and I go see The Proposal. Again, no friends. The obvious solution is we all go together, my preference anyway, but what to see?
This is how a nine-year-old boy ends up at a PG-13 chick flick.
I’m not opposed to him seeing The Proposal, necessarily (an updated version of Green Card). He’s seen Mama Mia and Baby Mama and Tootsie. But when we run into three different neighborhood families here to see Up, I feel a little sheepish. “We’re seeing The Proposal,” I admit, and they all chuckle. And when I notice, in the theater, the audience is comprised almost solely of adult women, with a couple guys hiding in the back, I feel self conscious. My kids are the only kids here, and Ty is the size of a seven-year-old. I know nothing about this movie except Leah wants to see it and the preview on YouTube was funny.
But when the lights go down and the movie rolls, we settle in and start to laugh. The plot? A magazine editor, played by Sandra Bullock, is the boss from hell who takes her bossiness to new levels when she orders her underling male secretary, played by Ryan Reynolds, to marry her so she can retain her work visa and thus her job (she’s Canadian).
“I feel sorry for that guy,” Ty stage whispers. He gets it. Not that Bullock is subtle. So far, so good, though—nothing Ty can’t handle.
When they head to Alaska for a weekend with his parents, the movie gets funnier. Ty’s favorite quote? “You touch my ass again, I’ll cut your balls off in your sleep.” (The assistant is sort of helping Bullock climb down a ladder in stilettos, and, well, but he’s really a sweetie and that’s obvious to all and he’s just getting a little revenge. He deserves it with all he’s put up with.)
How is it, Ty wants to know, that those little body scrub cloths can cover up Bullock’s nether region so effectively, when in real life you really can’t cover up nearly so easily. (She’s wet from the shower and trying to escape an invasive pesky puppy, while the underling has taken his clothes off to change and neither knows the other is in the room. They literally collide, to Ty’s wide-eyed delight. But you don’t really see anything except naked profiles—okay, yes, full body profiles, but no boobs whatsoever.)
And then there’s the male stripper at the local Sitka bar who’s not much of a dancer but does take it off down to his black Spandex undershorts. (But he is pathetic after all, and it’s totally supposed to be funny and, anyway, I’m not sure Ty knows what a stripper is, although I think he did get the dance moves.)
Um, yeah.
On the other hand, what’s so bad about a boy watching two people fall in love (because of course they do) through a series of comic errors, even if there are naked bodies? Personally, I’d rather he watch a little kissing than tank after tank getting blown to smithereens? Hey, maybe I’m grooming a sensitive boy who will happily head off to chick flicks with his girlfriend someday and actually enjoy them, no eye rolling involved. She’ll thank me, don’t you think?
Still, I feel self conscious again when the lights go up and we all exit the movie together, Ty the shortest audience member by about two feet. As we clear the mall and stride toward our car in the rain, Ty trotting next to me, he says, “That was really funny, Mom. Totally inappropriate, but really funny.”
Thanks, Ty. Way to rub it in, buddy.
1 commentLast Day of School
Today is the last day of school, and I have two hours before Leah comes storming home, elated to be out for the summer. Ty, an hour after that. Yikes. Where did the time go? How is it I now have a seventh grader?
As I do every summer, I’ve been thinking about what the kids can do around the house so I can get some work done (ha!).
1. Read (uh huh).
2. Help yourself to food (and I don’t mean cookies) rather than ask Mom to do it (right).
3. Play games with each other (in my dreams).
4. Go places together without me, say, to the park or the corner store or the school playground (still in dreamland).
5. Stay off the computer except for the allotted time allowance (good luck to me).
This is what I imagine really happening: The kids will not read or play games or go places together. They’ll lie around and moan that they’re bored. They’ll ask me to fix them breakfast or lunch, or at best, they’ll fix themselves something and leave the kitchen in a complete shambles that they’ll only sort of clean up when I ask them to, and I’ll end up wishing I’d just made the meal because the cleanup will be so involved it isn’t worth it in the end. Instead of relying on each other, they’ll call friends, and I’ll end up in charge of a couple of 9-year-old boys who need food (often) and who will hunker over Heroscape all afternoon in the confines of a small, upstairs bedroom, getting no exercise whatsoever while I crank on work. Leah will beg me to take her shopping for summer clothes she could use but doesn’t really need because she feels most loved by those around her when they buy things for her. They’ll bicker every day and chase each other around the house to torment each other and Ty will come running to me to hide behind me for protection after he instigated whatever it was that pissed off Leah. They’ll spend way more time on the computer than I realize. Two weeks into summer I will be looking at the calendar. When is it school starts again?
In truth, I do love summer. I love the sleep-in mornings (theirs), berry picking, flip flops, summer sunrise, dry grass, leafy trees, music in the parks, riding bikes, warm(ish) evenings, trips to the library, going to Mallards. It’s all good. Really, who doesn’t love summer? Now, if I could just do something about that bickering…
2 comments