Thursday, April 15, 2010

Doggie’s Wedding

As I have written before, Eli cares for his stuffed animals quite devotedly. Like any good parent, he tucks them into bed at night and makes sure they’re cozy, he throws birthday parties for them, and worries about their eating habits.

Big Doggie, the biggest of the stuffies, is also the oldest of the stuffies and recently we learned that he has a job. Every night at bedtime, Big Doggie eats a snack from his new bowl and heads off to his job, typing on the computer and talking on the phone (happily he doesn’t leave the bed, and the work seems not to interfere with Eli’s repose). So I shouldn’t have been surprised the other day when Eli announced that Big Doggie was getting married. “Who is he marrying?” I asked. It was a stumper. Eli glanced around his bed, then ran to the basket of other stuffies and started pawing through the pile. He pulled out the stuffed snowman Ben made at a friend’s house a couple years ago and held it up, laughing. “Big Doggie can’t marry the snowman; he would melt!” He rejected the kangaroo, the otter, the two frogs, duck and many others before finally coming to a dachshund about half Big Doggie’s size. Right behind that one there was a smaller dachshund. “Perfect!" Eli crowed, "A bride and a baby!”

So, we had the players, but then Eli realized we needed a wedding feast. “Cookies! Chocolate chip cookies!” Easy enough, and more fun when I remembered that we have lots of cookie cutters to make the wedding dessert more special. We picked out three dogs (a lab like Big Doggie and two different dachshunds), a bone and a heart. We picked flowers from the garden.


We dressed the happy couple in special outfits, including collars for their wedding rings, and we deptutized the mooses as ring bearers:






The preparations wound up taking a couple days, as we kept getting interrupted by little details like school and bedtime, but when you figure how long engagements tend to be these days, and how expensive weddings can be, I think we did pretty well. And afterward, the happy couple jetted off to Hawaii (under a living room chair) for their honeymoon, while the rest of us finished off the wedding feast.

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posted by Caroline @ 1:55 PM  

Wednesday, March 03, 2010

Eight Things About Eight


It looks the same upside down and right side up.

On its side, it's the symbol for infinity.

It's a power of 2.

It's a homophone (remember the old joke, Why was six afraid of seven? Because seven ate nine.)

It's a Fibonacci number.

It's the number of notes in an octave.

It's the number of planets in the solar system (sorry, Pluto, we still miss you).


It's the age of my firstborn son. Happy birthday, Ben!


image credit

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posted by Caroline @ 10:43 PM  

Monday, January 11, 2010

Double Feature


One of the most memorable post-kid dates for Tony and me came sometime around Ben's first birthday. We went out to a movie (American Splendor) and then, realizing the night was still young and Ben wouldn't need to nurse again for a while, we went to another (The Secret Lives of Dentists, which I wrote about much later). They are both good movies, but it didn't even matter; what mattered was that we were free enough to do something extra, something spontaneous. It felt great.

Since then, of course, we've been getting out a little bit more regularly. I don't feel so movie-deprived (the list over there in the sidebar is growing nicely), but the double feature is still a very rare treat. I wasn't expecting one this weekend, after the 6 PM show of Avatar, but leaving the movie theater at 9 and knowing, since the kids were on a sleepover, that we wouldn't have to get up early in the morning, we circled back to the ticket counter and checked the listings. 10 PM, Sherlock Holmes. Perfect.

Usually I have a lot to say (or write) about movies, but this pair took it all out of me! They are equally gorgeous; the watery blues and greens of Avatar's Pandora are getting all the press, but that actually felt more familiar to me (maybe because I am a frequent aquarium visitor?) than the foggy steampunk world of Sherlock Holmes' London, and I thought both were innovative and beautiful (the closing credits of Sherlock Holmes are the best credit sequence I've seen in years). They are equally, unnecessarily long; I took a little nap during Avatar because I was bored, and another little nap during Sherlock because I was up past my bedtime, and I found myself editing each in my head.

As for the writing, well, there's really nothing much to say about Avatar's script, is there? Though I do find myself wanting to make the distinction here between the story -- fine, as far as it goes, though we've seen it before ("Dances with Smurfs," scoffs a friend); I have no problem with new contexts for old stories -- and the actual script, which is so full of tired lines it's a wonder the actors could say them without laughing ("Bring the pain," indeed). Meanwhile, Sherlock Holmes doesn't rely on any one story for its script, in favor of the more sequel-friendly overview, which felt like a bit of a loss, even for someone like me who hasn't absorbed all the stories. But watching Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law banter and flirt is so pleasurable, I'm ok with the filmmakers setting this one up for a franchise.

Finally, Sigourney Weaver, welcome back from your roles in Baby Mama (meh) and Infamous (loved); to me, you belong in space, and seeing you channel Ellen Ripley and Dian Fossey was one of my favorite aspects of Avatar.


image source

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posted by Caroline @ 2:44 PM  

Tuesday, January 05, 2010

Fantastic Mr. Fox: The Sequel

At lunch today, Eli started talking about the differences between Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr. Fox and Wes Anderson's film version. We've only seen the movie once, but Ben has been reading the book to Eli in the car, and the conversation about the two different versions of the story shows no sign of abating. So Eli announced he wanted to write a sequel to the book, one that would come to a more exciting conclusion than Roald Dahl's. I offered to type it up for him, not knowing that I have been harboring a budding Gertrude Stein, someone who will write the same sentence over and over and just when you think you know how the paragraph is going to end -- bam! -- surprises you with a new detail.

Or maybe it's just that while I was typing, he was running circles around the living room. Anyway, here it is:

Once upon a time, there were three farmers. Their names were Bunce, Boggis and Bean. They were trying to catch a fox, but he was too clever. So they were waiting at the fox's hole so when the fox came out, they could shoot him. But the fox was too clever. Bunce was a geese and duck man. Boggis was a chicken man. Bean was a turkey and apple man. Let's go back to the story. So, each night Fantastic Mr. Fox would say, "What should it be now, dear? chickens from Boggis, ducks and geese from Bunce, turkey or apple from Bean?" And then she would say, "A turkey from Bean, or, a chicken from Boggis, or, a geese from Bunce." So after she said what she wanted, Mr. Fox would go out of his hole, sniff the air, and go to fetch what she wanted. The farmers did not like things getting stealed from them, so each night, they'd go down to the hole with their shotgun and wait. But the fox was too clever for that! So each night he would look around or sniff around and then he would go to whatever Mrs. Fox wanted and help himself. Then he would come back and get dinner ready and then they would eat dinner. Then they would go to sleep, wake up, Fantastic Mr. Fox would say, "What should it be now, dear? A chicken from Boggis, a geese or duck from Bunce, or some cider or turkey from Bean?" Then Mrs. Fox would say whatever she wanted and then Fantastic Mr. Fox would go out of his hole and help himself. The farmers had a bad idea. They would go in front of their farms, waiting for the fox. But then the fox went into the back door and they saw the fox go into the back door and they hid their gun in the back door and then Fantastic Mr. Fox would go into the front door and help himself. The farmers did not like that so they tried going back to his hole with their shotguns. And then it turned dark and Fantastic Mr. Fox said, "What would you like, dear?" And Mrs Fox would tell whatever she would like. And Mr Fox would dig a tunnel to solve the problem, a pretty big tunnel and then come out, do you know why? because if he came out the regular way he might get shot, so he dug a little tunnel where the farmers aren't. So he would come up, and help himself. And the farmers saw his tunnel so they moved to that tunnel. He would come back out the regular tunnel and then fix up dinner and after dinner they would go to sleep. Then after they went to sleep, morning would come, so they would wake up. Fantastic Mr. Fox would say, "What should it be now, darling?" So Mrs. Fox would say whatever she wanted and then Mr. Fox would help himself. Then he would come back, fix up breakfast, eat it, have a little rest, then go get lunch. After lunch, the one fox would have a little play, then dinner arrived. Mr. Fox would say, "What should I get? A chicken from Boggis, a duck or geese from Bunce, or a turkey or jar of cider from Bean?" Mrs Fox would say what she wanted and then they would fix up dinner, go to sleep, do another day, next day they would wake up, get breakfast, eat breakfast. The little fox would have a play, get lunch, the little fox would have some play, then dinner arrived. They would eat dinner, another day passed, they would wake up, have breakfast. The little fox would have some play, eat lunch, the little fox would have some play, eat dinner, another day. ["It's a long chapter," noted Eli, "to get you into the story. You might not keep reading if it was just, "Once upon a time there were 3 farmers. Next chapter." Fair enough.]

Next Chapter
They would get breakfast. The little fox would have some play, then lunch arrived. After lunch, the little fox would have some more play, dinner arrived. Eat dinner, go to sleep, another day passes.

Another Chapter, Chapter 3
They would wake up, get breakfast, the little fox would have some play, then lunch arrived. They would eat lunch, the little fox would have some playtime, then dinner arrived. They would eat dinner, another day passes. Wake up, eat breakfast, the little fox would have some play, then lunch arrived. They would eat lunch, the little fox would have some more play while Fantastic Mr. Fox would read the newspaper while Mrs. Fox would clean dishes.

Chapter 4
Dinner arrived! They would eat dinner, go to sleep, another day would pass. They would wake up, they would get breakfast, eat breakfast, the little fox would have some play, then lunch arrived. They would eat lunch, the little fox would have some play, then dinner arrived.

Chapter 5
They would wake up, get breakfast, eat breakfast, the little fox would have some playtime, then lunch arrived. They would eat lunch, the little fox would play while Fantastic Mr. Fox would read the newspaper and Mrs. Fox cleaned dishes. Then Fantastic Mr. Fox would fetch dinner, then they ate dinner, the little fox would have ten minutes of playtime and go to sleep. Another day passes.

Chapter 6
So they would wake up, get breakfast, the little fox would have some playtime, Fantastic Mr. Fox would get lunch, the little fox would have some playtime.

Chapter 7

To be continued...

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posted by Caroline @ 7:54 PM  

Friday, January 01, 2010

9 for '09

I didn't manage 9 categories, but here are my top 9's in 6 (9 upside-down) categories for 2009:

Memorable Meals

Eli's first meat, a meatball at the Pasta Pomodoro in San Rafael, of all places: "Mama, I know it's meat, and I want it."
Jewish Quarter falafel with Lilya
Tony's 40th birthday party at Beretta – burrata on pizza, mmmm…
Dinner with Libby and her family at Jamie's Italian in Oxford
One lukewarm bottle of water at Legoland in England (where it does get hot but they still don't have ice): the difference between surviving the day and passing out from heat stroke
Picnics by the pool
Cocktails & dessert at Aziza, any Monday night we had babysitting
Birthday parties for stuffies, with bowls of unsalted peanuts and eucalyptus leaves, hosted by Eli
Dinner and Christmas carol mash-up/singalong, with my parents, led by the boys

Best books

A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore
An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination by Elizabeth McCracken
My Life in France by Julia Child
The King (poems) by Rebecca Wolff
Boy Alone: A Brother's Memoir by Karl Taro Greenfield
This Lovely Life by Vicki Forman
The Good Thief by Hannah Tinti
American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld
Lit by Mary Karr

Movies

Where the Wild Things Are – a terrific adaptation
Ponyo – Eli's first movie theater movie since he graduated from the sling
Fantastic Mr. Fox – our first movie outing as a family
The Class (Entre Les Murs) – best new teaching movie
Who Does She Think She Is? – my favorite documentary of the year
Inglourious Basterds – actors, director, everyone at the top of their game
The Hurt Locker – the best war movie
(500) Days of Summer – best dance sequence of the year (and probably decade)
Sweet Land – my favorite love story of the year

2009 Memories and milestones

Eli and Mariah asleep, leaning their heads on each other, in the back of the car on the drive home from Pt. Reyes
Ben learning to ride his bike without training wheels
AWP in Chicago, meeting so many literary mamas, spending 4 days without the boys
Tony's and my night away at Indian Springs Resort
Wine and snacks with Rob, Lilya, Liz and Ross while our boys played soccer in the courtyard of our Paris rental with one of the boys who lived in the building
An amazingly relaxing two night Big Basin camp-out (8 adults and 7 boys)
Eli learning to read
Ben playing soccer at school recess
Mama, PhD readings at Duke and the University of Richmond

Art

Tate Modern + London Transit Museum
Andy Goldsworthy's Spire in the Presidio
Giverny
Musee de l'orangerie
Amish Abstrations quilt show at the De Young
Eli counting down to his weekly preschool art days
Seeing Maya Lin and Andy Goldsworthy installations at Storm King Art Center
Bidding on one of Tony's dad's paintings in an online auction – and winning!
Ben learning how to weave

Quotes:

Eli: "I just want one more hug of you."
Ben: "How is it that I am I?"
Eli: "I want some food." Tony: "I’m making dinner." Eli: "I want something more fastly."
Ben imitating Yogi Bear: "Hey, Boo Boo!"
Eli rejecting a band-aid for his sore throat, "And anyway, the inside of my throat isn't stickable!"
Ben: "I'm going to try something new!"
Eli: "Mama? Since you are two years older than Tony, why don't you know more about LEGO?"
Ben to Eli, referring to us, "Ask one of the grown-ups."
Eli to me: " I love you cozier than my bed, curlier than your hair, and gooder than my oatmeal."

May your 2010 be gooder than oatmeal, too.

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posted by Caroline @ 12:17 AM  

Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Dear Santa

Santa Claus has been responsive to us in the past (remember the year of the pogo stick?), so the boys are optimistic about their letters this year. And I have to say, with such reasonable (and relatively old-school!) requests, I think Santa will respond favorably:

First, Eli's. We do not have a dog, but he takes good care of all his stuffies, and feels the dogs need their own bowls:

two dog bowls
back scratchers
calculator
Please
Love eli Grant

Then Ben's letter, using his new paper-engineering and cursive-writing skills:


Dear Santa, Could I please have a very large tub of dominoes, a digital wristwatch, and a scientific calculator? From Ben Grant

We'll set out our plate of cookies & carrots tomorrow night and hope for the best! Merry Christmast to you and yours.

Labels: christmas, , santa claus

posted by Caroline @ 2:45 PM  

Monday, November 09, 2009

Young Playwrights

Depending on the company, Ben and Eli play lego, or rocket ships, or build forts, or draw, or do puppet shows. On Saturday, their puppet show friends came to play and, as usual, Ben and his fellow second grader took the lead, assigning smaller roles to the younger siblings. The boys wanted to perform a play by Shakespeare, but then realized that they don't really know the plots of any of Shakespeare's plays. So they went to Plan B, starting with an announcement from the MC:


Welcome to our show! Thank you for coming today! Please carefully read the list of rules. Smoking is strictly prohibited. Now we can get to the important part. Today we will be showing a puppet show. Please welcome: Shakespeare writing a famous play: Romeo and Juliet!!!

Next, they produced a script:

Shakespeare: I think I shall write a play.

Shakespeare: None of my other plays are very common. (sigh)
Shakespeare: This one shall be called, Romeo and Juliet!
Shakespeare: Servant, please get my pen?
Servant: Yes Sir William!
Shakespeare: And now I will begen.
Shakespeare: Thar are two villages separated by a big hill.
Shakespeare: and they are worst eminies.
Shakespeare: But two people – one from each village – fell in love with each other.
Shakespeare: And they got married.
Romeo/Juliet: La la la la la la!!


At this point, Eli apparently became disgruntled about his role, and expressed his dissatisfaction:


I DO NOT GET IN STAGE.

That seemed like a good time to pause for dinner. The quartet of kids gets together again next weekend, and it'll be interesting to see how the scripts -- on stage and off -- develop.

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posted by Caroline @ 5:10 PM  

Friday, November 06, 2009

One Busy Afternoon









I didn't photograph the Monopoly, but can report that my son manages to win the majority of our games with one simple strategy: you spend money to make money. In one recent game, which he likes to recall quite fondly, he cleaned me out in less than ten minutes and had made $50 (and this is Monopoly Jr, where the highest currency is a five.)

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posted by Caroline @ 4:40 PM  

Sunday, October 18, 2009

Food Is Stories

It has been, by most objective measures, a lousy week. It announced itself with a dog bite on my Monday morning run, developed with Eli’s fever, peaked the night Tony and I spent at Eli’s bedside, putting cold washcloths on his head and wondering whether to take him into Urgent Care, and has now moved into the quiet dull rhythm of boredom and cabin fever that settles on a house when a family member has been sick a while. I did finally make the ultimately ill-advised decision to leave the house, only to back our garage-parked car into our driveway-parked car (another reason I want to sell one of our cars; it might be a bit harder now, though). But I have to say that if my child was going to choose any week to be sick and keep me anchored on the couch, stroking his head while he watched endless episodes of Oswald and Peep in the Big World, at least he chose the week that the New York Times Magazine published the food issue.

Click on over to the other blog to read the rest...

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posted by Caroline @ 10:20 AM  

Saturday, October 10, 2009

Losing Gourmet

cross-posted from the other blog

It's not like I grew up with it. My mom learned to cook mostly from her own mom (though luckily got an excellent pie crust education from her mother-in-law). When we moved to the US in the early 70s, I remember seeing The Galloping Gourmet and The French Chef occasionally on our black & white kitchen television, but I think they were on more for entertainment than education. Mom subscribed to the Time-Life series of international cookbooks (the hardcovers now live in my house; the paperbacks, with more recipes, continue to get a workout in her kitchen) but never a cooking magazine, that I recall.

It was after college that I started to pick up Gourmet occasionally. It was a glimpse into another world. It was like a travel magazine to me, so glossy and beautiful. I tore out the occasional recipe – and if it looked good on the page, it always turned out well-- but at the time mostly just dreamed over the beautiful pictures. And that's one small reason I'm sad about losing Gourmet; for someone who doesn't subscribe to fashion magazines or anything else with beautiful photography, and whose nightly dinner table can get a little dull with plates of pasta, every month Gourmet showed me lovely tables I could aspire to, and reminded me to set out a vase of flowers or put the vegetables in a pretty bowl.

When I moved to California, I had more time for cooking, and although I didn't have much money, I saved a few dollars every month to pick up Gourmet. It was always fun reading, a perfect escape from my dense graduate school reading lists. When I broke up with my boyfriend and moved into a place without a kitchen, I would amuse myself trying to make some of Gourmet's recipes with just a toaster oven, hot pot, rice cooker and electric skillet. I made great stir fries, a fabulous (small) lasagne, and baked cookies by the half dozen. When I moved in with a roommate (partly, to be sure, because of the kitchen) we shared a subscription to Gourmet, and celebrated when she passed her oral exams with a cocktail party fueled by the magazine's recipes. Whether for a single woman without a kitchen, or two budget-conscious grad students who wanted to eat well, those recipes always worked. And that's another reason I'm sad about losing Gourmet.

And then just as I was finishing graduate school, I met Tony, and we bonded over food. I discovered, at his mom Nancy's house, a veritable library of cooking magazines, refreshed with new issues every month: Fine Cooking, Food and Wine, Saveur, Cooks Illustrated, Gourmet. Ruth Reichl was the editor of Gourmet by then and it was becoming a home for writers, terrific writers like Laura Shapiro and Michael Lewis and Anthony Bourdain and Jane and Michael Stern. We would hang out at Nancy's house leafing through all the magazines and tearing out the recipes, but Gourmet was the one to read and we would talk about the essays over dinner and long Scrabble games. I remember in particular an essay by Michael Lewis that came out the month Ben was born, in which Lewis describes a trip to Masa's for dinner with his wife and toddler. For ages afterward, I paraphrased a line from the piece (which sadly I can't find online), "If you won't [fill in the blank with whatever I wanted Ben to do] we'll just have to stay at home and eat broccoli."

The magazine was always smart, relevant, and delicious, and I routinely incorporated its recipes into our life, from cookies or savory biscotti for our annual New Year's Day party to banana muffins for preschool bake sales. Gourmet's vodka-spiked tomatoes came camping with us this summer, and the magazine's roasted potato and kale salad is now one of my favorite ways to eat those two favorite vegetables. Flipping through my messy binder of saved recipes tonight, I see that over half of them come from Gourmet. Without their monthly infusion of fresh recipes, the binders will stop bursting from their seams, which is probably a good thing, but it's another reason I'm sad about losing Gourmet.

After Nancy passed away, we had her mail forwarded to our house and that meant two copies of Gourmet each month. I called the customer service people, who were happy to consolidate her subscription and mine, but there was a little confusion over the name and so it has come to me each month with her name on it. If Nancy liked something, she put her money on it, so the subscription was supposed to go deep into 2012. It was a monthly reminder of the meals and conversations we shared, and that's the last, biggest, reason I'm sad about losing Gourmet.

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posted by Caroline @ 1:28 PM  

Friday, October 02, 2009

Math Games to Amuse and Confound

Here I am, solidly in my fifth decade of life and it has never occurred to me to play, let alone invent, a math game (in fact, I started to write fourth decade, then corrected myself and still had to doublecheck with my husband. That'll tell you something about the distribution of mathematical abilities in this house). My children, however, have inherited math genes from their dad and so driving home from school we have conversations like this:

Ben: Think of a number less than 100 but an even ten (ie, ten, twenty, thirty, etc). Don't tell me.
Me: Got it.
Ben: Multiply that number by two.
Me: OK.
Ben: Add your original number.
Me: Done.
Ben: Now subtract your original number.
Me: OK.
Ben: Divide that by your original number.
Me (starting to lose track): OK...
Ben: Did you get two?
Me, surprised and impressed: Yes, I did!

So, obviously the "add your original number" and "subtract your original number" is a bit of fill, but I'm still kind of impressed that the boy is inventing number games like this since the trick would never even occur to me.

It was inevitable that Eli would want to get in on the act. Here's how the math games go when Eli invents them:

Eli: Think of a number. Don't tell me!
Me: OK.
Eli: Equals.
Me: Honey, equals doesn't change a single number.
Eli: I know! I like equals, it's so simple! So, come on, equals. Don't tell me!
Me: OK, equals.
Eli (demonstrating): Now, with your left hand, hold up your pink and ring finger. And with your right hand, put up your pink and your ring finger. And your thumb. Your thumb!
Me (grateful I'm not driving): OK.
Eli: Add the numbers to the number in your head.
Me: Add five?
Eli: Don't tell me!
Me: I won't, I'm just checking which numbers to add; my fingers?
Eli: Yeah, add your fingers.
Me: OK.
Eli (losing interest): Now... what happens?

Maybe Eli will be a little bit more like me after all.

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posted by Caroline @ 3:35 PM  

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Sick Day

It's been so long (thank goodness), that at first Eli hardly knew what to do with himself.

He was surprised when I told him he wasn't going to school, but when I pointed out that he could barely lift his sweaty, feverish head, he nodded on the pillow and said ok. He rallied to eat half a bowl of granola, and then flopped on the couch sadly with me after waving Ben off to school. "Do you want to watch something on TV, buddy?" I asked him. "Is there time for a show?" "Oh, there's time for whatever you want," I told him; the boys don't watch much TV (none during the week, maybe a half hour on the weekend) but on days like this, I think of my childhood sick days, watching back-to-back Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers' movies, and I'll queue up movies for hours if that's what the boys want.

Except by this point, Eli was so cozily cuddled up, he didn't want me to leave the couch to get a DVD, so our options were limited to a few Tivo'd kids movies: Curious George, Babe, Happy Feet. He managed ten minutes of Happy Feet before declaring it too loud, so we looked at the Tivo list again: movies; Oswald; Peep and the Big Wide World; Bear in the Blue House. We recorded these shows years ago, when Ben was a toddler, but my children are creatures of habit like I am; if a show was good when they were two, apparently it's good when they are four and seven. Periodically we hear about new and interesting TV shows aimed at kids, and I'm briefly tempted to record something different, but then I think how I would miss the somber opening chords of the Oswald theme, or Peep's jaunty tune, and I doublecheck that Tivo won't delete these old shows before we're ready.

We settled into Oswald. Then we watched a Peep. I was half-watching, stroking Eli's head, and reading the New York Times magazine section. Life was good. But then Peep ended and Eli sat up. "I want to draw." Really? We moved to the art table, he picked up a marker and laid his head in my lap. "Eli? Honey? I think it's going to be hard to draw with your head in my lap." "OK, let's draw upstairs," he decided. I wasn't convinced he'd be able to hold his head up any better upstairs, but up we went -- and then he spotted his bed. "How about we read some books instead?" I suggested. "OK."

I got out a stack of favorites-- The Bunny Planet trilogy; Library Lion; Bread and Jam for Frances; The Bunnies Are Not In Their Beds; Violet the Pilot-- and we climbed into bed, and I read, and then I told him the story of the day he was born, and then I told him the story of the day Ben was born and eventually he was asleep, and I took a nap, too, and hours later when he woke he was still sick, but a tiny bit livelier, and I'm grateful for our day.

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posted by Caroline @ 5:09 PM  

Thursday, August 20, 2009

Camping!

When I was about six months pregnant with Ben, Tony and I went camping up in Mendocino. It was part of our regular routine in those days, a couple weekends a year we would camp in Mendocino or the Anderson Valley, or the Santa Cruz Mountains. As I lay on my stack of thermarests that first night, thinking comfortably of the princess and the pea, I felt the clock ticking down a bit on this life, but I thought for sure we'd be in the tent again the following autumn with our new baby.

Flash forward seven years. Tony and both boys have camped overnight at Slide Ranch a couple times, and the Tony and Ben have also gone on father-son camping trips with Ben's school. But I had not yet been back in the tent, and it was time.

So when a friend suggested that a group of us go camping, and actually pushed us to look at our calendars (and then even booked the campsite), there wasn't much left for me to do but make some lists. Mine was on Google docs (natch; if you can organize 45 writers into a book this way, why not 4 families for a camp-out?), and listed everything from dish sponge to cocktail shaker. Ben's was in his notebook: "Radio, Compass, Flashlight, All Available Snacks from Home, K. Kaplan Koala, Monkey, Racoony, Books I Will Choose Later, Drawing Pad, Markers." Eli tucked patch blanket and Moosie into his backpack and we were, with a few other odds and ends, ready to go. I was surprised and pleased that all the gear, the food, and the children fit into the car.

And it turned out to be incredibly relaxing. 7 adults and 7 boys (ages three to eight). 4 tents and 2 picnic tables -- one set aside for the boys' art projects, one reserved for meal prep and cooking. The boys played with sticks and wooden airplanes, they slid down a dirt hill on their butts, they made up baseball games with the badminton set, they colored, they climbed up onto tall tree stumps and jumped off. They got very, very dirty. When they were hungry, we fed them.

Meanwhile, the adults read and talked and led the boys on a short hike while some others napped; we made several great meals, drank cocktails, and read some more.

We all ate many s'mores.

And we are already planning for next year.

Labels: camping,

posted by Caroline @ 12:22 PM  

Sunday, August 16, 2009

Mama at the Movies: Rivers and Tides

I have unabashedly, and with great success, manufactured an interest in the artist Andy Goldsworthy's sculpture in my children this summer; soon I'll post pictures of our trips to see Spire, Stone River, and Storm King Wall. But in the meantime, here's my latest Literary Mama column about watching the film about Goldsworthy's work, Rivers and Tides:

My family has spent a lot of time in museums lately; both boys love to draw and paint, so we often take them to see works by other artists. We don't stay long, but we'll look closely at a painting or two, talk about what materials the artist used, wonder whether the painting was made outside or in a studio. I lift Eli up so he can see better, and we stop in the gift shop for a postcard of our favorite. But San Francisco is the home of a different kind of artwork, too: sculptures by a Scottish artist named Andy Goldsworthy that offer a quite different experience. The boys have reached their arms around his tall redwood Spire, climbed up and over Stone River, walked like tight rope walkers, arms outstretched for balance, along the path of Drawn Stone. We've sat in the dirt beneath Spire with a gathered pile of sticks and built our own miniature version; we did the same with pebbles at Stone River. These pieces are alive and accessible to them in a way a painting can never be; and for a pair of energetic kids, they're just fun.

And so it occurred to me to show my kids the beautiful documentary about Andy Goldsworthy's work, Rivers and Tides.


You can read the full column at Literary Mama; I'd love to hear your comments.

image credit

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posted by Caroline @ 7:12 PM  

Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Oxford

When I was a junior in college, I spent a year studying at Oxford University. I read (and read, and read), produced two twenty-page essays every week which I then read aloud to my tutors, attended lectures, drank pints of Pimms, ate quantities of curry, rowed on my college crew team, and spent hours around the kitchen table with my four housemates, taste-testing the various grocery store brands of wheatmeal biscuits and chocolate hazelnut spreads.

When we decided to meet Libby and her family during their first week of her summer teaching program in Oxford, I tried to think about what I knew of Oxford which might suit the kids. Biscuits and chocolate: yes. River (though not in a four-person scull): certainly. But the libraries and the lectures and the curry and the Pimms not so much. Googling "Oxford + kids" led me to a link for a multimedia show called the Oxford Experience, which sounded pretty awful. So Tony bought a map (a 3-D pop-up map that Ben popped up and down so often before we arrived that it was starting to get too creased to read) and I figured we'd have a nice, four-day country idyll, punting on the river and wandering the gardens with family before heading home.

Except it was so hot, we hardly wanted to leave our air conditioned apartment. And for the first time on our trip we had downstairs neighbors we needed to be mindful of and suddenly all the boys wanted to do is run, hard, up and down the hall. And wandering around lovely gardens is not really the boys' cup of tea; for instance they chose to picnic here:



instead of here:


And were understandably more than a little put off by how many and how much of the gardens are just for looking:

Still, the boys loved Oxford because of the glittery linoleum floor in our bathroom ("Treasure!" said Eli); our apartment was equipped with a big kitchen (complete with china tea set!); some of the taxis illustrated the Periodic Table of the Elements (Ben's new interest):



But most of all, they loved Oxford because they were reunited with their cousin Mariah, who lived with us through the winter and spring:
And despite the heat, an ice cream cone tragedy, the general whininess and travel-weariness, we enjoyed the river:


And a terrific playground:


And the amazing Pitt-Rivers Museum:



which is full of rocks and bones and other cool things, many of which the kids could touch:

And on the last night, I even got my Pimms.

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posted by Caroline @ 9:29 AM  

Thursday, July 23, 2009

Legoland

Some people go to Windsor to visit the castle, but when you have a boy who loves Lego and knows how to use Google Maps, you might just find yourself promising a day at Legoland. And it's a fine place to spend a day, although I have to wonder why, when every ride has a wait of at least fifteen minutes, and you can set out big long Lego tables so that the kids can play while waiting on one of the lines, you wouldn't put them at all of the lines? Just wondering.

We still rode a lot of rides, and we played mini-golf (where I nearly expired of heat exhaustion), and then -- fortified with slushies and lots of cold (but not ice; we were in England, remember) water -- we wandered around Mini Land, and that was my favorite part.

Mini Land is definitely pretty random; London is well represented, of course, plus we found the Montmarte neighborhood of Paris (which is where we stayed), Sweden (where one of Ben's friends is spending the summer), and (most random of all) the NASA shuttle launch pad and astronaut training center. We even got to see the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace, Lego-style, complete with tinny recorded music, which is good because we were not going to wait in line to see it for real:






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posted by Caroline @ 8:58 PM  

Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Tate Modern + London Transport Museum = A Day without Whining!

Maybe it was the Tube ride, the first since we arrived in London three days ago (why did we wait so long?!). Or maybe after almost two weeks away from home we've all finally figured out the rhythm of outing-downtime-outing. In many ways, our day didn't seem any more or less ambitious, any more or less scheduled than any other day, but this is the one day that kept everybody happy all day long: no whining, no sniping, no dragging.

First stop, the Tate Modern, which offers kids' activities on Sundays. We went straight to the Family Desk and loaded up on activity books and a big sheet of heavyweight paper for the boys to take into the gallery and draw what inspired them. Tony and I took turns, alternating supervising the kids and wandering the fabulous galleries. Ben was delighted to find a gallery in which he could identify every artist (Rothko, Monet, Picasso, Kandinsky, Pollock). The boys explored, drew, and folded their big paper into funny hats.

Next stop, lunch:


Why yes, we are feeling peckish, thank you, and the cafe did very well by us. Not having planned in advance to get reservations anywhere interesting (oh, River Cafe! we'll see you another time), not to mention the fact that the boys are beyond restaurant-weary by now, this is the most delicious meal Tony and I eat in London (orecchiette with summer squash and broad bean pesto for him, grilled vegetables on ciabatta with a good, vinegary caponata for me). Meanwhile, the boys eat their most elegant monochromatic meal of the trip: plain penne, chips, olives (some color there), and a vanilla/honey smoothie. Tony and I drink a glass of wine, the boys color happily, we watch a big rainstorm blow past.

Next stop, the London Transport Museum, with its fabulous interactive collection of exhibits on all aspects of London bus, boat and tube travel. There are vehicles to board and drive, passports to stamp, light-up, interactive maps and displays. It's the only London museum at which we paid an admission fee (one more reason to love London: free art!), and it's worth every penny.


We walk home through Covent Garden, eating ice cream on the way, the boys looking forward to leftover rice for dinner, and feeling happy about our two-museum day.

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posted by Caroline @ 4:48 PM  

Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Greenwich Mean (Whine and Complain) Time

You can get to know a place by climbing a tall thing (or riding one) and looking down, by visiting the grocery store, or by taking a boat ride. In Paris, we rode the Batobus; in London, we rode a boat down the river to Greenwich to visit the Royal Observatory. The boys sat a table drawing elaborate diagrams of imaginary subway systems, while Tony and I enjoyed the ride and took some pictures of sights we'll visit another time:




There's no way to capture how beautiful Greenwich was on this day -- one camera isn't big enough to embrace the wide, wide lawns sweeping up from the river to the Royal Observatory, the fragrant, blooming chestnut trees, the blue blue sky, the delicate gardens of lavender and roses winding around iron fences. Also, there's no way to convey -- in words or pictures -- how distracted I was by the supreme whining of travel-weary Eli, who by this point is subsisting (not well, clearly) on peanuts and ice cream, and flagging whenever a walk exceeds one block. We jolly him along with scavenger hunts and games of I Spy, or take turns carrying him. I joke at one point that as soon as we start to walk anywhere, he seems to get out his complaint book and page through it, looking for the appropriate grievance. He tells me he has lost his happy book, and I'm dejected, second-guessing this entire ambitious journey, but then he continues that he has a happy book, a laughter book, a silly book, a crying book, a screaming book, a whimpering book... And as the list gets longer and sillier, we both start to laugh and the moment is redeemed.

The walk and the whining have made us miss Greenwich's big daily event--the big red ball that drops down a short spire on the roof of the Royal Observatory to mark 1 PM--but we take a picture of it anyway:


We order lunch at a cafe at the top of the hill, and laugh about the most polite Keep Off the Grass sign we've ever seen:



Then we enter the observatory to look at the Prime Meridian of the World:

and take the obligatory picture of the boys straddling the meridian line:


The building is full of clocks and sextants and telescopes and other navigational equipment which is a little bit over the boys' heads (it's frankly over my head) but it's cool to look at, and maybe we can come back in a few years and it will all make more sense to us.

We stop briefly in the Queen's House, simply because I want to see the Tulip Stairs. I'm not allowed to take a picture, but others have:

Isn't it pretty?

And then we go to the National Maritime Museum, which has just enough good, hands-on activities (like a ship's radio and a boat simulator) to keep everybody happy for well over an hour.

Our walk to the train station is interrupted by a huge thunderstorm -- the kind where the thunder is so close and loud it makes you jump; the kind my children have never encountered in San Francisco -- and we take shelter in the lobby of a drugstore, buy a few packs of HobNobs, and pass the time, feeling grateful that we hadn't planned to take the boat back to London. The shop owner eventually, apologetically, asks us to leave (it's closing time) but not before giving us a cast-off umbrella from the back. We accept it gratefully and make our way to the train station.

Back in our hotel, the boys and I settle in for the evening while Tony scouts Gerrard Street's dozens of Chinese restaurants to find us some take-out for dinner; it takes him a while to find one that doesn't scatter pork bits in everything, and the boys don't love it (we wind up rinsing all the sauce off the broccoli and green beans), but the meal comes with about five pounds of rice, so not even the pickiest child goes hungry at the end of our long day.

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posted by Caroline @ 4:16 PM  

Friday, July 17, 2009

London!














The London Eye may be a huge tourist trap, but when you visit an unfamiliar city, there are two ways to get to know it: visit the grocery store, and then get up as high as you can: the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the Empire State Building in New York. (In San Francisco you only need a good hill, though we walk our house guests over to the de Young museum's tower). Here in London, we sail up high and back down again; the boys adore the ride. Our hotel room has a view of Big Ben, so the boys say good night and good morning to it every day, counting up the low-flying airplanes, jetting in and out of Heathrow, as they sit by the window.

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posted by Caroline @ 11:04 PM  

Thursday, July 16, 2009

The Last Day of Paris

I get Ben to choke down some Tylenol -- he's feverish and sore-throated, but he doesn't want to rest in the apartment any more than I do. We forge ahead to L'Orangerie to visit Monet's enormous water lily paintings, hung in their own two oval rooms. Oval skylights, covered with a linen shade to diffuse the sun, light the room; the effect is watery and beautiful.

Walking through the Tuileries gardens after we leave the museum makes La Villette make more sense -- the huge scale, the geometry -- La Villette's designers were clearly referencing this space. Even though La Villette has grass, the Tuileries' stone buildings and dusty pebbled paths feel warmer and more accomodating than all of La Villette's concrete and sharp edges. I may not like it any better now, but I'm happy to understand it better.


the boys with Henry Moore


a view of tall things

There's a carousel, so we buy the boys a ride, and then as we continue down the path we notice -- hurray! -- a small pond with a man renting sailboats. It's wonderful serendipity to make up for the lack of sailboats at the Jardin du Luxembourg earlier in the week. Plus, these boats are gorgeous, true works of art with hand-quilted sails, all different colors and textures of fabric. We rent boats for each of the boys, and then the man drops a third in to the water -- "Just for fun" he comments -- and then a fourth, and then he gives us a third stick to push them all around.





Then, another lucky break: an easy time at the Louvre. We sail right in via the Porte de Lions entrance, walk down the long (long) hallway to the Mona Lisa, pay our respects and leave. Eli has no particular interest in the museum, but he's delighted to do a naked baby scavenger hunt: naked babies with wings! naked babies with arrows! He's never seen so many cherubs in his life.

And then our happy luck runs out. We're close to Angelina's, famous for its hot chocolate, and decide to get the kids a treat. Except we're not really close enough (they're exhausted by the time we walk there); it's too hot for hot chocolate; we really just need lunch. There's nothing on the menu the boys want, and I don't want to risk spending 20 euros on a meal they won't eat, anyway. We should really just cut our losses and leave, but we've come all this way... So, we order ice creams for the kids and a salad and omelette for Tony and me to share. The food takes ages to come and we've left the boys' coloring materials at home so they're cranky and bored. We couldn't be luckier, sitting in a beautiful cafe, surrounded by gorgeous food, but nobody's happy. We eat quickly and head back to the apartment.

While the boys get their downtime, I get one last outing, visiting a friend who lives in the Belleville neighborhood. We walk in a park that reminds me of San Francisco's Buena Vista park -- a beautiful, overgrown hill rising out of a transitional, arty neighborhood.




It's good to see another side of Paris -- less touristy, less polished. Last year we stayed in Paris' Union Square, this year we're in Paris' Noe Valley; maybe another time we'll stay here.

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posted by Caroline @ 2:27 PM