A recent NYT article discusses studies finding that the first-born in a family has a higher IQ than that child’s siblings. It makes some sense; as the article points out:

Firstborns have their parents’ undivided attention as infants, and even if that attention is later divided evenly with a sibling or more, it means that over time they will have more cumulative adult attention, in theory enriching their vocabulary and reasoning abilities.

What researchers can’t figure out is why, among kids under 12, the younger siblings outscore their older sisters and brothers on IQ tests. One theory:

Adding a young child may, in a sense, diminish the family’s overall intellectual environment, as far as an older sibling is concerned; yet the younger sibling benefits from the maturity of both the parents and the older brother or sister. This dynamic may quickly cancel and reverse the head start the older child received from his parents.

See, this is why we can’t risk having a third kid, despite how much fun some people make it sound. We just can’t risk diminishing our overall intellectual environment any further…

I’m sure I’ve posted this recipe before, but it’s my favorite thing to do with summer fruit, and it’s incredibly easy, so I’m posting the recipe again, this time with a picture (before I topped and baked it, because honestly it’s prettier then).

This is two peaches, one nectarine, one pluot, one plum, and about a dozen cherries (ie, the fruit that wasn’t going to last another day before spoiling). The topping is a half cup each oats, wheat germ, flour, brown sugar, and melted butter, plus a dash of cinnamon. Bake at 350 for half an hour or so, until the fruit juices are bubbling around the edges. Eat with vanilla ice cream.

I haven’t posted an actual recipe in a while, and this is a delicious one. It’s based on one I tore out of a Martha Stewart Living a few years ago, and it doesn’t seem to be on her website any more so I’m doing you all an enormous favor by posting a simplified version of the recipe here. My main edit is to change the ridiculous first ingredient, which she list as “1 5/8 cups (13 tablespoons) butter” — as if either of those measurements are at all simple to calculate. Further, you actually only need one stick of butter in the dough; the remaining tablespoons of butter are added at various points — to grease the bowl, to brush the dough before its rise, to brush on the loaves before their rise. And you can take or leave those. In fact, you could just grease the bowl with the butter wrapper and be done with it. Next time I make this, I’m going to leave the egg yolks out of the filling (mostly because it’s annoying to have 2 leftover egg whites), and I’ll report back on how that works.

For the dough:
½ c warm water
2 T active dry yeast (2 envelopes)
1 t sugar

½ c butter, melted and cooled (plus some more to grease the bowl)
2/3 c sugar
1 c orange juice
2 large eggs
zest of 1 lemon
zest of 1 lime
zest of 1 orange
1 t salt
5-6 c flour

For the filling:
1 pound cream cheese (room temperature)
1 c confectioner’s sugar
2 egg yolks
2 t vanilla
1 c dried cranberries, dried blueberries, dried currants (or a mix)
2/3 c poppy seeds

For the egg wash:
1 lightly beaten egg

Stir together the water, yeast and 1 t sugar in a large bowl until yeast dissolves. Let stand until foamy, about 5 minutes. Now whisk in oj, eggs, remaining 2/3 c sugar, melted butter, zests and salt. Stir in flour, 1 cup at a time, until dough pulls away from sides of bowl and forms a ball.

Turn dough out onto a lightly floured surface and knead until just slightly sticky, about 5 minutes. Transfer to a buttered bowl and turn so that the dough is lightly coated with butter. Loosely cover and let rise until doubled in bulk, either at room temperature (about 1 ½ hours) or in the refrigerator overnight.

Meanwhile, stir together cream cheese, egg yolks, confectioners’ sugar and vanilla until smooth. Add poppy seeds and dried berries. Set aside (at room temp or in the fridge, wherever your dough is).

When you’re ready to shape and bake the coffee cakes, butter 2 baking sheets and set aside.

Punch down dough and divide in half. Roll out one half into an 11 x 15” rectangle. Spread half the filling evenly over the dough, leaving a 1” border. Beginning at one long side, tightly roll dough into a log, encasing the filling. Pinch seam to seal. Carefully transfer log to baking sheet. With a sharp knife, make cuts about 2” apart along one long side of the log, cutting just three-quarters of the way across. Lift the first segment, turn it cut side up, and lay it flat on the baking sheet. Repeat with the next segment, twisting it so it sits on the opposite side of the roll. Continue down the log, alternating sides.

Roll out, fill and cut remaining dough.

Preheat oven to 350. Loosely cover dough and let rise until almost doubled in bulk, about 30 minutes. Brush dough with egg wash, avoiding the filling. Bake until cooked through and golden brown, about 30 minutes. Carefully slide coffee cakes onto wire racks, and let cool completely before slicing.

A new restaurant has opened in our neighborhood, and I want to like it, I really do. The menu is vegetarian, the food organically grown, sustainably harvested, locally sourced (wherever possible, of course). The restaurant uses environmentally friendly products. It’s a kid friendly-space with toys and large tables. They are trying to do the right thing, and it’s clearly hit a chord around here (of course it has) because the place is usually busy.

But.

I cannot read the menu without wincing. Every item on the menu is an emotion, every dish a proclamation:

“I Am Sacred.” “I Am Joyful.” “I Am Triumphant.” “I Am Festive.” “I Am Bright-Eyed.” “I Am Sensational.” “I Am Prosperous.” “I Am Elated.” “I Am Plenty.” “I Am Charasmatic.” “I Am Precious.” “I Am Succulent.”

I Have To Stop!!!

I try to get past the names of the dishes and focus on the descriptions: the tabouli with hummus and spicy olive tapenade on pita sounds fine (“I Am Flourishing”), but it’s right there next to the “live sun burger” (“I Am Cheerful”) with macadamia cheddar cheese and I want my (veggie) burger cooked, thank you, and made with dairy cheese please, and then I see the basil hemp seed pesto (“I Am Sensational”) and although I know hemp is good for you, I’m not putting it in my pesto. The thought makes me cranky.

I will just never be the flax seed-eating, hemp-wearing person my zip code might suggest; in fact, I guess you can take the girl out of New York but you can’t take the New York out of the girl.

Check out all the good Father’s Day reading over at Literary Mama, including Libby’s column, my column, and one of the new features that we have been working hard on: a reading list!

Luckily, it didn’t take much (it was really only an hour, after all, and I didn’t even get any bruises) but it was abundantly, extravagantly erased by:

lots of sympathy from family and friends, both in the computer and out

+ a quiet afternoon playing with my boys

+ Saturday morning at the farmer’s market listening to a friend’s band

+ an afternoon at our friends’ new home, making up for the previous day’s aborted playdate

+ an impromptu barbecue with three other families (8 kids under 6 all playing easily together while the parents eat and visit)

+ Sunday morning’s chocolate-chip coconut coffee cake (happy Father’s Day, Tony!)

+ a sunny afternoon at the San Jose Giants game, both watching the game and, when it got too hot, watching the boys play the carnival games in the parking lot

+ another great dinner with friends (two nights in a row being fed by someone else!)

+ another late night, carrying sleepy, sweaty-headed boys from the car up to bed

= a sunny summer weekend with old friends and happy kids and good food

I wasn’t planning to participate in today’s blog bonanza on discipline. I loved The No-Cry Discipline Solution, but I thought I’d said all I had to say about it, and discipline. Or maybe I just didn’t want to think about discipline anymore. It’s like thinking about global warming, maybe; you know that your thoughtful action will make a difference, but sometimes you just want to pretend things’ll change on their own, without you.

But in fact, I do buy those twisty light bulbs, compost, recycle, and turn out lights when I leave the room. I also spend an inordinate amount of time saying “use your words” or “calm your body down” or “take a deep breath with me” and reminding Ben that his actions, like his brother’s, like mine, have consequences.

Which is why today, less than thirty minutes after we’d arrived at his friend’s house, a half-hour drive from ours, I packed him, kicking and screaming, back into the car, and drove home.

Maybe I should have seen it coming. I’ve been feeling lousy all week, and so haven’t been the most present parent. The boys had been up less than half an hour this morning before they were fighting over a spoon, and although I handled that fine, I didn’t see it as a sign of things to come. I suppose if you took every struggle as a sign of worse to come, you’d just crawl back under the covers. Sometimes it gets worse, but sometimes it gets better, and the uncertainty generally leaves me pretty optimistic.

Meanwhile, the end of preschool last week brought a fun week of vacation this week, but also a dizzying lack of schedule and routine.

Also, his good friend, one he’s known since before he was eating solid food, the one we tried to visit today, moved to another town.

Also, the week’s been hot and sunny– weather I soak up like a chameleon, but which leaves my fog-raised boys a little out of sorts.

So there we were: me, dosed up on advil and pseudo-sudafed, pretending I felt well enough for the excursion, dressed in my pretty new Goodwill sundress and a bangle bracelet Tony’s dad made in the 70s; the boys in shorts and t-shirts, wriggling through my careful application of sunscreen, eager to just get there already.

They sang a song about garbage all the way across the city and over the bridge, but even though it was tuneless and repetitive, they were happy, and I was happy, and I didn’t complain, even when it turned into shrieking.

When we got to our friends’ house (because of course these are my friends, too, the mom a person I treasure for getting me through some comically low points – like ten minutes with 2 toddlers, a crawler and a newborn in one grimy bathroom stall—with incredible good cheer), Ben told Eli he couldn’t play in the basement playroom. We got through that one.

Then Ben and his friend started running back and forth from playroom to living room, bringing out a toy stroller, a batting helmet, toy guitars, setting up for a concert. The halls are crowded with boxes (they just moved in last week), and Eli kept nearly getting knocked over. I asked Ben to keep the toys in the playroom, to open the sliding door into the backyard (“Look, this can be your curtain!”) and make the yard their stage. He started arguing with me about how far backstage (the playroom) needed to be from the stage (the living room), and I tried to have the reasonable conversation about concert hall lay-out, but I’d already lost him. He was shaking and shouting, red-faced, crying, still upset that I’d let Eli in the room at all, flailing his arms and legs the way he does when he wants to hit me.

So I asked him to sit with me a minute and try to talk, but it was too late. I suggested maybe we should set up another game, but he was stuck on the concert idea and couldn’t let it go. And then I pointed out that maybe if he couldn’t listen to my ideas we should leave, but that just made it worse, and then he did kick me, and being hit by a 45-pound 5 year-old hurts pretty badly, but I still didn’t lose my temper, just said I thought it was really time to go.

Eli was watching all this calmly, unsure what to make of it, and Ben’s friend and little sister were looking on in surprise at this uncharacteristic outburst from their friend. Their mom, bless her, strapped Eli in to his carseat and put all my other stuff into the car because I had my hands quite literally full with a kicking and flailing boy who wouldn’t walk out the door. I had to push him into his booster seat and he got a few more good kicks landed while I buckled him, and then he screamed the first 8 miles of the drive home. I know, because I was watching the odometer, willing myself not to cry, because then we’d just get in an accident and that would make one lousy hour last a whole lot longer.

So there it is. I think I did the right thing, but sometimes even doing the right thing doesn’t feel so great.

Lisa Belkin takes on the topic of the family dinner in today’s New York Times, so anyone out there feeling guilty at not gathering the kids round the table every night, take heart: there are other ways, other times, to connect with the family.

Of course.

It’s easy for us now: Tony and I both work flexible schedules so that we can be home for dinner, the kids are young enough to do what we tell them to do (mostly) and don’t have loads of activities crowding their schedules.

And it’s not easy for us now: Ben bolts his dinner and asks to get back to drawing, or he fidgets and fiddles and sticks his feet on the table until we insist he leave the table until he remembers how to behave; Eli eats a bite, climbs down from the chair (oh, how we miss the straps on his booster and high chair!), walks around to say “hi!” to Ben, climbs back up, takes a bite, climbs down, runs into the living room for a cuddle with his lovely, climbs back up… You get the idea.

But still, more often than not, all four of us manage to sit at the table and enjoy the food, and have a few moments’ conversation about the day, about what new number Ben learned (he’s into big numbers now: quadrillion and quintillion and so on), or what Eli did at the playground with his friend, and even if it only lasts a couple minutes and it takes some effort, it’s important to me to try. I like to cook, and I like to eat, but more important than those to me is the community formed around the table.

So, although I won’t feel guilty if we can’t, I hope we can keep this up even when the kids are racing off to soccer and band practice and friends’ houses and part-time jobs. I hope sitting together round the table will matter to them as much as it does to Tony and me.

Ben is off from school this week, and although I have plenty of work to do, I have to shelve it and pretend that I’m on vacation, too. Tony’s doing the same, so we took the boys to Train Town yesterday. We’d been once before, when I was pregnant with Eli; it’s a low-key, hokey kind of place, with a big steam train meandering through woods and past waterfalls and miniature replicas of 19th century Sierra mountain towns. That first trip, we rode the train once and then went into town for ice cream.

This time, as we rode the train and tried to keep Eli from falling out (he was leaning over the side, intently studying the train’s pistons and couplings), Ben noticed the amusement park rides. These hadn’t made any impression on that first trip, but there’s a small carousel, a Ferris wheel, a plane ride, even a miniature roller coaster. Ben kept eying those planes, and after our train ride, asked to buy a ticket for the airplane. “But you have to go on by yourself, you know,” I cautioned. “It’s too small for Daddy and me, and it’s too big for Eli.” Ben went over and read the sign himself: “Children only. No adults allowed.” “That’s ok!” he answered brightly. “I’m up for it!”

Well! My cautious boy is spreading his wings. He rode once, doing his air traffic controller play-by-play the whole time, then jumped off the plane, beaming, and asked to ride again. So he did, and in a day with two exceptionally happy boys, the best part for Tony and me was watching Ben, flying that plane.

I wanted to write about a father this month — Father’s Day month — for my movie column, and with all the baseball going on in our house lately, I thought a baseball movie would be appropriate, too. Besides, everything I know about baseball I learned from my dad.

But baseball + fatherhood + Hollywood = sappy, sentimental, movies. I could not get past the first twenty minutes of the first several baseball movies I tried. Then I watched Bull Durham (for the fifth or sixth time) to get the bad taste out of my mouth. Then I tried to write about Susan Sarandon’s Annie, who — when she’s not tutoring young ball players is tutoring writers — but the motherhood angle there is an impossible stretch and Kevin Costner’s Crash as a father figure really doesn’t work either.

But Annie the writing teacher and Kevin Costner triggered a memory for me, and I checked out Field of Dreams. Yes, this is another sentimental baseball movie but it does have a writer in it, played by James Earl Jones, and he proves instrumental in helping Kevin Costner’s baseball-loving character reconcile with the idea of being a dad. So this, ultimately, is what I came up with; check it out and let me know what you think!