In The Secret Lives of Dentists, Campbell Scott and Hope Davis play seasoned parents of three who, watching one child after the other succumb to a stomach bug, calmly calculate how long it’ll be before they get hit themselves, and how long until the entire family emerges, healthy, from the Tunnel of Sick.

I’ve been thinking about this movie a lot today.

Day One – Sunday: Tony wakes with chills and fever. I send him back to bed, take both boys to a party to which only Ben was invited, take them both for an extended visit with a friend. We come home for lunch and Eli naps. Ben and I read books — I’m in conservation of energy mode, because who knows yet how long this will last?

Day Two – Monday: Ben wakes feeling rocky, but insists on going to school. At the breakfast table, in the car, and on the walk from car to classroom I have second thoughts, but he continues to insist that he’s “up for it.” He brightens when he sees his teacher. I remind her of my cell phone number and leave, uncertainly.

Day Two, 11:30 AM: Ben made it three hours before admitting that his head hurt and he wanted to come home. Eli and I have been home long enough to eat lunch (nice timing!) and we pile back into the car. Eli falls asleep on the drive over, so I carry him inside. We find Ben curled up in a little bunk bed in the school’s administration office, enjoying the secretaries’ attention. Eli’s all excited about the bunk bed (“Li-li climb laddah! Li-li climb laddah!”) but I manage to extricate him without much fuss. He walks to the car while I carry Ben.

Day Two, noon-4pm: All the Grant boys sleep while I work on my column and try to ignore
incipient headache. Ben and Tony’s naps are a good thing; Eli’s makes me worry that he’s coming down with it, too.

Day Two, 4-6pm: Boys flop on couch reading books and watching Oswald. I get all the beds made up with fresh sheets, do the dishes, run to the grocery store to stock up on apple juice, apple sauce, and rice (bananas and plain bread for toasting: check). I’m still aware of the headache, and is that a chill in the air, or is it me? I take some tylenol.

Day Two, 6pm: Eli looks around at us all now flopped on the couch and asks, “Dinner? Li-li dinner?” Poor guy, I almost forgot! Scrambled eggs, toast, and veggie bacon it is. Tony joins him — his first meal since Saturday night. I eat a big plate of rice, lentils, cherry tomatoes, spinach and yogurt (sounds weird; tastes great, though I hope I don’t see it again). Ben makes a supreme effort to join us at the table, sipping his water.

Day Two, 7pm: Bedtime! Eli has spent the last half hour couch-diving and generally entertaining us. The class clown, he shows no signs yet… and yet, I can’t help wondering if this is just a last-burst adrenaline rush before he succumbs, too.

Tune in tomorrow…with any luck, even if it really hits Eli and me, too, we’ll be done with this by Friday.

We’ve undergone many milestones recently: Eli toilet-training; Ben starting kindergarten; me completing a book. But today, we did something that keeps making me smile, that makes our house seem bigger and much more easily navigable.

We took down all the baby gates.

Eli is now a free boy!

More big changes await, as we order a bunk bed for the boys, a pull-out couch to turn Eli’s little room in to a guest room, and move my desk in there, too, so that when it’s not a guest room, it can be (drum roll, please) an office for me. I’m can hardly breathe for excitement at the prospect of having my computer and my bed in separate rooms.

But for now, we’re all just reveling in having those three bulky gates gone. We hadn’t been using them much these last few months, anyway, but they took up space (and, we discovered, collected lots of dust underneath them). The hallways and stairs seem magically wider and brighter now.

Why didn’t we do this sooner? Recently I noticed a few moms handing out sheets of toasted nori to their kids and was reminded what a good snack it is; plus, we go out for sushi every month or so — why not make it at home?

We used:
2 c cooked short grain white rice, tossed with rice vinegar, sugar and salt
one slivered avocado
one slivered carrot
one slivered cucumber
2 slivered sweet potatoes, roasted with sesame oil and soy sauce
1/4 lb shitake mushrooms, sliced and sauteed in a bit of sesame oil
2 eggs scrambled with a bit of rice vinegar

I meant to fry up some tofu, too, but forgot. No matter–we had plenty of fillings, and even some leftover. Making sushi with two kids is a bit of an art project, but they ate a ton and are already dreaming of creative sushi fillings for next time (roasted broccoli! spinach! edamame!)
It’s a good, cheap dinner that everybody likes.

Slow: Our morning routine for 5 1/2 years. With me working from home and Ben in afternoon preschool the last two years, why get out of pj’s in the morning? Sure, we’ve had the regular assortment of playdates and (before Eli was born) classes, but for the most part, it’s been rather lounge-y around here, the weekdays not feeling too different from the weekends.

Fast: Our new up-and-out lifestyle. We’re up at 7 and out the door at 8 to drive 4.5 miles to school (20 minutes; we’re still looking for the quickest route), park (5 minutes; we’re learning the street sweeping schedule), and get Ben comfortably settled in the kindergarten classroom (good morning to the teacher; backpack in the cubby; yellow cardboard boy in the attendance chart) by 8:30. “Rushrushrush!” says Eli as we run down the street.

Slow: The morning pace once we say goodbye to Ben. Eli and I stroll slowly back to the car, stopping to say hello to the dogs parked outside school, to examine small plants growing out of sidewalk cracks, to observe the construction on the building down the street, to count the boats out on the bay.

Fast: The morning pace from 7-8am. Get up, get dressed, get fed, get out the door. Done!

Slow: Eli’s pace from 7-8, as he stonewalls and tries to prevent Ben’s departure for school. “No Buh-buh go school. Li-li miss Buh-buh,” says Eli.

Fast: Eli’s sudden rejection of Ben’s preschool, the school he’s longed to attend this past year. It took only 4 days of kindergarten for Eli to announce “No Li-li go preschool. Just go straight Buh-buh school.”

Slow: These first few days of kindergarten, getting adjusted to our new routine. We don’t know all the kids’ names yet, nor their parents. We haven’t had our lunchroom duty yet, our first parent-teacher night, nor even our first soccer game.

Fast (I expect): This year of kindergarten. Check back in June!

Ben’s first day of kindergarten is today, and I’m feeling prematurely nostalgic for his childhood. I’ll chalk it up partly to spending the weekend with some of my cousins, who have kids much older than mine. One, whose oldest son is 17, said it feels like just ten minutes ago that she was reading Goodnight, Moon to him. Another, whose eldest is twenty, said her arms sometimes burn to hold her daughter the way she used to.

Deep sigh. It’s just kindergarten. Eli is home for another year before starting half-day preschool. They will be home for many more years, and some of those years will likely feel very, very long.

But still, something about this transition makes me feel like I’m sitting Ben down on top of a very long slide, and when he shoots out the bottom, a blink from now, he’ll be 18 years old and walking off to college.

6,000 miles flown
540 miles driven
236 pictures snapped
187 (approximately) fresh blackberries eaten
23 family members gathered
13 family members (mostly teachers) missed (next time we won’t do this over Labor Day weekend)
7 days gone
3 boats paddled, sailed, and rowed (a lot)
1.5 gallons of apple cider pressed
1 happy, sleepy family, glad to be home.

The place: JFK airport, just outside the jetway

The players: Mom and 3 (or so) year old daughter, who have just exited the airplane after our 5+ hour flight from San Francisco

The scene: Daughter lying on the floor, prone, kicking and wailing. Mother standing over her, exasperated.

The dialogue:
Daughter: (unintelligible)
Mother: “Get up! This is not a good place for a tantrum!”

I throw the mom a sympathetic glance as we walk by — I feel her pain, I do — but later Tony and I discover that the same tantrum check list has run through our heads: “Is this a public place? Is this inconvenient? Is this embarrassing? This is a great place for a tantrum!”

I was tagged for this meme once already, but it’s always fun to play. And since tonight Eli took an extra-long time to go to sleep (see list 4), I have written an extra-long response. I posted the rules previously, so I’m skipping that step now; I’m also all out of bloggers to tag. But I will say that Jean Kazez tagged me, a contributor to Mama, PhD and a terrific writer, so go check her out!

List One: 8 small ways to improve the world
join MomsRising
subscribe to a CSA
compost
recycle
Freecycle
call the organizations who send you junk mail and get off their lists (or sign up for Green Dimes to do it for you)
walk, carpool, take public transit
buy refillable water bottles

List Two: 8 things Ben has made from his new cookbook
heart in hand cookies
extra e-z fudge
papa’s pesto
berry dip and roll
boss banana bread
blueberry pie
chocolate covered bananas
bunny salad

List Three: 8 things I carry in my bag
phone
rosebud lip salve
eye drops
wallet
notebook
pen
keys
tissues

List Four: 8 things I’d rather be doing now than keeping Eli company while he falls asleep
drinking a glass of water
doing research for an essay
packing for our trip
eating the last piece of blueberry pie
putting 3 years of family pictures into an album (or two or three)
reading the newspaper
watching a movie with Tony
sleeping

List Five: 8 best movies I’ve seen so far this year
Away from Her
Waitress
Whale Rider
Once
The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek
The Lives of Others
The Namesake
51 Birch Street

List Six: 8 things I worry about sometimes
light pollution
global warming
the safety of our food supply
the war
my kids’ nutrition
global malnutrition
earthquakes
accidents

List Seven: Eli’s current 8 favorite books
The Bunnies Are Not In Their Beds
Kipper
I Went Walking
Everywhere Babies
Why Do Babies Do That
The New Baby Train
A Fish Out of Water
The Baby Goes Beep

List Eight: Recent(ish) reading that’s stayed with me
The New Yorker article on light pollution
Irene Nemirovsky’s Suite Francaise
Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma
Nicole Krauss’ The History of Love
Andrea Barrett’s Secret Harmonies
Jeannette Walls’ The Glass Castle
Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife
Susan O’Doherty’s Getting Unstuck without Coming Unglued

Let’s say it again, shall we? My son cooked dinner! And for those of you who are new here, or maybe just a bit inattentive, I’ll point out that he’s five.

Hats off to the Spatulatta girls, who provided the inspiration and recipes.

The menu: rigatoni with pesto, sauteed spinach (ok, Tony made that), and chocolate covered bananas.

Eli kept marveling, “No Da-da make dinner. No Mama make dinner. Mama hehp Buh-buh make dinner. Buh-buh make dinner!” And Ben was a very proud chef, indeed, telling Tony, “You’re not going to believe how delicious this is, Daddy!”

And indeed it was.

Well, the Spatulatta Cookbook arrived earlier this week and the kids are eating it up. This is not the first kid’s cookbook we’ve encountered; in fact, among the over one hundred cookbooks on my kitchen shelf, five are for children. We’ve got the classic, Mollie Katzen’s sweetly illustrated Pretend Soup; we’ve got Linda Collister’s beautifully photographed Cooking with Kids, plus the retro-looking Look and Cook, by Tina Davis. We’ve got my childhood favorite, Mud Pies and Other Recipes, which is full of recipes to make for your dolls and stuffed animals in the backyard. And then we’ve got a real treasure, Michel Oliver’s La Cuisine est un Jeu d’Enfants, with an introduction by Jean Cocteau. This was given to Tony by his grandmother, and is inscribed thus:

“This is to mark your very first birthday–and I hope you will emulate your Mamma and Papa in the preparation of gourmet foods–I will look forward to your first efforts–and I hope it will be a souffle–that’s my favorite.”

Nothing like setting a child’s sights high! (And in fact, with such familial encouragement, Tony embarked on a culinary career that included, as a kid, chicken kiev and lemon meringue pie, and now covers most of our family dinners). We don’t use this cookbook much — it weighs about ten pounds, for one thing — but I love a cookbook for kids that includes such basics as coq au vin, pain perdu and sauce bechamel.

We use all these cookbooks, but what sets Spatulatta apart is that it is written by kids, the two girls behind the Spatulatta website, Isabella and Olivia Gerasole. As a serious cookbook reader, I was worried that this might translate into some cutesy, written-by-adults-to-sound-like-kids tone, but that’s not the result at all. The recipes are peppered with little comments like “Pretty neat, huh?” and “This is the fun, slimy part…” and Ben, a brand new cookbook reader (let alone reader) was delighted at these remarks aimed at him. I like that each step in a recipe is explained clearly enough for a five year old to understand, with cooking terms marked in bold and keyed to a glossary in the back. It’s a smart cookbook, too, with its spiral-bound, coated pages that wipe clean, tabbed section dividers and plenty of room to write in notes. The people who designed it know what they’re doing.

In our first 3 days with this cookbook, we made Extra E-Z Fudge, Heart-in-Hand Cookies, and Berry Dip & Roll, which were all a tremendous success and are not at all a representative sampling of the recipes in the book, which are seasonally organized and include a nice section of vegetarian recipes. I let Ben call the shots, and he went for the sweets; we’ll get to the Bunny Salad, Black Bean Chili, and other healthier choices another day. The one surprising omission from the cookbook, I think, is breakfast! Pancakes, french toast, and muffins tend to be a staple of most kid’s cookbooks, for good reason: they’re simple and plenty good for you. Spatulatta leans more toward lunch and dinner foods, when I’m less inclined to think of involving the kids in the cooking in favor of getting a meal on the table promptly. But of course, the more I include the kids in the kitchen, the less of an art project cooking will be for them, so I like that Spatulatta will help nudge us this direction. My kids, at 5 and 2, are definitely younger than the target Spatulatta audience, but this cookbook will grow with them, and I’m looking forward to the meals along the way.