Losing Your Head

The Bee Hero post brought up a topic I think about a lot: how not to transmit my hangups to my kids.

I consider myself to be less squeamish than average about squirmy and yucky things. I enjoyed dissecting animals in college, we kept a black widow spider as a pet for a couple years. But unlike my kids I don't run and pick up snakes, lizards and tarantulas.

Not that I find them yucky, I just don't want to be bitten.

And when we were in Maryland during the 17 year cicada hatching I started out with curiosity and interest and ended up being nauseated by them (or maybe that was just because I was in my first trimester with Greta).

But I tried not to betray this to Evelyn who was never without a beloved cicada in her hand.

I try to model calm interest in all things no matter how creepy, smelly, or yucky I privately think they are, such as the raccoon the kids skinned, the disemboweled squirrel they found a few weeks ago, or the squashed cane toad the size of a dinner plate that Clem, age two, was stroking, saying, "I pet him stinky frog!"

But sometimes a primordial revulsion takes over. When we came upon the head of a cedar waxwing while out on a walk, when Greta ran toward it hand outstretched, fingers eager to claim a treasure, I began to scream.

Yes, like the storied housewife who jumps on a chair at the sight of a mouse. "Aaaah! Aaah! Noooooo! Don't pick it up!" And when the hand closed on it I actually clutched my head in my hands and wailed.

So much for modeling calm interest.

Afterwards I had to laugh at myself. I always worry that my involuntary reactions will outweigh all my years of feigned or real calm interest, but the kids just looked at me like I was crazy.

Bee Hero

I opened the slider to the patio to find Greta sitting at her sand and water table in a cloud of bees. She was completely calm, staring down into the water, unconcerned about the bee near her hand, or the bees buzzing all around.

I thought I'm going to have to do something about those bees.

Bees need a source of water but they don't like it to be too close to the hive. Our sand and water table must be the perfect distance because they have shunned the birdbath out front and other offerings and made the sand and water table their water bar of choice. (Experienced beekeepers, suggestions please!)

Here Greta's saying, "This bee crawled on my arm and it didn't even sting me!"

Then she gave a gasp. And picked up a stick. She reached down into the water and came up with a bedraggled bee on the stick.

She walked it over to the mini-trampoline and set the stick down.Look, Mama! she said, I'm a bee hero!
And there I saw four bees drying in the sun.

We try to leave a towel hanging into one of the buckets so the bees can land on the towel and drink. But many fall in anyway. Lucky for them the bee hero sits poised, ready to help.
This bee fell off the bee hero's stick onto the rim of the tubs. I loved watching her dry herself. In the right center photo she is wet and bedraggled. Look how she preens until she is fluffy all over. Then she bowed low to the bee hero (center top) and flew off to cool her hive with the water.

Click to enlarge.

The Magic Wood

Hikes at Sunol Regional Wilderness are always magical. But this time the kids discovered something outside the ordinary magic of scorpions and darkling beetles: A wizard tree!

A hollow tree trunk beckoned from the path. We have passed by many times without noticing it. The girls' friends wanted to investigate, so down they went through the stinging nettles and miner's lettuce and lurking poison oak.

Inside the tree was a box.

Inside the box was a booklet and a stamp.

This is a wizard tree the booklet said. And inside it those who had looked in the tree and found the box had written their names and the date they passed by. The oldest was from 2005. Ev's friend Sasha recorded our names and the dates.

We all ran on toward the cave rocks, even more under the spell of the woods than usual.

Daddy's Little Girls

Ev and Clem were hard at work this week embellishing a corporate logo. Since their Dad works at at the company, I didn't mind too much.

They were participating in Doodle4Google: designing a doodle for the Google homepage on the theme What I Want for the World. It was neat to hear what they wanted for the world and see how they creatively altered and embellished the Google logo to express those ideas. I'll post their designs when the contest is over (I wouldn't want to accidentally disqualify them as I didn't read the fine print).

Greta had to get in on the act. "How do you spell Google?" she asked. I gave her a black and white printout of the logo and the above is what she did. She knew the colors of all the letters in the logo! I had to go to the homepage to check. I asked her how she knew which colors to use.

With cheerful exasperation: "I just remembered!"

The winner of the public Doodle4Google competition gets her doodle displayed on the Google homepage for 24 hours and a $15,000 college scholarship. Alas, daddy's little girls are not eligible for the public competition. But they sure have had fun.

Soup, Salad, Sorbet Behind the Scenes

The Menu:
Butternut Squash Soup
Green Leaf and Cucumber Salad with Meyer Lemon Vinaigrette
Grapefruit and Honey Sorbet

J.G. Wilder asked me to describe how we do our cooking thing.

This project started out as a way to romance the kids into trying new food. But the best part about it is how nice it has been to cook with the kids. To see them enjoying and taking pride in their creations.

The witching hour when the kids are tired and hungry and run around fighting while I try to make dinner is largely a distant memory. We work together to put the meal on the table. Nibbling at the veggies as we chop takes the edge off our hunger.

Here's a list of what we do. We don't do all of these things all the time, in fact, some we have never yet done. But as many of these as make sense, we do.

1. Look through cookbooks together to figure out what we want to cook, keeping in mind what is in season. I look for dishes I think we could "bridge" to.
2. Make shopping lists together.
3. Shop together. The kids have their own lists and run off to find all the items on their lists.
4. They carry in all the groceries. :)
5. We figure out together what order to make everything, or who makes what.
6. They peel and chop, eating the raw veggies and fruits as they work.
7. They cook and stir and taste for seasoning.
8. They set the table, light candles if they want them.
9. They set out condiments, salt, pepper. We have a salt tray and fancy salts to sprinkle. Greta likes the pink salt.
10. We sit down all together and eat!
11. I don't force them to eat anything. I woo. I charm. But I don't cajole or force (at least, I really try not to).

Here is how we prepared this week's Soup, Salad and Sorbet.

I was at the store and thinking I had not talked to the kids about what kinds of soup, salad and sorbet they wanted to make. I decided to buy some butternut squash and a chicken and give them the choice of butternut squash soup or chicken soup. Butternut squash soup seemed reachable to me as Clem once had a passion for sweet potatoes and loves pumpkin pie, and Ev loves soup.

Greta had said that she wanted strawberry sorbet, so I picked up several baskets of strawberries.

I chose a head of green leaf lettuce and two cucumbers figuring that a salad lies mostly in the dressing, and that all of them eat plain raw cucumber.

We took the strawberries to a history fair, and I baked the chicken for dinner one night. So much for the chicken soup and strawberry sorbet, and for the kids' opportunity to choose!

I peeled one butternut squash. Clem cubed it, pausing to be Captain Squash. I boiled it in stock.

Meanwhile Clem had the idea of toasting the seeds. Why not? I thought garnishing the soup with toasted seeds would be a great way to entice Clem and Greta to try the soup.

I was too sick to finish making the soup in the evening and we bought a chicken pot pie for dinner.

Clem and Greta ate all the toasted seeds.

The next day I woke up feeling ok and pureed the squash and returned it to the pot.

I felt terrible all day but just before Mike got home from hiking with the kids I popped enough advil and tylenol to get my fever under control and thought it was time to have that soup, salad and sorbet. I cut open the second butternut squash and toasted the meager few seeds it contained.

Greta thought the two halves of the squash looked like "babies wrapped in blankets". She loved and rocked her sweaty babies.

Evelyn picked a meyer lemon from our tiny tree and zested and juiced it.

I peeled a cucumber and Clem sliced it. Mike washed the lettuce and Clem tore it into bite-sized pieces.

Clem and Evelyn finished making their own dressings. Ev has not found a dressing she likes and was trying to make one without vinegar. Clem enjoyed mixing seasoned rice wine and red wine vinegar into her lemon juice, shallots and olive oil.

Our strawberries were gone, but there were a number of grapefruits that had hardened skins in the fruit bowl. I cut them in half and lo! they were all good inside. Evelyn juiced them with Greta's help. Greta helped me dissolve sugar and honey in a little hot water and poured the syrup into the grapefruit juice.

I put the mixture in the freezer to chill. Mike set the timer so that we could check on it and catch it just as it was beginning to get skim ice.

I finished off the soup with a dash of pumpkin pie spice and some cream. Clem stamped her foot and said that this was not going to be her dinner because she does not like butternut squash soup or green leaf lettuce. See pout at right.

Ev got the soup bowls out. I filled water glasses.

Greta cleared her story tapes from the table. She has cassettes of all different colors and she has been making Dagwood sandwiches out of them. The yellow are the bread, the green, lettuce and red, tomatoes.

I put out plates and forks. Ev got the soup spoons. Everyone who helped set the table got to light a candle (everyone!).

I served the soup in the kitchen, Mike carried the bowls to the table. Clem carried the salad bowl to the table.

I put five little groups of four butternut squash seeds on a doll plate.

We sat. Phew.

And passed the little plate around. Everyone sprinkled 4 tiny seeds on her soup (doesn't that make more sense as we girls outnumber the boys 4 to 1).

The seeds worked their magic on Clem. She inhaled her soup. Then half of mine, then most of Greta's. And then her salad.

Greta ate cucumbers. And made pretty patterns with her cucumbers. She may have eaten a plain lettuce leaf.

Ev tried her salad, but did not like her dressing. She seemed to enjoy her bowl of soup.

Evelyn remembered the book Pumpkin Soup. I pulled it off the shelf. The cover page was exactly the color of our soup. My soup eaten, I read the book to Greta hoping to entice her to try her soup.

In the story the duck always adds the perfect amount of salt. But he left in a fit of pique and the cat and squirrel oversalted the soup in his absence. I asked Greta if her soup was oversalted. She looked at me and dipped the very tip of her finger into the little puddle of soup remaining in her bowl and licked it.

"Not too salty," she said.

That was all she had of the soup, but I call it a victory. She chose to try it.

After dinner the sorbet liquid had chilled enough. Greta poured it into the ice cream maker. Everyone ate the grapefruit honey sorbet, served in liqueur glasses. Although Greta said it tasted like "lemon grease". I thought it was effervescent and intense and refreshing and delicious. Next time I'll have it with champagne poured over it as suggested.

So this time we managed to do, or at least partly do, numbers 6, 7, 8, 10 and 11 on the list.

And I happily added Butternut Squash Soup to my list of dinners that 4/5 of us will eat.

Anyone have any tips to share? Points you would add to the list? I'm all ears.