I Heart Deadlines!

A scheduled outage is, erm, scheduled in 18 minutes. (Make that 17.) On blogger, that is. Naturally that makes this the perfect time for a new entry!
It is an established fact of physics that liquids held in a container of some sort will assume the shape of the container. As it turns out this frequently is also true of people, especially watery people like me (that's an astrology reference there). Thus the highly useful nature of the deadline-- it serves as a container for a project, provides something to push against, something that increases the pressure enough (there I go back to physics again) to get the reaction, the project, to completion. Deadlines also have the power to be delightfully liberating; projects with no deadlines can remain unfinished forever, but projects with deadlines actually END, whether complete or not. Isn't that just fabulous?! Now the trick is to create deadlines for projects I *want* to finish that I can believe are real, whether those deadlines will be externally enforced or not.
This, to me, is one of the greatest failures of the public education system (ack! six minutes!). With externally imposed deadlines always looming and my extreme need to please/fear of failure as a child, I performed excellently in school (you could say I'm a very skillful hoop-jumper) but I languish and suffer horribly when put in charge of my own activities. The liquid has no container! I can only speculate but I do believe that in the absence of that focus (for decades of my young life) on externals I could have developed my abilities to follow my passions and complete projects without this need for external reinforcement. That's my theory, anyway.
Two minutes to go, and calling it done! WOOT!

I Just Don't Know.

So I haven't been blogging; if you know me, which I expect most of you do (otherwise how did you ever find me, right??), you know why. (Not to exclude you if you don't: I've started a natural grocery/coffee bar. Yes, in this economy. Yes, I am completely insane, but that is so not noteworthy anymore.) Every now and then, even with my lack of posting, I'll get a new comment on an old post (as just happened) and I'll think, I should go write something. However, I write so damn infrequently now that literally thousands of little word-children clamor to come out all at once, with such a ridiculous cacophony that I can't hear just one storyline and get a quick blurb out that's remotely coherent. So, I sigh, and mutter, and grouse, and don't write. Thus the title. I don't know what's going to come out, and I doubt I could figure out what to call it even after it's done, so I decided to not let that get in my way. Now here I am writing sheer drivel for the sake of posting, lest this blog become completely dead. Ah well. Perfectionism is for those who wish to avoid actually doing anything. (Ask me how I know.)
Needing to know what something will be before attempting to produce it-- now that sounds ridiculous, does it not? But I have done this my entire life, and I am experienced enough (note the avoidance of any reference to actual age there) by now to know that I am not alone. What is that about? Can you think of-- no, can you admit to a time when you've done this? Why did you do it? A need to be in control? Fear of failure/success? Fear of reprimand/repercussion(s)? Sometimes I think I fear not failure, but mediocrity. What if the writing doesn't suck, what if it's just blah? And of course, by extension, what if I am just blah? Say it ain't so! What if it serves no purpose, changes no one's life? What if-- dare I even type it-- no one ever reads it? Was it worth the effort, the overcoming of physical and mental and emotional obstacles to produce one tiny morsel of overly edited prose, for it to remain unread?

Homemade Marshmallows!

Ta-da!
Special thanks to my friend Lisa Stevenson for sharing the recipe on one of my "mom" lists. This comes from the Kid Friendly Food Allergy Cookbook by Leslie Hammond and Lynne Marie Rominger (2004). Here's the basic rundown of what I did:
I put 3 cups organic sugar in a saucepan with 1 1/4 cups not-organic corn syrup (does anyone even bother to make organic corn syrup??), a little salt, and 3/4 cup water. While this heated and boiled for a few minutes, I sprinkled 4 envelopes of gelatin on another 3/4 cup of water in a mixing bowl. This turned into fairly solid-feeling goo rather quickly. I don't understand the purpose of this step, but oh well.
Next, I was supposed to be able to pour the hot syrup mix into the gelatin in a thin stream while mixing. HA! Only if you have a stand mixer, friends, otherwise this is, as I discovered, hopeless. So very hopeless. So, I poured rather quickly, in a moderate stream, and got the heavy pan set down so I could mix.
Now I was supposed to beat on high for about 28 minutes!! Are you crazy??! How bad do I want these frapping no-artificial-color marshmallows?! Well, that did NOT happen, and I never quite got to true stiff peaks, but I stuck with it for several minutes, taking breaks here and there as required by my children and arm fatigue. Some where during that time I also beat in some vanilla extract, although the recipe called for powdered vanilla, which I didn't have.
I had greased a pan earlier, and so poured the liquidy marshmallow goo into it when I got fed up with mixing. By the next morning, voila! Solid marshmallow goo! I cut them into squarish shapes (frequent oilings of my knife really helped) and tossed them in powdered sugar.
They are fantabulous!! The only disappointment is that they do NOT roast well. Perhaps if I had beaten them longer, made them fluffier? But at any rate this batch was a bust for roasting. On the other hand, they taste so good I don't need to char them to make them palatable. Next batch I'll hopefully have a stand mixer, and I'll drizzle some with melted chocolate and sprinkle some others with cocoa powder... mmmmm.....

Who Said Parenting Was Easy, Either?

I am just getting slammed no matter which way I turn, I tell ya. Sheesh. Can't a woman watch a news clip without getting into a discussion of death by car accident with the almost-six-year-old? Damn those headline writers for catching my eye in the first place with their highlights from the VP debate, anyway. I cancelled TV last week and so only listened to the debate on NPR. I was curious to see how the performers looked onscreen. Is that such a crime?? And why, oh why, do I have to have such a sensitive and astute observer for a child? (Those who know me, stop laughing and SHUT UP.) Beautiful little darling, that child of mine. So you might have guessed by now that Galen picked up on the story of Biden's immense loss of wife and baby 36 years ago. Sitting on the bed holding his eyes as wide as he can to keep the tears from spilling, what can I say to make him feel better? I can't make it go away, I can't make the world devoid of tragedy, and he knows I can't. We are up against something intractable and infinitely sad. He cannot sleep now. We talk for an hour about how much safer cars are now, and how people used to not wear seat belts all the time and didn't have to use car seats, even though I know nothing of the details of Biden's wife's accident and even though I know people still die daily in accidents with seat belts fastened and air bags deployed. I will not mention this. I describe all the wrecks I've been in (I think seven at last count) and how in some the car was severely damaged but I was always okay. It's not enough, but it's all I've got. I can't explain statistics (he's too young) and unfortunately or not I can't quite lie, so I feel pretty awkward and dreadful. He is worried, and I begin to think that every lousy borderline syndrome I have is genetic-- and dominant. He seems to have inherited every mental, emotional, or psychological issue I have. He can't stop talking. We take breaks, switching to silly email pictures and Disney ads of all things, but we keep going back to facing the risk of death. He tells me he has to worry because he loves me and he loves the whole family. I need to cry too. I resort in the end to my own mother's tried-and-true: a promise of shopping tomorrow. It seems to distract him, but then Daddy comes in to go to bed and I am asked to tell it all to Daddy and so it starts over. Finally we simply insist he stop talking so he can go to sleep before it's already tomorrow. Now I sit here wondering if I did a good enough job: should I have reassured him more, should I have said something else? Am I failing him in his spiritual upbringing? Does he need more structure, more ritual, more (some) Sunday school, more faith? Is he going to be ok?? I have no way of knowing. All I can do is cross my fingers, hold my breath, and wait to see how melancholy he turns out to be. Nooooo, that's not nerve-wracking at all...

Marriage: Not for the Faint of Heart

Belief is built on an incredible mountain of lies. Now, that sounds bitter, and I'm feeling a mite pissy at the moment, it's true. But I mean this in earnest, not in bitterness. Previous generations simply did not strive for accuracy. We were taught how our parents thought things should be, how they wanted us to be, by way of statements that implied that ideal in their minds was how things were. Children construct their worldviews based on the teachings of their parents, and these worldviews are not at all fact-based but rather are constructed from a set of beliefs (albeit a very difficult-to-access set of beliefs, as ingrained in our thought patterns as they are). One of my beliefs, based on never witnessing any of my parents' marital challenges (and although I still don't know what they might have been I do know now that they must have had them), was that "good" marriages didn't have challenges. And, based on how disparagingly they spoke of others whose marriages failed, I also quite erroneously concluded that people with marital struggles shouldn't have gotten married in the first place. Oh, that fictitious world was so delightfully simple! And so nonexistent! I don't know if it will be of any benefit to my children to have less wool over their eyes, but it has been a great challenge to me to discover that all marriages of all kinds have difficult times, and that a failed marriage often is just too many things being too stressful without a break for too long. Condemnation on top of that is much worse than not helpful, it's cruel. Marital failure can happen to anyone. In fact, it's much easier to fail-- at anything in life, including marriage-- than to succeed. Success requires such constant uphill work, even when things are just in maintenance mode. With all we modern humans are trying to juggle it is physically impossible to keep it all going. The least squeaky wheel will get the least amount of oiling, until-- surprise! It rusts through and falls off, leaving you stranded in mud, utterly bewildered. (Yep, that's me, knee-deep in mud.)

Just for tonight, as a gift to myself, here's what I'm going to do: I'm telling the voices of my parents and anyone else in this highly dysfunctional culture that pass judgment left and right in my head to go f**k themselves and shut the hell up. I don't need their lectures anymore, thank you very much. I am a tired, broke, overworked mom of two and I am giving myself permission to be real and human and not have anything held together anymore because superglue I am not. So there.

Unschooling and Meditation

I just found the coolest thing by total accident: http://www.poodwaddle.com/meditation.htm
Then, in the process of me playing with this, an astounding thing happened. I managed to explain meditation to the hyperactive almost-6-year-old-- briefly enough that he listened!-- and then since I was doing it I asked if he wanted to try. (Baby was asleep.) I lit incense, we both sat on the zafus and I set the timer for one minute. He totally copied me and I am pretty sure he kept his eyes closed the whole minute. When the gong went off he was just peeking to see if I was looking, then gave me his total charmer smile :) I asked if he wanted to do it again, and for how long, and he said 2 minutes, so we did it again. Then he says, in a protesting tone, "MOM! this will make me forget about all the things I want!"

!!!!!!!!!!

He figures this out after three minutes of meditation. My child is the Buddha.

And what a thing to realize, to choose not to forget those things-- to choose actively to remain engaged, rather than being a victim of your thoughts-- what a completely different place to be in!

The OTHER miraculous thing he said today-- as if that wasn't enough-- was this about the dog digging under the chicken fence (as he was perched on a ladder saying "go Pedro go!"): "Mom, to get him to be a good dog we have to encourage him to do what he wants to do!"

Maybe I'm succeeding at this unschooling thing after all.

Iris says: "Eat yogurt, it's good for your complexion."

She is walking now, and fairly well, too. This morning she woke up, looked at her still-sleeping brother, and announced: "Bwuh-vah. Nye-nye!" (If you don't speak baby-ese, that translates to "Brother. Night-night!")

She is so. stinkin'. CUTE.