Play Dough February 27, 2012

For Christmas they got some Play-Doh, and I hadn’t gotten it out because we have carpet and I was worried about the seems on the table and the mess, and lots of reasons. However, on Saturday we got a kid-sized craft table and they love it. It also makes it a lot easier to do art projects since we’re down on their level. I got out the Play-Doh. Seamus loved it! Gil wasn’t really sure that he wasn’t supposed to eat it.

When Seamus woke up from his nap and Gilbert was still sleeping, he and I decided to make some homemade play dough using this website’s recipe. Seamus loves dying Easter eggs, so I thought this would be a good alternative. It made a ton. But we put the food color in and now we have a lot of play dough. The recipe says you can add scents to your play dough, so we tried the peppermint extract. I turn my back to wash my hands and Seamus got the lid off and dumped the entire (1 oz) bottle into the red play dough. “It’s minty!” he exclaimed. Indeed, it was.

Several hours later the whole house still smelled like mint.

Brothers February 21, 2012

Sittin' in the Big Red Suitcase

Wave!

Riding the Orange Box Train (The Orange Blossom Special?)

The latest pics off the camera yielded a bunch of pictures of S & G hanging out together. We got a box of oranges at Costco; they have loved riding the orange box train. Gilbert loves to get into Seamus’s bed. He crashes onto S’s pillow and says “night, night!” G has lots of two and three word sentences now. “Sit, book.” “Go, Park” “All done, down” “Up baba milk” “Out bath” “Back bath” etc… He’s willing us to understand him. Otherwise he pitches a tantrum.

 

The Paleo Experiment February 20, 2012

We had some friends over for dinner last night. They eat a Paleo Diet. I didn’t know much about it except from reading my friend’s blog where she talks about what they eat. I’d been afraid to cook for them because I thought our diets would be incompatible (since we’re vegetarians, if you hadn’t figured that out from my veggie recipes and cookbooks). But when I read that she shops at the farmer’s market for her vegetables and cooks up a big stew every week, I thought, Yes, I can cook for them–I’ll just make a stew with no meat.

But you knew we couldn’t leave it at that…

So I made a curried butternut squash soup with coconut milk, an edamame-asparagus bisque (both from Robin Robertson’s 1000 Vegan Recipes), and the Spanish potato tortilla my friend John always used to make for us (which I approximated by following Mark Bittman’s suggestions). They were all great–I like the asparagus soup a little better and I overcooked the tortilla a bit, but it was still delicious. I really enjoyed learning about the paleo diet–we won’t be doing it because it’s simply too radical a departure from what we eat now, but I firmly believe any time you eat more vegetables and less processed food, it’s a good day.

Now I have eggplant, cabbage, carrots, and green peppers in the fridge, because I thought I was going to make a stew with those things, but when I started looking at recipes, I couldn’t resist the other two soups. What should I do with those things? If you don’t have any absolutely must try recipe ideas, I’m going to consult my favorite man on the planet that I don’t actually know: Mark Bittman. I love love love his book How to Cook Everything Vegetarian. It really suits my style. He says, here are the things you must have to make the very basic iteration of this recipe, and then here are 27 ways to vary it up depending on what you have in the fridge and pantry. Never a bad recipe, except once when I ignored the things-you-must-have section. Love his granola recipe.

Babysitting Is Awesome February 18, 2012

Long bike ride this AM with Patrick while Jamie watched the boys. They really like her. After crying when we left pretty consistently, Gilbert didn’t cry last time she was here, and this time he was saying, “Bye Mama! Bye Dada! Bike!” This is not to say that G doesn’t like family babysitters…he loves them. But now he likes her too. Seamus talks about her all the time when she’s not here.

A couple of book things: Last month, I went to a reading with my colleagues. One of their friends was reading from her book, The Kitchen Daughter. I bought a copy because that’s what you do at a book reading. I ended up being an interesting book. The premise is that a woman with Asperger’s loves to cook. When her parents die, she discovers that she can bring back ghosts through cooking. It’s sad, compelling, and interesting. I thought the ghosts might annoy me but they seemed to work in the novel.

I read Passing with my students in The American Dream. They did a great job discussing the text! P asked why I’m having them read such short books, and I said that if the book is provocative, it doesn’t matter if it’s short. Most of them seem to be doing the reading–Yay!

It’s Saturday now…I wrote this earlier section on Wednesday. I was actually looking for some photos to post, but that looks like they’re going to be ready for the next post. Babysitting is still awesome, but so is being with the kids. I took them to the play place in Tyson’s Mall today and I felt guilty because it is so pretty outside, but I had already told them that’s where we were going, and Seamus in a phase where he needs to have a good understanding of the plan before we go places.

So we went. S was having a great time standing on a representation of a milk jug. This much older girl wanted to jump from a representation of some newspaper to the jug. She had her henchman go up to S and tell him to get off. He jumped off but then hopped right back on. As this was playing out, Gilbert came over to see if he could help. The henchman was getting angry at Seamus, but every time he succeeded in intimidating S off the milk jug, G would climb up on it behind his back. The two bullies became very frustrated because S & G together kept spoiling their plans. And that is a nice antidote by way of anecdote to my earlier post about annoying a sibling.

BTW, the parent of the older kids was on the phone in a corner paying no attention to the kids.

Service Learning February 13, 2012

One of the things I’m working on for work is the possibility of including a service learning component to each of the English 101 classes. Since our goals are information literacy, it makes sense that students could get information from a variety of places, including their own experiences in the world. To that end, I’ve been having my students read up on hunger and issues surrounding food in the DC area. Last week, I organized three excursions with students to sites around the city where we volunteered for 2-3 hours.

SOME (So Others Might Eat)–This organization does a variety of good things. My students were interested in the food kitchen aspect of this project. We left campus at 6:15 and went downtown to serve breakfast to people who came to the soup kitchen at 7:15. It was an incredible experience for my students (and for me). We served 400 meals that morning to 358 men and 40 women. Some people came in with their possessions. There was a highchair available, indicating that sometimes it gets used. A woman schooled one of my students on how he should mop the floor. Some of the other volunteers were White House interns, families, and retired folks.

DC Central Kitchen–This is a community kitchen where they prep 7,000 meals a day to send to senior centers, food kitchens, after school programs, and other needy places. They also do job training to help people develop culinary careers. I took four students to a morning shift. I cut onions for 1.5 hours. After the first 20 minutes, it didn’t hurt so bad. Mostly my students we’re impressed with this, but I was. I’d never been in an industrial kitchen, so that was fascinating to see the big vats for boiling food and tossing salads. Also, though, I think it’s good for my students to see people getting back on their feet as experts in something. So priceless to see Georgetown Law students told that they’re not cutting onions small enough!

Capital Area Food Bank–This one could have been good, but it was mostly a disaster. I didn’t organize my students. I left it for them to sign themselves up, I signed myself up and then I provided a ride. That mean when it all came down to the end, I only took one student with me. She was late to meet me, so I almost went by myself. When we got there we joined a tour of the warehouse. It was really interesting, and especially since Mark Winne actually talks about this place in Closing the Food Gap as a good example of a food bank. We sorted cans and stocked shelves for a while to prepare for the week ahead as people came to “shop” at the food bank. We didn’t get to see it, but when people come to get food, there is produce in addition to the canned goods. A deaf fraternity was volunteering Saturday too!

I’ve learned several good things about this endeavor, and I think it’s going to be great for students (and for these organizations)  if we can figure out how to scale it up. A couple of things I’d like to try include adding a farm to this. There’s a non-profit farm down by Mt. Vernon that runs a mobile farmer’s market to low-income areas. One thing I learned is that students from the city already think they know about poverty and hunger, so working on a farm would be radical to them, whereas the suburban and rural students need to go into town and see the challenges there.

Biography of Catherine the Great February 9, 2012

I just finished a biography of Catherine the Great by Robert K. Massie. What an interesting read! Here are some of the things I found particularly interesting. You may not find them as interesting.

• Catherine considered sending 20,000 Russian troops to help the British in North America during the colonist’s revolt. Can you imagine what that might have been like?
• I finally understand what Cossacks are, and one night when I stopped reading without finishing the information on the Pugachev revolt, I had a nightmare about a Cossack uprising.
• I have now entered a stage where I can see how much research went into doing a book. This must have taken years–the detail is incredible. For instance he thanks someone for their resources on serf theater. That’s maybe three pages in the book, but he might have read an entire book about it to research for this one.
• The guillotine was used in France until….guess…1977!
• Catherine commissioned the statue of Peter the Great. I have a picture of it from when I was in Russia. The statue is treading on a snake, aside from suggested symbolic reasons for the snake, it’s there because it’s needed for the three-points of stability.
• There was a lot of talk about sledging between St. Petersburg and Moscow and going up and down the various rivers. Very interesting to imagine the travel.

Overall, this book is very readable. I was curious as to who might read it, because I at least have enough interest in Russia, having been there in high school and studied the language in college, to enjoy it. I think the triumph of a book like this is it’s universality even though it’s about a very specific era.

Annoying a Sibling February 2, 2012

Probably no one out there in the world can push your buttons as efficiently as your brothers or sisters. I have two brothers, and we can all get the others going in less time than you’d expect. We don’t see each other much these days, so it’s mitigated by that a bit, but we do have a lively email format in which we all email each other with the goal of getting a reaction–just for good measure, my parents are cc’d on each of these emails to ensure maximum gotcha-ness. 

Seamus sobbed the first time he saw Gilbert. He proclaims to love him now, but Seamus can still take things away from Gilbert and set him off. They know that any overt aggression (biting, kicking, hitting, pushing down, etc) results in time out, so they’ve had to get more clever in their goading of the other. This morning, Gilbert was using his new words to annoy Seamus. In order to fully understand this story though, you have to know that S really is precise in his language. For example, I offered him a nut, and when he saw it, he yelled, “That’s not a nut, it’s an ALMOND!” 

This morning, after they had both gotten up, G said to S, “Night, night, Shay, Shay.” S replied, “It’s not night night, it’s breakfast time.” G repeated himself. S, more agitated repeated himself. G grinning repeated himself. S, melting down, “NOOOOO, Dilbert!”

Later this morning, watching out the window. G, “Hi, Grandude!” S jumps up to look out the window, “Grandude’s not out there.” G laughing, “Hi Grandude!” S upset at being taken in, “No, he’s not there.” And later, when Grandude came, G said it again, and Seamus didn’t believe him and was a little taken aback when Grandude walked in the door.

I’ve decided that the best motivation for learning to talk is to annoy a sibling.