booandbunny

We just finished exploring another country. Daddy picked Greece, mostly for the food! The feast was fun and I found a lot of great recipes that we’ll probably use again, just not all at the same time! My favorite cookbook this time was Sofi’s Aegean Kitchen: A light approach to traditional Greek home cooking. No pictures, but I was familiar enough with Greek food (MMMM, Parthenon in Chicago!) that I could figure out what we would like. Again I tried to stick with ingredients the kids would recognize and seasonings that would be new. The red-wine vinegar was not such a hit, but the kabobs, fish fillets and pita pockets vanished fast!

For the craft we made Greek urns. It was a fun project and cheap! Each of the kids painted a picture of a typical day: Ms. 8 went way Greek and painted herself at gymnastics. Mr. 5 painted himself playing with the dog and Mr. 7 painted the whole pot black, then scratched out a similar design. They enjoyed it on an afternoon that was too hot and humid for them to play outside.

The books they liked best: Ancient Greece!: 40 hands-on activities to experience this wondrous age (Hart and Mantell); Look what came from Greece (Davis); A True Book: Greece (Petersen and Petersen) the Usborne Book Greek Myths for Young Children (Amery) and Disney’s Hercules.

Now we're exploring our home country … it is almost July after all. I’ve already found some fun books about the different states, presidents, Mount Vernon, Monticello and the White House. My daughter of course has enjoyed doing the little journal more than the boys, but that’s OK. They’ve all done some of it, which provided me with 15 minutes of peace while it rained!

A Sunday Scribble

The daily routine
Soundtrack of suburban life
Music surrounds me

Giggles, laughter, joy
Secret chats, children's pacts, friends
Music makes me smile

Middle night silence
With door locked we say nothing
Music fuels my soul

Rampant consumption
click swipe "Thank you come again"
Music brings me down

Mowers hum, bikes tick
A.C. drones, sprinkler swooshes
Music dulls my edge

Bloop! Zoop! Kapow! Zap!
"Mama come see my score now!"
Music livens games

Washer shimmies, shoops
Dryer tumbles, rumbles, boom
Music launders moods

"I had a bad dream"
Tiny body snores next mine
Music calms my fears

Japanese rhythm
flexes my writing muscle
Music frames haiku

She was a one-in-a-million kid I met the first year I helped a buddy do a high school journalism workshop for minority students. I seem to remember it was her mother who raised her alone, doing what she could to keep her daughter on the right track in a culture that tells you everything in life is available 24/7. All the elements were there to set her on a collision course with destruction, but she chose her own course. Bright, talented, confident, I wonder how her story turned out. She was a leader wherever she went. Other kids looked up to her. I looked up to her and she was 10 years my junior. Some might have called her an old soul. We just called her by name: Echo.

A Sunday Scribble

I kept coming back to one of my favorite Sesame Street songs:
Here in the middle of imagination, right in the middle of my head,
I close my eyes and my room's not my room and my bed isn't really my bed.
I close my eyes and discvoer things that are sometimes strange and new.
And the most impossible thoughts I think have a way of being true. ...

For me it's usually getting up and leaving my bed to write. In that drifty drousy dreamy not-awake-not-asleep state stories come, so I leave my bed. But it isn't that way for kids.

From downstairs we can hear them, but usually don’t go up and say anything unless somebody gets too loud. But that doesn’t happen too often now that they’re getting older. So from downstairs you might here an explosion or a song or a giggle. Every once in awhile you might hear footsteps, but these were highlights in an imagination reel uncoiling.

Ms. 8 always uses here lights-on time to read a few pages, then she might grab her toy microphone and do a little show. Mr. 7 typically pulls out his art set or a construction toy, a half-contraption or partial metropolis typically graces his floor as he drifts off. Mr. 5 will wade through the rubble of his room until he finds the one Power Ranger or Hot Wheel or book he needs to plop on his bed and vanish into his netherworld until we come to tuck them in. It’s good to spend some time with yourself each day, so the kids do this before they go to sleep each night.

But turning off the lights and tucking them in is only intermission. That’s when the fun begins. When they know they can’t … shouldn’t … don’t really want to at the ends of these summer days … get out of bed and wander their rooms for toys. They drift off slowly, maybe having a conversation with Hermione in the girls restroom, hoping Moaning Myrtle won’t hear. In the Bionicle cluttered bed across the hall he might be talking himself through his Seisan Kata, adding a few Marvel Comic sound effects as he gets a good one in on a sparring opponent. Or, in that oasis from Rubbleville, he might be bashing his guitar at the end of Baba O’Reilly … or Rangering up and saving the world.

When you’re little your bed is yours. You don’t imagine that, someday, you’ll want to welcome some one else in. But what you do imagine keeps the creepy things away until tomorrow. What you do imagine makes this little corner of the world all your own … and one of the safest you’ll ever know.

Supersoakers for three kids: $15
Ice cream sandwiches for the neighborhood: $5
'70s-style summer afternoon: PRICELESS

Here's to the dads who have made my world, and my kids' world, such a wonderful place. May the grilling be glorious and the ties stylish. Happy weekend!

First, my scribble. I started out wanting to solve the mystery of Alzheimer’s disease. I thought I’d write about the last time I saw my grandfather. Then I got to thinking about other family members … his wife with the unnamed dementia, haunted by her own mistreatment of him and failure to feel loved by her mother … my dad’s father, withered by Parkinson’s, completely aware of the fact that he could no longer make his body do what he was telling it to … my 20-something cousin, who died a year ago this month, the victim of a brain tumor that spread to her spine … the countless people I know who battle depression, anxiety, ADD, ADHD, obsessive compulsion, anal retention, post traumatic stress, addiction the list goes on and on. I’m beginning to think none of us has an unscarred brain. Think of the lonely people, the people afraid to commit, the people with low self esteem. I stopped wanting to solve the Alzheimer’s mystery and started thinking on an uncontrollably large scale, as I’m often wont to do. Anyway, that’s where that bit of fiction came from ... what if we could get a reliable map that connects the ethereal emotional stuff to the physical bits of nervous system … something concrete that could help us all be healthy and, above all, more understanding of each other?

Next, summer fun, Week 2. I decided before school ended to have a bit of a plan for the summer. Thanks to the library we will visit a new country each week. After Sensei’s birthday party (at which we had a good time getting to know better some of the other families from karate school) I thought Japan would be a good place to start. So we checked out the following books, made our own mini Japanese gardens and carp streamers and tried three new recipes on Japanese Night. (The kids tried chopsticks for the first time!) I’m getting ready to make some pages for the older kids to color/write on to create a “My Library Travels” journal for the summer. It has the potential to be a good boredom fighter. The cookbook I checked out was Japanese Cuisine by Chen Shiu-Lee (1988 Wei-Chuan Publishing) … all the newer ones were checked out, but I liked this one because it is printed in both languages and had pictures. Also, I already had all the ingredients for the dishes I chose to make. Here are the books (with dates and publishers) all from the juvenile non-fiction section of our local library:

On the Map: Japan (1993 Steck-Vaughn Company)
Culture in Japan (2004 Raintree)
Colors of Japan (1997 Carolrhoda Books, Inc.)
Japan: Things to Make; Activities; Facts (1994 Franklin Watts)

So in the past few days we’ve been swimming with friends; done the Japan Night thing; caught some fireflies; built about 50 forts all using the linen from our beds; watched a fair dose of early-morning TV; continued our journey to the Earth’s core; read more books and learned to play Monopoly. BTW … the 5-year-old nearly won … proof it is luck and not skill … and yes, it has rained a bit!

Finally, I want to introduce something that took me much longer than I thought it would. The idea started here and then became a list in my journal. Then I thought about this blog then this blogger and oh, this one and this entry here and thought: “I should try to stretch, maybe make a collage. I used to do that all the time. I should try.”

So I did, but instead of a collage I ended up with more of a slideshow. I started each sentence the same. Some of it’s serious, some of it’s silly, some of it might offend even though I of course don’t mean for it to, some of it was just a way of getting things out that I forgot were there or didn’t want to look at. I hope blogger just lets it be. I think you can click on images to make them larger if you can’t read them. Most all the art is MicroSoft clipart. Some I found on Google images. I provided a link to any specific artist from whom I took work. So, I’ll just start now.

a Sunday Scribble

Wendy knew that Abbey didn’t get it. She couldn’t get it. She couldn’t see what Wendy and their grandmother knew to be true: There is a visible map of human connectivity … a visible map of human brain function. Wendy could see it, so could her grandmother Joan. For these past years as Wendy, 19, had come of age she and Joan had discussed these maps over countless hours together.

So when Joan passed away and left Abbey her wedding jewelry Abbey felt vindicated. All her baby sister got were cardboard boxes. A big nasty stack of cardboard boxes. Maybe Wendy wasn’t Joan’s favorite after all, Abbey thought.

Wendy knew that Abbey didn’t get it. Inside those boxes were generations of journals, not just Joan’s, but those of Joan’s mother and grandmother. They were all women who could see the map, but none had the opportunity that lie before Wendy.

All of them had gone to college. Wendy’s grandmother had been a researcher her whole life. Wendy’s great-grandmother had dared to teach science in a one-room schoolhouse at the turn of the last century. Before that Wendy’s great-great grandmother had been a nurse … a scientific woman in an age of hoop skirts and parasols. Each kept careful record of the energy they witnessed, trying to make sense of it all. What Wendy had that they didn’t was the promise of technology. At last, at last, her grandmother had once said, there will be a way to prove what we see! The ability to bring these energy fields into view for less gifted eyes. The ability to bring these fields into view in a way that proves they exist.

Wendy wiped her eyes and looked at her mother and sister as they packed Joan’s things. Each of them surrounded with the thick, fibrous aura of someone who has minimal connections. She remembered that long talk with Joan a few years back. She loved her son, Wendy’s father, dearly, of course, but had so longed for a daughter to whom she might pass her gift. As Abbey grew it was apparent she couldn’t see the energy people pass from one to the other, the very nature of our relationships, the reasons we bond with some and move on from others. By the time Wendy was about 12 and had, for the first time, experienced the sensation of touching one of these energy fields she saw, her grandmother had already talked with her about the gift. That muddy, streaked color is the only color any of them had ever touched. Normally the energy passed through you, but that brown-black smear was cold and slick. It’s because their barriers are so well fortified, Joan had told Wendy. They don’t let anyone in and they don’t let much out. It’s actually the absence of energy that we feel, Joan had said. There’s never been a desire to really connect, so no spark has energized the aura, its left resembling, perhaps, the primordial ooze from which all life came. No spark, no life.

Loading her boxes into her Honda Wendy rededicated herself to her studies. Couple more years of pre-med and then she could really begin to focus in on her field. She knew she had to keep up her journals and keep up her research and redouble her efforts to find the technology to harness these energies.

And it took Wendy the rest of her 93 years, but she proved it all … the previously inexplicable connections between body and soul were laid out like a roadmap for her eyes only ... until she met a handsome bio engineer. Together they set in motion the work that unlocked the mysteries and cured the diseases of the human mind.

Aaaaah. Summer Break. Thursday was the very first day off from school. Since then we have: Ridden 50 miles on bikes; gotten hair cuts; gone to the library; read 15 books; made s’mores; barbecued twice; gone to a surprise birthday party; hosted six other short guests; watched a few solid hours of cartoons; Slipped and Slid; sucked down two pitchers of homemade lemonade; painted by numbers and dug in the backyard halfway to the Earth’s core. AND I’m making my deadlines! Amazing. Summer Break is going just as I’d hoped.

Here's our winning Parent's Magazine Lemonade.
Juice of 4 lemons (I strain out the pulp.)
2/3 cup sugar
4 cups cold, cold water
2 to 3 Tbsps. maraschino cherry juice
Mix it up and serve over lots of ice. A few cherries into every glass never hurt anyone either!

Note: This is a Google image ... daylily Chicago Apache. Mine should be blooming soon!

Such awesome power. I don’t know why I think that every time I pull a weed, but I do.

I have two small flower beds, one devoted to day lilies, the other holds three dwarf Spruce and some mums. Both, of course, get weeds.

I’ve learned two important lessons: Weeds go from an inch high to a foot high over night. Whatever you see above ground is about the length of the tap root you’ll find beneath. Grrrrr. Letting those weeds get away from me my first spring as a homeowner made me diligent. I snip, pick, twist, pluck every morning this time of year so that the unpleasant job takes less than five minutes rather than several hours of wrestling Mother Nature. She’s slick. She’s quick. She’s experienced and I am an unworthy opponent. Except when I have to really dig for one of those roots and the beetles and occasional earth worm are sent scurrying. One flash in time and their whole world is topsy turvy. Sometimes I can’t help but stop and stare, like when a kid really looks at her first ant hill.

Their world uprooted they get to work, each creature knowing what to do to get life back to normal. “I couldn’t help but wonder,” did humans work together that well before money and politics? I always move some mulch over the open sores in my garden floor, but today I congratulated the beetles and worms on their “failure to evolve.”