But your refrigerator is empty!

Remember that little girl in the movie, Monsters Inc?  She toddles around talking nonsense.  She is very cute but causes lots of mischief.  Yesterday Rosie reminded me of her.

We had bible study meeting at our house last night.  With our kitchen getting very close to functional, I really wanted to make something for everyone.  I had been buying pre-made desserts for three months.  So before taking the kids to a playground around 4pm, I prepped the dry ingredients to make a raspberry/blueberry cobbler.  A friend had served me a cobbler a couple months ago, and she gave me the recipe on a strip of red paper.  So I left the house with bowls of measured sugar and flour on the counter beside the recipe.  Milk, water, etc to be thought about later.

We get home later than expected, and I need to get it in the oven.  Shouldn’t be hard because it’s a matter of putting it all together.  Rosie runs in the kitchen and grabs the recipe.  ”I need this in my kitchen.”  I wasn’t worried about it because her kitchen is pretty small.  She’s back in my kitchen in less than a minute, “Here, you can use this one.”  She hands me a yellow sheet of legal paper with writing.  She got it in the trash.  ”OK,” I said.

A minute later I call her.  ”Rosie, I need my recipe back please.”  She comes running in the kitchen.  ”It’s in my refrigerator.”

“Can you go get it please?”

She doesn’t come back.  I find her playing near her kitchen.  She has carefully lined the entire coffee table with plates, each one containing one piece of food.  We’ve been in the house less than seven or eight minutes, and she’s only played in one room.

“I put it in the refrigerator,” she says, “but it’s not there.”  Mmm.  Her fridge is completely empty.  I look in her stove.  Her microwave.  In her bag of veggies.  In the sink.  The whole kitchen is only about four feet by three feet, so it doesn’t take long.  No recipe.  This is crazy.  It’s gotta be right here.  So I look around, starting to feel my stress level rise.

“Rosie, think back.”

“I put it in the refrigerator.”

I decide to call my friend who gave me the recipe.  Can’t find her number.  It’s not on any of the emails she has ever sent me, dating back to ’04.  Takes me three mutual friends before someone answers.  I get her home and cell, but she doesn’t answer either.

At this point people will be here in 60 minutes, and the cobbler is supposed to cook for more than an hour.  And the kids are hungry.  It’s dinnertime.

I realized no one was going to help me.  My friend wasn’t available; Rosie had moved onto playing with bunnies, and John didn’t witness any of it.  His head is buried in a playmobile catalogue. (Otherwise, he would have probably been my answer.  He frequently knows what has happened.)  Only thing I have to depend on is my memory…not necessarily a good thing.  I had read the recipe that afternoon when seeing what the dry ingredients were.

So I took a deep breath and thought back.  I remembered being surprised that you put the flour mixture on bottom and pour the fruit on top.  It rises while cooking.  And water on top.  I put it together out of memory, and thought of what Bubie (my grandmother) used to tell me.  How can something with lots of butter and sugar taste bad?

And in the end, it came out fine.  I think I’ll wait until Rosie gets older to lend her any more recipes.

bacon

Did you ever see that movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding? We have tinges of that feel in Salisbury with my family. We visited my mom this weekend. Breakfast is always a treat. She has taught my kids to love fried eggs. They even think they know how to flip them because she lets them help. There’s also always bacon, fruit, bread, juice and usually some sort of cake. Although today there was no cake.

This morning Rosie and I got up two and a half hours before everybody else.  So we had eaten when the big event was unfolding.  Sammy and Emma showed up just as Adam, John and mom were sitting down for breakfast.  So it turned into a party.

Sammy sits down at the table, picks up a piece of bacon. Sammy is a vegetarian, and this bacon is the precooked stuff that you microwave for five seconds per peice. So whether it’s really meat is questionable, right?

Emma — Sammy’s daughter — looks at what he’s doing and says, “Daaad! That’s bacon.”

“No way,” says Sammy. “This can’t really have bacon in it.” Granted, there is a factory in New Jersey where they can make anything taste like any food, so it’s possible….

“Yes, dad. It’s bacon.” Emma says.

“MMmmmm….” Sammy.

“You’re a vegetarian.” Emma adds.

From behind, where I’m cooking, it looks like Sammy just took a bite.

John is across the table. “Bacon comes from a pig! Bacon comes from a pig!”  We visited an organic farm this fall, and he’s excited to explain that he understands what they’re talking about.

Just then Rosie starts to choke. She’s eating bacon. Her face turns red. I think she’s breathing, but she’s upset. It’s hard to get to anyone in my mom’s kitchen. So I tell Adam to hand her to me. He lifts her over several people.  She carefullyputs down the end of her bacon, then she throws up all over me and the floor.

Mom’s dog Zellie thinks this is great.  Bacon on the floor!  Emma is not having any of that.  “Get out of here Zellie.  Shoo.  This is gross.”  The dog comes anyway, takes one bite and decides it’s not worth it.  Mom shows up with a towel to get it cleaned up.  Our dog Samson pushes past her with the same idea.  Bacon!!!!  One bite.  Definitely not worth it.  He leaves too.

I take Rosie in the back to see if she’s ok. And to clean up. She curls in my lap, tucking her head under my chin.  A moment of peace.

Nothing like a a little bacon to start the day.

Big Day

Today was a big day for us. Life is lived in the moments of the ordinary around here but today we had lots of firsts.

John is very interested right now in signs, especially signs that say you are not allowed to do something. Every time we see a red circle with a line across a picture, John asks “Mom, what’s against the rules here?” Frequently the answers are things like, “This car seat can’t face backwards” or “No trucks on this street.” Once someone around you is really looking, you’d be surprised at how many of those signs surround us.

Well, one of the new ones, both at home and at the pool, is “No diving allowed here.” I have thought about hanging one in his room. It would have a picture of a child upside down, landing on the floor headfirst, then putting a red circle around it with a line across it. He likes to jump off things. Anything. Especially high things. So it’s been a tough job to convince him that he shouldn’t jump off his bed and dive headfirst into the floor. This is a child that jumps of dressers, couches, trampolines, walls. Today he jumped off something downstairs that made the house shake. He refused to tell me what it was. So — we’ve talked about broken necks, and after that he points to people in wheelchairs in the grocery store and asks if they have a broken neck. I hope you’re getting the picture.

I’ve been telling him that one of the only places he can safely dive is in the deep end of the pool. So today when he said he wanted to learn to dive, I said great! (It’s so good to have him want to do something I consider safe—at least if you think diving at age 4 is safe!) We started on the side of the deep end. Put your hands over your head. Cross them over each other. Then fall into the water headfirst. Piece of cake. So we went up to the diving board.

John could barely contain his joy. He almost ran to the end of the diving board. He looked at me for assurance, got the stance right, gave a very appropriate jump and went head first into the water. Perfect dive.

Some twelve-year-old girls who were diving off the side of the deep end looked up. How old is he? One of them said, “I just learned to dive today,and I’m 12!”

I would have thought that was our big news for the day until Rosie told me she had to go pee pee. That’s really big news around here. On July 4th we had some friends over, and the dad of the family was in our kitchen. Rosie came in, stopped, put her hands on her hips, made direct eye contact, and using a voice that is about two octives lower than mine, said “I go pee pee.” Our friend didn’t know what to make of this pint-sized person delivering such a serious announcement. He stammered and said, “Well good.”

The potty training is an on and off thing, when she feels like it. We haven’t been pushing.

So that was a few weeks ago. Lately we’ve learned it’s best to follow her into the bathroom quickly, or who knows what will happen. So I was right behind her tonight, and she made it clear she wanted to be alone. I told her that I wanted to come in with her, and begrudgingly she let me in.

I tried to help her onto the toilet. “No, I do it.”

She’s so short that she uses both hands and both feet to crawl all the way up on the back of the seat, like a dog on all fours. Then she stands up in order to turn around and sit, legs going at almost a 180 degree angle across.

At that point, she grabs the shower curtain and pulls it around herself. It’s white, and you can’t see through it. So there she sits, wrapped in a shower curtain, ankles and feet poking out. I was laughing so Adam grabbed the camera.

Only afterwards did I realize she was asking for privacy during her first poop in the potty.

(This was a day this past week. I wrote it the day it happened, and it inspired me to start the blog.)

This was the congratulatory hug — or squeeze depending.

Welcome!

Doggies figure large in our world. You might think I’m talking about food, but I’m not. Obviously Samson is our star doggie — our first of all doggies. He sets the tone. But that’s just the beginning.

We have So Big Doggie, a gift that Sasha, Annie and Ari brought John as he arrived in the US. So Big Doggie is the name John gave him when he learned to talk, and the dog was still almost bigger than John. They still sleep together every night. John played soccer with the Big Red Chicken Dogs.

But Rosie really ushered in the era of doggies. She LOVES doggies. As she was learning to talk and realized she could have conversations with people, she would ask, “Where your doggie is?” After getting a response, she would pause, look you in the eye again and ask, “Where your doggie is?” We read doggie books. We put on doggie diapers until she moved on to Pooh diapers. Now when you pull out a doggie diaper she says, “I want to hate it, the doggie!” John was reticent to join in the fun at first. He wanted me to make her stop loving dogs, but now he’s given in to the doggie craze. We make friends with any doggie we see. When Rosie started saying, “I want to eat it the doggie,” I thought she was hungry — until she grinned and said, “I funny.” So now that’s the humor among the under-four crown at 911 Urban.

Lately the biggest attraction in our backyard is to swing high. And I mean high. Underpushes are preferred. My kids seem to have missed the cautious gene. So if you’re willing to hold on and run all the way under the dangling feet, you are likely to hear a child above you yell, “Hot Doggies!!!!”

So that’s how the blog got its name. Welcome to our world.

Trains are almost as big around here as doggies. When John was two, they were bigger. This is my mom’s favortie picture of the kids.

That train picture is a few months old, and Rosie has grown up so much. She LOVES my mom, who is reading to her here.

And John loves his cousins, especially the ones that race him like Ari. This is John’s way — he is fast moving. But normally he’s not wearing a tie:-).