...I got a rock...

June in New England means the weather is sometimes hot enough for bathing suits and the sprinkler, and sometimes cold enough for jeans and sweatshirts. There are days when the kids hedge their bets and wear bathing suits under their sweatshirts. Gardening in New England is like being Charlie Brown on Halloween.

Plum thundercloud #2
(in hole #4)

We've spent the past week digging holes for trees. We have a young honeygold apple tree that's not doing as well as we'd like and yes, we've transplanted it during the growing season. We know it might die, but it's been loitering in the front yard for weeks, humming "Strawberry Fields Forever." We had to do something before it started inviting Pippin and Braeburn trees over and blasting The Presidents, U2, and Warrant all night long. We also planted two plum thunderclouds and a June Snow dogwood. I'm partial to any dogwood because I grew up in Virginia, where it's the state flower. Finding a dogwood tree that likes Massachusetts is better than seeing a double rainbow and having it still be there sixty seconds later when you haul your kids over to the window.

The first hole took us two hours on a Friday night. Dig, dig, clink! Excavate...toss... Dig, dig, dig, clink! Sigh. We're living it up, I tell you! Using the 2-hour-per-hole baseline, we figured we'd be digging holes all afternoon Saturday and Sunday, but that we'd get all four holes dug over the weekend. We could have three trees in and the fourth relocated by Tuesday evening.

Bwa-hahahahahaha!

To dig three holes, we spent four hours each afternoon on Saturday and Sunday, another two each on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday evenings, and a final four hours on Thursday.  To be fair, about two of those hours were given over to planting the trees. On Wednesday evening while Dan and I were entering our third hour of excavating the Alps-shaped behemoth in the fourth hole, we called Penelope and Emma outside and told them to order a pair of pizzas. You'd have thought we'd said we were moving to Universal Studios. WE get to order the pizza? Call them and everything? 

*not* a chocolate bar, a whale,
or a coffin

Thursday afternoon we were back outside, still working on that rock. More stubborn than a beagle, it threatened to keep me from writer's group, and Dan from his bug fixes. Dan's suspicions loomed like the thunderstorms forecast for that evening. I'd have called the rock our white whale, but having explained to the girls (while digging hole number two) that the white whale was the obsession that eventually destroyed you, I was reluctant. We just kept enlarging the hole, wiggling the rock, then levering it up a few inches and bracing it with smaller rocks. Finally, at five o'clock, we prevailed! It took the two of us to roll it over to the pile and maneuver it into a safe position. Then we nestled the last tree in its new home and rewarded its patience with compost, a long drink, and mulch. I speed-scrubbed myself clean enough. I hadn't written more than 500 words in the past week. I needed writer's group. S.D. had promised strawberries.

In the end, I made it to group where I enjoyed both strawberries and applause for conquering the rock. Dan fed the kids and dove back into his code. Last week, Dan and I were Cash and Jewel, wrestling Addie's coffin across the river, except we succeeded without crushing any limbs. Plus there were no buzzards. Just a lot of rocks.

I scream, you scream, we all scream

...eeeuugh!

All Sunday night and all day Monday, I was worried. Sunday night I tossed and turned, thrashing about like a suffocating fish and ripping the blankets away from the disgruntled beagle. Monday morning I dragged my butt out of the five-foot-long gully in the mattress -- so early, too early, okay 8 am, so not early at all -- and leashed up the (still disgruntled) beagle. Emma and I walked the beagle (Heel. Heel. Heel. Good heel! Heel. Heel...) while Penelope and Dan went jogging.

While the girls worked on their spelling and writing I paced back-and-forth, mixing it up every few minutes with a little to-and-fro. The girls subtracted decimals like the smart consumers they are. Do we have to show our work? We do this in our heads at the store. I distracted myself for two glorious hours by thinking up fake song names about fiber crafting for a Twitter trend. I had no idea what to blog about this week. I was minutes away from hyperventilating, then we baked the ice cream bread.

First off, there are recipes for this stuff all over the place. They are all the same. Everybody raves about it. People make comments like "ZOMG THIS IS DELISHUS!" and "I'AM NEVR EATING OTHER BREAD AGIN EVAR!!!1!" I don't know who these people are, but I suspect they have no taste buds. Or dictionaries.

The basics:
2 cups of ice cream
1 1/2 cups self-rising flour
(If you don't have self-rising flour, no need to look for the car keys. Just add 1 1/4 tsp baking powder and 1/4 tsp salt to each cup of all-purpose flour and sift together. Boom! You just saved yourself thirty minutes and three dollars.)

Mix it all together until just combined, put it in a greased 4x8 pan, and bake at 350F for about 45 minutes.

First, let me just say that I still can't feel my fingers. I typed this with my toes. Because my fingers froze. Because of the ice cream. Even if you let the ice cream get kinda melty, kneading this dough for even one minute is five times worse than kneading a 6-quart bowl full of raw eggs and ground meat. But I mixed the chocolate ice cream together with the flour and what-not until just combined. I squidged it into the baking pan. It didn't looked mixed enough to me; there were patches of flouriness. But hey, the ice cream will melt a little and things will combine, right? Just in case, I baked it for only 40 minutes.

It looked...eh. But then, so do my applesauce muffins, and those are heavy and moist and gone by the end of the day. So I sliced off two pieces and we all had a taste. Emma couldn't wait to get to the trash, so she spit hers right into her hand.

Whaddya think: Instagram?

It's not that it was dry. It's not that it was tasteless. It's that dry white toast from any National Breakfast Restaurant Chain is moister and more flavorful. It's that I wasted two cups of premium, micro-dairy chocolate ice cream and couldn't taste a lick of chocolate. At least, if it tasted like dry, crumbly chocolate, I could have mounded some vanilla ice cream on top of a hunk, drizzled some chocolate syrup over it and shouted, dessert! At least I have something to say, and I didn't even have to wait until Wednesday or Thursday to find it. And I'm going back to the ten-ingredient Holly Hobbie Hey Girls Muffin Maker Chocolate Muffins recipe that Penelope and Emma downloaded when they were five. Say that five times fast and you'll run out of breath. You'll also have twelve bakery-sized chocolate muffins.

Have you ever made ice cream bread? Did I do something wrong or am I a food snob? It's okay if you say "both."

Guess what mom? I've grown up to live in a pig sty!

The past few weeks have been crazy around here. I suspect most people go through periods of frenetic activity every few months. I know mine are annual events that I should be ready for by now, but do I plan ahead? Not so much.

I finally realized this weekend that I don't have to let these events sneak up on me every year. Just like I have a set routine around the holidays, I can create a Recital Season routine and a Soccer Tryouts routine so I don't find myself after two weeks with a fridge bursting with furry produce and grease-laden takeout containers. I'm tired of emerging from Crazy Time to wade through two weeks' worth of clothing on the blaundry room* floor. I've been averting my eyes every time I pass my writing desk, which is buried beneath mounds of leotards, makeup bags, shoe boxes, and fiber-craft reference books. I know it's under there. I can see the corner and almost bumped into it last night, when I added a landscape design book and a stack of clean wool socks to the hodge-podge.

This afternoon, I'm cleaning it all up...again. I've banished the spoiled remains of the last meal I cooked, which was chicken paprikash. Or pulled pork. Or chicken and chickpea chili. It was vaguely orange with tan chunks. In the produce drawer, I found several bell peppers that had morphed into peaches (I think) and a zucchini that resembled Senator Kelly right before he melted all over Storm's shoes. At any rate, I have a freshly sterilized cadre of plastic containers back in the corner cabinet.

As soon as we're done with the last bit of schoolwork for the day, I'm going upstairs. I think I'll put on some music, something cathartic like Lisa Loeb. I'm considering opening the windows. Because tonight, after a normal, cooked-at-home dinner, I'm taking back my writing time. Chapter Five is getting nose-prints all over my laptop screen and the only way to clean them from this side is to get the words out of my head and onto the hard drive.

*blaundry room: the combination laundry and bath room found in many modern homes. I wanted one until I had one. Now I'm not sure what I want.

REVIEW: The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin

You know those mystery books where you can tell whodunnit before the end of the fifth chapter? Ellen Raskin's The Westing Game is not one of those books.

When I was in sixth grade, I wanted to be Turtle Wexler.* Although Turtle was an afterthought to her parents, she was cool. She played the stock market, snuck into haunted houses, and got away with kicking people. As the oldest of three, sometimes I wanted to kick people. Turtle also slept in a closet years before it was all the rage.

I recommend reading The Westing Game with your child; you'll have fun comparing theories and sharing suspicions. As in any good mystery, everyone has a secret and nobody is entirely who they claim. However, it can be a difficult book to read aloud. Raskin lets you peek into many different minds, and sometimes the point-of-view shifts are sudden. When I read it to my daughters last year, I often had to redo the internal dialogue once I realized it had shifted. That's what I get for trying to give each character a unique voice without reading ahead first.

Safe to look. No spoilers.  :)

It's the disjointed nature of the story, though, that makes it such an exciting read. You know you're not getting the whole story...and also that you are. In spite of the head-jumping, this is Turtle's story and I promise, all the clues are there. But I'm betting you won't figure it out.

*I also wanted to be Harriet M. Welsch, Meg Murry, Mary Lennox, and Lucy Pevensie, but that's another issue.

Love that Dirty Water

We live about forty minutes outside Boston, and were relieved to find that none of our friends or their families were wounded in last Monday's bombing. Okay, that's an understatement. Still, watching the news this week was different in our house than watching past tragedies for one reason: our daughters watched the news with us.

Sandy Hook was just a few months ago, and neither of our kids wanted to know what was going on. At six weeks shy of age ten, they were scared and what little they did see and hear gave them a few nights of bad dreams. This week, they wanted to watch. They asked questions. They evaluated the actions of the police as well as the news crews. It mattered. I try to follow their lead, especially when scary stuff is involved, so I let them watch. As they went up to bed Friday evening they called down, "Come up and tell us what happens. Tell us when they get him out of the boat." Then they both commented that they hoped nobody else got hurt.

All week I wondered if they'd have nightmares, but they didn't. What made the difference? I don't know. What I do know is that at some point, our children begin paying attention to the world around them. One day, a terrible event on the evening news is something they want--and need--to follow. For Dan, it was the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (he was ten). For me, it was the 1982 crash of Air Florida flight 90 (I was eleven). The world becomes simultaneously bigger and smaller not just because of the tragedy but also because for the first time, we want to understand.

The evening of the marathon, my mom called to talk about the bombing. I told her we'd been at a friend's house when the news broke and in the car when our friend texted to say there had been fatalities. When I'm driving I toss the phone into the back seat and have the girls read and respond to any texts, so we found out together. My mom wanted me to talk to Pen and Em about the importance of not attending events that could draw out disturbed people, but I couldn't let her continue. I said, "Mom, that's the exact opposite of what I want them to learn."

Embracing life and each other.

What Dan and I tell our daughters is that the goal of terrorism is to incite terror. It's right there in the name. We tell them that when something horrible happens, it's okay to be scared. It's okay to cry. People who are sick, who take pleasure in hurting others, are out there. They're not going away, and they're not going to play by the same rules the rest of us use. But don't let those people stop you from doing the things you love. Don't give up on your dreams, or walk away from your passions, because of what they do. In fact, don't let any of the scary things that happen stop you from embracing life. It's one thing to say it, and a harder thing to live it, but living is the most important part.

Devastating events rock us all in some way, even when they're far-removed, but our reactions shape our futures as much as they are shaped by our past experiences. If your tween hasn't already poked his head up and noticed the world around him, he will eventually. Someday, something horrible and scary on the television will matter. He'll need to watch and understand. Because as we grow up, one by one we wake up, look around, and have to decide what we think and how we'll react.

After Emma's surgery a few summers ago--once we had the house to ourselves again and a few days to breathe--we looked around. We had one daughter who'd just had her life irrevocably altered and another who'd been scared she would lose her sister and best friend. Dan and I had reeled through the days feeling like marionettes in a windstorm. Vacation was out. So was summer camp. Normal kid activities like biking and skating and horsing around were off limits while she recuperated. But Emma needed to feel like a kid again. She needed to know that she was okay and the things that made her life, life weren't gone. So we threw a Harry Potter Film Festival.

Every night for the week before Deathly Hallows Part Two opened, we showed the first seven movies in order, one film each night. We invited all our local friends. We made Knickerbocker Glories and put out dishes of lemon drops, licorice snaps, and Every Flavor Beans (with a spittoon). One family brought butterbeer. Penelope and Emma came with us to see the last film in the theater. It was exactly what Emma needed to feel normal again, which means it was exactly what our whole family needed.

What are we doing this time? Dan and I are getting our enormous butts off the couch so all four of us can take part in the Harbor Walk and Run. This fundraiser benefits the hospital where our daughters were born and which has saved Emma twice. Two sick men blew up people in Boston, so we're heading in. Boston, you're our home.

REVIEW: My Life as a Book by Janet Tashjian

My daughter Emma chose My Life as a Book as her book club selection because like her, Derek only wants to read Calvin and Hobbes or other cartoons. The opening scene is hilarious with Derek's mom sailing over laundry piles as she chases her son, who is determined to avoid even a discussion about reading. Derek is very real: he could be my kid or the boy down the street. Like Calvin at his best, he often asks the questions adults would rather not answer. Reckless and goofy, passionate and clever, Derek sometimes takes things too far, but never out of malice.

Derek's big beef with reading is that he'd rather live all those adventures himself, not hear about someone else's amazing experience. As it stands, he's facing a long, boring summer with the required reading booklist when his best friend Matt heads off to Cape Cod and Derek gets sent to Learning Camp. The summer turns out better than expected as Derek gets caught up in solving a decade-old mystery and finds friendship in unexpected places.

The illustrations in the margins of My Life as a Book further personalize Derek--who clearly has a good sense of humor--and liven up reading for kids like my daughter. As we read, we scanned the sketches in the margins and looked for the corresponding words on the page. Emma had an easier time staying engaged in the story knowing there would be two or three breaks from the text, especially when reading on her own.

During our book club discussion, the kids pointed out that the comics Derek prefers have something in common with camp counselor Margot's visualization technique: they both make reading more accessible to people who are stronger visual than verbal learners.

The verdict? We aren't waiting to put the sequel on next year's book club list: we've already ordered it. 

The Story of a Reader

I have a new book review all ready to go, but earlier yesterday I found out about Marvelous Middle Grade Monday, on Shannon Messenger's blog, so everyone's going to have to wait (including me). Starting next week, I'll post my Middle Grade book reviews on Mondays.

In the meantime, I thought I'd talk a little about myself as a reader. I was the kid in elementary school who never knew what was going on in class. It was during the fourth grade that I fine-tuned my strategy and began sitting cross-legged in my seat, my binder and textbook on the desktop and a novel in my lap. If someone said my name (three or four times) I'd look up and attempt competence, but for the most part I was about as attentive as Calvin was in Miss Wormwood's class.

Okay, so I usually knew what subject we were on. But I bumped into plenty of things (usually walls or people), because I rarely put my book down. When I was forced to close it (like at the breakfast table), I substituted whatever was handy and continued reading. (Note: the back of the Cheerios box gets boring after a few days. It may very well be impossible to get through the jumbo-sized boxes fast enough to keep your brain from going numb. Even if you add bananas and keep refilling the bowl with cereal, then milk...thencerealthenmilk...in an attempt to finish both at the same time.) The walk to school was an opportunity to read in peace as long as I glanced up every few paragraphs and before I crossed the street. At night, after my sister was asleep, I'd duck my head under the covers and read by flashlight. Night after night, my parents pulled the still-blazing light from my hand, marked my place in the book, and laid them beside my backpack on the desk.

Over thirty years later, nothing has changed. I still take a book with me everywhere, and I often read on my Kindle. I love having a virtual library in my purse, but there's nothing like burrowing deep into the blankets with a book bent back upon itself just shy of the spine-cracking point. Yes, I do still fall asleep reading almost every night, only now it's my husband who slides the bookmark into place and clicks off my reading lamp.

I continue to read adolescent literature because it's alive in a way that little else is. Don't misunderstand: I enjoy grown-up material as well, both contemporary and classic. I stayed up all night one January 1st reading Wally Lamb's She's Come Undone. (I spent the next day at Magic Mountain with my future husband, where we rode Superman five times in a row until they closed it due to rain. Best January 2nd ever.) Kids, though...kids are deep in the trenches that most of us would never again dare to enter. They're artists, shaping and molding themselves like clay figures, and the process is intense and desperate. Reading adolescent literature is like peeking into the kiln, hoping that none of them crack. But even when they do--because none of us escape without a few fissures--the end result is inspiring.