Showing posts with label parenting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label parenting. Show all posts

Monday, October 31, 2022

Halloween 2022: Rapunzel and Her Tower



This is the last time for who knows how many years that I'll get to spend my second favorite holiday in person with all of my favorite people.

So we did it all! 

Can you be too old to trick-or-treat? NOPE! 

Syd's got ballet all Halloween evening, so at least my practically fully-grown teenagers only trick-or-treated once, here at our local state park's event. 
Rapunzel's Tower was a hit, but I think it was also Will's most awkward costume to date, and this kid has worn some awkward costumes over the years!

Can you eat too much Halloween candy? NOPE!

This Halloween snack mix looked better on TikTok. It turns out that it's nearly impossible to create a Halloween-themed movie night snack mix that the entire family will like... so instead we created one that nobody loved!

Can you watch too many scary movies! Yes, but also NOPE!

This year's traditional meatloaf mummy for our traditional Family Movie Night!
The meatloaf mummy was joined by skull mashed potatoes, cheesy breadstick bones, the above cocktails and mocktails, orange dipped pretzels, a DIY candy apple bar, and after Syd got a look at the menu, she roasted some vegetables so we don't all die of malnutrition.

Can there be too many carved Jack-o-lanterns on your porch? NOPE!


Okay, but can there be too many Jack-o-lanterns on your head? ALSO NOPE!

I am going to frame this entire photo shoot and put every photo on my walls, all year round.

But surely otherwise there can be too many Halloween craft projects. THAT IS VERY MUCH ALSO A NOPE!

These babies get to stay on the coffee table through Thanksgiving!

The only thing we're missing out on is neighborhood trick-or-treating tonight, since us country folk don't get the pleasure of kids coming around to our houses. But when we pick Syd up from ballet super late, we're still then going to pick up our traditional Halloween take-out pizza, and we're still going to stay up even super later watching our very last horror movie of the season while eating the rest of the kids' weekend trick-or-treat haul.

And then Nutcracker season begins!

Sunday, July 3, 2022

Teenager-Friendly Wholesome Family Activities: Hunt a Killer


Do y'all have any weird, low-impact parenting things that you nevertheless feel a ton of constant guilt about?

Mine is the fact that I don't really like playing games.

Like, I played games with the kids all the time when they were little, and did the whole Family Game Night thing semi-regularly. Late night games are part of our New Year's Eve tradition, etc. But in those cases, playing the game is mostly about playing the game WITH THE KIDS, or, you know, AS A FAMILY. I wouldn't necessarily choose to play any given game if it wasn't a #wholesomefamilyactivity. 

I mean, I'd rather be reading?

So we don't really play games unless I feel like it's one of those super special #wholesomefamilyactivity moments, and I constantly feel guilty about this. 

Will and Matt are pretty amiable about games and like to play them, but Syd has, I think, a similar game mindset. 

And yet, she found a game that we're obsessed with.

Syd and I are both into true crime shows--although to be honest the Intro to Serial Killers class that Syd is currently taking at the local community college might have broken us of this. It's... a lot of graphic details. Like, a LOT. And there's, like, a huge list of paraphilias whose definitions Syd was tested on and so now I can't get them out of my head.

Did you know that there's a whole thing involving somebody wanting somebody else to... you know what? You're probably better of not knowing.

ANYWAY, because we both like true crime shows (although maybe not as much now as we used to...), Syd gave me this Hunt a Killer game for Mother's Day. 

It was already the perfect Mother's Day gift, because it was an activity that we could do together. Syd is particularly good at the Mother's Day version of #wholesomefamilyactivity

But even better? The game is SO GOOD!

You play the role of a baby detective trying to solve their first crime. You're given the set up and circumstances and all the evidence, although some evidence is locked or password-protected and some evidence isn't evident that it's evidence and some evidence is unclear because the suspects used ciphers or other ways to conceal it. And some isn't even evidence, but stuff that might be evidence. 

So you're given all that, and then you just... solve the crime! In this particular game, Syd and I had to figure out if a beloved bar owner's death was murder or an accident, and if it was murder, who did it? How and why?

Syd and I made a whole evening out of it. We bought ourselves snacks and drinks and set up at the big family room table, and exiled Matt and Will elsewhere so that they didn't get any spoilers that would ruin the fun when they want to try the game.

We'd kind of thought that the game would only take an hour or so, because it's apparently one of the easiest in the entire Hunt a Killer collection, but, ummm... I think it took us nearly four hours to solve? And the whole time we were completely absorbed, absentmindedly eating Goldfish crackers (these giant Cheddar Jalapeno ones are the best) and figuring out clues and having stunning revelations and arguing over alibis and trying out different substitution ciphers and having an absolute ball.

Ooh, and there were awesome surprises! At one point I figured that just for a laugh I would Do a Thing and Syd was all, "OMG don't Do That Thing! Surely it's not a real thing, just a game thing, or if it is a real thing it's a different real thing and it will be so embarrassing!" But then, I Did the Thing and it WAS a real thing AND it was a game thing and Syd and I were shocked and delighted and I screamed out loud because I'm excitable and we're still talking about it. 

We LOVED it. It was SO FUN. 

The only downside to the game is that there's zero replay value because, you know, we solved the crime! But if you consider it a #wholesomefamilyactivity rather than a product, the spendiness is easier to bear, in the same way that I happily spend more on theater or concert tickets. And at some point Syd and I will successfully convince Matt and Will to play it (and then secretly time them so we can decide whether or not they're better detectives than us, but only tell them that we timed them if we win, of course), so that's double the value, and then if I get really lucky, maybe somebody on Craigslist has a different Hunt a Killer game and would be willing to trade. 

Or, I don't know... y'all got any mysteries that I can solve? I prefer mysteries with lots of interesting clues, a few ciphers, and zero paraphilias or horrifyingly traumatic details of graphic murders. My birthday is in August!

Saturday, May 7, 2022

That Time I Got an Abortion and Didn't Get Arrested because Roe v. Wade Existed

Me in the good old days, back before people knew how to focus their cameras.

It was Fort Smith, Arkansas, somewhere around 1992-ish. I was 16 years old and an A student. I had some extracurriculars I loved, some friends I liked a lot, a grey 1985 Lincoln Town Car I drove to school and back, and a boyfriend I was obsessed with. I'd had an excellent high school health class that had actually taught me how to have safe sex, down to the correct type of spermicide to look for  and the importance of latex condoms over sheepskin.

Because I considered myself a smart girl and had had what I still consider to be good sex ed, I've always judged myself for being exceptionally stupid and careless for getting pregnant. But you know what I'm just now realizing right this second as I write this? Here's what I didn't have: access to birth control pills, access to a medical practitioner to talk with about my specific situation, and reliable access to those latex condoms with Nonoxynol-9 spermicide that I'd been taught to use. I would have utilized the snot out of a Planned Parenthood, unless there were people protesting outside it like there often are at my local Planned Parenthood 30 years later, and then I wouldn't have dared be caught near it.

In Fort Smith, Arkansas, in the late 80s and early 90s, at least, from junior high on, there were a LOT of kids who got pregnant. People pretty much all just kept their babies, too--I knew kids who tried to DIY abortions but that never worked, and I didn't know anybody who carried to term and then relinquished the baby for adoption. We were probably all trash, though, because Matt swears that he never knew of a single kid in his entire education through high school who ever got pregnant. But he grew up in a sweet suburb in the Silicon Valley, and I grew up in a city that was known for having the lowest cost of living in the country, and my high school chemistry teacher would threaten us with future employment at the local chicken processing plant when he thought we weren't studying hard enough.

I didn't want to work at the chicken plant, or the factory that made disposable plates and cups, or the one that made lined paper, or the one that assembled washers and dryers when I grew up, and it felt like just the absolute end of the world when I got pregnant. And I didn't even know how bad it actually would be. I didn't fully realize what the negative impact on my education and economic stability, not to mention my long-term mental health, would be if I bore an unwanted child. I didn't think about how bearing a child into poverty, as a teenager obviously would, would mean that we'd both most likely remain in it, doing blue-collar work and living in subsidized housing and forever struggling to make ends meet, forever a half paycheck from disaster, forever locked out of the benefits of the middle class and unable to build wealth in our own generation, much less advance the quality of life of our descendents. I didn't have any thoughts about forced motherhood as a means of patriarchal control. 

My 1980 Lincoln Town Car, which is still my dream car and the BEST CAR EVER.

I mean, I saw all that played out in front of me, saw literally all of those scenarios among family and friends and acquaintances, but I didn't have the insight to recognize them as systemic or connect them to the myriad of societal factors that caused them and that I also witnessed. Honestly, I just focused on how my unwanted pregnancy would ruin my life right then. I did not want to be pregnant, and I did not want to be a parent. That should be reason enough.

Looking back, I kind of can't believe the level of helpless despair that I shouldered, trying to figure out a solution among my limited options. I can't figure out a way to accurately relay what it feels like, to know this thing is happening to your body, it can't be stopped, it's going to change the entire thread of your life in ways you actively do not want, you are going to become someone that you do not want to be and have a life that you do not want to have, and YOU DO NOT WANT IT. 

Probably the best thing that's ever happened to me in my life so far is that my sole trusted adult at that time, an aunt who came over for dinner one night, heard me sobbing in my bedroom, and did the work to get out of me why I was upset and what I wanted to do about it, agreed to drive me over to a clinic in Oklahoma so I could obtain a proper medical abortion from a licensed medical practitioner. It cost almost more money than I could scrape together at that time, and my aunt and I had to pretend to my grandparents that we were going on a fun weekend trip to get me away from home for the appointment. 

And after all that, the solution turned out to be the simplest thing ever: call long-distance, make an appointment, drive to Oklahoma City, give the receptionist sixteen years' worth of birthday money and two months' worth of school lunch money and every quarter you ever found under a couch cushion, put your feet up in stirrups, breathe the nice gas, and just like that, your life is back online. 

My shining moment of high school glory in my favorite extracurricular.

It sickens me now to think about how hard I struggled to access that simple abortion, how much mental, emotional, and physical energy I devoted to it instead of to my education, extracurriculars, and relationships, how many dangerous ideas I considered. I would never tolerate that amount of helplessness, despair, panic, anguish, and fear in a child under my care, if I had any way to provide a solution. Looking back, I kind of can't believe that I tolerated it as a child, myself, especially when in reality the solution was ultimately so simple. Just a phone call and a day trip and a very fat check.

I am SO glad for that abortion. I've never felt angst about it or regretted it--why would I regret something that I needed so badly and was so desperate to get? I've never been sad about it--why would I be sad about anything other than what a terrified, helpless child I was? I don't talk about my abortion only for the same reason that I don't talk about anything else having to do with my sex life--it's personal, and like all the other aspects of my sex life, generally kept to a need-to-know basis. I think about the abortion I got 30 years ago about as often as I think about the tonsilectomy I got 35 years ago, because the whole situation became a total non-issue as soon as I got caught up on my homework and won my first part-time job because I never want to be that broke again. 

What I do end up thinking about quite a lot these days is "abortion." Abortion, the human right. Abortion, the accessibility to which is crucial for humans to thrive and prosper, to live in safety and security, to be able to own and live in their own bodies. I think about "abortion" in the context of being furious when I see evidence of people being denied that piece of medical care, or being shamed for accessing it. I drive by the people protesting outside our local Planned Parenthood, and I roll down my window and flip them off while thinking how much I hate them for what they're trying to do. I see that leaked decision by the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, and I feel a pit in my stomach at how much harder it's going to be to live our lives while being deprived of yet more fundamental human rights. 

My younger child turned sixteen this week. She and her sister have grown up with lessons of consent, with their bodily autonomy respected, with great sex ed, multiple safe adults, all necessary and requested medical care, and the knowledge that anything they need, whatever they need, will be provided to them with the best of my abilities.

Before she's seventeen, my younger child and her sister may have fewer rights to their own bodies and less official control over their own fertility than I did back when I was sixteen and sneaking across state lines to find a legal abortion practitioner. I hope that they will never be compelled, by force or by legislation or by simple lack of access or options otherwise, to use their uteruses as incubators, or to have their biologically female bodies perform in any way they do not completely consent to. But my ability to maintain their basic personhood is limited, apparently, by the religious tyranny of a minority of politicians, and by Supreme Court justices who flat-out lied during their confirmation hearings. Politicians who do not even have uteruses or medical degrees get to insert themselves into the medical decisions of those who do, and legislate their personal decisions about their own bodies. 

Blessed Be the Fruit, I guess.

Tuesday, December 14, 2021

Cooking with Teenagers: Cloud Bread

 Your teenager has discovered angel food cake, only she calls it "cloud bread." 

And where did all the teenagers find out about angel food cake?

Tiktok, of course!


There are billion iterations of this recipe, all heavily borrowed (ahem) from each other, so I don't know which teenager was the first to post the recipe, but I'm pretty sure it was a teenager because they didn't put in any cream of tartar.

Teenagers rarely understand the point of cream of tartar.

Cloud bread is actually healthier than angel cake, as well, with no flour and quite a bit less sugar, although the sugar part may just reflect the fact that you're only using three egg whites, instead of the twelve that angel cake recipes usually call for. But egg whites and sugar... I mean, that's healthier than a lot of packaged breakfast foods! And I'm always nagging Syd to eat more protein, anyway, so cloud bread is basically the perfect food for her.

Syd and I also like the fact that it only takes a few minutes to make and get into the oven, and the way that you can spice and dye it any color you like. Here are a couple of different batches we've made recently:

Whipping the egg whites!

We use tapioca starch instead of corn starch in our recipes. I don't know why I got on that kick or if it's any better for you or the environment (for all I know, maybe it's worse for you!), but it works the same and it's, like, a tiny bit less Number 2 Field Corn in your system, so there you go.

Scraping it onto parchment paper

It's a lot tougher than you'd think to make it look smooth and loaf-like.

And look how soft and fluffy it turns out!

We were going for Christmas green with this batch. I don't think we nailed it...

It's sweet and light, a tiny bit sticky but still suitable for pulling off a bit and eating it out of hand. It does deflate a bit when cool (*cough, cough* needs cream of tartar *cough*), but since it's made from just three egg whites and some sugar, there's no need to leave any servings long enough to deflate.

Here's what else my teenagers and I cook together!

Friday, May 14, 2021

The Backyard Chickens Glow Up

 

It's been a long time since I made chick portraits with the kids.

How long has it been exactly?

THIS long!!!


It was so long ago that Syd, who now fears and loathes the backyard chickens in equal capacities, happily posed with a chick on her wrist. 

Syd won't go near even the bitty babies anymore, alas, but Will still has an infinite adoration for chickens both big and small. Early this spring she started to work on me and Matt about adding more chicks to our small flock. I kept a pretty hard line for a change, so obviously it was Matt's turn to be a sucker and spoil our child.

I mean, one of us HAS to, right?!? That's surely a rule somewhere...

So off Will and Matt went to buy four chicks, then a couple of days later they turned right around, for reasons that surely made sense to them, and they bought two more. And now we have six, on top of the four hens and two roosters we've already got. It's not exactly the farm that Will dreamed of having when she was four, but it's certainly closer to it!

This is Whistleblower:



And this is Whistleblower one month later!



This is Smol Bean:


And this is Smol Bean one month later!


Smol Bean is living proof of my kid's loving heart, as she lets me name one of the chicks each time she gets new ones, and she absolutely HATES this name. HATES. IT. And yet we still have a Smol Bean, because a Smol Bean was what I wanted:


This is Poppy:



And this is Poppy one month later:




This is Quetzalcoatlus: 



And this is Queztlcoatlus one month later, looking not entirely unlike her namesake!




This is Blitz:



And this is our baby Blitz one month later:


This is Hadrian:


And this is lanky Hadrian one month later:



The chicks just moved from their indoor palace into their outdoor nursery coop this week. I'm happy that their dust and smell and noise are out of the house, but I miss being able to pop into the playroom and visit with them, too. There's a metaphor in there somewhere, something about how fast young creatures grow and how wonderful and hard it is to have them when they're small, and how wonderful and hard it is when they leave the safety of your home. How their lives become so much more interesting in the wider world of the backyard, but you stop knowing them as well as you did when they were contained. How they become so different. How they stay so very much the same. 

Every day I think about how this incredible, funny, generous, bright, witty, thoughtful, and kind kid of mine is going to leave for the wide world so soon now, herself. Sometimes I feel excited about that--I'll find every brownie right where I left it! Sometimes I feel worried--How on EARTH can I monitor her from far away? What if there's an emergency, and nobody knows that my child must be evacuated before all the other children because she is the most special? Sometimes I make anxious to-do lists in my head of all the things I still have to teach her--physics, how to drive, the mandatory nature of daily showers, when to stop arguing one's point. 

Mostly, though, I think about how much I'm going to miss her every single second, and how much magic and newness and adventure and possibility she's brought into my life so far, and how I hope she keeps that and shares that as she makes her own way in the world. I hope she finds others who will participate with interest every single time she's reading a book and pops her head up wanting to discuss an important piece of information from it. I hope she finds others who love travel and adventure, who also want to go kayaking and skiing and hiking and climbing and target shooting and every other cool thing, but I hope she also isn't afraid to find new adventures and go on them all by herself, either. 

I hope she keeps this heart that loves animals of all kinds more than she loves most people, who treasures wolverines as much as she does puppies. I hope that her place in the world is filled with dogs of indeterminant breeding, ever-replenishing flocks of chickens, and fields of content horses. And I hope that every time she has a new batch of chicks, I'm close enough by that I can make their portraits for her.

Monday, March 29, 2021

Cooking with Teenagers: Fancy Coffee Drinks

 Sometime during the pandemic, one of my kids became a coffee drinker.

She's a teenager, so it's not, like, "real" coffee, or rather, not anything like the black coffee that I drink out of my French press every morning. Instead, her mid-morning coffee break consists of a carefully crafted beverage that does contain a goodly amount of either instant coffee or cold-brew, but also has so much sugar and milk in it that when she sometimes makes me a cup, too, because she's a generous kid, it tastes exactly like coffee candy in liquid form.

I don't know, you guys. Was I supposed to forbid her coffee until she's all grown up? I feel like maybe I was, but ugh. There is just so much to remember about being a parent! 

Anyway, it's more fun to find fancy coffee drinks on social media and make them with her.

You guys! I know this half-drunk mess in a Mason jar does not look appetizing, but it is that whipped coffee all the...

Posted by Craft Knife on Friday, April 24, 2020

Whipped coffee was definitely our gateway drink.

As much as I have the sinking sensation that I ought to be discouraging my growing child from polluting herself with caffeine, it IS pretty fun to have the love of fancy coffee drinks in common with her, and I do keep an eye out for delicious-looking recipes to try with her.

I mean, I would NEVER go to all the trouble to make myself, alone, a fancy coffee drink, not when black coffee is so quick and easy and gives me that same knot of anxious energy in the pit of my stomach. But when I make a fancy coffee drink with my teenager? Well, that's just us bonding!

Here's the latest recipe that we tried:

@cowlover3000

this is how i make the starbucks brown sugar shaken espresso yes i use a pasta jar for my coffees ##starbucksdrinks ##starbucksrecipes

♬ original sound - robyn

We made it a little too sweet--


--but look how deliciously frothy it got! Definitely going to try the shaken coffee method again:


And look how it encourages the teenager to drink her (free public school) milk! Yay, calcium!


Ooh, this was another really good recipe:

@littlebeancoffee

Reply to @ashleypummel I added peppermint because I’m still in a holiday mood 😍🎄##coffee ##frappuccino ##mocha ##starbucks ##christmas ##fyp

♬ The Girl - City and Colour
I even bought peppermint syrup for this! Syd doesn't always love chocolate, so for hers we used this salted caramel sauce instead of chocolate (and skipped the peppermint, I think? Peppermint and salted caramel don't seem like they'd be friends), although now that I'm thinking of it I bet we could substitute homemade dulce de leche. 

And because I was IN A MOOD, I found a totally different recipe that told me how I could make homemade whipped cream in my cocktail shaker, and then I did it, and then our gorgeous chocolate peppermint/salted caramel coffees were both beautiful AND delicious!


The mess that they made in the kitchen was less so...

But whatever. One thing that I now know about pandemics is that they leave plenty of time for housecleaning!

P.S. If you're doing a better job of keeping your teenagers away from caffeine than I am, I highly recommend DIY hot chocolate bombs as another great cooking with teenagers project!

Thursday, March 25, 2021

That One Blessed Week of Snow This Year

 Now that we're far enough into spring that writing about snow shouldn't call it back down upon us (it's in the mid-60s and calling for thunderstorms today--it's SPRING!!!), I'm safe to brag about the beautiful week of snow we had this winter!

This winter's Week of Snow was especially precious, because last winter we had none! We didn't make a single snowbeast, or skate outside one single time. There were two full years' of dust on the sleds when Matt brought them down from storage. It was a big, noticeable bummer that year, so we made extra sure we got our snowy memories made this year.

Syd let me take many photos of her in her beat-up pointe shoes in the snow, as well as a few of these still-lifes of her nice, new pointe shoes:




Will, who hasn't stepped skate into an indoor ice rink in over a year, got to skate to her heart's content on a nearby frozen lake:





And then she and I took Luna out for a nice wander on the ice:



Alas, we returned with our coat pockets absolutely stuffed with trash, because not only did the iced-over lake make it manageable to find and remove all of the various tangled fishing lines and lures and hooks from all the branches overhanging the lake, but when we finally stepped back on shore, we discovered that some monstrous evil had staged a... Promposal, perhaps? Or engagement photo shoot?... on the path, and had simply left an absolute zillion fake flower petals just lying there. If you look closely, you can also see whole strings of dead LED lights on both bannisters, but Will convinced me I could leave those for a park ranger to remove, since we'd already spent all of our remaining allotted free time picking faux flower petals out of the snow. 


And for our remaining allotted time with the last of the snow, we finally got to make our snowbeasts!


We even made our very first fort EVER:


It was wonky, fit Matt and Syd together only if they sat up very straight and didn't breathe too deeply, and melted nearly completely overnight when the weather turned, but it perfectly topped off the most perfect winter week we've had in year.