70s Birthday Bash

Our joint 40th birthday party was a blast!  This was our biggest event yet, and we could go bigger.  Here's the upstairs before the party started, with beaded curtain, colored lights, and Hotel California palm.  

The downstairs didn't photograph as well, because on the one side it was all about the disco-ball-illuminated dance floor (with blaring Pandora disco station).  More on that later.  The other side was the bar, with the fixings for lychee martinis (or juice).  The kids were very amused by the plastic martini glasses.  Ava (below in pink) went around for much of the night with a martini in one hand and a fake cigarette in the other.  Those were a hit with everyone, except possibly the ex-smokers who found them overly stimulating.  The ashtray was a birthday gift!

We provided tie-dyed headbands and fake mustaches.  The mustaches were a scream.  I don't seem to have a photo of Dale wearing his mustache and aviator glasses; he was stunning and just about unrecognizable.  Aaron liked his too, as did our young friend Nathaniel.

Here's Robert and Noah, the party staff, for whom the mustaches inspired ridiculous bandito accents.

All right, let's get this party started, why don't we!  Bekah making herself a little brisket sandwich, Jon looking on.  A neighbor gave that astonishing dress to Bekah for this occasion.

Twin babies Alvin and Dexter digging the beaded curtain.

Bob and Sara.

Bob and Dale with very fine shirts.  We need to get Dale to put his glasses and mustache again, because...wow.

Jules, Sara, and Jessica.  Note the fondue pot on the table - the one I nabbed from my parents is at the other end of the table.  I had never made cheese fondue before and it was delicious!

Ladies in the kitchen.  Bekah's necklace is something I snagged at the thrift store; it's made of shells and dry beans.  Mine is tagua nuts.

Nick and Gwen.  Gwen arrived dressed like a normal person, but I had a couple of extra outfits, and this floor-length halter dress suited her very well.

I promised I would get us back to the Club... it was awesome!!  Please start with the video so you get the full effect.

The photos required the flash, which sort of ruins it because when you turn on the lights it just looks like our basement.  But you do get to see some of our hot moves, and my gold hot pants.

We spent some effort trying to remember how to do the Hustle; all we could really recall was that we think it was done in a line and involved a kind of a four of this, four of that pattern.  (Next time, I'll start with this useful tutorial, though I wonder if I need that many pockets.)  Note Ava and Aaron, both of whom were on the dance floor for hours.

The joy on Aaron's face!

He and Ava pretty much kept up with Kari and Bekah, and that is really saying something.  Check him out down in the corner.

At last there was cake.  I figured for forty people I had better make a lot of cake.  

It was fun to finally see how the inside came out.  Pretty and surprising!  And delicious.  So were the Secret Ingredient Brownies.  (Sorry...the secret ingredient is wheat germ.)

And there was plenty of cake.  In fact, we sent one home with Robert and Noah, and still have leftovers.  

It was a fantastic celebration!  Thank you so much to all our friends and family, who made it so much fun!

Rainbow cakes

Some of you may not know that Dale and I are throwing a joint 40th birthday party next weekend with a 70s theme.  We spent Saturday afternoon at the thrift store scoring authentically ridiculous outfits and have encouraged our guests to do the same.  We're providing tie-dyed headbands and fake mustaches.  We have transformed the basement into a nightclub scene, with an actual disco ball and multicolored lights, and are primed for loud music and stiff drinks.  I am eagerly assembling multiple fondue pots.  We're expecting about 25 adults and 15 kids.  We had the brilliant idea to have staff at this party: a couple of super teenagers (Robert and a friend of his) will help the kids have a good time, so that their parents can enjoy themselves that much more.

One of the easy things to do in advance is make cake.  Cake freezes beautifully; I think freezing actually improves the texture.  On the day of the party, you frost the frozen cake, which is really forgiving - no crumbs or breakage - and then let it sit out for a couple hours (while you enjoy the party).  Easy.  For this event I have decided on smiley-face cakes with a tie-dyed interior.  Aaron helped me.  Here he is licking the bowl that once contained plain cake batter; as you can see, we've divided the batter into six bowls and colored them vividly.  Gel or paste food coloring is a must for this - not that weak-tea stuff you get at the grocery store.  A food scale is helpful for dividing the batter evenly.

I went with three eight-inch cakes.  To assemble, first dole out one-third of the red batter into each (buttered, lined) cake pan.  Right on top of that, the orange - it will smoosh the red outward on its own - no need to mess with it.  And so on for all six colors.  Symmetry is not important but if you can make the blobs somewhat concentric, each wedge of cake will have some of each color.  

Mixing is not going to help anything.  (Fellow geeks:  As your slicing will be in the r-hat direction, mixing in the theta-hat direction is irrelevant.  If you could mix in the z, it might do something cool, but then again it might just blend the layers into muddy brownness.  Better to just leave it.)

Cooked cakes (and one grilled cheese sandwich).  These have now been wrapped in plastic and are patiently waiting in the upright freezer for their big day.  

I will probably make at least another three of these (we are having 40 people, after all) and some brownies, too, like my mother used to make, with a secret ingredient.  (Sorry, it's wheat germ.  And it's excellent.)

San Francisco story

Jordan was asked to write and draw what he did over winter break, for school, and he got quite into it.  

"We got out of the plane we went to the Bay Boo Bridge"

(For some reason Aaron decided that the Oakland Bay Bridge should be called the Bay Boo Bridge.  We all thought this was pretty funny and it stuck.)

"After we got to my Grandpa's house we went to the Academy.  It was so fun!"

(That's the California Academy of Sciences, with true-to-life green mounds on the roof.  I'm guessing those are octopus and jellyfish on the right.)

"Then we went back to Grandpa's house.  It was pink.  I don't know why."

(It is a peachy color on the outside.)

"Then we took a walk.  Aaron did the Move It dance.  The end."

(will.i.am is big in elementary school)

Food hopes

As I said in an update to my last post (but I think too late for the Facebook feed to catch it), I realized that although I was feeling very negative about Jordan's food situation, the negativity actually has its roots in a positive wish for our children that underlies the struggle.  So here is my mission statement (again):  My wish for our children is for them to love real food; to be able to prepare it generously and lovingly for themselves and for people they care about; to use it to fuel their bodies, feed their souls, and build their relationships.  I want them to honor their bodies and souls with every bite rather than pursue market-generated addictions to factory outputs (something I struggle with myself, for sure).  I want food, for them, to be an intimate connection to the earth they live on, a way to bring their natural surroundings (the plants, the animals, the soil, sun, air!) literally into themselves.  I want food to be a gift they give to people they love, as in they make friends by inviting them to dinner.  I want them to know that no commercial product is better than what we personally make from what grows in the ground.  That's what I want to be working towards.

Thinking about that (which was a lot more fun than complaining about Jordan not eating, I tell you what) got me to realize how important it is to me that the kids learn to cook.  Aaron loves to help in the kitchen, as Jordan did at his age.  Jordan tends to be off doing his own thing while I cook.  But he is now old enough to really take the lead on some kinds of preparation, and I wonder if giving him that opportunity might recapture his interest.  I remembered that Mollie Katzen's cookbooks for kids have not only healthy food, but a presentation that would work well for a beginning reader - a sort of a comic-book style.  I dug one up.

Then, last night, I told the kids I had a present for them, but that it was not a birthday kind of present; it was a growing-up kind of present.  (I meant that it was not merely entertainment, but the distinction is pretty funny now that I think about it.)  I led us in a conversation about all the reasons I think food is so amazing and knowing how to cook good food is so great.  Then I presented them with the cookbook, and said now they are old enough to start learning to cook for themselves.  I invited them to choose any recipe they wanted, and I would get the ingredients, and they would be in charge of making it.  For Jordan, I will really try to let him be in charge and do everything he's capable of - which is a lot: read the recipe, get out the tools and ingredients, measure, count, stir, turn on the oven, the works.

Jordan seems to be enjoying this prospect very much.  He perused every recipe, putting post-it notes on the ones he wants to make first and helping Aaron do the same.  Tonight he makes focaccia (from dough we put in the bread machine this morning - the book uses store-bought pizza dough, but we make our own).

I'm still tracking what he eats, too, but I feel a lot less punitive about it.

Food struggle

Knowing that parents (especially mothers) since time immemorial have worried about what their kid eats does not make the issue less fraught for me.  I'm afraid that Jordan, left to himself, would eat only waffles, pasta, pizza, hot dogs, fried things, and sweets.  The popular advice from experts is that a parent's job is to offer kids a selection of healthy foods, including at least one food that is both healthy and popular, and above all not make it a power struggle.  I used to pride myself on this.  But these days, Jordan eats a waffle for breakfast and asks for another one, ignoring the fresh, ripe, farmer's-market pears on his plate.  At dinner, same deal - if there's pasta or bread, that's all he eats, asking for refills until dinner is over and ignoring all meat and vegetables.  I can make the carbs whole grain; that's all our kids know, and they don't mind that.  But we find ourselves dragged into bargaining over the rest... three bites of green beans before you get more pasta, dessert is only for people who eat a good dinner, etc.  Soon the entire mealtime conversation devolves into bitter complaining on one side or the other, and the pears become a symbol of the self-determination that is so important to six-year-olds.  Not good.

For lunch, Jordan often eats literally three or four bites (we know because he re-packs the rest), then probably fills up on Goldfish or whatever trashy snack his after-school program provides.  When I get him at 5pm he is sometimes very sensitive, crying and fighting at the least thing, surely because his blood sugar is rock bottom?

Jordan not eating what I think he needs to eat makes me so angry and sad so fast, I sometimes have to leave the room.  My anxiety can't be helpful but it overwhelms me.  Trying to identify my own problem (instead of projecting onto him what I think his problem is), I get pretty classic stuff... my love and care (expressed in carefully chosen, lovingly prepared food) is being rejected, and I feel helpless in the face of his independent choice to do something that I think is not good for him.  Seems like this is an excellent preview for the teen years. Perhaps I am being given the gift of an opportunity to develop my parenting skills and strategies, in a relatively low-stakes context.

So here's my plan for something different:  I'll collect data.  Quietly and without fuss, I'll write down what Jordan eats each day.  Who knows, maybe I'm misperceiving his nutritional intake, and in any case it'll help me feel like I'm taking some action.  Then in two weeks, if I think the data shows that my concern is warranted, I'll consult Jordan's doctor (who is very cool).  If the doctor also thinks there is cause for concern (which I admit is unlikely... pediatricians are rarely concerned about kids' eating if the kid is healthy), then I'll have him advise me.  If the doctor wants to see Jordan, I'll  leave them alone for an independent conversation.  If the doctor tells me to lay off, I will.

When I explained my plan to Jordan he didn't like it.  "I don't want there to be three problems on me," he said.  When we asked what he meant, he said, "The patch, the thumb, and now the food."  Eep.  I hadn't thought of it that way, but he's right, we have three Jordan-improvement projects going at once, three things that he semi-resents but has to do anyway.  Maybe three is too many, especially in addition to his other responsibilities like math and spelling and learning to read and not losing his hat and gloves every day.  But it's hard to imagine letting any one of them go.

San Francisco visit

We had a terrific family vacation in San Francisco last week.  We really liked flying down on December 25; traffic is light, lines are short, everyone seems to be in a good mood.  We rejoice in our children being old enough to tote bags, and they rejoice in the toting.

In the Seattle airport, Jordan had the following conversation with a lady in the bag check line, regarding a new dinosaur shirt:

Lady:  "What a cool shirt!  Did you get that for Christmas?"
Jordan:  "Yes; even though we're Jewish, we were at someone's house who celebrates Christmas and I got this shirt."
Lady, looking astonished and pleased: "That is the best answer I ever heard!"

Granty Jes spent much of the week with us and was in quite good shape considering that she had knee replacement surgery less than three weeks ago, and Aunt Deena spent pretty much all her non-work hours with us too.  We hit the California Academy of Sciences, the newly restored salt marsh that was once Crissy Field, and the deYoung Museum observation tower.  Here's a picture from there: Dad's house is in the middle, near that biggish mustard-yellow building, which is my former elementary school.

The other side of the tower faces the Academy, which is the building with the lumpy green roof.

Here's a shot of the whole family at the monument to Cervantes near the museums:

And here we are at the bench dedicated to Mom, which is in the renewed Rhododendron Dell around the corner.  As you can see it was pretty sunny a lot of the time.

Not all the time... When we went to Crissy Field, it threatened to rain on us.

So we spent a fair amount of our time indoors.  Aaron wowed us all with his new Saxaflute, a fabulous buildable instrument contraption that was an inspired gift from Aunt Kari.  

It was a great trip! We'd like to make it a tradition.