Halloween

This year for Halloween I got it in my head that I wanted to make a kitty litter cake. This has got to be the most revolting cake joke ever, while also being delicious and funny (not scary). You start with homemade chocolate and vanilla cakes and crumble them together... in a catbox. Brand new from the store of course, but still.

Then you mix the crumbles with pudding, to make it stick together, and cover the top with white cookie crumbs. Some people like to stain a fraction of the cookie crumbs green, to mimic the chlorophyll that is in some kinds of cat litter, but I just left it plain.

Then you make homemade fudge, and roll it into poo shapes.

Isn't that lovely! I laughed and laughed the whole time I did this. Some people like to use tootsie rolls instead, but of course fudge is better. Then you arrange plenty of poo in the catbox. You just have to drape one over the edge, don't you agree? It puts the whole thing right over the top.

And then you serve it with a scoop. New, like the catbox, but still.

Once I had decided to make a kitty litter cake, of course I had to be the cat. Our friends have an annual fabulous Shabbatoween party, so there was a great audience. I draped a towel over the catbox and carried it around with me at the party; with each person I met, I said, "I am the most polite cat you'll ever meet because I bring my own catbox," and unveiled the load of poo. I said I was carrying it around "for convenience."

It was the BEST. People shrieked and cracked up and recoiled and went to get their friends and kids to show them what I had. After a while I served it. Some people could not eat the poo; others only ate the poo. Some people could not eat it at all. One friend of Jordan's said, "I have mixed feelings about this cake. My tongue is telling me it's delicious, but my mind is telling me to throw it up." One friend of Aaron's said, "Wow, your mom's poo is the best!" It was all very satisfying.

I also made my Shabbatoween classic, candy corn challah. Horrible stuff, and yet, we just have to have it.

Weekdays

Here is the situation with weekdays, according to our normal routine and also for this week which has some special features.

Yesterday was Monday. On typical Mondays, Dale picks up both kids after school (first Aaron, then Jordan) and takes them to choir by 4pm. On choir days, you have to remember to get the choir binders when you leave the house in the morning, because there’s not time to go back to the house and get them after school. When he’s dropped off the kids, he stops by the grocery store and goes home and makes dinner. I pick up the kids at 6pm and bring them home and we eat. Then the kids have piano practice and homework for most of the rest of the evening. Last night, Dale also had band practice at our house, so the boys had to get piano done quickly.

Today is Tuesday. Both kids have hot lunch on Tuesday so there is no lunch packing in the mornings, though Aaron still needs to pack a snack (and I wonder if he packed one today). Jordan has flag football after school, so he has to bring his cleats. Normally on Tuesdays my friend Jessica picks up Aaron and her son Adam after school at 3:30 and brings them to Billings at 4pm. She picks up her older son Ian then, who is in track, not football; I meet her there to collect Aaron and also Nathaniel, another Billings friend who is in track. Aaron 

and Nathaniel and I have half an hour to kill until Jordan is done with football at 4:30. Then we go back to my house, and the boys have maybe half an hour of time to do one item of homework or piano or something, before walking themselves down to religious school (including pizza dinner) at 5:30. During religious school, Dale and I host Tuesday Soup for parents with kids in religious school – I just make a big pot of soup and anyone who wants to can come and hang out with us.

However, today there is a track meet way down in Seward Park. So instead of the usual arrangement, I will pick up Aaron and Adam after school at 3:30, drop Adam at his home, pick up Jordan (only) at 4:30, and take him and Aaron home, from whence they will walk down to religious school at 5:30. There are track meets every Tuesday in October so this alternate arrangement is likely to persist for a few weeks. Also, there will not be any Tuesday Soup tonight, because it is curriculum night at the middle school.

Tomorrow is Wednesday, another choir day, my turn to pick them up this time (and remember the choir binders). I also have to remember to pick up the farm box, but on the bright side, that makes dinner easy. I do not have choir myself on Wednesday nights this fall, because I am taking a season off, so I am better able to supervise homework etc. in the evening. Dale has band practice at our house again tomorrow, with a different band than on Monday.

Thursdays Jordan gets out at 3:30, and it is his night to make dinner. Normally I pick him up, he and I grab any groceries he needs, and I help him get started cooking. If all this is pretty efficient, he can come with me to pick up Aaron from his afterschool program at 5pm. I also pick up Adam and give him a ride home. When we get back from that, Jordan finishes making dinner, and then there is piano and homework time in the evening. However, this Thursday, Jordan won’t be making dinner, because we are going to a friend’s house for dinner in her sukkah. We do, however, need to bring a dish; maybe Jordan can make it.

A further complication is that this Thursday, Aaron has the day off school because it is the first day of Sukkot. For these school holidays Jessica, Sara, and I have a kid-sitting ring; Thursday is my day to host. It’s only Amara this time because Adam has another thing. I can take a partial day and just do some work from home (the kids entertain themselves), but there is one 90-minute meeting first thing in the morning that I don’t want to miss. I suggested to Sara that we meet at the Billings dropoff and I take Aaron and Amara to work with me from there; they could have screen time or play with physics toys in my office for an hour and a half, and then I’d take them home, then over to a neighbor friend’s house in the middle of the day where there is a big ol’ sukkot shindig for all the fifth graders. Unfortunately, Amara has an interfering orthodontist appointment that morning. We asked whether Amara could go to the sukkot shindig house early, but it turns out their daughter has an orthodontist appointment too. So I will have my meeting on the phone, which is fine, and Amara will arrive at our house during my meeting.

As far as the end of the day on Thursday, I was thinking it would be super easy, because we’re all going to the same sukkot dinner party so I could just bring Amara there. But it turns out Amara has theater rehearsal at 4:30. So the plan is that when I pick up Jordan at 3:30, I will give Amara to her brother Nathaniel (who is also released at 3:30 that day), and they will take the bus together to her rehearsal. (I offered to drive them, but they are jazzed about the bus.) And then we will probably see them at dinner afterwards.

Finally, there is Friday. Normally on Fridays I pick up Aaron at 3:30, happily hang around his schoolyard for a while with lots of other happy Friday parents, pick up Jordan at 4:30 after flag football, and go home and make a nice dinner. However, this Friday is another day off for Aaron. Amara’s family is hosting, and I haven’t figured out the logistics yet. Maybe Dale will be able to take Aaron to their house in the morning, and we will all meet back at the Billings pickup at 4pm (when track is done); Aaron and I would then wait for Jordan to get out of flag football at 4:30, and go home for dinner. Dale has a gig Friday night so it will be just the three of us.

Phew. That’s a lot. This week has special circumstances because of the holidays, but honestly every week has something outside of the ordinary, and even just the normal routine is pretty complex. And I haven't even mentioned the morning carpool. Parent friends, I am sure you feel me. I don’t know how we do it!

Madrich

Jordan is a madrich (instructional assistant) in religious school this year. It is his first job of this kind. He is one of about 135 madrichim at our synagogue, in grades 8-12 (serving about 450 students K-7). Many of them help in the classrooms, but they are also song leaders, photographers, librarians, art room organizers, you name it. It's an awesome program.

Jordan is a madrich in a kindergarten class... in the same classroom where he was a preschooler the year we moved here. (My heart!) He reports that the kindergarteners are very cute, that most of them do not say R's or L's properly, and that some of them act very authoritative or bossy, but are not very good at it. Jordan wants to say, "Dude, you're six years old." But he doesn't, because it is his job to be friendly and helpful to them. He didn't even react when the hot glue gun blurped melted glue all over his thumb, because he felt he needed to appear calm and disciplined in front of the students. This was very difficult: his hand was in extreme pain and all he wanted to do was run out of the room and plunge his hand into ice water, but instead he explained patiently to the children something like, "if you don't use a hot glue gun properly, you can get an owie. See, like this right here? It really hurts." A teacher's life, I tell you what.

One of the young ladies, whose name seems to be Poppy, has taken a special shine to Jordan. She spotted him at a park when she was in her family car and babbled to him out the window, saying, "I'm kind of obthethed with you!" Too funny. Jordan claims he hardly does anything to merit this obsession, just listens to her as she chatters happily away. But that clearly counts for a lot.

Torn paper

In art class yesterday, Aaron's task was to create a Yom Kippur-related piece using paper that is torn, not cut. So here is G-d striking down an evil man. Aaron says, "He's been evil for a long time; see how he's old?"

Therefore repent, all you evil old people - and younger ones, there's still time to clean up your act. Teshuvah, tefilah, and tzedakah can avert the severity of the decree!

Astronomy

Eighth graders at Jordan's school do a year-long project on a subject of their choice, and Jordan's choice is astronomy. He recently had to write a proposal, and he will eventually be conducting research, shadowing or interviewing professional astronomers, creating something astronomy-related...not sure what exactly. All of this is still in the formative stages. While he is musing, I thought of a bunch of astronomy questions that I thought might be accessible and interesting to a middle schooler, which are also interesting to me. Some of these I mostly know the answers to (though there would always be more to learn), and some of them are genuine questions of mine, as in, if I were doing a project on astronomy these are questions I myself would want to answer.

1. Are there planets outside our solar system? How can we tell? Can we see them in telescopes?
2. What kinds of things are out there in space? Stars, planets, and what else? How can we tell the different things apart?
3. Where are the big telescopes? Why are they in those places? Are there any problems or conflicts about the big telescopes?
4. Can you do astronomy in Seattle, where it is cloudy much of the time? What can and can't you do?
5. What is the life of an astronomer like? Do you have to stay up all night? Do you have to  live in a certain place?
6. Historically/globally, which people did astronomy, within a given culture? Did you have to be rich? Male? A priest? 
7. How about now, in the US - what kinds of people do astronomy? What are the problems with racism, sexism, etc. in astronomy?
8. Why did people do astronomy historically - what were they trying to accomplish? 
9. How about now, in the US - what are astronomers trying to accomplish? Are they trying to make the world a better place or help people in some way? Are they trying to get rich? Benefit their countries?
10. Spaceships and telescopes must cost a lot. Who pays for them? Why? Do they hope to get anything back for it? Where does the money come from? Who does it benefit?
11. I heard that astronomers just crashed the spaceship Cassini on purpose. Why? What was Cassini doing?
12. What spaceships are out there in space now? What is their purpose? Are they working? Will we crash them too?
13. Someone told me you can tell time by the Big Dipper. How do you do that?

I am not planning to pursue these questions... I have enough projects! But it was fun to think of them. I shared them with Jordan but I don't think he adopted them.

In closing, here is Cassini's last portrait of Saturn.

Ankle screws

Dale had surgery yesterday to remove the screws from his ankle. It would have been an office procedure with just local anesthesia (I was even invited to watch), but unfortunately the screws had broken, and the procedure had to be done in the operating room. The broken screws were not too bad; it didn't hurt (Dale didn't even know it had happened) and his doctor was unconcerned. This kind of screw only tends to last 6-9 months and in Dale's case it had been 7 months. However, it's still a disappointment. Nobody wants to go to the OR if they don't have to. 

Fortunately it all went very smoothly. The operation was on time, which was amazing to me, I was prepared for them to be anywhere from 2 to 6 hours late. (Last time they were 6 hours late.) The surgery itself was as it should be: four small incisions, two where they used a screwdriver to remove the piece of the bolt and two where they used something like an "easy-out" tool because it was the broken end of the bolt. We have learned that Dale needs extra time to recover from general anesthesia; he is dizzy and pukey when he wakes up, and no amount of fancy antinausea drugs seems to counter this; he just needs time. Now he's home and reasonably comfortable. He had to wear a boot at first, but only for a day while he had a bulky bandage on. Now he can switch to a more ordinary bandage and a regular shoe. He doesn't need crutches, and his pain is minimal. He took a post-surgery day off work to rest and then expects to be back to business. He is overjoyed not to be screwed any longer.

Even though everything was basically ideal, it's still a tiring day, being in the hospital. You can't have a loved one under general anesthesia and not be at least a little bit concerned about the outcome. Even just being surrounded by other people having surgery is kind of exhausting; so much illness and trauma and disability, waiting to be repaired. But thankfully we're fine. They gave us the screws to take home.

Identities

Part of Jordan’s school paperwork for eighth grade referred to the idea that many kids at this age try out “different identities.” 

Jordan: I don’t know what that means, “different identities.”
Me: That’s a thing where kids decide that they are a different kind of person than they used to be, sometimes all of a sudden. Maybe a kid who used to be all about sports suddenly changes his mind so that now he really just wants to read all the time. Maybe someone who didn’t used to do their homework decides that now they want to be a total homework-doer. Maybe someone who had been wearing colorful clothes decides to wear all black. That was me by the way – when I was in middle school, or I forget what age actually, I wore all black all the time. My mother used to ask me if I was going to a funeral. But I really just liked black.
Jordan: Only black?
Me: I remember that really every single piece of clothing I wore was black, every day. I don’t know why. When I describe it it sounds kind of extreme. But it was just what I liked right then. I guess I was kind of a goth. Then later I changed to being a hippie and wore rainbow tie-dye and grew my hair long. So that was a change of identity. Another time I had very light blonde hair that was short and spiky.
Aaron: Do you have any pictures of that?
[I don’t have many pictures of myself as a teenager, except for things like the junior prom. But I did find this picture of myself camping with my parents.]



Both kids: That is YOU??
Me: How can you even need to ask that? I look exactly the same as I do now.
Them: No you do not.

Oh well.