Stealth Jew

2012-01-29T02:26:00.000-08:00

Not long ago, my daughter declared that Firefly had prevented her from sleeping well. She said, "I didn't get my beauty sleep."

Her younger brother, not to be outdone, replied, "Well I didn't get my Spiderman sleep!"

They say that brands seek to hook children as early as possible, because if you are a Heinz Ketchup buyer at five, you will be a Heinz Ketchup forever. This has not held true in my life. I think my parents bought off-brand ketchup, and I find ketchup oddly repulsive in an at-home setting and never buy it. Any ketchup purchased is my husband's doing. Ketchup in restaurants doesn't bother me at all.

If brands do hook children forever, it is safe to assume that Genome will be wearing Spiderman underpants well into his middle age. Or he will do as Husband does, and have a son to purchase Spiderman underpants for instead.

Inequalities

2012-01-12T22:01:00.000-08:00

The 1 < 4 type, not the Occupy Wall Street Kind.

"Now Munchkin, does the alligator choose three cookies, or two cookies?"
"Three cookies."
"Does the alligator choose two cookies, or one cookie?"
"One cookie."
"Does he choose three cookies, or five cookies?"
"Both."
"He has to choose one."
"Okay, he chooses one cookie."
"No, he has to choose one number."
"Okay, he chooses eleventy-billion cookies."
"No, which is bigger, three, or five?"
"Three."
"How is three bigger than five?"
"Because you drew a bigger three there, and that's kind of a little five."
"No, which represents the larger quantity of cookies?"
"Can I have a cookie?"
"If you do this page of arithmetic I will give you a cookie."
"Can I have five cookies?"

2012-01-04T02:17:00.000-08:00

It occurred to me some time ago that many of my female friends and I seem to have essentially the same complaints about our husbands. Not that I complain about my husband often. He's really astonishingly tolerant. I'm not just saying this. People I barely know tell him so. I'm widely known as a lunatic.

So, on to the complaint. Husbands often don't seem to understand the highly time-sensitive nature of household tasks. Let me given an example. In my husband's work, he might have to write a letter. There's a deadline, let's make it Friday. So any time between now and Friday, he writes the letter. And when the letter is written, it's done. It doesn't unwrite itself and need to be rewritten tomorrow. And it doesn't particularly matter whether he writes it Monday or Wednesday.

Dishes are not like this. If he agrees to clear the dishes, this is not a single endeavor, a ceremonial Clearing of the Table after which the table will be ever and always cleared. In fact, the table is at most temporarily cleared, until such a time as we need it again, about eight hours from now. So when I ask what happened to the table some twelve hours after we ate dinner and accuse him of failing to clear it, his defence of "I haven't failed to clear the table. I just haven't cleared the table _yet_." doesn't really accomplish my objectives.

My objectives are to keep the knives away from Firefly and not to feel like my mother is looking down on us, judging.

My mother is also a very nice person who would not actually stare judgmentally, but worse, try to demonstrate how a helpful schedule-oriented system would prevent my house from looking like a frat house from an eighties Revenge of the Nerds movie, only with a wider selection of alcohol than just beer. Even though she's known me my whole life, my mother has never quite accepted that I'm a total loss on the domestic front.

So I had more or less decided that this must be a genetic defect that travels on the Y chromosome when a woman I know related that she had the same problem with her girlfriend who, as far as I know, does not have a Y chromosome.

Now I'm left thinking that perhaps I just make friends with people who are neurotic (as I am) and WASPishly uncommunicative (guilty), and that's why they can't make their life partner understand that if we don't change the children's close occasionally, the other mothers will talk.

Actually, if my husband were in charge of the dishes, he'd convert the whole house to paper plates and plastic cutlery by nightfall. I have stronger feelings against disposable tableware than I do about most of what shows up on Amnesty International, including a to-the-wall fight over the appropriateness of a plastic table cover for a formal occasion. I am against plastic cutlery. I am not quite sure why I am so against it. It's not just because of assiduous pro-environmental brain-washing as a child, because I feel very little uneasiness, say, tossing recyclables, and I never reuse scrap paper. I think it has to do with that imaginary-mother-judgement issue again.

No Rest for the Weary

2011-12-16T01:15:00.000-08:00

As my daughter clung to the railing of my mother's house, screaming "save me, grandma, save me, don't let them kill me!", I suspected I may have made a wrong turn somewhere in my gentle guidance of her development.

Let me retrace my steps.

After we finished her morning work on phonics -- may I just interject here that phonics are very, very boring? -- she was supposed to have her piano lesson at her grandmother's. After her piano lesson, she and her brother were going to go with Tatty to deliver cookies to various ill members of our congregation.

All to the good. She was happy to see her father. She wanted to bring a glass of water. No, her father told her, you don't need refreshments to steel you for the five blocks to the home for the aged. You will not die of dehydration; this is not the Sahara.

We live in a rain forest.

This is where the little train started to run off of its tracks. Her father told her to get in the car. She refused. He insisted. She broke away screaming, running back to my mother's house, yelling, "grandma, save me, save me!"

By the time she was locked in the main floor bathroom, she was probably wise to lock the door against me.

Some time later she explained to me that she had attempted to hold on to her calm place, but it had escaped and run down her leg, disappearing.

Rather like she did, but with less screaming.

Then she wept for an hour.

Then something amused her and she fell on the floor giggling.

My daughter has more emotional range on an average afternoon than I have displayed in the last ten years.

All the weary mothers of the world . . .

2011-12-12T18:38:00.001-08:00

Firefly declined his nap time. I hope to exact payment from him in the form of an early bedtime. And by "early" I mean "on time, like any normal child."

Thing I don't understand: the 180 day school schedule. Munchkin's books usually have lesson plans of 140 or so lessons. I don't know what the other days are. And apparently we're supposed to be doing 180 lessons a year. I have to work every day. Why is it that children don't? And given that children have the memories of goldfish (once round the bowl and they've forgotten everything they ever knew and are seeing the pink stucco castle for the very first time), would it be better to give them shorter lessons more often rather than full days only half of the year?

Drowning woman waving

2011-12-10T20:25:00.000-08:00

I'm drowning. That's why I'm not updating here. Munchkin is spending three to four hours a day doing home school, which has tipped the workload for her mother from "controlled chaos" to just the chaos part. Plus this being-Jewish business is time-consuming. Especially in a city without a close by kosher bakery that we are willing to use.

I'm looking for someone to clean and/or run my boys in a circle a few times a week, and if I find someone (IYH) I will update more often.

Minutia

2011-11-17T00:25:00.000-08:00

It makes me happy to know that should the police ever come to my house, they would know immediately that I'm not a drug addict. They would know this because, if TV and personal experience are to be believed (and of course they are), drug addicts never have sheets on their beds. I am marginally neurotic about sheets on beds.

No one has ever tested me for drugs immediately post-childbirth. No one has tested my children either.

If you are having a difficult day and feeling slightly tearful, it is important that you not listen to anything by Joan Baez. Just put the Joan Baez down and step away. Instead, watch documentaries about meth addiction and be pleased that you change your sheets regularly and are not in rehab. Rehab (why is it always called rehab and never rehabilitation?) looks dull in that workshoppy way. You know, trust exercises and brain storming and listening to dull people take turns speaking while everyone sits in a circle. I wish to avoid all of these activities, which is why I don't want to go into teaching nor become an alcoholic. Plus this particular TV-rehab looks like it makes you bring your children.

Why My Child Needs to Narrow Her Horizons

2011-11-13T07:53:00.000-08:00

Sinagpore Math is a very popular math program for home schoolers. It's supposed to teach children to think mathematically, broaden their horizons, and turn them into little math geniuses. Or something. Anyway, we were working on Math 1A. There is a picture of eight rabbits. Three are above ground. Five are below ground. Prompt: "Tell a story about these rabbits."

Munchkin: "Once upon a time, long, long ago, G-d created the very first bunny . . . "

Around about the time that Mummy Bunny met Daddy Bunny's eyes from across a beautiful spring field, I suggested we jump ahead to the part where she tells me how many bunnies there are.

"There are some bunnies, okay mummy? I'm trying to tell a story!"

We're doing Saxon Math for awhile now.

Homeschool Room

2011-11-01T00:51:00.000-07:00

On Becoming Devoted commented on the last post about people who have a perfect homeschool room, nicely matched to their perfect homeschool life. I do not know how much space I would need to have before I could devote an entire room to homeschooling. I do know that we do not have that much room now, and I cannot foresee ever having it in the future.

Munchkin on the parsha: G-d told Noah He was going to flood the world, so Noah built an arch, so he could climb up on it to get out of the rain.

I am watching the movie Commune.

I do not normally watch movies because I have no attention span. I am trying to watch this one.

These people spent an awful lot of time naked. An awful lot. But their children are dressed like mine. What I mean is that my children have that non-Christian, west coast homeschooler look. "I dress myself." "Why of course my mummy lets me wear a princess dress and superhero cape to the grocery store. Doesn't yours?" You know the type. You can tell from twenty paces that my children are homeschooled, that mummy bakes their bread, and that they spent way too much time sleeping in mummy and daddy's bed. In other words, they scream "poor boundaries." It's charming to me, anyway. I always wear clothes though. But you can clearly tell that they're a bit feral.

2011-10-30T01:39:00.001-07:00

I'm probably not cut out to home school my child. I don't actually like teaching. My mother is a natural teacher, but I've inherited my father's disposition in that respect. Unfortunately for us, my daughter is less cut out for school than I am for home schooling.

Slowly, slowly, she is learning to read and numerate.

I have heartburn.

This may be part of living with small children, but whenever I see some sort of "extreme hoarding" video, I always think that that is exactly what my house would look like if I just let things go for a few too many days.

I probably wouldn't acquire animals. I think I would notice that. Especially cats, to which I am mildly allergic.

Nonetheless, it is my job to beat back the hoard. And to beat back the teensy little hoarders who think that my home should be decorated in Early Fisher-Price. I don't literally beat them back; Don't call CPS.

Oh! And we have a toilet. And a bathroom to keep it in! And it isn't even yellow-on-green anymore. What more could a lady want?

Down for the count

2011-10-26T20:31:00.000-07:00

The chag just ended. During the chag, our slightly-leaky toilet became a very-leaky toilet. The plumbers came and took the toilet away. Now there's no toilet, but at least it doesn't leak.

My husband promises me that there will be a toilet soon. I believe with perfect faith . . .

Every Sukkos, my nieces come out from NYC, the home of all things Jewish. Inevitably my children contract something snotty, or streppy, or both. It's been snotty this time. Slight fever. I don't know if my children give the nieces something to take home, besides a whole new vocabulary of words they aren't allowed to say at Cheder. I suspect they do, but my sister-in-law has excellent manners and would never mention it.

Firefly, never my best-tempered child, is using this opportunity to let his brat flag fly. If I put him down, he screams. Then he follows me, screaming. Often as not, he trips (being more interested in screaming than in walking) and lands on his face, and then he really screams.

My mother, the Mayoress, needed four scripts filled. As is often the case for people needing prescription medications, she was unwell and unable to fill them herself.

I think I've mentioned this scenario before.

I went to Store One to be told that:
- Two of the medications she needs will take 24 hours;
- One of the medications she needs must be filled at Store Two; and,
- I'm welcome to wait half an hour for the fourth medication.

I feel that this has been a negative customer experience. I eagerly await the day that drive through prescriptions come to Canada.

The other day on the radio Mark Steyn said that a country that can't fill a prescription in less than forty-five minutes is likely doomed. Twenty-four hours is much longer than forty-five minutes.

Faux Judaism and Itunes

2011-10-18T23:07:00.000-07:00

I think I've ranted before about people who are actually Christian, but for whatever reason want to practice some Jewish rituals. The most irritating example of this is Lina at A Set Apart Life. I am not responsible if you go there and your teeth rot out from the sugary prose.

Anyhow, "Messianic Judaism," a.k.a. Christianity, is catching on. Unfortunately, since we're a tiny minority, if a sizable portion of Christians adopt the "Jewish" label, their noise will drown out our signal.

Even more upsetting is that posing as Jews is a tactic that missionaries use to drop Christianity on unsuspecting and vulnerable Jews who are trying to learn more about their Jewish identity. Even irreligious Jews are strongly attached to their identity as Jews and therefore unwilling to listen to missionaries. As a result unscrupulous missionaries package their message as being about Judaism, only springing the Jesus angle later on.

Itunes is collaborating (unwittingly) in their deception.

When I went to the Judaism category, between a quarter and a third of the podcasts featured were actually Christian. Most were labeled as "Messianic this-or-that," which means I can at least filter them out. They shouldn't be in Judaism, but they are relatively forward about what they are.

Others required me to do a google search before I could confirm that they were actually Christian podcasts.

This is completely unacceptable. If we can't keep a category called "Judaism" for podcasts relevant to, well, Judaism, then at least we shouldn't have to sift through listing that are clearly deceptive.

If this annoys you as much as it does me, go to your itunes store for itunes and enter the Judaism category. Feel free to leave some reviews for some of these guys. Don't let them put a stumbling block in front of another Jew:

Jason Sobel
Talking Torah with Jeff Gilbert
Hope of Israel with Sam Nadler

Meanwhile, a warning: Be very careful when you explore websites and podcasts for Jewish learning. Make sure you know the speaker is worth listening to before you invest your precious learning time.

Yom Kippur and onwards

2011-10-10T21:48:00.000-07:00

I think that this is how Yom Kippur is supposed to work: We all fast, and push ourselves to new levels of religious devotion. We exhaust ourselves. We promise to do better. The next day, invigorated by our exertion, we do better. Or try to.

This is what actually happens: Two weeks before Rosh Hashanna, I am moving at full speed. I turn over the children's drawers for the seasons. I procure new clothes. I get hair cuts, locate tights, polish shoes, and bake nine loaves of bread. I cook. I style my wig.

In between Rosh Hashannah and Yom Kippur, I wash the piles and piles of laundry that built up over the three-day holiday (more or less everything we own). I remove stains and hand-wash tiny children's formal wear. I hem. I re-hem. I tack up hems. I re-style my wig. I iron. Now there's a rarity. I force the five-year-old through a semblance of reading and math. Also, I plant. I lay down newspaper, then soil, and plant it with onions and garlic. I cover the new seeds with plastic. When they sprout, I mulch. I plant all the spinach.

Also, our toilet decided to turn its slow leak into a somewhat less slow, really too fast for comfort leak. As a result we're having bathroom disruption. Don't worry! There's another bathroom in the basement! Of course, I had closed it up (because I don't want to clean two toilets) and the kids are afraid to go down there alone. We're using the opportunity to paint over the ugly green paneling with a charming shade known as "what we already had extra of." So add "sporadic use of a bathroom" to the balls that must be kept in the air.

At the pre-Yom Kippur meal, there were signs all was not going according to plan. I botched both the rice (undercooked) and the bread (over-risen). The rice was crunchy. The children didn't notice, because they were busy fighting over ownership of a glow-in-the-dark sticker.

Then we fast for 25 hours from food and water.

The day after Yom Kippur, I have a tiny mini breakdown. It involves crying a lot, and not having any desire to better myself, or to sit outside in the rain in a plastic hut.

Also, my husband's relatives are coming.

Also, we're taking his father's dog for the duration.

It's been pouring rain every night for three straight nights.

When I prompt my daughter with, "G-d gave Noah the rainbow sign," she cheerfully responds, "No more water the fire next time!" No more water? Not quite.

Rosh Hashanna

2011-09-28T00:08:00.000-07:00

Someone please tell me why all the Jewish holidays are at the least convenient times?

The High Holidays come during harvest, canning, and winter planting. Pesach comes right when I want to do summer planting. Plus I have a million little starts that need fussing over.

This is just a long way of explaining why I've spent the evening harvesting the parsnips and carrots, baking nine loaves of bread, three honey cakes, and ten pots of blackberry jam. I'm not normally this productive.

Once upon a time, Jewish cooking was a great thing. But Internet, these are not our glory days.

Munchkin is certainly theologically prepared. Her favourite song as of late is Hallelujah. If you've never heard a five-year-old croon Leonard Cohen, you haven't lived.

She also likes Bruce Springsteen from The Seeger Sessions. As a result, she responds perfectly to the following prompt:

"G-d gave Noah the rainbow sign . . . "
"No more water the fire next time!"

Doom Dog

2011-09-15T21:35:00.000-07:00

My mother's dog, Strawberry, hates me. Strawberry is a small, grumpy shih tzu. Shih tzus are not the picture of health and virility at the best of times. this one is obviously the shih tzu runt. But not runty in a cute way. Just stringy. When she's wet, she looks like a drowned rat.

Strawberry hates me.

Strawberry has always hated me. I think she thinks I'm an intruder on my mother's main activity of feeding and otherwise pampering Strawberry. I demand she pee outside in the snow. I try to prevent my children from feeding her cereal and ice cream. I do nothing but thwart her desire to eat food that's bad for her, pee on the carpet, and sit on a pillow.

Strawberry is fifteen years old. She will never die.

Or so I thought. This morning my mother called me to say that she needed help. Strawberry had been, well, emitting. From three orifices. Orifi? Anyhow, it was bad. My mother had been cleaning all night and was beside herself. She assumed that Strawberry was preparing to die. Strawberry was wandering around, stunned.

Because I am a good daughter and do not believe in cheap grace, I bundled up the children and off we went. I secreted the children in another room with my mother and set out to attack Strawberry's presents.

Did I mention this dog hates me?

I have three children. I have never smelled anything so bad in my life. Rotovirus has nothing on the smell that this dog made. And this dog made this smell in every room in the house, sometimes in several forms in every room.

I cleaned it all up. I got out the mop. I got out the bleach. I mopped up the entire house.

She wandered a drunkard's path on to the landing and threw up. Then she threw up on the bookshelf. Then she went to sleep.

It had been totally perfectly clean.

I cleaned it up again. I mopped the floors again. I took out the garbage again. Then, I took a breath.

My mother's house smelled exactly like a vet's waiting room. It was bleach-on-vomit. I hadn't identified "vet smell" before, but now I know exactly what it is. It is the smell of bleach on top of worse-than-roto-virus-doggie-puke.

Strawberry didn't die. She'd eaten some moldy carrots from a forgotten lunch, plus most of the ziploc baggy. She's still with us; or rather, with my mother. She still hates me.

I think she will live forever.

Firefly has said his first word. It's "woof."

Back Ache

2011-09-09T00:01:00.000-07:00

Sometimes a zeitgeist takes the blogosphere. Minimalism, for example. The entire Christian blog community convulsed with pretend-amishness a few years ago. In the mommyworld, it's usually some reheated hippie stuff. Some new gloss on not vaccinating, or birthing in the living room, or never letting your kids within ten miles of plastic.

Right now a lot of people are into "living simply."

I have three children five and under. The only way I could simplify would be to ditch two of them. there is no socially acceptable way to do this, so we're going to have to work out a way to be happy with complications.

Well enough. But why does "living simply" translate into "moving to a farm"?

In that vein, I recently read This Life is in Your Hands and The Egg and I. The former is about an organic vegetable farm (affiliated with Helen and Scott Nearing) and the latter about a chicken farm.

Nothing about a farm looks simple or uncomplicated to me. I keep a fairly intense garden. I'm kind of glad that when something doesn't work out, it's easy to dispose of the evidence. I definitely keep a closer eye on the kids because of this quality. Cows, sheep, that sort of thing, they definitely fall into the "awkward disposal" category.

Second, I'm not sure that I'm responsible enough to own animals. I'm responsible enough to own children, but the standards are much lower for that. No one is going to get e coli if I forget to change the sheets this week.

Finally, as I explained in my previous entry, I'm heavily lettuce-centric. I'm not sure that there's a huge market for that.

Nesting Doll

2011-09-08T22:59:00.000-07:00

My mother went to Texas. She brought Munchkin a Russian nesting doll. Munchkin is entranced. She carries it everywhere. I asked her why. Munchkin says, "mummy, she has no feet."

This is quite true.

Genome started yelling, AAAAAAAAAAH.

I yelled back, AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH. LET'S ALL PANIC.

Genome said, "Mummy, shhhh! You as noisy as Firefly!"

That isn't the silliest thing I've done today. the silliest thing I've done is suggested putting a toy soldier in the time out chair, because it hurt Munchkin's feet when she stepped on it.

The winter garden is in. If I had a theme for it, it would be "lettuce." And kale. And more lettuce. So help me, the range is limited for outdoor gardening in Canada in the winter.

Fashion Maven

2011-08-25T22:17:00.000-07:00

I've always admired people whose children look coordinated and stylish. When confronted with my own children, insisting that they wear X or Y, I surrender immediately. Unless it's Shabbes, I just can't force myself to insist on clothing that is appropriate for the occasion, let alone coordinated.

With that in mind, allow me to share some of the recent outfits my daughter has selected.

For a trip to the park: Tutu, Hello Kitty leotard, bright pink knee socks, fairy wand, doll, fairy wings.
For Kumon: A "Spidergirl" dress, Spiderweb mask purchased from the dollar store and altered to add an elastic strap.
For the community centre: one purple sock, one white sock, both worn with sandals. cord skirt, pink. Pink shirt bearing bubblegum logo. Masquerade mask on a stick. Straw hat.
For Maariv, evening prayers, at synagogue with her daddy: A complete Care Bear outfit.

Genome is rather more subdued. He simply wishes to wear the same shirt (Star Wars) every day for the rest of his life. He can't understand why I cruelly insist on watching it when he's worn the shirt so many times that even unobservant neighbours are making comments. I'm afraid that please of "I wash it when he's asleep!" don't really make me sound better.

He would also prefer to jettison pants altogether. I suppose he is a sans-culottes at heart, but if I get my head cut off, I'm going to be irritated.

His yarmulke has Spiderman drawn in puff paint and is usually cocked one way or the other, or flying off. His tzitzits fall to his ankles.

Most curiously, he pulls the outfit together with a pair of rubber boots, even on the hottest day of the year. I'm not sure whether this indicates a lack of observational powers (other people rarely wear boots unless it's raining quite hard), or an excellent understanding of the local climate.

Minutia

2011-08-22T09:14:00.000-07:00

The other day, Genome was angry and wouldn't speak to me. To voice (as it were) his displeasure, he hid in the closet. With two feet sticking out. He lasted perhaps twenty seconds before he hurried out.

"Genome, why did you leave the closet?"
"Der GHOSTS in dat coset!"
He hurriedly closed the door, giving it an extra shove for good measure.
"Keep the ghosts in DER."

Genome is becoming a young man. Yesterday he cheerfully suggested that his toy be fixed with duct tape.

Someone suggested that if I didn't allow (nay, encourage) my children to read the types of books that they do, it's possible that they wouldn't communicate in knight-and-ghost talk. This is in all likelihood true. On the other hand, that Jack is out of its box, and I can't say that the results aren't colourful. I'll have to cook up some theory of being inspired by Bruno Bettleheim and advancing their psychological development in some way.

I live in one of those rainy single-season coastal cities that never gets particularly hot, nor particularly cold. It only becomes really hot for a brief period, perhaps a week or two interspersed with rain. This means that owning a pair of shorts is really surplus to requirements, let alone a proper summer wardrobe, one capable of keeping the wearer cool while maintaining his dignity. Come heat, people dig in their closets for whatever seems vaguely appropriate, unwilling to spend any actual money for what amounts to seven days of wear.

This week has been hot. About half the people I see are in their gym strip. Not "sports-styled" clothing. Actual gym strip, ratty shorts and occasional school athletic logos. Other people choose to wear the same Summer Outfit they've had since they vacationed to Disney World in August of 1985. One man in his late middle age looked particularly fetching in a pair of neon-on-neon shorts. Those were ravingly cool when I was a child. It was orange neon flowers on a green neon background. Do you remember orange neon? I never see it around now.

I can't wait until winter. That's when all our children go sledding in their rainboots, stuffed with several pairs of cotton socks.

Subway

2011-08-15T09:50:00.001-07:00

Last week, the Captain was riding the subway home from work. Our subway system has no turnstiles. Instead, your ticket is checked by a highly paid, unionised employee who is also in charge of general crowd control, policing, and so forth.

Since the employees are highly paid and unionised, there aren't a whole lot of them. And since there aren't a whole lot of them (and, I assume, they're giving priority to resolving potential or actual Situations over checking tickets), not a lot of ticket-checking goes on. It's not uncommon to go months, even years, without being asked to show proof of fare.

So on Friday, the Captain was asked to show his proof of fair. He absent-mindedly pulls out his transit pass. The transit cop points out that he hasn't scratched out whether this is a transit pass for zone one, two, or three. Quite true, he hasn't. He scratches out zone one.

Walking home he notices that he has forgotten to replace his pass this month. He is riding on July's.

My daughter is on acid. She hears orange, thinks it's very pink today, and feels sorry for eight having to be there by mean Mr. Nine. She's usually having a good trip, but it's been known to go the other way.

My older son is on marijuana. He's happy and laid-back. He always has the munchies. He really, really likes Scooby Doo.

I don't know what my younger son is on. He buzzes around happily doing something or nothing, and then at the ninety minute mark he erupts in shrieking, the world's most hideous broken alarm clock. He does this at ninety minute intervals throughout the night, and sometimes throughout the day. He has this shriek that penetrates your reptile brain and urges you to suffocate him for the good of the tribe, lest a sabertooth tiger eat you all.

On the other hand, it's plausible that like a skunk or a hedgehog, his shriek is a way of signaling to sabertooth tigers that eating him isn't worth the aggravation.

I could be on anything, except I've got a massive addiction and I haven't had it for three days. In other words, today I could plausible feature as an addict in Intervention.

The problem is I didn't do any drugs (i.e. have any fun) to get here. It's just a manifestation of living with the world's loudest broken alarm clock.

2011-08-02T22:40:00.000-07:00

Munchkin was punished for general bratty and impossibly spoiled behaviour, which she had the charming sense of timing to break into in front of several visitors.

She went in to the bathroom and poured out her woes to the toilet paper.

"Toilet paper," she said, "I am so sad and so tired. I have had such a hard day. I wish someone would come and carry me to bed and tuck me in."

I went into the bathroom. "Munchkin," I said, "may I carry you up to bed and tuck you in?" She agreed. I scooped her up and she said good night to the toilet paper.

As I carried her to her bedroom, she put her head against my shoulder and closed her eyes. "Mummy," she said, "how did you know where to find me?"

I should not let my children look at pattern collections. Other people, people with standards, have children who wear normal clothing. Maybe these children even request new regular clothing to wear. Someone has to be buying all of the clothing sold outside of the "costume" section.

My son alternates between dressing as a superhero, and as a dinosaur.

The other day, Genome was wandering around wearing a Darth Vader mask. He was carrying a long sword in one hand and a cutlass in the other. He was singing to himself: "I like dogs. I like dogs."

Good to know.

Parasol

2011-07-21T23:05:00.000-07:00

I was going to title this post, "this is how babies get shaken," and talk about my youngest keeping me up all of last night. But since this blog got dragged elsewhere, and someone was using my lack of sandwich-making prowess as an example of my sub-par parenting, it would probably be best to avoid the shaken-baby angle.

That was a joke people.

For the record, angry readers, I am not unfit to home school because I'm no good at making lunches. I home school _because_ I'm no good at making lunches. I'm also not particularly good at filling out forms printed on coloured paper and adorned with clip-art.

Really though. If you feel that you are more capable of making a dairy-free, nut-free, meat-free, and kosher jam; and if you want me to know that you are therefore a more fit mother than I am, please contact me c/o StealthJew. I will sample your wares and get back to you with a verdict.

An anecdote, to close.

Actual adult: Munchkin, you can't have an umbrella in bed.
Munchkin: It's a parasol.

YM

2011-07-18T23:18:00.000-07:00

My house is something of the flophouse of our neighbourhood. Sandwiched between accommodating neighbours and down the block from a large synagogue, we easily attract people, many of whom have an open invitation. Were we in college, ours is the type of house that would always produce wafts of marijuana smoke.

My house itself is in poor condition. I live in a city where the property makes up so much of our value that I await the day that the city deducts money from our assessment for having any structure on our property at all. As far as the city is concerned, I might as well live in a mid-ranged pup tent. My house is managed by a subpar housekeeper (yours truly). But I'm a good cook. So coming to my house gives the visitor that warm, happy feeling of being in the company of people who keep a much messier house than you do, with fairly good food to boot. Additionally, everyone living in my house except for me is a nice person, and good company.

This Shabbes, we had not one, not two, but three young and attractive couples over.

That's the stuff. Anyone feel like taking some quizzes?

I have been married for awhile now, and my husband and I both had the same thought: I am so happy that I am not dating.

When one is married, one learns to take certain good qualities for granted. But having young friends who are just dating reminds the observer that there is an entire world of faults out there, faults that the observer had forgotten existed.

A young lady broke up with the Captain for "inhibiting the positivity of [her] self-worth." Date, and you may end up dating someone who speaks in psychobabble.

Date, and you may end up dating someone who eats octopus or eel and wants to share.

Date, and you may find a vegan, or someone someone who Master Cleanses.

The next man you date may be Casey Serin. The next woman you date may be Aria Star

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Casey Serin, serial fraudster.

A friend of mine is adjusting to a new marriage. They are compatible. They had a long courtship. Nonetheless, I think a certain amount of marriage adjustment just has to be done with teeth gritted and the thought "I could always torch this place and run off to stay at the Hotel 6" in the back of one's mind.

Actually, that last part might just have been me.

American Pie

2011-07-04T20:43:00.000-07:00

My husband invited some American ex-pats for the Fourth of July. As the most humane climate in Canada, we have quite a few. i wanted to do something American for the Americans. Fourth of July, yes? So I made iced tea. I found some instructions on the internet.

Apparently it requires tea. But the recipe didn't specify which type of tea, and this gave me some trouble. First I found herbal teas, mint and such. I'm pretty sure that's too hippie fruity for Fourth of July iced tea.

Then I had Earl Grey and English Breakfast and Irish Breakfast. None of those seemed quite appropriate. They're all quite distinct-tasting, so I would think that if the recipe had intended for me to use Earl Grey, it would have specified.

So I found some bags that were unlabeled, and that's what I went with. After all, it may be the correct type of tea, whereas the others were almost certainly not.

I followed the recipe quite carefully. It tasted much too sweet for me. I was brought up drinking tea without sugar, so that may be the thing.

The Americans drank it. This may be a good sign. It may just have been politeness.

I had considered making an apple pie (As American as . . . ), but I've never made a pie and this seemed ambitious.

A second interlude: my daughter attending day camp for the first time. In fact, she's never been in any class, and never attended school. This is not because I am intentionally over-protective. She's five. More that I'm disorganised, and she was a late bloomer, and so on, and so forth. When I worked my children had a nanny. Having her attend an additional programme would be doubling up, since the second and third children followed in rather short order. One thing follows another and now she's five and attending day camp for the Very First Time.

I carefully pored through the parent's manual in search of anything that may have changed since my last day camp experience, which was some 15 years ago. One still labels everything with the child's name. Done. Send a bathing suit? Done. Make a sandwich. I can do this!

Make a sandwich with no meat (kosher reasons) and no nuts of any sort (allergies).

This became rather more complicated.

My daughter is lactose intolerant.

I made jam. Munchkin was pleased by a food that is sweet, strawberry-flavoured, pink, and devoid of nutritional value. All appeared to be going well.

She enjoyed day camp, but does not wish to attend tomorrow, as she said she was kept busy all day.

She also says that she slept poorly because her father and I kept waking her. I remember this. I woke her up to go to the bathroom. I woke her up because she was hungry. I woke her because her invisible friend told her something and I just had to hear about it.

Oh no, wait. That was all her, wasn't it? Well I can see why she was confused.

The Medium is the Message

2011-06-30T23:35:00.000-07:00

This evening I noticed that Noah and his wife (nameless) are riding around in a Fisher-Price TV van. This is from a Noah's Ark playset, of course. I think they may have some of the animals in there as well.

There is a statement there, something about religion and modern media and contemporary culture, but I have no idea what that statement would be.

In the meantime, I have a lot of rhubarb. Too much rhubarb. About six mature plants' worth. I inherited the rhubarb with the house, and we've harvested it thrice this season already. It would be nice if it weren't so cold, and then I could harvest something that isn't rhubarb.

Rhubarb has surprisingly few uses. Once you've made jelly, and compote, and pie, you're more or less rhubarb-ed out. It's one of those plants where a little goes a long way. And I have a lot.

From now on I think I am giving my children designated cups. This won't stop them from leaving the cups about. I will, though, have the opportunity to track down whomever left a given cup, and lock the offender in the closet.

Too bad I don't have locks on the closets.

Another Fantastic Expedition

2011-05-30T23:24:00.000-07:00

I am cheap. You may remember this. I also enjoy reading, and I am too disorganised to make good use of the library. I also accumulate children's books.

So, library sales. There was one in North Van. This was over a bridge. I'm afraid of bridges, because I'm scared I will drive off of the edge. But my desire for books is greater than my anxiety, though both are substantial. I had originally planned to leave the older children, at least, with their father. But he had to work. So off I go, three children in tow. I also have more desire for books than I have good sense.

Before leaving I fed them a nutritious breakfast. I was particularly impressed when Genome inhaled three eggs. He can be a big eater. But I felt very virtuous. I am rarely convinced to cook before noon.

The lead-up to the bridge goes through a very large park, and there is no stopping or pulling over. I was surprised that, although it was Sunday, there was traffic. It would take about half an hour to get over the bridge. Oh, well enough.

Genome is being whiny and kvetchy, which is unlike him. I growled at him, assuming, falsely as it happens, that he had no good reason to kvetch.

Just as we enter the park, Genome throws up. Then he throws up again. Then he throws up again.

Then he was understandably bad-tempered, since he was sitting with vomit all over himself. It was egg-vomit and particularly rank.

He'd also wrecked his favourite shirt-of-the-moment.

When we arrived, I swabbed him down with baby wipes, planted him in the umbreella stroller I always keep in the car for Moments like These, and off we went -- me, a baby on my back, a sensible five-year-old, and my son Shirtless Hillbilly Jack. We could have used a toothless dog.

I was buying a box of books, so I told the children that whatever they threw in there was fine, as long as they let me browse unmolested. When I got home, I discovered that their choices were not as bad as might have been expected.

We stopped at a fortuitously timed swap meet (violating Swap Meet Rule #1: Do Not Bring the Children) to obtain a new shirt. There were no Spiderman shirt. This is because the parents in this neighbourhood are much classier than the ones in the neighbourhoods I usually shop at. Nearly everything was educational.

My daughter is a natural shopper. She quickly located some of the few branded, Disney, no-nutritional-value items. They were in perfect condition, obviously gifts from less-aware relatives. She exited in a Disney Princess gown and he in Spiderman light-up sandals. Perfect condition. Five dollars. By way of the sandals, I bribed him into a generic blue shirt.

A summary:
1. Keep an umbrella stroller in your car.
2. Keep clothes in your car.
3. Best to go to swap meets where sellers are as tacky as oneself

Stealth Jew Can Homeschool

2011-05-08T16:56:00.000-07:00

Kind of?

Those of you who are good with math will realise that Munchkin is now approaching what is intended to be her kindergarten year.

When I was a child, kindergarten and preschool were considered optional. If your mother was absolutely-sick-to-death of you, you went. If she wasn't, you didn't. Optional. Now, all of a sudden, I'm "homeschooling" a three-year-old. No I'm not. I'm just too disorganised to take her to preschool.

Since I'm a firm believer in not teaching formally anything I'm pretty sure the child will learn anyway, we don't do any activities with colours, letters, play dough (heaven forbid), and so on. If at college age Munchkin can't identify "orange," I intend to attack it then.

Ahem. Back to the story.

Munchkin is now approaching kindergarten age, and she won't be attending kindergarten. So since her fifth birthday, we've been doing some formal school work -- Kumon, and reading. Not reading anything amusing or good. Reading via explicit systematic phonics, which is to reading what drilling the multiplication tables is to math. Not the exciting part.

I am proud to relate that she chants her short vowels like a pro.

My daughter is not interested in school. She'll do it, sure. She'll do it because she wants to please me. But she sees no purpose in doing it. It's completely irrelevant to her life.

What mummy wants me to learn: short vowel sounds. The number nine.

What I want to know: Where trolls live.

We are addressing this gap through a marvellous discovery I made not long ago. When I was in school, we used this book to teach Greek Myths:

I loved the D'Aulaires Book of Greek Myths. It's accurate, easy to read, and beautifully illustrated. So imagine my pleasure to discover that they had other books, some of which have been recently re-released.

D'Aulaires Book of Trolls.

I am in love. It was worth actually buying a book new.

Best of all, it gives me the opportunity to say "troll cocks with purple and green feathers" and not giggle.

I have a dirty mind.

The Blowhole at the Top of Your Mouth

2011-03-30T12:11:00.000-07:00

Yesterday the Captain asked me a question.

"Hey StealthJew. You know how I'm not all that aware of my body and health, right? Can you tell me if something is normal?"

"Sure."

"You know that blowhole at the top of your mouth?"

"You mean your throat?"

"No. The hole in the roof of your mouth."

"There's no hole there."

"Yes there is. You know that hole, the one in the roof of your mouth."

"I have no idea what you're talking about."

" . . . *expletive*"

Turns out the Captain has a cleft palate, with a teeny little hole right on the roof of his mouth. The roof of his mouth is also, for the record, kind of flat. After presenting him with Munchkin's mouth as well as mine, I've convinced him that this is not the usual way of things.

Yes, it is strange that the dentist didn't mention this. I realise no one explicitly asks dentists to count the number of orifii in the mouth, but you think they'd mention it.

"By the way, you know you've got an extra hole in there."

Anyone ever known this to exist in an adult? Any suggestions?

Howdy, Neighbour!

2011-03-20T01:46:00.000-07:00

So I got a negative comment -- my very first, I think -- on my little phosphate helper down there. It was left by some Suzuki acolyte who is sending her children to -- wait for it -- the elementary school I and my younger brother the Captain attended.

I feel obliged to warn you all that Captain and I are both Reagan conservatives, people who don't even _like_ polar bears, and who only recycle the stuff they pay us for. Now I can't say for certain that this was because of anything I was taught in elementary school, but I can't rule it out either. Be alert.

I do know they were beating the environmentalist drum pretty hard back then. Captain even dressed up as a recycling bin for Halloween one year.

You know, say what you want about the global warming people (or ask me to say it for you), but at least they make their case in public. I am already suspicious of environmentalists, because they seem as a whole to have an alarming totalitarian streak. Fine for someone to eat only organic potatoes, and please, do tell me about it. I'm open to being convinced. But increasingly the trend is not to discuss, say, phosphates, but instead to bypass us proles and trolls and instead legislate the change one wishes to see in the world. After all, why risk the unpleasant discovery that many of us would prefer working toilets to saving water, if one can impose one's will by fiat?

BTW: You're not saving any water if the darned thing keeps backing up, spasming, and vomiting all over my bathroom. Just sayin'. And when that happens, I'm definitely breaking out the bad-for-plants-and-animals chlorine bleach.

On the Move

2011-03-14T21:47:00.000-07:00

We have a new child on the move, and already I can tell that the younger two are going to be trouble.

When you have one small child, you think that you should supervise the child at all times. When you have three, you know that you should supervise them all all the time. Since they rarely mull about the same area, and periodically one is tempted away to change a diaper or use the bathroom, this is impossible. Three children get up to much more trouble than three only children would.

The other day I explained the difference between a preschooler and a toddler to someone else. A preschooler tries to pour her own milk and spills it all over the floor. A toddler pours the milk into the flour. Then he spills out the resulting mixture, and then he trods in it.

Let me tell you what my toddler and my crawler are up to.

Crawler was a raccoon in a past life. He has tipped over trash cans twice and once gotten into the recycling bin. He's either looking for something to eat, or his natural reaction when he encounters something putrid is to move it mouth-ward.

Toddler was served lunch while Preschooler's birthday cake was cooling on the same table. He decided to eat said cake, starting at the middle part and working out.

Crawler tried to drink from my mother's dog's dish. This is disgusting.

Toddler obtained a sample bottle of his father's colonge. What, pray tell, was he trying to do with it when he was averted by his now-unusually-wary mother?

He was attempting to get crawler to drink it.

Now they both smell funny.

Put your phosphates back in your dish detergent

2011-02-25T10:03:00.000-08:00

Have you ever noticed that every time something gets environmental attention, my life gets less convenient in that area?

Low flow toilets don't flush. Curly-cue light bulbs break and turn into toxic waste. Recycling makes garbage day disgusting and complicated. And let's not even get in to my city's mayor and his bicycle fetish.

So when my dishes stopped coming out clean, I should have suspected some green do-gooder at work. But I did not. I started supplementing with my various cleaning tonics. Nothing was helping.

Side note: one thing that will restore the shine to your glasses is a cup of bleach (stop before drying) and then a cup of amonia (run the whole cycle). They will take my bleach from my cold dead hands.

Anyhow, it turns out that someone got the idea to take away phosphates. Thanks guys. David Suzuki, the perpetually irritating, has a variety of ineffective solutions.

But I'm not David Suzuki. I want my phosphates back.

Cue trip to the hardware store.

Ahhh, that's the stuff.

Your previous dishwashing detergent had about 9% phosphate. Now it's 0.5%. I add about a tbsp per cup of Cascade dish detergent. Don't use too much; it's not good for your metal.

Ahhhhh. Clean dishes at last.

Arithmetic

2011-02-19T23:46:00.000-08:00

Dear Internet,

I'm sorry I haven't updated this week. I didn't update because I was sealing my grout. Because I didn't seal my rount when the grout was new, I first needed to scrub the grout. This was rather a more intensive proposition than it had at first appeared. I have an awful lot of tile in my kitchen.

If any of my kids turn out 'funny,' it is probably because of the smell of the sealant, which really permeates the house afterwards.

In the meantime, Munchkin has started Kumon. They don't give me money for talking about it, fyi. Kumon is basically "doing sums," all that really boring drill that seems to have gone out of fashion. Since Munchkin is not in formal school, I figured the sooner the better. After all, it's better to start this stuff when they're too little to fight as hard.

Kumon involves an interview and a placement test. The lady ascertained that my brother and I both did Kumon as children. She asked what we did now, and I replied that I had become a lawyer and he an anccountant.

When Munchkin attended at the centre, the franchise owner pulled over her head teacher to gush, "Munchkin's uncle did Kumon, and hes an accountant!"

Nevermine me, and my law school going chopped liver self! At least I produced another generation for Kumon.

Kumon produced a few workbooks. This means that people now say that they are "doing Kumon" when they are working through the books. This is not "doing Kumon." Kumon is not a body of knowledge; they did not discover nor invention arithmetic. Kumon is a system, a deadening, miserable system that will have you saying your timestables in your sleep at age 27.

Except my daughter doesn't know this. She thinks that doing twenty minutes of math a day is great fun, that going to the centre is an excellent opportunity to obtain stickers and that the whole business is a fantastic idea. Yay! Math!

Genome even tries to do the little counting exercises. He gets a touch too enthusiastic, though. When he's done counting, he throws both arms into the air and says "yay!"

"Un, Ooo, Free, YAY!"

I hate Everett Bogue

2011-02-09T22:53:00.000-08:00

Sometimes a zeitgeist is at work (a movement of the age) and I don't even notice. Actually, this happens a lot. It happens a lot because I've turned into that parental dottering type, wherein I remind myself as my mother and think that the music I grew up with is still "cool." Though even when it was cool, my age group's music sucked. Backstreet Boys anyone?

Anyhow, minimalism is one of those movements. Apparently all over this fine land, people are sitting about counting the number of things they own and trying to get under a hundred. By doing this, people in the third world will have bread to eat. Vegan bread. Or something.

A fun game can be had examining just what these lists exclude: most have no mention of cleaning supplies (12 bottles Dawn detergent, 2 boxes borax, 1 half-full jug vinegar, 1 large bottle bleach, 3 boxes baking soda, 1 box washing soda, 2 boxes cascade powdered dish detergent, 1 tin powdered alum, 2 bottles ammonia, 12 bars Ivory soap, 2 bars sunlight soap, rags, kitchen clothes, flannels, old diapers). They often include a brush, but few other personal hygiene items. They don't include cooking utensils. They don't include food items. Basically, the you can be minimalist as long as your possessions are not in the form of books (you should use a Kindle!), CDs (keep them on your hard drive!), clothes (you can have some, but not more than about 50 pieces, so try to keep your activities limited to things you can wear sweatpants to), or cars (strictly verboten, and we should all live in NYC).

Mr. Bogue, an early adopter and chronic self-absorbed jerk who blogs at Beyond the Stars, sums up the movement he helped midwife thusly:

"Minimalism can be reduced to a simple sentence:

"When you throw out all of you stuff, you free yourself to do anything.""

What a fascinating idea! Let's see how that would work.

If I threw out all my stuff, my baby would have no diapers, and he would pee on the floor. And I would have no rag to wipe it up.

(brief break as I realise baby actually has removed said diaper. Okay, back now.)

Therein lies the heart of the matter. Because what prevents me from being able to do anything is not my stuff. What prevents me from doing anything are my obligations, which are not to stuff but rather to people. I have three small children and a husband. I have a disabled mother and an aging father-in-law, a widow and a widower. I have a brother. I have a synagogue full of people. It isn't my three identical cast iron skillets nor my stockpiled bottles of Dawn that are keeping me from running off to Indonesia today. It's the people I need to cook dinner for and the dishes that need to be cleaned that are.

What Mr. Bogue actually describes is an extreme form of selfishness. He needs nothing because he does nothing for anyone, except that which he wants to do. Hardly an innovative way of life for someone in his mid-twenties (as I am), but hardly something to emulate either.

Most strikingly, I would not want to empty it because to me, his life seems empty not only of things but of purpose. My obligations shape and give meaning to my life. The objects of my life make me happy (in a general sense -- not every minute) because I enjoy fulfilling most of my obligations, and I enjoy the tools I use to do it. They remind me of my purpose. This life, domestic in the broad sense and not unusual, is meaningful and purposeful and fulfilling for much of the world. That seems to be something beyond Mr. Bogue and his ilk's comprehension.

Deeply uncool

2011-02-06T02:01:00.000-08:00

Last week we ended up with a cluster of little girls at our house, all Munchkin's age. As girls will do, they all dressed up as princesses. They came out to the living room, which had been designated "The Princess Ball." I noted that Cinderella was missing. As mothers of girls know, where one girl is missing, odds are good that one girl is crying. I went in search of her.

I found her borrowing my two-year-old son's dagger. I asked her what she was up to. She said, "I'm bringing a knife to the princess ball."

Those Princesses hang in a rough neighbourhood.

Munchkin asked why her friend (not the dagger child) had, many months ago, wronger her in some way. I said, maybe she was having a bad day. Munchkin sasked, what's a bad day?

As it happened, the next day was a bad day. So now I can answer.

A bad day is when your two-year-old gets into your flour and treads it all over your house. Worse, all over your mother's house. She's unimpressed. Then her small dog eats the flour you're trying to sweep up. Then the small dog vomits into the flour. Then the two-year-old tracks through the flour-and-vomit mixture and spreads _that_ all over the main floor.

Then your husband calls and when you relate the story, he can't stop laughing.

Then that night you learn that garbarators do not like shot glasses.

Right now all three children have respitory colds. This has hit the baby the hardest. Babies are born as obligate nose breathers. This means that if their nose is stuffed, they become very unhappy and slightly panicked. He's also sprouted two new teeth. He is seriously crabby.

Eleven years young

2011-01-28T00:30:00.000-08:00

I promised that I would blog tonight. Half past midnight counts as "tonight," doesn't it?

Anyway, I'm going to tell a story.

In my province, we have something called graduated licensing. That means that when a person learns to drive, he passes through a number of phases. First, he takes a written test. He receives a learner's license. A year after he's received that, he takes a road test. He then receives a novice license. A novice license functions as a regular license except that:
- one must display a "novice driver" sign (an N);
- one's license may be yanked for a smaller number of tickets;
- one must have a blood alcohol content of zero; and,
- one must not drive more than one unrelated passengers.

Fair enough. Two years later, the driver may take an hour-long road test and obtain a full license.

My year was the first to enter graduated licensing, some eleven years ago.

Last week, a friend of my brother's had his license suspended for two months over a minor novice-related violation. And I thought, my goodness, that would be bloody inconvenient. After all, I have children to haul around. Granted, my children are all related to me, and I've never had a ticket (kinehura), but it's bound to happen sooner or later. And so anxiety about the one (losing license) overcame my anxiety about another (road test) and I called to schedule a road test.

Only, let's see, nine years past due.

But it was more complicated than that. You see, it turns out that my license had been expired. And I've been driving about on that expired license for some, let's see, seven months. They cheerfully invited me to come in to the DMV and have it renewed, post-haste. The nice man also scheduled my road test.

I passed the road test. I have a full license. I also have an award, of sorts.

The DMV said that this is the longest anyone has ever held a novice license.

Going crazy dreaming, the American dream

2011-01-13T12:44:00.000-08:00

A number of blogs I read are anti-consumerist. Here's an example: the smuggy mcsmuggersons. Homesteading, downshifting, whatever. Everyone's doing it.

I enjoy consumerism. I went down to Seattle with Husband the other day (and Firefly), and we got our meat for the next several months. It was great. We get all our meat in the states. We actually buy almost everything there, at least everything for me. I only buy eggs and produce weekly.

We eat a lot of eggs.

In fact, here are some things about modern life that I really, truly love:

- Washers and dryers. Oh, my wash. I love my washer and dryer. Hanging out the laundry? No thanks. Besides, it gets crinkly.

- ipods, iphones, cell phones you can use to check your email and take pictures of the kids too, and podcasts. How did I live without these?

- shopping on the net. There is no longer any reason to take children to stores, and used books can be procured from half a world away.

- coke. Yes, I like coke. I admit it. In fact, I like coke quite a lot. Diet coke isn't bad either.

- products from China. My knitting needles have pandas on them.

- Cesaerean births. Dying in child birth is very not my style, and I don't really want to lose the kids either. I work so hard to make them.

- Vaccines. See above. I hate being pregnant, so I've got to look after the ones I've got.

- Deep freezers.

- Non-iron shirts. Brooks Brothers make some now. If your husband wears dress shirts, and you're still ironing, get these shirts. They are worth the cost (although Brooks Brothers has regular sales if you watch the outlets). They even have the crease down the arms. Do not iron.

What do you like about modern, consumerist life?

Schedule Forming

2011-01-05T21:44:00.000-08:00

Neurotics like me love schedules, because they help us manage anxiety. My whole religious practice is basically one massive over-compensation for what is probably a tendency towards OCD.

It's not a mental disorder. It's piety.

Unfortunately, I'm very bad at following schedules. I eventually figured out that this was because I was imposing a perfect schedule on my sub-par homemaking abilities.

My solution was to figure out when I was doing things anyway, and to call that my schedule. So without further ado, here it is:

Daily: Sweep. Empty and load dishwasher (it runs overnight). Wash and fold whichever laundry hamper is full.
Sunday: Kitchen. Mop. Bake that which is not challah. Eat at Father-in-law's
Monday: Living/dining room. Vacuum only rug in house. Stir fry for dinner.
Tuesday: Children's room. Change their sheets. Empty diaper pail. Stew for dinner.
Wednesday: Parent's room. Change our sheets. Fish things out from under the bed. Soup for dinner.
Thursday: Living/dining room - see Monday. Challah baking. Vegetarian for dinner.
Friday: Shabbos prep. Shabbos dinner.
Saturday: Bathroom. Change bathroom linens and switch out bath mat. Light dinner -- large lunch.

My children have helpfully adapted. Their schedule looks something like this:
Sunday: Have a serious potty accident in the bathroom.
Monday: Spill something vile in the kitchen. Grind it in to the tile.
Tuesday: Smush play dough into the only rug in the house.
Wednesday: Wet bed. Eat muffin in bed.
Thursday: Wet parents' bed. Eat muffin in parents' bed.
Friday: Defile challah.
Saturday: Run around like crazy people.

You Know What's Awesome?

2010-12-31T14:07:00.000-08:00

You know what's awesome?

It's awesome when you're not all that upset over something. And so you start recounting it to your husband, and as you recount it, you start getting upset. In fact, you get really upset. And by the time you're done, you're really, really upset over this situation that honestly didn't bother you all that much ten minutes ago. And there you are, fulfilling every bad stereotype about women and convincing your baffled husband that you're totally crazy and/or care far too much about coupon specials.

For some reason this inevitably happens to me on Fridays.

Also fun: forgetting you have a third child until you're halfway across the parking lot.

Also fun: when you suspect that a neighbourhood child isn't allowed to play at your house.

Possibly because her mother is convinced I'm a crazy person. Just like my husband.

Israel

2010-12-20T09:07:00.000-08:00

Since this unpleasant "boycott Israel" nonsense has come up again, via Lady Gaga flash mobs (I'm not making this up), I thought I'd repost this video. But first, this is why the other side sucks:

And now:

Canadians can fight boycotts by participating in the Buycott Israel program.

Less than success

2010-12-08T01:42:00.000-08:00

Today was not a great day.

Here I am in the morning, after Firefly woke me. Early. Which is why it's dark. I'm knitting. He's helping. Isn't he helpful?

I couldn't find my purse. So I stick Firefly in a sling and go out to the car to look for it. It's not there. I find the purse. But in the process I drop my keys. I get all of the children ready to go out. We're on the curb. It's raining. I don't have my keys in my purse. I don't have them anywhere.

Did I mention that neither of them would go outside without the plastic castle each got for Channukah? So it's me, three children, two plastic castles, the assorted and sundry things it takes to get the children out of the house, and a pile of packages to deliver.

Genome's got his coat on upside-down.

Munchkin has no coat on. She rejected a coat in favour of her fleece flower-power-style sweater. It has a hood, so it's totally the same as a coat, right?

I can't find my keys, and then Genome trips, falls, and cuts his lip. Profuse amounts of blood. Munchkin starts crying. I start nursing Genome, which makes Firefly angry because he's still sling-side. But Genome is quiet and I'm successfully talking Munchkin down by asking her questions about times she bled, but recovered, as Genome surely will. Unfortunately she starts thinking about having gotten stitches, which scared her, so she starts crying.

I call my mother to come mind the children so I can go inside and find. my. keys. Things are, at this point, very bad.

She brings the kids and puts them in her car to get dry. I get down on the road, right in front of the grill of her car, to look under the cars to see if my keys are there.

Right then, Genome honks the horn five times.

Do you know how loud a horn is when you're right next to the grill of a car?

I start crying. HE starts crying, because he's sorry. Munchkin starts crying because . . . well, any excuse in a storm.

I go inside. Find the keys. They'd fallen out of my purse while I was putting Genome's socks on.

In my mother's car, Munchkin is singing thusly to Firefly:
"Don't cry baby,
Don't cry Firefly,
Mummy and Daddy will take care of you
Mummy and Dadd won't let you float away."

Question Period

2010-12-05T13:32:00.000-08:00

What's an instant way to summon a two-year-old boy?

Take out your lace knitting. Child will appear instantly on your lap.

Genome's hair is in his face all the time, and he won't let me pull it back into a ponytail. The other little boys wear ponytails. Why does mine scream and yell NO GIRL as he yanks out my least feminine attempts?

Lots of Christian blogs are talking about Santa Claus and gift-giving right now. Munchkin asked her Tatty who Santa Claus is. He replied that Santa Claus was a man who was important to the Christian Church and died many years ago.

Yesterday I overheard her telling her little friend that Santa Claus died, but when Moshiach comes, Santa Claus will come back with Grandpa.

A+ theological understanding.

Cake

2010-11-26T10:43:00.000-08:00

If you bake a bundt cake for Sabbath, and you told your child not to touch it, and she says she did not touch it but rather licked it, and the child is an unreliable reporter so she may or may not have actually licked it, and you haven't got time to make another because you have six loaves of bread and a brisket to get on, is it immoral to serve that cake to immediate family members without mentioning the possible lick-age?

A. Yes.
B. No.
C. Yuck. I'm never having kids.

Toy box

2010-11-24T22:49:00.000-08:00

She's still odd.

When I go out, Munchkin says, "good bye mummy! Be careful and don't let any of the monsters get you!"

You'd think she'd be neurotic, given that she thinks that monsters lurk everywhere, but it doesn't seem to bother her.

She thinks we should get an octopus. Baby tried to roll off of the bed? "What we need is an octopus. Then the octopus could catch Firefly when he tried to fall."

I left my purse at a restaurant? "We need an octopus that's big, and also medium. It could get mummy's purse for us."

Well it could, dear, but it would also require a large tank and a variety of amusing activities. I'm too lazy to own a dog. I'm not ready for any varsity level wildlife.

I think that the reasons my headphones keep breaking is that my baby keeps trying to gnaw on them.

I went down to the US drop box to fetch the packages for the family this month. Allow me to demonstrate why the employees at the drop box, very nice people who are evangelical Christians of the t-shirt-wearing variety, think that my family is a family of loons. Our pick-up list:
- 5 lb soy milk powder
- 2 doll wigs, new
- 1 used doll wearing ugly gauze disco dress
- 1 Star Trek themed plastic wallet
- 1 snow suit and boots
- 4 ties (my BIL's, and therefore of excellent taste)
- 1 Fisher Price brand seventies-era plane

This is Why You're Anxious: Saturday Morning Cartoon version

2010-11-15T21:14:00.001-08:00

Does anyone remember Captain Planet and the Planeteers?

Now that I've refreshed your memory. Really, Ted Turner, really? I know the fellow is rumoured to be a bit off, but I'm not sure whether the show is strangest because:
- it's clearly political indoctrination of a certain worldview;
- it confronts topics that the viewers are in no way intellectually or emotionally prepared for; or,
- the premise makes no damn sense. Pollution is now a problem of going and beating up pollutors! A magic man should do it! And he should be summoned by the personified spirit of the earth! Well phew, I'm so relieved. I thought it involved a lot more paperwork than that.

As Luci from Chez Luci pointed out, I had forgotten the hole in the ozone layer. The ozone layer was opening up a giant hole over the arctic and as a result, we would all be burned to a crisp. As a result we should stop using anything in a spray can.

What else . . . over population! I remember that too! Kind of a strange one to teach a bunch of small children, but we learned that the world was running out of space. This is the kind of thing that can only seem remotely plausible to the youngest Canadian because again, space we've got. Obviously whatever anti-population message they were trying to share with me didn't quite take.

We were running out of oil. This used to be a really big concern, back before we learned to be more concerned with the people on top of the oil we want to use, and their wacky political theories.

And of course, there were drugs. On Fridays after dinner, my father used to take us to rent a video. One of the videos was a completely animated one-hour movie wherein the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and a bunch of other cartoons I don't remember teach us all an important lesson about drug use.

Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue

You really can find anything online.

Anyhow, the message of the story is that primary school children are regularly offered marijuana and should be ever alert to the possibility.

And smoke. Smoking would kill you, your mother, your father, and your little dog too. It was your duty as a child to weep pitifully that your father not smoke because you didn't want him to die. Not conducive to happy parent-child relationships.

We learned not to drink and drive. I started crying in a Chinese food restaurant wailing "please, daddy, don't drink and drive. He didn't think that one light beer rendered him un-roadworthy, but again, one for the family memory books.

Someday I hope that my children, too, will misapply what they have learned about health and safety in order to humiliate me in public.

Speaking of which, how do I teach my four-year-old that when she falls, she should say "I've fallen and I can't get up!" She should not substitute the near synonym, "I'm on my back and I can't get off!" Really.

This is Why You're Anxious

2010-11-14T04:19:00.000-08:00

Yes, it's four a.m. The boys woke me.

I was talking to my husband a few, well, hours ago. We were discussing what it was like to grow up and go to school in the late eighties and early nineties.

I began compiling a list of all of the things that I was reasonably sure would kill me.

I was so sure that the world would end, I thought it was just a matter of what got me first. In retrospect, this contributed a great deal to my skepticism of global warming. I'm still sure that the world is going to end. I'm much less sure that we'll know about it in advance. And if we do, my money's on Iran and not carbon emissions.

Anyway, I present to you the following list: THINGS I WAS TOLD TO BE SCARED OF IN PRIMARY SCHOOL

- Nuclear annihilation. At any moment we would be annihilated as a side event to the war between Russia and the United States. I owned a picture book called DISARMAMENT with the requisite cover photograph of a mushroom cloud.

- Environmental disaster. Because we were bad and littered, acid rain was going to rot the skin off of our bones, and whales were going extinct, nay, were probably extinct already. Literally no science-themed activity was free from the closing refrain that the coral reefs may be nice now, but we sinful, reckless human beings were destroying them.

- Fire. Every year, we all took turns going in the fire safety trailer. You lay on the bunkbed in a mock up of a children's room, and when the alarm went off, you practiced rolling out of bed and crawling on the floor to safety. You touched the doorknob to see if it was hot before proceeding out of that door. Since my bedroom was on an upper floor, I spent a lot of time worrying about this.

- Quebec leaving. As a child, I somehow got the idea that Quebec was an island, and if she voted to leave the union, we'd cut the moorings and set her adrift towards France. Quebec has never seemed all that important to me, but I gathered that this was something to worry about because the adults I knew talked about it a great deal. The reason that Quebec was going to leave was because schoolchildren in British Columbia were insufficiently diligent in learning French.

- Divorce. At school I was given a paperback called Dinosaurs Divorce, full of cartoon dinosaurs abandoning their children, living in post-divorce poverty, and so on. I was terrified that my parents would divorce. I probably beat the odds in that they did not. As a six-year-old, I would have preferred that our house be set on fire by acid rain caused by the atom bomb to my parents divorcing.

- People who touched me in my bathing suit area. This one was always a little vague, but I learned that there are people who wanted to touch you in your bathing suit area and one wasn't to let them. We sang a little song about it: "My body's no-body's body but mine! You have your own body; let me have mine!"

- Saddam Hussain. He invaded Kuwait. British Columbia could be next.

- Litter. Amazingly for someone living in Canada, I had been convinced that we were running out of space to put trash. It was crucial that I recycled and used reusable sandwich containers. Failure to do so would speed our burial in piles of trash.

- AIDS. Again, I was vague on the details of this one, but it had something to do with being an adult and sudden death.

- Earthquake. We had earthquake drills by hiding under our desks in preparation for "the big one." We did this a lot.

Actually, now that I've compiled the list, it's surprising I only have as much anxiety as I have. It's also amazing I had time to learn about anything other than certain destruction.

Memorial Day

2010-11-10T22:05:00.000-08:00

We are a family of holiday births. We have one person born on American Memorial Day, one on 9/11, one on Purim, one on Flag Day, and one on Lag B'Omer.

That said, this is one of the few secular holidays that I do make an effort to observe. Canadians wear red poppies in memory of the war fallen. Munchkin is old enough now to wear a poppy as well.

The homeschooling group was on about "white poppies." It's nice to know that the "peace movement" hasn't been shamed by its defense of Communist atrocities, or appeasement pre-WWII.

With that in mind, I present some of my favorite war poetry:

A Song of Defeat

THE line breaks and the guns go under,
The lords and the lackeys ride the plain;
I draw deep breaths of the dawn and thunder,
And the whole of my heart grows young again.
For our chiefs said 'Done,' and I did not deem it;
Our seers said 'Peace,' and it was not peace;
Earth will grow worse till men redeem it,
And wars more evil, ere all wars cease.
But the old flags reel and the old drums rattle,
As once in my life they throbbed and reeled;
I have found my youth in the lost battle,
I have found my heart on the battlefield.
For we that fight till the world is free,
We are not easy in victory:
We have known each other too long, my brother,
And fought each other, the world and we.
And I dream of the days when work was scrappy,
And rare in our pockets the mark of the mint,
When we were angry and poor and happy,
And proud of seeing our names in print.
For so they conquered and so we scattered,
When the Devil road and his dogs smelt gold,
And the peace of a harmless folk was shattered;
When I was twenty and odd years old.
When the mongrel men that the market classes
Had slimy hands upon England's rod,
And sword in hand upon Afric's passes
Her last Republic cried to God.
For the men no lords can buy or sell,
They sit not easy when all goes well,
They have said to each other what naught can smother,
They have seen each other, our souls and hell.
It is all as of old, the empty clangour,
The Nothing scrawled on a five-foot page,
The huckster who, mocking holy anger,
Painfully paints his face with rage.
And the faith of the poor is faint and partial,
And the pride of the rich is all for sale,
And the chosen heralds of England's Marshal
Are the sandwich-men of the Daily Mail,
And the niggards that dare not give are glutted,
And the feeble that dare not fail are strong,
So while the City of Toil is gutted,
I sit in the saddle and sing my song.
For we that fight till the world is free,
We have no comfort in victory;
We have read each other as Cain his brother,
We know each other, these slaves and we.
G. K. Chesterton

The Children
Author: Rudyard Kipling [More Titles by Kipling]
These were our children who died for our lands: they
were dear in our sight.
We have only the memory left of their home-treasured
sayings and laughter.
The price of our loss shall be paid to our hands, not
another's hereafter.
Neither the Alien nor Priest shall decide on it. That is our right.
_But who shall return us the children_?

At the hour the Barbarian chose to disclose his pretences,
And raged against Man, they engaged, on the breasts
that they bared for us,
The first felon-stroke of the sword he had long-time
prepared for us--
Their bodies were all our defence while we wrought our defences.

They bought us anew with their blood, forbearing to blame us,
Those hours which we had not made good when the Judgment
o'ercame us.
They believed us and perished for it. Our statecraft, our learning.

Delivered them bound to the Pit and alive to the burning
Whither they mirthfully hastened as jostling for honour.
Not since her birth has our Earth seen such worth loosed upon her.

Nor was their agony brief, or once only imposed on them.
The wounded, the war-spent, the sick received no exemption:
Being cured they returned and endured and achieved our redemption,
Hopeless themselves of relief, till Death, marvelling, closed
on them.

That flesh we had nursed from the first in all cleanness was given
To corruption unveiled and assailed by the malice of Heaven--
By the heart-shaking jests of Decay where it lolled on the wires--
To be blanched or gay-painted by fumes--to be cindered by fires--
To be senselessly tossed and retossed in stale mutilation
From crater to crater. For this we shall take expiation.
_But who shall return us our children_?

Kipling is on my mind today because I was reading the Just So Stories to Munchkin and Genome. Genome was clearly bored by the whole exercise, but Munchkin seemed rather enchanted at parts.

Half Moon Post

2010-11-01T20:48:00.000-07:00

Munchkin shows me what a girl looks like, in case I forget. Genome finds this so entertaining he just has to sleep through the whole thing. Wait, why is everyone in my bed?

I should make a proper post. But I'm not uploading any photos. (ETA: Okay, fine. One photo). Because I'm very jittery about the election tomorrow, and it's going to be a big one (they all say), and I want to see what happens.

If you haven't had children yet, or you only have one of each gender, it would be wise to stay with one gender. Boy or girl, it doesn't matter (boys are easier).

When I had a girl first and a boy second, everyone told me how fortunate I was to have one of each. But since then I've discovered a number of advantages of having them in, at the very least, regular lots of like-gendered children. For example:

Inventory Control
Like-gendered children, at least small ones, wear the same clothes. So I still remember where I put the boys' clothes when I need them again. Munchkin's I need to store, which I have yet to do, but there's a lot of it. It looks intimidating, I never get it done, and I'm always finding little pink socks.

Appropriate playtime activities
My girl and my boy don't play well together.

Munchkin sets up a tea party. Genome wants to play Superhero fights monsters. Munchkin wants to play princess. Genome wants to play superhero fights monsters. Munchkin wants to engage in age-appropriate developmental play. Genome wants to throw developmental materials at imaginary monsters while wearing the only thing he ever wears, the top of his Spiderman pajamas.

They're stuck with each other, and they work it out ("Fight off the monsters attacking the princess"), but I can tell that Genome covets the attention of another boy. He keeps trying to get Firefly to hold a toy weapon. And not chew on it.

Greater child satisfaction
I already mentioned that Genome is very eager to have another walking-sized boy. Munchkin has gotten downright alarming in her desire to have another girl. She says she programmed her sister's number into her (toy) cell phone.

Last night my husband explained again that even if G-d gives us another baby, that doesn't mean it will be a girl. He said, so, do you want another baby?

Yes, she said.

You do?

Right. A baby sister.

Pirates of Penzance

2010-10-25T16:47:00.001-07:00

Friday we went to the Maritime Museum. They have quite a host of activities; it's much better than when I used to go as a child. The main attraction is still the fully assembled 1920-era ship, around which the museum was built. It's a ship built for going through the Northwest Passage.

My children adore this museum. They attend about once a week.

Munchkin, in her perpetual mixing of metaphors and active fantasy life, enlisted her brother to play "Pirate Princess fights monsters with karate."

Genome, on the other hand. Well, he's lucky he's even allowed back to the Maritime Museum. When he was 18 months old, he made a credible attempt to climb the rigging.

Firefly mostly slept or looked bemused at the whole scene.

The Internet Continues to Open New Worlds to Me

2010-10-24T00:11:00.000-07:00

I am not now and have never been Catholic. I attended one Catholic service. It was in Latin at a monastery.

I was aware of the bare bones of the current controversy in the American church: after Vatican II American churches changed the way they gave mass. Some of them changed it quite a lot. At the very least the Latin Mass basically disappeared and priests started facing forward and giving a much more accessible service.

Lately the pendulum has swung in the other direction. The papacy has been made aware of quite how liberal things had gotten in some parts of the world (very) and clarified certain things. In addition, mine is a reactionary generation and many of us prefer things to happen in foreign languages.

Orthodox Jewish Services are inaccessible in a way that makes the Tridentine Mass seem like a Unitarian ecumenical service. There are no instruments and no choir. Everyone faces in the same direction and mumbles at high speed in Hebrew. It's entirely in Hebrew except for the speech. They don't tell you what page your own. People bring their own prayer books and pray from them. Some people do their own tradition rather than that of the group. Everyone makes actions at times but you won't know when, unless you're following along, which you can't unless you are very familiar with the service and the language thereof. Women are separated from men by a balcony, curtain, fence, change of level, or several of the aforementioned (I could do without this). Women do not participate in and cannot always see the service. And some people don't bother sitting down or standing up and just stand the whole time (I do this). People wander in and out, especially the ones with small children, especially women. They come late and start up when they show up, praying what they missed (I do this too). There are children wandering freely. Sometimes the leader sings the entire prayer. More often he just sings one or two sentences to let you know where you ought to be up to, if you're following along, which you might not be. Oh, and different congregations use different tunes to the prayers. There are no hymns, no programs, no English, no "let us stand."

I would be so distraught if we all decided to go to English. I don't know if I could even pray anymore. It was very hard to learn to pray in Hebrew. But I love Hebrew.

It is easier to have sacred space when it is strange. I think this is one of the reasons for the long-standing preference that many people have for the King James Bible. It sounds sacred. Praying in English makes me feel self-conscious.

I can see why Catholics found it so hard to see theirs shaken up. And that's without going into some of the less-sanctioned stuff that seems to have gone on. Like this:

I have been reading What Does the Prayer Really Say, a fascinating conservative view of these things with bonus Latin and religious studies geekery. Truly, the internet contains worlds within worlds.

2010-10-18T19:45:00.000-07:00

So I got myself Bright Sided by Ehrenreich. We shall see if she indeed agrees with my premise that it's silly to expect life, parenting, or anything else to be fun. Roller coaster rides are fun. Mothering is work. Of course, compared to most work, it's pretty good work. I wouldn't call paper pushing "joyful and fun" either. On the other hand, none of the papers I pushed ever pooped in the bathtub.

Speaking of work, a much better blog than this one called Hyperbole and a Half has an entry that I think describes an awful melt-down tantrum frmo the child's point of view. The child wants to eat an entire cake. Her mother, cruelly, prevents her from doing so. The child behaves in such a way as to interrupt the grandfather's party. The child thinks about how the mother will be sorry if she's dead, and so on.

I had no idea my children read blogs.

My children do not eat entire cakes. They eat raw bread dough. They absolutely adore raw bread dough.

When an Orthodox Jew has one of the many millions of little Orthodox Issues that arises in the average life, she calls her rabbi and asks a shaila, question. I suspect (but do not know) that my rabbi has a little asterisk next to my name to remind him that this isn't your average problem. A number of years ago, I was baking the challah and, as is the practice, I set apart an offering of dough with a blessing. Confusingly, the offering is also called challah. We are supposed to burn it. I did not burn it. Munchkin (I assume, it may have been Genome) ate it. I did not know what the practice is when your child eats your challah. Take more and burn that? Burning the child wouldn't work.

The answer, should you be waiting with bated breath, was "don't do anything. But be careful with the child and raw dough when it has eggs in it."

So my children like their baked goods, but they like them unbaked. You wouldn't know it given that they sabotaged my mixer, but there you are. Remind me to come back to the end of the mixer story soon.

Desperate Housewife

2010-10-16T23:50:00.000-07:00

The note I left my mother after clearing a mysterious recurring paper jam from her printer.

Thursday I got myself in a bit of a flame-skirmish at True Femininity, where a woman just out of college tells you that with the right attitude, it will be fun when your toddler poops in your bathtub. Or something.

She thinks it's a cliché that parents say non-parents are clueless. I think it's a truth. Some things are said a lot because they're actually valid.

Luckily for me, I didn't spend much time with kids before I had them. As a result, I cultivated few opinions. Had I had opinions, I would definitely have run at the mouth and embarrassed myself. Of course, blogging wasn't as big when I was younger, so there probably wouldn't be written evidence. I was particularly careful to avoid forming any opinions while pregnant. I've seen this movie; I know how it ends: mummy, crying on the couch.

Mummy still cries on the couch sometimes, but no one can say "I told you so."

I think it would be hard to be that certain brand of Christian that seems obliged to be happy all the time. Has anyone else encountered these people?

Have you read Barbara Ehrenreich's book on the subject of positive thinking? I normally dismiss communists, but maybe she addresses this.

Take heart!

2010-10-11T19:35:00.001-07:00

Firefly is five months old.

Roughly, childhood phases go like this:
Birth until social smiling (birth to about four months) -- Baby is a fetus that has been unkindly shoved out into the cold dark world. He is unimpressed with the development. Every two hours he forgets everything that has ever happened to him, ever, and must be fed-changed-soothed again. This is assuming he doesn't have colic. If he does, batten the hatches and don the rain gear.
Social smiling until tantruming (about four months until 17 months) -- Baby is becoming a transitional person. He smiles. He giggles. He hangs out. He begins to give positive feedback. He learns to move and makes a hobby of trying to put deadly things in his mouth. His mother starts to feel like she can get the hang of this. This isn't going to be such a disaster, after all. Maybe she can even take a shower.
Tantruming until talking (about 18 months until 2.5) -- Child is furious about that which he is unable to explain, or things that cannot possibly be fixed. Possible reasons for total meltdown include improperly sliced fruit, incorrect superhero offered on t-shirt, rain, no rain, bedtime, morning time, bathtime, etc. Child throws tantrums in a wide variety of public places. Child becomes a refusenik -- he refuses to put his coat on, or put his shoes on, or walk, or leave.
Talking until attitude (about 2.5 until 3.5) -- Child gets out of diapers. Child talks enough to convey important information. Child can be of help in small ways. Child idolises parent in charming way. This phase continues until the child develops a withering way-pre-teen attitude, somewhere around just before four years old.

What's amazing is that each time a child enters a new phase, I go into whiplash. What happened? Yesterday you were reasonable! Now you're tantruming! Now you've stopped! I'm a horrible failure as a mother! Or maybe not!

What's even more amazing is that I've spaced my children to ensure that I hit the hand-over-the-cyanide phases with all the children at the same time. But you know what? It's never as bad the second time. And it's even easier the third time.

Except the colic. That bit.

Question Period

2010-10-10T18:58:00.000-07:00

My husband asks me random questions. He reads very widely. He has chosen questions as his preferred rhetorical method, I think, because he knows I'm a type-A, over-achieving, anxiety-addled teenager at heart. As soon as I hear the inflection in his voice, all the alarms go off in my head: competition! Quiz! Test! All brain cells engage!

He has three types:

The Open-Ended Answer
Why are boys diagnosed with ADHD more often than boys? Why do left-wing people generally support the IRA?
These are invitations to discussion on a topic. He likes to ask them over dinner. If he hits a topic I know anything about, he's stuk listening to me opine for a good twenty minutes.

The Needful Thing to Know
How many years is 10,000 days? Who are the gubernatorial candidates from California? How are judges chosen for the Supreme Court of Canada?
He asks me these because I might know, and it's easier than looking it up on Wikipedia. Sometimes he asks me _as_ he looks it up on Wikipedia. Sometimes he checks me with a calculator. This is a teensy bit insulting, as I hate to think for no reason.

The Trivial Pursuit
Name the poet who wrote these lines. Which sitcom character was a drummer for The Beach Boys?
He asks me these questions because . . . well . . . I have no idea. I'm face-blind and therefore cannot identify people in movies. I identify members of my own family by their hair. And I could not now name a single drummer for any band at any time. Was Ringo the drummer in the Beatles? I don't even know. I think that there's someone in Red Hot Chili Peppers might be named Flea. But that might be someone else in the band. And it's not really his name, I hope.

What my husband doesn't know (until he reads this) is that I keep track of how many of each type of question I miss and which I get right. Somehow, it turned out that the seventh grade imprinted on me, and has become the lens through which I see the entire remainder of my life.

Question time: from which Canadian political institution does this post take its title?

Soldier Boy

2010-09-19T23:04:00.001-07:00

The other day my mother was discussing siblings with Munchkin. She was telling Munchkin that Munchkin has a responsibility to look after her brothers. Munchkin said, very seriously, "with great power comes great responsibility."

My husband tells me that this is from Spiderman.

Can someone tell me what objection Genome has to clean clothing, especially the variety of clothing that lacks a Spiderman design? I can't get the kid into anything that doesn't have a superhero on it.

I ask him to wear dress clothes twice in an average week: Friday night and Saturday. This is not, to my mind, extreme. Every other hour of the week he can wear something with Spiderman on it. He has Spiderman pajamas.

He cannot wear Spiderman to synagogue.

None of the other children at Synagogue are wearing Spiderman t-shirts. Or in Genome's ideal world, a Spiderman pajama shirt, a diaper, and running shoes sans socks.

Most days I let them pick their own clothes. In fact, they pick their own clothes, and they get dressed alone. Munchkin helps Genome. I thought that this was handy, but now I'm reaping what I have sown.

A4V: A horrible idea

2010-09-19T11:37:00.000-07:00

Hello everyone in blogland. I'm taking a moment from post Yom Kippur let's-dig-ourselves-out-of-the-holiday-mess to share this with you all.

Once upon a time, I articled for a summer in a large firm. One thing led to another, and I discovered one of my province's most prolific lay litigants: one John Ruiz Dempsey.

Mr. Dempsey is an "independent legal specialist." He is not a lawyer (or at least was not, at the time the judgements I'm reading took place. There is an off chance he attended law school, wrote the bar, etc., since then). Mr. Dempsey says that he does not call himself a lawyer because "he does not "practice" law and therefore he does it for real" The Law Society differs with him on this point: they say that he did hold himself as a lawyer and is not allowed to, because he hasn't passed the bar or been admitted to the law society.

I wrote Mr. Dempsey off as a highly eccentric personality, and filed the wonderful judgement The Law Society of BC v. Dempsey 2005 BCSC 1277 away in my personal "best of" file.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that there is in fact a whole movement of Mr. Dempseys. It's called the Freeman Movement. I might post a bit about the Freeman Movement later, but right now let me just summarize: Freeman Movement people believe that the legal system is not as it appears. It is all a sham and has been since the Federal Reserve of the US was established, and/or the US went off the gold standard.

According to the Freemen, the entire political system is voluntary. If you don't want to submit to the police, you don't have to. If you got a loan and it wasn't in actual gold, it's not a real loan. You don't have to pay it. Fiat money is imaginary and any debts accumulated under that system are null and void. If you have a mortgage on your house, you don't have to pay it: It's all pretend money!

So why do people pay their mortgages, tax bills, and so forth? Well, it's because they don't know the correct way not to pay them. What should the Freeman do? That's where the A4V, Accepted for Value process comes in.

It's hard to get good information on this, because everyone is out to make a buck. Here's a summary of one fellow explaining it. This guy is selling his version. George Tran here is trying it, and selling coaching, even if it doesn't seem to be working for him. There are bunches of youtube videos. There's a forum. On the internet, there's a forum for everything.

Short version: When you get a bill, write "ACCEPTED FOR VALUE" on it. Send it back. Voila! You're done!

Long version: When the IRS/CRA/bank fails to honour your "payment" of the bill with "Accepted for value" on it, try some other wrinkle. Maybe you need to try again. Maybe you need to use a different colour ink. The variations are endless.

To save time, you can purchase an "Accepted for Value" stamp!

So let's get to the point.

These remedies do not work.

They do not work.

They are a horrible idea.

Let's grant that the Freeman understanding of the law is the correct one, or as correct as any other. I think it's all a bunch of nonsense, but fine, work with me. All we're talking about is, if you write "Accepted for value" or something similar on your bill, will you still have to pay it? YES YOU WILL. And you will get yourself a lot of trouble to boot.

Canadian judgements refer to this as a "debt protest approach" and they don't like it at all. Here is what they say about it when one Simon Marples tried it: "this Court has clearly stated that such an approach is completely devoid of merit and will lead to special costs." Mr. Dempsey had to pay special costs too.

You interject, But Stealth Jew! Those are BC cases! I reside in another province!

Not so fast!

One I. Kovacevic tried the "Accepted for value" approach in Ontario in order to maintain possession of his Mercedes-Benz. It did not work. It was a spectacular failure, and Mr. Kovacevic when to prison, a surprisingly hard thing to do here in Canada.

Trying these "remedies" is like posting a great big target on your butt. Don't do it. There's no free lunch, and you do have to pay your mortgage.

As an added reason to avoid the whole mess, negative indicator Casey Serin is now working the A4V process to avoid paying for his parents home, and has a blog so you can follow along.

Anything Casey Serin does is a bad idea.

Don't do it.

Catching Up

2010-09-15T15:29:00.000-07:00

The recent dearth of posts has been to the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanna, which this year is part of a three-day food-fest to kick off the High Holiday season.

Last week I did not make a blog post. Instead I baked 19 loaves of challah (with no mixer -- thanks kids!), one loaf of rye, three honey cakes, two marbled vanilla cakes, and three batches of cookies. Plus two roasts, a salmon baked in salt, a stock pot full of chicken broth, carrot-ginger soup (husband's new favorite), three kugels, and innumerable side dishes.

I also fastened about 500 tiny buttons, and unfastened them, reaffirming our choice of being a button-free household on the day-to-day clothes of anyone who can't button. The man or woman who invented the elastic waist is one of the little Saints of modern motherhood.

Munchkin, Still Odd

2010-09-15T15:15:00.000-07:00

I don't know what world my daughter lives in.

I know where she doesn't live: She doesn't live in my world. I'm a literal person. I frequently miss the joke. I get bothered by historical details being awry in movies. I almost never read fiction, and when I do, it's only because a non-fiction writer referenced it. I never once had a real role in a school play. I have actually been cast as both a bird, and as a snowflake.

The other day we went downtown to run some errands. She chose her own clothes, in this case, Sabbath clothes: a light blue button-up, blue pleated skirt, knee socks, and light brown lace-ups.

So basically I took a Catholic school refugee downtown shopping.

I bought her new fairy wings (we won't talk about what happened to the last set). She opted to wear them immediately. So I had an enchanted Catholic school refugee.

You know you're making a scene when people on the bus start snapping photos.

Included here is one of the photos one man took of her. He emailed them to me. He's very talented.

I think we may need to keep a handle on the fantasy materials. She says that a bad boy with a kazoo is following her, peering in windows, and telling her she's dead. I said I'd pull the blinds. Is this reinforcing her delusion? I don't know. She said magic people can see through blinds. At least she knows that it's not a _normal_ person with a kazoo, right?

Yesterday she leaned against me and said, "mummy, I don't know why I did that. I'm a funny, funny girl."

My mother understands Munchkin perfectly. I think I may have been raised by, and be raising, a lunatic.

Babes in Toyland

2010-09-03T11:32:00.000-07:00

How many toys do you have that your children don't play with?

I would have liked children who played with aesthetically pleasing toys, the type hewn out of rough wood. They could gently wave their play silks in an interpretive dance before creating a little toy town out of wooden blocks. Although I've never really understood why Waldorf makes so many things out of felt (see A Toy Garden for examples of everything Waldorf), I have to admit that the aesthetic speaks to me in the same way that Martha Stewart does. It tugs on my heartstrings. My heartstrings are woven from estrogen, cash, and appealing colour schemes.

Genome does like blocks, though Munchkin has never seen much use for them. But Genome also enjoys Spiderman action figures.

One area I've been particularly unsuccessful in is baby toys. For the uninitiated, baby toys have ridiculous names and surprisingly hefty price tags. Through the indulgence of relatives, I have more or less tried all the trendy toys. A Whoozit. A Sophie the Giraffe. Enough stuffed animals to open a stuffed-animal zoo with representatives from all continents. They amused the kids for ten minutes, tops. Long enough to go to the bathroom, maybe, but not long enough to take a shower.

Husband bought Firefly a baby toy, and he likes it. He really likes it. It is called Captain Calamari, and it's made by Lamaze. Back when I was a kid, Lamaze only produced ineffective breathing techniques. No matter. Captain Calamari's name suggests otherwise, but he is actually an octopus. But he is a fabulous octopus. He is an Octopus that can entertain my son for, and I am not exaggerating, two straight hours. And then, after he's fed, two hours more.

Captain Calamari is my very favourite octopus in the whole world.

How much do I love you? Not that much.

2010-09-03T01:45:00.000-07:00

Some of you might be aware of the very sad case of Jani's Journey. Long story short: the older child is very mentally ill and about eight years old. In order to avoid sending her into residential care, the parents live in two different apartments. The mother lives in one with the younger son, whom Jani attacks. The father lives in the other with Jani.

I do not think that I would do that for my child.

If one child attacked one of the others, I wouldn't put the family into two separate apartments. I just don't love my kids that much.

In fact, I dont' love them enough to do a lot of things, as my daughter sometimes reminds me:
- I don't love them enough to let them watch Spiderman before bed.
- In fact, I don't love them enough to mother after 7:30 p.m. That's when mummy goes off duty, and if you're going to be up all night you're getting very subpar mummy.
- I don't love them enough to be a natural birth. I know that there's a lot of debate about whether natural birth is better or not, but my answer is: I don't care. Unless an epidural is very, seriously, dangerous to me or the kid, I'm getting it. Causes baby to be born drowsy? Makes labour longer? Couldn't care less.
- I don't love my son enough to let him wear a Spiderman t-shirt to all occasions.
- I don't love my kids enough to explain to him why he can't wear a Spiderman t-shirt to all occasions. If he doesn't get it yet, he's not going to.
- I don't love them enough to pay full price for their clothes. If you want full-price clothes, you have to reliably wear them for more than five minutes.
- I don't love them enough to let them self-wean. I tried once, and the kid went so long I was going to be nursing three. I don't love my kids enough to nurse three kids at once. Now I start working towards weaning at two.
- If you spend two straight weeks screaming at the top of your lungs, I will still hold you, cuddle you, rock you, swaddle you, clean your butt and bathe you. But until you stop screaming, I won't like you that much. I don't love you enough to be immune to your behaviour -- whether or not that behaviour is your fault.

I guess I love my kids. But I'm not head-over-heels in love with them.

Stealth Jew does not approve

2010-08-28T22:45:00.001-07:00

Some almost ten years ago, when I was in college (yes I'm old shaddup), the big thing in online Christian circles was a type of Amish fetishism. There were even a bunch of novels, Christian lit, published about Amish situations. A whole bunch of blogs appeared about being "plain" and "plain-living."

Fine, some Christians like Amish people. So what, Stealth Jew? Can we go back to talking about how you screwed up your kids this year?

I'm going somewhere with this.

Now the trend is Jewish fetishism. Everyone and his uncle is eating challah, wearing tzitzit, and blowing shofars.

It's Jews for Jesus writ large.

Does Jews for Jesus still exist?

Stealth Jew in principle supports the right of all people to practice their wacky religion in any wacky way they want, as her own practice involves wearing a wig over perfectly good hair, and thus she lives in the proverbial glass house. But in practice I have a powerful negative reaction to the, what's the lefty term, "cultural appropriation" of Jewish traditions by Christians. Those are ours. There are a lot fewer of us than there are of them, and I don't want to be drowned out. In addition, this kind of cultural soup has been used to aggressively seek Jews for conversion.

Plus it's a theological mess, profoundly un-Jewish, un-Hebrew. Judaism is not about you, a Bible, and a high-speed connection. It is by its nature experienced in community. Not a virtual community. A real community, one where people show up unannounced and observe what a mess your house is. One where people are up in your business all the time and you're limited in what you can do by what people will think. Further, Judaism involves submission to an authority. Everyone is to make himself a rabbi (that doesn't mean 'become a rabbi'; it means to find one).

I hope they all move on to something new soon. How about Catholicism? I think rosaries are pretty nifty.

The Second Coming

2010-08-25T22:01:00.001-07:00

Munchkin wanders out to sea. Yesterday, her mother wanted to wander out to sea and drown herself.

This is going to require a little backstory, but it will be worth it.

My mother has a serious spinal injury that has deteriorated over the years. Long story short, she has rather fewer vertebrae now than she once did. This injury requires her to be on some serious and controlled medication. My mother takes the type of medication that periodically becomes the subject of an MSNBC documentary called PERCOBENZOMETHADOT: Scourge of America's Small Towns. It is really just a fancy version of morphine. The morphine is released gradually over the course of 12 hours. Regular morphine must be taken every four hours. This requires the injured person to develop a baby-minding sleep pattern, waking at least once during the night to 'dose up,' a further waking in the morning feeling terrible. So percobenzomethadot is well worth the trouble, and I salute the big pharma giant who came up with it.

The problem is that if you are up to no good, you can crush your percobenzomethadot. Then you get all that lovely morphine at once. This is not the idea. Apparently it makes people much happier than doctor-prescribed medication ought to make them. Of course, people with chronic pain are unlikely to use their percobenzomethadot this way, because it rather defeats the purpose, now doesn't it?

In order to prevent my mother from misusing her percobenzomethadot, my mother, like all people taking it, must receive regular scripts. No refills allowed. The doctor must see her in person to give her the more complicated prescription. Then that prescription must be called in to the pharmacy days in advance of when it is to be filled, as the pharmacy keeps a very limited stock on-site, as they do not want to be hell up. But she can't wait too long, because the super special prescription expires in seven days.

Also, people taking percobenzomethadot for their disintegrating spine are not encouraged to operate motor vehicles while under the influence. So mum needs a ride.

During the work day, because that's when the doctor works.

Since my brother is currently gainfully employed, I and the three woodland creatures bundled into the car to take my mother on this monthly errand.

We handled the doctor's appointment with aplomb.

At the pharmacy, things fell apart.

Munchkin wanted to ride in the cart. I had let her ride in the cart at the grocery store this morning. This is because the grocery store carts are big proper carts, and the pharmacy carts are little pretend carts, the sort found at liquor stores. They could not hold a four-year-old.

She started to whine and melt down.

I told her to stop. She didn't. I took her out front, leaving my mother with Genome (Firefly was strapped to me). Out front of the store she proceeded to shriek as loudly as she could and make a variety of interesting and dramatic gestures. She was attempting to communicate that I was the worst mother in the entire world.

Need I mention that there was regular foot traffic to shoot me disapproving looks? We were also right in front of a homeless man selling the homeless periodical.

After a few minutes of this I realised it was not going to taper out on its own.

So I smacked her butt, and told her if she shrieked again I'd smack her again. She shrieked again. I smacked her again. She stopped, opting instead for soft-ish weeping on a bench.

Now I had _really_ gotten some horrible looks.

I used to read childfree groups sometimes. One of their tropes was that parents think that they are entitled to be treated better than the disabled. A surprisingly high number of the childfree identify as disabled in some way.

They are wrong. Being four is a terrible, terrible disability. If an adult acted this way, we'd either sue him, or commit him.

I think that Munchkin committed at least two torts against me, including the intentional infliction of emotional distress.

When the crying was more or less under control, I dragged Munchkin back to locate my mother. The prescription was not filled, running 30 minutes late at this time. She went back to the pharmacist and stressed the important of having it right now, for the well-being of everyone in the store. He filled it. We all went back to the car. I realised that I had left some vital object upstairs. Went upstairs. Genome sees me walking away and starts to cry. Found item. Went downstairs. Leaned against car. Cried. Drove mother home. Called husband. Cried again.

My mother points out that no one took down her license plate number, and it's unlikely anyone called CPS because they had no way of identifying me.

"Hi, child protection? There's this woman in black . . . yeah . . . looks about ten days dead, to be honest."

But if I disappear, you'll know where I've gone

2010-08-22T23:21:00.000-07:00

He's cute when he's sleeping.

Right before Shabbas this week, I did the ridiculous. I went to sit down with the baby. My husband had to run out and do a work errand. Everything was ready. All that was necessary was for Genome to not destroy anything for a 25 minute period.

We explained this clearly to Genome.

Some ten minutes later I heard a crash, and Munchkin's dulcet tones: "you weren't suppossa do that!!"

Genome had found and open a package of miniature Israeli croutons. If you don't know these, they're about a half cm square, hard as rock, and neon yellow. They are said to be some sort of condiment. I have my doubts. My husband likes them. My son thought that my house had too few of them.

Immediately the two older children began crushing the croutons into the floor, the carpet, the couch, and so on. Genome was also eating the occasional crouton off of the floor.

So what if it's twenty minutes to Shabbas? I maintain few standards, but one is that crunching beneath my feet should not be an indoor phenomenon.

As I vacuumed, I had a problem. Munchkin wanted to help. So she ran in front of the vacuum. Genome did not want to help. So he took pieces of our vacuum (it's one of those space age transformer models in neon green and electric blue) to use as weapons.

Then Munchkin fed one of my slings into the vacuum. I smelled smoke.

Then everyone got sent to his or her room with strict instructions that mummy _bites_.

Missives from my increasingly strange oldest child:

"I was having fun at shul, but then I got tired, and so I ate my shirt." (She had indeed been chewing at her shirt. I don't know if she digested any of it.)

In response to the question, "Why did you do that?"
"Because . . . because . . . because I don't know why because!"

Passages

2010-08-20T01:15:00.000-07:00

My little boy is turning into a bigger boy. Today he told me "mummy doesn't love me anymore" for the very first time. Apparently I don't love him because I made him change clothes. He is following closely in the steps of his older sister, who told me that I didn't love her approximately five times a day for what seemed like an entire year of her life.

It's so exciting when a child enters a new stage.

He's not very good at the entire hysterical breakdown business though. He kept trying to giggle while he said it, and he had forgotten the entire incident within sixty seconds. His sister had much more staying power. Now that girl could really throw a tantrum. Still can.

I asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up. She said either a butterfly, or an astronaut. A friend said that those are connected because both involve flying.

I think they are both implausible. I heard on the radio that President Obama intends to phase out manned missions in NASA. I didn't say that to my four-year-old; don't worry. Cross that bridge when we come to it.

Firefly is doing a lot better and crying a lot less BH.

The Baby Book

2010-08-18T17:01:00.000-07:00

Stealth Jew hates Dr. Sears. Dr. Sears answers questions at Ask Dr. Sears.

Actually, I hate a lot of those people: Penelope Leach, whomever or whatever wrote What to Expect When . . . , Brazelton.

But I particularly hate Dr. Sears. And I particularly hate him today, after Firefly has been crying without stop for four days. Because today I had occasion to read his advice on COPING WITH COLIC. I mentioned Firefly has a touch of colic, yes?

First, "You try to cuddle, but baby stiffens in protest. You try to nurse, but baby arches and pulls away. You rock, sing, and ride. The soothing techniques that worked yesterday aren't working today. And inside your head the familiar refrain, "What's wrong with my baby? What's wrong with me?" plays over and over again."

Dr. Sears, nothing is playing in my head. IF anything is playing in my head, I can't hear it. My baby is screaming too loud. On the odd occasions that I can pawn him off on someone else to scream at, what do I hear in my head? Ringing. I have always had tinnitus, but I think Firefly is making it worse.

"When an adult hurts, the doctor and patient do some detective work to track down the cause of the pain, so they can fix it." Well, sometimes. But sometimes they just administer something for the pain. Do they know what causes fibromyalgia? Can they 'fix' the pain after an operation? Maybe what my baby needs is morphine. Why can't my baby have morphine? If it's unsafe for him, give it to me.

The problem with the epidural is that they took it away and made me keep the baby.

"By viewing your baby as "hurting" instead of "crying," you're more likely to be empathetic, like you would a baby who was hurting because of an ear infection, rather than viewing crying as an annoying tool babies use to manipulate their parents into holding them a lot" Dr. Sears, we passed empathy so long ago. The only way I'd empathise with Firefly mid-scream-fest is if he were making another little firefly and birthing it into his diaper. Crying for 48 hours is more than annoying. It is a form of torture. My baby is torturing me.

"Carrie, a mother in our practice, had a colicky baby who was content as long as she was in a sling. But Carrie had to return to work when her baby was six-weeks-old. I wrote the following "prescription" to give to her daycare provider: "To keep Tiffany content, wear her in a sling at least three hours a day."" That's an awesome idea. Except that Firefly is worn in a sling, well, all the time. Because he cries all the time.

The other day I had a migraine. I was lying on the bed with a pillow over an ice pack over my head. Firefly was next to me, screaming. Round about four a.m., I was so tired that I swaddled him, put him in his bassinet, and just left. I couldn't do any more. I went into the other room, and over his crying, I fell asleep.

I don't know how long he was there. My husband woke up and held him for awhile, and brought him to me to nurse at around 5:30 a.m.

When I started thinking of Firefly and me as a tragic dyad, conjoined twins who hate each other, I realised it was time to visit grandma.

He really likes his grandmother.

I believe in the sun when it's not shining, right?

Stealth Jew can paint by numbers

2010-08-12T20:46:00.000-07:00

This week we are at war with the wood paneling. It turns out that I was right and husband was wrong: we have actual wall back there. Granted, it is plaster wall that is older than the two of us put together. But it's in reasonably good condition (a little patching and painting) and, more important, not wood paneling.

In keeping with their commitment to dated and questionable aesthetics in each and every home decoration decision (yes, I recognise that they may not have been dated at the time, but it wasn't great foresight), the walls behind the wood paneling are painted mauve and mint green.

Let that sink in.

For imagination's sake, the mauve of the wall is approximately the same colour painted on Munchkin's face, above.

I am using this opportunity to throw things out. I use every opportunity to toss things. I am the only natural predator of stuffed animals, plastic toys, and mailings found in our household environment. If they overcome me, you will see the remainder of my family on some future episode of Hoarders.

I will represent for you a conversation my husband and I have more or less weekly:
Husband (tensely): Sweetheart, have you seen the Passover dishes?
Stealth Jew: Oh yes. I gave them away.
Husband: Why did you do that?
Stealth Jew: Well we haven't used them in six months. I figured we couldn't possibly need them that much.
Husband: . . .
Stealth Jew: I don't know what you're so upset about. You'd think you want to live in clutter.
Husband: . . .

In my defense, this is the man who kept an unopened package of VHS tapes through four moves because they were in perfect condition. Also, a television aerial. Also, a garden gnome. And he still has the garden gnome; I saw it in his study.

ETA: My husband correct me: it is not a garden gnome but rather a "squeaky elf."

Slaughterhouse-Five

2010-08-05T23:13:00.000-07:00

These are two stone rabbits. They come from my mother's garden. Munchkin has always liked them. Really, really liked them. First she would sit with them and pet them. then they started to come into her playhouse for tea. Eventually the rabbits moved inside, and lately, they've been appearing in various locations around my mother's home.

Most alarming was when she woke up to two rabbits on her bedside table.

Strange child. Maybe they're just following her.

Speaking of Munchkin, would someone tell me what she has against the number five? Never have I seen a child have such a vendetta against an innocuous number. We must have spent half an hour before I finally had her convinced to stop counting six fingers on each hand -- and that was only with copious bribing.

The number five is very important information. There's just no workaround for five.

I said that to a rather, well, computer geeky friend of the family. He suggested teaching her to count in base two. This is not helpful.

I can count to 1023 with my fingers. I used to do this in law school during the more boring classes. You should learn to do it too.

Admit it. You read here for all of the actionable information.

Amusing Ourselves to Death

2010-08-03T23:42:00.000-07:00

Over the weekend, we had a family outing to an amusement park way, way out in the burbs. Possibly past the burbs. We were going to one of those family attractions/amusement parks, but "amusement park" might be an overstatement. Six Flags this ain't. It advertised itself as being the "only X in North America," where "X" is a small category for a reason -- say, "the only theme park in North America devoted entirely to spam," or "the largest corn museum west of the Rockies."

In this case there was a dinosaur theme.

Why, you may ask, why did we troop three children 90 minutes out of town to take them to what I surmise is the most lackluster theme park extant in the province? It's my husband's fault. He's powerfully attached to anything that reminds him of his childhood, and he loves for his children to participate in the same activities. He is aided in this by our powerfully provincial natures. We both live in the same city we grew up in. We can walk to our parents' house (note: not the same parents! That would be a differently themed blog. His children attend the same synagogue that he attended. And they haven't redecorated the sanctuary. It's very seventies.

Anyhow, the kids had a fantastic time. It was exactly their speed. They have no ear for tacky, and so they loved the dance party with Teenagers in Mascot Costumes. Apparently it was a "Justin Bieber Dance Party." Until last month, I did not know who that was either. My mother told me. I am less cool than my mother.

Actually, that's not new. My mother's always been pretty cool.

I took my big camera to the amusement park, in order to better capture the experience for your vicarious amusement. I fit right in with the fathers. My husband and I seem to have reversed the usual pattern as to who actually enjoys the experience, and who compulsively records it with twenty pounds of recording equipment.

Firefly was on my back the whole time, so he didn't get into any pictures. If I ever look back on photos of the event, I'll probably wonder -- wait -- was Firefly born yet then?

Not Enough IKEA

2010-08-02T21:34:00.000-07:00

We were on a family outing that required about 90 minutes of driving each way. Because we are deeply, deeply citified people, who both grew up close to downtown, we rarely go out to the suburbs.

On the way back home, Firefly began screaming. This is a trope of his.

Side note: it amazes me that it is illegal to drive while talking on the hand-held cell phone, but legal to drive with children. A few months ago I was driving with a newborn Firefly, Genome, and Munchkin. All of a sudden Genome, a bit under two, started yelling "help! HELP!" I pulled over. He was . . . fine. I still don't know what he had been upset about.

I am a neurotic person. I am a nervous driver. I do not need Munchkin instructing me how to drive, Firefly shrieking, and Genome yelling "HELP!"

End of diversionary side note. So we pull over into the suburban IKEA. And this IKEA is huge. It is three times as large as our local IKEA. We stopped in the parking lot. We were in "Q." That is how large this IKEA was.

What's in it? I have never said, when shopping at IKEA, gee, there's just not enough IKEA here. There should be three times as much IKEA. No. It seems, in fact, much larger than it needs to be. The entire display section could go. So could the apparently resident bands of slow-moving people traveling with tantruming children.

Anyway, we pulled over and I fed Firefly, but he started screaming again less than five minutes later.

Stealth Jew's children have boring names

2010-07-30T05:37:00.000-07:00

Genome, who probably has the best of the IRL names

I was a bit nervous about naming my children.

Most names are selected for aesthetic reasons. IYH, my children will be stuck with these names for many years. What kind of aesthetic decisions were you making 20 years ago? Twenty years ago, I was seven. I thought that high fashion included matching pink sweatpants and a Rainbow Brite belt. What about decisions made 30 years ago? We bought our house from people who last redecorated circa 1975. Their vision could be summed up as as, "wood panelling." Everywhere. The basement has wood panelling on the ceiling.

So I dodged the issue. All of my children are named for recently-dead relatives. We didn't even get creative. They all got the exact name, first and middle. This way, their names may be dated, but they are still family-dated. In fact, two of the names are arguably dated already.

Genome, though, dodged a bullet. Had he been a girl, he would have been "Bella." Only when I saw that Isabel/Bella was the number one girls name in his year did I realise that something was up. Gee, I thought, these kids can't all be named for my great-aunt.

Well, no. It actually had to do with a series of novels featuring sparkly vampires. A series of novels I had never heard of at the time Genome was born.

Children have a way of putting you out-of-the-loop.

Stealth Jew Can Get Out of her House

2010-07-27T23:48:00.000-07:00

Sooner or later, it comes time to leave our humble little quarters. Generally this is done to procure food, to transport the children to grandma, or to just let the little rotters destroy the great outdoors, rather than my indoors. Remember: if you pee on the grass, that doesn't make extra laundry.

Getting out of the house, though, requires a vast quantity of packed goods. Also, the children have a limited attention span. If it takes too long to get everyone ready, I risk that the first child prepared may have wandered off, taken off her shoes and coat, and become engrossed in some non-portable activity. So how does the lazy, disorganized mummy get out the door?

I always keep my diaper bag packed. I unpacked it to take a photo for you: Firefly sized diapers, fresh underwear for Genome (who is potty training), baby wipes, large wetbag, small ziploc for anything disgusting, extra sleeper for Firefly, extra hat for Firefly, receiving blankets (they are endlessly useful).

The diaper bag goes in the coat closet. Baby carriers hang on the hook by the coats.

Tada! If I only had one child, I could be out the door in five minutes.

Of course, when I only had one child, I didn't know to do helpful things like this. It still took me an hour to get out of the house.

They say that G-d doesn't give you more than you can handle. Whether this is true in my life depends on how you define "handle." Broadly, everyone I am responsible for seems to eat, move their bowels, and approximate a state of hygiene. This is good. But if "handle" implies "handle with grace and dignity," then I definitely flunk.

I didn't quite realise that motherhood would leave me permanently flustered.

No wonder old ladies can seem flighty or batty. The children have been eating my brain. By the time I get to retirement (IYH), there won't be that much of it left.

Destruction Junction

2010-07-26T22:03:00.000-07:00

See what's happening in this photo? That's a rough approximation of what Genome does to my house.

On Friday I was making the dough for the challah when I (you can see what's coming) went to the bathroom. Silly mummy! I left two children, Genome and Munchkin, dutifully observing the bread dough going round and round in the mixer. They looked quite charming, actually. A sibling activity. I felt that Maria Montessori or Rudolph Steiner would have approved of my morning activity. All we really needed was something made of felt, perhaps, or bark.

When I returned, my mixer was making the most alarming sound, which I will render as "chunka-ca-chunka-chunk." And it was not going round and round anymore. It was stopped. The gears are now exposed, about half-an-inch worth, between where the dough hook is attached and the body of the mixer.

I can still make it stir as long as I keep pushing up the hook, but this makes baking rather tedious.

I don't know what he or she did. I don't know who did it. They both say nothing happened, but Genome isn't much of a communicator and Munchkin's grip on reality is fanciful.

Husband says he'll take it to get fixed. This person seems to suggest I could do it myself. I'm not very handy though. I'm the type of wife who calls her husband to plunge the toilet. I once, in a moment of panic, asked him to come home from a society meeting and unfold the stroller. By "once," I mean "two weeks ago." My adjustment to a new child is always a bit rocky.

I'm distressed. Even if my mixer is fixable -- it has to be fixable! -- it seems unlikely I'll have it ready for challah this week.

Today I had Genome knead the (non-challah) bread for me. This seems only just, because I'm fairly sure that it was he who worked his magic on my mixer. He did a pretty good job, too.

Sisyphus' Baby

2010-07-25T00:46:00.000-07:00

As soon as Firefly was born, he needed something to suck on. At first he would only sleep while he was sucking on my finger. If you've had a baby, you may remember that babies prefer to suck on fingers with the fingernail down, towards the tongue. Try this with your hand. It's moderately awkward. Eventually, you might want to get up, use the bathroom, feed yourself, or any of the other myriad activities that is surprisingly difficult to accomplish with one hand in such a position. Also, Firefly would take personal offense to any attempt I made to move. As soon as his father came to visit him, I dropped Firefly into his lap and took off to find a pacifier.

Now the Maternity Hospital does not sell pacifiers, out of some belief that they impede the initiation of breastfeeding. As I already knew from previous experience, initiating breastfeeding is not a problem for me. Weaning is a problem for me. Initiation? Definitely not. So I was quite comfortable giving my child a piece of plastic to suck on, and all the various physical and psychological issues attendant thereto. Nevertheless, because of the Maternity Hospital's position, I couldn't buy one at the gift shop.

No matter! An intrepid aged lady working at the gift shop directed me to the attached Children's Hospital. There, she said, they did stock pacifiers. In fact, pacifiers were often recommended by pediatricians, and so she regularly directed patients to the Children's Hospital to purchase them. Off I went, down the world's most depressing hallway (neonatal intensive care and pediatric cardiac), and into the Children's Hospital giftshop. Not fifteen minutes later, Firefly was sucking on his very own neon green plastic pacifier. It's the very same one you can see in his photo.

As soon as I popped it into his mouth, his entire tense little body relaxed. "You," I told him, "are never allowed to even approach a cigarette." When Freud described the oral fixation, he may have been on to something.

So why Sisyphus' baby? Well, when Firefly drifts to sleep, he relaxes even more. And the pacifier pops out of his mouth. He then realises he's lost his pacifier and begins flailing about, whimpering, and generally working himself into a lather. Unless someone is next to him to replace the pacifier, he will quickly get quite upset. When the pacifier is replaced, he must begin again the process of drifting to sleep. Drift-slip-wake, drift-slip-wake.

It is 12:58 in the morning. We are on cycle number 27 in a row.

Sisyphus' baby.

Munchkin

2010-07-23T15:15:00.000-07:00

I sometimes feel as if Munchkin is only a periodic visitor to our world, drifting in and out from wherever she actually resides. Nonetheless, there are issues on which she is absolutely firm. She is adamant that we must all Follow the Rules, and failure to do so upsets her.

I was driving home with Munchkin, Genome and Firefly when I made a right turn. As I turned, she began to cry. I was confused. Did I jerk her? Did Genome throw something? Anything was possible.

But no. She was crying because "you're not supposed to go on a red light!"

I will interject at this moment that it is impossible to explain nuances of context in driving to a four-year-old. We quickly reached an impasse. I maintained that it is indeed legal to turn right on a red light in most places in North America, including in our city. She maintained that it is always wrong to proceed on a red light. We finally settled on "don't tell mummy how to drive," which she could agree on, and "mummy knows how to drive," which I suspect she still doubts. But she doesn't pop up saying so, and that's good enough for me. As my own mother used to say: think what you want, but do as I say.

If you're wondering, the photograph is of Munchkin tossing water into the wading pool near our house.

Stealth Jew needs an imaginary friend

2010-07-21T18:39:00.000-07:00

Recently a friend of mine has taken her child to the doctor. He appears to be suffering from hallucinations. This is obviously very serious and very sad, and I hope he can be helped. That said, the whole incident has concerned me somewhat, as I realised that if Munchkin hallucinated I would have absolutely no idea.

You see, Munchkin's barrier between fantasy and reality seems permeable at the best of times. When I was pregnant with Firefly, she was convinced for months that she, too, was pregnant. With a baby panda. A girl panda. She laid out an outfit for the girl panda, and I was starting to get concerned that when said panda failed to materialise, she would be worried or terribly disappointed. You see how the unreality of a four-year-old has a way of sucking me in.

Someone suggested that perhaps she is just creative. This is possible. But she has an imaginary friend named "Imaginary," which seems rather literal.

Yesterday Munchkin informed me that I was going to have a girl baby next (she tries to slip this in at various intervals, as she is a believer in the power of suggestion and positive thinking). I said something about being helpless against the force of her preference. She said, "yes, forest. The baby girl is in the forest."
"In the forest?"
"Yes, in the forest. Waiting for G-d to put her in your tummy. But she's not afraid."

All right then.

Little does Munchkin know that there's a whole world of imaginary friends out here on the internet. I could use one today, because Firefly has colic. Colic can bite me. In fact, Firefly can bite me, too, if only he'll stop crying while he does it.

StealthJew's Adventures in WallyWorld

2010-07-20T09:36:00.000-07:00

Three children is too many to take to Walmart. In fact, three children is exactly three too many to take to Walmart. Isn't that a coincidence?

Children are ill-suited to big box shopping:
- Four-year-olds have bladders the size of pins;
- Two-year-olds find everything endlessly fascinating, especially that which is located in the opposite direction from the direction in which mummy is currently proceeding; and,
- Two-month-olds eat/sleep/poo on a cycle that automatically resets every twenty minutes.

It was a mistake.

I tried to explain to the children that there comes a time in every woman's life when she must purchase men's athletic socks in bulk quantities. She must do this because she is too lazy to match socks but too cheap to pay retail for 20 pairs in one go.

This is not the first time that I have laid down my mental health on the altar of economy.

When did I realise I had made a mistake? I realised it when two-year-old came down the aisle with a toy wheelbarrow full of Nair.

Nair

I love my two-year-old. Who else would choose Walmart as the place to say, "you know mom, I really think you need to do something about your body hair. Such as bathe in a cut-rate price wading pool filled with depilitory cream."

My husband asked, is it always like this?

Of course not. Usually, the four-year-old has an adult-sized bladder. The newborn endures Ghandi-like fasts (with less urine consumption). The two-year-old recognises that other Walmart shoppers may wish to tame their own bikini lines, and purloins the Nair in moderation.

Of course it's always like this. Given that no one cried and no one disobeyed (even when told to abandon a wheelbarrow full of Nair), this was pretty good.

Vigils and Visitors

2009-02-07T23:18:00.001-08:00

There are two kinds of families when someone is in hospital: vigil families, and visitor families. Visitor families stop in during visitor hours. They stand at the end of the bed and ask you a series of ridiculous questions. They search awkwardly for conversation and excuse themselves early. They do not take off their coats. Vigil families drive you to the hospital with a packed overnight bag and their own pillow. They then set up by the side of your bed. If you fall asleep they wander the halls of the hospital, looking for spare or lonely people (of which there are many in hospitals) who could use a reprieve. It is a great mercy for vigil families that hospital stays are now so short.

Of course, each has a dark side. Visitor families are sometimes delinquent families, who inquire whether their wife isn't a little pale, only to be reminded that she was in for an appendectomy three weeks prior. Vigil families can become the type of open emotional display that requires a summons to hospital security.

My mother is a vigil person who married into a visitor family. This is stressful for everyone.

Why Mothers Never Get Anything Done

2009-01-28T21:39:00.000-08:00

So I tried to work a bit on setting up The New Blog. And also do my List of Things to Do Each Day, which includes a chapter of Yiddish, a lesson of Hebrew, reviewing vocabulary, and some math.

Isn't this funny?

If you could have seen a time-motion study of my day today, that first paragraph would cause you to bust a gut laughing. I did the Yiddish. I did a little of the blog. Mostly I just succeeded in not killing my toddler, or allowing my baby to buy himself.

In other news . . . are gnomes known for bitting? Because Gnome does. Often. That's how he guards his spot on the bed. And now that he crawls . . . well, today I found him chewing on my toes. This seems abnormal, but I can't quite articulate why.

Changes in the works

2009-01-27T17:56:00.000-08:00

Sorry for the lapse around here; I am moving towards taking this to my own domain.

Breastmilk

2009-01-24T21:55:00.000-08:00

I am not that interested in breastfeeding.

Is that heresy? I am appallingly unable to wean and thus an extended breastf-eeder by default. As in many areas of my life, I live in a kind of fog of semi-denial. I envision myself as a no-nonsense type of woman who chooses whatever is, frankly, the easier way to feed the baby. In reality I am a terrible soft-touch who nurses through the night for far longer than advisable and, indeed, nurses in general for far longer than necessary.

But after nearly three years of non-stop nursing, while I am still happy to keep doing it, I am completely uinterested in talking about it. I have a breastfeeding group that I skim through regularly because I have been foolish enough to sign up for it. I do this with the imagined goal of reading a variety of interesting information. In reality I skim until I see something that annoys me. It takes me ages to get around to unsubscribing. Again, a symptom of my general disorganisation.

But may I humbly suggest that none of the following are achievements worthy of sharing with over a thousand people:
- You have been nursing your child for 6 weeks/3 months/6 months/1 year/whatever. Good for you. Who are you again?
- You are angry because you saw someone formula feeding/someone indicated they feed their child with formula. Get the hell over it. To channel my grandmother: there are children starving in Africa, and this is what you worry about?
- You are happy because you have successfully nursed in public. Good for you? Again, remind me who you are?

These little achievements of life are things you share with your friends and family. And if none of these people has friends nor family, then social disintegration in modern life is considerably worse than its advance press would indicate.

But that being said, suppose you do not have anyone who wants to hear the minute details of your childs food intake, feces, suckling and so forth. What shall we then do?

The answer is obvious. Do as I did: start a blog.

One for sorrow

2009-01-22T22:25:00.000-08:00

My children spend their time either adoring each other, or conspiring against me. Munchkin appears to have some natural affinity to bread. "Bake" is her favorite game.

The other day she made her own bread (Munchkin: FLOUR and WA-ER and GARRIK and RICE. Don't ask me how the garlic and rice got in there), kneaded it, baked it, and ate it. Which makes her arguably more adept in the kitchen than I was until college.

I put it in the oven and took it out, but the rest was her.

This is all my fault. It's hard to get kosher bread here, so I was baking it all when she was born. Now she intends to live on it -- as well as on any other food coloured white. My daughter: food racist?

I wonder if there are any legends of Munchkins eating bread.

The woodland creatures like nursery rhymes:

One for sorrow
Two for mirth
Three for a wedding
Four for a birth
Five for silver
Six for gold
Seven for a secret,
never to be told
Eight for heaven
Nine for hell
Ten for the Devil's
very on sel'

Shira Moments

2009-01-21T23:48:00.000-08:00

Shira is my sister-in-law. She's a lovely woman. She's a born-and-bred Flatbush (that's Brooklyn for you non-Jews, Stealth or otherwise) girl. She's frum, and also tidy and well put together. I have never seen a hair out of place. I have never seen her hem fall down. Even her children fall into line.

Once her older girl and Munchkin went on an outing together with my husband, after Gnome was born. Munchkin's cousin was wearing a navy blue dress with a red trim. And navy tights. And navy shoes. With a matching red trim.

There was more organisation in that child's outfit than exists in my entire body.

Munchkin, for the record, was wearing a bright pink jersey dress (ebayed), rainbow tights, pink off-brand crocs with lights in the heels, and a blue sweatshirt her Zayde brought her from Israel -- it said PRINCESS in sparkles across the front.

Anyway. Last night, at three in the morning, I got a not uncharacteristic powerful desire for chocolate. After rummaging around for at least twenty minutes, I found half a pack of candies I had hidden, heaven knows from whom, behind the yeast cultures in the kitchen.

And as I sat there in the dark, munching away, I had that thought again: This kind of escapade? I bet Shira never does this.

Meet the Indigo Children

2009-01-20T15:19:00.000-08:00

Meet the Indigo Children. They're mine.

You know the ones. They're the ones the childfree are complaining about.

Is your child a super speshul indigo starseed child like Munchkin and Gnome are? Answer this simple quiz for him/her to find out!

1. Your baby brother has just fallen asleep after three hours of colic. How can you best aid the situation?
a. Be quiet
b. Go play with toys
c. Sing him a Lullaby to the Universe at top volume while leaning over his bassinet

2. You are a baby. Why do you have dirt under your nails?
a. Your mummy didn't cut them
b. Some mysterious, toddler-based explanation
c. You are just that in touch with the earth

3. You are a toddler and almost never talk. For what words do you make an exception?
a. Mama & Dada
b. Eat & Diaper
c. Whatever will get mummy expelled from synagogue play group

4. You are a toddler. Why did you turn your dinner onto the floor?
a. You wanted to make a mess and see mummy turn funny colours
b. You wanted a hot dog with sugar pops instead of whatever you were served
c. The food had a bad aura

5. You are a baby. Why did you poop on your new clean sleeper?
a. You wanted to make a mess and see mummy turn funny colours
b. You have relatively few ways to amuse yourself
c. You were making a statement about your preference for that which is organic and natural over the Wal-mart consumerist soul-sucking vapidity of your mass-produced, gender-limiting blue sleeper. In other words, pooping in your sleeper is how you rage against the machine.

ANSWER
Give yourself a point for each C.
0 Points: Your child is not speshul. Sorry.
1-5 Points: Your child is an Indigo Starseed! Drop him or her off at the door to the local naturopathic/new age store and then scurry purposefully away. The owners of the establishment will be thrilled with the opportunity to care for a member of the coming ruling class.

Seriously though, people believe this stuff. (I've always regretted not believing in New Age stuff, because it looks like a way to make money. Is that Jewish of me?) My personal favorite is The Indigo Files. Are you an adult Indigo? Well, no, it seems not. I don't like cats. But they certainly sound special, don't they?

A matter of timing

2009-01-19T20:06:00.000-08:00

I've discovered where I went wrong with this entire parenting enterprise. It was, you see, a matter of bad timing.

I had my first at 22. This was too late to be a disgrace to the family, as my brother charmingly put it. It was too late for sympathetic social programs. It was too early for minivans and yoga pants. Three years later, I still don't own a minivan or yoga pants. And I am either ten years too old or ten years too young for the nearest suitable peer groups.

I thought it might all even out as I kept having children. But I've discovered that one's parenting peer group is really set with the oldest child. I think it's because having a first child together is a formative experience in a way that subsequent children are not. You can only get excited, really excited, about the colour of baby feces once in your life. When that window is closed, it's closed forever.

So here I am. And maybe in other parts of the country, women in their early twenties get married and have babies all the time. But where I live, child-bearing rarely comes before investment in the real estate market. And real estate is expensive.

I've always been a bit out of step, and now I've gone and had babies when I was supposed to be having lovers.

I must find a way to blame this on the housing bubble.

2009-01-19T19:08:00.000-08:00

This blog is titled in honour ofthis amazing website. I love the term stealth Jewish.I intend to use it regularly in conversation.

Wearing a sheitel and not a tichel? Stealth Jewish.
Baseball cap over the yarmulke? Stealth Jewish.
Saying "happy holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas"? Stealth Jewish.

And you frum tourists who visit other cities in long denim skirts and sneakers (women) and sneakers and NY baseball caps (men)? You are not stealth Jews. You fool no one. No one wears black suit pants with sneakers!

Let's share one of our linked friend's images, shall we?

It's beautiful.