New website!

Hi everyone!  Thus begins a new chapter for me.  Please head over to petersoutowood.com for all new content.  There will still be the same inane blog posts featuring frequent mistakes in parenting and life, unsatisfying bedtime stories, and things sure to embarass my children when they’re older.  There will still be many bread and baked-good recipes, including the baffling popular rainbow unicorn cupcakes.  To all those structural engineers around the world who come searching for “shear punch failure” will not be disappointed–the archived blog post is here.  Everyone looking for gruesome crime scene photos will arrive at this post, get disappointed, then delighted when they move on to the rest of the site.

But there’s more!  I will be promoting my first released book, “From Border to Border:  Crossing the Continent by Land Rover” and the new website will have links, exclusive interviews with the author, and possibly some bonus content that didn’t make it into the book.  I’ll also have previews of my upcoming books and other writing trifles.

I hope all my subscribers head on over and please tell your friends.

Your host,

Peter Soutowood

Permalink:  http://petersoutowood.com.

Bedtime Stories My Daughter Hates, Contd.

Child Harbat:  “Babbo, I want you to tell me a story tonight but not like you usually tell it.”

Me [acting innocent]:  “Oh, like how?”

CH:  “Okay, I’m going to tell you but this ISN’T the story for tonight.  Okay?”

Me:  “Proceed.”

CH:  “Once upon a time there was a banana.  And its name was tomato.  THE END!”

Me:  “I liked that story!  But okay, here’s a real story.  Once upon a time, three animals decided to open a pet shop.  There was a giraffe, who was good at getting things off the top shelf, a rat, who was good at burrowing through the garbage, and a polar bear, who was white and made things cold.  But none of them had any business management or accounting skills and the shop shut down within a month.  The end.

CH [scowling]:  “Babbo, that was a banana story!”

Me:  “Night night!”

Everybody Needs Something To Do

Boredom liquefies the brain.  We are not only social animals but working ones.  Don’t let the stereotype of slack-jawed youth fill your head–today’s young ones are energetic and ready to do their part!  Already at one and a half, Number Two sets himself to tasks with the steady gaze and seriousness of a young communist.  Together forward to a greater good!  After I pick him up from school and we enter the front yard, I shut the front gate and our little rusted Himalayan bells ring to signal the afternoon work shift.  Number Two squirms to be let down so he can commence his job which, as far as I can tell because he can’t talk yet, consists of moving wheeled objects around the yard.  That wagon there?  It belongs over by the dirt pile, comrade.  I will take this task on myself, he says with a dismissive wave, you fill out the paperwork for the High Committee.

Please note the feast-famine dividing line of our front walk.  The herb bed on the left is irrigated so the mint is on a non-stop breathless growth spurt.  The grass on the right died when the rains stopped a few months ago, sent up some seed pods that harpoon into every piece of fabric within ten feet, and even those were ground into dust.  Life and death with a narrow DMZ between–there must be a story in that somewhere.  But here I am telling stories during work time!  Together we will sing inspirational songs for the fatherland while we labor!  Number Two now must fill plastic tubs with gravel and dump them out, then push the wagon in worrying acceleration toward the gate like a battering ram.  With a crash and reverberation of the entire gate and fence the time is announced to go on an afternoon wagon ride around the neighborhood.  Labor is made refreshing by a tour of the countryside, no?  Climb aboard, brother, we are spreading the message to the Proletariat!

The Happy Children

The end of the day is tough for everyone.  Child Harbat is usually over-stimulated and tired, Number Two has had a full day of preschool and has no idea how to read his body’s own cues that he is accelerating toward the bedtime wall at dangerous speed.  Now that it’s light out so late we are enjoying taking an afternoon stroll when we get home from work/school.  Number Two will walk to the porch, wrestle down his stroller, climb into the seat, and look up with the exact same look that dogs give when they are holding their leash at the front door:  “Could I be any more clear about this?”  So we push Number Two in the stroller and he watches the world roll by, a pretty nice way to ease into the evening.  CH will hop on her scooter and zoom around the neighborhood, then we all crash into the kitchen for dinner and everyone is:  A)hot, B)tired, C)grumpy.  Why grumpy?  It has something to do with cleaning the kitchen, making a new meal, and providing relief for screaming and whining children who have transformed into cloven-footed horned demons who DEMAND FLESH NOW!  How do they respond when given food?

You know, this picture is familiar.  Let’s jump in the time warp blog-o-rewinder and see how Baby Harbat reacted when I tried to take away a piece of bread.  See the same misery, the food ready to fall from the mouth during protest about not having enough food?  Do we all see the irony here?  What?  WHAT?  I can’t hear you over the crying.

 

Couch Forts

Small children are like mice.  They utilize at-hand materials to create little nests, cozy spots just big enough for a bed and a lookout.  If left in the forest I think children would do better making shelter and staying dry and safe up in a tree than would adults.  We recently got a new couch and Child Harbat immediately got to work, seeing the potential in large structural-slab cushions, roof-spanning pillows, and the possibility of knocking out a pillow wall and expanding over the coffee table.  For a little girl she’s remarkably adept at handling massive cushions and muscling them all into place.  Blankets are repurposed as curtains, shelves are made from corbelled pillows, table legs buttress soaring walls.  For her the couch wasn’t just what it was, it was what it could become.  And this Sunday it was built and rebuilt into habitable spaces with room for stuffies, book spaces, sleeping nooks, flashlight storage, roof access panels, and hidden doors.   When the electronic apocalypse occurs and we’re back to eating with our hands and making stone tools, I know who I’m going to look to for home-building expertise.  Not I, the architect, but my daughter, the couch-fort constructor.

Mr. Noisy

Number Two child is working on his speaking skills.  This involves yelling EVERYTHING AT MAXIMUM VOLUME.  Requests for food are similar to that of a bull elephant trumpeting an immediate charge.  Denials of questions about wanting more water/food/face-wiping are met with a drawn out “Nooooooooo” that leaves you with no questions and little functioning apparatus in your inner ear.  All hopes my wife and I had for a quiet introverted second child are being trampled.  But it still may come to pass.  Now the important question that has been hovering on the lips of all you readers:  what is it like to take Mr. Noisy to a smorgasbord at IKEA?  Let’s start from the ground and work up.

Even though it looks like most of his food is on the floor I can assure you five times as much made it into his stomach, sometimes detouring across his face and through his hair.  It was really a horrifying amount of food he consumed.  Mr. Noisy yelled, smacked his hands on the table, rocked his high chair back and forth to the point of severe consternation of reasonable adults.  MORE MORE MORE!  We gave him smoked salmon, toast points, grapes, potatoes, meatballs, broiled salmon, blueberries, watermelon, pickled beets, lingonberry sauce, deviled eggs, and still he ate.  My God, the consumption was something to behold.  Did he enjoy his meal?  The Social Smile says…yes!

Wait, I’ve seen that face somewhere before.  I think he’s picking it up from his big sister.  Now it all makes sense:  the noise, the thousand-megawatt smile, it’s all trickling down in the household.  Where is an introvert to hide?  My wife has recently been buying grownup drink-making supplies, from rum to muddlers, mixers to jiggers.  At first I made fun but now I see how a few hours with the mini-human noise machines will send even the calmest soul reaching for the bottle.  YAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Feeding a Unicorn

One of the things I’ve learned about parenting from my step-mother, who is a wonderful parent and longtime journalist about family issues, is how to let it go.  What fights are worth fighting?  Does every moment need to be a teachable lesson?  When is it okay to make a mess?  I learned from her, as Child Harbat wanted to wear her vampire cape to the beach, to just let it go sometimes.  It sounds ridiculously easy but as a parent you get stuck in a mode of protecting, nurturing, and educating your child and look in the mirror one day and realize you’ve turned into a joyless prude.  LET IT GO.

So what do you do when your daughter has dressed up in her unicorn outfit right before dinner and made a unicorn nest for herself out of a sheepskin stuffed into a laundry basket?  You LET IT GO.  My wife prepared her a plate of food so she could eat under a chair and keep the magic alive.  And we got to have a quiet meal as adults.  Just kidding!  We got to eat at the kitchen table with Mr. Noisy, but more about that tomorrow.  In the meantime, please line up one at a time to pet the unicorn.  Do not try to take its food away, however, unless you wanted to be gored with a horn.

Sometimes They Surprise You

The weekend was a tiring march from one required task to the next:  dishes, laundry, clean house for party to which I’m not invited and must hide with the children in the kitchen and bedrooms, smear food off the floor with teary futility, and trim back dead clumps of lavender that was flowering just three months ago.

Okay, it wasn’t all misery but it felt like all chores and no relaxation time, possibly exacerbated by Number Two’s cold/general unhappiness.  I should say my 18-month old son is mostly happy and patient so after getting some required vaccinations last week we were sorry to see he’d caught a cold and was grumpy and tired.  For several days he took two two-hour naps then went to bed early after being miserable and tired all afternoon.  This weekend I chased him around trying to wipe his nose, at one point resorting to a leaf torn from a tree to try and stem the tide of goop coming from the front of his face.  Gah.  And because he’s a boy and a toddler he gets into everything.  Not content with emptying the lower cabinets and pantry of all the contents, he now picks up objects and delivers them to unpredictable places.  I found a dirty diaper in the shower, yogurt cups from the recycling bin scattered across the couch, and my dental floss is nowhere to be found.  I’m thinking someone will discover it in thirty years when they switch on the bathroom shin-heater and a billow of trickle of toxic smoke snakes out the vent.  “Now who would put floss in a heater?”

I spend most of my time chasing the Boy around saying whiny and hopeless things like, “Please don’t pull that lamp down…leave the mop alone…get out of the trash…watch your head on the—[THUNK]”  All small slights, disturbances, or stumbles were amplified by his mystery illness, meaning we got to the Everything Tears ™ checkmate earlier and earlier in the day until breakfast was an explosion of hurled yogurt, rejected toast, and snotty tears.  Poor kid.  I mean me.

So it was with great satisfaction that Child Harbat decided to read a book to her younger brother, unbidden, and both sat calmly while I tried to scrape ossified banana mush out of the carpet with my fingernails.  Sometimes it’s what’s out of frame in the picture that tells the real story.

Learning How to Complain

Number Two has been working on his complaining skills.  You’d think this is instinctual but toddlers are able to move up to the major leagues when it comes to protest.  At over 1 ½ now, Number Two is finally realizing that while quiet whining and patience may eventually get you what you want, max-volume shrieking and drama will get a more immediate reaction, good or not.  Just as Child Harbat learned how to bring Kabuki-like drama to every small setback, now Number Two sounds the klaxon for maximum alert for even the smallest things.  Drop a book?  Shriek.  You take away a meat cleaver he is waving around?  Shriek.  He finds a closed door where once it was open?  Turn and walk the other way for five wobbly steps, pause, then drop to the ground, sob, and beat your head with your fists.  Utter misery.  Often this culminates starting at four in the afternoon and accelerates through dinnertime.

So, readers, do you go to pieces if not allowed to feed yourself yogurt?  Do you turn into a teary blubbering mess if you are prevented from eating stale breadcrusts off the floor?  Do you scream and wail if someone suggests, beg pardon sir, that you shouldn’t paw through the kitchen garbage like a raccoon?  Then you might be a contestant for THE game of the year, Everything Tears!

 

Thursday Grab Bag

What I love about Thursday Grab Bag is no rules!  Nothing is too random or inconsequential!  Let’s get started.

[Tuesday night, dinnertime.  Scene opens on the kitchen table where Number Two is sitting in high chair and emitting loud shrieks, Child Harbat is sitting in her chair eating a sandwich.]

Number Two:  Shriek!  Screech!

CH:  Stop that.  STOP THAT!

Number Two:  [Throws up a little, then throws up seemingly everything he has had to eat or drink in the past week.  Vomit is all over his tray table, shirt, pants, chair, floor.]  Ehhh?

CH:  [Sitting two feet away, still eating sandwich.]  Babbo, he threw up.

Me:  Thank you for that.  [to Number Two] No, NO, don’t put your hands in it.  Oh God.

[end scene]

 

Last night I dreamed I was walking with two childhood friends through the basement level of some school and came to a large tiled boy’s restroom with incredible acoustics.  I began to sing to sing some harmony and melody parts from Bach’s Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desire just to hear the space.  I woke up with more Bach in my head, a pleasant way to start the day.  I found CH snuggling on the couch with her blanket telling me she dreamed she had a friend named Molly who was a doll who was actually real, but when she woke up she was gone.  She seemed sad so I made her three pieces of toast instead of the usual two.  I don’t know how a child can grow on buttered toast but she’s doing a good job.  She also informed me, as one might make an aside to the waiter, that I’d put too much vanilla in her yogurt, but “that’s okay, we all make mistakes, I’ll eat it anyway.”  I think Molly is having a positive effect on her attitude.

 

Finally, I am having a serious tailoring emergency.  It seems the sleeves on my shirt are slightly long, and the sleeves on my suit jacket are slightly short, so I either have to tuck the extra sleeve fabric up by my shoulders and keep my neck hunched like Quasimodo, or hold down my suit sleeves like a child ready to wipe his snotty nose on his forearm.  What’s that you say?  Take off the jacket.  NEVER!  This is my tan summer suit and I won’t have wardrobe malfunctions detract from the ensemble.  Though it isn’t quite an ensemble since I forgot to wear pants.  Never mind that, I wonder if I can use paper clips to fold up the sleeves accordion-style inside my jacket sleeve and walk with stiff arms all day…