Bad Parenting and Other Holiday Fun

It’s a new year, another chance to learn from my mistakes and follow the travails of a parent, baker, husband, and home improvement  buffoon.  This holiday season was a study in sloth.  I found new ways to eat horrifying amounts of sugar and carbs, eyed the clock to gauge when it was late enough in the day to have a glass of port (turns out that any time after noon can be called ‘afternoon’), made many fires (most of them in the fireplace), and delayed going running because it was raining.  Raining!  Here in San Diego!  Actually the weather was pleasantly cold and dank, perfect for sitting in a warm living room beside a crackling fire and listening to the children yell while you decide how long you can go before vacuuming the rug because it’s just making your skin crawl how there are bits of food, dust bunnies, wood chips, torn bits of paper, and dirt clods all competing for space even though YOU JUST VACUUMED IT THIS MORNING.

So how did the children enjoy Christmas?  Child Harbat demonstrated that the Id is released from the psyche on Christmas via an insatiable appetite for the Next Present Even Though One Has Just Been Unwrapped.  Number Two accelerated his crawling speed to warp five, making mad dashes for open doors, unattended wine glasses, and precarious piles of books.  He discovered that turning off the PS3 while a movie is playing causes the large humans in the room to make loud unpleasant noises.  And he ate everything in sight—ham, bread, soup, salmon, tofu, greens, potatoes, fruit, shortbread, raisins—and still banged the table like an angry dwarf demanding MORE.  Speaking of dwarves, I went to see the Hobbit.  Let me give you a moment to absorb that.  I went to a movie.  By myself.  During the week.  Guilt-free.  This is the joy of having the grandparents in town—they can watch the children while you lay down parallel tracks of burned rubber while screaming with glee as you drive away.  But I did come back to do some Real Parenting.  Example:

Who knew that boxes of unassembled doll furniture came with free Snak Paks to distract the kids while you try to decipher a Guangdong manufacturer’s version of step-by-step directions?  After eating all these, the kids were nice and lethargic for the rest of Christmas.  Kidding!  They were actually more hyperactive.

I’ll leave you with a holiday version of Bedtime Stories My Daughter Hates:

And unto us was born a child.  And his name was Bethlehem.  He was born at the Star of David manger and lo were there many sheep and peasants and peacocks to celebrate the boy.  And his parents, the three magi, were very wise and said, “Go unto the world and distribute pamphlets door to door,” and then there was much gnashing of teeth and rending of hair for thus was the Word of God made into an infomercial. 

Amen.

Now go to bed or Santa will bypass this household and leave only reindeer droppings!

Break Bread With Family

This holiday season, take some time to sit down with family and friends to celebrate the simple act of breaking bread together.  Communal dining may be one of our species’ most basic activities, and what better way to celebrate the holiday than to have some good bread.  While I enjoy and recommend all the breads on the bread page, I think the most appropriate for this season is the Worldwide Family Christmas Bread.  It’s a fairly simple yeasted bread that satisfies all day long with just a smear of butter.  I’ve had some requests for converting this to a volume recipe and, while I still recommend baking by weight, can offer a few suggestions.  I find a cup of flour to be roughly 150 grams, and a cup of liquid (milk or water) runs about 236 grams.  If you have the time, buy a simple kitchen scale instead of trying to convert the recipe.  You can find scales at most grocery and kitchen goods stores and you’ll be glad you did.

This holiday season, break bread with family and reflect on all the good things in life.  Happy holidays!

Home for the Holidays

There’s nothing like family traditions to remind you it’s holiday time.  When I was growing up our family would make Christmas bread each December, locating a floury notecard with the recipe my grandmother jotted down in slanting cursive.  Every year we tried to make it ourselves and the bread was burned on the bottom and had a doughy inside.  Every time.  Ruining the Christmas bread was our tradition, so we had to rely on my grandmother to make it right.  Last year I declared that since I was the bread-making expert, I should once again try to make Christmas bread.  And I ended up burning it and the inside still wasn’t quite baked.  I chalked it up to the altitude, since I was baking at my sister’s house up in the mountains around 5000 feet, but I really think it was the ghost of family tradition.  This year I vowed redemption.  No prisoners, no mistakes.  No burned bread.

Why is Christmas bread so difficult?  Our recipe used just eggs, butter, and milk for the liquids.  It’s very enriched which makes it sluggish to rise and touchy about temperature.  I’ve made enriched breads like brioche, which tend to burn rather than toast.  Our family recipe called for 2 cups of milk.  I made it 1 ½ cups of milk and ½ cup of water, and I kept the oven temperature low and baked the bread longer.  I also skipped the scalded milk and yeast-proofing steps, which are a bit outdated now with our more reliable yeasts and pasteurized milk.  Result?  Christmas bread perfection.

So what did I do this Christmas?  I ended one tradition of ruined Christmas bread, and began a new one:  baking it just right.  I like to think my grandmother would approve of the recipe modification, and hopefully my family will forgive me for not burning the bread.  Although the holiday season is over I may post this on the bread page to share the new recipe.  The tragedy of failed Christmas bread shall not plague anyone for next Christmas!

Should Christmas be Cancelled?

It was a tired joke twenty years ago, now it’s a tradition.  When the holiday season approaches, and that means any time after September, I begin the Christmas cancellation notices.  The origins of the notices are clouded in ancient history but likely started with some offhand remark by one of my parents that my brother and sister and I leapt on and began elaborating beyond the absurd.  It goes like this:

“You know what, everybody is just exhausted this year.  It’s all just too much, I think we should cancel Christmas this year.  No, no, I think it’s just for the best, let’s just keep it low key, and next year we’ll have a really big Christmas, okay?”

Just like with all horrible jokes, it’s only fun for the teller, and oh the fun you’ll have.  It’s usually best to dust off this joke when someone in the room is especially excited about Christmas or some gift they plan on giving that’s just perfect.  Feel free to add your own embellishments, keeping in mind the theme of the joke is that the parents are just too frazzled to deal with it all.  As a parent I can now sympathize, knowing the work involved in priming up a child until their head is spinning at ten thousand RPM.

But.  As much fun as can be had with this joke, it’s not for the more literal-minded out there.  Which means little children who don’t get sarcasm.  I’ve decided with Toddler Harbat that she gets an exemption from the Christmas cancellation joke this year.  I’m not sure she’s ready.  But next year come December 1^st, she’d better be prepared to pack up the ornaments, take down the lights, and put the presents in the closet, because Christmas will be postponed so the parents can get some bottled water, a New York Times, and just relax.  The year after that we’ll have a great Christmas.  I promise.

Time Warp

I remember the buzzy excitement of a school concert.  It’s nighttime yet you’re not at home, you’re back at school.  The dark empty halls have the elicit feel of a store after hours.  You leave your parents and prepare in a classroom—warming up, putting on special clothes.  Then you walk out onto stage in front of a crowd, the blue flicker of flashes and a sea of lenses pointed at you.  After the concert you find your parents in the crowd, receive adulations, and run around in circles with your friends on a crest of adrenaline.

Last night I got to experience this from the other side.  I’m no longer a child, I no longer perform for the parents.  Toddler Harbat’s preschool held its Christmas pageant at the church next to school and I felt incredible vertigo as we sat in the pews and I realized I’m the parent now.  The place was packed with anxious families and TH was sequestered in her classroom with the other kids to get their costumes on.  The whole thing had the feel of a wedding, with people murmuring and craning around to look down the aisle to see if the procession had begun.  As if on cue everyone stood up and people crammed the aisles as the kids were brought in the transept doors and sat in the pews in front.  This first group was the younger kids including, presumably, Toddler Harbat.  Then the older kids marched down the main aisle in itchy costumes.

Thus began the I-can’t-see-my-kid competition.  When you have no stage, flat seating, and three-foot tall performers, you aren’t going to be able to see even if you spent five hundred bucks on your new HD camera and you’ll be damned if you miss little Tyler singing “Mary and Joseph Riding on a Donkey”.  I snuck up a side aisle and finally spotted, for half a nanosecond, Toddler Harbat’s face and her lamb costume.  Then she was obstructed by the parent paparazzi and I retreated to my seat.  I realized that you either come an hour early for good seats or bring a periscope and a telephoto lens.  I would show you the few pictures I took but just imagine a watercolor left in the rain of a group of kids that may theoretically contain my daughter.  Like a summer storm, as soon as it began it was over, the kids were led back out the side door and I raced up just to see a glimpse of TH’s face as she left.  I never saw the costume or even caught her eye.  It was like stalking a celebrity:  lots of crowds, nothing to see, and a few grainy pictures of the back of someone’s head.

But that’s not the point of the Christmas pageant.  The real meaning of the holidays is, naturally, sweets!  Imagine every parent and extended family member of a hundred kids each bringing a box of cookies.  If you do some quick math you’ll know that the per capita consumption would have to be one box.  Somehow the post-pageant celebration didn’t do this math, and we ended up with hundreds of thousands of cookies on a sea of folding tables.  Who knew there could be such variations in sugar and flour?  Toddler Harbat had one.  Then another.  Then some lemonade.  Add this up with post-performance rush and you get this.

And now I remember the joy of school concerts and for the first time can appreciate how magical it is as a parent to watch your kid present something they’ve really worked hard on.  Or in Toddler Harbat’s case, sit in a pew with a sheep hat for fifteen minutes.  Happy holidays!

Krissmass Kraziness

Baby Harbat is now officially old enough to get really excited about Christmas, presents, parties, cookies, and staying up late.  This all culminated last night after a full day of all the aforementioned things.  She woke up at 1:30 WIDE AWAKE, and needed company.  Until 5:45.  So our choices were A)stand in her room while she lay in her crib and didn’t sleep, B)sit in the chair with her while she wriggled, C)bring her into our bed so she could wriggle and poke me in the face, or D)listen to her wail because someone wasn’t in the room with her.  It was a long night for everyone, and true to prediction, I have gotten a deep lung cough that makes me sound like a Dickensian beggar.  “Please sir [cough cough hack] can ye spare a ha’penny?”

This may be one of the reasons for the excitement.

Picture 1003

This trike is totally sweet.  It’s heavy, stable, and feels like a real piece of machinery.  Plus it’s stable and has real inflatable rubber tires which, in this day, shouldn’t be something you’d have to boast about until you see the plastic trashcan lids they’re trying to pass off as bike tires.  BH immediately had to take Ray Ray, a plush manta ray doll with the name of a pimp, out for a ride on her new trike.  He mostly rode on the back after being told, “Hold ON Ray Ray!”  He also flicked open his switchblade and flashed his gold teeth at everyone.  I’m a little scared of Ray Ray. 

Picture 997

On Friday we finally got a working dishwasher!  Because it is the season of joy and giving, I will not say anything more about the plumbers, but I am glad they are out of our house and not causing any more damage.  One of my dreams last night, in the brief period of delirium between baby soothe duty, involved workmen in our house at 4 AM.  Even when I told them to get out, they seemed baffled.  Because, you know, it’s perfectly okay to show up early for a job and start work in someone’s bedroom.  Maybe it was better that I was awake all night, otherwise I might have used some non-Christmasy four-letter words with the workmen in my dream.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

It’s Not Even Funny Any More

My four and a half hour test yesterday was a real brain drain and left me worn thin the rest of the day.  Which is why I wasn’t so happy to come home and find, A)our old dishwasher sitting in the front yard, B)our new dishwasher dented and scratched and sitting loose and unconnected in the base cabinet, and C)a note from the plumber asking me to call him.  Turns out he had some questions and tried calling me but had the wrong number, so he left without finishing the job.  That’s funny!  It turns out there’s a little technological advance called caller ID, where you can see that a client has called you a dozen times over the last three weeks to get you to finish the job.  Hee hee ha ha!!  My ribs are cracking from the strain of laughing!

 

Hulk rage

I think the home improvement gods hear me complain about going in the crawlspace, which is why I found myself on all fours in the cold mud last night, shimming up the dishwasher.  It was so much fun, I would be happy to go down there again for any reason.  [do you hear me, repair gods?  DO YOU?!]

[deep breath]  I am sure it will all be worked out today.  And again I am reminded that past behavior is an excellent forecast of future behavior.  The first three times this plumber didn’t show up, or came and didn’t do work, I should have pulled the plug.  Forewarned is forearmed, and now I’d like to swing my forearm at…well, I’d better stop.  It has taken three weeks and over seven hundred dollars, and we’ve seen a quantum improvement from an old dishwasher that worked until the line clogged, to a new and dented dishwasher that will work until something goes wrong with it.  Hooray home ownership!

It seems that every year there is a “perfect storm” convergence of stressful things:  work deadlines, tests and studying, home improvement disasters.  This year I’m going to beat the odds and not get sick because of it.  And I will somehow muster the energy to finish painting the bedroom so I can close the book on the mold remediation project.  I’m crossing my fingers I get that done before something else goes wrong.

Oh!  I forgot the punctuation mark on the day yesterday.  Amidst all this, I was setting the dinner table and stood up suddenly.  My head smacked into the chandelier and knocked loose candles and glass bobeches, which crashed to the floor and sent shards of glass all over the room and into the Christmas tree.  But I’m not worried.  Baby Harbat’s bare feet will find that broken glass soon enough.  Just like the neighborhood kids always find the razor blades I put in our Halloween apples.  Ha ha hee hee, just kidding everyone!  Merry Christmas!

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Eating…[repeat]…Eating…[repeat]

It is the holiday season, which means you will be surrounded by food all day and night.  In our office there’s a constant flow of sugary nom-noms to the kitchen table, given by clients and consultants.  Because I run twice a week I think I’m allowed entitled to eat these things.  If, by the end of the day, I don’t want dessert after dinner, I know I’ve had too much.  Today I’ll try to be better.  Sure.  So far I’ve only had chai, caramel popcorn, and chocolates.  Really that’s not SO bad.

It now looks like our dishwasher won’t be done until the middle or end of next week.  Considering the 45-minute dishwashathon I endured last night, I’m not pleased about this.  I’m not sure what’s worse:  having the old dishwasher still in place but unusable, or having our new dishwasher sitting in its packaging in the dining room, also unusable.  Considering that we’ve got the old stove and hot water tank in the garage awaiting disposal, that makes three full-size appliances taking up space.  Maybe I should put my car up on cinder blocks in the front yard, throw a blue plastic tarp over some big piles of trash, and get a pit bull on a chain.  Junkyard’s open, y’all!

After Bread Week, I’ve taken a bit of a hiatus from baking.  But that’ll all change over Christmas.  We’re going up north to my sister’s house for a family reunion/holiday.  I’m already planning out which breads I want to bake and what ingredients will be needed for each.  It’ll be odd to A)bake at high altitude, B)bake with unfamiliar tools in an unfamiliar kitchen, C)not get paid for my work.  Just kidding.  I will be charging full price.  So far my ingredient list is fairly simple.  The only thing I’ll take with me is a small stash of sourdough starter.  If it survives the flight and freezing temperatures I should be okay.  I would carry it with me on the plane but the TSA might have issue with it.  If it’s less than 3 oz and smells like sourdough, is it okay?  Because that means I could take my running socks too.  Hey-O!  Happy Friday!

Read and post comments | Send to a friend