Some Things Don't Change

My week has unraveled, I have an impossible amount of homework this week, we need to prepare our taxes and I'm generally under a hair-pulling amount of stress. One thing remains unchanged: I still make my son a mean lunch.



Tomorrow he eats cinnamon almond buttered sweet potatoes, orange wedges cut the way he trained me, Mrs. May's yummy pecan clusters and almond butter and jam stuffed mochi.

Now, if the universe listens to me, I'll get through all this work and have really good sex - all in the next 5 days.

Points, The King and The Snow

My wife and I got back on plan at the new year and have committed ourselves to losing the weight we gained back over the latter half of last year. We're back to counting points and playing the food game, as we explain it to Mr. Man. I'm re-learning that it's tricky being vegan and counting points on WeightWatchers. The guide books that provide point values for food include everything from bear meat to squirrel meat, but it's a crap shoot to determine the points value for mochi or homemade seitan. The other thing I'm re-learning is that I'll save a lot of money by not buying espresso drinks everyday. Damn, the calories and dollars I wasted over the last year!

I've been in a cooking frenzy again since we did blowout shopping last weekend. I made my first homemade calzones stuffed with seitan and spinach. The fruit and nut bars I made turned out to be a good-for-you, no sugar version of a Cliff Bar. I finally found a vegan waffle recipe that works - and turned them into waffle sandwiches for Mr. Man's lunch. My wife made a better version of Riblets by coating our homemade seitan in BBQ sauce and baking. Yum! Tonight I made a Cowboy Meatloaf that was super tasty - a cowboy definitely worth riding. Later on this week's menu are Pigs in a Blanket and Texas Corn Pone Muffins.

We've been instituting PJ Saturdays area here lately. Pretty much only my wife gets her cute ass in the shower. Mr. Man and I alternate between cooking, cleaning and playing. This past Saturday featured the building of a ferris wheel out of K'Nex.



Mr. Man comes home from school with lots of writing practice on little strips of paper. They randomly float around everywhere and over the weekend we recycled some and put some up in his room. Mr. Man chose to tape the word king to himself.



Monday was MLK Day and Mr. Man had no school. Today we woke up to heavy snow and an inch on the ground. I slid my way into work on the bus, which got stuck behind stalled vehicles on the Hawthorne Bridge entry, so I walked across the river and into work. Fortunately, my wife and Mr. Man did not leave the house with me or else they would have arrived at school for a second time only to find school cancelled.

Last week Portland Public Schools closed school for nothing. Today there's heavy snow and PPS doesn't cancel school until 8:15am!!!! Kids are already on their way to school for crying out loud. Tonight PPS has already announced the school closure for tomorrow. I'm happy to write my tuition check for Montessori school if this is the decision-making modeled by public school administrators. Nonetheless, tomorrow marks the third day my wife is home with Mr. Man. We'll see how icy things are and how I get into work tomorrow. All the busses and almost all the cars are chained. The light rail is running all night tonight so that the lines don't ice over. It's a different kind of winter here in the Northwest.

The No Snow Day

Portland Public Schools was closed for a snow day today. That means that I stared up at bright blue skies all day and on some blocks there was a dusting of snow. It was, however, very cold.

My wife called me at work to have me check the school closings online because she and Mr. Man were standing outside school and it was closed. Sure enough, for no good reason that I can see, Mr. Man had a snow day.

These people should go to the Midwest for a real dose of snow. Wimpy Northwesterners who live in valleys.

Table Design

My winter break pleasure reading theme has been largely about food. Starting with Mad Cowboy by Howard Lyman I quickly felt relieved I was vegan and horrified that I had eaten meat while I was pregnant and the years prior to age 18. I'm currently in the middle of Christopher Cook's Diet for a Dead Planet. It turns out an ailing food system is not only killing people and animals, but is significantly responsible for global warming and environmental destruction. Food should nourish, not kill. This reading inspires the same rage one encounters when reading political history a la Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky or any other truthful account of American imperialism.

It makes me look very carefully at what's on my fork. So when I went to our local grocer a few days ago for a few items, I was unable to by the $1.65 bag of generic popcorn and instead picked up the $3.19 bag of organic popcorn. I knew the dangers of a crop genetically modified or sprinkled with the manure of sick livestock and I couldn't imagine putting that in my son's mouth. Whenever I could, I picked up the items with the "Home Grown" label popping out from the shelf. I knew they were transported less and more likely to be from a small grower/producer. I did not bring home the sickly looking, expensive, out-of-season tomato my wife desperately wanted for her sandwich.

Mr. Man and I came home from a 13 mile bike ride yesterday and my wife lovingly prepared dinner - falafel and a very garlicky tahini sauce. Mr. Man was asked to set the table, which he did. He took a picture of the table "exactly as he designed it." He had set an origami peace crane at each place setting.

Happy eating.

The Cat's Meow

When we returned from our trip to Seattle it was clear Pumpkin the Cat was unhappy with our absence. We fed him ounces of extra love and attention. For two whole days he didn't bite or scratch us. Clearly, he was sick.

My wife dutifully carted the cat off to the vet, only to learn he had a bladder infection. She brought back a $120 bill, antibiotics and pain relievers (for the cat). While he may not have been in pain, the drugs didn't stop his constant diarrhea. Regular readers will remember that Pumpkin is not the neat and tidy ass licker.

Three days ago he pretty much stopped eating and what he ate he just vomited back up. My wife and I drew a line in the sand a long time ago about who was the poop mom and who was the throw-up mom. We were clear about the distinction, but the topic pertained to our son's bodily functions, not those of our cat. Cat vomit and diarrhea are exponentially more disgusting than anything that has thus far come from our son's body. With neither of us willing to stake a claim to a particular substance, we shared the duties.

On one occasion when the upward convulsions overtook the cat and I knew he would soon throw up, I experimented with a technique I use for Mr. Man when he is sick. The bucket. If you can't get to the bathroom, you throw up into the bucket. Since I'm not the throw up mom, I hate holding the bucket or dealing with vomit in any way, but on this particular evening, my wife had just gone out for a walk and the cat was about to hurl. So I grabbed a bowl and put it under his mouth. Turns out cats aren't like kids. In my efforts to catch the disgusting vomit and prevent yet another carpet cleanup, I followed him around with a bowl under his mouth. He just kept moving away from me until finally instead of just one pile of puke, there was a trail. Mental note: don't use the bucket method for a vomiting cat. It's futile.

Thursday morning my wife took the cat back to the vet, helpfully also a cat hospital. She proceeded to do something I didn't think we'd ever do in our life. She applied for a line of credit for pet health care. The vet anticipated no more than $800 if she ran all the possible tests.

Friday night we brought him home with a mere $250 bill and no explanation as to what made him sick. However, he's not vomiting and he's back to pooping "normally".

My wife loves to remind me that I was the one who suggested we take in the cute mewing kitty that appeared in our yard that fateful October 13th two years ago.

Backdating

I got mysteriously older in the blogging world tonight. I went back to my LiveJournal and moved my posts over here. The posts were fun to relive and are lovely snapshots of my life when Mr. Man was 3 - and still nursing.

If interested, review April 2004 to May 2005.

Happy New Year Addendum

Following the building of the K'Nex contraption pictured below, Mr. Man challenged me to build the car in the K'Nex builder's guide. The car is the final design in the book, presumably because it's the most challenging. So I did it.

Mr. Man test drove the car and deemed it not worthy because it made a clicking sound when the wheels turned. So he pulled it apart, improved upon the axle design and he's now satisfied. Turns out the best help center comes in the form of a 5 "and three-quarter" year-old.

In the oven: creamy alfredo penne vegetable casserole.

Happy New Year

Gone is the era of Legos. Last year's holiday gift-giving season consisted of about 5 Lego building sets of 500 pieces each. Not this year. My in-laws decided that Mr. Man needs K'Nex. And not just any plain old plastic K'Nex - the kind that have battery packs and glow-up light tubes.

I used to spend hours configuring Lego structures with Mr. Man. Now I've got complicated glowing structures to fight with. Thankfully K'Nex hosts an after-holiday help center for confounded parents like me.

Happy New Year.