bearing blog

Milo’s become quite the master of the amusing turn of phrase. Yesterday I noted that he turned a somersault and called it a "spring roll." Today on seeing a many-legged arthropod walking up the pantry wall, he asked:  Is that a spider, or is it a recipe?

Last night, as the Labor Day sun slipped away, our family hopped in the car to take a walk. 

There are many nice places to walk in the Twin Cities, but few of them are within walking distance of my house.

We decided on a local triumvirate (trium-virent? does that pun work?) of parks:  Roberts Bird Sanctuary, the Rose Garden, and the Peace Garden.  They’re all adjacent to one another, near Lake Harriet.  At the Peace Garden, we enjoyed a brand-new, still-incomplete sculpture.  It’s called "Spirit of Peace," and it commemorates the children who died as a result of the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombings.   But it’s the sculpture itself that I admired; it’s really a lovely idea for outdoor art.  This article from last year describes the sculpture setting.

Bronze plaques set into boulders surrounding the sculpture will show the steps involved in folding a crane. Moving from boulder to boulder, visitors to the site can fold a crane to be taken home or left at the garden.

The sculpture isn’t there yet, but the plaques and the surrounding boulders are.  There are fourteen of them, surrounding a larger one that will be the sculptures’ pedestal.  I rather liked the pedestal the way it is, without the sculpture.  It was covered with others’ paper cranes, some more avian-looking than others.

There’s a little box off to the side containing squares of paper.  Mark took two, handed me one, sat down by himself on the first boulder to see if he could fold the crane from memory.   I wandered from stone to stone following the directions.  Finally I came to the seventh or eight stone and couldn’t figure out the next step.  That stone was surrounded by partially completed, crumpled, discarded cranes, so I must have been in good company. 

The children ran around, played with their pieces of paper.   Later they almost fell in the fountain.  A nice last day of summer.

Milo showed off yesterday to a family friend:  he bent over at the waist, touched his head to the floor, and tumbled heels over head.

"Look!  I can do a spring roll!"

Ann Althouse wades into somewhat controversial waters with a post about working mothers pumping breastmilk.  You can go ahead and read the post here, but it is the comment by "geoduck" that most amused me:

My mother, born in the early 40s, was my grandmother’s first child. (Her mother, my great-grandmother passed away in the 1930s, so she was not able to give her daughter advice.)

Anyways, breast-feeding at that time was not promoted. Bottle feeding was seen as more healthy.

Grandmother got confused and thought, for some reason, CREAM was what she was too feed my mother.

At her first doctor’s appointment — the doctor saw a very, very plump little baby. (We have pictures.)

Poor baby!  But perhaps real cream is better than that old standby, canned Carnation evaporated milk and Karo syrup.

Try 22:

Lucille Miller of Waseca, Minn., who bore 15 girls and seven boys and raised them on a farm with the help of her organizational skills and the buddy system, died Monday in Waseca. She was 83.

Miller was 17 when she had her first child and 43 when she had her last.

"We didn’t intend to have this many children," she said in an April 17, 2000, Star Tribune article by Chuck Haga. "But it’s been wonderful to have them and watch them grow. They’re all individuals."

Miller also took in several children who needed homes over the years. She led two Catholic women’s groups at her church and founded an organization to set up group homes for the mentally disabled in Waseca.

When I clicked the link, I was sure that some of the 22 would turn out to be adopted — nope, she gave birth to 22 children over 27 years, from about 1940 to 1966. Read the whole thing, and the earlier article too:

Diane Miller, a New Brighton attorney, was No. 8 – "the youngest oldest kid" – and one of just a few who lived with all of her siblings, arriving before Ramona left and still at home when Damien was born. She cared for two of her little sisters from the time they were a year old.

"I was 9 when I got Helen, 12 when I got Alice," she said. "Mom always had the new baby."

There were seven bedrooms in the farm house, and up to five children to a bedroom.

"I remember a lot of rides in the wheelbarrow from the granary to the barn," Diane said. "I remember a lot of grinding feed, a lot of egg washing and packing, a lot of sitting by the wood stove in the basement, singing songs as we candled eggs."

And she remembers each of her brothers and sisters, naming them in order of birth without hesitation.

"We always did it with our prayers at night," she said. "We can say the chain of names just like we’re singing a song."

It is really a beautiful story, and it seems to be out of another era.

Yesterday Mark went back to work.  It was broken up a bit by Mary Jane’s three-week checkup at the midwife’s; we picked Mark up on the way, so everyone got to see Daddy, always a bonus.   She’s doing fine, gained twelve ounces in two weeks.

After we dropped him off, around twelve-thirty, the boys clamored:  "Let’s go somewhere for lunch!"   

They know I’m easy to convince.  I probably take the kids out for lunch more often than I should.   The thing is:  I like going out to lunch.  I went out to lunch all the time when I was in graduate school, and before that in undergraduate.  I learned how to enjoy going to restaurants by myself when I was traveling solo in Europe as a sophomore.  Before that I was always kind of embarrassed to be seen sitting at a restaurant table alone — I felt that diners were staring at me, as if I’d been stood up.  But I learned to take a journal with me, or something to read, or a crossword puzzle, or (later) a pad of paper with something I was trying to derive written on it.   Later, too, the coffeeshops proliferated all over the country, and it became normal even in Ohio for people to sit at tables in public places with something to drink and eat and a book, or a laptop.  Anyway, restaurant meals out may be expensive, but they’re really one of my favorite ways to spend money.  I think they’re worth it, especially at lunch time.

After I had Oscar, I found myself far too often longing for Beef Black Bean Pan Fried Noodle or a gyro or plantains or some other such thing I can’t really make at home, so I started taking him to restaurants with me.  Not very often, maybe once a month or so, but often enough that I got used to it.  I do try not to take the kids at the height of the lunch rush, and I try to stick to places that have a fair amount of background noise and that I know have quick service.  (Fortunately, the Vietnamese and Mexican places nearly all qualify.) What the children really love are buffets, but the logistics with that are not as good as you might think unless the adult-to-kid ratio is 1:1.)

I insist on Best Behavior, too.  I always remind them before we go that the reason we are able to go out to lunch is that I can trust them to speak in low voices and stay in their seats.  This reminder has worked well with Oscar since he was about three (not so good before that — we had a long restaurant hiatus from 18 months to 36 months) and with Milo all along. 

One of the ways I’ve kept my courage up, to take the kids out to lunch often enough that they remember how to behave and I remember how to make it go smoothly, is this:  I make a rule that we can eat out, but I can’t go through a drive-through.  It’s a common temptation, when I’m hurrying from place to place, to just get them a damn hamburger already.  Also, some french fries start to sound pretty good to me as well.  So — I don’t let us do it.   The second trick, which I recommend highly, is to bring a spare clean shirt for each person (yes, me too) whenever we leave the house.  That way nobody goes to the grocery store afterward with ketchup stains. 

So back to yesterday:  I was going to say no, but then I thought:  This is my first day out with three children, by myself.  I have to do it sometime unless I’m going to give up on it.  I briefly considered going to my favorite Vietnamese place — what is better for children than a restaurant where "salad" can mean eggrolls on top of noodles? — but decided to play it just a little bit safer, in terms of the expectations of the wait staff and the uniformity of the time-for-service, and went to a chain "family restaurant" near the university that has the children’s menu printed on the paper placemat, which comes with crayons.  (Near the university, too, I didn’t want to hit any of my favorite spots — too great the likelihood of running into a former professor, which normally I don’t mind, but this was my first day out.) 

And do you know what?  It went well!  Mary Jane slept in the sling the whole time and didn’t wet her diaper, and the boys (who were warned that if they were loud or unruly, would not get to go out to lunch with Mommy again until I felt brave enough to try it, which would be a very long time) stayed in their seats and colored their placemats and ate their pasta.  I had a sandwich and some coleslaw and talked to my kids and had a fine time.   Milo announced that he never wanted to sit in a high chair again because he was Not A Baby, and I promised that next time we go out, he could sit in a regular chair if he asked.  My only regret is that I didn’t make the kids split a kid’s entree, because they were HUGE.

Maybe Vietnamese food next week.