Hair Show!

When we were little, my sister used to entertain us by having “hair shows.” She has hair that can be sculpted into all sorts of amazing, gravity defying shapes. We would howl with laughter every time she emerged from the bathroom with a new hairstyle, each one more outlandish than the previous one. Too bad she’d kill me if I posted a photo of one of those…

Nowadays, she works her magic on the kids. Here’s a hair session with my son:

Here we go again…
Argh!
The “Biebs”
The “Alfalfa”

This weekend it was my daughter’s turn:

The “Elizabeth” – step 1
The “Elizabeth” – step 2
The “Elizabeth”!
No pain, no gain!
The Gibson Girl
Too puffy?
Let’s do the twist
Cute!
Another one? Really?
Messy bun, almost done.
(Sigh)
Done!

In the (not so bleak) midwinter…

Locker Intervention

When my son showed up for his English class last Friday without his textbook yet again, his saintly teacher staged a locker intervention. In the email she sent to us afterward, she explained that not only had they found the book he was missing, she had also discovered a veritable cornucopia of food in his locker. There was enough to feed an entire continent…if it weren’t for the fact that it was growing limbs and developing individuated personalities. There was an entire wardrobe of clothing crammed in there too. On Sunday when the usual mad scramble for “church pants” was going on, I serenely pulled a pair out of the dryer that I had just washed from The Great Locker Clean Out 2014. Unfortunately, I failed to take into account the fact that they’d been stashed in my son’s locker for a few months:

So…tea length capris – that’s a good look, right?

Kindle

One wintry day many years ago when I was a poor graduate student subsisting on a daily diet of one can of Campbell’s tomato and rice soup for lunch and dinner, I was wandering down Broadway when I stopped at a vendor’s cart piled high with CDs. Was it the intoxicating aroma of roasting chestnuts and honey roasted nuts from the neighboring carts that was my undoing? The unmistakable smell of snow in the air? Whatever the reason, I found myself handing over money from my meager student stipend to buy the Boyz II Men Christmas album.

“Ya wanna plain brown paper bag fuh dat?” the vendor asked.

“Hunh?” I looked at him blankly.

“Ya don’t wanna be seen walking around in public widdat, do yas?”

Damn. Openly scorned and mocked by a street vendor to whom I had just forked over my last dollar bills.

I guess my taste in music has always been embarrassingly haphazard at worst, “eclectic” at best. Nevertheless, my playlist is a reflection of who I am and where I’ve been. Similarly, my bookshelves full of Russian literature, poetry, and children’s picture books are also an accurate record of my life and interests.

I recently borrowed my son’s Kindle to read a book I didn’t want to add to my already overflowing bookshelves. In reading through his “Archived items,” I unearthed a treasure trove of information about him. There were things you might expect to see on any eleven year old boy’s reading and app list, like soccer books and games, “fart-themed” apps, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, The Legends of King Arthur, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and Treasure Island. There were some surprises as well. For example, I hadn’t realized how deep my son’s interest in  Civil War history was until I read through the extensive list of memoirs, histories, and documents on his Kindle including that classic: A Refutation of the charges Made against the Confederate States of America of Having authorized the Use of Exploive and Poisoned Musket and Rifle Balls during the Late Civil War of 1861-65. I’ve always known that my son’s the kind of kid who likes to figure out how things work. Even so, his list of “How-to” guides still managed to surprise and entertain me: Clutter-Free Home Living, How to Get Cash in 24 Hours, Hotel Room Workout, Make Perfect Coffee, How to Read Maya Hieroglyphs, Evening Yoga for Women. And then there were the cookbooks. To understand my puzzlement over these, it would probably help to know that we often refer to our son as “White Boy.” This has nothing to do with the color of his skin, and everything to do with his preference for white food…the blander, the better. Imagine my surprise to discover such exotic cookbooks in his archives such as The Kerala Kitchen: Recipes and Recollections from the Syrian Christians of South India and Taste of Romania: Its Cookery and Glimpses of Its History, Folklore, Art, Literature, and Poetry.

I’ve learned a lot about my son’s wide-ranging interests by going through his Kindle archives. My budding renaissance man is interested in cookery, wildlife, the ancient ballads, poetry, and songs of the English peasantry…And also? The boy’s a sucker for free downloads.

The Rivanna Trail

We took advantage of the beautiful weather on Saturday to walk an easy, quiet little stretch of the 20 mile long, mostly wooded Rivanna Trail that loops around the city of Charlottesville.

It’s Cold

Part I: It’s cold. It’s freezing. We’ve been saying the same two sentences all week long. Tired of repeating the same old hackneyed phrases? Here are some more colorful alternatives:

The Brassy Option

It’s colder than a witch’s teat in a brass bra.

It’s colder than a brass toilet seat on the shady side of an iceberg.

It’s cold enough to freeze the tail* off a brass monkey. *(Frequently substituted with spherically shaped male part of the anatomy).

It’s colder than a gravedigger’s shovel.* (Frequently substituted with word that rhymes with “brass”).

The Classy Option

“When the breath freezes into ice dust and falls almost silently to the ground, Siberians call it the whisper of stars.” from David K. Shipler’s Russia: Broken Idols, Solemn Dreams.

Part II: It could always be worse:

Here’s a reading suggestion that will put your shivering into perspective. Evgenii Zamiatin’s short story “The Cave” is about a couple trying to survive in an unheated apartment in the dead of winter. Post-revolutionary Petrograd is depicted as a prehistoric landscape of glaciers and woolly mammoths. The bitter cold drives the couple to desperate acts. The story is deeply depressing, of course. It is Russian literature after all. I know this doesn’t sound like much of a recommendation, but it’s a great story and I can guarantee you it will make you feel like you’re not so cold after all…If you have access to JSTOR, you can read the full text there for free. Otherwise, it’s in The Portable Twentieth-Century Russian Reader.

I spent the four coldest years of my life during my college days in frigid New Hampshire. I would run as fast as I could between classes trying to minimize my exposure…and there are very few things I hate more than running. As soon as the air hit my face, my ears would burn with an icy fire. The snot dripping from my nose would turn into miniature icicles. My eyes would start to water, the tears would freeze my eyelashes, and I would hear an icy tinkle every time I blinked. At least it’s not that cold…unless you’re reading this in New Hampshire.

It’s been widely reported recently that it’s colder in Winnipeg than it is on the surface of Mars. Again: no comfort at all if you happen to be reading this in Winnipeg.

And for more perspective…at least we didn’t get 26 inches of snow like we did in 2009!

At least it’s not 26 inches of snow this time…

Stay warm out there and have a wonderful weekend!

Baby Boy

A few summers ago, we were heading to the beach to meet up with family friends with whom we were sharing a house. Our children would be sharing a bunk room for a week, and, we imagined, all the knowledge that they had amassed between them through friends, family, and sex ed classes. We knew that our friend’s son, who was going to school in another state, had already had these classes, and that even before this, his parents had dutifully taught him everything there is to know.

We, on the other hand, as usual, were woefully behind the curve. Not only had our son not yet gone through the “Family Life Education” classes as they are euphemistically called here in Virginia, we, as parents, had not given him any real information at all. I’m sure my son would say that we are overprotective parents, although he’d probably put it in a slightly different way. When he first asked me where babies came from, I flat out panicked and blurted out the first thing that came to my head, “You go to the hospital and the doctor helps you have the baby.” Period.

And so, as we drove down to the Outer Banks, my husband and I decided that at the very first opportunity, he would head things off by taking our son for a walk on the beach to have “The Talk.”

Later, he reported their conversation to me with a half grin on his face. It had been going pretty well, he told me, until he got to the actual mechanics…

“Ewww! That’s disgusting!” my son exclaimed as he recoiled in visceral horror.

“It’s really not that bad,” my husband tried to reassure him.

“Why? Does the doctor put you to sleep first?” my son asked with such sweet innocence that I really had to wonder if we had made a terrible mistake in tearing away the veil.

As a firstborn, our son has had to weather his parents’ inexperience. It’s often difficult for us to gauge how to treat him. I’ve always felt guilty about the fact that at the tender age of two, he automatically became “a big boy” in my eyes, the very minute his little brother was born. When I look back at pictures of how very little he was back then, I am filled with sorrow and regret that I didn’t baby him for longer.

On the other hand, he has always been the kind of kid who has bridled against being treated as a child. I remember one morning, when our son was a Kindergartner, my husband returned back home after seeing him onto the school bus with his shoulders slumped and a mournful expression on his face. As he had done every morning for months, he had given our son a big hug as he saw the bus pulling up to the stop. Our son bore it stoically, but as he mounted the stairs, he stopped and turned around for a moment. Gazing into the distance he said with a world-weary sigh, “I wish people wouldn’t hug me in public.”

It’s only gotten more confusing with time. He can now finally sit in the passenger seat next to me when I drive, but I usually have to remind him of the fact as he automatically heads towards the back of the minivan. I still have to nag him to do his homework and to pick up his clothes, but to do so, I have to crane my neck to look up at him as I shout my directives. Last week my husband bought our son his first razor and he shaved for the first time. He absolutely refused a tutorial, insisting that he’d figure out  how to do it “on the internet.”  This week, he’s going to get braces. And so we bumble on, hoping that he feels as cherished and loved as a newborn, while knowing that we are cheering him on as he makes his way to adulthood.

Nicholas holding up one of his baby outfits.

Related posts:

Adolescence
Rite 13, Pt. 1
Rite 13, Pt. 2
I am truly evil
The Inferno
This morning…
Lost and Found
Im/maturity