Days of Milk and Daffodils

There will come a day when my sons' first thought upon viewing flowers growing outside will not be how much I might love a ragged bouquet of them in an old canning jar on the kitchen table.

That day, however, has not yet come. And thank goodness for that.

Spring Cleaning

I was outside with Jack and Charlie yesterday afternoon, surveying the impressive collection of bones left from the dogs' fall and winter of carcass chewing on the lawn. It was pretty grisly. It was also right next to the path that most people use to come into our house. I figured maybe I should clean those up; you know, pretend we're not as woodchuck as we really are.

Charlie was all too willing to help. I can't get him to willingly clear his plate from the table after dinner, but pick up bone shards and pieces of skull from the lawn? So pleased to be of assistance, Mother!

Of course, clearing his dinner plate doesn't result in a coyote skull to play with, so there is that.

Luckily, Jack was mostly otherwise engaged during this chore (by which I mean he was crawling after the cat). This is good, because the contents of that bucket were all too fascinating to him.

Hmmm, which should I pull out to chew on?

Maybe I should have let him take the teeth. Get it? Teeth to chew on? (Just kidding. I didn't even let him touch any of it. Even I have my limits.)

We ended up with approximately two gallons of bone remains. Yum. 

Immediately after finishing this necessary but unpleasant cleaning chore, I realized the dogs had gotten into the bucket containing the remains of the most recently butchered rooster, leaving feathers scattered over a large swath of the driveway. I can dump the bones and re-fill the bucket with feathers, I guess. You think Charlie will help with that, too?

What Remains

The other day I was making a recipe for cornbread that calls for an 8-inch cast iron pan. But I wanted to double the recipe, so obviously the original pan size would be too small. The MiL is usually the one who uses this recipe, and I knew she usually doubles it, so I asked her what size pan she uses when she doubles it. She uses the 10-inch pan. Righty-o.

I made some offhand remark about how it was kind of odd that twice the amount of batter should fit inside a pan that's only two inches wider.

Later that night, the MiL presented me with a list she had made of all our sizes of cast iron pans and their respective areas in square inches.

I looked at it for a second, and then said, "How do you figure out the square inches in a round pan?"

At which point, the MiL asked me very pityingly, "Didn't you take any geometry in high school? Pi times "r" squared?"

Yeah. Right. I took geometry in high school, all right. Almost failed it, too. The chances of me remembering anything from it other than the feeling of dread before a test are pretty much nil. On the other hand, I do remember how to sing "Rubber Duckie" in Spanish, which has made me pretty popular with Cubby, who is learning Spanish in school now.

We all have our own areas of expertise, I suppose. Geometry is not mine. But song lyrics I learned twenty years ago will never leave me.

I Hate It When I Do This

Cleaning out our woodstove, no matter how carefully it's done, inevitably results in a layer of fine ash on every surface of the dining room. This is why I usually plan ahead to do my dusting the day I clean it out (or, um, the day after, if I'm lazy).

We haven't been using the woodstove all that much, though, with the periods of warm weather we've been having, so I haven't been paying as much attention to it. I dusted yesterday. Then I realized today that it's going to be cold again starting tonight, and the woodstove needed to be cleaned out for the coming continuous use.

So I cleaned it out. And now I have to dust again. Dammit.

Speaking of Kitchen Prep . . .

It's an unfortunate side effect of having access to the occasional real chicken that the chicken at the grocery store becomes somewhat appalling. Not just because of the abstract idea of the conditions those chickens are kept in before slaughter (abstract to me because I've never seen one of those battery chicken operations), but because of the undeniable fact that grocery store chicken is nothing like a real chicken when it comes to eating. The texture is different (store chicken is mushy in comparison), and the taste is pretty much incomparable.

So I have become spoiled when it comes to chicken.

That's not to say, however, that I don't realize the advantage of a grocery store chicken. And that advantage (singular--it's the only way in which the store chicken has the edge) is ease of preparation. Even if you buy a whole chicken at the store and cut it up yourself, it's nothing like trying to break down an old rooster that's been running around eating bugs.

Store chickens are soft. Even their bones. You can cut through the bones of a store chicken with a big knife. But a real chicken requires some forceful whacking with a meat cleaver. And then you have to pick off all the little hair-like feathers all over the meat. So the blithe initial instruction in a chicken recipe to "Cut chicken into six or eight pieces" becomes a significantly more involved endeavor.

We're having Chicken Cacciatore tonight made with a rooster given to us by the MiL's brother. The hacking and the plucking are all done, and the chicken is simmering away. The inconvenience will be forgotten with the first bite of dinner, I know. Because it's worth it. Good food always is.

* For Zoe, who wondered if I had ever thought of not peeling potatoes . . . I am aware that this is many people's preference, but it's not for me. The skins of waxy red potatoes are okay--thin enough not to be displeasing--but the Russet-style potatoes I cook with almost exclusively have thick skins that are totally unappealing to me when cooked with the rest of the potato. Plus, our own  garden potatoes are usually so filthy that peeling the dirt away with the skin is the easiest way to get them clean.

When In Doubt, Peel Potatoes

Not too long ago, I was at a playdate with a couple of other mothers and the discussion turned to the difficulty of making dinner with small children present. I'm sure any of you who have been parents or are currently parents of small children know why this is a topic of some import. Little kids are the worst at 5 p.m.  The. Worst. It's as if they have an internal clock that tells them it's time to start screaming and crying and fighting all at once while the adult is supposed to be engaged in preparing a healthy, satisfying, and tasty meal.

Though the tasty part is less important than the others, frankly, and often takes a backseat to speed.

The other two mothers mentioned that they don't eat until very late, and they asked me with some awe in their voices how I manage to get dinner on the table every night at 6 p.m. I think I said, "There are tears. Mostly from the kids."

I was only partially joking. The fact is, most nights one or more of my kids do cry while I'm making dinner, either because I'm not holding him (Jack), or because someone is menacing him with a toy (Charlie), or because someone bit him literally on the ass (Cubby, and I can't say I entirely blame Charlie for retaliating for the aforementioned menacing). I do what I can to keep the peace while I cook, but in the end, there must be food ready for six people at 6 p.m., and so I forge ahead.

I try to avoid this as much as possible, however, by doing as much ahead as I can. And I suppose this is the real "secret" (not exactly a top-secret one, however) to my dubious success: Do it ahead. Anything. Everything. Get the meat on a pan ready for the oven. Get the lettuce washed. Make salad dressing. And almost always, peel potatoes.

There is no time to be standing at the sink peeling potatoes for fifteen minutes right before dinner. Thankfully, however, potatoes can be peeled way ahead of time and covered in a pot of cold water to keep them from getting brown. So even if I can't think of anything else to get done during Jack's nap to make my 5 p.m. a little less wretched, I can always peel potatoes.

The New Recruits

There are some things that I have given up on after having a third kid. Any hope of going anywhere without at least one child in attendance, for one thing. Normal haircuts, for another. Although that last one has taken a turn for the rather alarming.

I shall explain.

When Cubby was young, I would bring him to an actual salon (albeit a Country Salon with a deer head on the wall) to get his hair cut whenever A. went. This was feasible because I only had one kid and the Country Salon only charged five bucks to cut Cubby's hair.

Then I had another kid. And then this kid started to have a lot of hair. Getting two kids to any kind of salon became kind of a hassle, as well as kind of expensive, so I would mostly cut their hair myself, despite having no experience or skill whatsoever. Every four months or so I would bring them both to a professional to fix my mistakes.

It was at this point that A. started suggesting that he could just give them buzzcuts with his beard trimmer. I adamantly refused this suggestion, because I don't really like the way buzzcuts on little boys look.

I mean, look at the cuteness of those little heads of hair. JUST LOOK.

Then I had a third kid. He doesn't yet have enough hair to worry about really, but getting three kids to a salon for a haircut with any kid of regularity was just . . . no.

I have some problems, though. One of them is that I am really not good at cutting their hair. Another is their hair is very thick and grows very fast, especially Cubby's, so they need a haircut every four weeks without fail. And the third problem is that I do not like long hair on males of any age. So if I wasn't willing to cut it myself, pay for someone else to cut it, or let their hair grow . . .

I surrendered to the beard trimmer. And A. has been shaving their heads regularly ever since.

But then his beard trimmer died, probably because it wasn't really meant for shaving whole heads of hair with any regularity, so A. bought actual electric hair clippers. He used them for the first time last night, putting on the number zero guard* first and starting with Cubby. He took the first swipe right above Cubby's ear and said, "Oops."

The number zero guard is pretty much the "bald" guard. Super.

Because he didn't actually want Cubby to be completely bald, he then did the rest of the bottom part of Cubby's head with that guard, using a longer guard for the top and then attempting to sort of fade the two together with an intermediate-length guard.

And then, so Cubby wouldn't be too upset about his, um, extreme haircut, he did Charlie's hair the same way.

This is Charlie's response to a request for a smile. Yikes.

DROP AND GIVE ME TWENTY, PLEBE.

It's . . . well, it's not the look I would have chosen for my sons.

I trimmed Jack's hair for him a few days ago, but he has so far escaped the clippers.

Looks like a damn hippie next to his brothers now, though.

At least we won't have to worry about cutting it again for awhile. I guess.

* The guards are the interchangeable heads for the clippers that determine how short the resulting haircut is. They start at zero for the shortest (i.e., BALD) and go up from there.