the squibix family blog

The new look also sees the appearance of Zion, finally, on the little cartoon of us up there above these words. True, he's only a head and hand in Leah's arms at this point, but you have to start somewhere. By the next masthead update he'll be walking!

And as an aside, let me apologize for all the comments spam we've been getting, especially to anyone subscribing to the comments feed (I think it's actually just me, so that's ok). It's not even like we're getting spam for cool products or really dirty porn or whatever; no, it's "dyson vacuum parts", "estate planning", "neck pain treatment"... "KOSHER BEEF JERKY" (capitals in original). I guess the internet is getting old, just like the rest of us.

From Leah's cousin-in-law Arthur Harvey got a knitted purple monster that's a perfect size for toddler hugging, which he immediately did. It was also in his bed its first night home, but as the photo above shows it made its way downstairs where Rascal was able to appreciate the coziness. Our friend Amy crocheted a pair of monkeys for Zion and Harvey, each of which was marked with the appropriate initial. Not only are they super silly and cute, I will also credit them with teaching Harvey his letters. Today he picked out a small wooden 'z' from the box and said, "It's a 'z' for Zion!". Of course, when he says for somebody it means he actually wants to give it to them, which I had to stop: that little letter had choking hazard written all over it! (well, one letter of that phrase, anyways). But the intention was good, not to mention the pre-reading skills!

Speaking of which, I'm not super excited to go back to teaching children who are not my own tomorrow, and my body has chimed in with its agreement by coming down with quite a fever. Leah's sick of me, though, so hopefully a good night's sleep will see me fit and ready for the trenches again. If nothing else I can keep popping Tylenol. Man those things really work; I never would have got this blog post out otherwise! Now to bed.

Also, I have temporarily made it so we have to approve comments before they appear on the page. Something must be done to stop the flood of spam. Frequent commenters, though, may rest assured in the knowledge that you will be allowed to continue posting unconstrained by any delays... as long as you don't change the name you're commenting under. If you think you should be on that list and you get the "your comment is being held" message, send me an email—in fact, do that if anything in your commenting experience is not to your satisfaction. Sorry, and thanks for your patience!

I sure know I wasn't. The second-grade picture is a reasonable showing, but by fourth I was showing a little too much buck teeth. The "rat-tail" hairdo didn't help me in middle school, nor did the braces and acne freshman year in high school. If Leah is to be believed, though, I made something of a recovery a few years after that.

These days with Harvey the cycle between beauty and... otherwise... is a matter of weeks or even days. He managed to get some good genes from somewhere (must have been his mama) so he's generally doing alright, but as I noted before he tends not to take the sort of care with his appearance that you'd expect from a model. Scratches, food smudges, and plain dirt are long-time occupants of his face, and lately he's branched out to magic marker as well (during the Christmas Eve church service he all unseen applied a very Robert Smith-looking smear of orange around his lips). Worst of all, though, are the weepy eyes that are the most notable feature of his current cold. Not only is the eye-goop and clumpy eyelash look a little off-putting, the irritation (and interrupted sleep!) have given him more droop to the eyes than usual. The J Crew catalog would not have him in his current state. Ah well, he'll soon be restored to beauty.

As for Zion, he's still working the cheeks and the smile, and he's lately added a bit of tongue-sticking-out (not yet captured on film), so he's pretty much set for cuteness. Especially with the cheeks.

Our excuse is that, when presented with an opportunity to do something fun, we tend to take it. On Saturday, for example, the bizarrely warm weather gave Leah the idea of going to Drumlin Farm; when we invited our friends along it was revealed that they had had the same thought and were about to invite us. The outing was thus clearly divinely ordained, so off we went. Then we brought them home to dinner at our house—unplanned, un-prepared-for—so naturally, rather than getting cleaner, the kitchen (to take only one example) got almost unimaginably messier. (The fact that three of the homemade beers exploded upon opening did not help the situation.) Sure, this afternoon all was made presentable again, but theoretically I could have been cleaning other things had the kitchen already been done.

But never mind hypotheticals. Even if you assume that I could manage two days of solid cleaning, something not really borne out by evidence, what kind of existence would that be?! A clean house is easier to live in, but the real reason we want it to stay nice is so we can offer hospitality, so it would be silly to pass up an opportunity to invite folks by now because we're getting ready for some as-yet-undetermined future visit. Also if all we did was clean we'd be even grumpier when all our work was undone in scarce moments by children and food preparation, as it invariably is.

So. We want a clean house, but not at the expense of fun times. We're working on having both. So stop by any time... and we're now accepting invitations for outings next weekend.

The worst part of it is—worst for everyone involved—even big almost-pre-schoolers like Harvey don't really know what's going on with the acute stomach pains followed by coughing followed by you-know-what. There's no desperate dash to the bathroom, nor even any awareness that such a thing might be advisable; on the contrary, Harvey associates any gestures designed to mitigate the mess of being sick—sitting up, a towel held in front of him, and so on—with the terror of vomiting itself, so he resists them with all his meager, sickness-addled strength. Or sometimes he's just asleep and gets sick all over the himself and the pillow like earlier this evening. At least he's so wiped out that, as soon as he's cleaned up, he's desperate to get back to sleep.

He's only thrown up twice this evening but he's definitely down for the count—at least now he's sleeping rather than lying crying on the floor, which is how Leah tells me he spent nearly all of the day today. Zion is also sleeping through his own sickness, if by sleeping you mean occupying the bed and crying out in pathetic discomfort every fifteen minutes or so. Leah has been keeping him company since about 6:30 this evening. If she gets any rest in between wakeups it'll be a grand help to her long-enduring cold.

Hopefully a good night's sleep will see us all restored, otherwise heaven knows what'll happen tomorrow!

Another kid had a better question, wondering how under the circumstances I was so well-versed in the characters and settings of Phineas and Ferb. I told her we watched on the computer (not mentioning the questionable legality of the particular method), which of course led other perceptive children to wonder why I couldn't watch the game online. I told them to take it up with the NFL and the broadcast networks, but when I started trying to describe licensing and blackouts they got bored and wandered away.

I've been completely out of the loop this football season, but I did try and catch up with a few of the late-season games via bittorrent; I tell you, football games take a lot of time to watch, even with all the ads stripped out. But when you already know how it comes out and you can pause it indefinitely in the background, it's kind of nice to watch a game in five-minute intervals over the course of a couple weeks. It sure doesn't get in the way of your life like watching it on live tv does! So don't worry 3rd graders, we're doing alright.

Early in our cohabitation we had a hard time sleeping together under one comforter, and needed separate sets of bedding for nighttime comfort, even in balmy Santa Monica. How we laughed about that even a few months later when the new comforter was plenty big for the both of us, to say nothing of when we welcomed a dog and then a baby into the bed and still found room to spare (relatively). Somehow, though, the same comforter is now once again too small.

I can't imagine what the problem is: Rascal is the same size that he has been and Zion is certainly no bigger than Harvey was just before we kicked him out into his own bed. But somehow now, every night, both Leah and I struggle with trying to keep the edges over us as we cling desperately to opposite sides of the mattress. We've always had to cling, mind, but the lack of comforter cover is new and alarming. Has the thing shrunk? Is Rascal taking up more of it underneath himself in his old age? I have no idea. In any case, we now each have a supplementary blanket to cover the gap. Oh well, at least it's useful when the nights are as cold as this one now!

I had a grand Martin Luther King Day post planned except we lost our internet this afternoon. Silly Harvey stories are about all I can type on this phone.

You see, even at the best of times our wonderful puppy is a little neurotic, and he's never what you call pleased when presented with the prospect of anyone he doesn't know touching him; still less with being closed into a small exam room saturated with the odors of other dogs' terror (although I assume they do a good job of cleaning up all the actual pee...). So he wouldn't even let anyone put a muzzle on him, which was a prerequisite for getting near him in a medical capacity. Thus the sedative.

If all had gone well, he would have been sedated right there in the exam room, checked out and vaccinated, and then the sedative would have been reversed by another injection. The vet was very positive about the prospect. Unfortunately Rascal is like a super-villain in that, even when injected with a dose of tranquilizer warranted to stop a dog 20 pounds heavier than he is, he can fight it off for quite a while. And when he finally did go down, he kept fighting to the extent that he started seizuring. So they gave him valium. Here he is completely out of it being brought back to the surgery where they could make sure he wouldn't die while examined him.

At this point I had already been at the office for over an hour, but while he was pleased to report Rascal's fine state of health the vet also had to tell me that he wouldn't recover from the valium for another couple hours. So I had to go home dogless.

After an hour at home—I was told to wait two hours before returning, but, you know, the half-hour drive each way—I headed back, this time with Harvey along for the ride. When they ushered us in to see Rascal he didn't look like he'd ever be able to stand again, but they assured me that he was coming out of it wonderfully—so much so that they had him well-muzzled up. Apparently the wild snapping part of his brain is the first to come back online.

Figuring he'd be happier waking up with his family, the techs set us up in an exam room with him (and with a movie for Harvey—Snow Dogs, have you ever seen it?). Realizing he was among friends he jumped right up but was very unsteady on his feet, and after I petted him for a couple minutes he laid back down and went to sleep. I think he would have slept all night, but there's only so much Cuba Gooding Jr. I can stand so we woke him up and hauled him out of there. He slept in the car on the way home.

Back home it was kind of scary how out of it he still was. He could walk around but didn't have any fine motor control: he tripped over things and misjudged corners and was just generally clumsy. What with that combined with the strands of drool—the drugs made him forget how to swallow—and glassy eyes, he was quite disturbingly zombie-like. But we got him settled down and he went to sleep again for an hour or so, then roused enough to come upstairs and join us on the bed.

He's still not quite himself yet—he didn't eat his dinner!—but he's much more active and coordinated today, and I'm sure that tomorrow will see him completely restored. That said, I'm not looking forward to next year's checkup. All the staff at the clinic were super-nice throughout the whole thing, but I can't help but think there has to be a better way. In all honesty, I feel the same way that he does about doctors, I just have the social conditioning to hide it!

Anyways, that's how I spent yesterday afternoon.

Featuring prominently in all this imagination are Jop and Boonin. I argued for "Jopp" as a spelling for the former but Leah got there first, so I guess I'll follow her lead. In any case, I wish I could remember when we started to hear about these two characters. All I can recall is that Jop showed up first and Boonin followed a little while later, but by now they tend to be inseparable. They live under the flower tree in our yard (Harvey makes his home in the hemlocks and the store is beneath the holly), but they spend a good deal of time over at our house. Today they were even there when we were out watching the football game with friends! Maybe they're more base hoop fans.

In the car on the way home this evening Harvey was talking about the pair (that's how I knew I could expect them when we got home; he says they let themselves in). At some point in what was mostly a monologue, we heard the following:

"I'm Jop. And I'm Boonin. And we're Jop and Boonin."

So there you have it. Whether he was influenced in his cadence by the football announcers—he didn't seem to be paying attention but we should know by now that he's always listening—or some other source, it seemed like as good an introduction as any to the pair that play so large a role in our elder son's imagination. I expect to continue to hear more from them in the future

This evening I was perusing The Farmhouse Cookbook, by Yvonne Young Tarr, which was published in 1973. It's a really interesting mix of old-time recipes, alot of them of Pennsylvania Dutch extraction, with trendy modern dishes. Soy sauce is an ingredient in at least one recipe, for example, and glazed ham with pineapple makes an appearance. On the other hand, if you had access to 100 lbs of hams you could also follow the recipe for Farm-Cured Ham on page 140 and, "[l]ike the country folk of the past, ... enjoy this time-ripened delight." Time-ripened here refers both to the recipe and the product itself; I only wish I had room to store that much ham, carefully wrapped in brown paper and muslin bags, on the premises. Ditto the bacon, which also calls for 100 lbs of meat.

I was also fascinated by the recipe for Calf's Head Soup, which I read to Leah. Even though she joined me yesterday in vigorously defending, in principal if not in practice, the use of "mechanically separated meat"—doesn't it seem right to use all possible parts of the animal?—she thought the line could be drawn at brains. In her defense she's never been a fan of brains, but I don't think it's entirely a necessary conclusion that she would resist eating them when they were cooked unrecognizably into a soup. The point is moot, however, because I could no more easily get my hands on a calf's head than I could pig meat in three-digit weights. Although I bet if I asked around at the farmers market...

(David Walbert at Walbert's Compendium writes more knowledgeably than I'll ever manage on the topic of old recipes, and I recommend you check out his blog if you're at all interested in the subject.)

I'm sure there's no slight against farming intended by any of the authors; they just don't expect their readers to believe that a young couple, the sort likely to have a picture-book-protagonist-aged offspring, would willingly tie themselves to the soil for their livelihood. Not that the farmers in the stories seem to be working too hard; it's more the retired-in-the-country-and-fun-to-visit farming. True, there are some good books about farming in the olden days—our last library visit I read Harvey Jane Yolen's Harvest Home—but if you go by most of the books set in the modern day farming is clearly a dying art.

Which it may be, in mainstream culture. But we're fighting the power over here, and we need picture books to back us up and send the right message to our children! One of the rare counter-examples is Nikki McClure's To Market, To Market, which dives right into realistic descriptions of how farmers market vendors grow or make the things they bring to the market. Only there's not much plot to grab you, and the explanations are a little long for Harvey's taste. Oh, he'll listen to them—this child will listen to the dictionary for as long as you're willing to read it to him—but it's not the kind of thing that's going to excite him, either about rereading it or about living it.

So... who knows any children's-book authors?