Happy Halloween!

The kid's "alien pumpkin" idea, as usual, was the best. Go dress up and eat candy, people. It's really the only time it's acceptable to be a big goofus.

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Pearls of wisdom, LAUSD-style

A brief discussion of Columbus Day brought on a little lyricism by the small child whilst dog walking:

Columbus sailed on the ocean blue in 1982...

Me: It was 1492. In 1982 I was in school.
Child: (missing emphasis entirely, her mind obviously bogged down by important matters like how much TV she could boonswoggle out of me): You went to school with Columbus?

And then, Red Ribbon Week. Where they teach kids who don't know anything about drugs and alcohol and smoking about drugs, alcohol and smoking.

Me (ignoring the red ribbons in favor of finding the kid in the melee after school): Hi. How was school?
Child: I got this red bracelet. It says, "Just Say No To Drunks."
Me: (stifles laugh, can't speak)
Child: What's a drunk? Oh, and they say that if you find someone smoking, you should run up to them and say "BOO!" And you can't have wine every day. Just sometimes. And C---'s Dad smokes.
Other kid: And tries to keep it from the kids (apparently not very well, C---'s Dad. Not that you're not in for some fresh Hell now).
Other kid's parent, under her breath: "We have wine sometimes and now I'm worried that she's going to run around telling everyone we're lushes."

Have mercy, LAUSD. Sometimes the sin is all we've got left, huh? Not me, of course. Just saying. BOO!

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Cruising, total coolness return to Van Nuys

We got that rare dinner alone tonight (thanks, Grandma!) and ran off to take the dog for a quick spin as the night turned cooler. Behold, at Starbucks, a beautiful car. And then, wow, another, a Corvair. And then, wait, what's that on the boulevard? Okay, hold up, what's with all the nice cars? We get over to Van Nuys Blvd. and there are amazing vintage cars in every direction cruising up and down.

We followed the ruckus to the old Rydell Chevy lot and there they all were: Fab cars from all over, with enough fumes to knock us all over flat. Really serious stuff -- hot rods, Mustangs, VW buses, 1950s Chevys, GTOs, Model As, crazy lowriders -- you name it. And the ones that weren't parked were all around, cruising, or parked seemingly randomly, as at one Mobil station, where in each of three bays was an enormous lowrider car with everyone leaping around greeting each other. It was like catapulting back in time to the '70s, when you could cruise Van Nuys Blvd. and everyone wasn't such a tightass.

Of course, in lieu of the child to remind us, we ran into our kid's preschool teacher, who was there with a teacup chihuahua that threatened to nip Poppy's enormous-by-comparison face off. Poppy was completely nonplussed (We're out! We're out! Yay! Yay! People! Noise! Urban decay! Whoo! I love being a dog! Can I poop right here in front on the grass where everyone is talking?!).

A lovely evening in Van Nuys in the summertime. Sometimes it's just nice to see people out having a good time (including us for once!). Nobody seemed to know who organized this, but I found this fab poster online...Word to the locals: I hear this will be a second-Wednesday-of-the-month phenom. See ya next time!

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Campy camp

Ah, summer camp!

This all started with the looming spectre (and that’s no understatement) of unlimited time alone with the child for two months. I’m just not enough Mom to provide the sort of 24-hour long entertainment **interruption while the kid comes in and insists that I get up to come see the monstrosity she’s made out of her room her dollhouse made into a pet sanctuary. Where would she get the idea for that?**……I rest my case.

So there needed to be camp. The kid needs a break (I reasoned) from school, but some of the camps available (read: affordable) seemed to resemble daycare aimed at whiling away hours so that parents like me wouldn’t need hospitalization.

To provide maximum fun I tossed a few paychecks into FancyCamp (not its real name but it could be). FancyCamp is where the rich kids go – it has LOADS of counselors and CITs (Counselors In Training) and teachers. The kid starts the day with art, then do cooking (if you can call spearing hot dogs with raw spaghetti and then cooking it so you have some weird arty thing that kids love to eat cooking. Also, they always overmix the cake. Can’t they teach them the muffin method so fussypants adults like me can enjoy their kitchen labors?); plays with real live animals like Kimodo Dragons, love birds and frogs, and then finishes the day with Tae Kwon Do. They sell ice cream after every day and donate the proceeds to a camp for kids with heart ailments. We could only afford 2 days a week (you have to be seriously flush to do every day), but she loves it and we’ve been really happy she got to go.

Today at FancyCamp it was Wacky Hair Day. I learned that some parents think that putting a child’s hair in 4 ponytails constitutes wacky hair, while others had on full on dioramas on their heads and spray-painted Halloween hair. I don’t like the spray crap getting on the car seat, me, every damned thing in existence, so I went for the wacky fake-hair-in-ponytail look. The kid was so insanely chuffed she kept her hair like this until we got home from dance class and decided to take a walk in the balmy but less stifling weather and she spied some Thursday-sanctioned lawn sprinkling. Out came all the finery and off she ran over the suburban lawns with the dog and I in hot pursuit. We ate ravioli and broccoli and overmixed cake while she watched a new digital station with kid TV (the best of which appears at 8 pm and beyond…?) Then she went to bed at the rock-star hour of 10pm, and if someone could just inform the dog that we’re waking late tomorrow we could – gasp – relax!

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All creatures great and small -- that's us!

As part of the kids' "learning module" for science, they were mailed (?) some animals (and shortly thereafter, learned about the end of the lifecycle when some didn't make it). The survivors include a single goldfish, a few guppies, and a bunch of land and water snails.

The kid has been particularly enamored with the land snails, otherwise known as garden pests, possum chow, and in areas not Van Nuys, escargot, since she found one outside her classroom one day. In the infinite wisdom of a half-empty adult noggin, it was suggested by a fully employed adult that she throw it away in a trashcan. (She apparently missed the memo on Student Learning Objectives For the Animal Module: Compassion). Well, the kid may be a carnivore at times, but she ignored this directive and found the little critter a place in the shade.

So when her teacher asked if any children wanted to make a pet of a little gastropod, our spawn ran after me sputtering and begging for one. And being the progeny of the The Birdman of West Hills*, I dutifully went to Petco, shelled out $5 for a little breathable box, and presented such to her enthusiastic teacher (who was undoubtedly thinking, "just 7 more to go!" ) .

The kids at school came running over like we were rock stars ("what's inside the box?") and were fascinated with...Bruno**, our new snail, who was hanging upside down in the newly sprayed box. Now all the kids want a pet snail. And although nocturnal, snails slither about quietly, unlike the white furry terror that now sleeps beside me but still occasionally insists on waking me at 5:30 am with an insistent wag and the flinging of my slippers until I rise bearing an expression that would strike fear in anyone smart enough to recognize it. But she persists, optimistic as ever. Somewhere there's a deep philosophical lesson, but I'm too damned tired to recognize just what it is yet.

*current pet count: 2 cockatiels, 2 finches, 4 canaries, 2 parakeets, 1 still-untrained doggie, 60 or so fish - some have spawned and had to be given to the pet store, 4 diamond doves, no partridges and a plum tree or two.
** Named for the dog in Cinderella. The cat's name is Lucifer. I'm reserving it for later.

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It's all about the bark. Woof!

A year ago (!), I went on about how I learned something about orchids and ended up transplanting all these odd little plants into some bark-infested orchid pots. I think I delusionally hoped for results in 5 months. Har. Well, just one year of fertilizing with blue parmesan-smelling fertilizer and blam-o! -- one of the plants issued forth with some beautiful orchid flowers dancing in a line like chorus girls. The others look better at least.

And then there was the amazingly swell year we had with the Amaryllis, to which we did absolutely nothing and received a ridiculously large number of glittering flowers. They look like giant air-raid sirens, only way prettier.

Starting June 1, we can only water our lawn two times a week, just as the weather becomes searing-hot. We'll be whipping out the kiddie pool, having a run through it and then, in a clever guise, we'll dump it out over the lawn. Can you get a ticket for watering your kid too much?

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Down on the farm

A couple of weeks ago, 80+ kids along with some Advil-poppin' parents and teachers (including me) trotted out to Underwood Family Farms for a little face time with some right-out-of-the-ground food. It was a long ride, but by the time we saw actual fields, the kids were getting rowdy with excitement. First they got a primer on fruits and vegetables (during which I heard more than one parent comment that they were learning something also).

Okay. A fruit is the actual reproductive part of a plant, complete with seeds. It's very clever when you think about it. The plant can't move, and if something doesn't scatter the seeds, the new plants will be too crowded to survive. Here's where the animals come in. Something eats the seed-bearing part (and sometimes the seeds too), and by tossing the core, or the seeds, or even pooping the whole seeds and the plant and the animal survive and go on to reproduce. (And plants make their own food, unlike us; they're cleverer than you thought, huh?).

So a fruit bears the seeds. So a tomato, a cucumber, zucchini, an avocado: Fruit, technically.

So what is a vegetable? When you eat the leaves, stems, or flowers. The guy mentioned that cauliflower really is the flowering part of the plant. Really? Okay, I learned something too.

After that we were towed by tractor to a strawberry field, where the kids ran loose with a clear box and their adult chaperones in a strawberry field. Underneath the leaves lay ruby red strawberries so ripe that the field smelled like heaven. So what did the kids do? My little charges started picking strawberries that looked like the ones at the market -- the kind that are not yet fully ripened (so they can be shipped) and still have yellowy tips. I stopped them and explained that this was different, that they could pick the ripest, best ones, and then they did. And then they wanted to eat some of them in the field. When I discovered that there were no pesticides, that's just what we did. One of my kid's friends came back with a red-stained ring around his mouth like a little, very happy clown.

Unfortunately, after that the kids were encouraged to eat lunch and see the animals, though they all wanted to see the other crops. We saw some by tractor -- peach trees, walnut trees, avocadoes, beans, etc. They were fascinated. It was 90 degrees that day (one my little charges got heat exhaustion...), but as a bonus many of them fell asleep in the bus going home, even my little sleep-averse child.

If you can take your kids to a farm, or grow your own fruits/vegetables, do. It's the greatest way for them to make a connection with the food they eat (and it both encourages them to eat well and spoils them for really good food that doesn't taste bland or half-ripened). We ate strawberries for a few days -- they were like candy.

We've got tomatoes on our side yard in a pot, as we do every year. The kid won't eat a tomato, but it doesn't stop her from getting very, very excited every time one ripens on the vine and she gets to pick it.

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Buggin' out

Do you shred all the stuff with your address on it? You probably should, and so should we. But:

I put off the shredding (which, when I set a large paper bag down for the mail, swore I’d do every week) for a couple of months and the magazine addresses and crap credit offers were finally going to meet the recycling bin. They'd been sitting in a paper Whole Foods bag. Halfway through, and feeling a sort of satisfaction sitting there on the floor getting something done, a GIGANTIC, as in hissing Madagascar-type COCKROACH skittered out of the bag and into my LAP. We haven’t had a cockroach in our house – ever -- and I haven’t had much close contact with the little bastards (minus the occasional nocturnal waltzing across the sidewalks during the summer heat) since I left New York. Cockroaches were the only kinds of bugs I ever killed, and they used to shrug off a direct hit with a full bottle of Nivea so it wasn't easy. So when this Darwinian specimen took the pause that refreshes on the front of my shirt, I could have been singing an aria at the Met. And of course, I was airing out the house so every single window was open.

Steven, outside with the kid pulling weeds (we are an exciting bunch, no?) came in to see what the hell was going on just as I stood up and realized it was clinging to my ankle, causing me to launch into another round of Human Airhorn. When he sees this beast make a run for it down the hall, we’re scrambling for cardboard and cups. Steven hardly even made fun of me (and in our house that means something because we routinely make fun of each other for screaming like a little girl. For Steven, it takes a lot, but a rat jumping out of the compost bin is a guaranteed shriek). The kid and he set the cockroach free somewhere near the back of the yard, where it will probably breed and come back to suck the life out of me (for vengeance, because it is now deaf). Steven’s aunt Harriet always used to tell me not to keep paper shopping bags, that the glue in them breeds cockroaches (which I thought was ridiculous). I thought of her immediately; if there is a heaven, she’s up there falling over laughing.

And the shredding? Done. No more waiting on that – lesson learned.

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