Ha! Happy Effing New Years!

(I actually wrote this on New Years Eve, but naps, sick husbands and iffy internet connection kept me from posting until today.)

I cannot believe I am spending the second New Years of my life sick in bed. The New Years Party got cancelled, because of my kids getting sick, not me, and then I woke up this morning with a little sore throat. By 9am I have a full blown migraine. Two Motrin and three Excedrin later, I get in bed. I think I will do some writing, but holding my head up hurts. So does light, and noise. I fell asleep and bitchslapped Paris Hilton, so at least that wasn't a total loss. I was sure when I woke up I would be fine. I was wrong. I could actually hear my eyes opening. They creaked like the head of that giant statue Clash of the Titans. I finally got out of bed around 5:30 and washed my face and brushed my teeth. I thought I was fine to go downstairs and spend a quiet evening with my family. Oh.....that's right.....five year olds don't care how much pain they cause you when they talk, they will keep talking. And ten year olds? They take it personally if you keep saying "Quiet voice, please!" Roser made my Nana's sauce, with his own spin on it, (Oregano and meat) and it was delicious. Unfortunately, my family doesn't know the first thing about being quiet. To be fair, they've never had to. I am not given to migraines, or even regular headaches. When I do get a headache, I take some Motrin and it's gone. This totally sucks! Why am I being punished for wanting to have a New Years Eve party?

My Love Affair with S.E. Hinton

I discovered S. E. Hinton when I was around 13 years old. I read all four of her books in a row, and then I went back and re-read them. I read The Outsiders maybe twenty or more times over the next two or three years. I had the book memorized. I read That was Then, This is Now nearly as many times.

My own ultra-feminine XX13 was assigned The Outsiders as an English class reading assignment. To my surprise, she loved it! She got the same look on her face when she talked about it that I used to get on my face. She loved the boys in the book, and got a little crush on Ponyboy. (That ended when she saw the movie, as, after you see Rob Lowe in nothing but a towel, there really is no-one else for you but Soda-Pop.) She is such a fashion minded, giddy gossipy girl, that I never expected her to be so invested in the lives of boys from early '60's Oklahoma. It is even more astounding when you consider she is not much of a reader. She averages one to two books a year. When I realized how much she was enjoying it, I bought her That was Then, This is Now. She had to finish another book that she had been working on since February. She started reading it yesterday, and she couldn't put it down. Wow. I can't even tell you what that means to me.

She came in to the bonus room where I was sewing and curled up on the couch to do her homework. She finished her math and said,

"Now I can read my book." I have never heard, nor have I ever expected to hear those words out of her mouth. She would stop every once in a while to tell me how much she liked the way S. E. Hinton wrote. She laughed out loud, and would read passages she liked to me. She became almost giddy when Ponyboy, from The Outsiders made an appearance.

"It's like seeing an old friend," She said. Of course I knew exactly what she was talking about. It's like introducing my daughter to my old friends, the ones who were there with me and for me. These old friends have been frozen in time, held as teenagers, able to give my daughter the gifts they gave me. I wish S. E. Hinton knew what she has done for me. First, when I was a teenager, already an avid reader, and now, she has ignited a love of reading in a girl whom I never thought would love reading. Thank God for her.

Sugar Toast and Sprite

About eight years ago, Roser and I decided to host a family friendly New Year's Eve party. We set up the garage for the kids, and bought the food and the booze. We had invited about fifty people, (Around twenty families) and then I got one of the worst cases of the flu that I can remember. It lasted about four days, right through the proposed New Years Eve bash. Roser is not the type to do that sort of thing on his own, so he had to call everyone at two in the afternoon to let them know the party had been cancelled.

The other night we were at a small Christmas celebration, and one of my friends recommended (insisted) that Roser and I host a New Year's Eve party. We finally agreed. We came home, and XX5 woke up in the middle of the night, sick to her stomach. She was in my bed, throwing up everything, and then, nothing, for twelve hours. I mostly stayed close by her in bed, since I got no sleep the night before, and tried to get her to eat saltines, and drink flat Sprite. I thought maybe the mere commitment to a New Years party is enough to encourage the plague to visit our house.

Right now, I have Spiderman 3 on in the background. "Why?" you might ask, "Why, on a Monday morning would you have an action movie aimed at ten year old boys on in the background?" That would be because my ten year old boy is sitting here beside me, with the barf bowl, and a can of Sprite. Yep, another one has been felled by the stomach flu. I am pushing on with the party, in the hopes that I will not be barfing when the time comes. Wish me luck!

Cook Books

Last night, my good friend gave me a copy of "Mastering the Art of French Cooking". I received it last year at a Book Club book exchange, and she stole it. I barely even remembered that she took it more than once or twice a month. I sat on my porch and read the introductions and forwards. There were about eight of them, two from Julia Child herself.

Cook books are something special to me. They combing my two great loves, cooking, and reading, more specifically, books. I had a childhood, lacking in all forms of tangible manifestations of love. Perhaps due to some genetic memory in my French and Italian lineage, I have long equated delicious food with feeling loved. It is by no accident that my best child hood memories took place in the kitchen or at the dining room table of the most amazing cook I know to this very day, My Aunt Liz. She is a loud, exotically beautiful Brooklyn born Italian. She oozed love like essential oil, but not a flowery oil, a garlic and pepper infused oil. It was a love that was not about making you feel good about yourself by telling you how wonderful you were, it made you feel good about yourself because it took care of your needs. It was a love that could tell, just by looking at you, that you need a sandwich and a glass of milk. Her house always had the lingering smell of the red sauce she made weekly, and a cookie drawer. A drawer, designated for nothing but cookies! Oh, and she always had Pop-Tarts. That was as good as it got when I was little.

This was very different the house I grew up in, on the same street as Aunt Liz. Family dinner in my other aunt's house was an infrequent affair, tense and not very tasty. The aunt who raised me just wasn't a very good cook. I don't know if she wasn't able to taste well, or if she was missing that certain generosity of spirit and patience that I think is necessary to be a good cook. Our house always smelled like cigarette smoke. Aunt Torm pretty much gave up cooking around the time I was ten. I began making dinners for myself out of Top Ramen, hot dogs, and fried eggs. Not all at the same time of course. I would roast the hot dogs over the gas flame on our stove, and I drained the broth off the noodles in the Top Ramen and add canned Parmesan cheese. none of these are particularly original ideas, but at ten years old, it was the best I could do. The point is, I was tweaking, and working, and trying to make mediocre food taste good.

When I moved in with my dad at sixteen, my step-mother had several cookbooks. She was a busy pastor's wife, and it often fell to me to cook dinner for the family, and what ever members of the congregation we had for dinner that night. I never felt this was a burden. I loved it. One of the recipes I discovered in one of Ruth's little church based cookbooks is a recipe I use to this very day. (Heavenly Chicken)

Somehow, over the years, I have amassed a collection of about 60 cookbooks. I have at least skimmed through all of them. Many of them I have read cover to cover, like a novel. Ann Hodgman is my favorite, both for entertainment value, and recipes. Many of my cookbooks are old, from the 70's or earlier. The old ones give me a sense of history. I think about older dinner parties, where there was no goat cheese or sun-dried tomatoes. I am also grateful, that we are no longer expected to eat things covered in Jello and call it fancy.

Mostly my cookbooks are like "how to love" manuals. Food, to make my family feel love, feel actual physical love, in their bellies. Waking up the smell of bacon, popovers whipped up when we have unexpected guests. Their favorite meal, whatever it may be, for birthdays, or first jobs, or other special days. My kids joke with me,

"You can't solve every problem by making a sandwich Ma," they say. Well, I disagree. There are very few problems that cannot be made better by a lovingly prepared meal.

Roser's Family, or, The Side of the Family we Don't Hide the Knives From

Thursday night was my niece's 11th birthday. She is Roser's sister's daughter. I love her and have since the night she was born. Literally, I was there. Roser's sister, 'Rosie' was married, twice to the same jerk. Not the beating on her kind of jerk, the sitting on his ass stoned, screwing around on her, jerk. The only good thing he ever did in his life was contribute genetically to my two nieces, J and M. Rosie and Jerko were high school sweethearts, and Rosie is still close with Jerko's family. His sister and her two girls were at my nieces birthday. Rosie married an man she had known for many years, and she now has the kind of husband she deserves. He gives more, much more than he takes, and he loves her extended family. He treats her parents with love and respect, and her daughters like they are his own. He has two daughters who were 18 and 20 when he and Rosie got married three years ago. His daughters have loved Rosie's girls, and referred to them as sisters, (never using the word step) from day one. They have taken J and M to get pictures taken altogether for Father's Day and Christmas.
There was a large amount extended family at J's party. Good husband's mother is staying with Rosie and her family. Her girls call her Nana. As I said, Jerko's sister was there, and good husband's girls with their boyfriend and husband. It was just a mishmash of people, young and old, who in some ways loosely connected, but who consider each other family. It was wonderful for me to see my kids around these people whom they've known for so long. I love that my sister-in-law is the type that stayed friends with her ex sister-in-law, and that her husband is the kind of guy that is okay with it. I love my kids knowing that there is this group of people with values and morals, who care what happens to them. I am convinced that my kids are who they are partly because of this stable consistent love and support they have gotten from family who is not Roser and me.

Buying Clothes my Children will Hate

Roser started a new job recently. For the first time in about nine years, we have a company Christmas party. It is a family Christmas party. I didn't even try to talk XY17 into it, and we gave XX13 the choice to go or spend the night with a friend. XY10 and XX5 were not given a choice. We tend to be a pretty casual family, with spotty church attendance, so at any given time, the closest my boys have to dress clothes is black Dickies, and tennies that their toes aren't poking through. I had to go all out and buy XY10 a full dress outfit. My daughters are easier, as they just naturally dress up more. Still, I had to get XX5 a fancy dress. Oh, and joy of joys, I had to buy a ginormous pair of pants to cover my fat ass. Oh yeah! Yesterday was a great day.

I decided to go with comfort in mind for the kids. XY10 got twill pants instead of full on dress pants, and XX5 got a stretch velvet dress, with no taffeta, or netting, or anything stiff or itchy anywhere. I had a shirt picked out that I thought he and Roser would like, cause Roser cares about that stuff. As I walked through the store with the shirt, I realized I hated it. I went back and picked the one I liked, and decided to just bear the anger of my boys. I went to four different stores to find a pair of dress shoes that would not make the boy bleed from the eyes and call on fire from above to put him out of his misery. The shoes were the most expensive thing I bought, and if I'm lucky, he will wear them, maybe six times. Sigh.

When I got home, XY10 and several similarly mop haired 10 year olds were waiting to go cause havoc at the park down the street. I showed him the stuff I bought him, and when he saw the shirt, I was rewarded with a "That shirt's sick!" If you are a unfamiliar with 10 year old boys, that means he liked it. A Lot.

Moments that Make a Mother Proud

We were all sitting at the dinner table, (Spaghetti Carbonara, with extra cheese) when I brought up, what I thought was an amusing little anecdote about a quasi-celebrity. It seems Kellie Pickler was on Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? and totally embarrassed herself.( http://youtube.com/watch?v=juOQhTuzDQ0 ) I told my family the question, "What European country is Budapest the capital of? First of all, NO ONE! in my family of six knew the answer. Most of their answers came from Asia. Everyone was surprised that it was Hungary. To be fair, it took me a long time to get that too. It just sounds like the capital of Mongolia or something. Anyway, I went on to the part where Miss Pickler thought Europe was a country. We were all laughing (except XX5, she was trying to sneak more cheese) and I didn't notice that XX13 had a quizzical look on her face.

"I guess I kinda thought Europe was a country too."
"Oh Baby, No. You don't know the continents."

"No, I'm really bad at geography."

Come to find out she is really bad at geography.

She could not name one continent without the help of XY10. Xy10, little history freak that he is, could name them all. She further, could not name the three countries that reside on the North American continent. Oh, It gets worse....She thought maybe Indiana might be one. Yeah... Indiana. And, ummm....is Hawaii a country? I was horrified. Laughing, of course, but horrified. How did I the trivia enthusiast of the world, the one who gets her daily endorphin boost by getting all the answers right on Jeopardy. How did I raise a kid who, in 7th grade, can not name one continent. Who thinks, maybe Hawaii is a country. I mean, she's cute and all, but, Seriously?

I don't even know what to say. Do you all think this is evidence that I never should have reproduced in the first place?

What a Weekend pt. 2

My family is a little fuzzy on boundaries. My dad was a pastor of a nondenominational church in downtown Las Vegas when I was a teenager. It was not at all uncommon for him to bring home homeless people. I spent time in my teenage years sharing my room with ex-hookers, and recovering drug addicts. We had a large house and at any given time there were up to six non-family members sharing the house with us. I can, and will at some point, say all sorts of true, horrible things about my dad, but in spite of his many, many faults, he is completely generous, and hospitable. Since I have lived in California, Roser and I have had an open door policy for my family. Sometimes it caused a little tension, like the time my dad called me to tell me that my then 17 and 19 year old brothers were on there way with 4 friends and would be at my house in about an hour. That was a little stressful because I already had 2 out of town guests staying with me. My guests and I left when I got the message from my dad, and when we returned a few hours later, my home had all the evidence of a full scale invasion. We tripped over gigantic shoes near my front door. There were duffels stacked in the front room like it was basic training, and the house reeked of boy sweat and cheap cologne. The actual boys, all six of them, were out, getting lunch.

In spite of the inconvenience, and annoyance, I loved the noise and chaos they brought with them when my brothers and their friends came out. I loved feeding all of them. I loved the vitality that filled the house. I just would have appreciated a little warning.

Roser, on the other hand, is one of 2 children. His father was never a pastor, and he never brought hookers home, at least not that we know of. Roser's extended family is mostly tucked safely away in Indiana, and would never dream of dropping in on anybody. His family is identified by its sense of propriety, and consideration. It has been a very easy family to be a part of because of these things. Roser has been amazing with my family, that is so different from his, and is loving on the days that I want to go after all of them with a hammer. None of this has made the Italian invasion from the north any easier to deal with.

Now that my family is local, they are dropping in, A Lot. I still kind of love it. Roser, not so much. He is very protective of his time with the family. I would love to have kids over all the time, but I need to balance that with Roser's need for time alone with us. We were supposed to go to a Christmas party on Saturday night, the one that got cancelled. When my dad found out were going, he asked me to ask the hostess if he could attend. When the party got cancelled, Roser and I decided to have a family night and put up the Christmas tree. When I told my dad this, he was hurt. I figured he would not be coming around for a while. I was wrong.

He showed up on Sunday without calling, as Roser and I were on our way out to do some errands. He settled in, even though we were leaving, and let us know that my brother, his wife, and my sister (the tattooed) would be coming by. I got totally forced to offer to make dinner for everyone. Roser was livid. He does not want to have no control over when people come over. Because it is my family, I don't care. It feels like the house I grew up in, and the type of house I always wanted to have.

I made baked rigatoni with spicy Italian sausage and green beans with garlic, olive oil and Parmesan cheese. My sister-in-law's little brother, who is a very good friend of both my own Xy17 and SibXX16 came over and ate too. I was really happy. Until 9pm, when they were showing no signs of leaving. My dad had been at my house for 13 hours, watching TV, reading the paper, hassling me about my weight, (sweetly though, if you can imagine it,) and I was done. It took a full hour to get them all out of there. An hour and tons of hints. I am not the girl I was. Apparently, I need time with just my immediate family too. Roser has rubbed off on me.

What a Weekend pt. 1

What a weekend! XY10 had his football banquet this Saturday. We were supposed to go to a Christmas Party that I was looking forward to, but it got cancelled due to my friend's little XX getting the stomach flu. Unfortunately, I, nor any of my family members got the stomach flu, so I had to go to the football banquet. With the football moms. And the football dads. Usually the football moms and dads are the best thing about Pop Warner football, but this year they were all snooty, and by snooty I mean not willing to be fascinated by me. In years past, the football parents have been a rowdy, flirty, friendly bunch, but this year they must have thought they were signing up for little league. It was one of the coldest days of the year, with a high of about fifty-three degrees. I'm sure for a lot of Americans that is down right balmy, but her in So-Cal, it was arctic. It was held at the home of one of the coaches, and the entire thing was outside. The festivities started at 12 noon, and they didn't even start handing out trophies until 3:15. There was a picture montage set to music, all very sentimental, and/or rousing, and there was not one! picture of XY10. Not One! out of about 400 pictures, and a thirty minute montage, Not one! And my kid didn't suck at football, so I don't get it.
When we first arrived I noticed a book sitting out on the counter. It was called, I think, The Pale Blue Eye.( http://www.amazon.com/Pale-Blue-Eye-Novel/dp/0060733977 )It was a 19th century murder mystery, with Edgar Allen Poe as one of the characters. I assumed it was the woman of the house who was reading it, but I couldn't figure out who the woman of the house was, so I finally asked the coach that lived there who was reading it. Turns out, it was him, Coach S. I was very impressed. We talked a little about books. I went back inside, and noticed a complete CD collection of David Sedaris.(http://www.barclayagency.com/sedaris.html) Wow! This guy was not the type of guy I would expect to be a David Sedaris fan, you know, being straight, and a football coach and all. I know, I shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but I do. All the time. Those were the slightly bright spots in a cold miserable day.
My family came over on Sunday, but I need more time to digest that. I will probably write about that later.