Suddenly Salad

Here's another fabulous habbit Theo has picked up this summer: When we are home for lunch on these lovely summer days I ask the kids what they want to eat. Theo immediately and unfailingly has been answering with a shout, "A salad! And a pita sandwich!!!" Then he swings out the porch door, slips on his flipflops and heads to the garden. From the kitchen window I can see his little head down there at lettuce level, selecting just the right greens for his personal chef salad. Sometimes he spies a ripe peapod and grabs one or two of them to pop into the mix. Then he plops his harvest into a waiting little tupperware of HOT water (for some reason he needs it HOT) and swishes them around. After that it is over to the hose, a handful of greens clutched to his chest. He uses the hose to rinse the leaves as he marches around the yard. I don't know why he feels the urge to march while rinsing, but he does. His shirt often also ends up rinsed, which is fine and mostly needed. Once they are rinsed to his satisfaction he tosses them into a papertowel that he has already laid out on the grass and then gathers them up and brings them in. If there are some raspberries in the kitchen he will toss them in with his greens, add a dab of dressing and dig in. I never have the pita and the hummus ready for him because I am always too absorbed in watching his little ritual to do anything but smile contentedly. I promised Theo that I would NOT mention what the end result of so many berries/smoothies/salads in his life might be. Let's just say that if you happen to be hanging out in the path to the bathroom when he needs it, you will be run over.

The Hardy Boys of Summer

For a good long while now Eli has been floating through life without sticking his nose deep into a book. This is big news. The kid is an astonishing reader, in regard to fluency, speed, and depth of understanding. I have been amazed to watch him plow through what seems to be atleast half of our local libary's kid section. To give an idea of his efficiency- he once read The Two Towers from The Lord of the Rings in a weekend. Anyway- for a while now he has traded the novel for comic books. And he does devour quite a number of them, but we've seen more of him as he works his way through this break in his reading. I think it has something to do with the fact that his ability far outstrips his content comfort level. So on some unconcious level he has told himself to hold off until his social knowledge matches his reading skills. But I digress. As Eli has fished around, trying to find the next great book that will recapture his attention, Jon has not been shy about name dropping. What should I read? is almost always answered by Jon with....The Hardy Boys! Jon and Eli took a brief foray into the land of these dectective brothers a few years back, but since then Jon's old blue-covered hard backs have been sitting untouched on the shelf.

Recently Jon got more proactive and took them all off of the boys' shelf and stacked them up near Eli's old reading chair. And it worked, Eli dived in. He's read two since yesterday. After he finished one this morning he came up for a breath, and as is his custom, found a parent do to a little debriefing. We got to talking about the some of the old time language and had a little laugh over the frequent description of the Hardys' "stout friend Chet". Stout is used often. Poor Chet. Never smart, or handsome, or wily, just stout. And then Eli commented on how the boys often used radios to communicate, or even telegrams. This got us off on a thread about wondering if they were rewritten today (are they? Eli thinks there is a modern author who has taken up the tale) how things would be different. The Hardy's would email, facebook, text to solve their crimes. And then Eli was able to weave in other new trends by coming up with a plot that involved the Hardys twittering to solve the crime about how old Stout Chet was cheated out of his victory on The Biggest Loser. He just went off on this riff that pretty much smacked those Hardys right down into 2009- gave me a hearty chuckle. Love that kid.

The Smoothie Meister

Theo is a fan of the smoothie. Luckily we are smack dab in the high season of our raspberry patch and have a plethora of strawberries, both fresh and frozen, from a recent outing to a pick-your-own farm. So in the mornings Theo will stumble down in his pjs, and while still bleary eyed he will get out the blender, a mixture of berries, maybe a banana, and a touch of juice and yogurt. He follows no recipe and no two smoothies are ever the same, but they are all delicious. It is a joy to watch him wake up as he concocts his magic brew. He oohs and ahs over the color and texture, adding ice or juice to get it to right where he wants it. He can't quite negotiate getting the whole lid off by himself, so he just pops off the little top part which he calls his window and plops in the ingredients as needed. The whole process is delightfully independent of me- although I sometimes try to give him advice which he rarely heeds. By the time he is clamboring up into the cup cupboard he is fully awake and ready to start his day- he grabs a glass, pours himself a healthy dose of his homemade elixer, and off he goes. He has never been much of a breakfast eater and he continually runs at just a faint dewdrop above dehydrated, so this selfmade liquid breakfast is a cureall. I am currently stocking the freezer with the daily harvest of 'extra' berries, hoping we can keep this trend going past the berry season.

Little laughs

As we were trying to get the kids into bed tonight we realized that we had failed to pick up a refill of one of the FIVE drugs Theo is currently taking for his asthma (see below). I decided that even though I did not feel like walking down to Walgreens right then, I felt even less enthusiastic about dragging the freshly laundered sheets up from the basement and making the beds. So I headed out down Brimhall with a touch of a bad attitude. But then I got to the old Walgreens pharmacy counter and said that I was there to pick up a prescription for Theo Sage-Martinson. The pharmicist could not see the hyphen in the name when I said it aloud (quite surprisingly, that happens often), so looked at me blankly and asked, "And which one of those would happen to be his last name?" I told him it was two of them, Sage and Martinson. He grabbed the drugs and as he was scanning them said, "You know, that's a pretty cool name, it means the wise son of Martin." I said, "I know, good thing too, because the other sons of Martin are complete dumbshits." And he guffawed. Which made me smile. Now you out there who might count yourselves among the other Sons of Martin, I apologize. I didn't mean it. The guy just set me up and the comment slipped out, surprising both of us.

Sucks to your as-mar

Maybe you haven't read Lord of the Flies- but I was forced to read it in high school and the line "Sucks to your asmar" has been passing through my mind often lately. As in SUCKS to Theo's asthma. The kid is currently on 5 drugs. 5. Ok, one of them is for pink eye, but the other four are attempting to join forces and beat his lungs into shape so that he can get more oxygen in and less coughing out, and therefore I can get more sleep. Which is the bottom line. Or maybe the bottom line is that Jon and I kind of suck at being the parent of a kid who has pulmonary issues.

Earlier this spring, after about 4 years of trying to treat Theo's asthma with a nebulizer, we watched old brother Pete swirl up a batch of drugs for his son, Max, who has a propensity for croup and ends up with the little fishy mask on with some regularity. We watched the familiar motions of opening the vials and pouring them in the contraption, and then Pete put this little stopper thingy on the end. Stopper thingy? We never use that....but we looked through our neb case and sure enough, we had one of those. So the next time we had to fire up machine for Theo we put on the stopper thingy, and boy oh boy did that elongate the nebulization process. Hmmm.

And then this week, Theo would seem great during the day but go to bed and the wheezing, the coughing, would set in with a vengeance. So Jon and I did a little thinking.....what could it be about his bedtime routine that could trigger this? Could it be the moldy book (soaked it in the river last weekend...oops...big library fine) that we should probably toss but are at the climax so can't stop reading to him? Or perhaps it was a mistake to wash all of his bedding last week and hang them on the deck to dry on a day that was great for line drying due to the 30 mph winds. Could those winds have been carrying all the pollen in the tri-county area? Seems so. Tonight we paid up our fines to the library and got ourselves a second, fresh, copy of the book- the moldy one is now ours to keep, but me thinks we should give it the old heave ho- and we washed all the bedding and dried it in the drier. And we used the stopper thingy on the neb. We're hoping that we are turning over a new leaf here and that the boy will rebound. Sometimes I wonder how I ever passed that parenting license test that they give you.

Looking forward

The boys have been talking a lot about our upcoming pilgrimage to Camp DuNord. My favorite comment so far came from Theo yesterday musing about the 5 hour carride up to Burntside Lake. "Mom, what I like best about the carride is two things. One is getting out at Ely and eating at that one restaurant and the other is when we pull up down by the tents and we start unloading all of our stuff and we get to run around from tent to tent and remember everything from last year. But Mom, my most favorite thing is that moment when we are outside our house before we even leave and you guys are packing up the car and then we're ready to go and you get in the car and you shut the door. That is my most favorite moment ever. When you shut the door and we're finally ready to go!" I just love that something about his little radar out into the world has identified that moment as it- the big moment when you are finally ready and actually poised to move out, but you haven't gone anywhere yet and everything, every possibility, is still out there in front of you. Just waiting.

Localvor-acious

I am a locovore wannabe. I really really love the idea of only eating food that is grown locally. But the reality is that we are in Minnesota and I would weep throughout the winter, dreaming of fruit. I know that there are canning techniques I could learn, but I guess the bottom line is that I want to be a locovore and I want it to be easy. Which is not going to happen. But summer is upon us and today I had the most delicious salad with the tastiest greens and strawberries- all from our garden. I did have to wrestle the berries practically out of the beaks of a few grackles which have been picking us clean, but I did come away with a handful. And tonight when we pulled into the garage we could see the beacon-like glow of the first red raspberries. Of course, that deep red color is a beacon for me as well as for the entire local society of vermin and fowl, but I have already managed to pop a handful of ripe ones in my mouth, still warm from the sun. And right now Jon is downstairs washing and storing box #2 from the CSA we decided to join for the season. I'm proud to report that we managed to eat all of box 1 the first week AND we could identify everything that was in it. Today I had to take a guess on one of the greens- I think it was the beginning of the soon to be dreaded Swiss Chard- but this first batch looks delicious. That lunchtime salad still makes me smile- it was just so dang lively. Here's to eating local! In the summer. When it's convenient. So I'm a lackluster locovore- but tonight I am a happy one.