Tommy's Pumpkin

Tommy grew a pumpkin this year. It's small, and it was a hard-fought battle to get this little pumpkin for two reasons:

• As I've belabored to the point of becoming tiresome, our backyard is not sunny enough to grow anything bearing fruit.
• Squash bores got into the squash vine, and this pumpkin was the sole survivor of that attack.

The pumpkin's special because it was grown from a seed I saved from a pumpkin Tom picked during a kindergarten trip to a local pumpkin patch. Around early November last year, when Max and Tommy had friends over, I removed the seeds, saving and drying some and roasting the others. Then I cooked down the pumpkin and froze the pulp, and threw anything left over into the compost heap. It reminded me of fifth-grade social studies class learning how the Indians were respectful of the buffalo they killed, and used every last part.
So Tommy's prize this year, a descendent of his kindergarten trip, will be cooked into the chocolate chip pumpkin muffins he likes, with seeds saved for next year's sunny front-yard mini pumpkin patch.

The Modified Compact Revisited

At the start of the summer, with three kids going into camp or daycare (and the resulting costs), an oil spill gushing in the ocean and making it clear our days of relying on petroleum are numbered, and having felt more and more convicted about traveling more gently on the earth, I entered a modified compact.
Max and Tommy are back in school, and my 10-week experiment is over. How did it go? Here's what didn't go strictly according to plan:

• Let's get this out of the way immediately. I bought an iPad. Some of the motivation had to do with my job and being conversant in new forms of e-publishing and understanding what some have touted game-changing technology. But it would be disingenuous to say my boss told me she'd fire me if I didn't have an iPad. And, as you can guess, I didn't get this on Craig's List or at a garage sale.
• When traveling for work, a publishing partner took us to a strip of new, locally owned shops and I bought this t-shirt because it made me laugh out loud, it was on sale, and I felt okay supporting the shop and the local goods.

• I had not one but two benders at Fabric.com, my newest vice. I swore I wouldn't succumb to the $3/yard sales, but when some designer fabrics dropped to $2.50, I succumbed. I'm weak. I'll admit that. I convinced myself I was just buying it to make gifts for others.

What did go well, and was surprisingly easy:

• I didn't buy new clothes for myself or the kids.
• I didn't buy physical books, although read some good ones on my Kindle.
• I didn't buy new, nonconsumable gifts. I bought my dad some asparagus plants for his birthday. I bought Phil consumables for Father's Day and his birthday, and made him a gift. I made gifts for other family members who had summer birthdays, but I've yet to get them in the mail. I promise guys, they're coming!
• I didn't even have to buy new canning supplies for the garden -- a loophole I'd left myself. A co-worker with a toddler, who has no time for canning these days, brought me some jars that were collecting dust in her house. (Thanks, Melody!)

Phil and I have a pretty simple budgeting method: We pay our bills and ourselves first, and scrape off any extra money in checking to go into savings, or, if checking's tight, stop spending. So I can't tell you to the penny whether the compact actually saved money. Also, our income this summer was a little atypical, with the iPad purchased from an unsalaried windfall, so I would have to do some heavy number crunching that I don't have the patience or time for to see whether this made a financial impact.

But it's definitely showed me that (iPad notwithstanding), new isn't always necessary.

Compact Update: Can You Live Without New?

I started a modified Compact a couple weeks ago, trying to lessen my environmental impact by limiting my purchase of new products. Overall, not a biggie, although I was sad to get a 15% off birthday coupon (with a wacky birthday candle necklace) from Anthropologie and realized I'd be breaking my Compact to have a girly birthday bender. Oh, how I love Anthropologie.

My hope was that a by-product of the Compact would be saving some money, although it wasn't my primary goal.

Today. Oy, today. I had a 7:15 am flight to get to a lunch meeting in DC. I was getting into the city early enough to meet one of our publishing partners for a casual meeting before the lunch meeting, so had a couple pieces of business during my in-and-out trip. I got to the gate at 6:30 a.m. just in time for the announcement that the flight was delayed two hours due to mechanical issues, so cancelled my first meeting. Four delays later, I was not going to make even my lunch meeting and threw in the towel. I decided to work the remaining day from home.

On the drive home from the airport, I happened upon two yard sales. The first was an annual event some neighbors throw to benefit charity. The second was a family fundraiser to fund an upcoming trip to celebrate the mom being five years cancer free.

Total, I spent $20 at the two sales, and here's what I bought:

• Small stoneware brownie pan
• Pizza stone (we broke ours two days ago)
• Vera Bradley glasses case
• 2 glass piggy banks -- the kind you have to break to get the money; Sylvie has one, so these were for the boys
• Vintage fabric cut into three-inch squares that I'm going to use to make a quilt for Sylvie
• Vintage sewing notions, like rickrack with its original 10-cent price sticker
• Glow-in-the-dark Perler bead kit for the boys
• Leather Coach backpack
• A yet-to-be-revealed Father's Day gift
• Jeans for Sylvia
• Spiderman action car for Tommy's Spiderman action figures
• New package of sewing machine needles
• Three-piece food mill for making applesauce
• 2 DVDs for the boys (Mythbusters and Superman Returns)

The biggest-ticket item was the Coach backpack at $5. I'd coveted this backpack at Coach stores in years past. I think it retails for somewhere between $300 and $400. The yard-sale edition had no wear, and cost less than the Venti Skinny Cinnamon Latte I'd bought in the terminal after the second delay was announced.

Not too shabby. And not too much suffering, despite eschewing new products. I might keep up this Compact thing after the summer.

Scenes from the Garden

Tonight...

Tom watering the plants with the water I'd left in the car from driving back from Michigan this weekend. I figured the plants would be fine with any plastic leeching into the sun-heated liquid. Sylvia accompanies him doing I don't know what.

American Gothic.

The little 8 X 4 raised beds I made this spring. Please don't scrutinize the craptacular workmanship.

Phil and Sylvia working on their circus act.

Beets, carrots, and kale. I love the color of beet greens.

Welcome, little out-of-focus cayenne pepper. Max will be so happy to see you. He's currently obsessed with the idea of feeding hot peppers to unsuspecting folks.

Hey, there, whatcha knowin'? I've come to watch your pea pods growing...

I'm seeing kale chips in my near future...

Wow! This alien carrot is as big as a grill!

...or smaller than a five-year-old's pinky.

Our neighbor took out his circa 1920s cast iron front rails and gave them to us. I think they lend a Grey Gardens vibe to the original, appropriately overgrown, little garden plot.

The end of the rhubarb and the start of the sweet peas. I froze the rhubarb to pull out mid-winter for Angry Chicken's rhubarb hand pies. Man, those things are delicious.

I keep thinking the little lettuce patch, which now has a couple zucchini plants interspersed, is exhausted and ready to be tilled over. And then I cut more greens. Here's tonight's cutting; we're a very healthy family:

Oh, dear. Is that a leftover Cinnamon Poptart in the background?

Pretend you didn't see that.

Tell Them That It's Human Nature

Lately I've noticed that moments of contentment come unexpectedly. With three kids, a sometimes demanding job, a house, a marriage, and other relationships I don't spend nearly enough time tending to, I often spend more time thinking of what didn't get done than what did. What I hadn't gotten to at work and should have. What quality time I'd half-assed with my kids because my mind was in a million places.

Michael Jackson's Thriller came out when I was in tenth grade. It defined my high school experience. My best friend Susan and I shared a locker in our conservative private Christian school, and were reprimanded for decorating the door in a montage of Jackson shots. I put a plastic "Thriller" jacket on layaway at Sears; not being particularly courageous in the fashion department, I ultimately only had the courage to wear it once or twice.

By this time I no longer shared a room with my sister, but the remnants of our time together remained. Years earlier we were allowed to choose how we wanted the room decorated, and at that moment Becky had been feeling purple. The result was purple carpet, purple walls, a purple ceiling, purple crushed velvet bedspreads on our twin beds. The room remained regal into my high school years, although I made throw pillows to tone down some of its royalty. So I spent hours in my purple room, playing Thriller over and over on my Emerson turntable. I loved every song on the album, but "Human Nature" had a special, eerie feel for me. It felt grown-up in the way the other songs didn't, and I heard it and thought of all the possibilities laying out before me. The road was wide open.

A few years later I was in college, and Michael Jackson was a joke. The Thriller jacket was loaned to a friend for a comedy bit in a college show and never returned. The album was long packed away. The ensuing years, with their tabloid drama and true or untrue allegations, were not kind to Michael. I gave Thriller and Off the Wall to Goodwill when Phil and I were downsizing for a move to Brooklyn.

When Michael died, though, I bought a copy of The Essential Michael Jackson, and the kids and I have been listening to it nonstop. Whenever a slow song comes on, the boys yell that they hate love songs, and I have to skip over, say, "I Just Can't Stop Loving You" so that we can get to "Leave Me Alone." They have no tolerance for "Human Nature," which is fine with me. The song has made me feel sad, seeing that the road is no longer wide open, and I prefer to listen to it alone, without their banter and squabbling. I've made life choices that have negated other life choices. My age now was inconceivably old to 16-year-old purpled-roomed Cindy. Had I let my mind wander to this age, I would have won an Oscar for best screenplay in between consulting with patients in my thriving New York psychology practice. I was not picturing the chaos that is my current life. The fact that the physical flaws I saw at 16 didn't disappear but only magnified as I grew older. I wouldn't have pictured myself schlepping to work in jeans and a hail-damaged Subaru.

Tonight Phil took the boys out to get their Halloween costumes, and Sylvia and I had a little girl time. She destroyed the living room while I loaded the iPod with some favorites I'm only able to listen to alone. When "Human Nature" came on, before I could get wistful, she came into the kitchen and started dancing and laughing. She appreciated the song. She didn't ask me to flip past the ballads. She has her whole life ahead of her, with all the promise and possibility that brings, and she was enjoying it.

Sylvia wasn't a planned-for or necessarily wanted baby. I was at the point that I was ready to move on from babies. When I learned I was pregnant, Phil and I spent a good deal of time hand-wringing before we settled into the inevitable. When I lost that baby, we were sad but also had some guilty relief. When I learned I was pregnant again a month after the miscarriage, I knew this baby wanted to be here. Watching her dance to "Human Nature," I listened to the song for the first time feeling the same excitement and potential I'd felt at 16. I hope she felt it, too.

Dreaming of Marshmallows

I love Facebook. Whatever you're into, there you are. A few weeks ago I saw that my neice became a fan of s'mores. I couldn't believe that the s'mores fan base was smaller than the fan base for, say, Barrack Obama, Hugh Jackman, or the Old Facebook. I mean, seriously, how controversial is that? Who doesn't like s'mores?

Which got me thinking we needed to have them this past holiday weekend. With dark chocolate and thick graham crackers from Trader Joe's, and homemade marshmallows. I was feeling that passionate about s'mores.

Max got sick and July 4 was so rainy here that Indianapolis downtown fireworks were postponed until July 5, so no marshmallows were made. But I'm thinking next week will be a do-over, complete with marshmallows.

I've only made them once -- last Christmas. Both Phil's and my families had decided to go easy this Christmas and just be together and not buy gifts. But I love gift-giving, so made each family a bag with hot cocoa mix, homemade marshmallows, and the stuffed bird ornament on the cover of one of my favorite quilting books:

The marshmallows are a little sticky to make and take several hours to set up, but if you're willing to put in the quality Kitchen-Aid time, I think they're worth it.

Bags of sticky goodness.

Max included a few on the assortment of treats he plated up for Santa. He's generally a scoffer, but suddenly got Santa religion on Christmas Eve, hedging his bets so he wouldn't get shafted. He wanted to give Santa something, so I suggested, with as straight a face as I could muster, that maybe Santa would really appreciate a picture of Max. The picture.

We were out of carrots, so told Max reindeer actually like celery better.

The recipe I followed is here; I have seen a million recipes online and in books for homemade marshmallows, but this was the most thorough for explaining in great detail all the steps in a kitchen process I found a little initimidating.

So happy birthday, America. We'll be pulling out the sparklers, Uncle Sam hats, and homemade s'mores on July 11. I can almost taste them now.

The Blog Post that Made Me Happiest Today

Most days I cycle through a blog roll, some for work, some that I just personally like.

One of my favorites is my co-worker Suzy's blog www.four-by-two.blogspot.com, in which she chronicled her pregnancy with quads and now life with quads. Yesterday's post was absolutely delightful. Check it out!

Whoo-hoo! Guess Who's One Year Old?

Yeah for me!

It's hard to believe. Monday Sylvie hit her first birthday.

This weekend both sets of grandparents came to celebrate.

I whipped up some applesauce cupcakes that I've made many times from The Buttercup Bake Shop Cookbook. Something went terribly awry (the powdered egg substitute, perhaps?), however, and they collapsed like deflated basketballs. The lemon and strawberry numbers that Phil picked up from The Flying Cupcake were much, much more appropriate for such a momentous occasion.

Sylvie got some presents: Tasha Tudor books from Grandma and Grandpa Morrow, cute little girl clothes including the cutest, flounciest dress I've ever seen from Grandma and Grandpa Kitchel, a talking My Pretty Purse, which Tom and Max kept usurping to "show Sylvia how to use it."

How cool is it that the little girl's name in the story is Sylvie Anne?

Sylvie dove into her first cupcake with the kind of respectful gusto one might expect.

And then it was time for the ritualistic post-cupcake hose-down.

I can't believe you're 1, birthday girl!

Imagine Last Week's Picture...

With a big black hole in the front of the pained smile.

Max was more than a year before he got any teeth. His 10-month pictures boast a big gummy grin. Then about a week after his first birthday his mouth exploded like a bag of microwave popcorn and he got four teeth in about ten days.

Which appears to be the way he's going to lose them. All of his friends have had Tooth Fairy visits a'plenty, and he's been stuck on the sidelines, fruitlessly wiggling his very solid teeth and praying for a miracle.

But in the last two weeks he's lost both his bottom front teeth and his right top front tooth. It's really something to watch him struggling with an apple.

Meanwhile, the Tooth Fairy is more seriously eyeing those e-mail solicitations to unlock the equity in her home.

By the way, I loved the comments about Max's photo. I'm still giggling over the thought of Photoshopping on a big gold clock, Flavor of Love style. And, offline, my friend Kim said he looked like Napoleon Dynamite's brother Kip after he got all gangsta'd out.

Enjoy Them Today... And for a Lifetime!

Max had picture day a couple weeks ago. His school does picture day old style: Your parents pick and pay for the package they want, the photographer gives everyone a 10-cent black comb, one picture is snapped, and two weeks later a raft of those pictures are sent home.

And yes, Max, who has the most beautiful smile and infectious laugh in the world, freezes up horribly when he's told to smile for the camera. And yes, he and Tommy have been going through my old jewelry from the 80s and 90s and wearing it around the house. And yes, Max was overdue for a haircut. And yes, he recently got a silver cap as the result of our being negligent in the flossing arena. All of this I knew.

And yet nothing prepared me for the 8 X 10 glossy that greeted me when I opened his homework folder:

"Tell us what you think!" states the envelop containing 25 -- 25! -- of these photos. "We'd love to know what you think of your school portraits."

And I'd love to tell you. Darn tootin'.

Knitter's Weekend 2008

Good times.

Protecting Our Food Borders

Through the years I've harbored crushes on men who were never to be mine. Take my fifth-grade love for Andy Gibb (dead). Or my late-high-school affection for George Michael (surprisingly, not playing for my team). These days, my crushes are centered on Don Draper (the character, not Jon Hamm who plays him), Stanley Tucci, and Michael Pollan. So there were schoolgirl screeches this weekend when we got the New York Times and found that the entire Sunday magazine was devoted to food, with a very large article contributed by Mr. Pollan. Be still my heart.

For those who haven't heard my blathering on about Michael Pollan, he's a journalist and food activist who is known for his wit, balance, and ability to boil down complex topics into readable prose. He spoke here in Indy last winter, and I waddled my nine-months'-pregnant self into Butler University to bask in his glory and giddily ask him to sign my copy of The Omnivore's Dilemma. I still get chills thinking of his discussing the difference between Food and "food," how we can turn around the current unhealthy eating situation in America, and sustainable agricultural practices. The stuff of dreams.

The article, which you can read here, is basically an open letter to the future president, explaining his thoughts on how government can help to take oil from food production and give the job of nurturing our food back to the sun, as it was intended.

Mike, as I like to call him, is a huge advocate of eating local where possible, something Phil and I have been trying to do more of in the last couple years. One argument he made, which I'd never thought of, however, is that it would be extremely easy for terrorists to attack through our centralized food supply. If your salad is coming from a mondo-farm in California that produces 20 million servings of salad a week, tainting that supply could quickly hit millions across the country in a way that tainting the supply of a weekend farmer at your local farmer's market couldn't.

Remember the big beef recall last winter? It affected 143 million pounds of beef that was distributed nationwide. Since Phil and I have started buying our antibiotic-free meat locally from a local farming family, our meat for an entire year has come from a single cow, and the packaging is labeled with our name (KITCHEL - BEEF STEW MEAT, it'll read). Should something go wrong, the source of the issue would be easy to trace and would be miles, not states, away.

While I don't see a terrorist around every corner and am as annoyed as the next air traveler about dispensing my toiletries into 3-ounce lots and collecting them in little baggies, it is something to think about. The current uber-farming system is bad for our health, it's bad for the environment, and it does make the possibility of hitting millions of people quickly relatively simple. Certainly, I'm guessing, more simple than building an on-board bomb from my hair conditioner.