Minor league Mayberry

We observed the first Monday of "spring" break with a minor league baseball game. If you've never done this with your kids, it's totally worth it even if you have less than zero interest in baseball (as I do). It's way easier than a major league game, in terms of parking, stadium size, and cost (and in our case it's at least 90 miles closer to home than the nearest major league park). The ballpark closest to us is clean and very kid-friendly; it even has a playground.

Plus, the goofy activities and cheesy (more on that later) promos are nonstop. Kids can't get bored by the slow pace of baseball when pretty much every inning includes a giveaway, race, or contest.

And when you are freezing your butts off in the bottom of the 5th you can just pack it in and go home, no harm done.

Brrrrrr.

Free baseballs! (Note empty seats. A staffer we talked with was so pleased we were there he handed each child a real! baseball!)

We win a cheesy giveaway (afraid to actually eat them, so far).

I'm telling you, the excitement NEVER STOPS: a cannon that looks like a bratwurst on a bun and shoots packages of brats out into the crowd.

Almost as cute as that sneezing baby panda

We went to an "open barn" at a lamb farm yesterday to check out the itty bitty lambies, ranging from 12 hours to a few weeks old. Here are some with their own little mini-Snuggies:

The kids got to hold one that was about two weeks old:

And here's a similar scene, with sound effect:

The teenage kids who help raise these animals are the fifth generation to live at this farm and raise sheep.

Of course, we only found out after we'd fallen in love with the cute wittle babies that this breed is raised for meat, not wool. And after we toured the barn, we were invited inside the house for some samples of ... lamb stew.

Faaaaaaarm livin' is the life for me! Um, maybe not.

How did I end up in Mayberry, anyway?

Get the answer in my guest post at Midwest Parents!

Thanks, Heather, for the invitation and the warm welcome.

Sturgeon stein, frankenfish

I can't believe I almost missed writing about sturgeon season. It has been a source of endless fascination for me since we moved here. The arcane rules, the family tradition, the regionality--it hooks me right in (HA).

This year I hadn't had anything new to say. Plus I was so disappointed: Our next-door neighbor speared a 68-pound fish this season, and he even came over to see if we were home so he could show it to the kids (he didn't know I would have been so much more into it than them). Alas, we weren't around and by the time we found out about his big catch, the beast was already filleted and filling up the freezer.

As a consolation prize, Jeff got me this beer glass. Now is that true love or what?

*

Over at The Full Mommy today, I have a Parent Bloggers Network review of the most adorable (unlike sturgeon--they will win no marine beauty contests) Sylvania PalPODzzz rocket-ship nightlight/flashlight. A flashlight equipped with LED bulbs and NO batteries? Very space-age.

Untelling, undoing

It would be a lot easier if everyone read my blog. I've given our news to as many friends as possible via email, and my mother and Jeff's have mostly told family members for us. That still leaves neighbors, teachers and parents at the kids' schools, even my dental hygienist. I dread each and every conversation. They don't know what to say to me and I don't know what to say to them.

More than that, having to say it means having to believe it, just a little more, each time.

I'm thankful we don't have a nursery to empty. Eventually I'll have to decide whether to give away the baby clothes and gear I've saved, but for now all that can stay safely tucked away. The last thing I want to do right now is wear maternity clothes, but neither do I want to pack them up, spending another hour or two confronting the fact that I don't need them.

Thank you all for your supportive comments and e-mails. We are getting along as best we can. The small-townness of Mayberry helps; word gets around and soon our refrigerator and freezer are overflowing. They don't bring our baby back, but these loving, caring gestures help us eat and sleep and breathe and sometimes even smile.

Too much snow, too much information

Over the ground lies a mantle of white...

You're not kidding. In addition to the foot of snow we got 10 days ago (which mostly didn't melt), we're now in the midst of a fluffy downpour of flakes today, with more predicted for Sunday/Monday. White Christmas: check.

It's not, however, a snow day. Still had to take Jo to school this morning. She gave it her best shot by putting an ice cube in the toilet and sleeping with a spoon under her pillow, but no luck. I have never heard of those two superstitions--is it a Midwest thing? We never did it growing up in Pennsylvania.

I have to brave the highways later on for an OB appointment. My practice now has a new procedure for urine tests: BYOU. They give you a little cup at your appointment and tell you to bring it back at the next one--full. Isn't that delightful?

I had an sonogram yesterday, the nuchal translucency screening. Baby spent the whole time sucking his/her thumb and trying to shove away the ultrasound wand pressing down on its turf. Not to sound like a pro-life activist but it really is amazing to see that at 13 weeks gestation. When I got home, like an idiot I googled what a normal NT measurement is. It's almost 4 times less than the number I thought I saw on the screen. Thanks a lot, Dr. Google.

Christmas in Mayberry

So the Santa Float came by a couple of days ago. It's a fire truck fully decked out in Christmas lights and it ferries SANTA! around our whole town, street by street, over the course of a week until he passes every single house. Here's us watching with our neighbors (at the end you can see my husband is holding the neighbor kid, who ran out of his house so fast he forgot to put on shoes).

Halloweeners

That is what my husband calls the characters I would call "trick-or-treaters." And a few stopped by our house tonight. We gave away about 10 bags' worth of candy and were down to our last three tiny boxes of Dots (I didn't buy those!) when time was up. Our favorite Halloweener was dressed as a "killer banana." He wore a banana suit with a bloody hockey mask and carried a big scary knife. One of our friends' kids came by dressed as a ninja. My husband disappeared into the kitchen and came back with a slice of sweet potato carved into a throwing star. He so crafty!

Look out! Killer bananas!

Jo = Teh Awesome

I am grooving on this little girl this week. To wit:

1. Last night she voluntarily, cheerfully, and capably washed a huge sink full of dishes. I may still have to remind her regularly to take her plate to the sink and put her pajamas in the drawer, but did I enjoy having post-dinner clean-up cut in half, at least just that once? I did.

2. For the past few days she has been giving Opie "homework assignments" after school. She dot-to-dots letters and numbers for him to trace and then gives him a letter grade for each page (ranging from A+ to Z-). He loves it.

3. She was one of two kids from her school chosen at random to spend the morning at our local fire station. She was so excited you would have thought she'd won the lottery. She got to slide down the pole, have lunch from McDonald's (no firehouse chili?!), and be driven back to school in an honest-to-god fire engine. She tried on the gear and reported that the helmet was so heavy she couldn't walk in it. And one of the firefighters nicknamed her "Crumb" because she was the smallest kid there.

(crummy souvenir photo)

Monday miscellany*

One of our neighbors--the kind of guy who keeps a TV in his garage and watches NASCAR on it all weekend, and I think that says a lot about a person--has put up an Obama yard sign.

*

Jo learned this song at after-school care:

We will, we will
Rock you
Sock you
Flush you in the toilet
Hope that you enjoy it!

As well as:

Made you look, made you look, now you're in the baby book!

I confess I missed these two in my own upbringing.

*

We did our annual autumn pumpkin patch/agritainment excursion this weekend. The trees are gorgeous. Whenever I see beautiful fall leaves I always remember the banquet director from our wedding reception. Since our wedding was in the fall, he made sure to note that the dining room overlooked a wooded mountain, the better to showcase the fall foil-age.

*thanks to Leighann for the title

Overthinking the yard sign

The McCain-Palin signs have started to pop up around our neighborhood. There are a few Obama-Biden ones, too, but not as many.

I'm on record as being a strong Obama supporter. So what am I waiting for, with the sign? I think about this all the time when I'm biking around town. I've gone back and forth 100 times about whether or not to get a sign.

It's not that I'm ashamed to proclaim my choice. It's not that I'm afraid someone will steal my sign, like Magpie's. It's not even that I don't want to be perceived as a stark raving liberal (which, let's face it, I am).

It's not that I don't want to be confronted. In fact, my fear is that I wouldn't be confronted, that I wouldn't have a chance to explain why I think Obama is the best choice for our country. The fact is this is a small town. Many of my friends and neighbors are staunch Catholics. For them the election revolves solely around the abortion issue.

What about the death penalty, I say. What about the war? What about the poor, the homeless, the immigrants? These are all high priorities for the Catholic church as well. What about the fact that unless you're a millionaire, I'll bet you that million that your taxes will go up in a McCain administration?

That's a lot to fit on one little yard sign.

This still feels like a big fat rationalization to me. But I did put a sign up on my blog.

It's a start.

Yeah, I'll take dying in my sleep, thanks

Occasionally our neighbors gather for a summer potluck. There is an older man who always attends; he's more than 90 and lives alone--and a bit lonely since his wife died several years ago. He's always in good spirits at these events and basks in the attention of kids and adults alike.

At one such party, he started choking on a hunk of meat. Luckily for him, there were several doctors in attendance. One of them Heimliched the man and he was soon fine again, although those of us who witnessed all this were shaken.

As the party drew to a close another neighbor said goodbye to Mr. G., giggled, and noted "Glad you are OK! That would have been an awful way to go, after you've lived this long!"

Oh yes, she did.

Jen's post inspired Magpie's which inspired mine. Are you next?

Rebound girl

The bad news is we're back at the hospital.

The good news is that as setbacks go, this one isn't awful. (Although hearing the words "If it was my child, I'd want her to have the cat scan tonight--I wouldn't wait until tomorrow" wasn't exactly reassuring.) Jo just needs to spend a little more time with an IV pump and a couple of syringes of antibiotics.

And as far as amenities go, our local children's ward is kicking SF's butt, what with the superspacious private room and bath. And the slippery vinyl sofa is way better for parental sleep than the slippery vinyl recliner. Oh and here, the cafeteria staff is not on strike, so I can actually eat. Yay for Mayberry.

mayberry mom ... all appendectomy, all the time!

Just suck it up and go to the pool

Yesterday afternoon my kids really wanted to go to the pool. Since I was already feeling peevish and whiny I refused. We actually have a really nice community pool here. It has an enormous shallow end with lots of fountains and sprayers and other fun stuff; it has two water slides, a huge grassy area, a big sand play area, a snack bar, and halfway decent locker rooms. It's a five-minute walk from our house. Of course, the kids love it (anyway I think that's a Little Kid Law, to love any and all swimming pools).

But yesterday I just wasn't up for changing the clothes and slathering the sunscreen and packing the stuff and blah blah. And I especially wasn't up for the post-pool herding of two children into the showers and back home (where I'd immediately have to move right into Dinner-Books-Bed mode).

So I brought out all my home-based water ammo: Let's play with the volcano sprinkler! How about you guys can spray each other with hoses! I'll blow up the little pool! They grudgingly agreed to the little pool. Which I then spent TWO HOURS trying to inflate with a bicycle pump. (Two hours, because I had to keep stopping to a] prevent myself from keeling over and b] check what mischief Opie was up to wandering around the house/yard by himself. Apparently, according to my husband we do have some kind of electric pump but all I could find was its tormentingly empty box.)

Of course the kids lost interest way before the pool was ever inflated. And my arms fell off and now I really don't look good in a bathing suit even if you do overlook my stretchmarks and smushy belly.

And so the moral of the story is I should have just taken them to the pool that didn't require inflating, mommy suit and all. Especially after last weekend's visit to The Waterpark Capital of the WORLD (where people wander all over wearing next to nothing and believe me, some of them need just a little more something), I have come to terms with my tankinis and swim skirts. When I go to the pool, I accessorize my post-kid body with a couple of cute kids and that means a lot.

This post was written for Parent Bloggers Network as part of a sweepstakes sponsored by BOCA.

I am doing the unthinkable

Something I even ranted about on my blog: Hosting a sales party.

[cowers in shame]

Apparently I have been living in suburbia too long because I finally succumbed. In my defense ... I got suckered into this by going to a party at Jo's teacher's house. How you gonna say no to an invitation from your child's teacher, for an event held just a few weeks before the end of the school year? And then, at that party, how you gonna be the fifth person in a row to pass on hosting your own party?

I know. You're going to grow a spine, that's how.

Maybe next time.

So tomorrow night it's my turn to be the shill. I was frankly embarrassed to send out the invitations and I mostly limited them to other mothers from the kindergarten class. But now that the party's almost here, I'm secretly excited. I love to have people over and I don't get to do it enough. It helps that it's MY event and therefore my husband will not be helping with the preparations (although he will be on kid duty). Every other time we have a party or even just invite another family over for a kids-included meal, he gets so panicky about how everything will look and taste and possibly be ready in time. He makes entertaining far more stressful than it needs to be.

When I'm running the show solo--like with this party, or when I host book club--I go for super easy and I do not worry for one second "what anyone will think" like he does. These are my friends and if I keep the wine flowing, they will not care that all the food I am serving is storebought. (When our book club read Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, I served rice crackers, edamame, and miscellaneous frozen dumplings and egg rolls--and everyone is still raving, especially the woman who'd never had edamame before that night. There is nothing easier than throwing a bag of soybeans into a pot of boiling water!)

So tomorrow, it's wine, cheese, wine, crackers, wine, cookies, wine, and cheesecake, with a few corny games and catalogs on the side. It won't be that awful. I promise.

Photo by Swamibu.

Weekend earworm

... or ear spider, I guess, was "Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive replant pachysandra" (with apologies to Sir Walter Scott). After we pulled about 100 miles of it out of our front yard, we gave away 200 miles to every neighbor we could strong-arm into taking some, and still had 300 miles of scrambled, snarled roots to unravel and transplant in the backyard.

That pretty much sums up the weekend (snore. I know), along with a little list I started called "Alarming independence, Opie":

• unbuckles car seat while vehicle is traveling 65 mph on highway
• reaches weedkiller on garage shelf, uses it to "clean" tricycle

Tempered, I'll admit, by "Welcome independence, Jo":

• puts Opie down for nap: reads book, snuggles on chair, leaves room with stay-in-your-bed! admonition
• reads self to sleep, including switching off the light
• assists Opie with five a.m. drink of water request, without waking parents

Huh. I now sound like I paid far more attention to my groundcover than my children, at least in the past 72 hours. Well sometimes that's just life in suburbia. OK? OK?

Long weekends with Pete the Pineapple

On these holiday weekends I especially miss being far away from family. When I was growing up it was a given that my grandmother, aunt, uncle, and cousin would come over for every holiday, plus all of the nine birthdays among us. There was no thinking, no planning, just a simple potluck on our back deck and everyone banging in and out of the screen door.

Here, we have to make our own fun and sometimes we just don't have the energy to set it up, you know? Many of our friends do have lots of family around and aren't available anyway. Still, we managed a productive and pleasant weekend. Jo played with the kids next door. My husband ripped out a huge hedge, with an assist from the mini-backhoe that our neighbor happened to have rented for the day. We discovered that the same neighbor has a hot tub outside when his wife invited the kids to "swim" in it. We went to the world's cheapest amusement park (hours of fun for $5 worth of tickets).

As I sat on the front lawn this morning tearing out ground cover from where the hedge once grew (4 sale cheap free: 12 thousand pachysandra plants) I did have plenty of company. Every person who passed had a friendly comment or at least a few words of commiseration.

At the dinner table we took turns telling stories about Pete the Pineapple and his unfortunate demise (we were eating grilled pineapple at the time [oops, so much for locally sourced food]). Jo had the best twist, when she turned Pete into a secret agent who went back to the store to warn the other pineapples about the dastardly family who'd almost turned him into a tasty dessert.

I hope your weekend was much better than Pete's.

Iceberg summer

And no I'm not referring to these upper midwestern climes we now enjoy. Actually, summers here are beautiful, with sunshine and temperatures in the 80s for much of July and August. After winters that go on, and on, and on and on, we enjoy and appreciate our summers and spend as much time outside as we can. Mayberry has a totally kid-pleasing community pool, with a huge shallow end, two water slides, a sandbox, a lawn, and the all-important concession stand. We're also not above ruining our new grass with a blow-up kiddie pool of our own and even one of these monstrosities (purchased on end-of-season clearance thx). Yep -- we are big consumers of the Little Swimmers 'round these parts.

We have fun. But it's nothing compared to the adventures my husband had when he was a kid. His aunt and uncle had a lake house (a 20-minute drive from their ... non-lake house) and he and his brother and cousins would spend every day of every summer there, just generally goofing off and having a good time.

My favorite lake story is this, and it's totally of the moment because we are currently obsessed with all things Star Wars in this house. (Tip, BTW: Pool noodles make excellent, cheap light sabers.)

Anyway (get to the point young Jedi) one day Jeff and his brother and his brother's friend Marc found this big piece of styrofoam. They immediately decided that it would make an excellent iceberg and it should go on the lake. The next time they came to the lake they brought every single Star Wars figure they owned -- i.e., hundreds -- plus a bunch of spacecraft and airplanes. Then they spent an hour painstakingly setting up a huge battle scene on the styrofoam iceberg.

Their masterpiece complete, they floated it onto the water.

You know what happens next, right?

It floated too far out, and Jeff's mom wouldn't let them go after it. They threw rocks at it, trying to shift the current to send it back toward their dock. Instead, they ended up breaking it and sending all their guys to an even swifter watery death. Some clung to the edge for awhile, but with no rescue crew in sight eventually they succumbed to the inevitable drowning.

For the rest of that summer and all the next, Jeff and Mike and Marc hoped against hope that Luke or Han or Lando would wash up on shore and be returned to them. It never happened, but the story lives on.

Tell your summer story for this weekend's blog blast. May the Force be with you.

Haiku Friday: They probably wore Birks

Liberally stickered
Prius parked at NPR
event. Ahh, my tribe!

Jeff and I went to the This American Life live event last night and saw the aforementioned vehicle in the parking lot, right next to another car that bore a bumper sticker reading "Somewhere in Texas, a village has lost its idiot." Here in Mayberry (and in the neighboring, larger town where we were) we are much more likely to see huge "W'04" decals. We had to laugh at the cliché of it all.

The show itself was charming, containing clips, outtakes, and previews from the TAL television show, as well as discussions with host Ira Glass and the show's producer. It did strike me as I watched how much listening to or watching that show can be like reading a really excellent blog. You get a peek into someone else's life, usually with a host (the reporter/producer for the story) that is articulate and wise and expert at drawing out the essential quirks and nuances of that person's world.

You can listen to free podcasts of the radio show or pay $2 each to download past editions of the TV show.



BTW, speaking of peeking into someone else's life, I finally saw Johnny Depp the other day. In a framed photograph on the counter at my dry cleaner's, next to a newspaper article about how the cleaners laundered the costumes from the movie while it filmed nearby. So that's like, one degree of separation, right?

21 Squeeee Street

Which famously seafarin' star, who's shooting a movie in a nearby town, is said to be whistlin' pretty in a rented home right down the street from your faithful correspondent?

Seriously ... le tout Mayberry is abuzz with rumors. Exact quote from my neighbor (Joe is her live-in boyfriend): "One of Joe's former employees girlfriends works at Jimmy John's [sub shop] and she said they delivered food to the house." OMG it's like complete confirmation.

I've heard other tidbits from various sources in the 'hood. One of my friends has ordered me to spend my workday facing the window so I can keep track of any relevant goings-on.

Tonight I stalked walked my dog past the house to check things out for myself. From the front: Everything quiet and dark. But! From the back/side, lots of lights on and several parked vehicles, including a large dark SUV with a trailer attached.

Stay tuned, me hearties!