pink pajama mama

The Case of the Chocolate Footprints

Today there was a mystery in my house, and we love a good mystery around here. If we can’t find one, we create one. For example: The Case of the Missing Car Keys, The Case of Mama’s Missing Cell Phone, The Case of the Little Lizard in the Paintbrush Drawer…

 On this particular day, I was busy making lunch and when I turned around and saw a trail of footprints across the kitchen floor. I gasped. “Where did these footprints come from?” I asked. We all looked at the footprints and then each other’s feet, we being me, my two-year-old son, Henry, and my four-year-old daughter, Annabelle. It wasn’t long before we found the culprit— Henry’s little pink toes were covered in chocolate.

Henry is one of those amazing children that can eat one cookie and end up with it in his hair, across his face, down his belly, and yes, smeared all over his tiny plump feet.

I had just swept the floor, but it was impossible to feel anything but amusement. I stand by the motto I have taped on my refrigerator: “My favorite kitchen has chocolate fingerprints on the appliances and flour on the floor.” 

In Italian architecture, the “hearth room” is often an extension of the kitchen. The Italian word for hearth is “focolare” from the same root for the word, “focus.” This makes sense as the kitchen is the heartbeat and focus of most homes. I like to fantasize about the hearth-like kitchen I’ll have one day: arched ceilings, a brick oven, Tuscan colored walls, a lavendar dishwasher, and plenty of room for family and friend to hang out with a glass of wine while I’m cooking. Recently, I was able to pick out a few things for the little kitchen in my new house. My coup de grace of the entire house? A blue granite farmhouse sink, one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. I love running my hands over the rough side, and I must say everyone who comes to the house gasps when they see the sink and says the kitchen is their favorite room.

I don’t know why I’m so devoted to kitchens as cooking has never been my forte. The only recipe I’ve ever mastered is chocolate chip cookies. I’ve been the cookie queen since I was twelve years old. But other food? What other food? To me, the essential food groups are all contained in a big bowl of chocolate chip cookie dough. Add oatmeal and the nutritional value increases exponentially.

However, I knew I couldn’t feed my growing children cookies, so I learned to cook, and amazingly enough, I’ve learned to enjoy it. I love making hot meals that nourish their growing bodies. I like thinking about which vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and proteins they might want to eat today, and I feel very fortunate that they love vegetables. The other night I told Annabelle she could pick whatever she wanted to eat for dinner and it could be anything. She shouted exuberantly, “Broccoli and carrots!” Wow. I offer you anything and you pick broccoli and carrots? I made oven-roasted cauliflower the other day and Annabelle said, “These are great Mom! They taste like candy!” My heart did a little flip. Of course, I made them again a couple of days later and they weren’t nearly as popular as the first time. In fact they were spit out accompanied by a nasty face. But I just keep presenting a wide array of colorful veggies and tell the kids we need to eat rainbows to be our strongest. Incredibly, they get very excited about eating rainbows and will usually try just about anything colorful I put in front of them. And I’ll tell you a little secret if you don’t already know: when you roast veggies in the oven at a very high heat (like 450-500) after you’ve massaged a little olive oil and salt into them, all the natural sugars in them rise to the surface making them taste—and I’m not kidding here—better than candy.

And so my cooking has become a labor of love, I never thought I’d see the day when I, self-proclaimed domestic disaster, reveled in cooking, but when you’re doing it to nurture the people you love, it takes on a whole new meaning. It becomes a sacred rite. And I get to reap the benefits of it myself by eating more healthy food then I ever thought possible.

And I still bake the cookies. And I have the curves to prove it.

As for Henry, he was delighted by his chocolate feet. After gazing at them with wonder for several minutes, he sat down, lifted his foot, and said, “Mama, lick my toes!”

It’s not every day you hear those words come out of someone’s mouth. And as tempting as tiny chocolate-covered chubby toes are, I ended up washing them and the footprints, although a bit sadly. I actually like having chocolate footprints on my floor. 

I’m so glad I married the male Martha Stewart. The other night we were decorating a tiny little Christmas tree. I had bought all these beautiful ornaments that looked like candy. I thought the kids would love making a candy tree. We decorated it, and it looked pretty pitiful. But then my Martha Stewart in shining armor swooped in to save the day. Armed with twinkly lights and a couple of little elves, he created an adorable masterpiece. “Do we have any fabric to put under the three as a tree skirt?” he asked me. I padded to the sunroom and returned with a torn piece of forest green felt, a look of chagrin on my face. He smiled as he folded it in just the right way to hide the tears and make it look sumptuous, placing it under the tree and putting the little elves on it. Wow. Instant transformation.And so my pathetic tree has turned into a twinkly delight thanks to my 75 inches of decorating love.We’re quite a team together. He’s the male Martha Stewart and I’m the female Oscar from the Odd Couple. No, I’m not that bad. But I can create quite a few disasters in my wake. I’m kind of like an absent minded professor, except I’m not a professor, but I do have the absent-minded part down. And I’m kind of cute in a rumpled, messy-haired way. But I’ll be the first to acknowledge my absent mindedness can be a real pain in the toukas–like the time I accidentally threw away our passports and birth certificates because they were in a wrinkled envelope. Now, that went over like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest (as my father used to say). Or the time we got up at 4am in San Francisco to rush to the Oakland airport for our Christmas flight only to get to the desk and find out our tickets were from the San Francisco airport. To Martha’s credit, he quietly races to the terminal next door dragging all our luggage and our kids and spent $1,000 buying us four new tickets to New Hampshire. And then there was the time I sauntered into the Los Angeles airport for my flight to Nairobi thinking I was two hours early ( I had been killing time buying little bottles of shampoo) only to find out I was two hours late and the plane was long gone. But that was before I met Martha.Ah the adventures…And while a lesser man might run out of patience cute craziness, Martha says things like, “I love your mind. You have so many creative ideas running around in there. Your imagination amazes me.” Granted this is after a couple of margaritas when everyone’s minds seems pretty brilliant, but I cherish these moments. And yes, sometimes he does get exasperated, but most of the time he just shakes his head and marches on when he not waxing poetic about my amazing mind.And I have to say, he is a wizard, turning the wacky into the wondrous, the pathetic into the pleasing, the messes into magnificence.  

I’m trying to decide what to do for my upcoming 40th birthday next year. 40!! Wow! I never thought I’d see the day. How glamorous and beautiful and terrifying… George wants to throw me a party, and I can’t decide exactly what I want–shocking, I know, with my Piscean nature.On the one hand, I can see myself dancing in the middle of an 18th century Moulin Rouge nightclub with cancan dancers and scarlet and fuschia ruffles and glitter falling from the ceiling preceding me coming down from the ceiling on a swing, bubbles floating through the air…But on the other hand, I can see me sitting quietly at a battered old desk, my eternal fantasy, writing with a notebook and pen, listening to Billie Holiday on a scratchy record player…And on another hand, I can see me watching fireworks on the beach with Henry, Annabelle, and George after having dinner with a princess and chanting “dreams really do come true!”…And on the other hand, I can see sitting by a huge roaring fire after a day of skiing, drinking hot cocoa with marshmallows in it and laughing with my dearest friends and family…And I’d also love to spend the evening laughing my ass off while watching the talent show that takes place at my family parties…And of course, nothing is better than coming home after dancing in a second line parade, taking a hot bath and putting on my flannel bunny pajamas and just lying around talking with all my favorite people…I’d originally wanted to rent a villa in Europe and send out invitations and just cook amazing meals and sing and eat and dance barefoot under the moonlight with starlight in my hair…

I found the best bookstore the other day. I’ve passed it a million times but never entered as it’s on a semi-nasty street and covered in grates. I finally entered it and it was like walking into mecca for a book lover like me. Fabulous books from wall-to-wall. I came home with a huge stack. Right now I’m reading an amazing book on Tolstoy’s marriage. I have loved Tolstoy since I read War and Peace at 14 years old. My teacher didn’t believe I’d read it as it’s so long, but she quizzed me on it’s content and I passed with flying colors and she had no choice but to give me credit but she also served to humiliate me by doubting me. Rude.I’d picked it out of my school library because of it’s length. I go though books very quickly and I wanted to find a nice juicy long book that I could savor for a long time. (There were no Harry Potters back then, so for me, it was Tolstoy.) I loved War and Peace and Anna Karenina. The plot lines, the glamorous parts of Russia, the peasants, the passion, the loves…When I was at Harvard I fell in love with Tolstoy all over again, but this time with his school, Yasnaya Polyana. He ran the school for peasant children at his family’s estate, and he wrote some really fascinating essays about the education of those children, and the importance of asking the hard question–what is art? What is the meaning of life and death? He believed children should be intimately involved with nature and after leaving Harvard, it was my dream to teach at a school like Yasnaya Polyana, and that is how I found the Waldorf methodology and Plum Hill School on Martha’s Vineyard. I don’t think Waldorf is perfect, but for me, it’s close. I loved the rolling pastures and woods and ocean surrounding Plum Hill. I loved the nature-based materials, the oral storytelling of the fairy tales, the emphasis on walks through the woods and children learning to balance by climbing trees and walking on fallen tree trunks instead of plastic playgrounds. The world was so alive for those children, full of wonder and magic and the every day miracles of spiderwebs dripping with raindrops that sparkled like diamonds, thick chunks of moss under their boots, the glow of the candy colored autumn leaves, the surprise and delight of coming upon a group of ladyslippers, the rare pink flowers that grow in groups in the woods on the island and look just like their namesake.So now, I’m reading and Lev and Sonja. Apparently, Tolstoy was married for 48 years, most of them happy. I’d much rather have learned this  story when I studied writers instead of all the stories of opium addiction and changing partners, drunkenness, misery, and early death.Tolstoy found an intellectual and creative match in Sonja. She didn’t write, but she was the basis of many of his characters. She engaged in fiery debate with him but always with love and adoration. They both wanted to have an open honest relationship and know everything about each other. He gave her all his diaries to read before marriage so she would know everything. Throughout their marriages, they both kept detailed diaries and shared them with each other. He attended her births and encouraged her to breastfeed even though at that time, only peasant women breastfed their babies. I’m still in the beginning of the book, but once again, I find myself inspired and amazed by Tolstoy who seems to step in with me at some very important crossroads in my life. The russians…My favorite book of all time is Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky. Fascinating and funny, again not afraid to ask the hard questions, Brothers Karamazov changed my life. It put into words my own feelings about religion, helped me crystallize my own questions (if there’s an all-good all-powerful god, how can there be so much suffering in the world–and not of adults as they can make their own choices, but of children. He talked of an abused child weeping in a corner and said all of heaven was not worth that one child’s tear.) I liked how he used the four central characters to give voice to the warring sides of my own psyches–the wild sensual brother, the intellectual atheist who questions everything, the all-loving faithful brother who questions nothing, and the illegitimate brother who can’t find a place for himself.And so at my new favorite bookstore, McKeown’s on Tchoupitoulas, I re-ignited my love affair with the Russians. When I bought the book, the McKeown sister that was standing behind the counter looked at the title and said, “Now there’s a marriage for you.” How very wondrous and exciting to stand on the cusp of learning…

I woke up this morning to Annabelle jumping on the bed wearing my baby blue satin bra on her head, the strap tucked under her chin, shouting “I’m a hiker! I’m a hiker!” Henry was soon imitating her saying, “Hiter! Hiter!”A while later, we decided to make monkey bread and it turned out to be a crazy experience. We barely had enough flour, so when the dough turned into batter, I had to add wheat flour. Then I scorched the butter in the saucepan, and when I poured the mixture over the bread, it ended up leaking out of the damn bundt pan all over the stove–the house is still smoking–and when I tried to clean it out of the bottom of the stove, a drop of butter seared my hand and it’s now blistered. It was worth it all, however, when I bit into a piece of monkey bread–it was HEAVENLY!! Melt in your mouth, explosions of cinnamon and sugar and light and fluffy moist bread. Perfect! Try the recipe: http://www.recipezaar.com/Monkey-Bread-from-Scratch-153152.Then I heard a retching sound from Henry on the floor and when I looked at him, he was eating a pink post-it. Why? Why are you eating a pink post-it?  

I’m still recovering from yesterday. I took the kids to the toddlers at 10 class at the zoo, a kind of science class. They always bring an animal to circle time for the kids to look at and touch. One week it was a turtle, one week a bearded dragon, last week was a possum, and this week, the grand poobah of nasty ass animals–a vulture! What the @&#%&$#? This horrid creature, and I do have great respect for them in the wild, I just don’t want to see them up close as a man feeds him chunks of dead mice and tells us how the vulture crushes the mouse’s skull. To make matter worse, Miss Keitha passed around the vulture’s food bowl, I’m not sure what made her think anybody would want to see what was in it, but sure enough, there was a little mouse body curled up surrounded by red chunks nad I though I was going to vomit! As it was, I leaped back and screamed and had to suppress the tears. All the other parents said, “What?” and I had to say, “I have a phobia of dead animals!” It was a great moment. And then some joker of a mother decided she’d be brave and help Henry or Annabelle feed the vile creature. Annabelle refused thank goddess, but little trooper Henry, accepted her offer and now I can’t believe I let his perfect and beautiful little hand hold a chunk of dead mouse out to a damn vulture that was twice his size! I was so traumatized I wasn’t thinking straight. They had already freaked me out by passing around pelts for the kids to feel–a tiger, a wolf, with holes where the wolf’s eyes should be–so gross!! Frankly I’d rather them learn about these animals by seeing them alive and in their natural habitat. Then I had nightmares all night about death. I think we’ll take a break from zoo class for a few weeks. Mama needs a break!