Check this out:
Proof that anything can be deep fried.
Suddenly those Christmas cookies I ate for breakfast don’t feel so good. I’m going to the gym right now.
Ugandan president will veto bill
The Advocate reported yesterday that the president of Uganda, Yoweri Museveni, has pledged to veto the bill wending its way through the legislature. For those of you who hadn’t heard, this bill would have punished homosexual “repeat offenders” with the death penalty. Horrifying.
From Our Family to Yours Campaign
Wanna send a holiday card to the Obamas?
LGBT family rights groups are encouraging you to do so. Send your card by January 1st. Let’s increase the visibility of our families!
Details are here.
I think I’ll send this holiday card from a few years ago, since I’m unlikely to get this season’s card out until sometime in the spring of 2013.
Spaghetti Sauce
Here’s my recipe for spaghetti sauce. Before Claudia’s son tasted this, he would only eat Ragu.
1 eggplant
1 green pepper, halved and seeded
3-4 carrots
1 onion
4 cloves garlic, minced
a handful of fresh basil or parsley or both
1 large can (28 oz.) tomato sauce
2 large cans crushed tomatoes
1 large can diced tomatoes
salt and pepper
olive oil
Peel the eggplant. Cut off each end, then cut in to slices about 3/4 inch thick. Salt the slices liberally and let sit.
Here is where a food processor comes in handy. I put all the vegetables through the food processor shredder. If you don’t have a food processor, cut them very, very fine.
Shred carrots, green peppers, onion. Chop fresh spices.
By this time, the eggplant should have drops of liquid on its surface. Take a paper towel and soak up this liquid (it’s bitter). Then put the eggplant slices through the shredder as well.
Cover the bottom of a heavy pot with olive oil. Turn up the heat to medium high. Add the shredded vegetables, garlic, spices. Simmer, stirring often, for about 10 minutes, until the vegetables are soft. Add the tomato products. Return to simmer, then turn heat down to low. Cook uncovered for as much time as you have — at least a couple hours is best, but I’ve served it in 45 minutes. Adjust for spices. Add a can of tomato paste if it seems too runny.
I sometimes fry up a pound and a half of spicy sausage to add to this sauce an hour into cooking — the kids like it best that way. Once I make this sauce I usually serve it over spaghetti a couple of times, make homemade pizzas with the kids once, and use the remainder in a lasagna. Recipe to come.
Marriage Equality in D.C….!
It’s about to pass, I think. I’m watching it live:
http://www.dccouncil.washington.dc.us/
UPDATE: It passed, 11-2!
Photo credit, Women holding hands
Blended Families
I spent a lot of my first year with my daughter explaining to her that no, she was never going to have a dad.
“But why do you kiss Claudia like that and not me?” she would ask.
“I kiss Claudia like I would kiss a dad if you had one,” I would say.
“But why can’t I have a dad?” she would whine.
“Because I am a lesbian. That means I love other women, not men. And that’s okay. Families can look all different ways.”
This would inevitably bring on a pout.
“Look,” I would say, “you can have a Claudia even if you can’t have a dad. If you had a dad you wouldn’t have a Claudia.”
This always seemed to cheer her up. Claudia was way more fun than I was and always came up with cool projects for her to do when all I had the energy to do was drop her off in the childcare room at the grocery store. And after about a year she had settled into a secure attachment to both of us, and the dad question stopped coming up.
Things got a little stickier a couple of years later. I was tucking her into bed when I got the dreaded question: “Mommy, let’s talk about the sex.”
Errr. Think age-appropriate. “What do you want to know about sex?”
“How do you do the sex?”
I didn’t know six-year-olds asked this question!
None of my lesbian parenting books had prepared me to answer this. I considered the fallback position–what had I learned as a kid? The sex talk with my own mother had gone something like this: “Sex is intercourse. Intercourse makes babies. Women don’t much like it. Don’t do it until you’re married. Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?”
Okay, scratch that. I wished I could retreat to a technical description of intercourse, as my mother had done, but clearly sex is way more than that. I was stumped. She looked at me expectantly. I couldn’t give a hetero-centrist sex talk here. But what to say?
Eons ticked by.
Finally I had an epiphany. “Well sweetie,” I said, “sex is when people who love each other touch each other in the places their underwear covers.”
I was so busy congratulating myself on this bit of genius that I wasn’t prepared for her next question.
“But Mommy, do you and Claudia do the sex?”
Oy.
I would love to hear how others have dealt with these sticky questions. Have your kids asked you about “the sex” yet? What did you say?
Mother worries…
Tell me, other mothers out there, are you sometimes paralyzed with worry about your children?
My worry = cell phone for daughter
Such anxiety is a fairly new thing for me. Years ago when the little one had been with me about a year, I had a dream that I lost her. Since I woke up panicked, and not wishing I was back in the dream again, I took it as a really good sign. A sign of attachment. Whew.
Then came the scene at year ago, when an after-school program dropped my daughter and a group of other new middle-schoolers off at her old elementary school fifteen minutes early. She headed to the playground — not viewable from the street. I must have looked like a crazy woman when I finally found out, after waiting a half hour, that she had been dropped off 45 minutes earlier. I ran around the school, crying and talking to myself, until she was finally located.
The next day I bought the girl a cell phone, and put up with 2800 text messages a day–I kid you not, thank God for the unlimited plan–to be able to contact her at anytime, anyplace.
I’ve come to view that incident as jusified worry. Lately I would classify my anxiety as distinctly unjustified. On several occasions last week I panicked when picking her up at swimming when I got there after the pool door was locked, even though I knew there was an alternate way out of the locker room. I just didn’t know where that door was. One day I spent several hours talking myself out of driving across town to make sure she had made it to practice because she had neglected to text me when she got there.
Unfortunately, sometimes I take my worries out on my daughter, barking at her because she seems to often be wandering in an adolescent fog. And insensitivity. And self-centeredness. And navel gazing. All of which, I know, is normal at her age.
I’ve come to believe that my anxiety revolves around keeping her safe. But it has less to do with the realities of her safety and more to do with the realities of how safe I felt at her age.
Anyone else have this experience? Anyone have any tips for how to handle it?
Photo credit, I love you
Gay Dads in the Penguin World
Act one. The East London Aquarium staff wondered why penguins Molly and Guido didn’t produce offspring after sixteen months together. And so they did a blood test. Surprise—both Molly and Guido were male. A penguin gay couple.
Act two. In the Penguin world as in the human world, apparently heterosexual individuals can be bad parents. A straight penguin couple rejected their own egg. Enter Molly and Guido, who incubated the egg and are now the proud daddies of a as-yet-undetermined-gender baby penguin.
Says curator Siani Tinley: “They’re very happy together and made great parents. We’ve not seen any difference with heterosexual parents.”
Well duh.
Here’s the full story.
Healthy Granola Bars
This is a high-protein snack that even kids who insist they hate nuts will love. The secret is chopping the nuts very finely. My daughter carries these with her to eat before swim practice to give her energy.
2 1/2 cups Quaker oats (not the quick cooking kind)
1/4 cup steel-cut oats (or substitute more Quaker oats if that’s all you’ve got)
1/4 cup wheat germ
1 14-oz. can sweetened, nonfat, condensed milk
2 tbsp. melted butter
1 cup finely chopped walnuts
1 cup finely chopped almonds
1/2 cup finely chopped pecans
1/2 cup chocolate chips
1/2 cup butterscotch chips (or use another 1/2 cup chocolate chips if you prefer)
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease a 9×13 inch glass pan.
Mix all ingredients together. Press flat into the pan.
Bake for about 25 minutes, or until top begins to brown. Less time equals chewier bars; more time will produce crunchier bars. Cool for five minutes, then cut into 18 squares. Let completely cool before removing from pan.
I wrap these up in Saran wrap and put them in a tupperware container on top of the fridge. The kids can help themselves.
The Band-Aid Crisis
I visited with my daughter-to-be for six weeks before she moved in with me. It was supposed to be a time for her to begin getting used to the idea of moving to a new family. I’m actually fairly sure there was no preparing her for the huge change that was to come. I, on the other hand, desperately needed those six weeks to wrap my mind around the fact that I was becoming somebody’s mother.
On an afternoon like any other afternoon I picked the little one up at her foster home. She was dressed in a pink tee shirt with the Powder Puff Girls logo splashed across the front in cheap, glittery plastic, peeling at the edges. Her denim shorts, a size too big, had some kind of sparkles embedded in the fabric, making them stiff and scratchy. They hung down below her chubby belly, which peeked brown below the keyhole tie at the bottom of her shirt. Her white flowered underwear stuck up out of the back.
“I buy her clothes a size or two bigger so she can wear them for awhile,” her foster mother had told me.
On her feet she wore Dollar Store flip-flops.
I was pretty lost about what it meant to be taking care of another human being. But two things I grabbed hold of immediately—I could at least help her get healthier by making sure she got more exercise and less dessert. And I would dispense with too cheap, too big, too girly clothing in favor of something a little sturdier and a little less pink. That day I mentally resolved to buy her strap-on sandals, and soon, so she would stop tripping over her feet on our walks to the park. It was hard enough for her to walk a half a mile.
I had learned to cajole her on these walks with promises of what was to come. On our way to the park, she could look forward to a big swimming pool with a slide and a real diving board and a ride on the carousel. On our way home again, the promise of a popsicle usually helped propel her forward. But not on our way home that day.
“No! I’m tired! I don’t wanna walk any more!” She half stomped one flip-flopped foot; her eyes were crinkled up and her lower lip trembled.
“Honey, you have to walk home. I don’t have the car here. Come on, there are popsicles in the freezer.”
She shuffled along, flip-flops dragging along the ground, four steps behind me, muttering. I turned around every so often and urged her forward. The prospect of a five-year-old temper tantrum had my diaphram twisted up in dread. I had no idea how to handle raging fits in the middle of the sidewalk.
I heard the scuff, the thud, and the delayed wail. She had tripped on those stupid shoes and hit the sidewalk. I turned and ran the four steps to her. “It’s okay, sweetie, let me see.”
“Look!” she wailed. She had a raw and dirty scrape on the palm of her hand.
“Come on, we’re almost home. We’ll bandage you right up.”
I looked at my watch. Her foster mom was due to pick her up in a half hour, which meant she would be there in twenty minutes. I kept my arm around her, feeling much more confident now that we had averted a temper tantrum and were on to first aid. I knew how to do first aid.
Once home, I took her into the bathroom and pulled peroxide, Neosporin and Band-aids out of the medicine cabinet.
“What IS that?” she said, looking with fear at the brown peroxide bottle.
“It’s just peroxide. It will clean out your scrape. It won’t hurt. We’ll clean it up and put a Band-aid on it.” I mentally cursed myself for not getting any bandages with cartoon characters on them yet. I was pretty sure that good mothers made sure to have Mickey Mouse or Cinderella Band-aids for when their kids got hurt.
“I don’t want that!”
“C’mon, sweetie, we have to clean your cut.”
“No! No!”
My nerves were moving from frayed to shredded. I began to feel frantic. Her foster mother would be here soon. I had to bandage her cut. That’s what mothers did.
“No!”
I took her hand and pulled it over the sink, unscrewing the peroxide bottle awkwardly with my other hand.
“NOOOOO!” She started to cry.
“We have to take care of your hand.” I tried to moderate my voice to mask the heat of the rage I felt building up in my solar plexus. My words sounded icy.
I pushed ahead, following a set-in-stone, unresponsive path. I poured the peroxide over her scrape as she screeched, feeling the tingle and small sting of the peroxide.
“All done, honey. Look it’s bubbling because there’s dirt in there.” She kept crying. I dispensed with the antibiotic cream. “Let’s put a Band-Aid on.”
She clutched her hand under her arm, shaking her head no.
“We have to put a Band-Aid on to keep it clean.” I grabbed her hand and stuck a bandage on as she struggled. The doorbell, right outside the bathroom door, clattered. Even stuffing a sock inside that thing couldn’t keep me from jumping out of my skin when it went off. Today I jumped a little higher than usual.
She ran to the door and flung herself at her foster mother. I followed.
“What’s wrong princess?”
She kept crying. “She fell and scraped her hand,” I said. “I was just putting a Band-Aid on it.”
“Oh. Well, princess, I don’t think you have to have such a fit.”
I handed over her bag, not even attempting a goodbye hug. I didn’t much feel like hugging anyway. I willed them back out my front door. They headed for the car, my almost-daughter still clinging to the only mother she had ever known.
I couldn’t even put a band-aid on a kid’s scrape without a crisis. What on earth was I doing, anyway?
Photo credit, Spoils
