Public Service Announcement

Last night, while the kids were in their rooms reading pre-bedtime and I was flopped out in the master bedroom, Michael was downstairs.

And he choked.

I heard a mild ruckus -- as though a kitchen chair had tipped over -- and thought nothing of it. Then, a thumping and crashing noise traveled up the stairs, and I thought I'd better check it out.

I encountered Michael at the head of the steps, gasping and gulping. He managed to squeeze out the words "can't breathe" but that was all.

Now, Michael has asthma (as, indeed, does every member of our family), and in the past has had strange respiratory reactions to various OTC meds, so I had no idea what was going on -- I assumed he was having a very bad asthma attack. I grabbed him diagonally across the chest and talked him into relaxing and allowing what little air was getting through to get through. When he had recovered a bit more breath, he gasped "Something went down the wrong pipe."

I still wasn't registering what had happened, but he was getting some air in at this point, so I wasn't panicked. I had him lie flat on the bed to relax and he started gasping again. That's when the penny dropped. "Choking? You're choking!" I stood him up again and peered at him more closely; his face was gray.

Being vertical seemed to help pass whatever needed passing, and lots of good coughs and burps later, his color was improved and the crisis was over. He had been having a snack of pear, cheese and crackers, and a chunk of pear had gone to the wrong spot.

Being the wonderful wife that I am, the first thing I did after the crisis had passed was yell at Michael for not using the universal sign for "I'm choking."



Seriously, I'm short, but I'd have found a way to perform Heimlich on him.

I went to tuck the kids in -- our nightly "snuggle time" -- and taught them both the universal sign for choking. I also told them if they ever see anyone who looks like they're having trouble breathing to run and get the nearest adult.

Seriously, we do a great job teaching our kids not to get into cars with strangers, but we don't teach them about how to respond to a choking incident (either as the choker or as an bystander). And I'm guessing it's statistically much more likely that most folks (kids and adults) will have to deal with the latter than the former in the course of their lives.

SO! Teach your kids the universal sign for choking, and make them practice it. Myself, I think I'm going to randomly shout out "Pretend you're choking!" at odd intervals until it becomes second nature (for the kids AND for Michael). If you've got bigger kids or other grownups in your house, make sure they know the Heimlich maneuver, and have them "pretend" practice it from time to time. Muscle memory is a very powerful thing, and a quick response time can mean the difference between life and death.



No joke. My friend Val's ex-husband died after choking on a piece of meat, and now she's raising two kids with no dad. It can happen just that quickly, folks.

Be safe out there.

Channeling My Ancient Ancestors

I felt like baking bread the other weekend, but ran out of time for the dough to rise. So, I turned to unleavened bread.



These are matzoh crackers from Rose Levy Berenbaum's "The Bread Bible". She calls for chopped fresh herbs in the dough; I used toasted sesame seeds instead. These are tasty enough when hot out of the oven and smeared with soft butter, but I wouldn't walk a country mile for them. The leftovers have been languishing on the counter for 2 weeks, which is all you need to know, really.

Garrick-Ism

"Daddy, I think that's just a fragment of your imagination."

Two Weeks and Counting....

Vacation Haiku: Puerto Vallarta

Imminent escape
Negates the distress caused by
Trying on swim suits

Holiday Baking, Part the Second

For the last several years, we have held an annual holiday open house a few weeks before Christmas. I love the opportunity to see all (or at least a large portion) of our friends, as such opportunities are rare these days. I also love the large-scale effort of menu planning, shopping, baking, and cooking for the big event. We usually have about 60 people come through over a six-hour period, and over the years our menu planning has become more and more ambitious (because we need our heads examined).

The general division of labor is: Michael - savories; Me - sweets; Kids - tidying up and running coats up to the master bedroom. I try to start prepping a good month ahead, making buttercreams and fruit curds and anything freezable with lots of time to spare, leaving the last week for the last-minute assembly of the more perishable items. With the exception of his home-cured gravlax, most of Michael's to do list falls within the last few days before the party.

We strive for a good balance of savories and sweets, hot passed items and cold buffet items, vegetarian bites to offset the meaty bites, fruity sweets to offset the chocolate treats.

This year's menu was as follows:

Hot Apps

• Lime marinated chicken skewers with avocado crema dip
• Cocktail sausages with rosemary and honey
• Savory bread puddings with basil cream
• Caramelized onion & thyme tarts
• Wild mushroom bouchees
• Ham & Dijon croissants
• Miniature meatballs

Cold Apps

• Lemon-tortellini skewers with basil and sun dried tomatoes
• Cognac-soaked apricots wrapped in prosciutto
• Zucchini rolls with herbed goat cheese & roasted red pepper
• Miniature Caesar salad croustades
• Vegetable Sushi

Savory Buffet Nibblies

• Home-cured gravlax with the trimmings
• Hummus with homemade pita chips
• Spiced nuts
• Cheese board
• Goat cheese terrine (layered with pesto and roasted red peppers)

Sweets

• Black & White meringue cookies
• Triple ginger cookies
• Ganache-topped coconut macaroons
• Pistachio petits fours
• Neopolitan minicakes
• Lemon Charlotte
• Chocolatine (mousse/dacquoise cake)
• Lemon meringue tartlets
• Sweet cheese puffs
• Miniature apple tatin
• Chocolate-dipped langues de chat
• Pumpkin cranberry bundt cake

Due to the nature of the thing, I always end up with almost no pix of the savories -- by the time the passed hors d'oeuvres are coming out, I'm busy being a hostess and have put the camera away. But no matter how mad the dash to get into (and out of) a shower before the first guests arrive, I always manage to get some photos of the sweets, as least. Enjoy! I wish you all could have been here -- it was a terrific party. Thank god we have a year to recover before doing it again, as it nearly killed me this year. Next year we're hiring Help.

IN PROCESS



Bouchees, before and after baking


Croustades, shaping and baking


Tartlet shells


Sweet cheese puffs



Zucchini rolls with herbed goat cheese


Photo of Chocolatine (upper right)


Dacquoise for Chocolatine, ready to bake


Preparing to assemble the lemon charlotte: sponge cake, lemon curd, lemon soaking syrup, softened gelatin, candied lemon slices


Lining the mold with jam-joconde sandwich


Preparing the lemon mousse


Filling the sponge-cake-lined mold with lemon mousse

READY FOR GUESTS


Vegetable sushi, langues de chats, macaroons & triple ginger cookies, pita chips


Michael's kick-ass gravlax


Langues de chats


The sweets table: Pumpkin-Cranberry Bundt at rear center


Neopolitan minicakes & lemon meringue tartlets


Pistachio petits fours & Black & White meringues


Chocolatine


Lemon charlotte

I Can Has Immune System?*

Seriously, this is getting beyond boring.

I'm Airborning, I'm decaf-green-tea-ing, I'm sleeping as much as I can and still earn my paycheck, I'm hot-bath-ing and forcing fluids and eating healthy foods. And I'm sick again.

Craptastic.



(* With apologies to the LOLCats.)

The Sex Post

Quin finished his Health & Human Sexuality cycle in school last Friday, and may I state for the record that I'm Shrek-green with envy? I wish I had had such a thorough education in human sexuality at his age (11-and-a-half). Over the course of the six-week cycle, his homework has included such tasks as seeking out a definition for premenstrual syndrome, correctly identifying the function of the vas deferens, and locating the clitoris on an anatomically-very-correct line drawing. His Health & Human Sexuality teacher is a goddess, and I want to take her home with me, wrap her up in a cozy cashmere pashmina and feed her bonbons.

(Imagine the bother and anguish we all could have avoided if the men of our generation had known about PMS and where to locate the clitoris so early in the game....)

Quin tends to be a bit hesitant about sharing his inner thoughts and questions with us parental types, so it wasn't entirely clear to me just HOW far this education had gone until we spent some time together a few weeks ago prepping for a quiz. The review sheet was a round-up of his-and-hers sexual glands, organs, and cells, and we were doing speed review. Male sex cell -- sperm, check. Female sex cell -- egg, check. Then I asked him if he knew what happened when the sperm and egg get together.

"Fertilization." And then? "A baby." Paaaaause. "And, I know stuff I wish I didn't know." Such as? "I know how the sperm and the egg get together."

All righty then.

I blathered something about how while it may seem icky and unnecessary to know this stuff now, it's really important to learn it before puberty dials all the way up to eleven, because that's when common sense can take a leave of absence (not enough blood reaching the brain, dontcha know). That he can put this knowledge in his back pocket for when he needs it, waaaaaay down the road. Blah blah blah blithering mom-cakes. Then I ruffled his head, proclaimed him well-prepared for his quiz, and sent him off to build Bionciles (which, last I checked, you can't catch an STD from).

But the discussion, and the topic, have nagged at me for weeks now. We parents who are lucky not to live in abstinence-curriculum-only school districts (grrr) are incredibly fortunate -- we will have kids who are knowledgeable about the biology, who know what to expect from their developing bodies, and who will know how to stay safe (and hopefully exercise that knowledge when appropriate). But as thorough as that is, for me it's only part of the picture.

How do we teach our kids to enjoy and embrace their sexuality? To not be ashamed or afraid of it, but still behave in appropriate ways? How do we impart a sex-positive message without compromising safety? This question is haunting me these days.

I remember very little about the school-based sex ed I received -- I remember my 6th grade class being separated by gender and learning about menstruation with the girls, but not much else. The parental messages I received where entirely cautionary in nature -- don't do that, watch out because he might want to do this or the other thing, whatever you do, don't have sex, ohmigod you had sex, I thought you were smarter than that (nevermind that I was smart enough to use birth control, which is how they found out in the first damn place!).

Now, I'm not saying that I was scarred for life by all the cautionary messages I received, but they left me nothing to fall back on when I was trying to make peace with my body as a young adult. After a period of extreme acting-out, I had no road map to a healthy sexuality for myself, and boy, what I wouldn't give to be able to wind the clock back on that one. The therapy bills alone, when adjusted for inflation, would've paid for a decent used sportscar.

And I'm far from alone in this. The number of my friends, both real and virtual, who have scarred sexual psyches is really astonishing. Some victims of direct (or emotional) abuse, some not, all are struggling to find a way for themselves without that essential context of what a healthy sexuality might look and feel like. And don't we all have much better ways we'd like to be spending our time and energy? Isn't it liberating to imagine what it would feel like for these issues to gently drift away from us, to imagine how life would be without this ongoing struggle?...

When I think of what I want for my kids as they grow, certainly being safe and happy are the highest priorities. But to be honest, I don't really care whether they ever get serious about learning an instrument, playing sports, or getting into an Ivy League university. What I care about -- what I've always cared about -- is that they are able to find the fun in whatever they do and be proud of themselves, that they learn to communicate well, connect with, and care for other people, and that the petty neuroses of life in the 21st century pass them by. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad I stuck with piano as long as I did and the Ivy League education has afforded me wonderful opportunities. But I'd trade them both (and more) for an earlier, more peaceful acceptance of myself.

What do you think?

Portrait of the Puppy as a Meercat

Separated at birth? You be the judge.

Warmth

It was very cold last week, so on Saturday I made bread.

It was gone by Sunday night.

I want more. Soon as the temps drop back below 60*....

Oops!

I never told you where this title came from. The exceedingly brilliant William Finn wrote "How the Body Falls Apart" for his musical "In Trousers," a companion piece to "March of the Falsettoes." Eventually the two musicals were conflated/combined into "Falsettoland," but "How the Body..." does not appear in the combined score.

Are you glad I remembered to tell you?

Hindsight

The below is transcribed verbatim (complete with overlooked apostrophes) from a crumpled sheet of paper I found in Quin's room while cleaning up last night:

JOIN CLUB REBELLION

Are there things your parents
wont let you do? Club REBELLION
changes all that!

Sign up in Garricks Room.

I knew I should have had the contractors install a dungeon while they were here.......

Because Y'All Are Too Polite to Ask

You're all so well-bred, but I know you want to know how I got the huge bruise on my ass. I fear that at this late date it will be somewhat anticlimactic, but a promise is a promise.

It was about an hour before the first of the Hanukkah party guests were due to arrive, and most of the prep was done. The house was presentable, the leg of lamb was in the oven and on schedule, and I had even remembered to stick candles in the menorah. All that was left was for me to jump in the shower and change clothes, with time to spare.

Theo had been full of piss and vinegar all afternoon, chasing the deck squirrels from the inside of the sliding deck door, begging for chopped vegetables, and generally making a nuisance of himself. When he started baying at the deck door, though, I knew something was up. Occasionally red foxes slink out of the woods behind our house -- they creep up the side of the deck, or up our neighbor's driveway, and are generally very camera-shy. It is quite a coup to spot one, and my antennae were up. I carefully opened the deck door about three inches to ease myself out and do some recon.

Big mistake. Theo lunged at the sliver of open door and barreled over me as if I wasn't there. The deck was a bit slick from an earlier rain, and I went ass-over-tit in quite the most spectacular way. I think you can guess what I landed on. Theo made tracks as only a 2-year-old goldendoodle on a mission can, and Michael and the kids scrambled after him while I regained my feet (but not my dignity).

(It is important to note that Theo's most egregious area of misbehavior is when he escapes in the Great Outdoors. He does not come when called, he deliberately eludes humans and evades capture at all costs. We have been very very lucky thus far that we have always been able to corral him, usually thanks to his inability to ignore other doggies that he encounters. Our extremely unscientific and marginally effective method is to use a little misdirection and pounce on him while he is busy sniffing the other dog's butt.)

So now I am unshowered, ass-bruised, with guests arriving in an hour, and have a dog on the loose in the wilds of Swarthmore. I jumped in the car to circle around to the opposite side of the woods while Michael and the kids gave chase on foot. Unfortunately, Michael didn't grab his cell phone on the way out the door, so we had no way of communicating. Imagine a high-speed chase with a pillowcase over your head, and that will give you some idea of how effective we were. I circled the woods twice, getting out of the car and calling for Michael several times, but I had lost them completely. I zig-zagged all of the streets leading to home, planning to check the house and then set out in the opposite direction, expecting and fearing the worst -- that Theo had made a break for freedom across the busy street two blocks away.

I cannot express my relief at seeing Quin in the doorway as I pulled up the house. I knew there was no way Quin would have given up mid-chase. And indeed, Theo had encountered some doggy friends one house away from the busy street two blocks away, and had stopped for a sniff -- enabling Michael and the kids to surround and capture him.

(It turned out Theo had seen a cat on our deck.)

I know we were lucky -- again -- this time. The only lasting damage was to my ass and dignity (and my ass eventually healed). But I'd welcome any suggestions for dealing with the Dog as Escape Artist. He is fairly responsive to the command "come" when in the confines of our house, but out in the Free World, we may as well be speaking Swahili to him. Or Hebrew.

Barukh atah Adonai, Eloheinu, melekh ha'olam
asher kidishanu b'mitz'votav v'tzivanu l'had'lik neir shel Chanukah.

Barukh atah Adonai, Eloheinu, melekh ha'olam
she'asah nisim la'avoteinu bayamim haheim baziman hazeh.

Happy belated Hanukkah, everyone.

Holiday Baking, Part the First

So here's a little of what I baked over the holidays, working in backwards chronological order....

For my co-workers, I made rolled sugar cookies with run-in icing decor. I'm not nearly as expert in this technique as my friend Heleen, but I was fairly pleased with the final results. Each of my co-workers received one large cookie individually wrapped in a small cellophane bag. To this day, some of my colleagues still have the cookies on their desks, uneaten. I'm particularly pleased with the snowflakes, the designs for which I stole from "Rose's Christmas Cookies."

In a moment of temporary insanity, I volunteered to make the cupcakes for Garrick's 4th-grade class's holiday party. And being me, I couldn't possibly just keep it simple. Snowmen, anyone?

I did manage to creep myself out a bit with the tray full of dismembered snowman heads as I piped faces late into the night. They were all looking right at me.

I think they turned out cute, if a bit short-waisted.

Next up: the Holiday Open House Extravaganza; or, In Which I Nearly Lose My Mind for Good and Need to Take Three Weeks to Recover.

Last Week

I said the word "clitoris" to my 11-year-old son. My head then exploded and I died.

That is all.