Jiaozi

From all of us to all of you

I have written a number of posts in the past month -- half-written them, rather, because I cannot seem to carve out enough time to make a sustained effort and finish something. So I'm going to take a page from Johnny's book and simply take a break. I want some time to just sit and listen to Christmas music and watch It's a Wonderful Life and Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol with my kids and not feel guilty about the posts I'm not finishing. I'll be back after the holidays with (I hope) new thoughts. In the meantime, here's a picture of my beautiful girls all dressed up to see the Pacific Northwest Ballet Nutcracker. Consider this my holiday card to you.

 

Happy holidays to you and yours!

"The storey of a fasta nesta"

I am swamped. I've started several posts, but I'm going to have to resort to plagiarism to get a post finished.

Ella scribbles constantly in her journals. She has a number of notebooks squirreled away around the house and car. Her spelling is highly idiosyncratic (see title above), but her observations are worth reading. Here's a little essay she wrote (with the spelling translated for you):

I know that May and Mom is a fashionista because May said that to me. Well she did not tell me but she talks about it to my family a lot. Just saying. And they like to look at magazines a lot and hair stuff but that is a different story. Anyway I just know that they are fashionistas aha. The end of my story. Ze end.

By Ella

This girl makes me laugh all the time.

More conversations from our house

Big A (from the next room): Hey, Carrie, what's it called when you put two songs together?

Me: A mashup.

Big A: That's it, thanks.

*****

Ella: Mom, where's the spot you're supposed to rub to help nausea?

Me: The inside of your wrist.

Ella: Oh, right.

*****

Ella: Mom, who's your favorite X-Man?

Me: I don't know. Maybe Wolverine. I like Storm and Rogue, but they don't have very good powers. Who's your favorite?

Ella: Any X-Man who isn't evil.

*****

This is the House of Esoteric Information.

Do you ever have conversations like this at your house?

Me: I'm making oatmeal. Do you want some?

Big A: Sure, if you're already making it for yourself.

Me: Do you want raisins in it?

Big A: That's okay, I can add them later.

Me: That's not what I asked. I asked if you want raisins in the oatmeal. A simple yes-or-no question. I did not ask you to try to read my mind and determine whether I want raisins so you can respond in the way that is least likely to displease me. I want raisins, and the reason I'm asking is that if you also want raisins, I will add them before the oatmeal is done cooking so they will be moist. Otherwise, I will add them later. So, do you want raisins or not?

Big A: Oh. Yes, I would love some raisins.

Me: Thank you. Was that so hard?

Big A: I can't say that I want raisins because if you don't want raisins, you won't say anything, and you'll sacrifice and put the raisins in just because I want them.

Me: You're projecting. You are the one who sacrifices. Me, I always act in my own best interest. You don't have to worry about me. So, raisins in the oatmeal.

Bess: Oh. My. God. I can't believe you guys are arguing about oatmeal.

When good laundry goes bad

Good grief, what was I thinking? You don't want to read another post about laundry! But I backed myself into a corner and have to finish. Here goes.

*****

Putting away laundry was the worst job in the house when I was growing up. Nine people = Mass quantities of laundry. You had to keep the laundry moving because there was always someone in diapers, and they were cloth diapers, and this was before the days of diaper service. Also, almost every night someone wet the bed, so there were soggy sheets to deal with in the morning. And lots of clothes and 18 feet worth of socks.

It was my job to process the laundry. I'm sure my mother ran a few loads while I was at school, and she took care of the diapers, which required a complicated rinse-bleach-wash-deodorize cycle, and which my dad was forbidden to do because it made him gag, loudly. Whatever she didn't get to during the day overflowed out of the ridiculously small dirty laundry hamper and onto the floor next to the washer. I grabbed armloads of things off the floor, ran them through the washer, and put them in the dryer.

After I took the clean clothes out of the dryer, I dumped them on the floor in front of the dryer. The top of the dryer was reserved for a cardboard box full of socks that no one had gotten around to matching. Clean sheets, towels, and clothes ended up on the floor because there was no other place to put them while they were waiting for sorting. But because there was no system and no one took responsibility for sorting, it never happened. The laundry was self-serve: If you needed something clean to wear, you dug through the pile until you found something in your size.

After a few cycles, the clean laundry pile covered half the floor. If no one gathered up the big items like sheets and towels, the clean laundry started crossing over to the dirty side. Once the line of demarcation was lost, and you couldn't tell dirty from clean, it was time to go to the smell test.

When you needed something to wear, you had to pick up each garment in which you had an interest and smell it. If it didn't pass, you tossed it back toward the dirty end of the room. The smell test was used not only to distinguish washed clothes from unwashed clothes; it was also needed to check for cat pee. When you have multiple cats in a household, and one or more of the cats are boys, anything lying on the ground is apt to be used as a convenient alternative to the litterbox. Sometimes an item started out on the clean side and had to be tossed, damply, back to the dirty side. Unpopular clothes could spend their entire lives being washed, peed on, and washed again without ever being worn.

A couple of times a year, someone -- and it may have been me, foreshadowing my OCD approach to housework -- would get the idea to Clear Out the Laundry Room. This was an effort similar to clearing out the garage in most households. It would take several trips to carry everything out to the living room, where we'd sit in a circle and claim clothes. When we were through, everyone carried their clean clothes up to their bedrooms, where they were usually dumped on the floor, since not everyone had a dresser. But at least they were closer to the wearers. Any items left in the living room -- sometimes there were garments that nobody recognized or wanted to own up to -- might go to the Goodwill, or they might just go back into the laundry room to create a base for the next clean laundry pile.

Then there was the sock box to deal with. So many white crew socks, in so many different sizes, and none seemed to match. The best you could hope for was to find two that had a passing resemblance and create fraternal twins. The leftovers went back into the box in hopes that one day the washer and dryer would give up their hostages and reunite the solo socks with their mates.

And then the cycle started all over again. So you can see why I have laundry issues today, and why I cannot let the laundry take over the house.

*****

I don't know why sorting and putting away laundry is such an onerous task for most people. It's not nearly as awful as scrubbing the roasting pan, for example, or cleaning behind the refrigerator. Perhaps it's because laundry is not quite as mindless as other household chores. You can wash dishes on autopilot, enjoying the view out the kitchen window. But sorting laundry requires skills in analysis and categorization, and putting it away involves picking up each object and deciding whether it belongs in the sock drawer, say, or the linen closet. Too much thinking. It's easier to put it off. Especially if you are time- or organization-challenged, as many members of my family are.

*****

Several years ago, Sister 5 and I went over to Sister 2's house on a charitable mission to help her clean house in preparation for Christmas. Her husband had just had knee surgery and was even more useless than usual. The house was remarkably chaotic considering only four people lived there, but that's a story for another time.

When I saw the laundry room, I backed away in horror. She had a big laundry room. There was a river of laundry running through the room, past the washer and dryer, and out into the hall. Sister 5 waded through the river and dove in. So brave. She has a good nose, so I assume that she set to work applying the smell test. I didn't see her for hours. I went around to the bedrooms, which were impassable, and collected even more laundry that was strewn around on the floors.

By the time we left, the laundry had been contained in the laundry room, and it was again possible to walk from through the bedrooms and reach the beds without going through an obstacle course. But I have never been back to that house, and I am afraid to imagine what it looks like now. True story.

The moral here? Eh, I don't know. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree? Better no husband than a useless one? Take care of your laundry, and your laundry will take care of you? Cats will pee on anything you leave lying around? Yeah, I think that's it.

I did actually have some deep thoughts about laundry while I was writing this, about how our changing laundry reflects our changing families, but I think I'll leave it at cat pee.

*****

There. I have literally aired my dirty laundry for all to see. Now please entertain me with your washing stories.

Washing day

Laundry, laundry, laundry, laundry. and laundry. Laundry is much like Spam in the famous Monty Python sketch -- repetitious, pervasive, unavoidable.

There is no end to laundry. You are never "done" with laundry. It is the quintessential Sisyphean task. No matter how much washing you do, there is more to be done.

As jobs go, doing the wash is not the worst. Sorting the wash is a pleasant activity. When the girls were younger, I sorted laundry into three piles: Pink, Purple, and Cartoon Underp@nts. Now that they are older, I sort it into Jeans, Br@s, and Other. Sometimes the Jeans load is big enough to divide into categories, such as Skinny Jeans and Bootcut Jeans, or Ink Wash and Distressed. ("Destroyed" jeans, which are a step more damaged than Distressed jeans,  must be washed in a lingerie bag to keep them from becoming Wholly Wretched jeans.) And Bess does her own wash now, which is nice.

I like pouring the laundry detergent into the tub and watching it bubble up. I like loading the wet, sweet-smelling wash into the dryer, and I like pulling the warm, crackling load out of the dryer. I like folding fluffy towels. (They must be folded lengthwise and then folded over twice into a square; that way when you take them out of the cupboard, they are ready to drape over the towel bar. I am still training my helpers to do this.)

I do not like having to untangle the br@s from the lingerie bag and drape them over the drying rack and then figure out which belongs to who. I do not like having to sort and match socks that all look the same even though they may or may not be different sizes. (And yet I have not motivated myself to write everyone's initials on their socks, so I have no one but myself to blame.) I don't like having to lug the big basket of clothes upstairs to the bedrooms, and having to put Ella's away in her dresser because if she had her druthers, she would keep them all in a pile on the floor and grab what she needs. It's just a big nuisance.

But it must be done. I have learned from experience that if you don't manage the laundry, it will take over the house.

Well, I'll be darned. This is going to be a two-part post. A two-part post on laundry. My life is so dull.

The man in the red flannel suit

Big A: Ella, are you going to write a letter to Santa Claus this year?

Ella: Yeah!

Big A: I hear the Post Office won't be delivering any more letters that are just addressed to Santa Claus, North Pole.

Me: That's a weird way to cut costs. Well, you could always send an e-mail.

Big A: That's right. Abbey sent Santa an e-mail one year and she got an answer back!

Ella: That wasn't from Santa.

Me: It wasn't?

Ella: No. It was from some man in a suit. I know when it's really Santa and when it's a man in a suit, and that was a man in a suit.

Big A and me: !!!!

Disclosure: She probably meant a man in a Santa suit, but both A and I thought immediately of some corporate flack sitting at a desk answering Santa's e-mail. I very nearly spit my coffee out.

The hunt is on

The evidence: Blood and tiny droppings on the family room baseboard.

The detective: Our bloodhound cat, "the Sniffer."

The suspect: Our boy cat, "Owen Wilson," the only animal who wasn't shut in someone's bedroom last night (because he's too hyper).

The victim: Small rodent, location unknown. The Sniffer is very interested in the space under the dryer, but a pass of the yardstick found only lost cat toys. Dead end.

The moral: What's the only thing worse than finding a dead mouse in your house? Not finding it.

Update 1: The mouse was not quite as dead as previously thought. Owen cornered it in the rec room and chased it back upstairs. I trapped it under a mixing bowl, got it outside, and let it go by the fence. It looked okay and had all four limbs and a tail. Now I'm scrubbing blood off the baseboards. But whose?

Update 2: I'm totally going to record a country album and call it "Blood on the Baseboards." Thank you very much.

Overlooked

As soon as May learned enough English, she told me about the year she spent in the orphanage before entering foster care. As you might expect, it was a dog-eat-dog world: The older kids stole from the younger kids and picked on them when the adults' backs were turned. The beds were hard. She learned not to eat whatever mysterious gray meat was served at meals and stuck to the rice and vegetables.

May saw her first white people at the orphanage, Americans and Europeans who came to adopt infants. To be honest, she thought they looked a little old to be parents.

"They were only interested in the babies," she told me. The white people walked past her and the other older children in their mismatched hand-me-down clothes; their disinterest must have shown in their faces and the way they avoided making eye contact. May wanted very much to have a family, but she was sensitive enough to realize she was invisible to most of the visitors.

I hope that has changed in the ensuing six years. I know of a number of older children who were adopted from that orphanage. When we visited, we brought candy for the children, and they were excited but not shocked to see us. More and more people are realizing the rewards of adopting older children, and I hope the children no longer feel overlooked.

But the memory of being left behind remains. The other day May and I were talking about animal shelters, which is were our pets came from. "I just love to visit the animal shelter!" she said. "I love seeing all the cute little kittens."

She thought for a minute. "Oh," she said. "It's like the orphanage, isn't it? People just come to see the kittens and puppies. Nobody pays any attention to the older cats and dogs."

I could see the gears turning in her head. I said, "That's why we got most of our pets when they were grown. Baby animals are cute, but I like older ones too. And ours are awesome, aren't they?" She had to agree that they are.

Friday roundup

I've been thinking that I might be a better blogger if I were a sloppier blogger. I work those essay-length posts to death, and that cuts into my output. I'm going to try the lazy writer's friend, the bullet list.

• October is adoption month at our house. Bess, May, and the dog all have their adoption anniversaries this month. Is it weird that the only date I'm sure of is the dog's? I don't have the other adoption dates written down except in my travel journals. We've never made a big fuss over "gotcha day," a term I don't especially like anyway. For the record, this month marks 13 years for Bess and 4 years for May. And they are both excelling in junior high. I am so proud of them. I really didn't expect for May to be doing so well academically this soon.
• Reality TV is evil. I may explore this thought at greater length later. It seems to me that reality TV capitalizes on the same urge that causes people to slow down in traffic to look at an accident. (I'm not judging -- I have that compulsion too.) It could have been humanizing, the way blogs are humanizing, by reassuring us that we all share experiences, but instead it's exploitive. And dishonest, since much of it is staged. Also, it reduces the amount of work available for screenwriters.This is a bad thing for creative people everywhere.
• That said, some good writers must be getting work, because I find that there is an embarrassment of riches on TV right now, being as how I'm a scifi and musical geek. My [only intermittently functioning] DVR is getting a workout. But the DVR's memory is almost full because I never get to watch the shows I record. A warning to those of you who have young children: When they get older, you can never watch anything adult on TV until they are, well, adults. Or at least 18. My teens stay up later now, and they want to hang out in the family room with the comfy couch, so until 10 p.m. I have to watch family-friendly programming. And I can't stay up until 11 p.m. because we're all up so early in the morning. I've given up on putting anything rated R in my Netflix queue. I don't think I'm overprotective, but there's no reason to expose them to material that they are not mature enough to understand.
• On a related note, how come every PG-13 movie has the F word in it exactly once? I believe that the rules are that if they use it more than once, or use it in certain contexts, they get an R rating. But why use it at all? Does a PG-13 rating sell more tickets than a PG rating? And is it any wonder that the girls report that kids crowding the locker bays are all "F this" and "F that"? We used to get in trouble for saying "crap." (Remember when the radio stations skipped that word when they played Paul Simon's "Kodachrome"? Of course you don't, you're too young. Take my word for it.) Am I wrong in thinking that the worst cussing should not be used casually but saved for when you're really at the end of your rope? I'm just not sure that breaking a fingernail warrants the F word. Let the profanity fit the crime.