Children Say Many Amusing Things

Ages ago, I read an interesting article in the New Yorker.  I know this was ages ago because I only subscribed to the New Yorker for the first six months I lived in New York. I found the weekly publication schedule so stressful that I cancelled my subscription.

Anyway, the piece by Adam Gopnick was about psychoanalysis.  I don't think it was specifically about his experience with psychoanalysis but he did draw on his own experience.  Once, after the author unloaded a long story about his ambivalence about having children, the analyst simply retorted, "Children say many amusing things."  This quote had a huge impact on Gopnick, who went on to have a family and remember what his doctor said every time his kids said something amusing.  If his house was anything like ours, he probably remembers his doctor on a daily basis.  Since I read the article, I know I do.

Recently M was remarking on the different ways his friends pronounce his name. The pronunciation does differ noticeable between his cousin L, who has a Boston accent, his British teachers and friends, and West Coast L. As we discussed this, he asked where West Coast L is from. I told him Portland. He replied, "she speaks Port."  Last weekend out of the blue M said, "I think I'll marry L and be an army man."  I asked what L would do and he said, "she'll stay with the kids so they don't get into mischief."  When I asked how many kids, he said, "two, because that works out well for bunk beds."  When I asked where they would live he said, "when L's mom dies we'll live in her house, and I'll be Port!"  (Note:  moving into someone's house after they die is a recurring theme with M; I suspect he doesn't understand real estate transactions and thinks this is the only way to acquire property).

A couple of weekends ago we were out most of the day, then we came back and played Batman. First with figures then live action. I was the Riddler, then maybe after a few minutes M said, "pretend I'm Bat Boy and daddy is Bat Man and you are the Joker but you turned nice and married Bat Man."  Reforming baddies is a recurring theme with M; his "lands" must not have a high rate of recidivism as Batman, etc. spend a lot of time teaching the villains how to be nice.

M is a huge fan of Robin Hood, and often uses his Playmobil knights castle to play a version of Robin Hood.  I, always assigned the role of the baddy, am often asked to be the "Foamy King of England."  For those of you who (unlike me) haven't watched Disney's Robin Hood four million times in the past year, there is a song that refers to Prince John as the "Phony King of England."

Art

I recently discovered a store called Xenos, which seems to be Amsterdam's answer to the Christmas Tree Shops.  They have a terrific craft aisle, so while I was there buying picture frames for M's school photo gifts to P's family, I thought M could do some paintings on canvas for them as well.  I bought 6 small canvases, a stubby paint brush perfect for preschool hands, a set of 12 tubes of acrylic and a nifty palette (a la Vincent Van Gogh).

Uncle David playing football

A daddy and baby dragon.

Mixed purple and gray.

His paintings were basically experiments in color mixing, and two of the three he did today had stories (one was a dragon, obviously inspired by the color he mixed, and the other was Uncle David playing football.  The video shows a little bit of his process.

Food Friday: Fail

M and I set out today to make some simple oven baked onion rings from our new Better Homes and Gardens Kid Favorites Made Healthy cookbook.  The recipe calls for dipping circles of onion in egg white then fine, dry breadcrumbs mixed with melted butter, then baking them in a hot oven.

I certainly started out with the best of intentions and enthusiasm.  M and I went to Albert Heijn to pick up some supplies, but yet again we were met with blank looks when looking for a product.  This time it was cooking spray.  This isn't really something I bought regularly in the States, but I know I could find it just about anywhere.  Do we really not export Pam?  The shopkeeper, trying to be helpful, pointed me towards something which turned out to be a weird liquid form of Benecol.  I know this because I bought it.

The amount of onion the recipe called for

The amount of onions the crumbs actually covered

The second thing that tripped me up was how the breadcrumbs stuck--or rather didn't stick--to the onions.  I chalked this up to the breadcrumbs being either not fine enough or not dry enough--maybe both.  Certainly, they were not nearly plentiful enough.  The recipe called for 3/4 cup; I made about a cup and they "covered" (using the term loosely) about 12 rings rather than the 2 whole onions indicated in the recipe.

Sad, burnt onion rings

Not having the cooking spray wasn't such a problem, since it was only for greasing the cookie sheet. If I was thinking I wouldn't have even stressed about this since I prefer to use straight oil at high temperatures because it's easier to clean up.

No, the real problem with this recipe is that I overcooked it because I was in the living room watching Conjunction Junction with M and didn't hear the timer go off.  We ate the non-charred onion rings and all three of us enjoyed them.  I'll definitely attempt this again (maybe after I get a food processor or some type of tool that will allow me to make finer bread crumbs).

Food Friday: Some Recent Triumphs

P's Beautiful Turkey Pie

Last weekend P made a beautiful turkey pie from some Thanksgiving leftovers I had put in the freezer. This is a great recipe from Real Simple that he would occasionally make in New York, although our local grocery, even the big one, didn't have refrigerated pie dough. We used puff pastry and came out great. A big shout out to one of my oldest friends, Amelia, who suggested pie and also thought some crust initials would be fun. Peter insists he didn't read that comment, and M refused to eat the pie, but I really liked it!

Our freezer could use a defrost so have been trying to use up what we have.  Last week I made a delicious meatloaf out of some random ground beef, cumberland sausage, and cooked chicken that we had.  To that I added bread crumbs (am I the only one for whom bits of old loaves of bread pile up in the freezer?), a couple of eggs, a couple of grated carrots and a couple of grated cloves of garlic.  It was delicious, and turned into two meals (I put about a third of it in the freezer and we had it last night with pasta). Here is M's review. The first word he says is "delicious," but it's hard to understand through his food giggle and my late breaking idea to film what he was saying.

Partially thanks to Cheryl's suggestion and partially because I wanted to use up what I thought was fish stock from the freezer, I made some delicious salmon stew.

Mushrooms and Shallots

This is a delicious dish that is really simple to make.  You start with a small wild salmon fillet.  I don't know what the weight was; but the piece was probably a four inch square (for two).  I sauteed a bunch of shallots and mushrooms in butter and olive oil, added some green beans cut to one inch in length, then added the salmon and "fish stock" (it was actually the water I'd cooked some carrots in, but it worked) with a fish bouillon cube (the bouillon we get here is much better than US bouillon).  I also added a couple of tablespoons of savignon blanc since I had it in the fridge.  I cooked a small amount of brown rice separately and served up the dish with a little fresh parsley.

Salmon Stew, served with a chunk of fresh
baguette from our local French bakery.

M was served a deconstructed version which
was heavy on the rice (he dislikes fresh salmon).
This did not go over well.

Museum Monday (Kinda)

OK, it's been quite a while since M and I were off to a museum, but that doesn't mean we haven't been experiencing high culture.

Shortly before we went back to the States for the holidays I had the good fortune to observe M's ballet class.  Every Wednesday, M has a ballet lesson at school.  This is an optional "extra" that I'm really glad we opted for.  Our little fellow is all about pretending, and this "pre-ballet" class was basically non-stop pretending.  The kids went from pretending they were guessing what Christmas presents were to being cross [angry] giants to being horses to being elves and fairies to throwing snowballs at ice skaters all in the span of about 10 minutes.  Having taken many years of ballet myself I recognized the ballet step at the hear of each of these mini-scenarios.  And was my little boy in his element!  I think we spent just over 150 Euros for the entire school year (September-July), and man, was that money well spent!


After the ballet observation I headed over to the Concertgebouw for a free lunchtime concert.  This was my friend's idea, and I was grateful to have someone orient me to how this works. I enjoyed the string quartet so much that this past week I brought M to the Dutch Concert Choir performing some Rachmaninoff selections.  These lunch time concerts are about a half hour long, so certainly in the spirit of Museum Monday (i.e. short and sweet).  And although in the interest of full disclosure I must inform that M had a lollipop in his mouth for the entire concert, he was very well behaved and seemed to genuinely enjoy himself.  When the concert started he remarked, "it's just like church."  This evening when I asked him point blank if it was fun or boring he said it was fun and he wanted to go back when the orchestra was playing.  I may take him back in a couple of weeks for an open rehearsal, even though it will mean missing school.

We've also seen a little bit of theater.  While we were in Massachusetts we caught one of the final show's of threesixty Theatre's Peter Pan.  It was spectacular!  M was engaged through the entire performance and is still talking about it.  And, although it hardly classifies as high art, we introduced M to an important part of his cultural heritage, the Christmas Panto.  He can't get enough.

Work Wednesday: Cleaning Update

After my "work wheel" post last month, a couple of readers have expressed their surprise at the frequency with which I clean the floors.  Actually, it is pretty surprising.  Every week the floors get vacuumed and swiffered and every other week they get washed for real, with a bucket and a cleaning product that's similar to Fabuloso or Spic n Span.  What's really amazing is that despite being a basically shoeless household, and despite not allowing our kid to eat anywhere but the table, the floors are actually dirty when it comes time to clean them every few days.

Really, when I swiffered on Friday, only 3 days after I had vacuumed all the floors, the swiffer cloth was so filthy I thought about changing it midway through (I didn't).  I don't know why this is, but I suspect it has to do with living in an old building (don't they just spontaneously release dust?), our lifestyle (M and I are home much more often than we were in New York and therefore we are making dust at home as opposed to work or school) and our windows (don't close properly to the point of an inside door blowing closed one particularly windy night).

So, despite needing some slight tweaking to address tasks that aren't regularly completed, sadly, cleaning the floor isn't really something I can cut back on.

Home Improvements

Our apartment, although beautiful and charming, it pretty cold and drafty these days.  The heating system is good, if a bit uneven (3 exposures, 4 windows, and 2 small radiators in the kitchen and a single exposure, huge radiator and 2 feet of exposed heating pipe in our bedroom).  Although the apartment heats up quickly I worry about the amount of energy used to heat up an apartment that doesn't even have storm windows.  Plus, the drafts and lack of humidity certainly detract from the comfort.

A couple of weeks ago I used masking tape to seal up the cracks around most of our windows.  We immediately saw some improvement in both temperature and humidity.  I also bought these little ceramic vessels that hang on the radiators to release moisture into the air.  I'm a little suspicious that these aren't doing a thing because the water level doesn't really drop but I still dutifully change the water weekly.  You are probably wondering why I don't just buy an electric humidifier (or two, like we had in New York), but I haven't been able to find one here.

With all of us having a cold I have been trying to add some moisture to the air.  You'd think in such a wet climate I wouldn't need to do that but you'd be wrong.   At night I leave 3 wet towels in M's room (by morning they are bone dry) and whenever I can I let laundry dry in there as well.  I often also put a pot of boiling water in his room at about 9 at night and leave it there until morning.  I steam up the bathroom by letting his nightly bath run through the shower head and then open the bathroom door (often leaving his bathwater in the tub overnight).  We have also dropped our daytime thermostat setting to 19' C (66'F) as opposed to 20' C (68'F), which strangely keeps the thermometer on the hygrometer at 68'F.  At night we turn the thermostat down to 17, since we have found anything lower wakes us up with a chorus of "Mama, I'm freezing" in the middle of the night.

All of these actions seem to be helping.  I received a hygrometer for Christmas (perhaps my favorite gift--thanks Mom and Dad) and if my calibration efforts are correct, our home is within the comfort target of 40-45% relative humidity.