Dalai Mama Dishes

^{Ever wonder what Catherine sounds like? Listen to her read this blog entry.}

Birdy is crying and crying. "Owww!" she sobs tearlessly, "Yowwwwwch!" and we say, "Wow, that must have really hurt!" We're not exactly leaping out of bed, though. I mean, it doubtless hurts a very great deal to bang your finger on a doll. It kills! Or at least it sure seems to. And Baby Chunky isn't exactly the softest doll, it's true, what with her molded newborn oversized head and grimace, just waiting to passively attack her human caretakers; she does have a little something of the Pod People about her, that doll. But this seems like a comfort-from-
under-the-comforter situation, sans alarm, even though Birdy holds up the injured pinky,...

^{Ever wonder what Catherine sounds like? Listen to her read this blog entry.}

You know that feeling you had, watching Gilligan's Island as a kid? You imagined yourself in their situation, banging two rocks together for years, unable to generate a single spark or egg noodle or even the crudest roll of Scotch tape, and there they were with their tiki lights and swim-up bar, their umbrella drinks and palm-roasted halibut?

That's what camping is like. Here you are, feeling pretty pleased with yourself to have gotten the tent and bedding into the car, to have remembered the paper towels and even such niceties as a tablecloth and corkscrew, and then you drive up and other people's sites...

^{Ever wonder what Catherine sounds like? Listen to her read this blog entry.}

Hey, it's not my fault you didn't get the memo about mandatory joylessness. Maybe it got stuck somewhere with that other one about the experimental fashioning of our home into a gulag. And so you thought it might be "fun" to twirl an enormous box of packing peanuts over your head? Fine. Now they cover the living room floor like a Styrofoam tide. I hope it's "fun" to clean them up too. It's not? Why? Because they're all static-clinging to the couch and carpet and coffee table? Because your idea to sweep them up with a broom and dustpan turns out to be as effective as blowing them or kicking them with your foot, which you also tried? Because of the missing spontaneous hilarity? Because you --...

^{Ever wonder what Catherine sounds like? Listen to her read this blog entry.}

I once held a friend's knee aloft for the two hours it took her to muscle out a baby. I whispered encouragement, groaned in sympathy, and shouted Hallelujah! to the heavens when that dark, cabbagey head forced its miraculous way into the air. I had practically out-midwifed the midwife! I could have coaxed a million dollars from a sealed vault.

And I was reminded of that evening years later, coaching baby Birdy while she labored to push out a stool the size and shape of Barney. Before then, the word "constipation" had evoked a condition I would have described as...

^{Ever wonder what Catherine sounds like? Listen to her read this blog entry.}

"You made our lives more interesting," Ben says, and his voice wavers. "You were as good as a goldfish could be," I say, and Birdy cries, "Good-bye, Charlie!" before Michael tosses a shovelful of dirt onto our poor, dead fish.

The gravitas is, perhaps, a bit affected. But what can you do? It's sad when a pet dies. This is an incontrovertible fact, and I even say it out loud a number of times. But a fish is tricky. That Charlie made our lives more interesting might be a true statement on, say, Opposite Day. The swimming in circles! The swallowing of food flakes! The accidental blooping against...

^{Ever wonder what Catherine sounds like? Listen to her read this blog entry.}

We're eating the first corn of the season, and it seems to be inspiring a kind of Lunatic Revival feeling in my dining companions. If corn is local and fresh, I boil it for exactly 3 minutes, then let the children spin each ear over a stick of butter until it gleams and drips. This corn is so sweet -- each kernel bursting in your mouth like a tiny, buttery grape -- that I can't help wondering if the kids are actually getting some kind of sugar buzz. Kernels are flying. The children are chomping and chewing and talking a mile a minute, laying their cobs down only to gesticulate wildly with open hands....