Dalai Mama Dishes

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

I will grant that I picked a bad day for us to walk to school — and perhaps if I'd looked more closely, I would have seen everyone's coccyx broken off and lying on the ground near all the fallen bodies, and I would have thought, "Let's drive today." But I didn't. It's been alternating between pouring rain and freezing rain — that thing they call "wintry mix,"which makes me feel like someone should be offering me a bowl of white and blue M&Ms mixed with spiced Chex cereal, but which turns out to mean only that there's enough standing water in our basement to dive into, and enough black ice in our driveway to skate on. And so, halfway to school, Birdy slips on the ice and...

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

On the weekends, I'm all about board games and family walks, sewing doll dresses, and kid-filled dinner parties and quality time with a capital K. But during the week, my children spend hours and hours playing by themselves, and mostly I think it's great. I believe in unstructured games for kids, in empty stretches of time that fill organically with imaginary sandwich shops and doll parties and the complicated sketching out of the children's stuffed-animal family trees (Are Junior Beaver and Pengy cousins or siblings?) or the impromptu surrealist drawing of a vase full of carnations. The fact that this philosophy happens to suit my particular style of employment -- where I...

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

You know when you're doing a Van Gogh jigsaw puzzle, and your fingers are moving in a kind of regular finger-like way, fitting pieces here and there or organizing them into piles of iris and sky, but your brain has suddenly turned into a slot machine? And it's spinning around and around, cherries, lemons, dollars, barrels, coins spewing out, coins not spewing out, and you keep repeating crazy things aloud until your loved ones, who are just trying to get the ochre of the grass done before bed for goodness sake, finally say politely, "If you don't know any more of that song than the one line, could you please find something else to sing?" And you realize that you have...

Ah, the sweet sounds of my dinner table! It's like a symphony. If by symphony I mean surreal play about people talking and talking like they're the conversational equivalent of a Cubist painting.

Birdy: Mama!

Ben: Wouldn't it be cool if there was a kind of a robot fridge that told you when you were out of stuff?

Birdy: Mama!

Michael: Honey?...

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

Birdy is sick with a fever and a bad cough, and her nostrils look like they've been filled with fluorescent green pony beads molded from virus and snot. She cries and coughs and then coughs and coughs and gags, coughing, and then spits up a little and then is suddenly throwing up torrentially all over our bed while Michael holds a washcloth vaguely near the geyser of her mouth. Oy. Birdy cries and shivers in the bath, cries and shivers in a towel, cries and shivers in her pajamas back in bed, where I read to her and try not to smell the barf smell that is still shimmying off her hair in cartoon waves. Oy. Ben is revolted but doesn't want to miss the story I'm reading, and so -- smart boy -- has pulled our old...

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

"Tell us about Ute!" The kids and I are playing Yahtzee, and Ute stories are part of the package. When I was a graduate student in Santa Cruz, living in a rambling and gabled Victorian house with 10 other people, Ute and I shared the upstairs. She was German and imposing in a kind of a hefty, guttural way, and my imitations of her slay the kids. "You will play Yahtzee with me!" This was her daily announcement, and it was always accompanied by her muscling herself into my room with the folding card table. "You will work later. Here. Yahtzee. I go first."...