Dalai Mama Dishes

Birdy is kneeling in my lap, facing me and pantomiming a song that I'm supposed to guess: two fingers up in the air, hands shaking in alarm, a fist tapping, a beckoning palm. I figure it out and sing, " 'Help me, help me, help!' he said." Birdy's face falls, and her arms drop to her sides. "No," she says. "No." She is almost whispering in the effort to control her emotions. She is near tears. "It was, 'Little rabbit come inside.' Let's start over." She's a letter-of-the-law kind of girl. "Well, I did get the song right, right, Bird? I just said the wrong line." "Let's start over, Mama," she whispers again, and my playful, consoling attitude turns to irritation. "I think that was close enough," I say, and when I plop her out of my lap onto the couch and stand up, she bursts into tears....

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

The question on the table is: What is your worst fear? Ben has plucked this from our family's Question Jar: a dinnertime conversation-provoker modeled after a game we played at his grandparents' house. Ben has decorated an old pickle jar, and we've filled it with questions, each written out neatly on a slip of pretty paper. "You should totally pitch this to the magazine!" Ben said when we were done making it -- which cracked me up. That he knows the expression "pitch," for instance. Or that he sees our lives, as I so often do, in terms of how we might mine them for saleable ideas. Probably this shouldn't make me smile, his budding spirit of exploitation, but it does. "You're right," I said. And then a little later:...

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

In the car Birdy says, "Tell me again. Is my class called jernast-tick or jernast-ticks." When I say, "It's actually jim-nastics," she says, "Oh. Right." And then, quietly to herself, "Jernasticks." Birdy loves gymnastics. Michael has been taking her, and I've been hearing for a month now -- from both of them -- how great it is. "Pike!" Birdy will cry, suddenly, and go stock-still -- her arms out in front of her, her face a mask of surprise: many of Birdy's gymnastics positions seem to involve mostly her eyebrows. "Glunge!" she will say and shoot a bent knee out in front of her, throw her arms up to the heavens. "Is it glunge?" she will ask then, "or lunge?" and I have to answer,...

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

I truly don't understand the children and what their problem is. Is there a chemical irritant they emit? A sibling hormone that's like pheromones but, you know, the kind that de-tracts other people from you? I mean, how else can you explain the arguments they have? Their primal irritation with each other? Tonight, for instance, they're fighting about who brushes their teeth first. Note that, in opposition to such coveted operations as opening the front door or lying on top of me in the morning, tooth-brushing is a situation for which the desired position is not first. "Who went first last night?" is the question every night, and to be fair here, the children usually do a fine job of honest reckoning....

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

Sun floods our bedroom, lighting up our white sheets, the dust in the air, the rich brown of the children's hair. It's a school morning and it's freezing, and they're huddled against me for warmth and stalling. Nobody wants to get up. And then, of course, there's the urgent matter of our dental hygienist that really needs figuring out before the day can start. "You said he was mean," Ben says, and his voice is tight. Ben is one of those people who believes that mean should be saved for such extreme personalities as Cruella de Ville, say, or Attila the Hun. I respect his hesitation. "Oh, I didn't mean mean-mean," I say, in inadvertant triplicate. "I meant naughty-mean. Besides," I add, "he's Romanian, so that kind of...

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

We're trying to figure out what still fits. Despite the fact that Ben's main summer project appeared to be eating his own weight in saturated fat -- fried clams, dishes of ice cream, buttered rye toast, rhubarb custard pie -- he is skinnier than ever. All his pants are sliding off him. Which is just as well, because any that actually stay up on his hips end up being about a foot too short. Plus, he won't wear pants that involve zippers or snaps: when nature calls, who has time to respond by fumbling with metallic closures? Especially when nature's actually calling back, in a panic, because you forgot to return its call of an hour ago? Why not get a head start on the elastic-waisted comfort of the retired...