Georgia's Journal

Success! My own concoction, there are a myriad of mixtures when it comes to the garden variety cookie dough, with coconut, with peanut butter, oatmeal, raisins…. Why not mix them all together and call it a salad? I think that’s what Cold Stone Creamery does with their ice cream.

The cookie I’ve just made is now one of my favorites. It could still succeed with less sugar. (I always cut part of the sugar out of a recipe. So sad to bite into a cookie and the prominent flavor is sugar!)

These won’t last long at Brad’s office (Six Apart) tomorrow. And that is the real success.

Sally at Trader Joe’s, offering tasty samples and answering all my cheese questions, turned me onto Fage (pronounced Fa-yeh!), Greek style yogurt. As a product of my generation, I naturally reached for the non-fat. But Mireille Guiliano, of French Women Don’t Get Fat fame, said to go for the full fat. Ok, I like fat.

I’d no idea yogurt could be so good. The texture of the non fat was already nice and thick, but the whole milk yogurt was over the top, and filling as well.

If you live anywhere near a Trader Joe’s and you like yogurt, I highly recommend this one. It is best with grapes (1) and/or strawberries as well as granola. (Flax seed offers a nutty taste to compliment the fruit.) Beware, it also contains cream, and I don’t think anyone should take the one cup serving size to heart, but the fat of the milk and cream are also what make it so satisfying.

1) If you like grapes, they are lovely with milk products, not just yogurt, but Brad likes them cut up into his ice cream and marvels, “Why has no one marketed grape ice cream?” Grapes also make a nice dessert when cut up into Rice Krispies, Frosted Flakes, or your choice of hearty cereal. They combine well with the milk.

As I write, children all over town are soaking in the best bath they’ve had all season. Tomorrow is the first day of school. Savannah, Seth, and Arwen are watching their last Spongebob of the “summer.”

At 8 a.m. Seth starts real school, not just preschool. Savannah goes into 4th grade, and although Arwen’s preschool won’t start ‘til the end of September, the lives of her two best playmates will be disciplined by the school bell. We have to be dressed and fed and out the door by 7:45, Arwen right along with the rest of us.

I am so excited for them. I hated school in the beginning. Life was quiet on our street, and I had few playmates except a sister as good at fighting as I was. My mother didn’t go out unless it was necessary, and socializing from the grocery cart is not the same as kindergarten. I got into many fights those first months of school. It wasn’t until I had a toddler of my own that I understood why; I saw Savannah making friends everywhere we went, and we went all over Fairfield County, Connecticut and beyond. Now, Savannah looks forward to school the same way she jumps into her little start-ups, but a halfway decent teacher keeps her more motivated. Goal oriented, she’ll have good energy for school for about 7 of the 10 months in session. I don’t even ride her about her homework because she hates the idea of missing her recess.

Before dinner tonight Seth has not acknowledged kindergarten. The last thing he spoke about it was his sadness at leaving his kinderpals classmates in the Spring. I think it’s my fault, ‘cause I talked a lot about the first day of school, his birthday, and his birthday party. He couldn’t keep it straight. If I asked him what he thought of starting kindergarten, he’d say, “When’s my birthday?” They love their countdowns. When I said over stir fry tonight, “You start kindergarten tomorrow!” He said, “Tomorrow?!” and yelled his tameless, nonverbal enthusiasms.

Okay, time to draw his bath.

Just like his Daddy has done for a long time, Seth just started using his vocal chords to yawn. Kids have all kinds of quirks that come out in different phases, talking loudly while breathing in; that's a lovely one, especially right in your ear. Yawning with a voiceover isn't so bad. Even when he (1) does it in public. There are far more disruptive things a five year old boy could do.

I don't imagine Seth ever had a moment where he thought, "Hey, I like the noise Daddy makes when he yawns. I'll start that." But it's at this age that boys have really begun to identify with their fathers. (The process of pulling away from the mother can start at about 18 months.) I think even this goofy, subconscious adopting of a trait seals the deal. We are destined to become our same sex parent, no?

Naturally, there are little troubles and stress (2) that you learn to let go of with each child. It may be the best reason to have three children. As Daddy has yawned loudly through our years together, I've learned to transpose annoyances into amusements. And there is the secret to a happy marriage!

~
1) Seth, not Daddy
2) As little as they are, they step on my feet and I still holler "Feeet."

If people are able to lie to themselves about their motives and such, and never be aware that they’re doing it, why can’t we lie to ourselves on purpose? Brad, at 20, could stay up all night and go to classes the next day, sometimes 2 nights in a row! And, he was working full time. In the nights he did go to bed, at 2:30, he’d tell himself it was 8 o’clock. How rested this made him actually feel the next day, I don’t know. He acted fine.

When I have to step out of the routine that I’ve built around us, I lose the ground under me just a little. Driving to a new town, taking a driver’s test, doing my taxes for the first time. It’s a little embarrassing. Brad has always done our taxes. I wanted to do them too, just to know that it wasn’t difficult, but it was easier for him to do them by himself. So after a failed home business in ‘06, I had to do them myself. I knew things in my paper work that Brad didn’t, and well, I was too proud to ask him to do my taxes. April was a particularly hard month, where I took on too many commitments, and then I got sick. I worried over it far too long. And then I got this idea that I could “lie” some confidence into myself. Why not? We lie to ourselves in order to get what we want, avoid guilt, make the world a happier place. One day I just decided to do it. I moaned to myself about what little concentration I have, what interruptions I have, until I worked myself into an awful mood. Then I just got up and did it. It took me two hours, two very interrupted hours, actually spanning about 4 hours’ time. But there! It was done!

What else have I not accomplished? How else have I held myself back? What’s keeping me from being a song writer? or a biographer? or finding someone to learn Spanish with me? My lack of confidence and excuse making are real killers. So if we lie to ourselves anyway, why not use it to our advantage?

“Georgia, your confidence is astounding! Your natural writing abilities are grossly underused, and if you don’t harness the quiet moments, say no to the piddly little goals that don’t matter to you as much, something terrible will happen!”

I know, they’re really just fancy affirmations.

A couple of months ago I was waking in the middle of the night, almost every night. Every time when I woke, the gears of my mind began turning, and I began thinking either about the events of the previous day, all the possibilities of the next, or whether or not one of the little ones had wandered off down the street in a night terror. (Just kidding, that fear has mostly passed.) I’d get up to turn off a fan, cover up the baby, recheck a locked door. And then I’d lie back down, awake for 2 hours.

Unfortunately, I get ideas in my head. I’m a “Why” person. So when it came to my insomnia, from what I’d read I was sure that caffeine was the offender. I got stuck on this notion for a long time.

Like most people, the thought of giving up something, especially something with strong comfort associations for me, is just what I need to go hog wild. So giving up caffeine entirely made we want it more. But an older friend rightly told me, “The best thing a mother can do for her children is to get a good night’s sleep.” You can see the dilemma.

Then we had a cool night in June, and I put on my winter pajamas to go to bed. I woke in the night as usual but closed my eyes and went right back to sleep. I can tell with a few years behind me that as we age, we learn quicker. Hallelujah. I thought, what if I went back to sleep easily because I had more clothes on? Apparently so. Night after night, I’ve gone to bed in my winter pajamas, a sheet and thin blanket on me, on warm nights the oscillating fan blows throughout the night. I wake just a bit, enough to know it, and I go right back to sleep.

This has shaken the ground underneath me a bit. To be so sure for so long that one thing was causing a problem, a cause I felt pretty powerless to do anything about and then to find a solution in what seemed like an accident, is a real left-field feeling I have never had. Really, I don’t think this sort of lesson or knowledge has ever come to me like this before. It never occurred to me that I might be cold or even slightly chilled. The fine line my body temperature was crossing was almost indistinguishable. My body knew it, even if it took my mind months to figure it out.

I’m not one to think I’m right about everything. In fact I’m a chronic fence sitter on major issues, but what else might I be wrong about!? The possibilities are exciting.

Seth and Arwen have been wearing their new bike helmets, the trendy round kind. Seth organizes astronaut games, usually involving the helmets, our good climbing tree, and dismantling the wagon. They're playing astronaut this morning.

Arwen is our slow child. It's a good, dreamy kind of slow. She's as sharp as the other two, but there's little to hurry her when she's not compliant.

When Seth and Arwen came in for "space gear" which involved Arwen's getting into her bathing suit, Seth got tired of waiting on her dilly dallying and shouted, "I'm blasting off without you!"

My mother hated taking us to school. I think she was afraid she’d be late for work. My strongest and worst memory of starting each new school year was the recurring nightmare the night before school started or the early morning of. Grey and foggy at dawn, the bus would stop in front of our driveway and never wait long enough for me to get outside. As the bus disappeared in the distance and the fog, I’d run after it. I always woke up before catching up to it. My sister had the same recurring nightmare.

Garfield comic strips; I Spy, I Spy, and more I Spy!; Animal, Vegetable Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver (grown-up book)

The 8 year old’s joke o’ the day, “What loses its head in the morning but gets it back at night?”

“A pillow!”

I have found a pattern in my party planning. When I'm shopping for my children at their birthdays or December, I'm conservative in my buying. Savannah always gets one or two things on her list, which is always 5 times that long. When she shows me her list and talks about it, I can see two things; one, she knows she won't get everything on the list, and two, this year there were subtleties in her approach. She's conscious of appearing greedy.

I love that. I want to reach out and hug her for it. She's thoughtful of her place in the world, and I'm happy to see that so far she has not fallen for the notion of entitlement that so many children of this generation and in our location on the map seem to have fallen for.

It must mean I'm correct in my conservative shopping. But then I wrap the gifts. It's almost always the night before the friends come for games and cake, and every time I panic a little. I'm sad that I didn't give her just one or two more things on her list. Then I wonder if I'll have time to pick up High School Musical 2 or one of those American Girl movies tomorrow before the party. (I won't.)

Her main present is an American Girl accessory. (She owns two American Girl dolls which she paid for herself with allowance and birthday/grandma money.) Before wrapping the box, I saw the catalogue in it. I've thrown several away before she ever even saw them. I know, aren't I cruel? ;-) But some I give to her. Tonight, the catalogue reminded me how I felt when I was young and looked at wish books. I knew I couldn't have _any_thing in them. That doesn't bother me now, seeing things I can't have, but it was very sad when I was young. I hope it's not like that for her. I don't think it is. I believe she has more ambition than I did, more knowledge than I had that she can work toward something.

On her card I drew a picture of nine individual candles, some with little polka dots, some with big, some with stripes, one a flower collar and the last, the ninth, large wings and a smile on the flame. The front of the card quotes Helen Keller. "Life is either a daring adventure, or it is nothing at all."