Godzilla Kisses

Dear self,

Remember why the nice doctor suggested that you start taking Claritin every day?

Remember what tends to happen when you stop?

Aren't the bright lights and the swimmers in your vision pretty sometimes? When you're lying flat on your back and holding utterly still, that is.

Also, you might want to mind the way you hold your neck when you're sleeping.

(Sigh.)

Friends, I urge you: do not trust Paula Deen's recipes. The last several friends I have had to trouble-shoot for have been relying on one of her apparently ill-tested concoctions. Talk to me first if you can. Ask for alternate recommendations. Oh, Paula, I'm sorry, but you're hurting the ones I love.

RSI flare-up prevents me from going into detail for now, but I had a nice weekend. Not in order: made soup, had tea with nice folks and then had tea again with someone else nice, played poker, fielded very funny misplaced phone calls from a friend late on Saturday night.

I would like somebody else to list my professional accomplishments for me, please.

1. I love roasting turkey. I love heritage turkey. I love leftover turkey. I love leftover heritage turkey so much that I may buy a bigger turkey next year even though this one was entirely more than adequate. I love that this turkey finished an hour earlier than planned, which made up for the fact that I put it in an hour late. I love the fact that my low-salt brine experiment resulted in an insanely juicy bird that I was able to stuff and make gravy from, too.

2. I think I am going to make turkey tetrazzini next week. Mmmm.

3. I have enough leftover stuffing to feed the babies through their next birthday. It's the perfect toddler food! Especially seeing as I made it with bacon -- extra protein -- and no nuts or dried fruit (i.e. choking hazards).

4. I love outsourcing dessert. Thank you for the pies! I love outsourcing side dishes. Thank you for the salad!

5. Thank you too for friends, family in the expanded sense, paper plates and metal forks, card tables that make perfect mobile forts (I cannot wait to play fort with sheets and pillows with these girls), old-school Sesame Street and new school too, corn bread at midnight, text messages from afar, every breath, all of it.

I have a somewhat complicated relationship to crafts. I don't do them, as a rule, but I feel vaguely guilty about that fact. There's gender stuff and there's queer stuff and there's body stuff all wrapped up in there. But I'm definitely not part of my generational cohort that took to reclaiming crafty things with a vengeance.

I just realized one important component to the whole mess -- my grandmother. She used to send me a crafty gift every birthday and every Christmas. Hook rugs, books on jewelry-making, crochet projects. Twice a year, every year.

It didn't take. I have sewing survival skills, but that's about the extent of it. I do think that I kind of rejected all craft-related things as an imposed idea of what girls 'should' do, being fed to me like vitamins whether I showed any actual interest in the subject or not. Not that there was anything inherently bad about the activities -- just for example, my grandmother also sent me cookbooks, and, well, um, I guess I rolled with that instead, just a little, huh?

Nonetheless. It will be interesting to see how the ladies feel about crafty things, and how I negotiate those shoals if so. I might have to farm them out to friends again. I'm sure some of you out there won't mind :)

Today, April managed to lose one of her shoes somewhere between here and Walgreen's.

If I could think of a good art project involving one toddler-sized shoe festooned with skulls and crossbones, I'd do it.

It's all true. P.S. Don't get me started on Erasure.

Thank you for your answers! Here's mine:

A pantry slut is a person who likes the raw materials for cooking so much, she tends to accumulate a menagerie of really interesting characters on her shelves. Sometimes she has a short and torrid fling with, say, a jar of pistachio paste; other times she ends up in a long, luxurious affair with a certain kind of lentil.

I hastily scribbled a shorter and less well-written version of this in response to an unexpected IM message over the weekend, which is how the question came up in the first place.

"Princess Venison"

My babies love the kung-fu movies.

Essay question: "what is a pantry slut?" How would you answer?

(I will post my answer later, with notes.)

Three real-life items that the twins are so interested in, it might be nice to have a 'play' alternative to fob them off on once in a while:

* Keychains
* Cell phones
* Laptops

April demonstrated that she is feeling better today by performing a double pacifier fan dance this afternoon. With extra wrist-twisting action.

Pediatricians are the only effin' doctors that you can ever get in to see right away any more, aren't they? Though it probably helps that I live five minutes from the office.

April started running a fever yesterday, and was very sleepy and clingy. She also had a runny nose and a bit of a cough, so we took her in -- honestly, the receptionist talked me into it. She has a cold. Her lungs are clear, and she's probably had the chance to build up immunity from her h1n1 shot, so unless her fever gets worse or the symptoms linger past next weekend, we just keep her cozy and let her cuddle and wipe her nose a lot.

True to her developing personality, she's only a little emotionally fragile and a lot sleepy. I had a hard time convincing the receptionist that, really, this baby in my arms who is beaming from ear to ear at you has been lethargic all day...of course the moment we were in the exam room she put her head on my chest to doze.

I am glad that this is actually their second ever cold (once a year :P), so I've popped my 'sick child' cherry already.

Logistics around taking only one child in, and keeping the h1n1+ parent out of the office, were ably handled by Steven and the pinch-hitting assistance of slackerstalker, who'd just come by to say hi and hang out, now that we were all supposedly feeling better.

My cold is improving, too. Hopefully we are all on the road to mend.

The hardest part in some ways is dealing with Simone's jealousy at April getting held. When she's older, I could explain, but for now I just say the words out loud ("I'm sorry, Simone, April needs extra attention right now because she's sick") and hope the soothing tone communicates some of the meaning. Simone would really like to be an only child some days, you can tell. Other days she is delighted to have a sibling. She would just like to be first, you know? She's the first-born, after all.

Looking forward to adventures that *don't* involve sick children or adult partners soon. Or soup.

Somebody should remake The Prisoner again, but this time, with Amazonia as the Island...and Wonder Woman as Number Six.

You know you want to see and/or read it! I know I do...

Also, the national newsletter for twin club associations is a sexist piece of crap.

1. I am attempting to see if the healing powers of soup apply even if you only make it, but don't eat it.

2. I am reading a book, Packaging Girlhood. I have mixed feelings about it, but it's certainly interesting. It also happens to be huge fodder for the writerly-minded. No girl-girl friendships? No supportive mothers? We can fix that!

3. I am finding also that I seem to have skipped an entire developmental layer of books. That is, I seem to have gone almost directly from picture books to adult books. I dabbled a little bit in what we now call YA but I thought it was kinda boring. Name a classic children's book that doesn't have pictures, and I probably haven't read it. (Or if I did, I read it for school.)

4. The babies are starting to reject naps. Among other excitement -- teething, tantrums, constipation...

5. I think it's time for tea.

I think it's just a cold, but it's a miserable cold.

My teeth ache. :P

Done. Thud.