Katsuke

While washing dishes I normally let my brain go to other places and today I mused upon a childhood memory I thought I’d share.

I tried to learn German, probably not as hard as I should have, but I did try no matter how much I hated it. My biggest lack of motivation was that it was just so hard, and I honestly felt like a complete moron because it seemed to take me so much longer and so many more lesson repeats than it took my siblings. This eventually ended up as a deep seating loathing of the language, which, along with my knowledge of it, has been fading over the years.

There was, though, one way I loved German.

I was quite the little explorer, and I always wanted to find new paths, new trees, new nooks, and new rooms. So one day I wandered into the little room behind the organ at church, it was fairly unused at that point - mostly dusty boards and choir robes - which made it absolutely fascinating. While poking around like only a curious child can, I found an old lovely book. It was in a tiny corner with a little “window” where one could keep an eye on the narthex, if one felt they were in a place they shouldn’t be and wanted to be able to skedaddle out fast enough to not be caught.

The book was very dusty, and very small, and very old, and smelled very much like a proper old book should. In short it was exactly the thing to peek my interest.

It was actually a hymnal, an old German hymnal with no music and just tons of cramped German words. It was a challenge, a puzzle, and I sat down right then and there and started trying to decipher hymns. Using nothing but the German words I knew and the German words that look essentially like their English counterparts I managed to figure out what one hymn was. I couldn’t read it, I could barely pronounce it, but I knew the tune and I started singing my German hymn.

I went up there several other times, sometimes bringing an English hymnal and sometimes sneaking the English to German dictionary, and managed to identify around 15 hymns. I always tried to sing them, but occasionally they had different meters than the version I knew, but then I’d find a tune with the proper meter and wing it.

I don’t remember why I stopped doing that, if I was too afraid of getting in trouble or if the church got locked up more often, but I sometimes wonder how much better at German I would be if I had kept learning like that. It was definitely “harder,” but it was so much more fun integrating all the different things I love (ciphers, music, dictionaries, logic puzzles, etc.) and that might have made quite an impact over several years.

As a child we made bread, lots of it. Eventually we kiddos got to make some of it, something I never liked much because we made so much we couldn’t use the Kitchenaid. The worst part in my head was the first part: stirring the sugar, water, yeast, and several cups of flour together at least 100 times. I’m sure mom explained why at the time, but what stuck with me was getting it mixed.

For years I was of the opinion that you just needed to stir it to mix and the “100 strokes” was a mother’s way of making sure it actually got mixed semi-decently. So when I got married and started baking bread I just stirred the starting part as much as I thought took to make it mixed, which was usually 10 or 20 times. It was okay bread, but okay bread isn’t worth spending all that time in a mini-kitchen so I eventually stopped making bread very much.

Then I started working full-time and never wanted to bake anything, let alone bread. My mediocre bread making skills stayed fairly mediocre as I only made bread every couple months.

Finally, I saw an e-mail from my mom saying that you needed to stir at least 100 times to help develop the gluten. That made me wonder if that was my problem. The next time I made bread I stirred and stirred until my weak little arms said, “no more!” at number 104.

As it turns out, when your mom says something and you can’t remember why… there’s probably a very good reason and you should still listen. My bread is so much better now!

Funny sounding word “Nopalitos.” In actuality it is the term for Prickly Pear pads when they are prepared for eating.

Now take a guess at what I spent a while doing today.

I’ve gotten this wonderful book from the library several (read: often or lots) times, and it panders perfectly to my desires for learning new things about nature and for experimenting with food. I have found this book so amazing I have written out multiple pages out of it with recipes and how to identify certain wild yummies in case I need them and it turns out it’s time for me to be sharing it with other patrons.

Turns out my hunch was right, I didn’t have the book today and I had exactly what I needed anyway.

Punky and I were out walking when I saw beautiful, clean, perfectly sized, Prickly Pear pads. One fist pump later we were scurrying back to the apartment for a bucket, gloves, and tongs. The little lady kept staring at me as I twisted the three best pads off and dumped them in the bucket, “her” bucket, but followed me around anyway.

Next on the to-do list after getting the pads was to get the prickles off which I expected to be a tough job. There are two ways to do it, burn them with fire or scrub them off. I decided on the first method and got out a lighter; oddly enough trying to burn the prickles off a cactus with a cigarette lighter is both tedious and ineffective. Onto the next method of scrubbing them off with a scouring pad, which also turns out to be painstaking and time consuming work as you have to hold them in the tongs as you scrub unless you want to be scrubbing prickles out of your hands next.

There are two common, or best as the recipe said, ways to cook the pads. One is to grill it (open flame preferred) and the other is to pan/stir fry. I chose stir frying as I don’t have a proper grill, neither do I have much experience with them and I wanted it to be as perfect as possible. The recipe was very specific about cooking them whole and then rinsing them before eating or using in other recipes.

Wait.

Rinse?

Ew, rinsing stir fried vegetables sounds like one of the least appetizing things you could possibly do to a food. But I wanted to do it right, and I was following the recipe to the letter because I was really looking forward to eating the local wild goodies. And as a Northerner at heart eating a cactus just seems so cool and exotic. So I fried them up to the nice crisp brown color it said it should be; it didn’t take too long either, even if one did “pop” and end up looking like a balloon. One thorough rinsing later and they weren’t looking so crispy any longer, so much so that Punky decided that they were Blecky. I cut them up with slightly waning excitement as they didn’t look as delicious any more.

Then I stopped. More rinsing… followed by more rinsing…

I have a high tolerance for weird and vaguely unappetizing looking food. I even drink what I still will occasionally mock as snot-mushroom tea. Snot-mushrooms have nothing on what this looked like. If you’ve ever read a little about cacti you know that they store water inside their hollow pads/trunks. Guess what happens when you cook this stored “water”? You end up with a little pouch full of warm, sticky, runny, stretchy, snot. No amount of rinsing would get rid of it.

Even from her low vantage little Punky could see the the snot stretching on the knife and across the counter which prompted a full slew of Blecky, blecky, blecky, blecky, which I could not help but repeat.

The worst part was that I had spent so much time on it I still bit the cleanest end of one of the pieces. Tasted as bad as it looked, and felt worse than it looked. The second saddest part is that I had done all of this after the incident of making wild persimmon jam and learning the hard way what exactly “astringency” means. The most sad part is that I know I’m going to try something else and no amount of failure is going to stop me.

Little missy now knows 12 body parts, she doesn’t say them but she can point them out on herself, myself, and pictures.
Head, eyes, ears, nose, mouth, tongue, hands, fingers, feet, toes, bellybutton, and tummy. I don’t know if hair counts as a body part, and she’s learning knees and chin so she continues to eat up knowledge.

She’s nearly obsessed about the letters on the “no diving sign” by the pool, she loves to point them out and have me tell her what they are. I think she may know what an uppercase “g” is, but considering how she doesn’t like “perform” I may not know for a long time.

Punky decided to go through another three almost diaper-free days before she got her underpants a little dirty and shows no sign of potty training desires anymore.

She’s making good signing progress. Missy is making up her own signs, and picking up on useful signs such as “swing” “swim” and “juice” (among other things).
Verbally she’s a little stinker. I overheard her refer to an animal by name, outloud, clearly. But she doesn’t talk, you know. Today she also was playing with her special lamb and it fell off of the car toy, she put it back on and told it “stay.” But she doesn’t talk, you know.

Regarding naptime and nighttime she’s wanting more independence and is not wanting me to stay until she goes to sleep. Sometimes I think it may be from a desire to get up and play instead of sleeping, but at least half the time she’s asleep within five minutes of me leaving.

Her current obsession is trucks. Everything is trucks, trucks, trucks, trucks, TRUCKS! We found a video called “Twenty Trucks” and it’s just 40 minutes of real trucks doing real things, and she loves it. Of the eight books she chose from the library six of them are about trucks, cars, and planes. And I’m so totally boring I got Madeline books, and the wretchedness of sitting through a picture book that doesn’t have trucks in it is just beyond wretched. She plays with trucks, makes “trucks” with her duplos, reads books about trucks, watches truck TV, and points out every truck she sees. Yesterday’s and today’s highlights were the garbage truck and the mail truck.

At least there’s a little bit of girlie in there, she does like her dolly and her dress up scarves and beads… but they are indoor things and outdoor activities are better.

She loves swimming and shows no fear of her face getting wet. She starts telling us before breakfast starts that she wants to go swimming and a day is not a great day unless there’s water involved.

So there is a “brief” run down on all things Punky-Pie!

• Totally forgot I could update twitter from my blog. That means I may use it more… nah… I won’t… #

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Yes, I admit, I am biased against the public school system in general, but I am perfectly willing to also admit that it’s what we have and it’s up to parents to really work with their kids to make the public school effective. I see over and over how equally bright children with equal opportunities get different results because of one thing: parents.

Parents are the pivotal point in their children’s learning, and until parents realize this - and don’t just think the schools will do it all - the public schools will keep deteriorating. Parents can make the public schools work well enough for regular kids, the biggest problem is that not all kids can be stuffed into the cookie cutters. Whether high or low, these kids are getting jipped. The hyper-intelligent kids have more room to grow, but there’s only so far they can go without more one on one attention. I’m not calling for more teachers to get the schools up to the “ideal classroom” of 6 students or below (sound familiar anyone?), that’s not financially feasible or good for our society’s attitude towards learning vs. schooling.

The biggest problem I see is in the “lower functioning” special needs kids. I’ve seen first hand how well homeschooled Special Ed. kids match up against their public school counterparts in social skills, everyday life skills, and academic skills. I’m not saying homeschooling is a magic tool to make it all better, but it does seem to work better. Loving attention from parents and family, understanding friends, and varied social interaction partnered with 24/7 everyday life learning may be a struggle, but it is effective.

And regarding the “What about socialization” question, I do have a few things to say. Children learn behavior, manners, and social niceties by example (for the most part, they do have to be directed). And it used to be, I’m talking way back when, that children usually had more adults in their life than peers. More maturity to emulate and more responsibilities to live up to. Now what happens when you pack 24 kids into a classroom with 1 adult? Monkey see, monkey do. And we wonder why kids are so immature.

Now take that to the next level. Pack 5-8 behaviorally immature/inappropriate children together for 2/3rds of their day. What do they see all the time? Who are they going to copy? Even with adult intervention and trying the best they can, there’s only so much a person can do to stop a river.

The little lady loves the library. Granted, she’s a social butterfly and loves being out and about all the time, but she really loves the library.

First she gets to “help” carry the bag of books in and then be the big girl and put all the books in the book drop. She absolutely loves this part, and I didn’t know quite just how much until I found her trying to stick other things down the drop.

Then she can pick out all the books and videos she wants. This usually ends up to be a Kidsongs DVD and two or three board books. Today, though, she found a really neat book of wildlife photography in the adult section while I was looking up herb books. We had a great time looking through it this evening.

By the time she wears out the specialness of the munchkin sized rocking chair and huge stuffed animals she’s done picking out books and it becomes time to run around like a crazy toddler. She doesn’t want to lose me, just make me look for her, so after much up and down and in and out and zigzagging under tables I finally catch her and we sit and read for a few minutes or, in Punky’s case, sometimes dumping my purse.

Today we did something new. I gave her my library card on our way to the check out line and told her to give it to the librarian. It was so cute watching her walk up and hand over the card and then help me unload all the library goodies (after a brief retrieval of a DVD into the book drop), and put them back in the bag after they were checked out.

She loves books, she loves to help, and she loves being a big girl. I think the library may have just beaten Wal-Mart out as the best place to be.

Right now it’s just so much fun to watch her play. Before bedtime today I got to watch a conversation between a stuffed bear and a stuffed lamb, they had different voices (”baa”s and “grrr”s) and physically interacted, and it was just cute. She’s really getting into imaginative and pretend play, and some of her animals are starting to get somewhat consistent personalities. The Sam Houston bear has a very deep voice and likes to stomp on the other toys, but the kitty likes to rub on the other toys. They change, but for a day a two that’s how she plays with them.

She does similar things with her Noah’s Ark, sometimes Noah has to stomp on the animals before they go into the ark. “N” says it’s because Noah is in charge and sometimes she will make him herd the animals, I haven’t seen this yet though.

Playdough and drawing are now much more fun, especially playdough. She spent almost an hour straight playing with the playdough I made; rolling with a rolling pin, using the cookie cutters, stabbing it with a knife, etc. She isn’t showing much of an interesting in molding or stacking, but chopping is the best ever.

She now shows no interest in the potty, again, it seems to be just a game she wants to play every once in a while. Punky’s just teasing, but she’s doing what she wants. And since we’re not fighting about nursing anymore it really doesn’t bother me to occasionally have to fight at changing time; she’s still so young, she has quite a while before she needs to learn.

Climbing is a driving force in everything now-a-days. She really likes to escalate the dangerousness of everything she does, once something is almost mastered she’s already moving onto the next step. Here is a very typical progression involving the couch: climbing onto it, crawling along it, standing on it, sitting on the armrest, sitting on the back, and we intervened recently with the newest addition of running along the back of the couch. If there is no danger, there is no fun. We had to stop her from jumping off the couch onto the beanbag chair.

Her vocabulary is increasing, she can now say “juice,” “yes,” “please,” and “bath.” That’s about 10 words altogether! If you add in her signing vocabulary there’s “book,” “hat,” “ball,” “swing,” “car,” and “please.” I know a lot of kids her age are talking more than she is, but she has very good understanding. Since she knows what the words are, when she’s ready she’ll use them. She’s getting more language concepts down, if I ask her “can I see your . . .?” the answer is “no” or hand it over. I don’t actually know what else she knows for the most part because as a toddler there really isn’t yet the desire to comply with questions and directions.

Punky’s newest obsession is bubbles, blowing them, watching them, popping them. Every once in a while she manages to blow a couple bubbles, but for the most part she likes to dip the bubble wand and have me blow the bubbles.

There are many other things, but that’s just a short snippet before my bedtime.

Just a quick story here.

I had made Punky’s breakfast, mostly of her own choosing, consisting of peanut butter toast and yogurt. She loves it, and I can eat the same thing and we’re both happy. I decided to have a mug of cocoa with mine today just for a little sugary celebration of “I’m at home today,” and she just watched me as I made it.

So when I sat down next to her with cocoa in hand she scoots over closer, as far as her chair allows, and holds out her toast. “Teece?” she said, which from all I can gather means “please” and mimes dipping the toast up and down. I laughed and let her dip her toast in my cocoa.

She has never had cocoa before, let alone cocoa and toast, and as she bit into it her face lit up. She dropped the toast onto her plate so she could clap, got a big smile, and started giggling in happiness.

Yeah, that’s my girl.

Warning: this topic may not be relevant or comfortable for men.

I was again reading a topic of conversation on the internet about whether or not to breastfeed their soon-to-be-born little ones and the general consensus was “it’s hard at first, but it gets better,” and, “it’s one of the most bonding activities.” I am a firm believer in the “breast is best” side of things, but I realize just how bad everything went for me when all I want to tell people is that it can be the most stressful, painful, awful part of having a baby.

Especially the “it gets better” line. I know it normally does, I remember talking to someone with an 8-10 month old when the munchkin was about 3-4 months and remarking on how they got their kiddo to stay still. At that point I got hope, just a few more months and I won’t be pinning the baby down… a few more months and I wouldn’t need to go sit in public restrooms to nurse because of the constant battle. For a kiddo like mine, it only got worse as she became stronger and could fight harder. Part of what kept me going was the knowledge that the mommy has to win everything! Remember, if you are fighting battles it may seem horribly difficult in the here and now, but it is worth more than you can possibly imagine if you win.

I really admire the people who can keep breastfeeding for two years, that’s a lot of dedication, but I thank my lucky stars almost every day that child-led weaning worked in my favor and that she decided she was done at 13 months.

I’m not writing this to scare people or to play a pity party, mostly just in the off-chance that someone going through the same thing I did will find it. I remember searching the internet for hours trying to find someone who dealt with the same problems, someone who, though I’d never talk to them, would be fellow soldiers on the same battlefront. And you know what, I never found anyone. For a long time I felt like no matter what I did right, who’s great advice I followed, I must be a total failure because it always failed. Now that the little missy is older I can see in hindsight that it’s just her personality and she honestly doesn’t seem to like the taste of breastmilk. I can see now how I didn’t fail because it wasn’t a matter of right way vs. wrong way, it was a matter of what she wanted vs what she was physically capable of.

I know to people who didn’t have such a hard time this may seem weird, but I know if I had found this 10 months ago it would have been one of the most comforting things ever. So as much as a stretch it may be, I hope this helps someone out there in the vast nothingness of the internets.