The Fish Pond

Finding Comfort in a Book

Those who know me in real life know how much I love to read. I never leave the house without my cell phone, key ring with CPR face mask and nail clippers attached (seriously, you'd be astonished at how many tasks you can do with nail clippers), my iPod, and a book shoved in my bag. I've even forgotten diapers and wipes sometimes, but I always have my book.

I constanly had my nose buried in a book as a kid. My mother would send me out to play, knowing I needed exercise, but I'd just take my book and sit under a tree somewhere and read instead. I had a little nook at the end of our living room couch between the couch's armrest and a side table, and I was a teeny little thing and I used to take a drink and a snack and stash them behind the couch and I'd curl up on the floor in this little spot and read. Sometimes my mother would stand right in front of me and scream at me at the top of her lungs and I wouldn't even know she was there (though paybacks are a bitch because my oldest does the same thing now and it drives me crazy even as I'm happy she's found the same relationship with books that I have). When my mother died when I was 15, I retreated to the solace of my room and read and reread all my favorite books. They gave me comfort when my world had been destroyed. I was able to get through some really awful years and horrible things in my life by retreating to my books.

When I find a book that I really like it's like I'm visiting an old friend that I haven't seen for years but who I have a close relationship with - like "ahhhhhhh, I'm home" even if I've never read the book before. Comfort Food by Kate Jacobs is one of those books. I expected that it would be like some of the food mysteries that I've read - an easy to read, predictable plot with lots of meaty descriptions of recipes and dishes and a few recipes printed at the end. What I found was so much more.

What usually sucks me in to a book is the characterization - convincing portraits of people that pull me in, teach me something about myself or the world at large. I found that in Comfort Food, but in particular Gus' two daughters and their relationship following the death of their father when they were children and their mother's struggle to cope with her grief and establish a life for the family really,  really struck me. They were convincing and compelling. I couldn't put the book down, which is particularly difficult when you have 4 kids and a lot of other stuff to do - one afternoon I picked up one kid from preschool while the baby slept and then I drove to the bus stop for my older kids an hour early and put on a DVD for Sunny so that I could keep reading. But don't we all go to such lengths for our old friends?

This post is part of the monthly book club for the Silicon Valley Moms Blogs. Go here to read what others are saying about Comfort Food, where you'll find more about how others have been affected by this book.

The Pit of Despair

When Nemo was about a year old or so, we bought a Superyard XTLMEGAHUGE or somesuch nonsense, aka babyjail, so we could keep our busy climber in one place so I could pee by myself or work on dishes and not have to worry quite so much about him getting into stuff he shouldn't. Of course, he's a fourth kid, so as a result of him watching his siblings, it took maybe three months before he figured out he was strong enough to pick it up and crawl under it to get out. Since that time, we've just used this huge area in our family room as the catchall place to pitch all the toys when we wanted to quickly clear a path so we could walk across the room without impaling ourselves on a playmobil pirate mast or a stray lego or barbie shoe. We called it the Pit of Despair, because it was depressing, and God help you if you were missing something, say the crevice tool to the vacuum cleaner or the one special lego from the Indiana Jones set of Maximum Proportions or $20 or something, and it happened to be in there. It wasn't coming out anytime soon. We probably had gnome colonies in there.

We also kept the chairs to our kid size table in there, because although Nemo could pick the thing up and crawl under it, he isn't strong enough to lift the chairs out, though he can push those chairs to all sorts of locations were we hide Treasure and Cookies and other contraband, so we keep the chairs there so we can eat all the chocolate. Works for us.

A couple of weeks ago my old daycare provider, who has been watching all of my kids off and on for a couple of hours a week, asked if she could watch my kids at her house instead of at my house, and I told her that was actually better for me and how often did she want them? Because while she's the bestest at making sure our kids do not make more of a mess and at making them clean up (she can tell them the same thing I tell them IN THE SAME WORDS and they pick up for her and just whine at me and go all limp boned), I am sorely limited in what I can do when they are in the house, because God forbid I throw out that piece of hershey wrapper, it was the best hershey wrapper in the world AND I JUST DON'T UNDERSTAND!

So, over the last two weeks, I've had several hours of kid free time. Here's what I did with it:

In progress - this was after I had already cleaned out at least 3/4 of what was in there. I'm too embarassed to show what that looked like, but suffice to say I couldn't even get IN the fence.

More mess....

Still more....

One of the three bins I filled with stuff to donate. There were two more bins that were a size bigger than this one.

We bought this thing, a locking media cabinet, into which we put all of our DVDs, DS systems and games, and Wii games so our kids can't get to them without supervision. They'd end up strewn across the room and the kids would step on them, or Nemo would pick them up and try to get them out of the cases and snap them in half. Nemo has already mashed his face into it and given himself a fat lip. So it has been properly christened.

Here is the new and improved Pit of Not-So-Much-Despair:

The only things in it are the chairs that we still don't want Nemo using for nefarious purposes. It has been reduced in size by half and may go away altogether if we can figure out how to secure the chairs in a better way. Next up is steam cleaning the carpet, despite BigDaddyFish's fears that the carpet will disintegrate if we do that.

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New DC Metro Moms post about my mother in law over here. It's not what you think.

Kids Show Characters Who Need to be Smacked. Hard.

1. Caillou AND his parents. Whiny little twit. And why oh why do his parents let him get away with it? Why? I wouldn't allow that in a million years. This show is totally banned from this house.
2. Henry on Oswald. We get a lot of him in this house, as Oswald is Nemo's favorite show. I don't care if his feathers get wet. And poor Daisy gets the brunt of his obnoxiousness. She is voiced by the same person who does Libby on Jimmy Neutron, and I keep hoping that just once she'll lose her mind and open a can of whoopass all over him. That would be awesome.
3. Barney. Nuff said.
4. Every single one of those dragons on Dragon Tales, but especially Ord. I hate the stereotype of the big, dumb fraidy cat and think the show's writers could do so much but don't.
5. Ruby. Shut up big bossy sister. I love Max, though.

Dora and Diego drive me crazy, too, as a whole show, but not nearly as badly as some others. Lest you think I don't like any kids shows, I rather like Backyardigans, Blue's Clues with Steve rocked (oh, the pregnancy dreams I had about him) and the aforementioned Jimmy Neutron is one of my favorite shows ever.

So, who would be on your list? Who do you ban from your house? Who do you like? And at the risk of sounding like the dirty old farts we are, who have you/would you have a sexy dream about?

Note to My Neighbor's Visitor

Look, I fully appreciate the difficulty of dealing with getting a child out of the car and in the house in the pouring rain. You have no idea. But really, that's absolutely no excuse for taking up two parking spaces because you don't want to take the time to park properly. It might have been nice for me to be able to get all four of my kids into the house before they were completely saturated.