The Zog Blog

The more things change…

…the more things stay the same.

(Three years ago, and now. Wishing you all the best of the season.)

I need to get used to writing snippets about our life, quick posts that only take a few minutes. Daniel’s infancy is zooming by, and I want to be able to have some documentation to remember it.

Daniel may still look eerily like his brother, but they couldn’t be more different. While Jacob enjoys other people, he is clearly far down the introvert scale. As a baby and now as a boy, he prefers to have large stretches of non-interactive time when he can throw himself into a task.

Daniel is as much an extrovert as Jacob is an introvert. He’s constantly trying to catch our eyes, our attention, our smiles. He doesn’t like being in the Bjorn or carried much, because then he can’t see our faces. New people make him light up like an incredibly pudgy firefly. Any toy with a face is instantly a favorite. He gurgles when he gets his diaper changed, because look! A face! Right above mine! HELLLOOOOOO, big person, gurglegurglegurgle.

Putting him to sleep is usually a matter of waiting until he’s tired and then leaving him alone in a dark room. Our presence jazzes him up and keeps him awake. Nursing was a disaster–a terrible combination of me letting down too fast, him not wanting to engage in an activity where our faces were so far apart, painful intestinal gas. Now that I’m pumping and feeding him by bottle, he’s as happy a baby as I’ve known.

Jacob continues to be a never-ending spring of fun. School is wonderful for him, particularly socially–after a very rough summer, he’s turning into quite a friendly and affable kid and often asks to have playdates with other children. He’s getting closer and closer to reading, sounding out words and asking what everything, everything says. He makes jokes, he’s a huge help in the kitchen, we play around on the monkey bars and chase at the playground.

(Also, if you ever need butter smeared on your lens cap, he’s totally your guy.)

Life is wonderful, busy, terrible, joyous beyond belief, unbearably dull, frantic, fantastic, full.

So very full. Hope you’re doing as well as we are!

Uh, sorry about that–there was a peculiar and difficult error with my Wordpress installation. But it’s fixed now, so here are some pictures!

Family portrait, day 4. Also, I present the following as evidence that all babies look alike:

Daniel, around 1 week old.

Jacob, around 1 week old.

Life with two kids is difficult so far. I thoroughly enjoyed Jacob’s newborn period and had a very easy time with it. Lots of things have been even easier this time around (healing from the birth, nursing, getting Daniel diurnal, etc.). But on the whole, this is well more than twice as hard as one newborn was. Daniel is a much fussier baby than I remember Jacob being, which may just be Daniel, and may be the fact that there is very little catering to the baby this time around.

His needs are all met, of course. He’s fed promptly, and walked when he’s fussy, and changed quickly. But with a three-year-old to keep up with, Daniel doesn’t get the hours of leisurely nursing and napping in my lap that Jacob did. Starting on his first day home, he’s been to Target, to the grocery store, to Jacob’s preschool, to the park, around the neighborhood, up to Maine, down to Providence. He’s up at 6:00am with the rest of us, doing the madcap race to get out of the house in time to drop Jacob off at preschool. (Which Jacob is loving, by the way.)

So, I have to wonder if Jacob would have been this fussy, too, if he’d never had a moment to catch his breath. If he was constantly exposed to slices of the bright, cold world from the side of the Bjorn or peeking out from the Moby wrap. If he was constantly prodded, tickled, giggled at, caressed, all as carefully and gently as a three-year-old can manage.

Sometimes I feel badly for the little guy. But on the other hand, Jacob is the first person Daniel has really looked at, and Jacob is so obviously smitten with the little tyke. I can tell it’s going to be a privilege to watch their relationship develop. And we’re more relaxed and competent parents, too.

Parting gift: Jacob took this picture yesterday. I had the tripod set up with the camera on it, and I showed him how to look through the viewfinder and which button takes the picture. He turned the camera until he saw us, and clicked. He was completely thrilled with himself, of course.

Squeaking in under the wire, our second August baby.

Born at 7:30pm August 31. Mom and baby healthy and happy. He was 9 pounds 14 ounces, and 22″ long.

Welcome home, little guy. Nice to finally meet you.

Our absence, that is.

This picture is from two weeks ago, now, but the little dictator-in-residence is apparently still quite happy where he is. (All labor-inducing suggestions and distracting funny stories gladly welcomed.) A few days after my last post, we finally diagnosed the rash Jon and I had picked up since the move. (Warning: Those looking for cheery content should skip to the pictures at the end.)

Our (insert expletive here) tenants–or, more particularly, the tenant in our bedroom–forgot to take their bedbugs with them when they left.

Now, just in case you thought that bedbugs were something out of a Dickens story, let me briefly digress and say: They’re making a resurgence in this country now that we don’t dip everything in DDT, they’re common in most of the rest of the world, they’re persistent, and cleanliness has no effect on them. In neighborhoods like ours, they’re often brought into a house on used furniture picked up from the curb on trash day.

(And, lest you be tempted to never visit us again, they’re nocturnal and VERY lazy. The few who managed to survive our first spraying are still living in the same baseboard in our room as before we arrived, and Jacob never got a bite despite sleeping just down the hall from us.)

So the bedbugs have kept me from the blog (and that idyllic lifestyle I wrote about last time) because getting rid of them is like some terrible soap opera. One basically has to move out–pack everything up, get all furniture away from the walls, live somewhere else for a couple of days, take every piece of fabric in the house and either launder it in hot water or dry clean it.

Three times, 30 days apart.

No, I’m not kidding. We’ve been through one treatment, and the next is in a week. An “insurance” treatment at the end of September, and then hopefully we can be done with this move. To say that it’s been stressful would be a major understatement, particularly at this very nesting-focused point of my pregnancy. I’m not sure I’ll ever be willing to be a landlord again, after these nightmare tenants.

Anyway! More cheerful content. Jacob does seem to enjoy many things about living here again, even if our house isn’t one of them.

The local park, for instance.

(This is where Daniel will sit.)

The local kid-haircut place, which is like a giant plastic theme park and which has cheap-cheap toys that he can have after he cooperates about the haircut.

And his Daddy, of course. Strangely, my lumbering and incapable self doesn’t seem to be high on his favorites list these days. :)

Let’s keep our fingers crossed that the baby comes soon, eh?

We packed up, we moved separately so that I didn’t hit any too-pregnant-to-fly limits, we unpacked, we found a preschool for Jacob, we unpacked, we got Jacob through the many transitions, we unpacked, the baby grew, I swelled, we all slept, we cursed the humidity, we unpacked, we started working, the baby grew, the baby grew, the baby grew.

We’re still alternating between this idyllic, lazy, warm, and sunny life that I imagined we’d lead here in Boston, and the utter hell that is trying to unpack and set a house up and get a toddler to understand why we don’t live in Monterey anymore and start new jobs and deal with the million-and-one things that a move dumps onto you while one adult is essentially incapacitated and cranky with a late pregnancy.

But now that we’re through the worst of it, I think we do have a fairly idyllic stretch ahead of us. Jacob certainly already things things are wine and roses. Or, translated into toddler speak: Popsicles,

sprinklers,

and chocolate-zucchini cake.

And we’re all hoping that this baby comes just a bit early.

Jacob enters the room with a tape measure and the mouse to our computer.

“This tape measure is not sticking! Maybe the mouse can help it!”

*****

Also, an addendum to the last post: I took a picture of my scraps from the last pie crust.

We are likely to disappear from internet-land for the next couple of weeks. See you on the other side, hopefully with both mouse andtape measure intact. No promises about our sanity, though.

So the thing about pie crust is this. While a lot is made of whether a crust is flaky, the most important thing to remember is that any crust must also be tender to suit most people’s taste. And to enhance tenderness, you absolutely need to be fast. There are lots of other things you can do to help matters, but the bottom line is that your speed in combining the fat and the flour is way more important than the method you use to combine it. If you knead that dough too much, too much gluten forms and your crust will be tough.

Lots of people look down on using a food processor or stand mixer, but if they’re used properly they can produce a far better crust than a hand-made one that took 10 minutes or more to get together. Make an honest evaluation of how quickly you can get a dough together, and then decide how you want to combine your flour and your fat. (I use my fingers, the stand mixer, or the food processor depending on how much mess in the kitchen I’m willing to tolerate that day.) A couple of good tips: Add a little acid to your pie crust to break down a little of the gluten that will form. Only barely work the dough after the liquid has been added.

Finally, and this is the single best thing you can do for your pie crust, in my opinion: Break your fat into 2 groups (roughly 1/3 - 2/3 works best for me). Cut in the first group (quickly) until the mixture looks like coarse cornmeal. This fat is doing a great job of really coating the proteins and protecting them from the liquid you’ll add later, giving you some tenderness. But it will also melt really quickly in the oven, and give you zero flakiness. So, have the second group of fat (you can use two different kinds of fat, here, to change the flavor of the crust) cut into small cubes and frozen for at least half an hour. Add the second batch of fat to the flour mixture and quickly combine it until the fat is no larger than small-pea sized. Now use your hands or a rolling pin to flatten out that fat and coat it in the flour. It should look like paint flakes, almost. Get the dough together into a disc and refrigerate overnight. These long, cold flakes of fat that never really get *combined* with the flour will melt slowly in the oven, producing steam and giving you lots of nice pastry layers in your crust–the flakiness you’re after. This method works no matter how you’re combining the dough initially.

I prefer the flavor of an all- or mostly-butter crust, but butter melts very quickly and so can be trickier to work with than shortening or lard. (Lard in particular takes forever to melt, which is why so many people prefer to use it in pies. You can work a lard dough for much longer than a butter dough before the fat really starts to break down, so your chances of getting big flakes of fat are that much higher.) If you want a crust that’s a little easier to work with than an all-butter, try subbing in some shortening, lard, cream cheese, or even mascarpone for some of the fat.

Other pie tips: If you’re using a cream or custard filling, take steps to make sure the bottom crust isn’t soggy! For pie shells that aren’t blind-baked, press cookie or graham cracker crumbs (depending on the filling) into the bottom crust–they’ll absorb some of the moisture. Bake your pies at the lowest rack of your oven, or even on a baking stone, so that bottom crust gets set quickly. For blind-baked pie crusts, brush the baked crust with either egg white or white/dark chocolate (depending on the filling) to give yourself a moisture barrier. And, sad though it is to type, always let your fruit pies sit up for a few hours after removing from the oven to avoid the ooze.

Also, Jacob is a cutie.

Apparently the blog decided that if I wasn’t going to update it, it would just stop working.

Posting appears to be the apparent fix for this. As I’m knee-deep in upgrades and work just at the moment, how about a classic Jacob expression?

(He would still like me to put the camera away.)

Well, this seems to be a year for big changes, so why not go with it? In June, we’ll be moving our family back to our house in the Boston area. There are still plenty of details to figure out, but all major decisions have been made.

Certain family members are jumping for joy.

(Thanks so much, everyone, for your kind words about my grandfather. Time, of course, heals all.)

*****

Business trips (both of us), guests, planning another major move (more on that later), trying to come up with names for the healthy BOY that seems to be crushing my internal organs, the beginnings of potty training, keeping up with a two-year-old…

It’s all enough to make you want to spend $10 on a ridiculously unnecessary kitchen accessory…

…make a metric ton of gingersnap cookies…

…and then eat them ALL UP ALL BY MYSELF.

On February 7, after more long illnesses than any one human should have to encounter, my grandfather Ray passed away. He was a few weeks past his 80th birthday.

As an adult, I knew Ray better than any of my other grandparents. I thought, as I started Gram Lois’ essay back in August, that whenever Grampie Ray died his would be the easiest to write. But instead, it’s been the hardest. I suppose I just haven’t been ready for the closure represented by the memories I’ve shared with you of my other relatives over the last 6 months. Gathering the thoughts to write this is such a final step, and a large part of me wants to still imagine him on the other end of this blog, sharing it with my father or sending me back thoughtful email.

*****

His eyes were poor enough that he couldn’t fight in the war. With his ready smile and his slightly wicked sense of humor, he was “quite the dancer” at the USO dances and swept my grandmother (who was really quite a hottie) off her feet. They had three children when they were still quite young: My aunt Terri (dead this past November), my father, and then my aunt Lynn. He was a born salesman, as they say, and while his family was never what anyone would call “well off”, he provided for them well enough that in 1959 they purchased a house kit. With help from friends, he built the house they stayed in for almost 50 years with his own two hands. He wired it, hung the cabinets, ran the plumbing, put on the roof, installed windows and floors and doors. He built it next door to his own father’s house, raised his 3 kids, and then cared for his parents until they, too, left. His most incongruous hobby, from my perspective, was his love of guns and shooting. He was a championship skeet shooter “back in the day”, and I don’t know if my grandmother ever really knew how many guns he had. But by the time I was old enough to know anything he was pretty much only terrifying to the squirrels in the yard. (”Heh. That bastard won’t be eating out of the bird feeder again, let me tell you.”)

He had a long career of a variety of jobs, from working in the shipyard to a brief and failed furniture business with my dad. Eventually, he discovered that his job at the yard gave him emphysema and asbestosis in addition to the paycheck. My memory is hazy now, but I’m pretty sure he finally succumbed to his doctor’s urging to use oxygen shortly after I started college. He retired around that time, too, and he and my grandmother drove each other crazy until he went back to a part-time job selling cars. (Eventually his health prevented that, too.)

I have to be honest and say that I didn’t really know Ray at all until I was edging toward adulthood. I don’t know if this was just because he worked so much, whether I just wasn’t around when he was, whether he just plain wasn’t great with children. But starting when I was a teenager, I felt more of a kinship with Grampie Ray than with any other grandparent. He was the only member of my family who shared my love of books, of knowledge, of learning. When I was in high school, I’d sneak whatever he’d finished off his shelf, read it, and talk to him about it. We’d play cribbage together, me always losing but us both always having a good time.

Ray loved people, he loved being clever, he loved a good laugh. As his body started failing him, he threw himself even more into mental hobbies. Crosswords, crypto-quips, and eventually (thank heavens for this) the computer. I don’t remember exactly when he convinced my grandmother to get one, but eventually he wore her down and they got a computer (and, in quick succession, dial-up and high-speed internet service). I was fond of joking with him that he was the hippest grandfather anywhere, and the only one to point out the latest security issue to his information-security-worker granddaughter. Sometimes his unending technogeekery about software and hardware and whatever he was doing that week got on my nerves, but I never lost sight of how damn lucky I was to be able to keep in touch with him so regularly. As distance (economic, physical, and cultural) brought me further and further away from most of my family, I was never more than a heartbeat away from Ray. I cherished that, and still do.

My fondness for him really didn’t know any bounds, these last few years. Ever interested in learning something new (and always more attracted to alternative explanations than was really good for him), he began studying Reiki about 3 years ago. I wonder sometimes if I was the only one he felt took his latest pursuit seriously, and if I look back our conversations about Reiki were the start of the strengthening of our friendship. (I can’t say that I personally get anything out of Reiki, but it was so clear to me how much Reiki helped my grandfather that I couldn’t help but respect it.)

When we moved to California and I started this blog, he quickly became a daily reader (and emailer, if I hadn’t posted yet that day). In many ways, he provided the motivation to keep this thing going. He was so supportive of it, and of me, especially the more personal writing I’ve done here. I can’t say how much I miss his IM chats and quick messages (always, always signed with “Luv ya…” and a smiley face wearing sunglasses, mind). How much further away from my family and my roots I feel, now that we’re not constantly chatting.

With some doubts about whether or not he would really be up for company, I stayed with him the weekend of my grandmother Lois’ funeral. I am so, so happy I did. We watched movies and baseball, drank beer, did the crosswords, talked about his latest conspiracy theory passion, indulged in ice cream together. We’re both such quiet people, and I think we did one another a world of good that weekend. It was one of those rare and wonderful moments of adult friendship with a relative. We were two people who had loved the same person, who enjoyed the same things, giving one another companionable silence when it was needed most.

Jacob, Jon, and I stayed with him for a few days when we visited in December. I am glad I didn’t know it would be the last time. Again, despite my reservations, he seemed to love having us around. I cooked him dinner, he played with Jacob, we gossiped about his new Mac and how much easier it was to maintain than his old PC. I helped him get all of his digital pictures migrated from one system to another. We had nice chats. He laughed at what a handful Jacob could be. He shared some of his (more precious than gold!) deer meat with me, and we ate more ice cream while we watched the cat watching the snow fall.

Ray’s health took several turns for the worse, after the new year, and he confided to me early in January that he felt like he ought to “check out” before his 80th birthday. He was off by a few weeks, but kept up with the jokes until the very end. He was a great man, and is greatly missed.

Pregnancy still sucks, but fortunately (?) I have plenty of other things keeping me way too busy to dwell on that fact. In lieu of complaining about them, though, I want to share something I wrote today.

This is about politics. I’ve wanted to write something for awhile, about my feelings on the upcoming election, but haven’t wanted to start a flame war or spark any name-calling. I still want to avoid anything but a respectful and honest exchange of ideas, so if you feel you might have something nasty to say… look! Jacob got a haircut!!

I have donated to a campaign for the first time in my life (to Barack Obama), and have been getting the predictable slew of campaign announcements since then. Today, I got a request from the campaign to share my story. They’re collecting stories from supporters to make a stronger case to the superdelegates likely to decide who receives the Democratic Party nomination. This is mine.

I might be one of the last people you’d expect to dive into a Democratic primary battle. I was born and raised in Maine, a state that values independence and unorthodoxy for their own sake. I’ve spent most of my life on the libertarian edge of conservative politics. My family’s values, which became my own, center around the core belief that the government should generally stay out of my business. I was even registered Libertarian, for a few years.

As I’ve gotten older, and spent more and more years *in* our society (rather than critiquing it from a liberal-arts campus), I’ve come to settle in pretty solidly as an independent. But even as an independent, I tend to lean more to the economic right. If I were forced to pick a party, the democratic party would probably be my third choice.

Like most Americans, my views are centrist. Like most Americans, I despair at the lack of compromise and common sense in the current political atmosphere. I’m tired of the expansion of power in the executive branch, I’m tired of the erosion of our civil liberties, I’m tired of the effect rising healthcare costs are having on our small businesses, and I’m *really* tired of these major issues being ignored in favor of yet another fear-mongering jab from one party to the other.

Which brings me, I suppose, to my support for this campaign. I thought I was incapable of truly supporting *anyone* in this fall’s presidential race. I was convinced that the whole thing would be summed up by two positions: “Whatever you think of the current administration, know that the Democrats would hand us all over to the terrorists without any hesitation!” and “We’re the only hope for salvation from the Pure Evil of the Republican Agenda!”

I’m not sure you can imagine my disbelief, and then relief, upon discovering that the Democratic Party’s young darling was actually a candidate who made considered decisions based on reason and realism. Someone who didn’t just welcome independents like me, but who reached out to those with good ideas *regardless* of political affiliation. I don’t know how I could *not* support Barack Obama. He’s everything that has been missing in American politics for an entire generation. And I, for one, am really looking forward to being welcomed back into the national debate.

I hope that, whatever your political affiliations, you’ll take the time this year to figure out who you support, and why, and then vote for them.

First of all, if your primary elections are today, get out and VOTE! Go. Go now.

Second… well, the little mister is going to be pretty surprised, come his birthday this year.

Around then, a new zog will join our family. The crib notes: I’m 12 weeks along, everything looks healthy and fine, I’m having as many annoying symptoms this pregnancy as I did with Jacob, we plan to find out the gender, if we can.

Wish us luck!