Trick-or-Read?

I will say it right out:  I am cheap.  Life just doesn't get any better than when you get it at a bargain--and for me that usually translates as a quarter at a yard sale.  This is the way, over the past six years, I have accumulated a sizable, diverse library of like-new kids' books that wait on a $5 bookcase to transport the grandkids and me to wonderful, imaginary places every time they visit.

So imagine my surprise a couple weeks ago when, on my weekly whirlwind trip through Wal-Mart, I heard a display of brand-spanking new books call my name.  One second I was Googie heading for the toothpaste aisle and the next I was Odysseus lured right into the rocks by the song of the sirens.

I crashed hard.  They were Halloween books, and I am a sucker for Halloween.  What could it hurt to look, I thought.  I wasn't going to buy any of these at $6.99 a pop--I never pay full price for new books.  And I wouldn't have done it this time either--if there hadn't happened to be the perfect book tailor-made for each one of the five kids.  If this picture doesn't scream "FATE," I don't know what does.

Sticker Doodle Boo! is perfect for Sooby.  It contains page after of page of Halloween-themed activity pages for her to add stickers to or doodle on to complete pictures.  She can design a mask from a whole page of sticky eyes, noses, and mouths, or draw sharp, pointed toenails on the foot of a creepy monster. She loves artwork and design, and she should have a field day with this.

Lisa McCourt's Happy Halloween, Stinky Face will be fun for all the kids but especially for Pooh.  Time after time, he is the one who requests that I read McCourt's original story, I Love You, Stinky Face, when we are together on Skype. This little Halloween variation is no less charming as Stinky Face concocts a whole new set of "what ifs" to ask his mama, whose answers continue to demonstrate the wisdom and creativity of a parent who makes it clear that she loves her child unconditionally.

For Bootsie, my little poet (see my post "Bootsie's Morning Haiku" from 11/7/12), there is a delightful little story in rhyme titled Room on the Broom by Julia Donaldson.  In this National Bestseller, a lovable but slightly clumsy witch loses her hat, her bow, and her wand while riding through the sky on her broom with her cat.   The lost items are rescued and returned to her by a dog, a bird, and a frog, who each ask to ride along.  When the broom finally snaps from the added weight, the odd menagerie lands in a swamp and ultimately has to pool  resources to save the witch when she is threatened by a scary dragon.

Beenie gets the Baby Einstein Halloween, a touch and feel board book of bright colors and textured objects. This is perfect for him because of his love of the video Baby Mozart  (this was a 25-cent garage sale item), which we watch once almost every time he spends the day at Googie's.  We have done this for over a year now.  Julie Aigner-Clark's colorful toys moving to the timeless compositions of Mozart keep his attention as well now as they did the first time he saw them.  The video is a restful, relaxing oasis in every day we have together, and I hope he likes the book as well.

Finally, little Zoomba has his challenges with food allergies, but he can eat Cheerios.  Enter The Cheerios Halloween Play Book and the little bag of Cheerios I got to go along with it.  In this interactive little book, Zoomie can complete various Halloween scenarios using Cheerios for things like black cat eyes, buttons on Halloween costumes, and the letter "o" in the word "Boo!"  Then, he can eat the Cheerios, and they won't make him sick.

So, along with a theater-sized box of Skittles (for the older kids), my grandkids will each get a new book for Halloween this year.  If they have as much fun reading them as I did picking them out, it will be well worth the little bit of extra money spent.  All in all, I would call this a successful trip to Wal-Mart--except that I did forget the toothpaste.




 

 

The Legacy of Baba Edis

My children, Cookie and Teebo, first met Baba Edis in the 1980s, welcoming her into our home as a visitor from the county library.  A Ukrainian peasant woman, Baba Edis is the unlikely heroine of a delightful children's story, first published in 1979 by Carolyn Croll, titled Too Many Babas.

The story offers a clever, literal treatment of the idiom "Too many cooks spoil the broth."  In it, Baba Edis, awakening on a winter morning, decides to make some soup "to warm her bones."  While she is in the process of simmering a bone with beans, carrots, celery, cabbage, and onion, she is visited by three of her friends--Baba Basha, Baba Yetta, and Baba Molka--who each in turn determine that they should all stay for lunch because the soup smells so scrumptious.

During the course of the morning, each of the other babas ventures to the kitchen to taste the soup.  In doing so, as best I remember, Baba Basha adds a "fistful" of salt, Baba Yetta turns the handle of the pepper grinder a few too many times, and Baba Molka throws in a whole garlic bulb.

When everyone finally sits down to lunch, they belly up to four bowls of soup that tastes "terrible."  Even the face of Baba Edis' cat is contorted into a grimace.  So the babas have to start from scratch in order to produce another pot of soup for supper, this time working together but leaving the seasoning to Baba Edis alone.

Even as the kids outgrew the reading of this endearing tale with its memorable folk-artsy illustrations, references to it continued to pop up at random times in our conversations.  Maybe we were having some kind of soup for dinner.  Maybe we saw an old lady in a head scarf.  It seemed that Baba Edis and her baba-friends were never far from our minds.

One time, when the kids were a tween and a teen, we were talking about the story and realized, to our great horror, that among the three of us, we could come up with the names of only three of the babas.  I racked my brain over this to the point that I actually went to the library to find the book and ferret out the missing baba.  Barring Alzheimer's, I will not be forgetting Baba Yetta again.

Several years ago I ran into a copy of Too Many Babas at a yard sale for a quarter.  It was like I had found gold.  Because we had enjoyed this story so much as a family a generation ago, I sent it home with Cookie, hoping the tradition would continue with her children.  It seems that it has.

On speakerphone with  Pooh the other day, I heard Cookie prompting in the background, "Tell Googie what we're making for dinner."  Whereupon Pooh told me, to my utter delight, "We're making Baba Edis soup."

Indeed, Cookie had bought a soup bone and all the vegetables mentioned in the story.  She bought a loaf of dark bread just like the four babas ate with their soup.  (She was surprised that the kids liked pumpernickel.)  Finally, in an effort to stay true to the story, she topped the meal off with some tea.  I love the whole idea of a family meal based on this great little children's masterpiece.

By the way, baba is the Ukrainian word for "grandma."  A diminutive of babushka, it would compare in our language to something like "grammy"--or, with a slight stretch of the imagination, "googie."

Here in our part of the country, winter is coming, and with it, soup weather.  If you find yourself spending time with a little person you love, may I suggest for you a good book to snuggle up with and an easy, fun baba-inspired meal to warm your bones on a cold day.







  

The Starbucks Poster Child

Truth be known, I expected a little more preferential treatment last week at the original Starbucks, founded in Seattle, Washington, in 1971.  To be quite honest, I expected to walk in the door and hear a sharp intake of breath from the barista, who would whisper frantically to the rest of the crew something like, "Heads up, guys!  That's Googie!  I recognize her from her blog pic!"

At the very least, I expected a free venti decaf skinny vanilla latte--skinny, of course, to balance out the calories in the hunk of iced lemon pound cake they would insist on serving me, also compliments of the house.  However, hard as it was to believe, their eyes showed no glint of recognition as I found myself forking over the same amount I pay three or four times a month at the Starbucks in my smaller Midwestern hometown of around 20,000.

This is where I am a celebrity.  Here, I am well known as "Beenie's Grandma."  This Starbucks was the venue of my first public appearance with Beenie when he was a little over six weeks old.  On that visit, I was inspired to ask for an extra cup so that I could snap this pic with my cell phone:

The extra print I made for the Starbucks crew shot us into an orbit of fame and notoriety, and it has been on their bulletin board ever since. Every time I go in, I glance at the wall to see if it has been taken down yet, but it has not.  Because the pic has made such tremendous waves locally,  I thought surely our fame would have preceded me to the west coast.

Just before the Seattle trip, I archived the pictures from my digital camera and cell phone in preparation for the fall and winter holidays.  In the process of that, I made the Starbucks crew an updated print, snapped by my good friend and fellow Starbucks addict during another visit with Beenie over a year later:

Notice the intent look with which the child contemplates the cup this time.  (It was empty, of course, so don't turn me in to the Division of Social Services for child endangerment.)  With Beenie wide awake for this photo shoot, I'm sure you will agree that, once this pic goes up on the bulletin board Friday, we will surely be going viral.

At that point, it will be only a matter of minutes until our faces are recognized not only at the original Starbucks location at Pike Place Market in Seattle, but at its other 139 locations in that city alone (according to a "Show Me Seattle" tour guide named Dan) and its other 17,432 locations in this and 54 other countries (Statistic Brain, 12 Aug. 2013).

I am thinking I will take Beenie to Starbucks with me and snap his picture once a year until he goes off to college.  (I may have to bribe him when he reaches those sensitive middle school years.)  That way I should get not only worldwide facial recognition but also all the coffee and lemon pound cake I could ever want.  

The Hostage

Bootsie didn't quite understand why we were having cake and ice cream if it wasn't really her birthday. I tried to explain we were having this early party at Googie's house because we wouldn't be able to be with her on her actual birthday six days away.

So when Bootsie and her three siblings ended up spending the night with Pa-pa and me during the weekend before Oct. 4, it just made sense to stage our own celebration.  To properly observe this momentous third birthday, we invited her great-grandma and her cousin Beenie's family out for a Saturday pizza lunch topped off with the "white cake with chocolate icing" that Bootsie herself ordered last week on Skype.

Such events involving five children age six and under are always lively, to say the least, and this one was no exception.  It is never unusual when the transition between the lunch part and the dessert part goes less than smoothly.

On this particular day the transition seemed to take an especially long time.  Boots sat patiently, looking at her cake with its sprinkling of nonpareils in fall colors and its recycled "3" candle propped in the middle.  I was running around, lighter in my hand, for what must have seemed to her like forever.

Every time I got ready to pull the trigger, it seemed like something else demanded my attention:  hands needed wiping here, a face needed wiping there, a stray pepperoni hit the floor, the ice cream needed to be set out.  Where was the dipper?  Were we out of napkins?  Was that a whiff of dirty diaper?

Anyway at one unforgettable point in the chaos, Bootsie herself, usually a pretty quiet little girl, levered her voice above the hubbub to proclaim, "LET THE PARTY BE RELEASED!"

Released?  Really?  We all looked at her in a kind of stunned silence.   I froze in place, my mind racing to analyze that remarkable choice of word by a not-quite-yet-three-year-old.

Amid the laughter that followed, the cake was cut, the candle lit, the ice cream dipped, and the traditional "Happy Birthday" song chorused--all with an efficiency uncharacteristic of our parties. Our captain had spoken, and we took our marching orders seriously.

Happy Birthday next weekend, little Bootsie.  Have a great time at the party you will have at your house on your real birthday.  Keep everyone in line and, whatever you do, don't let anyone else make the mistake of taking a perfectly innocent party hostage.

Morning Meandering

Over the years Pa-pa and I have clocked a lot of hours on the outdoor walking track at our local community college.  It is a meandering strip of blacktop, three-quarters of a mile long, that snakes it way east and west along a state highway and then southward toward a wooded area flanked by farmland.

Until fairly recently Wells Fargo fitness stations dotted the landscape along the track.  At these, the serious fitness buff could pause from his cardio workout just long enough to stretch a hamstring, execute a sit-up, or pull himself arm over arm along an overhead ladder.

After enduring thirty-some years of weather, the wooden stations finally had to be dismantled for purposes of aesthetics and safety.  However, the idea of a walk punctuated by stopping-stations is alive and well in the way Beenie and I have been spending some glorious late-summer mornings.

Warm-up:  We grab Bunny and buckle into the stroller.  (Bunny was an Easter gift to Beenie's cousins a couple years ago.  Strangely, he still lives at Googie's house, possibly because, with the slightest push on his little paw, he begins to sway, wiggle his ears, and belt out a saxophone solo that puts Kenny G to shame.)

Beenie loves Bunny and all my animated plush creatures that sing and dance and do all kinds of loud things that other people consider obnoxious and I consider charming.  I have a baby chick that does a frenzied "Chicken Dance"; an Elmo in chef garb who sings a duet with a talking pizza; an Ernie that sings "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" and snores; an angel bear whose pink wings flutter wildly to the tune of "Oh Come, All Ye Faithful"; and a hamster, dressed in full black and white prison regalia, who sings, "Jailhouse Rock."  But I digress.  Back to our walk.

Station 1: The Jack-o'-Lantern on the Porch.  We tool up the driveway of a neighbor down the street to contemplate this big orange harbinger of Halloween that sits at the bottom of her front steps.  Sometimes her cat watches us from the front porch, as does her dog from inside the front door glass.  We make doggie and kitty sounds and say "ooooh" to acknowledge how very scary Mr. Jack-o'-Lantern is.  Beenie claps his hands.  This means he likes what he sees.  But we can't tarry long, so on we go, strolling to a wonderfully cacophonous musical background provided by Bunny and the cicadas.

Station 2:  The Tree-Trimmer.  This is a skillful performer we have stopped to watch several times lately as he removes dead and broken branches at various locations along our path.  We are fascinated as he rises up, up, up from his truck in a white bucket and then stops to let his chainsaw perform its magic.  The saw is loud and momentarily drowns out Bunny.  We leave the show and move on.

Station 3:  The Swing.  Moving on around the corner, we detour off our beaten path to stop at another neighbor's backyard playground.  Here we take a break from the stroller long enough for Beenie to feel the rush of cool morning air through his hair as we take advantage of an open invitation to use the baby swing.

From the swing we head back toward Googie's, either via the street, where many other "stations" await us (like The Black Dog Who Always Barks at Us) or by way of a short cut through a couple of back yards.  Back home, we park at the foot of Googie's steps for juice and animal crackers before going into the house.

Beenie munches and I contemplate.  Our box of cookies is just about down to the crumbs.  Bunny's batteries are running down.  The summer is just about gone.

Cookies and batteries are easily replaced.  But nothing can ever replace these special mornings I am blessed to share with my grandson.  All too soon, they will pass into history.  He will outgrow the stroller.

But right now the air is crisp and the cicadas' song soothing.  Beenie claps his hands, and I join him in a celebration of this moment.   

Witch Fingers

I really can't remember where the witch fingers came from.  My best guess is that Cookie and Teebo brought them home some twenty years ago as prizes won in little gallery games at their elementary school carnival.

The witch fingers, some fifteen or so of them, are hollowed-out plastic toys that you wear on your own fingers when you want to do your best witch impersonation.  Even Beenie, at just shy of eighteen months, knows to cackle when he wears them.  Most of our witch fingers are green with red nails, and my most fashion-conscious witches prefer a matched set, as Beenie models here:

 

Of all the toys at Googie's house, the witch fingers seem to have cast a spell on all five grandkids.  They love to wear them, fight over them, and chew on them, to the point where I worry some about the little ones ingesting too much paint.  But the older kids have survived, so I am cautiously optimistic that the babies will too.

 

I wonder why it is that children are fascinated with witches?  As a child myself, I was so enthralled with the witch in Hansel and Gretel that I imagined her living in my bedroom closet, and Oz's Wicked Witch of the West has long mesmerized Sooby.  Pooh and Bootsie both love for me to read  Little Boy Soup, a picture book about a little boy who must outsmart the Witch of the Woods in order to avoid being converted to soup stock.  (Refer to my review of this great little story in my April 25, 2012 post with the same title.)

 

In fact, Pooh had witches on the brain during one of our recent breakfast conversations.  He looked particularly thoughtful as he watched me stir the milk into his Fruit Loops.

 

"Googie?" he asked.  "Why are your fingernails so long?"  I didn't get the chance to answer before he continued with his musings, which, incidentally, indicate a pretty sophisticated thought process for a four-year-old.  See if you agree:

 

"You know?" he said, narrowing his eyebrows to indicate he was thinking very hard about this.  "If I didn't see you for a year . . . , and I forgot you . . . , and then I saw your fingernails again . . . . , then I might think you were a witch." 

 

Huh? 

 

I was trying to follow this logic, decide if I had been insulted or not, and manufacture some sort of response, when the ever-practical Sooby piped up and saved the day.  "They're perfect for scratching backs," she offered.

 

I smiled.  The girl does like to have her back scratched.  Earlier that morning, she had padded into my bedroom, crawled into bed beside me, wadded her nightgown up around her neck, and whispered, "My nightgown is ready."  This, of course, meant that she was ready for the back-scratching to commence.

 

For the past couple months, I have been having one of my "good fingernail" episodes.  That usually means (1) nothing is making me nervous enough to bite or tear them off right now and (2) they haven't started getting in my way yet.  Good fingernail episodes happen more often now than when I was teaching school and living with teenagers.  But, seriously, I am not really seeing a likeness between them and our witch fingers.  Do you?

 

 

 

Nevertheless, the whole thing leaves me thinking about the hypothetical situations Pooh presented at breakfast.  What if he didn't see me for a year?  Well, as long as I can help it, that ain't gonna happen.  What if he forgets me?  Perish the thought!  What if he mistakes me for a witch?  I will have to hope against hope that any remote similarity starts and ends with the occasional good fingernail episode.

 

Daughter Cookie may disagree, but I like to think that any evil spells she thought I cast on her as a tween and teen are long broken.  I am Googie now, and things have changed.  Now I get to scratch little backs and have my fill of Little Boy Soup.  Best of all, I get to share random morning musings over bowls of Fruit Loops.

 

Halloween is coming next month, and we witches will be in season.  Let us disguise our ordinary hands with witch fingers, and let the serious cackling begin!     

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Katie and Me

Katie Couric and I are living parallel lives.  This I learned from an article she wrote for the November, 2012 issue of Woman's Day.  (Yes, I am a year behind on my magazines.)

Granted, Katie makes a little more money than I do (okay--a lot more) and, I will have to admit, ranks a little higher across the country on the facial recognition scale.  (In fact, Reader's Digest [June 2013, p. 95] lists her as the 37th most trusted person in America).  But I consider these minor differences only.

Demographically, Katie and I are female Baby Boomers who write, who graduated from college in the 1970s, and who are mom to two kids.  But the subject of her Woman's Day piece, titled "Family Ties" (p. 34), makes it clear that experience connects the two of us in such a way that her words leaped right off the page, traveled to someplace deep inside my mind, and lodged somewhere close to my heart.

Katie and I both lost our dads in 2011.  In the wake of that, we find ourselves buried in what she calls "the sandwich generation," engrossed in the delicate task of looking out for our 90ish-year-old mothers.  She says she "often feel[s] like the peanut butter between two slices of bread" as she works to meet the vastly diverse needs of the generations before and after hers. 

Katie notes that her mother still lives independently in their old family home, as does my mom, and that she vociferously rejects the option of an assisted living facility.  At the suggestion, Mrs. Couric refers to it as "God's waiting room."  My mom, a little more blunt about the proposition, says simply, "I'd rather be dead."

I am thankful that Mom is able to live alone, but I worry constantly that she will fall.  This concern is not entirely unfounded, as she has taken three moderately serious tumbles in the past two years.  Fortunately, there have been no broken bones, but I have to wonder how long our luck will hold out.  Katie worries about this too, noting that she has often found her mother's life alert necklace draped over a picture frame.

Katie calls our situation "the inevitable role reversal that comes with age."  I wonder if she also misses the thing I miss most:  the chance to just relax and visit with each other in the kind of carefree manner that I took for granted for so long; the chance to stroll leisurely through yard sales or face off in a heated game of Scrabble; the chance to just sit out on the porch swing with a dish of ice cream.

We can't do these things anymore because, now, it requires every waking minute to take care of business.  The checking account needs to be balanced.  The CDs are maturing.  It requires a multitude of doctor's appointments to maintain the various systems related to a heart that has been beating for nearly ninety years.

The bathroom stool is leaking.  The front bricks need patching.  The kitchen sink is draining slowly.  The front door knob is hard to turn.  The milk jug is empty. 

Sixty-six years of paperwork and mementos need to be sorted or disposed of.  We need to clear the outbuildings, the basement, and the attic.  Everything we do these days involves taking care of some kind of business, and some urgent task seems to rear its ugly head every single day.

Katie didn't mention things like this in her effort to keep an upbeat and positive tone.  But I read between the lines of her impeccably crafted prose and know they are as much present for her as they are for others of us experiencing her "peanut butter" syndrome.  The truth is, assuming the responsibility for another adult's physical, mental, emotional, social, and spiritual welfare can be overwhelming.

That said, I think back to a day a little over two years ago when I sat with Mom and Dad in an exam room in the cancer center of our local hospital.  It was the day we learned that the chemo was no longer working, and Dad's cancer had spread past the original site in his lung.  We didn't know it then, but in just a few weeks he would be gone.

I knew exactly what Dad was thinking when he looked straight at me through misty eyes.  Mom's whole life had revolved unselfishly around him, and she had always depended on him for so many things.  "I'll take care of her," I told him, and I meant it.  I am doing the best I can.

I am confident that Katie knows all about this.  She may have more resources at her disposal than I do, and her fame may offer her a broader network of support services.  But at the heart of the situation is a 60-ish woman and her 90-ish mom who views her, like it or not, as some kind of lifeline.

Thank you for buoying me with your article, Katie.  As you point out, ours is a situation shared by many of our generation, and you are right--there is comfort in knowing that.