Thoughts and Words Ill-Sorted

Your children are not your children
They are the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

– Kahlil Gibran

I’ve been listening to a South African group that uses this poem for its song lyrics.  As one about to have a child, you can bet it has got me thinking.  Much of the time, Continue reading →

Nelson and I enjoyed a lovely excursion to the Adirondacks on Sunday and Monday. We launched our canoe in Lower Saranac Lake, paddled up the Saranac River, and camped on Norway Island in Middle Saranac Lake. That would be the fourth island from the right in this map: Continue reading →

The boys arrived home on Monday night apparently unperturbed by the wicked temperatures of their camping expedition.  Since I was looking a bit green on Tuesday morning, Sydney drove me the hour to my midwife appointment and was rewarded (or punished, depending on your position) by being called in to hear the baby’s heartbeat near the end of things.

Nelson’s left to entertain himself a fair bit as Sydney and I head off to class each day, but we’re hoping to get out more and enjoy Ithaca with him more near the end of the week.  Ithaca, however, is sending down a mix of rain/sleet/snow and threatening to whisk away our lovely fall scenery and turn us toward winter.

Erin

Whoa, this banana bread IS good.  I pulled it out of the oven, went outside for an hour-long walk, and am now enjoying the residual warmth in the bottom of the loaf.  I couldn’t decide whether to wolf it down or call my mom to tell her about it, so I tried doing both at once.

BEST EVER BANANA BREAD

1 cup sugar

1/2 cup butter

3 very ripe bananas

2 eggs

1 1/4 cups flour

1/2 tsp salt

1 tsp baking soda

1 cup crushed walnuts

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Cream sugar and butter. Add bananas and eggs beaten. Sift flour,salt and baking soda 3 times. Blend and add to banana mixture. Add walnuts.  Pour batter into a 9×5 loaf pan. Bake for 55 min. Cool on rack.

One of our favorite cooking websites is epicurious.com.  Sydney loves it for the unusual ingredients and gourmet recipes.  I love it for the conversation: each recipe has a section for comments, and you get some great ideas reading the reviews, where other cooks post not only their feedback but also their adaptations.

Today I was looking for a simple banana-bread recipe, but I wanted, of course, the best.  I clicked on one that was rated highly, and then, as I read the comments, I realized that the rating was not for the posted recipe, but rather for one that a commenter had included in his review.  Fifty pages of commenters who all said, “I have to say, my rating isn’t for this recipe, but for John’s, posted some 30 pages back!  It was great!”

After all that I had to give John’s recipe a try for myself . . .

Erin

Yesterday started off pretty leisurely.  We were all ready to sleep in after such a long day on Friday.  It as a waffles-and-newspaper kind of morning.

But in the early afternoon we hit the grocery store for the second time in two days and took Nelson to the library booksale (where, yes, I bought more kids’ books).  By late-afternoon Continue reading →

Nelson just flew in yesterday for a visit, so the Penner brothers are reunited and looking for Trouble.  I am confident that this will mean Trouble in the Kitchen: strange ingredients, new recipes, and lots of experimentation.  I also think that Trouble might involve their hijacking the car and going camping in the Adirondacks in the next few days.  What with the cooler weather we’ve been having, I hope they’re ready to get cozy!

Late last night I submitted a paper that I’ll be presenting at a workshop next week.  After several weeks of reading up, several days of head-scratching writing, and then a burst of ideas, I feel like what I produced is a major accomplishment.  On the other hand, I talked over my dissertation plan with an advisor yesterday and I realized that the paper I just wrote may offer material for what is only a very small fraction of the whole thing–maybe a third of a chapter?  This is going to be a long haul . . .

Hoping to eat good food and get out to enjoy the beautiful fall Ithaca’s been showing us these past few weeks.

Erin

This afternoon I got a call from a very pleasant older-sounding gentleman who began his talk with “Hi, I’m calling from the Nielson Ratings . . .”  Right about then I started to shake with mirth.  But I answered his questions and he was delighted to find himself talking to a head-of-household under 35 who might, he hoped, hear him out and consider recording her TV-watching schedule for a week.  But after he finished I told him there was a slight problem: we don’t have a television.  His reaction was interesting: “I’ll be darned.  We get that every now and then, and it’s strange–we find it strange–but that’s alright.”  After hanging up I had to wonder what I did with all that time I apparently didn’t spend watching television . . .

Erin

We’ve finished shelling this year’s bean crop.

Varieties, clockwise from the left: Hidatsa Shield Figure, Koronis Purple, Topaz Pinto, Austrian Red Kidney, Jacob’s Gold, and Berwick (two bowls).

Sydney

I’ve been doing some reading up recently on when pregnant women begin to “show.”  Not only does it vary widely, but the descriptions of the shapes of women that are more and less likely to show early on were outrageously funny.  If you’re tall and thin, you’ll show sooner.  If you’re short and round, no one may notice for awhile.  If it’s your second baby, you’ll show a lot sooner than for your first baby (accompanied by all sorts of descriptions of your body “knowing already what to do” and “stomach muscles already ‘relaxed'” or, my favorite, you being “already broken in”).  If you are extremely fit, your ‘killer abs’ may keep things slimmer for longer.  Sydney merely snorted when I mentioned this possibility out loud.  Okay, okay, no killer abs here.

And then there are the metaphors for the embryo-turned-foetus.  People get the strangest literary bents when they get pregnant: women carry peanuts, pork chops, drumsticks, cantaloupes, watermelons–lots of food.  When Sydney and I first found out we called it our little bug.  That became extremely appropriate when I began to feel like I had a three-month flu.  Later the baby became a lime, and then a lemon, to remind us of its approximate size.  As one who encounters people every day who dismiss metaphors and the like as merely poetic classroom talk, I’m astonished to find the metaphors coming out in full force when the topic turns to pregnancy.

Erin