The Kitchen Table

Micropolis: A Look at the Least Diverse Neighborhood in the City - WNYC

All 1,488 residents of this section of Midwood, Brooklyn, classified themselves as white during the recent census, data shows. Of all the census tracts in New York City — 2,168 — it is the only one with a 100 percent homogenous population.

via www.wnyc.org

According to WNYC's Diversity in NYC map, we are moving from about 28% diverse to somewhere between 73% and 82% diverse.
I'm not surprised. When we moved into our apartment in SoHo, I missed regular interactions with people who weren't white, thin, and dressed all in black. If I saw someone who was black, more often, in this neighborhood, he or she was working in one of the stores as security or sometimes as retail help. It was rude shift from rubbing elbows with people who didn't look like me at the local coffee shop (which, in Oakland, isn't always true, either. Oakland is diverse, but there are color lines there, too). But I grew up in mixed schools and neighborhoods and grocery stores. I wanted something similar for my children.
Comfort. You get used to your surroundings like the frog in the pot of water. I learned to see more clearly the people around me, which are still mostly white except for the nannies, but not only white. But mostly.
In our new neighborhood, there is gentrification and new restaurants and boutiques pushing out the old (read: white people pushing blacks further out), but my children will play with children who are mixed, they will read stories next to families who don't look like them.
I will be a frog in a new pot of water, listening for languages, taking in what is around us, learning. Hopefully, learning.

All You Had to Do Was Ask

Mister and I had been using instagram regularly (me, maybe too much) until Facebook announced its $1B buy-out. Mister deactivated his account, but I continue(d) to use Facebook and instagram.

Instagram has been one of the best and most fun ways to share pictures with our friends. I can post to instagram, which works faster than camera+ or flickr and a is more satisfying because I know more people on it. I can copy the photos to flickr for longevity and easier searching or to facebook for those friends to see, and I can tweet them. My nieces and one of my nephews recently joined instagram. I'd been doing an alphabet photo project with a friend, checking out photos of friends' kids and food, following strangers who post incredible shots of the bay area, dublin, ireland, and other places.

I have this blog. I have a facebook account. I'm on ravelry, pinterest, quora. Intellectually, I know that our content is not ours because terms of service for most social networks (barring flickr, as far as I can tell) gives those services digital rights. I'm not sure when we all became okay with this, but we did, the collective we of people who post photos, snippets of life, lesson plans, stories, poems, paintings to the internet. We said, sure, you can have access to all my creative personal work so that I can Like my friend's photo of her pug. 

A couple of nights ago, with dramatic flair, Mister showed me instagram's home page and the series of screen shots that included this one: 

There's our girl. One of his coworkers pointed it out to him. He was shocked, and I was furious. We were caught with our pants down. If you haven't had a photo of yours pop up somewhere unexpectedly, especially one of your child, this is largely theoretical. Of course we know it happens, but it left me sputtering. 

Mister and I are not on the same page about privacy, but the differences are complex. It's not as simple as Mister believes in privacy and I don't. He's more conservative about his privacy than I am. My father would have loved him for many reasons, especially this. My dad wouldn't give out his SSN to his doctor wihtout a fight. He resented being asked for his phone number or driver's license. I don't disagree with Mister's position. He was the CEO of a company that dealt with extremely personal informaiton and did everything he could to build a system that would protect that information. He didn't take shortcuts. It may have cost him the business when faced with competition that didn't have the same standards, but he wasn't going to break trust with his customers or himself.

I tear up credit card offers, but do I shred as a I should? I would tell my students and my nieces and nephews that photos they take on a cell phone and send to a friend are no longer private. A photo on facebook isn't private. They can be copied and redistributed. 

A couple of days after my major freak out and fury, I realize that I didn't expect a company to pick up and use our photos. I've worried about identity theft and security breaches, not my daughter's image being used for marketing a company. 

But, my daughter is 3 1/2. While I appreciate seeing who "likes" pictures of her and Rabbit and think it's kind of cool that a guy at instagram followed mister and liked a few of his photos, including this one, couldn't they have asked before using it? When does the Terms of Service ownership crap preclude doing the right thing and asking if it's okay, really okay, to take a photo that's seen mainly by friends and occasionally by others and largely flies under the radar, and using it on the front page of a company whose billion dollar acquisition was headline news for two weeks (we were in California at the time, and it was the only news people were discussing). 

To be fair, when we talked about it again last night, Mister said, "I could have done the same thing inadvertently, used a photo from someone's profile on the home page [user photos scrolled the top of his company's website for a while to demonstrate the community of users], and not asked." Most companies could do this based on Terms of Service including Google, Facebook, (we think not Flickr) and many others because users post avatars and projects and the list goes on. If you're excited to share, you might just share without considering ramifications. 

When I initially bitched about it on twitter and facebook, a couple of people unhelpfully reminded me of terms of service agreements (typepad has rights to this content, too). Wouldn't it have been amazing if Kodak and Polaroid said we own your photos, too! Who would have stood for that?

One of the trade-offs that comes with the digital socialization of our lives is the dissolution of common courtesies. Salutations in emails. Proper greetings via cell phone. Actual birthday cards. Actual thank you notes. Actual acknowledgement that while your company claims rights to all content that passes its transoms, asking or at least notifying people you're going to use their pictures is a nice thing to do. In truth, I would have been thrilled to have a sneaky little peek at my girl on instagram's home page. 

But no one asked so in a snit, I cancelled my instagram account and deleted all my facebook photos (except for profile shots which I can't figure out how to delete, stupid facebook, and NO please don't leave me directions on how to do this, thanks). I sent instagram angry emails. I considered dumping facebook.

Immediately I felt lonelier way out here in New York. I was out with Bama and Rabbit the next afternoon, playing in our amazing garden, and thought, why bother taking a photo? I won't mail it to anyone. No one looks at my flickr pictures. My connections to faraway felt tenuous. And there's the rub. I'm willing, like we all are, to give away rights so that I can like a photo of my friend's pug and they can give thumbs up a photo of Rabbit eating broccoli. And I need to be okay with that. 

I cracked and went back, creating a new instagram account. 

A Failure to Screen

Bama reads a lot of books. A lot. She picks up a half dozen every trip to the library, and wants to read many of them at that moment. A more competent parent might screen all those books before getting them home. Me, I'm happy I've got all three of us, haven't inadvertently dropped extra (not checked out) books in the bag, and haven't fallen down the treacherous stairs from the children's room.

My wilding, or irresponsible, approach to reading has brought us Zathura (lots of brotherly fighting), Cosmo and the Robot (name calling), Earth to Clunk (more name calling), among others. Sometimes, as with Cosmo and the Robot, I edit out the name and carry on because there's more in the book that I like. Zathura, I put aside for when she is older.

We've also brought home The Widow's Broom (loved the dark brilliance of it), Gossie (and all the gosling books), the beautiful friendship of Toot & Puddle, the humanist All the World, When Carmen Learned English, and the list goes on. Many are way above her comprehension level (Two of a Kind, Sojourner Truth's Step-Stomp Stride), but she's curious and asks good questions and uses the pictures to sort out some of what she doesn't understand. A friend said, Oh, you didn't read the books ahead of time? Not always, no. I wish I did, but I don't. Sometimes, we sit and read and there you have it. Me, editing out "stupid" on the fly.

Today, after a night interrupted by wet beds, teething, sheet changes, and sobs we had a play-date and whirling trip to the library. I almost never say yes to television, but today I offered it. Something new, and sweet. I flipped through netflix screens hoping she wouldn't spot an image like Dora and ask to watch it. Babar! Yes! 

Babar, King of Elephants. How bad could it be? We already knew about Babar's mother murder and that the king dies from eating a poisonous mushroom. Yeah. Except in this drawn out version, Babar's mother is shot while he's on her back.

(image: cinemotions)

As she falls dead, he's hurtled from her shoulders to go bouncing through a jungle clearing. He goes back to her, calling to her, finds her dead. Birds chirp louder, the monkey screams, and the hunter returns with his double-barrel shotgun. Babar, in a panic, runs, as he does in the book. But in the book, he runs for a page and finds himself in the ciyt with the kindly old lady. In this movie, he runs across a desert, through mountains, in the night, into a cave (to be chased out be a leopard), into another cave (to be frightened off by a cobra), swept away by a flash flood. Each element sent Bama into new panic -- he's never going to stop running! What's going on with the water? Why can't he run? What's happening? 

Later, I explain that some snakes are poisonous and will bite things to hurt them -- this after the kindly old woman is bit by a cobra. Bama thinks snakes are nice. I do not, in fact, want to dispel her of this idea. Ditto spiders. I'd like her to be interested in creatures that generally freak me out in part because I think my own oogies are lame, in part because she's a girl and I'd like her to be of hte 1% that doesn't get creeped out by bugs and snakes.

Then comes the rhino battle. Doesn't bother her, we move ahead. Cornelius' house burns down, the old lady is bit, and Alexander --- one of Babar's children -- nearly drowns. Mired by worries, Babar has a nightmare. 

The second the video showed a glowing door I told Bama to close her eyes. Too late. 

See the scary thing on the far left, the white thing with the nose on the back of something? She saw that before I got it together and turned off the television. She's been asking about the ghost on the alligator all night. Would it come to our house, would it live here, why did it go to Babar. She didn't see the sequence, when the elephants chase the demons away, but I tried to tell her Babar chased it away.

Then she read Sylvester and the Magic Pebble. A book I chose, but wasn't 100 percent about and had set aside. She found it and gave it to Mister, who hadn't read it but thought it must be okay if I'd brought it home from the library and it was sitting around.

(Image from Sam and Boo Book Reviews as well as a good write-up and discussion on this as a banned book.)

Anyone read Sylvester? He is an only child, a collector of rocks. He finds a magic pebble that grants wishes. An encounter with a lion, he wishes to be a rock so the lion doesn't eat him. Bam. He's a rock. His parents don't know where he is, the police can't find him, he's vanished. (Sylvester needs to be touching the pebble to work its magic.) In the end, after a long while, the pebble rolls near enough and everything works out.

But when they read it, I was out of the house. It was enough for our girl and sent her over the edge. Dead mother? Scary ghost things? Babar running endlessly and nowhere? A goddamn rock?

There are growth moments here, somewhere. But now I need a new safety trick for her, because I'd relied on magic rocks as her security (under the pillow, in her pocket) and after tonight, I'm not sure she'll be so keen. The big takeaway? It may be as easy as no TV, but could be watch everything first.

Doesn't that idea just make you retch? 

Weekend Hats: Winner, Winner, Chicken Dinner!

Hi Knitters, Well, I see that lots and lots of people love to knit hats and would love to have a copy of Weekend Hats. Thanks for the enthusiastic entries to win a copy of the book. I have randomly selected a winner and have notified her. Congratulations to Gabby [Mama_G] of NYC! Gabby, you need to email me your mailing address. Thank you to everyone for entering. I'll have another giveaway very soon.

via susanbanderson.blogspot.com

I never win anything. Seriously. If it's a raffle or a drawing or a toss of small sticks, forget it. Lay odds on the others in the pool.
Until now, people!
Susan Anderson is a knit designer. I have her Itty Bitty Hats book, follow her on twitter, because I like her style.

I've been coveting the hat she wears in her avatar (yes, that clever chapeau) and guess what, it's in the book Weekend Hats, a book of hat projects that theoretically can be done in a weekend. For me, that is more like a week or so, but I'm quibbling. The important thing is that something nifty will be coming my way in the mail.
If you visit her blog, check out her milk cow pattern and her especially cute owl softie she has up.
Thanks, Susan!

 

kids' clothes week spring 2012

It's back. Elsie Marley's kids' clothes week challenge. I've looked. I've wanted. I've lurked.

This year, I'm in.

 

via www.elsiemarley.com

OMG. An hour a day, that's all she asks for the clothing challenge. Given it took me three weeks to make two wee pairs of pants and a twirly skirt, am I crazy?
What's on my side: I know I can sew and get quite a bit done in an hour.
Bama no longer naps, but she rests AND she can sew buttons on to her fabric while I'm sewing.
Rabbit naps.
I have morning time while she's in school.
I'm desperate to get more pants and skirts done before spring and summer are really here.
I'm in. I signed my name to the comment board. No one will know except me if I flake ... okay, make that no one would have known if I hadn't slapped this post together. And tweeted it.

Playdough!

We've been talking about making playdough for months, but Bama and I hit a focused creative project skid that lasted until this week. 

Playdough. There are recipes everywhere online, but I used this one from Nurturestore, a UK blog I follow on twitter. It took all of 10 minutes. The only downside to home projects is the crazy amount of salt and flour you need to have around. Otherwise, so fun. 

I mixed the hot water into the dry ingredients and oil that she'd stirred together. 

We made blue, yellow, red, and green. Then we added some extra blue to change the green, and a little more yellow to lighten the red. Bama's art teacher (we love Miss Elizabeth!!) has been teaching color blending to the class, so support at home is helpful. 

And so fun.

Colors, Shapes, Hopscotch

Bama's officially dropped her afternoon nap. Up until today, we kept our routine. I'd put Rabbit down for his nap, then she and I would read stories, have a snuggle, and I'd leave her in my room for her "rest." She would nap, but more often over the last couple of months,  she'd get up and read to herself for an hour or so. Sometimes, I fell asleep during our cuddle and she would read, eventually coming over and giving me a kiss on the cheek. "Mama," she'd whisper, "It's time to get up." 

But nap is gone and quiet time is here, because she still needs down-time to chill out and reflect or be still or whatever. Today we did things a little differently. She asked if she could sit at the table and play with the playdough we made yesterday. I was cleaning our disaster of a kitchen and sorting clothes. Chores. Unfun for me, background for her. She made me diamond cookies and clovers and moons and padded back and forth between her playdough world and my slog, sharing her creations. 

When it was time to go outside, finally!, she decided to practice jumping from the rocks to the bricks and deck. We added chalk islands. I chose two colors and shapes for a game that she modified, but one I think we can come back to again and again and make more complicated. She could jump from blue to blue or orange to orange, or shape to shape, allowing her to zig zag across the wood and onto the bricks. She called it Run-Jump-Hopscotch, hopscotch being her new obsession even though she doesn't understand it. I'm excited to see how this will progress and how Rabbit will be able to join in.

 

 

What We Ate: brisket, couscous, chard, mushrooms

Update: This overly bright shot is mine. Thanks! backyard and iPhone.

 

Bama will eat most anything you give her, or at least try it. There are few absolutes: sausages, hot dogs are on her no list. I'm okay with that.

I must have memory block about her eating habits at one -year, or a steadfast refusal to be more accommodating to Rabbit. We all eat the same thing, but this means that he doesn't always get greens as he should because they aren't workable for someone who has five and a half teeth, none of which are molars.

I paired this couscous dish from The Kitchn (minus the chili pepper flakes) with a brisket we made the night before. I say we because Mister pulled out Suzanne Goin's Sunday Supper at Lucques for the brisket recipe. I did the browning and vegetables, leaving him to dump chicken stock (because I don't have beef stock on hand, shameful!) and stout over the meat and toss the whole thing in the oven. What should have been easy suddenly was not because he had to defrost the stock. Oops! Where was I? Playing D&D, people. Mama has a life! ;)

The grown-ups thought the dinner was delicious. The juice from the brisket worked well with the chard and couscous. I'd planned on adding mushrooms, but ran out of time before getting the smalls outside to eat in the garden. The brisket came from good ol' Tamarack out of Vermont. It was only a pound or so, which is really too small for a brisket. The meat was tender and delicious, but it's a silly size considering all the time you spend on it. Five or six pounds makes more sense because you have leftovers. Sandwiches, another dinner. This lot left me with a puddle of couscous and a sliver of meat and some dessicated carrots. Yum, but sad.

The smalls, on the other hand, were overjoyed with eating outside again and having spent the last 30 minutes mucking about in the dirt so they weren't as keen on the whole sitting and actually eating thing. Rabbit did his usual snack and spit (he rolls the food out of his mouth with his tongue. He thinks it's charming), while Bama ate the brisket and carrots, smearing dark brown tracks across her face. They played with the napkins for a while, I ate while enjoying them. It was nice even if it didn't turn out quite as I'd hoped. They both hated the chard. Who can blame them? It's tough and unfun. She loves kale, and once he has molars, I'm sure the whole leafy texture issue will evaporate.

Let's get back to the other matter at hand: What was I feeding Bama at 14 months? She had the same number of teeth, give or take, at this point. Didn't she? 

 

Note: Rabbit's not starving nor is he missing vitamins. His diet is fine, thanks. They both eat sardines, mac & cheese, peas, and mango, among other things. He likes bananas, she thinks she likes bananas. They love seaweed. We're good.

Pants, Dots, Art

I'd be lying if I didn't say I was proud of these pants. They are far from perfect, but they are my first go at making my own pattern and whipping out a pair for Rabbit. Mr. Captain gets a similar pair as whatever one gets, the other does. Two of everything isn't so hard. 

Lesson One: Make sure your pattern is going the correct way so you don't bollocks a bunch of fabric into weirdly unusable pieces that are sitting under the desk waiting for Godot.

Lesson Two: Be sure you do, in fact, cut a back side to your pattern so you don't give your bubs a permanent low-rise. I'll likely take out the 3/4" elastic and replace it with 1/4" to get a little more life from these pants since I think they are bright and fun for spring.

Bama's in the background, tucked into the ball pit at the Children's Museum of the Arts, a magical place we're lucky to have easy access to. The museum hosts a laundry list of art classes for smalls to teens as well as a drop-in "messy art" time. We've managed to make it to the actual art segment a few times, but lately, with Rabbit's nap, we show up just as the sing-along starts. (Drop-in is $22 a family and includes art, singing, and a story. Membership is $250 and friends who have it love it.) There is an ambient space, a ball pit, and a small slide for getting the yayas out. We've never seen most of hte museum because we're consumed by the messy art and playspace. 

Rabbit's still too small for the ball pit.I don't mind because I think it's a bit Lord of the Flies to my liking. Doesn't mean he won't try to get in, though.

Bama and Tom, the early childhood program manager. They are gluing bits to a piece that will be mounted in the upstairs part of the wee arts area. She told him her life story while they discussed the benefits of squishy pieces vs. felty pieces of the collage.

Rabbit working out crayons and paper on the wall.

Dot paints! Ooh!

 

Dot paints. Pas dan la bouche!

Sister works on her own piece. Flubber bucket in the background.

She loves flubber. LOVES it.

Back upstairs. (The dot paints and flubber are on the lower floor along with clay, magnetic magic, hte sing-along. Upstairs are watercolors, gluing, a sand table. Also, a perfect place for Rabbit to play peekaboo with Kelsey, one of hte teaching artists. 

I can't say enough good things about CMA. It's a beautiful space, and the teaching artists seem to have endless patience and creativity when it comes to being with small children. Plus, they do interesting installations, like Love from Mt. Pom Pom from Japanese artist Misaki Kawai. The museum has been transformed by whimsical additions like a giant fuchsia dog who comes with a two-foot long comb for its fur. The New York Times is one of hte many entranced by the exhibit. (We did not, of course, see this exhibit because we were too busy being messy!)

 

It's Official: favorite chocolate chip cookie

via instagr.am

I made a batch of chocolate chip cookies today. The recipe is Jim Lahey's (Sullivan Street Baking) via Bon Appetit. The gossip around town is that Lahey is a nutter, but he's a nutter who can bake some decent loaves of bread and offers up these cookies.

In truth, I'm not much of a cookie eater. Mister is known for his chocolate chip cookies. They contain secret spices (we gave out the recipe and a packet of spices as our wedding gift). When I told one of his best friends, at our first meeting, I wasn't crazy about hte cookies, she looked like he might have to cut things short with me. We've mended the cookie fence, she and I, though I still don't love the spice cookies, and I prefer dough to the finished product.

Until today. I thoght I had my cookie recipe, A Friend to Knit With's adaptation of the Tollhouse recipe. She uses bread flour and they are fantastic.

But I can't stop eating these Lahey cookies. Bama hasn't had one and Mister flew out to Califonria today. It's must me. And this pile o' cookies I can't leave alone. I've eaten four. Maybe that doesn't seem like a lot to those of you who are cookie monsters, but it's insane for me. 

They are crispy round the edges and soft in the middle. Clouds of butter with a few chips for good fortune. My belly can't fit in the kitchen with the rest of me anymore.

It's not like it hasn't been a busy day. Mister flew off, it's daylight savings (who the hell thought it was a good idea, really??). So after a weird morning nap, and absurdly long afternoon nap, the smalls were out back gardening while I finished up dinner. I cooked like crazy today, starting with buttermilk-buckwheat waffles. Cookies, egg muffins (mini- soufflés), soba noodle yum.

I've got a sink full of dishes to wash and a dozen cookies to avoid.