Alliteration amoré

Because I love alliteration, and because a master of the form, William Safire, died this week, I'm dedicating today's post to this sentence he penned as a speechwriter for U.S. Vice President Spiro Agnew:

"In the United States today, we have more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism. They have formed their own 4-H Club -- the hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history."

A reading reduction

Left to right, from top: Sam tells his joke; Chaja, Sam and Annie read about harpies; Amelia goofs off before taking the stage; Max reads his riddle.

Let's Write poetry slam
Serves five children, plus their families

One chapbook (PDF version)
25 flutes of sparkling juice
2 strings of twinkling lights
40 cream puffs stacked in a small mountain
Two pounds of melted chocolate in a fondue pot
A friendly audience

Simmer for two hours. Taste the sweet success.

All photos by Marcel Levy at Dance in the Kitchen.

Let's write

One of five participants in my writing workshop. Photo by Dance in the Kitchen.

Five kids met regularly at my kitchen table to write this summer. It was a skill swap with a friend: She gave my kids art lessons, I taught hers writing. I seized on this arrangement because she's an excellent art teacher, and I'd never given a writing lesson.

Plunging into uncharted territory, I researched the broad subject of writing with children, and the particular topics of poetry and comic writing. Among the arsenal of books to guide me in developing a workshop, I relied most heavily on "Don't Forget to Write: 54 Enthralling and Effective Writing Lessons for Students 6-18." Armed with this excellent book, I developed a syllabus. Here it is, along with my class notes:

Message in a Bottle -- For years, desert island poets have sent their deepest thoughts out to sea in bottles. In this workshop, students create postcards and send them out into the world to find their way back.

Kids left their postcards in grocery aisles, tucked into library books, launched them with balloons and dropped them on sidewalks. One postcard made its way home, and, oh, how we cheered when it arrived in the mail!

Tiny Tales -- Celebrate in a small way. Eat tiny cakes, drink tea from tiny cups and write tiny stories that consist of just a few paragraphs. Learn the basics of story-writing on a small, manageable scale.

The most-anticipated class by the students, who gobbled up the petits fours and drank copious amounts of sweet tea. In the future, I'd divide this into two classes: The first focused on story craft, the second spent creating the book. The free tutorial I used is at Making Books with Children.

Weird Science -- Facts take a backseat to fiction in this inventive workshop. Students compose their own wacky faux-science journals.

This class was a hit with my active and younger kids because it involved shorter, directed pieces of writing.

Everyone’s a Comedian -- Introduction to joke writing and puns encourages word play. Leave with your very own riddle book!

The final class was the most challenging. Having never succeeded at retelling a joke myself, I was nervous and relied on the examples of how to write baseball jokes featured in "Don't Forget to Write." But my group of kids (all soccer players) didn't know baseball. Their lack of knowledge about the game made it difficult for them to manipulate language and come up with jokes like this one:

Why is a catcher a good dinner guest?
Because he is always cleaning the plate.

So I quickly moved on to the "How's business?" joke model found in Joanne E. Bernstein's "Fiddle with a Riddle" and met success. Example:

I'm in the diaper business.
How's business?
It stinks.

In addition to these topics, each class introduced a new vocabulary word (all fabulous insults such as popinjay and stinkard) and poetry form (such as couplet and haiku). Two great books I used were "Poetry from A to Z: A guide for young writers" by Paul B. Janeczko and "Poem-Making: Ways to begin writing poetry" by Myra Cohn Livingston. The Shakespearean Insulter was the source of the vocabulary list.

My students will read their poems and short stories at a poetry slam and art exhibition in my backyard this weekend; I'll share sights and sounds from the event in a future post. I believe the energy, time and money spent teaching kids what I love to do was a wise investment. Their art hangs on my wall. Their stories inspire me.

Quid pro quo.

Diktat

dik-taht
noun

Photo courtesy of Dance in the Kitchen.

Oops goes the flour. Out comes the vacuum. One is never too young to understand the diktat: Clean up the mess.

1. A harsh settlement unilaterally imposed on a defeated party.
2. An authoritative decree or order.

Glorious, garlicky soup

Photos courtesy of Dance in the Kitchen.

Sunday often tastes like the dregs in the bottom of the coffee cup. The day has a bitter grittiness to it: The weekend is over and the family is tired of the activities, the chores, and each other. But occasionally a perfect day comes along filled with mellow autumn sunshine, stolen naps, and garlicky soup for the many runny noses in my home.

In the bowl:

44-Clove Garlic Soup with Parmesan Cheese

44-Clove Garlic Soup with Parmesan Cheese
Adapted from Bon Appetit, February 1999 and Smitten Kitchen

Serves 4

26 cloves of garlic, unpeeled
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 tablespoons butter
2 1/4 cups sliced onions
1 1/2 teaspoons fresh thyme, chopped
18 garlic cloves, peeled
3 1/2 cups chicken stock or broth
1/2 cup cream
1/2 cup Parmesan cheese, finely grated
lemon wedges

Roast 26 cloves (I used a whole head) of garlic in a small ceramic or glass dish. Add olive oil, salt and pepper. Cover with foil or lid and bake until garlic is golden brown and tender, about 45 minutes. Cool. Squeeze garlic between fingertips to release cloves.

Melt butter in soup pot over medium-high heat. Add onions and thyme, and cook for 6 to 10 minutes. Add roasted garlic and 18 raw garlic cloves. Cook 3 more minutes. Add chicken stock, cover and simmer until garlic is tender, about 20 minutes. Working in batches, puree soup in a blender and transfer back to the soup pot. Add cream and bring to simmer. Season with salt and pepper.

Divide grated cheese among your bowls and ladle soup over it. Squeeze lemon wedge into each bowl and serve.

Manneken Pis

Photo courtesy of bEbO.
Manneken Pis, Dutch for "Little man, urinating," is a famous Brussel's landmark.

My sons' third-grade teachers are actively discouraging their students from using the restroom or getting drinks of water during class instruction time. Apparently, there was too much wildplassen going on (Dutch for random acts of peeing), so instructors came up with a thoughtful solution:

Each student has a "credit card" good for five trips to the restroom or drinking fountain in a week. Need to pee? Your card gets punched. Feeling thirsty? That's a second punch. Maxed out your credit card by Wednesday? My sons shrugged for lack of an answer. They don't ever plan to get to that point, they assured me. They're going to dominate their bladders until noon, when everyone is allowed to pee freely.

My initial reaction to this policy looked something like this:

"Angry sandwich" courtesy of Sakurako Kitsa.

What kind of teacher would develop a policy that could lead to bladder infections, constipation and embarrassing accidents? But, keeping in mind the excellent advice about experiencing discomfort from Geek Feminism's post "Notes from a PTA mom," I decided to let my boys solve this.

Each morning, they fill bottles of water to keep at their desks. Each afternoon, they make a beeline for the bathroom. Get out of their way; otherwise, urine trouble.

An ending

"Raking walls" courtesy of bricolage.108.

A robin hangs out under the pergola, picking grapes off the vine. Pinch. Drop. Pinch. Drop. But the third grape the robin swallows in one giant, grotesque gulp. The patio stones are littered with rejected grapes in various degrees of decay, which attracts flies. At the feet of the picnic table and under the benches are tangled messes of sticky web that crackle when torn. The widows that spun these webs hide and wait.

But I know that soon: The grape will shrivel. The robin will migrate. The fly will die. And the widow, stiff from the cooler night and maybe a little hungry from lack of flies, will expose herself to the waning September sun to thaw out and warm up.

And I will squash it.

Absolution

"Do they taste nice?" courtesy of publicenergy.

Since I was raised on the Catholic model of confession and penance, I'm sharing this deadly sin: I am a glutton.

I blame it on the box I'm sending to Heather, my friend in Spain. I thought it'd be fun to include her family's favorite candy bars, but, being at the grocery store without a list of what they liked, I decided to guess. Into the cart go Butterfingers, Snickers and Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. Once home, I discover I was 60 percent right in my guesswork; nobody likes Butterfingers.

What else could I do but eat it?

There I am, crunching this too sweet, too crumbly candy bar that's sticking to my teeth, and I'm not enjoying it. I toss it. Growl. Open the Peanut Butter Cups to get rid of the cloying taste. As I eat this second bar, I realize that Dark Chocolate Reese's Peanut Butter Cups are much better, and actually congratulate myself on eating the candy bar intended for my friend. Now I can go back to the store and buy Heather the better candy bar.

This wrapper joins the half-eaten Butterfingers in the trash. My stomach feels funny from so much sugar, my conscience is pricked. I am unable to forgive myself for my lack of self-control, my binge, my guilty pleasure in chocolate.

The Snickers sits on the counter.

I eat it.

A key

Photo courtesy of alicia rae.

"Memories remain incomplete in your head but sometimes, if the memory is shared, you can pool resources and come up with a version that feels true."
-- Molly Young of Magic Molly.

I'm thinking of a particular memory. We -- me, my brother Joe -- were sitting on the back of the yellow Honda Civic, clutching the metal bumper as the car weaved and hiccuped across ... what? I remember a potted dirt road. Joe swears it was an alkali flat. I was, maybe, 12. Joe, 9. He says we were fighting, and our dad had stopped the car and told us to walk home. But who's idea was it to ignore the order and jump on the back?

I only remember the dust and coughing. Of legs, too long, scraping against bushes. Of feet dragging. I remember my fear mingling with, first, shock that my dad was actually trying to throw us off the back of the car, and, second, determination to not let him succeed.

I think Joe may have fallen off. When I asked my dad about it, he just smiled and denied it happened. But each of us -- Joe, my dad and I -- got a third of the memory. Next time I see Joe, we'll unlock it and fill in the gaps.

Inspired by Molly Young's post "Not a cloud marred the blood-red sun." For more thoughts on keys, visit Sunday Scribblings.

Celerity

suh-lair-uh-tee
noun


Chaja reads in twilight, courtesy of Dance in the Kitchen.

She read with celerity, devouring the teen-age vampire story in two days and craving more.

1. Rapidity of motion or action; quickness; swiftness.

Woohoo for the workers

Hoorah for the secretary! An old ad courtesy of Olivander.

After this weekend's work -- sanding a door, painting a wall, scrubbing a house -- The Slow-Cooked Sentence is playing on this day dedicated to the social and economic achievements of American workers.

A story written with frosting

A 2-year-old's cake.

My daughter, Chaja, celebrated her birthday Thursday and frosted her 11th cake. When she was small she smeared "raspberry-fluff icing on an angel-surprise cake" a la "Bunny Cakes." Now that she's crowing that she has just two more years left before she's a teen-ager, she asked for a yellow cake with chocolate frosting as dangerously dark and delicious as the vampires in "Twilight."

The same girl, nine years later.

Here's the to-die-for recipe:

Foolproof Chocolate Frosting
adapted from Cook's Illustrated March-April 2008 issue

20 tablespoons (2 1/2 sticks) unsalted butter, softened
1 cup confectioner's sugar
3/4 cup Dutch-processed cocoa (I used Hershey's cocoa)
Pinch of salt
3/4 cup light corn syrup
1 teaspoon vanilla
8 ounces chocolate, melted and cooled (I used milk chocolate)

Cook's Illustrated recommended mixing the frosting in a food processor, but I didn't read the recipe ahead of time, and poured everything into my mixer. Didn't make a difference in the outcome.

Process butter, sugar, cocoa, and salt until smooth, scraping sides of bowl as needed. Add corn syrup and vanilla and process until just combined, 5 to 10 seconds. Scrapes sides of bowl, then add chocolate and pulse until smooth and creamy, 10 to 15 seconds.

Licking the bowl with her brothers. All photos by Dance in the Kitchen.

Farewell summer

"A leaf's view" courtesy of Creativity+ Timothy K Hamilton.

Watching
yellow leaves fall
in a late summer wind,
my small son looked at the trees and
yelled no.

For more poetry, go to Sunday Scribblings. I particularly enjoyed Quin Browne at a gasping little voice, Dee Martin at Thoughts Have Wings, and the concise piece published at GlowbyWords.

Tyro

ty-roh
noun


Courtesy of Marcel Levy. For notes on the animals, go to Chaja, Master Showgirl.

In the Nevada State Fair's master showmanship competition, kids compete by showing every animal featured in the fair: rabbits, guinea pigs, chickens, dairy cow and steer, horses, swine, market and dairy goats, and, finally, sheep. The competition is open to the first-place winners in all the individual showmanship events.

My daughter, Chaja, took second in the rabbit competition, but with only two hours before the master showmanship, she discovered she had to step in for the first-place winner. She quickly learned how to show all the other animals, then she showed her stuff to the judges. The result?

A tyro turns champion.

1. beginner in learning; a novice.

Icebox cupcakes

"My fridge" by Dance in the Kitchen. Sketch inspired by Spill Studio.

Icebox Cupcakes

Pour cream, sugar, vanilla into bowl.

Whip.

Spoon whipped cream on top of chocolate wafers.

Stack.



Place in refrigerator.

Chill.

Wait 24 hours.

Devour.


The critics say:

Portrait inspired by "The Willoughbys" by Lois Lowry.

They're delicious!
•
They're soft like an ice cream sandwich.
•
They taste like a giant Oreo cookie.
•
Mo?

Jewels in a jar

Today The Slow-Cooked Sentence ends its four-week series highlighting moments of my family's summer vacation on the East Coast.

"Firefly" courtesy of art farmer.

It was a hot, sticky night in Delaware, and my 8-year-old son Max and I sat on the grass staring into the shadows for a sparkle in the bushes, a flicker of chartreuse in the grass. My eyes ached from staring at nothing. Then right in front of our faces a ghostly green glow burned. Faded. We saw the smokey shadow of tiny wings and body. Erased.

We were watching fireflies. For the first time.

Max tiptoed through the grass, hands cupped, poised.

“I caught one!” he cried and ran to me, opened his hands a crack, then wider.

“Ooh,” and his face fell.

Bug guts smeared his palms, glowed, glistened, a miniature shooting star smashed in mid-flight. He wiped his hands in the lawn. Now the blades of grass glowed, too.

He ran to the house for a jar. First he tried catching the fireflies directly with the jar. Metal lid clinked against glass. No luck. He returned to using his hands. Gingerly.

He caught one and transferred it to the jar. He caught another. Together in the jar, the fireflies glowed like green embers. Their flashes pushed him further into the night, into the shadows, searching for more. Far away, the sky was heavy with rain clouds and silent streaks of lightening.

Max caught a few more before the mosquitoes drove us inside. When I went to kiss him goodnight, I found him under his blanket reading by firefly light.

Check out Firefly, a nonprofit site dedicated to raising awareness about the decline of firefly populations, for amazing and magical pictures and information about this jewel of a bug.

Metamorphosis

In which I compare the life stages of a caterpillar to the development of my children:

Embryo: (Greek meaning "that which grows," "to swell, be full"). The earliest stage of development, from the time of first cell division until birth or hatching.

Each time I discovered I was pregnant I cried.

The first time tears fell for happiness because I was pregnant and had proven the doctors wrong. The second time because I was stunned with the knowledge that I carried not one embryo, but two. The final tears were shed in sadness for the freedom I believed I'd lose with the arrival of yet another baby.

But you know, this final, tiny grub hasn't been the Go-Directly-To-Jail card I feared he would be.

Larva: A young form of animal with indirect development, going through or undergoing metamorphosis.

The door banged open and my 8-year-old son Max bounced into the kitchen, panting for a drink after speeding around the block on his Razor scooter. His body was steaming.

"What's for lunch?" he asked.

"Max, you just finished breakfast a half-hour ago," I replied, wiping the stove clean of globs of oatmeal.

He whined about hunger. I complained about how stinky he was.

"I took a bath last night," he replied.

"Did you use soap?"

He shrugged, noncommittally.

"Smell your arm pits, Max," I said. "You've got stink-waves."

He shoved his nose into his pits, wrinkled his nose, and headed for the shower.

Pupa: The stage when an insect undergoes a complete metamorphosis. Different insects have different names for this period, such as chrysalis in butterflies and tumbler in mosquitoes.

My daughter, Chaja, pulled her shirt tightly across her chest and studied herself.

"When can I get a training bra?" she asked.

"When you need one," I replied.

"But when did you get one?" she insisted.

The gears in my brain halt and grind backward, slowly, reluctantly, to seventh-grade gym class. I can see myself in the locker room, back hunched as I tried to slip on my gym shirt while not exposing my naked chest where small breasts were growing, untrained. The wheels in my mind squeak, turn again, and I remember boys running their hands down a girl's back in search of the bra strap, grabbing hold of it and snapping, and the girl's happily indignant squeal over being singled out, discovered. Memories shift again and focus on me and my mother in a dressing room, teaching me how to put on a bra: Hook it in the front, spin it around and then slip the straps on.

"Mom, Mom! How old were you when you got a training bra?"

My mind's gears chugged forward.

"Twelve, maybe."

She groaned because that is a year away.

Imago: The last stage of development of an insect. It's sexually mature and, if it is a winged species, has functional wings. The imago is often referred to as the adult stage. The Latin plural of imago is imagines, and this is the term generally used by entomologists.

A long-ago conversation, remembered:

"I'm going to be Superman when I grow up," 4-year-old Max said. "Then I'll be able to fly. What are you going to be Sam?"

"I don't know. Maybe nothing. Maybe a fireman," said his twin, Sam. "Or maybe a fairy."

To read others' thoughts on the subject of adulthood, check out Sunday Scribblings.

Crepuscular

kri-pus-kyuh-lur
adjective

In the day, the web is empty.
The spider sleeps, safe and snug, in a crack in the wood.

But in the crepuscular gloom, the spider awakens
and skitters down a long strand of web.





The children watch
it stitch its torn web under the darkness of night.


All photos courtesy of Dance in the Kitchen.
Final two photos by Marcel Levy.

1. Of, pertaining to, or resembling twilight; dim.
2. (Zoology) Appearing or active at twilight.

Tastykake

The Slow-Cooked Sentence is focusing on my family's summer vacation on the East Coast for just two more Wednesdays.

Tastykakes top selling item, the Peanut Butter Kandy Kake.
The company makes 500,000 each day.

These are yummy.

Sponge cake.

Salty peanut butter.

Chocolate dipped.

Oh, my God, these are yummy. Yes, I know they're the East Coast equivalent of Ho Hos or Twinkies, but they're

so

much

better.

My husband, who grew up on Peanut Butter Kandy Kakes, and has suffered withdrawals since we came home from vacation, has researched the possibility of buying a case. That's 72 chocolate-peanutty pucks, with a shelf-life of 21 days, for $37.99. He'd have to eat 3.5 cakes a day.

"You gotta be joking," I said.

"No," came his reply.

You see, they're not sold in Nevada. Not at the 7-Eleven nor CVS Pharmacy. Not anywhere. They're back East in the Wawa. I kid you not. The Wawa. The store's name is as funny as the cakes are delicious. Can you believe people in New Jersey actually say, without a shred of laughter in their voice: "I'm going to the Wawa. Do you need anything?"

Yeah. I need another box of Tastykakes.

My safe Sam

The knee, courtesy of Dance in the Kitchen.

Sam's knees take a beating. They're scabby and torn up with road rash. The abuse began early this summer when a kid on a bike ran him over. Sam hobbled home with a bloody knee and bragging rights, for it's the rare kid who can claim to have survived a hit-and-run.

Sam follows rules, so the injustice of the accident bothered him. But as much as he loves the law, he also loves speed. He understood how a bike could barrel down the sidewalk and knock him down. In fact, he continued to burn around our block on his own bike, and re-scabbed the scab over and over.

These two parts of Sam's personality dueled it out the other day when we went school shopping. He needed a new pack for school, and after finding the right size, I asked him to choose a color: unadorned black, blue with a silhouette of a skateboarder, or a green silhouette of a BMX biker. He went back and forth for a half-hour. Finally, he made a decision.

"My favorite color's green, but I think I'll get the black one," he said.

"Why?"

"Because the snowboarder and the biker aren't wearing helmets, and that's against the law."