The Soy Surprise

Kate began to enjoy imagining that she was lactose intolerant which caused me some initial trepidation until I did a little research and then waited. She would whine intermittently about how she really wanted soy milk and the last time she made this request aka demand, I complied and bought some soy milk. Quietly refused to use it until another round of request, refusals resulted in my making Kate's breakfast cereal and topping it off with soy milk.

"This cereal tastes funny."
"How, funny?"
" Well, like it has chocolate in it."
"It's soy milk, sweetie. It's what you asked for."
"Oh, thanks"

"Mommy, I don't like this. You're right about it tasting funny"

Are there sweeter words in the English language than "you're right Mommy?"

Mom stuff

For the last several months I've been having Wednesday morning coffee with a fellow Friends parent who also has children from China. As we've gotten to know each other over the last couple of years as dinner partners with our husbands and then simply as individuals, we have discovered alot of similarities and common interests. Our daughters are also the same age and became good friends this summer when they shared a cabin at camp.

I'm all about trying to stay ahead of Kate's development. A failure in the making I know. But I've been clipping info about make up artists, body awareness etc, And this weekend Kate tackled me about buying a bra. Good, fine, lets buy it but in my mind this is a disgusting item of clothing that I wish I didn't have to wear. Ironically I feel the same way about make up. But I told Kate that she would need to be properly fitted and that I would take her to a special store....And this morning Anne and I decided to take the girls together and make a day of it.

I think this is going to be so fun because we're all doing it together.

Bravo

Kate was invited for a Friday night sleepover...I went up to Milford, Ct. to have dinner with some old friends and Arnie had all of New York at his finger tips. But only for a few hours because then Kate and her friend Lile arrived at 9 ish in the morning. I didn't get home from CT until noon.

Lazy weekend -- I made a sensational split pea soup -- the kind of cold weather where you wanna stay inside and finally we ventured out to see the Woody Allen film that just won a best actess award for Penelope Cruz.In general I detest Woody Allen and feel judgemental about him and his life style which is an uncomfortable feeling for me but apparently I've been able to keep this feeling going for almost 20 years. Which I'm told is the amount of time he has been married to Sun Yi with whom he has two children! But i digress because the Movie is great. I loved it and Arnie hated it which was interesting to discuss.

And Kate also received her letter from Hunter -- we had alerted the mail man that we were waiting for this important letter and then he called up to let us know that he saw it in the mail -- and it said, Too bad, there is no place for you at Hunter or words to that affect. I think we were all disappointed. In fact it made me feel very blue because I was looking for something to celebrate and Kate thought that she had not done well on the test she took in early January.....apparently she was correct.

like several other families at Friends who were waiting until the very last minute, we dropped off our deposit check for next year this morning.

And our other signal accomplishment for the weekend, was the finalizing of all our china pictures. Arnie spent hours bent over the computer putting some 500 images in logical order so that we would have a hard copy of our China trip. Bravo. I don't understand how this works exactly and frankly don't care but i do know that I will have a book of our pix that I can actually hold in my hand. Bravo again.

Week end

Valentines Day. Lots of flowers and a home cooked meal -- is that not amazing -- before we dashed off to a jazz concert. I love to be cooked for at home and watch with great interest all the hubbub going on in the kitchen. Arnie cooked a filet with vegetables and served a great red wine. Then jazz and some wandering around New York like real people without having to make a final dash to get the baby sitter out. Kate was on a sleep over where she wrote a letter to president Obama about her educational experience with the Quakers which I thought was sensational.

Saturday and Sunday were a blur except that at one point Arnie said it was too cold to go out and that he wanted to stay home. That's serious from a guy who always wants to know what he's going to do next, even when he's doing what he's doing. That mystery has not been solved.

On Monday Kate and I had a girls day passing amongst them in New York. A slow start to allow for some final homework and then down to Chinatown because I had been really yearning for some rice noodles and barbecued pork. A walk through a still expanding Chinatown until kate's talked about her desperate need for a taxi. How am I going to take her to London or Paris if she won't really walk. That's the charm of these cities. The second part of our agenda hinged around a trip to the Gap where we bought some jeans and then Kate fell in love with a red plastic-y jacket. i was in full steam about how she didn't need it, etc, etc. until I took a look at the price and figured out that it was $20. How bad can lust for a red jacket be for a 12 year-old?

I had a day off

and nobody else did. Winner.

The day before was incredibly warm and so I had a chance to dash over to the East Side to do some errands, grab a sandwich big enough to feed 4 construction workers off one of the Halal trucks which I had never done and go eat in the Park. I felt so hip. After that is I figured out what to order and how to do it. You know how the first time you went to Starbucks you had no idea what the hell or order or how to do it because all the language was different.

Yesterday i went over to Williamsburg with a friend for a grown up road trip to Bklyn. Great day. No time constraints and then time to read my book once I got home in the afternoon.

This morning I discovered Kate trying to lock herself in the bathroom which has no working locks so that she could put on lip gloss and blush! Zounds

Road trip

We all took Friday off, including Kate -- we excused her from school --, rented a car and took off for Vermont. That's a five hour drive which is always easier on the way because it's an adventure and quite boring on the way home because you want to be home NOW. It's at that moment, like many others, that I want to ditch the car. Any car.

We arrived in Woodstock, Vt in the early afternoon to find a landscape devoid of large buildings but decorated with carefully marked fields dotted with horses, houses, red barns and lots and lots of snow. Our friends are renting a cute house on the main drag of the quintessential New England town with its community church with a tall white spire, classic houses built in 1773 and beautiful country inn named after the town nestled on the village green and surrounded by twee stores in varying stages of rustic.

Cold. Very cold. It was 6 degrees when we went out on Saturday morning for a stroll and breakfast. So it wasn't as much of a stroll as it was a pretty brisk walk. We went to a very good bakery and then poked around in stores selling fabulous winter wear which I only need when I walk the dog. I bought some red thinsulate gloves and various country products. Never go ome empty handed. We filled our time with sightseeing and then in the afternoon we went cross country skiing which was much tougher than I wanted it to be. We spent almost 2 hours there which was just great for all of us. I fell rather consistently and several times really bonked my head on the snow. Arnie did very well and it was the highlight of the weekend for Kate.

Dinner at the beutiful old inn, lots of good conversation with old friends and then we took off on Sunday morning promising Peg and Ave to come back in the summer. I think this part of the country which is so beautiful now with old snow must be extraordinary in the summer when everything is green.

Could I live there? Absolutely not.

More road trips please

Whoppee

We just did the deal on a one-week rental in Chebeague for the last week in August.
We will pick Kate up at her camp in Freedom Maine wth trunks of dirty laundry and then lazily go down the coast to Portland. From there we'll take the boat over to chebeague. But not before 3 days so that Lazily is the operative work here because frankly we're gonna have time to kill before we can take possession of the house that Sunday. So from Thurs to Sunday we're gonna be looking for stuff to do..But the great news is that we can take Miss murray. kate is estatic because she says, All you ever do is nap and read so for this vacation Miss Murray is mine." I guess so. but I'm thrilled. And Dorothy is going to rent the house down the road from us.

Very satisfactory all round.

Mushrooms

Lydia Bastanovich is one of my favorite TV chefs although we've never been to any of her very well known New York restaurants. I love this imperious woman who clearly terrorizes her family and cooks up a storm. So, on one episode, she was wildly breaking up lasagna noodles and dropping them into boiling water and the result looked like delicious handkerchief noodles. So, the other night as I walked Miss Murray and pondered the inevitable dinner sitution, i remembered this great segment. Soon I was back in the kitchen cracking up sheets of very brittle lsagna noodles and dropping them grandly into boiling water. The result: delicious handkerchief noodles. Top that with some Porcini mushrooms, some reduced cream and a boneless pork chop. Devine. And Kate ate it.

That must be my signature: And Kate ate it.

Year of the Ox

On Friday we had a great dinner at a Peking Duck Restaurant in midtown with several families who had adopted from the Liu Zhou orphanage in 1999. I hate to brag but really while the restaurant was good, it wasn't AS good as the restaurant we went to this summer in Beijing. That was an unexpected treat that left all of us - Arnie, Kate and me -- wanting to go right back to the restaurant. It was there that the chef carved the duck into 110 pieces,precisely, removed the skin and served it with a little bowl of sugar.

We all want to go back to that restaurant.

Happy New Year.