crooked house

On Heat. And Marriage.

The family is sitting in the car, waiting for the air conditioning to kick in.

Luke (whining): I'm hot.

David: Nice to meet you, Hot. I'm Fred.

Luke (whining louder): I'm hot. I'm really hot.

David: Nice to meet you, Hot. I'm Fred.

Luke (starting to cry angrily): I'm HOT!

Steph: Luke, we acknowledge your condition and we deeply regret it.

Luke starts to wail in earnest.

Steph: What? That was a nice thing to say.

**

We've had a couple of trying days. Luke came down with some virus and he hasn't been in the cheeriest of moods. I knew he was sick when he started to weep the other night at bedtime. When I asked him what was wrong, he shudderingly told me that he didn't want to get married.

"Well, you're not getting married any time soon, honey," I said.

He cried louder. "I don't want to get married ever," he said.

"Okay," I said. "You don't have to get married ever."

"I don't want to get married," he wailed.

"Okay, okay!" I said. "You don't have to!"

"I want to stay here with you and Daddy forever."

"Okay," I said.

As much as I, personally, am charmed by this idea, it's conversations like the one we had in the car today that make me pretty sure he'll want to move out as soon as he hits puberty. If not before.

More Paper Houses

From Hestia House miniatures.

Another Paper Village

One of the most popular posts on this blog is this one devoted to model towns and villages made out of paper. For quite some time now I've intended to start a separate blog devoted to paper and felt but so far, thanks to the presence of two small children -- particularly the smaller one -- that plan has been thwarted, in much the same way my plans for sleep have. Every day, though, these kids are getting older so I'm sure it will appear soon. Or soon-ish.

In the meantime, please enjoy the work of reader Richard Orton, who emailed to show off this gorgeous paper village he designed in the mid-90s for his family's mantle. He cutout the original by hand and then had a large number manufactured as a mat board sculpture that folded out into one piece. Orton, a designer of paper packaging, managed to sell it to Crate and Barrel one Christmas season. I wish they were still available now.

Sylvie Recommends: CAT!

Sylvie has a new favourite book that she can't stop babbling about. It's called Cat by Matthew Van Fleet and everyone in this house has now become deeply, intimately familiar with it. I know this book better than I know my husband. I know this book better than I know I'll need another coffee before I can face reading it again.

Actually, it's not that bad. The first fifty or so times we read it together were fun. It's got many, many good photos of cats, a rollicking rhyme, and lots of pull-tabs and flaps and so on. It's even got a squeaky toy that Sylvie can actually make squeak -- no mean feat where baby books are concerned as many of them of them contain squeaky toys or sound buttons are too difficult for little hands to manipulate.

The best thing about this book is the way Sylvie has now begun to say the word "CAT!" Of course she calls ducks, dogs, and lemurs "CAT!" too, but with the incredible diversity of cats pictured in this book, who can blame her? Perhaps she will grow up to rework the system of biological classification, irrefutably demonstrating that the first forms of life on this planet were not simple cells -- prokaryotes -- but teensy tiny, practically invisible "CATS!"

Even Luke knows this book by heart. As an added bonus, he can now spell the word "CAT!" Note Sylvie's look of intense concentration.

Happy First Birthday, Vie!

Today this child turned one year old. Luke, who strongly believes that children display dramatic signs of growth on the day of their birth -- he was certain his arms and legs were demonstrably longer on his own birthday -- was surprised to note that she didn't look much different today than she did yesterday. "Except for her feet, Mama," he said. "Her heels look different."

Sylvie chose her own flowers for the birthday table. She pointed emphatically at the PINK Gerbera daisies, not the yellow ones; she danced with abandon to Sly and the Family Stone; she devoured a piece of cake, squelching the icing between her fingers, rubbing it all over her face and hair, and inserting it up her nose; and she was enthralled with the first birthday offering she received -- the glittery card that came with her grandfather's gift. She was so enthralled with it, in fact, that it took her quite some time to muster any interest in the mountain of presents her brother so kindly opened for her. 

She may not look much different than she did yesterday -- except for her heels, of course -- but she sure looks different than she did this time last year. A lot can happen to a baby in 365 days. She can transform from a squinty, squalling, slug-like creature into a tiny, shrieking girl with a glint in her eye who staggers after the cat and tries to wrench his tail off, just because she loves him so.

We didn't expect you, button, but we're thrilled you came anyway. You turned out to be the life of the party.

Babies in Literature: Tolstoy's Anna Karenina

'...The evening before last I met a woman with an infant at her breast and asked her where she had been. She said: "To the wise woman, because a shriek-hag has got into the child, so I took him to be treated." So I asked how the wise woman treats the shriek-hag. "She puts the baby on a roost with the chickens and mumbles something."'

Although this anecdote, from Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, is offered by Levin as an example of the hopeless ignorance of his peasant workers, I'm guessing the remedy for colic it describes is about as effective as any known to date, including those suggested by medical personnel.

Update on that Family Crest: Pelicans, Not Swans

Two commenters, Aaron of Hobart and Nathalie Foy, who has a neat blog about books about books, pointed out that the birds on the family crest featured below are not swans but pelicans. And that the pelican is deliberately feeding her babies her blood, not being attacked by her own offspring. This is a Medieval symbol of Christ. Aaron gave me the heads-up to this Medieval Bestiary which confidently explains:

As young pelicans grow, they begin to strike their parents in the face with their beaks. Though the pelican has great love for its young, it strikes back and kills them. After three days, the mother pierces her side or her breast and lets her blood fall on the dead birds, and thus revives them. Some say it is the male pelican that kills the young and revives them with his blood.

You can see where the Christ allegory comes in. Hmm. I'm beginning to think that the internet is like a giant Medieval Bestiary, filled with fascinating but faulty information. To which I have contributed.  (I just got a flash of a college professor type listening to a student with an expression of great interest and then intoning, "Fascinating. But wrong." I must jot that down in case I ever try to write an Indiana-Jones style movie script.) 

This Wikipedia article says that the misunderstanding may have arisen because:

... pelicans look as if they are stabbing themselves as they often press their bill into their chest to fully empty their pouch. Other possibilities are that they often rest their bills on their breasts, and that the Dalmatian Pelican has a blood-red pouch in the early breeding season.

Earlier in the article it also mentions that "before or especially after being fed, pelican offspring may seem to have a seizure that ends in falling unconscious; the reason is not clearly known. Parents of ground-nesting species have another strange behavior: they sometimes drag older young around roughly by the head before feeding them."

But we all know what everybody says about Wikipedia.

Family Crest: Attacking Baby Swans

My cousin Tonya (of Pauline's Cookbook, a blog devoted to our grandmother's cookbook specifically and Slovak food, family history, and culture more generally) is in Eastern Europe doing a little research. Recently she visited Orava Castle* in Slovakia, where she found this Medzihradne family crest. Our great-grandmother's sister married into that family. So the crest is not technically ours. But the image of those baby swans attacking their poor mother (apparently a symbol of sacrifice)... well, it sure does feel somehow familiar some days. 

I'm not at all sure what to make of that bodiless head impaled on a sword brandished by a floating arm. But it's giving me a headache.

*Cool fact: Many scenes from the 1922 film Nosferatu, thought to be filmed in Transylvania, were actually filmed at Orava Castle.

Kelly Link's Blog Tour

Okay, here's something you really shouldn't miss. One of my favourite writers, Kelly Link, author of the critically acclaimed -- and very fabulous -- story collections Stranger Things Happen and Magic for Beginners, is doing a blog tour for her Young Adult collection Pretty Monsters. She is doing guest posts for a number of blogs and they are riveting. Link recently had a baby girl, Ursula*, who was born at 24 weeks and therefore had a long and harrowing stay in the NICU. Start here:

I could hardly stand being in the NICU at first. We knew that Ursula’s situation was precarious. Almost half of babies born at 24 weeks don’t survive. (Before my pregnancy became high risk, I didn’t know that any babies could be born so early, so small, and go on to thrive.) A majority of those babies that do survive end up with serious complications of one kind or another due to the therapies that keep them alive as well as due, simply, to their extreme prematurity. The gregarious nurse assigned to Ursula that first day told us immediately, well, it’s good that she’s a girl. Girls have a better chance of survival. The next day when we went up, he said, well, she’s still alive. The first twenty-four hours are really crucial. The next day he said, she’s still alive — that’s good. The first 48 hours are crucial. After a week had passed, when a nurse told us that the first week was the period of greatest danger — and so it was a good sign that she had made it through — we weren’t surprised.

Then go here:

I didn’t write any stories during this period. Maybe this is because the kinds of stories that I write don’t have the kind of happy, conclusive ending that I longed for, so badly, for so many months, in my own life. Maybe I didn’t write because it was always going to be hard to write while you are a new parent.

Then here:

I was never the girl the vampire fell in love with. Or the girl who discovered her destiny was to kick vampire ass. For that matter, for a long time I was sure that I would never find love. I was fairly sure I would end up an old maid, living in a house full of cats. Except even cats were never as smitten with me as I with them. I would have been the old maid living in a house full of iguanas. I’ve had a pet iguana: it doesn’t break your heart that your iguana doesn’t love you. You don’t expect love from an iguana. But I digress. What I’m trying to say is that many of my characters are faint of heart, like me. They aren’t especially heroic. If they get involved in dramatic situations, let’s say, with werewolves, it tends to be a terrible mistake: maybe they did something stupid. Or maybe someone else dragged them in. Me, I’ve always been concerned about the fact that I can’t drive stick shift. Come the zombie apocalypse, or the werewolf attack, I’ll be the one sitting in the driver’s seat of the getaway car, crying hysterically while I flood the clutch.

And here Kelly provides lists of her favourite romance and paranormal romance novels and favourite paranormal romance in other media. I'm bookmarking those, so I can work my way through them.

*Kelly's baby daughter's name, Ursula, means "Little Bear." The Little Dipper is also known as Ursa Minor or Little Bear and it contains within its constellation Polaris, the North Star, which is the most well-known and widely used directional star. Clearly Ursula is a very good name.

             

Whirlwind Trip to Scotland

Last Wednesday evening I made a whirlwind trip to the Scottish countryside to help my dear childhood friend Sara celebrate her marriage. I am now back home, feeling very whirled and very winded and very excited about taking David and the kids back there as soon as we can swing it.

Above you can see James, the groom, helping their son Ben into his kilt for the ceremony. I may have been a bit of a party-pooper but I suggested to James that Ben not go commando. I had visions of him inadvertently  flashing the congregation in the very proper Episcopal church.

Below you can see my little god-daughter Jennifer, also known as Woozy, in the backseat of the 1936 Bentley we rode in to the ceremony. I felt like someone in an Agatha Christie novel in that car, bumping along the winding country roads. Luckily, no one was killed either at the ceremony or at the reception. Sara was following with her mum, Lindy, in an antique Rolls Royce, I believe, and Woozy spent most of the drive standing up in the backseat, waving frantically out the back window at her mother and grandmother. It made Sara laugh all the way to the church, which is a very good state to be in when you arrive to get married. I know it's not the usual course of things to have your children before you get married but I must say it made the wedding a whole lot more fun.

 

Below is Sara the day after the wedding, showing some of the guests their latest project. Among many other things, Sara and James turn run-down old buildings into gorgeous holiday cottages. I will post a lovely wedding photo of Sara in all her finery as soon as I get one -- she cleans up good. I was too busy doing Matron of Honour things, half of which I'm sure I forgot, to take pictures during the actual ceremony and reception. Check out that view behind her.

And be sure to check out their website to see what they do to buildings like the ones pictured below. You should go stay there. I can highly recommend it!