Lilacs: Signs of Spring

The lilacs are out in full bloom and the air smells sweet with their scent.  It’s gardening, season in Chicago.  And this Windy City Momma has a secret: when I garden, I like to get REALLY, really dirty; no knee pads and gardening gloves for me!  When I get in my garden, I dig for worms, spread the manure with my hands, feet, arms and legs and basically get covered in dirt from head to toe.  Call it a stress reliever for a weary mom or a sick way to embrace my inner child; I really don’t care. Carefree gardening is just plain fun!

My Fledgling Garden

It just so happens that the generous P&G folks at Tide asked me if I was interested in trying out the new Tide Pods (detergent, stain remover & brightener in one) to confirm that Tide could, in fact, get out any tough stain and dirt.

What a great challenge!  Look, I have NEVER been a devout believer that any particular laundry detergent would be able to get my clothes clean after a full day digging in manure, dirt and clay.  I have accepted the fact that some clothes are meant to be discarded after I (literally) roll in the mud for a day. But my husband has sentimental feelings about using Tide.  His mother always uses this particular brand and he loves the scent(s).  I guess it just provokes wonderful childhood memories and when he smells his shirts in the morning, he is instantly happy.  Far be it for me to take this little slice of heaven from him, right?

As for its effectiveness, well, I wasn’t too convinced that one little pod could clean, get rid of stains and brighten my clothes.  I decided too accept the free samples but I would use it to clean my dirtiest and scummiest clothes: the bright fushia sweatpants I wear every year when I plant the garden.  Trust me, when I was done for the day, the pants smelled far worse than they looked in these post-gardening pictures:

Dirt, Rain & Manure = A Cleaning Challenge

Just gross

That's Never Coming Out!

Here it comes to save the day! Tide is on the way!

Wish me luck!

So, you’ve seen the pictures and I have expressed my doubts.   Will a Tide pod be able to get rid of (a) the dirt etc. stains (b) make the pants look like they were new and (c) eliminate the awful manure smell they emitted?

And the answer is:

YES!

Need I say more?  I am convinced!  If Tide Pods can get rid of the stains and smell great then I am a believer and a convert.  The Keats can officially be declared a “TIDE Family!”

**Note: Since my daughter found out about my little Tide experiment, I’ve noticed that she has ceased being as careful with her clothes as she was last week. Perhaps the drastic difference between the dirty and clean sweat pants was a bit too effective for her?

 This is a Sponsored post written behalf of Tide Pods. All opinions are 100% mine. Click here if you are interested in getting a Tide Pods sample.  I would love to read about your experiences with the product!  

Ramona Quimby, Age 8

At 9:15 p.m., along with “Mommy, I just threw up in your bed” one of the last things a mother wants to hear from her child is “Mommy, I forgot to do my homework and it’s due tomorrow!” Despite reminding her to finish the assigned reading this week, my daughter “forgot” to do it because, to be quite honest, she hates the reading assignment: Ramona Quimby, Age 8.

Most parents have been in a similar situation. Children frequently and conveniently “forget” to do their homework particularly when it is a subject that they despise, like Ramona. I can remember finishing an assignment or two at the breakfast table before school started while my mother berated me for procrastinating. So, despite the fact that she should have already been sleeping, I told my 8 year-old daughter that she had a choice: either stay up tonight and finish the assigned chapter or I would get her up early the next day. Either way, that kid was going to show up for class with the dreaded reading done.

And that’s when she hit me with the “kicker”: “But Mom, I can’t find the book!” Of course she couldn’t; she HATED the book and the assignment. Losing the book was all part of the plan, right?

While she got ready for bed, I looked frantically all over the house and in my car for her missing book. Guess what? I couldn’t find it because, my daughter sheepishly later acknowledged, that she may have left it at school. Another 15 minutes wasted.

Now I faced a real dilemma: in the Chronicles of Mommyhood (as I like to call it) this was an opportunity to teach my 8 year-old a lesson about responsibility. Despite the fact that she didn’t want to do the assignment, it was still due. We all have things that we dread doing in life. LESSON, LESSON, LESSON….bah blah, bah blah, bah blah.

If this was the early 80′s, for instance, my mother would have yelled at me for being so irresponsible and admonished that I deserved whatever punishment the teacher felt was appropriate for my misdemeanor. With that train of thought, if I was my mother, I would feed my daughter to the lions (aka her teacher.) But if this was the 80′s there would also be no such thing as a Kindle, iPad or other e-reading device.

I have a Kindle and with a flick of my magic wand (the internet, a computer and amazon.com) I could make this problem go away for my young child. As I stood at the foot of K’s bed, I thought about the swimming analogy: do I do nothing which means letting her sink and hope that she figures out how to swim (i.e. learns a lesson) or do I hold her up because I know that there is a tool available to me now that wasn’t available when I was a child?

What would you have done if you were in my place?

I suggested to K that I download the book on my e-reader and no one would be the wiser. But I also took advantage of the moment to remark that she was “Darn lucky that your mother is SO smart and willing to help you out of a jam!”

My reasons for helping K were not totally altruistic. It’s important that I reveal that there was another reason for my willingness to commit a “Mommy Crime” and possibly rob my daughter of her future integrity; I needed to observe a Bat Mitzvah on Saturday at our synagogue and I knew that if I helped K that she would be obligated to come with me. I gave her the choice: “I’ll download the book and help you out but then you have to come with me on Saturday. Or if I don’t download the book and you deal with your teacher, you’ll get to chill at Grandma’s Saturday morning.”

Guess what? She asked me to download the book. She read three pages tonight and promptly fell asleep. So much for helping her out. Note: She still has to go to the Bat Mitzvah. Before I downloaded the book, I made her “pinky swear.”

A promise is a promise after all, right? And I have integrity after all.

A Parent's Nightmare

My husband and I are really lucky when it comes to childcare.  When we go out, we have a built in babysitter anxious and willing to spend a few, uninterrupted hours with our child: Grandma.  And while we don’t always agree with what transpires while we are out, in general, the household rules are followed.
 
But every so often, Grandma is not available and we need to hire a babysitter. We have had good experiences with the teenage sitters in our neighborhood.  Our household rules are pretty lax (yes, K can watch t.v., no, there is no set bed time while we are out. Occasionally, K might mention that the sitter was too strict or wouldn’t let her have dessert. We don’t consider that to be a major issue even if our child does.
But what happens when the babysitter tells your kid to keep something secret from her parents and flat out lies to you when you ask her about it? We recently experienced this situation and are wondering about the actions we should take.
 
While attending a theater event on a Sunday afternoon, one of the neighborhood teenagers (who was highly recommended to us) agreed to watch our child.  While we were gone, a few minor calamities occurred: balls flying and landing on the roof, a few toys breaking from misuse and a sketchy decision by our daughter to use suntan lotion as a way to “draw” on the driveway.  None of these things is a big deal to me.  Really… I have done and experienced much worse first as a child and then as a mother.  What I struggle with is the decision to “let’s just not tell your parents” by the sitter.
 
Note, there are three basic rules in my house:

1. Be courteous to ourselves and one another
2. Safety first.  Before doing something ask yourself if this is safe.
3. No secrets from Mom or Dad.  It is much better to just tell your parents what’s going on rather than keeping it inside and letting them find out about it later.

 
In typical middle-child tradition, I tried to break the tension by first shrugging my shoulders as if this was not a big deal and then, of course because I was a bit nervous, giggling. I have to admit that I was afraid if we questioned the kid too much that we would make her cry.  The sitter admitted to me that she was going to tell us about the ball landing on the roof and that she was really sorry about it.  Again, now wanting to create tension, I just shrugged it off and said that it was no big deal.  But…at the time, I didn’t know what she told my child: “Don’t tell your parents about the sunscreen.  Let’s just keep it a secret.” Had I known, I would have stopped giggling immediately.

WHAT? 

On a side note: Had a great time at the party until my feet decided that it was time to get off of the concrete floor.  Major pain despite the fancy shoes.

Honorary chair and Steppenwolf ensemble member Kathryn Erbe (center), with Renee and Adam Keats of Highland Park at Friday’s the Red or White Ball at Architectual Artifacts. | Kyle Flubaker photo (http://www.suntimes.com/photos/galleries/index.html?story=11942517)

Nevertheless, be it a Commandment or a tradition, hard boiled eggs have been made and stacked in my refrigerator for my family to consume through out the week.  (Side note: I really don’t like hard boiled eggs.  They remind me of that movie “Airplane!” when all of the people got sick from eating the fish and all of the sudden eggs came out of their mouths? Weird right?)

So K, who also hates hard boiled eggs, decided we need an infusion of color to encourage us embrace our egg eating tradition.  K’s suggestion was to follow the lead of our Christian brethren and “Color those eggs!”  She decided to call in an egg decorating expert, her best friend (and neighbor E) who happened to be playing at our house when we decided to pull out the Easter Egg dyes and get “cracking!”

I found the egg. Now where's the bunny?A long .

A long time ago…

See that child? Hard to believe that’s me at age one year. This picture sat on my father’s dresser for as long as I can remember.  I am wearing my Mother’s Easter dress which seems a bit ironic because we are Jewish.  Nevertheless, the non-secular celebration of Easter was a tradition in my family and, when I think about it now, leaves me with warm feelings.

My dad loved participating in Christian holiday traditions.  It must have given him great  pleasure to hide Easter eggs for my sister and me to find and store in our baskets.  My step-mother always made a point of buying Easter candy and ensuring that we had a basket to enjoy on Easter Sunday.  Somehow she knew what types of candy I really enjoy. (Hint: Jelly beans and Cadbury Easter Eggs.  No PEEPS!)  Year after year, my father and step-mother boiled eggs in preparation for my visits to their house. (I lived with my mother for most of the month.)  They bought the fake green grass and the candy.  Hid the eggs after I finished decorating them and ensured that I could not get my Easter basket until all of the eggs were located.  To perhaps put a spin on our Passover Seders, we always included those eggs in our celebration of the Jewish holiday.

Four years after my father passed away,  I participated in an Easter egg hunt with my husband and my daughter on my best friends’ condo roof.  Feeling gleeful as my daughter found her “treasures” (and we continued to take eggs out of her basket and re-hide them so the fun would last a long time) I finally understood why my father participated in the Easter egg hunt tradition.  There is something so “precious” about seeing the joy on one’s child’s face when she discovers her eggs, the candy and finally a chocolate bunny.

What's in the basket?

Now, where is the Easter Bunny?

My father passed away twelve years ago on April 11, 2000.  It’s a bit ironic that he died around Easter.  While we weren’t necessarily close and he wasn’t the easiest person to get to know, when I think of Easter, it is with fondness for my father.  Easter was one of the few times that I truly felt close to him.  I like to think that he would be happy knowing that K and I set aside a few hours to boil, dye and decorate a dozen eggs in preparation for the Easter egg hunt in our backyard.

This year, like the ones in the past,  as I watch K search for her hidden candy and eggs, I know that I will also imagine my father standing next to me and perhaps smiling at the knowledge that I keep the tradition going for another generation.

Digging in the Dirt for Beets

Growing up in Baltimore, I clearly remember being “forced” to eat beets at my grandparent’s house.  As a child I reasoned that cold red beet soup and sour cream must have been good for old people and thus the reason that my grandparents consumed it almost daily.  I hated beets–all beets, no exception.  The mere mention of the word drove me into fits of mock hysteria complete with gagging sounds and fake vomiting.  (Hey Mom?  Remember the time I fake puked in front of your Danish friends?  That was a scene, wasn’t it?) 

Leave it to my husband to re-introduce beets into my diet.  (It helps to live with a semi-gourmet cook.)  But every now and then I flat out refuse to eat something that he has cooked.  Baked beets were one of those dishes.  Serve me up some Kohlrabi and I am your girl.  I’ll even try a bit of broccolini before condemning it.  But beets?  Forget it.  Eventually, when my (then) 2 year old daughter gobbled them up like they were candy, I decided to try beets again.  And I loved them!  The secret was in the baking with olive oil and not serving them as a cold soup.  Now I can’t get enough beets and cherish opportunities to find different varieties to cook and serve with various parings.

Thus the Dwight Schrute reference.

When we moved to the Chicago suburbs six years ago, my husband and I were jazzed to have our own “bit of earth” and converted part of our minuscule lawn into the organic garden of our dreams.  (That’s right, no pesticides, chemicals or sprays on our food. Just me fighting the bunnies, deer and bugs.)  At first he was really involved in charting the progression of tilled earth to seedling to plant and harvest.  But after a few years, my husband lost some interest in the whole gardening experience and concentrated his efforts solely on the seasonal tomato and basil production.  I was left to my own devices in the rest of the garden and we discovered that there was one less thing that we had in common. Left to my own devices, I have a BLACK thumb.   At first I planted and tried to grow all sorts of fruits and vegetables:

• Cantaloupe: Horrible disaster and rather messy. Who knew that you were supposed to let them grow on the ground?
• Carrots: Did not appear OR the rabbits ate them before I could protect them
• Thyme and Lavender: Over-run by my husband’s chive (aka: garden grass) plants
• Cucumbers: Usually get one monster cucumber that turns cannibal and eats the baby cukes. (Scary, I know.)
• Strawberries: Yeah, uh….we prefer not to discuss the patch of strawberry “weeds” we cannot get rid of in the middle of the garden.  We never did finesse a “berry” out of that patch.
• Sugar Snap Peas:  Well, I got them to grow but then forgot about them and they dried up on the vine.  Plus, the vines sort of attack you when you’re not looking.

Neighborhood Girl (NG): Mrs. K?  What do you put in that giant metal cage* you keep in your basement?

(*Note: We lock our dog in the crate for her safety when we are not in the house.  She get’s too nervous if she is left alone and the vet recommended it.)

Me: Oh?  That thing?  We put K in there when she is misbehaving.  It’s perfectly safe.

NG:  (To K) Is that true?  Does your mom really lock you in that cage?

K:  Oh yeah!  Tons of times!  (Whispering to her friend) I think that she likes to put me in there.

NG:  Uh, Mrs. K?  I think I hear my mother calling me to come home for dinner.

(Note: It was 3:00 in the afternoon.  Unless it’s a holiday, who has dinner at 3:00?)

Yup.  I wonder if NG will be venturing over to my house any time soon?  If you know my daughter, husband or me, you also know that there is NO WAY that K WOULD EVER be locked in a cage!  As if!  She’d figure out how to get out of it in 5 minutes!  :)

Now, her locking me in the cage, well, that is another story.  Just Kidding!

Torah! Torah!

The short answer?  Studying Hebrew.  (And yes, I know that it rythmes) It’s the end of January and the big day is on May 26th.  I received my torah portion a few weeks ago and I am beginning to wonder if 5 months is going to be enough time to learn, memorize and clear the linguistic tongue twisters that I have come to know as Hebrew.  Heck, I can’t even master the prayers that are recited before the torah portion is (get this) chanted!

A few weeks ago, while she was on a sugar low (i.e. I forgot to feed the creature) K, my 8 year old, confessed to her father that she thought that there was something seriously wrong with me: “I mean, Dad, she (meaning me) CAN’T even chant the Ve’ahavta!  Everyone knows that prayer!”  I don’t think that she knew that I was listening and to his credit, my husband defended me.  But seriously, that is a REALLY hard prayer to read, let alone remember if you weren’t raised hearing it. But maybe she is right, perhaps I am a Hebrew language idiot?  There are still letters that look the same to me and I can’t seem to remember.  Even my Hebrew teacher has been caught writing out the phonetic pronunciation for me.

Let’s add another layer to the stress, shall we?  The date of my Bat Mitzvah also happens to fall on my 4oth birthday.  No pressure right?  So we are celebrating a double mitzvah!  Not only will I become a woman on May 26th (that’s what happens when you become a Bat Mitzvah–you are told that you are now a woman) but I become a MIDDLE AGED WOMAN!

I’ve gone into my reasons for willingly ensuring this discomfort and embarrassment in another blog post so I won’t bore you again with my reasons.  Let’s just say that at this point not only is getting a Bat Mitzvah a personal goal but it is also proof that I am capable of finishing things that I have started.  Like many women (and particularly, moms) I start a lot of things just to leave them hanging for a bit while I move onto something else.  Completing this “project” will prove to me that I can set a life goal and meet it.

In the meantime, I still have to figure out who I am inviting, design and make the invitations/announcements and, oh yes, find a place to take everyone who is flying in to dinner.  Oh the pressure!  The pressure!

The Perfect Cupcake

Luckily, she also has quite an imagination and makes up humorous and somewhat gruesome stories for her dolls.  K can be found in her room setting up a Tier 3 ER for her American Girl dolls who have recently been in a deadly helicopter accident and were then “mauled” (aka sniffed) by the German Shepherd, who for the sake of the game is now a Saber Toothed Tiger.

Imagine my surprise several weeks ago when I discovered the American Girl dolls had been left by the wayside and K was parked in front of the television watching the Food Channel’s latest dessert show: Cupcake Wars. When I tried to distract her, she promptly told me: “Not now Mom!  I’m about to find out who won this season’s competition!” Uh, huh?  What exactly was she watching?  It seems that K is hooked on a show that, like Top Chef (on the Bravo network), pits chefs (Pastry chefs in this case) against each other for the honor of winning an award and monetary compensation.  In K’s case, she was watching the final episode of the 3rd season in which Chefs Casey Shiller, Certified Executive Pastry Chef, and Dana Holland, executive chef of Jilly’s Cupcake Bar & Cafe competed against several other teams on the episode entitled “The Final Frontier,” an outer space theme.  The winner’s cupcakes would be featured at a VIP party honoring the first man in space.  Guess who won?  And guess who was screaming with joy and jumping all over our living room furniture?  Yeah, it was Jilly’s and K was THRILLED!

So it seems that the competition had been re-run in preparation for Season #4 beginning in January, 2012 but K didn’t know (or care).  When we told her that we decided to go to St. Louis for a winter break holiday, K’s first questions were  ”Can we go to Jilly’s?  You know their in St. Louis too?”

So off we were to visit some wonderful friends in St. Louis and go to Jilly’s.

K Outside of Jilly's: Day 2

We showed up at the bakery a bit later than we had intended: 4:30 p.m.  The bakery was scheduled to close in 30 minutes.  How were to know that we were about to experience Divine Intervention in the shape of Jill Segal and a fantastic cupcake?  When Jill saw us taking pictures, she sadly told us that they were OUT OF CUPCAKES! OMG!  We came all this way (from Chicago to St. Louis) and they were out of cupcakes?  I couldn’t help it.  I swear that the words just slipped out of my mouth: “Oh No!  And we drove all of this way!  From Chicago to St. Louis just to try your cupcakes! And she (my daughter) is such a fan! You can’t be out of cupcakes now?!?”

Jill just melted in front of us.  This wonderful woman who owed us no more than an “I’m sorry but what kind of dummies show up at a bakery 30 minutes before it closes expecting prize winning cupcakes?” explanation, stopped everything that she was doing, grabbed K’s hand, took her to the back room and introduced her to Casey Shiller and Dana Holland, the chefs who created magic and won the contest!  K was speechless, and it looked as though she was having trouble breathing because she was so excited to meet her culinary idols!  Casey asked K if she was interested in designing her own cupcake?  And the rest of the story can be shared through pictures–they are much more interesting and tasty:

Casey and K choose the cupcake

Yum! Cream cheese fills the cupcake

Pink Cream Cheese Icing

Now? Which toppings to choose?

Carefully applying silver balls

More design

Add an Umbrella or No? Choices, choices

The Perfect Cupcake

The Finished Product: Boxed

Dana consults and declares it a "Good Job!"

We get our pictures taken with the famous crew from Jilly's

What a way to spend a phenomenal afternoon in St. Louis!  Adam, K and I had different favorite parts of the trip.  Visiting with new and old friends absolutely made the list of highlights.  But I think that we can all agree that there is NOTHING like a cupcake to make your day and bring a smile to your face.  I cannot thank Jill enough for her hospitality and enthusiasm.  Carey and Dana were fun to work (and play) with and I know that K cannot wait to make it back to Jilly’s again for a repeat performance.  Be honest, if you had a chance to design your own cupcake with an award winning team, wouldn’t you?

Brings a smile to my face every time I see this pic. Must be a Mom thing?

I know that she would!

Willy Wonka's or Jilly's Cupcakes? Yummy!