Baking 101

Today is a beautiful autumn day in New England, a Norman Rockwell painting kind of day. It’s an auspicious day to make apple pies for Thanksgiving. And it’s a perfect day to make a bread pudding, that comfort-food-with-a-wow-factor dessert. Today’s flavor will be chocolate and cherry, with a nice bit of caramel sauce on the side. (Since I have no self control, I’ll make a smaller pan to eat between now and Thursday.)

My head is so full of plans for making these dishes that I have no room to think of anything to say about the food. So, I will leave you with two images. One, the oven.

This is Scooby’s EasyBake™ Oven. She got it as a gift from camp. Although I had expected my hard-core budding feminist to rail against having been given a girl toy (hard to re-define a kitchen appliance as an action figure accessory, but I was willing to try), she fell in love with it immediately. It helped that the oven is not pink.

The first project was a bit of a disaster, as Scooby didn’t realize that ingredients had to be carefully measured. (Doodle, always the gentleman, gamely ate the “cake” that resulted from that experiment and convinced her that it was dee-licious. He will make a fine husband someday.) The second project, S’mores, went much better, even though the oven can only bake one cookie at a time. We meticulously went through each of the fifteen steps, and Scooby’s finished product was closer to the masterpiece she was aiming for:

Maybe I’ll invite Scooby and Doodle to bake with me (using the big oven, of course). After all, even feminists have to eat. They might as well learn to bake while they’re young.

On Weddings and Marriage

This weekend, we drove up to Maine to attend a friend’s wedding. Actually, Rev was performing the wedding, and we were there to offer him moral support as much as to witness the marriage. In the end, it was a tiny wedding in a rural country church, with the same number of guests as members of the wedding party.

Every bride wants her wedding to be perfect: beautiful and sunny weather, happy guests, no disasters. She wants to be the gorgeous princess, with all eyes on her in stunned admiration. She wants to have a leisurely breakfast, pampering herself and her attendants as they do their hair and makeup.

She doesn’t want to wake up to a broken sprinkler gushing in her hotel room, which causes a flood of biblical proportions and leaves her gown and all of the bridesmaids’ dresses in sodden heaps on the floor. She doesn’t want to be late for her own ceremony (designed to take place on 11/11/11 at 11:00) due to having to give statements to the police and the fire department.

We left our house at the crack of dawn, drove across two states, and arrived at the church early (for once) to the news that the wedding might be a tad delayed. This was conveyed by the groom, who was the quintessential unflappable Mainer. We got to work filling balloons with helium (Doodle and Scooby are happiest when they are being useful, like Thomas the Tank Engine), while Rev went over the ceremony with the groom. By the time the bride arrived, her laughter a hair shy of hysteria, all of the family and guests had settled into a collective shrug: hey, if this is the worst that will happen, you’re going to have a fine married life.

For his homily, Rev used a piece of advice my dad had given him years ago. In sum, most people think that marriage is a fifty/fifty proposition: each gives an equal fifty percent. But it’s not. Each person has to give 100 percent – because there will be days when one or the other can’t give that much, or maybe can’t give anything at all. And the other one covers the difference. Otherwise, on a bad day, you can’t even meet in the middle. He also reminded them that they don’t have to look behind them, because they will have each others’ backs.

Rev and I are seventeen and a half years into our marriage. On occasion, we still might have our schmoopy moments – when we’re not running around crazy busy and texting schedules to each other. He likes to pat my tush at inappropriate times in inappropriate places, and I think he is at his sexiest when he’s in his vestments. We have never had a shouting fight, and neither of us has ever placed a hand on the other in anger. (I like to say we argue like chess, not tennis.)

But he always has my back. If I say, Honey, I want to try to do X, his natural response is, That’s great; what can I do to help you? He wants me to succeed, and wants me to be happy, and he’ll do anything in his power to help me get there.

And I’m, as Scripture says, his helpmeet. I protect his unguarded flank. I keep watch for predators and dangers; I offer my good sense and solid opinions; and when I can, I take out the enemy.

When we got to the hotel that afternoon, I watched an episode of Say Yes To The Dress – with my mouth open. I only have five weeks to find my perfect dress! My fiance and my mother want to pick out my dress and I don’t agree with their taste! Waaaah! This is sooooo hard!

Seriously?

You can tell brides until you’re blue in the face that a wedding is just a day, but a marriage is a lifetime. That’s a truth they have to come to on their own. Regardless of the disasters that happen on The Day, all that matters is that there is a husband and a wife standing there at the end. I used to have a Post-It stuck to the credenza in my office in the days leading up to my wedding. It said: All you need for a marriage to be valid is a bride, a groom, an officiant, a witness, and a license. Everything else is fluff.

Fluff is good. Fluff is sweet and gooey and yummy. But fluff has no nutritional value.

I wish that our friends’ wedding had been perfect. I wish it had been everything that the bride had hoped for and dreamed of.

But more than that, I wish that the couple will be able to face every day with the same calmness and good humor as they did the small-scale catastrophes of their wedding day.

For the rest of their lives.

Even Seven Year Olds Need To Breathe Deeply

It seems the perfect antidote to a stress-filled — although fun – child’s birthday party is . . . yoga. With a seven year old.

Let me back up. I make everything difficult. I have some control issues, I’ll be the first to admit, when it comes to planning an event that needs to go well. Today, it was my ten year old’s bowling birthday party. Oh, I had done the advance planning, reconnoitered with the bowling alley, arranged for completely nut-free refreshments on account of the kid with the allergy, chased down just the right loot bags and the acceptably benign stuff to go in them. I had managed the time down to the minute and put out a small logistical fire regarding whether two or three of the invited guests would be able to attend despite a breakout of head lice (they got their treatments in time and agreed to wear baseball caps anyway).

Of course, man plans and God laughs. Our normal two-hour first Sunday of the month service stretched out endlessly, as everyone and his or her cousin wanted to ramble on and on about all kinds of things, which I’d normally be all into – but not today. I ducked out before Communion and managed not to run over anyone as I sped across town trying to salvage my schedule.

Most of the guests were on time, and by ten past two, they were happily bowling away. (Although, proving, I guess that CP Time trumps Daylight Saving Time, two kids showed up after two strings of bowling had been completed and as we were sitting down to have pizza and cake.)

It went as well as a party of ten year olds could go. Moms and Dads came and got their happy kids, and I went home, determined not to do another thing for the rest of the day.

Except yoga.

There it was on the whiteboard: do yoga with Scooby. She’d been watching last night as I’d shopped for a well-reviewed yoga program on NetStreaming – just until I could get back to the Y for a live class. I figured I’d practice at home in the meantime and maybe look a little less awkward next time I went. We watched on video a bit as the instructor took her students through the first couple of stretches, then Scooby asked, “Can we do that?”

Not now, I said, it’s time for bed.

How about tomorrow?

Fine. And so, up it went on the whiteboard. It was her last reminder to me before she fell asleep, and her first request this morning.

So, still wired from being responsible for a bunch of other people’s kids for two hours, I crept into the kitchen and encountered the whiteboard reminder.

We rolled out our yoga mats and started the video. We earnestly tried each pose, following the directions to relax or press down with various body parts. (Scooby’s flexible!) I thought she would get bored quickly; after all, yoga is slow-moving and the instructor’s voice was, well, soporific.

She tried everything. She only got the giggles when she kept falling over during the touch-your-feet-to-the-floor-behind-your-head pose. (Whatever.) I could hear her breathing deeply next to me as she concentrated. She seemed surprised when it was over; it was a little abrupt: deep breathing, deep breathing, credits.

How do you feel? I asked her.

That was fun, and hard, she said. We did yoga! And then she added, Can we do it again?

Maybe tomorrow, I said.

The strange part was that I wasn’t self-conscious or anxious or anything. At the end of it all, I was relaxed, refreshed, and looking forward to the next time we could do yoga together. I wouldn’t have thought spending fifty minutes with my seven year old daughter contorting ourselves in front of a TV screen would be anywhere on my list of things to do, but there it is. Maybe Scooby, like her mom, gets a little tired of running around her life like a crazy person. Maybe she craves a little quiet time and deep breathing to center herself before another hectic week begins.

I guess it’s never too early to learn such a useful skill.