the sleppys

Ty and Kyle both started classical piano pieces: Clementi Sonatina in C and Mozart Minuet K.1, respectively. Kyle prefers to memorize his piece and has a difficult time reading musical notation. I constantly have to remind him to look up at the music, but the piece involves his hands’ moving up and down the keyboard, which gives him a valid excuse to look at them.
Ty started playing his piece using the metronome, which he loathes. He does keep good time when I remind him, clapping along to the metronome. Like most students, he says that it confuses him. “Make it unconfuse you,” I tell him, as I tell all my students. “Play in a pattern that you don’t HEAR the metronome.” He finally understands after he plays correctly.

Taylor started playing piano and reading music. It’s interesting that even the piano teacher’s children behave like other piano students, expressing their unique strengths, weaknesses, preferences, and attention spans. She plays “Yankee Doodle” and “Old MacDonald” by heart.

Talon and Kendall regularly sit at the piano and play sweetly together. I hear them singing, “…lonely world… city boy… SOUTH DETROIT… on and on and on and on….” And the sweet playing turns into banging. Rhythmic banging, mind you, they are trained musicians!

I’ve gotten the three older children to sing in rounds, Row Row Row Your Boat. We were fairly successful but aren’t auditioning for any major competitions yet. We have tried “Carol of the Bells” a couple of times, which has shown slow but steady improvement. I think we should be ready to perform it in Christmastide.

About three times a week, the five children practice all the Christmas songs and carols that I can force them to sing in unison. Because their voices are still young, that means only about 25 minutes of singing can be expected. I try to get both holy and secular ones in the mix.

As we were watching the 9/11 memorial ceremony, the First Lady whispered something to the President. I remembered what my mother had always taught us, her children: “Whispering in public is impolite.”

Plain an’ simple:

(1) Just one God.
(2) Put nothin’ before God.
(3) Watch yer mouth.
(4) Git yourself to Sunday meetin’.
(5) Honor yer Ma & Pa.
(6) No killin’.
(7) No foolin’ around with another feller’s gal (or ‘nother gal’s feller).
(8) Don’t take what ain’t yorn.
(9) No tellin’ tales or gossipin’.
(10) Don’t be hankerin’ for yer buddy’s stuff.

An’ bless your little cotton pickin’ heart!

I’m often asked how we feed a family of seven on a teacher’s income without the “benefits” of government subsidies. Day in, day out, we use the same ingredients: rice or pasta, beans, onions, sometimes garlic, bell peppers, maybe celery, broccoli, and/or carrots. Dad roasts a chicken, which feeds us for a couple of days. On the surface, it looks like the same old same old, but the spices and herbs we use are different.

I try to teach the children to appreciate foods from all over the world, but with only rice and beans, you have to be creative. This is what I’ve discovered:

Olive oil, mint, and garbanzos make it Greek.
Olive oil, basil, and tomatoes make it Italian.
Sesame oil, soy sauce, and ginger make it Asian.
Corn oil, cilantro, and tomatoes make it Mexican.
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme make it English.
Pork fat, soy sauce, and tomatoes make it Peruvian Chifa.
Pork fat, parsley, and mustard make it German, but I never use garlic when cooking German food because everybody knows that the Germans don’t eat garlic.

And then there are the varieties or regional herbs and spices:
Cinnamon over Italian makes it Cincinnati.
Crystal hot sauce over red beans and rice makes it New Orleans.
Mango with Asian still keeps it Asian, but with cumin, it’s Cuban.
Key lime over Cuban makes it South Florida.
Sour cream and avocado over South Florida with a side of lychees makes it Sleppy Rock. (I just made that up. I don’t think I’ve ever had that combination, but it’s perfectly possible!)

You get the idea: a rough overview of world cuisines. It’s not the End All, Be All, but a small glance of our culinary escapades just to show readers that rice and beans doesn’t have to be boring.

Todd, my brother, and I are at Aunt Jennie’s house. The uncomfortable place. The backyard; a metal shed to store crap, some slash pines, and That! mango tree.

No AC!! Jalousie windows. Aunt Jennie’s mango-stained whiskers. Itchy. Yuck!

Mommy and Daddy are on a married date.

AM Radio squawks “Elvis, Dead!”

Mommy and Daddy were going to see Elvis in three months.

That day would never come.

Many days never came.

Amazing Grace

Taylor just completed her first sewing project. It didn’t take long at all, about fifteen minutes.

My cousins and aunt from Alabama came down for a visit. They brought some toys for the boys and twins and a Simplicity Lockstitch sewing machine for Taylor. She was really happy and carried around the machine in its packaging for a day and a half. I told her that I’d teach her to sew as soon as we had time, but with all the home projects that we had, Dad and me, there really wasn’t any time.

Yesterday, before we left to a pool party, I taught her to sew straight lines. But the bobbin thread was too tight. The needle thread was too tight. It was just getting frustrating. I tinkered with it a little; my own sewing machine is nearly a decade older than I am and keeps me versed in sewing machine mechanics.

This morning, I figured that I had about an hour to tinker with the bobbin and the tension some more, and I finally got the thread to behave. After stitching straight lines and zig zags, I thought it was time for Taylor to start on her project.

I had a scrap of fabric hanging around from the twins’ dresses, just big enough to make a little pillow for one of Taylor’s dolls. When I sat her down, she was upset with me because I took too long to get started. I explained to her that I wanted her to have a good experience with a sewing machine. (There are few things more frustrating than a machine that doesn’t cooperate!) I taught her to start with a reverse stitch as an anchor. She sewed straight lines down the side until she reached the end, where I taught her to lift the foot, turn the work, drop the foot, and sew another straight line. She did that for three sides until she was about three inches from the end. Reverse stitch to anchor.

She turned the work inside out and stuffed it polyester fiberfill. As she was doing that, she kept exclaiming, “This is so cute! This is going to be so cute!”

I was thinking about teaching her to hand sew the pillow shut, but I wasn’t in the frame of mind to teach her to wield a needle and produce a whipstitch. She used her machine again to stitch it, practicing the reverse stitch to anchor, forward straight stitch, and reverse stitch again.

Once that was completed, I took a picture of her with her first project and the sewing machine.

I’m thinking about her next project, something that still involves straight lines…

For the first time in almost nine years, there are no cribs set up for sleeping babies in our house.

I received a call from my neighbor at 08:48 today. Stupid White Cat had been found. Dead. Stupid Cat! He was planted in our backyard this morning.

Our cat, Stupid White Cat, ran away for the last time. If he does decide to come back, he will not be allowed into the house again.

About a month after we acquired our cat, Taylor developed a low-grade on-and-off fever. She was like that for a few days. Some of our other children were passing colds to one another, so we thought it was that… UNTIL… I discovered a lump in Taylor’s underarm. I knew exactly what it was. After some e-research and thinking back upon my own experiences, Dad and I concluded that it was cat scratch disease, or a Bartonella henselae infection. She had all the classic symptoms, from headache and loss of appetite to mild fever. After a week or so of this, we took her to the doctor who asked us if we had a cat, and he gave us a prescription for amoxicillin and clavulanate potassium, which is an antibiotic paired with a molecule that gives it an extra punch.

After a couple of days of taking the medicine, Taylor started doing better (no fever, normal appetite), but her little lump didn’t go away. In fact, I think it got bigger. Dad would massage it to encourage it to drain. Nothing. She even developed a non-itchy skin rash that looked like measles! It was everywhere, from her face to her soles. Now, I can’t be certain if it was from the antibiotics because we were also eating a ton of mangoes: there are people who get rashes from just touching mango skin or sap, eating mangos, or eating too many mangos. Just for good measure, we stopped feeding the children mangos, and Taylor finished up her 10 days of medicine.

The rash went away. Whew!

Warning: Gross nastiness follows; Read at your own risk. But her little lump wasn’t little anymore. It was a big ball. Dad said that it is most likely filled with pus (eww!) and could take months to drain (double eww!). At least Taylor wasn’t holding her arm up to protect her lumpish ball anymore, creating muscle tension in her shoulder and neck, positioning herself to develop awfully bad posture.

After a month (I took her to the doctor the day after Memorial Day), she started getting what looked to be a heat rash under her arm. It looked like the skin on the ball was chaffing, rubbing awkwardly against her own skin and clothes. Because it didn’t hurt her anymore, she was bring her arm all the way down, molding the ball to look for triangular, like a pyramid. She also behaved like her normal self, roughhoused with the boys, and came crying out of the room a couple of times, saying that a brother had hit or kicked her on the lump. “It was an accident!” they’d cry in defense. Still, it was scary as heck as a parent to see this weird, chaffing, soft-on-the-outside, hard-in-the-inside, mushy small golfball thing under my daughter’s arm.

On the first Thursday in July, I was getting our of the shower to get ready to go to work when Taylor opened the door and looked at me sadly. She didn’t look guilty. She didn’t look confused. She had an expression that I’ve never seen before that covered sad, guilty, and confused. She pointed to her underarm without saying anything. I got really worried! “What’s the matter?”

“Somebody vomited on my arm.”
“What?”
“Yea, look.” She showed me her shirt and her underarm.
“Oh, honey! That’s pus! Thank God! That’s a good thing, Taylor. Take a shower and get washed up. Let’s try to drain it as much as we can.” She didn’t understand that we were waiting for the thing to abscess and ooze out. I cleaned it up, gave her a fresh shirt, and went to work. I cleaned it again when I got home and again in the morning and again and again and again.

That Sunday, my brother’s daughter was having a pool party for her birthday. I took the five children while Dad stayed to watch the space shuttle Atlantis’ docking with the ISS. The boys swam in the pool and had a good time while the girls sat under the shade of a mango tree and ate and talked with the other ladies who weren’t going in the pool. I told Taylor on Saturday that she wasn’t going to swim because she had an open wound. She understood and had a good time at the party.

My dad walked up to me with a concerned look on his face, “What happened to Taylor’s arm?” I told him that it looked waaaaaay better than it did a week before. My mom also expressed concern, and I explained to everyone, “I know it looks nasty, but it is on the road to healing.”

So today, after keeping the wound clean, Taylor is back to her old self again. Thank God!

Dear Husband and I are always talking and commenting to each other about how weird our children are. The last weekend in June, the children were outside in the front yard and started playing Marco Polo. In the frontyard. Where there is no water. No pool. But there are three trees. Ty shouted “Marco” as he kept his eyes closed while he wandered around the front yard. Kyle and Taylor responded with the appropriate “Polo.” Kendall and Talon played along, too. *sigh* I don’t know.

The day after the Independence Day, we woke up to find that some jerk body drove really fast into a young oak tree. He knocked over the tree, and his car stopped on top of it. We saw the police cars talking to neighbors. They went away. A wrecker came by to haul the car away. The next day, government employees went by and propped the tree up, nailed together a tripod to keep it from falling, and it is now looking okay.