The Rinrins

School lunches

I attended elementary school in the 1970's. I was thinking about this one lunch they made as a treat, called Frito Bake. It was Fritos topped with chili, cheese, lettuce and tomato. Kind of a Southern taco salad, although I didn't even learn about tacos until I was 21 and living in Colorado. Maybe that's why they called it Frito bake, because if they called it taco salad everyone would be confused.  Maybe they didn't realize they were inventing the taco salad independently from the people eating taco salad.

Anyway, that was considered a treat. The rest of the time, I remember we had things like soup and grilled cheese, spaghetti, potatoes, regular dinner-like things.  And milk. No juice. Did they even have juices like apple in the 70's? I don't remember EVER having fruit juice other than orange until I was an adult. As a kid, when I drank something other than water it was orange juice, ice tea, or coke.

I was looking on the lunch menu for the kids' school last year. They try to offer a choice every day, an entree-like item such as "lasagna casserole" or something like a corn dog. Most kids probably choose the corn dog. By the way, isn't lasagna, by definition, already a casserole?

Other days there are items like fish sticks, chicken nuggets, hamburger, hot dog...stuff I would have had at parties or if I were being fed by a babysitter.  Except chicken nuggets...those didn't get popular until Sides include peaches (canned), pears (canned), green beans (canned), or baby carrots. One day a month they serve a chef salad, but offer hot dogs instead, if the kids don't take the salad.

I was thinking about how this generation is raised on that kind of stuff, which is great sometimes on nights where I don't feel like cooking, or no one is that hungry, or we are all tired of pizza (which I consider a pretty damn good meal, nutrition-wise).  But none of it was even invented when I was a kid. I started pondering, what DID we eat, when there was no such things as chicken nuggets?

I actually found a website where someone has posted the school lunches as listed in the local paper for a few random dates between 1948 and 1971.  Here is a sample menu from 1971, and it sounds really familiar:
Barbecue on sandwich bun
Fried potatoes
Applesauce
Milk
Brownie

Okay, you've got your meat and bread, not bad, and fried potatoes. Not the best, but they were likely cut up and fried in oil right there in the kitchen, not processed in a plant, coated with a floury, hydrogenated, colored mixture and frozen in a bag months earlier. Applesauce, yeah, that's processed fruit. The brownie, again, chocolate, but probably did not include any ingredients that were artificial, simply because they weren't available yet. It's like a down home dinner.

Here's another:

Grilled cheese sandwich
Buttered corn
Lettuce with cream dressing
Milk
Peanutbutter cookie
Jello cubes

Well, the sandwich is pretty awesome, and the buttered corn--fresh vegetable--great. Lettuce with dressing, I definitely remember this. It was iceberg back then. Still a cookie, likely much like homemade. And the jello, well, that's the treat I guess. But again, I can see this being home cooking.

Check these poor kids out from 1953:

Salmon salad on bun
lettuce and tomato salad
ice cream cup
milk

Salmon salad. Wow. I can see that being a mini version of the ringed salads housewives were serving at cocktail parties. Salmon and gelatin all pureed with mayonnaise and green olives with pimientos probably.

I don't think our lunches were fabulous. They were still mass-produced for hundreds of kids, and had to be compromised in some way. But it's a far cry from chicken nuggets and canned peaches.  We had a lot of mashed potatoes, corn, and turkey with gravy. Schools today don't do the daily cookie or brownie, as they are considered unhealthy. But I'd rather my kids have a simple cookie with spaghetti than fish sticks and corn dogs and canned green beans and no cookie.

The thing is, if my kids were presented with a BBQ pork sandwich, they wouldn't eat it. I don't cook like that. I do make things like beef stroganoff and spaghetti, but not every night.  Now we eat buttered corn on the cob in the summer a lot.

Tonight we're having pizza.

I need to improve. And they need to learn to eat real food.

What did you eat for school lunches? And when?

The hot hot heat

We're in day three of the 105 degree temp. Our neighbor's kid has heat sickness; they had to move out to stay with someone with air conditioning. The kids are getting cranky. Yesterday we tried to get out for some errands and be back by 10.  We went to a toy store to buy puzzles.

Everything started nicely this morning: we all slept in one room, and when they all woke up, big brother read to the baby for a while and they snuggled. Seriously cute stuff, almost making me want to sleep in one room all the time.

Then the girls had an elaborate game of school going on. Ellery plays school by packing any bag she can find with food from our cupboard, then going to "school" and eating it.  Big sister plays along perfectly. And really, this is all she knows, me packing lunches for the kids and taking them to school.

But the layers of cordiality began to fray. Looking at the same walls all day every day for hours and hours and hours caused a breakdown.  This moon colony is self destructing.

It's really too hot to go anywhere, even the beach. It's a two hour drive one way, and our car's air conditioner can not keep everyone cool enough for a trip that long.  The kids aren't shoppers, and neither am I, so the mall is out. The library sounds nice, but we have plenty of unread books right now, and it's not worth getting in the car.

But sometimes we must do what we do not want to do.

I decided to drive us all to the Burgerville and take a short picnic at a little cemetery near us.

We found shade, and there was a breeze, but it was 98 and uncomfortable, and soon Ellery looked as red as a lobster. We took a 10 minute walk down a wooded path saturated with blackberry brambles to navigate. My plan was working, though: make everyone miserable enough for long enough that they will willingly go home and be GLAD to be there.

Now they are happy, eating bananas and watching Spongebob. It is 101 outside, 85 inside. We're in for the day.

Tomorrow comes the big cool down, though: it's only going to hit 97.

Two and a half

I think this month will be the last I try to catch the monthly birthdays. I am missing six of the monthly markers, which, because I am an unholy perfectionist, tortures me to no end--especially since two of them are from a computer crash, but I manage to pull through every day. I had grand plans of taking Ellery out to her favorite spot of late, a little duck and frog pond in our neighborhood, for a little photo shoot. But it was one hundred and 5 freaking degrees yesterday. And it is also one hundred and five freaking degrees today, too.  I can't imagine any of those pictures would have turned out well. She'd be nothing but a limp noodle.

I did catch her doing something she hardly ever does, and that is sleeping. For three hours. Behold the Miracle:

I didn't know what to do with myself, other than run over to her every ten minutes to see if she was still breathing.  I am not kidding, I really did that. She did fall off the couch onto her face once, but went right back to sleep. I could have cleaned the whole house in three hours. All three toilets, even, in ONE SINGLE DAY. But no.

When she woke up, she did it in an equally rare way: by NOT thrashing, grunting, crying, or calling for my slow death. This kid has me on pins and needles lately. I always have a fluttery hole in my chest, from anxiety, waiting for the screaming.  She wakes up like some mob boss who's just been informed that his load of guns fell off the boat into the river, and instead of getting to play poker and smoke cigars with beautiful women hanging on him for the rest of the evening, he has to go tie up loose ends by setting his nephew's house on fire in the middle of the night.

Yesterday, she just woke up. Like this:

I was pretty happy to get that. Definitely one of my all time favorites. I could have kissed her. But she doesn't allow me to. It would only get me a slap and that animalistic noise she makes that reminds me of a large monkey protecting it's food. She even sticks her tongue out a little when she does it, like they do.

I spent a few minutes looking through all the other months, to see the changes, and I was a little surprised to see two certain similar pictures from the first month marker.

This next one was taken by one of the kids. I don't remember which one. I'd like to say Brenna, because she loves taking pictures, but it could have been Garrett helping me out, and that's why it was so memorable, since he's not much of a photo guy. I thought I would always remember, and here it's only taken me a little over two years to forget.

I told said anonymous child (whoever it was) to focus on her face, and it really didn't take that many to get this lovely composition and focus.

Sleeping with her mouth open, just like yesterday. Also a virtually nonexistent reality from those early days, the sleeping. Had I known she wouldn't get better, that she'd always be a poor sleeper, well, I guess nothing would be different because I can't do anything about it. Maybe I would have had more cocktails and given myself a break.

And later in the day, I had her on the floor and took this, looking as sweet and calm as she did yesterday after her nap:

She was colicky. Very seriously, horribly, awfully colicky. It was hard on everyone. But here, she was just being herself.

My, my.

All this remembrance makes me pine for the quality newborn photos of the other two that I will never have. And damn, but isn't it easy to scroll through her entire life in Zoombrowser and just pick images like berries from a bush, instead of lugging out heavy albums and boxes of unsorted leftovers. I have lofty ideas of scanning all of them one day and fixing the really serious problems in photoshop. Since I can't manage to even surmount the challenge of cleaning all of our toilets on one single day, I might need to accept that this will never happen.

But the children, they keep getting older. The babies grow. The same miracle all parents see every day, all over the world, never fails to amaze.

Someone's baby quilt

I donated a carload of stuff to the Value Village here today. Which means I went inside, too.

I almost walked past this quilt. It was tiny and being swallowed up by bad 80's comforters.

It's very obviously handmade, and I say that with love, because anyone who ever sees a quilt of mine in the future will say the same thing. It's kind of a 9 patch separated by sashing, but not really, because in the other direction there's an extra row tacked on. Hmm. And it's kind of a flowing rainbow, but not really.The fabrics are so wonderful.

Blue apples???? I would buy yards and yards of that for no reason at all. And the little dolly people!

That one shows the cowboy fabric and the pencils on olive. I like that the gun is pointing at the bull and it almost looks as if the rider has just been shot.

The backing is Raggedy Ann and Andy, of course. Some of the squares are completely faded away. This quilt was definitely used and loved for a long time.

Always makes me wonder, who would give that away?

I also found a perfect doll sized rocking chair. Kitten thinks it needs a good washing.

She makes that open-mouthed-tongue-protruding face after smelling it, but I couldn't catch her doing it. Then she goes and smells it some more. I have found myself doing the same thing, smelling once, recoiling in horror, and smelling again. Why?

The quilt and chair were a hit.

Our Value Village has this wall with a thousand pegs, and on each peg are 6 or 7 baggies of miscellaneous stuff. I wish I had hours to look through them all, because I know this is where the good stuff is hiding. I did find these when I skimmed the surface:

Two complete decks of old cards, complete with jokers and scoring rules for Bridge. There is no other explanation for something as pristine as this except that these were owned by one woman for a long time who is now old, or passed away. They were played with, but in great condition. I got them for Ellery, who ignores actual children's toys.

She jumped on them as soon as she saw them. Think I can swap them out for some plain old Bicycles when she's not watching?

A benefit to all the Oregon rain

Silver Falls

 

 

Taken by our brother-in-law during a trip to get all boys and toddlers out of the baby shower house:

 

Aww, Baby's First Rhetoric

From our 29 month old, while playing in the bath:

"DARN IT!"

(daddy): "Why did you say that?"

"Well, I can't say damn it, can I."

Mentos and Diet Coke

My previous post reminded me of this. We all did the Mentos fountain trick; Brenna watched how we did it, but devised a better plan to get more mentos in to the bottle before it exploded . She whooped all of us.

Sprinkler

Giant Kite Giant

My name and my facebook

I finally joined Facebook. Everyone says it's better than myspace, and myspace really sucked, so I figured I could only move up.

I found some old friends, a girl I was in the Scouts with, and almost every current friend I have.

When I am seriously bored, as in really dredging up activities to divert my attention from housework and everyone else is asleep like right now, I search my name on google. Back in the beginning days of google, I didn't find much. I've never come across anyone with my name, ever.

One day, I found a couple who had named their dog Visty. I can't find them anymore. I couldn't figure it out, though. Who would come up with such a name as that for their dog? I found another young teenager on some weird anime website, who had her artwork posted. I emailed her. Why is your name Visty? Is it your real name? Did you hear it somewhere? Did your parents make it up?

She never emailed back. I suppose I did sound a little eccentric. Or psychotic.

The only other connection I made was older (like 40's or 50's) Pakistani men. And the name of a Czecoslovakian newspaper, The Electric Visty.

This was years ago, and the internet has changed so much. I haven't googled myself in a while, so today I got bored and searched for my name on Facebook.

It seems that on the other side of the world, Visty is pretty common. Lots of younger Asian girls have the first name. Lots and lots. And they are all pretty and thin, and they are all doing their come-hither looks at the camera. This makes me a little wary. I hope Visty doesn't mean the equivalent of being named Cherry in our country. I might have to do some more googling.

Then I thought, I'll check my middle name too. Jae. Well, I've known for a while that it's not unheard of in Asian societies. But yeah, I can see now that my middle name is pretty much solid Asian. The older man with the dog named Visty probably served in some mid-century jungle war, and the girl on the anime website was probably inventing a name for herself that reflected her Japanimation love.

This is really funny to me, because as a kid growing up in the South, my name sounded very rooted there, like Daisy May or Sarah Lou. Visty Jae. Say it with a southern accent.

And now there is this weird possibility, as the world community draws close ranks, that I have an Asian name.

Hopefully it doesn't translate to Cherry Pie, because if it does I am never going to visit China.