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            BlueCollarDaughter
 raised to profess social justice and faith

Spooky Saturday. Bwah hah hah hah!

10/30/2010

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Headless Roo proudly presents his unholy public school artwork
Here’s the Heathen Holiday Weekend News from the BCD Haus…

1.  The curse of the disappearing…er, stuff.
In the last 36 hours the following items have “vaporized” from their appointed place in our homes:  Mommy’s razor sharp prized paring knife, Tovi’s favorite “Rubber Buzz” Buzz Lightyear doll, the DVD Backyardigans Super Secret Super Spy, and the sentimentally cherished red rubber ball of our long-dead beloved dog “Biscuit.”  Who hooo hooo’s to blame?!?

2.  The Friday-ween Miracle.
TRUE STORY. While sorting through the lads’ laboriously overgrown craft tub yesterday afternoon, I heard a mighty roar and glanced out to the window to see a car barreling down the sidewalk in front of our house at high speed.  It clipped an SUV (not ours for once) parked at the corner, hopped the curb (taking half a heavy steel No Parking sign with it), zoomed through our and Crazy Farmer neighbor Amy’s front yards, and narrowly missed a crew two houses down putting on a new roof. Without stopping, it then bounced back onto the street, stalled out briefly, and with 3 flat tires started up again and tore away from the scene leaving behind only skid marks, scarred tree trunks, broken branches, and a flattened, tire-marked political lawn ad (which we are calling the “stigmata of the Dayton sign”).  Miracle?  Well, no one was hurt or killed, and if you saw the narrow space through which the car traveled without hitting house, our cars, giant rock, tree or any person head on, you’d be befuddled.

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3.  Ghoulish goodies.
Teachers give out some interestingly creepy treats these days.
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edible embryonic candy lizard in mock formeldahyde
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yummy
4.  Kitties on the prowl.
Once again, Toe will be Toe, and has determined he will dress up  as his imaginary black cat friend “Cleveland” for trick-or-treats.  Roo has followed suit in his own more untamed, manly manner with the decision to be a “fluffy lion.”  Both costumes come cheaply, as the masks are repurposed from the lads’ Curious George Zoo game (bonus!), tails were brutally harvested from cast-off plushies (via Mommy’s kitchen shears), and the rest of the costumes are animal color-appropriate fleeces the lads had anyway.  Meeeooooow!  Toe and Roo have spent much of their recent pre-Halloween time dressing up in their costumes and “shooting” each other with their foam rubber plinko flinger “gun.”

5.  The traffic of American commercial gluttony. 

You heard it first here, friends, a year ago, and now it’s in the “real” news.  Spooky Saturday (the weekend before Halloween) has replaced Black Friday as the official start to the crazy conspicuous Holiday shopping glut.  If you’ve already been getting those midnight madness and toyfest sale flyers in the mail or spent 30 minutes in freakishly heavy traffic just trying to get past the mall to the pet food store, this is why.  Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus, and apparently he is on duty!  Now you can roll your shopping needs for the Day of the Undead, Thanksgiving and Jesus’ holy birthday all into one “season” of ka-ching!

Mwahhh hahhh hahhh…whatever.

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Pre-K Truancy Disorder By Proxy

10/29/2010

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Roo experiencing rainy day inertia
Well, sure, I survived my surgery!  You knew I would.  Then there was that in-between world, that ride down the rabbit hole of post-op delirium.  I remember little boys tossing noisy and cumbersome toys at the foot of my bed, someone poking my cheek repeatedly and squealing, "Look, Daddy, the corner of Mommy's mouth is leaking!"  I remember a familiar man's voice in calling out to God as two children swung from his arms like monkeys on a vine.

Now it's just take it easy time.  Roo, profoundly relaxed in his home environment, has a little of the convalescent bug himself what with Mommy on the mend.  He sees anyone propped on a pillow with a book or snuggling a blankie, and he's there my friend.  This, along with the blustery raw weather earlier this week made getting him off to school a challenge.

Here were his top 3 (very convincing) reasons to stay home in bed with Mommy:

"I miss Claire-E-Claire!"
(his regular teacher is in London for a funeral this week, and apparently the sub is no Nanny McPhee)

"I not done with blanket time!" (followed by an adorable long, withering red-eyed yawn and pout)

"Cold!"  (who can argue?)

Here are the top 3 reasons Mommy falls for Roo's plea for truancy far too often:

I had a work-at-home Mommy who had a firm belief that children were better off if clutched to the bosom until they violently protested it, and also had the good fortune to be able to accomodate our need for both "physical" and "mental" health days.

I rarely went to grade school and still graduated 7th out of a high school class of 400 and was Magna cum Laude in college, so, meh.

He's 3, he's cute, and his will is greater than mine.

So, St. Paul Public School, send the truancy bot after me if you will (cuz I know you don't have the human staff to deal with rule breakers like me!).




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X-Games: the surgical edition!

10/25/2010

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Tomorrow morning is yet another surgery for me and my dumfoundingly strange, increasingly robotic body, so you know what that means!  More fun for the surgeons!  They are as ready to get grooving as a group of Hannah Montana-loving 'tweens at a Wii Rock Star band marathon party!  Apparently, nothing will stand between them and Knife Sports Xtreme.

Transcript of surgeons reviewing my questionable pre-op exam results:

Dr. Bollywood: Wow, according to the report, girl's ferritin level is so low it's undetectable--she is Xtremely anemic! (covers mouth dramatically)

Dr. Messerschnipper:  Hmmm...  Wait! I know!  Let's do bloodless surgery--it's Xtreme, but it may work! (snaps fingers with triumph)

Dr. Bollywood:  OMG!  The lab says she has strep and didn't even know it!  That is an Xtremely infectious bacteria! (strokes leather case of newly-minted personal scalpel set)

Dr. Messerschnipper:  Huh...  That could be Xtremely challenging to control after the stress of surgery, but let's go for it anyway!  Hoo ha! (punches air)

Dr. Bollywood:  Looks here like the physical therapist thinks her current level of muscle spasm in her dislocated jaw may make intubation an Xtreme challenge! (slaps forehead)

Dr. Messerschnipper:  True!  But..  We could always inject her jaw muscles with an Xtremely powerful muscle relaxant to make prying it open a can-do operation! (slams table)

Dr. Bollywood:  Sounds like an Xtremely unusal and fascinating surgery to me--let's do it!

So, you know, see you later (maybe).

 
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Roo-in-the-Box

10/25/2010

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Roo during a particularly long 'sit-in'
Kids are weird.  I know this. (Maybe a little too well?).  They have all sorts of alternative ideas about how the world should be experienced.  They are creative and uninhibited and innocent.  Little tabula rasas of endless posibility, they like to push the envelope.

And, sometimes, they want to live in boxes.

Roo, our den animal child, has always liked dark, cozy, covered, sometimes confining spaces (nooks, crannies, caves, tents, forts, tunnels, sewer pipes, pet carriers, wheel wells, window boxes, large pieces of Tupperware).  He gets this from his Daddy, who as a child was apparently also a den animal, so conveniently I can blame it partly on genes.  The other part I will just have to chalk up to, um, personality. 

Here's the thing.  Say your child likes hanging out in boxes.  Okay, fine.  That's one of his "special"qualities.  But is there a line you draw in the sand, maybe a point where as a parent you say to yourself:  Self, do you think your child is spending a wee bit too much time in boxes?

Admittedly I offer no answers to this, but pose the question to you, reader, to consider yourselves.  Let some of the evidence guide you:

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Roo: 'I think better inda box'
 
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Roo: 'I sleep better inda box'
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guess who likes to take pictures of 'da box'?
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'everything is funner in da box!'
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fish story

10/23/2010

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Dotty, our dominant male dalmation mollie

Fish stories aren't typically horror stories--but then, when are my stories typical?  Let's be honest with each other.  In some of the more macabre ways, I think I could probably go freakout for freakout with a few of the unadulterated tales of the Brothers Grimm, don't you?  Fishy fish tales for sure.

So, Roo is getting on 4 years old.  To be exact, in Roo's words, "227 hours 'til my birfday!!" With less than 10 days to go, I am just looking forward to an end of the constant, ever-changing and unforgiving speeches about what he wants for his "birfday".  Here are just some of the requests in the last week alone:
FOUR caramel apples "not for Tovi or for Daddy"
stuffed buff'lo
"Tovi go away"
"coins"
"jewels"
"monies"
"paint Mommy's car pink"
"more real animals not dogs": turtles, birds, parrots, rabbits, fish
cheetos and red
"air ballon"
river
hedgehog books
"swimming not cold places"
"cakes with white marshmallows"
"games with dogs"

If your kid yaps this crap enough, word starts to spread among the homies.  Case in point: one of Roo's beloved non-biological Tios recently brought him the gift of a fully decked-out 1.5 gallon tank with 4 itty bitty fish (2 freshwater mollies and 2 neon tetras) and all the pelagic accoutrements.  Awww. NOT.

Let's just say, very sweet gift, but, eh, I am no fan of owning fish in tanks.  Can you tell?  I mean, I realize they're tiny fish, but there is something that feels like bad stewardship to me about sticking any of God's creatures in a decorative glass box just so we can gape at them. I know, I know, they'd just be eaten in the wild by bigger fish, they have no complexity of thought, blah blah blah.  Mama don't do animals in cages.

Hub is, on the other hand, an a-fish-ianado, having fond memories of posessing and interring small maritime creatures as a heartless young lad himself.  Hub even goes so far as to say there is something amiss with my psyche that I am not lulled into peace by their tropical colors and gentle swaying movements trough the flora-filled waters.  He says I ought to talk to somebody about the fact that the presence of a fish tank in my home would add to my distress.

Maybe so, Jonah, but let me just say this in my defense.

In my first 24 hours of the fish ownership experience, I went through the following:
1. The itty bitty briny stench of death. 3 of the 4 creatures promptly croaked in their first night, leading to elaborate breakfast table talk of how some fish leave their tanks to go off to school at the lake, a covert op tank cleaning and purchase of fishy doppelgangers.  My living room smells like dockside at a gutting factory near the wharf.
2. PTFD.   Post-traumatic fish disorder.  Yah, it's real. The one poor suriving fish of the original 4 cowers endlessly in the bottom corner of the tank, not eating, barely moving his fin, as if he is haunted by all the death and brutality he's seen. His pain disrupts my sleep and I find myself counseling him through the glass: Just breathe, Wolfie, you are in a safe place now. Come out among the living! In the recesses of my mind I am visited by the phrase, "never again." 
3. The filthy putrid life cycle.  All these fish do is eat the flakes of the smelliest nutrition since brewer's yeast, swim stupidly in place awaiting their inevitable death, and excrete long unappealing links of feces into their water.  What the hell is relaxing about witnessing this, I ask you?

Point, counterpoint.  Put that in your fairytale pipe and smoke it.

 
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while you were breathing...

10/16/2010

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natural beauty
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Rocky
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buddies at 'Buddy's'
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ore ship of fools
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the Wrong Brothers
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Roo: take me with you, please!
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Toe finally at home
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my medicine
 
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spore

10/09/2010

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the walls have balls
Many years ago I read a fascinating book called My House is Killing Me! and now that there are unwelcome colonies of visitors growing in my walls, I get to live it!  Don't you just love new adventures? 

Actually, it's more like I have been "dying" it than "living it" to be accurate in reporting.  There also happen to be unwelcome colonies growing in the walls of my lungs, and I am just not a very gracious hostess at this time.

Now on my 3rd relapse of pneuomia, even the strongest antibiotics and
most restrictive of medical confinements (okay, I busted out, I disobeyed) have not been able to cure me of the consumption.  Oxygen!  I miss thee!

And, to peeve me further yet, historically my lungs have been one of my healthiest, most reliable parts (as a medical guinea pig in a recent Cystic Fibrosis study, I regularly wowed the doctors with my 140 % of normal lung capacity tests--they couldn't explain it except to glance over my biographical information and say, "It must be all the singing. And she is tall.")!
Unfair I say...hhuff....

Alas, the BCD family will all be off (including hounds) in a few days to the fresh and healing breezes of coastal Lake Superior.  While we're away, men with masks will gut and rebuild an entire bathroom plus an adjoining closet, and decon our nest of all its fungal cooties.  This will take (in the loose talk of contractors), about 4-5 days, which should be just enough time for the feverish wheezing to leave my body while I lie shivering in a chilly northwoods damp of Two Harbors, clutching my copy of Ahab's Wife and my hot water bottle under of the shadow of the great Lighthouse and amid the screech of the gulls.  Sipping tea. Hack, hack.

Okay, I'll be in a well-heated inn with large screen TV, maid service and high-speed internet, but the walls are log and there is a view of the barnacled harbor.  Plus I have to be there with my hyperactive boy children, so do you really see me convalescing?  Hmm?

Maybe I shall spot the great Moby Dick and come back with only one lung, har har.  Or at least a bag of cool rocks.

 
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my terrible lizard

10/09/2010

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tyrannosaurus roo
Lately my child has been channeling creatures of the late Cretaceous.  He has become the tyrant king, a living recreation of that most menacing dinosaur, T-Rex. In all of the possibility offered by creative play, my baby boy chooses this.  Roar. 

(And did you know, in parenting pre-Kers, the "terrible three-and-a-three-quarters" is the new "terrible twos" for the dawning milennium?  Terrible, terrible.  Terrible 3, terrible 2, terrible Roo!)

I have to admit though, some of Roo's dinosaur mimicry (complete with roaring and stomping of giant dinofeet in the predawn hours) can be endearing.  Especially when he fancies himself a papa dino taking his baby Rex for a walk.  No seriously.  I have to walk down the street with my 3 year-old weirdo while he drags his 3 foot rubber dino on a retractable dog leash behind him (or, if he's feeling particularly loving toward Rex, carries him on his shoulders a la Hubby).  
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In case you are wondering, yes, people do stare.  Cars stop.  Neighbors come out of their homes (especially two older gents we referred to as "Grandpa Neighbor" and "Skinny Santa", who are churlishly in love with strange escapades of my unusual boy children) and watch us pass.  They say things like, "Lookit that!" and "I'll be!" and "That Reuben!"  The older ladies--such as the school bus drivers or Grandma Neighbors admit to laughing so hard they have bladder leakage. 

I think Roo's sidewalk escapades may have been responsible for at least one heavily pregnant neighbor going into labor, but that is unconfirmed.  The stuff of urban legend. The future Eastside tales of the craxy lady of Edgerton Street and her buggy little Dinosaur Boy.
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THe Legend of Dinosaur Boy
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Our Autism Odyssey: Dance of the PCAs

10/06/2010

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Toe and Jude: happening dudes
Ah, Fall.  A time of change.  The leaves turn, the weather evolves, school years start, totally unqualified billionaires announce their plans to be president.  Fall is exciting, but it also makes you appreciate those wholesome things that always--at least in part-- remain the same.

Toe and PCA Jude are still BFF men about town, but now that both have new school routines (J Man is working on his MDiv, growing ever holier and more fianancially viable each day), we've had to mix things up a bit for them.  In fact, today is Jude's first day assisting the autism ed staff in the Garden of Children at Toe's school.  Twice a week Toe will have the added excitement of his hipster hero during reading, recess, sponge painting.  All that manly stuff. Yay, Jude!  A boon to our family as well as the shamefully understaffed SPPS!

On another note, things have not gone so well for us in the search for a Sunday churchtime PCA.  None of the heathens we've hired have worked out (okay, most of them were not exactly heathens), and maybe it's just because God is smiting us for trying to make someone labor on the Sabbath?  At any rate, our latest attempt this past Sunday with new (our FOURTH so far!) Sunday PCA "Cotton Top Steve" (let's just say he is familiar with the name "gramps") was an utter failure.  Although he came with extensive PCA experience serving juvenile clients, we suspect all these children must have wanted to do was sit at the table sipping coffee and discussing the latest ballgame.

Sigh.  So long Grandpa Steve. The search for another Nazarene stand-in continues...
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Booya!

10/05/2010

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It's booya season!  Booyas abound!  Are you excited?  Are you-- like my prairie grass southern MN Hubby--confused (apparently rural Czechs do kolackies, not booyas) if not a little bumfuzzled?  Having grown up in the warm embrace of a booya festival family (NOT "booyah" or "bouja" in my hometown, NO), I was shocked--I say SHOCKED--to learn that Hub had never heard of nor tasted this hearty stew of my culture.  He is a booya virgin.
 
Thus, I offer my booya primer: 

Booya! What is it?
 The real question is: what isn't it?

Well, you can't pass a church, fire station, VFW or an extended Polish family gathering in St. Paul without the signs of booya.  All you need for a great one is a beautiful fall day, a greenspace or parking lot, an open fire, a large black cauldron (minimum capacity: 25 gallons), a European grandma (or just her recipe, if she is RIP), some oxtails, chickens and veggies, a taste for boiled bone marrow, a bowl, a lawnchair, a gang of really booya-friendly participants willing to contribute the vegetables (and beer) and all day to stand a round watching a pot boil.  Beer helps, but is not required.  Horseshoe pits, croquet sets and bocce ball courts and charitable raffles are all fantastic complements to the booya as event.  Oh, and don't forget the oyster crackers!  That's it!


The entire month of October is traditionally prime booya time, before the onslaught of truly brutal weather and before the Big Three commercialized American holidays (Halloween, Thanksgiving, Xmas) cast a pall over all more humble celebrations.  Sometimes booya newbies will try to jumpstart the season in September, but green trees and sweaty weather is not in keeping with the spirit of booya.  Booya is meant to coincide with the start of flu season.  They don't call it "the Belgian Penicillan" for nuttin'. 

Booya is what is happening now.  Right now.  Pencil it in.

Grandma Rahn's Old World Booya:
5 pounds oxtails (sub beef stew meat if you're scared) 
2 pounds yellow onions, roughly chopped
Bay leaves, salt and pepper
1 pound butter
2 mutant-large stewing chickens or capons (at least 6 lbs), cut up (or about 3-4 regular whole chickens)
4 pounds pork shoulder
2 bunches celery, chopped
4 pounds carrots, chopped
3 pounds cabbage roughly chopped
1 pound green beans, chopped
12 chopped ripe tomatoes
3 pounds corn kernels
3 pounds green peas
5 pounds red potatoes, chopped
Juice of 2 lemons
1 or more tablespoons worschester sauce
Additional salt and pepper to taste
bouillon cubes (optional)

Place beef in very large pot with some of the onion, a few bay leaves, the butter, and some salt and pepper. Add enough cold water to fill the pot 1/3 full. Bring to simmer, skim surface as needed and cook 1/2 hour. Add chicken parts, more water (to cover all the meat) and a little more salt. Continue to simmer 1-2 hours.

Meanwhile, prepare all the vegetables as described.

When meats are tender, lift them out of the broth. While meat is cooling, add the prepared vegetables, including the remaining onion. Add one type of vegetable at a time, bringing the broth back to a simmer after each addition (grandma's warning: if you add all the vegetables too fast, the broth goes "haywire").

Remove bones and skin from cooled chicken and beef. Chop the meats and add to the pots after all the veggies have been added. Simmer the soup at least two hours---longer preferred. Water may be added during the cooking process if necessary.

Season with lemon juice, worchester, beef bouillon (if desired) and salt and pepper to taste. 

ALWAYS SERVE WITH OYSTER CRACKERS!

Booya!

 

 
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    QUOTE OF THE WEEK

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    Dear brothers
    and sisters,
    never get tired
     of doing good.

    ~2 Thessalonians 3:13

     

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    Author

    Writer, blogger, advocate, religious lefty, Christian crackpot, mother of lads, great wife shark

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