After the candy frenzy of Halloween, I felt really drawn to make soup yesterday. Thursdays, Shmoo stays at day care a little longer so I can spend some special one-on-one time with Doodlebug. When we got home from school, I asked her to help me make soup. I told her we had no recipe, so we should just taste all our vegetables and see what we wanted to put in there.

First, I showed her how to start a soup with vegetable oil, onions, and garlic, without which I don't even know how you can HAVE soup. Then we literally opened the fridge and started pulling things out as we found them. Doodlebug can be a picky eater, but like many kids, when she gets involved in the cooking, she'll try all sorts of things she'd not touch if I just set them in front of her at dinner. So, here's what we ended up with:

• Celeriac, also known as celery root. Mmmm, this is really good!, said Doodlebug after trying it raw.
• Carrots. Mommy, we have to make them CIRCLES! And can I have another one, please?
  
• Parsnips. Can these be circles too? They taste just like the carrots, but whiter!
• Yukon gold potatoes. Triangles! Yes! Cut them like triangles! And can I have one right now? (Note: oddly, she even liked this raw!)
• White cabbage. It's sweet! Put more in!
• Kidney beans. Beans! Beany beans! I love beans!
• Gemelli pasta. I mean, what's soup without noodles?
  

Add all that to the onion/garlic/oil already soft in the pan, and then five cans of vegetable broth. Doodlebug would not let me put any dill in, because once I referred to the herbs as "spices," and she doesn't like things that are "spicy." After we ate the soup for dinner and proclaimed it a success, she agreed to let me add dill next time.

The name of our soup? Lewis Shape Noodle Soup, because of the circles (carrots), squares (celeriac), and triangles (potato). It was delicious -- and made in part by a five-year-old. No recipe -- just a full fridge, a sense of adventure, and imagination!

Of course I'd look at my daughters and my husband, but specifically their eyes...

Aside from the fact that they distribute tons of great independent artists, wouldn't you also love to get an email receipt like this one?:

Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with

sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.

A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure

it was in the best possible condition before mailing.

Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over

the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money

can buy.

We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party

marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of

Portland waved "Bon Voyage!" to your package, on its way to you, in

our private CD Baby jet on this day, Saturday, November 3rd.

I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby.  We sure did. Your picture is on our wall as "Customer of the Year."  We're all

exhausted but can't wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Sigh...

--

Derek Sivers, president, CD Baby

P.S. I bought Kristin Andreassen's album "Kiss Me Hello," just so I could have a recording of the song featured in my last blog post!

I am pretty much allergic to anything with fur, but I admire dogs and wish we could have one. A distant cousin has passed along several dog-related emails in the past week, and she pointed out this beautiful YouTube video yesterday. I dare you not to smile!

My brother was married this weekend, and it was beautiful.

That's the short version of the story. The longer version includes a first marriage that failed before it even began, and more than one soul damaged by it. That longer story includes the hopes of the people around him all sending out wishes to the universe that he meet his intended soon, that he be healed by the love of someone good, that we all gain a friend in the process. The long story tells of his new bride and her similar losses, of their gentle falling-in-love, of the families around them buoyed by that growing love.

The wedding story is a fairytale of tiny princesses in flower dresses, of golden glowing sisters and sisters-in-law surrounding the bride and groom like beacons, of wise parents bestowing blessings and gifts. It is a story that includes eloquent soliloquies, beautiful music, soft colors and delicous feasts. It is a joyous spiritual story, and in the middle of it, my brother's smile and my sister-in-law's bright happy eyes taking in every detail as it swirls around them.

As we say, mazel tov to the chossen and kallah, and to the universe that brought them together for this happy ending. As it began under a chuppah surrounded by soft light and the love of two grateful families, let it continue forever.  Amen!

I think that children and adults both get happy, but that the highest point of happiness is higher for a child than an adult, for the most part. Witness a child on a swing -- the absolute top of joy, given with the whole face and body and soul. There's a reason for the phrase "like a kid in a candy shop," and a reason that it isn't "like an adult in an electronics store!"

That said, I also think that children can be sadder than adults. There is a complete resignation to misery that children have -- say, in the middle of a tantrum, or after an injury -- that indicates a total grief that you rarely see in an adult. I don't know if they're sadder, exactly, but they are living more completely in their sad moment than adults do.

Hey...maybe that's it.

Children are just more of-the-moment and intense than adults. "This is the most wonderful thing in the world!" or "I am totally miserable!" There is no consideration of the next day, the next hour, the moment when joy might be taken away or anger resolved.

How do you measure happiness, anyway?

We cook from scratch all the time! Yesterday I made a pot of Corn Chowder, a sun-dried tomato and basil bread, and a crustless quiche. Saturday, I made a pan of cookie bars. Friday, I made pasta with broccoli. I love to cook from scratch!

This is our Thankful Tree. We have been tracing our hands, cutting out the shapes, and writing on each hand something we are thankful for. Even my sister-in-law and brother-in-law added their hands to the tree (they are the ones with wedding rings near the top). On the tree are hands with the following thanks-givings; you can guess which are from which people:

Make mashed potatoes.

Set the table.

Nurse Shmoo.

Clean the counters.

Bake the veggie meatloaf.

Kiss True.

Listen to Doodlebug read to me.

Put on music.

Clean up toys.

All at the same time!!!!

Thirty-three years is the longest relationship I've had -- and it has been with Myself. It's not been nearly long enough, and I hope it lasts my whole life!

The best thing about it is that I think I know Myself  very well. I know how things make Me feel, I recognize whatever my current set of limitations are, and I know how to play up my strengths to make the relationship work. I can usually predict what I'm going to do, and because of that, I feel relaxed with Myself -- at least when I'm alone.

When I try to include other people in my relationship with myself (which is different from entering into a relationship with other people, separately), I become more guarded, more prone to either bravado or simpering. To say to myself, "I know that I want a closeness with Someone Else" is one thing, but to say to Someone Else, "I know Myself, and I am sure that I want closeness with you" is quite another.

That is the worst thing about my long, deep relationship with Myself -- that I have put much time and energy into knowing about Me, and it feels like a big risk to share that with Someone Else...

...unless I can trust that Someone Else to be True.

I was tagged by Andrea at http://ckr.zaadz.com/blog

Here are the rules:

1. Link to the person’s blog who tagged you.

2. Post these rules on your blog.

3. List seven random and/or weird facts about yourself.

4. Tag seven random [?] people at the end of your post and include links to their blogs.

5. Let each person know that they have been tagged by posting a comment on their blog. or shout-out wall [added by Meenakshi when I saw what people are actually doing].

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Seven random and/or weird facts about myself.

1. I have an illogical and pretty much baseless ban on Barney in my house. I hate him, and I don't know why.

2. I have to sleep with something covering whatever ear is facing up.

3. Chocolate chip cookies are my favorite food.

4. I will only eat fruit if it's really perfect -- I'd rather eat no fruit than mediocre fruit.

5. Though I don't want any more babies or any more pregnancies, I would actually love to give birth again.

6. I have such a strong astigmatism that, until it was properly corrected, I had what I thought was a totally irrational fear of escalators. I could never figure out when to put my foot down on the first step!

7. I think I like kindergarten as much or more than my daughter does!

People I’m tagging [after trying to ensure they haven’t been tagged by others]:

Jen: http://peacelovingmama.zaadz.com/

Ohmsmom: http://ohmdog.zaadz.com/

Juli (come on! start your blog!): http://julihernandez.zaadz.com/

Shannon: http://earthmama.zaadz.com/

Stori (time to get back into it, Mama!): http://alaskalogcabin.zaadz.com/

Karen (who has probably done this meme or something like it many times before): http://www.freerangelibrarian.com

Matthew (take a bouncing break and write something sillier!): http://matthew.zaadz.com/blog

 

When you see a problem, how do you relate to it? How do you describe it, or explain it? How do you attack it, if you do?

Some people -- like my father, for instance, and to a certain degree, True -- see a system when they see a problem. They are able to group together all aspects of a problem and its potential solutions, come up with a sort of "problem average," and admit that the best they can do is try to positively impact the situation as a whole. They can step back, let their eyes blur a little, and make a change that will fix things - so long as the focus remains on a conglomerate of items and forces.

My approach -- and this is not to say that it is right -- is to lean in and see the tiny pieces of a larger problem. I am often paralyzed by this, because it takes so long to see each piece. Doing this forces me to admit that there is no way to resolve each piece perfectly. The balance of the universe is constantly swaying, and sometimes, a piece of the problem has to remain unresolved to allow resolution elsewhere. This is manifested, for me, in a frustrating but fascinating tendency to imagine stories.

Let me explain...

I see a food kitchen. I see only enough food for fifty people for dinner. Someone must decide how to pick which fifty people get dinner. My father would be able to effectively come up with a system to make that decision impersonal -- first come, first served; a lottery; etc. -- and he would then be able to feel good about having effectively served fifty meals to people who could not have had them otherwise. I would never be able to feel complete that way. I would imagine someone running down the street two minutes too late, having been forced to stop earlier to tie her child's shoelace, just missing that hot meal. I would then imagine other stories, looking around the room, people having made it there that night who perhaps had been there the night before, and was that fair? Who needed the hot meal more? What is the story behind the need of each plate of food? And on and on my mind goes, imagining more stories, imagining how they'd be told, or worse, how they would never be told.

There are stories absolutely everywhere. I feel so many things so deeply because, I think, my imagination is always extraordinarily active:

The person next to me in the coffee shop - what is he reading? Why does the book have no writing on the cover? And why is he drinking tea with milk? Who taught him that -- when did he learn to add milk to his tea, and does it remind him of the person who taught him?

The old woman walking by with her bag of expensive chocolates -- is she having guests tonight? How often does that happen for her? Is it family, or old friends? How much does it take from her to walk out in this cold, make her way to the chocolatier, and carry her chocolates home?

This tune I'm listening to, 6/8 du 5E, what on earth does that title mean? Is 5E an apartment number? Did Andre Brunet learn the tune in that apartment? From whom? Was it an old man, passing on a tune only he knew? What does Brunet think about when he plays it now?

What is the story behind the tea? The chocolate? The tune? Do you see why I get so little done? Do you see why I spent my childhood hearing my father say to me, as I now say to Doodlebug, "pay attention! look where you're going!" I just couldn't. I was trying to imagine the story.