Saying goodbye to camp

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On Friday, dd will finish her last day of her first summer camp experience. Kindergarten starts next week, and it didn’t make sense to keep her in camp for half of the week, with Kindergarten intruding midway through the week. DH and I are splitting the duty; he’s got her for a few days and I have her for a few days, and between the two of us we’ll now begin doing this comical dance that somehow provides us with coverage for days when she’s not in school while simultaneously keeping us from running afoul of the dregs of our paid time off pools.

It’s been a strange journey. I thought I’d write more about it, especially when she was such a sad panda for those first few weeks, crying about not wanting to go to camp before we’d even made out of the house, clinging to my leg like a wet leaf as I signed her in every morning. But somewhere around the 4th week, things went past clicking – and she really fell in love with it.

By then, she knew all the counselors’ names, and they all clearly knew her. They loved playing off her humor and they knew how to push her buttons to get her to smile or interact with them, and this increased my comfort level dramatically over the course of the summer. We’d originally been very hesitant to send her to this camp, since though most friends gave it decent reviews, we heard bad things from one friend whose daughter is a contemporary of dd. There were anecdotes of her dd coming home from camp still in wet clothes (they swim daily) and too-young, clearly inexperienced people tending to my friend’s child. But when I sent in dd, whether it was that she was a year older at the time that she went or whether it was just the difference between the two girls, dd just didn’t have those issues. She never came home in the wrong clothes, or in wet clothes, or in anything other than what I expected.

She came home happy.

She never face-planted into her dinner plate, as I’d been warned that she might, but she did come home tired every day…worn out from playing outside in the lovely summer weather and swimming in the pool.

And now she’s leaving it behind, for terra incognita. She’s off to Kindergarten, a whole new adventure.

We knew that things would change come the Fall; one drop-off would become two, breakfast and lunch would be on-us rather than served up at day care, and a backpack would be the norm rather than a rare exception. Camp was our opportunity to get everyone into that new routine a bit early. Our ds also needed some time to adjust to not having his sister RIGHT THERE when he wanted her, since day care allowed them to visit each other pretty much whenever they wanted. Camp set a serious geographic boundary between them that forced him to handle the day all on his own, and he’s done well with it. Oddly enough, when I come in to pick him up in the afternoons, his sister in tow, he blasts right past her with yells of “Mommy! Mommy!” and gives me the biggest, awesomest hugs ever.

It’s been quite the summer. It’s whisked by in a blur of trips and parties, with camp, daycare and work as the only things not on some kind of orbit. They were fixed points. And now one of them is changing – again. I suppose it will actually get easier; the elementary school is closer to home than camp. Still, it’s all more changes to the routine and somehow we just need to get into the new routine without somehow losing our collective nut.

So expect that I’ll still struggle some with lunches and snacks and the inevitable “OMG HER NEW MORON FRIENDS ARE GETTING HER INTO {name something I’m sure to hate}“. I suppose every parent goes through this at some point or another. It just seems like the summer raced by and I don’t know how it happened that my little girl, who it seems I only just put into day care, who only just became a big sister, is now staring down turning six in a couple of months and is starting Kindergarten in a week. ONE WEEK.

It all seems rather incredible, and yet I suppose I can believe it. So we’ll say goodbye to camp for now – with plans to return next summer (perhaps with both kids this time). And I’ll still think of her as my little girl, because (deep inside her) she always will be.

Adventures in CSA (year 2 week 9): MYOB encore

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This week’s return to the Make-Your-Own-Box (MYOB) plan is brought to you by the letters “O” for “Oops” and “E” for “Enh”. The “Oops” relates to my having remembered on Thursday morning that we didn’t place an order by Wednesday night. D’oh! The “Enh” relates to what I saw when I looked at the list of items included in this week’s box. Sure ’nuff, there were some great things, like 8 ears of sweet corn, but they were also throwing in a bunch of hot peppers – and the kids aren’t yet up on the same amount of spice that we like.

I don’t see this as the worst thing in the world; there’s a certain satisfaction to be had from bringing the kids into the farmstand and letting them help decide what will go into the cart. The more excited they are to eat, and the more invested they are in the food decisions, the likelier they are to want to eat the food…or so the theory goes.

To keep things simple, I pointed out the items that were clearly marked as being from the farm; that was the bulk of what they had to offer right now, anyway (apart from any citrus, which is always coming from out of state). This week’s haul:

Adventures in CSA Year 2 Week 9 MYOB

Lush color = luscious food

Year 2 – Summer Week 9 (Make Your Own)
Weight
(lb)		 Farmstand Unit Price
(per lb)		 Farmstand Total Item Cost
Corn 6.00 $0.58 $3.50
Wax Beans (large) 0.69 $2.49 $1.72
Green Pepper 0.72 $1.99 $1.43
Raspberries (half-pint) 1.00 $4.50 $4.50
Currants (half-pint) 1.00 $2.59 $2.59
Cherry Tomatoes (pint) 1.00 $3.50 $3.50
Grapes (quart) 1.00 $5.99 $5.99
Farmstand Total Cost $23.23

Now, you’ll probably notice that I WENT OVER THE LIMIT OF $22.00! (cue forbidding music and potential influx of ninja warriors to cut up my debit card with a sword) Here’s the issue, and I’ll leave it at this set of excuses:

  1. For whatever reason, Friday afternoon was THE time to be at the farmstand and it was packed with people. Thus, it was hard to get things sorted out easily with two small kids while trying NOT to be in the way.
  2. The farmstand, God love ’em, doesn’t appear to have a scale that’s accessible to shoppers, so it’s hard to tell how much you’ve purchased. I tried to keep a running tally on my iPhone, but I didn’t have a way to measure the weight of the items that were priced by the pound. Of course, it also didn’t hep that the kids were aiming for the more expensive items, like the grapes, but if the biggest problem that I have is that my kids like to eat fresh fruit and vegetables, I’d say there are probably plenty of people who’d like to have that kind of “problem” themselves.
  3. I was in a hurry. We still needed to hit up the fishmonger (who sets up outside the farmstand every Friday afternoon) to get some scallops before we headed home and started getting the corn on.

So, we have an overage. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa! But it’ll all work out in the end. Why? Because it’s only $1.23, and it’s worth it when you taste the difference. I know it’s impossible to express this properly over a web page, but if you can get fresh stuff straight from the source, boy, is there a world of difference. I will note that the raspberries are the only one item that did NOT originate at this particular farm. However, they came from another farm elsewhere in Massachusetts, so I consider that local enough for my purposes.

Now, the only tricky item in this list is the one I never cooked with before: the currants. I haven’t dug through all of my cookbooks yet to see what the options are (aside from “heating and making into a sauce for meat”), so I’m curious as to what these currants will turn into. And I’m really hoping they turn into something tasty before they end up being “that thing I really wanted to try and never got to before it went bad.” Any suggestions for currants, folks??

The night the music came back

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I’ve loved music seemingly all my life. I grew up on a steady diet of Simon & Garfunkel, Hall & Oates, Billy Joel, Elton John…and the occasional classical piece or opera to round things out a bit. Road trips were filled with music, often thematic for the trip (Billy Joel and Elton John for trips to New Jersey; Kenny Rogers and Juice Newton for trips to Virginia). When my sister played “Hot Hot Hot” by The Cure for me, when “Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me” first came out on vinyl, I knew I’d found something truly special. Only a few years later, I would get the chance to expand my repertoire even further when I got a job working at a local record store chain. I remember listening to “Nothing’s Shocking” by Jane’s Addiction, learning the Rolling Stones had a whole streak of country-esque songs, and discovered the joys of howling “Mother!” at the top of my lungs along with Glenn Danzig. Life’s always been grand with a soundtrack.

Back in the DC area, we had WHFS, which was THE source for what was then known as “alt-rock”, the “alternative” to the standard pop offerings from the more mass-market radio stations. I was a complete devotee of WHFS; the only time I didn’t have it on was when I needed NPR to keep my road rage down on the Beltway.

When I moved to the Boston area fifteen years ago, I renewed my acquaintance with WFNX, the radio station my sister (again) played for me during her college days in Cambridge. WFNX would be my new aural home – the place where I’d first hear Arcade Fire, Temper Trap, Passion Pit, Frank Turner, and other amazing, AMAZING singers and bands. When WFNX was in its death throes, having had its frequency sold off to media sucking-sound-of-evil ClearChannel, it was like part of my soul got ripped out. Would I be forced to go to Pandora and other internet services that just spew music with no context, no local connection, and no sense of why something was worth listening to beyond some algorithm’s mathematical matchmaking?

Thankfully, the folks at boston.com (the web face of the Boston Globe) had an answer: they quickly snapped up a chunk of the on- and off-air talent from WFNX and decided to launch their own radio station – RadioBDC. It’s internet-only, but that’s not a limiting factor if you don’t let it be one. And, better still, they built something with the soul and wit and style of that “alt-rock” that has sustained me for nearly three decades.

RadioBDC

Last night was the launch party for RadioBDC, and I snapped up my free ticket to the party as soon as they were available. For a while, it was unclear if I could go, but a combination of circumstances made it possible, and I raced to get to The Paradise for the 8pm start time. It’s odd going to a show by yourself; I always go in tandem. It took me years to get up the courage to go to a movie by myself, and this was the first time I went to a rock show on my own. The only person I “knew” who was attending was OccupyFNX (now OccupyRadioBDC), a fellow tweeter with a love of great music and a passion for keeping it on-air. We wouldn’t meet until just before Boston native and former Letters to Cleo frontwoman Kay Hanley would take the stage, but it was a great few minutes of solidarity…together.

Kay Hanley

Kay Hanley, rocking out to her killer set

All of those of us who came out for the show want to see RadioBDC succeed. We know the DJ’s from their time on WFNX (in some cases, even farther back than that), and there was something so wonderful about seeing them together after hearing a few days of early broadcasts from the fledgling station. I was only a few feet away from Adam-12 as he spun tunes before Hanley and her band played, but I hung back. It’s not that I didn’t want to say “THANK YOU SO MUCH” to someone who’s played such amazing music for me; it’s more that I didn’t want to intrude. Years ago, before I left DC, one of my side-ventures was to run an online music magazine and I often interviewed bands before or after they played at local clubs. Ultimately, I never felt comfortable in that world; I always felt like an intruder. I liked listening without poking in, even if to say thank you, because I felt like I was taking up time they had to themselves. It was the same last night. The party was a celebration of the rebirth of alt-rock in the Boston area, with the people who know it the best, and I didn’t want to bother them by gushing about how much it means to me that they’re back on the air, bringing the music to my ears that I so desperately needed.

RadioBDC DJ's

RadioBDC staff (L-R): Adam-12, Paul Driscoll, Julie Kramer, Henry Santoro, and Mike Snow

It’s not as though I don’t have an iPod. I have two. I have over 1000 CDs at home. I HAVE music. But having access to a variety of music, especially new and local bands, with DJ’s to put it into true context…that’s something levels beyond what you can get from your own static collection. My iPods are filled with what I’ve learned of over the years, and these people have helped me build this collection by giving their knowledge and sharing their loves on air with me and everybody else in Boston.

Adam-12 spinning tunes

Adam-12 spins aural joy before Kay Hanley’s set

Now, thankfully, the new station reaches even farther than the former WFNX’s sometimes-limpy transmitter in Lynn, Mass. RadioBDC can be accessed via the internet on a laptop/desktop and can also be streamed to an iPhone/iPad, Android device or Blackberry via the RadioBDC app. I’m not being paid by the boston.com or RadioBDC folks to say any of this. I love music, and when I see my nearly six-year-old daughter dance into the room when she hears Death Cab for Cutie’s “Soul Meets Body” or when she tells me how much she loves Florence + the Machine, I know that it’s these people who helped me make that happen. They facilitated my bringing that love of music to the next generation.

And on and on and on. Please pass it on. Music is love. Long live RadioBDC!