those boys

(there's a chicken post below this one, also posted on 8/11/07)

The other day, during the preparation of kale, refried bean, and tomato tostadas, I remember that the boys were giggling and saying something about "wopes". We read some stories while they baked, and then we sat down to eat. All of a sudden, No*ah yelled "my wopes!" and Oli*ver yelled, "wopes!". N pulled some twist ties out of his tostada, put there (and thus baked) by one of my little stinkers when they were messing around in the kitchen drawer at prep time. Wopes.

The boys seem to love anything between two tortillas. I hate to mention this to my mother, who hates beets, but the boys love those too.

The boys really enjoy a smörgåsbord of options, and eat all kinds of things, including spicy food. Their daddy cooks them giant breakfasts of pancakes, hot cereal, and eggs dishes, and they wolf it down. They also have their picky days about some foods, like most toddler do.

What's a little fingerpaint between brothers?

Speaking of painting, I think the difference in how they paint is kind of interesting. Here are two takes on the same art project:




It's kind of the opposite of how they eat, as No*ah is quite neat, and Oliv*er, well, not. This is what our kitchen wall looks like right now. I'm about to take it all down and put it up in the garage, since we start new classes and such in September. I know a lot of moms complain about the constant craft projects and how to know what to do with them, but I have to say, I so enjoy this. We'll see how I feel by the time they're in third grade.



The boys tried a bouncy house for the first time last week, and thought they'd gone to heaven.






Oliv*er is still gaily purposing to take anything he can find apart, sometimes using his teeth, and we're doing our best to keep him occupied and safe. It was actually No*ah who broke our front window last week, so our efforts may need to be more equitably divided. I'll consider it a successful summer if we can keep both boys out of the emergency department for the length of it... Such good intentions, but so many bad ideas.






We had a borrowed bike and Burley trailer to use for a few days, which the boys greatly enjoyed.

What, don't you play the kazoo in your underwear?

update on the "ladies"

Well, with all that seriousness lately, I thought I'd give an update on our chickens.



We have eggs! Small eggs, but the real thing. The eggs will get bigger as the chickens get older.

Mea*gan* found one in the next box yesterday, and then today, we found three more, so I think maybe two or three of the girls are laying now.



Marcy has been quite agitated lately, but she's been cool as a cucumber the last couple of days, so she must be please with herself.


All the ladies are doing well and they've grown a lot.



They spend a couple of hours or so a day hanging out in our fenced backyard. So far, nobody has tried to escape. Why would they, when they have such a lovely coop?



They often hang out under the spirea bushes, taking dust baths. I've not seen a slug this year that wasn't in a chicken's mouth.




This garden bed is fallow this year, as it was used pretty heavily for four years straight, and the chickens are doing a nice job of fertilizing it. I also take their bedding and spread it there when I clean the coop, tilling it in a little. This bed should be in great shape come spring, and perhaps by then, the boys will have enough self-control not to eat everything they have access to. The care an feeding take less than an hour a week, and we've had enough compost to give them that they don't need a whole lot of feed. Taking care of chickens is quite simple and easy compared to a dog, or even a cat. The litter sure doesn't smell as bad.


Every morning, the boys go out to the co*op with Jo*el before breakfast, usually in their underwear and pajama tops. If Mea*gan hasn't let them out yet, they open the door to the coop, and the boys give any extras like leftover salad or cereal to the hens. The also throw them some scratch grain to keep them busy and happy. The boys love it, crooning sweetly to them, "Good morning, girls! Here's some scratch!" If we're out and about for a long time, No*ah says we have to go home, because the chickens are lonely.





We still plan on getting a couple more hens next summer or spring, but for now, we're very happy taking care of our four hens.

Stage two: anger

The Kübler-Ross model of grief says that there are five stages for those grieving— denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I think, as a city, we are well into stage two, and that includes me. Frankly, I’m choking on outrage at the moment: when I think about the fallen bridge and how this possibly could have happened, bile rises to my throat like acid. This is a rich country. We spend hundreds of billions on this seemingly endless war, but fail to ensure that all Americans have access to health care and a decent education. We send our young men and women—especially low-income men and women with few other options— to war and fail to treat them fairly and decently when they finally come home. Freedom isn’t the only thing that isn’t free (not that freedom is gained by bombs and guns to begin with). Education isn’t free. Health care isn’t free. Treating veterans decently isn’t free. Infrastructure isn’t free.

My expectations are not all that high. I don’t expect affordable health care here; I don’t expect our inner city schools to be funded adequately. I really, really wish those things were different, but I don’t expect them to be. I did expect, however, that when my fellow Twin Citians and I drove over a bridge, that bridge would hold up every single time. The people that died or were injured didn’t willingly gamble their lives when they attempted to cross the Mississippi. That disbelief that echoed around the world this week? I share it entirely.

Certain politicians are claiming that it isn’t helpful to point fingers, but you know what? They don’t get to say that, in my book. They don’t have the right to be in charge of our resources and not have fingers pointed in their direction when things go horribly wrong under their leadership. The people of this fine city and state (and country) will darn well point fingers, loudly and insistently, until we have some decent answers and until we have a plan in place that will ensure that this never, ever happens again. It’s going to cost money, and for once it’s the politicians who will claim to want to save us a buck who are going to leave a bad taste in our mouths. I imagine that those who hail from New Orleans probably have a pretty good idea how we feel. It seems that the people and institutions who may turn out to have had a hand in failing to prevent this tragedy would like for us to move neatly past the anger and right onto acceptance, and in the process to accept their tidy spin on how this happened. No-one I know here is ready to do that.

Most of the victims went to the hospital where I work, and some are still there. We all did what we could to help this week, and the atmosphere was one of quiet resolution, working together to help people heal and get their lives back. There were blessedly few deaths in the end – far fewer than initially expected. There were many heroes that day, including our own Meag*an, who along with her boyfriend, knowingly put her life at risk to help rescue severely injured people just after the collapse. What people who don’t live here may not entirely understand is that the whole city pretty much feels like it’s cheated death. Almost all of us crossed that bridge regularly – 140,000 a day is almost half the population of Minneapolis, and everywhere I go I hear stories of those who were just ahead of or just behind the tragedy. It could have been almost any of us, and yet it wasn’t. For many of is, it will be a long time before we can drive across the Mississippi River without remembering what was and what could have been.

On Saturday, I drove the boys to the Children’s Muse*m in St. Paul. For a weekend morning, traffic was heavy on 94, mostly due to the reroute. As we slowly crossed the river on yet another highway bridge, my boys singing Old MacDonald in the back like any other day, I couldn’t help but imagine the accident, the horrible end to an ordinary stop-and-go commute, a bridge suddenly giving way underneath us.

It was the word accident that most stuck in my mind, though, even more than the terrible images. Bridges don’t just fall down, at least they didn't used to. Whatever the exact cause, this was almost certainly preventable. If we don’t take proper care of our basic infrastructure, if we don’t dare spend the money to do it properly and thoroughly, this will probably happen again. This was a horrible accident, but it was also an opportunity to get some very basic things right. If we don’t, then the now predictable result cannot fairly be called accidental.