I'll be reading Growing Up with Tamales for story time at Blue Willow Bookshop, in Houston, on Thursday morning, May 15. Tell everyone you know with kids in the Houston area. How do you find and support local indie book stores like Blue Willow? By going to Booksense.
On Saturday, May 17, I'll be in Dallas, reading and signing at the J. Erik Jonsson Central Library, for the 13th Dallas Children’s Book Fair & Literary Festival.
On June 22, here in Houston, I'm going to do a poetry workshop. It's free and open to the public, y'all, and they're having one every Sunday in June, taught by local poets I love and respect. So come on down.
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
All my meters are incorrect.I'm still doing the magical eat-less-exercise-more diet that I started at the beginning of May. I try to eat 1600 calories or less each day, and I try to exercise as much as I can without feeling sorry for myself. And I think I've lost some weight. It looks like I have. But I bought a cheap scale, just to be sure.
According to my book (can't lose weight without a book), 1600 per day will make me lose 8 pounds per month.
According to my scale, I lost 7 pounds in May. Then, I gained 5 pounds during the first week of June. Then, I gained another pound before the second week of June was even half done. Then, apparently, I lost 5 pounds yesterday. Oh, and sometimes I weigh nothing.
It's too late to return the scale. Even though I'm pretty sure it's broken now, I keep weighing myself on it. I don't know why.
Meanwhile, I'm home sick today. I have the same illness I get over and over, in which my body has chills and fever, my stomach feels blech-y, and my muscles are weak. This morning I decided to take my temperature, so I'd have a hard fact to give my coworkers when they ask me, tomorrow, exactly how sick I was.
My temperature was 95.5. I think that means I actually died, on Saturday, and now I'm secretly a zombie, unbeknownst to anyone.
I almost died on Saturday.
We went to the beach town known as Surfside, Texas, and immersed ourselves in the filthy water. Normally, my height and buoyancy keep me safe in the deep waves. Normally, I love the deep waves. But this time, a huge wave overcame me and almost took my life.
My boyfriend was standing a few feet away. He said, afterwards, that a smaller wave had just knocked the white Nike visor from his head. It was bobbing a few feet in front of him, and he was reaching forward to grab it, when the big, almost-lethal wave overtook us.
First, the big wave hit me. "Yay!" I squealed, right before being knocked underwater. I landed partially on my left knee, which scraped hard against the ocean floor, but mostly on my boyfriend. "Garba glubba blubba!" I told him, as, like crabs in some kind of crab porn movie, we tangled limbs in the brine. I couldn't get loose. Couldn't get my face out of the ocean.
One long minute and two liters of inhaled salt water later, I was finally free. Standing on my own two sea legs again. My boyfriend was standing, too, safe. But his visor? Lost. Lost to the wrath of Neptune and/or Calypso.
"I have to find my visor!" he kept saying, throughout the afternoon. He went into the water with his glasses, then without his glasses. The kids went with him, sometimes. But they never found it. "Your visor's in France now," I told him, but he didn't listen. "I'm sorry," I said, but he said it wasn't my fault.
I stayed in the beach chair, under the beach umbrella, while everyone else searched and swam and conquered the waves. I'd had enough of the beach to last me all year, already.
My children are giant monster locusts.
Four years ago, when my boyfriend first met my three small sons, he said, "Three boys. Those kids are gonna eat tons of groceries."
"No," I told him. "You're wrong. My children are very polite."
Today, two of my kids are taller than my boyfriend. Taller than me, even. They wear giant shoes - sizes 13 and 12 and 10 - and their feet get bigger every school year. Faster, actually. I make them wear their shoes until three out of five toes are emerging on either side. Only then do I buy them new shoes. Again.
And, so, yeah, they eat a lot. It's frightening. I'll bring home groceries. Make them take the bags out of the van and pile them on the kitchen counters. "Put these groceries away," I say, and then run to my bathroom for, like, twenty seconds, to empty the bladder that has been rendered weak and worthless by the birth of three kids. When I come back, all the groceries are put away, all right. Into my children's stomachs. All the stuff is gone. There's like, one can of Campbell's Won Ton Soup left, and the kids are punching each other in the heads to see who gets it. They're knocking each other over, into the louvered doors that hide the washer and dryer, and those doors are broken again. They're dragging each other up to the roof of the house, then taking turns pushing each other off. When one falls, old, broken toys fall out of his pockets, all over the back yard and the patio furniture. Then one falls on the patio furniture, breaking it. Then, suddenly, all the furniture in the house is broken. The couch has giant holes in the cushions, and in each cushion is a stash of Nutrigrain bars or mini carrots or bizarre Asian candy or Campbell's clam chowder, hidden there by a seemingly starving child.
"Goddammit," I say. "Quit that!"
"Sorry, Mom," they mumble.
Then I have to go back to the grocery store for more. Again. Every minute of every day. It's the only reason I work anymore - to buy my children groceries. 1:02 PM #
Comments:
Try to think of the constant feeding of your offspring as a parallel to the beautiful flowers in your garden.You sprinkle them with water and fertilizer and in return they give you a magnificent bouquet.
You sprinkle your children with Love and Food, and more food and more food until one day they are all grown up and leave you all alone to take out the garbage they left behind.
Then one day your sons scatter their seeds to the wind and have little sprouts of their own to feed.
THAT is when they all come to visit Grandma!
We're Hungry Grandma! So hungry, feed us feed us feed us feed us they chant till it seems your head will implode from the sound pressure.
Just be sure to remind them to wash the raw potatoes before munching them.
Above all else, NEVER let them in on the secret of dipping fudge covered Oreos in peanut butter!
# posted by
: 8:20 PM
"...Surfside, Texas, and immersed ourselves in the filthy water."
Actually, the water isn't filthy at all. It's actually very clean. What you are swimming in is small silt sand, a tan color, that floats in the water instead of falling to the floor. The "pretty" water you see in Long Beach Cal., is actually loaded with human waste, so much so that they have to shut down the beacches for days at a time. But it looks good.
# posted by
: 12:17 PM
I originally read "Surfside, Texas" as "Suicide, Texas."
Hee!
Well, not "hee, suicide," but you get what I mean.
# posted by
: 5:48 PM
"Actually, the water isn't filthy at all. It's actually very clean."
Yeah, because there's no tar floating around out there and Dow Chemical doesn't dump anything into that water. Nope, nothing at all. And it's certainly not toxic.
# posted by
: 5:52 PM
Gwen: getting pulled under in the ocean is scary. I'm glad you didn't die.
One of my coworkers has a 6'6" son who is 15. The kid is naturally slim and he has to eat practically every hour so he has the strength to haul his big-footed and lanky ass around. For breakfast he puts three instant oatmeal packets in a bowl adds the boiling water and then dumps in a cup of cottage cheese (the full fat kind). That sustains him for a bit and then he has a bunch of other stuff throughout the day mostly all high protein and carb meals. After dinne and before bed he heats up a frozen organic macaroni and cheese entree so that he can sleep through the night without waking with hunger pains.
I marvel at him. I told his mother that even though I know better than to take delight in feeding someone like some old yenta grandmother would, I totally would if I were her. She admitted that she does get some satisfaction from feeding him but then the massive grocery bill puts it all in perspective. I guess the novelty of exhorting someone to "Eat! Eat!" and having them comply wears off quickly when it becomes a challenge to keep them full. I enjoyed your description of your sons' ravenosity.
- Maggie
# posted by
: 8:10 PM
To this day I still feel like I have to hoard food in my own home because of my experiences growing up as the only girl in a house with three brothers.
I am a grown woman with a child of my own, but sometimes when I go to the pantry for a snack I look furtively around to see if someone is waiting to snatch it out of my hand.
When we have a box of cookies in the house I have to fight the urge to count them out and divvy them up.
sad
-greer
# posted by
: 9:04 PM
Oh boy. I'm the older sister of two boys (and four girls), and I could not BELIEVE the amount of food my brothers put away in adolescence.
When they went away to college, my mother switched from making 5.5 lbs of our favorite shrimp dinner (to feed herself, my brothers, and my four sisters) to making a 0.5 lbs. My brothers had been eating 2.5 lbs of shrimp EACH at dinner. Plus a loaf of bread each. Plus salad. Plus other veggies. And then complaining loudly that Mom was starving them.
I kind of hope I never have to feed sons. I'll need a second job.
# posted by
Laura V : 10:05 AM
My hubby is 6'6", played football in high school and generally has been a huge guy his whole life. He would bring home his equally huge football-playing classmates and eat their way through all the food in the house. His mother gave me great advice when he and I married: "Don't try to fill him up. Just keep him from starving." Best advice I've ever gotten. I
# posted by
: 1:13 PM
Gwen, have you had your thyroid checked? Have you ever been tested for hashimoto's antibody? It is just some of the things you say in your blog that remind me of me and how I felt before I got diagnosed.....
# posted by
: 5:06 PM
Mike: Funny. As for grandkids: I think I'll be on vacation when that happens. :)
Anon expert on small silt sand: Thank you. Honestly, I love the Gulf Coast, and I'm going to repeat your post to myself and others next time I'm there.
Laura: Suicide, Texas! Okay, who calls that for a band name?
Picklewagner: Doh... Okay, but, whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger, right?
Maggie: Oh my god. 6'6" at 15? That's so crazy. (I would be proud of a child that big, though. I admit it.)
Yeah, the feeding stopped being fun when I had more than one of them, I think. Now I enjoy watching them cook for themselves. Or, they'll call me at work and ask if they can cook something they found in a cookbook, or a recipe they saw on TV (as opposed to just microwaving or boiling water). And I'll go over the steps with them on the phone, then let them go for it.
I don't know why I get so paranoid - I started cooking whole dinners when I was younger than any of them. But kids, you know...
Greer: Preach on, my sister. As a survivor of a boy-filled house, I know exactly where you're coming from. My kids started divvying food on their own, and I let them. If there's anything I want for myself, I have to hide it in my bedroom. And then, they find it and eat it, anyway. Last night they asked to make ravioli and I said, "Okay, but leave me some to eat for dinner when I get home, before we go to tuba lessons."
I got home. My middle son said, "We left you about twenty raviolis." Don't know if they counted them out for everyone, or what.
# posted by
Gwen : 9:04 AM
Laura V: Oh my god! 2.5 lbs of shrimp! And the bread! Man.
(Second job: Soon, I will make my kids work at the grocery store. They can forage there at night, I figure.)
Anon: "Don't try to fill him up." Ha!
Karen: I had it checked. Thanks. I have hyperprolactinemia. But now I have to go look up Hashimoto's Antibody, because inquiring minds would like to know.
# posted by
Gwen : 9:06 AM
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