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We’re Going All Free-Range

by Katie

One thing our family is known for around our neighborhood is that we’re pretty free range with the kids. The girls have been walking to school for years now (okay, granted: it’s only a block and a half, and there’s a crossing guard). My fifth-grader, M, has been allowed to go on short runs, bike rides, or walks by herself for about a year, and this year I’ve let the girls walk up to the school playground to play on their own.

Many of M’s friends’ parents are not nearly so comfortable with all of this freedom, which has been a bit of a bummer because M could theoretically ride her bike to a few different friends’ houses, but since the friends couldn’t do the same, the point was sort of moot. What’s really stuck in my craw about this is that there’s a little posse of 5th grade boys who are often playing outside together who’ve clearly got more freedom to roam.

But we might be reaching a breakthrough. One friend’s been allowed to ride around the neighborhood as long as she’s with a friend, and when M heard the news, she took the first opportunity for a test ride after school.

Really, it went unbelievably well. The weather was terrific. M hadn’t been gone long when I saw her reappear, not with the one friend I’d expected, but with three girls from the neighborhood. They’d come onto our street because the ice cream truck was right by our house, and J had already run inside to raid the giant mug full of spare change that we set aside for ice cream purchases. After a full winter of collecting quarters, there was plenty for everyone without my even having to go outside, but I couldn’t resist taking a quick photo from the porch and sending it to the moms in case they were fretting with all the new freedom. To top it all off, I got an email from a further-afield neighbor reporting on my daughter’s good behavior and sociability while she was jaunting around the neighborhood. I was psyched that M got some kudos, plus it was reassuring to know that there were Parental Eyes around the neighborhood. Because I’m not above spying.

J, meanwhile, found a friend to visit as well. So I’m feeling pretty psyched about the girls’ prospects for a spring and summer full of plenty of roaming outside with friends.

Look! She's even wearing her helmet!

Look! She’s even wearing her helmet!

 

 

Twitt

April 23, 2013   4 Comments

Mmmm, Mmm. . . That’s Good Cookin’!

by Katie

While in Savannah in February, I was sitting next to my sister, who had a big plate of delicious shrimp and grits in front of her. I’d had them before, so I knew they were good, but she just shook her head. “They’re not as good as Dad’s. You have to get him to make some for you.” She knew I was coming back for spring break, and I think she reminded me three more times to make sure that homemade Shrimp and Grits were on the menu. When I ate them, I finally understood. They were really good. And yes, I know: you probably won’t be buying the shrimp right off the boat like Dad was. But if you make these I bet they’ll still be delicious.

Shrimp and Grits

4 cups water
Salt & pepper
1 cup stone ground grits
3 T butter
2 cups shredded sharp cheddar cheese
1 lb. shrimp, peeled & deveined
6 slices bacon, fried & chopped
Optional: sliced, cooked Chorizo or Andouille sausage
4 t lemon juice
2 T chopped parsley
1 cup thinly sliced scallions
1 large clove garlic, minced

 

Bring water to a boil.  Add salt and pepper.  Add grits and cook until water is absorbed, about 20-25 minutes.  Remove from heat and stir in butter and cheese.
Rinse shrimp and pat dry.
Fry bacon in a large skillet until browned.  Remove bacon from pan and crumble when cool.
Drain fat from skillet leaving 2 tablespoons.
Return chopped bacon and add sliced sausage along with lemon juice, parsley, scallions and garlic.  Sauté for 3 minutes to blend flavors.
Add shrimp and cook till pink—do not overcook.
Spoon grits into a serving bowl.  Add shrimp mixture and mix well.  Serve immediately.
The other Southern classic that Dad made was Crab Cakes, and for these, he followed a recipe from Southern Living. They’d actually made a double batch the last time, so the ones we ate were frozen and thawed before frying, but they were still scrumptious.
Twitt

April 22, 2013   No Comments

This Week

by Katie

We had a busy day today! The girls were singing with the junior choir in church, and the choir director tasked M with leading the group in a warm-up song. She did a great job of bossing kids around in a non-irritating way, I thought. And they all did great singing. Then I whisked M away to what I thought was going to be a Girl Scouts work day at a farm, except that apparently no one told me it got cancelled. But M was psyched because she helped all by herself. When I picked her up, she was covered in horsehair, toting freshly-laid eggs, and exhausted. J, meanwhile, was eager to get her garden on, and she practically dragged me outside to rake up the last of last autumn’s leaves. Then we headed to a late-afternoon soccer game, the first outdoor game of the season. M and her team played well and won 1-0, and J was excited to explore and climb around some new outdoor territory. Then we headed to Jumpin’ Jacks for dinner and got to bed slightly too late. Phew, and hooray for spring.

Here’s what’s up this week:

Multiple Days:

  • OPEN BOUNCE!!! at Afrim’s Sports. You’ll Love Our Bounce Zone… Starting May 1st, 2013 our bounce hours will be on Tuesday and Friday Nights from 4:30-8:00pm (Ages 3-9 ONLY)

Monday, April 22nd:

Tuesday, April 23rd:

Wednesday, April 24th:

Thursday, April 25th:

Friday, April 26th:

Twitt

April 21, 2013   No Comments

Books We’re Reading

by Katie

We’ve read a few good books lately, so I thought I’d share.

The first happy surprise was  Illuminations: A Novel of Hildegard von Bingen by Mary Sharratt.

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I mentioned that this book was on my “to read” list after my sisters and I saw Mary Sharratt speak at  the Savannah Book Festival, but I was surprised that this novel about a woman who entombed in a cell as an Anchorite nun for about thirty years was as readable and interesting as it turned out to be. If you like historical fiction and girl power, you’ll love Hildegard.

I heard about Me Before You by Jojo Moyes on WAMC’s The Roundtable, and then later I think someone on WAMC was talking about it again, so I requested it from the library and had it for our spring break trip to Savannah. This was one of those books that I just didn’t want to stop reading. It’s a love story. In fact, this reminds me of when you read a review and someone says that they picked up a book and sat down to read it and they didn’t stop reading until they were done. What the hell? Don’t these people have lives? There are so many times that I wish I could do that, but these damn kids want meals and rides to places, or I have appointments. Every time I hear someone say that they spent the entire day and/or night reading a book, I’m fiendishly jealous, both because I love having books that I don’t want to put down and because, even when I have one, I always have to put the book down and do something useful once in a while.

For our spring break trip we tried something new and I looked around for some audiobooks that we could all enjoy together, then I organized a secret ballot to vote on what we’d like to hear. On the way down to Georgia, we listened to The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley.

 

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Oh my gosh, we loved this one. The main character, Flavia de Luce, is an 11-year-old English girl who loves chemistry and finds herself solving a murder mystery. I found out later  that it’s officially a grown-up book and that it’s the first of a whole series starring our heroine Flavia. We are overjoyed, because she is one of the most kick-butt girls ever! But I’d highly recommend listening to the book, because the narrator, Jayne Entwistle, is spectacular.  As for its not-for-kids status, if you are okay with your child listening to a murder mystery and hearing about dangerous situations, there wasn’t any gore or sex or bad language. Between the sophisticated vocabulary and the British accents I was sometimes concerned that 8-year-old J not be understanding it all (although she seemed to be), so I think younger than 8 would be tough.

On the way home, we listened to The Emerald Atlas, by John Stephens, which everyone liked as well.

Right now I’m reading The Pickup: A Novel, by Nadine Gordimer, and I’m actually liking it. I say “actually” because it’s for my book club, and it’s become sort of a joke around the house that I hardly ever like the book club books that I’m reading.

Here’s an  interview with Anna Quindlen talking about some of her favorite books. I love her so! I, too, am a huge fan of Middlemarch, and I’m thinking that this means that I’ll have to try again with Bleak House. Plus I’ve acquired a whole new list of new authors to try. I especially like what she said about putting down a book because she didn’t like it.

I’ve had a link waiting around for me to post it that’s a list of early chapter books for kids/series about girls from What We Do All Day. She’s actually got a bunch of fun book lists.

I’d originally thought that the early chapter book list would be good for J, but she has her own ideas. Cute W had read The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien with the girls back at the end of last year so that the family could all go see the movie (you know we have a strict read-the-book-before-you-see-the-movie rule) and since then, J has been a little Fellowship of the Ring-obsessed. She just finished the third of four books (or the second of three, if you don’t count The Hobbit as a prologue, jeez, even trying to describe the damn books is confusing, no wonder I can’t follow the damn things). This morning M was still at a sleepover, so Cute W and J enjoyed an early showing of The Two Towers. I sat down for a few minutes, just in time to see some of the few females sobbing and clutching babies while a fortress was being attacked. I couldn’t help rolling my eyes at Cute W, and when J heard me harrumphing, J pointed out, “You don’t need to stay in the room, you know.” Sigh. She had a point. I’m going to try to sort through some of our warm-weather clothes. Yes, it’s boring, but I have an audiobook for the occasion.

 

Twitt

April 20, 2013   3 Comments

Earth Day Activities, Pippi Longstocking, Sketchbook Project, HVCC Summer Camp Fair

by Katie

Hey! It’s finally starting to act like spring around here! Flowers are sprouting, robins are hopping, and there’s a flourishing village of carpenter ants happily munching the wall behind our soon-to-be-closet. Ah, burgeoning life! So inspiring. It’s okay. We’ll survive. The ants won’t. Probably not the windows in that wall either. Which I’m okay with, since those two would have been in the closet, anyway. Also, my kitchen is currently torn apart, but you know what that means, right? Chinese food, baby-bee! And Cute W’s out of town tonight, so there may even be a chick flick involved!

Here’s this week’s KidsOutAndAbout.com newsletter, and here’s what’s up this weekend:

Multiple Days:

Friday, April 19th:

Saturday, April 20th:

Sunday, April 21st:

Twitt

April 18, 2013   2 Comments

A New Master Bath! Part 2

by Katie

Since I broke our exciting new bathroom news I’ve been collecting photos to share. Really, it’s more than two posts’ worth, but I don’t want to drive you all nuts. Still, the whole project has sort of been taking over my life, plus I’m excited because we’re starting tomorrow!! Whoop, whoop!!

So I’m going to inflict a bunch of photos on you in one long, long post instead. Because I could talk about this all day, baby!

First, I thought that I’d show you the awful full bathroom that we all share right now.

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Oh, sure, you’re saying. It’s not so bad! It’s kind of. . . cute. Well, you’re kind. Too kind.

Really, we should have gotten rid of this bathroom long ago, in particular because it’s terrible for kids. The vanity’s tall and the mirror’s high, which makes it difficult for them to see in the mirror. In fact, when I want to look in the mirror closely, I usually stand on the stool with one foot and put my other foot up on the counter so that I can lean in. There’s no dignity there.  And the light! It’s this humming fluorescent thing, and you can only turn it on with the switch which is way the heck up there, on the end of the bar of light. Which means that the kids can only turn it on by climbing up on the vanity, too. There’s an overhead light, but it’s comically dim. And there’s no air vent.

And look at this!

 

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When we bought the house, the only literal and figurative bright spot about the room was the window. Except then the building inspector said we’d have to hang the shower curtain, which basically doubles your chances of having a curtain sticking to you mid-shower. And I hate the tile. And the grout is ewww. There’s some old-fashioned trap-in-the-pipes thing that means the bath drains slowly, encouraging soap scum. Actually, it drains slowly, and then very slowly, and then so unbelievably slow that Cute W has to remove this screw-on section of the wall to get access to the pipes with a trap that’s hopelessly clogged. Then he plunges like crazy while I create suction in the pipe with my palm so that he can remove all the yuck. Then the cycle begins again. Apparently it’s a common thing in old houses–the contractor knew all about it. We never would have survived this long if Cute W weren’t handy.

And, ugh, the whole room is so damn old. We have nasty, nasty linoleum that was dirty beyond possible redemption years before we ever assumed ownership. Even if I use a cleaner that is unbelievably hazardous, there’s no way to get rid of this stuff. Actually, the shower curtain and shower mat are about ten years old, but it hasn’t seemed worth it to buy fresh stuff and put them into this yucko room.

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So, yes. The girls are deeply jealous about the bathroom, but once we have a back-up shower, it’s going to be tough to resist improving on this.

Okay, enough whining about what the present bathroom.

Let’s talk future!

There’s been some serious shopping going on. Of course, we’ve got the constraint of a small space. In the plans, our architect drew in a “Euro-style” vanity, which seems to mean that the sink overhangs the teensy weensy vanity. Apparently the standard vanity size is 21″ deep, and that’s too deep for the space we’ve got. So I went looking for vanities. Look–I accidentally took a picture of myself taking a picture of a vanity!

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I was walking from one overhanging sink vanity to another overhanging sink vanity when I saw another petite vanity that I liked oh-so-much-more than them (it’s below on the left and the upper right).

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I liked that the cabinet was bigger, so the sink wasn’t just hanging out there. But the euro-style vanities were 14″ or 16″ while this one was 18″.  It seemed like the extra 2 to 4 inches was too extravagant. Then I realized that those numbers just mean the cabinet, not the sink itself. When you measure by the sink, they all stuck out about the same amount. Yee-haw! So that was the high-drama choice. The vanity’s got a matching mirror and cabinet, so that was easy-peasy (you can see the mirror above, too). We’ve chosen tile and we’ve got a faucet and shower hardware and a toilet. I collected my booty for a still life–except for the toilet, currently camped out in the screened porch, too heavy to move.

And it’s been a project, but I’ve managed to empty out the room!

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As I took a picture, I noticed that I’d forgotten one last thing: a picture.

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I love this picture, and not just because I’m a sucker for Impressionism. Oh, no. This nifty little print is a treasure that we found when we were sorting through some of Cute W’s Grandma’s things, trying to decide what to salvage and what to donate. We liked it right away, and then we turned around. . . .

And we loved it!

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How fun is that? Apparently they used the back of it for some campaign party.

Twitt

April 16, 2013   No Comments

Crying

by Katie

I started this post last week, and my children kept interrupting me, so it’s been languishing. But it’s been another day that’s probably left all of us sad and angry, so I’m finally finishing this one for a little capture-the-precious-moments escapism.

 

It was just a few days ago that a friend shared the Reasons My Son is Crying tumblr, and already it’s become enough of a phenomenon that Good Morning America flew them down to New York to interview them.  And now I’m feeling a little bit bad, because according to The Christian Science Monitor, the dad is taken aback by the attention. He’s hearing from plenty of freaks who are trying to pathologize the whole situation as emotional abuse or undiagnosed behavioral or phlegm-oriented dysfunctions. He’d rather that we forget about him and check out Humans of New York instead. Which, okay, admittedly HONY is awesome. But I’m stuck because the bittersweet images have been bumping around in my brain since I saw them, begging for me to write a post. I loved them and I can’t resist. I’m rationalizing that most of you have already seen the tumblr anyway, but if you haven’t, it comes with a plea: look at the crying toddler, but don’t send the dad any diagnoses or advice. Use that time to peruse HONY instead.

Ah, Reasons My Son is Crying tumblr, I love this so much and for so many reasons.

First and most obvious? I wish I’d done it. Earlier, I spent way too much time checking the photo archives, and found just a single toddler crying photo:

 

M crying_1

The only reason why I have this one is that we’d wrestled M into a dress and its little matching kerchief so that we could take a photo, and she hated wearing the kerchief. So it’s not like I’m documenting day-to-day life here. Even though I stocked up on pictures of messy faces and big spills and children running around naked, I didn’t think to snap photos of my kids when they were sobbing or having a tantrum. And I regret it, because it’s a defining period of time in kids’ and parents’ lives. Maybe it’s partly the fear that the tantrums and sobbing won’t ever end that makes us so reluctant to snap a photo. Or it’s just that listening to sobbing is excruciating and we want it to stop.

But it’s worth remembering.

Seeing the tears and snot rolling is so poignant and bittersweet. It’s this fleeting time when these small humans know what they want and have so little power to communicate or execute their own desires. You know: they have opinions and preferences. Strong preferences. Juice is better than milk. I want my sister’s toy. And yet these people who are in charge of them are foiling them at every turn. Milk! Sharing! Of course it feels like a series of tremendous injustices. It just doesn’t feel fair that toddlers have no control whatsoever. I scroll the photographs and read the captions and imagine myself a toddler, the whole thought process. For example, “He can’t climb into the sea lion tank.” Well, that’s ridiculous [says my imagined toddler]. I mean, they force me to get into the water for a bath, and they let me get in the hotel pool, and then there’s finally a really awesome pool with amazing rocks to climb and friendly sea creatures and I’m not allowed? That sucks. Or, “We wouldn’t let him open the hotel door and run naked through Times Square.” Come on, that’s alarmist. Maybe I just want to investigate the nub of the carpet that is incredibly dirty in the most fascinating way or push the button to make the ice machine go. Really, what would be the harm in that? I know that the parents are making completely intelligent and rational decisions. And yet I still can’t help feeling sorry for the kid. Words that you can’t yet enunciate, the desire to take care of yourself coupled with a complete lack of capacity to do so. Day in and day out. That is a tough life.

Growing up is a struggle. One of my favorite baby postures to witness is the straining sitter. You know that one? It’s when you see a fairly young child, maybe 8 or 10 months, who has recently mastered the art of sitting up, and someone’s put her (or him) into a reclining stroller or baby seat. And that child hunches forward as far as possible, pushing against the safety straps, because that’s what they can do now. Sit up. Like someone grown. Or more grown than them. It’s a completely different perspective. Kids get to see ahead instead of lying there passive, watching the sky or worse, a canopy. Maybe they’ll grunt and point. Because they have places that they want to go. Things they want to see. That struggle, that eagerness, just hits me in the gut every single time I see it.

Recently someone said something dismissive about a 2nd grader’s rough life. Sure, we grown-ups sneer, you don’t have a mortgage, and someone puts dinner in front of you every night, what’s there to worry about? But there’s so much. Trying to understand how to tell time and friends who don’t get along with each other and older siblings who can do everything and drawing a picture that doesn’t look like the one in your brain at all. That’s stress. It might not be grown-up stress, but it’s tough stuff. And a 12-year-old who’s lost a best friend and has a pulsing red pimple and just got cut from the basketball team. . . yuck. Awful. You couldn’t pay me to go through that again. I found old diaries once and thought that I’d find it amusing, but it was awful. So much sorrow and anger and ennui, and reading it, I felt just as sad and mad and melancholy as I had decades ago. My heart was breaking for poor Puberty Katie. It’s easy for us grown-ups to counsel that all this will pass. But it’s passing through it all that’s the problem!

So all of those toddler crying photos call up the drama of growing up, but also the best and worst of parenthood. Because it’s hilarious and baffling. As parents, we’re constantly making reasonable choices and feeling like horrible people no matter what choice we make. We say “No” because we’re good parents knowing that our children will use those “Nos” as evidence of our utter malice toward them and all of their most deeply-held desires. Toddler parenting just highlights a theme that’s laced through all the parenting years: You absolutely cannot win. The other day, M was protesting because we don’t always conform to J’s bedtime, which M thinks is unfair. Not just unfair, but evidence of our greater love for J than for her. I pointed out that (1) it wasn’t really her business and (2) they’re two different personalities who will get different treatment based on their individual needs, and (3) my strongest point, that M never even had a specific bedtime until this year. If she thought about it that way, I said, then really, poor J was getting the harsh treatment, because she had an imposed bedtime three years earlier than M. At which point M argued that J needed that early bedtime and we were responding to that need because (Oh my gosh, do you see it coming? Do you? Do you? . . .) we love her more!  And she believed both statements with great sincerity and conviction. There’s no way to win when you’re dealing with that. So I feel for these parents, these poor baffled parents who are shaking their heads over the booger-sodden sob-fest their toddler has launched as a direct result of their considered choices, made in order to best keep the child safe and clean. Because we’ve all been there.

Something else that I love is the documentation of this transitional time between baby and big kid. In one image he’s got a full diaper and all the little rolls and creased wrists of babyhood, and in another image from the same day he’s dressed and rolling his luggage through the airport like a little man-about-town. Children are always shifting between the baby and the grown-up, and capturing that juxtaposition, and how their development ebbs and flows, is lovely. Maturity approaches so gradually, with so may leaps forward and back, that it’s like a high tide coming in very, very slowly.

Or I guess it’s more like low tide, going out. Because if we’re doing it right, we’ll end up alone on the shore, squinting out toward the horizon as they roll out into the wide world.

 

 

Twitt

April 15, 2013   5 Comments

Week of the Young Child, Taste of Troy, Pippi Longstocking, Zombie Prom, and More This Weekend

by Katie

Hey! Here’s what’s up this week.

The spring programs for the Town of Niskayuna are out. I said I’d spread the word.

Multiple Days:

  • WEEK OF THE YOUNG CHILD at The Wonder Room. We are celebrating the WEEK OF THE YOUNG CHILD! This year’s theme is Early Years are Learning Years – and that’s what we are all about! Come play all week for half price! That’s just $2.50 for children. Free for adults (as always).
  • OPEN BOUNCE!!! at Afrim’s Sports. You’ll Love Our Bounce Zone… Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday Nights from 4:30-8:00pm (Ages 3-9 ONLY)

Monday, April 15th:

  • Monday, April 15: Messy Monday at The Wonder Room. Every Monday we are open from 9am-3pm – and we always have something extra messy out on Mondays! Come play with us!

Tuesday, April 16th:

Wednesday, April 17th:

Thursday, April 18th:

Friday, April 19th:

Twitt

April 14, 2013   No Comments

A Master Bathroom! Part 1

by Katie

So, guess what?

We’re putting in a master bathroom! Yippee!

If you’re a regular reader, you know that I live in a small-ish, somewhat decrepit old house. I want to be the kind of person who is perfectly satisfied with our smallish house, but often I’m not.

We’ve got one-and-a-half-bathrooms, which means the four of us share the same shower. More on that one later. With two daughters moving toward adolescence, we’ve been thinking that everyone could use the additional space and privacy that an extra bathroom would provide. For a little while we had aspirations to do an addition with a master bathroom and more space downstairs (one thing that drives me crazy about the house is that when I carry groceries in, I enter the back door and walk through two other rooms and take a U-turn to enter the kitchen), but we’re just too cheap to do that much. Or so we found out after finding out how much it would cost with an architect in a consultation we’d “won” for our nursery school silent auction.  So we procrastinated and sulked for a while, and then we had an architect friend draw up some plans within the space we have.

As it happens, we have a pretty worthless little room that’s right off of our bedroom:

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Okay, yes. It’s cute. It has so much potential. This is the kind of room that you see when you’re walking around with a realtor and you sigh over how pretty all that sunlight is and imagine how lovely it would this room could be. “Perfect for a baby nursery or a sewing room!” they say. And you nod eagerly, forgetting that you don’t actually want any more babies and you don’t really sew all that much. It could be a great home office space, except that it’s tucked away a little bit too much. I would probably be super-productive, but I do a lot of work-and-personal-life juggling, so I feel like I need to be a bit more centrally located. Plus, there’s not much electrical wiring available, so I just never tried.

Instead, this room became a sort of catch-all for storage and yet another playroom for the kids. And it would get seriously messy. This is a neat day for the room. The girls actually call it “the schoolroom” because that’s where they’ll play school. Here’s the other side of the room:

 

 

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That doorway on the right goes to our bedroom. And the blue tape on the floor has been there since we talked about turning it into a bathroom with our architect friend. The end you see here will be a closet, the corner you see closer up shows where the shower will be. You can see it better in the plans.

Anyway, we liked the plans and we applied for a home equity “line of credit” to do the bathroom. But there we stalled. Because we’re cheap and we hate to spend money. If we’d received the loan, we’d want to spend it and move on, but since the loan was just waiting for us to start spending, we couldn’t bear to start, somehow.

Here’s where we should see a sped-up version of a calendar with months being yanked off and discarded. . . and yanked and discarded again. . .  snow falling, then melting, then leaves sprouting, then turning gold and dropping off. . . .

Then our architect friend contacted us to say he knew a contractor with a hole in his schedule. And when we double-checked the money situation, we realized that if we refinanced our mortgage, we could lower our interest rate enough to nab the extra cash we needed for construction while still paying about the same amount monthly (seriously: if you haven’t refinanced lately, you should SO look into it. We’d only refinanced a few years ago, too).

So let me invite you along on our little home-improvement adventure! We’re starting later this week. Whoop, whoop!

 

Twitt

April 13, 2013   7 Comments

Driving North: Barbecue Stop, New York City Tenement Museum, & John’s Pizza

by Katie

Whenever we drive to and from Georgia to visit the parents, we stop for barbecue. On our way south this year, our efforts were thwarted. We stopped at one place that had gotten high ratings but was pretty much mediocre and, inconceivably, was out of ribs. Then we stopped at Smithfield’s based on Yelp ratings again, but we somehow didn’t process that this chain is mostly about fried chicken. The fried chicken was delicious, but it wasn’t the bbq we were seeking.

Finally, on the way back north we hit the motherlode at the Backyard BBQ Pit. The ratings on Yelp had been terrific, and it was hardly out of the way for us at all. In fact, as we were driving their, M kept saying, “Wait, are we driving out of our way? How much extra time is this taking?” She’d harassed us about that when we went to Monticello, too. She’s not a fan of driving, as you know, and so she’s vigilant about making sure we’re not wasting her valuable time. She’s a BBQ ribs maniac, so she was grouchy and suspicious about going anywhere after the earlier disappointment.

Oh, man, it was good. If you go anywhere near Durham, North Carolina and you are an omnivore, you simply must go there. I am not a huge hush puppy fan, but they were the best hush puppies I’ve ever eaten. We tend to buy a few dishes to share around, and after we found ourselves fighting for the pulled pork, we got back in line to get more.

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The macaroni and cheese was as delicious and greasy as reviewers had advised. The pulled pork made you not want to swallow because then it was over.

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M said that she’d happily drive out of the way again, and J, who usually doesn’t love much at the barbecue joints, decided she liked just about everything. Which was especially surprising because her usual complaint about ribs is that they have a little bit of barbecue sauce and these were drenched in sauce. The only drawback was that the floors were so slick and sticky–especially in the bathroom–that it was pretty yucky. For some, this might raise concerns about the overall cleanliness of everything. Luckily we ate before we went to the bathroom, so we were already deeply in love. Cute W argued that it was part of their we’re-not-fancy-we-just-make-great-food schtick. I don’t care. All I know is that it’s a good thing that this place is hundreds of miles away because otherwise I would double my weight by summertime.

Continuing up the eastern seaboard, we planned to make it to the New York metropolitan area by lunchtime on Saturday, so we scheduled ourselves for a tour at The Tenement Museum. Cute W and I had visited this museum back when we lived in New York, and we loved it. It was fascinating. The museum is actually a tenement building at 97 Orchard Street with a museum shop and other facilities a few doors down the street. In order to visit, you must schedule a tour and walk around with a guide, and the tours fill up, so it’s good to purchase tickets online a few days ahead. We chose the Sweatshop Workers tour, mostly because it’s one of two recommended for ages 8 and up (several others are for ages 12 and up).  Our tour guide was knowledgeable and articulate and the girls thought the whole visit was pretty interesting. Sigh. But Cute W and I were both disappointed. I feel like the museum has become a victim of its own success. They do a great job of coordinating the tours so that multiple groups are moving through the building at the same time, each focusing on a different topic. But what that means for visitors is that they see less of the actual tenement space. With kids, they want to see as much as possible, and at a pretty rapid clip. For our tour, we focused on two tenement apartments and spent a long time talking about sweatshops and the garment industry in general. I wish that we could have had more of an overview designed for families. In fact, while I’ve been writing this paragraph, I received a pop-up  notification of an email asking for feedback on our visit, and since they don’t have space in the survey for a big long comment, I’m just going to put it here. I think it would be amazing if, once or twice a month, they offered tours that were an overview/highlights tour. The guides could just follow each other on a delay (like we did during our other visits at Monticello and the birthplace of Juliet Gordon Low during this trip–both of which also get many visitors). I understand the impulse to do multiple topics, because it encourages repeat visits and allows the guides to explore topics more deeply. But the first visit is crucial. When we visited the first time and saw more of the museum with a terrific tour guide, we came out thinking that it was awesome and we had to tell everyone we knew to go visit. After this visit, which included an excellent tour guide, the consensus was “pretty interesting.”  Maybe part of the problem was that our expectations were high. However, I could easily drop a couple hundred dollars on books at the gift shop, which had an excellent selection.

After the 1:50 pm tour we were on a hunt for “linner.” At this point we started to feel like tourists. The truth is that we’ve been out of the city for almost eleven years now (sniff). Even then, we’d lived in Park Slope and usually went out to eat around Brooklyn. After a bit of wandering (it was a gorgeous day), we ended up at an old reliable: John’s Pizza. We knew the kids would be happy, and at this point I was intensely craving a detox salad, and I’ve always loved their basic-but-delicious house salad.

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As we waited for food, J decided to leave her mark on a bench. She pretty much lost interest before making a permanent mark, but in any case, don’t worry. It’s what people do there.

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And finally some pizza. Usually I’m able to hold the family back for a minute before we all start eating, but after a long walk, we all dived in right away.

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So good.

Twitt

April 12, 2013   5 Comments

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