Vitamix vs. Vaporizer

At a ladies’ brunch recently, I caught up with a friend. It was 10 a.m. We were knocking back Mimosas and talking green smoothies.

“Guess what I got?” my friend said. “A Vitamix!”

She did a little happy dance.

A Vitamix is where blender meets power tool. It liquefies anything in its path. The toughest, most resilient kale turns into green juice. Beets turn to borscht, carrots to carrot juice and almonds to almond butter at the touch of a button. Some people even use them to mulch food scraps, coffee grounds and eggshells into instant compost. 

Ah, to own one. 

It would bring this pasty, land-locked city mom one step closer to fulfilling my dream of living in a beach hut and becoming a tanned, clear-eyed raw foodist with amazing skin and a squeaky-clean intestinal tract.

On my wish list of ridiculously expensive household appliances, that blender has been sharing the top spot—above a dishwasher—along with that other essential for stressed-out parents everywhere: the vaporizer. They may not scream "take charge of your health" like the name Vitamix. But what the Pax, Magic Flight and Whispr do connote is relaxation.

“Forget the vaporizer,” said my friend. “Get the Vitamix. It’s life-changing!”

“A regular blender can’t be that different,” I said. “Sure, my kale smoothies do have a bit of texture. But I’ve learned to live with it.”

“Do your kids drink them?” 

She had me there. 

First chance I got, I dashed away from the party and went home to revisit my $40 Hamilton Beech. I was going to challenge that sucker. Push its limits. Take it into uncharted territory. With my finger firmly on the “Pulse” button, I knew I could provide the calm-assertive energy it needed to blend up the most tooth-loosening veggies I had in my fridge. 

I tossed in the driest winter carrots, the stringiest parsley stems, beets that had rattled around in my crisper for weeks, ginger root. And of course, kale. 

I added water, and blended. It became a murky sludge I was afraid to taste. I added dates. I blended and blended and blended. I blended for several minutes. When I smelled rubber burning, I stopped.

I poured the smoothie into a glass and forced it down, chewing the mulched, liquid salad. Tried to think of it as a gazpacho of sorts. Sweetened with dates.

“This is really good for me,” I said between gulps. But after my stomach refused another sip, I had to admit I had probably just made myself some really expensive compost.

I had made my decision.

Feeding kale to my kids in liquid form just wasn't that important. 

Maybe that isn’t life-changing. And I still have chunks in my smoothies. But after a hit on my new Whispr? I don’t really care.

How I Became My Kid's Bitch

It was my son’s sixth birthday recently. I picked him up after school and asked him, “Did you have a good day?”

“No.”

“But it's your birthday! What happened?”

“Nobody brought me cupcakes.”

And by that he meant me.

His older sisters chimed in, supporting their brother in a rare moment of cooperation. "Everyone gets cupcakes except us!"

I don’t know which punk-ass mom started this trend, but according to my kids, they are the only children in their school of 400+ students whose mom doesn’t bake or buy them birthday cupcakes to bring to class. I don't mean the cake or cupcakes they get at their birthday party. This is a whole extra batch of cupcakes.

"That can't be right," I said, trying to employ logic where logic didn't matter. I did some quick mental calculations--40 weeks in the school year and about 25-30 kids in a class. 

"Your teachers would be dealing with kids strung out on cupcakes every two weeks. At least."

Stink eye. Stony silence.

I've been a parent for a decade, and know how easy it is to become your kid's bitch. We drive them everywhere, ensure they are supervised every waking moment, feed them organic grapes and free range chicken, obsess over food intolerances and sensitivities, even organize their play dates for them.

By the time my eldest daughter's birthday rolled around, I had learned my lesson. I bought the stuff to bake cupcakes.

While lugging it home, I started to think my way out of actually doing anything: That’s a lot of gluten to feed those kids. And about a kilo of refined sugar. Surely the teacher won't appreciate it. It’s got to be wrong.

 

Then I ran into some moms I know. They were out for their power walk but stopped to chat.

"Oooh, what are you baking?” one of them asked when she saw my grocery bags bursting with flour, butter and cheetah print muffin-tin liners.

“I got roped into birthday cupcakes. For the whole class.”

“Oh yeah," said the other mom, waving away my complaint. "That is a nice way to give back when you don’t invite all the kids to the party. My daughter and I always make them together.”

"I guess I thought I might get off easy this time. You know, just by organizing a party and giving a few gifts."

I went home and set about making the recipe. But halfway through I had a stark realization.

There were 25 students in my daughter’s class, and I had two muffin trays, which meant I could only make 24 cupcakes. 

This was a household crisis of the highest order. You know, the kind where the task is so menial and the solution so obvious that it shuts down your frontal lobe? 

Thankfully I could still use my thumbs to text my sister-in-law: “Should I reserve some batter and make an extra cupcake? Should I make a cake instead? Why can't I figure this out?”

Her orders came down like a gavel. “Bake the 24. There’s always someone who doesn’t want one.”

I knew I had to do as she said, but it was really walking the tightrope. What if all the kids did want one?

 

Then it dawned on me. What's more reliable than an absent kid? A kid with a food intolerance.

And I was making wheat flour cupcakes with buttercream icing. Dairy, sugar, gluten. I had my bases covered. 

I baked the 24 cupcakes. I was really living on the edge. I didn’t even know which kid would be intolerant. Didn’t want to know. Didn't need to.

The little vanilla cakes, iced with blobs of buttercream, went to school with my daughter the next day. 

After school, she couldn’t wait to tell me. 

“Mom, everyone wanted one! They were so good,” she crowed. “My friends were all asking for the recipe!”

My heart swelled, but my stomach sank.

“Isn't there a dairy-free kid in your class?”

“Yeah, he couldn’t have one.”

"Yesss!" I said under my breath, and made a quiet little victory fist.

How to look 10 years older and tank your career in one easy step!

There is a moment when a stay-at-home parent's job title shifts from "homemaker" to "straight-up unemployed."

When that happened to me a few months ago, I considered making a resume.

I thought about how to re-brand myself and sell my new "mom" skill set. But making awesome waffles, tricking my kids into cleaning the toilets, using chia seeds to replace eggs in baking, keeping a quarterly blog, none if it seemed very...skillful.

Then, through the dense fog of motherhood, I had a vague recollection from before kids: I once had a real job. At a real office. Writing for a real magazine. Maybe I could do that again.

Abandoning my crazy resume idea, I called up my journo friends who were still in the biz, bought them drinks and then held out my cap.

They were kind enough to toss me some assignments. I wrote a few small articles and many top ten lists (You know the type: Top Ten Biggest Celebrity Butts, Top Ten Baby Nicknames, Top Ten Nicknames Celebrities Give Their Babies' Butts.)

Really, though, my friends couldn't help me much. They were too busy barely hanging on to their own jobs.

They told me horror stories about top people getting the axe, mass layoffs, biweeklies turning into monthlies, established freelancers clawing each others' eyes out over custom content work (soul-killing, sponsored puff pieces on corporate execs).

Around the same time, I saw a depressing rumination by Eric Reguly, who was covering the winter Olympics from Sochi. The talk at the bar was that--while the sports were fanatstic and everything--he and his fellow hacks were more excited about just being there, given the current state of journalism.

But two weeks ago was the real kick in the pants, when a robot broke a story for the LA Times.

Quakebot is his name. And his story wasn't half-bad, either. Straightforward, all the details were there. I'm pretty sure I've written worse pieces. Certainly nothing that got half as much media coverage.

I realized since I dove head-first into motherhood a decade ago, I didn't know journalism anymore.

It used to be about getting a good story, and telling it well. Now it's about getting any story, and telling it quickly--before a robot scoops you. However you have to do it--barf out stream-of-consciousness tweets, Instagram your cleavage--anything goes, as long as you get eyeballs on it.

The game has changed, and if I'm going to get back into it, I'll need a lesson in how this whole self-promotion thing works. But I'm done with journalism school, and my friends can't help. I don't have any marketable cleavage.

So, who to turn to? Who can give me advice on how to resucitate my career?
 
Maybe I should take Quakebot for a drink. He might have a top ten list for me.

Toy Mountain

I did my Christmas shopping online this year. While perusing retailers' web sites, I had a strange feeling that toy makers were playing some horrible joke on parents.

You know the one: create a desire and then offer really expensive crap to fill it? It's an old one but we fall for it every time.

Lego, for example, is getting ridiculous.

It's long stopped being an awesome, generic building toy. Now you're strongarmed into choosing a themed, branded set, like Hobbit, or Chima, or Friends. They all have these teensy-tiny specialized pieces that are impossible for any person of any age to actually hold and build with, so instead they fall off, frustrate your kids and get lost until they stab you in the heel when you inevitably step on them.

And Nerf. Remember the Nerf from days gone by? When the point of the Nerf toy was to throw a ball indoors without hurting babies or old people, or breaking stuff?

Not anymore. The Nerf Elite Mega Centurion Blaster looks like it could be used in a drive-by. But not one that hurts babies or old people.

And who thought of calling a toy Cuddles My Giggly Monkey Pet? Don't know what it is, but I'm keeping my kids the hell away from it.

I tried to find toys that are “educational,”  but I even wonder about most of them. My kids received a “chemistry set” last year that contained packets of colored, flavored sugar to teach them about solutions. I wouldn't call overpriced Kool-Aid educational. Okay, maybe educationish.

Done shopping for a lot of crap that will disappoint them hours after opening it, I closed my laptop and took my kids to the park.

It was a cold, windy day and the playground was looking a little forlorn. Kids being kids, they didn't care.

"Ice!" they yelled, and ran to a group of puddles, breaking the frozen crusts under their boots.

A woman walking her dog stopped to watch the kids playing with ice chunks, fallen leaves and mud—a few precious bits of nature in a small oasis in the city.

She looked over at me, smiled and said, “Who needs toys?”

Talking To Your Kids About Crack

Say what you will about Rob Ford—and it's pretty much all been said already—but his recent admission to smoking crack while in a drunken stupor has provided parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, godparents, teachers, family friends and leaders of children everywhere with a wonderful opportunity.

We can finally have that awkward discussion with our kids—and I don't mean teenagers, I mean kids. Little kids. Let's get it out in the open, way before they're hiding under the school bleachers and smoking it.

No, not weed, I mean rock. Badrock. 24-7. Crumbs, cloud, candy, Devil drug, Electric Kool-Aid.

You know what I'm talking about.

Let's talk to our kids about crack.

With Rob Ford's apology all over the news today—it was only once, when he was so shitfaced he can't remember it and he'll never, ever do it again, honest, he pinky-swears—children across Toronto were asking, “Mom, Dad? What's crack cocaine?”

My kids asked, after we got home from school just in time to watch Ford's afternoon press conference.

Of course I said, "Don't do crack. It's a ghetto drug.” I have been waiting and waiting and waiting to say that to a child since I saw the mockumentary Bob Roberts in 1994.

But my kids had a bunch of other questions. The middle child asked if we should feel bad for Ford. The 5-year-old asked, “What does the government do?” My eldest asked if I thought Ford's head was shaped more like a squash or a potato.

I hushed them because I wanted to hear our mayor's incredible statements. He tossed his own accountability to the wind and said, “The past is the past. I can't change it," and, “God bless the people of Toronto.” (Translation: “Whatever, okay?”)

By the end of the press conference, I had at least one answer for my kids: “Mashed potatoes, honey. He looks like a pile of mashed potatoes.”

Hallowe'en on a Budget

For years, I have resisted buying decorations for Hallowe'en. I have tried hard to stick to a one jack-o-lantern rule.

I blame my ancestors. Half came from the shtetls of Ukraine and Poland. The other half were just Scottish. (Four generations ago, yes, but it still counts at our kids' school multicultural night.)

Forget a dollar, my forefathers knew the value of a penny. Of a rag. Of spent matches, even.

But there is no excuse for such frugality these days. With a Dollarama on every corner, anyone can adorn their porch with a fake devil or two.

So every year, recession or not, Hallowe'en decorations festoon front yards all over the city.

Except ours.

This year, our next-door neighbors got an inflatable spider for their front yard. Our kids looked on enviously as the good parents plugged in the spider and its googly eyes lit up.

Even I had to admit it was awesome. Definitely would have been a hit in the shtetl.

Our 9-year-old stared at it sullenly for a while, like she just knew that would never be her reality. Then she turned to the neighbor's kids.

“Can you help us decorate?” she said. “Because our yard is kind of lame.”

I tried to tell our daughter that our creaking door and lack of renovations made our house genuinely creepy.

But, no, she wanted fake creepy.

That was it. I had to ignore my instinct to keep my money in my wallet, and I headed out to buy fake spider webs, Monster Mix sprinkles, fake tombstones and a second, totally ostentatious jack-o-lantern.

I came home $40 poorer, and I swear I heard my ancestors rolling in their graves.

The Place Beyond the Lilacs

We used to have the coolest backyard.

We share a property line with the neighbors to the north of us. There is no alley or road dividing the two yards. So, six years ago, when me moved in, the effect was that we shared one giant lawn with our back neighbors.

There was no fence, but there was a natural partition—a row of lilac trees that yielded a fragrant, white froth of blooms each spring.

The occupants of the other house were one very elderly lady and her cat. We didn't know her well; she hardly ever went outside except to sit on a wooden bench she had under the lilacs.

Our kids sometimes wandered around on her property to talk to her or play with her cat. She didn't mind.

This communal paradise yard went on for a while.

Then one winter, three years ago, the lady died.

Her house was sold, and stayed empty for a while.

Then suddenly, one Monday morning as I was getting the kids ready for school, there was a work crew in that yard. Backhoes and chainsaws and diggers and mini-bulldozers. Whatever small excavating machinery they could fit in there.

Out went the grass, the bench and the bluebells.

Our children watched from our back yard in tears as a worker took a chainsaw to the lilacs and felled them in a few short minutes. It was a Watership Down moment.

It was clear our new neighbors were building a fence. I saw a family there, and went over to introduce myself. There wasn't much we could do about it. The fence was on their property line. The lilacs were technically in their yard.

They built the highest fence allowed under the building code.

And the kids, though they occasionally peeked through the fence at each other, never met.

Until recently.

It was a blustery but warm and sunny fall afternoon, my kids were just home from school and went to play in the back yard.

The neighbors' kids were out in their yard with their nanny watching over them.

“Hi,” my 5-year-old son called out.

No response.

“Hi!” he bellowed. "Hi! Hi! Hello-o!"

He's third born, and is used to being ignored.

Finally one of the neighbor's children answered him back.

“Hi!” said the little boy. He had glasses and looked a bit shy.

 “I want to come play with you,” hollered my son. “But your fence is too high to climb!”

At that point, he and his two sisters ran out back together.

They tried to scramble up the fence, but couldn't get a foothold. It was a fortress wall.

My daughters tried to boost up my son and help him climb the fence, but instead they made a type of tottering pyramid. The other kids' nanny, probably sensing this meant trouble in some way, ushered her charges inside and slammed shut the sliding glass door.

We haven't seen them since.

It is a good fence. Well-constructed, anyway. But I'm not sure it has made us good neighbors.