Suburban Kamikaze

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Cheerleaders

You can hardly hear yourself drink in our house these days with all the clapping and spelling going on.

Girl Kamikaze's newest burst of inspiration has taken her into the exclamation point-riddled world of the eighth-grade cheerleading squad. Go! Fight! Win!  

She could not be any more excited. We could not be any more scheduled. But she is not the kind of girl who puts any stock in the concept of time as a finite resource.  Which brings us to the first habit of a highly effective cheerleader:

1. Nonstop cheering: The basketball players may be limited to four quarters, but you can cheer anytime, practically anywhere. For home, school and your mom's office, nothing sets the mood like a cheer. Give me a P! Now please, get out of here.   

2. Ponytail mastery: You can fling it, whip it, twirl it and top it with an enormous bow, but any way you comb it, your ponytail is the secret source of cheer power. Work it.

3.  Twirl as if the game depended on it. 

4. R-E-B-O-U-N-D: It's not enough to be able to spell it. From boyfriends to out-of-bound basketballs, a little grace here will serve you well, in middle school and beyond. 

5. Curry favor with the referee. You never know when it's going to come down to one call.

6. Make sure the boys on the team understand that it isn't all about them. Ask them,"What time is the cheerleading game on Thursday?" 

7. Keep track of your uniform, including shoes and ponytail accessories your mom on speed dial.

Separated at birth

Seventeen years and 3,000 gallons of milk later, a full-grown man has sprung up right before our eyes. I'm not going to lie to you, we did it for the money.

An optimist sees the chair as half empty

from our winter clearance sale: A Blizzard Runs Through It, Cold Play, The 5 Stages of Winter

Putting the "i" in honor roll

We are working our way through a list of class choices for her freshman year when the girl's anxiety begins to show.

She begins high school in the fall, and as chair of the household Education and Paperwork Committee, it's my job to ensure that all 987 pieces of paper associated with registration and class selection are filled out, lost and then rediscovered in a pile of dust behind the couch at the last possible minute.

As chair of the Stuff that Requires Tools Committee, it is Mr. Kamikaze's job to roll his eyes while fixing things that the children and I adamantly deny having broken.

He sits at the kitchen table using a set of tiny tools to replace a cracked screen on the girl's iPod. I shuffle paper and try to convince her that the debate team is way more fun than any of the actually fun classes. She sits between us, her head in her hands.

"It's my life," she says dramatically.

I am a little surprised by the sentiment even if the melodrama is just for laughs. Just a few weeks away from her 14th birthday, the girl is ordinarily a stockpile of optimism, who doesn't sweat the small stuff, the big stuff or any of the other-size stuff in between. We depend on her for the family's entire supply of sangfroid. 

Then again, at the risk of sounding sanctimonious,  it must be said sanctimoniously: learning has always been a priority in our home. You wouldn't believe the pile of books we had to move to make room for the Xbox. 

So while it might be a little out of character, is it so hard to believe that our littlest scholar and werewolf enthusiast would fret over making the right educational choices?  

"It will be fine," I say. 

"I'm so afraid," she says, casting a look at her father, who is too engrossed in his repairs to even recognize the pressure she is putting on herself, academically speaking. 

Dean's list, I am thinking. Maybe a valedictorian. I don't want to brag, but it's obvious that my system of surrounding the children with the high-quality reading material they use for drink coasters has paid off in intellectual ambition. 

And by "obvious" I mean "not impossible" because it's the iPod surgery that has her worried. 

I knew that.

Cookware Chronicles, Part II: In which a raclette maker also calls to us and we are sauteed by indecision

The Backstory: The author, who suffers from aspirations, is taken in by a New York family's description of how a piece of Williams-Sonoma cookware changed their lives. 

***

Was it fear of commitment that kept me afraid of committing to the oddly-shaped Nordic pancakes known as ebelskivers? Or something stickier?

If I was going to be completely honest with myself, I had to acknowledge that there was something about the oozy fruit filling and the dusting of powdered sugar that suggested the teenagers would take to them like teenage ants on a pile of powdered sugar and oozy fruit filling.

And where was the satisfaction in that?

I was looking for something to build a tradition around, in which we would be a completely different family than the one currently occupying our house. 

We'd be a family for whom a meal was an unpronounceable mix of new cultural experiences built around cheese and good wine. The children would use forks.

But I was beginning to doubt that ebelskivers were the answer.

As much as I liked the sound of ebelskiver, there was also their resemblance to doughnuts, which are very hard to pair with wine and taste like something a 16-year-old boy would make for dinner, if somebody else were there to make it for him.  

It was then that I turned my attention to raclette, a cuisine, that according to its Wikipedia entry:         

"... was mentioned in medieval writings as a particularly nutritious meal consumed by peasants in mountainous Switzerland and France (Savoy region). It was then known in the German-speaking part of Switzerland as Bratchäs, or "roasted cheese." Traditionally, the Swiss cow herders ... "  

The factual accuracy of which is "in dispute" and which only raises more questions than it answers. How, for example, had medieval peasants gotten their hands on the Williams-Sonoma electric raclette maker, with its 8 individual broiling trays and spatulas, granite grill top and adjustable thermostat?

I was beginning to see the makings of a new weekend tradition - one that had both cheese and controversy going for it. Williams-Sonoma, it seemed, had a dark side after all...

 

Next: In which it is all revealed to have been a dream. Except the teenagers are real and I am still leaning toward the raclette maker.

Cookware Chronicles, Part 1: Ebelskiver Dreams

All our previous attempts at weekend traditions built around Nordic cookware had ended in disappointment

But something told me this would be different.

How could ebelskivers be wrong? Were we so different from any other family in Newburgh, N.Y.? 

"Ebelskivers are now a weekend tradition in our home." - Newburgh, NY. (Excerpted from "Nordic Ware," by Williams-Sonoma)

What did the overpriced cookware catalog family have that we didn't? Other than a $39.95 nonstick pan designed with seven deep wells to ease the batter into the traditional ebelskiver shape? And possibly the accompanying set of ebelskiver turning tools? ($12.95) 

There was only one way to know for sure. But first I had to overcome the deep skepticism of a family easily spooked by exotic cookware.   

Could they even be persuaded? What sort of literary tie-in could be folded into the experience?  What exactly is an ebelskiver?  I had to know...

Coming Next Week Or Possibly the Week After That:  The shocking and somehow completely predictable conclusion of "We Are Thinking of Buying an Ebelskiver Pan." 

Oh Internet, Is there no end to your appetite for kittens and babies? Babies dressed as kittens? And don't even get me started on the puppies.

Yes, the dream babies are cute, but try posing teenagers in their sleep and then tell me I'm supposed to be impressed.

Go ahead and look. You know you want to. But when you come back ask yourself this: Where do you think teenagers even come from? And who left wet towels all over the floor again?

It's the same answer. 

 

 Teenage Daydreams:  Because anybody can  take a picture of a baby. 

 

99 Reasons to Drink in the Suburbs #15: Cocktail porn

There was something inspiring about the St-Germain French 77 cocktail, even before we knew anything at all about the gently ushered wild blossoms and the bicycle-mounting Alpine men.

The Executive and I had just settled onto two bar stools overlooking the Chicago skyline, but it was clear from the very first sip that this was a cocktail that had more than a view going for it. Handsome, mysterious and with an accent we couldn't quite place, it aroused our tastebuds and our curiosity. This was a drink with a backstory.

We edited it a bit and recast the man on the bike. But other than that, it was perfect.    

St-Germain French 77 cocktail at Cité.

The war on Christmas begins in the living room

from the archives: War on Christmas brought to successful end