Culmination Cupcakes, Vile Comments and Pablum

Chocolate and Vanilla Cupcakes with Fondant Checkers

This blog appears to be turning into a superficial baseball and baking fest with a bit of eggsex education thrown in. Where are the grim reports of disability, shitty government and seizures? Where's the poetry? Where's the politics and parenting? Over the last week, I've not only gone to four baseball games, but I've also baked and decorated nearly ten dozen cupcakes and three cakes. I've got four dozen more to go, so anything pithy or angst-driven will have to wait. I'll hope you'll hang around if you're more of the mind for the serious. If you're in to that sort of thing, I was recently baited by a vile commenter who calls himself skunkfeather on a reactionary conservative blog that I visit every week or so to see what the crazies are up to. He uses the word libtard regularly and sort of drives home or confirms my perhaps cynical belief that all the talk of needing more civil discourse and we have more in common as Americans than not is pablum at best and bullshit at worst. I didn't take the bait -- except for here, of course, because I doubt he comes around and seeing my name in his comment made me throw up a little in my mouth (an expression that I usually despise) and want to purge.

OK.

Here's a photo of a cake I made for someone for Father's Day. It's chocolate with dark chocolate ganache filling and white buttercream.

And here's a quote from one of the world's greatest satirists, Jonathan Swift:

It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into.

And this:

I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed. 

Reader, how was your weekend?

Mulan: An Epitaph and Addendum***

Yeah, I know. How perfect is this French postcard?

Mulan didn't make it home yesterday afternoon, but Brooklyn did, cracked-up, to be sure, but nestled securely in his box and held by Noah.

We threw Mulan out, Mom, Henry told me when I asked where she was. It was the end of the project, he added and turned on the radio. Geez, I said, just like that, she's gone? Yesterday, when I tried to take the picture of a beautiful young classmate of Henry's who was wearing her egg in a lovely box around her neck, he stopped me, embarrassed. Thinking of Mulan lying at the bottom of a school trash can made me wonder how some of the girls might have dealt with the end of the project. But the radio played one of the six songs it rotates through, and the three boys talked over one another like they generally do. They told me in their already-deep voices about an egg fight that broke out between two other boys. Evidently, when the project was declared finished, a few of the boys started throwing eggs back and forth, and since this is Los Angeles and the 21st century, another boy filmed it. Before long, one boy threw an egg a bit too hard at another boy who then put the egg-thrower in a choke-hold and then punches started flying. The guy with the camera phone kept filming.

It was a real fight, Mom, Henry said, laughing, and when I asked who broke it up and what the consequences were, he admitted that he didn't know and that he'd just watched the video.

Reader, go where you'd like with that.

So, guys, I said, when they'd calmed down relating the fight to me,  you each have to tell me what you learned with this egg baby project in two sentences or less. Henry?


Henry said, I learned that it's really hard and stressful to take care of a baby, even if it is for a week and it's an egg.


Noah said, Yeah, I'd basically say the same thing as Henry. And I learned that I'd do anything to get enough money to get out of debt.


I nodded my head and decided to no longer be smug and satisfied. You know, there's a lot of joy, too, in a baby -- way more joy than anxiety and stress, anyway. 


But only if you're ancient in years and experience, I added, and the boys rolled their eyes.


***The comments provoked my memory, and I completely forgot to tell ya'll that Oliver was sitting in the car during the discussion about Mulan's demise, and do you know what he said?


You know what, Mom? When I do the egg project, I'm going to have TWO eggs, TWINS!


 Like one of my old writing mentors said about memoir, "you really can't make this sh#$@ up"


Stay tuned. I'll probably have twin grandeggs in two years.

Mornings with Mulan

Mornings here are a careful orchestration of and restrained hysteria over coffee, breakfast, the packing of lunches, the feeding of Sophie, the dressing of Sophie, the arguing over who feeds the dog and today over whether the Taliban were in Cuba (Oliver and The Husband, two peas in a pod). I'm the one who keeps things moving along at a fairly rapid clip. Mornings now include:

Don't forget the egg!

If you're French and reading this, take note: apparently, if you're the grandmother to your thirteen year old's egg, you're still the one in charge. 

Mulan 3

Mulan 2

Mulan 1

My grandegg Mulan - an update

This is where Mulan spends most of her day, nestled in a soft bed made of a cigar box, cotton material and an upside-down strawberry crate. Henry got into the car yesterday in a grumpy mood, tired and unwilling to share what had happened that day. Henry is almost never in a bad mood, so when I gently probed, I learned that not only was he tired of dealing with his egg, but the whole project was getting boring and hard.


Tell me about it, I said, trying not to sound smug. Henry slumped further down in his seat, clutching Mulan's box. The money thing is just hard, he said, I'm tired of it. I just raised my eyebrows and murmured

The other night, at the school's fundraiser, I had commiserated with Henry's in-laws about the project. The father thought it was too negative as did a haughty French woman I'd met earlier in the day who I rather ineffectively argued with about being a thirteen year old parent. She was impossibly French, inferring confidently in the usual never-disappearing-French-accent-despite-years-and-years-of-living-in-the-United-States that with the proper amour, a baby can be a beautiful thing. She disapproved of making the whole baby thing so negative. When I pointed out that I was the loving mother of three and the only mother in the room, actually, and that I would of course, support, a baby if Henry were to have one, but that it would be an unequivocal disaster, as far as I'm concerned. Frankly, I wanted to say that if Henry were to have a baby, I would be hard put to not say Your life is fucked.


Oh la la.


So, the ride home in the car was pretty silent. Moods were grumpy enough that Oliver's pleas to play music from the station that rotates about six songs were ignored, and when we pulled up to Noah's house to drop him off, I cheerfully asked whether I could take a photo of Baby Brooklyn. Noah, who is a quiet guy and probably the sweetest kid on the planet, cheerfully uncovered Baby Brooklyn for his first photo:

Noah, I might remind you, is a single parent, and while I'm a little bit in debt, he told me, everything is pretty good.


Reader, I'll let you take that where you will.

Mulan, Part One
Mulan, Part Two