The perfect survival technique

My bald son and I were sitting on the sofa watching tv while I nursed my baby. He looked at me and asked, "Mom, have you ever drunk milk from yourself?"

I looked at him in complete bewilderment and thinking that I didn't understand the question he motioned like he was holding a breast up from his chest and sucking on it. Nice. Every parent of a 10 year old boy should experience a moment like that one.

I responded, "No."

"But Mom, it totally would be a perfect cycle. You'd make the milk and you'd drink it. I mean, you could go live in a desert."

Brilliant. I don't know how I didn't think of that first.

I think he does it just to drive me crazy

I truly wonder if all 10 year old boys are this way, or if I'm simply blessed with one like him.

Last Friday was the last day of school. To celebrate (and ensure that the kids will in fact not do any learning on this day), the elementary school has "Crazy Hair Day." I thought it would be fun to put my son's hair up in 2 dozen or so little ponytails. He looked like a porcupine.

Doing his hair offered me the very rare moment to comment to my 6 year old daughter on how she should be more like her brother. While I combed his hair and tied it up in pony tails, he cringed but didn't cry about how I was pulling his hair. He sucked it up and submitted to my ministrations. My daughter, however, would rather go to school with bed head instead of me brushing her hair. She will, in fact, pull out a hairstyle if I inadvertently pull her hair while fixing it. She did this once when I was french braiding her hair. I only had to put it in a rubber band but I pulled some hair while applying said rubber band, and that was it. Braid was out, girl was crying, mother was exasperated.

It was fun to watch my son walk out to the bus stop down the street to see the other kids. The hairstyle achieved the desired effect, and he was soaking it all up. People cooed about how cool it looked. Shoot, we woke up a full forty minutes early just to do the do.

After school, I waited for him to come home. I was excited to hear of how his friends reacted to the hairstyle and if other kids did anything crazy with their hair too. It was his last day in elementary school so I had wanted to hear if they had a fun send off.

What I was instead greeted with was a child whose head looked a lot like a soccerball. You see, he had come home and ran into my husband outside. He said, "Dad, this hairstyle hurts my scalp." My husband replied, "When you go upstairs, you can ask Mom to cut those ponytail things out." What he meant was that I'd cut the elastics out of the hair. My son, who hears about only half of anything said to him heard, "When upstairs, you can cut those ponytails." So that is what he did. He got my kitchen scissors, went to the bathroom, and proceeded to cut every little ponytail out.

When I finally did see him, I had so many emotions. You know, the usual ones.

Denial: "Oh hell no, you didn't!"
Anger: "What did you do?!?"
Blame: "What exactly did your father say to you? Did he tell you to do this?"
Bargaining: "Can you please just use your brains for once? Next time, could you please just talk to me first?"
Acceptance: "Fine, here we go again..."

So I got out the shears and shaved his head. The annoying part of it all is that he actually loves the hairstyle. He looks like his Uncle Norm which he thinks is pretty cool. He also asks if he looks like the kid from Kung Fu, which we've been talking a lot about lately. I told him he looks like a convict. But he doesn't really. I did get asked if he had lice, which was just so nice. Funny that I'd rather people know about his poor problem solving in this instance rather than even think we had a lice problem.

What I find interesting is that everybody that I tell this to laughs. I'm the only one who has yet to laugh. Really. Thankfully he is a boy. If my daughter did this, I'd need medication.

I should be a vegetarian

Last week had one of the lowest tides of the season. My friend Kiko lives right on waterfront and this being the Pacific Northwest, she has access to some pretty amazing clams -- right there in her backyard!!! Anyway, last year, after having watched an absolutely engrossing documentary about geoducks (pronounced gooey-duck, which means "dig deep" in a native language) I wanted to eat one. They showed how to butcher and sashimi these creatures. I was so curious to try one. So I asked Kiko to dig one up for me.

She showed up on my door with a large tupperware container filled with 3 clams -- one 3 inch shelled one and two 7 inch beasts. The inches refer only to their shells. The clams themselves are about 3 feet long -- each!. The little one was maybe a foot long.

A lot of people make fun of these creatures, saying they look like the horse's pecker, and honestly, when I get into the description of how to prepare these things for eating, you'll be hard pressed to believe that I really do like men and have no desire what-so-ever to go Lorena on them.

Kiko had brought the beasts to me in seawater, which allows them to spit their silt out and stay fresh and alive for when I kill them with my bare hands.

I searched frantically for a recipe or step by step instruction on how to prepare them. I found that most sites encourage you to cook them in boiling water for about 10 seconds, then quickly put them into ice water to shock them. This way the meat won't continue to cook and the clam will be killed with the heat treatment.

Consider that before I actually cooked them, I kept peeking in on them, and they all would spit at me when I opened the lid off the container. It was all very distressing. I'm used to my food being saran wrapped and served up inert. This eating stuff alive is very upsetting.

So I put my thick rubber kitchen gloves on and threw the first unlucky clam in the boiling water. And while I had prepared the sink full of icewater, I didn't think to get an implement to pluck the clam out of the boiling water, since I had used my gloved hands to put it in. I couldn't pull a Kwai Chang Kane and reach into the pot for the clam. So the 10 seconds passed while I rummaged around for some tongs and it probably got about 30 seconds in the pot before getting dunked in ice. That clam opened up, just like the websites said it would, and the disgusting process of cutting the creature out of its shell went uneventfully -- aside from the LIVE SANDCRAB inside of it. That darned sandcrab had no eyes either. My kids decided that the clam ate them off. But I digress... After removing the clam from the shell, you sever the siphon (long penis like structure which is more like the clam's nose than the clams schlong) from the body. I didn't want to put it on my cutting board at first because after it was out of the shell, I couldn't keep the clam together. Bits were falling off everywhere and there just was no integrity to the thing. There was the scary gelatinous straw looking structure that gave me the heebies. What IS that? Anyway, I held the siphon in my left hand and with my right hand tried to cut the siphon with a knife while suspended over the sink. This does not work people. Just so you know, it simply doesn't work. I had to opt for the cutting board, but I used the plastic one that can be sterilized in the dishwasher. After doing that, the clam's siphon needs to have the outer skin peeled off. One website said that it would come off like one would remove a condom. As if the phallic feel of the creature wasn't enough, I had to envision removing its condom! This is only like removing a condom if before you applied the condom to the penis, you used Liquid Nails construction adhesive instead of KY jelly. I had to skin it with a knife all the way up, and towards the tip of it, I had to cut off the end 3 inches or so. There were mussels, sea anemone and seaweed stuck to it and I just didn't have the heart to even try to scrape that off. With one scary clam done, I reached for the second with my knife and inserted it into the shell, at which point the clam shut tight, proving that it was still alive, and I screamed and ran for the arms of my husband, who said he would not enter the kitchen while I was performing these heinous culinary rites. It occurred to me later that I had simply not cooked it as long as the previous one. I already had tongs in hand when I put in the second clam. So it stayed only the 10 seconds and it simply wasn't long enough. Lesson learned. Plus, it was a bit larger than the first clam. So I boiled up some water, stuck that one in for at least another 20 seconds, then back into the ice water. Still the shell hadn't opened so I stuck it in the fridge and hoped that courage would return when I came back.

When all was said and done, I had about 2 cups of diced lovely clam meat. I did try some sashimi and it was heavenly. It tasted like a seabreeze. It was firm but not chewy. It was really beautiful white translucent flesh. The rest I chopped up and made a pasta with some shallots, herbs, and a white wine reduction. It was really quite good and I enjoyed it but I swore that I would never EVER butcher one of those clams again.

If I had to kill all the kinds of food that I eat, I would be eating beans and rice exclusively.

I have no idea if anyone will be interested in even reading this, but I figure that there is a market out there for our Island Haddon Yearly(ies). After printing out and then neglecting to send out our newsletter last year, here is a catch up post.