Girls before Swine

I knew I was in for it when Jeff quarantined himself in the basement Monday afternoon with swine flu. We'd gotten through Alison's birthday party on Sunday, and I thought the sweat was from his exuberance with the laser tag ames. But Monday dawned badly for him, and he went downhill (and downstairs) fast.

I felt bad for him, but there was a whole of stuff going on last week: Alison's actual birth day, Hannah Ogden's (and 799 other IPS musicians) concert, Katy Seiwert's big 1-0, my friend Jenni's college graduation party and all the regular stuff required of a working mom. So I called down the stairs fairly often to see if he was still alive, we blew him kisses and we thought good thoughts for him.

But mostly we left him alone. The swine flu is nothing to, um, sneeze at, and neither of us wanted any part of it.

OK. He didn't really have the swine flu, but that's been my story and I'm sticking to it.

He recovered just barely in time for Mother's Day or neither one of us would have survived.

On Tuesday, the official day Ali turned 8, he managed to snuffle up the stairs to greet her big day. We kept a little distance, but got to do the parental thing before our day got started.

As we started off to school, she tossed her backpack in the back seat and cast a baleful stare at her booster seat. Our eyes met in the rear view window.

"Hey!" I said. "You're 8-years-old. You don't have to sit in that thing anymore, do you?"

"Nope!" she chortled, tossing the chair in the way back. Her grin was as wide as the car. It was as if she was riding on the back seat of a convertible, wearing a tiara, in a small town parade.

Jeff's not thrilled, but Johnny Law says 8 is the limit for booster. And Alison is so tall, the strap hits her perfectly without the boost.

She's thrilled to be 8. And thrilled beyond words with all the booty being 8 has brought her. She's awash in Laffy Taffy, LPS, gift cards and cold hard cash. She's planning to put most of her money in the bank -- they'll give her extra money if she does, you know, but she's already spent her Aunt La's cash on a new Club Penguin book that's yielding secrets and virtual coinage.

Today, she spent a lot of time helping clean up, both in the house and out. Having kicked the pig disease, Jeff make it through basketball and came home where he fell prey to the urge to trim the magnolia tree. There were a couple small dead branches that he went after with a small saw.

But then he put his weight on a big branch, which cracked -- an indication of just how dead it was. So out came the chain saw. The tree does look better. That, and parts of my Mother's Day presents helped improve the look of the lawn.

It actually was a great day that started last night with dinner and led into a day where I really didn't have to do much. And it ended with a snuggle beside the firey chimenae.

Moms can't really ask for much more than that.

The Joke's on You

Inspired by Ginny Reed, who every day put a little note in her daughter's lunch box, I've been sending notes with Ali's lunch since she started Kindergarten. I can't remember if it was late in first grade or early in second that she said to me, "Mom, can you stop sending notes? It's kind of embarrassing."

I stopped, but I wasn't happy about it. "Stupid boys at the lunch table," I grumbled.

A few months ago, she asked me if I could start up again, but this time, maybe it would be better if I sent jokes instead of notes. So of course, I complied.

She has hot lunch at least once a week, and sometimes two, so she doesn't always bring her lunch, and I don't have to come up with a joke every day.

Still eschewing peanut butter and every sandwich sans cheeseburgers and hot dogs, Ali usually takes pizza, pizza rolls or chicken nuggets, along with a container of applesauce and a dessert.

She sometimes has pot stickers or tacos and she's usually the envy of the cold sandwich crowd, including the three boys she sits with. Sometimes, she confided the other day, the boys purposefully forget their lunch because they know she'll share with them. One day this week, she took one slice of leftover pizza and one leftover Taco Bell taco. The boys nearly went wild.

But I digress, a couple of weeks ago, Ali asked if I could put a pencil in her lunch box, along with the joke, because, "you, know, I might want to tell you something about it."

"You want to give me feedback?" I asked.

"Yeah! 'Cause, we'll, no offense, but today's joke...it just didn't make any sense," she said. "No offense."

So I give you a sample of jokes from Mom and feedback from the Ali Cat. Remember, she's 8, so the jokes are geared for 8-year-olds, and I've not corrected spelling:

1. Why was the baby ant confused?
Punchline: Because all of his uncles were ants!
Ali feedback: "ant that funny!"

2. Where is the ocean the deepest?
Punchline: On the bottom!
Ali feedback: Huh?

3. How do rabbits travel?
Punchline: by hareplane!
Ali feedback: "Halairius!"

4. What do you call a funny book about eggs?
Punchline: A yolk book.
Ali feedback: "That's a funny yolk!"

5. Why was the broom late for school?
Punchline: It overswept.
Ali feedback: Funny!

6. What do lazy dogs do for fun?
Punch line: they chase parked cars!
Ali feedback: Ha Ha Ha

Got any great jokes suitable for 2nd grade? I have a month of school left...

Shot to the heart

Thursday night, Jeff came home and said he was thinking of going to an Indians baseball game with our friend Ed Kaufmann. Nothing odd about that, but when Ali heard of his plans, she asked if she could go to.

I thought Jeff was going to fall down dead. Happily dead. But dead. You know he's near deaf, and so does he.

"What did you say?" he asked the light of his life, his hand on his heart.

"Can I go to the baseball game, too, Daddy?" she asked.

Jeff has lamented loud and often that his greatest pain in life is that Ali doesn't love baseball and the Red Sox as much as he does. She's definitely a Sox fan and knows the Yankees are evil SOBs, but she can take baseball or leave it. Her earlier reasons for going to the Vic have been to play on the bleachers, to get ice cream and to play those silly games as you come through the gate.

"Honey, why do you want to go to the game?" he asked, hope clearly breaking through even as he fought it down like a gladiator facing a hungry lion. "It's kind of chilly and it might even rain."

"I just want to be with you," she said.

Now I'm not sure what game Alison was really playing at, but she toppled Captain Reed with those seven words. I'm not sure he truly fell for it or if he was as suspicious as I was, but he swooped her up and said, "OK."

My knee's still bothering me, so I stayed home. They came in less than two hours later, chattering like old pals. The game had been cancelled due to wet grass but they'd managed some lemonade and ice cream and apparently had a great time.

I don't know that they would have had as great a time had they sat through more than a few innings in a drizzly April rain, but we'll never know. Jeff was over the moon. Ali was happy, and all was right with my world.

Saturday morning we all went to church for mass, which featured most of Ali's class receiving communion for the first time. All year long, she'd gone through the instruction with them but was firm in not wanting to actually become catholic. On Wednesday, she springs it on us that she wants to go to the service.

"I have been practicing all year long, I don't want to have wasted all that time," she explained.

I had to ask the teacher if she could, if she needed a white dress, what do we do, where do we go? I was a mess. We got the dress Friday after school and made it through just fine. It was really sweet. All those kids -- even David Whitamore -- scrubbed and polished. Looking like fresh little flowers.

Ali wore pink and looked as sweet as can be. She and Dominic (the boy who asked if he could kiss her) were the only heathens to show. They got to pass out programs, and they got a blessing instead of communion. I think they had fun just sitting together and watching the show.

We hightailed it out of church in time to pick up Alison's shiny new birthday bike. It's hot pink, but not frilly, and we don't yet have its basket put on, but she's had it out and is pretty good on it. Stopping is still a bit of a challenge, but she's getting it.

Jeff grumbled a bit about never having gotten a birthday present early when he was kid. But she was happily pedaling away yesterday anyway -- taking advantage of what could be a break in the weather. We're forecast for several more days of rain, which was his rationale for breaking out the bike a tad bit early. Her birthday is Tuesday, so we had her party this afternoon. Getting the bike early didn't seem like a big thing to me.

Her party was at Laser Flash, and one of her little friends was a no-show. That meant we had an opening, and Jeff took full advantage. Little Ty came out, eyes glowing, hands in the air declaring it "awesome." Jeff Reed was only slightly less effusive. He's planning on going back with friends from the office.

Unless Ali asks him first...

Mushroom Season

My friend Lisa e-mailed me the other day asking if I wanted to go down with her to the lake house. Way cool, I'm thinking. The weather is great, I can lay on the dock and read and tan. The boys will cook. The kids will play. What could be better? I'm in!

But she went on. John is taking her mushroom hunting in the woods that surround the lake in southern Indiana. She calls herself a Hoosier, but this will be her her first foray into the woods for fungus.

For my sister Nancy, Lisa's would have been a must-do offer. She's always loved mushroom hunting. At Easter this year, when the big kids were looking for money laden eggs at Shakamak State Park, she was scouting for 'shrooms.

If you're not from the country you may not know that Springtime in Indiana is the time the woods are alive with fungus. Morels are the holy Grail -- the biggest and best, but there are a lot of different ones -- small, medium, dark, light. All musky , velvety and kind of phallic, if truth be told. They're sneaky little buggers, though, and like to hide. So to be a good mushroom hunter, you have to have great vision, great patience and a great affinity for all God's creations.

• I can barely see with my glasses on or my contacts in.
• I have never met this thing called patience.
• And while I love many things, creepy, sleepy snakes just waking up from their winter's lethargy are not among them.

So I had to decline the invitation. I hope Lisa likes it. Plenty of people do.

I remember my dad taking us out in the woods when I was a kid -- back home you keep your mushroom hunting territory to yourself much like the Sanders family guard the special recipe and the Coca-Cola family shields the formula.

How people don't walk all over each one's area was beyond me then and is beyond me now. It was all such a secret. Yet there was limited land. I'm guessing there was a lot of criss-crossing, but like fishing, mushroom hunting is a silent game. (yet another reason I'm not good at either) so maybe the hunters never knew each other was in their territory -- unless the evidence of shorn mushrooms was found.

So Dad would pile us in the truck and then send out out in the woods. He seemed to think we had an inborn talent for it just because we were related to him. Or maybe he was just getting us out of my Mom's hair for a while.

Invariably, I'd be somewhere within his sight, stumbling along looking out desperately for snakes and stepping all over the mushrooms I never -- as in EVER -- saw.

I'd hear him say, "Cheryl. Stop right there!"

Every time I was sure he was warning me about a snake. But no. He'd say, "Can't you see it?"

"See what?" I'd shout, looking this way and that, straining to hear the slither. Sure I was in the sights of some fanged monster.

"Just stop and look around."

He'd be crouched down, one knee to the ground. He'd have already collected a dozen morels and their smaller cousins. "Look over there. It's RIGHT there," he'd say.

He would sit there in the middle of the woods and take a long look around him. He must have had some sort of mushroom radar because he'd spy them under leaves and nestled next to rotting branches. He'd point me in the general direction and just shake his head when I never came up with anything.

He never got so frustrated that he left me out there alone, and I never got into trouble for not finding them. For all I know I was just comic relief. In all my years of forced mushroom hunting, I may have found 5. Maybe. But probably because I fell down on them. Come to think of it, I don't know that I ever actually saw a snake either... But they were out there. I just know it.

The hunting is, of course, just the prelude. Once you have an acceptable "mess," you take them home, split them in two and let them bathe in a bowl of water for a while. This isn't just to marinate them. It's to help get the dirt and bugs off of them. Ick.

Then, you dredge them your own breading concoction (another real mushroomer's secret) and you fry them in a cast iron skillet. You can have them for breakfast, lunch or dinner. Sometimes you have gravy.

It's a real delicacy. Just like brain sandwiches, Rocky Mountain Oysters and frog legs.

Give me canned, sliced mushrooms. Or porta-bellas stuffed with crabmeat, spinach and yummy cheese.

Yeah, I know they come from the woods, too. And that cheese comes from milk, which spurts from the udders of cows or goats.

But I don't have to forage for the fungus I eat, and I have never yet felt a four-legged creature's udder, teat or any other nether region. Nor do I intend to.

So enjoy mushroom season and all the hand-selected, breaded and pan-fried fungus you want.

I've never yet seen the slithery tail of a viper hidden amongst the produce or dairy aisle of any grocery I've ever shopped. But they do occasionally offer morels fresh from the woods, all cleaned up and shining through sheer plastic film. So if you want to nibble and you're not inclined to find them yourself, you still can.

I can't wait for Lisa to get back. They're newlyweds still. Were I Lisa, I think I'd distract John from ever getting to the woods...

Tech Support; Alison Reed speaking

So I've fixed dinner for Alison and she's indulging her passion for mashed potatoes and gravy when the phone rings. Jeff's not yet home from work, but is going to head right out for a wine tasting with his new BFF John Vielee. I'm not feeling well, so Ali is at the counter, eating on her own while I'm on the couch looking outside and wishing I felt better.

I answer and it's a boy. For Alison. Coincidentally, it's John's nephew, Charlie Vielee.

"Hi Charlie," says Alison, still eating, puts the phone on speaker. I go back to the couch.

Turns out Charlie needs help with a spy mission on Club Penguin -- the latest craze in the world of the 4-feet-tall crowd.

"Alison, how do I get past the secret code in the GS Secret Mission?" he asked.

She goes immediately into tech support mode. All she needed was a head set and she could have been on the Geek Squad.

"Are you at the ski jump?" she asked.

"Yeah. But I can't get the secret code," he says.

"OK. Here's what you do," she says, rattling off a series of instructions. "No. Look. Wait. Let me log on."

She moves over to the laptop, logs on and walks him through the process. She must have been on the phone for 15 minutes, offering suggestions, praising him every now and then and double-checking that he'd done exactly as she ordered.

Charlie managed to get through the mission and was a pretty happy camper.

"Bye, Charlie," Alison chirped, and returned to her dinner. I wonder when she's going to start charging.

Easter Bunny and one new Angel

Happy Easter! It's off to a good, if weird start, here at Team Reed Indy. Alison got up at 6:30 this morning, eager to see if the Bunny had come. Snuggled in my warm bed, I heard a wail from the living room.

"Mommy! He didn't leave me anything," she called, her little voice breaking a bit.

"Well you know he's a tricky bunny, Al, why don't you look around a bit?" I called, thinking she could surely locate the treat basket without me.

"Or, right," she said, instantly cured and off on the hunt.

"Found it!" she called within seconds. "Wow. This is some big basket," she said.

She started squealing and I realized there was no way I was getting an extra Zs in my Easter basket. But my body refused to give up the ghost. "Why don't you bring it in here?" I called.

So we spent the next several minutes exclaiming over what the bunny had left. It wasn't long before she sped off to log-in her new Littlest Pet Shop friend, Flower the Fox. We'll go down to visit the cousins this morning, and I'm sure Flower will be going along for the trip.

I think Ali had decided to wait for Jeff to come home to try out her new Wii game -- it was her father's contribution and very well received. After her fast from candy, I thought she'd want to have her Laffy Taffy for breakfast, but she hasn't asked and I haven't offered.

It's weird to have Easter morning without Jeff here. He flew out to Maine Friday to be with Team Reed Maine. We got word Tuesday that Auntie Methyl had suffered an aneursym and has left us.

Auntie Methyl fell in love with Alison from the moment she saw her. I don't know if it was the connection of red hair or just a sweet little baby, but both she and Roger have always been very, very close Alison and of course to us. We saw them every time we visited Maine and we talked pretty often -- sometimes inspired by cards and coins Auntie and Uncle Roger would send. Sometimes just because.

Auntie introduced Alison to the world of Lynne Plourde, a wonderful children's author who lives near Methyl and Roger and who signed several of her books for Ali. If you have a little one, you need to know Lynne Plourde and her silly, invented words and crazy characters like Drew A. Blank, Maybella Jean Wishy Washy, Josephina Carolina Whatasheena the First and their teacher, Miss Shepherd.

I think Moose Of Course! was Alison's first Plourde book, and I'm fairly certain Marian was the first one to read it to her. It was an instant hit and read so many times that first visit that she'd memorized it before she needed a bath. We don't have that book here; we decided to leave it in Maine and it's one of the first things Ali grabs when we get home.

I think Methyl brought the book to Marian in a stack of others, thinking somehow that the mountain of books from Jeff, Jen and James' childhoods wasn't enough. Methyl taught kindergarten for many years and always checked on Ali's school progress and always always bought her books for Christmas and birthdays.

I didn't know Methyl very long, compared to the other Reeds, and that makes me sad. But the way she delighted in Alison amazes me even now. I love the picture of Marian and Methyl playing Chinese checkers with Ali. Every child deserves to have someone love him or her the way Marian and Methyl loved Alison. And it was returned with interest.

Ali never failed (without prompting) to put Roger and Methyl on the list of people she wanted to buy presents for at the school holiday shop. Though they are people who appreciate quality things, they were always thrilled to get the cheap little trinkets. They knew she'd picked them out special, and that dramatically increased their value.

Alison had even less time with Auntie than I did, but I'm confident that she won't lose her memory of her.

Jen and Cousin Mary have decided that Marian and Methyl are with their mother now, having tea and sour cream softies. Ali and I have taken comfort in that thought, and the knowledge that there's one more angel looking over my little red head.

Sprung too Quick

I think time shifted into warp speed last week to make up for the prior week when it essentially went dormant, crawling sloth-like to Spring Break in Indianapolis.

I'm not ready to go back to work tomorrow. Alison was hoping the forecast for snow flurries would turn into a school-closing blizzard, but Jeff's worse than both of us: the Red Sox take to the field tomorrow for a day game after a long winter off.

Ah well. We're not alone in our suffering.

Alison has just a week to go now in her sacrifice of candy for Lent. This morning, we wandered through the Fresh Market waiting for Northside News to open. Ali immediately went to the candy display and oohed and ahhed until I tugged her away after my 53rd reminder that yes, "gumballs are candy." We were over in the dried veggie section when she reminded me that she had $1 to spend and maybe she could just stock up.

"If you're really hungry for a snack, I bet we can find a banana," I said, helpfully, thinking of my FitCity friends who are hellbent on getting Hoosier kids to give up the sugar.

"I am not wasting good money on a banana!" she declared.

OK. Don't tell my FitCity friends about that...

We did not cave into the sugar buzz, and we had a great walk before a crazy spring storm struck just as we were getting to the first Easter Egg hunt of the season down at the Athenaeum YMCA.
I worked out while the hunt was on and emerged, slightly sweaty, to find Dale Ogden sharing half his Laffy Taffy with my little Catholic.

"Um, is that candy?" I said, as the pink sliver of taffy edged into her open mouth.

She looked at me. She looked at the candy. She looked at Dale.

"She gave up candy for Lent," I said.

"Uh-oh," said Dale.

It was as if a strong wind came, pushing that candy into her mouth. Her mouth closed. I almost looked around for a cigarette to give her -- the expression on her face was priceless.

I'm pretty sure she won't go to Hell for half a stick of a snack-sized piece of Laffy Taffy. I'm not Catholic. I don't really know the rules. I just know it's been a long 33 days.

We spent the rest of the day inside, watching it rain. If it weren't so cold, the rain would be great. Ali finally got her rain boots painted -- they were a Christmas present from Auntie Jen and they are mah-velous. They come plain white and you get to paint them. There are even little wash pads so you can swipe off your design and paint again. She's been wearing them ever since the dried on Friday, hoping in vain for rain and some worthwhile puddles.

Amid the fun, we have had some bad news this week. Please hold the hearts of Ginny Reed, Amer Reed Tokash (and the rest of their family) in yours this week: Amy's father, Dennis Reed passed away this morning. Those who've lost a parent know there are few words that can comfort you, but the thoughts and prayers do get through some how.

Ginny is one of those moms you read about in the Hallmark store and see on TV shows from the 50's. She's June Cleaver, Marian Cunningham with just a dash of Laura Petry. She's just wonderful and it hurts to think of her being in pain. Amer will help her through, and we'll all help Amer. So hold them all close, if you would.