BrooklynGirl

Frosting Scares Me

The Girl turns one this weekend, and in order to prove that she is not an overlooked second child, we are throwing her a birthday party.  For the occasion, I am making cupcakes.   Chocolate cupcakes.  With frosting.

Now, I'm set with the cupcake recipe, but the perfect frosting recipe eludes me.  In the past I've made cream cheese frosting, which is easy and delicious, but a little...ordinary on chocolate cupcakes.  I long to make the classic buttercream frosting recipe in the Joy of Cooking, but the candy thermometer business makes this too daunting at this juncture in my life.

So, I thought I'd ask: does anyone out there have a fail-safe frosting recipe that is easy, can be used ahead of time (I'd like to frost the cupcakes the night before the party), and looks great with sprinkles?

The News from Here

I wrote a somewhat self-congratulatory post about how we finally moved The Boy to a big boy bed and how easy it all was, and how he was loving it, and how I was loving the sleeping big boyness of him, but before I had the chance to hit publish, I heard The Boy crying and went in to find him lying on the rug in his room.  Judging from the imprint of the rug on his cheek, it was clear he'd been there for some time. Maybe it's not going as well as I had hoped.  Huh.

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My last few experiences at the playground have been pretty nightmarish with The Boy and The Girl running (or crawling) in opposite directions faster than I can track.  As soon as I turn my attention to one, the other topples over or runs headlong into some playground equipment or eats copious quantities of sand.  I feel that I am wearing a sign on my back that says "Least Competent Parent Ever."

Today, when everyone was bruised and crying, I decided I'd had enough and packed up to flee.  Even though I know I shouldn't care, I felt the disapproving eyes of the parents and nannies on me.  The Boy loudly announced that some ice cream would make him feel better, and not content to be just the parent who inadequately supervises her children,  I agreed and became the parent who also feeds her kids crap. 

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There is a lot of terrible yet typical NYC public school stuff going on with pre-k admissions for Fall 2008, and even though we're not applying for The Boy until Fall 2009, it's freaking me out.  I think I screwed up by not getting him into a real pre-school (instead of the kinder, gentler play-school he goes to now).

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And speaking of play-school, it ends for the summer in 3 weeks.  Oh God. 

Enough

Lately, I feel like my demographic has been getting it in the teeth.  First, there's the general unease about mommy bloggers, that we're somehow whoring out our families if we write about them publicly and (God forbid) make money from that writing. 

Second, there's the latest and greatest attack on my neighborhood, which apparently everybody hates  (the neighborhood is so hateful that the demand for apartments outstrips supply, but hey, let's not quibble over details).  As the author of this article acknowledges, "[n]o consideration of Park Slope is complete without a discussion of stroller semiotics, of the stroller as synecdoche for the perceived evils of the neighborhood and indulgent urban child rearing in general."*  She goes further to say "[t]hat’s why our feelings about Park Slope are linked to our feelings about our entire city: our overpriced, chain-store city run by bankers, socialites and, it seems, mommies."  And that's when I had to laugh out loud because, yes of course, it's the mommies who are running the city. Of course we are. 

It seems to me that the criticisms lobbed at mommy bloggers and stroller-piloting Slopers are just  plain old   sexism dressed up to look like something else.  Mommies, apparently, are still supposed to pack up our broods and disappear into the suburbs, where we only communicate with one another in furtive whisperings at school drop-offs or the playground (and, then of course, we catch shit for our disconnectedness from the Real World).

People get mad at mommies because we're a paradox.  We have hard and often thankless jobs--whether we stay at home, work at home, or work out of the home--and we do them anyway.  We complain about the beasties (we call them beasties!) when they aren't sleeping or eating or refraining from hitting their little sisters, but we love them anyway.   It's not glamorous, it's not sexy, it's not what we went to graduate school for, but we do it. 

Now, I need to get back to running the city. This afternoon I'm going to see what I can do to make the subway even less stroller accessible.

*Because I had to look it up: synecdoche is a figure of speech by which a part is put for the whole (as fifty sail for fifty ships), the whole for a part (as society for high society), the species for the genus (as cutthroat for assassin), the genus for the species (as a creature for a man), or the name of the material for the thing made (as boards for stage) 

Night Time

The Boy has nightmares--every few nights or so, he whimpers, then quiets down, then cries, then quiets down, then screams, then quiets down, and every now and again he shrieks these blood curdling shrieks that give ME nightmares.

He doesn't really wake up, and if you wake him up, he's disoriented but might babble something about monsters and mommy and daddy.  If you ask him the next day, he'll say he had a bad dream, but can't (or won't) remember any of the particulars.

It's hard to know how (and whether) to comfort him because, as I said, he's not really awake.  However, his roommate, The Girl, does wake up.   She'll generally settle herself back down to sleep (since she has her own rigorous schedule of night wakings to maintain) unless she sees Mom or Dad in her room in which case she Wakes Up.  If we ignore her awakeness and just leave the room, she screams and screams and that, of course, does wake up The Boy.

Hell, as they say, is other people.  Especially siblings sharing a room.

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In other news, I made my first pilgrimage to Tar-jay in quite sometime and fell in love with the girls' clothes.  I've been lucky enough in the hand-me-down department that I haven't really had to buy anything for The Girl, but today I fell in love with this.

Bring it on summer!

Excuse Note

Apologies for not posting last week, but I was trapped under two snotty children and one large freelance project, but today the snot is receding and the project is done.  Done. Done. Done.

The work thing, well, I still don't know.  I don't think I'm doing very good work, whether because of lack of time, focus, or actual skill (the work in question is copyediting).  Then again, I have always been pretty hard on myself in terms of work product.  Back in school, I was the annoying girl who walked out of a test proclaiming that she'd failed it only to learn later that she'd actually gotten a 93.  Not that a 93 is perfect, but it's not failing.  The thing is: it wasn't manufactured concern--I actually did think I had failed--and it didn't matter how many times I repeated the cycle; the concern was always the same.

With work, I've rarely finished a project and sat back to bask in the glow of a job well done.  I almost always feel I've been inadequate in some way--even when I've had unlimited time.  Now that my time is strictly rationed, I feel even worse.    When I wrote about this before, several of you chimed into remind me of the joys of doing a half-assed job, and I'm trying to embrace that, but it's hard because I'm only just trying to establish myself as a freelancer and most of  my work has come through friends who I don't want to hang out to dry with my less than stellar work.

Alas.

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For mother's day I took myself out for some long overdue bra shopping, with a proper fitting and the whole thing.  Good Lord.  We don't need to get into my newly determined bra size, but I will confess that I didn't realize this particular size actually existed.