As the last major revision to my book, I have replaced the entire section about becoming a firefighter with the following section about feeding time at the zoo.
Meal Time Is Family Time
You know how sometimes you are cruising along in life thinking everything is just fine and dandy – perhaps you’re right where you want to be financially, you have the right job, your marriage is perfect, your car is perfect and you have a perfect tan, fresh from a vacation in the Bahamas? And then something happens to make all that go sideways in the blink of an eye? It may not necessarily be a bad thing, but it could be. Maybe it’s a layoff at work, maybe it’s a promotion at work, maybe it’s being chased by a pack of wolves on the way to work – it could be anything, but the point is that now your carefully balanced and perfect little world is suddenly thrown into turmoil and can’t tell which way is up and everything feels like you are sinking and surviving all at once and you lay in bed awake all night with a cold sweat and a feeling of anticipation and anxiety and nobody could possibly understand what you are going through but it’s real, dammit, and you have to deal with it no matter what you would choose to do and all you want to do it find that light at the end of the tunnel but you’re so lost in the dark you have no freakin’ idea which way to turn to look for the light and the next thing you know you’re yelling at the toaster because it’s so slow and stupid and you are certainly headed for a breakdown and SOMETHING FOR THE LOVE OF PETE HAS GOT TO GIVE? You know what I mean? You know that feeling?
Life at the Bradbury house doesn’t ever cruise along on an even keel – it starts at the crazy-yell-at-the-toaster stage as the calmest it gets. And, unfortunately, this level of calm usually only lasts for the fleeting moments when all five kids are asleep. The interesting crazy usually breaks out five or six minutes before I’m ready to get up in the morning, which I find to be the cruelest kind of joke. I can stay up all night long with a kid who has a 102 temp. I can jump up at 3 a.m. to respond to a little girl having a nightmare or to a strange noise downstairs. I can wake up at 5 a.m. to get started on a school paper I have put off until the last minute. I can do all that without complaint, and honestly, without being terribly tired. However, getting woken up at five to seven when my alarm is set for seven drives me mad.
No, I don’t have a good explanation for this. I have sort of a bad explanation, which would be that I suppose I feel that if I set my alarm for 7 a.m., I should be able to sleep until 7 a.m. without being awoken for some totally pointless reason like the cat being on fire again. For some insane reason I have gotten it lodged in my tiny brain that the time leading up to my alarm sounding is me time. Me time. That’s amusing, just thinking of it, writing this here in the fire station at midnight after I’ve already finished my other work. Ha. Me time usually comes so late at night or so early in the morning I can’t think straight and I have trouble focusing and remembering what the hell I was writing about and the next thing you know I’ve babbled on for two pages and absolutely nothing has gone well and I need to shake my head and try to remember what the hell I was writing about.
What was I writing about?
Oh, yeah – meal times. The reason I was leading into the eating section with chaos is because meal time is chaos time at the Bradbury house. Mostly because feeding seven people is a major production in and of itself and this has to be wedged into the rest of the day which, as we know, pretty much consists of driving around all day from one place to another in a mindless haze of sports, errands and shopping. Frankly, my life would be a lot easier if we didn’t need to eat. Not that I want to stop feeding the kids, because I understand that to be a Bad Thing, but that I wish none of us had the need to eat unless we wanted to. Of course, while I’m wishing for major modifications to the body’s grand design, I wish we didn’t have to sleep, either, but that’s neither here nor there.
Unfortunately, the kids do have to eat and I’m the one who feeds them. The best way for me to properly convey the feeding process is, as you know, interpretive dance. Since that still isn’t an option, I’ll just break down the way it goes – three meals and two snack times a day. We’ll assume it’s either summer or a weekend and the kids aren’t in school, so I’m going to oversee/prepare all feeding times at the zoo.
Breakfast
This is usually the thing that wakes me up five minutes before the alarm clock – some kid will burst into the room and announce that we “DO NOT HAVE ENOUGH MILK FOR BREAKFAST!” “Enough milk” being defined as an amount sufficient as to allow five children to eat two bowls of cereal so disgusting and sugary it makes ants sick to their stomachs. Breakfast is, after all, the most important meal of the day, so it’s important to ensure that meal consists of the Recommended Yearly Allowance of sugar and chocolate. I’m not sure why or how it became acceptable to eat candy for breakfast, but it has. And I’m not just talking about sweetened cereal, either. For one thing, everyone loads the unsweetened cereal, such as Cheerios, with sugar – not just my kids, but all kids (except maybe few extremely odd people who must have serious, serious issues to be eating Shredded Wheat without sugar).
But sweets for breakfast isn’t limited to just cereal. I like to cook what we call at our house Big Breakfast, which generally consists of pancakes or French toast, along with bacon or sausage and possibly eggs. What goes on top of the pancakes and French toast? Liquefied sugar, of course, promoted under the pseudonym of “table syrup.” That’s the stuff that used to be called “maple syrup” until that freaking pesky FDA started demanding truthful labels on items and it became difficult to justify calling something maple syrup when the stuff consists of 99% corn syrup. So really, even when I get up and cook breakfast, it’s not really that much better for them. I may as well just inject some sugar directly into their veins, stick a diabetes medic alert bracelet on them and go back to sleep.
Anyway, after I wake up to a child informing me that there is no milk, I know in my heart that I need to run to the store to get a couple gallons. Why? Because the kids could sit there and fuss all day long about their cereal being dry and I could probably live with it, but I can’t drink my first cup of coffee with no milk, so off I go.
The upside to this process is that I get about five minutes to myself in the supermarket in the morning. I have to go all the way to the supermarket, because the people who own the convenience store at the end of the block are only a ski mask away from being armed robbers with the prices they charge for a gallon of milk, and I just don’t have the thirteen bucks or whatever they charge for a gallon of milk. The upside is that I like the supermarket when two things coincide: a few moments without the kids and very few other customers because normal people can remember to get milk the night before so they don’t need to run to Stop N Shop and wait for them to unlock the doors at 7 a.m. There’s nothing like a leisurely stroll through the American excess we call the grocery store to put things in perspective – as long as we still have enormous store with shelves stacked floor to ceiling with such necessities as Fruit By The Foot and microwave popcorn, I know that the terrorists have not won.
Anyway, I admit to taking more time at the store in the morning than I probably need – I don’t think it is absolutely necessary for me to stare with wonder for five minutes at the sheer variety of laundry detergents, and I’m almost certain there is no good reason for me to stop and read Star magazine and get caught up on Brad and Jen, but I am unable to help myself. The supermarket just makes me feel good. Don’t tell my wife that I take my time, thought, as the morning is fairly hectic and to have it discovered that I lollygag on my way to the dairy section – the dairy section cleverly located in the far back corner – could be detrimental to my Secret Motorcycle Plans.
When I finally get the two gallons of milk – we buy it two gallons at a time when we can’t afford three – I like to come back, place one gallon on the dining room table for the kids, then bring the other gallon to the fridge where I discover not one, but two gallon milk containers which are each half full. In the children’s defense, these containers are usually cleverly hidden behind…who am I kidding? The damn things are always right there, clearly indicating that the child who informed me we were out of milk is either going blind or is a liar bent on driving me crazy. Since they get yearly vision tests at school, I can only assume they are trying to drive me crazy. And I think it’s working.
The nice thing about breakfast is that I don’t have to do anything beyond provide milk from 17 cows and 32 bags of sweetened cereal (Yes, bags – we buy the store brand bags of cereal, alright? It’s cheaper and it tastes the same). From there, the kids are fairly self-sufficient – by which I mean they each pour their own cereal and milk, almost all of which goes in the bowls. One of them – I forget who – has been tasked with feeding Lady Macbeth, so all I need to do is make my coffee and go behind them and clean the tremendous mess they made – this has to be done in a hurry, because a Frooty O (that’s a Froot Loop that comes in a bag) which has been dropped on a dining room chair will not only stick with the tenacity of super glue, but it will leave behind a fruity color ring when it is finally dislodged – could be purple, yellow, red or green. As a general rule, I try not to consider that this thing which has managed to discolor a wooden chair is what I fed my kids for a meal.
Mid-morning Snack
“Mid-morning” is best defined as “twelve minutes after breakfast ends,” because that is when at least one child will begin asking me whether or not it is snack time. Snacks consist of two items – a piece of fruit and a piece of junk. The junk is packaged as real food, but it bears little resemblance to anything of nutritional value. Fruit Roll-ups – a perennial favorite – are to actual fruit what hot dogs are to canines. Chew granola bars probably contain actual granola, but they coat it with so much crap and then load it with chocolate chips and other weird items that they are really not much different from candy bars. Of course, by purchasing chewy “granola” bars instead of, say, Three Musketeers, I can continue my charade of healthy eating. Sometimes I buy the regular hard, inedible granola bars, but no on will eat them, and frankly, I’m not too sure what granola is or what it is made from or whether bona fide granola bars are good for you anyway, so it probably makes no difference.
Other snack items include the peanut butter crackers and cheese crackers family or foods and their bastard cousins, the cheese crackers with peanut butter. This is one of those areas I can’t quite remember who likes what and who likes the other, but I’m fairly certain that there are warring factions in my house and the line of demarcation is whether you are pro peanut butter crackers or pro cheese crackers. I try to remain neutral, like a snacky Switzerland. The only thing I know is that the “cheese” crackers don’t require refrigeration, so I think that tells us all we need to know about the dairy content of that particular item.
Peanut butter crackers also lead to a whole different set of problems when it comes to snacks sent with the kids during the school year. When I was a kid, peanut butter was not only a major food group to be eaten in at least three servings a day, but it was considered to be a relatively benign substance when looked at from a non-consumption point of view. Apart from misguided attempts to use peanut butter as an aid when attempting to extract a wad of chewed Bazooka from my sister’s hair, I didn’t spend a whole lot of time contemplating the brown paste, and I’m fairly certain my parents didn’t either – my mom would send us to Great Salt Bay school loaded with peanut butter and peanut butter related food substances and I can’t recall ever having Mr. Marchi freaking out over such an episode.
Sending a kid to school with a peanut butter sandwich today causes a slightly different reaction. I’d be better off strapping a load of TNT to Achilles’ chest and sending him to blow up the school bus than sending him with anything even vaguely related to the peanut family. Nut allergies are wreaking havoc on my lunch and snack plans. Slapping some peanut butter on two pieces of bread was always my fallback emergency snack when I couldn’t get my act together enough to get to the store for real snacks (“real” being defined as “sugar laden”). Things weren’t always this way, even for my kids.
When I first sent Mab to school, the nut allergy kids were sequestered at a single yellow table where peanuts were not allowed to venture – kind of a nut DMZ. The poor kids who were allergic to nuts had to sit by themselves and pretend they were normal, even though they were complete freaks. I kid, I kid. They weren’t complete freaks, but let’s face it, in 1976 if you had a kid in your class who had to sit at a table all by himself because your Fluff and Skippy sandwich might kill him, you’d have made fun of him. These days, of course, we don’t make fun of anyone and I’m pretty sure “freak” is not an acceptable term under any circumstances not involving a genuine circus act.
But even in that short amount of time since Mab started school, we are now to the point where nut allergies have completely dominated the children’s lunch menus. Some kids have such bad allergies that just being near the offending substance is enough to send them into anaphylactic shock, requiring a teacher to break out one of those nifty little EPI pens. Nut allergies are everywhere – so prevalent that establishments such as Dunkin Donuts feel compelled to post notices on their doors stating ATTENTION PATRONS: BANANA NUT MUFFINS CONTAIN NUTS, which seems like a waste of a sign, to me. It’s not that I don’t feel sorry for the people who have nut allergies and will never taste the deliciousness that is a banana nut muffin from DD unless it is during a suicide attempt – I feel for these people. Deeply. It’s just that if we, as a society, have come to the point where we feel compelled to point out that banana nut muffins contain nuts, well, it’s just a sad day.
I mean, come on – let’s be realistic. If you have nut allergies, you probably ought to be somewhat wary of ordering any food substance that has NUT in the name. It’s not as if Dunkins is trying to trick people into eating these muffins by calling them “blueberry muffins” or “sage and licorice muffins ” or “completely free from nuts muffins.” There are only three words in the name and one of them is NUT – if that doesn’t tip you off, I don’t think a little sign on the door further explaining that the muffins contain nuts is going to help. If you are allergic to nuts and you actually order a banana nut muffin, you’re a moron and probably living on borrowed time anyway. At that point, I think it’s inevitable that you will kill yourself in some spectacularly stupid fashion which will likely get forwarded around the world in e-mails with the subject line “Darwin Awards.” Of course, by the time someone sends it to me the subject line will read “RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: Darwin Awards.” Can’t you people at least change the subject line back to something normal and delete some of the attached crap when you send me one of these e-mails so I don’t have to scroll down for ten minutes reading past the e-mail address of every person in the world with comments like “Check this out” and “Funny.” And while you are at it, do yourself a favor and run your urban legends pas Snopes.com before you forward them, because they are never true. Ever. Seriously – a terrorist’s girlfriend did not get an advance warning of a plot to blow up a mall on Halloween, shampoo does not contain a chemical known to cause cancer, no one from Nigeria will be sending you $35 million in exchange for getting the money out of the country and BILL GATES IS NOT GIVING AWAY MONEY FOR FORWARDING E-MAILS.
Sorry about that.
Of course, as much as I’d like them to be, nut allergies are not urban legends and the number of people coming down with them are increasing every year, and nobody knows why. I have my own theories, but the last time I tried to explain it to someone, she made me a tinfoil hat and told me to stay away from the internet for a while. Whatever the cause, it makes my life difficult because peanut buttery things are easy to send as snacks. Actually, it’s more annoying for my kids who are much more likely to get apple and apple for a snack when I can’t send peanut butter.
Lunch
Around noon, I am usually alerted that we are out of bread and so I can’t make sandwiches for lunch. If I’m lucky, I may have some mac and cheese or a couple of packets of Ramen noodles which will do in a pinch, but if not we make another rush trip to the store, this time with all the kids in tow because Stacy is at work. This is a major project which can take hours to complete if I’m not careful, and I have to be careful because any long delay in lunch time means a long delay for nap time which comes directly after lunch. And you know how I feel about nap time.
The worst part of this major project is actually leaving the house. Never is parenting more like herding cats than when you are trying to get them in the car in a hurry. First I walk around yelling for everyone to put their shoes on because we are going to the store. Then I recruit the first kid dumb enough to walk by to put Lady Macbeth’s shoes on, too. About five minutes later, 60% of the children will still be barefoot and I have to yell again to “Get your shoes on, we’re going!” This is met with the sound of feet thumping on the floor upstairs as people begin to scramble for shoes. However, somewhere during the next few minutes, Lady takes off her shoes because the child who put them on her put them on the wrong feet. Also, another child takes her shoes off, having decided to wear sandals. Ten minutes into the project we are back at 0% shoe wearing numbers. Which means I have to yell again, only this time I use my Serious Voice which indicates that I am no longer just telling them to put their shoes on for my health and I have moved into Punisher Dad mode. Oddly enough, I look around and I am able to find one child playing Gameboy without shoes – this child is totally surprised by the fact that I am now screaming and red in the face. Why in the world is Dad so mad, he is saying to himself as he wanders around looking for shoes. Finally, 20 minutes into the project I have achieved 100% shod status if you count the kid wearing mismatched sneakers as being shod (I usually do).
Next, I instruct one child to put the dog into his crate, another child to take a bag of garbage out on the way to the car and a third child to strap Lady into her car seat. Unfortunately, this leave one child with no job, which means he has time to wander back to his room and pull out every single toy he owns and spread them all over the upstairs and the living room. The speed at which he creates this mess is remarkable – something akin to supernatural in scope. While I yell at this child to clean up the mess, I notice that the child who was supposed to be putting Lady in the car seat has gone to the car without her, which, one would imagine, makes it difficult to put the baby in the seat. More yelling. More scrambling.
After we catch the dog who has escaped because the child assigned to put him in the crate went back to playing Gameboy and forgot what he was assigned, we get in the car. Where we find Lady sitting, but not buckled in. Also, there is a bag of garbage in the car because I didn’t specifically say what to do with the bag of garbage and somehow, the dog is now in the car.
Ten minutes of arguing about who is going to sit where and we’re on the road. We usually get all the way to the store before I realize I don’t have my wallet. Once we get back to the store a second time, I have an argument with the oldest child explaining why she cannot stay in the car and finally we are ready to enter the store. Amazing.
This is where the real fun starts.
There are all kinds of things the children enjoy at the grocery store which make me nuts – many of them involve touching every single thing on ever single shelf. A favorite trick is to run a hand down the jars of spaghetti sauce until a jar falls to the floor. Then they look really shocked like this was something totally unforeseeable. There I was, their little eyes say, minding my own business, when a jar of Ragu just fell on the floor. What was I to do?
Of course, everyone’s favorite trick is much simpler – just ask over and over again, “Can we get this?” It’s like a mantra for these miniature people. I don’t think they are even operating on the same wave of consciousness as the part of their brains which are asking this – it has become so automatic and engrained that they are probably calculating complex physics problems in their heads while their mouths continue to ask, “Can we get this?” More than 50% of the time, the thing they are asking for is something they wouldn’t eat in a million years, but has a flashy package. Can we get this? Well, sure, but it’s a package of wild rice, so I’m not sure you’d like it. Can we get this? Can we get this? Can we get this? I can take only so many of these queries in a single shopping trip – that number if flexible depending on my mood, but it is always one less than the children actually ask.
Now that I’m at the store for a second time, I’m clever enough to purchase dinner, too. I may be dumb enough to need to make two trips to the supermarket a day, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to make three. Once I have my cart full of groceries, we make our way to the checkout where I am hit with another barrage of Can We Have This accompanied by children actually trying to put that damned candy on the conveyor belt – I’d like to strangle the guy that came up with putting candy in the checkout aisles.
Finally, it’s back home where I will discover three loaves of bread in the freezer.
Afternoon Snack
As you might have guessed, this goes pretty much the same way as morning snack, except somewhere along the line my children got it into their heads that they should have tea, so we quite often have that. I’m not sure if the children secretly have Mary Poppins as a nanny when I’m not around or if the queen regularly drops by or where this tea habit came from, but there it is. So, apart from tea, afternoon snack is the same as morning snack.
Dinner
We do two things for dinner at the Bradbury household that set us apart from many other families. First, we make an effort to eat together. We try to sit down and have dinner each night at 6:30. Now, as the children get older and have more activities which take them out of the house for longer periods of time (I’m talking about mostly sports practices, but there are other things) this becomes more and more difficult. However, we still try to sit everyone down together and eat at the same time as often as we can.
The second thing that sets us apart is that we don’t eat in front of the television. Even if we are having pizza, we still sit down at the table and eat it as a family. That makes us really weird to many of the people I know – most of my friends have long ago stopped pretending their dining room table is a place to eat and use it as a place to store keys, books, random scraps of paper, magazines and old bits of mail. To eat at one of these tables would require a clean up effort which would only be realistic in execution if the EPA declared the table a Superfund Site and sent a team of specially trained agents to help for a month.
As crazy as the rest of the feedings at the Bradbury Zoo are, preparation for dinner is somehow worse. This is the direct result of two converging facts. 1) I like to cook, so I’d like to be left undisturbed while I create dinner – all I ask for is a little peace while I practice my art. 2) This is never, ever going to happen.
Why isn’t this going to happen? Because at 5:00, when I want to start cooking, everything in the world starts happening. Actually, it doesn’t start – it just doesn’t stop. While I am cooking dinner, I must help the Duchess with her homework because she needs a little extra help and individual attention. I sit her at a table in the kitchen while the other three work at the dining room table. Working with the Duchess requires all my brain activity, so cooking is not only a side project, but it becomes something I can’t really think about, so I have to prepare a meal easy enough to complete on autopilot.
In between helping the Duchess with her homework and cooking dinner, I have to help the other kids with their homework. The other three, as a general rule, can complete their homework without my help. Can is the operative word there – not do. Usually they attempt some sorry effort to make the homework appear to be finished, but upon closer inspection, I discover that they have done the easy problems and filled in random answers for the rest.
“Are you absolutely positive about this answer, Edward?”
“Yes, sir.” In my daydreams they all call me sir and treat me with respect.
“You don’t think you should check over this work again?”
“No.”
“And you really want me to believe that eight plus six is green?”
“That’s how my teacher told me to do it.”
That’s how my teacher told me to do it – this is the last ditch argument by all my children when they don’t want to re-work a problem. Of course she did, I usually say. Most teachers specifically tell you that if you run out of room at the bottom of the paper, you shouldn’t get a new piece – just smoosh half a page worth into the bottom inch. Of course your teacher wanted you to skip every fifth problem – sounds logical to me. I completely believe your teacher wanted you to complete your homework in purple crayon. Absolutely. After all, I was born yesterday, and I wouldn’t have a clue what a teacher would or wouldn’t want you kids to do.
By the time I have checked everyone’s homework, sent them back to correct it, checked it again, sent them back again, and checked it a third time, we’ve killed an hour. And at 6:00 the telemarketers call. And call. And call. Of course, this problem has pretty much been solved by the invention of caller ID, which I will never again be without. Unknown number. Hmm, I wonder if I should answer it? College Loan, Inc. – yeah, that sounds like someone I want to converse with in the middle of dinner prep. Out of area. I’m not even considering picking that up.
In the old days (read: before kids) no one ever called Stacy and me. The phone would ring about once a week and we would stare at each other as if this was obviously someone calling to inform us that New England was missing or that the mid-West had suddenly blown up. Over the years, telemarketing became a wildly popular way to waste people’s time and company money. At first we picked up all the calls, usually long distance carriers. There was a time when they were sending us checks to switch back and forth - $50 from MCI, $75 from AT&T, etc. For about two years I honestly believe we were paid more in cash to switch than we spent on long distance.
Then the telemarketers stopped offering us money to do things that essentially didn’t effect us one bit – this was when telemarketing became annoying. It also ratcheted up about 50 notches in quantity – we went from getting almost no calls to getting 10 day, all of which were telemarketing. So, we went through a span of four or five years where we just didn’t answer the phone at all. That system actually worked fine and I would have been willing to stick with it, but the kids finally hit that age where they had friends with irritating voices and those friends started calling the house on a routine basis, so suddenly the phone started ringing and I had to pick it up again and it was either a telemarketer or a child with an irritating voice – a lose/lose situation. Anyway, that’s when we got caller ID.
Which, I realize, doesn’t have much to do with the story, given that I don’t answer the phone anymore except to say, “Mab can’t come to the phone right now, she’s on the toilet.” Which is what I say to any boys that call while she’s doing homework. She gets a big kick out of it when I do that.
Once dinner is finally prepared and the children have set the table (a chore they have done so many times it only requires me to yell once or twice to complete), we all sit down for a family dinner. This part I’m not joking about. We sit down together and discuss how our days were and what we did. Sometimes we play a game called High/Low where each person tells the best thing that happened to them that day and each person tells the worst thing that happened (we unabashedly stole this from a movie). Other times each child must tell three things they learned that day. The thing the kids like the best, though, is when we quiz them on different topics and kids who answer correctly get extra minutes on their bedtime.
Usually, this is the best part of my day. I get to hear about the kids’ days and my wife’s day and I get to explain how much laundry I finished. It’s a regular 1950s TV moment where things are semi-calm (in the sense that no one is actually shooting at someone else – it can be pretty loud, though, so I can’t swear with any certainty that no shots have ever been fired at the table) and everything is beautiful. Of course, that only lasts so long, and after that it’s rush around, clean up the dinner mess, showers, teeth brushing, reading, cleaning rooms and off to bed. But the brief time I get to spend with everyone at the table is something I am enjoying while I can, because I know it’s only a matter of time before I’ll be sitting around a big empty house with my wife and we’ll be wishing for those loud and obnoxious dinners when the kids tell us about getting a homerun in kickball or scoring 100 on a spelling test. A matter of time.
This is my son who has tragically mutated into Michael Chiklis.
