You think this cup-o-noodles is still good?

"I brought home a bucket of praying mantises from work - they hatched," Chris tells me over dinner last night. "Once they hatch, they start eating each other, so right now it's like insect thunderdome in the car console."

In my mind, I pictured hundreds of full-grown praying mantises biting each other's heads off, blood-spurting from headless bodies with twitching ciliated appendages, and a few flag-bearing survivors scaling mounds of buggy corpses.

About a month ago, we let loose a fleet of ladybugs in the gardens and trees. The mantises are our second wave of natural pest deterrence.

We forgot to release them last night, so this morning, I feared that our car interior would resemble a biblical plague. As Chris left for work he explained that as soon as I opened the lid, the mantids would cover my hand, but that they wouldn't bite, and I just needed to gently shake and guide them to freedom throughout the garden.

After breakfast and coffee, the girls and I headed out to see our squirmy surprise. We found the newly hatched mantis nymphs in a half-pint cardboard container. Not nearly as 'B'-movie as I'd imagined, each was about a quarter-inch long, nearly translucent brown, with tiny supplicant forelimbs. And contrary to Chris's warning, they huddled in the tiny bit of wood shavings and nectar with which they'd been packed.

The girls and I walked throughout the vegetable garden, coaxing the baby mantises onto pepper, squash, bean and berry plants with our fingers. A lid-full landed on our black-eyed susans.

We've avoided dousing our earth with chemical irritants, but it doesn't escape me that we've nevertheless completely upended the ecological balance of our property.

Someone call an intervention if I start communicating by rubbing my forearms together.

Chris and I are learning how to make cheese. We've started with soft cheeses - mozzarella, ricotta, panir - hoping to work our way up to the hard ones with wax shells, colorful aging patterns and healthy aromas.

It's a fun way to spend an evening, talking and bumping into one another in the kitchen. Part science experiment, part Oregon Trail. In fact, the only way it could be better, in my opinion, is if it was bacon - without the messy pig slaughter bit.

Two gallons and a quart of milk yields about two pounds of mozzarella and two pounds of ricotta. The mozzarella from one batch topped a dozen medium-large pizzas for the girls' birthday party and the few days following. And it's incredibly creamy and flavorful - but that could just be the satisfaction of making it myself.

For supplies and recipes, go to New England Cheesemaking Supply Company.

Permissive Parenting

My daughter Runa is running in circles nearly as wide as her smile, bright red chiffon scarf streaming above her head, leaving a wake of giggles around the dozen other seated parents and obedient children. I have called for her to come and sing with mommy, but my own laugh belies my weak resolve to reel her back into my lap.

Runa, her twin sister Damian and I are trying out a nationally syndicated music class that is subsidized by a community church. Their best friend Jonah and his mother Katy have come for the fun as well.

"Runa, come here, let's stomp our feet together," I tempt. The instructor looks sideways at me as she collects scarves and tiny sandpapered percussion blocks from the other children. Not a single actual musical instrument is ever produced during this one-hour session.

A goodbye song is sung, so exciting that I forget it as soon as the last note falls. I stop to thank the teacher and inquire about tuition and scheduling. She effectively kills my interest in a second try by commenting on how unfair it was to paying parents for me to allow my children to dance.

"What does she expect? It's a music class for 1-3 year olds! We should be letting them explore music with real instruments - be free spirits. They'll have to sit still and stand in lines plenty when they go to school," Katy rants to me later.

I couldn't agree more.

We have to tell our children 'no' for so many legitimate safety reasons: no hitting, no running into the street, no climbing on precarious furniture, no playing with electrical sockets.

Why squelch their joy of exploration - especially in the arts?

Katy and I try different music class several days later. The instructor is surprised by our attendance - no one told her she would have visitors this morning - but she smiles and welcomes us to a large rug in the corner of a spacious dance studio. She learns each child's name and incorporates it in a song, stepping everyone up the musical scale with the help of a xylophone. The children get to bang on drums, shake tambourines, run, sing and dance to relatively familiar folk songs. No one is chastised for having fun; we sign up for the next 12-week session.

My girls will be two in January. I don't get to sleep late anymore. Rarely do I have the attention span to complete a book without colorful illustrations or rhyme. But then, all parents accept some minor tradeoffs. What I get in return is the opportunity to show the world to these fearless, inquisitive little people, and to say 'no' as rarely as I can.

The last of it

Beauty in the dregs. I'm feeling this year folding up on me. It's a humming sadness, like what you feel when you have to retire a favorite pair of shoes or close the door to an empty apartment with the keys on the kitchen counter inside. It's the last of it - the last pops of color on my firecracker plant, the molding husks of the girls' first jack-o-lanterns on their way to the compost heap, a spring tipula well past his season taking advantage of a tattered banana leaf, and a few ambitious peppers found clinging to a naked plant in our tiny abandoned garden.

To hope for the things we wish to want...

I feel electric. Chris says he feels electorate.

Barack Obama is the 44th President of the United States of America.

We did that.

I have never felt so proud to be an American as the moment last night when this election was called. I can’t really say that I’ve ever felt pride as an American before that moment, period. Our image abroad is poor, and we tend more toward individualism than cohesion - many of us keep to ourselves.

I voted thoughtfully in the last two presidential elections. In 2000, I punched in for Nader, because, at the time, I felt most represented by the Green Party; that was when I learned that a third-party vote is still a wasted vote in this country. In 2004, I not only voted (for Kerry), but bullied every friend and coworker into going to the polls as well; when those ballots were tallied, I sensed no injustice in technicalities - but rather the withering revelation that we were simply outnumbered.

But as the numbers rolled in last night, I knew that my knocking on doors in the cold and rain with the girls had helped 63,905,968 other fists beat down the door of the White House.

As young as they are, the girls’ excitement to walk for “O-BA-ma” stoked my own, and though Runa may not remember it in 20 years, she got to push the big green go button on my touch screen last week at early voting. I hope she never knows a time when she feels her involvement doesn’t count. And, at the moment, I have a lot of faith in hope. I look at my daughters today and think ‘We may not leave this as screwed up for you as I feared.’ I am proud that we have done this as a nation for all our daughters, and hope that we can ride this incredible collective surge of joy and accomplishment well into the hard work ahead of us.

I feel electric.

Dirt

My stepfather passed away on Sunday. He celebrated his birthday in hospice care on Friday, and Sunday, after several years of increasing suffocation, he just passed - peacefully, they say - away. And the first thing my brother asked me when I told him was

Where did he go?

Away.

Why, I wonder, is it such a horrifying thought that perhaps he just went back to the dirt?

The dirt from which emerge my tangy sweet amana orange tomatoes and my fuzzy lemon cukes. The tomato blood-water runs over the edges of the cutting board, spilling onto the counter beneath. My mind confuses sound and touch as the kitchen blade slices the summer cucumber harvest, crunching through the skin, skimming through the flesh. I tumble the tomatoes and cukes with dill and mint from my dirt, purple onions, vinegar, sugar, olive oil. Sun, water, dirt, from my tongue, to my belly, to my cells.

The dirt that catalyzes seeds the size of the “d” at the beginning of the word into head-heavy, seven-foot sunflowers, with their scruffy stalks and lazy spreading leaves, and their faces smiling with a thousand little unpotentialized “d”s.

The dirt that smells so crisp, cools and dries my fingers and palms, when my husband and I break it and turn it and pack it back with our hands around spindles of green and brown that aren‘t as fragile as they seem. I drink my coffee with him over a shovel and a bag of Black Kow, puffed up with the accomplishments of a whole day before most people have finished checking their email in the morning. I hold his gritty hand.

The dirt on which my stepdad played football as a kid, that ground through his uniform to stain his knees and elbows, and sprayed under his helmet each time he took the ball to the turf in practice or game play.

The dirt that gets between our toes, fills our nostrils, finds its way beneath the most indoor fingernails, so pervasive, so integral to every moment of our lives.

The question is not Where did he go? but What do we do now without him?

Adult ADD

It’s been a productive week for freelancing. A sizeable yearly project to which I’m committed has rolled around again, and I’ve been hacking away at it during the girls’ downtime - admittedly, a rare occurrence at 20 months.
Yesterday, Chris took both of them on an errands run to allow me time uninterrupted at the computer. After making a couple of phone calls, I checked email for further instructions regarding the job, and found a note from a local activist group that’s concerned about plans for a new cement factory less than 10 miles from our house.
The site was supposedly grandfathered as industrial because it housed a cement plant as recently as 20 years ago, but the neighborhood has evolved in the decades since that plant closed.
Wilmington has crept outward and now several housing developments and schools border the property. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has even expressed concern for large fish nurseries and native animal populations on the property, and for the potential damage to 600 associated acres of wetlands.
I followed some links through the site and spent a half-hour writing each of my representatives about their positions on Titan Cement.
Midway through the second email, I realized that I was using political activism to procrastinate.
Glad to have contacts for all these responsible people, I started to go back through the roster and vent on the bailout theme, but I thought better of it and went back to work.
I’ll put that off for another day.