Shannon Phillips

My holiday fruitcakes are in the oven right now, filling the house with their deep, rich, spicy aroma. I love fruitcake. When I was growing up, my mom’s aunt Louise sent us a wonderful, intense, rum-soaked fruitcake every Christmas, and it was always received with great delight. A few years ago I set out to try and make similar fruitcakes of my own (the dry, storebought versions with their lurid cherry toppings in improbably day-glo colors are no comparison), and I found Alton Brown’s recipe, which is entirely satisfactory. I’ve made it every holiday season since.

Now I understand that there are people in this world who like to scoff at fruitcake, but I’m pretty sure that these people have simply been eating the wrong fruitcakes. The real thing is fantastic.

Meanwhile, Robin is on his stomach watching his toy train (an early Christmas present from his Uncle Bobby) going around our tree:

Our stockings have, with all due care, been hung by the chimney:

Our advent calendar (a gift from Robin’s Nonna and Pappy) is up-to-date:

And generally we are feeling pretty festive. We’re just back from seeing Pops and Mo and all of my siblings except for the boys’ Uncle Jesse (who was missed) in Arkansas—it was a lovely visit, although unfortunately we all developed the sniffles on the way back. Stupid plane germs! But even that’s not all bad—Sam stayed home sick today, and so was able to perform Valuable Cuddle Services while I worked on my holiday baking.

Davy has cut a tooth, and he’s getting nippy with it. I took this picture minutes after he bit me at nursing time:

Look at that “who, me? Not me, mama!” face.

So Robin has these “play silks” in various colors. Last night his father tied the red one around his shoulders, and Robin was jumping around declaring himself Superboy. This morning he brought me the green one, and as soon as I tied it on him he identified himself as “Green Batman.” He then instructed me to say “Thank you, Batman!”

So, if you see Green Batman, I guess now you know what to say.

Edited to add: Batman humor, always funny!

The new game in our household is called TICKLE THE STINKY SKUNK. First, you must catch a skunk:

They aren’t hard to catch.

When you have your skunk, you may tickle him, provided you cry “TICKLE THE STINKY SKUNK!” as you do so.

And that’s it, that’s the game. The rules are simple, and all the players win.

Okay, I love living in California. This week in our CSA box we got a pint of strawberries—fresh strawberries! In the last week of October! We also got spinach, lettuce, bok choy, green beans, broccoli, carrots, zucchini, bell peppers, six apples (they’re Fuji, I asked; and last week’s tomatoes were, ironically enough, Early Girl), four plums, six of what look like Red Bliss potatoes, and some more sunchokes.

Tonight we’re having skirt steak and green beans. In fact, just now Davy started crying while I was in the middle of smearing marinade on the steak. Because my hands were full of garlic-rosemary paste I went about finishing what I was doing instead of going immediately to pick up the baby. Then he abruptly stopped crying, and that did bring me running—only to find that Robin was in there with him, kissing his toes and asking “What’s wrong, baby?” What a good big brother! Robin has his weaknesses—we’re still stalled out on potty training—but his strengths are wonderful strengths to have. He’s a friendly, generous, secure and loving boy, and frankly if I were told that I could have all that in a son in exchange for delayed potty training, that’s a trade I’d be happy to make.

I almost added something there about Robin not being very verbal, but actually I’m not at all sure that’s true. Even though he’s talking a lot more now, it’s still not as much as some of the other kids his age—but at the same time he’s extremely interested in written language. He recognizes all the letters of the alphabet and initiates a lot of conversations about letters, the sounds they make, and the words that start with various letters: right now he’ll often come running up saying “C! Cat! Kitty! K!” and then follow that up by going “cuh cuh cuh.” I’m pretty sure he’s working on the problem that different words can refer to the same thing, and different letters can make the same sound, which I think actually puts him a bit ahead of the curve for reading/writing. It’s not something I’m actively working on with him—I mean, we do read books, and when he wants to stop and pay attention to the letters, we do that, but I’m not trying to push him into being an early reader or anything. I’m just making a note to myself not to be too quick to make sweeping assessments of Robin’s strengths and weaknesses, because they may be more granular than I expect, and in any case they’re obviously still developing.

We got Robin on the waiting list for a preschool, by the way, and we’re signed up to take a tour of another preschool (the one that we could walk to) in February. Both schools say they will likely have openings next fall. I would like to get him more opportunities to socialize with kids his own age a little sooner, so we might look into signing him up for a Saturday toddler dance class or something like that. We watched Hello, Dolly! the other night and Robin loved the dance sequences. It was hilarious to watch him doing his best to follow along, twirling and kicking all over the living room.

Anyway, meal planning. Tomorrow night I’m roasting another chicken, along with the potatoes and maybe the sunchokes (unless I decide to just compost them instead). Wednesday night I’ll make a homemade spinach-and-ricotta pizza with whole wheat crust, and Thursday we’ll have grilled sausages, onions, and peppers, with a salad on the side to use up the remaining veggies. Friday will be for leftovers.

Bonus picture: Davy and Nonna!

Here’s our Halloween away team, preparing to gather data on the native custom known as “Trick or Treating”:

We have a pretty able commander in Captain Robin Phillips, backed up by Science Officer Daddy, but I frankly have some suspicions about our Navigator. I don’t think he knows what quadrant he’s in most of the time, let alone how to make warp speed. Maybe it’s not fair to blame him for our technical limitations, as we lack an Engineering division entirely—but nobody wanted to wear the red shirt.

When dusk fell and we set out on our mission, we were at first a bit dismayed to see that our street was oppressively dark and quiet. I left a bowl full of candy on our porch by the jack-o-lantern and we set off to look for houses giving out treats. None of our neighbors had their lights on, but we could hear the sounds of revelry coming from pretty close by; we turned a corner and noticed another group of kids on the sidewalk. There were three or four houses on that block that were lit up and handing out candy, so Robin got to practice saying “Trek or Treat!” (yes, ours is the starship Dorkus Maximus) a few times before we hit the real paydirt, which is apparently a little street called El Camile that runs parallel to ours two blocks up. This street does Halloween like some blocks do Christmas: each house striving to outdo the next, with lots of lights and elaborate decorations. Robin was actually a little bit scared by a “creepy clown” themed driveway, but we just gave that one a wide berth and continued on. He seemed to recover right away so that was good. He certainly figured out the whole “I knock on the door and they give me candy” premise in no time flat—he was very eager to go running up to each new house. He’s not even had a lot of candy in his life, but I guess it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the stuff in the brightly wrapped little packages is desirable. Also, he’s a friendly kid, and I think he may have just enjoyed the chance to say hi to a lot of people, and to mingle with groups of other kids.

When we got home none of our candy had been touched and no trick-or-treaters were evident on our block. I was pretty bummed—but a bit later we had a group of older kids come by. I know it can be annoying when teenagers trick-or-treat, but this group was dressed up pretty adorably: there was a black cat and a ladybug, both age-appropriate (i.e. not a “sexy” ladybug) and a dude in a rubber ghoul mask. I happily gave them fistfuls of candy. I hope next year we get more kids. Maybe if we step up our Halloween game—some fake spiderwebbing, some jokey tombstones—our neighbors will be shamed into leaving their porch lights on and forking over some mini Snickers bars.

Today’s art project was a simple collage. We gathered up dried leaves and other interesting autumnal things at the park (despite what I wrote the other day, there are some trees that change color a little bit) and then we went to town with a piece of construction paper and some glue sticks. Robin chose the placement of all the items, though I helped make sure they were pressed down well enough to stick.

Meanwhile Davy chilled in his play area:

Here’s a picture of Davy enjoying the little play area we’ve set up for him (it’s the HABA “Dream Meadow” playmat, which I had to get from eBay since they’ve apparently discontinued it. I just think it’s really cute.)

Davy likes it and will happily spend up to about twenty minutes lying there. Mostly he plays with his own toes rather than any of the crinkly rattly things designed to grab his interest. The only trouble I’m having with it is in dissuading Robin from climbing in with him!

I think in a lot of ways it must be hard to be a baby—no control, no way to predict what’s going to happen next in your world, and only the most rudimentary ability to communicate your wants and needs—but Davy seems really happy with it most of the time. We have delightful conversations, where I say “Hi!” and he says “Ooogoo!” and we both grin. He seems to think it’s pretty great being him.