Shannon Phillips

The parents at Robin’s school have organized to contribute morning snacks to the classroom, and my first day to contribute was today. Now, here’s the restrictions I’m working within:

• UMCS is a nut-free school
• One child in Robin’s class is allergic to cantaloupe
• Another child has a gluten intolerance and a dairy intolerance

Robert Frost once remarked that writing poetry in free verse is like playing tennis without a net. And honestly, I’ve come to feel similarly about cooking and dietary restrictions. I like them. They give me a structure to work within. So when I hear “nut-free, gluten-free, dairy-free,” I think: Oh, this’ll be fun.

On further investigation the dairy intolerance turned out to be a casein allergy. This is significant because it means that clarified butter (ghee) is okay. I decided to exploit that loophole and cooked up a batch of corn-apricot mini muffins for the Hummingbird classroom. They came out very well, so I thought I’d share the recipe! It’s adapted from Cook’s Illustrated—the original recipe called for all-purpose flour along with a stick of butter, 1/2 cup milk and 3/4 cup sour cream instead of the ghee and coconut oil. So you can backwards-engineer to the original if you like.

Corn and Apricot Muffins with Orange Essence

Take a cup and a half of dried apricots and either chop them or run them through a food processor until you get chunks the size of raisins. Put them in a saucepan with 2/3 of a cup of orange juice and turn on the heat until the juice comes to a simmer. Turn off the heat, cover the saucepan, and put it aside while you proceed with the recipe. The apricots will absorb the juice and plump up nicely.

Adjust your oven rack to a middle position and heat oven to 400 degrees. Grease your muffin tins with coconut oil or nonstick cooking spray.

Combine two cups of gluten-free flour (I like King Arthur brand), one cup of fine-ground, whole-grain yellow cornmeal, one and a half teaspoons of baking powder, a teaspoon of baking soda, and half a teaspoon of salt in a large bowl. Whisk it all together. Do note: cornmeal is naturally gluten-free but if you are baking for someone with a gluten intolerance you still want to look for a brand that is labeled gluten-free, because otherwise cornmeal is often ground in facilities that handle wheat and there’s risk of cross-contamination. You’ll also have to look closely at the label to determine whether your cornmeal is whole-grain or degerminated; whole-grain is better for you and will give the muffins a richer corn flavor. Arrowhead Mills makes a good fine-ground, gluten-free cornmeal that’s also organic. In general I like Bob’s Red Mill a lot too but the store only had their cornmeal in a medium grind. (First world problems: the baker’s edition!)

In a second bowl, lightly beat two eggs and then whisk in half a cup of granulated sugar (I’ve started using raw sugar for most purposes on the grounds that less-processed substances are almost always better for you) and a quarter cup of packed dark brown sugar. Slowly (a little bit at a time, stirring after each addition) stir in a half cup of ghee and 3/4 cup of coconut oil. (If you store your ghee in the fridge you will need to melt it first.) Lastly stir in about a teaspoon of grated orange zest, and the apricots, along with any juice that didn’t get absorbed, from the saucepan.

Now fold the wet ingredients into the dry, stirring gently until the batter is just combined but not over-mixed. Use a large spoon to drop the batter into your muffin tins and bake until they are light golden brown and a toothpick inserted into the middle of the muffin comes out clean. If you’re doing mini muffins start checking after ten minutes; regular-sized will take a bit longer.

This recipe made a platter of 24 mini muffins with enough batter left over for the eight full-sized muffins pictured above. Those are shown with a sugar topping (granulated sugar mixed with grated orange zest), which is delicious, but I left it off the mini muffins in order to make them more healthful for the kids.

So, if you didn’t know, there’s this kind of spontaneous performance art that sometimes happens when people get together on Amazon and start leaving spurious product reviews. Sometimes it’s because the product itself is transparently ridiculous (BIC “For Her” ballpoint pens, Hutzler 571 Banana Slicer). Sometimes the product is just a convenient window for commentary on some sort of larger current-event issue: after the debate in which Mitt Romney famously claimed that he had “binders full of women,” commenters started leaving bogus reviews on office supply products, complaining about the lack of women included with the binders.

And sometimes the reviews are just a kind of offbeat collaborative fiction project. I actually bought Robin one of the “Black Dragon T-Shirts” based at least in part on the stellar reviews:

From reviewer O. de Frias:

“This is, without a doubt, the best black shirt with an angry monochrome dragon perched on two natural pillars on a cliff that I have ever seen. I know that when I get married, this is the undershirt I’ll wear. The amount of awesome displayed on your chest canvas while wearing this shirt, obviously a shirt given to man by Zeus himself, is currently impossible to calculate using our current mathematical constructs. We actually need to devise a new form of mathematics which we should call Wurm Theory in order to parse the data.

I’m going to explain to you what it’s like wearing this shirt. Each separate occasion merits a new stage of awesomeness being unlocked.

First wearing – You hear Sean Connery’s voice command you to be the greatest. Whether you want to or not, while this shirt is on your back you will comply.

Second wearing – The best theme song of all time is instantly created for you and sung by the dragon on your shirt which, contrary to what you would assume, has an awe-inspiring singing voice.

Third wearing – You ascend to a higher level of consciousness.

Fourth wearing – The “what came first, the chicken or the egg” riddle is conclusively solved.

Fifth wearing – Zeus reveals his master plan and the meaning of life.

Sixth wearing – You get like, $0.20 off all your Starbucks purchases, and some places even let you take the cup you used the day before and knock an additional $0.05 if you use that.

PROS: Dragon on your shirt, Sean Connery finally gets some steady work again
CONS: Some of the independently-owned Starbucks don’t let you do the used cup thing.”

Amazon not only tolerates these sorts of shenanigans, they’ve actually given their blessing by compiling a list of some of the most popular “funny reviews.” People! Sometimes they’re just the greatest.

On my walk home today I was thinking about the nature of politeness in different social contexts.

In a crowded urban environment, ignoring other people is generally the polite thing to do. There’s so little real privacy, but people extend each other the illusion of privacy, and that helps. You travel through crowded sidewalks and trains in your own little imaginary bubble. And generally the only people who try to pierce the bubble are catcallers, panhandlers, pamphleteers and the like: people whose social advances are an unwelcome imposition.

Of course you acknowledge people who you have real business with, and over time you build up a friendly rapport with the folks at the shops and cafés you frequent. Also your neighbors, which in a true urban core means the apartment-dwellers whose units border yours. The term might extend to everyone on your hallway: it almost certainly doesn’t encompass the entire building. But in general, in public spaces, you respect the imaginary bubbles.

This leads to really interesting effects like the phenomenon of familiar strangers: people you see every day but never speak to. I think it’s also something that feeds into the famous reputation of New Yorkers for rudeness. (Those who visit large cities but aren’t familiar with urban social norms could easily find the we’re-all-politely-ignoring-you thing to be offputting, distant, and cold.)

Oakland is not dense enough for this rule to come into effect. Polite sidewalk interaction in my neighborhood requires a “hello” at minimum, with “how ya doin'” greatly preferred. (Note that there’s no question mark at the end, because it’s a statement, not a question. It is perfectly OK to answer with a matching “How ya doin’.”)

I had a little bit of trouble adjusting to this new norm when we first moved here. There’s an older gentleman who’s usually sitting out on his porch when we walk by after school, and I found myself walking on the other side of the street just because the psychic effort of exchanging a few meaningless pleasantries with a stranger every afternoon felt like a burden. It didn’t work, though. He just hollered across the street: “How ya doin’!”

Today on my walk home from picking up Davy, that gentleman was not on his porch. I wondered where he was—on vacation? Running an errand? I hope he’s not ill. I kind of missed him. On the other hand, there were a couple of people standing around a few houses down, folks I hadn’t seen before. “Good afternoon!” I waved across the street. “How ya doin!”

Davy started a new year at Peter Pan today:

That photo looks Instagrammed but it’s actually just blurry because neither Sam nor myself remembered to bring along a proper camera, and so Sam snapped one with his phone.

If you’re not intimately familiar with the franchise, Robin is here cosplaying as “Dark Moon” Luigi, sporting the Poltergust 5000 ghost-hunting equipment (i.e. a backpack and a broom).

Davy is just Mario and very happy to have a role in his older brother’s fantasy play. (Everyone in the family has in fact been cast: I’m Princess Peach, while Sam is Bowser, and Sol is a mushroom man.) The hats were a present from Pops and Mo—they arrived yesterday in the mail and the kids just about flipped their lids!

While Robin is off to his first day of kindergarten, Sol and Davy play together under Thora’s supervision:

Update: Robin was so much happier when I picked him up after school today! He said he had a good day, he likes kindergarten, and he’s looking forward to going back again tomorrow. Such a relief!

So where were we? I think in my last post about UMCS I said that Robin was having a tough time with the transition to a UMCS “lower elementary” classroom. The Montessori lower elementary classes are mixed-age, first through third graders, and Robin was the youngest in the class by quite a bit. His teacher thought that he was prepared for the work academically, but she also said that “Robin doesn’t really have a peer group in this classroom.”

And Robin himself was really, really clear that he wanted to move. “I want to be with the little kids and do little kid things,” he said. “I want to be in a different classroom. I want to go to kindergarten.” He said the same thing over and over in different ways. So I thought, you know, my kid is telling me as clearly as he possibly can what he wants for himself.

And here’s what I think. In Nature’s justice system, Robin has not been guaranteed a jury of his peers, nor has he been vouchsafed an impartial judge. The universe is cruel and it can be very quick to render a verdict. There are no indivisible rights. But in this system Robin has been outfitted with an advocate—one person who will put his needs above literally anything else in the cosmos. And that’s me.

I think he needs to learn that the world won’t always rearrange itself to suit him. But you know what? Sometimes—if he’s clear about his terms and he sticks to his guns—it will.

So I decided to fight this one for him. I scheduled another meeting with his teacher, and then a meeting with the administration, and basically it came down to everybody agreeing: Robin is an edge case. If he “stuck it out” in the lower-el classroom he would probably learn a lot, and the older kids would mentor him…but it would be a rough transition. If he moves to the kindergarten classroom, he probably won’t make a lot of progress academically over the course of the year, but he’ll get a lot more social and emotional support.

And I said: Robin knows what he wants. I don’t think he should get the only vote in this decision, but I think he should get a vote, and in this case probably the deciding vote.

So it’s agreed! Robin moves to kindergarten, starting next week. He’s really happy with the news, especially since one of his friends from preschool is already in that class. I think it’s going to make everything much happier for him. And I’m very pleased with UMCS for being so flexible and for sincerely doing their best to meet Robin’s developmental needs.

I took a picture of Davy tonight for use as his “cubby photo” this year at preschool. I had to catch him right out of the bath to get a clean face!

Robin is having kind of a hard time with the transition to elementary school. He says his days are “bad” and he’s started asking to stay home instead of going to school. This is heartbreaking because he loved preschool so much, and that enthusiasm and delight was something I really wanted him to be able to hold on to.

We talked to his teacher a little bit, specifically floating the idea that maybe he would be better suited to a kindergarten classroom. She says from her perspective he’s doing fine—she thinks he’s going through some normal transition anxiety and that he will settle in within a couple of weeks. She also said that, academically speaking, he is at a first-grade level. (I thought that was true, because I looked up the state standards and did those lessons with him to get him up to grade level, but I was rather pleased to hear her confirm it.)

I told Robin that if he gives it six weeks and still hates school, we’ll make some sort of a change. I hope his teacher is right and that it’s ultimately not necessary.

Me: “So Robin, how was your first day of school?”
Robin: “Long.”
Me: “It is a long day, isn’t it?”
Robin: “The teacher got fustalated.”
Me: “Frustrated? Why?”
Robin: “Because my friends did a bad thing.”
Me: “Really. What did ‘your friends’ do?”
Robin: “Hmm. I’m not going to tell you. You don’t need to know.”