Sugar, We're Goin' Down

If I use a Fall Out Boy song as my entry title, does that make me young, hip and cool? You betcha, much in the same way that my using the phrase "you betcha" makes me young, hip and cool. As an aside, I just bought the Fall Out Boy cover of Michael Jackson's "Beat It," and I'm not sure how that affects my youngishness, hipsteration or coolocity.

In any event, here I am. A week removed from single parenting. As noted earlier, Cathleen went to western New York for her first "Slipping" reading. She took Max, they both had a great time, and she learned a lot about what and how to read "Slipping" passages to a young audience. Eliza and I spent some quality time together. The only crisis moment occurred on the first night at bedtime when I sat down to read to Eliza. Normally, I read to Max and Cathleen reads to Eliza (a system that grew out of the fact that I could read but not breastfeed), but now it was just me and E. It was only at that moment that she came to terms with the fact that mommy was not there, and she promptly burst into tears. She got over it, and by the next night bedtime was no problem. Of course, on the second night after the lights were out she tried pulling out all of the tricks to get me to come back into her bedroom. "Max hit me on the head." "Umm, Eliza, Max is not here. He's more than 300 miles away from here right now." She stares at me. "Max hit me on the head."

Cathleen and Max returned on Thursday, on Friday we baked hamantaschen, and on Saturday morning we packed up the car and drove up to Bloomfield for Easter weekend.

Claudia and Walter live on a few acres of mostly-wooded property, and I had long noticed the abundance of Sugar Maples around the area. Always one to think of gifts that give back to me, I came up with the idea of giving Waler a maple sugaring kit for Christmas. We enjoyed our first jar of homemade maple syrup last month. When we arrived at their house on Saturday, I could see that the gallon jugs that Walter had hooked up on the trees were filled with sap, and by midday we were collecting the sap from six trees and boiling it down over a fire on an outside grill that Walter had constructed for the task. We basically filled a tin lasagna pan with sap and stuck it over the fire; when it boiled down a couple of inches we'd add more sap. The trick was to keep the fire as hot as possible to keep the sap at a rolling boil. I split wood on Walter's wood splitter and fed and stoked the fire all afternoon. We boiled 8 1/2 gallons down to about one gallon or so. By then it had taken on a slightly amber color, sort of like a weak iced tea. When Walter collects enough of the ambered-sap, he then finishes the syrup-making process inside, in a pot on the stove where he can carefully monitor the process to prevent under- or overcooking (he purchased a hydrometer to aid in the process). We didn't get that far on Saturday, but that didn't matter. I still came home with a jar of homemade syrup from an earlier batch.

I ran 9 miles on Sunday at a nine-minute per mile pace...crazy fast for me, and I've begun entertaining the idea that I might be able to finish the Brooklyn Half-marathon in under two hours. Speaking of which, they moved the race date from April 26th to May 3rd, and now Mark and Elizabeth can't do it. So I'm flying solo, which increases the odds of me running faster, as I will focus on running and not socializing the entire time. I'll have to see over the next few weekends if I can keep up a nine-minute pace as I extend my distance to 10, 11, 12 miles, but I'm mildly optimistic.

After my run, Sam and I "hid" the Easter eggs around the yard while everyone else was at church, and then there was a huge luncheon (26 people, I think) and Easter egg hunt. I am always surprised to hear when kids believe in the Easter Bunny. It seems so absurd to me that I can't imagine how anyone would buy it, and so when I hear Miriam excitedly proclaiming that the Easter Bunny got her a particular book on Pets because he must have known how in to dogs she is these days, I assume that Miriam has an incredibly sophisticated and sardonic sense of irony. As it turns out, she doesn't. Last year Max figured out that Cathleen and I hid the eggs in our backyard and I was all Jewishly proud of him, but this year he was pulling Peep after Peep out of the eggs he had collected and he was wondering out loud why the Easter Bunny hadn't given him any jelly beans. Yeah, I wonder.