Quiche and cannabis, cat barf, and vaccination
Gargantubaby is three and three-quarters. He's going through a phase of making polite conversation. For example, when his sister gets home from her other house, she immediately goes to the swing hanging from the living room ceiling, opens the door to their bedroom, and works off the weekly transition by swinging from the living room through the doorway into the bedroom.
GB sits on the couch with his legs hanging off the side, hands on his thighs, watching his "best buddy," and asks hopefully, "So. How was your day?"
Another morning he sits quietly beside me in the bed, gazing at the dappled light from the oak tree reflecting on the curtains, and then says, "So. How did you sleep, Mommy?"
"I slept well!" I say. "You're so nice."
"Well, I'm mostly bad."
GB (wanders into the office where I'm working): So. What do you want to do with me?
***
A few things have happened since the last time I wrote. Yes, my book is coming out! Also, SJ and I got our first vaccinations; I started smoking cannabis; and the pets have been on a rampage of pooping, peeing, and barfing inside the house. I’m talking Every. Fucking. Day.
They must have a schedule. Like they wake up early and consult each other, like the dog says to the cat: "Do we have today covered? I pooped in the kids' room yesterday, so if today you could take over barfing on the rug Jenny bought in Oaxaca — extra points for getting the barf to splash UP onto the part of the quilt that's hanging down off the bed — I would really appreciate it."
That was me Saturday morning, waking up at 5:30 a.m. to the sound of the cat retching I SURE WISH SOMEONE HAD TOLD ME THAT ONCE MY KID STOPPED BARFING AND POOPING ON THE FLOOR THE ANIMALS WOULD TAKE OVER in the same spot on the bedroom floor where he barfed a few days ago. That was me, throwing the cat and doing laundry in the dark. The day before, I'd walked out of the bathroom for ONE SECOND to get an extra pad for the litter box (we have a fancy, no-smell litter box with diaper pads in the bottom to catch the cat's pee), and came back to the FUCKING cat hanging off the side, as is his habit, peeing into the cat box that had just been emptied of its diaper pad. Except the pee was going straight through the plastic grate onto the floor.
Also, our dog is 16, mostly deaf, and over it and for the better part of a year has been pooping and peeing inside the house if we don't proactively shove her outside 10 times a day.
Which brings me to cannabis.
***
I exhort GB, as I do multiple times a day, to please wash his hands with soap after he pees. As usual, he refuses. He sits on the side of the tub with his arms crossed on his chest.
"Just let me go on with my day," he mutters.
He's still my little parrot: Apropos of nothing, one morning over breakfast he says sadly, "I wish we lived in a different country."
(Also, he will snuggle up to me and say, "I love it when it's just you and me.")
SJ and I ask that he “participate” in his Zoom karate classes, instead of, for example, launching himself from the shelf onto the couch or sitting behind the laptop while his wonderful teacher goes over down block, high block, inside block, outside block. As usual, GB turns this around on us: Later in the week he gets mad at his dad because his dad is not "parpicipating in playing musical instruments with me."
At bedtime SJ makes the magic toothbrush sing, which it doesn't usually do (normally it talks in a high-pitched voice about how excited it is to be brushing GB's teeth).
"I like your conthusiasm," GB tells his dad.
He has to poop first thing in the morning, a little unusual (his time is the afternoon or evening). He pulls down his cow pajamas and sits on the toilet seat, but then slides off.
"It's cold," he says. He opens the cabinet door. "I want the blower thing."
"You want me to warm up the toilet seat with the hair dryer?"
"Yes."
"Don't do it!" SJ yells from the kitchen.
"Why, because I'll set a precedent?"
SJ nods and gives me a look.
I look at GB. He bursts into fake tears.
I blow-dry the toilet seat.
***
I wrote last time about finally trying the vape pen my sister-in-law left in our house when she visited from Oregon more than a year ago. For the first couple of months, I was CBD oil only, since that was what she left us and I wasn't brave or motivated enough to try anything else. That shit was WORKING, too, especially the part where, since cannabis is now legal in California and it's a pandemic, the local dispensary will DELIVER TO MY HOUSE. I feel some sort of something when I run out to the street to meet my driver, lean into the car to show them my ID, and pay with my debit card (cash only), since this is how you USED to buy weed (minus the ID and the debit card), but it used to be against the law. Mostly I feel like a Big. Ass. Dork, standing there in my middle-aged middle-class-ness and clogs I associate with pregnancy. So far all the drivers have been Russian.
One time, they put this thing called a "pre-roll" in the bag, and it's mostly THC. THC is the stuff that gets you "high," whereas CBD is the stuff that relaxes your body. THC is what I've spent 25 years avoiding, because that was the part that never agreed with me. THC was the part that had college me, all cargo shorts and hairy legs, rocking in a corner, unable to speak, somehow shaking when I was supposed to be relaxed. (One friend had an experience I can relate to, wherein he smoked some pot at a bluegrass festival and spent the next four hours trying to figure out whether or not he’d pooped his pants.) I hated THC.
Well: Times, and weed, done changed. Do you know about this stuff?? Cannabis is AMAZING. Once a day, around 5 p.m., I take this same pre-roll out to the laundry room, light it a tiny bit, inhale a tiny bit and don't hold it for too long, and instantly feel relaxed and motivated ALL AT THE SAME TIME and when SJ gets home with GB, I hang out with my kid doing pretend play for a half-hour straight, if not more. Sometimes I think I'm tripping because I feel like I'm getting into his brain, that I’m understanding my son on a deeper level. I have no motivation to fight with anyone, my food tastes amazing, bath time is fun, and I go to bed early and, I swear to god, have good dreams. When I wake up in the morning, I'm rested and happy.
"We have to get this again," I told SJ last week. "I have to figure out what this is."
So I put on my reading glasses and, feeling Very Old, called the dispensary.
"Hi!" I said to the young, incredibly enthusiastic manager. "Can I ask a couple of dumb questions? What is the kind of cannabis that makes you awake, not sleepy?"
"Oh, that's sativa," he said. And then I read him everything on the side of the plastic sleeve for the pre-roll and he used his computer thing to figure out the percentage of THC I should be looking for when I buy another one. Which will be soon, because I have gone more than a week without alcohol, I have stopped treating my anxiety with microdoses of Klonopin, I feel deeply connected to my kid, and I sleep like a fucking baby WHOEVER MADE UP THAT IDIOM SHOULD BE TAKEN TO THE STOCKS AT DAWN BABIES. DON’T. SLEEP. Cannabis + Lexapro = my dream team. YAY DRUGS.
***
I’m folding up an extra duvet, but before I put it on the closet shelf, I say, "Gargantubaby, when you go to bed in there [meaning his room], are you too cold, too hot, or OK?”
"Too scared," he says. (He doesn’t like sleeping by himself and 100% ends up in my bed because I am a failure.)
Here's some spending money, says my son, handing me a penny.
We’re all playing hide-and-go-seek in the dark (this is before the clocks changed). SJ and I are hiding in Stepdaughter and Gargantubaby's room. They come in looking for us, and GB starts to get nervous, so SD offers to bring him out to the living room where there’s a little light.
From my hiding place in the closet, I can hear her reassuring him by saying, "It’s only Mommy and Daddy. They can’t do that much damage. And also I sprayed monster spray everywhere, so there aren’t any monsters."
"I farted," GB tells her seriously. "So many times."
At breakfast, GB spoons two kinds of jelly onto his peanut butter and jelly bread.
"It's jelly-riffic!" I say. "That's like 'terrific,' but with jelly."
"It's big, it's enormous, it's huge!" he says.
"Those are synonyms!" I say happily, smelling a teaching moment. "A synonym is a word that means the same thing as another word. Can you say synonym?"
"Sy-no-nym."
"Can you think of a synonym for 'small'?"
"Hmm. Maybe kuh-zhun-jah?"
***
After weeks of turning down various friends who encouraged us to get the vaccine by lying and saying we worked with them, SJ and I have a legitimate reason to get vaccinated: He's organizing a weekly garbage pickup in the garden on our block with the neighbor kids, so we're officially working with kids. Separately, a week apart, we go to the vaccination site in our neighborhood, the domed disaster tents set up on a side street, and with absolutely no fanfare or hassle or appointment, are vaccinated within about a half hour each.
It's the Moderna vaccine; we both have soreness around the injection site, and SJ feels a little sick the next day, but that's it. Voila, we're vaccinated.
The lightness takes a few days to kick in (and hoo boy does it kick in OH THE LIGHTNESS AT THE END OF THIS LONG FUCKING TUNNEL). But those first few hours and days felt oddly … the same.
"I don't know why I can't just be in a good mood about it," I say to SJ a couple days after my shot. "That's great that we can travel again, but now that means I have to go back to planning all that travel."
SJ agrees: "It wasn't like I was ecstatically happy before the pandemic. I was just sort of trudging along. Barely keeping my head above water."
***
SJ: I bought Mommy something special from the farmer's market. Something that rhymes with "cloister"!
Jenny: Oysters! I'm impressed. Does anything else rhyme with "oyster"?
SJ: I don't think so. I got a little nervous after I said "rhymes with."
I lay down with GB in his bed, but he won't go the fuck to sleep, so I get up to move back into my bed, where SJ is sleeping on a bare mattress instead of making the bed like I fucking asked him to. GB follows me into our room and sits right in the middle of our fight. He tells me I need to be nice to Daddy, so I kick him out of our room. Later that night GB has a bad dream and comes back into our room, so in the morning we wake up together, as usual. I ask him if he wants to talk about what happened the night before. He pretends — pretty well — that he doesn't remember that I kicked him out of our room. Confused, I describe in more and more detail what happened, and he keeps it up until finally he smiles and says, I remember.
Well, do you want to tell me how you feel? I feel bad for yelling.
I feel good for loving you, he says.
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I would like to apologize to my cousin Kaila Rain, writer of the hilarious Single Eating ("I'm a 26-year-old virgin who can’t drive" I MEAN) and baker of all things by scratch, because for this quiche I used the Pillsbury premade crust SJ brought home from Safeway, and it was buttery and flaky and I liked it just fine JUST DON'T READ THE INGREDIENTS. Also, I don't follow a recipe for quiche — I just look up a random recipe online and vamp from there based on what I have. For this one I guess you need:
5 eggs
¾ cup of whole milk (or so)
Leftover roasted broccoli and asparagus, chopped
1 cup mushrooms, chopped
1 block sharp white cheddar cheese
Fresh oregano, chopped
Fresh thyme, chopped
Fresh basil, chopped
Salt and pepper
Olive oil and butter
Store-bought crust, unfrozen (I used this one.)
9-inch dish. Somehow we ended up with one from Le Creuset WHAT WHAT. I literally do not know where it came from. Maybe Kaila?
You need to:
Turn oven on to I seriously do not remember. Three something.
Sauté mushrooms in butter, olive oil, oregano, thyme, salt, and pepper until they turn brown and yummy.
Whisk eggs in a large bowl and pour in milk.
Grate cheese.
Stir cheese, leftover veggies, and basil into eggs. Season with more salt and pepper (oh, this is a good tip for quiche: Season the ingredients before adding them to the eggs if you want it to taste like anything, like you’re doing with the mushrooms.) Wait until mushrooms cool to put them in the eggs because maybe they'll cook the eggs if they're hot?
Unroll crust and pinch into 9-inch dish.
Pour in egg mixture.
Cook until a knife comes out clean.
Delicious with a green salad with chopped green onions and a lemony olive oil dressing!