Category parenting

Monday brings Crying Clouds to Moscow

Angel Ackerman Leave a comment

Upon waking, thankfully after a good night’s sleep as the second night is usually when jet lag holds M and I hostage. My daughter slept through the night even though she’s never experiences the rigors of international travel before.

The breakfast at the restaurant was full so the maitre d’ sent us to the VIP lounge on the sixth floor. It gave us a wonderful view of the neighborhood below us. I hadn’t brought my phone so no photos. Sad face.

I had a taste of the pancakes and cheese cake pancake things, a couple broiled sausages, porridge, an aloe vera mango drink, two cappucinos and a bottle of water. For dessert, I had a chocolate muffin with these chocolate crispy balls on top.

Daughter says breakfast had a few quirks. She ate her weight in sausages and bacon, had a couple potato wedges and a little danish. I gave her a watermelon yogurt drink and suggested she try the caviar, but she did not. She didn’t like any of the pancakes or similar items.

We headed into the streets, a downpour out there. We walked down to Red Square but St. Basil’s doesn’t open until one.

We ended up taking a walk and visiting the RYM (I’m not taking the time to use the cyrillic alphabet) shopping mall. That basically became a voyage of escalators and stairs. That’s what the child wanted to do. I gave her 500 rubles spending money.

Throughout the mall, the displays featured a tribute to Russian athletes, of the current and Soviet Union days.

Stopped in the hotel room to dry out. Off to more adventures soon.

 

 

 

Goodbye, Paris. Hello, Moscow.

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Our traveling companion M took us on a walk through Barbès where my daughter made some French/Algerian friends in one of the shops. The people there tried to get her to speech French and Arabic and gave her a piece of candy. She noted the difference between standard touristy Paris and the so-called immigrant presence in the outer districts, seeing Africans and Arabs. I use the term so-called immigrants because of how the French consider even second generation citizens “immigrants.”

We walked up to Sacre Ceour. Lil Miss didn’t realize it was on the top of a hill. She just thought it was tall. But she was a trooper walking up the hill. And M showed her the Eiffel Tower in the distance.We wandered half way down the hill and she spotted the funicular. We had a metro ticket for the day so we actually walked back UP to Sacre Ceour and rode the funicular down.

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Funicular to Sacre Couer

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View from Sacre Coeur

Dinner was at Le Magenta, another place where I have eaten before. I ordered a two course meal for each of us, with Lil Miss trying to overcome her fear of using French words. I suggested the restaurant based on past experience and as soon as she saw they served escargot she was in.  She ordered six escargot in a bourgogne sauce. In the photo, she looks a tad intimidated but in reality she was merely focused on getting those snails out of their shells. I asked her why she liked them and she said it was because she loved getting them out of their shells. I suppose she’s like a cat and needs to play with her food.

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She also had a duck thigh which came artfully arranged on potato wedges and slivers of tomatoes that resembled flower petals.

The walk back to the hotel was exhausting, not because it was far but because of the jet lag and the nine miles we had walked. Lil Miss showered, collapsed into bed. In the morning, we were on the RER early returning to CDG-Roissy.

In the Air France lounge, Lil Miss made an amazing discovery. 1. She LIKES croissants. She has insisted for years that she doesn’t like plain croissant. I have countered, for years, that it’s because she hasn’t tasted one in France.

She ate five or six plain croissants and two pain au chocolat. She also learned how to read French jam labels, though she thought the “orange” was orange marmalade and it turned out to be bitter orange. An adjective makes a big difference.

IMG_3928.JPGThe plane from Paris to Moscow was on an Airbus A318, a big change from the Boeing 777. I discovered this morning a lovely note from the TSA that apparently gave my bag a check before it left the States. Not that I noticed.

We navigated the Moscow airport with no problem and child kept trying to compliment the female customs agent on her pretty eye makeup. Overall, she’s a good kid but we’re working on NOT spurting out every thought in her head to the entire universe.

We even navigated the Moscow subway. The majestic tunnels, architecture and details in the stations. Every train looks completely different. Some old, some new. Very colorful.

We had Russian-style beef dumplings with a butter and sour cream sauce for dinner in a little restaurant off Red Square where to Lil Miss’s delight they had American music videos playing. Calvin Harris and the Disciples: “How Deep is Your Love?”

Child compared Moscow to an urban New York feel. Paris seems smaller and offers more recreation. She thought Moscow was more exotic while Paris felt more like an American town.

And the best so far–

“All I know about Russia is what I see on CNN and they don’t have nice things to say.”

That’s my baby. Now when you go back to school, set them straight.

 

 

Arrival in Paris

Angel Ackerman 1 Comment

My daughter was fascinated by every stage in the airports. Luggage, security, the lounge, the jetway, the plane. She loved take-off. She loved landing. She loved airplane food.


But Paris didn’t get quite the reaction I hoped for. She yelled in her boldest American voice, “It’s just like ‘Merica only better decorated.” And that the people carry themselves “so dignified.”


The two hours sleep she got on the plane and the one nap in the hotel had started to wear off… We headed down to the patisserie around the corner where we had pastry and café crême. Well, pain au raisin and pain au chocolat and hot chocolate for the traveler.

Then off to what she wanted to see–

I.M. Pei’s Pyramids at the Louvre.


We walked from Pont Neuf to Musée Orsay along the Seine and the took #7 train from the Louvre to Gare de L’Est and meandered back to the hotel across the street from Gare de Nord.

Passport Panic

Angel Ackerman Leave a comment

Normally before vacation, I pack and unpack. I rehearse exotic languages. I google and read books. 

Not this time.

This time my 12-year-old daughter and I, with my traveling companion, will head to Paris for the day Saturday and then Russia for a week.

Today we had a lil “come to Jesus” meeting about her room. And she was told to clean it before we started packing. My plan was to get her packed (after seven years of summer camp, she got this) and take her for a one mile or so walk around the neighborhood as training for navigating airports and subway stations.

She organized her bags like a trooper. And then I asked her to pull our travel paperwork. Money, passports, notarized documents from her father saying she could travel with me, vaccination records…

“Mommy, your passport isn’t here.”

What?!?!

We checked my purse, the car, ripped the drawers out of furniture. I checked under the bed. I checked lunch boxes. 

I had it out to use it as identification when I needed fingerprints last week, for my position as a graduate assistant at West Chester University. I called the fingerprint office.

After an hour of ransacking my house, my friend reminds me that we stopped at the grocery store 15 miles from my house so she could buy sesame oil.

I call them. A nice young man named Jeff tells me they have a passport and he thinks it’s mine. 

I drive out.

It is.

A Day in Asbury Park

Angel Ackerman 1 Comment

My daughter asked to go to the beach for her birthday outing. So as a family, we decided on Asbury Park, one of several Jersey Shore points that host Volkksport walks. Last year, my daughter and I did a similar day trip to Barnegat.
We didn’t arrive until close to noon since we didn’t alter the morning routine and then we hit traffic. It’s an easy 90-minute drive from my home to Asbury Park. Their on-street metered parking was extremely reasonable and easy-to-use. 


We first went to the Twisted Tree Cafe, keeper of the Volkksport “walk box” where I had iced dirty chai, child had iced chai, and I also bought a very, very scrumptious vegan ginger cookie. (The total for two chains and two bottles of water was $13.70 and the cookie was $1.50 which I found amusing since six hours of parking cost me $12. But the chai was so good the child kept asking to go back for more and was willing to spend all of her birthday money on chai. So, if that’s not an endorsement I don’t know what is.)


The only complaint I have was that for some reason the café smelled so strongly of onions that my eyes burned. My family noticed it too.
But before we went on our walk, we had to do some potential shopping. You see, there was a paranormal and curiosities shop next to the cafe and a store called Fetish across the street. My husband bought a glass with a ouija board on it at Paranormal. The owner of that shop keeps her merchandise so beautiful and organized it’s a joy to walk through. She has each of her crystals nicely labeled in mason jars. She refers to it as her apothecary system. 

Fetish had some gorgeous clothes, jewelry, collars and lingerie. I fell in love with some brown cowboy boots with laces up the side. Functioning laces. As someone who wore cowboy boots for several years, they enticed me because of my attraction to cowboy-booty and my fascination of things that lace and tie. 


From there we started the volkksport walk with the hope to do the 10K. It was lobster fest at Asbury Park today and some other bridge festival too. The walk is an out-and-back on the boardwalk. Sadly, we made it about a half-mile from the turn-around point on the 10K before we were all a little cranky. And we missed the drawbridge!


But my husband bought me a floppy sun hat. And I would have had a $5 tarot card reading but the lady looked really unapproachable. 


We had massive sandwiches at Vintage Subs: roast beef, salami, turkey and capicola with provolone, oil, vinegar and oregano.
Then, my daughter got to swim in the ocean and I read half a Cosmo magazine. Life is good.


My husband had to drag her from the water (perhaps not literally) and in a quest for water, they somehow managed to score a free full size pizza from a vendor at one of the festivals. 
She picked what appears to be a mussel from the beach and it isn’t dead. It keeps cracking open its shell and doing something. She grabbed it at low tide and now, out of guilt, tossed it in a tupperware container of water. 

Chicken pitch a success!

Angel Ackerman Leave a comment

So, much of my recent time has been spent pondering what I want from my life and I keep saying that I want to write more and publish more. (And then I see sentences like that opening one I just wrote for this blog entry and think maybe I need to revisit my grammar skills.)

I keep saying that I’m going to write more and pitch more.

And I don’t.

I say I’m busy. I’m tired. I don’t have time. I work too much.

Well, in the fall, I had a success with Step Away Magazine publishing my Paris poem. And in January, I pitched an old essay I wrote about my daughter learning to take care of chickens when a friend of a friend went on vacation. I pitched it to Hobby Farms magazine. The editor there responded promptly that he would keep it on file.

A few minutes ago I received the notification that my piece will appear in the July/August issue of the magazine.

My portfolio grows more eclectic by the day.

 

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Adieu, my cat Zoot

Angel Ackerman Leave a comment

I rescued my cat Zoot after Christmas 1999. At the time, I babysat my nephew every Tuesday night so my brother and his wife could have date night.

My nephew was preschool age, and for some reason, my brother and his wife decided to adopt two kittens, freshly weened from their mother. Their logic was that they had heard “cats were easy.”

“Cats are easy,” I replied. “But you didn’t get a cat. You got kittens, not even one, but two kittens.”

They clawed the tablecloth. Ripped up house plants. Caused a ruckus all night long.

The one was docile and loving. The other wouldn’t take poop from anybody.

That second one was Zoot.

My nephew liked to carry the kittens with their neck in his elbow. In a spirit of self-preservation, Zoot scratched him. This and other incidents led my brother to chase Zoot around the house, fling her down the basement stairs, and swat her with a broom.

But whenever I visited, and put the kids to bed, she would come out from hiding and curl against my neck using my then-shoulder-length hair as a blanket.

And she’d purr. As if saying, “save me.”

Christmas came and went. My sister-in-law pulled me aside and told me if I didn’t take Zoot she would have to take the cat to the shelter to keep my brother from killing her.

I asked my husband. We had married October 30, 1999. We had a tiny ramshackle apartment. He said, “I guess.”

I could tell countless stories about her. But to summarize, I never cried or napped alone. She liked to watch me wash dishes. When my daughter was born, Zoot always there whenever the baby cried. She loved company.

I taught her to sit and give her paw for a treat. So whenever I had anything she wanted, she would sit down and put her paw on my arm.

She also tended to crawl in bed and spread her body between me and my husband. And she would sit on me if it looked like my husband might be interested in hanky-panky.

  
Today, my husband took her to the vet for her final sleep.

To my surprise, my daughter went and stayed with Zoot the whole time.

  
So, in my weakness, I got to see how strong my daughter is.

The Easter basket parenting win

Angel Ackerman 1 Comment

My daughter will turn 12 in June. We have a lot of tween meltdowns. We have difficulty communicating sometimes. 

This morning I stepped outside to write in my journal. I’ve been working a lot of extra hours, making my part-time retail job a full-time one.

So I needed some peace and sun.

My daughter approached me one paragraph later. She wore her mopey face. I asked what was wrong.

For the sake of brevity, I will skip the pleading and cajoling that went into getting her to reveal her complaint.

My friend Gayle had said to her that her mother always said you didn’t buy something until you had the money for it.

“I have a savings account,” she says, “and it has a lot of money in it, but I can’t touch it.”

I explain to her she can touch it, but that money is for big purchases: summer camp, someday when she wants a car or needs a security deposit for her first apartment.

I also ask, “what are you pining for?”

“Well, it’s stupid,” she says, “but I told you months ago that I wanted a new doll and you said you would consider it and you haven’t said anything.”

Months is an exaggeration, for the record. The doll in question is a $10 Draculaura Monster High Doll.

Now I know I bought her that doll and a Frankie Stein doll as the focus of her Easter basket. But she’s in full drama and feeling dejected.

I go in the house and get the shoe box containing her goodies. I haven’t wrapped them or retrieved her literal basket. I hand her the box.

“Should you chose to open that, it’s the contents of your Easter basket. There will be nothing for Sunday. It’s your call.”

She opened it.

 She found the dolls.

  
So I told her, “You need to have faith in us, we are listening. We just don’t always do what you want when you want it.”

The wonder and brilliance of children

Angel Ackerman 1 Comment

I am far from a perfect parent. I show my daughter my strength and also my weakness. 

I love children. If I had more patience, I would have spent more time with as many of them as possible. 

A little boy occasionally comes into the store where I work in the café. I believe he comes with his grandmother and by the time they reach me, she seems exasperated. And I know why.

They have their shopping bags. They are ready to leave. She offers him a pizza.

He’s about four and he never stops talking. And I try my best not to interrupt him because my manners need to demonstrate how people listen to and engage others. Then the questions start.

It’s Easter week. The store is busy. At this particular moment, I’m momentarily caught up and there’s no one waiting. 

So I answer his questions. These aren’t dumb questions, these are “how things work” questions. What is that light? What’s that sound? I explain everything he asks about, even though his grandparent clearly wants to go. But he’s processing, he’s learning, and maybe someday he’ll be a scientist or an engineer because of this interest in how things work.

But now, my daughter.

I frequently help my friend Nancy with her writing career. Nancy is an essayist and poet. She’s also blind so sending an email, managing submissions and finding writing markets can be challenging with a sighted person at a computer. Her diligence and prolific work habits inspire me so the relationship is mutually beneficial.

My daughter is on spring break so she joined Nancy and I at Dunkin Donuts where I sipped iced coffee flavored with pistachio and Nancy drank her vanilla chai. And we even had donuts!

When we were done working, my daughter piped in.

She thought it would be interesting if we all wrote flash nonfiction about the morning to see the different perspectives. Nancy and I were thrilled. We set word counts and pledged to write and submit this piece.

Daughter and I did ours. We love them. Can’t wait to see what Nancy does.

Made possible because we listened to a child. 

State Parks Weekend with the Liberty Bell Wanderers

Angel Ackerman 1 Comment

I have had a great month in October. My boot is off. I had a fantastic ortho who released me from his care on Wednesday (Thanks, Dr. Sacco.) I also have a team of physical therapists who have taught me so much in the four short weeks we’ve been together. (And I will probably have my final session with them on Monday.)

This weekend my family and I joined the Liberty Bell Wanderers in Willow Grove where we will visit four state parks. Today we walked 10 miles on trails and more around town.

We arrived at the hotel where most of the group was staying at 8 a.m. We were on the road fairly early for our first stop: a 10K walk through Fort Washington State Park. By about mile 4.5 my ankle had that mild soreness, but we came upon a playground so the swings, monkey bars and, no lie, FOUR WAY SEE-SAW soon made me forget a twinge of discomfort.

Oh! And we saw hawks swirling around at the Hawk Observation Deck.

Lunch was at Feliz Cantina. There we experienced a true culinary miracle: gaucamole with candied pecans, bacon and blue cheese. And I tried fish tacos. And I liked them!

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We went back to the hotel where we moved from (my friend and fellow walker) Gayle’s room to our room. She’s staying with us tonight. After a very brief respite, we headed out to Tyler State Park which reminded me of our local park, Jacobsburg.

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We only attempted a 5K, and to keep child happy we let her take photos of people’s dogs. I’ll have to do a count and perhaps a gallery of her dog photos.

Once again we found ourselves at the Hampton Inn in Willow Grove where child immediately hopped in the shower. I had brought cake pops from Starbucks, microwave popcorn and board games in my suitcase. Gayle and I went out for beverages (found a 7-eleven a half mile away) and somehow ended up with a pizza. On foot.

We had pizza, cake and chocolate milk and played Ticket to Ride (the board game). Child crawled in bed without a fight at 7:45.