Zeno's Bar & Grill

Not even a month ago, we read the dazzling article (“How to Get Into College by Really, Really Trying” in the NY Times) about a Harvard undergrad who also just happened to have a penned a hot new book, “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life”.

Darn it, we thought. There’s someone who’s practically an infant, and she has a published book. Well, not so fast. Turns out a large number of passages in her book were cribbed (“unintentionally and unconsciously” according to the author, Kaavya Viswanathan) from the books of Megan McCafferty. Publisher’s Marketplace provides a PDF file of all the known instances of plagiarism in the book.

Is this yet another data point on the risks and benefits of the whole ubercompetitive parenting trends of the new millennium? The original NY Times article describes Ms. Viswanathan as “taking part in the full panoply of enrichment programs and extracurricular activities that have become the birthright of the Ivy bound -- summers at the Center for Talented Youth, a Johns Hopkins University program for gifted children; editor in chief of her school newspaper; advanced placement courses at her magnet high school in Hackensack, N.J.” Her parents even shelled out tens of thousands of dollars to IvyWise, a college counseling firm. For someone like this, publishing a novel before age twenty while taking courses at Harvard seems like the logical next act.

Ms. Viswanathan did indeed get her novel, but at what cost? Maybe it would have been better to retain her integrity and just set the bar a tad lower.

--Melanie & Kelly

Pull up a chair and pop open a Pacifico. It's time for Thirsty Thursday. Join us if you want, invite a friend, and/or come back next week when we'll have a new Special. Today’s theme…Playdate Etiquette

Do you let the kids watch TV on a playdate?
Melanie: Only rarely. It’s such a hot button issue, I just prefer to avoid it. Luckily, the kids seem to prefer running around and spying on me anyway.

Kelly: It depends on the mom. Some of the moms I know are pretty strict about television viewing, and so for them the TV stays off the whole time. For other kids, I’ll let them watch one show, especially if I feel like the playing is getting a bit too wild and the energy level needs to come down a notch or twenty.


Do you do drop offs if you’ve never met the mom?
Melanie: I am awful. I couldn’t do it. I'm probably way overprotective. Also, there are some kids where even if I've met the family, I don’t want my kids to go to their place—based on data I’ve gathered on previous visits (violent TV on in background when I picked up, for example). I’ll bend over backwards and tie myself in a pretzel to get their kid to come to our house instead of vice versa. I hope that keeps working.

Kelly: Up until this year, the answer has been an unequivocal “no”. But, at the same time it was easy, my oldest was still in preschool, so it was accepted that you could tag along on a date or two. Plus, I knew the parents anyway. Now, it is less so and I’ll let them go if I know someone who knows the mom. Otherwise I’ll suggest the date be at my house.

Do you ask about guns in the house?
Melanie: I know I should, but I haven’t so far. My kids don’t go on playdates that often, so I guess I’m just avoiding a lot of these issues. Coward! (slaps self)

Kelly: Unfortunately, not directly. I do try to bring up this question in big groups to kind of suss out who has one. I’ve also talked to my kids about what to do if the child they are playing with brings out a gun.

Don’t worry about picking up the latest Newsweek. Several of the stories we’ve already talked about right here at Zeno’s. Women not sleeping, check. Cervical cancer vaccine, got it. Zillow? What do you think?

--Kelly and Melanie

I’ve decided that I want to put Mexican tile on the risers of the stairs leading to my living room. The New York Times had an article about tiles and led me to a great site called Tierra Y Fuego. Since Sunday, I’ve been working non-stop on assembling the right mix of tiles. I copy the picture of the tile and paste to a word document, then I print them out and arrange. And, yes, I must admit I’ve actually taped my sample strips to the riser. In my defense, there are a lot of tiles to choose from and they’re pretty expensive (about 3 dollars a tile), so I want to make sure I get it just right. Also, the stairs aren’t all the same length, so I need two patterns of 11, one of 12, one of 13, and one of 14. Feel free to check out the site and weigh in with your suggestions. Go to the Talavera Tile section on the site.

--Kelly

Apparently things aren’t all sauerbraten and smiles in Germany on the mommy wars either. As reported in Sunday’s NY Times, the buzz word there is rabenmutter, which translates to raven mother. It refers to women “who leave their children in an empty nest while they fly away to pursue a career.” Despite the nasty moniker, the Germans seem to be on the right track overall. The first female chancellor, Angela Merkel, has nominated a mother of seven to hold the position of minister for family affairs. One of her more interesting proposals would require fathers to take at least two months off from work in order for the family to receive the full twelve months of paid maternity leave. This is a really clever idea. It gets men more involved with their children from the start and helps to level the playing field at work as well.

--Kelly & Melanie

We went to a silent auction fundraiser on Saturday night for my daughter’s school, and I made a boo boo. There was a silent auction item where you sign up to go to a poker night at someone’s house. Now, if you’ve been reading this blog, you know that Kelly and I both like to play poker, and do it fairly often. So, of course my husband and I both signed up at the top of the list. Nowhere did it say men's poker night, yadda yadda. Obviously, I assumed it was co-ed.

Lo and behold at end of night I'm the only woman on the list, and someone tells me they plan to have cigars, masseuses etc!!! I felt like such an idiot. Actually, I felt like the character Jane, from our novel.

Naturally, I removed my name. But it was so odd to me that everyone was supposed to assume it was a men's hoo hah just because it was called Poker Night. I mean, poker is hot. It’s gone way beyond the stodgy old boy’s night out. Haven’t they ever heard of Annie Duke? Even celebrity poker has female players.

--Mel

To drugs for your kids, that is. There was an article widely reported in the press last week about parents who use Benadryl to keep their young children quiet on planes. A poll on babycenter.com got the usual flames going by the people who sedate vs. those who don’t. Though from my experience the people on babycenter can get just as incensed over whether it’s better to spell Kelly with a y or an i.

With our first babies, we were horrified at such an idea, but over time and air miles logged, a teaspoonful of the pink stuff starts to seem like a more pragmatic—not to mention humane solution (for everyone including the baby). Our theory is that it’s one of those parenting things that you kind of let go of as you have more kids and get more frazzled, kind of like opening up to the possibility that every single toy they own doesn’t have to be handmade of renewable wood with vegetable dyes.

--Kelly & Melanie

What is this Clorox ad trying to say about the status of women in the modern era?
We totally get the rest of them. The twenties/thirties liberated flapper, the forties USO gal, the 50’s blonde bombshell movie actress, the sixties mod chick, the seventies career woman…all of them doing fun, exciting things that symbolize the age in which they lived. And then the preggo at the end. Does this mean that the very best we can hope for is to have lots of babies??? Seriously, why on earth would a pregnant woman symbolize the new millennium woman? This was from People magazine, not a mommy magazine. What is going on?

--Melanie & Kelly

Pull up a chair and pop open a Pacifico. It's time for Thirsty Thursday. Join us if you want, invite a friend, and/or come back next week when we'll have a new Special. Today’s theme…Our Memoirs

What is the title of your autobiography?
Melanie: Forty Below

Kelly: A Tale of Two Women

What age figures most prominently in your memoir?
Melanie: My childhood in Alaska, which shaped me more than anything. Plus, it has so many potential great scenes, from living in our teepee to herding musk oxen on a motorbike.

Kelly: I hope it will be my fifties and sixties. I feel like I’m stumbling on to my path in life and that the best is yet to come. Of course, if our books manages to hit it big, maybe the memoir will revolve around how Melanie and I came to be friends and write an international best seller.

Who would play you in the movie version?
Melanie: Kate Winslet, of course. What’s that you say? You haven’t noticed the resemblance? Mmm Hmm. That’s what they told Erin Brockovich when she suggested Julia Roberts and look how well that turned out.

Kelly: Scarlett Johansson. I’ve had people tell me that I look like her. Though, unfortunately more in her unglamorous role in Lost in Translation than in her sexier persona in Match Point.

This dude is aiming to convert one red paper clip into ownership of his own home. Sounds crazy, but so far, he’s gotten a year’s free shelter in an Arizona duplex. We hope he succeeds, because we have hundreds of paper clips in our desks right now. By our calculations that makes us potential billionaires.

--Melanie & Kelly

A few months ago I wrote a post about a documentary called The Real Dirt on Farmer John. On Saturday we visited his farm. I wanted to learn more about the farm and to show my kids where the vegetables we will eat this summer come from. His farm is a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) Farm and we are shareholders. Each week, starting in mid-June, we will get a box of vegetables grown organically, a mere 80 miles away.

I had so much fun visiting the farm. My husband and son thought it was kind of boring, though my son did concede that it was less boring than the windmill tour I dragged them on when we were in Palm Springs. One part we all enjoyed, however, was seeing the animals – horses, chickens, kittens, and baby goats. We got to hold a baby goat and one particularly friendly chicken. It was almost enough to tip me over the edge to being a full-time vegetarian instead of just a wanna-be. We were able to bring some eggs home and they were fantastic. The yolk was so much darker than the eggs I buy in the store. The educator from the farm told me it was because the chickens eat a varied diet high in vitamin A. She also said that one time they fed them some peppers and the yolks turned bright red. It would be fun to use those for Deviled Eggs!

I’m looking forward to receiving our vegetables and hopefully roping the family into another visit.

--Kelly

We’ve probably all noticed that trans fats have disappeared from the grocery store landscape seemingly overnight. And nutrition labels now include trans fats explicitly. But how much is too much?

I, for one, am used to thinking about fat as being something where a few grams is considered “low fat”. I assumed trans fats were the same deal, so I kept buying my favorite PB crackers for the kids, which contain about 4 grams of trans fats. They’re cheap, they’re easy. What could possibly be bad about that?

An op-ed piece in the NY Times yesterday told me I’m wrong. It turns out that a daily intake of five grams of trans fats increases risk of heart disease up to 28%. There's apparently no safe level for trans fats. Buh bye, Costco peanut butter crackers.

The article also describes how regulations in America do not cover fast food. An order of fries and nuggets at McDonald’s (also another guilty parenting pleasure) delivers 10 grams of trans fats.

Maybe all those perfect moms making nutritious snacks were the ones who were right all along. I hate it when that happens.

--Melanie

What says Easter better than Peeps? And who knows more about Peeps than these guys. Check it out while enjoying your own multi-colored sugar confections. What’s not to love?

--Kelly and Melanie

I think I need to check in for a three-day follow up for my twelve step Perfect Momism Recovery program. We recovering Perfect Moms must be ever-vigilant for the signs of falling off the wagon. I don’t know if it’s the birthday season or what, but lots of little things are adding up to make me a tad nervous.

Exhibit A would be the excessive searching for “perfect” goodie bag items. I think I’m having fun, but what if it’s something more sinister? Did I really need to find the “flower theme” items at three different stores in town, plus one internet purveyor? I think not. But I’m having fun, and our birthday pact said that was okay, right? Right?

Then there would be the freaking out after my daughter tested into the GATE program. One would think that being able to join in the pull-out program at her school would be good enough, hmmm? But, no, now I’m thinking that she should be transferring into the school that has our district’s only standalone GATE classroom. They sent all the details about the lottery in the letter I got a few days ago. Many want to attend, but only the chosen few can. It’s getting ugly isn’t it? I’ve even started thinking idly about her college future. She’s eight for God’s sake. Make it stop, someone.

Finally, there’s the damn bathroom paint color. It’s a bathroom. Does it really matter what color it is? Apparently it does, since I’ve now tried Martha’s “Green Apple” and Sherwin-Williams’s “Dancing Green” in both full strength and 50% formula book recipes. Not to mention the debate over water-based versus oil-based. And tomorrow I fully intend to go and get me some “Gleeful Green” since none of the above was quite right. It’s downright scary.

Okay, there. I think I’ve made a full disclosure to the group. Thank you all for your support. I promise to turn over all my worries to a higher power and try harder not to be so perfectionistic. In fact, I’m not even going to fix that little punctuation error in paragraph 2.

--Melanie

A website called Zunafish lets you trade your used media (books, DVDs, CDs etc) for different titles from other people’s collections. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure and all that. It’s a buck a trade. Sounds pretty cool, but I’m worried because I don’t have the covers for any of our old videos. Not sure if that will fly or not, but I’m on the case.

--Melanie

Pull up a chair and pop open a Pacifico. It's time for Thirsty Thursday. Join us if you want, invite a friend, and/or come back next week when we'll have a new Special. Today’s theme…Your Significant Other.

Where did you meet your husband?

Kelly: In first class, on a plane from Washington National to Newark the day after Christmas. He was in DC visiting his brother and on his way home to San Francisco. I was in DC visiting a friend on my way to SF to visit another friend. The ticket agent upgraded me for the short flight to Newark and my husband-to-be used his last upgrade coupon so that I could continue being his seatmate for the long fight across the country. At the time I was living in Michigan, so when we landed he gave me his card with every possible way to get in touch with him (cell, home, work, email, fax). I emailed him once I was safely back in Michigan and we got married 10 months later.

Melanie: In Advanced Molecular Genetics at UCLA. We were assigned to the same study group because our last names started with the same letter. And now, of course, we have our own little genetics experiments.

What makes him significant?

Kelly: As I said in my earlier post, my husband is really my best friend and as clichéd as this sounds he makes me laugh. Being married to him is like being married to your favorite comedian that tailors his jokes just to you.

Melanie: Apparently I will never be able to drive him away. He seems to love me no matter what I do, which probably makes him one in a million, because I can be a doozy.

What makes him other?

Kelly: I think the hardest “other” we had to overcome was our arguing styles. I have/had kind of a flashing anger where I will lash out, but then feel better and want to for things to just go along as they were. This hurts his feelings and he becomes silent and withdrawn, which drives me crazy!

Melanie: Ummm, the fact that it often seems like we disagree about just about everything? Actually it’s not that bad. The last presidential election was the first time ever that our votes actually did not cancel each other out. That’s progress. Who knows, by our golden anniversary, we may have given up debating altogether. But I’m not holding my breath.

About a month ago Melanie did a post on her favorite children’s movie, My Neighbor Totoro. I meant to get the movie on Netflix, but never got around to it. This weekend, our babysitter left behind an animated Japanese movie called Spirited Away. I watched it with the kids and I was blown away. It was beautiful and the story was just incredible. And when I looked up the movie, the director was none other than Hayao Miyazaki, the same director as My Neighbor Totoro. You can bet that that movie has moved to the top of my Netflix queue.

--Kelly

Eight nurseries. Two straight days of gardening. Ten filthy black fingernails. One whacked head on a pine tree limb. Hundreds of dollars worth of plants, pots, soil, mulch and bark.

And my garden is only about 20% of the way to where it should be at this time of year.

Something just doesn’t add up here.

Actually, I’m kidding. I’m thrilled with our progress. Many thanks to Katharine, who so generously shares her time and talents every time she visits. Not only did she cook dinner for twelve at our house on Saturday, but she spent the next two days helping me with my side yard. Lucky me: she is a certified horticulturist and has her own landscape design company. She is going to do a plan for my back yard, and we’ll install that the next time she comes to visit.

--Melanie

P.S. Regarding my putative concussion courtesy of the Monterey Pine: I told my husband to watch out for any personality changes. So if he notices me being really nice and agreeing with him all the time, he promised he will call a neurologist.

Yesterday we went orienteering with another family. For the uninitiated, orienteering involves finding your way around a wooded area with only a map and compass. The idea is to find a flag with a hole-punch attached to it, you punch your card to prove you were there and then work your way to the next flag, also known as a control. Oh, and you are being timed. Of course, my son already knew all of this because he “saw it on television” (?!).

This was my first time, but orienteering is right up my alley, as I love competition, maps, and hiking in the woods. The kids got a little bit bored by the end, but next time I’ll have to get them more involved by helping me read the map and charting our course. It will hurt our time, but schlepping through the woods with a pre-schooler is pretty much a guarantee that we aren’t going to come in first anyway.

One final warning for the super-competitive people out there: When doing this with your spouse, be careful, because doing this could incite arguments worthy of The Amazing Race. Not that I would know, of course.

--Kelly

Thursday night I went to a surprise birthday party. The surprise, however, was on the guests. None of us knew that is was our hostess’s birthday! It was a fun evening with about twenty women in attendance, of whom I knew about half. The most interesting thing for me was that I’d never been in the company of such a large woman-only crowd.

I went to a small high school, and wasn’t in the “popular” crowd though I had a cadre of about four or five close girl friends. And then in college, I didn’t join a sorority and had an equal mix of guy and girl friends. Maybe it was because I went through the majority of my teen-age years without a mother, but I’ve never felt super comfortable around large groups of women.

Since having my own children and becoming a stay-at-home mother I’ve been plunged into a girls-only network, which I find fascinating and at times still a little strange. For instance, one of my closer friends has stopped speaking to me. We were supposed to go out two weeks ago and I was fifteen minutes late picking her up. She decided she didn’t want to go, we got into an argument the next day and I haven’t heard from her since. In our argument, she said she felt like I was treating her like an “afterthought”. I think that she wanted a “best friend” to go steady with and I am just playing the field. Besides, I really, honestly feel like my husband is my best friend.

I’d be really interested to know how you all balance family (I don’t want to say obligations, because I’m including the fun stuff too), and your friends. And do you have a "best" frined that you do the majority of your things with or do you have a larger network of more casual friends?

--Kelly

Mom on the Edge (Chilihead) had an interesting discussion going last week about privacy issues with blogging. It’s something we’ve thought a lot about as well. In fact, at one point, we even wrote a short article about it, although we didn’t end up submitting it anywhere.

It’s a little freaky how Google gets their sticky little fingers into everything. Not to mention horror stories like strangers stealing kids photos for their own nefarious uses. These things do happen, apparently, so some caution is warranted. We love the Groucho glasses that Chilihead uses as disguises in all her photos!

A lot of people use aliases and there’s a lively discussion on the pros and cons of this at Chilihead’s blog. We thought about that too, but since our blog was originally started to talk about our book, which will hopefully end up being published someday—we decided to use our real names. For the time being, however, we decided to keep our blog content off Google through strategic use of the no-cache, no-index commands. So in the meantime, if you’ve found us, it’s only through the blogging community (we are on Technorati, and of course read and comment on other blogs).

So that’s a long way of saying that we’re trying to have our cake and eat it too, without a helping of Google! Check out the discussion at Chilihead’s blog too—it’s really interesting.

--Melanie & Kelly

Pull up a chair and pop open a Pacifico. It's time for Thirsty Thursday. Join us if you want, invite a friend, and/or come back next week when we'll have a new Special. Today’s theme…Our State of Mind.

Where were you born?

Kelly: Pennsylvania. I spent my first 24 years there.

Melanie: New Joisey, but I can’t really claim to be a Jersey girl, even though most of my family was originally from there. We moved a few years later.


In which states have you lived?

Kelly: Pennsylvania, of course, Ohio, Michigan, California, and now Illinois.

Melanie: Alabama (and probably a few other Southern states that I can’t remember since I was a baby army brat), Alaska (spent ages 5-18 there), Hawaii (art school sabbatical for my mom), Oregon (college), California, (grad school), Pennsylvania (postdoc), California again (post-postdoc and beyond).

In which state would you most like to live (where you haven’t already)?

Kelly: New Mexico. Specifically, Santa Fe. I’ve never been there, but I’m really intrigued. It seems like a very laid back place, and the weather seems ideal. Four seasons, but without the extremes we get here in Chicago.

Melanie: Wah! Can’t we choose one where we already lived? That would be Oregon for me. But I digress. I guess I would choose New York, because I’ve always wanted to live in NYC.

Last weekend we went with some friends to the Santa Ynez wine country and took a new road we’d never tried before (Foxen Canyon). We brought the kids along (this is really common, since most tasting rooms have great outdoor spaces for them to run around). It was absolutely fabulous. The weather was perfect and everything looked so lush and green from all the rain we’ve had lately.

After an ill-fated stop at Fess Parker’s (my husband insisted for some reason), we went to Zaca Mesa, where I found the varietal I’ve been looking for since I first tried it: Roussanne. It’s very rare—only 300 acres are planted in California at present. I scored three bottles. Decadent, wasn’t it? Unfortunately, I didn’t get to taste much more than that, since I was the designated driver.

Then it was on to Foxen, which was featured in the movie Sideways, and is just as charming in person. It’s in a little roadside barn-like building…a far cry from some of the swanky tasting rooms, but even better in my opinion. I especially liked the tee-shirts reading: “If you don’t know Foxen, you don’t know Dick…or Bill” (invoking the owner and winemaker’s names). They seem to be the rebels of the winemaking world, and whatever they’re doing, it’s working. My husband got a bottle of their Syrah.

Finally, we went to Rancho Sisquoc, which is incredible…tucked way off from Foxen Canyon, which itself is just a tiny, winding road. The wine was delicious there, too, according to my spouse. True confession: we got another bottle here (Merlot).

It seemed somewhat miraculous to see all of this undeveloped land in such a prime area for urban development. A deer even ran across the road at one point. I hope it never changes. And, hey, we did our part to support the wine industry, didn’t we?

--Melanie

The giant SUV drives across the desert as the message “we sold ourselves for oil” scrolls across the screen, accompanied by that cheesy car-ad music we all know so well. The ad ends with a view of the interior of the new Tahoe, and the message “the ultimate padded cell.”

It’s just one of many DIY Chevy ads that have been popping up on the web this week. The website to create the ads was launched for a contest sponsored by Chevy. However, it’s the environmental parodies that are getting more attention than any sincere attempts to hawk the product.

The New York Times had an article about this today, and they raised the idea that Chevy may have very well known what would happen. And it’s probably true: you wouldn’t have been reading about the Tahoe in this space otherwise!

You can see plenty of the ads people have come up with at YouTube.

--Melanie & Kelly

Last night was book club night. This was my favorite book so far: All Over Creation by Ruth Ozeki. Two of the themes in the book really spoke to me. The first was about modern agriculture and the use of pesticides and GMO’s, but it wasn’t preachy and put a human face to these topics. The second, was about leaving your childhood home and becoming a different person and returning later. The book generated a great discussion and as a serendipitous surprise, the New York Times Magazine last week had a cover story by Michael Pollan, whose book The Botany of Desire influenced Ruth Ozeki to write All Over Creation. And, coincidentally, when looking up the hyperlink for Michael Pollan, I discovered that he also wrote the New York Times’s article about how cattle are raised, which totally changed the way I eat.

Next time, it is my turn to host and so I got to choose the book we’ll be reading. Actually, I chose three books and then everyone voted. My picks were: Ishmael by Daniel Quinn, Perfect Madness by Judith Warner, and Veronica by Mary Gaitskill. And the winner was…Perfect Madness. Check back in mid-May to hear how it went.

--Kelly

While fish sitting for my friend, I noticed that the little pellets of food for Beta fish smelled disturbingly like caviar. Either I've had really lousy caviar, or that's some damn good fish food!

--Kelly

Make way for the next set of Mom stereotypes. We’ve heard about soccer moms and yoga mamas…now there’s a whole new set, as set forth in a new book, Queen Bee Moms and Kingpin Dads, by Rosalind Wiseman. There’s also an article by the author in Parenting magazine this month.

The types of moms Wiseman says she’s met while on the lecture circuit range from Queen Bees, Sidekicks, Starbucks, Wannabes and Steamrolled Moms to Reformed Moms and Outcast Moms. A truly dazzling array. The idea being that by understanding how we fit into one or more of these categories we can understand our actions and motivations and how to change if desired.

The Queen Bee Mom reminds us of a certain nasty character and her posse in our book. Speaking of the book: well, by now it’s had more face lifts than Joan Rivers. We are getting ready for a submission to several publishing houses in the next couple of weeks.

--Melanie & Kelly