La Familia Brophy

Today it was a little too hot to cook much for dinner but we did manage to turn the oven on for a short time to make some dessert. Nathan and I baked up a batch of biscuits for strawberry shortcake. I explained what strawberry shortcake is to him as I sliced up the strawberries we got at the the farmers’ market yesterday. His only comment was, “That’s crazy. It doesn’t have any chocolate on it though.”

When Ben got home he told him he thought we should melt chocolate on top. It probably would be pretty yummy that way but we didn’t do it. Believe it or not he liked it anyway.

Last Wednesday Nathan woke up at 4:45 am and seemed quite energetic. Somehow or other we convinced him to go back to sleep in our bed for a few more hours and when he woke up at 7 he revealed the reason for his early rising. It seems as though the Easter Bunny had come for a visit and he laid an egg in Nathan’s bed. Nathan didn’t crack the egg but it did hatch and out came some baby chicks or “chicklets” which were quacking so loudly that it woke him up. Later in the day as we rode the number 47 bus home he entertained several women with his story starting off by loudly announcing that something funny had happened to him. He had a great audience who laughed and asked him lots of questions. He interjected things like, “This is a really long story” and told them how he had to come to our bed because of all the noise.

It was really my suggestion that this was a dream. I have no idea if it was or if it was just his explanation for waking up so early on the summer solstice when really we should have all gotten ourselves outside to enjoy the longest day that happened to be really beautiful too. I had also been convinced for various crazy reasons that there was a bat in his room so I kept asking things like what color was the Easter Bunny (light green) and what did the quacking sound like (it was more like a duck than a bat).

Last night when Doodah put him to bed he decided to try the “dream” with him and emerged from his bed nearly an hour after going in. The recycled story almost worked except Mama and Papi walked in just then. Nathan was pretty amused that this time the Easter Bunny laid a hard boiled egg that still managed to hatch. Although we thought that was pretty funny too all we managed to say was “Go back to bed!”

These rainy mornings seem to keep the Easter Bunny away. Given that, we shouldn’t be hearing from him for the rest of the week.

One of Ben’s Father’s Day treats was to have Nathan help him wash the car. This was Nathan’s first time with the hose. Luckily it was 98 degrees out there so he barely noticed his soaked clothes. Happy Father’s Day!

I’m making Tej (Ethiopian Style Honey WIne). It’s like a mad science project. Here’s what’s happenned.

• 4-to-1 ration water and raw honey.
• It sat in an urn for 3-4 days covered with a dish towel.
• Now it’s sealed with an airlock in a bottle.
• Bubbling away like crazy, been going 1 day but it supposed to take 2-4 weeks. Could it really take that long?

It’s alive! It’s just amazing. And with a lot of luck it might even taste good.

Many people have asked how the new job is going, and I’ve just now completed week one. It’s going great. Kind of a rough start at the beginning of the week, I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be doing. But now I have much better idea of how the company’s software works thanks to three days of classes, and I even know a bit about the project I’ll be working on. Plus I’ve started getting to know the people I work with. I am really excited now - a little homesick for MIT, but feeling like I don’t know, like a new person in a way because my daily routine is changing and it’s kind of giving me a fresh look on everything.

Lisa bought mantis eggs which Nathan has been eagerly watching for weeks. Today, unexpectedly, they hatched! We’d just about given up hope. We unleashed them on lettuce Lisa is growing on the back porch that attracted aphids. Check out the pictures on flickr.

Nathan has been really into riding his tricycle. He has wanted to do it every day, plus I bring him out again after dinner. It’s great - it’s the first time he’s been really into doing something physical for fun. He mostly likes to bike aound the basketball court, which I remind him he an only do if there isn’t anyone playing basketball! He’s fast too, when we ride around the block I almost have to jog to keep up (’he’s much faster than when we posted the tricylcle video a few months ago). He’s fallen over three tmes by taking sharp turns too fast and he’s just gotten up and said “I’m OK” and kept riding, which is like miraculous becasue it usually doesn’t take much to get him frustrated.

I saw X-Men 3 with my Dad last night. I thought it was great, my Dad not so much. I used to read my neighbor Arthur Milano’s X-Men collection for hours at a stretch back when we lived on Hemenway Street. I think that gives me a kind of mythical knowledge about the Marvel universe, so my mind fills in gaps and elaborates on subtle cues in the movie. If the movie fails to build up a rapport between the characters and the audience, I wouldn’t know because I already have that relationship.

The X-Men as a comic book in the 70s and 80s had a special appeal to people who feel like mutants in American society. Growing up in a Queer family makes you feel like one of the X-Men, misunderstood and reviled by the government, always under threat of attack by people who discover your secret. The whole part about the homo sapiens coming up a with a cure for mutants, and the mixed reactions that brought out in the mutant community, really resonated. My dad whispered that Magneto reminded him of Queer Nation during one of his speeches.

Today is “Blogging for LGBT Families Day” by the way, so you can see what others are saying on this topic as well. I blog on this topic every now and then, because there is still so much politicking going on around how the government wants to define what is and isn’t a family, that I think it’s important to remember that Queer families (by which I mean families with one or more LGBT parent) already exist, it’s not some new idea. My last post on the topic was around adoption laws.