When I first moved in with The Father ( a deep and dark secret that his parent’s insisted we hide from the family, oh, some 22 years ago), The Father had a dark-room. For black and white film. He used to take his Nikon camera out and photograph all sorts of old buildings and then, with me being the silent grasshopper, would develop the film.

Once he started the new company and the children came, he lost interest in photography, although I can always pass him the camera and he finds that perfect shot.

Today, I …uh…set up… installed… my birthday present : a color printer. I do believe that everyone and their cooties has a color printer, but I didn’t, and I coveted one in the worst way. Oh, they aren’t that expensive, I know, but still, in this household, a color printer falls under the category of ‘toy for Mummy’, and I can be cheap as Scrooge when it comes to things like that.

I suppose that I shall be disappointed, as for me, the combination of PhotoShop, my camera and the color printer evokes those days when The Father was showing me how any picture could look great if handled well in the dark room.

The other thing on my wanna have list is a new deep- fryer ( frites pan).

Oh, how the mighty have fallen…

Most Sundays, I sleep in. Yep, no babies in this house. When I hear the bells pealing from the church behind our house, I know that it is time for me to get up, the outer limits of my sleep- in have been reached : when those bells ring, it is ten o’clock.

And so I crawled out of bed. Oh, I had been half awake since about 6, drifting in and out of never- land, caught in an utterly boring dream which involved calculating- over and over again- what to pick up at the bakery today. My antennae told me that one child was awake- most likely The Baby, and already downstairs.

Before I go downstairs to clean up the cat’s mess, to feed the cat, to feed the dogs, to feed the kids, to start my coffee, I always take ten minutes for myself at the computer. I check how my downloads are going, if anyone has sent me a note. It is nice to just sit for a moment before confronting the requests of the family.

As the screen focused before my eyes, I saw that the computer had automatically changed the time that appears in my…uh…bar at the bottom. And realized that- obviously- the church had yet to computer- ise their bells. The ten o’clock bells had indeed rung, but…

It was 9am.

I am beginning to believe that when you conceive your first baby, you know, when your hormones take off to Pluto and never seem quite the same again, odd little bits- like java pop-ups and spy-ware and browser hi-jacks- are inserted into a woman’s psyche. Or perhaps simply becoming responsible for someone’s else’s health causes pre-natal mal-ware to activate.

Whatever. Yesterday, the mysterious , internal calender which developed after I had The Girl clicked. It is time once again for Winter Food, it told me, like some happy and dulcet voice from a robot in a Ray Bradberry home.

And winter means a pot of soup simmering away on the stove. I decided to make Beer Soup to mark the arrival of Winter Food. We adapted it from a recipe for a stew, simply increasing the liquids proportionally.

Today, I’m doing what we call ‘experimental cooking’, in other words, trying something new. Nothing fancy, in fact, the recipe came out of the magazine our supermarket publishes once a month ( AH) . It’s just a stew, but I have never had celeriac nor have I ever used beer in cooking. I shall probably discover why at dinner tonight.

Runderstoofpot Met Wintergroenten
Beef Stew with Winter Vegetables

-750 gms rib-runderlappen
1 1/2 pounds of some sort of very nice looking stew- meat, I guess

- 2 eetlepels grove mosterd
two tablespoons of coarse mustard- you know, with whole mustard seed in it

- 50 grams of boter
almost 2 ounces of butter

-2 teentjes knoflook, in plakjes
two cloves of garlic, sliced

-2 winterpenen, in plakjes
two carrots, sliced

-1 knolselderij, in blokjes
1 celeriac, in cubes

- 1 vleesbouillontablet
1 beef bouillon tablet

-1 flesje bier, op kamertemperatuur
1 bottle of beer- 33cl- at room temperature

-4 vastkokenede aardappels, in stukken
4 potatoes, in chunks

-2 dunne preien, in stukken
2 thin leeks, in chunks

- 3 takjes selderij, grof gehakt
I don’t know what this is in English, but 3 sprigs of something that might be flat leaf parsely- it smells like celery, in any case- coarsely chopped

1. Bereiden : Vlees is grove stukken snijden en omscheppen met mosterd, zout en peper. In braadpan boter verhitten en vlees in 5 min. rondom bruinbakken. Knoflook, knolselderij en winterpeen toevoegen en al omscheppen 3 minuten meebakken.

To Prepare : Cut meat in chunks and stir into mustard, salt and pepper. Heat the butter in ( probably a dutch oven, but I just used a lidded) large, pot and brown meat for about 5 minutes. Add garlic, celeraic and carrots , stirring, for about three minutes

2. Vleesbouillontablet boven pan verkruimelen. Bier and 200 ml warm water bij vlees schenken. Vocht aan de kook brengen, vuur laag zetten en vless met deksel op pan in 2-2 1/2 uur laten gaarstoven. Vlees regelmatig omschepen. Halverweg stooftijd aardappel en prei toevoegen.

Crumble the bouillon tablet over the pot. Add beer and 200 ml ( a little less than a cup) of warm water. Bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer ( covered) for 2- 2 1/5 hours, until the meat is done. Stir occasionally and half way during the cooking time add potatoes and leeks.

3. Stoofpot op smaak brengen met zout, peper and bestrooien met selderij. Lekker met aardappelpuree en wortelsalade.

Season to taste with salt and pepper and sprinkle with flat leaf parsley ? Good with mashed potatoes and carrot salad

As the smell fills the house, The Father nags me to invite his parents over for some Beer Soup. His mother recalls having something similar as a child. But I am always very nervous about my cooking skills and so put him off. Never writing down my changes to a recipe, let me first see if I have it right.

Next time I make it, we can have them over.

But the smell of soup is one of the best things about winter and my clock is saying : winter is here.

Tonight, I saw the twin daughters of one of The Fathers oldest friends. He actually gave me one of the wouldn’t- have- missed- it- for- the – world moments in my life, eons ago, when I sat on the back of his bike and he pedaled me through the quiet streets of a rather large Dutch city in the wee hours of the morning. Never having sat on the back of someone else’s bike, there were some issues with the balance, but still, everyone should ride- at least once- on the back of a bicycle being driven by an utterly charming young man through the sleeping streets of a foreign country.

A must have.

And so, I saw his daughters. They are 10. When they were two, their Mother…. came down with ?…. what is called M.E. in dutch. It is something… Fatigue Syndrome in English. She was my best friend. But 8 years ago, some thing forced her into her bed.

I lasted longer than her husband did, but still, in the end, I left her as well. Which was not easy for me to do. I don’t make friends casually.

But I wondered, when I saw the girls tonight, what it was like to have ‘grown up’ in a house kept perfectly clean by T’huiszorg, being led to school by the same social workers, but- essentially- having a mother who was there but for a few hours a day. Quality time, no doubt.

I’ve heard that she is actually awake for more hours a day than I, watching T.V. in bed. Perhaps that is simply the cruel nature of the disease, or the biased reports that I have received.

But still, when I looked at the twins, I thought, how strange a life you lead.

Although it most likely seems very normal to them .

Can you tell that I miss their mother very much indeed, am angered by this affliction ?

I have always admitted that I am a very shallow person . Thinking of that part of my past makes me want to simply stamp my foot.

I had nothing to do with this -

The Baby´s birthday presents meet Papa’s Christmas present:

I come to getThe Baby dressed after her bath. I tell her, this is your last bath as a 4 year old. She tells me that she doesn’t want to be 100 and then die. Pulling her night gown on over her head, I tell her that she is only 4, almost 5.

Once the nightgown is on, she looks pleased. It fits me very well, she says.

A novel approach to raising campaign funds.

Steph has been writing much information about the present- seemingly auspicious- alignment of the stars, or perhaps the planets, what do I know. And that is the point : she has been telling me that things could get odd- according to the stars- but those things just…uh….go in one eyeball and out the other. ( Steph is the Steph on my friends).

But today was just one of those days when everything I tried went wrong. I was planning on sleeping in today ( no Mr. Jo)- it is, after all vacation. I had been pushing forward the grand entrance to the kitchen since about 8, nibbling away another half hour as time passed. I do believe that I had settled upon 9.30 as a good time to wake up ( although, truth be told, I probably would have pushed to my ultimate guilt level of 10 if the house remained quiet).

But at precisely 9am, all of the electricity in our house fell out. Not my sharpest when I first drag myself from my bed, I trudged downstairs. I went to the fuse box- but, it’s not really a fuse box, we replaced that thing that I knew how to handle with something more…modern- I could barely focus my eyes, but all of the rows of switches looked, well, truth be told, looking at that long row of switches told me nothing. I flipped a few up and down.

Nada.

No coffee. I poured a glass of bubbly water for myself, had a cigarette and tried to think what I should do. Calling The Father was not an option : the phones were out. Rising to the inherent drama of the occasion, The Girl surrounds me with tea lights and a flash light.

I suppose that I will read about it all in the paper tomorrow. It wasn’t the cat tinkling – yet again- on an electrical outlet. It seems that even in Waalwijk the electricity went out at 9 am.

But it is a poor way to start a morning, sitting there, no coffee and three kids who are very bored indeed.

It went down hill from there, The Boy and The Girl squabbling – very loudly- all morning, The Baby becoming emotionally attached to a rogue branch about 7 feet long and carrying on for hours when I banished it to the…uh…rose arbor.

My attempts to do work-work failed, when everything on earth insisted that my master copy of the company DVD was unreadable.

Whine, whine, moan, moan- we all haves days like this.

I go downstairs to pick up an ashtray for the bedroom. The Father is on the phone. He is explaining the American electoral vote system to someone. He tells them that he is taking the morning of November 3rd off.

It is one of the Henks, first borns of a large family whose first born son is named after the Grandfather. They go through life being known as Henk of Aunt this- or of Aunt that . Being the first born of the baby of the family, The Father has been named after a little girl who died young, broke her mother’s heart.

The Baby is named after that little girl as well.

Catholic families are like that. Here.

He called beause he saw the Kerry poster in the paper and knew that it could only have been our house.

Last Tuesday- of course- was the dress rehearsal. I went with The Girl on the bus to the manege, a mere ten minutes away. In more ways than one, taking this bus would give her freedom.

Today I stood with her at the bus stop, gave her the strippenkaart for it, explained- very precisely what she must say and do , where she should sit, what to say if she pushed the buttons all wrong and why she should say that.

Piece of cake. I would never send her out on a dangerous mission.

But as I stood at the bus stop, watching her walk down the aisle of the bus, dragging her foot- locker of horse must haves, and as the bus pulled away, all I could think was- I want that girl to have a cell phone.

It gnawed away at me until she returned. The little girl who had been bouncing with anxiety before she boarded that bus, alone, for the first time, replied to my perky question of How was the bus ? with a nonchalant- perhaps even mummy- you- bore- me sniff “Tsk- fine….”