Keeping the kids busy. Stories told with tears.

20250724

I wrote yesterday about raising children. My girls have to be doing something just about all the time. If they have nothing to do, they will squabble with each other and pester Mom and Dad just to get attention. If you do attempt give them something to do, they will resist. This arises from their sense of justice: why should they be expected to do anything? And also, as always, their desire for attention. It's a constant battle to try to get them to pick up their messes and straighten up the room. Put things away and so on. It's a worthwhile battle but one that parents constantly have to fight.

An observation about children from earlier generations is that they belonged to large families where it was expected, in fact it was essential that the older children help with the younger. Everybody had to pitch in on the work around the house and the farm. This was understood. Moreover, the children learned to take joy in doing and accomplishing something.

The golden age of America, if there ever was one, was when children had the discipline of having been raised on a farm. The great entrepreneurs such as Ford and scientists such as Ernest B. Rutherford credited the discipline that they carried out all their lives to the early childhood on farms.

I mentioned yesterday that I am on the lookout for opportunities to put the children to work babysitting. If friends who have babies are willing to trust our daughters to babysit them – under our supervision, of course – it will be beneficial, both for the families so they can get out, and for our daughters to spend some time with babies. They need to learn what it is like to clean them up and keep them from crying. If the children are older, they can prepare meals and feed them. It feels so grown up to care for somebody younger!

There are things we can do right now. Our trees are bountiful. We have a lot of apples, quite a few peaches, and some cherry plums all ripe at this moment. They drop from the trees. An apple may rot in spots after falling, but it's easier to cut out a few bad spots than to climb the tree to pick them. When you have an abundance such as ours, throwing a bit away is not an issue.

In years past I have had two favorite apple recipes. One was my mother's apple pie, the second was my great-grandmother's German apfelküchen - apple cake. The pie requires making a crust in advance. I'm the one that makes the crusts - the kids aren't yet quite up to it. Apple cake is bit simpler but it does require that the apples be neatly sliced to be put edgewise into the cake.

But the dish of the moment is Apple cobbler. As we harvested our currents three weeks ago, I made a current cobbler which turned out very well. But as the currents are gone and we have an abundance of apples, I searched for apple cobbler.

Characteristically, when I proposed making it, the kids were quite willing to turn me down and let me do it all by myself. They didn't want to participate. But - it is all part of their act. I simply started. First Marianna, then Zoriana came into the kitchen to look, got curious, and demanded that they take part as well.

There are jobs for every skill level. The first is washing the apples. Next, cutting them into quarters. Third is cutting out the bad spots and the apple cores and putting them into a bowl to be chopped. The girls have long been comfortable using our big, sharp knives. Zoriana quartered them and they took turns with the rest.

The girls fought for the privilege of putting them through the Kenwood food processor. It’s easy, but they like using the machine. Greasing the pan is also an easy job. – Marianna did that, after being reassured that she could eat whatever butter was left when it was fully greased.

Next is to make a 4:1 sugar and cinnamon mixture to put with the apples. Easy for the girls to do. Marianna let her fingers make a few detours through the sugar along the way. After that you lay the apples in three or four layers, each covered with an appropriate fraction of the sugar and cinnamon mixture. This just about fills the baking pan.

The last steps concern the topping. It is really amazing that it works. You mix together a cup of flour and a cup of sugar – two of each for a large baking pan like ours. Put in one teaspoon of baking soda per cup of flour. Stir these dry ingredients well. After that, add the wet ingredients. Amazingly, they consist of nothing more than one egg per cup of flour and 1 tablespoon of vinegar, and that only because here we use baking soda instead of baking powder.

Stir it up. This is the only job that I have to do myself. With nothing very wet, it's hard to get things mixed evenly. What you wind up with is a very lumpy batter with some dry flour here and there throughout. It seems pretty improbable. But that's how it works. You lay it on top of the apples, sprinkle it with 1/4 cup of water – it works even without the water, which I forgot last time – and put it in the oven for half an hour at 180°C. That's 350°F.

The delightful part is how the girls squabble and compete for the privilege of using the food processor. But they also like mixing the ingredients getting the proportions right. They like laying it out in the pan, especially chastising Dad for not doing as neat of a job as they think appropriate.

They're happy to correct me when I do something wrong. For the cobbler that I'm showing in these pictures, Dad had made a mistake. I started out with the number two size baking pan, thinking it would be large enough. They had told me it would not be large enough, and I asked them to wait and see. It turned out they were right!

We had to grease a larger pan. I made a big deal out of being wrong. Daddy made a mistake. Oops, we have to get a bigger pan. Who will grease the bigger pan? Of course there were two eager volunteers to make up for Dad's mistake. Marianna got to grease the pan, which again involved the privilege of eating the leftover butter.

The larger message here is that it's okay to make a mistake. All children are very shy about being criticized. They hate it when you call mistakes to their attention. The lesson this time was admitting a mistake, laughing about it and moving on. It is a hard lesson to learn in life, and I'm sure that one example not going to do the trick, but at least we have a start.

The result is a truly huge on cobbler. About 17 or 18 good-sized apples. It fills a 35x25x6cm (14x10x2.6”) baking pan, more than five-quarts. Enough to last a couple of days.

That's the news from Lake WeBeGone where the strong man is always grappling with question of how to raise kids to be functional adults, and the kids are always devising ways to get mom and dad's attention, to skate around responsibility, and to blame each other for anything that goes wrong. And yet, despite everything, they do grow out of it.

As I wrote this last paragraph, Zoriana came into my office, crying. I told her I was busy. Sit on my bed, collect yourself, stop crying, and when I’m done, I’ll listen.

She stopped only momentarily. And her story came our piecemeal, between sobs. Beach. Catastrophe. Need me. Floatation device. Where is mom? Is she at the beach? Downstairs. Who is at the beach? Nobody. What’s the crisis. The float. Why is it a crisis? Need to get it. Why didn’t Mom bring it? Forgot. Who forgot? It took ten minutes and gallons of tears to produce one sentence worth of information: “Please bike with me to the beach to pick up the floatation device I forgot there.” The disjointed telling, the tears, the drama was because she didn’t want to come out and tell me she did something careless and needed my help to bail her out.

This quick jaunt, as usual, turned into an expedition. Marianna had to come along for the ride, in her child seat. Both girls had to be restrained from playing once we were there. But we are back and this is getting posted.

I would hope that the girls would outgrow such fears before they marry. But I’m sure, if my shoulder is still there to cry on, husbands will have some stories to tell.

Graham