Like a pioneer woman, I am stocking up our homestead for winter. Have you read the delightful book Ox Cart Man? I’m like that: Making things, selling things, buying things, except for the making and the selling.
***
If you order a Fashy brand German hot water bottle on Amazon you can’t choose the color. The one I received is a sullen Germanic gray, which I guess is suitable because hot water bottles aren’t supposed to be fun. The night before the midterms, I wrapped it in a 2008 Obama T-shirt and slept with it. Kevin is never cold, he thinks I put too many blankets on the kids and (correctly) suspects that I am trying to inculcate them into my coziness cult, so for the first few days or so of owning the hot water bottle I snuck it into bed with me, like the guilty invalid I was.
I also got these Arctic Extreme brand socks. I read a lot of Amazon reviews of warm socks, and what convinced me to go with Arctic Extreme, which probably contain asbestos, was the high percentage of reviews like these: “Got these for my son who works in an unheated ware house with cement floors that gets bitterly cold during the winter.” If these socks work for men who work in unheated factories, then they will work for me, in bed, under multiple quilts, in a 64-degree room.
I bought two pairs of fleece-lined footless tights, two pairs of fleece-lined footed tights, and a pair of “Keysocks” to wear under Toms. “I don’t understand what these are,” Kevin said, regarding them on my feet.
“They’re socks you wear with Toms.”
“Why don’t you just wear regular socks?”
“You can’t wear regular socks with Toms,” I said in a “you must be crazy” voice, standing there filling the Fashy from the electric kettle. During this conversation, I was wearing skinny jeans with my footless fleece-lined tights under them, and the Keysocks under the tights, but honestly, if you’d seen me outside, you never would have known I was wearing any kind of socks at all.
***
Back in August, I signed the kids up for the late fall session of Tinkergarten, which was supposed to run from late September to early December. If you’re unfamiliar with Tinkergarten, it is — I guess I will just start with the essentials and go from there, it’s an urban outdoor class for children ages 18 months to 5 years. The goal is for them to appreciate nature, in all weather, and not be afraid of getting dirty, etc. I think the model is probably those Scandinavian forest kindergartens I’m always torturing myself by reading about.
We have a friend who calls Tinkergarten “Stinkergarten” and once you’ve heard that it’s difficult to think of it in any other way.
Our first class was held on a beautiful fall Sunday on Cambridge Common, during church time if we went to church. The Tinkergarten “leader” had hidden oval rocks on which she had drawn lizards with permanent markers, colored them in colored pencil, and Mod-Podged them to make them shiny, and the first activity was to wander around and collecting them. It was a pleasingly consumerist way to begin the class; it probably goes without saying that my kids both immediately became obsessed with the lizard rocks, if only because they were available in limited quantities and because they knew they wouldn’t be allowed to take them home. We roamed Cambridge Common looking for the lizard rocks. Kevin and I almost immediately found a used syringe and couldn’t stop snickering.
The leader told me that in her previous season’s Tinkergarten session on Cambridge Common, there had been an anti-circumcision protest going on at the same time, with people dressed up as (uncircumcised, I assume) penises, and when she asked them to move, they wouldn’t. I imagined looking at her somberly and asking, “Why did you ask them to move? Is it that you’re against the art of peaceful protest? Or is it that you support male genital mutilation?”*
Then there was a circle time on a tarp on the ground. Tarps are a big thing in Stinkergarten. Most of the children, including ours, had come with two parents, and in this circle all the moms sat down with the kids while a bunch of dads stood around in a semicircle in their Arcteryx fleeces checking their phones, shoutout to Kevin for not being one of those dads! I had not read the Tinkergarten preparatory emails closely enough to know that we were supposed to bring a snack. Everyone around us was opening up their stainless steel containers or in some cases entire lunchboxes at 11 AM.
Alice and Hugh were regarding me like I was a monster, but luckily the leader was pulling out this giant stash of, oh my god they were tiny enamel cups and they were the cutest thing I had ever seen. What kind of cup would you buy if you wanted to show people that you don’t use plastic AND that stainless steel is too mainstream for you? Is there lead in it? Who cares, these are so good for Instagram! I resolved to Google them immediately when I got home.
“I made lemonade,” the leader said. “It’s just lemons and water, no sugar.” “I like lemonade with sugar in it,” Alice blared out. Nonetheless she and Hugh guzzled multiple tiny cups of the lemon water. “More? More?” Hugh kept asking, giving the impression that we don’t allow him liquids at home.
The leader took some time to explain how winter was coming and we would still be holding Tinkergarten outside, OBVIOUSLY, but how she has “a lot of ways” to keep warm. The two she mentioned were hand warmers and hot tea, and I felt as if I could have thought of those things myself, but nonetheless appreciated that the warmth of the parents would not a total afterthought in the class.
“This is the peak Cambridge that I can handle,” Kevin warned me.
WELL, that was the last Tinkergarten class I ever went to. The next session was canceled because of a family emergency the leader had, then Kevin took the kids to the next one, and then the next Sunday was a rainy, cold morning, but we weren’t going to let that stop us. I let Kevin sleep in and I packed a bag with a million warm clothes for the kids and me, got us all into the car at 8 AM and took them to Wegmans to go grocery shopping, the plan being that we’d go to Tinkergarten straight after — and then, when we got home from Tinkergarten, I’d redeem all the marriage points I’d collected from the morning of mothering, and go take a nap or something.
I dislike when people call stores, or anywhere, “my happy place,” but I will allow that I have very warm feelings toward Wegmans. In the back of the dining section of the store, there’s a kids’ table and chairs and a TV that’s always set to Nick Jr. When we’re done shopping, the kids get to go sit there and eat and watch a show and I look at my phone.
There are always other moms there with their kids doing the same thing, and I can tell immediately which ones I’m going to want to talk to: Not the ones who are hovering next to their preschoolers feeding them off forks. And not the ones who appear in any way to be judging what my children are eating — the unspoken rule for most people at Wegmans in the kid area is, don’t talk about what the kids are eating; you may get a tiny thrill of satisfaction if, for instance, your child is eating watermelon chunks while the adjacent stranger child is eating a chocolate chip muffin (LOL this moment is crystallized in my mind bc it was so rare that Alice was eating a fruit), but you need to keep in mind that on another day the situation will be completely reversed: Another day, your child will be eating donut holes, that come out of a large plastic tub of Wegmans donut holes that is very clearly sitting right in your cart, opened while shopping and before checkout (by the time we get to checkout, half of the food items in the cart have already been opened and nibbled on by the kids, I rip them open out of desperation to just get through the shopping trip and buy me time to get as far as the dairy aisle, and god bless the cashiers for never saying anything as they scan my now damp and falling-apart baguette) — and in that case of donut hole kid, you had better not be the other mom in the kids’ area, who sees your kid’s donut holes and looks at you and sort of wiggles her eyebrows up and down in what I guess is supposed to be a “fun” way and says, ostensibly to your kid, “Look at what a treat you are having!” Just keep your mouth shut, lady, the tables will turn on you one day, and also your kid was eating pizza, nothing wrong with that but it wasn’t like it was a kale salad or something.
So: You have got to watch out for those moms, but what I want is a mom who’s also parking her kids in front of whatever food and whatever show as quickly as possible so that she can get back to looking at her phone. Those are the ones I talk to; there are plenty of them. For some reason the Wegmans atmosphere is highly conducive to intimate conversation in which we vault over any formalities and launch straight into heady topics like the oppressiveness of public school hours and whether to have a third child.
*SAMPLE CONVERSATION*
Mom 1:
Where did you get those milk boxes? I didn’t see them.
Mom 2:
Oh, I think you can only get them with the kids’ meals from the counter.
Mom 1:
Oh, that’s why I didn’t see them.
~perfunctory rueful interlude about our gross kids eating junk and watching TV slack-jawed, then~
Mom 1:
Is this children’s seating area of Wegmans in which we find ourselves interacting just another sad example of how Americans bond with each other through consumerism? In other words, how pathetic should I feel that the deepest conversation I have today will be with you, a stranger, in this grocery store, while our kids watch TV?
Mom 2:
Honestly, I think that’s too pessimistic a way of looking at it. You could also argue that this is an example of women ingeniously carving out hybrid spaces for meaningful conversation while juggling all of the caretaking duties that society still expects them to perform even as they’re also work full-time.
Mom 1:
Perhaps it’s both. Wait, where did you get your kids’ jackets?
Anyway, we were in this sitting area when I got the text saying that the morning’s Tinkergarten had been canceled due to bad weather. This seemed odd — the weather really, genuinely wasn’t that bad that morning — as well as unfortunate, because now, in order to keep the kids out for the entire morning as I’d planned, I was going to have to come up with some other activity to do with them myself. Also, what had been the point of all that hand-warmers-and-tea discussion if classes were just going to be canceled willy-nilly?
My suspicions were borne out later in the week, when we got an apologetic email from a Tinkergarten customer service representative saying that our leader had had an emergency and that the class was being canceled, and that we were getting our money back. Maybe not my first thought, but an early thought after reading the email, was that I could use the $271 refund we were getting from the class to, like, buy some new Boden sweaters for myself or something.
I hope that the leader is okay, but I think that she is, because I’ve seen her around the various local buy/sell/trade mom Facebook groups, selling a Kitchen Aid mixer and Hanna clothes and Pottery Barn baskets and stuff.
On the other hand, maybe she isn’t okay, and is just looking to products and shopping to help her feel a little bit better and feel a sense of community. That also would be, oh, completely understandable. I should probably message her something.
“Hope you’re doing okay? Also, where did you get all those tiny enamel cups?”
*Just in case you were worried Hugh is circumcised.