Tennessee turkeys: Papi Chulos.

It was a perfect cool, foggy morning when Bustelo, camera and I headed out to the side steps for morning peace. Out rustling in the woods were three turkeys -- a male and two hens. They are my favorite part of living out here. Wild turkeys are glorious and after much observation, I have decided they are not unlike some Latins I know.

Let me explain.

The male turkey is very Papi Chulo. He stands near the hens and struts, shakes his tail feathers, spreads them wide, drags them around. He's like the guy bathed in Paco Rabanne and dripping in gold: "Look at me! Notice me, Mami." If the hens ignore him, he'll gladly peck and strut to the image of his likeness reflecting in the car bumper. Your loss, Mami, he says.

The hens are like the viejas in the housedress and chancletas. They don't have much color. They're a little stooped and they totally ignore el tipo, going about their business of scratching the ground, and clucking at each other over the fence. That is, until they need some spring love and then, I don't want to know what happens.

Maria will one day discuss with her therapist her mother's deep love of Tennessee turkey. She'll have the baby tapes to prove it: See video shot of gorgeous, gordita 4-month-old in her swing. Cut to turkeys in the drive. More of baby doing tummy time. Cut to turkeys under bird feeders. And so on.

My husband, the Pied Piper of Deer, thinks we're raising a vegetarian. Given the wildlife and the shock that one day will be a big lechon asado out back, (mami's 40th this summer!) the child likely will give up meat. That might send me, Cuban carnivore, to counseling...but in the meantime, I'll be hanging on the side steps watching the turkey dance.

My daughter, the Guajira

It has been made clear to me that my little half-Cubanita is really just a little Tennessee guajirita who happens to be able to sing Los Pollitos Dicen and count en espanol. I know this now after watching her spend the last two days requesting a ride in this new green farming monster. (That's her on the right, in the carseat). I wonder what her Miami and Jersey cousins will think of her one day. Probably that she's the coolest country girl they've ever met, despite that drawl she's sure to have.

Me? I spent the morning channeling my abuelita: I hosed down the front porch, ceiling, furniture and all. The woman lived her life hosing down el portal and changing the sheets -- both daily. I'm not fully Mama, as sheet changing is not my favorite household task and if I hosed the porch down daily, my husband would cut the water off. But, damn my porch looks good. Almost as good as my kid in John Deere green.

Sana Sana

Stuffed Panda is “asleep” in the hallway, covered by every single dish towel we own.

“Panda, wake up!’’ says the 3-year-old girl, smacking bear on the head.
“Maria, be nice to Panda.’’
“Oh, sana sana culito de rana.’’

Love note to lazy writers

This story in USA Today made me very happy. It's a beautiful story about a 96-year-old author with a new book. There's hope for us frustrated writers who say "One day...''

Writing on the 'Wall'

By Bob Minzesheimer, USA TODAY

BRICK, N.J. — Harry Bernstein had been married for 67 years when his wife, Ruby, died in 2002. He was so lost without her, he considered killing himself, or, as he puts it, "I wished I could join Ruby" and gave "serious thought to ways and means of doing it."

Instead, he started writing, taking refuge from the present in the past, mining memories of a bittersweet childhood in an English mill town blighted by poverty in the years surrounding World War I.

His memoir, The Invisible Wall, will be released today in the USA. It won rave reviews last month in Britain ("An exceptional book on several levels," The Guardian said) and is getting good notices here. (It "takes on the heft of a historical novel with stirring success," Publishers Weekly said.)

Both the book and author are remarkable stories, and not just because he's 96, living quietly in a New Jersey retirement community and at work on a sequel.

The Invisible Wall is a family history driven by a loving, self-sacrificing mother and a hard-drinking brute of a father. It invites comparisons to Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt's 1996 best seller about his childhood in the slums of Limerick, Ireland.

To read the rest...

Art, noise-makers and a loss for words

Maria and I spent the morning yesterday at The Frist looking at beautiful works by Gauguin, Picasso and Matisse. We also explored the Mexican art exhibit, which was the real focus of our trip downtown. It was not as colorful and thereby did not interest her too much.

For lunch we went to “the quesadilla restaurant’’ - her name for all Mexican restaurants. OK, we get some visual culture and then some cultural cuisine. Lovely, I thought.

But, we sat right under the blaring television. The workers kept changing the channels and when the Spanish language stations weren’t showing jiggly Latina boobs, they were showing ridiculous grown men in strange outfits and then came Delta Force in Spanish.

And so, a morning of gentle beauty turned into an afternoon explaining what the “noise-makers’’ were. They were guns. Yesterday was the first time Maria watched people shoot at each other. And while I am often at a loss for translating Spanish to her, I had no idea I would not be able to find the words to explain what guns do. I told her those men liked to make a lot of noise and after about the 10^th “Why?’’ she moved on.

Luckily, she didn’t ask me what the half-naked mamasita and the strange man in the telenovela promo were doing.

Starting Spanish school, letting go and loving Judith Warner

Maria has snagged a coveted spot in the Spanish immersion pre-school. I guess lighting all those velitas worked. (Sing with me: Lo que esta pa’ ti, nadie te lo quita…pero por si acaso prende una velita…’’)

It is a full-time slot and so because of that, Mami confesses she is a bit freaked. My daughter will be just a few months shy of 4 when she begins to leave me five days a week. Just 4. Time has gone by too quickly. I expected at least two more years of mid-week zoo trips, spontaneous art and morning library storytime.

But, the focus on Spanish five days a week wins out.

The school’s half-day hours didn’t work for us because by the time I drop her off and come back home to clean or work, it would practically be time to turn right around. Boonie Life such as it is and we live en la casa del tu-sabes-que. Her current pre-school is a stone’s throw away and she attends part-time. We’re spoiled.

Sane friends assure me Maria will thrive and that I will love it. More time, they say, for baby t-shirt work and fun for Mami. I kinda see it: Monday, clean, work; Tuesday, gym, work; Wednesday, groceries, work; Thursday, weed, work; Friday, laundry, work. Cook Everyday! Drive 40 miles Everyday! Yay, freedom!

Given my qualms, it seems right I recently stumbled upon Perfect Madness: Mothering in the Age of Anxiety by Judith Warner. The woman got slammed by reviewers and blogging mommies for her focus: Modern mothers - particularly Upper Middle Class stay-at-home moms -- are a bunch of narcissistic, control freaks who are quietly seething, intensely depressed, and boring. Furthermore, we spend way too much time locking eyes with Our Children and not enough time on ourselves, our partners, our inner life and the world around us.

You know what? I have found myself nodding in agreement with a lot of it. Not all, but a lot. I know those women. Know them well. I have been that woman -- the one who worries about every ounce of food ingested, every plastic toy, every tone of voice used, every minute spent away. Not so much anymore because estoy frita y aburrida of all that and my kid doesn't need that kind of mami. But, oh have so been there.

An excerpt: “Studies have never shown that total immersion in motherhood make mothers happy or does their children any good. On the contrary, studies have shown that mothers who are able to make a life for themselves tend to be happy and to make their children happy. The self-fulfillment they get from a well-rounded life actually makes them more emotionally available for their children - in part because they are less needy.’’ P. 133.

So over here, I am continuing the work of letting go of “the shoulds,” the control, and trusting this full-time escuela is the right thing to do for me, my daughter, my husband and the Pollitos.

But, the admissions director already told me where I can park the car and cry.

Vino makes you pee

“Mami, where does the pee pee come from?”
“Most of it comes from the liquids you drink, like water, milk and juice.”
“And vino?’’

Maybe Mami needs to lay off the sauce. But hey, at least she said it in Spanish!

Of Woodpeckers and Forgotten Spanish

Maria and I took advantage of Spring weather and walked down the hill to our creek. It’s but a trickle of a little thing, with barely enough water to be called a creek, but it is enough to make her happy hearing the small “plop’’ when she throws rocks in. It takes about 10 minutes to make the descent and forever to get back because she makes me carry her.

“Mami, this is deer poop,’’ she said, pointing to a patch of woodland floor that had been scraped by some sort of animal. “Yeah, Daddy told me. Deer poop.’’

Caca de venado, I told her.

It probably was turkey scratchings, as the deer pellets were not visible. But, who knows. I’m still really trying to get a grip on this non-city life.

When she wasn’t throwing rocks, she was flipping them over to find salamanders. We found none.

I spent my time listening to the woodpeckers. Pileated woodpeckers, ala Woody Woodpecker seen above, live here with us. They are prehistoric-looking and when they are working a tree, you can see the thick chips fly. The first time I saw one, I had no idea what it was. Now, their rapid drumming is music and each sighting a thrill. One, or more of them, however, is working hard to destroy a 300-year-old beech tree. The tree is covered in holes, massive and oppressive. Such is nature, though. I apologized to the tree and told it to hang tough. A few years ago, lightning struck another ancient beech we had named “Amazing Grace.’’ If it isn’t one thing, it’s another, no?

With Spring at our doorstep, we will spend more time outside exploring. I need to freshen up my "Spanish for Nature Lovers." The whole time we were out the other day, I could not for the life of me remember the Spanish word for “branch.’’ How could a girl who spent her formative years at La Progresiva not remember such a simple word. It wasn’t until a full 24 hours later that it hit me: rama. Rama, rama, rama, rama.

Where do these words go hide? And, how is it that they pop from the grey matter when I am not even thinking about them? And, yet strange and out of context words pop in: socotroco, tareco, to name a couple recent ones. But what we’re needing are words like oak, maple, and moss. Because telling Maria that is is oak-EH, MA-H-pel and moh-SS just won’t work for long.

Some pictures from years past of what is to come around these here parts muy pronto:

Los Pollitos in the news

It's media week over here at Los Pollitos Dicen.

Los Pollitos is featured in Find It! Source Book for Parents, published by the Meredith Corporation. It just hit bookstores. Inside, are lists and pictures of companies, big and small, hawking cute baby stuff. A lot of cute baby stuff. The book stays on the shelves for a year. Meredith, by the way, publishes Child, Parents, and Ser Padres, among many other great magazines.

The in-box also brought a nice surprise from the fine folks at Hispanic.com. They're featuring the Boonie Blog here and they have a running list of other Latino blogs worth a miradita.

I got back to my writer roots and wrote a column for the March/April issue of Multilingual Living magazine. If you are raising a child to speak more than one language, the magazine is a source of inspiration and the site, Bilingual/Bicultural Family, is wonderful.

Finally, the chicks are expected to be in the April issue of Tu Ciudad, the city mag in Los Angeles. You can read a great letter from the editor, Oscar Garza, here, and about the magazine as featured in the New York Times.

We will return to stories about my genius child after the break.

Gracias.

Seuss-inspired boberias

A couple of months ago as I was dressing Maria in her PJs, we came up with a silly game:
“What if, you had toes for eyebrows?’’
“What if, your hands were behind your knees?’’
“What if, your eyes were on your tongue?’’
And so on. And so on.

It cracked her up to the point of not being able to breathe. Seriously, she could not breathe. She loved coming up with oddities and saying things like “But, then you couldn’t walk’’ or “But, how would you eat?’’ Of course, we said some of it in Spanish, but it wasn’t until my parents joined in during our January visit that the thing took on a new life.

“Maria, que tal una rana en tus zapatos?’’
“Y que tal una ballena en tus pantalones?’’
“Y que tal si tus pies estuvieran en to nariz? Fo! que peste!’’

The three of them went on this way for hours, for days. The house was full of silly laughter and despite the OCD-like repetition, there were lessons being given. La nena spoke full sentences in Spanish, something she doesn’t do that often. And better still, it puffed my parents with pride - and I mean PUFFED -- because, they got her to speak Spanish. And then we got the PR pitch of “if you leave her here for a month, she’ll be talking nothing but Spanish.’’ And of course, we told them if we left her there for three days, they’d be sending her back via cohete. But anyway…

The other day I saw a newspaper story on the 50^th anniversary of The Cat in the Hat. We had been reading a lot of Seuss when we came up with the “What if’’ game. I don’t doubt the odd man and his furry, rhyming (and freaky) creatures were our subliminal inspiration. And, I am guessing the good Dr. would be pleased that a little girl in Tennessee dreams up trees with knees too.

I just hope next time she asks “What if your boobies were on your head?’’ we’re not in the produce section.