On two separate occasions now, my son has played piano in church. There are many lessons to be gleaned from the experience, and not all of them have to do with piano playing.

I choose the pieces (with his approval, usually) a month ahead of time, and then I drill him batty, nitpicking the dynamics, demanding perfection, calling him on his tense shoulders or hanging-open mouth. I yell all sorts of nonsense at him, things that would probably make a real piano teacher cringe. “Curl the notes! The top ones, slow them down! Even! Steady! Feel the music! Sit up straight! Don’t hit that note again! It’s not in the song! YOU’RE GOING TOO FAST. ONE-TWO-THREE-FOUR-STAY-WITH-ME!”

At least two times before the actual event, I have him practice the songs on the church piano. The day before he plays, I help him trim and clean his nails (whoever heard of playing piano with dirty nails, gross, I mutter), and the day of, we arrive at church early so he can play through the songs several more times.

Fifteen minutes before the service starts, I go completely OCD: go to the bathroom; get a drink; blow your nose; put chapstick on; sit on your hands so your fingers stay warm. I pump him up with lots of positive stuff, too: you’re handsome; you know this music inside and out; you’ll be awesome; smile. He pretty much takes my heckling in stride, only occasionally brushing me off or muttering an annoyed Mom!

It’s a little insane, but then again, not really. It takes that much work to do your best, and the work he does is pittance when compared to what professionals go through. Just ask your resident painter, writer, photographer, chef, builder, etc. (Or Amy Chua, for that matter. Thanks to her, I’ve upped my expectations of my children, roar.)

Funny thing is, my son doesn’t get nervous till the last minute, and the only way I can tell is because he keeps checking the bulletin. Once up front, he plays with complete confidence. At least that’s what it sounds like—I only listen, too nervous to even look his direction.

(Disclaimer: I know nothing about teaching the piano. When my piano teacher friend was visiting the other week, I asked her to please listen to my son play through one of his pieces, just to listen and look for any red flags. When he finished, she said, “That was great, but one question. How do you teach the pedal?”

I looked at her blankly. “I don’t.”

So she explained the pedal, and after she left, I had him play through the song several more times, this time with me crouched on the floor beside him yelling, UP DOWN! UP DOWN! UP DOWN! until he got the hang of it and we both had the giggles.)

Back in the spring, my son did a piece for the offertory that was light and lively. It ended with a playful flourish that caught people off guard which led to laughter and applause. And then my ever-the-ham son, who was caught off guard himself by their reaction, gave a couple little vigorous bows. Not wanting to squelch his pride and happiness right then, I decided to save my comments for the next time he played.

So on our way to church this past Sunday morning, just the two of us chugging along in my husband’s pick-up, our eyes nervously watching the near-empty gas tank’s needle (as though staring at it would make the gas last longer), I explained what it means to create a space of worship.

“It’s an important job,” I said. “People come to church with all sorts of experiences and feelings and it’s the job of the worship leaders and musicians and speakers to create a place that invites people in and allows them to connect to something bigger and deeper. Worship leaders that tell rambly stories and crack jokes are drawing attention to themselves which is not the point of worship. Your job as piano player is to do the best you can while trying to be invisible.”

“So I shouldn’t have bowed last time?” He sure didn’t waste any time making the connection, darn it.

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said, stalling for time, choosing my words carefully. “Pianists are taught to bow after they give a recital, so in some situations it’s quite appropriate. But for church, it’s probably best not to. If people clap for you, just smile at them and go sit down.”

This time around, no one clapped. “It’s not because you didn’t do well,” I assured him. “In fact, it’s the opposite. It’s a sign that your playing fit into the service. Your playing is growing up.”

The first time my son played in church and someone thanked him, he mumbled a hurried thanks and turned away, flustered and embarrassed.

I immediately pulled him aside. “Listen here,” I said. “When someone gives you a compliment, you stop whatever you’re doing, look them in the eyes, smile, and say thank you. Look them in the eyes, do you hear me?”

Not a minute later, another person approached with compliments. My son looked the person directly in the eyes, smiled, and said “Thank you.” My eyes bugged.

I was surprised on two accounts:

1. That my son was so receptive to my coaching.
2. That I was surprised that my son was receptive.

Of course kids want to act mature! Of course they want to know how to handle themselves! Why would I think otherwise?

Sometimes I fall prey to the thinking that kids figure everything out on their own. They do figure out an awful lot, it’s true, but sometimes a well-placed pointer can make a world of difference.

Give your gifts to the church!

That’s the mantra I’ve heard all my life, but I see it the other way round. The church gives us gifts, gifts of community, support, and opportunity. Where else do people of all ages get to try their hand at such a variety of skills—singing, speaking, acting, teaching, leading, mentoring—almost all of them in a public setting, too?

On Sunday, my son busted his tail doing the best he could and in return he received affirmation and encouragement via shoulder punches, high-fives, requests to play again, and even a note of thanks from the lead pastor.

What a gift.

I have not a single broccoli recipe in my recipe index. This is criminal, atrocious, and completely unacceptable because:

a) broccoli is delicious.

b) we love broccoli.

c) we eat broccoli fairly frequently.

d) we eat broccoli not frequently enough.

e) there are countless ways to prepare the vegetable.

f) broccoli rocks.

On Saturday, I bought two bushels of gorgeous broccoli from a local farmer because I have learned that it is easier to buy gorgeous, wormless broccoli from a professional than it is to plant it, weed it, cut it, and then pick each and every worm out of it myself. Unless someone can convince me otherwise, I don’t think I’ll ever grow my own broccoli again.

But first, Saturday. Saturday was a weird day. Let me tell you about it.

1. I woke up to a thick blanket of snow covering my potted plants and tomato cages. The sprinkling of yellow, red, and orange leaves on top of the snow made the early snowfall that much more wronger. And then I got grumpy.

2. Of course, I hadn’t yet gone through the kids’ winter duds BECAUSE IT WAS STILL FREAKING OCTOBER, so my husband climbed up into the attic and handed down all the garbage bags which promptly exploded, spewing boots and woolens and snowpants in all directions.

3. So I went to town for a meeting and left them to sort things out.

4. On my way to my meeting, I stopped at the farmers’ market for my bushels of snow-covered broccoli. I dumped them into two wash baskets I had brought along for the express purpose of broccoli carting.

5. When I got home (after a second meeting, grocery shopping, and errand running), the family (plus two kids who were staying the night) was all at my brother’s house and the power was out. So much for my afternoon plans of blanching and freezing two wash basket loads of broccoli.

6. The kids came home and threw six sets of soaking wet snow clothes hither and yon.

7. We ate stale crackers, peanut butter, apples, and cheese for supper. The kids said they were still hungry. I said tough.

8. The boys did a power dance around the kitchen, but the lights stayed off.

9. I played piano by the light of the flashlight.

10. The boys drug the outdoor cookstove from the barn to the porch and popped popcorn.

11. We sat around by the fire and talked about the sort of things 12-year-old boys like to talk about. (The girls were hiding in their lair.) My husband and I drank Root Beer in mugs without the kids knowing, one of the pluses of life in the dark. (Hm, I wonder what else we could get away with in the dark, on a lark?)

12. The power came on and we screamed and yelled and jumped up and down and then wildly ran around flushing toilets, washing dishes, getting baths, and vacuuming the floors.

So. All that to say, it wasn’t until Sunday afternoon that I got around to blanching and freezing the broccoli.

We froze all of it except for what we ate, plus a large container that I stashed in the fridge to combat the upcoming candy overload. Some of it I tossed into a stir fry and the rest went into a broccoli potato soup.

I love broccoli soup, but I often have problems with it curdling. This is probably because I don’t really follow a recipe, instead just throwing in the ingredients every which way. This time, however, I took care to follow a process—one that I made up in my head—and the soup turned out deliciously creamy and smooth.

My kids aren’t thrilled by it (but they eat it anyway, and with minimal complaining). They declare my friend’s broccoli soup to be the best ever (hers is basically broccoli in a cheese sauce, yum), but I like to add other stuff to my soup, stuff like potatoes and onions. Plus, I use a light hand when it comes to the cheese.

This soup is plenty creamy and rich even without tons of cheese and cream, and it has a hefty dose of nutrition, thanks to the vegetables and several cups of homemade chicken broth. I just had a bowl of it for lunch and it made me very happy.

How do you like your broccoli soup? Do you puree your soup into a creamy green smoothness, or do you keep it chunky? Do you drown it in cheese? Do you add other vegetables or fancy spices? 

 Cheesy Broccoli Potato Soup

Proportions are flexible: it’s the method that’s key.

3 cups chicken broth
4-6 cups chopped, peeled potatoes
4-6 cups chopped, blanched broccoli
1 large onion, chopped
1 bay leaf
5 tablespoons butter, divided
½ scant cup flour
2 cups milk
1 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese
1-2 cups good melting cheese (I used Provolone)
2 teaspoons salt, plus more to taste

Saute the onion in 1 tablespoon butter till translucent. Add the potatoes, broth, and bay leaf and simmer until fork tender. Add the broccoli and heat through. (If you want the broccoli to be super-soft, add it sooner to the potato-broth mixture sooner so it can cook along with the potatoes.) Remove the bay leaf and stir in the salt.

Melt the remaining 4 tablespoons butter in a separate saucepan. Whisk in the flour and then beat in the milk. Heat till hot and bubbly. Remove from heat and stir in the cheeses. Stir several scoops of the broccoli-potato mixture into the cheese sauce to thin it out before adding the cheese sauce to the pot of vegetables. Stir well (do not let boil), taste to correct seasonings, and serve.

This same time, years previous: sweet and sour lentils, lemon squares, blessing hearts

The wind was blowing, the leaves were falling, and I had just read a post about using a fan to boost the interest factor when taking pictures. So I grabbed my youngest daughter. “Hey, I’ll give you a piece of candy if you come outside and let me take pictures of you,” I said. She jumped at the chance to earn a piece of yucky hard candy and hurried to throw on my Guatemalan poncho.

Then she just sat there while I took pictures to my heart’s content.

Why did I not think of bribery before?

We’d hear the breeze roaring through the trees down across the road, and I’d ready my camera.

She’d lift her chin and face the wind.

And then she’d start to smile.

“Feel the wind!” I yelled, and she grinned harder.

“Come on. Smile bigger! Show me your teeth!” And so I got this:

Serves me right.

This little girl is a work of art, let me tell you. She goes through spells where she’s highly irritable, spitting venom with every breath, defiant and argumentative. After one particularly bad day, or series of days, rather, I said to her, “You’ve been having a hard time lately, haven’t you?”

She nodded sullenly, and I said, “What should we do when you get like that? Do you need to go outside and play? Snuggle with me? Be alone in your room? What helps, huh?”

“Listening to music,” she said, quick as a wink.

And it’s true, the girl loves music. She will listen to tapes for hours on end. She picks out melodies on the piano. She loves the songs from My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music. Music feeds and soothes her.

I’ve started giving her piano lessons, but I think she needs more. I think she needs to sing. Perhaps I should look into getting her into a choir? I’ll have to ponder this more.

I also need to ponder why it is that at our all saints’ day church service, she lit a candle, not for her dear friend’s deceased father or her great grandmother, but for Sally, her big sister’s dead guinea pig. It added an element of hilarity to an otherwise somber service.

And I need to ponder how it is she managed to get such gorgeous golden ringlets. The girl has no idea how lucky she is. And the curls will probably all disappear with puberty, or, if not puberty, then with childbirth. My hair used to be stick-straight, but then I had kids. Same things with my complexion: it used to be creamy smooth…until I had kids. Having kids has changed me from the inside out.

It’s been totally worth it.

When my older daughter caught on that her sister was posing for candy, she demanded her turn.

Or maybe I asked her, I forget which. In either case, she was eager to oblige.

Candy is a tool that must not be underestimated!

This girl will be a teenager all too soon. When my husband saw this picture (a pose she pulled off all on her own), he actually gasped, “Teenager! She looks like a teenager!”

She’s starting the bursting-into-tears-at-the-drop-of-a-hat thing. (Door slamming was already commonplace.) She likes to attach an old portable phone to her jeans, put on the headphone/mouthpiece thingy, and sashay around the house talking valley girlese. It drives her father batty. In fact, just the other night he roared, “Don’t talk like that! I can’t stand it! It makes you sound … dumb!”

He’s never one to mince words (he once mentioned that a soup we were eating at a friends’ house tasted “moldy”—he has yet to live that one down), but his outburst didn’t slow our girl down, oh no. She just went up to him and yakked louder.

Seriously, this girl doesn’t stop talking. Her mouth goes and goes and goesandgoesandgoes. At least a half dozen times each day I find myself squeezing my eyes shut and screeching, “Do not say another word!”

“But—,” she presses.

“Stop it!”

“But—”

“DO! NOT! SPEAK!”

Such theatrics buy me approximately 8.5 seconds of silence. It’s a losing battle.

See how her chin is lifted here? It’s how she goes through life, kind of rammy. She’s a lot like her father. He gets her. Which is good, because, well, lets just say, I love her to smithereens, and I respect her and adore her and think she’s the bomb, but I don’t get her.

This is what’s so amazing and unique and strange about raising children. They are people. I mean, duh, right? But no, really! These children, these people who came from me, exhibit behaviors and thinking patterns and tendencies that are so completely not me. It’s fascinating, challenging, intriguing, invigorating, and baffling.

Partway through the wind and her brother throwing rakefulls of leaves on her, my girl, ever the resourceful one, plucked a long green grass and tied her hair back.

And then when I told her to kneel, because I wanted to shoot some from-above pictures, she went all devout on me.

I never even got around to playing with the settings on my camera. But after last night’s traipse around town, I have enough candy to fuel a gazillion photo shoots, so I’m not worried.

This same time, years previous: why I’m spacey, Greek yogurt, oatmeal bread