The first entry

The first entry of the year. I was hoping Gabriella would supply me my first entry of the year, but alas. Well, some things never change here at Peaches & Coconuts –references to the insufficient number of entries in my married life and my tired double entendres. It’s a genetic thing-the double entendres, that is. My father is a carrier of the RESH gene (Roll Eyes Sense of Humour), and he passed it on to me. I remember the day that my father and I first made the first awful pun aloud and in unison. I realized at that horrifying moment that I would spend the rest of my days making people groan with my sad excuses for jokes.

If you’re a Jew of Eastern European descent who is considering procreating, you might want to get tested for the RESH gene. It’s very common amongst our people. The prognosis for carriers is pretty bleak. There is absolutely nothing you can do about it and little you can do to suppress the tick like responses to banal comments that would normally and preferably be left alone. I appreciate all the friends and family members who put up with my uncontrollable need to have the last, unfunny word.

But the subject of this first entry is not to dwell on unfortunate humour but instead to share with you some holiday highlights. The goals of this holiday season have been to 1. keep the thermostat set to almost-humane-degrees due to the exorbitant cost of heat, and 2. to spend quality time with the boys before we’re both working full-time (given allowances for blogging, obviously). To this end, I am happy to report that we’re a frugally freezing family. Last night, Gabriella and I decided that our frugal freezing family bonding activity would be to light the fire in the fireplace and make s’mores.

If you are a parent, then you know that s’more is to a child what purple drank is to rappers. The insipid, animated rodents Max & Ruby elevated the status of s’mores from fun treat to Food of the Gods when Ruby’s bunny scout leader taught Max and Ruby how to make them. When we told Asher that we were going to make them just like Max and Ruby did on television, he jumped and leapt around the house for hours as if he hadn’t relieved himself in 3 days. Levi followed suit without really understanding why. And yet, it’s true that some things are better left as fantasy.


It all began pleasantly enough with the boys positioned closely to an open fire-flammable twigs in hand. And then, Levi’s marshmallow caught fire. Asher fah-reaked. Mommy blew out the flames and showed the boys the beautifully crisp and blackened marshmallow that survived the blazing pyre and gently pulled it off the stick with the graham crackers. Unconvinced that we were safe, Asher watched his own marshmallow hover dangerously close to the fire. When his cube of gelatine was baked just right, I pulled the stick out from the fireplace to proceed with the s’more assembly. Unfortunately, there was a single ember still lit on the corner of the marshmallow. Though it went out in a fraction of a second once it hit the cold air of our refrigerated house, Asher was convinced that the marshmallow was going to combust at any moment and turn us all to ash.

I can’t blame the kid for his aversion to fire. We Jews don’t have the best history with fire. Soaking in the sun on a tropical beach is as close to baked as we care to get these days, thank you very much. I am also uncomfortable with the high calibre of German engineering that has perfected seat warmers in their cars. I’d prefer to take the bus than to risk an electrical short in case the technology in a German car can detect a Jewish tush. All that said, I didn’t want to completely invalidate Asher’s fear of fire, so I took the first bite of his s’more to prove that it was safe. These are the kinds of sacrifices a mother makes for her children.

Meanwhile, Levi had a cow because he did not want a “sandwich” of ingredients. He screamed and cried until we successfully pulled apart each element of the s’more and removed any evidence that the marshmallow and chocolate squares and graham crackers had ever made contact. Not easy to scrape melted marshmallow off a graham cracker. Once Asher had finished his s’more, Levi agreed to taste an assembled s’more, but he abandoned it after 2 bites and ate his lone, dry graham cracker instead.

Asher managed to eat one s’more, but I don’t know that he’ll be requesting another camp fire dessert any time soon. He did enjoy the sticky goodness of the marshmallows in between his fingers. Takes me back to pre-pregnancy days when I could gauge my fertility from the consistency of my own cervical mucus. I’m sorry. Were you eating? Well, I hope you never look at a s’more in the same way again!

On a more sombre note, Curtis Allina, the man who put the heads of licensed characters on Pez dispensers, died on December 15th begging the question, will his headstone resemble Mr. Allina’s face, and if so, will we be able to pull it back to say ‘thank you’ to him for enabling us to eat sweets from the slit throats of our favourite entertainers?