ao neko

cranky craft

2011-02-14T17:32:00.002-05:00

Can I just tell you what a colossal pain this supposedly simple, classic valentine craft was?

The only part that was no problem was collecting orphaned and broken crayons. After that:

1. Peeling that paper off was hard, yo. The Crayola brand, especially, seems to use a lot of glue. I finally hit on the idea of soaking the crayons in a hot water bath before trying to peel their wrappers, that that was probably what saved my thumbnails.

2. I could not break the crayons into small enough pieces, so I resorted to chopping them with my mezzaluna, which caused the brittle sticks to jump all over the kitchen.

3. I baked them at 250 in a silicone mold, then let them cool on our freezer-like back porch. Feeling optimistic that they had turned out OK and planning to make a second batch, I told the kids they could each have two for themselves.

4. But they were really hard to get out. And they left a residue of color behind in the mold which I was afraid would mar the next batch. So...

4. I popped the mold in the toaster oven, hoping to melt off the residue. Instead, the mold itself melted.

5. Now how was I going to make a second batch in order to have enough for Kai's class? I was forced to repossess the ones I have given the kids, promising them new ones at a later date. They were not pleased. I was not pleased. Valentine's Day was seeming less lovely-dovey by the minute.

6. Miraculously, my husband ran into a friend the next day who was on her way to Ikea, and she picked up a new heart-shaped mold for us. Now that's love!

7. For round two, I sprayed cooking spray in the new mold before putting in the chopped-up crayons, hoping it would help them slide out better and keep them from leaving any of their color behind.

8. This batch cooled with a coating of congealed cooking fat on top which I had to scrape off, heart by heart, with a scissors blade. And no, it didn't keep a residue from being left behind in the mold.

9. I hope Kai's class liked these because I'm never making them again. My own kids have lost interest.

soft landing for the tooth fairy

2010-09-03T19:30:00.008-04:00

We're expecting her again tonight. Iris lost the other front one today, at school on her second day of first grade. It's a big deal to lose a tooth at school - you get to wear it home in a little tooth-shaped box on a sparkly green string around your neck. Iris' grin was almost too wide to fit through the doorway of the school bus this afternoon, missing teeth and all.

We planned this tooth fairy pillow together. She picked the fabric from Loom (which has a whole shelf devoted to fairy prints) and I copied her writing in embroidery floss colors of her choosing. I admit it can be very hard for the control freak in me to reliquish design decisions to a 6-year-old. I have always had very specific ideas. But let's keep in mind who this was really for. I was just the seamstress. I think it turned out just as Iris hoped and she is really happy with it.

And so am I, because this was the first time I have made much of anything in a very long time. It was simple and very satisfying.

Kai worked alongside me, cutting magazine subscription cards to "make a house."

one

2009-07-15T17:01:00.007-04:00

We are away, visiting relatives for Kai's first birthday week. The trip did not get off to an auspicious start. See Exhibit A:

In case it needs a caption, this is a picture of our car being towed from where it broke down as soon as we pulled onto the highway.

Seven hours and God bless our mechanic later, we were finally on our way. At 1 a.m., only halfway across the state but utterly exhausted, we stopped for the night, but then the kids were so hyper- energized by the novelty of the hotel room – Iris leaping the chasm between the double beds again and again, Kai crawling desperately after Jasper, trying to re-attach his leash to his collar – that it was 3 a.m. before anyone got any sleep.

Seven hours and 34 minutes later, Kai turned one. With great ceremony, we turned his carseat around to the forward-facing position, then drove on to my cousin's house for a sweet family party.

I so wanted to get a picture of Kai in his Hawaiian shirt in front of her hibiscus plant, but he was having none of it. A perpetual motion machine like his sister.

And like his sister, too, he will have his birth story broadcast on Blogspot.

So this is how my Bastille Day baby stormed the world.

July 13: I’m one week past my due date, and my sister-in-law has arrived for a four-day visit. The pressure is on to produce a baby. At dinner, I feel distinctly crampy, but I’ve been feeling that way off and on for weeks now, so I don’t get my hopes up.

July 14, 7 a.m.: I get up to go to the bathroom and do my usual full-body inventory: did I deliver a baby in the night? Am I delivering one now? No on both counts: still hugely pregnant. Ah well. I have my now-standing Monday morning appointment with Dr. A at 10:45. I’ll find out then if signs of impending labor have progressed any further and, most likely, her thoughts on the dreaded induction should this pregnancy go on much longer. In the meantime, back to bed to rest until Iris wakes up.

8:00: Hmm. I could be mistaken, but the crampiness I’m feeling seems to be organizing itself into distinct episodes. I tell J I might be having actual labor contractions, then get up to shower and finish packing my bag.

8:17: As I’m bustling about, I keep my eye on the digital bedside clock. By this inexpert method of timing, my contractions seem to be coming at 5-7 minute intervals, but they’re so mild, I feel no sense of urgency. I do, however, decide to call my doctor’s office when it opens and ask if Dr. A can squeeze me in earlier. Just to check on my progress.

8:35: I call my mom and tell her, “I think something might be going on.” I explain my plan to try to move up my doctor’s appointment and ask if she can come stay with Iris.

8:45: J is up, dressed, and anxious for my mother to get here. He has begun timing my contractions using the stopwatch function on his iPhone (what else?) and they’re now 3 1/2 minutes apart. He’s moving into crisis mode, but for me the contractions are still pretty mild and totally manageable, so I’m relaxed and cheerful. I toast the last two of our blueberry scones for breakfast.

9:00: I phone the doctor’s office but get the answering service. “Is this an emergency?” the operator asks. Is it? “I don’t know,” I admit. “I think I’m in labor.” The operator says the doctor on call, Dr. V, will phone me back.

9:05: I’m sitting on the yoga ball in the front hall when my mother arrives. Each contraction is now noticeably more intense than the last, and I’m beginning to have to concentrate on breathing through them.

9:10: My contractions are 2 1/2 minutes apart, like clockwork. J can actually look at the time on his phone, say, “You should be getting another one now,” and as if he ordered it, I’ll feel a new contraction coming on.

9:15: Why doesn’t Dr. V call back? I’m starting to think I won’t be able to walk to the doctor’s office, 3 blocks away, for my 10:45 appointment. In hindsight, this will be the understatement of the year.

9:20: J makes an executive decision. “We’re all going to the hospital!“ he announces. “Everyone in the car!”

9:30: The drive is excruciating. Every turn and bump along the way makes my insides twist and shout, and not in a happy way. On a brick-paved alley that he takes as a shortcut, J simply stops the car to let a contraction subside before going on.

9:33: Stopped at a red light, J tries to call the doctor’s office again to tell Dr. A that I am in active labor and we are headed to the hospital. He gets a busy signal.

9:40: We pull up in front of the hospital, but I can’t climb out of the car until another contraction finishes wringing out my insides. When I do get out, Iris breaks down in tears. I so want to lean back in and comfort her, but I don’t want to (a) have her see me in any more pain, or (b) have the baby on the sidewalk, so I say goodbye, turn and walk in with J, my heart breaking a little as I leaving my sobbing daughter in my mother’s capable hands.

In the elevator to the labor and delivery floor, someone asks, “Are you in labor?” Eyes closed, I manage a single nod.

9:45: At the check-in desk, J has to do most of the talking. A pregnant woman watches me from the waiting room chairs, seeing, I imagine, a glimpse of her future. Later, a nurse remarks to me, “You came in in a bit of a whirlwind,” but it doesn’t feel like that to me at the time. Though I am breathing deeply and intently now to get through every contraction, I am still a model of composure compared to what I will shortly become.

9:50: The triage examining room is tiny; there is nothing in there to help a laboring woman cope, least of all the nurse. She has a young intern or assistant or something take my vital signs, then announces that if my pulse were really that low, I’d be dead. The assistant tries again: same result. Not reassuring. As J fends off her preparations to give me an IV and begs repeatedly for someone to call my doctor, I fight nausea (which, thankfully, passes) and begin moaning through monster contractions.

10:00: A young woman doctor comes in, quickly assesses the situation, and hurries out again to page Dr. A.

10:05: Another family practice physician, Dr. L, arrives to examine me. I will later learn that he is Dr. A’s neighbor and good friend – “We’re brethren,” is how he puts it – and I am very, very lucky that of all the strange-to-me doctors at this great big hospital, he was assigned to me.

Although contractions are coming fast and furious now, no one is more surprised than I am to discover that I am fully dilated. Dr. L disappears briefly, then reappears. He has called Dr. A himself, and “when she heard you were fully dilated, she hung up on me,” he says. Relief: Dr. A is on her way.

10:10: I am moved to one of the hospital’s beautiful labor and delivery suites, where I am too overwhelmed by contractions to take advantage of the birthing ball, private shower, or any of its other spa-like amenities. My birth plan, in which I’d said I wanted to try gravity-assisted positions for the delivery, is a distant fantasy. As a tsunami of a contraction tears through me, it is all I can do to allow myself to be helped onto the bed in the center of the room, let alone stand or squat.

Dr. L has actually read my birth plan, though. “I hear you want to go completely natural,” he says. I nod, although I now remember this moment in my previous labor well, this moment when natural childbirth doesn’t seem like such a good idea after all. But Dr. L replies, “Good! That’s best for mother and baby.” Finally, even though Dr. A still isn’t here, I feel supported.

10:22: I am bellowing like a wild animal now, and then I feel it: the urge to push, except urge isn’t really the word at all. It is a physical imperative so powerful I can’t not obey it. I never felt this during Iris’ birth – I had to be coached through the pushing, I had no instinct for it at all – so I am completely bowled over by the ferocious power of this feeling. “I’m pushing!” I yell.

10:25: I’m pushing through the “urge,” but apparently it is not accomplishing much. I hear Dr. L remark, “I think she’s holding back to wait for Dr. A.” To me he says, “The contractions are bringing the baby down, but you can have this baby very quickly if you want.”

“I want to have the baby!” I cry, meaning, as much as anything, I want to get this over with! But I’m not sure what else to do: I thought I was pushing. “I need help,” I admit.

Dr. L locks eyes with me and tells me what to do. What did he say? I’ve already forgotten. But whatever it is, I do it, and this time I am able to watch in a mirror as a blue-black scalp become visible, then, with the next big push, crowns.

Then a nurse’s voice is in my right ear, giving me urgent instructions: stop the big pushes. Take a breath, give a little grunty push. Uhh. Like that. Take a breath, give a little grunty push. It hurts it hurts it hurts!

Finally I get the go-ahead to push hard again and I push through the pain and I feel the big hard roundness of the baby’s head deliver. With the next push come the shoulders; compared to the head, they are nothing.

10:34: One more push, and the baby’s whole wet body spills out. Stressed by the stormy labor, he has passed meconium (basically, fetal poop) in utero, so there is no ceremonious “Would the father like to cut the cord?” Instead, I watch over my belly as hands, presumably Dr. L’s, swiftly and expertly clamp and snip, and the baby is rushed to an examining area under a warm light on the other side of the room to be cleaned and suctioned.

This must be the moment when Dr. A gets here, because I hear Dr. L announce, “We just delivered!” and then she is there next to me, talking to me and reassuring me about the baby. He has begun to squawk and if I look over, I can see his little legs kicking the air. “Hear that?” Dr. A says. “He sounds good. He’s going to be fine.”

And he is.

Happy birthday, beautiful boy.

putting down roots

2009-07-03T12:54:00.006-04:00

Our backyard plum tree is laden again with fruit. Every day, it's a race against the squirrels to pick the newly-ripe plums before those rat bastards help themselves.

I've been mashing them (plums, that is) with bananas for Kai, but he actually prefers to bite into them whole. Problem is, like Ramona the Pest with her apples, he likes to take just one bite of each. That's his hand sneaking into the picture above to help himself.

Speaking of trees, we have wanted a tree for our front yard for years, and this spring we finally planted a dogwood. Like so many other things in our lives (including, you could even say, our old house itself), we got it secondhand, from our neighbors, who are in the midst of a super-deluxe backyard landscaping project. They rejected this specimen because it has a couple of leafless branches, but we're okay with that. So now, between our preowned dogwood and the redbud I got for my birthday, we have almost doubled the tree population on our property, a very happy thing.

the back 40

2009-06-27T14:50:00.006-04:00

So I turned 40 a couple months ago. I try not to get too hung up on birthdays or age, but just so my entrance into this new decade would not be too sobering (literally or figuratively), J threw me a big party. I think I have already mentioned that he is the chef in our house, and he takes that job seriously, so planning the menu for this fete was no small matter of picking up a couple of trays of cold cuts from the supermarket. Oh no. J cooked up a biographical feast, complete with explanatory table cards. I already posted these to flickr, but I thought I'd share them here, too, because they make me feel good about where I've been, where I am, and what is to come.

The only thing I would add is peanut butter crackers. Not exactly sophisticated party fare, but these were/are a staple of my own childhood and Iris' (Kai, of course, is still too little for peanut butter) which somehow brings us full circle with this mother-of-small-children phase of life I now find myself (up to the ears in Polly Pockets) in.

(recipe for chick pea chili here.)

paradise lost, odd socks found

2009-06-19T12:02:00.008-04:00

There once was a time, a happy well-rested time, when I did not mind hearing Kai's first cry o' the morn, because I knew all I had to do was sleepwalk the couple steps to his crib, bring him back to our bed, and nurse him till he conked out again. Then, with a belly full of warm milk, he would sweetly slumber for one, two, sometimes even three more hours, some days allowing me to get up, shower, and actually make my hair presentable before he came to with gentle coos and baby-babble.

No longer. Now that Kai is a crawling, standing, baby on the move, he cannot wait to start his day of tearing our house apart. His first crow is at 6 a.m., sometimes even earlier, and his first nursing, instead of lulling him back to la-la land, just fuels him for marauding around our bed and standing at the (unscreened) window, threatening to defenestrate anything he can pilfer from our nightstands. This morning he was up at 5:47. I know that is a bright, bouncy hour for some of you (insufferable morning people!) out there, but we are not morning people in our family. Even Iris has been sleeping in till 9:30 since school ended for the summer. I keep telling myself this is a phase. A baby phase. Surely Kai is not expressing some renegade recessive early-riser gene. Surely he will rise (late, of course) to his proud sleeping-in heritage. But when?

Meanwhile, I am pleased, if kind of grossed-out, to report that I have solved one of the mysteries of the universe: I now know where the odd socks from several loads of laundry have disappeared to. The other day I was taking a load out of my front-loader when I spied (with my little eye) a bit of red fabric at the edge of the drum. I pulled at it, and lo and behold! one of Kai's red baby socks came out of the seam between the drum of the washer and the rubber gasket that seals the drum to the housing. (Are these the proper, technical washing machine terms? I have no idea.) Intrigued, I stuck my fingers into the channel under the gasket, and felt more fabric. Pulled some more, and all together, I retrieved five small socks from this secret, unseen place, all of them gunky and linty from their untold, insufficiently-rinsed tumbles with the family's dirty laundry.

Now that I know where those socks disappeared to, I can rest easy. Until 6 a.m., at least.

and to think that i saw it on mulberry street

2009-06-11T14:35:00.004-04:00

I do not actually live on Mulberry Street, but for a couple weeks every year, the block around the corner from my house effectively becomes Mulberry Street when a huge mulberry tree goes into fruit (is that the botanically correct term?). For years, we have simply avoided the purplish-black, seedy sludge formed by the hundreds of overripe berries the tree rains daily upon the ground by crossing the street, but this year, with two berry-crazed kids, we thought, why not? And we picked a colander-full. (As for asking the tree's owner, the house is a rental, we only picked from the branches that were hanging over the sidewalk/street, and if you saw what an invisible dent a pint or so of missing berries makes, you wouldn't accuse us of denying anyone their fair share.)

Then the very next day, there was this article about urban fruit foraging in the New York Times, making us feel unexpectedly au courant with our re-purposed plastic blueberry clamshell full of pilfered mulberries in the fridge. See? We're not poor berry thieves – we're urban foragers!

And then, a block farther down the street, on my route to Whole Foods, this:

Makes me smile every day.

In other news, Kai can crawl and pull himself up and he has – brace yourselves! – two teeth, with two more on the way.

The better to eat mulberries with, my dear. I get more than love bites now when he gnaws my chin, his unmistakable hint that he's ready to nurse. And the summer yawns before us now that Iris' school has ended. School – that's a whole 'nother subject for another post, and maybe I'll actually get around to posting it. Then again, I don't want to make any promises I can't keep.

straight from the heart

2009-03-29T04:13:00.006-04:00

Since she's been going to Waldorf School, Iris sings a lot more, both songs she's learned and ones she makes up. Here's one she belted out in the bathtub the other day:

"I don't like George Bush
I don't like John McCain
I don't like when my daddy yells at me
Or when my brother screams.

I don't like when I'm sad
Or when I'm hurt
or when I'm cut."

Iris turned five on Thursday. My big girl! We gave her a Little House on the Prairie party, to which she wore the new hot-pink-polka-dotted flamenco dress her grandparents brought her from Spain. Ma Ingalls would have had the vapors.

More birthday party pictures on flickr soon, I hope.

(Long time no see, I know! The secret to finding time to update appears to be insomnia – see date stamp on this post.)

i'm still here

2008-11-11T11:52:00.000-05:00

And look at that, so is my banner from spring, even though that plum tree has progressed from blossoms to fruit to leaves to bare branches. Oh well, no time to do anything about that now. While all the stars are aligned – i.e., I'm fed, dressed, and showered, Kai is fed, relatively freshly diapered, and asleep, and isn't quite time to pick up Iris from school yet – I actually have a minute for the computer.

So, how are you? How about that election last Tuesday? I've got to say, it really restored my faith in humankind, or at least in my fellow Americans. Have you seen that Obama has a Flickr site? Of course you have. Unlike me, you are still plugged into the world wide web of fact, fiction, and mystery. Anyway, I'm sure he checks it every day. First thing.

In the much, much smaller picture, I've managed to post to my own Flickr site every so often, but I'll level with you: I've thought about ending this here blog-thing once and for all. But I haven't been able to let go of the idea that maybe I'll come back to it one day. I don't know if today is that day, or if I'll disappear again for several months. It's not that I don't have anything to say. My days are full. It's more that... I don't know. It's hard to explain, and I guess that's one reason I haven't been here, trying to explain it.

Instead, just to give you some sense of recap, here are some posts I've thought about writing while I've been unplugged:

News Flash: The Universe is Interactive! – in which Kai discovers he can use his own hands to reach for, touch, and even grasp things that interest him, including my dinner, which he swept off of my plate and into my lap last night. Silly baby! Pasta is for people with teeth!

Baby's First Goose Egg – in which Iris drops Kai on his head, opening the door to a lifetime of dropped-on-his-head-as-a-baby jokes. I can say this only because the injury was unsightly, but not serious.

That's What I Get for Making a Deal With the Devil – in which I explain how I ended up promising Iris a Barbie (yes, a Barbie. You know those iron-clad child-rearing principles you held so dear before you ever had an actual child? Yes, well, that's how far I've fallen from mine. There actually was what I considered a good reason, but I'm not going to go into it right now) for a month of gold-star-worthy behavior, only to find that the discontinued, deeply-discounted ballerina Barbie I ended up getting her had a broken leg, occasioning an afternoon of tears, ultimately unsuccessful doll doctoring, and begging for a replacement, which was duly procured, when I was counting on that damn Barbie's diversion value to allow me to meet a looming work deadline.

Do I get a run-on sentence award for that?

Anthroposophy and Me – in which I report on Iris' transition to Waldorf school (briefly: she loves it), and why in spite of that we're trying to figure out which other school to send her to next year (briefly: money), and the time a fellow parent actually used the term "anthroposophy" in a conversation with me without blinking an eye – or, more to the point, using a tone of voice which conveyed invisible quotation marks.

Christmas – There's no way it's going to be a handmade holiday from me this year. My studio has been gathering dust and large household objects – like the vacuum cleaner and the yoga ball – that have no place else in our house to live since Kai's birth. Sigh. I miss it, but there is a certain irony to letting the baby fuss while I try to finish making something nice for the baby, so.

Oops! Time's up. Kai and I have to run to get Iris before she turns into a pumpkin. Till next time, whenever that may be...

xoxo

[Not-so-Confidential to Tracey from Paper Dolls for Boys: Thanks for tracking me down and leaving a comment! I think it was the spur I needed to finally post this post.]

WKAI

2008-08-25T19:24:00.002-04:00

Don't touch that dial! While you may have been watching the Olympics (and let's be truthful, I wish I had watched them too - despite the drug scandals and intimations of underage Chinese gymnasts, I still get sucked in by the idealistic promise of a contest among beautiful youthful athletes in their prime) I have been glued to channel WKAI, with its 24-hour programming on no particular schedule, for the past six weeks. Computer? Computer who? I'm lucky if I get to check my email once every couple days, let alone frequent my old internet haunts, the blog circuit and Flickr. It's hard to type when you're nursing anyway. Ditto taking pictures.

It's not that I haven't been thinking about posting, or even composing posts in my head. After all, I don't keep a paper journal anymore, so this is the closest I come to fulfilling my compulsion to document my life (that, and the calendar that J fills in every night before bed, recording our daily activities. We've got seven years so far! But that's pretty cursory, and this, fairly discursive). One of those unrealized posts was called "breastmilk and saltines." That was the week that Iris fell victim to a nasty stomach bug and was unable to keep anything, not a drop of water nor crumb of cracker, down. Poor kid. Thank goodness (a) that is now firmly in the past, and (b) I didn't catch it too, because I don't know how I would have coordinated round-the-clock nursing and throwing up.

But it's all good. Kai is a little dreamboat. Doesn't cry much, easy to soothe when he does. Likes things that rhyme with "ing": the swing, the sling, and sing(ing). Oh, and have I mentioned that Kai coos and smiles? I could pass out from the breathy, gummy joy of it.

Having a summer baby has been nice. Not only do we log lots of time on the porch swing, we have interrupted our regular programming on a few occasions to go to the zoo, Idlewild, and some low-key picnics and parties. As long as there's shade, a bench for nursing, and another grown-up to hang with Iris so that she doesn't have to be tethered to me while Kai indulges in one of his epic feeds, we're good.

I should have said this right off the bat, but: thank you for all the lovely comments you sent when Kai was born! People have been so kind. Almost everyone who has brought or sent a baby gift for Kai has included a big sister present for Iris, too. One faraway family friend, ignorant of the fact that my girl has worn nothing but dresses and skirts since she was 2 1/2, sent her shorts that she actually wore. Twice. Then she found some other shorts in her dresser and wore them, too. A short-lived experiment (no pun intended) or a wardrobe breakthrough? We shall see.

We have even had a bit of anthroposophy in our lives. Yes, Iris will be starting the Waldorf School in the fall – that is, in a little over a week – and our August schedule has been full of teacher home visits, get-acquainted picnics, and new parent orientations. I am impressed by the effort the school puts into forging relationships with and among its families, and so far that and the truly wonderful early childhood play yard – no plastic play equipment, just landscaping and homemade wooden features like a sandbox and playhouse as backdrop for imaginative games – have formed a positive impression that outweighs the oddity of the choral reading of a "verse" from Rudolf Steiner at the closing of parent orientation.

Myself, I have no verse to close with, so I'll just say: This is WKAI signing off for now.

a conversation while nursing*

2008-07-28T11:56:00.002-04:00

Iris: Isn't it wonderful that your body makes all the milk that Kai needs to eat?

Me [reveling in this spontaneous Our Bodies, Our Selves moment]: Yes! Women's bodies are amazing!

Iris: Do all women have nipples?

Me: Yes. You will, too, someday. [Then, deciding the time as come to correct a longstanding misnomer of hers:] Actually, you already have nipples. The full parts of women's chests are called breasts. The nipples are the pink parts at the tips where the baby nurses.

Iris: What are breasts for?

Me: For making milk and feeding babies.

Iris: Why aren't they called nursing plumps?

*Posted while nursing. Because that's my life right now: all nursing, all the time.

baby brother has landed!

2008-07-15T15:34:00.004-04:00

Kai Oliver was born yesterday, Bastille Day, at 10:34 a.m. after a labor so fast and furious that it knocked the socks off of everyone present. Seriously. They're still sweeping up socks.

I'll tell that story soon. For now, let's skip to the happy ending:

He's such a pumpkin dumpling.

here's hoping

2008-07-10T11:30:00.000-04:00

the waiting is the hardest part

2008-07-07T06:30:00.004-04:00

Actually, that is completely untrue – the giving birth is the hardest part. But I'm not sure waiting for it could make me any edgier.

Yesterday was my due date. On the one hand, I'm grateful to Baby Brother for hanging in there over the long fourth of July weekend while my doctor was out of town. On the other, I feel like a ticking time bomb. I'm trying to remain cool, calm and open to whatever his plans are, but somehow I don't think that is what has kept me awake since 3:30 this morning.

Just for a little variation from the theme, here is a gratuitous photograph of Iris on the fourth of July, standing in the middle of what appears to be a heart-shaped crop circle. Actually, J informs me that it is probably the outline of a below-ground fungus, but I prefer to think of it as a botanical magical mystery. That orb of light over her head, in case you're wondering, is either a firefly, a firework, or a UFO.

pins and needles

2008-07-04T14:33:00.007-04:00

That's what we're on around here, as signs accumulate that Baby Brother is getting ready to make his move.

Now that I don't have my book to distract me, it's harder not to live in constant anticipation of The Big Event. What was that twinge? And that one? Do I detect a pattern? I'm trying to stay relaxed and busy myself with little things, like some last-minute quickie crafting.

First, some headbands for Iris, who has been begging me for some for weeks now.

These were so fast and simple to whip up, they'll probably become the new default birthday present for her friends.

I also finished a chicken applique on one of her old onesies, which will of course be handed down to Baby Brother. Lesson learned from this: those little pieces were really hard to machine-sew. If they don't survive the wash, at least I'll have this picture. Also, who knew chicken feet would be so hard to embroider?

I actually freezer-paper stenciled these little newborn kimono shirts some time ago, but it's been hard to get the colors to come out in a photograph (Sarah, I've needed your help!). I think this is as good as it gets.

More news soon, I hope. Happy fireworks, everyone!

150 pages, 39 weeks, and 3 centimeters

2008-07-01T11:48:00.006-04:00

So this morning I was trying to take the milk out of the fridge for my coffee when a huge spasm seized my back (no, not that kind of spasm or that part of my back) and I lost my grip and milk spilled everywhere. I wasn't so much crying over the, well, you know, as the incredible difficulty of bending over to clean it up. If I'm going to be hunched over my ginormous belly, forcing my lungs into my collarbone and cutting off my air supply, for that long, I'd really much rather be giving myself a pedicure.

But it's all good. I may have not had a baby via a painless, 1/2 hour delivery, but I did finish my book! It took a month of uninterrupted concentration and a back-to-the-wall self-imposed deadline, but I did it. I think we have all heard the comparisons between gestating a baby and a book so I will not go there, except to say that this book has been in the works for a lot longer than either of my babies, not to mention demanding a lot more willpower than the forces of nature that are pregnancy and birth, so the feeling of elation and relief at having finished is tremendous. (Also, I think my editor would be very surprised if I dropped Baby Brother off with him after he is born.) Of course, what I've written is a draft. I know there will be further revisions and other tasks after my editor has his shot at it, but I feel I will be able to make time for that somehow after Baby Brother is on the outside. I am just so glad to have all the big thinking work, the updated research and pushing to new conclusions, behind me. There are still a few things on the old to-do list that I would like to cross off before life changes forever around here, but basically now the decks are cleared for Baby Brother's arrival.

Which is a good thing, because at 39 weeks I am already walking around 3 centimeters dilated. No effacement action, though, and Baby's head is still floating. But still, free centimeters! I'll take 'em (who wouldn't?).

I am also pleased to report that Jasper is running and jumping around like his old self, despite the raw, gaping hole in his leg onto which J and I have to smear liquid skin daily (yuck). Furthermore, our regular mailman is back from vacation, which may not sound like good news to you, but his daily rounds – with his little box of dog treats – are pretty much the highlight of Jasper's life, so between that and the feeling better, we've got a happy hound again.

Here is Iris' zoo calendar for the month of July. Back when she first got it, we went through all the months and made special notes and decorations on all the family birthdays and other important dates. I told her July was the month we were expecting Baby Brother to be born, but we couldn't know exactly which date. She proceeded to draw a baby on the 11th and to scribble out every other day. So there you have it: in the world according to Iris, Baby Brother will come on July 11th.

Works for me.

PS. My friend Kat wins the Perceptiveness Prize for noticing something in my last post that even J and I had not noticed: when the refinishers put the handles back on our kitchen cabinets, they replaced them backwards. I can't believe it took someone looking at before-and-after pictures on the computer to see such a fundamental change in the kitchen J and I use every day, but there you have it.

while we wait

2008-06-24T12:48:00.001-04:00

I took some time out from The Book this weekend to spend with my old (have I really known her for over 20 years? yes, I have) friend Beth, who decided to shoehorn in a visit in our waning days as a family of three. Not for anyone else would I have swept, mopped, and scrubbed the entire house at 38 weeks pregnant. But since it was very likely the last top-to-bottom cleaning this house will get before (and let's face it, after) Baby Brother arrives, it was good to get it done. And of course, great to see Beth, who is truly a fellow traveler in this life.

The only unwanted drama of the weekend was that poor Jasper impaled his thigh on a branch in Frick Park and had to be carried to the vet for treatment of a pretty gory wound. We've been nursing him with painkillers, liquid skin, lots of petting and special treats, but he's going to be an invalid for a while, poor pup, and it's sad to see him not his usual spunky self.

With all that excitement now over, and before I put my blinders back on to finish (let's hope) The Book, allow me to introduce... Ladies and gentlemen, my new kitchen! Go ahead, view it large!

Lest you merely nod politely and move on, I think a little before and after action will dramatize the transformation. The "before" shots are scans of old film prints from several years ago – in other words, not that great – but you'll get the general gist of the hideosity we were up against.

Here's the corner where the window had been walled over and we were able to install an exhaust hood. The stove and cabinets date from the last renovation of the kitchen in 1962. My father-in-law generously offered to buy us a new stove, but we like our funky old one and will keep it till it quits. The steel cabinets likewise fall under the heading of "they don't make 'em like that anymore," so we had them refinished rather than spend more money on new ones. A new pull-out style cabinet to the left of the stove provides 12 precious inches of extra counter space next to the cooktop and is where we now keep our most-used cooking oils and spice jars, saving multiple mid-sautée trips to the pantry.

Here's the other side of the kitchen. Same cabinets, new butcher block counters and tile backsplash (our one big splurge). Where you see the little bookcase in the "before" picture is where, a couple years ago, we busted through the back wall and restored a doorway to the former butler's pantry. Aside from restoring the house's original circulation pattern, this brought a lot of borrowed light into our otherwise cavelike kitchen.

A "new" sink was key to the whole project – actually an old enameled cast-iron double sink with a double drainboard, which allowed us to skip building any countertop between the dishwasher and the window. We haunted Construction Junction for this sink for a year and a half and finally picked it up for only $20, which allowed us to splurge on a super-deluxe faucet. I had no idea what a difference a a nice faucet would make. Have I mentioned how much I love my faucet? I lurrrve it.

Finally, here is the little hallway which leads from the front of the house to the kitchen in the back. Some years ago, we knocked out a broom closet on the left which allowed us to move the refrigerator across the room and install a dishwasher (another life-changing event). The two doors lead to the basement and the pantry. I painted the wall at the back of the little hall with chalkboard paint – fun for Iris, a place to write shopping lists and notes for J and me.

Even though it's not a whole new kitchen, it is. We may have kept the same cabinets, appliances, even roughly the same layout, but small improvements have made it a better space in every way. The room where we spend the most time is now a room where we like to be. So good!

another insomniac post, which brings us to how many now?

2008-06-14T12:53:00.013-04:00

I wish I could bottle some of this wakefulness for when the baby comes and I'll need it.

I am 37 weeks pregnant, and if you've been in my shoes – which are flip-flops because that is the only footwear into which I can cram my feet, which are swollen like popovers – you know what that means. It means I am officially full term, so I could go into labor at any moment, or still be pregnant a month from now. It's a weird waiting game.

Until recently I've been complacently confident that Baby Brother, like his big sister before him, will almost certainly be late. On time at best. But recently, I've begun to get some inklings that this baby might actually come early. And, uncomfortable as I am with all my late-pregnancy aches and pains, and as eager to get that pesky business of having the baby over with so I can actually meet this squirmy little person who's been taking up increasingly greedy amounts of my internal real estate, I really don't want the baby to come early. Are you listening, Baby Brother? Please don't come too soon! Because I need my month of June!

Because I am desperately trying to finish a book. Writing one, that is. The manuscript consists of my 10-year-old master's thesis, to which I need to add a host of updates and revisions, and this month – this month only! – I have the incredible luxury of being able to work on it full-time. The past couple weeks, I've been on a roll, and if I can continue at this feverish clip, I think I can finish by my self-imposed deadline of the end of the month. If no cataclysmic life events intervene.

It's not too much to ask, is it, that Baby Brother should come not too late (so I can avoid the dreaded pitocin drip this time) and not too soon (so I can put my right-brain cares away, or more accurately lob them into my editor's court, and just enjoy this boy when he gets here)? I feel like I should make a Goldilocks joke here but I am too tapped out to think of a good one... maybe you can.

On a related tangent, I got the best mail this week. For the work I'm doing on my manuscript, I decided I needed to have my own copy of a book that I had had on indefinite library loan when I was a grad student. The book is out of print, so I ordered it from an online used bookseller, which for me, as a person who is picky about books, is always a bit of a crapshoot in which I weigh the price of the book versus what little information about the edition, condition, etc. I can glean from the seller's (often unhelpful) description. The only edition of the book I ever knew was that borrowed grad school copy, which had a plain blue library binding, so imagine my delight when I opened a manila mailer the other day and found this:

It's the little things in life, I tell you. I keep this beside me even when I'm not actively referring to it because just looking at the cover makes me happy.

And, although I've severely curtailed almost all non-book-related activities lately (now you know why I haven't been around here, or your blog, or Flickr much), I did drop by the thrift store that is on my way home from my neighborhood library (how conveeeen-ient!) and bring this home recently... because another serving bowl is just what my household needs... not. But it's a slightly different size than the rest of our bowls, J pointed out, and has already put it to use. Good man.

a feeling of deep well-being

2008-05-30T15:53:00.006-04:00

Because it is sunny and warm and I think spring may finally be here to stay.

Because we brought up the porch furniture from the basement and made our favorite room in the house ready for summer. Let the outdoor living begin!

Because good friends are coming over for diner.

Because a vacant lot in our neighborhood is becoming a community garden this summer. Thank you Whole Foods! Say what you will about "Whole Paycheck" and all that... Whole Foods is a good neighbor.

Because be that as it may, greens and broccoli are growing like gangbusters in our backyard garden. We had our first home-grown salad the other night and it was good.

Because Mr. Breech Boy got himself straightened out and is now head-down in the blast-off position. 35 weeks down, five (or so) to go.

Because this weekend, our kitchen will finally be 100% really, truly done.

Because I am sitting on the porch swing with my (only somewhat swollen at the moment) feet up.

Ahhh.

little miss malaprop

2008-05-26T18:06:00.003-04:00

One of my favorite things about Iris' little-kid speech is her malapropisms. Here are a few I want to remember:

"Mama, could I have some of your tarogomi paper?" (Taro Gomi is a Japanese author of some children's books we own.)

"The pennies are the opera-colored ones." (Sorting coins.)

"When you're done petticoating, could you read me a story?" (Spoken during my neti pot ritual.)

"Cantalope." (A horned, hoofed animal that lives on the African plains.)

Any good ones at your house? C'mon, share!

bea's ensalada

2008-05-22T17:26:00.000-04:00

Even though it's more brisk than balmy today, I'm in the mood to share one of my favorite summer recipes.

Several years ago, my dear friend Gretchen went away to live in Spain. When she came back, she had me over to lunch and served me this salad, which she'd learned from her Spanish friend Bea. It's since become a staple of my own warm-weather repertoire.

1 15 oz. can garbanzos
1 tomato (in season only)
1 medium cucumber
1/2-1 red onion
1/2-1 red pepper
1-2 avocadoes
4 or so radishes
1 can tuna (splurge on the good stuff – dark meat packed in olive oil)

Dressing (not an exact science):

2 parts olive oil + 1 part red wine vinegar + a dollop of good spicy mustard + salt and pepper (add how much you think, then a little more)

Drain the garbanzos. Chop up the veggies and toss with garbanzos and tuna. Whip up some dressing and pour over the whole shebang.

This is a great hearty + nutritious lunch, no-cook summer supper, or picnic potluck dish. It's also really flexible – when I don't have radishes, I just throw in something else that's colorful and crunchy, like a carrot. Sometimes I peel the cucumbers and carve out the seeds; sometimes I don't bother. Avocadoes too hard or too expensive? Leave 'em out. The salad will still be good.

overdone

2008-05-18T19:22:00.000-04:00

So I missed the mother of all yard sales this weekend, a huge neighborhood-wide one that I try to hit every year. In the neighborhood in question, I don't think they sell you a house unless you are a family with little kids, so the pickings of toys, children's books, clothes, and baby gear tends to be especially rich. I was hoping to score some new reading material for Iris and an exersaucer and/or a swing for Baby Brudder.

Instead of yard sale-ing, I learned the meaning of overdoing it. It began a couple weeks ago with an afternoon of crouching in the garden, planting, which strained some muscles or ligaments or something in the all-important thigh-bone's-connected-to-the-belly-bone region. But did I rest? Oh no, I did not. I walked, here there and everywhere. Then I spent that one afternoon hauling baby stuff up from the basement. I felt that afterward, too. But instead of taking it easy for a few days, I walked some more. Miles more. By the night before the sale, I was in no shape for an hours-long, neighborhood-wide yard sale safari. I could barely make it up the stairs to bed. I don't just mean I was tired. I mean I was hurting.

I don't like to admit it, but I am four years older than the last time I carried twenty-five pounds of baby and all its prenatal baggage on my belly. All this time I have been mocking the fact that I am considered, in the medical parlance, of "advanced maternal age," and yet here I am, hobbling like an old lady. I hate to give up walking - it's not only my pleasure and my exercise, but my lifestyle, one of the reasons I live in a city neighborhood instead of out in the 'burbs somewhere. But I think I better put in some R & R now or pay for it later, quite possibly in damages worse than missed yard sale bargains.

So, since I have no yard sale scores to show off, here is a little something I found elsewhere for Baby Brudder's room:

A little spot-cleaning and it will be good as, well, the 1970s.

And some embellishments I have added to spiff up Iris' former infant wardrobe:

Trees. I just can't stay away from the trees.

A fox related to this one; an apple applique to hide an unsuccessful stamp attempt; and a kangaroo pocket because, ridiculous as it is, the idea just grabbed me one day.

This little elephant is here because I have a pet peeve about baby clothes with cutesy words and phrases on them. This otherwise perfectly presentable secondhand shirt had completely unnecessary ribbons sewn onto it to inform all and sundry that its wearer was "cute as a button" or some such. So, off with the ribbons and on with an elephant applique to cover up the scar. Much better! In my finicky little world at least.

does a family of three get 45 minutes of fame?

2008-05-17T16:05:00.000-04:00

Because we're putting plenty in the bank this week.

First, J and Iris were on TV on Thursday morning. They were talking up Pedal Pittsburgh, the annual city-wide bike ride and fundraiser for one of my favorite organizations, the Community Design Center of Pittsburgh. Wish I could link to the clip but the powers that be at KDKA Today Live apparently have a very different idea of posterity than I do. Booo! I actually have not even seen it myself – even though KDKA is a local broadcast channel, it doesn't come in at our house. A friend taped it though, so I should get to revel in my family's cycling star power soon enough.

Now, class, please turn to page 160 in your latest issue of Craft: magazine:

How about that! An "enchanted dresser"! I guess that makes me the salvage fairy. Hey, maybe that's what I'll put on my business card.

free to a good home

2008-05-12T23:04:00.001-04:00

OK, I can have the baby now.

I spent the afternoon in a furious fit of nesting, cleaning the nursery and then re-stocking it with the contents of all the boxes of toys, board books, cloth diapers, diaper covers, bibs, hats, and other infant-related whatnot that I hauled up from the basement. Because the baby will need toys and board books urgently, without delay! Honey, hand me a shape-sorter, stat! I am reminded of when I was pregnant with Iris and I asked a friend, who as the parent of a 15-month-old seemed cloaked in the wisdom of motherhood, what we would really need when we brought our baby home. "Not much," my friend said. "Pretty much just diapers and breasts." What a comfort that was.

Anyway, since Iris moved into her big-girl room and up until today, the nursery has basically served as a clothing-sorting station. I've been sifting through four years of her wardrobe, sorting the girlie from the unisex, that to be donated to Goodwill from that to be taken to the consignment store. (I play a little game where I try to never, or almost never, spend actual money on her clothes, but recycle the old for credit toward the "new." Does anyone else do this?) Of course I've made a little sentimental stack of things to keep – favorite dresses, the baby peasant blouse my friend sent her from Paris and which she wore for her first Christmas photos, the tiny shoes she wore to my sisters-in-laws' wedding.

But there are a couple other things I'm having trouble just boxing up and giving away. Things which Iris never even wore, but which I'd like to pass on to someone who will really appreciate them.

So, do you have or know a kindred spirit who has a small baby girl? If so, I offer the following free to a good home:

If you can resist the toadstools, polka dots, and ruffles of this outfit, then I really think someone should check your pulse. I don't even like mushrooms and I am still getting over the fact that Iris never got to wear this. My mom gave it to her because the toadstools reminded her of Germany, but sadly, so sadly, it was the wrong size/season for her little peanut baby self, and I never got to put it on her even once. It is size 6 months.

I admit I picked up this little vintage (80s?) Hanna Andersson one-piece romper/jumper thingie on a thrift expedition before I found out that Baby Brudder was, in fact, a brudder. Now, I am pretty liberal when it comes to raising a boy in a lavender-painted nursery with flowered curtains, but it turns out I draw the line at dressing him in pale pink stripes. This is a Euro size 60, which is about the equivalent of US 3-6 months.

Interested? Just email me at chartreusebag (at) mac (dot) com. And stay tuned – there may be more as the sorting continues.

happy mothers' day

2008-05-11T13:22:00.004-04:00

1972

1988

2008

telling it like it is

2008-05-10T11:19:00.004-04:00

[Waiting at the pharmacy counter, Iris spies a shelf of children's vitamins and immediately hones in on a box adorned with those accursed Disney princesses]

"Look, mama! Cinderella and Ariel and Belle! Why are they there?"

"Those are children's vitamins, and the people who made them put the princesses on the box to make them attractive."

"I'm attracted!"

* * * * *

[a conversation between Iris and our mailman]

"Do you go to school?"

"Yes, but I'm on a break right now to spend some time with my mama before Baby Brudder turns our lives upside-down."

* * * * *

"I've noticed that as your belly gets plumper with Brudder, your bottom is getting bigger too."

i heart new york

2008-05-02T22:31:00.006-04:00

It's a great place to visit and heck yeah, I'd want to live here if it were remotely affordable, which it isn't, especially not with stores like Muji and Pearl River tempting my inner consumer on nearly every corner.

We're away on a week-long trip, visiting family and friends in New Jersey and New York, sort of a last fling as a family of three before Baby Brudder (as Iris calls him) turns our lives upside down in two months (!). And what of the last month or so that has somehow slipped by since I last updated this space? Mostly, it has been full of a lot of busy-ness that doesn't make very good copy. End-of-semester push. Houseguests. Family birthdays (including mine), the quiet kind without a lot of fanfare, but which might include long afternoons whiled away at the cupcake cafe. Finishing up the kitchen, or nearly. I'd say it's about 98% done, but I'm waiting for 100% to give the triumphant full-color lavishly-illustrated before-and-after report. Preparing for the baby, including making some things, but not having very good luck photographing them (still getting to know my new camera).

In other words, daily life.

Also, to tell the truth, I actually enjoy the occasional hiatus from my fearsome internet addiction. It's been a very good month of life lived, if not blogged.

it's about time

2008-04-06T23:55:00.004-04:00

...for an new banner and, hey, how about a quickie post while I'm at it? That's one of the first buds to bloom on my backyard plum tree there. I wonder if it will bear fruit this year. The first five years I lived in this house, it didn't. Then a couple years ago, a bumper crop. Then last year – nada. Don't know much about botany, so I don't understand the whens and wherefores of its cycle. Lends an element of mystery to every spring: will there be plums?

Lots more going on, but will have to wait till I'm less swamped for show and tell.

Till then.

xoxo

four years ago today

2008-03-26T14:23:00.010-04:00

Today is Iris' fourth birthday. Taking a page from Sarah's book, I thought I'd tell her birth story. (Iris', not Sarah's.) Settle in, get comfy: it begins two weeks before her birth.

March 12: Baby's original due date (according to my doc's Magic Due Date Predictor Wheel). No action.

March 15: Baby's alternate due date (according to mid-pregnancy ultrasound). Still nothing.

March 16: An ex-boyfriend's birthday. Gosh, he was such a nice guy! Haven't thought of him in ages! But yeah, I can see how this would be maybe not such an auspicious day for this baby's birthday. Showing early solidarity with her father, baby stays put.

March 17: I am relieved my baby will not be forced to share future birthdays with shamrocks, leprechauns, and green beer.

March 19: All right, baby, listen up. The first week overdue was fine. I was actually kind of grateful for the extra time. But now I'm starting to get performance anxiety. Of all things, I dread an induction, so let's get this show on the road, shall we?

March 21: The first day of spring and my friend Beth's birthday to boot. What a perfect day to have a baby! Unfortunately, the baby does not agree.

March 22: I am so tired I can barely walk to the bus stop. I remember a coworker telling me that one day at the end of her pregnancy, she felt she couldn't go another step, and sure enough, her labor started that night. I call J to tell him to get ready, I think tonight may be the night. But no.

March 23: I never thought I'd have to make this presentation at work. I was so sure I'd be cozily ensconced at home on maternity leave by now. Members of the audience regale me with folk wisdom for going into labor: "Drive over bumpy roads!" "Eat grapes!" Don't they know I've tried everything by now?

March 24: My grandmother's birthday, but clearly this baby is not interested in sharing her cupcakes with anyone.

March 25: Leaving work for my weekly doctor's appointment, I wearily inform my boss that I don't think I'll be back. How right I am. Dr. A says I am to check into the hospital at 6 P.M. for an induction to begin at midnight. Furthermore, I am 2 cm dilated, 80% effaced.

I temporarily forget my dread of Pitocin in my excitement that things are finally moving. J and I go home, pack, call friends and family, and spend the warm, sunny, spring afternoon walking to our favorite video store two neighborhoods away, renting a movie to entertain us in the hospital. The marathon walk is a last-ditch effort to get labor started on its own. It sort of works – by the time I'm examined in the hospital (we walk there, too), I'm up to 4 cm. But they don't have any birthing suites available, so the induction is put off till morning.

In the miserable little room we're stashed in to wait, I get stuck for an IV and weep bitterly at my fate. "What's the matter?" asks the nurse. "I don't want to be induced!" I sob. She looks at me quizzically: "Why not?" If she has to ask, how can I answer her?

Unable to sleep, J and I walk laps around the maternity wing all night.

March 26, 6 a.m.: Things are looking up. We move into a big, beautiful birthing suite. The day dawns overcast but warm, and I take pictures out the window of the day that will be my baby's birthday.

7:00 a.m.: The anesthesiologist pays a visit. "I hear you're going to try and go natural," he says skeptically. I nod, though as I look the reality of Pitocin in the face, I'm not as confident as I may seem.

8:30 a.m.: My doctor arrives, voicing annoyance that the hospital staff kept me overnight for nothing. She examines me and determines that I am still 4 cm dilated, now 90% effaced. Pitocin drip begins.

10:00 a.m.: 5 cm: halfway there! We're watching Moonstruck and I'm snacking on the cranberry juice, chicken broth, and tea from my liquid breakfast tray. A nurse comes in to ramp up my Pitocin every 20 minutes. She's nice and pregnant, too. I feel the contractions as a rock-hardening of my abdomen, but so far, no pain.

12 noon: Feeling some pain now, nothing I can't handle, but it's not what I expected. It feels exactly like sharp intestinal gas, whereas all the descriptions of labor pain I've heard/read refer to backaches. My back does not seem to be involved in this at all.

12:15: My doula, Laurie, arrives. I'm on my birthing ball, talking on the phone to my father in Holland. "I'm having a contraction right now!" I tell him cheerfully. The pain is getting more, well, painful, but I'm still in control. Maybe I'm having one of those beautiful, easy labors, after which I'll tell everyone, "It really wasn't that bad!" Yeah, I can totally handle this.

12:30: I'm still telling myself that, but something has shifted. I can't find a comfortable position. I feel sick. The pain is becoming overwhelming. I'm not so in control anymore.

12:45: I am desperate to find a position that eases the grinding band of pain around my stomach. As I lean forward over the counter on one side of the room each time a contraction hits, my skimpy hospital gown falls forward, exposing my naked rear end. At this point, modesty is the last thing on my mind, but Dr. A kindly ties another gown over my behind.

1:00: The counter isn't my friend anymore. I lean against the wall. It doesn't help either. Nothing helps.

1:15: I am back on the birthing ball when I realize that the nausea is going to get the better of me. "I'm sorry," I tell J. "I'm going to throw up." "It's OK, go ahead," he says, and I do. "That's worth a centimeter!" says my doctor congratulatorily. Everyone seems so unconcerned, even cheerful, about my losing my breakfast, I feel a smidgen less miserable myself.

1:30: I don't especially feel like getting into the bed, but Dr. A wants to examine me again, so I do. She determines I'm 8 cm dilated and 100% effaced. Now I'm free to get up and move about the cabin, but it's out of the question. Contractions, coming fast and hard, pin me to the bed. There's no time between them to do anything but catch my breath.

1:50: J gets in bed behind me so I can lean back against him, my human armchair. I've begun uttering a low, moaning, mooing sound.

2:20: Dr. A is sitting lightly on the window ledge, watching me moo. Serenely, she says, "If you feel like pushing, go ahead." After a few more contractions, I think I feel it, so I give it a try. I didn’t realize I had to learn how to push. For some reason, my response to each contraction is to want to elongate my body by stretching it back; Dr. A shows me how to grab my legs and crunch forward, over the contraction, to compress my uterus even more.

2:30: Agony. That is the only word for this. I want to beg for the epidural, but I know it's too late. I look at the clock on the wall and tell myself: I will push this baby out by 3:00. Then it will all be over. Another half hour: I can do it.

2:40: The fetal monitor begins showing that the baby might not be getting enough oxygen, so the nurse gives J an oxygen mask to put over my face between contractions. I don't know if this helps the baby, but it definitely helps me. Its weirdly pleasant smell is a sensory distraction from the enormity of the pain, and its presence reminds me to try to relax and breathe deeply between contractions. Then I feel the stirrings of the next contraction, meet J’s eyes, and he removes the mask so I can hold my breath and moan.

3:00: There's a flurry of excitement in the room. The baby’s head! They can see the head! They try to position a mirror so I can see, too; I'm giddy and relieved, fully expecting to see the baby crowning. But when I do catch a glimpse in the mirror, I feel crushed. That, that dark spot, way up there? The head is visible all right – way up in the birth canal. I have a long way to go.

3:15: The baby is bobbing up and down in the birth canal. Dr. A is perched on the edge of the bed now, and during every contraction, she locks eyes with me, saying, “Five seconds. You can do anything for five seconds.” I'm so tired, I fake pushing through some contractions just to get a little rest.

3:23: So that's what they mean by the ring of fire! This is it: I'm done. I'm determined. From where the sun now stands, I will push no more forever. Just as the contraction is fading, I give it an ounce more effort, and Iris Susanna slides into the world, her clenched fist pressed up against her pink, swollen face.

J is red-faced himself and weeping. I'm too wasted for that kind of emotion. Not to mention I have to brace myself for the next contraction... which doesn't come. Instead, a baby, my baby, is placed on my chest. I look into her sweet face for the first time and see, clear as day, that she has my nose.

Happy birthday, sweet little love of mine. The waiting, the Pitocin, the pushing... it was worth every second.

what's cooking

2008-03-24T20:56:00.002-04:00

Our kitchen is!

It may still look like a construction zone to you – and believe me, it very much still is – but it has come a long way from last week, when it was a stripped shell of a room, empty save for dust, drywall, lumber, tools, and a disconnected dishwasher and stove huddled forlornly in the center of it all. We were relying on restaurant reviews, take-out, and the kindness of friends for our meals. Let me tell you, washing dishes by hand in the laundry sink in the basement wasn't pretty.

Still, even with our kitchen in its somewhat put-back-together state, our house is in no condition to host a birthday party for a flock of four-year-olds right now. So we're having Iris' at a county-owned working farm and crossing our fingers that March get its lamb on by then.

In other news, J and I stayed up much too late the other night cross-referencing between a baby name book and the Baby Name Voyager (warning: highly addictive!), searching for the perfect boy's name. Conclusion: it doesn't exist. The problem is not that we can't agree on a name, but that we can't find one that we really love. We ended up making a short list, but in truth even it is padded with names we pretty much already know we aren't going to use. The only serious contenders are defined as names I can imagine using in the grocery store in the following scenario: "[Insert name here], please don't put your hand in the lobster tank!"

not because of Sam Walton, that's for sure

2008-03-20T08:03:00.001-04:00

"Why is it called Wal-dorf if it doesn't have any dorves [dwarves] in it and it isn't a wall?"

oh boy!

2008-03-16T17:02:00.014-04:00

What with all the excitement in the kitchen – still in the worse-before-it-gets-better stage, but definitely coming along – it's been easy to forget that anything else is going on.

But wait, I've got another major project in the works, haven't I?

I mean aside from taming the atrocious bedhead in this picture. I am now 24 weeks pregnant and feeling almost as big as I did when I was about to pop with Iris. Pictures from that pregnancy reveal otherwise, but it's clear that my abdominal muscles long ago threw up their metaphorical hands at the challenge of holding this one in check. Through the miracle of ultrasound and a cooperative baby, whom I deliberately jacked up prior to the procedure with a banana and some chocolate, all three of us got to see inside that belly last week. As a result we now know with crystal clarity that not only is my placenta high and dry (hooray!), the baby attached to it is (drumroll please) a boy!

Now, if it had been another girl, that would have been great. We'd have four years' experience parenting a girl under our belts, an entire wardrobe on hand, even a name already picked out – and Iris would have the sister she's wanted since before I even got pregnant. But oh boy, a boy! This will be a whole new adventure. Thorny circumcision question aside, and despite the fact that I think choosing a boy's name is really, really hard, I'm thrilled.

Other reactions have included the following:

Iris: "I'm going to be the big sister to a little brother!" [Notable for her enthusiasm at the news. I asked the ultrasound technician to whisper it to her, so she got to be the first one to know and the one to tell mom and dad. Female-centric that she is, she'd hoped for a sister, and we were a little worried about how she'd take it if it happened to be a brother instead. But as my yoga teacher pointed out, "A brother is different from a boy."]

My mother: "I'm speechless! We don't have boys in our family!"

My father: "Now I can start looking for tiny lederhosen!"

Fellow parent from Iris' preschool: "That's perfect – now you'll have a complete set!"

that was then, thank goodness

2008-03-13T23:22:00.003-04:00

Posting about Iris' big-girl room inspired me to hunt up this picture of what it looked like before we redid it. You can see exactly why we used to call it the Pepto-Bismol room:

That, plus all the current action in the kitchen, inspired me to dig up some more "before" pictures of our house. It was pretty much a shambles when we bought it from the estate of a 98-year-old widow (I once wrote a little more about her here) in 2001. The last time she had any work done on the house was 1962. We have dated these renovations, including the kitchen, from scraps of newspaper we found under "new" flooring, behind cabinets, etc. At some point, the stairs clearly became too much for old Mrs. Armstrong, and she converted the first floor to her living quarters while renting rooms upstairs. That explains the sinks in two of the bedrooms and the cedar closet in the dining room, which she made her boudoir.

Here's J cutting it out with a Sawzall shortly after we moved in. Man, that closet was built like a fallout shelter. The dining room is far from done, but this corner currently is Iris' play kitchen.

(I pried out all the cedar and stashed the planks in the closet of a then-unused upstairs bedroom, thinking we would re-line another closet with it someday. Then, in a mania of nesting toward the end of my pregnancy with Iris, I came up with a higher and better use for that closet and relocated all the cedar to the basement. Last year I moved it again to a heap in the backyard, where it sits still, awaiting its next incarnation as a child's picnic table. When that happens, you'll be the first to know.)

This was our second-floor bathroom:

There actually was a ceiling in here when we bought the house, but then a friend set his baby in the third-floor bathroom sink (right above this bathroom) and... let's just say that by the time anyone noticed that sweet Alyssa had played with the faucet and accidentally turned on the water, it was too late. The plaster was utterly and completely drowned. Here's that bathroom now.

And here's the room that would become the nursery. Like every other room in the house, it was chock-full of stuff – Mrs. Armstrong's stuff – what was left of a lifetime of stuff after it had been picked over by her heirs. Our first task when we moved in was sorting through all that.

Mrs. Armstrong had another bedroom in the little room we now call the sunroom or, when we're feeling grandiose, the breakfast room. It looked like this:

That little headboard got a new coat of paint, and it's in Iris' room now... and so we've come full circle.

Actually, it's nice to be reminded of how far we've come.

I'm saving pictures of the kitchen for a dramatic before-and-after when the new kitchen is unveiled. Eventually.

politics for preschoolers, or: Iris for Hillary!

2008-03-05T23:15:00.006-05:00

Iris and J are in the car, listening to NPR (don't tell the Waldorf School!), which is, as usual, covering the presidential primaries.

"What's a president?"

"The person who is the leader of our country. The people in our country get to pick a new president soon."

"Who is the old president?"

"A man named George W. Bush."

"What did he do?"

"Some very bad things."

"What kind of bad things?"

"He started a war he shouldn't have."

"For no good reason?"

"No good reason at all. And a lot of people have died because of that."

"Is that why I'm always hearing about dying on the radio?"

[cue parental weeping]

* * *

"Who is going to be the new president?"

"It's going to be one of three people...." [briefly describes Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John McCain]

"I hope that the she becomes president. It's not fair if the old president is a he and the new president is a he, too. Two he's in a row! It should be a he and then a she."

"You know what else is unfair? No one with dark skin has ever been president of our country. If Barack Obama becomes president, he will be the first president with dark skin."

Iris: unmoved. My daughter has clearly sworn her loyalty to the sisterhood above all else.

* * *

NPR on the radio again. Barack Obama's name is mentioned – some innocuous filler story about books by presidential candidates.

"They said Barack Obama!" [increasingly outraged] "Do they want Barack Obama to win?? Are they talking about Barack Obama because they're trying to get people to vote for him instead of Hillary Clinton?!?!"

If there's a media conspiracy at NPR, somehow I don't think that's it.

i don't mean to exhaust you with tales of my kitchen, but...

2008-03-03T17:59:00.006-05:00

I'm so punny, I just can't stop myself.

So we bought this house in 2001. Good bones, total fixer-upper, God-awful kitchen. Among the many amenities, functional and aesthetic, it lacked was an exhaust hood over the stove. Evidence was that the previous owner didn't cook much, but we do, and we're not afraid of frying, either, so it didn't take long for everything in that kitchen to be covered with a fine, greasy film. Eventually, this collected dust and became a greasy, furry film. Eeeew.

I'm not sure how long we had lived here, but it was probably a year or more, at any rate an embarrassingly long amount of time, when one of us noticed a window on the outside of the house where there was none on the inside. And, my friends, guess where said window was located? Right over the stove.

You know what that means, don't you? There is already a hole in the house in the very place we need one to vent an exhaust hood!

Yesterday, J ripped out the inside wall that had covered up the window for 45 years. Seeing as how that wall was encrusted with hideous urine-yellow and black plastic tile, no loss there!

It's a beautiful window, or it was before its frame was hacked off like a bad haircut, and I will hate to see it go. But the fact is that our stove will cover most of the bottom sash, and our new exhaust hood will cover most of the top, and the window faces the house next door so it's not too great from a light or privacy point of view, anyway. We'll be able to keep some glass in the middle. And I think we'll really enjoy it most with smoke-free, grease-free, fur-free air and walls.

A front-loading clothes washer, a dishwasher, and now an exhaust hood... if, as I have long believed, adulthood is defined by the point at which you start to care deeply about major appliances, I am middle-aged.

this, that, & the other

2008-02-29T23:28:00.002-05:00

I have been absolutely swamped with work this week, but that doesn't mean life hasn't been interesting.

1.

Last weekend we interrupted our regular programming to spend our annual winter weekend in the woods with friends. Unlike last year, when it rained the whole time and we all got cabin fever, the weather this year could not have been better. Crisp, cold, snowy but sunny: winter just the way I like it.

Perfect for walks in the woods.

Jasper loved it. Here he is in the cemetery up the road from our cabin, apparently posing for Dog and Mausoleum magazine.

Iris and Anya look happy here, but they spent most of the weekend as the Bossy McBickersons. By Sunday afternoon, we four parents were passing a murderous mood back and forth like a hot potato. Is it the age, or the fact that they really are two very different personalities, or just that it is hard for anyone to be cooped up with another person for a whole long weekend, and kids least of all are equipped to deal with it gracefully? Probably all of the above. In any case, it will be interesting to see how their friendship evolves as they grow up.

(This is the part where I try not to think about the very real possibility that these friends, who are really like an extension of our own family, may soon move away from here. No! Please don't go! I'll eat you up! I love you so!)

2.

Several people asked about things in the pictures I posted last time of Iris' new room, so here are the answers, since Blogger won't let me email most commenters back directly:

Hi Wayfarer! The mat under the easel in the playroom is made from two layers of Mexican (?) oilcloth (so it's reversible). I think it came from the Land of Nod catalog, but I wonder if you could just find some pretty oilcloth by the yard online? Or even locally, if you have really good fabric stores. Failing that, I bet a vinyl tablecloth would work well. Because, you know, hooray for PVCs.

Hi Kelley! The metal flower hooks on the wall are from The Company Store. I'm not bothering to link to these great big retailers – they're easy enough to find.

Hi Selah! The little chair in her room came from a department store children's fitting room. I bought it when the store went out of business.

Hi Upstate Lisa! Yes, I do live in one of those big old Pittsburgh houses. The fact that it was last touched by the previous owners in 1962 means that it is a total fixer-upper, but also that, thankfully, it slept through that late 60s-early 70s era when everyone was gutting Victorian houses of every last trim, molding, and detail.

Speaking of which....

3.

Once again, the contents of my kitchen have been emptied into the sunroom and the dining room (which makes for a fun time emptying the dishwasher) because this time we are redoing the kitchen for real. Top to bottom.

Goodbye, nasty plastic tile! So long, ugly red Formica counters! Hasta la vista, leaky old sink! The room where we spend the most time is finally going to be one we don't mind spending time in. Eventually. Until then, we could be living like this for a while.

Now where do you think I put the salad spinner?

movin' on up

2008-02-19T09:56:00.001-05:00

The big news in our house actually is not a new school, at least not yet, but a new room. We got Iris' big girl room finished with plenty of time to spare before little brother or sister lays claim to the nursery, thinking that we might be in for an extended transition. The new room is on the third floor, whereas her old room and ours are on the second, and for all her stated enthusiasm about sleeping up there, we fully expected there to be nights when she chickened out. But after her first night kickin' it big-girl style, almost a month ago now, she has not looked back. She says her old room is Baby's now. Man, what a big girl.

Up for a little tour?

We have taken to calling this the Magic Bed because the sleep she gets there is, well, enchanted. She hops into this bed early and, dare I say it, eagerly. What's more, she stays there. And the sleep she gets there is so deep and long and satisfying, she wakes up cheerful and amiable. I'm totally giving this bed a raise, a promotion, and a corner office.

Right now the Magic Bed is wearing mismatched thrifted sheets.

I also freezer-paper-stenciled some hand-me-down sheets.

Remember the dresser I painted (and scraped and scraped and scraped) last summer? A little wax on her drawers, some new painted pulls, and she's a working girl again.

Hamper. Hooks. In the frames are pictures of friends and family we wish we saw more often.

The closet in this room (not pictured) is one of those old-fashioned, six-inch-shallow ones. So to hold hanging clothes, I repurposed an old wardrobe that was sitting around in our basement. The doors were warped, so I replaced them with a noren curtain from my days in Japan.

Ubiquitous Billy bookcase from Ikea and the best part of the whole room – the windowseat. Actually, there's another one, too, next to the dresser, but this is the one with the view.

And just in case you're wondering how a little kid's room can be so uncluttered with toys, it's only because the playroom is right across the hall, taking the brunt of it:

every day is Valentine's day at our house

2008-02-17T00:16:00.002-05:00

Me, from the couch with my pregnant feet up as J flashes through the room: Hey, slow down! Come give me a hug!

J: Just a minute, I've got a handful of moths.

I'm not Rudolph Steiner

2008-02-14T14:35:00.008-05:00

(This post outgrew its nutshell long ago, but it has a terrific poem at the end, so stay with me):

So we're looking into a new school for Iris. We've been very happy with her current school, which is a university-based early-childhood development center, although the fact that this is the first year that we haven't been 100% thrilled with her teachers makes it easier to contemplate leaving. Still, we wouldn't be contemplating it but for the commute. When I worked downtown, Iris and I simply rode together on the bus every morning and afternoon (simply? I could write a whole book, never mind a post, about that. By and large it was good). Now that I don't, the pick-up and drop-off duties – this is where I always think of one of my favorite Car Talk lackeys, Russian chauffeur Pikup Andropov – have become an onerous twice-a-day 45-minute round-trip. J and I split it, but still.

So we're looking for something closer to home.

The perfect option would seem to be the public Montessori school, which includes three- and four-year-old preschool classes, three blocks from our house. As a Montessori graduate myself, I'm all for it, plus, who can argue with free preschool? I mean, seriously, everyone should have it! The only hitch: admission is by lottery, and we did not get lucky. I thought 8th on the waiting list sounded OK until I heard there are only 7 open spots in the class. So, Iris won't be going to Montessori school this year. (We'll try again for kindergarten.)

Next stop, another few blocks up the road: Waldorf School. I haven't totally drunk the Kool-Aid on Waldorf education, but I'm interested enough to have filled out the application (four closely-typed pages of questions about everything from my pregnancy and childbirth to Iris' dream life); attended a "Waldorf sampler" for parents in which I got to participate in some of the same activities Iris would, including baking, painting, and molding beeswax; and sent Iris for a classroom visit. She liked the teacher – whose name, and people, I am not making this up, is Ms. Pagan – and the beeswax, but, uncharacteristically for her, did not hit it off with the other kids. I'm not sure what to make of this: most likely it was a matter of her being an outsider in a situation where the other kids had already clicked (or cliqued), but what if it's something more fundamental?

Other impressions:

No one likes handmade wood and felt toys more than I do, but the absence of books in the early childhood rooms kind of weirds me out. I realize that the Waldorf thing is not to push reading or other academic skills at an early age, and I'm cool with that. I also realize that the teachers do quite a bit of storytelling, and that's great. But books and reading – even including some of the questionable choices Iris makes at the library sometimes – are such a huge part of our family's life, it's hard for me to imagine her not having access to books at school.

I also like the emphasis on rhythm and ritual, flowers in the classrooms and lighting a (beeswax) candle at (organic, crunchy, homemade) snack time and all that, but I'm less comfortable with the – how shall I put this? – peculiar Waldorf mix of didacticism and mysticism. No recorded music or other electronic media! Just music in the mood of the fifth (whatever that is)! And the lyre is the only musical instrument in the classroom! Which is painted pink! And the teachers are wearing full skirts or dresses!

I'm grateful to have this book, courtesy of the school, to explain it all to me, but it's made me realize I am more of a seat-of-the-pants realist myself. I mean, I think Rudolph Steiner's heart was in the right place, and even his more eccentric ideas seem harmless. But my daughter has had a CD player in her bedroom since she was an infant, she seems to regard me as maternal enough even when I'm wearing pants, and I'm not above treating her to the occasional video, artificially-flavored lollipop, or plastic trinket from the dollar store. On the part of the Waldorf application which asked, "Are you willing to set limits on your family's exposure to media?", J and I answered, "We are comfortable with our current limits." We'll find out tomorrow, when we have a meeting with Ms. Pagan and her colleagues, how that goes over with them.

And then there's the fact that whenever I think of Waldorf school, my brain starts reciting lines from this sestina by my friend Jonah Winter:

1-800-VOCABULary

USE MORE WORDS!
For a low monthly charge, you can increase your vocabulary
by 600 words. Yes, 600 words! To wit: "Costermonger":
a hawker of fruits, vegetables, fish, etc.; "Pulchritudinous":
physically beautiful, comely; "Anthroposophy":
a spiritual and mystical philosophy based on the teachings of Rudolph Steiner.

It is not so crucial to actually know anything about Rudolph Steiner
himself so much as it is to KNOW MORE WORDS
like – wait, where'd I put it – "anthroposophy."
Yes, you can actually feel your vocabulary
expanding as those brain cells increase to allow more space for "pulchritudinous," uhm, "costermonger."

You're at an important banquet. "Costermonger"
suddenly occurs to you during a lull. You blurt it out, and Rudolph Steiner,
of all people, appears out of nowhere, to congratulate you on your "pulchritudinous" understanding of WORDS.
"What a vocabulary!" he crows, NOT knowing YOU know HE invented ANTHROPOSOPHY.

"WELL," you say, winking at the invisible studio audience, "How's your ANTHROPOSOPHY going these days? COSTERMONGER! COSTERMONGER! COSTERMONGER!"
Vocabulary
is key. It has to do with Rudolph Steiner
and how he and others like him respond to YOU. Words
are what make you pulchritudinous.

Take the word "pulchritudinous,"
for example. Or "anthroposophy."
By now, you should be able to use these words
comfortably in most social situations. Repeat after me: "Costermonger."
That's right! You've got it! You don't have to be Rudolph Steiner
to show off your new and very impressive vocabulary.

For years, I labored at cocktail parties with little or no vocabulary,
using hand signals and facial expressions to communicate words like "pulchritudinous."
I'm not stupid, nor are you. But neither one of us is Rudolph Steiner.
Again, you DON'T have to be the inventor of ANTHROPOSOPHY
to slyly insert "COSTERMONGER"
into a discussion of Italian-American immigration. Words

are how we talk. "Words" is the same thing as "vocabulary,"
basically? Though a "costermonger" is usually not described as "pulchritudinous,"
"anthroposophy" was invented by "Rudolph Steiner"!

i have a little neti pot, short and stout

2008-01-26T11:51:00.000-05:00

My sinuses have always been my Achilles heel. Stress, exhaustion, a cold, dogsitting... it all ends in sinusitis. I had been battling a low-grade case for weeks before the three-dog weekend, and in the ensuing allergic aftermath I guess it got the best of me. For the past three days I have been slammed by migraine-grade sinus headaches that I cannot cope with except by going to bed.

In desperation, I broke down and got a neti pot. J has been trying to sell me on the idea for years (not that he has ever used one. He would not know a sinus if it bit him), but, like any sane person, I am afraid of drowning, and I figured that's what it would feel like to pour salt water through my nasal passages.

So? I won't go so far as to say it's "pleasant and soothing" as the package literature attests, but I could breathe through my mouth while I was doing it, so I didn't get too panicky. Too soon to say if it's helping. "Persistence," counseled my neighbor, a veteran neti potter. My other neighbor, who grew up in LA, said he never had sinus problems until he stopped swimming in the ocean every day, so there must be something to it. Or maybe, like a 19th century woman of delicate constitution, the answer is to move to a seaside town for its "restorative atmosphere." You never saw a Henry James character hanging over the sink with with a neti pot, am I right?

It's probably my overall mood more than anything – the pain and the wasted days are getting me down – but I was looking in the mirror the other day and thinking, I have no business having a baby. I am anything but the picture of a radiant young mother-to-be, me with my gray hair and tired face and a neti pot up my nose.

Iris, doubtfully observing my neti ritual: "Mama, are little kids allowed to watch this?"

three dog weekend

2008-01-22T17:05:00.000-05:00

I know that everyone else has long since moved on and left Christmas behind in the old year where it belongs, but in our house, Christmas did not officially end until yesterday. That's when the last of my in-laws dispersed and left our house feeling strangely, sadly, but also gladly empty again. We were host to my sisters-in-law, father-in-law, his girlfriend, and her little dog too. Oh and did I mention we were also dogsitting for friends who'd jetted merrily off to Panama?

The hair of the dog indeed. I don't even know what that expression really means. I think it's some sort of British hangover remedy which sounds worse than the affliction itself. All I'm trying to say is that the weekend was as much fun as it is possible to have with your allergies in an uproar.

My sister-in-law Amy is a very non-materialistic person, which is one of her many admirable qualities, but makes gift-giving a challenge. Fortunately, the stockings were still hung by the chimney with care, in hopes that the aunties (as we collectively call my sisters-in-law) soon would be there, and I was sitting staring at them absently when inspiration struck, as it so often does, at the eleventh hour. I noticed – not for the first time – that Amy's stocking was a pathetic contrast to everyone else's: one of those cheap red polyester fuzzy-felt numbers with her name written on in glitter glue – you know the kind I mean – that I think was procured at the last minute before the first Christmas Amy spent with our family (she is Jewish, so she did not have an ancestral stocking of her own). So I decided to make her a nice new stocking that would not be embarrassed to hang with the rest. Here it is, entirely from felted sweaters, wool felt, and buttons already in my stash:

Now, I have a bad habit of deciding to prototype a new project when I need to make a gift for somebody, then giving it, warts and all. That is what I did for my sister-in-law Ronica, but in this case, fortunately, the result was not too wart-ridden. I made her a blank journal from this handy tutorial:

I printed pictures I've taken and glued them back-to-back for both covers, so there was an inner and an outer face to each, a little deviation from the tutorial which worked out nicely. For the pages, I used a combination of plain paper and graph paper and embellished with a few stamps (of the ink variety) on random pages. I was glad I invested in a paper cutter for this stage. The spine is Italian gift-wrapping paper which I saved from a present Iris received back at regular Christmastime. I did make a few mistakes along the way, but I was still uncharacteristically happy with the final result.

One great thing about this project is that it consists of several short steps, ideal for when you are rushing around trying to get a million other things done and do not have a half-day stretch to devote to crafting.

Finally, at the risk of repeating myself, I'll share the present I made my father-in-law even though it already debuted on Flickr. When he finally became convinced that his kids were not returning home to roost and converted their old bedrooms into guest rooms, he jokingly gave them B&B-style names: Windchimes and Whispering Pines, after the sounds that drifted in through the open windows in summer. I've long wanted to make him little door signs for those rooms, but I never knew how to do it until one insomniac night last fall, when it hit me. Little wood rectangles + rubber stamps + ink + twigs gathered in the park + hemp twine + hot glue =

Fin.

in which food and my placenta are unfortunately mentioned in the same post

2008-01-18T00:05:00.001-05:00

Today I did something I haven't done since college: inspired by this photograph of Sarah's, I made my own yogurt. I made some other things too, but ssh! They are top secret until a belated Christmas gift exchange with my sisters-in-law on Saturday. (Just in case you have been waiting by your mailbox for a vintage linen tea towel that never comes, now you know what I have been doing – lollygagging about with a candy thermometer and other indolent devices. I will make it to the post office next week, I promise!)

In other news, my doctor phoned today - you know she didn't just call to say hello - to say she had figured out what probably caused some of my more worrying first-trimester symptoms. If you don't mind just a little bit too much information, read on. Apparently I've got a case of placenta previa, or, more colloquially, "Hey, you, get your placenta off of my cervix." It's not a big worry right now, but if my placenta doesn't "migrate" to higher ground, it's bed rest and an express route to C-section City. So go, placenta, go!

it was your ancestors, the germans

2008-01-14T23:44:00.000-05:00

You would think that a person who just got a spiffy new camera for Christmas would have more pictures to post, but (a) I'm still getting the hang if it, (b) I have been whirling around dervish-like with the snafu-filled start of the new university semester, and (c) what passes for daylight around here lately has been particularly grim.

I promise to strut my new camera's stuff soon, but in the meantime, I present: Theatre of the Overheard From the Backseat... only not exactly, because this was more of a direct question:

"Who came up with this Christmas tree concept, anyway?"

The lights may be down, the ornaments packed away, and the presents more or less integrated into the everydayness of it all, but yes, Virginia, we are still unpacking the pagan/Christmas rituals around here.

kitchen corner

2008-01-10T09:37:00.000-05:00

Leila, Meg, Erin, and Beki, come on down! Send me an email (chartreusebag [at] mac [dot] com) with your address in it, and I will send you a gen-you-wine 1970s Czechoslovakian/Canadian linen tea towel.

While I'm in the kitchen, mentally at least, sometimes I think it's a little surprising that I don't post more about food, because food is a big part of my life, and I don't just mean eating for two. Maybe I don't write about it much because it's not really my creative arena: my husband is the main shopper and chef in our household (lucky me!), so my roles are mainly as assistant menu planner and appreciative audience for his cooking.

I'm breaking out, though, because I can't contain my excitement that a local magazine ran the recipe for one of my favorite local restaurant dishes: Mad Mex's chick pea chili. If you live in or around Pittsburgh, you know what I mean. If you don't, trust me. This stuff is from heaven. Eat it as soup or stuff burritos with it plus some rice and veggies and/or chicken. You'll be glad that the recipe makes about a gallon.

2 pounds peeled, washed tomatillos
2 whole jalapenos, de-stemmed
1 small Spanish onion, sliced thinly to julienne
1/2 cup rough chopped white onion
1 32-oz. can garbanzo beans/chick peas, drained and rinsed
4 cloves whole garlic
2 t salt
1 T black pepper
1/4 cup olive oil
2 T chopped cilantro

Clean tomatillos by immersing in water and removing skins. Place tomatillos in heavy duty ovenproof pot with whole jalapenos, onion, whole garlic, salt, pepper, and olive oil. Place pot in 500 degree oven and roast vegetables until soft and lightly browned.

Pour roasted mixture into blender. Puree thoroughly. You may need to do this in two batches.

Return mixture to pot. Bring to a simmer

Stir in cilantro and serve. Enjoy!

Ed.: Oh yeah, and don't forget to throw in the chick peas! They don't go in the blender.

show and tell and a giveaway

2008-01-08T02:40:00.000-05:00

Thanks, all, for your warm response to the big new year's news! The first trimester was kind of touch-and-go, but I'm fourteen weeks now and going strong. Behold the belly! A Christmas Eve ultrasound which showed all was, in fact, well gave us the confidence to tell Iris, and she is excited to be a big sister. Our baby is apparently up to the size of a lemon (does anyone else find it amusing that the unit of fetal measurement seems always to be a fruit?) and is due in early July. If there is any baby karma coming my way, it should really be born in June, since I was pregnant for a full ten months with Iris before finally submitting to an induction. Given that, I realize another late delivery is more likely than an early one the second time around, but a girl can hope.

I've got a little show and tell today. I saw this scarf

in one of my favorite vintage stores on the same day I had just splurged on new shoes, so I regretfully let it be. Then I went back there with my mom, and they still had it, and she bought it for me for Christmas. Isn't she sweet? (They also had the exact same hot-pink-and-orange striped Ives St. Laurent sheets my parents had on their bed when I was little. So very 70s. Somehow my mom resisted a repeat purchase of those.)

I've been looking for a set of these Pyrex food storage containers for a long time to replace some of the plastic ones in our kitchen. Found this set at one of those antique stores that looks like a single storefront from the street, but is actually an infinite warren of interconnected, overfilled rooms inside. The price was more than I wanted to pay, but the guy was so nice - he kept slipping trinkets into Iris' purse – and in the end, he made me a deal that I was happy with. Goodbye, plastic! Hello, chickens. (Has anyone had experience with the design holding up or wearing off in the dishwasher?)

Finally, I guess in every family there is someone to whom you can give old junk from your attic and call it a Christmas gift, and I am happy to be that person in mine.

These vintage linen tea towels from my father-in-law's girlfriend's mother's attic (follow?) were such a gift this year. As you can see, I have a whole stack of them and I like you all so much that I'm going to share the love. Just leave me a comment if you're interested, and if I get more than four I'll do a little drawing. Oh, and speaking of 70s, (which I briefly was above), doesn't this label say it all?

this should explain a lot

2008-01-02T09:55:00.000-05:00

The crushing exhaustion and the siren song of the couch. The inability to get much of anything done (like, say, Christmas crafting or updating this blog). The dependence on ginger beer while longing for red wine. The crankiness, especially if hunger strikes and I don't get to eat this minute. And, of course, the belly. Holiday indulgence, and let me tell you there has been plenty, cannot account for it all. Some of it, yes. But the rest?

Yes sir, that's my baby!

last day of 2007, first ever guest post

2007-12-31T18:16:00.000-05:00

This is for you, anonymous commenter from my last post who asked how I made a shield out of felt. But since I didn't, I asked my crafty husband to weigh in. Here he is:

First, take a bamboo slat left over from building your backyard fence and bend it into a circle. (Soaking it in the warm bathtub your child has just vacated helps with flexibility). Pre-drill a couple of holes at the overlap, thread some hemp twine through them, and then whip the twine around the overlap for a firm fit. The diameter of this shield is about 20", a dimension determined more by the available felt and the flex of the bamboo than any other considerations.

Next, attach the felt to the bamboo frame, again with the twine. A tapestry needle is crucial here, as it punches a nicely-sized hole through the felt without any risk to your flesh. I don't know the name of the stitching I used, but you can see how it cinches the felt around the outside of the frame while tightly fitting within. A rustic look is good.

Stencil, paint, embroider, or otherwise decorate the felt; I stenciled it after sewing the felt to the frame in order to ensure a centered design. I would also note that Athena's shield was generally depicted with Medusa on it as well, but I didn't want serpentine overkill.

The cross-bracing was added to take the slack out of the felt, as well as to provide attachment for the handles. The tension of the bowing keeps the bamboo in place, but a little hot glue helps.

Wrap a short piece of bamboo with the twine and cut a narrow strip of leather, suede, or some other sturdy yet soft material to match. These are the handles. Actually, the arm goes through the former and only the latter is strictly a handle. I made the strap extra-long to accommodate future growth. I also tied the handle and strap to the cross-bracing, to allow for adjustment.

Then, take a couple of blurry pictures with your borrowed camera and post to your wife's blog for posterity.

Speaking of which, let's not end the year without a picture of the Christmas table linens Angelique made (yup, those are scraps from Iris' curtains all right):

Happy new year to all and to all a good night!

coming up for air

2007-12-27T23:37:00.000-05:00

How was Christmas at your house?

Ours was wonderful, even if pictures, taken with a borrowed camera, were not. Please do not adjust your set. A Nikon D40 is on its way! (Thank you, Santy Claus!)

The only picture I got of Iris looking happy about her crown, as opposed to striking her strangely somber 19th-century-child-portrait pose, is terminally blurry, but here it is anyway:

Opening her crown prompted a change from pajamas to dress-up clothes. Here she is reading a new book in full fractured-fairy-tale regalia: gown, crown, and Athena's breastplate, complete with head of Medusa, a joint project of her father and me. (He gets most of the credit. The idea and design were all his. I just embroidered the details.)

He also made her a shield of Athena, boldly proving that the freezer-paper technique is perfectly suited to felt.

And now Christmas is over for another year. Actually, make that another three weeks. That's when my sisters-in-law are coming and my father-in-law is returning for a belated celebration with them.

Until then, a little breather and ringing in the new year, which – whether because of or in spite of a lot of changes around here, I'm not sure which – is going to be a great one. I just know it.

farewell to the marvelous barking camera

2007-12-23T10:27:00.000-05:00

So my camera died last night, a quiet little death in the pocket of my coat. Probably the only time that camera has ever been quiet about anything. Cause of death: the dreaded E18 error, but I have no idea what brought it on. Last time (yes, it has happened before), the cause was all too clear: Iris tried to manually push the lens back into the casing. That time we were able to have it repaired, resulting in the camera adding a crotchety clackety-clackety noise to its repertoire, which already included birds tweeting when it turned on and a barky little "rarf!"-ing sound that I never figured out how to disable every time I pressed the "shutter" button. Now, silence. (Cue "Taps.")

In theory, this is an opportunity to go all-out and buy my dream digital SLR, or at least a Nikon D40. You wouldn't know it from the point-and-shoot pictures I post, but I am actually a photography buff (buff is such a funny, dorky word – like saying "photography is my bag" – can you picture me now in a field vest stuffed with accessories, a big old camera hanging around my neck on an embroidered guitar strap?) with not one but two film SLRs to my name. I love them, but I have become well and truly addicted to the instant gratification of digital photography.

Alas, I don't think a digital SLR is in the cards right now. We are probably looking at another point-n-shoot under $300. The question is, will it be another Canon? My brand loyalty to Canons goes back to my trusty AE-1, which is almost as old as I am, and which I got in a trade for the camera which took my baby pictures. Talk about dependability. But I've been burned twice now by the E18. I've heard good things about Fujis and their ability to take clear pictures in all levels of natural light, which is important to me. Any advice? I've got a loaner through Christmas, thank goodness – actually, thank my father-in-law, who never travels without a full arsenal of consumer electronics – but as soon as the stores re-open, I'm going camera shopping.

it's about time

2007-12-18T16:46:00.000-05:00

I am finally getting my elf on and making some Christmas presents. What I have not been doing is making my usual internet rounds (and I probably will be scarce until after the holidays), but the reason has changed a bit. Before, it was because I was in denial and did not want to expose myself to bandwidths of holiday cheer and other people's festive preparations, which would only make me feel simultaneously Scroogier about my own lack of festivity and panicked at being so behind in my own preparations. Now, it's because the panic has caught up with me and I am so busy making up for lost time. In other words: it's not you, it's me.

Now that I have finally gotten into gear, I feel a lot better about everything. Not only knowing that Christmas will come for my loved ones this year, but when I am making presents, that is when I truly feel the Christmas spirit. Not to get all hokey on you, but the Christmases since I gave up Christmas shopping have been the best of my life.

By the way, did I mention we got a menorah this year? Actually J made one out of bamboo left over from our powder room floor. We were having dinner with friends during Hannukah, and Iris was full of questions about their menorah, which led to the telling of the Hannukah story, which captivated her, and a little gelt after dinner didn't hurt either. I love the Hannukah story and the symbolism of the candles myself, so I may have enjoyed this addition to our holiday ritual as much as she did.

Anyway, here is a sneak peek at a present now completed, but which I cannot show in its entirety because its recipient has been known to lurk around here. I promise full disclosure later.

My mother doesn't hang out in cyberspace, so I can be a little more bold. Guess what I'm making her?

OK, that wasn't much to go on. How about this – now can you guess?

Felting those sweaters sure was fun – I just let my front-loader do the work.

I was playing with the idea of making Little Miss Dress-Up a crown for Christmas, especially since she has recently promoted herself from princess to queen, but then this injected pure inspiration into my veins.

I whipped this little number up last night after Iris went to bed. Very satisfying to go from vague idea to checking another gift off the list in such a short time – and to be happy with the results! By the way, that's supposed to be an iris there on the front, not tonsils as someone (coughmy mothercough) thought. I know you wouldn't make that mistake, but I just want to be perfectly clear.

OK, back to the salt mines.

let it snow let it snow let it snow

2007-12-09T16:27:00.000-05:00

As has been well documented on this site already, I am not a big holidays person. I am about as likely to get into the Christmas spirit as I am to win a gold medal in pole vaulting (or anything, for that matter – I have no idea why pole vaulting was the first feat of athleticism to leap, no pun intended, to mind). I try not to be too Grinchy about it, but I would not mind skipping Christmas altogether. I used to fantasize about spending the day alone in my apartment, eating chocolate, drinking Champagne, and watching videos. That was when I was single, of course. I should have gone ahead and done it then. Now that I have a child and a husband whose abundant Christmas spirit is so infectious, I sometimes wonder if I just might catch the bug myself, that is obviously not an option.

For me, the real highlight of winter is snow. Probably because I grew up in the south, where winter was just rainy and a white Christmas seemed like a fairy tale, snow is still magical to me. While people all round me are grousing about delays and inconveniences of one kind and another, I am happy inside. I love to walk in it, make footprints, hear it crunch under the soles of my boots, see it pile up on tree branches and rooftops. I love to sit inside under a blanket with a hot mug and watch it fall outside the window. I love its silence. I love the way the sky and the ground are the same color when it snows.

Today it is raining. I started this post the day before yesterday, when it was snowing, and have only just had a moment to finish it. That's the way things have been around here lately – no wonder I have gotten nothing made for Christmas. Nada. I better put on my pointy elf boots and hat and dust off my workbench or kiss my handmade holiday aspirations goodbye, and really, let's face it, nothing brings out the Grinch in me like Christmas shopping. Shudder!

truer words were never (well, seldom) spoken

2007-12-02T13:09:00.000-05:00

as Iris jumps off a banquette in the neighborhood Belgian beer/burger joint where we have gone for lunch (quel extravegance!) for the tenth or eleventh time:

"Why is the waitress letting me jump off this?"

"Because she is deferring to our judgment as your parents, and probably finding it lacking."

reupholstered and it feels so good

2007-11-18T16:35:00.001-05:00

After nursing a love-hate relationship with the cushions on these secondhand chairs for years, I finally came down firmly on the side of "must go" and had them reupholstered.

I didn't attempt to do it myself because I fell in love with a fabric remnant that was about a yard too short, and the upholstery shop (T's in Lawrenceville, if you're local and interested) had more confidence in their ability to eke four cushions out of it than I had in myself.

I'm thrilled with the result, and thankful that it is done just in time for the Cavalcade of Houseguests, 2007 edition.

In other news, this morning I made chocolate-cherry pancakes for breakfast by dropping chocolate chips and halved frozen cherries into the batter blobs as soon as I plopped them in the skillet. Highly satisfactory.

crunch time

2007-11-16T16:07:00.000-05:00

Zoiks! Thanksgiving is in, like 15 minutes and I am so not prepared, in any sense of the word. Luckily for me, my talented husband is the family chef, so I don't have to stress the day itself. But all the preparation beforehand, that is mostly my department, and that department seems to have been out to lunch.

That is why I am devoting today to all the miscellaneous things that have needed to be done for ages, but the simple reason that I have not felt like doing them has, up till now, provided an adequate excuse for putting them off. To wit: Cleaning the playroom. Repotting the rootbound plants that have been gasping for help in my studio. Repairing the front-door curtain which Jasper damaged in jumping up to look out the window (remind me, again, why it seemed like a good idea to get a new dog?). And most importantly of all, out with the old and in with the new in the room that is to be Iris' new bedroom. Though it's not quite ready for prime time, I will not have to be embarrassed to offer it as guest accommodations next week. Actually, it's looking good enough that Iris is getting excited, and me too. I think finishing the room is going to become Priority Number One after the holidays.

As for those holidays, three words: Must. Get. Motivated.

three acts

2007-11-11T11:52:00.000-05:00

1.

This is Jane, a Playmobil knight who can pass for a girl thanks to her plastic pageboy hairdo and magenta accoutrements:

Jane and the Dragon, the story of a girl who wants to be a knight instead of a lady-in-waiting, is our latest diversionary tactic from the cult of the beautiful princess. Iris loves her. True, she is usually wearing one of her princess costumes when she suits her up to take on the (secretly wimpy and lovelorn) dragon, but still. It's something. Apparently there is a TV show, too – has anyone seen it?

So in the end, the Madeline costume arrived in the nick of time for Halloween, but Iris stuck to her original plan to go out as a goddess. Every time she met a princess, which was often, she said, "I like your dress!"

I appreciate all your comments and counsel on the subject of princess vs. anti-princess. I found it especially heartening to hear that someone as creative and self-determined and generally admirable as Amy was into princesses as a child, and I am definitely going to start tacking "and then she went to college and traveled the world" to the end of all princess stories, as Kelley does – I love that! I also love the attitude of two dads who threw a full-on Disney Princess birthday party yesterday for their little girl, one of Iris' preschool cronies. "She's mixed race and being raised by two dads," they told me. "She can be conventional in any other way she wants." I wish I could be so relaxed.

Another friend, who is raising a lovely little boy, emailed me that maybe there are just as many traps for boys, what with all the action figures and war games. Her own son possesses a figurine named Action Man (don't ask me - they live in France – I wonder if his arch-enemy is Passive Man? Yes, come to think of it, surely it was Passive Man who taught Clint Eastwood to say, "Go ahead, make my day.") Anyway, his mother has told him that his gun shoots weedkiller – you know, because Action Man is a gardener. I am still laughing about that!

2.

I went to the Handmade Arcade yesterday, unencumbered this year by my spin-the sparkly-earrings sidekick. I missed some of my favorite vendors from last year, but there were some good new ones too, and I'm happy to say that the squid people were back and better than ever. I somehow resisted shelling out $80 for a squid nativity, and also nobly resisted spending any money on jewelry for myself, though I was sorely tempted. This felt "painting" by Jennie Stephens, however, I could not resist:

3.

And now, from the Department of Non Sequitors:

"I love you. Even when I'm mad at you. Even when you're mad at me."

"When you're mad at me, like when you say I have to take a break from Jasper, I just want to run away and say I won't be your little kid anymore because I don't like how you're being mean to me."

"When someone is mad at you, you get upset and feel like being alone? I understand those feelings."

"And I understand the feeling of wanting to take a bath in your Halloween clothes."

good day

2007-11-04T22:26:00.001-05:00

Morning:

"Wow, you did lots of washing today, Mom! You're the greatest laundry washer in the whole world."

Afternoon:

Night:

"I wasn't naughty today. Except when I pulled Jasper's ears."

the suspense is killing me

2007-10-30T16:14:00.000-04:00

It's T&T (trick-or-treat) minus 24 hours, and Iris has yet to settle on her Halloween costume. Last year's lobster get-up still fits, but the girl is too grown up to impersonate a crustacean this year. Instead, the contenders are:

1. The Greek goddess Iris. The allure of this choice is obvious, with the additional benefit that I made a costume way back in March for her birthday party. She wore it all of about 10 minutes that day, so maybe it will actually get some mileage now. Yes, it is a little light for 50 degree evenings, but I'm sure it is absolutely authentic to wear a turtleneck and tights underneath to keep warm.

2. A princess, wearing one of the gowns from the royal dress-up trunk that a well-intentioned family friend gifted her, and which I hate with a passion. More on that momentarily. The dresses have been worn so often for dress-up play that they have a somewhat tattered, Cinderella-before-the-ball aspect to them.

3. Madeline. In an effort to distract her from the whole princess schtick, I have been pushing fictional females with more spunk and, well, literary merit. Iris is pretty into the Madeline costume idea. The only problem is that inspiration struck only a couple days ago, followed by a sinking feeling, which proved to be correct, that I had given away the French blue corduroy coat that would have been perfect to cannibalize for a Madeline costume. So, this is on its way, and we'll see if it arrives in time.

Thus does my aversion to fairy tale princesses trump my commitment to homemade Halloween costumes. Where, exactly, is the line between gentle parental guidance and out-and-out control-freakishness?

As a feminist from the Free To Be You and Me generation, I think I need some serious counseling on how to deal with a daughter who's fallen for the whole Disnified princess scenario hook, line, and glass slipper. Maybe it would be easier if I had had the princess bug myself as a child, but I never did, so I can't relate. For now, I cope by imposing arbitrary rules on when and where the accursed princess gowns may be worn (because if I didn't, she would wear them all the time, everywhere), resisting pleas to watch the Disney princess movies at home (not just because, well, over my dead body, but because I actually fear parts of them will be too scary at her age), and casting a revisionist spin on the stories we read ("You know why I think the prince fell in love with Cinderella? Because she was such a good person! She was so nice to everyone, even though her stepmother and stepsisters were mean to her.") I think I am probably (definitely) making way too big a deal out of the whole thing, but I am surprised by the strength of my feelings about this.

Oh, and one more coping tactic: read this. Pure genius.

Sarah strikes again!

2007-10-29T13:42:00.001-04:00

Now wait a minute, wasn't I just showing off an unexpected windfall from Sarah – the fabulous toadstool T-shirt – the other day? What did I do to deserve another surprise package from her when I had scarcely thanked her for the first? Maybe it's her scheme to get me to post something already here in this little corner of the internet which is growing dusty, I fear, from disuse. If so, it's working. Look at this lovely apron she made:

Just in time for holiday baking! I love love love it. In fact, I was sorely tempted to wear it to a party on Saturday night.

And this wonderful little vintage dish which has already proven itself perfect for a pumpkin muffin and Halloween m&ms (not at the same time, not that there would be anything wrong with that). If that is not the jauntiest chicken ever to roost on ceramic, I don't know what is.

Sarah, thank you again and again!

the Ryan Home of its day, or: secrets of the sex lives of Victorian middle management

2007-10-21T18:47:00.000-04:00

This is the way the late afternoon sunlight (which is getting less and less late all the time – hello, fall!) looks as it falls through our wavy old window glass onto a door in my bedroom. I was lying in bed as I took this photo – I'm down with a crushing head cold, so have been logging a lot more time in said bed than I would really like – and when I opened my eyes to see this, I thought, too bad I don't have the camera nearby, but no way am I rousing my sorry self to get it. But wait! The camera is miraculously on my nightstand! And so I was able to capture the moment without bothering my congested little head about getting up.

That is just a side note, actually. What I really want to tell are two interesting facts about this door:

1. It leads directly into the bedroom next door, which, for obvious reasons, we have designated the nursery. (Yes, the child who sleeps there is now well beyond nursery-occupant age, but that is another story.) J and I always sort of assumed that our hundred-year-old house was built with this direct access between the parental and baby bedrooms in mind, that the convenience of the linked rooms was thanks to the foresight of the original owners/parents/builders. Then I was on my umpteenth tour of this local historic house* and, as I walked between Mr. and Mrs. Frick's bedrooms, separate but joined via a shared, private hallway, a light bulb went off: our house is nothing but a poor cousin of the Fricks'! Our interconnected rooms were not meant for easy back-and forth between parents and baby, but for the middle-manager-master and his wife, the mistress of the house, to have separate occupancy but private access. The baby slept across the hall, and if it cried, they didn't bother themselves – that was a job for the nanny, who lived upstairs.

*Well worth it if you are ever in the neighborhood, though in my experience the quality of the tour varies widely from docent to docent.

2. The door, like all the doors and woodwork on our second and third floors, is faux-woodgrained. No, not by me, good heavens no. By a craftsman (presumably he was a man) who must have made his living dressing up cheap woods to make them look more expensive. On our first floor, in the rooms that guests would see, we have the real McCoy, quarter-sawn oak; on our second and third, which would have been seen only by the family and servants, we have this, pine painted to look like oak (in some rooms) or walnut or mahogany (in others). It's so expertly done that J and I did not realize it was a faux finish until well after we'd bought the house. I actually love these faux-finished doors more than if we had expensive wood throughout. I love the idea of this craftsman, who must have sold his services to local builders, making poor woods look more expensive as turn-of-the-twentieth-century tract houses went up in the former farmlands of the east end. Of course, the irony is that nowadays, you'd pay more for such fine craftsmanship than you would for a real oak door.

To late – and dark – now for me to try to take a close-up picture, but I'll try to post one tomorrow for all the old-house geeks who are still with me.

What are the quirks of your house?

just how I wanted to spend my morning

2007-10-16T09:54:00.000-04:00

Bathing the dog after he returned literally shitfaced (and shitnecked and shitbacked and so on and stinkily so forth) from his morning constitutional. Of course the need for this was discovered just as J was heading out for a meeting, so I was on my own to find out whether what they told us at the shelter – that Jasper is good for baths – was true. Verdict: so not true! We were sold a bill of goods! Or more accurately, I suppose, we adopted one. Suckers.

Anyway, after that ordeal I had to make myself feel better so I went to the kitchen to fill a prescription for café au lait and waffles with strawberry jam. Then, finding I still had not quite recovered, I put on this fabulous T-shirt that Sarah sent me a couple days ago:

There, now I'm starting to feel restored! Those of you who follow Erin's lovely blog may recognize this as a ringer for the shirt Sarah made for her. Indeed, that is because this shirt was originally supposed to be Erin's, but due to a sizing mishap, got passed on to me instead. Sarah's extra labor is my luck! And I'm pleased as punch (in a dorky way, of course, because can a person who uses the phrase "pleased as punch" be anything but dorky?) to be T-shirt twins with Erin.

My friends and family who read this are laughing right now, because I am well-known in my circle for my aversion to mushrooms. However, I make an aesthetic exception for cute red-and-white spotted toadstools. It's probably some genetic throwback to my German ancestry. In fact, what was I thinking – I should have taken this picture outside with the Gartenswerge. It just goes to show, you can take the girl out of Germany, but you can't take Germany out of the girl.

Sarah, I could just whip you up a big batch of mushroom quiche to thank you. To echo Erin, you rock. My day is better already.

rest assured

2007-10-09T23:01:00.000-04:00

Iris on Jasper's watchdog abilities:

"Jasper will chase off rats, Jasper will chase off monsters, Jasper will chase off whales, especially any monster whales. Jasper doesn't bark at people. He barks at other animals."

just thought I'd share

2007-10-06T22:54:00.000-04:00

Three years of family portraits in the Smicksburg woods:

2005

2006

2007

with a name like Smicksburg, it's got to be good

2007-10-06T22:32:00.000-04:00

Yeah, it's been almost another two weeks since I've turned on the lights over here, but I'm not apologizing for it anymore. It is what it is – and what it is right now, mostly, is soaking up this crazy endless summer while it lasts. I know I should harbor a healthy skepticism toward it because, after all, it's got to be global warming, but I can't help it – I'm loving these bonus days of sunshine and skirts and sandals.

So, what with it being 85 degrees and all, it was a little hard to get in an autumnal mood for our annual family trip to the Fall Festival in Smicksburg. Especially since the day really started off on the wrong foot, if not the entirely wrong side of the body/bed/pick your metaphor. Iris was fitful and whiny, J and I fed up... I believe that cancelling the trip was in the offing at one particularly low point this morning. Thank goodness we managed to pull it together as a family and persevere through the hour-and-a-half car trip for our annual stroll through the shops and walk in the woods.

The drought has been murder on the foliage, but there were still plenty of pumpkins, yard sales (no luck, but fun looking), baked goods, and face painting. We missed out on the latter, much to Iris' dismay, but ice ceam was offered and more-or-less cheerfully accepted as a consolation prize.

Which brings me to a log of the food the child has eaten today:

1/2 peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich
approximately 6 grapes (let's hear it for nutrition!)
brownie from bake sale cunningly sited outside Saturday morning music class venue
pickle
pretzel
ice cream

Think that had anything to do with the meltdowns? She did not eat dinner, but conked out in the car on the way home from Smicksburg and was carried straight to bed. Possibly the first time I have ever succeeded in transferring her sleeping person from car to bed, probably because her body was so completely depleted of good wholesome fuel, but a triumph of (selfish) sorts nonetheless, because it meant a rare grown-up dinner at home for J and me.

All's well that ends well.

she doesn't call, she doesn't write

2007-09-25T17:01:00.000-04:00

More than two weeks since I've stopped in here to say so much as hello! That's a new record. Even my usual sporadic pace of blog-reading has been stretched to extremes, as those of you who received a comment from me some three weeks after the post in question know. It kind of cancels out the whole instant-gratification aspect of the internet... I mean, at this rate, I might as well go back to letter-writing. I have really been out of it (where "it"=the internet, that is).

We have been in the midst of some transition here in the ao neko household, nothing earth-shattering, but requiring some adjustments on everyone's part. J has been working more (a big job on the fast track through the fall – wait, I'm in denial that it's now fall, so let's call it late-late summer). Meanwhile, I am supposed to be working less, only this week I have actually been working more. Office work, that is. I also have a big job to do this late-late summer of the work-at-home variety, but my mother, who cares for Iris on my work-at-home days in exchange for meals, kisses, and the opportunity to hone her tantrum-defusing skills, is down for the count with pneumonia.

And wouldn't you know it, Iris has chosen now, this moment, this late-late summer, to give up her nap. Oh, I saw it coming. And I closed my eyes. But it came just the same. We are now, officially, sleepless in Pittsburgh, at least during daylight hours. Since the demise of the nap, Iris does admit that she's tired and ready to go to bed about an hour and a half earlier than before, but her parents are usually too beat by that time to do anything more ambitious than drink wine and watch another Sopranos episode on DVD.

So no, I've got nothing to show for myself in terms of creative pursuits. I don't even have a photo for this post. I've got a to-do list as long as my arm, but it's on hold, listening to endless repetitions of "Someday, Someway."

One thing I can cross off for now, albeit somewhat abashedly, is a bed cover for Iris' big-girl room. I was, of course, intending to make something, but still contemplating exactly what when I saw this. The price was right and so were the colors, which is to say it's pink but not so pink it denies that other colors exist, and I think it will play nicely with the dresser. So I took the plunge. I may still make something eventually, especially if I get her a duvet, which was the original sort-of plan. But the magic of online retail brings me effortlessly one step closer to having her room complete. I think that's called a quick fix.

doh!

2007-09-10T19:36:00.000-04:00

Iris loves to bake pies and cakes in her kitchen – out of play-dough, of course.

The problem with play-dough is that, unlike her other toys, which only cause tripping hazards and fits of parental exasperation when not put away, left-out play-dough dries into lumps of Kool-Aid-colored hardtack and must be thrown out when it is discovered in, for example, the toy toaster or teapot weeks after the creative cooking spree which caused it to be toasted or brewed in the first place.

So this morning, in the real kitchen, we replenished her dwindling supply by making four bright new batches: blue, green, purple, and pink. We used this recipe which was quite successful.

The girl who was so excited about adding the food coloring and watching the formation of each brightly-colored lump then wasted no time in layering and combining them to make her properietary pastry.

By this afternoon, the "wedding cake" had been kneaded into a massive loaf the drab color of a thundercloud.

So much for the bright, beautiful colors and, it must be said, for my own ideas of how to play with play-dough. The part of me that was invested in this little project could not help thinking that it would have been much less time and effort to have made up one big batch since she was just going to moosh it all together anyway. But then she would not have had the pleasure, a la The Color Kittens, of mixing the colors together herself, which I strongly suspect was half the fun.

Anyway, we've got enough play-dough now to keep Iris' bakery in business for some time, even allowing for a little bit of hardtack every day. Next time we replenish her play-dough, it should be winter, when kneading hot-from-the-pot balls of dough will be a welcome hand-warming treat.

And as for the little bits of squishy dough that are constantly underfoot, at least we don't have carpet.

suburban ramble

2007-09-08T13:29:00.000-04:00

Not sure what it says about me that I can't seem to update this here blog-thing more than once a week. Not sure it matters.

Here in Nouveau Jersey, life is good. There is a breeze. There is a hammock. Much as I heart New York, I have bailed on the idea of going into the city today. This suburban life sure is nice to visit, even though I wouldn't want to live here. (Wait, isn't that what people say about NYC?) I think the thing I love most about my father-in-law's house is that here it seems perfectly OK, even normal, that Iris' bathing suit is lying crumpled on the cutting board in the kitchen. Not that I am such a neatnik by any means, but that just would not fly at home, you know?

On the way here we stopped for lunch in Brookville, PA, and I had to describe the concept of "torn" to Iris, as in, "I am torn between getting back in the car and driving to visit Grandpa as planned and staying here for the rest of my life." Not only is Brookville's main street a Rockwellian slice of Americana, for which I am a total sucker, it is chock-a-block with consignment stores. If I did not have to set a good example for Iris, I would have allowed myself to be dragged away kicking and screaming.

So J and I started talking about buying a country property near Brookville. The country property has been a fantasy of ours for years: some wooded acres, preferably with a pond or a stream, within easy driving distance of Pittsburgh, where we will build and design a modest, modern dream house for weekends and short-haul vacations. It's a fantasy that indulges the other half of our collective split personality: we love living in the city, but we love being in the country. We love living in our quirky old house, but we are both really Modernists at heart. (Funny, I remember saying almost that very phrase – in the first person, of course – to J in our first ever conversation.) We also love the idea of our country place being within bicycling distance of a small town where we could go for necessities and the occasional social outing. If Brookville could be that town, how happy we'd be!

In sadder news, this makes me feel like a bright light has gone out. Her books, especially A Wrinkle in Time and A Swiftly Tilting Planet, meant so much to me growing up, and still do. They're in that category of books I look forward to introducing Iris to one day.

Also in that category: the Ramona books by Beverly Cleary. I just scored a full set of them at an otherwise junky flea market. Not all of them are the same editions I had when I was young, which is always important to me in used book purchases, but for 50 cents apiece, it's all right. Re-reading them is like reliving my own kid life, the very best parts.

update

2007-09-01T20:01:00.000-04:00

on Jasper and the fresh peach pie:

Alas, one of them is no more. Tragically devoured by the other. I'll leave you to guess the predator/prey relationship.

This photo has nothing to do with that, of course. it just reminds me that it may be September, but summer's not over yet.

meet Jasper

2007-08-26T14:23:00.000-04:00

He's a very polite and mild-mannered boy.

He was kind of an impulse dog, if you will. Not that we hadn't been planning to get a new dog. Eventually. Which for J meant sooner than it meant for me. Of the two of us, he's the real dog person, and despite my foot-dragging, he had begun trawling petfinder.com, looking for possible candidates. Fast forward a few weeks, and we found ourselves at the shelter (hey, how'd that happen?), where we fell in love with Jasper's composure and affectionate nature and, truth be told, his superficial resemblance to our dear departed Thisbe.

Iris was asleep when we got home with him—she’s on the mend, but not all the way better, and still sleeping as much per day as the average cat—so she did not meet him till early the next morning. “Just you wait,” we said to Jasper that first night. “You think you’ve been adopted by such a nice, quiet, mellow family. Just wait till Little Miss Smother Dogs With Love wakes up!”

In her fever dreams, Iris has been traumatized by foxes, so we were a little worried about what would happen if she woke in the night and came into our room only to find what appeared to be a real fox lurking there. But J played defense between them all nght, and when morning broke, all was well. She reached out and very lightly patted his velvety head, and then she actually said, “We got a new dog! Hooray!”

Other recent happenings of note:

Iris' school art show. The Japanese mother of a boy in her class made these paper cranes out of the kids' artwork, which I thought was really great.

Iris helped her dad make a fresh peach pie.

And she had her first sleepover with Anya. In the morning, they made breakfast in their pajamas and aprons. Mmm, play-doh pancakes!

J gallantly took the girls for the evening part of the sleepover, since my friend Kat was visiting from Ithaca and we were invited to a girls' night of pesto and wine at another friend's house. Got home at 2:30 a.m. Felt 28 again. Until Anya and Iris woke up a scant four and a half hours later. Oh, right, that's why I don't do that anymore!

it's raining again

2007-08-20T22:51:00.000-04:00

Hello, and how have you been this past week and then some? Here, our rain barrel runneth over. We had bad news this week, then more bad news, then the kind of news that makes you wonder if everything really does happen for a reason. I don't know. We're equilibrating, holding our breaths to make sure it all really is going to turn out all right. (What if it doesn't?)

On top of this, Iris is under the weather, which is pretty low indeed. It started with her voice "feeling crooked," then like she had "orange thread in her throat." By yesterday she was feverish, complete with hallucinogenic fever dreams. She is not prone to this kind of sickness and it's kind of scary. I mean, she actually asked to go to bed – before 8 P.M. Who are you and what have you done with my healthy, vivacious child?

But with wet weather pre-empting any work on the backyard fence and a poor sick kid who's slept 20 out of the last 24 hours, I've had plenty of indoor project time (when I haven't been compulsively checking on Iris to make sure she hasn't incinerated in her sleep).

Does making curtains count as craft? I don't think so – I think it's really just measuring, cutting, and hemming. But making curtains has kept the old sewing machine humming the past few weeks.

Sunroom:

J's office:

Third-floor bathroom, badly in need of paint:

Playroom, badly in need of sunlight:

Iris' big-girl room to be:

I've also been working on all-new table linens, since I tire of the old ones I made ten if not twelve years ago now. I had this idea to make a set of placemats and napkins for each season. These are the spring ones, completed some months ago now. I hope to have pictures of summer (a little late, but who's counting?), fall, and winter soon.

scenes from a weekend

2007-08-12T19:14:00.000-04:00

Iris' new favorite video: the blueberry cobbler demonstration from America's Test Kitchen. "Mama, can I watch blueberry cobbler?"

She made a shoe out of salvaged cellophane and masking tape. That's my girl!

We went to Medha's first birthday party

at Moraine State Park.

I am totally moving Iris' birthday to the summer so we can have outdoor picnic/swimming parties. Also, I am converting our ethnicity to Indian so the food will be as good as it was at this one.

Revenge of the nap.

it's raining, it's pouring

2007-08-05T16:32:00.000-04:00

So, no pool today after all. We're taking a rain check, quite literally, but you won't hear me complaining, because it's the kind of good soaking rain we need to revive our poor tomato plants. Plus, the cool air is a relief.

It's been a challenge being inside all day, though. None of us is used to it.

My rainy-day project was making a curtain for our inner front door (our house has a vestibule, so we have two sets of doors – actually three in summer, including the screens) out of organza ribbons. I've had the idea, and those ribbons, for years. Attribute the delay to second thoughts about the whole idea of a curtain – the longer we lived without our previous one, the longer I liked the light and transparency of the bare window – compounded by uncertainty about how I would actually construct the thing. I wanted the ribbons secured to both a top and a bottom rod so they wouldn't flutter when the door was opened or closed. Not rocket science, but I knew the solution would be tedious. And so it was.

But now it's done and I'm really happy with the result. From some angles, the different colors and widths of ribbon are very apparent; from others they almost vanish into a sort of shimmery, barely translucent screen. I'm glad a rainy day got me to revisit this project.

Final score: me, one. Procrastination, infinity minus one. I'm still counting a victory.

375 fun-lovin' degrees

2007-08-04T17:14:00.000-04:00

It's the temperature our blueberry cobbler is baking at (or should I say, like the proper English major I am, at which our blueberry cobbler is baking), but it feels like the my body temperature right now. I am sweltering. Withering. Wilting. Hello, August. Why are we baking, again? Because we are rolling in blueberries, that's why.

I am hoping to show some things I'm working on soon, but I'm not sure I can get anything else done until I get my studio under control, and it is just too hot for that kind of effort. The most effort I can muster is for staying up late to watch Sopranos DVDs, which I've been getting from the library. J and I are finally stepping from the cultural sidelines into the mainstream. So what if the mainstream passed under the bridge eight years ago? Who's counting?

Meanwhile, my love affair with my new bike continues, at least in the mornings and evenings when it's not too blistering to be outside. I got a nifty detachable basket for it so now I can carry Iris and my purse, water bottle, lock, and packages. Thus equipped, this morning I set out on a couple of Uninspiring Errands, which fortunately took place in an Ever-Interesting Neighborhood. I pedaled past a rack of never-worn 1950s dresses on the sidewalk, then (can you hear the screech of tires?) executed a rapid about-face to stop and peruse them. I ended up trying on two and buying both after a lengthy internal debate about whether this one was too busy:

But I so loved the cut of it and especially the sleeves, which have fins just like the cars this dress would have ridden in:

And though I have not really been on the whole mustard-yellow bandwagon this summer – let's just say that the color does not flatter my northern European pallor – there was never any doubt about getting this one:

It even came with a little matching butterfly jacket. I'll probably mostly wear the dress without, but cute, no?

The guy who was selling the dresses said they came from an old woman who bought them 50 years ago and just stored them in her closet. Indeed, most of them had the tags still on and they looked just printed yesterday.

In case you can't read the fine print, that tag would have you believe that Flairlin is "The finest man made fabric available." So quaint, that atomic-age enthusiasm for all that is unnatural! But that's just the jacket; the dresses themselves are cotton and crisp as potato chips.

Speaking of which, tomorrow we're invited to a picnic at the home of friends who have a pool. Counting the hours....

random

2007-07-29T19:49:00.000-04:00

Usually when I sit down to write, I have something in mind to write about. Not today. Nothing big is going on.

Actually that is not true. J is building a fence as I type – that's big. The idea of our backyard as a habitable place is huge. I'll have pictures soon.

Until then, it's just the little things. Pleasures found, not planned. Like putting the borrowed child seat on the back of my new bike, strapping Iris in, and setting off on our maiden voyage to the sprinkler park. Like stopping by the thrift after a meeting on Friday and finding that someone had dropped off a raft of Mini Boden, size 3-4 years. Like they knew we were coming! I also found a vintage Pyrex mixing bowl, avocado green. You can never have too many of those.

Actually, since we've been working in the backyard, we have been spending time there as a family even though it is still pretty wild and woolly. It's not a very big backyard, but it's terra incognita for Iris, who often explores it in a pink dress, Chuck Taylor high-tops, and tiara. Today we found cicada carapaces on one of the fenceposts. Here are some other treasures that have turned up as we've been digging and turning over the dirt:

There was also a little rubber Charlie Brown figurine. Whatever happened to him? And a fork I finally threw out because decades of dirt had somehow melded to the metal and it would not come clean. And countless old coins. I love this kind of urban archaeology. Someday I'll do a whole post on things that were left behind in our house when we bought it. (That will be a long one....)

Not today. J and Iris are shucking corn on the porch, and I'm going to help.

in a nutshell

2007-07-23T14:52:00.000-04:00

This was Boulder.

(created with fd's flickr toys)

This

is the Japanese paper I bought in Boulder which will be perfect for a companion project to the dresser in Iris' big-girl-room-to-be. The store was so amazing, it made me want to move there just to be close to it. Then I came back to Pennsylvania and filled my lungs with muggy, humid air and felt like I'd come home (which, in fact, I had). Because, for me, it turns out it's not the heat, it's the aridity.

And this

is

summer. So if posting continues to be a little slow and sporadic around here, you'll know what I'm up to.

tomato pie in the sky

2007-07-11T21:54:00.000-04:00

Thanks for all the dresser love. Jen even tipped off craft:zine and it was fun to see it pop up on their blog. I really appreciate the blue tape tips (and Amy H., as for purple tape, Iris came home from preschool today with purple-taped artwork, so I can vouch for its use as a kids' craft material) and ideas for drawer pulls. Yes, I am going to add some eventually....

Now, my girl and I are off to Boulder, CO to visit my sisters-in-law. My official duties consist of helping them pick paint colors for their new house (I hear there is a mauve problem that needs to be eradicated), but I am also looking forward to sharing Iris with her adoring aunties and finding out how a mojito tastes at high altitude. A certified-organic, free-range, collectively-farmed, solar-powered mojito, of course. This is Boulder we're talking about.

I'll be back next week. Toodles!

P.S. I like the name of the place in the photograph, Tomato Pie Café, because it reminds me of a story: the first time my mother ever heard of pizza, it was from her grandmother, who reported eating a new food on the boardwalk in Wildwood, NJ called "tomato pie." My mother thought it sounded awful. It kind of does, doesn't it?

ta-da

2007-07-09T19:03:00.000-04:00

I have to admit, it looks good in the picture. As I'd hoped. But if you detected a note of false triumph in the title of this post, it's because the blue tape let me down. I know! When I peeled it off, I found that primer had seeped under the edges, blurring the entire design. Gaah! J says it probably happened because the wood was too porous and I shouldn't retract my blue-tape-is-the-bomb post without sufficient evidence. Anyway, several tedious hours with a razor scraper (and several blades) later, I'm calling it done. Embracing, again, wabi, the beauty of imperfection. Reminding myself that it is destined for a child's room, after all, not a gallery.

Where did I get the inspiration? (Kirsten wants to know.) Well, unlike most of my craft projects, which are adapted, if not outright copied, from others, this one came all from my own head. The dresser was rescued from the trash, so it wasn't in very good condition.

Here's a picture I took of the top of the dresser when I was working on it because I couldn't bear to obliterate that decal without any documentation. If there had been more of it, I'd have tried to preserve it in some way.

Anyway, after scraping a layer of ancient, alligatored varnish from the whole thing, I discovered a veneer of beautiful wood on the drawers, but it was too dinged up to look good unfinished. I came up with the idea of the tree to let a little of the wood veneer show through a coat of paint.

See, it's really all right in the end. Even close up. That fabric on top will be the curtains for the room. I also painted a little bookcase headboard the same shade of pale green. It's not much to see right now, but I promise I'll include it on the virtual tour when, eventually, Iris' big-girl room is done.

for this we kept the child up way past her bedtime

2007-07-08T09:40:00.000-04:00

And it was worth it. Rather than watching paint dry, I thought I'd show you some pictures of a cool public art project that is going on right now downtown. Buildings have images of art glass projected onto them in light.

The Tiffany hotel is hands-down my favorite.

blue

2007-07-06T17:06:00.000-04:00

Not feeling it. Taping it. I want to personally hold an awards banquet for whoever invented blue painters' tape. Maybe he or she can help me commit to some paint colors, and then I might even be able to finish this excruciatingly prolonged project this weekend. But who will I be without this dresser hanging over my head? (A person less at risk of metaphorical cranial injury, perhaps?) How will I know myself?

the best laid plans

2007-06-28T11:43:00.000-04:00

I didn’t mean to go to the yard sale. I swear I didn’t. The whole family was tuckered after a nonstop napless Saturday (music class, picnic, birthday party, dinner at friends’), so I had no bigger ambitions for Sunday than sleeping in and making blueberry pancakes. I told myself I didn’t need to spend any money, anyway.

But then. My mother called. She was at the sale, and she had a blister on her foot, could I pick her up and give her a lift back to her house? Oh, and while I was there, I might want to check out this lady’s stuff, because she thought I would like it.

And isn't mother always right? Turns out this woman who lives a few blocks from me once had a vintage shop in the Strip and now was liquidating all her inventory at her yard sale. If her stuff was this good at 4:00, I can only imagine what the pickings were like in the morning. I walked out with this:

Which my mother says is exactly the same as the one her parents got her when she was a teenager. I got it to replace a little table I don’t like between our two living room chairs. But it’s a lot taller in my living room than it was at the yard sale. Maybe I should live with the table a little longer and find another place for the old phonograph. What do you think?

Oh, and did I mention it works? Not that we have any records anymore.

I also picked up this very tall lamp

for the playroom

and this Plantation Jinglebits tin

from the Plantation Chocolate Co., Phila., PA, which I've decided has the world's coolest tins, based on my scientific sample of these two. The top one I got about ten years ago. It contained "Plantation Dainties" (well, not anymore when I bought it). Love the names too. I may just have to become a Plantation candy tin collector.

I also got this little shelf

and I put an octopus on it, one of several I have around (including the octopus skirt I stenciled last summer), because it is my favorite invertebrate and when I read this article* about the Renegade craft fair in Brooklyn, I was dismayed to see the cephalopod forecast as the up-and-coming "it" animal. Don't you feel robbed when you've had a passion for something for years, and suddenly it becomes all fashionable and your true love is indistinguishable from everyone else's trendiness? Or maybe that's just me.

* I was excited to see Sue of Giant Dwarf there in the lead picture. She was a Pittsburgh girl till recently. I heart my recycled sweater hat from her.

in which there is a long parenthetical featuring bovine metrics

2007-06-26T07:57:00.000-04:00

The sad news is, a good friend of ours moved away. Santa Fe will be lucky to have her – though Iris is not so sure. She worries for Theresa’s safety. She’s afraid she will live too close to Alice Nizzy Nazzy, a witch in a book, who lives there too.

The good, or should I say somewhat consoling, news is, Theresa gave us these wonderful iron sculptures to remember her by. Her artist uncle made them. (It always surprises me, the things people will leave behind when they move. When another friend up and left for NYC, he held a house sale and sold everything – including his kitchen equipment [doesn’t he plan to cook in NY?] and all the little, and I mean little, things he’d picked up at yard sales and flea markets over the years. I got a pair of very old wire-rim spectacles that used to hang on his wall and now hang on mine, and a cow tape. It’s like a long measuring tape used at county fairs to measure, you know, cows. Which J promptly broke by “seeing what would happen” if he put it on our ceiling fan and turned it (the fan) on. But I ask you, how hard would it have been to pack up and move a cow tape? It takes up no space and weighs nothing. I guess all those little things add up. I guess once the urge to purge sets in, people are ruthless. I guess as someone who does not intend to move for a long, long time, if ever, I have a different relationship to stuff.)

Anyway. The butterfly is for Iris, who, thanks to lots of artistic friends, already has an impressive art collection for one so young. The bird is for J and me. I love them so. Thank you, Theresa. Good luck out there in Santa Fe. Don’t let Alice Nizzy Nazzy get you.

P.S. Speaking of yard sales, I have something to report on that front too, but that post will have to wait until I can take some pictures.

6 happy years

2007-06-21T23:40:00.000-04:00

(updated with a slightly better scan)

"Mama, what is a wedding anniversary?"

"Well, six years ago today your daddy and I...."

"No! I don't mean when you got married! I mean, what is a wedding anniversary?"

"I'm telling you: our wedding was when we got married, and... OK, our anniversary is kind of like the birthday of our wedding."

"Oh! Did you get cupcakes?!?"

we're baa-ack

2007-06-18T12:39:00.000-04:00

Whew, re-entry is hard. I'm not particularly suffering from jet-lag (too tired to wake up on German time), but Iris is, so we're all a little strung out.

I'm glad I posted some pictures while I was away because I don't think I have it in me to try and recap our trip. In a nutshell: it was great. Great to be with my dad on his birthday, great to see lots of other family, including my 91-year-old grandmother – it meant a lot to me that she and Iris got to meet. Great to enjoy a kaffeepause in the afternoons and the long, late northern European light at night. Great to explore hot spring resorts and cathedral towns with J while Iris hung with her Oma and Opa (like traveling before we were parents, right, J?). Great to sit up late with them, drinking my father's favorite Rhein wine and talking, after Iris went to bed. Just great. Okay, so much for not recapping.

But it's good to be back, too. Iris really missed my mom, so they had a joyful reunion. And I got home and wondered: what is this odd object in my house?

It wasn't until a few days later, after the dust had settled, that I found out. Why, it's a homemade sewing cabinet that my mom picked up at an estate sale while we were away, complete with lots of spools and other supplies still inside. It has a handle, so it's portable, and its sides are upholstered for sticking up fabric pieces (maybe I'll re-upholster them with something bright and funky... hmmm!).

Thanks Mom!

I also came home to a surprise package from my college friend Ellen, who'd gone through her craft closet and decided to de-accession a few things in my direction. I won't try to photograph everything that was in the box, but for me these were the highlights:

A piece of very thick, old flannel... just a small, sweet piece. Iris has already put it to use a doll blanket, but I'm not so sure I'm giving it to her for keeps.

And these. I can see the one on the left made into something Christmassy, the one on the right into some summery, picnicky napkins (yes, I'm still stuck in the housewares department), and the one in the middle as one of Erin's smocked sundresses. Thanks Ellen!

last day

2007-06-13T18:07:00.000-04:00

maus

2007-06-12T04:21:00.000-04:00

happy birthday dad

2007-06-09T16:51:00.001-04:00

Trier

2007-06-07T19:00:00.000-04:00

am Rhein

2007-06-06T18:58:00.000-04:00

an der Mosel

2007-06-03T18:58:00.001-04:00

on the other hand, maybe just some photos

2007-06-01T14:59:00.000-04:00

every day or so... better that than an exhaustive (and exhausting) travelogue when I get home.

weekend update

2007-05-28T14:00:00.000-04:00

Thanks for all the nice comments last week! While we're on the subject, I really appreciate every one, all the time, though I have yet to settle on a good system for responding to them. Blogger sends me my comments via email, but most of them do not come with a valid reply-to email address, so with a couple exceptions – people who've supplied their emails to Blogger, I suppose – I can't respond personally. At one time I said I would leave responses to comments in the comments, but I haven't, much, because I doubt people really go back to check. But maybe they would if I actually did it, so I'll try to be better about that.

Anyway, so much for being on a posting roll, since it's now been another week. I've been at a family wedding in Doylestown, PA, a place so cute it puts buttons to shame. It is also home to one of the best business signs ever:

And the Fonthill Museum, a 100-year-old concrete castle positively encrusted with handmade Arts and Crafts tiles, where my cousin got married.

It was a spectacular setting for a beautiful wedding and de facto family reunion, as these things go. My party girl danced the night away. The next morning, J made a reconnaissance mission to our hotel's breakfast bar and reported back to Iris:

"Would you like cereal, a bagel, a muffin, or a danish?"

"A danish."

"What kind of danish?"

"Salt."

"Umm... I don't think they have salt."

"OK, rainbow."

My child's eccentric tastes in pastry have also manifested themselves in a game she invented called "Tortilla," which, apparently, involves her Opa getting baked into bread a la Mickey in In the Night Kitchen. She'll have plenty of chance to play it over the next two weeks, when we'll be visiting him and Oma in Germany. I doubt I'll be posting while I'm away... maybe a picture or two (or twenty) to Flickr. Talk to you when we get back!

let the sunshine in, or not

2007-05-21T17:19:00.000-04:00

So here's the rummage sale curtain in all its new glory as my bedroom window curtain. It took some surgery: I had to separate it into two panels and convert the rod tunnel into tabs so it would stay in the "bunched back" position without ties. But for $5 and the amount that I love it, which is so much I just want to sit in my bedroom all afternoon with the curtains drawn like some overaged Goth girl, that bit of sweat equity was well worth it. It is obviously hard to take a good photograph of a curtain, it being backlit and all, but you get the general idea.

Speaking of Goth tendencies, I won't go so far as to say I have been feeling unpopular, exactly, the past couple days, but I did think to myself, gee, it's funny the posts people comment on and the ones they don't. Was that yard sale post too boastful? Pictures and stories about my daughter too self-indulgent? What is a blog if not self-indulgence anyway? As an only child, I am very good at this kind of over-analysis. Not to mention as a person who is ambivalent about keeping a blog in the first place. (Although this here makes three posts in three days, so maybe I'm on some kind of a new roll – we'll see!)

Well, it turns out I had accidentally disabled comments. Whoops! Thanks to the loyal Kirsten for pointing that out. I've fixed it now, so comment away. Whoa, not all at once!

fairy tale

2007-05-20T10:47:00.000-04:00

This is Cinderella.

She arrived at our house at approximately the same time as a gift of princess dress-up clothes. What a coincidence!

This is Cinderella waiting at the bus stop to go to a baseball game.

Shortly after this photo was taken, the bus arrived. Cinderella bought some gum and walked out of the kitchen, then quickly backtracked, saying "Cinderella forgot to get on the bus!"

Alas, Cinderella soon returned with a sad face and the announcement that the ball game was closed. This made Cinderella weep. When she weeps, she draws pictures of ferocious animals with fiery pink breath in her sketchbook.

After she felt a little better, she tied a string around the handle of the refrigerator so the chickens in her backyard won't go peck, peck, peck.

The end.

let the games begin!

2007-05-19T23:21:00.000-04:00

Oh how I love the Regent Square neighborhood yard sale! It's like a whole season of sales in one glorious morning.

I scored the usual motherlode of kids' clothes and toys. This year I am thinking small since I am trying to assemble a portable bag of amusements for an upcoming long, long journey. I got plenty of new-to-Iris books, little toys and whatnot from the 25 cent jumble boxes, and this, which was just sitting there like it knew I was coming:

It even packs a kid-size backpack. I do realize I will end up pulling it half the time (or more), but Iris' pleasure at having her very own luggage makes it worth it. Oh, and the Yellow Submarine lunchbox? Free! (Michael the somewhat-larger-than-life-size stuffed cat featured for scale purposes only. )

I have a weakness for chickens – maybe because that is my Chinese zodiac year, maybe just because I have a weakness for chickens. Anyway, I was happy to find these little made-in-Japan beauties for $1 at a sale which was otherwise priced more like a savvy vintage shop. I passed up a $17.50 tablecloth and $45 – that's right, 4 tens and a five! – for a toy horse I had when I was a kid and for which I doubt my parents paid more than a Lincoln. Excuse me, ma'am, but I think you may be a little unclear on the concept of "yard sale."

On the vintage fabric front, I found this heavy cotton which I did not even unfold all the way before buying.

So it was not until I got it home that I realized it is actually a nicely handmade curtain (circa 1976, according to the selvedge) that not only happens to have the color of my bedroom walls in it, but will be a perfect fit for my bedroom window.

I also got some vintage towels. I am trying for a little collection of these but for some reason, as Iris would say, they are harder to find than it seems like they should be.

And if you had asked me, "Do you ever find jewelry you like at yard sales?" I would have said "No," but then I found this, which I truly love:

All in all, a satisfying start to the yard sale season.

on nature, or maybe if I posted more frequently this would not be this long

2007-05-14T17:13:00.000-04:00

Hello! I trust all you mothers and people related to mothers had a happy day yesterday. It was truly lovely here. J and Iris made my favorite Mexican chocolate coffee cake for breakfast, then we went with my mom to the zoo, where Iris wished a happy mothers' day to all the mama animals, including two pregnant elephants. That's 44 cumulative months of gestation, people. I hope those elephants get a big bouquet next year, or will it be two years from now?

Anyway, thanks for all your nice comments on my last post. I've taken another impromptu internet break since then, during which I've done lots of, well, living, I guess you'd call it, when you do stuff instead of write about it on the computer. It's been good. Maybe I should just make it official and come out and say I'm only going to post once a week, but then as soon as I set a rule, I'll want to break it, so never mind. Let's just say I'll be here now and again. How's that for setting expectations?

One of the things I've been doing is reading this book about one of my favorite children's authors and illustrators, Virginia Lee Burton. There is so much to admire in her life and her art. And is it any surprise that a preservationist's favorite book would be The Little House? I could look at the pictures in that book all day, with their gorgeously detailed, rhythmic depiction of the cycle of the seasons* and the passage of time and "progress."

Both of these books make me think a lot about reconciling my love of nature and of the city. We are pretty committed city folk here in the ao neko family for lots of reasons: the conservation of land, the community of people, the convenience of having most everything from dry cleaning to Thai food within easy walking or busing distance. We even walked to the hospital when Iris was about to born (hoping the exercise might kick-start those contractions since I was two weeks overdue and scheduled for a dreaded induction. But that’s another story). Iris is a seasoned public transit rider, attends a downtown preschool with all colors and creeds of children, and plays on a roofdeck. Once we were driving down a suburban commercial strip (without sidewalks, of course) and she asked, truly puzzled, "Why there are no people walking?" That's my girl!

But J and I do have a fantasy about a buying a property in the country where we can design and build a little dream house and have some of the experiences Virginia Lee Burton and her family did living year-round in the country. Raising animals. Growing food. Really living the cycle of the seasons. Really living in nature. Full-time. Sometimes I think it would be worth trading city life for that. But then I realize I would have to drive for every gallon of milk, bank transaction, and library book, and I just don't think I could live without my city sidewalks.

So we are working on our little postage-stamp-size parcel of nature, otherwise known as our backyard (which is in quite an uncultivated natural state right now - if we tame it, will it still be nature?) and I am on the lookout for a pretty little table to put in our front hall to become our nature table. We will put a plate or a tray on it, I told Iris, for keeping all the special things we find out in nature: eggshells, acorns... "and dead flowers," she suggested. Then, "Is nature what we're sitting out in right now?"

This morning she found a bird’s feather on the ground and asked me, “Mama, did you find a table yet?” I'd say the nature table is an idea whose time has come.

* Iris delivered a bravura soliloquy on this topic the other night at dinner. "First it's winter," she said, "then sprin', then summer, then fall, then winter again. I never figured that out before!"

saved by the bell

2007-05-08T14:42:00.001-04:00

So it's been almost a year since I started keeping this-here blog-thing – and over a week since I've posted. My husband pointed out that I seemed to need the outlet of this particular space much more last year when my life was in a blender than I do now that things have settled down. Although I tried back then to keep the mewling and puking to a minimum, there may be some truth to that. My life outside the internet is just so much more satisfying now than it was a year ago when I started ao neko. What a difference a new job has made, that and my mom moving just a mile away, making us an extended family.

A year is longer than I've kept any form of journal since I was 23, but don't worry, I'm not going to mark the occasion with some big paean to blogging and how it has changed my life. Obviously, it has, best of all by helping me keep in touch with far-away family, but, somewhat unexpectedly, also by opening up friendships with people who amuse and inspire me daily, whom I feel like I know even though we have never met. But blogging has also brought its own set of weird little issues which, for now at least, I am not going to try to unpack here. I have thought of quitting, not because I don't enjoy this on the whole, but because who needs more issues? But I'm not announcing that I'm quitting today either. I'm just rambling.

So what have I been doing when I'm not doing what I'm doing now? Well, working of course, though a little less now that my teaching semester is over, which is nice. Playing outside with Iris. We've inaugurated a Pittsburgh Tour de Playground, trying to hit a new one every week. (Anyone local? I'll try to let you know where we'll be, if I'm that good about planning ahead, and you can meet up with us there.) And because there will be rainy days, I'm still working on the playroom, trying to make it a fun, functional yet flexible space. I'll show more pictures when it's farther along, but for now, look what I found over the weekend for $3 a piece:

Four old school molded fiberglass chairs with steel frames. I got them from Construction Junction, where $12 buys a lot of dirt, let me tell you. But they cleaned up real nice, and they'll be the perfect rough-and-tumble playroom furniture. I love that they can stack together to take up less space or link arm-to-arm to make a row.

I've also been rocking on my rectangles. New table linens are in the works – thank goodness, because I am sorely tired of my old ones, which I've been using since my last big bout of home ec crafting about 12 years ago – and curtains are being planned. With most of the work on these simple projects being the pressing and pinning, I am anxiously awaiting the delivery of my new iron. I've been using J's mom's old iron, a trusty appliance if there ever was one, and so very 1970s in its lovely almond and orange color scheme. But the casing on the cord is shot and that makes me just a leetle nervous.

I'm embarrassed to admit it, but the project I started a year ago when I started this blog, I still have not finished. The problem is color paralysis, which does not happen to me very often so I am not sure how to overcome it. Since you all are so clever, maybe I'll post an updated picture soon and ask for your input.

! ! ! That was the doorbell. Hello Brown!

home ec

2007-04-29T22:24:00.000-04:00

So there I was, performing my thrift-shop ritual of rifling through the racks of kids' clothes, when my eye just happened to wander over to the toy shelves and I spotted this:

Holy Fisher-Price vision of Tudoresque suburban bliss, Batman! Needless to say, I abandoned the clothing immediately and all but tackled it in my zeal to claim it before the lone grandmotherly type who was also cruising the store, who probably could not have cared less about it anyway. At 79 cents, there's no buyer's remorse, not even after Iris decides the Fisher-Price sticker on the roof needs redecorating with her markers. Oh well, it was pretty trashed anyway. The rest of the house is in move-in condition – the doorbell even works!

The funny thing is, just a couple weeks ago I found this at another thrift:

Sort of the pastel 80s urban update on the classic suburban single-family dollhouse. The tiger has a bachelorette pad above the pet shop (hmm, is that a little like living above the pizzeria? Best not to think too hard about that), and the beauty salon around back is convenient for getting her stripes touched up. As I recall, this little beauty was 99 cents. Well, you know, real estate in the city is through the roof.

Speaking of roof, I just love that these houses have handles for carrying them and their contents around, and so does Iris. It's hard to say which of us gets more of a kick out of them.

My own life-size house is the object of all my creative/crafting energy right now – I'm still deep in nesting mode – so don't expect (not that you do) any cleverness in the crafting department here. Right now, it's all about the rectangle: placemats, napkins, curtains. Maybe I'll branch out into triangles and make one of those pennant-banner thingies for Iris' playroom. You never know!

Before I go, a picture from today's seed- and flower-planting fest, just because... because it's so damn nice to see and live life outdoors again.

open season

2007-04-23T19:18:00.000-04:00

What is your idea of a perfect birthday?

Here's mine:

Not having to go to work :: chocolate croissant and a cappucino for breakfast at Grasso Roberto café :: Parking Authority's birthday present to me=out of order parking meter :: hanging out at the National Aviary with my mom and my girl :

: Iris' present to me=a three-hour nap :: during which I finished making new placemats and napkins :

: J cooking one of my favorite dinners (rustic pork ragout) :: and dark chocolate cupcakes with coffee buttercream :: all to be eaten and enjoyed on the porch:

: Yesterday, the day we scrubbed the porch and brought the furniture up from the basement and blew bubbles and drank wine on the porch swing in the afternoon sun, really marked the beginning of spring.

And not a minute too soon.

the stockyards in the moon

2007-04-18T23:51:00.000-04:00

Tonight as I was patting Iris' back before sleep, we were talking about the moon.

"Sometimes it looks like it has a face," she said.

"Yes, that's called the man in the moon," I told her, then could not resist adding, "In Japan, they say it's the rabbit in the moon." [true!]

Whereupon Iris asked, "What do they say in Chicago?"

in living color

2007-04-13T07:09:00.000-04:00

A lot of people are observing a week of color, and that is a beautiful thing. But as someone who has been getting up prior to the crack of dawn this week to lead architectural historians on coffee-fueled walking tours, I am not feeling quite focused enough for that. I present to you instead: Things That Have Changed Color.

water (+ beet juice, red cabbage leaves, onion skins, and turmeric):

eggs:

Iris' playroom:

and freezer-paper-stencilled T-shirts:

Two for a brand-new baby born on Easter morning – who could wish for a more perfect birthday? – one for her radiant and exhausted mom, and one for her big sister, so she won't feel left out.

Iris didn't change color, except for her hands a little because she helped.

nesting 1-2-3

2007-04-06T17:08:00.000-04:00

My friend Marijke is about to pop with Anya's new little baby brother or sister, but it is I who am nesting like crazy. I've been poring over my cache of decorating/design books, especially this one

which is overflowing with deliciousness on every page.

Just a few of the pictures that inspire me:

I love this setup for vertical storage/display. Of course, it requires a wall unimpeded by a door or a window, and my 100-year-old house has precious few of those.

I've always wanted to make a bed frame out of plumbing fixtures. No, seriously, I have. I love the way this one integrates fabric panels. I'd have colored and/or patterned ones and change them for the seasons. J thinks he may be able to figure out a way to build a bench into the footboard.

Having realized recently that we have just enough room in our kitchen for a narrow island, we made an actual design for one, inspired by this, last night.

The pocket doors between our living room and front hall are long gone. Maybe we could rig up some cool rolling collage of salvaged panels, like this one. Another thing about this picture: surprising no one more than my own self, I find this room's color scheme to be extremely pleasing.

I so need something like this. Where does one acquire an "old industrial trolley"?

And this picture, from another book, may lead to a design for the cabinetry/open shelving we want to build at some point between our living and dining rooms.

On a related topic, you can see some bits of my current decor right now over at ikea hacker. Just be warned – the danger of getting sucked in to Jules's site is extremely high.

Oh, and if you're wondering how the playroom turned out, or even if you're not, I'll post a picture as soon as our beautiful spring sunshine comes back. That's right – I'm holding the playroom hostage for spring.