putting down roots

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

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

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

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

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

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.]