Be so nucleic

Does anyone else out there find spam subject lines fascinating? "Be so nucleic." I certainly feel like I've been very nucleic lately. If "nucleic" means something along the lines of confined in an atom-sized space, which it may not, I'm too lazy to check. I have been right close to home for the past week since I last posted, but this has been lovely for me. Sprintime is holding here and I've been continuing to plant and work out in the backyard. I'm nearly done laying a stone path around the side of the house. (When I say stone path, I just mean some stepping stones--nothing elaborate.) I've nearly filled a couple of shade beds on either side of the path with holly ferns, ajuga, creeping jenny, cinnamon ferns, columbines, Jacob's ladders, and brunneras, plus one soon-to-be-gorgeous rose-flowered climbing hydrangea vine that I'm hoping will someday cloak the brick chimney.

This has occupied all my baby naptime breaks. I don't do a thing else with that chunk of time, and even errands out of the house involve trips for more bags of mushroom compost or more plants. It's an obsession that I'll put on hold once the weather gets too hot to plant anything, or for me to stay outside long enough to weed, given that baby naptime happens during the most scorching part of a summer day. I'm cramming it all in while I can.

You know, I actually started a private gardening blog so that I wouldn't have to bore you all with my plant talk, but as you can see, it still spills over into this here. How about another subject then? Today was also a glorious food day, very welcome after my annual winter food doldrums. This morning I made the girls some French toast out of challah bread, close enough to French brioche to be equally decadent soaked in nutmeg-y egg batter. I heaped the slices high with sliced strawberries and blueberries--which aren't too bad at Whole Foods these days--sprinkled lemon juice on top, then drizzled maple syrup on top of it all. Oh, and did I mention the whipped cream? Yeah, we all had whipped cream with our breakfast. Bean took one look at it and said, "Duh-dirt!" which is how she says dessert. SO delicious!

Husband and I took the girls out after lunch for a trip to a local goat dairy where they were kicking off their cheese-making season with a baby goat viewing. We packed a snack of baguette slices and cherry preserves and ate these with some fresh goat cheese on their porch. Also extremely delicious, especially after chasing the girls around outdoors for a couple of hours.

And lastly, Husband and Bean have made an ice cream run. While they were gone, I made a quick pot of homemade fudge sauce which sits steaming and thick on the stove, even as I type this. Do you all want the recipe? Sure you do.

Hot Fudge Sauce

9 oz unsweetened chocolate, chopped
1 C sugar
1 C brown sugar
2 C heavy cream
1-1/2 oz butter
pinch of salt

Bring sugars and cream to a boil. Remove from heat and add chopped chocolate and butter. Let rest 5 minutes, then whisk to combine. A couple of tablespoons of good rum or bourbon would do this sauce no harm.

May I recommend that you scoop yourself a bowl of vanilla ice cream after you make this? And then add either chopped strawberries or crushed Girl Scout thin mint cookies before pouring on some sauce? That's just what I'm about to do, once I decide between strawberries and thin mints.

Happy spring, y'all!

Peaceful mama

After all my angst last week about not having a career and being just a stay-at-home mom, I've had such a lovely week being just that. Sister and Bean have required rather intense parenting lately--very hard and tantrum-inducing math homework from the one and games of demand-then-refuse-then-demand from the other have been absorbing to say the least. But I've been sort of giving in to it lately. I don't mean giving in to them, but rather giving in to them needing the attention because they're little. I sometimes forget that Sister especially is still a little girl. She can do many things on her own, but at 8-1/2 she is still little.

Lest I pat myself on the back too much for being grown-up enough to maintain my equilibrium in such a stellar fashion, I should also mention that I've spent the 2 hours of Bean's daily naptime this week gardening. This is exactly why my attitude has been transformed. It's been in the 60's during the days here, and while the official frost date of this part of NC is April 15th, I can just feel that the weather balance has tipped towards spring now. No more hard frosts, and maybe not even any light ones. I'll probably hold off on the zinnias and the tomatoes, but I've put in many, many plants in our new backyard landscape. I'm looking forward to putting up before and after pictures once things are in their full growing prime. I can't tell you how lovely it feels to have a garden again. I don't even miss my old garden!

Running numbers

It's been a helluva day. In the last 24 hours, I have gotten up with the baby 5 times over a mysteriously wakeful 2 hours, filled and dumped 12 wheelbarrows' full of mulch from a 20 cubic yard pile newly dumped in our front yard, planted 3 bottlebrush plants, moved dozens of stones into a new border, spent an hour and a half helping Sister with her wretched math homework, purchased 2 hours' worth of landscape design services at a silent auction fundraiser at Sister's school, rung up approximately $4000 worth of sales within half an hour as a volunteer cashier at same, packed one nutritious lunch, and assembled one Colin Powell costume for Sister to wear at her class' "Blacks in Wax" exhibit first thing tomorrow morning.

Yes, I said, "Blacks in Wax."

Fortunately for me, it is now officially wine thirty and time for this mama to sit idle.

The question of work

I talked to a friend on the phone yesterday who casually asked me what kind of work I wanted to do after I was "done" staying home with the girls. The answer is that I have no idea. I've been giving this question a lot of thought lately as I think about the possibility of Husband and I having one more baby. I'm not pregnant yet, but the years slip by so fast now--Bean will be 2 in April!--that it's been on my mind a lot. I feel like I'm already in the home stretch of the tough baby years.

I'm taking a ceramics class on Saturday afternoons now. It's something I've been idly interested in for years, starting back when I took a few ceramic sculpture classes in college. I'm really enjoying learning to throw bowls and cups and vases and the like on a wheel. I have fantasies of continuing with it, maybe eventually teaching little kids. I love to sew and have also enjoyed doing this off and on for years. I love to garden. I love to cook and bake, but I'm pretty sure that I don't want to go back to the professional kitchen.

The thing is maybe I don't ever want to go back to work or have a career again. How about that? Husband has told me that if I wanted to work again, I should go out and get any old job that would make me happy--as a clerk in a plant nursery or the local quilt shop, for example--and not worry about the salary. (Of course he DID tell me this back before he quit his job and started his own company...) It was a shocking prospect at the time and I'm still not sure how I feel about it. Why should I be allowed to fuck around at home pursuing hobbies while Husband's out earning all the money? I know I "work" at home, too, but no one's paying me for it. And if I weren't home so much the house wouldn't get so damn messy anyway. If I never had a career again would I regret it? What the hell would I say when people asked me the dreaded "What do you do?" at cocktail parties?

I don't have to decide now, of course, but I'm curious about the rest of you out there. Would any of you out there just not work if it was an option? Maybe a spouse would be supporting you or maybe you'd win the lottery, but however you could swing it, would you quit your job forever? Or not?

And what WOULD you say to people at cocktail parties who ask what you do?

Leisure

Another naptime spent in various puttering sorts of activities--taking out the trash and recycling, rearranging the lamps and plants in the living room, putting things on the porch away, scrubbing off the black spots on the pizza stone, and sprinkling columbine seeds in a sliver of earth between the patio stones and the house. (These need cold to germinate and won't emerge for another month.) It's so restorative to be able to just putter sometimes.

Does this blog post make me look fat?

I've been neglecting my blog lately in favor of working in the yard, celebrating the glorious 40 degree weather. Glorious relative to the 18 degrees I woke up to the other day, of course. I know, I know, some of you have it far worse with temps in the negatives and wind chill blah blah blah, but I chose never to move farther north than where I am right now 'cause I like to sweat, dammit. It's good for you.

I have been sweating in the yard lately, lugging around 50# flagstones left in a pile by the landscaper to a new spot as stepping stones from the front door to a side gate. I had to grade the path by hand, too, shovelling great piles of soggy, rich clay to what will be new beds on either side of the path. All that, plus hauling broken chunks of concrete driveway that were left on our property as the first course of "stone" in a stone path border. The chunks are all about 6 inches thick and damn heavy but at least we don't have to landfill them, and they read visually as stone once you put real stones on top of them. I love to work like this. I don't know about the rest of you, but hard labor is always good for what ails me.

Today, though, it's just a bit too cold and windy to feel comfortable outside even doing heavy lifting work. I've got some baking projects going instead to make things cozy here. I'm trying a recipe for no-knead whole wheat bread, and no-knead yeast breads were not even something I knew existed. I'm too lazy and have too much of a sweet tooth to have ever devoted much time to really learn how to bake good bread, but something about the weather inspires a longing in me to perfume the house with fresh baking. I also pulled some custard cup-sized apple crisps out of the oven a little while ago. I feel all virtuous about it because I used up 4 apples just beginning to wrinkle, half a cup of some homemade mincemeat filling, and some pecan streusel I had frozen some time ago to be able to make quick fruit desserts. Apples and mincemeat plus some sugar, cinnamon, and a big dollop of sour cream were the filling, the streusel I sprinkled on top, and that was it. Sooooo rich and yummy and belly-warming.

And now to go with my theme for the day of self-indulgence, I'm off for a little nap. Hope you're all finding ways to relax out of the cold today!

A nothing much kind of day

No blogging all day today, though I meant to several times. It was one of those days where I was with someone else at all times, from getting Sister up this morning at 6:30 to get ready for school, fetching Husband Saltines and Cokes and ginger ales with lots of ice because they were the only things his virus-besieged stomach could keep down, to intensively playing with Bean pretty much non-stop to distract her from jumping on her papa's usually bouncy belly, til just about 15 minutes ago when I was able to get the girls down to sleep. Phew.

And now I'm remembering that I've got to make a phone call to the other Brownie troop leader about tomorrow's meeting. Was I the only one treading water today? I sorta thought February was the slow month out of the year....

Good day sunshine

It's cold and windy outside today, but I resolved early this morning that I have GOT to get out of this funk I feel stuck in most days. Staying inside is just driving me crazy, and with this "arctic blast," as this morning's weather report termed it, moving in to stay for a week I should clearly not be waiting around for anything to change for me.

So I just spent an hour and a half outside during Bean's miraculously long naptime all bundled up but planting things where the mulch wasn't too frozen to scrape aside. I've had several things sitting around in pots outside for a couple of weeks now, so presumably the cold won't bother them. I planted 3 blueberry bushes, 1 climbing rose, even more sweet alyssum, a twisty branched plant called Harry Lauder's walking stick, and a tropical-looking evergreen plant called Japanese aralia. Chores accomplished, but mostly I'm high off fresh air and sunlight right now. Sounds a little corny, I know, but it feels so good to have broken a sweat working outside that I don't care.

Pet peeve

Sister's school was cancelled this morning, which I found out at 6:10 am with a call from an automated phone operator. This particularly sucked because Sister is currently in Florida with my mother, living it up in Disneyworld, and I really didn't need to know this time.

We have what is termed a "wintry mix" outside in NC today. It started off with pretty snow around 7:30 or so and turned into some kind of sleety rain mix within a couple of hours. It's not currently warm enough to stick to the roads so I made it out earlier to Whole Foods for some things I didn't really need and a latte which I kinda did need. What I really needed, of course, was to set foot out of the house with Bean. I didn't relish the idea of being stuck in here with her for the whole day one little bit.

While shopping, I was once again subjected to the tired Yankee tirade against Southerners and snow, courtesy of the deli clerk who sliced my ham. Fer chrissakes, I've heard this rant a hundred times if I've heard it once. It goes like this: "You guys call THIS snow?! Back in Chicago/New York/Philadelphia, where I'm from, this would be nothing. They'd have the school buses running without even thinking twice! What is your problem down here anyway?"

Please, Yankees, just shut the hell up about this, will ya? We just don't get much snow here and therefore no one wants to waste their money on snow tires or chains or even a fleet of snowplows and tons of salt for the roads. I mean, why bother? It does something frozen here maybe once or twice a year if we're lucky, and it's usually ice, not snow, which nobody should be driving around in anyway, 4-wheel drive, snow tires, Yankee heritage or not.

So what if we cancel school when you would be bravely forging ahead in your school buses. Take a break, drink some hot chocolate with your out-of-school kids and find a new way to disparage the South, o.k.? God knows there's plenty of fodder if you want to rant.

Are dads allowed?

It is nothing short of amazing what a good night's sleep will do to improve things. I went to bed early last night, Bean didn't wake up even once, and I got to sleep a full 9 hours. 9 hours of unfettered sleep! I woke up with my cheeks all pink again and a most excellent ebullient, let-it-slide mood. I forget that deep down I'm the same person I always was whenever I'm well-rested. I even have a sex drive again! Love that.

I got out of the house today, too, though it wasn't to work in the yard. I took Bean to a so-called children's museum in downtown Chapel Hill. It's basically an indoor play place with themes which, of course, doesn't have quite the ring of "museum." The exhibit--or whatever--going on just now was Mister Rogers' neighborhood which frankly wasn't much of a draw. I don't know about the rest of you 70's-era babies, but I thought Mister Rogers was at best boring and at worst creepy. Those puppets? King Friday and Queen Sarah Saturday with god-knows-whose grown-up voice doing weird falsetto behind the curtain? Turn it off, Mama!

But anyways, I took Bean there and she had a blast playing with the plastic sushi in the pretend kitchen--'cause in Chapel Hill we're all ethnic and shit--and trying on fancy capes in the dress-up clothing trunk. So Bean ran around, trashing a space I didn't have to worry about cleaning up while I got to have a real conversation with another parent. But get this--the other grown-up was a dad.

Shocking, I know. No, really. I admit that it's hard for me to get used to there being male stay-at-home parents these days, though I see quite a lot of SAHD's around town. There are even some dad members of the big mothers' club that I joined last year. One of those poor guys asked to join our playgroup a few months back, which I thought would be fine. The other moms weren't o.k. with it because I guess they felt like they might want to talk about tampons or something at some point. One of the moms emailed him back to say that our group was full, but thanks anyway and good luck. They weren't even able to articulate why they didn't want a dad to join us.

I scoff at the other moms in my playgroup, but upon introspection I am no better at all. Honestly, my first reaction today when this guy started talking to me was to turn on my radar to try to detect whether he was hitting on me or not. Even knowing that his twin boys were right there with him and that was the real reason he was there. And yes, even with him mentioning his wife a few times, which I'm pretty sure was his way of letting me know that he wasn't hitting on me. We talked about another local mothers' group that he had joined earlier in the week, which had just kicked him out yesterday, also via polite email. (They were more frank about it at least and told him that after lots of discussion, their female members felt that a man around would impede on the kind of dishing they wanted to be able to do.) But when he asked for my email address later so that we could get our kids together--who are indeed the same age--my immediate thought was, "Is this guy a serial murderer who's going to track me down and stalk me? Is he actually these boys' psycho babysitter and not their dad at all?"

I'm so lame. I think of myself as so enlightened and o.k. with the notion of fathers having equal responsibility for childcare and blah blah blah, but when faced with an actual dad who might want to get our kids together or even start the area's first real, co-ed parents' group I get nervous. I didn't get a single weirdo, creepy vibe from him and still.

(Hey, who noticed that I did not once use the phrase "male member" when discussing men in mothers' clubs? Yeah, that was on purpose.)

Tired mama whine

I'm bewildered today by 2 conflicting and equally compelling feelings. First off, I am stir crazy as hell just now. I'm sick of winter and temperatures in the 20's. Bean doesn't want to stay outside longer than 15 minutes or so and truthfully neither do I. It's all bright and beautiful looking out the window, but as soon as we're slapped in the face by a brisk wind we're both done. Yardwork is out and there's so much to do out there that I feel a bit pissy about it.

So I'm stuck inside the house and feeling resentful. On top of that, I'm exhausted. Bean has yet another cold that has her super-congested. She's been waking up many, MANY times per night for the last 3 nights to complain about her nose. The humidifier helps some and I try to tent the blankets near her face so her little throat doesn't become too dry from breathing through her mouth, but none of us are getting any sleep.

You'd think that if I can't get outside and am this exhausted I'd just shut up and nap but I just can't nap this early. My usual crash time is around 3:00 which happens to be when Bean wakes up and Sister gets home from school.

For the record, I'm going to try so, so hard not to be a raging bitch mama this afternoon and evening, but it won't be easy.

Yes, she REALLY says stuff like this.

I just had the best time with a very good friend of mine, Annie, who's 20 years older than me, the owner of a vintage thrift shop in town, a native of the Tennessee mountains, and a believer in all things conspiracy. I love, love, love talking to this woman! I've known her since I worked in her store during college about 15 years ago now, but we've been getting together much more often now that I'm staying at home. She told me today that she's decided to "reclaim" her personality after (mostly) getting over a lengthy illness. This means, apparently, that she is going to say whatever she damn well pleases, though personally I don't feel like she ever stopped. Here's a short sampling of our 4-hour conversation today:

Me: (in the middle of venting about the stupid backyard): Yeah, I'm not currently allowed to do anything in the backyard. I'm only allowed to be stuck in the damn house making dinners, changing diapers, and sewing. No planting anything or it's just going to be where the future rain garden is going to be, or where some drain pipes have to be put in or something.
Her: Are you allowed to fuck?
Me: Oh yeah, that too. I'm allowed to do that.
Her: And suck dick, I bet.
Me: Yep. Still allowed.

Other topics included her frequent colonics, how much both Jews and Christians suck and how she also went to a Buddhist wedding recently where they served giant platters of roast beef and so they clearly sucked too, the imminent death of the oceans, the frequency with which she has to throw drunk Mexican guys out of her store, how much she loves Nigella Lawson, her new friend who used to be a dominatrix but who is now a creative writing teacher, her method of chasing solicitors, hunters, and other strangers off her property (with a megaphone and an antique sawed-off shotgun that used to belong to her grandfather), and how the world's biggest statue of a pinecone was located in the Vatican and this was a part of some reptilian conspiracy which I only dimly grasped but in which both JFK and Princess Diana were named as human sacrifices.

Phew! It was some afternoon! But I sure do love this particular friend of mine, equal-opportunity offensiveness and all.

More gardening funk

I started off the day with a nice, morning fight with Husband about the yard. I swear, I wasn't accusatory or demanding or upset myself. It started with me asking how he felt about hiring someone to come draw up a scale map of our property that we could make a bunch of copies of to play with. I explained to him (calmly, dammit) that I'd like to have him put down all the projects he's working on as well as all the things he wants to do in the future so that I'd know where I could plant things. It went from calm discussion to voices raised and hands thrown up in disgust within 5 minutes. It ended with him saying, "You can plant things right now," in a steely voice and me walking away, thinking, "Fuck you, I will," and plotting how I'd get several $100 weeping cherry trees home to plant.

Nice, huh? I'm so mature. Do I at least get points for not having said this out loud?

Playgroup for mamas

Bean just went down for a much-needed nap. It was so needed, in fact, that she even requested it herself with a plaintive, "Seepy! Kib!" while still eating lunch in her high chair. Say no more, kiddo, say no more.

So here I sit at the glorious beginning of 2 hours of mama time. I've already tidied up the lunch dishes and all the toys after our morning's playgroup. I get to blog here now and move on to a sewing project in a bit.

Before I move on, though, I should note that our playgroup this morning was really stellar. We had a fourth mom join us just before the holidays with her 18-month old daughter and she somehow seems to make everyone mesh much more smoothly. It's not something she's actively doing. The other 2 moms were a bit high-strung and I don't think I was imagining a bit of tension between them. The fourth mom helps to interrupt that tension just by being here. Plus, one of those high strung moms was home with her little boy this morning because his pediatrician said his ear infection could be contagious. (Um, okay...) That left just us other three with our respective little girls. We talked about our husbands and ex-jobs and ate chocolate chip cookies freely and enthusiastically. And for the first time, the conversation contained some cussing. Just a bit, so that we could test the reaction of the other moms. One said dammit, one said shit, and I, being the hostess, let rip the delightful adjective, "fuckin' " while describing the cats' propensity to shred the porch screen door. Even the f-word was received with laughter and visible relief from the other moms. Nothing like a well-timed f-word to make everyone relax, at least in some crowds. (No, you prisses out there, I didn't say it in front of our babies.)

Some of you city girls and Yankees out there probably think I'm laying the drama on a bit, but you've gotta be careful here in the 'burbs with the whole potty mouth thing, especially if you happen to live in the South. The infamous Senator Jesse Helms once suggested that Chapel Hill be fenced off as the state zoo, referring to it's freakishly liberal population. Even so, it's taken us 4 months of weekly playgroups to get to this point.

Now that we're here I'm going to look forward to playgroup for myself and not just for the sake of Bean having some social interaction. It's such a pleasant surprise to make friends as a grown-up, no?

January biliousness

The winter weather passed us by yesterday, or at least the hard core stuff did. No ice, no sleet, no snow. Still lots of rain, which means that most of both yards is sitting in a couple of inches of standing water, but I've learned to avert my eyes when looking out the house windows these days. Or just look up at the sky. I've really got to get more adept at the digital camera photo uploading business so that I can put some pictures up here and you all can see the wasteland that is our backyard at the moment. Even my friends find it disheartening.

But anyways, this is a big nothing of a day so far. Just a lot of errands to take care of, the house to tidy before the playgroup meets over here tomorrow, emails to send to Sister's school principal attempting to convince her that when my mother takes her to Disneyworld and Epcot Center next week it should be plenty educational enough to be excused from school--that sort of stuff.

One of the playgroup moms just announced last week that she's pregnant, and I need to get in a happy place about that particular bit of news before she gets over here. I keep thinking I'm over having the miscarriage and then things happen to make me realize I'm not completely. I say "things happen," but what I really mean is that I keep hearing about other women getting pregnant. Then there's the emotional residue of our genetic counselling appointment a couple of weeks ago, where all of a sudden it was impressed upon me by a 23-year old counsellor that I'm old now, procreationally speaking, and therefore at high risk for all kinds of awful, genetic mishaps. Maybe I can't even get pregnant at all anymore because of my horribly advanced age. Young, fertile wench.

Sigh. This sucks. One of the reasons I'm contemplating making this a private blog is that I want to write about Husband and I trying to have one more baby, and then again I don't want complete strangers to witness my self-pity and angst about it.

And then, what if I get that third child? Ha!

New perspective

It's a good day for the baby to be napping, Sister to be at her dad's, Husband to be out running errands, and me to be sitting in front of the computer sipping hot chocolate. What I ought to be doing is hauling firewood from the huge, damp pile in the corner of the backyard to a dry spot on the porch. If the "wintry mix" of precipitation that the weather forecasters have been threatening us with ever materializes then I'll be sorry I didn't. Just now, though, I'm enjoying a bit of peace that doesn't include any sort of cleaning, laundry folding, emailing to Brownie parents, or firewood hauling. Very, very rare for me.

I'm feeling a little less like an insecure harpie today and more like my regular, even-keeled self. I took Beth's advice and just came out and asked Husband last night why the hell he was looking up his ex-girlfriend and did he contact her. He had not, of course, gotten in touch with her and I know he never would. But she's just published another book, he told me, which naturally does not help with my just-under-the-surface angst about being only a stay-at-home mom. I'm working on that.

The nice thing about being 35, though, is that I've finally got some damn perspective. And here it is: This is my life. I am making it and living it and it really is a lovely life. A bit full just now of poopy-diaper changing and servicing the needs of 2 demanding young girl children, but lovely for all that, too.

In keeping with the introspective theme here, I'll disclose that I spent all last week mentally drafting my retirement post. I had decided, after hurting the feelings of a close friend with a flippant mention of her daughter's eating habits, that this blog really wasn't what I'd meant it to be. I had become too concerned with entertaining an audience out there and less with just recording daily life here, journal-style, as my own personal reference guide. This is a big part of why I've kept journals since I was 10 years old. The stories in your past shift each time you tell them to someone else. If you write it down when it happens, though, it's like a compass you can pull out when you need it. I've been surprised many times when I've gone back into my old journals to look something up and been able to see how much my story to others had been distorted from the original over the years.

I'll stop trying to entertain now. I'm going to make the switch to journal-keeping here, and if it gets to where I don't want anyone reading it anymore then I'll make it completely private. I'll see how it goes.

Shitty feeling

There's nothing quite like learning that my Husband has been looking up one of his old girlfriends to make me feel like a dumpy, boring, suburban fucking housewife. And just for the record, I did NOT learn this by snooping on his computer. He accidentally revealed it to me himself while looking something up on Google to show me as I sat beside him.

Hey, if there are any male readers out there? Making your wife or girlfriend feel unglamorous and uninteresting is not the way to get a piece.

Now I feel like I need to go out and start a revolution or something...

NIMBY

I think it would be accurate to describe Husband's preoccupation with the landscaping of our backyard as a full-blown obsession now. He's been spending evenings after the kids have gone to bed researching dry wells, dry creeks, pond-building, and storm water on-line. He wakes up at night and can't get back to sleep for wondering what the hell could be causing our backyard to be so full of water. He even rented an extremely expensive, ornery and vicious-looking piece of machinery for the entire weekend--his birthday weekend!--so that he could spend all his daylight hours trenching through the quicksand-like mud, hauling dirt from one spot to another, and moving one of the 2 enormous piles of gravel that are still blocking the top of our driveway and easy ingress through the side door.

Sigh. It is too wearying for me to get involved anymore. After the landscaper came, built the retaining wall, and left again I assumed that it was time to begin the fun of planting. I moved around some lavender plants to a better location, I bought a whole bunch of spring-flowering items, and I even got to work extending a stone-lined pathway around the corner of the porch with all the rocks left over from the retaining wall. This is when Husband began realizing that the yard needed FAR more work than he thought and pretty much all my little projects were destroyed. The stone-lined path was plowed through so that Husband could excavate yet another drainage trench and make the gravel in the path a whole lot deeper. He plans to put a rain garden right where the drought-loving lavender bed is now located. There's a foot of mud on top of 100 spring-flowering bulbs as well as the bare, and therefore invisible, branches of a hydrangea bush. Again, sigh.

I am literally just trying not to look at the backyard anymore, much less think about it. I have instead begun painting the kitchen and dining room inside the house. I'm managing to get a wall at a time done during naptimes and while the girls are sleeping. It will be beautiful, the exact color of Breyer's coffee ice cream or a milky cafe au lait.

But painting ain't gardening. I'll be glad when this is all over.

A month of Sundays

Okay, I thought I was a weekend landscape widow before? Over dinner this evening, Husband shared with me his vision of a "water feature" he wants to build in our newly transformed backyard. He wants to take up prime, sunny plant real estate with a pond that will be fed by a small water fall operated by a pump. Stormwater will in some way be routed to the pond, with overflow being siphoned off to a dry creek bed which will be filled with river rocks, but which will also have a large pipe underneath to funnel water to another pipe leading to the street.

Holy no-weekends-off-from-childcare for the forseeable future, Batman!

Beyond the call of duty

I knew when I first became pregnant with Sister that I was likely signing up for all manner of disgusting tasks. I distinctly remember the first time I thought to myself, "Yep, I'm a real mom now." It was when Sister was a year and a half old. She had been asleep for about half an hour when I heard her calling for me in a weak, pitiful voice. I went in to see what was wrong and when I picked her up she promptly threw up what felt like buckets of baby hurl down the front of my nightgown. That is, inside the front of my nightgown. And then threw up all over the sheets, the comforter, and the floor.

Since then, barf has practically become old hat. Ditto, diarrhea and all manner of nasal secretions. That's just part of the parenting job description. So I don't know why when this morning I went to get Bean's stroller out of my car and discovered that it had been left under the house eaves all night after Husband borrowed my car yesterday, and then I unfolded it and discovered that not only was it not dry, it was also covered with no fewer than 23 slugs I felt squeamish. Slugs in the garden, no problem. Slugs snacking on the moist remnants of old Cheerios and bloated raisins in the baby's means of neighborhood transportation is just nasty.

Not part of the job description.

Mama's law

I have to admit that with Sister I've always felt a tad smug when it came to her eating habits. From a very early age, that child preferred--and could pronounce!--aged Manchego over any other cheese. I once fried up a couple of chicken livers that were stuffed inside a whole chicken I'd bought to roast as a little snack. I cut off a piece of one for her to try, not expecting anything, and was shocked when she asked for more. She's a foodie mama's delight and always has been. But when it comes to food, Bean appears to be her own girl.

Tonight I made miso-glazed salmon, brown rice, and sauteed snow peas for dinner, expecting that Bean would chow on the rice and have a few experimental bites of the fish and the peas. What she actually ate was nothing. Not one single bite. She clamored for juice for the first 5 minutes and when Husband looked like he was going to cave I said firmly, "No juice with dinner. We have milk." She began screaming for most of the rest of the next half hour. I ate my damn dinner while Husband gave her a few time-outs and fielded her pleas for dessert. (Husband created the toddler-dessert monster, not me.) At one point, Husband had a spoon of rice and fish in his hand and was on his knees in front of the high chair, calmly trying to get her to equate taking a bite with permission to get down, which she was begging to do at that point.

I don't remember food battles with my mom, and I really don't recall if my mom was such a bitch about eating that I wouldn't dare, or if I really was fine with eating everything (except nasty baked beans--ack!). Husband, however, is famous in his family for never eating a single vegetable til he was in college and began cooking for himself. His mother used to sneak vegetables into things in the hopes that he wouldn't notice. (He always did, according to them both.) He's used to food battles, I think, and used to the cajolery and the bribing that some schools of parenting accept as just a normal part of getting a kid to eat. Not me.

I have a good friend whose picky kid has pretty much always been given her own separate dinner from what she and her husband ate. This child is now 9 years old and is still eating this way. I asked myself tonight if it would really be so much trouble to just give Bean something besides what was in front of her, maybe some applesauce and some cottage cheese. The answer is yes. Yes, it would really be a lot of trouble. Bean would come to expect that she could always eat whatever she wanted, regardless of what I was cooking for dinner. You know what? I'm not doing it. Everyone in this house eats what I give them or they just won't eat.

And you won't find me on my knees begging.

Trying again

Husband and I are talking about getting pregnant again. Or rather, we've both mentioned it in passing while discussing new health insurance policies, Bean's development and such. As for talking about our hopes for another baby...well, we're both too scared of another miscarriage to talk about it like that.

Next week, we're going to a genetic counselling appointment so that Husband can be tested for the cystic fibrosis gene that I carry. If the news is good--and the odds are that it will be--then we'll try again. I don't know yet if I'll talk about being pregnant quite so early. It's difficult to go back and tell everyone that you're no longer pregnant if the worst happens. But having no one know about it all doesn't sound too appealing either.

Spring is comin' groove

What does it take to get my groove back? Certainly not my extremely cranky 8-year old child who I'm sending to bed early tonight in the hopes that she's just sleep-deprived and will shake it off with a couple extra hours under her belt.

And not my 20-month old little one who is charming and cute most days lately, but who treats me like a waitress in a crappy diner, demanding "Juice!" or "'Nack!" (snack) or "Dooey!" (smoothie) all day long, and I better hop to it or she'll help herself to the fridge, thanks.

No, I do love my girls and am pleased to be a mama, but to feel like my real self it takes sewing projects and grown-up conversations. And plants. Lots of plants.

One flat of sweet alyssum, an big mess of low-growing sedums, thymes, and mints for patio cracks, and a little colony-to-be of hellebores in my trunk and I'm good to go!

Couch bound

I'm not feeling my best today. Perhaps it's the scouring being perpetrated on my innards by our good luck meal of collard greens and black-eyed peas last night, or perhaps it's just the post-holiday let down finally catching up with me. I dunno. But all I want to do today is curl up on the couch with a cup of tea and watch Sex and the City reruns.

I've got to snap out of this before Sister gets home from school today. Sister and I are in one of our phases of not getting along, which means that I can look forward to an afternoon of her arguing with practically every statment or request that leaves my mouth, sobbing over math homework for an hour and a half, and then perhaps a little screaming on the floor while her 1-1/2 year old baby sister does one savage thing or another to her. This usually takes the form of hair-pulling, flesh-squeezing accompanied by a challenging stare, or perhaps a swat or two. I keep telling Sister that she outweighs Bean by 40 pounds and could simply get up off the floor to keep Bean from doing this to her, but Sister seems to enjoy being victimized by a toddler for some reason. I swear she even invites it. I had no idea that an 8-1/2 year old would stoop to this kind of interaction with a toddler 7 years her junior, but siblings are siblings I guess, no matter what the age difference.

Sigh. The weather is sunny and clear here today after a few depressing days of dreary gray. There's a lot of tidying up in the yard I could do now that the landscapers are gone. But right now I'm heading for the couch.

End of the year musings, avec champagne

Today I did a whole lotta nothing. Or really, a whole lotta baby-watching because these days I'm a weekend landscaping widow. I've mentioned here before that Husband and I have had this landscaper working in our backyard for the past week or two, and he's worked miracles on the boggy quagmire that would appear behind our house whenever a bit of rain would fall. It's now a boggy quagmire retained by a beautiful stone wall with a completely bog-less gravel path running in front of it. But seriously. We're hopeful that even the confined bog will go away once the hundreds of feet of drainage pipes Husband has been spending every.spare.weekend.hour laying are all in place. Then he gets a turn as a landscape widower once it's warm enough here for me to justify spending hours at a time planting things in these new planting beds we have all of a sudden.

In the meantime, I'm starting to think of what to get Husband for his 37th birthday coming up in a few weeks. I think I'll look into renting a room in a b&b in Asheville, or perhaps a rustic cabin or some such. Husband has a good friend living up there now and we could perhaps get him and his charming wife to go out to lunch with us while we're up there. (And if said friend is reading this, he should be sure and comment on this post, leaving me his email address which will be hidden from others. I do not have his email address and would like to hear from him whether he'll actually be around some mid-January weekend...!)

Anyways. My dear husband has just put a second bottle of champagne left behind by some mysterious but much-beloved guest at our cocktail party into the freezer for a rapid chill. We've just polished off the first bottle, see. Now off I go to curl up with him to get drunkish and watch Battlestar Galactica which is, as far as I'm concerned, the perfect way for us to ring in 2007.

Happy new year, y'all!

Out with the old

I know that it's not even the new year yet, but Christmas was 5 days ago. Anyone else out there looking forward as much as I am to getting all the dusty damn garlands, ornaments, and light strands out of their living rooms, family rooms, kitchens, porches, and front yard? I can't wait to purge this house of all things Christmas and get back to the clean, uncluttered lines of bare windows, mantels, and doorways, all lit up by the sunshine that will come in through a window unblocked by a big, dead Fraser fir.

I'm done with the winter holidays. Time to think about spring cleaning and vegetable seeds...

Cozy suburban vision meets bitchy mama reality

Do any of you suburban, SAHM types have this sweet little vision of having the neighborhood go-to house like I do? You all know what I'm talking about, right? The house in the neighborhood where the rooms all have interesting stuff to play with or look at, the backyard has swings and toys and other good stuff, there are pets to chase, crafts to do, the homemade cookies flow like wine, etc? Some part of me wants our new house to be that house. Some part of me very much likes the idea of having a house full of kids that I can play mama hen to and that Bean and Sister can play with until it's time to send everyone home to their grateful parents. I want the neighborhood kids to be comfortable here, to think of me as a nice mom, to have this house be a lovely, cozy backdrop to my kids' childhood that they'll remember fondly when they're adults. Nice image, huh?

So when a neighbor lady called up a little while ago to ask if her 2 bored, out-of-school kids could come over to play for a few hours because she wasn't feeling well, I should've been all sweetness and light and getting out the plate of cookies 'cause here was a chance to live my nice neighborhood mama vision! I wasn't. To the mom I said yes, of course they could come over and I was sorry she didn't feel well and if she wanted they could have lunch here while she napped and Sister would love to see them and yada yada yada. But when I hung up I fumed quietly to myself, even as I recognized that Sister would probably snap out of her own out-of-school funk if she had someone besides Bean to play with. All I could think, though, was, "They better fuckin' all like grilled cheese and baby carrots for lunch. I better not hear any babies screaming because they're feeling left out, dammit. No one better fight..." and so on.

Just call me the neighborhood bitch.

Kickin' back at last

Ahhhhhh. The lull after Christmas may be one of my favorite times of year. Or at least one of my favorite non-gardening times of year. It's such a lovely, empty, relaxing time. Sister has no school and I am therefore not required to get up at 6:15 to squeeze in a shower before I have to start hustling her around. I am getting good rest these days and have the mental energy to indulge in a couple of new-found obsessions: Battlestar Galactica, sudoku puzzles, and plant selection for a brand new landscape being created in our backyard even as I write this. I have no shopping, wrapping, or baking to do--unless I want to shop a little, like for quilt fabrics on sale on-line to start some new projects. And I may want to bake a little, like maybe a batch of some real Scottish shortbread which, according to a new book of Scottish teatime recipes I received, contains rice flour in addition to wheat flour. Yes, I may want to do these things. But right now I want to blog.

For the record, I had no intention of slogging along in real life for two weeks without even the briefest dip into the blogging pool. I'm a bad, bad blogger. So I'm going to try to make it up here. I vow to blog a little something everyday, barring stupid Time Warner Cable connectivity issues here at the cave. It's not that I believe you've all been longing for a little window into my life (or into Husband's, as the case may be). Rather, it appears that this blog has almost completely taken the place of my pen and ink journal writing--all except for the really ugly stuff that I hate to put out there for the masses. If I want some documentation of the minutiae of my life-with-babes that I can go back to someday then I better get a little more disciplined about documenting.

Not a new year's resolution or anything, mind you...

The menu, as promised, but without recipes (yet)

I'm just thinking about putting on a giant pot of caramel sauce, a follow-up to an enormous pot of hot fudge sauce I boiled up today. Every year I give my stepfather an ice cream sundae kit for Christmas. Being the large, hedonistic ice cream fan he is, he never tires of this gift, just as I never tire of his gift to me, a big fat day spa certificate. In his kit, I include a quart Mason jar each of hot fudge and caramel sauces, a batch of his favorite nut-free brownies, some peanut brittle, toffee, purchased raspberry sauce, and maybe some chopped up broken pralines to sprinkle if I made a batch that had some break. I include all this detail just in case any of you are at a loss as to what to give an ice cream sundae lover on your list. If you use it, I hope you get day spa gift certificates out of it!

But the measuring out of ingredients made me realize that I had not yet lived up to my promise on Friday to post my cocktail party menu from last weekend. I don't feel up to actually posting recipes just now, but let me know if you'd like to see some. So here it is, for your perusing pleasure.

Little snacky type things:

• Marinated olives
• Tamari roasted almonds
• Chili spiced pecans
• Puff pastry parmesan cheesestraws
• Platter of assorted cheeses, quince paste (to go with the Manchego), and crackers
  

For the vegetarians:

• Wild mushroom pate with little toasts and almond crackers
• Platter of roasted beets and asparagus, and endive leaves with aioli
• Caramelized shallot and blue cheese dip with roasted potato wedges (a.k.a., oven fries)
• Hot pepper and smoked mozzarella empanadas with avocado relish
• Marinated sheep's milk feta, orange, and mint skewers

For the meat-on-toothpicks crowd:

• Beef and mint skewers with Thai dipping sauce
• Tandoori shrimp skewers
• Chicken with peanut sauce and scallions in phyllo cups

And then some assorted little homemade candies and a fruitcake kind of hiding in a corner of the living room, because truthfully I didn't devote all that much time to desserts for some reason. Oh, and did I mention my sour mix? I make rockin' sour mix.

That's it! Gotta run because Husband's trying to get me to watch a movie with him. This weekend's been incredibly busy for both of us and finally we're getting a little time together here if I could just...tear...myself away...from this keyboard...

Reunion

Phew! I haven't meant to completely abandon my blog this week. But between cleaning up after our party, planning Sister's Brownie troop meeting which included another party at our house--and by the way, 14 little girls literally make as much mess in 15 minutes as 40 adults over 6 hours, in case you had any doubts-- dealing with Bean going through a waking mysteriously every night at least 6 times phase, sending out Christmas cards, planning my Christmas candy-making and cookie-baking extravaganza...well, this is why I haven't been blogging. I suspect the rest of you are in the same merry boat, though I haven't checked your blogs to find out. I will, though. Really really.

But not just now. In about an hour I'll be leaving Bean and Sister with Husband while I go with my mom to Taylorsville, NC to visit a woman who was my stand-in grandmother from the time that I was in 6th grade through the end of high school This woman was the mother of my mother's boyfriend, and when their relationship ended (badly), my contact with Gran was pretty much broken off, too. I talked to her a couple times on the phone, and she sent me $20 my freshman year in college once, but after that I didn't talk to her.

She's turning 93 in a few days and my mother's ex-boyfriend asked my mother to lunch because Gran's asked about seeing us one more time. I haven't been back to Taylorsville since I left for college 17 years ago. It should be something.

So I'll catch up on my blogging this weekend and I'll even post the menu and probably some recipes from my party since some have asked. In the meantime, I hope you all are well and still alive and kicking in the blogging world.

The party is over

I'm feeling somewhat less poisoned today than I did yesterday, though--let's be honest here--hangovers take a lot longer to get over once you're past 30. Am I right?

Our party was a whopping succes, if I may say so. Many people came and had fascinating conversations with each other. Everyone loved, loved the food that I made, and they drank so much liquor I was actually shocked. Seriously, me shocked about everyone's liquor consumption! Nearly ever guest showed up with a bottle of wine in hand, but then left it on a side counter and made a bee-line for the cocktail table. I mixed drinks almost continuously all night long. We started out offering gin fizzes and whiskey sours since I had made my locally famous sour mix. When the sour mix and the gallon of gin and the fifth of whiskey were gone, we switched to mixing bourbon and ginger ale and cosmopolitans. Then the fifth of Maker's Mark and the gallon of vodka and the fifth of Cointreau were gone, so we mixed rum and Cokes and white Russians. Our liquor cabinet is down to the weird stuff now--Pimm's and pear liqueur and peppermint schnapps and that sort of stuff. But at least we won't have to buy any wine any time soon. Not that I feel up to having any yet.

Some highlights:

• The food was almost all eaten! This thrilled me because there have been parties in years past where not enough people showed up or cared to eat and we had a lot left to put away and eventually throw away afterwards. Plus, it's flattering as hell when your food gets eaten!
  
• One neighbor woman got so drunk she started talking shit about another neighbor woman, who overheard her! Ouch!
  
• Only one glass got broken! But many cute glass swizzle sticks with seahorses on them that I put out just for kicks bit the dust.
• Bean had a great time for about an hour, but went immediately to sleep when I put her down, despite all the loud shrieks and music coming from downstairs. What a good baby!
• Husband got many people to play this weird hand-shocking, reflex-testing game during the course of the party and all of them thought it was hilarious fun. Most of them were male, but I didn't need to tell you that.
• Me doing and saying several embarrassing things to party guests that I wish I hadn't. I'm not even going to say them here because...well, at least one of them is SUPER embarrassing. Okay, I'll just tell you. I pinched someone's nipples and cussed at him for saying something extremely scornful to his wife in front of me. There. Just so you know, I am mortified now that I am no longer drunk. Hopefully I won't have to see him ever again.

But I figure if you wake up with a sense of unease that perhaps the party was a bit TOO out of control, then it was probably a damn good party. Everyone left smiling at least, including pinched-nipples guy.

Foodie mamas--are you out there?

We're having a cocktail party on Saturday, and I'm so very pleased to be resuming this mostly-annual tradition of ours after skipping it last year. Husband and I just couldn't seem to get it together with an 8-month old baby to concern ourselves with. This year, though, we're seasoned parenting pros and we've got more space in our new place, too, to fit even more friends and neighbors. I'm really looking forward to it, even though I have no idea what I'll be wearing.

More than that, though, I'm having trouble deciding on an hors-d'oeuvres menu. In years past, I had a million ideas and had to whittle my tremendous lists of canapes, crudites, and the like down to a number of items I actually had platters to serve from. This year, not so much. What's making it hard is not just my usual lack of time to plan, though that is a factor. More than that, I'm feeling a bit intimidated about cooking for everyone. I used to know my way around a professional kitchen like...well, I don't know like what. But my work was so a part of me that it was a part of my physical memory. My arms and hands were used to exactly the right movements necessary to whip egg whites, shake a pan of rapidly caramelizing sugar, flute dozens of pie crusts in minutes, and all the rest of those small tasks I did for years. Those physical memories are pretty rusty now. I've been out of that life and really that culture--because there is a professional kitchen culture--for a couple of years now. And some of those people from that life are coming to my party.

So chefs are coming. Not only that, there will be vegetarians. Then, there's my good friend on a gluten-free diet. Husband isn't so down with the veggie thing since I wooed him away from his virtuous vegetarianism with a plateful of warm fried chicken some years ago. He told me he wants "meat on toothpicks." How the hell am I going to pull this all together AND make it yummy and festive? Wish me luck, will ya?

And any menu ideas you want to throw my way would be warmly received.

Old habits

The other day I was waiting with some other parents outside the school for the kids to be released. Everyone was making idle chit-chat as usual. I was chatting with a mom I don't know very well, but who lived on our street til she moved last month and who has invited me to a cookie-swap party at her house. She told me that she liked my new-ish haircut and that the new-ish color looked nice, too. "Oh, thanks." I told her. "I used to dye it really bright red when I was younger, but I'm getting old for that now," I laughed.

She responded very seriously, "I'll bet you were one of those goth girls when you were in high school, weren't you?"

"Uh, we didn't have this thing you call 'goth' where I grew up," I joked back at her.

She was not to be put off. "Well, 'alternative' then. You were 'alternative,' weren't you?"

"Okay, alternative-ish," I said. "I mean, as alternative as you can be in Tater-hill, North Carolina," hoping she'd let it drop. She seemed satisfied with my answer and turned away.

I thought about it off and on for a couple of days, trying to figure out why it is I found it so funny and weird. I still don't quite know except that aren't we all supposed to have grown out of these labels now? Or if age isn't the great leveller, isn't parenthood? Where you so often have to swap out whatever clique-ish costume you might once have been accustomed to for something you don't mind getting spit up on or that you can roll around on the floor in? Isn't being a mom our new clique, where we may not have New Wave music or musty vintage clothes or drug use in common, but we damn sure all have kids and the kidless don't get it at all?

I dunno. Mabye we don't ever grow out of this stuff. I mean, I do still look for those moms who look interesting or "cool" on the playground to talk to. Hmmm...

Will work for Scotch

There's nothing quite like the calculatedly off-handed yet sincere suggestion that I call a handyman to fix a few things around the house to make Husband leap into action and do things himself. After the girls went to bed last night, and with a glass of Scotch in hand, Husband trooped upstairs with assorted tools and unguents to patch cracks, caulk stuff, and try to get a broken light bulb out of our shower fixture. I am so grateful.

But my gratitude is tempered at this point by what I fear is the answer to the following question: just how long will a screwdriver, 3 tubes of caulk, a caulk gun, a putty knife, a pair of needle-nosed pliers, some painter's tape, and a shop vac all be left to languish in our bedroom without me nagging him about it?

Yeah, I think you know.

Hooray! My first real family drama!

You know you're busy when things like, "Blog," and "Put up Xmas decorations" appear on your list. Or at least I do. Those things are things I consider fun, not something I usually have to remind myself to do. But here goes again, right?

I've fallen very behind on my blog reading lately, but I should get around to it during Bean's afternoon naptime. (Right after I cross off "Wash out muddy cooler" and "Soak antique quilts" from my list.) This means I have no idea how the rest of you spent your Thanksgivings, whether your dinners were delicious or hectic or fraught with family drama. I, for one, experienced all three of these things over the weekend.

Thanksgiving itself was lovely. Everyone showed up and got along. My old friend Suburban Gorgon came with her family PLUS delicious homemade egg noodles and a chocolate chip pie that caused most everyone to shun the usual pecan and pumpkin pies. My mom brought some veggies and some cranberry sauce so tasty that Bean hoovered down three servings before I stopped her out of fear of fruit acid-induced diaper rash. My stepfather was in rare, benevolent form and didn't make a single charged political statement to stir shit up for the fun of it. The kids were all good and when they got rowdy we sent them outside to play tag, which they did ecstatically, if muddily. Really, a very wonderful Thanksgiving.

But my euphoria over a successful, relatively relaxing holiday was not to last.

Husband's brother booked a 6:00 am flight Saturday morning after a big fight with Husband on Friday. I won't go into details because it was just too silly to even believe, but given Husband's brother's slow, mysterious simmering all day Friday something was bound to happen. Anyways.

Guess I'll have to get used to future holiday dramas. This is not something I've ever had to worry much about in the past, mind you, so I'm a little unclear of family drama protocol. I suppose that I should just take my cues from Husband, since it's his brother, and just brush it off.

It IS sort of a pain in the ass when grown-ups just won't grow up, though.

Rode hard...

This house has seen some hard use in the last 48 hours and I have this feeling it's about to come down around our ears. There are smudged cabinets and sticky knobs. Smears of unidentifiable stuff going up the banisters in the stairway. Stained linens, bruised fruit, damp bathrooms, slimy flowers in vases, pine needles ground into rugs, cat barf we keep discovering in hidden corners, a broken screen door, a muddy porch flooor, a cooler out in the yard covered in mud and filled with used turkey brine. And the worst of all, a leaky pipe upstairs that drips through the ceiling onto the floor outside the pantry, a product of some novel way that Husband's nephew takes his showers that otherwise doesn't occur when, for example, we give the girls their bath there.

Ugh. Thanksgiving was lovely, but I have to admit I'm looking forward to giving our poor, over-used house a rest.

A little punchy here...

My to-do list was ridiculously huge today, even for me. I've just begun to realize how close Thanksgiving is and how much I want to do before Husband's brother and nephew get here from Colorado and my mom and rest of the clan show up. The number one thing on my list is to clean the whole house, followed by a trip to the ABC store for booze, getting new plants for the front porch to replace the faded mums, sorting through the morass of papers on our desk, and much, much more. It's a colossal list.

We're hosting this year and I'm so psyched.

I'd like to go officially on record as saying that Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. There. Christmas is a definite number two if you ask me. To me, Thanksgiving has all the good parts of Christmas without all the stress and overspending. Most of you who've been reading here awhile already know how much I love to cook and bake and eat and drink. I do! Absolutely love it all! Thanksgiving prominently features ALL FOUR OF THESE FABULOUS THINGS. I also enjoy dinner parties with children running around wildly in the yard while the adults gaze on them fondly over post-dinner glasses of something. Furthermore, I love having an excuse to bust out the china and ancient crystal wine glasses, the white linen napkins, and a freshly ironed tablecloth. See? Thanksgiving is just the best, hands down, for a little Laura Ingalls wannabe like myself.

It's a lot of work to prepare, of course, though the amount of fuss you want to put yourself through is totally optional and therefore shouldn't be stressful if you're careful to maintain perspective. Today's naptime, for example, found me on the back porch trying with little success to empty the contents of a huge, neon-green, supposedly indoor-outdoor, but nevertheless undeniably moldy beanbag in order to save some of the styrofoam beads inside and reduce my paroxysms of liberal guilt over THAT much styrofoam in the landfill from ME. (I can use these styrofoam beads for something...) I was doing this in order to make the porch look nicer without this enormous, moldy, styrofoam-leaking eyesore--for Thanksgiving. I even went so far as to floss the porch floorboards free of the stuck styrofoam beads with a pick-up-stick, vacuuming it all up with Husband's handy shop vac. For Thanksgiving. And all the while I was near hysteria--I mean the good kind of cackling, laughing hysteria--over my own stupidity and ingenuity at creating tasks to take up the time here at home. I was thinking to myself, "C'mon, I know being a stay-at-home mom is supposed to be work and all--or at least you're supposed to SAY SO in order to be p.c. these days--but truly, I am making this shit up most of the time!"

Anyways, Husband's out of town for the night, gone to Georgia where he's picking up some furniture in storage at his uncle's house. It's for Thanksgiving, you know, to make our still-empty guest room sleepable for Husband's brother. And I'm off to have a second cocktail since it's the weekend. I'm going to try out a recipe for a bishop (American style, not English). If I like it, we might be having them for Thanksgiving.

Brownie bitching

Ugh. Slogging through formatting yet another list of volunteer "opportunities" to hand out to parents at tomorrow's Brownie meeting. Did I complain last year about what a crap job it was to be the cookie mom of Sister's Brownie troop and be stuck with trying to make other supposed grown-ups meet deadlines? Did I say how much other parents sucked for making me nag them about giving me troop money on time and then getting mad and pissy with me for nagging them? Did I ever complain about how much it sucked to be PAID to hassle people back when I used to manage a bakery with a dozen bakers on staff? I take it all back. Being cookie mom was just for 2 months. Being a bakery manager actually paid pretty well. Being a Brownie troop leader is for most of the year and you do it for free.

What's REALLY a crap job is having to hassle parents every month to please do something to contribute to their daughter's Brownie troop. Please just say you'll bring a box of granola bars or a bag of apples for the girls to snack on. Please sign up to help with the single meeting you're required to help with. C'mon. We tell you about this at the beginning of the year. Your daughters love love love it when you come. Please send money on time so that we can buy event tickets on time so that we can actually attend the events that your girls voted to attend. Please help drive all these girls to the events. I know they're usually on Saturdays. Did you know that it's Saturday for me, too? Do you realize I'm not your free babysitter? Did you know you're making it so that I really don't want to do this anymore?

Say it with me now--what the hell was I thinking? Again?

New habits

I decided after having the miscarriage that I really need to get healthier. The midwives told me that there didn't appear to have been a specific cause for losing the pregnancy, but still. I'm 35 now, get no regular exercise other than walking a 10-pound dog around our block, and feel no shame about gorging on all the Halloween candy that the girls hauled in a couple of weeks ago. I drink gin with abandon, add heavy cream and butter to most things I'm cooking with great recklessness, and have dessert every night. Sometimes I even have a little sweet something after lunch. I could be a little healthier, dontcha think?

So as of about 2 weeks ago, I've changed a few things. I've stopped having an enormous bowl of ice cream with homemade caramel sauce dripping all over it every night after the kids go to bed. I've stopped having my customary two gin drinkies every night. Now I just have a glass of red wine over the course of a couple of hours and then a cup of herbal tea after the girls go to sleep. (Okay, it's still alcohol and you teetotallers won't approve. But red wine is good for you, and it's just a bad idea to completely deprive a mama.) I do not snack on candy during the day, but have fruit or yogurt or cheese and crackers instead. I am trying to pay attention to when I feel full at dinner rather than snarfing everything on my plate just so I don't waste it. I do not finish Bean's leftovers at lunch or breakfast. And I've begun exercising again.

Not much, mind you. But I got up at 6:00 am this morning to go to the gym before Husband and Bean got up, and I did this last week a couple of times as well. I've been dragging the poor doggie on longer walks of 30-45 minutes in which I walk briskly up hills, working up an actual sweat. I sometimes even do abdominal crunches during naptime (though, ahem...not right now).

Husband says he can already tell it's having an affect, and I do feel different already. I feel great, actually. I've got the beginnings of the muscle tone I used to have a couple of years ago when I went to the gym as part of my regular week. And I find that it's self-perpetuating. Since I went to the gym this morning I denied myself that little sweet snack I craved after lunch because I didn't want all that damn early morning exercise to go to waste.

Now if I can just keep it up during the holidays...

Under construction

Can a cave be green? I've kept my same black template ever since I started this blog last year because caves are black, right? And I'm not as talented as some people about just making design stuff up, at least when there has to be a computer involved. But since I've switched to Blogger beta and it's supposed to be all fabulous in various, still-mysterious ways I feel like I should do something different. Can a cave be green? Maybe I should shuffle colors like they say you can do now. Or choose a different one altogether for my on-line cave. If I could just figure out the instructions, because really I see the instructions but I can't make sense of the instructions. Anyway, new template...

Oh, and crap, where did my blogroll go?!

Return to normalcy

Husband and I took Bean to a friend's going-away party yesterday afternoon. This is a friend that Husband made here in Chapel Hill when we first moved here about 6 years ago and Husband joined a running group. I think they immediately hit it off, which pleased me at the time because, while Husband lived here when he went to college, he'd been gone for some time and didn't have friends here anymore. I'm very sorry to see this particular friend leave, though it's for a great job in a great town and his wife and 2 kids are very excited.

It was a fun party and I do feel up to parties again now. But I was a bit shaky when Husband's friend's wife asked how I was doing because she knew I'd "lost the baby." I had mentally prepared myself for the possibility of people asking me about it, but the second she asked me I teared up a bit and came very close to saying, "I don't want to talk about it," as a precursor to really losing it in the middle of the party. I didn't realize I was still that shaky. In my normal, daily life I am NOT that shaky at all. I'm too busy feeding the kids, grocery shopping, cleaning the house, walking the dog, working on projects, planning Thanksgiving dinner, bringing in the houseplants from the porch, planning our holiday party, and all the myriad other little items that fill my life to actively feel sad about it anymore. I feel o.k. now, really. Maybe just when I'm confronted with someone else's sympathy it's hard.

So if I happen to lay eyes on you in person, don't be sympathetic, damn it! A little light-hearted, "How are you?" will do fine.

The worst news

Well, the worst has happened. The spotting escalated into a full-blown miscarriage that kept me awake half of last night. I am no longer pregnant and am terribly, terribly sad about it. I'm also feeling like a complete idiot for announcing it so soon, given that I've had a miscarriage before and remember all too well how months afterward I would STILL have people asking me cheerfully how the pregnancy was coming along. I'm kicking myself now.

I remember writing here, too, that if something happened I'd want to talk about it here. You know what, though? I don't. I really, really don't. What I want to do right now is hole up for awhile and not talk to ANYONE about it. I need to think about it on my own for awhile and really believe my midwives when they say that even having 2 miscarriages is no indication that I'm predisposed, especially since they happened so far apart and I've had 2 perfectly healthy children in the interim.

My 2 beautiful girls ARE a huge help to me right now. Bean especially is so unfettered in her sweetness and mama-love that when I'm with her the sadness is just gone. So I'm going to immerse myself in my life right now and just do the things I enjoy and be sweet to my babies. I'll be back in a couple of weeks, I think.

Scary

It's been a pretty shitty day today. I got a call from one of the midwives at the birth center about the fact that I tested positive as a carrier for cystic fibrosis. Now Husband has to get tested to determine if he is, too. If he isn't, there's little to no chance that our baby will be born with the disease. If he is, then the baby has a 25% chance of being born with it. I immediately called Husband after hanging up with the midwife and burst into tears when he answered the phone. My thought was not of this baby in my belly, but of Bean who exists already. I now think I needn't have worried about her, because in reading descriptions of cystic fibrosis on-line today it looks as if Bean would already be a sickly child indeed if she'd been born with it. Still, both she and Sister have a 50% chance of being carriers themselves, and now I have to fear for any children they give birth to in the future as well as this new baby of mine.

Then again, I may not have to think about this new sibling because--as if the threat of cystic fibrosis wasn't enough--I'm spotting today, and have been since 5:00 am. I haven't had cramps so I have no way of knowing what the hell is going on, and neither do the midwives. I just have to wait and see, and in the meantime I'm pretty freaked out about it all.

Part of me also sees the irony in being so freaked out recently about the prospect of having this third baby so soon. Now I'm just worried that I won't.

Free time

This was a gorgeous, windy, bright fall day here in NC. I spent most of it indoors, unfortunately, stuck in a whole day's worth of Girl Scout leader training. The morning session was 4 solid hours and the afternoon class was a jam-packed 3 hours. By the end of it, I was information saturated and I think my eyes were literally glazing over. By the time 4:00 rolled around, I kept having to read the same sentence in our books several times before I could comprehend it. But in between those 2 grueling sessions I had an hour and a half lunch break. A whole hour and a half to myself where I wasn't expected to be at home or anywhere else, where the kids were taken care of, and I could do what I pleased.

I was practically delirious with the restaurant options for my solitary lunch.

My grilled reuben dripping with Russian dressing, pastrami hangings, and yummy sauerkraut was delicious, and the cannoli I had afterwards was tongue-shockingly sweet, creamy, and crunchy all at once. Because the deli was take-out only, I ate it all in my car with the windows rolled down to catch the stiff breeze. I licked my fingers afterwards.

But possibly even more delicious than that was the walk I took to a nearby park afterwards. The weather was, as I mentioned, lovely for a brisk walk, and with a little time to myself I fully realized that I am pregnant. It sunk in today. I noticed that I felt poochy today, though granted that was probably because of my recently gobbled lunch.

It wasn't just that, though. I just felt pregnant all of a sudden, sort of roundish and full of busy cells and blood and life.

This is the last time I'll be going through pregnancy, and I was so glad to have a bit of free time to pay attention.

My life without blog

Our internet connection has been spotty at best for the past few days. For some reason, Time Warner Cable has to deal with this problem in our neighborhood everytime it's a bit rainy outside. I've missed my blog, and more than that I've missed your blogs. But on the other hand, I do get quite a lot done without the blog vortex sucking me down during naptime hours. Witness,

1. I finished planting 2 flats of cute little Johnny-jump-ups in my front bed. They've been waiting for me right by the front door for 3 weeks now.
2. I mulched most of that same front bed to lessen the quantity of mud that comes sliding down the front walkway everytime I try to water the new plants I've put in there. Plus, mulch will control the little fall weedies that are popping up everywhere.
3. I dug up 5 azalea crowns from diseased, old azaleas growing unhappily at the side of the house. I don't much care for azaleas anyway. Too ubiquitous in Southern suburbia, and they're only pretty for a couple of weeks in the spring.
4. I got a start on digging a giant hole in the backyard for a redbud tree before I hit what must've been a bed of prehistoric sandstone. Ten minutes of trying to scrape some headway and my heart was racing, I was dripping sweat, and the shovel felt like it was made of lead. Yes, I am out of shape, thanks, but that was some damn heavy clay shit! This is a job for Husband to finish, I think.
5. I made a big batch of buttercream for decorating some pumpkin cupcakes with Sister and a friend who's over today on this, a teacher workday. I love teacher workdays. It's almost enough to make me consider home-schooling except that I know that my days would not be spent baking cupcakes and letting Sister veg out in front of movies. (Or would it...?)
6. I ordered hundreds of flower bulbs!
   
7. I gave some thought to Thanksgiving dinner!
8. And I talked with my mom about her visit with my brother earlier this week. He looks great, she said, and is currently living with 2 other recovering addicts in a condo owned by their mother. He seems to be getting back on track and as long as he's employed and staying clean, he's welcome to live there. Considering he's spent the last 2 winters living in a tent, my mother and I are both very relieved that he'll at least have a warm place to live.

See? Very busy without the blog as an option. It's been quite cozy.

Blue

I had my first prenatal appointment this morning at the birth center where I had both Sister and Bean. Not all the midwives I remember are still there, but enough of them were there that I felt very welcome. I'm sure it's a nice validation when they get repeat customers, especially when it's for something more than just buying your toothpaste or your sewing supplies or what have you. They couldn't yet hear the baby's heartbeat since I'm only just over 9 weeks so far, but the RN went overboard reassuring me that my uterus "definitely felt pregnant" and the right size for gestational age. I'm not worried.

But I also walked away not terribly cheered up, as I'd hoped to be. I can't tell if I'm just super hormonal or what, but I just feel blue today. Probably it's got something to do with a talk that Husband and I had last night at the dinner table. A little back story is in order here.

I have a brother 2 years younger than me who is homeless and a previous heroin addict, probably still using. He lives in a city a couple of hours from here and, needless to say, has made a complete mess of his life. He has 2 sons by different mothers, neither of whom he's allowed to see anymore. He pays no child support to their moms, and is employed only some of the time. When he did work steadily, he was a stone mason and made good money at it. Now when he works, it's at drudge construction jobs, and I suspect that his money is spent on fast food meals, helping various friends with whom he sometimes lives for a few weeks at a time pay their rent or gas or whatever, and yes, drugs.

My mother is going to see him tomorrow for his 33rd birthday. She's taking him out to lunch, and to get a haircut and some new, warm clothes. She asked me on the phone last night if she could invite him to Thanksgiving, which Husband and I are hosting this year, if my brother seemed o.k. I told her I thought it would be fine, but that I didn't think that we'd be comfortable with him staying overnight in our house. This may sound harsh to you, but if he's really still an addict, then he could very likely do something stupid like steal cash from our wallets when we weren't paying attention, or make off with some small electronic thing he could pawn or something. My mom thought this was reasonable, and even said she'd likely put him up in a hotel because her own husband, my step-father, wouldn't want him staying there either.

When I mentioned this conversation to Husband, he just got silent. I asked him if this made him unhappy, and he told me frankly that he didn't want my brother to come to Thanksgiving. At all. He didn't want him in our house or around our kids. He'd been keeping tabs of him through his county's courhouse website, had seen his arrest record and mug shots, and just didn't want him here. I didn't know what to say. My mother has also been keeping tabs of him that way, and says that he was arrested once this year for possession of drug paraphernalia and 3 times for failing to appear in court. She thinks he's more or less o.k. now.

I emailed my mom to tell her about my conversation with Husband, and she told me she understood, but emailed me a link to the courthouse website so that I could see for myself my brother's arrest record. When I looked, there were pictures of my brother that I couldn't believe. Just devastating pictures. He looks like a homeless person. He's dirty and underweight and has uncut hair, and in one photo his eyes were rolling from whatever he was on as the picture was snapped. And my mother was wrong. He'd been arrested 4 times this year for possession of drug paraphernalia.

So my husband is right and I don't feel comfortable having my brother around our kids and in our house either, even for a few hours of Thanksgiving dinner. And this is such a shitty thing to admit, that I'm keeping my door closed to my brother, knowing that he won't be with family, won't get to meet Bean whom he's never seen, and will likely be eating a Thanksgiving meal at the homeless shelter, if he eats anything at all. I feel horrible.

The first of many pregnancy gripes

A good friend of Husband's was over this afternoon with his wife and kids. It was very pleasant despite the rainy afternoon--the kids all ran around screaming, helping themselves to the plate of cookies in the kitchen at frequent intervals while the grown-ups sipped hot cider and tea (me and the other wife) or cold beer (the husbands) and talked.

These friends have 2 kids born 12 months and 2 weeks apart. They're 6 and 7 now and their crazy, newborn days are long over. The parents seem downright serene and content, so I asked the mom what advice she might have for me once I'm the mom of 2 very little ones. Her advice was damn funny. She told me right away, "Just don't go anywhere or do anything," which made me laugh. Of course! I mean, I knew that! It makes total sense. By the time you've got them both dressed and in clean diapers and their giant, shared diaper bag packed, and snacks packed, and then one of them needs another diaper change, and then you lug them both out of the house and buckle them both into car seats...well, it hardly seems like it'd be worth getting to where you're going. So this mom said, and I can see it.

Husband and I went to dinner at a different set of friends' house last night with both Sister and Bean in tow. We met this couple at the birth class we took when I was pregnant with Bean and they're the only ones we've kept in touch with. Their son is a month older than Bean, and they're now pregnant again, too, a month ahead of us again. While the guys talked techie stuff, I talked with the other wife about how she was feeling physically, how she anticipated her little son would handle it, how her last birth had gone and that sort of thing. She made it clear that it was freaking her out some, contemplating a second child with her first so young. When I mentioned this to Husband upon returning home, he asked me, surprised, "Are you freaking out about this?" To which I replied, "Uh, yeah. You're not?" And apparently he's not.

My first prenatal appointment is tomorrow and I'm wondering if I can let my mixed feelings show, or if I'm going to be asked annoying, leading questions like, "Are you so excited?!" from a beaming, midwife-intern type. What I really want is someone who's going to say to me knowingly, "Honey, you're in for it. Now here's what you need to do..." and who will then go on to tell me all their secret mommying tips for staying sane with 1 kid in school and 2 still at home. 'Cause I spend a fair amount of time worrying just how the hell I'm going to pull this off with any sort of grace or sweetness. Grandi, whose been-through-it-all grandmama perspective I find incredibly helpful and reassuring, commented on my last post that someday I'd have the privilege of hearing my kids talk over the dinner table about how much fun it all was. I just hope that's true and it's not them talking about what an absolute bitch I was, which frankly seems like the more likely scenario.

Help!

Okay, quick! Our third wedding anniversary has snuck up on me, and I've just learned that it's our leather anniversary. Leather! A Google search for "third anniversary leather gifts" has yielded either very boring or very expensive ideas--leather luggage, leather briefcases, leather wallet, leather belt, etc. Husband neither needs nor would want any of these things. Anyone out there got any brilliant ideas? Lay them on me, please! If, however, you're a friend of Husband's thinking of doing him a favor, just know that "leather-clad escort" is NOT an option. (One of the expensive options I ran across on a Google search, that one.)

Help me!

Big question

I've been back from my fabulous beach vacation for 2 days now, but was so immediately plunged back into the daily grind that it's taken me this long to get to blogging again. I didn't think it would wear off THIS fast, dammit! Ah well. It was worth the back-to-real-life shock. We had 2 full days of having to do absolutely nothing. I read magazines I've been meaning to read. I wrote in my journal. I ate whatever I wanted, whenever I damn well pleased, and didn't have to fix any for anyone else. I went to bed very late and got up late, too. Most strikingly to me, though it was a subtle thing, was that when I woke up in the morning I just lay there awhile. Opened my eyes and stared up at the ceiling and thought quietly about things before I pulled back the covers. I can't remember the last time I did that.

But I'm mostly solidly back now. Not sleeping great because the baby's still, STILL not sleeping great. Rushing through mornings to try to get Sister out the door to school on time. Lunch packing. Homework supervising. Laundry folding. Sigh.

One of my friends asked me while I was there if I had any strategies for coping with things once spring rolls around and there's another little baby on the scene. The question stopped me cold as I realized how damn hard it's going to be to have 2 such young children. I told her that basically I would be kissing my own interests and hobbies goodbye for the next couple of years and just keeping my head down. I already don't have much time for doing the things I like to do, and soon I'll have zero time. I'm just glad that Sister will be almost 9 by then and perfectly capable--as she is now--of taking care of many things herself. She really is an incredible big sister.

But I don't mean to sound as if having this third child is something I don't want to do. I did want one last baby and if the timing was off by a couple of months that shouldn't be SO daunting. But I'm beginning to realize that it is very daunting indeed and asking myself, "What the hell have we done?!" Mixed feelings? You betcha.

Packing list

2 pairs of fat pants? Check.
1 fat skirt? Check.
Large beach towel? Check.
All my favorite CD's for the road? Check.
Grocery bags and a cooler stuffed with chips, crackers, pates, cheeses, chocolate cherry chunk cookies, and all manner of very delicious snackies? Double check.
Bathing suit? Check.
Bikini wax? Are you kidding?! These are my girlfriends! No check.
Gleeful expression and loud heart thumping as I realize that I am minutes from walking out the door to my fabulous all-ladies beach trip for the next 3, baby-free nights? Check, but I'm keeping those low key for the sake of my poor, put-upon husband. God bless him.

See y'all on the other side!

Beginning the new garden

Bean woke up at 4:30 this morning screaming, and then woke every ten minutes after that for the next 2 hours, crying her loudest. I was exhausted, and still kind of am, though I'm coasting on a couple of dark chocolate cherry chunk cookies that I just got out of the oven. (I'm baking a couple kinds of cookies to take to the beach--good, grown-up kinds with chunks in them.) But the good thing about Bean depriving herself of so much sleep was that she fell asleep in the stroller while we were out walking the dog this morning, and this meant that I got to garden. I just left her sitting in her stroller in the front yard and dug away at the bed in front of the house til she woke half an hour later.

It's been a few months since I was able to plant anything and now, of course, we're in a whole 'nother garden space. It's nice dirt here--heavy with all the clay, but still workable because previous owners have also done a little gardening and lightened things up a bit. I planted some hardy lantanas, some catmint, a sweetspire bush, 2 white flowering camellias, and some pretty purple asters, just for some color right now. I'm trying to go with a few new gardening assumptions at this new place. Namely, that global warming is here to stay and I should really be planting as much that is drought-tolerant and tough as possible. Also, that you just can't force soil conditions. The beds by the house appear to be moist-ish and rich, but when I get around to planting by the street it'll be plants as close to cacti as I can stand to make them since the ground out there is bone dry. And lastly, I had the recent realization--just this morning, in fact!--that I can make our gardens here full of smells that my girls will from here on out associate with this house and this life and maybe with their mother who loves them. Lantanas, lavender, sweetspire, gardenias, and tea olive are all present in these beds already. I'm going to start going with more good-smelling stuff to see what kind of smell associations I can instill in my babies. Seems like a nice way to try to be remembered.

And one final, parting comment about gardening before I quit boring those of you who couldn't care less. I forgot how much I really love it after this long, busy, extremely hot summer. It felt really wonderful to be back out digging in the dirt again. I can already see what this garden is going to look like in my head, and I can't wait to really get started, heavy clay and all.

Countdown til Friday

It's official. I have all the emotional maturity of an 16-year old high school girl. The playgroup mom who dissed us yesterday? She sent an email last night with "I am SO SORRY" as the subject line. She'd been in California and it had completely slipped her mind to let us know she wouldn't be coming to the playgroup. She was extremely apologetic and we're all good playgroup buddies again. Makes me glad I phrased my email to her as neutrally inquisitive as possible, inquiring after her well-being, even. I am NOT a weirdo that other moms try to avoid after all.

But now my mental attentions are straying to the fact that I'm going to the beach this weekend. Husband isn't going. Neither are Sister or Bean. Who IS going? Me and four of my very good girlfriends, (including Mommygoth!) on our annual all-ladies-all-the-time oceanside estrogen-fest. I'm desperately excited about the prospect of 3 nights' worth of uninterrupted sleep, no dinner preparations, no children to entertain (God love 'em), all the grown-up girl talk I could possibly want, walks on the beach if I want, reading trashy novels on the oceanfront porch if I want, cookies for breakfast if I want, and yes, dammit, a glass of wine if I want. Dreamy, no?

But I've got to keep my head down and still.get.through.this.week. Here's what I have left to do:

• 3 more nights of teething Bean waking to scream her head off at least once and probably more times per night. She'll then wake at 6 am, insisting that it is too time to get up.
• 2 afternoons hassling Sister to finish her homework already and get into her bathing suit for swim class across town. Then entertaining Bean in a gym for 40 minutes when the childcare isn't open, and anyway Bean screams her head off if I try to drop her off at gym childcare.
• 1 Brownie meeting, including snack for 15 girls, that's only partly planned so far. I'll probably need to run to the store at some point for craft supplies, too. (Crap, better do that tomorrow...)
  
• 1 baby music class across town, which is mostly fun except that about halfway through the class Bean starts bogarting the laps of any dads that happen to be present. This generally pisses off their own offspring, makes me feel a bit awkward, and makes all the other parents stare at me as if I am secretly doing things at home to make Bean scared of me.
  
• 6 dog walks, 6 animal feedings, 3 dinners to prepare, 3 toilets to scrub, many loads of laundry, etc.

But after that, I'll be hitting the road around lunchtime on Friday, the car stocked with my favorite road trip CD's, the windows down, leaving Bean with her beloved Papa and Sister to be picked up from school by my Ex. They'll all be fine and will miss me. I'll miss them, too, of course.

But I can't frickin' wait!

Dissed by a playgroup mom

I just finished hosting the second meeting of our playgroup at my house, but for some reason one of the moms didn't respond to my email or bother showing up. This meant that it was just me and one other mom because so far we haven't had anyone else in the vast mothers' group list want to meet on Monday mornings. This no-show mom's absence was pretty conspicuous, then, as you might imagine, and I couldn't help feeling like I was back in high school again or something. Like I planned a party where I invited someone I liked--because I did entertain visions that this mom and I would really like each other--who just didn't come. I'm wondering now what did I do to scare her off. I mean, I didn't even cuss lat week! Am I some kind of weirdo? Oooh, or maybe it was the crappy, 80's hair band music that the other mom played in the background when we met at her house last week that scared this California native off? (Actually, I thought it was a pretty weird choice of music myself, but what do you do when it's someone else's house?) I don't know. But I can't help feeling a little rejected. Stupid, huh? When I'm in my mid-30's now, happily married, with a pretty sound self-image?

More on food

Aw, shucks! Y'all are just so nice to be saying congratulations and asking after my level of barfiness and all. And not one of you asked if this pregnancy was planned like my mother did. So sweet!

We're in the throes of homework/snack time at the moment, and so far Sister has been at her eating and homeworking for just over an hour now. I keep thinking the snacking is coming to an end, but I happen to be trying to get a jumpstart on dinner at the same time, and the girls both keep begging me for pieces of what I'm making to supplement the perfectly adequate snack of cheese and crackers and dried strawberries they've already eaten. Sister likes this new kind of dill pickles after all, it appears, and who knew that Bean liked pickles at all? I gave her a little cube of one and she immediately dragged her high chair over from across the room so that I could give her much, much more. Little part-Polish girls after my own heart.

Me? I'm having a hard time with the food lately. I'm only slightly barfy in the mornings, which is usual for the knocked-up me. I'm also starving at various points during the day. Already! At seven weeks! But the hard part is that I can't think of a thing I feel like eating, and believe me, I'd be happy to eat! I gained 50 pounds with Sister and 40 with Bean and, well, whatever. It all came off after nursing awhile. Most of it did anyway. Stupid recommended 25-35 pound weight gain. But fabulous nursing!

The one thing I've found that is very delicious to me is drinks with ice in them. Ice is SO yummy to me right now. Oh, and Ben and Jerry's, any flavor. They sort of balance each other out, dontcha think?

Long time no blog

I have zero excuse why I haven't been blogging or even keeping up with others' blogs lately. I'm busy, but when am I not? I have projects going--transforming the antique quilt top I bought a few weeks ago into a full-fledged quilt, tiling the top of a perfectly nice, round table that a neighbor discarded by the side of the road recently, cake-baking, soup-simmering, homework-supervising, etc, etc--but these days I usually have some kind of project working, so even that is no excuse.

Maybe it's because I'm pregnant? Yeah, maybe.

'Cause while I've got all these other things going on, I basically didn't know what else to blog about as long as I was keeping my knocked-up state a secret. So now that I've told my mother, most of my friends, and hell, even my insurance agent, I guess it's time to tell all of you. I am about 7 weeks pregnant with my third and probably last child.

I know, it's a little early to be spilling it all over the internet, but in the event that I miscarry (God forbid), I'd want to blog about that, too. So how 'bout that? I'm pregnant again...