Blueberry picking

Picked this morning, originally uploaded by Secretsugar.

Sometimes this real life business is pretty sweet. I just took the girls out to an organic pick-your-own blueberry farm way outside of town. Like an idiot, I forgot to bring my camera which was a real shame. It was so peaceful and all the mamas and kids--and it seemed to be only mamas with their kids out there--were so happy and relaxed. The blueberries were abundant, a bumper crop according to the cheerful women running the stand. Sister asked how much their bushes usually produced each year and they told us it was somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 pounds of blueberries.

Can you imagine?!

I swear, I want to retire to a pick-your-own blueberry farm now and have that be the way we make our living. I walked away with the sense that the world is fruitful and abundant, that all it takes to be your real self is to live that close to things that grow. Happy children running around exclaiming over every little amazing everyday thing--a dragonfly wing, a bird's nest, all those berries, an ancient apple tree--doesn't hurt either.

Something fun

It's hard to put together the chatty, light-hearted post I'd half-written in my head earlier today now. It's been a long damn day. Husband had to leave the house for something work-related at 7:00 am this morning. He returned for 45 minutes this afternoon--long enough for me to make a solo trip to the grocery store--and then was back out again til 9:30 tonight. When he got home, the goddamn dog woke both the baby and Bean up with his shrill little miniature Schnauzer yapping and I could have thrown him across the room. Sweet P has just, just fallen back to sleep after screaming for the last hour. Stupid frigging dog.

So anyways.

Remember how I wrote about real life, wanting to live a real life, something...what the hell did I say about real life? 'Cause all this doing real life stuff is tiring! Here's a list of real stuff I've been doing since my last post:

1. Repainting my downstairs bathroom. A room probably 10 square feet has taken me most of last week to (almost) finish painting during naptimes. Why am I doing this? Is a turquoise bathroom really worth it?

2. Dealing with Bean's mysterious, horrible spider bite. She woke up yesterday morning with a hugely swollen ankle and 2 tiny pus-y (um, how do you spell the adjective describing something containing pus...?) fang marks in the middle of it. She's on a course of antibiotics now because it was already getting infected. We're supposed to be looking out for necrosis. That's dying tissue that will have to be removed via surgery, for you spider bite neophytes.

3. Running naked in a thunderstorm with some college girlfriends and drinking entirely too much wine. Yes, this really happened! I'm too old to be drinking that much wine, though, and my liver hates me now.

4. Hmmm, can't think of much else just now besides changing a lot of diapers, nursing, and cleaning up a lot of poop and pee, of both the child and animal variety. Do any of you other moms feel like most of your day consists of wiping someone's butt?

5. Did I mention that Sweet P can crawl as of last week? It's a whole new world for both of us. She's interested in all kinds of things now--delicious bathroom trash, dog ears, the compost bucket, dust bunnies, electrical cords. I forgot about this dashing around to protect my infant from all things disgusting part of baby-mamahood, I must confess.

Off to bed now. It's late for this mama and both the big girls were demanding to do "something fun" tomorrow before they went to bed. And I get the sense that it better be something real, too. None of this "Let's just hang out!" stuff I've been trying to get by them lately.

Trying to catch a morning frog

Trying to catch a morning frog, originally uploaded by Secretsugar.

Please ignore the black plastic of Husband's waterfall-in-progress, and try not to worry that Bean will fall in here. (She didn't.) It was such a lovely, cool morning after last night's thunderstorm that we were all drawn out onto the patio to enjoy the cool even before we'd had our respective morning beverages.

There's a frog under the rock that Bean's after there, and you can't tell in the picture but there were several bullfrog tadpoles--which are the size of my thumb!--surfacing and diving, nibbling on algae, maybe. It felt like autumn for a little while.

Sleep-deprived and jonesing for some mama time

What the hell has happened to my sweet angel baby? I'm not joking here when I say that she woke me up probably about a dozen times last night. Teething? The fact that she just learned to crawl yesterday and is practicing in her crib when she should be freaking sleeping? I don't know! I've had no problem letting her cry it out ever since I went on nighttime nursing strike last week. But the other morning I came into her room to get her up and her leg was stuck between the bars of her crib all the way up to her chubby little thigh. That's a first for me, so now I'm worried now that she's going to injure herself through my slack-ass, third-baby parenting. Ugh. I dread going to sleep tonight.

Despite my recent angst about my on-line time, I did lollygag around today on the sofa with my trusty laptop, browsing amazing Flickr photos and inspiring Etsy shops. I'm dying to try my hand at something called itajime after I saw this gorgeous little quilt. I also really really really want this to be my sewing space.

See? So inspiring! And so utterly unattainable for me with my sleep-deprived brain and utter lack of any long stretches of free time. One of these days though....

Is there life without the internet?

I've been struggling with finding the time to blog lately. And struggling with some new mixed feelings about my life + internet, too. When I posted about our cabin vacation a few weeks ago, I didn't mention how absolutely eye-openingly lovely it was to be without internet access or television for that week. Do any of you remember life before the internet? It's a distant dream, isn't it? I had forgotten how my days could be filled with real activities if I didn't have a computer doing it's daily time suck thing. I could read! I could sew! I could pay attention to the hilarious things my children come up with! I could think long thoughts! In short, I could have a REAL life and not some shadow life where I was just reading about what others are doing with their time, y'know? It made me want to go back to my pen and paper journal and just board up my little on-line cave here. Horribly luddite of me, I know.

But here's where those of you who know about Spoonflower, our (ahem) internet-based business, will start to think the obvious: "Um, you know you can't chuck that computer out the window if you've got help emails to answer and craft blog posts to write and all, right...?" Sigh. I DO know that. And I have no intention of avoiding that part of my new job description of stay-at-home, work-from-home mama.

I'm still trying to decide how to keep that feeling I had at the cabin, though, of remembering REAL ways to spend my time and energy. I'm a things-in-front-of-me kind of girl all the way, I guess.

I have a 10-year old!

DSC01081, originally uploaded by Secretsugar.

It's hard to believe that 10 years ago this child made me into a mama, but there it is. Time passes and they grow up.

Sister had 4 friends over for a sleepover for her birthday which she also did last year. But this year all of a sudden the girls seemed so grown up. They got along well without me having to intervene and make them be nice to each other. They told jokes, they listened to each other, they made little "trading cards" to exchange, and they just generally hung out and enjoyed each other's company without me having to do much besides feed them and make them brush their teeth. (Oh, and settle down at 1:30 in the morning when the baby woke me up and I realized that I could still hear them giggling loudly downstairs.)

One of my favorite things they did was riff off of this Worst Case Scenario board game we have. At first, they got a kick out of reading the cards to each other, but then began making up their own scenarios:
"How to eat your lucky underwear after a volcano erupts."
"How to survive an unexpected poop."
"How to drink your pee in a dire emergency."
"How to use a chicken and a DVD as clothes in dire trouble."
"How to survive in a room with a toilet, Hagrid's butt, and a saw."

They just keep being hilarious, I guess, no matter how old they get!

Crisp around the edges

Husband has taken all three girls and the dog out for an evening's walk around the neighborhood. I am grateful, if all too aware how quickly this little piece of quiet will last.

I am burnt out, I think. Short-tempered with everyone, sleep-deprived, and having dreams about how I fail at trying to fix things or make them better. Husband told me the other night that my overreacting to Bean's nightly ruining of dinner is in fact ruining EVERYONE'S dinner. I've decided that ignoring my middle daughter at dinner is my best strategy, but I can't just ignore everyone all the time.

Actually, I don't know what the hell I need to make this better. I mean, I THINK I know what I need, but it's so unlikely that I'm going to get it anytime soon that it seems pointless to try and do much. I need to be able to sleep nights for at least one long chunk of time. I need to be not the only one maintaining the house on a daily basis. I need someone to fix shit that's broken around here. I need some time daily to do a little something for myself--just an hour or so would do. And I don't want to make it the very last thing in my day after the dishes are done and the mess picked up and the trash taken out and the laundry folded.

And while I'm making a list of things that I'd get in my ideal world, I'd like for kids not to scream back or sigh dramatically or glower sullenly at me if I ask them to do something they're not particularly fond of. I'd like people to remember the things that I tell them or request of them for longer than the day that I tell or request them. I'd like my mother to be involved more in my kids' lives and, like, keep them at her house sometimes. I'd like to have no t.v. I'd like to chuck the computer out the window and go live in a big, ancient farmhouse somewhere out in the country where there was a pond and animals and a huge garden and quiet and you could still see the stars at night.

All that stuff I want. Anyone else feel like joining me?

Last vacation

Hmmm. Guess I shoulda said something about how I'd be gone for Husband's family reunion last week, huh? We were up in the mountains of TN at his family's cabin and had a really lovely time. Just for the record, I take back everything I ever said about the (ahem) rustic state of the cabin. When we drove up, I was startled to note my happiness in seeing it again, spiders, dust, must and all. And I promise, it wasn't all due to my relief at getting out of the van after 8-1/2 hours. No, really! I was even genuinely sad to be coming home, and I usually LOVE to come home after vacations. Was it me who even suggested to Husband how great it would be to stay there for a month sometime?! Yes, it was!
But here we are at home and it is nice to be back after all, except for the evidence of an enormous storm that blew through on the 4th. It knocked a huge branch off our neighbor's old maple, crushing a particularly lovely part of my flower garden out front. I have blackberry lilies, obedient plants, hollyhocks, and spiderwort there and hope they'll all perk up again. Oh, and a 7-foot tall cactus we keep on our front porch to ward off religious proselytizers fell over, taking out both our porch railing and half a gardenia bush. Our metal porch railing! Now there's a big hole in the house siding that will no doubt cost an arm and a leg to repair. How random is that?

Still, it was a lovely vacation and our last one for quite awhile, I think, since work is getting so busy. Hope all you American types had nice holidays, too!

Good life

Other reasons it's great to be home:

1. A batch of chocolate covered banana-sicles made up with an enthusiastic Bean this morning.

2. A batch of chocolate chip cookies, also made with Bean's help, for our new neighbors one street over with a son Bean's age.

3. The discovery of an ENORMOUS, 3-inch long, disgusting grub in our compost pile this morning. Very exciting and totally gross!

4. The discovery that Bean, quite suddenly, knows how to draw scary monsters with her colored pencils. This thrills me. Though I do wonder where the drawings of blood come from. "'Cause monsters have blood, Mom!" she tells me as if I'm an idiot. Still, I can't help but wonder if my Bean has dark, Goth chick leanings already...

5. Oh, and the disappearance of our USB cable so that I can't post a single damn picture of any of this.

A what?

Just saw one of these out in our garden--a zebra swallowtail. Never seen one before!

But in other, more personally relevant news, we're back from Topsail Island as of yesterday afternoon. Even though it took me vacuuming and sweeping the house, unpacking several suitcases and bags of leftover groceries, the immediate evacuation of a small colony of hatched and starving butterflies to the outdoors, SEVEN LOADS OF LAUNDRY, and a marathon session of plant watering to get the house back to normal, I am officially back to normal. Insert contented sigh here. I love coming home.

Overall vacation verdict this year is that it was sorta wasted on me. I swam in the ocean a grand total of two times because I was mostly stuck indoors with Sweet P whose tender skin I was afraid to scorch. Husband and I still had to get out the weekly fabric shipment and do some Spoonflower work from the beach. And we helped fix meals for way more kids than usual. But at least Sister and Bean had a blast. As Bean recounted with premature nostalgia when told that we were leaving the next day, "Mom, I played for days and days at the beach." She sure did!

7 of 11

7 of 11, originally uploaded by Secretsugar.

It's so hard to get a group kid photo when there are 11 kids to corral and one of them REFUSES to leave my arms for any reason. This is as close as I've gotten this year--7 of the assorted cousins, including 2 kids of my own, snapped while they're eating and quiet for a change. They're chatting to themselves, but it's not the utter mayhem that has otherwise been their mode this year.

I've hardly seen Sister at all this week because she's suddenly old enough to not make a nuisance of herself among her teenage cousins. She's hanging out with them and they're not annoyed by her presence. She's also old enough to be responsible, not get lost on beach walks, stay hydrated, not drown, etc. I'm sorry to say that what interaction I've had with her has been mighty sassy on her part. Trying to save face in front of these same teenage cousins, I guess.

Bean has needed, as usual, a lot of entertainment and Sweet P has needed me. A lot. Like, nursing half the night and miserable whenever I put her down during the day. I am exhausted. On vacation!

This is one beach trip I won't be sorry to see over, however much cat barf there is to clean up or laundry to do at home when we return.

Beach quickie

I'm sneaking in a quick blog post here while I nurse the baby (to sleep, I hope!) and supervise Bean's settling in for a nap (which isn't looking very settled at the moment). We're all three in our shared beach house bedroom on Topsail Island, NC for our annual clan convergence. Ratio of children to adults--11:6.

It's a chocolate chip cookie snarfing, hot tub splashing, thunderous overhead porch stomping, sandy pocket emptying, no-more-than-2-sodas-a-day-please saying, giant lunch cooking, wet floor wiping, shrimp peeling, watermelon seed spitting, close-that-door! shouting, I-SAID-no-more-than-2-sodas! reminding, wet towel hanging, kid skin sunscreening kind of vacation.

Pictures to come, I hope, if I can remember where I packed that damn USB cable...

Summer spruce up, plus bloggers visiting me!

I ought not to mind getting older. I tell myself this often, chastising myself that it's shallow to care. 'Cause I mean, I could be dead, right? Nevertheless, I find that I do care that every.freaking.year. the annual getting-ready-for-summer beauty routine gets harder. Or rather, it has less of an effect. And out of frustration about my mousey self, I end up doing idiotic things like dyeing my hair lurid purpley-red, as if I don't remember that a red that bright just doesn't go so well with the jeans and spit-up encrusted t-shirts I might manage to pull on late in the morning. With my old, cute, black crepe flapper dresses, yes, but with mommy gear...uh, no. Sigh.

Nevertheless, I doggedly kept a bikini wax appointment today, more to avoid scaring the passel of children who will be attending this year's family beach trip than in the hopes that anyone might look twice at me in a bikini. I mean, tankini. I mean, skirted tankini. (Do they still make flapper bathing suits? I would so wear one at this point!) I bought some bronzer and some mineral make-up stuff that I actually think does make my complexion look better in some subtle way. And I painted my toe nails pink.

That about does it for my summer sprucing up this year. That's all I have time for, and that's all I have the heart to try.

On a brighter note, I'm pretty damn excited that tomorrow night I have two bloggers coming over to my house to hang out--woo-hoo! I met Beth from Blind as a Bat last year when she was in Raleigh visiting her daughter, and she was just as friendly and funny in real life as she is on her blog. Joan from Southern Suburbia I've never met, despite the fact that she lives only about an hour away from me. Small confession here: I kinda had her in mind when I painted my toenails tonight, having gotten an inkling how she is about her own toes.

I'm only slightly embarrassed to say that I'm serving them take-out pizza for dinner, feeling like a big salad, homemade brownies, and Kat's Bourbon Slush (scroll down to the end of the post) ought to make them feel welcome and feted, regardless. I'll let y'all know how it goes, okay?

Mummified Barbie with precious oil

Mummified Barbie with precious oil, originally uploaded by Secretsugar.

What?! Your kids don't anoint Barbies with fragrant oils and mummify them in toilet paper when it's summertime?

P.S. Lest y'all think I'm the most permissive of mamas, letting my girls play around with my perfume collection, know that the bottled Gap stink pictured here is a yard sale find that Sister picked up this weekend. Perfume makes my nose hurt. (All mummification around here happens on the porch.)

Summer on the porch

I bought the girls a kiddie pool the other day to help us all stay cool in the scorching heat. (100 degrees here for, like, 4 days in a row! Ugh!) We've all enjoyed soaking in the freezing cold hose water, even Sweet P. Yesterday, after we all had a dip, we had a snack picnic on the porch while our skins dried under the ceiling fan. Then Bean went outside to "chalk."

I shucked off my wet suit, wrapped myself up in a beach towel, and nursed Sweet P, who drowsed off in my arms in the rare peace. I laid her next to me to finish her nap.


Peace while the kids are awake is seldom seen around here, so it was an especially sweet afternoon that I want to remember.

Rising fifth grader, not rising at the moment

Rising fifth grader, not rising, originally uploaded by Secretsugar.

This is how Sister intends to spend a good portion of her time now that school has let out. (Today! Finally!) Can you tell she's psyched? And do you remember when you had this kind of leisure time? I remember long afternoons and evenings spent curled up in a chair or on the porch with nothing to do but read if I wanted. Back before the days of the internet, clearly.

Happy summer, everyone!

My baby can sit!

DSC00865, originally uploaded by Secretsugar.

And does she not look like a little angel baby who requires some attention? Yes, she does. Which is partly why I haven't been blogging lately. My two little nappers do tag team napping now, with Sweet P's naps sorta bracketing Bean's single afternoon nap. Neither of them much appreciates mama being on the computer when awake either. Only 6 more months and they might actually nap at the same time, right?

Feeling better

Happy baby, originally uploaded by Secretsugar.

Trying to post today if only to get that last one down a bit. I'm feeling a lot less sorry for myself today, thanks. I've been so busy lately with the kids and the new business that I've been really struggling. Last night, though, I realized that my help with the business is the thing that should give around here if I need something to. The kids shouldn't be the thing I let go, right? I mean, if my help consists of responding to people's emails and posting on our blog now and then, that could probably wait longer than a lonely young'un in need of some mama time? Yes.

This morning, Sweet P woke me up at 5:30 to nurse. After I got her tanked up and back to sleep, I went on downstairs because it was already getting light outside and I relished the thought of having the quiet house to myself, sleep deprivation be damned. I sat alone on the back porch with the birds singing, drinking my tea. With quiet time to think, I made a new plan to think of some way of giving each of my daughters some small thing they want each day, something to make them cheerful and happy about the day. For Sister, it was biscuits and strawberries for breakfast and a trip to the library after school today. For Bean, it was my undivided attention for a couple of hours while Sweet P napped. We went out in the garden together and planted vegetables and sunflowers, dug for worms, and chatted. For Sweet P, I'm vowing to just play with her more rather than popping her into her swing or her bouncy seat so I can blog, send emails, steal a few minutes for a sewing project. Sewing projects are going to have to wait til after the kids are in bed now, I think. It's going to require some focus on my part, but if I get up a little early every day, that may just give me the break I need to be able to do all that for everyone else.

Everyone gets a little something, mama included.

Break

Oy vey! I hope the rest of you out there aren't feeling as stressed and overwhelmed as I am lately! I feel like I just don't get a break anymore since our babysitter has left town for the summer and my mom has my little brothers to keep her from acting as regular grandma. Know what stupid thing happened today? Bean was in the bathroom washing her hands after lunch when all of a sudden she let out a loud wail. My nerves were already pretty jangly after a morning full of wails from both little girls. I come rushing in to see what's happened now and she's in tears because she's tipped over her potty which was apparently full to the brim with pee. Pee is now all over the bathroom rug and floor and Bean is still wailing. I put the baby down in her swing so I can clean the lake of pee and she starts screaming.

It was just the last straw for me, I guess, because then I burst into tears.

I'm over myself now, but jeez! Do I really need to wait til the babysitter is back in town to feel like I'll get a break?

Martha's mac

Like many crafty, nest-feathering women I know, I have a love-hate relationship with Martha Stewart. I kinda love the projects in her magazine. Even if I never do any of them, they look like things I would like to do if I had the time to rustle up some completely dried out tree stumps to turn into coffee tables, or the wherewithal to arrange a few hundred stems of delphinium and larkspur into a graduated color arrangement. No time for that sort of thing, but love to think I might someday.

Then--haaate!--capping off a snarky rant against a certain kind of cookout, this sentence: "And is there a sorrier state of affairs than the one summoned by the words margarita mix?" Here I have to confess that I'm a girl who squeezes her own citrus fruits whenever I make cocktails because it is SO yummy. But would I spurn a prefab cocktail if a cookout host handed me one with a smile? Hell, no! I drink and eat what's served to me, with gratitude and zero snarkiness! This particular article goes on to describe what is apparently the right kind of cookout, offering recipes for fresh peach margaritas, caviar dip, and lobster with drawn butter. I mean, please. Please! This is not a real standard! And this is why I continue to NOT subscribe to Martha's magazine (but do, occasionally, toss an issue into my grocery cart and hope that none of my friends spot me doing it).

Okay, more about what I love, though--a recipe for mac and cheese which hooked me when it mentioned breadcrumbs crisped up in pancetta fat as a topping. My mac and cheese is sadly lacking, so I gave it a whirl. One hour, half a pound of pancetta, one pound of pasta, and TWO POUNDS of FOUR DIFFERENT KINDS OF CHEESE later, I had before me the most sumptuous, kick-ass vat of mac and cheese EVER. I will never make this dish without a 2:1 cheese-to-pasta ratio again. A warning to those of you who eat at my house sometimes. Or perhaps it's a siren song.

I do love a cook who is unafraid to use plenty of the good stuff. All things in moderation, right? Including Martha.