fashionista

I know that I said that I'd be back in the new year, but this girl is cracking me up.  She got two hats for Christmas, a gold and brown colored one (below) and a hand knit one in aquas and pinks (above).  She also got this dress (see below-below) which she wore two days in a row and begged to wear three days, and then four.  On Tuesday we woke to snow, so you can imagine her joy when she got to wear 1. her new birdie dress, again, 2. her snow boots, and 3. a new hat.  I grabbed the gold one out of the drawer and she stomped one of those snow boots promptly down.  

"That is not the matching one", and she grabbed the aqua one and put it on her head.

And she's right. 

And she knows it.

Okay... as you were.  See you back in a few.

holiday message 2011

2011 has been a difficult year and I'm not going to sugar coat it.  I'm glad to see it go.

This may seem a bit harsh, a bit glass-half-empty, a bit whiny, and even a bit ungrateful.  But it's also true, more true than I even wish to share here, in this place that I feel more comfortable sharing in than any other place.

2011 - I'm glad to see it go.

This has been the catch phrase - the theme - that has embedded itself into my brain throughout the year.  You may know by now that I talk to myself in letter form quite frequently.  Words bring order to my thoughts and sometimes I find a good opening sentence can provide just enough structure to my musings to give me the strength to make a decision, perform a task, analyze a situation.  In E's class they call this "the grabber".  Once you've got a good opener you've drawn them in and provided the foundation for the story to follow.

I run into someone I haven't seen in awhile and they ask "How's it going?"  I find myself shrugging, non-committal.  Okay.  So-so.  I can read the questions on their face.  "It's been a tough year," I offer up, a vague explanation of a more complicated formula for the general state of things.  I always smile - it's the optimist in me.  Things do get better, they slow down, they ease up.  Right?

I carried this phrase with me for most of the year.  It started so early, in the month of renewal and promise that January is supposed to be.  It came in the form of a cruel and unjust diagnosis for someone that we love.

It wove its way through our heartbeats, and we felt the stress and the weight of it as we waited for our father, our grandfather, to have his heart that we love so much opened up, scarred, forced to heal in a new way.  We thought we would be the most terrified during those hours when his heart would stop operating on its own, nervous that we had to trust a machine and a pair of hands to bridge the gap between non-function and function, death and life.  Looking back we know now that those hours were not the difficult ones.  The moments of his pain, his discomfort, were the stressful ones.  Make it worth it we whispered in our heads as we tried to work, to eat, to sleep, to play.

Work stress began to pile up, and the hours in the day to get done what needed to be done just weren't there.  So we took them from the nights.  Two years into my title as "underemployed", the shift of roles at work from getting jobs done to trying to find jobs was starting to wear thin.  I'd like to think of my husband as "overemployed" - too many tasks for one person to sanely do.  Our beloved daycare was faced with finding a new home after twenty-three years in the same location, and M's role as simple board member multiplied overnight, and the responsibilities and weight that he carried added into the mix.  I worked late hours each week in long meetings and through stressful presentations in an effort to shape a beautiful, sustainable, functioning church out of our beautiful, dated, sometimes non-functioning one.  Sleep is vital, and we got little of it.
 

The spring brought words like "hospice" and "decline" into our lexicon, and in the span of just a few days we lost two of the most precious people in our lives.  I lost both of my girls' namesakes.  It was a time when we could never be in the right place, and despite all of our family's work throughout the years to remain connected to one another despite our geographical locations, when death comes those distances are magnified and wrought with pain.  In the moments of my deepest, most guttural pain I was alone - in the car, or in the air, surrounded by strangers, so far from home.  The moments of grief did not end, they came in waves.  Dear friends lost their baby, just a few days into this world.  We lost friends at church in an instant.  I attended more funerals in the middle of this year than I had in the entirety of my life.

The summer wore on with no vacation, no respite.  It was a bit of belt-tightening and a bit of practicality.  There simply wasn't the money or the time.  We had started out the year full of hope for new projects to complete and tasks to finish.  Again, there simply wasn't the money or the time.  The list of things that I needed to be working on never shortened, and the weight of those unfinished tasks became heavier and heavier.  I found that I could manage to stay on top of those things that needed to be done in the present, but the underlying things that needed to be done (or that I wanted to do) just never surfaced to the top.  I long ago mastered the art of taking photos of the everyday.  I almost daily upload them to my computer, sort and size them, post them and write about them.  But the photo albums that I had started for both grandmothers and both girls sat unfilled as the months and years ticked by.  The dropping off point was April 2009, and I know that it was because I was well into my pregnancy with the little one, and every waking moment spent outside of work and family was spent studying for an exam.  And then the baby came, and the months piled up, the task growing in size, becoming more daunting with each passing day.
 

The girls celebrated birthdays in late summer in true birthday style, and as the schedules and rituals of the school year started up I suddenly felt the urgent desire to get this one thing done - caught up - on track.  I made a chart on a clipboard of those months of photos and began going through the archives day by day.  Reviewing photos, making copies, sorting them into files for my mother, M's mother, both girls, and a few for the photo wall in the hall so long out of date.  It's a task that takes hours, it can be monotonous, but in little pieces in the evening it was manageable, and sometimes downright enjoyable. 

And then something funny started to happen.

The two places that I found respite from the stress were Sunday mornings in church and in the late night hours sorting those photos on the computer.  After a very sudden and profound loss in our congregation, I remember the words of our pastor talking about those last moments he had spent with our friend, how mundane and ordinary and regular they were.  He talked about moments in his life where he had gone to his spiritual cupboard and it was bare.  I knew that feeling, I know that feeling.  This year had too many of those moments.  And I knew how difficult it was to articulate that feeling.  My real cupboards were not bare.  We are fortunate beyond belief in this way.  Missing a vacation is not missing a mortgage payment or a meal, but the strain of that bare cupboard of a soul can be just as debilitating.  I would fill that cupboard up on Sundays, and then spend weeknights looking back through those moments of our lives - the mundane, the ordinary, the regular.  And God, they are beautiful.  They are full of color and smiles, parks and playgrounds and books and food and family and celebrations and art and toys and school and music and joy.

And then I read this quote, and I have sung it in my head for the past few months, through all of the lettering and the cutting and the printing and the assembling.

For in the dew of little things, the heart finds its morning and is refreshed.  Kahlil Gibran

That was it.  I know that what I strive for most in this life is to enjoy those little things.  Those everyday moments that restore me, refresh me, give me the strength to keep going and moving and making and doing.  I feel the strain of the times, and I know you do to.  I talk about this with friends, with family.  It's not been an easy road for anyone of late.  I hope that if I know you personally and you receive one of those frames in the mail that you will take a moment this holiday season to find an example of one of those "moments" to frame for yourself.  And if we just meet in this space, thank you for visiting.  Your presence here lifts me up daily, and I am always grateful to share these moments with you in this way.

Thank goodness for a season that reminds us to focus on the little things: the candlelight, the familiar carol, the tiny baby.  Thank goodness for the places that we can go to restock our spiritual cupboards: our sanctuaries, our gardens, our kitchens, our homes.  Thank goodness for those little things we make and do and share and love.

Happy Holidays to you and yours and best wishes for the New Year from the four of us.  I'll meet you back here in 2012.

admiring

For a week or two I've been admiring Geoffrey Keating's handcrafted furniture.  Design*Sponge did a feature on his work, and the piece that first got me was that desk with all of those lovely little drawers.  If you don't think I could fill that thing in about two minutes flat, well... then you don't know me very well.  The stool keeps me coming back though - gorgeous.  I'd pull a few of those up to the giant work station of my dreams.  (I get a little dreamy about dedicated studio space while I'm working on those Christmas cards...)  He has a gorgeous website, and a wait list I'm sure, so I won't hold my breath that these are coming down a chimney anytime soon!

unbendable

Unbendable:  Firmly, often unreasonably immovable in purpose or will: adamant, adamantine, brassbound, die-hard, grim, implacable, incompliant, inexorable, inflexible, intransigent, iron, obdurate, relentless, remorseless, rigid, stubborn, unbending, uncompliant, uncompromising, unrelenting, unyielding. Idioms: stubborn as a mule. See resist/yield.

December 19:  After being a bit nervous at the, ahem, heft of my Christmas cards once I assembled one, I decided to run by the post office and make sure the single forever stamp I had affixed to the envelope over a month ago would be sufficient.  I first weighed it on the postage scale in the office (2.3 ounces), and as best I could tell from online sources I knew I was going to be out another stamp of some sort of denomination.  When I handed over my test envelope the postal worker laid it on the scale, typed in the sample zip code and various numbers flashed across the screen.  Eighty-four cents was at the top of the list, and I knew for a few pennies more an envelope I was looking at a second ornament stamp for the bunch. 

Then she picked it up and gently gave it a bend.  Nothing.  I knew it wouldn't give - there was a layer of mat board inside that envelope, stretching rigidly from end to end. 

It's unbendable," she said, typed a few more characters into her computer, and the numbers on the screen changed.  $1.28 it read.  She explained that because the letter could not bend, it was considered a different type of letter, thus requiring a flat rate fee to ship.  Perhaps it's because it cannot roll through an automated machine and will require hand cancelling, perhaps because there will be mailboxes too small to slide it into, it will need to be delivered to the front door.  She made a move to print out a label to make up the difference in postage but I stopped her.  "It's not just for this one, I have a hundred," I explained, and she started dealing out the books onto the counter while I reached into my wallet to pay the bill.

The synonyms for unbendable are not too flattering.  Grim, relentless, unyielding?  But I was committed now, and I suppose you could say uncompromising.  The attribute I think that I strive most for in this life is flexibility.  It doesn't come naturally to me, but I work at it.  So I guess sometimes going with the flow can also mean unbendable.  They seem to occupy different corners of the arena, but there is a similar undercurrent to both of them.  And like the Christmas season, once you're in it, you're in it.  And even the careful planning and the diligent oversight sometimes have to take a backseat to the reality that you made a hundred little presents that need to go on their rigid little way.  I swiped the card and didn't give it another thought.  Unbendable?  Absolutely.  It's Christmas, after all.

to-do list

Is your to-do list winding down this week - or ramping up?

I find myself getting to a tipping point every December that teeters precariously upon the insertion of one hundred envelopes into a mailbox.  Much like we date points in history with BC and AD, I balance the ongoing to-do list in my head the same way.  Call it "Before Cards" and "After Delivery".  A few nights ago I was sitting on that seesaw, my end as high up in the air as the device would allow - as if an elephant were perched on the opposite seat, not budging one bit.  As I worked through the weekend, bouncing from pile to pile and task to task, my seat slowly lowered towards the ground and I could see the end in sight.  There are always moments when I feel like I'm dangling off the ground and in need of a good, firm grounding (or a nice long nap), but for the most part I enjoy the challenge, the busyness and then the relief.  The joy of completion, the triumph over time.  Tomorrow I'll slide those out-of-town envelopes into the box, and on Wednesday the local friends' will follow.  Looking forward to that, and the relaxation time to come.  And glad I tackled this personal challenge once again (even if the last minute postage snafu nearly kicked my tail!).

baby shower, part two

 

The take home favors for the baby shower were these gingerbread onesies with some coordinating baby animal toys.  I love this gingerbread recipe - it's always a favorite.  It cuts beautifully into cookies that hold their shape and are sturdy enough for packaging, but when you bite into it, it's super soft and heavy on the ginger.  I was particularly happy with these cookies - sometimes simple and sweet (and a little bit spicy) is just the ticket.

baby shower, part one

I did some baking for a baby shower this morning.  The baby-to-be is a boy, and the theme of the shower was animals, with a neutral sort of vintage, old school feel.  The mom-to-be doesn't like chocolate, but does like flavors like carrot cake and spiced goodness, so I decided to do two flavors of cupcakes that I think fit the bill.  The first was a meyer lemon cupcake with a tart cranberry filling, and meyer lemon cream cheese frosting.  I tend to always go back to Cupcake Bakeshop for recipe inspiration.  She is always spot on, and this time was no exception.  The cupcakes were moist and buttery, and I used the cone method of removing the center, filling it with the cranberries, and then replacing the top.  All evidence of sneakery is hidden under that delicious frosting.  I hope no one wears a white shirt to the event. 

The second cupcake flavor was a carrot-ginger cupcake with organic carrots, fresh ginger and candied ginger.  It also had toasted pecans in the mix and was delicious for breakfast which is when I tried one.  The frosting on that cupcake is a vanilla cream cheese frosting, and I topped each one with a gingerbread "animal cracker".  Yum.  Just the right amount of spice and winter sweetness for a December baby shower.

I'll post the cookie favors later.

christmas kitchen

 

More to follow...

friday finds: with dad

 

I had a pretty full day today, and while I was at a doctor's appointment, F went downtown for lunch with dad.  The highlight of the trip was the gigantic tree in the lobby of his office building.  Or maybe it was walking around downtown, or hanging out in his office by the windows on the nineteenth floor.  Or the bagels.  Who knows?  There's always something fun and magical to find when you get to go to work with dad.

 

I like the weird perspective in the photo above - it looks like super baby, with little, tiny grownups in the distance.  Thanks for pinch hitting with the photos, M.  And for always making the hectic schedule that is our life work.

good job sissy

E performed in her winter concert Tuesday night.  It's one of those events that I like to have a camera for, but I get torn between just wanting to sit and watch the performance vs. trying to wrangle a halfway decent shot.  I chose to sit for most of it, and tried to sneak one in at the end.  And then I tried not to annoy everyone with a gigantic flash so this is the best I got.  Thank goodness for friends who send iPhone pictures like the bottom one.  (Thanks RH!)  If we were smart, we'd get one person with a camera to take subtle photos throughout, and tell everyone else to just sit down and listen.  But cameras and phones are everywhere, and you can't watch anything without seeing a dozen rectangles held up in the air, recording every moment.

Somehow this post turned into a speech on digital recordings rather than an elementary school recital.  Back to my regular programming now...

I love watching E play, and really love listening to her practice at home.  What an amazing transformation over the past three and a half years.  The best part was watching her little sister throw her arms around her when she was done.  F is fascinated that her sister can make music come out of that instrument, and she is hands down her biggest fan.  (Her grandparents come in at a close second - they drove 660 miles round trip to see her play for fifteen minutes!)

tis the season: for thank you notes

Bookmark this site, and check in each morning.  Daily gratitude with a twist.  You'll thank me, I promise.

brown paper packages

This year our presents to others are wrapped in brown paper and covered in drawings.  Our gifts have to travel in a couple of different directions, so years ago we learned not to cover them in ribbons and bows.  I like the simplicity of having a nice roll of brown kraft paper on hand, and once we stopped having to sell and buy gift wrap for school fundraisers, I stopped buying gift wrap altogether.  I reuse the boxes from the office - we always have tons on hand - and then when I'm sitting down relaxing with family I doodle.  If you know me very well, you know that I don't sit still - at least not for very long.  And if you've ever sat next to me in a meeting, you'll know that I have a pen going the entire time.  It's much more fun to draw on Christmas gifts and think of the recipient than to sit through long meetings.  Maybe I should show up at the next one with a few brown paper packages, a black pen and a white colored pencil.  I might get a few looks, but I'd be sure to get a lot done.

busy

One of the reasons I have this camera focused on this one so much is because of the expressiveness of her face.  Occasionally she catches me watching, but for the most part she's in her own little world - talking or singing to herself, acting out a series of conversations with the things around her.  Here she is taking in the Christmas trains at the garden for the second day in a row.

ten on ten ::december 2011

sorting :: stashing ::  licking ::  Christmas trains ::  our candy shop ::  filling pez ::  dessert ::  first movie (and first popcorn) :: after dinner with friends :: back home - four sleepy people 

I haven't participated in awhile - the tenth of the month sometimes slips by before I realize it, but this was a day of doing some of those favorite Christmastime things, and then celebrating with a movie and dinner with dear friends. Enjoy.