Fall

Autumn has always been my favorite season.  The cool, crisp weather feels like Taiwan in the wintertime.  Since moving to State College, however, I’ve come to really enjoy spring.  I love the bright yellow-green leaves and all the flowering trees in our neighborhood.  Even winter isn’t so bad here, with a lot less snow and gloominess than Western NY.

Unfortunately, I’ve been remarkably unimpressed with this entire year’s showing of seasons.  We had a long, dark winter.  Spring was ridiculously brief (and allergy-inducing).  Summer was hot and miserable.  Fall, so far, has been rainy.  And, horrors, A successfully built a snowman in October.

BUT–today was beautiful.  The sun was shining; the temperature was in the 60s.  For the first time in a while, I realized how gorgeous our backyard is.  Tomorrow promises to be a similarly perfect day.  

I dare this year to redeem itself.

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Go to sleep, little squirrel

I can’t sing. It’s true.* The only person who would argue is P, but he doesn’t count. I have enough of a musical ear that I can tell when something sounds bad (which is why singing is probably frustrating to me–I can’t stand that I have no range and have trouble hitting each note).
At any rate, I find myself singing a lot more these days because I have a preschooler who likes to sing and I also have a newborn who is soothed by lullabies. Thankfully they are not judgmental.
It didn’t take me long after having A to realize that my lullaby repertoire is severely lacking. Most often I would find myself making up crap to the tune of Brahm’s lullaby:

Go to sleep, little girl
Go to sleep now, my baby
Go to sleep, little girl
You’re the sweetest in the world.

Go to sleep, go to sleep
Go to sleep now my baby.
Go to sleep, go to sleep
Go to sleep now my girl.

Can you tell that I’m a little weak in the lyrics department? (Hilariously enough, whenever P makes up songs to sing to A or L, he almost always ends up rhyming “girl” with “squirrel.” So we end up singing about squirrels a lot.)

Anyway, the point of this is that I don’t know a lot of lullabies. There was one lullaby album (on cassette when I was growing up, of course) that I loved as a child and sometimes I sing songs from that. But my unfamiliarity with kids’ songs means that I’ve had to adapt other songs as lullabies.

Here are some of the songs my girls hear fairly regularly (linked when possible):

• Bob Marley–“Three Little Birds” (To be fair, this is oft-adapted as a kids’ song by various artists)
• “Edelweiss” (I don’t know all the words to this. Often I end up singing about my elementary school principal, because a friend’s mom rewrote the lyrics for him when he retired: “Mr. Wentz will go from hence, and (?) twenty-six years of service. We’d like to sing our thanks to him, although we’re all a bit nervous!”)
• various hymns (I always go back to “Like a River Glorious,” for some reason. That and “I’ve Got Peace Like a River.” Rivers must be calming.)
• The Beatles–“Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” (A’s favorite)
• The Wallflowers–“Josephine” (Really, only the chorus. L smiled at me when I first sang this to her, which obviously means that she likes it, right?
• John Denver–“Annie’s Song” (Always reminds me of my dad, a Denver fan. If I think too hard about this song, it makes me cry.)
• Michael Learns to Rock–“Sleeping Child” (Yes, I sing my daughters cheesy Danish rock)
• Counting Crows–“Long December“

*Proof that I can’t sing? I once volunteered to lead worship at the church I attended in college. The congregation was made up of mostly elderly folks and they had no one to lead in the singing, so they resorted to having everyone singing along to MIDI files. NO JOKE. I felt so bad that I figured anything is better than a MIDI file, right? WRONG. I led worship once and was never asked to lead again.)

Quiet afternoon

A is not allowed to watch TV for the rest of the week because she complained when I turned off PBS when it was time for her nap.  So far, she’s had the best afternoon she’s had in a while.  (Maybe TV is the devil, at least for our particular kid.)  We read Peter Rabbit and she went down for a nap without a fuss, which might be the first in a long time.  She woke up happy and we’ve been playing with her birthday Play-Doh (and snacking on bananas, peach bread, and coffee–for me) ever since.

Watching her concentrate on various creations is so much fun.  And I am thankful for the millionth time that she got her dad’s eyelashes, not mine!

A minor obsession

During our visit to Naples for R and S’s wedding, R’s mom stocked the lodge refrigerator with all sorts of goodies.  My favorite treat, by far, was the peach bread from Joseph’s Wayside Market.  I kept going back to the fridge to sneak slices and, on our way home, we decided to go a bit out of our way to stop by the Market to pick up a loaf to take with us (we were also on the hunt for Arbor Hill black raspberry preserves–delicious!).

I made the loaf of peach bread last a whole week and a half but finished off the last slice last Friday.

Tonight, I decided to try my hand at peach bread.  I just found a random recipe online (bad idea) and went to town.  The verdict?  Bleh.  My peach bread is okay but completely misses the pound cake-like texture of THE peach bread.  I’m not really one to experiment with recipes nor have I necessarily ever been on a quest to track down something to recreate at home, but this might just change that.

Realizing that it is tough to make a hunk of something brown look appetizing.  Need to work on my food photography, that’s for sure!

Lucky

I’ve been feeling a little silly lately, realizing that almost all my Facebook statuses (because, of course, that is the true barometer of real life) are related to parenthood/my children. I’ve wondered if the funny things A says are really the most interesting part of my life (according to FB feedback, the answer is a resounding YES).

My friend AR and I were talking about parenthood recently and she mentioned a friend of hers who has had a tough transition to motherhood, fighting the change of her identity from person to mother. AR said something about understanding the difficulties, but also feeling like parenthood shouldn’t be that much of a fight.

That really hit home. I certainly am guilty of “fighting” motherhood. As evidenced by my little FB status insecurity above, I get panicky when I feel like my entire life is consumed by my kids. I might even have to admit that a big motivation to be back in school is my desire to have something other than motherhood define me. (Really, this is me being a broken record because this theme has come up OVER AND OVER in the past three years.)

That said, at this very moment, I am feeling content with the balance in my life. I turned in a paper yesterday and successfully completed a group assignment. I slept in this morning and have spent the afternoon so far catching up on e-mails and cleaning the kitchen. Anna is upstairs napping and Lucy is right here, sleeping on my chest in the front-carrier. After P gets home from work, we will go to pick up our CSA share, then we might make a stop at the library to pick up the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, which I have yet to read (!!) and which we hope will be a good choice for our first foray into chapter-book bedtime reading for A. Then home again to make dinner and do more house-related chores before A goes down for the night and P settles in to do some reading for class tomorrow.

I still feel some envy when I think about my friends with careers and social lives.  But when the day comes when my life is more clearly defined by my job, I know I will miss these days.

Yes, that is a pile of laundry behind L.

**incidentally, A just woke up from her nap. I offered her a graham cracker and she exclaimed, “I’m so LUCKY… if you want one, I can share mine with you!” Yep, my kids are the most interesting aspect of my life right now and really, that makes ME lucky, right?

Adjustments

I completed my first year of graduate school as a mother of a two year old (and I was also pregnant for the entirety of the second semester).  With the exception of a few particular points (mid-terms, finals, and group project deadlines), it was not difficult.  P was working full-time but did not take any classes and A was in part-time daycare.  This meant that I had free time for homework in between classes, and anytime I needed extra time in the evenings, P took over childcare and I could escape to the library, a coffee shop, anywhere away from the house.  I essentially did all my assignments in the same back room at the library or holed up in a study carrel late at night in the almost completely dark law school library.

This year, A is three and is in half-day preschool (and we plan to stop her enrollment mid-October, since my parents will be with us until Christmas).  P is still working full-time but is also taking two classes.  I am only taking one class.  L was two and a half weeks old when classes began (she is seven weeks old now).

Because I’m only taking one class, which meets once a week for three hours, I fully expected the school-home juggle to be easier this semester.  And yeah, in some ways, it has been.  I like only having one class’s assignments and deadlines to keep track of.  But over the weekend, it became apparent that we will have to be more intentional about everything this year!  First of all, A is so much more demanding of our time as a preschooler than she was as a toddler.  Secondly, both P and I are students, which means that I can no longer assume that P will be free in the evenings if I need to take a couple of hours to do homework (since he very well might have homework, as well).  Lastly, I had forgotten how much attention a newborn needs!  L is a sweet, easy baby, but is less content to not be held than A was at her age.  I sat down to write a paper last night and everything took four times as long because I was simultaneously trying to keep L happy.  I’d sit to write for a few minutes with L on the swing… L would fuss, so I would move her to the front-carrier… fifteen minutes later she would want to move again.  It was just hard to keep any sort of momentum going on my work.

P and I have agreed that the days of procrastination have to be put behind us if we’re going to survive this semester.  We need to plan everything the week ahead and take turns covering childcare so the other person can fully focus on whatever work is at hand.  We learned the hard way last night, but hopefully this single experience of both having to start the week on 2-3 hours of sleep will ensure that we’ll plan things better next time!

Saturday

My ideal Saturday morning consists of sleeping in, waking up to the smell of coffee, and enjoying said coffee over a book (or, to be completely honest, Google reader).  Either that or meeting a friend for brunch downtown.

Our 3-year-old, A, often climbs into our bed once daylight hits (That is our rule for her–stay in bed until daylight.  We established this rule over the winter and paid for it over the summer, when the sun rises at 5 AM), and we spend the next hour or two cuddling in our tiny bed and dozing in and out of sleep.  When A finally decides that she is too awake to stay in bed, P gets up with her to get her breakfast and lets me continue to snooze with L.  P then often whips up brunch or works on a backyard project while A eats and plays (and I sleep).  It is glorious.  Saturday mornings remind me of how lucky I am to have married someone unlike me–someone who doesn’t find the appeal of being lazy just for the sake of it

On this particular Saturday, P’s working on the back patio.  A had cereal and blueberries for breakfast and is now splashing around in the bathtub.  L is snoozing in her bouncer.  I caught up on e-mails over coffee and pumpkin bread.  Soon we will head to the grocery store to do some much-needed shopping.  Later, we hope to make an appearance at the annual Great Insect Fair.  We will then spend the evening at our CSA’s farm for hayrides, a potluck, and all sorts of other early Fall festivities.  Then hopefully we’ll be back home for A’s bedtime, after which I have a paper to write.

Happy Saturday.

Personal history

My first real diary was a hardcover Babysitters Club tie-in “journal” that I ordered from Scholastic. I wrote things like, “This year, I want a boy to like me,” something I remember specifically being more related to peer pressure than any real interest in particular boys.  There was a lot of angst directed towards my parents and siblings.  I still have the book somewhere in my parents’ house, probably in the bottom of the single plastic bin that still contains leftover belongings that I couldn’t bear to part with, yet didn’t want to bring to college. I know for a fact that the journal smells like Stimerol gum, as I taped a chewed-up piece as a memento to one of the first pages.

During the one year of high school I spent in the Ph, I carried a little blue notebook around and wrote in it obsessively. I believe the first entry was about a family visit to a fancy hotel–something about how the outdoor space would be perfect for “______’s and my garden wedding.” (I am cringing as I write this.) That year marked my first true infatuation (I vividly recall the moment I realized that the feeling of having “butterflies in your stomach” is a cliche for a reason) and my first broken heart. I was fourteen and it was all innocent, thank heavens, but man was that book full of roiling emotion. I have no idea where this book is. I hope I burned it.

I bought a fresh, faux-suede journal right before leaving to study abroad in England my second semester of college. There was a little cut-out for a picture in front, and I promptly inserted a portion of my tube-map in it. I know for a fact that this journal is sitting in a wine box in my closet, right this very minute. I didn’t write in this journal too frequently, but revisited it every few months, mostly to write about boys (seriously–I even dissected interactions with boys long gone–good grief), my hopes and dreams, my conflicting impulses, my uncertainty about what the future might hold. I was about as innocently self-obsessed as most college students are in that period when they discover the world for the first time. I remember writing while lying in my bunk in Belfast, during the brief two-week sojourn I took across the UK after my program ended. I wrote about desperately wanting to hold on to the version of me that I had found in England. I was also dating someone for real and wrote about our future so tentatively, so insecurely, that when I re-read my old entries, I feel painfully protective of my former self.

I returned to college the summer after that term in England, newly single and eager to jump into a new life. It was 2002 and I jumped into the world of blogging. My first blog’s original url was eventually phased out because it included an underscore. I posted regularly on that blog for EIGHT YEARS. I started blogging before I realized that people could get famous, could earn MONEY for blogging (a realization that gives many casual bloggers nowadays a sense of failure that was foreign to me back then)–truly, I blogged for my little brother and perhaps a tiny handful of college friends. I finally set up the old blog (which included my full name) to automatically forward people here (a more anonymous site), as no one who meets me in a professional setting now needs to be able to learn about about the countless hours I spent at the pool table in 2003 through a Google search of my name.

Before my second semester abroad (my junior year of college), I realized that I couldn’t depend on blogging, as I was to live in a tent without electricity for 4 months, so I picked up a plain black sketchbook from the campus store and tried to learn how to write again. This marked my most prolific period of journaling. I even wrote poetry freely, for the first and only time of my life. I filled four or five of those black notebooks (the three from the semester in TZ are charmingly grimy) within two years and only stopped journaling when I met my now-husband. Both of stopped journaling abruptly not long after we started dating, a fact that made us both nervous (were we trying to hide something from ourselves?) until we realized that our communication with each other via e-mails, conversations, etc. took the place of our journals. I suppose that is acceptable. (As my friends and I concluded, the wonder of having a partner is having a witness to your life. So P is the lucky (?) recipient of my emotional dumping.)

Upon the birth of A, I started a new blog in order to write monthly letters to her (I still maintain this, although a bit more erratically). I think even then I realized that I didn’t need my letters to my daughter to share a url with ramblings by my college self. I opened a Tumblr account, then another just for pictures, and now I’m blogging here. Kind of.

I write about how embarrassingly narcissistic my old diaries were but gee, here I am writing about my own journaling history at 12:38 AM. I am not trying to fool anyone into believing that my blogging now is any more mature or meaningful. But as I fumble around, trying to find an online home, trying to figure out how to journal or write or blog again, I can’t help but revisit old entries and feel grateful that I had taken the time, at certain points, to pinpoint what I was doing, what I was eating, what crazy thoughts were in my head. Really, I still write for my little brother (my one regular reader), but honestly? I am writing for me. For future me, who will certainly get a kick out of this someday.

This can’t be good for my back

This Flickr set really caught my eye, as I love seeing what people carry around in their bags.

After looking through the set, my brother asked me to post the contents of my bag and I complied (click on the pic to read notes):

As you can see, these are the contents of my backpack, not my purse*.  I cheated a bit by not including garbage (receipts, printouts from class, crumpled-up Post-its) and realized too late that I had removed my cellphone from the arrangement when I went to pick up A right before taking the picture above.    Sometimes I also carry a small umbrella.

I was a bit surprised to see how generic my bag contents are.  Objectively, I guess one would be able to ascertain that I like to read and I like gadgets.  One would probably be able to guess that I’m female.  It might not be too difficult to surmise that I am a student.  Other than that, though, there’s not too much that is surprising or unexpected (besides the Christmas ornament, I guess–it’s still a mystery how it got in my bag).

*My purse contents would differ in that I’d probably have a spare diaper for Anna, no laptop, and no textbook or stapler.

Growing up

I turned 28 on Sunday.  Usually, sometime during a birthday, someone will ask me if I “feel any different” now that I am a year older.  That question usually seems a bit absurd to me but this time, much to my surprise, I found myself answering in the affirmative.

I suspect that it’s largely due to the fact that the other students in my grad program are as young as 22 (it was made explicit to me by more than one classmate that we were never in high school at the same time) and, while I don’t feel old and certainly don’t envy their youth, it is clear that we are living very different lives.  Or maybe it’s because we bought a house this year.  Maybe I’m realizing how close I am to 30.  Whatever it is, I actually DO feel older this year.

A always refers to Daddy as a “big boy,” herself as a “little girl,” and Mommy as a “special girl.”  I have no idea where she came up with these designations, but the other day I thought I should teach her to call grown-ups “men” and “women.”  I told her that Daddy’s a man and Mommy’s a woman.  I believe that might have been the first time I have ever called myself a woman, as opposed to a girl.  Almost overnight, I feel like an adult, a realization I didn’t expect to ever happen.

One other thing I love about being older is that birthdays are now a lot more fun.  I used to drive myself to anxiety anticipating my birthday, setting up expectations that were unlikely at best and impossible at worst.  I remember so many emotions riding on whether or not people would remember that it was my birthday.  I remember wanting to celebrate with a party one year but was too embarrassed to plan one for myself.  Now, all that anxiety seems like such a waste of emotions.  P had a nightmare a few weeks ago that I was mad at him because he had gone all day forgetting it was my birthday.  When he told me about the dream, I laughed out loud and told him that he can rest assured that he could never go all day forgetting my birthday because I would simply remind him.  It just isn’t that big of a deal anymore.  If I want to celebrate my birthday, I would just call some friends and have them over.  This year I didn’t want a present* (dude, we have a new house) and was too busy to have a party.  And it was a great birthday.

*Despite my protestations that I didn’t need a present, my super generous older brother gave me a Kindle for my birthday.  I am really excited about the actual device but just as cool is the fact that we decided to all read the same books together, which will be yet another way to keep in touch with my brothers.