horses of courses

Sunday, nov. 8, 2009   |   0 comments

Behold! Our mantle bedecked with two gigantic ceramic horse heads!

Don’t you love how they’re all, “I’ll just shove my head through this here semipermeable wall…Oh! Hello farmer people! What’s for dinner?”

These pretty horses used to hang out in the house of my dearest friend, Sophia, and I was always very vocal about how deeply I coveted them. So when she inexplicably found herself ready to move on (I know!), she gifted them in our direction. So stinking awesome!

The heads had, however, seen some action over the years, and there were some visible wears and tears from old earthquake-slash-small-children-related injuries. I was about ten million months pregnant when I finally got my hot, swollen mitts on them, and I immediately became fixated — with the special intensity of the vastly pregnant — on getting them fixed and hung before the baby came. Meanwhile we’d only just moved into our house, and the stove, dishwasher, and washer-dryer were all still yet to be installed. Also we had no heat. Nor hot water. And I was about a week shy of my due date.

So the scene was this: Dirty, sweaty, swearing Marco, feverishly trying to get these major appliances up and running. He’s racing around, the power’s going off and on, and the air is tinged with the delicate scent of what can only be described as “gas leak.” And then there’s me, sitting on the floor, quietly painting in the cracks of some ceramic horse heads with an itty, bitty brush.

It seemed important at the time?

the annie and eric show

Friday, nov. 6, 2009   |   0 comments

Yeah, I guess we like Annie and Eric’s paintings and prints okay:

Either that, or we’re turning our house into a gallery dedicated to their work? That would explain all the cheap wine.

(Get your own affordable and frame-able slices of happy via my favorite Annie and Eric’s website, 3 Fish Studios!)

wonder bump

Friday, nov. 6, 2009   |   0 comments

Back when I was about eight months pregnant, we needed the city to sign off on some of plans we had submitted for our ultra ambitious, cliched “pregnant lady in nesting mode” kitchen remodel. The planning department had been sitting on the paperwork for over a month, and we were getting frantic — any delay meant we were in danger of losing our insanely slender-margin-ed race against time to get into the house before the baby arrived.

So I put on my green maternity dress, the one that made me look extra specially pregnant…

…and I waddled down to the city offices.

Me: “Hi, I’m here to pick up our plans?”

Lady behind the desk, after typing in my information: “I’m sorry, they aren’t ready yet.”

Me: “Is there anything I can do to speed things up? We’ve been waiting over a month, and we need those plans signed before we can move into our house. Meanwhile we’re paying both the mortgage and rent, money we can’t really afford to waste, seeing as [pointing at gigantic bump] we’ve got a baby on the way…”

Lady: “We’re still waiting on a signature, and the man who needs to sign it isn’t in the office yet.”

Me, sweetly: “I can wait.”

Lady: “He won’t be here for at least an hour. Maybe two.”

Me: “That’s fine. I’ll wait.”

She shot me a nervous look as I lowered myself into a seat at the counter, closed my eyes, cupped my belly, and started practicing my breathing exercises, slowly and audibly.

A few minutes passed, then the lady placed a quiet call, her hand cupped over her mouth. Moments later a man came out from the offices in back, I’m pretty sure he was the head of the whole operation.

Honcho: “Let’s see…it’s been awhile since I’ve done this. Now where do I sign?”

And just like that, our planning woes were solved. All thanks to the mighty power of the wonder bump!

Now we’re looking down the barrel of our big final inspection, and we could really use some magic on our side. But sadly I’ve lost my baby stomach…more or less. Perhaps it’s time to invest in a prosthetic pregnancy belly?

love letter to a cloth diaper

Thursday, nov. 5, 2009   |   0 comments

Over the past months, we have received many a great baby-related gift — incredible hand-knit sweaters, body- and heart-warming blankets, gorgeous hand-written checks…the works. We’ve also purchased more than a few items ourselves — swings, tinctures, salves, batteries. But out of this blessed mountain of lovely and practical stuff, possibly the most valuable acquisitions we’ve received so far are the dozen or so plain old cloth diapers that (I think?) Natalie recommended we register for, and that (I think?) Erin and Adrienne actually purchased for us.

Above and beyond their intended use as a catchall for a baby’s hindmost quarters, plain old cloth diapers, it turns out, have no end of ingenious uses.

They swab up spit-up, clean up coffee spills, and protect the changing pad when the changing pad cover has already been soaked in pee yet someone (Marco! Or wait…no, that was I. Many apologies from Past Me!) forgets to replace it. They prove handily absorbent for tears shed over Anne of Green Gables, a happy rediscovery from a box of childhood books recently rescued from my parents’ attic.

They also help the baby sleep. Per Van Halen, our cradle indeed rocks. Unfortunately, rather than sooth Desmo to sleep, all that the traditional side-to-side rocking does is stimulate him into bright-eyed, bushy-tailed wakefulness. But! By wedging cloth diapers under both rockers, we have been able to totally take back the night:

Plain old cloth diapers are even powerful enough to keep the baby asleep during a deafening nail storm:

Note: As you can see, longitudinal rocking (vs. the cradle’s latitudinal rocking) as produced by his swing is for some reason fine. He is a very particular baby. We try to use the swing only sparingly, however, because my gut tells me the sleep it provides isn’t as wholesome as the zzz produced by more stationary bedding. But sometimes the swing is the only thing that works. Parenting, I’m finding, is full of last (vs. tropical) resorts.

local food movement

Wednesday, nov. 4, 2009   |   0 comments

Something about motherhood seems to be making me eat like Cookie Monster, where only about 27% of what I attempt to ingest actually makes it into my mouth. And since the baby is frequently in close proximity to these feeding frenzies, he catches the bulk of the fallout, like a passive remora collecting food around a shark’s mouth. Witness…

Food eaten by me only to be later discovered on my baby’s person:
> Macaroni and cheese, found tangled in his hair
> Black bean soup, discovered hours after lunch on his left pant leg
> Ice cream, dripped upon and then eaten off of his right arm
> One sesame seed, unearthed deep down the back of his diaper

And for his part, Desi has spit up on my back, front, and everywhere in between, sending his breastmilk back with a vehemence bordering on rudeness.

Back and forth we go, spilling and dribbling on each other in the world’s slowest, most protracted food fight.