New home, new blog

Hello faithful readers . . .

When I decided to get back into blogging after our recent move I felt like I needed a bit of a fresh start. Find me writing again over at Life Together. Everything that is here is there and I'll keep this up, at least for awhile, to keep links working.

paying it forward

My old friend Ginger used to live in DC just a few houses down from me. Since I can no longer be inspired by her creativity and energy in person I am an avid reader of her blog and I'm not ashamed to admit that I jumped at the chance to get a handmade item from her some time in the next year or so. I felt even less bad because I can definitely credit Ginger with directly inspiring me to finally learn to knit. Just a few days before she posted this blog chain I had gifted myself with a book and materials to begin knitting. This book was highly recommended by an accomplished knitter and though I'm excited about working through it I definitely don't need to keep all those projects for myself.

I'm not sure I even have three readers on this blog right now but if you want to play, here are the rules:

1. Be one of the first three bloggers to leave a comment on this post, which then entitles you to a handmade item from me.
2. Winners, you must post this on your blog, meaning that you will "Pay It Forward," creating a handmade gift for the first three to leave a comment on your post about your giveaway!
3. You have 365 days to make/ship your item. And, remember: It’s the spirit and the thought that count!
4. When you receive your gift, please feel free to blog about it, sharing appropriate linky love! If you are not one of the first three to comment on this post, you can still play along. Start your own "Pay It Forward" chain and encourage your blogging friends to do the same!

You'll probably get a knitted item from me but you never know what creative juices will begin to flow once I get the crafting bug.

Coming Home

Ernest Hemingway wrote about Michigan from a Paris cafe. He said he could only write about his home from a distance. Like a Seurat painting or--to put a more modern spin on it?--an HD TV, the picture is only clear after obtaining a certain distance.

We've spent the last year living in Minnesota. I didn't blog much in Minnesota. It's not that I gave up blogging or that I was more busy than usual (sure, I had a baby, but there's always something), I just didn't get to it. I never felt that I had anything to say. It's not that we had a bad year--our time in Minnesota was lovely. We made some wonderful friends whom I will miss a great deal. We spent lots and lots of time with Eric's family and our kids had the incredible blessing of living very close to grandparents. We got to see parts of the country we hadn't explored before. Eric's home is the Midwest--he grew up in Madison and went to college in St. Paul where his family now lives. It was very, very good to gain more familiarity with my husband's home but I found myself, for the first time, missing mine.

I was struck, in part, by the intense loyalty to their home that I saw in people from Minnesota and Wisconsin. I used to joke that my husband's family had a religious devotion to Wisconsin but I found that his family was far from unique. I was even more flabbergasted once winter came: these people endure weeks of sub zero weather and, for some reason, do not move away once its warm enough to go outside.

Joking aside, the turning point in the year was, I think, our trip to New England in October. We had a friend's wedding and a 50th Wedding Anniversary party to attend so we went for ten days. I grew up in a very small New England town and it had been years since I'd been home in the fall which is a famously glorious time to be in that part of the country. There were many moments of nostalgia, to be sure, but there was also an acute sense of being home. My knowledge of being from somewhere was deepened. Just a few days into that trip Eric got laid off over the phone and our life felt completely upside down. Our time in Minnesota felt all-the-more temporary.

Shortly after that trip I got an e-mail invitation to my 10th High School Reunion. It was sort of out-of-nowhere and when I mentioned it to my mom she casually mentioned that she'd gotten some mail for me on the subject but had tossed it assuming I'd have no interest. Not too long ago she would have been right but I suddenly realized that I was pretty disappointed to miss seeing my high school classmates. I was intensely curious about what had become of them all.

Eric landed his full-time teaching position in the winter and we ended up spending the second half of our year in Minnesota preparing to leave. While we still enjoyed family, friends, and the sub-zero weather our hearts were already looking forward to what would become our home. My sister convinced me not too long ago to get on Facebook to keep in touch with our adult cousins and I was suddenly connected--for, really, the first time in over ten years--with people I'd grown up with. There they were, other people from that small New England town, living their lives. Some are married, some have kids. Many of them still live in our hometown or very close by. And here we are, about to move to the city that my children, very likely, will know as home when they are grown.

It seems likely that we are finally settling for good and I am so grateful for that. I am also grateful that we will be living close enough to my hometown to easily go back and visit Grandma for a long weekend. But we'll be far enough--just far enough--to step back from my home and see it and, I hope, reflect a bit on the importance of place and roots and community and belonging.

Starting school

Hello loyal readers (and you are loyal indeed if my blog is still on your reading list after such a long break). I could write several posts, at least, on all the reasons I haven't posted all summer. Chiefly, we moved to Minnesota and that has taken a lot of time and energy. But more immediately, I don't have any idea where regular blogging can fit into my life right now. So I've had moments here and there when I could have written something but I never wanted to give the impression that I was "back to blogging" only to take off for three months again. What's the word for this kind of "all or nothing" personality of mine? It does not serve me well.

So I'm going to dive in here on one of the gazillion topics I've been wanting to write about lately and I'm going to start with the easy one: we started school.

Joseph will be four in October. I think, actually, that in most school districts he would not be eligible to start kindergarten until Fall of 2010 which is just incomprehensible to me. I have many, many unschooling and "Better Late than Early" tendencies and I struggled with how much--and how formally--to attack the whole school thing this year. In the end I decided that Joseph and I would both benefit tremendously from some structured time together each day. My crazy daughter has taken up most of my time and energy for the last two years and my laid-back son has really gotten the short end of the stick. Margaret still naps two hours every afternoon and Joseph almost never naps. Our routine is that I get Margaret to sleep after lunch, have an hour to nap myself or get some work done, and then spend an hour with Joseph who will have had an hour of quiet "rest time" on the futon by then.

I wanted to round out our new "school" focus with a reinstatement of our tea time tradition which was definitely set aside this summer. And I want some kind of semi-regular outing schedule for mornings. But one thing at a time.

I intended to start school the first Monday after Assumption but we had an out-of-town guest. Then I realized that things were still a total mess in our home and that I couldn't really be in school mode before Labor Day anyway. So I moved the start date to the day after Labor Day. But we were out-of-town that day. So we started on Wednesday last week and that was all the school we did last week.

But we did get in tea time every day. Tea time is a snack--usually a sweet one--with tea (herbal and diluted for the kids). I read about the saint for the day and then we dive into the refreshments while I read aloud from a chapter book. We got through quite a few last year and last week I started The Secret Garden.

Today was a fiasco schedule-wise. Margaret fell asleep at 10:30 this morning. But in an amazing feat of flexibility it actually ocurred to me to do school anyway. And in a last-minute inspiration I decided to use the material and activities I'd chosen for the year to work on one letter each week. So with no preparation at all we started right in on "A".

Our curriculum this year consists, so far, in nice paper, crayons, colored pencils, scissors, glue sticks, old magazines, and books. Basically we have an activity at the table and then we read together on the couch until Margaret wakes up. I'm still working on what it will mean to do one letter each week but today I drew an A, and Joseph traced it. Then I helped him think of something that started with "A" and he drew an apple--a really lovely apple, I might add. Then I let him draw his own picture of anything he liked with his new crayons while I worked on my own drawing. Margaret woke up then and we put away the nice art supplies and moved to the couch. Instead of finding an A book we read Tomie de Paola's book Mary, the Mother of God in honor of Mary's birthday today.

My "goals" for this year with Joseph are to improve his fine motor skills and solidify letter and number recognition. I have no idea how long that will take but that's the goal until we meet it and then we'll set a new one.

I do hope to be back here more often but I've only been able to write this much because my children have suddenly decided that raisins are the single best thing that has ever happened to them.

I'm still here

I think.

It's been almost a month since I posted and in that time . . .

I have started a home business.
Eric has gotten a job.
In Minnesota.
We've been packing and preparing for a cross-country move.
We've discovered that we're expecting baby #3 next February.

Life is busy. Busy is good. I haven't had too much time for morning sickness--but I've had a bit of that. And I'm exhausted all the time. But I think busy is, overall, a good thing for me. I don't have as much time for wallowing in discouragement. I also don't have as much time for anything else--including this blog. We won't really be settled for another couple of months, unfortunately. We'll be hunting for a rental house for a couple weeks while we stay with Grandma. Then we have to move and unpack and, doubtless, spend hours and hours on the phone with someone in India trying to establish internet service. Once all that is taken care of I'll be back online. Until then, I'll post if I can. Happy summer, everyone!

Happy Birthday to me . . .

Yesterday was my birthday, actually, and a lovely day it was. I'm twenty-eight. I don't have any weird hang-ups about my age. I remember in college that some classmates were moaning about how old they felt when the turned 22 or 23. I have had the opposite problem of being the youngest mom in my neighborhood by a good decade. But I still don't feel old and now I know lots more moms closer to my age so I'm pretty much fine with 28.

We took a breakfast picnic to a lovely island in the Potomac yesterday morning. This island is on the small side with a few trails scattered about. In the center there is a Theodore Roosevelt monument with fountains and huge statues and it feels like something out of Tolkien. There's lots of wildlife and if it weren't for the airplanes overhead on the approach to Reagan you would never know you were so close to a city.

Our dinner was fried fish. Eric's birthday was in March and for his birthday dinner he requested fried fish. I agreed--it was his birthday--but dreaded both the eating and the cooking. I'm not good at frying stuff and I've never had fried fish I liked. I did, however, have a good recipe and the results were amazing. I liked it so much, in fact, that we decided to do the same thing for my birthday. Mostly I'd completely failed to plan any food at all for dinner and fried fish is pretty easy to do in a pinch if someone is available to run out to the fish market. Eric was available to do this so fish it was.

For dessert I made a strawberry tart. I'm allergic to most kinds of fruit but I can eat berries and I've been wanting this dessert for the last week. Its from my favorite cookbook, of course, and the crust is a shortbread. I made a custardy vanilla cream to go over the crust and then just sliced plain strawberries on to the top. I tried to arrange the strawberries in some artistic way even though I assembled the dessert only about ten minutes before eating it. I wanted a nice picture and I need to work on my food presentation skills. In the end I just sort of crammed the sliced strawberries anywhere they'd fit. I asked Eric to get two cartons of berries and only used one but in his birthday zeal he bought me a container of mascarpone, knowing my love for high-fat dairy products. I might think of another yummy dessert using that because it would be wrong to just dip the berries in the mascarpone and eat them all that way. Right?

After dinner we watched the first half of a movie of the life of St. Rita of Casica whose feast day happened to be yesterday as well. We really enjoyed the first half and I'll post a review once we finish the movie this weekend.

Happy Friday!

Me and My Dishwasher

My dishwasher is working again. Just after Christmas it tanked: the fill cycle kept repeating itself without ever doing any washing or draining in between. It wouldn't shut off, either. I finally just gave it up for lost and Eric and I each spent some time sucking water out of it and then I irresponsibly forgot all about it. I bought myself a drying rack and a drip pan and in the intervening months I think I've actually gotten a lot better at keeping up with the dishes.

Around the same time the dishwasher broke an awful odor overtook our kitchen. It was a distinctive rotten-lettuce smell and it seemed to be coming from the refrigerator though I always had a nagging suspicion that it was dishwasher related. After a few weeks of horrible stinkiness Eric and I took an evening and emptied the refrigerator. All the food was inspected and wiped down. The shelves and drawers were removed and washed. Everything was neatly replaced. The smell persisted. Our ice took on the smell and was too gross to use. Our cheese and butter took on the smell. And I kept thinking, I hope that the smell isn't really, somehow, the dishwasher. Every once in awhile I'd open the unused dishwasher and see a roach scurrying away. We didn't bother complaining to our landlord about the dishwasher because Eric is convinced that we are going to lose our entire security deposit because so many things in our apartment are broken. Our apartment is beautiful but it was renovated on-the-cheap. The cabinets are falling apart, the plaster crumbles if you stare at it for too long, and mold grows on our walls because the original brick walls can no longer breathe properly. The dishwasher really seemed to be the least of anyone's worries.

I'm embarrassed to admit that we put up with the fridge smell for a couple of months until a couple of weeks ago we got the brilliant idea that maybe the smell was emanating from our jar of homemade fermented garlic. That might seem like a no-brainer to an outside observer but we had smelled the garlic lots of times and it didn't smell a bit like the rotten-lettuce odor that had overtaken our apartment. We pitched the garlic and sanitized our garbage disposal and the smell disappeared. My mom was due to arrive the next day so it was with intense relief that I found myself living in an odor-free apartment again.

We started in on several days of torrential rains that day and by the next afternoon a new odor had arisen. This one was much, much worse than the rotten lettuce smell. What could it be? My mother is as sensitive to smells as I am and confirmed that the smell was quite foul, indeed. Oh, no, I thought. It is the dishwasher. I'd meant for weeks and weeks to scrub it out with baking soda and vinegar and dry it thoroughly and I'd been putting it off because I'm afraid of meeting roaches and now it was going to be awful. I was trying to come up with a creative and not overly-manipulative way to talk Eric into doing it for me when he casually suggested that I run the dishwasher just to see . . .

It worked like a charm and, oh, did it stink. I ran two consecutive sanitizing cycles and had a sparkling clean appliance again. And the smell persisted.
We decided by the end of the weekend that an animal had sought refuge from the days of steady rain by crawling into our wall and had then died in our wall. That's what it smells like. It's been a little over a week and the odor is finally gone and I can finally write this without convulsing in disgust.

As for my new dishwasher, well, I have mixed feelings. I'm not really sure if my improved dishwashing habits are the result of a method that works better for me or just a more improved character. I used the dishwasher for the first time last night and it saved me a lot of time and stress. I'm such an all-or-nothing person. Maybe this will be good for me.

Bits and Pieces

I think I mentioned a few posts back that yard saling is a waste of my time. For the most part I guess I still agree with that. I have a tendency to discover a need for things I find at dirt-cheap prices and if I set out on a yard-saling trip with needs in mind I am sure not to find them. It’s too bad because there are really a lot of yard sales in my neighborhood (despite the almost total lack of yards—we should make like Brooklyn and call them stoop sales). On a typical Saturday an intrepid yard-saler could easily hit four or five sales on foot around here. But in my efforts to spend less money and reduce clutter in our house I’ve mostly avoided them this season. Our immediate neighborhood isn’t big on yard sales, anyway, so it’s a bit of a hike just to get to yard sale territory.

This past weekend our parish held its annual, enormous yard sale to which we donated a large box of lovely toys—I’m so glad all that stuff is out of here. I sort of intended to go but then got to enjoying my lazy Saturday morning. By the time I decided to check it out there was only one hour left and on my way out the door I noticed that a house on the next corner had a sale going on. I wandered over with low expectations and was just about to leave when the home owner mentioned the books on the porch. I browsed a bit and all my frugal, decluttering vows disappeared. I called Eric who was home with sleeping children and started reading him titles. I boxed up fantastic, hardback books—some we’d been looking for for a long time and paid. I ran back home and sent Eric to pick them up and I think he found five or six more in the process. It’s hard to resist books at yard sale prices. Never mind that we have absolutely no place to put these books. Our shelves became officially full when Eric cleaned out his dissertation office on campus. In fact, there was already an unshelved stack of theology titles on his “desk” in the back room. We cull our library pretty regularly but this is a recurring problem for us.

By the time I got to the parish yard sale there were a mere thirty minutes remaining. The selection was dwindling but the prices had dropped to $1/bag—anything you could cram in a plastic grocery sack cost $1. I snagged a CD and three books, including a lovely illustrated guide to trains and an illustrated King Arthur which Joseph has already spent a good deal of time devouring. I also got these two jars.

I never seem to have enough glass jars around even when I save nice-sized ones from the store. I buy in bulk pretty much anything that can be bought in bulk and it all needs a place to go. We bought a whole lot of glass storage jars when we moved here and discovered all the critter problems.

And can I just interject, because I don’t brag enough about my husband, that Eric installed this shelf on a brick wall many months ago and it still hasn’t fallen down. He even decided to put those jars up himself while I was out and it still makes me happy every time I walk into my kitchen. They are just cheap IKEA jars but I like them and these two at the yard sale are part of the same set so I picked them up. The smaller one is providing a home for some of my coconut. My coconut stash is sort of an example of bulk-buying gone bad: I got fourteen pounds of the stuff a long time ago. I’ve been storing it in the chest freezer which does not motivate me to use it any faster. But now it finally has a jar even if the jar itself has yet to find a home. The tall jar is tinted blue and is too tall for any of my cupboards. I was a little worried about the blue, actually, because I don’t like to see my food through colored glass. I don’t even like blue freezer bags. But I filled it with granola and the blue seems a bit muted once there is food inside.

Its granola season again. I buy oatmeal in bulk, too. Usually 25 to 50 pounds at a time. Eric was highly skeptical the first time I bought that much oatmeal but we really do get through it. We eat oatmeal hot quite often all through the winter and every day during Lent. Then when the weather heats up I switch to making granola. I love cold cereal, I confess, but I’m firmly convinced that breakfast cereal is completely useless as a source of nutrition. When I’m pregnant a bowl of crunchy cereal drowning in cold milk is about the only thing that staves off morning sickness so I resolved to find a way to make myself yummy, crunchy cereal before I’m pregnant again. I have a high ideal of soaking all our grains a la Weston Price but I’m very bad at following through on my ideals. This winter I remembered about half the time to soak our oatmeal overnight. I had a recipe last summer for soaked granola that was, frankly, a major pain. I burned the first batch I made in this kitchen (love gas stovetops, hate gas ovens) and gave up for the season. As I was ramping up for granola making again Eric gently announced that he does not like my granola. He generally loves the food I make so I wasn’t offended but I decided to set out to improve my granola this year. I’m sort of tweaking one thing at a time and, so far, I haven’t tried a soaked batch. I’ve learned to only cook the oats and then add everything else in afterwards. And I’ve learned to use a combination of wet and dry sweetener and some salt. The batch in the jar right now is oats cooked with coconut oil, raw honey, sucanat, salt, and vanilla. After cooking I added cocount, almonds, crystallized ginger, and dried pinapple. Very yummy. Maybe I’ll give soaking another try with the next batch. Anyone out there have a fantastic granola recipe?

Ember Days

I just noted that I haven't posted much in a couple of weeks. If you are wondering why you need merely follow the link on the post before this one and then re-read this old post. Much as we are both really and truly glad and relieved and all that about the successful defense it is all a bit anti-climactic. The darn thing is just never really done. There were a few minor corrections and then the long, angry session with Microsoft Word during which I gently reminded my husband that he was using a borrowed laptop and was not at liberty to throw it across the room. Then there's the long meeting with the Provost's secretary where you get asked questions like, "Did you even read the Dissertation Handbook?" Then there's the printing of the darn thing on expensive, archival paper. Then there is the final deposit. Then you really are done. Unless your director is really pushing you to publish it as a book this summer. And, of course, he's still job hunting. And there was no graduation. We went to a graduation party for a good friend last night and learned that there isn't even a ceremony for summer graduation. You just get a diploma in the mail. Ah, well. We postponed our trip to the Midwest and we've both spent the last two weeks looking for job openings, writing application letters and generally driving each other crazy. I think we're going to return to our old routine tomorrow wherein Eric leaves each morning and goes somewhere else to work and I will return to doing things like running my household and posting on blogs.

We've just come off our first ever observation of the Ember Days. The Ember Days are an old liturgical custom that went out in the sixties along with a lot of other stuff when the liturgical calendar was revised. The Ember Days are three days of prayer and fasting at the start of Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall. The days are actually determined by the liturgical calendar but most years they fall quite close to the actual starts of the seasons. This year was an exception with Easter coming so early. The Ember Days are the Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday following the first Sunday in Lent, Pentecost Sunday, Triumph of the Cross (September 14th), and St. Lucy's Day (December 13th). The Ember Days are typically seen as ways to sanctify each season, pray for the agricultural events of the coming season, and ordain priests. They aren't celebrated very widely anymore.

The fasting issue is a bit odd in conjunction with the modern calendar. In our old Catholic dictionary a fast is described as one full meal in the afternoon along with a few ounces of bread at breakfast and 8-10 ounces of food at lunch. Not too rigorous. Only those aged 21-59 were required to fast and even those were exempt in case of illness, the need to do very hard work, pregnancy, etc. But even that sort of a fast is really difficult for me and in the old calendar (according to this same dictionary) every day in Lent was a fast day. Fridays, additionally, were days of abstinence, meaning that no meat could be eaten. In the new calendar the only fast days in the whole year are Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. Abstinence from meat is required on Fridays during Lent.

Combining that new practice with the old practice of the Ember Days means, then, that the Ember Days end up being far more rigorous than Lent and I wonder if we'll find ourselves revisiting our Lenten practices next year. I struggled a lot with fasting this past Lent even though the rules are easy and it was only two days. I haven't fasted in years because of pregnancy and breastfeeding. The Ember Days were hard, too. I'm glad that the three days are broken up. We observed the one meal and two snacks rule on Wednesday and Friday and used leftover Lenten soup for our one meal so that even that was light and penitential. We broke the fast with Saturday's Lord's Day supper which, this week, was a graduation party.

It was a great experience. I do well in voluntary situations. I'm not exactly proud of that but I chafe against the "rule" of fasting during Lent even though I see a lot of benefit in following imposed rules. The voluntary observance of the Ember Days was quite motivating for me. And I did it. I don't think I even cheated on Wednesday when I gave the kids oatmeal cookies for tea time. I drank my water and read their story and survived until dinner time. It was instructive, too, to see how little food was required when I was mindful about it. I have pretty big blood sugar problems and I tend to either not eat or eat too much simple sugar and then crash. I don't often feel hungry I just start yelling at people. I've "coped" with this over the last couple years by sort of developing an "I have this sickness" mentality and just eating all the time in an effort to maintain balance but all I've really maintained is my postpartum weight. On fast days I knew that my quantity of food would be limited so I was more careful about what I ate and I took extra care to not give in to hunger and take it out on the kids during the day. I hope that more frequent times of fasting and prayer can help me with a better attitude towards food.

I'm hoping that we'll gradually find other traditions to associate with the Ember Days--special prayers, special foods, seasonal activities or crafts. And I'm looking forward to how this will impact our next Lent.

And there was much rejoicing . . .

What we're excited about today . . .

Tuesday

Our good friend Brett joins us for breakfast every Tuesday morning. He was originally a college friend of mine who became a friend of my husband after we all moved to DC. Eric was his sponsor two Easters ago when Brett was received into the Church and our kids consider him a member of the family. I suppose I better not gush too much because I finally cracked and gave Brett the address of this blog. He lives a few blocks away and stops here for breakfast at 7:30 on his way to work for a member of Congress. I love hosting breakfast for friends and this morning we enjoyed overnight baked French toast and fresh fruit. I love that our friend can make it here on a weekday and still get to work at a responsible hour because he can commute on his bike.

After breakfast our family set off for a religious house in our neighborhood. There are at least two communities of consecrated women in our neighborhood and one of them hosts a regular "Mom's morning" for mothers of small children to come and relax with other adult women while the kids play. The women help out entertaining the kids and, in theory, we moms can slip off to the chapel for some quiet prayer. Margaret is finally getting independent enough for me to avail myself of that opportunity more often but I love just being with these holy women and it's always a relaxing time. Eric walked with us this morning and we both tried to answer Joseph's endless questions about the different trees, birds, and flowers he was seeing on our walk. I have always loved the gardens in our row house neighborhood. They average twenty-five square feet, I would guess and it's all the "yard" most people have. It's kind of silly to tend a plot of grass in that small a space so most everyone turns the whole space into a garden and since all these gardens are right up on the street we can examine them carefully without invading anyone's private property. It's all cultivated, so it's not quite like a nature walk but it's a darn good way to get all of us interested in species identification. We all felt triumphant the other day when, after noting a pretty bird on a walk, we found it in Audubon's and discovered that it was a Mockingbird.

Eric dropped us off at our destination and continued on to do a bit of work at the library and then attend noon Mass before picking us up again. We eat lunch together as part of our "Mom's morning" and normally the kids are so worn out that we head straight home for a nap. But today was Free Cone Day at Ben & Jerry's. We are ice cream snobs and try to avoid brands that use things like carrageenan and we'd rather eat our candy bars and ice cream separately. And I have a friend who was treated very rudely by Ben of Ben & Jerry's at a political rally. I promised her I'd join in her small boycott of the brand. But I'm not one to turn down free ice cream so we go every year to get a free cone. There are two Ben & Jerry's shops in our neighborhood but we walked to the one more on the way home where we were very embarrassed to be ushered to the head of the line on account of Joseph's wheelchair.

It is nine blocks from that ice cream shop to our apartment and for the second time in three days Margaret decided that she wanted to walk every step of the way herself. We've got her pretty well trained to hang on to the stroller or someone's hand when we're out and about. It's a bit excruciating to traverse nine blocks at toddler speed--especially when your three-year old is wanting to wheel at breakneck speed over bumpy sidewalks--but I'd rather my kids walk than get chauffered everywhere in their strollers so we indulge Margaret when we're not in a hurry. We took a shortcut through an alley and explored an upset nest of very hungry caterpillars, one of which met a sad end underneath Margaret's shoe.

By the time we got home I had just enough time to get Margaret to sleep before going to my monthly co-op delivery. A bunch of moms in my neighborhood have worked together for a few years to get regular deliveries of bulk foods. It's sort of like Whole Foods meets Costco but it comes via semi-truck to someone's yard and we get good volume discounts if our group orders enough. It's mostly stay-at-home moms who are involved because the schedule requires flexible daytime availability. Today was my last delivery serving as a bookkeeper and it was fun visiting with my friends while Eric stayed home with the napping kids. The co-op site is walking distance but I always drive so that I'm able to bring home my sacks of oatmeal and flour.

I got home as the kids were waking and took care of odds and ends for a few minutes. Eric left to walk to his weekly Holy Hour at our parish and I made a pizza for dinner. I wanted to walk with the kids to meet Eric at the church but I haven't figured out how to push a wheelchair while carrying Margaret and a pizza so we decided to drive. There is a park next to our church and we all sat on a bench there and people watched while we ate our pizza. Lots of dog walkers were out and one dog owner and fellow wheelchair driver let Joseph feed treats to her cute dogs. We got back home a bit later than we normally start bedtime and the kids fell asleep quickly so I'm here, typing away, while Eric is out walking and praying a Rosary.

I've had friends say they don't feel like they can accomplish much in one day while living in the city. I've always found the opposite to be true and I thought today was illustrative. We got lots of exercise, spent lots of time outdoors, saw lots of friends, accomplished errands, spent good time with the kids, and kept on top of house work and prayer. It was a great day.

Summer wardrobe

Here it is. I meant to include Margaret's sandals in the picture, too. I've finally discovered something that makes girls easier to raise than boys: their wardrobes have fewer pieces. I know the possibilities for accessories are endless but those sorts of things are optional. I did not set out to outfit my daughter exclusively in dresses but this summer I found myself needing to buy her entire wardrobe myself whereas we have always relied mostly on hand-me-downs and gifts for the kids' clothes. I spent all winter griping about ill-fitting pants for little girls and I doubt that shorts are any better. Even if we didn't cloth diaper many of the styles for babies are ridiculously tight fitting. I kept reaching for dresses even in cold weather just so Margaret could move her legs freely. Then my radical clothing purge got me thinking in terms of simplicity. Each article of clothing needs to be folded individually, put away individually, and is a potential piece of clutter needing to be picked up individually. Eric always dresses the kids in the morning and struggles with needing to match tops and bottoms. Dresses are a single piece of clothing requiring nothing to match in the summertime. Summers last for about six months in DC so for half the year Margaret's entire wardrobe is five dresses and a pair of sandals. We reserve the nicest dress for Sunday. Easy, right?

It's not a perfect system. People do give us stuff sometimes. We have a sixth two-piece outfit that was a gift. We also have a formal dress that is too fancy to wear every Sunday--also a gift. There is also a cardigan for the occasional chill, two pairs of pajamas, and a bathing suit. And someone else just gave us a generous bequest of shoes so that Margaret now has regular sandals and snazzy, waterproof shoes as well. And Joseph's wardrobe is still a mess.

I don't know if dresses will work as well in the winter. Part of the attraction for me is that one dress costs less than a top and bottom separately. But the addition of tights in the winter might negate the cost savings and I'm not sure daily dresses are really practical in cold and snow. But I'm keeping my eye out this summer for sales on long-sleeve play dresses.

English Muffin Challenge Day

Since Robyn beat me to the punch of making homemade bagels we decided to challenge each other to make something else on our baked breakfast list and yesterday was the day for English Muffins. Robyn even managed to make English Muffins and blog about them on the same day. I didn't even have time to make them and clean up afterwards on the same day.

I was pleased to discover that English Muffins actually do have English origins (at least, according to Wikipedia). I had sort of assumed that they were something akin to French Fries. In England, of course, they don't call them English Muffins and it sounds like this type of baked good was sort of on the decline until Americans started eating them like crazy but at least I can feel that I've made something marginally authentic. My recipe came from The Tassajara Bread Book which is one of my favorite cookbooks. It automatically falls open to the recipe for cream scones but almost everything I bake comes from this book: our Christmas pecan rolls, our Easter bread, our "company" coffee cake, our birthday chocolate cake, my favorite yogurt cake. I could go on and on and I haven't even mentioned the actual bread recipes in the first half of the book. This book is the reason I have never been able to cut wheat and sugar out of my diet.

The muffins were a huge hit and there are actually none left now. Between yesterday's breakfast, yesterday's lunch in the car, and today's breakfast we polished off a full dozen. I think I'm going to make them again for our friend Brett. Though the recipes don't call for overnight preparation I find that I can make yeasted breakfast doughs the night before, punch them down and refrigerate. I can then shape the dough and let it rise while the oven heats and I've turned a big breakfast project into something manageable for a normal morning.

We ate our lunchtime muffins in the car en route to a job interview for Eric. It went well on his end and my task while he was on campus was to poke around the area to try to generate some excitement about moving there in the event a job is actually offered. I was somewhat successful. We passed a lot of farms. Joseph votes for living on a farm and I didn't have the heart to tell him that wheelchairs and cow fields aren't that good a combination. We found a good-sized town not too far from the school so we'll just see what happens. Please keep us in your prayers these next couple of weeks as that school makes a decision and as we're hoping to hear from another.

Darn Blogger won't let me upload pictures but I'm going to post anyway and come back with pictures later.

Popcorn

One of the easiest ways to declutter in the kitchen is to look for items that serve only one purpose. Some single purpose tools are valuable: I do own a garlic press because I often cook with large amounts of garlic and I find it more satisfying to press the garlic into the recipe. We have, on the other hand, survived without an ice cream scoop for several years and we eat a lot of ice cream in this house. The garlic press is a point of dispute because I could just chop the garlic with the same knife I'm using for everything else. Come to think of it, that garlic press might be toast next time I go through the kitchen. A better example in our house would probably be our ice cream maker. It only makes ice cream but there is no other way to make ice cream and given the amount of ice cream we consume I'd rather make it myself.

Last time we did a major kitchen purge I did get rid of our hot-air popper. We like popcorn but I knew that I could make it in a pan and that darned popper took up a lot of space. I tried making popcorn in my dutch oven several times but the results were less than satisfactory. The pan is pretty heavy with a lid on and the metal handles were too hot to hold without pot holders. And there were always lots of unpopped seeds left in the pan (this always happened with the hot air popper, too).

I recently had the idea to try making popcorn in my wok and I'm no longer tempted to buy a hot air popper. The wok is lighter than my dutch oven and has two wooden handles that stay cool to the touch. The large, domed lid keeps in all the popped corn and the heat distribution allows for all the seeds to pop. I often get every single seed popped and I've never had more than five left in the pan. I pop four or five tablespoons of seeds in two tablespoons of oil on medium heat for the whole family. It takes about five minutes to pop the whole pan once the popping starts and the pan must be gently shaken while the corn is popping. When we are feeling especially piggy I dump the corn into the serving bowl and cook four tablespoons of butter, four tablespoons of brown sugar, four tablespoons of maple syrup, and a few dashes of salt together. Stir the mixture constantly until it boils and then continue cooking and stirring for 2-3 minutes. Remove the pan from the flame and stir the popcorn back in. We enjoyed a large bowl of caramel popcorn and a movie last night after the kids went to bed unexpectedly early.

About our day yesterday

Memorable.

Two spots of loveliness

Our Lord's Day dinners are going really well. We love the simple liturgy that we devised the first week and we've really stuck to it. We've often tried to include friends in our Saturday evening meals and we've been happy to show them our new tradition. I haven't always come up with an extra-special meal to serve. Last night was refried beans with fixin's. I make this sort of meal all the time but something about all those bowls on the table makes things feel festive.


I also recently put my domed cake plate to daily use. We almost always have some baked goods around and I've always put them in a ziploc bag on the counter. It doesn't look very nice and things get crumbled when stored that way. And the mice are happy to chew through the plastic bag if there is anything sweet inside. I brought down the cake plate and I now have a beautiful, mouse-proof way to store our food and preserve its structural integrity all at once.

Suburban Shopping Adventure

I had a couple of Big Box Store errands to run yesterday. Two items I'd ordered online needed returning and it was cheaper to bring them back to the store than to ship them. I also had a gift card from Christmas to a store I never shop at because there aren't any in DC or in the close suburbs. I decided to combine the two errands figuring that surely in the vast suburban expanse that surrounds Washington I'd find a town that had both of these stores. And I did. While I'm at it, I thought, in a deluded moment of pre-coffee inspiration, I'll finish off Margaret's summer wardrobe (Joseph never seems to need clothes--why is that?).
So we set off. If I could have done these errands in my city I would have, especially if I could have done them on foot. But two of the stores were determined for me. I had some discretion on where to shop for Margaret (though I hoped to use my gift card for her) but there are, sadly, few realistic options in town. Our neighborhood--defined broadly--has exactly one store that sells children's clothing. The clothes there cost more than I care to spend on myself at my most extravagant. If I were an entrepreneur I would open a consignment shop here for children's clothing. My neighbors have bags of clothes to spare. Some just give them away for free on our neighborhood e-mail list but even the prospect of free clothes is not enough to entice me to spend time on another list serve. Plenty of families have "yard" sales and I did score four sweaters for a dollar once last year but that was one lucky day out of a whole season of yard saling. I don't have that kind of time. So I couldn't shop locally but, how hard could it be? She only needed a few things.
City driving no longer bothers me. I think what gets to a lot of people is that there are so many option--so many ways you could turn. My extended family really don't like to come see us. They like us just fine but they always get lost here and they have trouble parking. I wrote a post once addressing this topic and it was well-liked. Growing up I seldom went into cities but we drove through them all the time. The freeway systems through East Coast cities are fast-moving and complicated. There are lots of merges and splits and exits on both sides of the road. I don't blame people for not liking to drive in that setting but I really don't think you can blame cities for that. Cities--many of them--are designed on a grid. New England cities aren't (so what does my family have to complain about!) and, yes, Washington has those pesky avenues that do not follow any system. But, for heaven's sake, just go to the next intersection--a mere one block away--and look at the number and/or letter signs to get your bearings. Or ask directions because there is almost certainly someone else out in a city. The suburbs, in my experience, are a different story. You can go for miles in the wrong direction --first because there aren't enough cross streets to alert you and second because there is no place to turn around. I know there are exceptions but this has happened to me more than once. I know, too, that I'm really complaining, again, about the highways and not the neighborhoods but the highways exist to get suburbanites into the cities for work. The highway system and suburban development do feed into one another but if there were no suburbs there would be a heck of a lot fewer highways.

I actually didn't get lost on yesterday's foray into suburbia. I stopped for coffee at a nice Starbucks. It lacked the atmosphere of the ones in town but at least it was easy to find a seat. I returned my online purchases without incident and moved on to the gift card store. This store was on Cherry Hill Drive or something. It was hilly, but the cherries were scarce. This annoys me about suburbs. I see developments with names like "Quail Run" or "Babbling Brook Village" and it's cute but, let's be honest, the quail left when the bulldozers arrived, and if the brook is still babbling the sound is drowned out by the roar of the traffic on the six-lane road required to get all those development-dwellers to work.
By the time I arrive at the gift card store I'm feeling a little on edge and a bit depressed by my surroundings. The kids are bored and its hot and there are too many rules and the stores are HUGE so if Joseph takes off he can really get far and I'm not even going to think about letting Margaret out of the shopping cart. She is not impressed with this arrangement and I was forced to camp out in the shoe department for awhile nursing my huge toddler in an attempt to avoid complete meltdown. I did manage to spend the gift card on sandals for Margaret and sunglasses for me. The sandals are pushing it for me in the cute department and they light up but at least Dora wasn't on them. But I'd still failed to complete Margaret's summer clothing supply and another, cheaper department store beckoned from the other end of the strip mall. Some of the newer suburban shopping centers are doing a decent job with a design that encourages customers to walk between even the big stores. This typically requires underground parking. I was not, however, at one of these centers so we got back in the car to get through the maze of parking lots. This is what really puts the kids over the edge on these trips. If we're on foot I can often do a couple errands in one shot or, if I only can fit in one because of the slower pace, it doesn't feel like time and energy wasted because we've at least gotten out doors and had a good walk. But gas prices being what they are and traffic being what it is I can't bear to get all the way to outer suburbia and come home with items left on my list. These big department stores try to have it all but you can't have it all.

So we're in and out of the car, in and out of shopping carts, loading and unloading a heavy wheelchair, going from cool store to hot car over and over. We were cranky but, darn it, Margaret needed those clothes. I threw (well, not really) both kids in the back of the shopping cart at the our last destination and zoomed to the toddler clothes section. I was optimistic because when I'd last been in this store they'd had several racks of just what I was looking for. I guess they had just what everyone was looking for because they were sold out. Okay. Fine. Margaret was attempting to dive onto the floor, taking Joseph's head with her, anyway. Back out to the car. Back onto the freeway. I put both kids down for a nap as soon as we got home. Then I went on to Amazon and completed Margaret's summer wardrobe in about ten minutes for less than I'd probably spent on gas that morning.

Thursday Afternoon

Just to be fair, because I know I'm usually sort of a zealot in this area, I'll start with one of our less-enjoyable experiences of city life.

Eric was out on a college visit with his little brother Thursday afternoon when I noticed a police car pull up in front of our apartment. There is nothing unusual about a police visit in our neighborhood. We are, rather, quite excited whenever we see that MPD logo, ever hoping that the drug dealers are finally going to get busted. Two bored-looking women emerged from the car and wandered off down the block. A bit later I noticed that the car had been joined by an ambulance. That piqued my interest just a bit more and when the fire lieutenant arrived I had a really hard time focusing on dinner preparation and began to hover in my front window. A few women arrived who looked like social workers--no uniforms, but professional dress. By this time I'd figured out that the excitement, such as it was, was focused in my building. My building is fifteen units divided among three sections. The cops were busy in a section that does not communicate with mine. One of the social workers came back out, retrieved a few hospital face masks from her car, and went back in. Hmmm. Several minutes later the entire party--cops, fire lieutenant, and social workers came out to the sidewalk and milled around.

Then the real excitement began. Over the next ten minutes we were joined by two more ambulances, two more police cars, two bike patrol cops, a couple more social services types and at least three fire trucks. This is only what I could see from my window. Our street was closed. The young, burly-looking firemen climbed out of their trucks and started donning white haz-mat suits, complete with those masks that make you look like a giant bug.

This is where I started to get a bit nervous. Criminals I already know about, heart attacks are sad but pretty self-contained, it seemed clear that there was no fire burning next door, but why the need for haz-mat suits? We mostly know, at least by sight, everyone who lives in our building. There are a few residents we know well enough to wave hello and comment on the weather when we pass in the street. The other residents we know the best (and that not very well) are a young, newlywed couple who live in the section the police were busy in. At the height of all the chaos out on the street Thursday the wife of that couple came home from work. They tried to stop her from getting home but she managed to get through just as I went out to the street to invite her in.

Shortly after that at least one person was brought out and taken away by ambulance and Eric came home just as the haz-mat guys were getting sprayed down with a fire hose. Then they all went home. Eric had tried, on his way in, to get one of the firemen to divulge some information but they weren't forthcoming. I wondered a few times as I craned my neck out the bay windows trying to take in the street or listened hard trying to catch some of the conversation if it wasn't a bit perverse to take such a lively interest in what appeared to be some kind of crisis. I used to get really mad at "rubber-necking" at freeway accidents. Eric pointed out once that it's a bit callous to just drive by a horrific traffic accident as if you don't care. It's annoying to get stuck in traffic but all that traffic slow-down is probably a fitting show of respect in the case of a car accident. I felt the same way about what happened on my street. Every door on my block was filled with someone watching our building to see what was happening. I might even have gone outside if not for the kids. The haz-mat suits gave me concern for my own well-being but, before that, I was wondering about the other residents of that part of the building. Had something happened to the young couple? Maybe the reclusive old woman on the first floor had died and finally been discovered? These people aren't friends of mine but we live in close proximity and share the same frustrations about the mice in our building, and the loud rap music in the summer, and the Maryland drivers who take our parking spaces.

We called the young couple in our building later to get the scoop. We aren't really friends with this couple but we know them well enough that we can call when a haz-mat team has invaded our building. They only knew what had happened because they'd badgered the fire department over the phone for awhile. The condo association is evicting a resident (not the young couple or the recluse) and the police, I think, had gone to serve notice. Upon arrival they found four people living in squalor. We only know a few of the ways in which the apartment was "squalid" and I'll let your imagination fill in what kinds of conditions required six firemen in haz-mat suits. Our neighbor was pretty shaken to realize that such a close neighbor had been living this way--though he hadn't been entirely ignorant of the problem. The residents will be finally evicted within the month, we hear. This particular tenant likes to sit on the corner of our back patio, drunk, and talk loudly to his buddy while smoking at exactly the time I'm putting Margaret to bed so part of me is glad to be rid of that problem. But it is sobering, in a healthy sort of way, to have some exposure to the sadness and poverty of the human condition.

City Life

I have a lot of conversations about living in the city. There was the recent thread at 4Real which I finally quit because it was taking up way too much of my time, but I also get into this topic with a lot of friends in real life or via e-mail. Robyn asked me once why I feel so passionately about convincing people about city living. A lot feeds my desire to share this life with others.

I've found that people make a lot of assumptions about city life. I'm sure that many of these assumptions are based on actual observations about some cities. I think a lot of the assumptions are based on television and movies as well. I'm not a big consumer of television or movies but, from what I've seen, these media tend to portray extremes of city life. A few assumptions I have heard over the years that are not true of me or my neighborhood:
I am extroverted.
I love to shop.
My neighborhood is dangerous and I am, therefore, exceptionally brave.
I have a large wardrobe.
I am politically liberal.
I feel called to minister in an exceptional way to the poor.
I don't know my neighbors and they don't know each other.
I don't like nature.

And so on. Some assumptions about city living are true of my neighborhood and they just don't bother me. It is noisy here--our front window is about six feet from the street. It is "dirty" in the city, I guess. Our neighborhood is particularly bad with litter but this is not the norm. Country living seems dirtier to me. That might be just a personality thing. It is crowded. Houses in my neighborhood are attached together and there are plenty of apartment buildings and condominiums. We are the only renters in a condo building and our apartment is basically the first floor of a row-house. There are drug dealers in front of my building, people do get mugged in my neighborhood and there are even shootings not too far from me. I have never been asked to buy drugs, I have never been mugged, and I have never heard gun shots. We would not live here if we felt that our family was in danger.

I think cities are misunderstood and have thus been largely abandoned and neglected by those most able to effect change: families. I've decided to start an occasional series of posts aiming to simply show you city life. Maybe I'll include commentary on why something seems good or bad to me or why something about my city is succeeding or failing, but mostly I just want to show you our urban way of living. I'll try to share honestly. I'll try to share things that seem to particularly illustrate what is urban about our life. I will certainly be glad to share about a topic of particular interest to readers if you leave me a comment. There will not be any particular schedule for these posts because I can't commit to blogging in that way but I'll try to be regular--I have a lot to share.

And with that I'll close. I had intended to post my first installment now but I've been interrupted many times by a little girl who has now fallen asleep. I need to start dinner, among other things, but I may be back later.

Humongous

My brother-in-law (age 17) arrived from Minnesota very late last night. His parents thoughtfully flew him into the airport farthest from our house and Eric went to get him. He thought I should have a snack waiting for Ben when he got here. He mentioned this after we'd polished off the pan of brownies I'd already made over the weekend. Fortunately I love to bake, especially when I know I'll have the help of a hungry teenager to eat it all. Eric wanted blonde brownies but my recipe called for one tablespoon of vanilla which was one tablespoon more than I had. Every month when my co-op catalog comes in the mail I look to see if the warehouse serving us has started carrying quart-sized bottles of vanilla extract. I don't know how we get through that stuff so fast.

I did have two entire packages of cream cheese so I went to a recipe website and searched for recipes using cream cheese and chocolate, but not vanilla extract, and came up with Humongous Cookies.

The title of the cookie reminded me of something small that happened in college. I majored in music, but after a couple years of the grueling demands of that program I needed a change and I started pursuing courses in history and politics and using long-neglected regions of my brain again. One of the first classes I took during this time was Constitutional Law. It was taught by a professor I adored, but the class really had a reputation. It was taught in the round and the professor called on students at random to brief cases and we were on the spot for a good amount of time when called upon. Discussion was abundant and we were required to make pretty stiff arguments. My favorite gaffe from a classmate was when he said, "It just seems to me that this case deals with more of a local problem," when we were discussing Lucas v. The South Carolina Coastal Council a case which impacted pretty much the entire East Coast.

My favorite personal gaffe came during a time of heated discussion. I have no idea what case we were debating but I had a moment to interject my carefully considered opinion and began, "This is a humongous . . ." I stopped. I turned red. I'd just used the word "humongous." In retrospect I doubt that anyone would have noticed or cared, but there I was: the inexperienced music major trying to prove that she could do Constitutional Law with the politics majors. I decided to recover by stopping my argument entirely and saying, "I can't believe I just used the word humongous." Everyone laughed and we all moved on. I got an A in the class. I didn't go to law school. And I've avoided the word humongous ever since.

In the end there weren't any other recipes to satisfy the requirements of me, the baker, and my blonde-brownie craving husband so I made the cookies. They weren't bad. They are called humongous because you press the dough into two cake pans and then cut it into wedges to serve. I probably would call this recipe chocolate-chip cookie cake. They're tasty but the texture bugs me. Too cakey for brownies, too chewy for cake. But they got us through the opening rounds of "Where should Ben go to college?" He's here because we live near his current top-choice school and we're glad for the opportunity to influence his thinking in this decision.