Garden start

One of the other reasons why I stayed so far far away from the blog was because my beautiful computer crashed early in May and took everything I had ever come to create with it. Fortunately the photos are semi-salvageable, having uploaded them online at the Kodak store. But, all the wonderful little videos of my daughter? Gone. But, the most traumatic was the actual fact that all of my lovingly organized bookmarks and spaces had vanished and I was going to have to start from scratch – with the new job it just felt too daunting to face.

However, after A LOT of back and forth with the Mac store – a drama too persnickety to allow myself to bore you with the details – two months later we have a brand spanking new hard drive and even newer backup system. I feel ready to start over again, too.

While I have been away, I have been busy making my garden grow… and I am VERY impressed with myself. During the time between seeing the house for the first time and moving in, we found that the cute little garden had quickly devolved into something out of The Day of the Triffids, we decided to accept them and the hammock-like spiderwebs and befriend Aragog for the remaining summer season.

In the spring, we dug up everything and re-built walls. I plotted the sun and read up on basic gardening. But mostly I went by advice from my Gardening-Guru (my mom) and/or the directions on the pack of the seed packages . We also planted a month too early, but lucked out and never got a frost. We planted beans and carrots, swiss chard and lettuce, herbs… and several flowers, with crawling type plants and things that I thought would look nice. It definitely takes constant involvement to understand how it works and I love that part especially.

Beans

Incredible. It has been over two months since my last post, which feels like a lifetime ago. I actually thought it was a lot longer since I let my blogging habits slide. It had never been my intent to leave this go for this long – my decision to stop had all good intentions like Bridget’s mini-break with Hugh Grant, only to find myself then distracted with my own versions of not getting the memo about the Tarts & Vicars party,  blue soup, vodka, and reindeer jumpers.

It’s been busy, too busy. But the rest of the summer doesn’t feel so jam-packed… yet.

So, this being my first blog post back, I don’t want to say too much and bore you to death with every single fascinating thing I have been up to… but I do want to promise you that if you come back, I will have more for you.

At pre-school today, we were given a “cookbook” for Parent’s Day. (They lumped Father’s & Mother’s Day together for today). It is the best cookbook I have ever received: each child in the class was asked for a recipe and it was transcribed and paired with that child’s drawing of that recipe. Sheer hilarity is the entire cookbook. Here is E’s “recipe”:

Cereal

You make it with pasta.

It’s in the kitchen.

if you’ve been reading, you’ll know that i am in the throes of re-arranging my life with a new schedule and it has been a very positive adjustment in every aspect of my life (minus the lack of seeing good friends on a regular basis, but this is arranging itself out, too).

i have spent a lovely saturday morning tending to house stuff and enjoying two little girls play together. E and N have known eachother since birth and it really is incredible to watch how with each stage they change the way that they interact with eachother. this morning they insisted on sharing a “quiet time” and made me set them up in E’s bed so that they could read books to each other. i stayed beyond the door and listened to their little conversation discussing In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak. Familiar with this book? It has a little naked boy in it (and apparently this was so offensive to some that they banned the book).

anyway, here is a snippet of that conversation:

E: MICKEY!

N: hee hee heeeee

E: Mickey has a PEANUT.

N: hee hee hee

E: But girls don’t have peanuts

N: hee hee hee

Quite succinct and quite right.

So this whole working thing leaves me completely shattered and brainless by the time we have E down at night. It’s the waking up at 5:45 and being in complete and total “GO” mode from that moment forward. This is a completely different kind of exhaustion from the type that leaves you brainless from being at home with your child all day DESPERATE for outside communication. Oddly, it’s all in the reverse – I’m communicating all day at work. And I up my level of communication with E when I am with her, because I am so desperate to make all moments quality moments now. That she knows that Mummy is thinking about her all day and that she knows that Mummy loves her and misses her and wants to be a part of her life that she misses when she’s at work. It’s a different kind of juggling act, a different type of guilt (like, I feel guilty for enjoying that time that I have to complete work, to think about tasks in a logical and complete way, to be able to sit in silence for long periods of time without interruption), a different type of life that I have suddenly found myself immersed in at full throttle.

But I want to do it all. And I think I can do it all? I think I can. I’m still training for my races. I am still making efforts to stay in touch with friends. I’m still making sure meals are healthy and home cooked. I’m still making sure the laundry is done, the bills are paid, the lunches are made, the house stays clean, etc. etc.

But by 8 p.m. its zero brain power – I can’t tell you how hard it is to even write this!

Anyway, this is completely off-topic but I just read Dooce’s post on The Vaccination Debate and I think every parent should read it, regardless of where you stand. It’s an articulate, thought-provoking stance on the issues involved and covers a lot of my own inner conflict that I had when I finally made the decision to vaccinate E. (An incredibly tough decision when you sit on the fence and feel like neither side presents ALL the facts.)

That is all – better posts to follow after the holidays.

Rain rain rain… but ALL the snow is gone gone gone.
Love it.

Listening to The Shins and She & Him, for some reason they remind me of the 90s and being 16. And Winona Ryder. Why? I don’t know.

Here’s a version of New Slang for that movie Garden State… which was a movie I could not finish watching because it irritated me in the sort of I’m-such-a-depressed-angsty-cynical-guy-ness and I think I had had enough of that at that time in my life. I might have a better appreciation for the movie someday. But I still really like the song.

And Zooey Deschanel’s band She&Him: Why do you let me stay here?:

E LOVES dancing to these songs.

So, apparently when you work all day, you have no time to monitor twitter. Or reply to emails. Or have any brain cells left at the end of the day to do those things. Kind of SAD.
I’m looking forward to playing catch-up this weekend and logging in a couple of runs to train for the upcoming races I keep pretending I didn’t sign up for…

Have a lovely weekend and thank you all for your support and well wishes this past week. It has been deeply deeply appreciated.

Despite the wee crisis I encountered this morning, when I arrived at E’s school to find out that it was, em, CLOSED…

(cue panic, cue choking back unprofessional tears, cue sweating all through my new clothes from Banana Republic, cue angry conversation over the phone with spouse because we decide we should yell at eachother instead of… the fates? I don’t know. cue calm resolve. cue huge relief that said spouse is a hero and took the day off his work to allow me to go to my first day of work. cue running across the city to drop off child. cue running back to work. cue astonishment in only being 10 minutes late. cue relief.)

I have to thank the Supernanny and my mom’s Camp Checklist (that we used when we were kids) for this stroke of brilliance:

If you have ANY trouble getting your child out the door in the morning, I promise you that an illustrated chart will help you loads. Note: make your child get dressed BEFORE breakfast (if you don’t already) this saves, like, five hours of your day. E wakes up at 7 a.m. and no joke, without fail, without begging, without pleading, without physical struggle or rampant chases throughout the house, we are out the door no later than 7:45 a.m. WITHOUT BREAKING A SWEAT. Mind you, I am up an hour earlier to get ready for work, but who cares, right?

I’m heading back to work today. I find it hard to believe that it was three years ago that I left work thinking I would return shortly before E’s first birthday. It didn’t work out that way and I am really happy that I decided to stay at home with her. I would have not had it any other way. In the interim of raising my daughter I’ve experienced a range of emotions that can vary from enraged sea monster to weeping at the sight of dust on a shelf in nanoseconds; I deeply understand the monotony of housework and frequently write full page rants (in my head) on the inequality of this system and that if only women were paid for the work that they did at home, the balance of power would feel more even-keeled; I went from knowing no one with babies, to meeting many many incredibly women with babies whom I am so deeply indebted to for my sanity and for helping me see the hilarity on those days that I have shoved my head into the pantry because I can’t seem to have a complete thought anywhere else (or hold a conversation on the phone).

I’ve been in constant flux since making the decision to return to work – for the most part, I am really excited to have 8 hours a day where I am responsible for other work. No laundry, no agonizing over what I’m going to make for dinner, no desperate hope for a nap-time, no picking up the same things over and over and over, no witness to dirt I can’t clean, no more debate about whether I can get away with wearing the same outfit I’ve comfortably worn for the last month. On the flipside, I am afraid that the moment I walk in that door today, my little life that I so love will disappear and all of those important friendships will follow. Of course, I am also deeply afraid that this will be the decision in my daughter’s life that will turn her into a heroin addict at 17.

So I’m off and this is not as good a post as I would like it to be – but wish me luck.

Well, it’s been a full and fascinating week on Twitter.

FOLLOW FOLLOW FOLLOW: Everyone should follow Christopher Walken. 140 words of Walken is pure brilliance everytime i.e. “I do my best thinking in a barber’s chair. Sadly I do my worst remembering there too. Sure, I could take some notes but who does that?” and “An associate told me that he’d been cheating on his wife. He asked me not to talk about it and I probably won’t. Unless it comes up somehow.”

TREND OF THE WEEK: The love wave experiment proposed by Ashton Kutcher was a fascinating use of Twitter. It demonstrated just how powerful this medium is by its ability to summon the masses to pass on a message almost instantly.

MOVIE OF THE WEEK: The new trailer for Spike Jonze’s movie Where The Wild Things Are was retweeted by everybody and then everybody else. This movie? Looks A-M-A-Z-I-N-G. To watch the trailer, visit the lovely Cochonet.

I SWEAR HE IS MY TWIN: @chewbacca: “ahhhrhrhhnnnnn GRRRRHHhhh wwhhreeehrhrnnnn”

FASHION TIP OF THE WEEK: @Limited Hype: “instructional guide on how to be a thoroughbred douche: 1) track pants 2) leather jacket. END.”

PARENTING TIP OF THE WEEK: @robcorddry: “Just played fake fetch with my two year old. Pretend to throw fake bone. Retrieves. Read the paper.”

FOOD FAD I’D LIKE TO START: @astrik: “super nibs are not part of a food group, this I have only learned after I ate a lunchtime meal of them…..”

BEST PENIS JOKE. EVER.: @Katie:  http://tinyurl.com/cux3kl

Oh, and if your daughter sticks a currant up her nose and you tweet about it, everyone will want to know how you got it out. (All you need is a little pressure, a little patience and a downward stroke alongside the outside of the nose. Unless it’s REALLY up there.) (Then you see a Doctor.)

Also, post-IKEA trip stress feels much better after convening tweets of reassurance that storming out of that place is IMPOSSIBLE.