Speaking of Crafts

Did I tell you about the time I tried to take Little G to a bead store last week and nearly had a nervous breakdown? I promised her we could do a special project for one of her best friends who is moving away at the end of the month. Why do I do things like that?

Long story short, we were there for what I think was an hour and half but felt like the better part of a week and by the end of it the sales lady intervened, told me exactly how I was going to do the project and then took Little G around the store and they picked out all the beads. The woman was a machine. I asked her if she would come home with us and organize the rest of my life but she laughed it off like I was kidding. Then she told me that they didn't usually size and cut wire for customer's projects but for me she was making an exception. It's possible that she just didn't want to see me back in her store and, sweet as she was, the feeling is mutual.

and deliver us from crafts.

This post started (in my head) at some point last week when I started registering Little G for summer camps. You know how neurotic I get about scheduling - it calms in the long run but while it's happening you'd think I'd been charged with planning an inauguration or something (actually, now that I think of it, an inauguration would be much easier to plan). There are about a gajillion variables including not only our own unscheduled vacations but other people's because we have to coordinate with friends. Spots are filling discounts are expiring. Calendaring mayhem I tell you.

But what does this have to do with crafts? Somewhere in the midst of my summer camp hand-wringing I realized that I was sick of paying for her to go sit somewhere and make more crap out of popsicle sticks and glitter. This is partly a reaction to last summer's camps, which is not to say the camps weren't good, it's just that my main goal last summer was to get her out of my hair. It's also true that my stance on crafts and summer camp stems from this one particular day, many moons ago, when I was forced to make a bird feeder from peanut butter and a pine cone at the Boys and Girls Club. I hated day camp when I was a kid but I had to go because my parents both worked. I figure there's no reason to make Little G suffer like that, you know, with the nut butters and sunflower seeds and such.

The end result is that I'm trying to be selective so we're doing things like soccer camp, which is only 2.5 hours a day but it's about soccer the whole time and not soccer for an hour then graham crackers and coloring for the next two. I might really regret this when the dog days of summer roll around but it's my new theory and I'm going with it. This is summer, dammit, and we're going to be hot and bored.

Hop on the Hep (redux)

It was Super Bowl Sunday and, while most people were sitting on the couch with a beer having chips and dip for dinner, I was up on the flying trapeze again. I think we can safely say that, much like natural childbirth, I don't need to experience that a third time. I returned in part for redemption but largely because my trapeze buddy is moving away at the end of the month and well, she went ahead and called the school to sign us up for one last hurrah. I have all the expected muscle pain this morning plus a sore face due to a couple of rough landings in the net (btw, continue to look up as you fall). It was a thrill, I'm not gonna lie, but in the future I'll look for thrills that don't involve nearly putting a tooth through my lip.

Friday afternoon:

The baby is pulling all the books off the bookshelf while Little G conducts mock marriage equality hearings in her new bathing suit and a tutu.

The couch is my life raft - all I need is my wifi and a packet of Nairn's ginger oat biscuits.

TGIF

Here we go!

We have an official crawler on our hands, one day shy of his seven month birthday. I foolishly assumed we'd have eight solid months of stationary play but the mobility began a month ago and today he suddenly got fast - right after he ate about a gazillion sweet potato puffs, a serving of baby food and half a banana. So we spent the last half hour before bedtime clearing Playmobil out of the living room, the first of many baby-proofing sessions, I'm sure. Little G is already demanding a gate on the door to her room.

It might be time to pack away the floaty toys

We've been trapped in the house all week, save for one blessed Spanish lesson, due to the Great Snow Storm of 2012. You might think three inches of powder wouldn't completely shut down an entire region and cause the Governor to declare a state of emergency but we live in an area full of hills and completely devoid of snow plows (okay, to be fair, the outlying towns and suburbs got dumped on but here in the city it was pretty minimal). Entertainment has been hard to come by.

Here is a picture of some ice I shoved off the deck:As it turns out, shoving ice off the deck with my foot was sort of the highlight of my week. It was really crunchy.

This morning we took pictures of geese:
That wasn't quite as much fun because it didn't require me to go outside without the children.

Other than capturing our soggy surroundings on film, we've been keeping busy watching the baby learn to crawl and wringing our hands over the eleventy hundred thousand tiny chokables strewn throughout the house. I fear that the Playmobil community currently residing in the living room may have to pack up its tiny rake, horse grooming implements, dustpan, milk cartons, toilet plunger, badger family, etc. and move to a safer neighborhood.

Good times.

Greens in a Glass

I had a little trouble finding food I could eat in Maui, probably because we were living in Resortville, which was beautiful and exactly what we needed to survive with the kids but pretty much devoid of vegetables. Lucky for me, my amazing and obliging husband managed to ferret out a restaurant called Choice Health Bar where they served absolutely delicious, locally sourced vegan and raw meals. Now, eating raw all the time it too extreme, time-consuming and expensive for our family (that and we actually like our food cooked) but the food at this place was so good that it inspired me to incorporate some of the elements into our everyday life in Seattle. We started with smoothies because this is about the simplest meal in the world and because I was craving large doses of greens after spending five days eating nothing but noodles and shaved ice. Little G and I worked out the recipe below and it was so yummy that she's asked me to make it again tomorrow.

2 cups frozen, shredded greens (I like to buy the leafy green mix from Whole Foods)
1 cup water
1 cup unsweetened almond milk (obviously you can sub whatever you want for the liquids)
2 bananas
2 tbsp cocoa powder
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 tsp cinnamon
3 scoops pumpkin seed protein powder (or some other protein powder)

Paradise glimpsed

After about ten years of talk, we finally went to Hawaii last week despite many warnings that you should never go on vacation without a few extra adults in tow. For the record, it can be done but it's not exactly relaxing.

If I wasn't typing one-handed, this is were I would give you a bunch of practical advice about a beach vacation with kids. For now I will just say that I highly recommend buying a beach shelter so the whole family can hang out by the water without worrying about getting too much sun (we got ours at the Costco on Maui and the nice people on Hawaiian Airlines even let us bring it home on the plane). Also, staying at a hotel with penguins really helped boost the mood.

In the picture is me, stumbling across a huge expanse of coral so I could do some snorkeling. It was beautiful but I was too scared to stay out for long by myself (water sort of terrifies me). This was one of those times I really wished we had someone to watch the kids.

Resolved:

A few years ago one of my friends resolved not to go to jail in the new year. Except she called it the pokey, which made us laugh every time. I was talking to that same friend this morning after I received a text message from her announcing that they had returned from their vacation with bed bugs. We discussed the upcoming year and what is in store for both of our families and ultimately came to the conclusion that our best bet for a new year's resolution is to try to lower expectations across the board. This may sound defeatist, depressing or even ungrateful considering how charmed our lives are but for someone like me sometimes lowering expectations is the key to happiness. My grandfather always used to say that we should expect the worst and celebrate when things turned out better than we'd anticipated but that's not exactly what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about expecting the baby to sleep in my bed for at least another six months, not feeling like a bad mom when we eat take-out more than once a week, planning for friends to come over in the evenings to visit with me instead of trying to go out and being disappointed when I can't and coming to terms with the fact that I now like to buy microwave mac and cheese because I can't be bothered to make it from a box anymore (that one alternately makes my wince and smile). And as for the pokey . . . three squares and the promise of solitary confinement . . . I should be so lucky.

Snips and Snails?

I always figured little boy babies and little girls babies were pretty much the same, just your basic bundle of joy but with different stuff under their diapers. And maybe they are but what I can say for certain is that the way I feel about a boy baby and a girl baby is nearly night and day. Which is hard for me to admit because, before I had a boy, I would have been the first one to rag on other parents for treating their children differently based on sex. Of course I'm still miffed at the people who dismiss bad manners and outrageous behavior with a helpless (and slightly proud I might add), "Boys will be boys!" I've noticed, however, that I am undeniably guilty of looking at my son with a lens I did not use for my daughter. I just can't put my finger on the difference. At least I couldn't until the other night when my mother mentioned how much sweeter a baby boy seems and wondered aloud if it was because, compared to the man we expect him to become, a baby boy is awfully earnest and vulnerable. I'm starting to wonder if I feel differently toward the boy because I know he'll only be a part of my world for a limited time before he leaves the "women and children" and becomes a man. Or perhaps this sort of thing only matters in life boats.