Locked Out

We interrupt your regularly scheduled broadcast to announce that the Bug has locked himself in the hallway.

Off to climb through the bathroom window...

Another Big Helper-Boy

While Nate-Bug helps me take care of Bay-bee, Isaiah helps me keep the apartment nice and tidy. Whenever I change a diaper, Isaiah takes great pride in being entrusted with the job of throwing it away.

This truly is a big help--at least, when it's diapers he's throwing away.

Nevertheless, as I look at the dwindling contents of my silverware drawer, I have to wonder if it might not have been better to keep the trash strictly off limits.

Why you should always cut grape tomatoes in half before feeding them to your toddlers

I always thought it was to prevent choking.

No.

It's to make them look less like balls.

Baby Bjorn

Time is money, and when you're short on both, sometimes there are a few big ticket items that you can't afford not to invest in. For us, a Baby Bjorn was one of those things. It is simply the best baby carrier out there. Other carriers are useful--a good compromise for when you want to be cuddling your baby but need to be vacuuming. But there's no compromise necessary with the Baby Bjorn, it cuddles baby up to your chest just the way your arms would, at the perfect height for eye contact and interaction. Unlike other models with their plethora of confusing straps and buckles, it is quite simple to take on and off. And as an extra bonus, I can wander about a crowded grocery store without anyone noticing that I'm nursing.

The difference is in the details--but for something that you're going to use this much, the details matter. It is a delight to use, which means it actually gets used... and much more of the vacuuming gets done.

And the beautifully balanced design is inspiring, a sort of tactile image of the way a well-run household ought to work.

It's a bit pricey... but it's more than paid for itself in meals that we didn't have to get at McDonalds, because Mama's got things under control.

First Thanksgiving

This year was Tembo-Teff's first Thanksgiving ever, and Isaiah's first Thanksgiving dinner that he stayed awake for. (Not that he would try anything but rolls and cranberry sauce....)

And it was my first Thanksgiving as a woman. Or at least as the woman.

Three years ago, Andy and I drove out to Arizona to spend our first Thanksgiving together with my family. We managed to roll in just as they were clearing the table. So I didn't have a whole lot to do with that Thanksgiving dinner.

Our second Thanksgiving, I was exceedingly great with child--er, make that children--and although the doctor gave me permission to sit up for a (short) Thanksgiving dinner, I wasn't allowed to so much as wash a single dish. My family came out, and I lay on the couch busily gestating while Mom did everything.

Last year, my parents and sister and grandparents all came out, and we had a splendid four-generation celebration. That one was a collaborative effort.

But this year, it was just me.

Tim and Rachel came over, bearing yams and pie, and I brined and roasted a turkey, mashed potatoes with cream cheese, made cranberry sauce and fruit salad, baked rolls and made fresh butter in my new bread machine. And defrosted a bag of green beans. (Hey, you can only do so much!)

At the beginning of the week I had all sorts of good intentions about how organized I was going to be. I would do my shopping on Monday, mash the potatoes on Tuesday, make cranberry sauce on Wednesday, and on Thanksgiving Day I would only have to do the turkey and fruit salad. And defrost the beans, of course.

I forgot to reckon on the difficulty of getting anything done with three wuggies underfoot.

Thanks to much help from Mary-Kate Reynolds, I did indeed get the shopping done on Monday. And on Tuesday, I cut up the potatoes. On Wednesday, I started to boil the potatoes, and on Thursday, I threw them out and started all over again.

So yesterday was pretty crazy. I had no idea what I was doing, and I was highly intimidated. I felt utterly incompetent... and yet when all was said and done, I had a tender, moist turkey with a deep, rich gravy, and beautiful dinner rolls with freshly churned butter. The cranberries and fruit salad were respectable, if unremarkable. And let me tell you, I can defrost a mean bag of green beans.

All in all it was quite a confidence-builder. It's funny--most holidays are about rest. We take the day off, we pause our work to remember. But for a woman and a homemaker, Thanksgiving is a day of particularly hard work. While this often winds up being true of most holidays, it's a good and wonderful and essential part of Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is a celebration of her work itself, not just the end result, but the raw materials and the process.

It was a joyous day in the kitchen, yesterday, engaged in the good labor of feeding the family with which God has abundantly blessed us, with the food he has so richly provided.

It is good.

Marshmallows

Marshmallows are super-duper. Not only are they scrum-tiddly-uptious, but they're also good for throwing. The wuggies had a splendid marshmallow fight. It was lots of fun.

Oh yes.

But then... uh-oh! Marshmallows are sticky. When the wuggies went on their next TP-ing expedition, the tissue stuck to their fingers in funny long, white, trails.

Isaiah quickly became very absorbed in the fascinating problem of disentangling himself from the marshmallows and toilet paper. Nathan, on the other hand, was very upset, and threw himself across my lap, crying piteously.

I must confess, I had very little sympathy. Wuggy-o-mine, you just covered the entire living room with our second-to-last roll of toilet paper, and ground marshmallows into into the carpet....

....and now you're upset because your fingers are a little sticky???

Boys will be boys

We've been TP'd again.

More blessings, still more cleverly disguised...

As I was reaching for a little spouty measuring cup in which to mix up some homemade salad dressing, it occurred to me for the very first time that a salad dressing bottle would be awfully nice. That way I could save some for next time, instead of trying to guess exactly how much we would use in one meal. Besides, dressings really ought to be shaken, not stirred---and a pyrex measuring cup looks pretty silly on the table.

A faint splashing sound snapped me out of my reverie.

Well, it was a different flavour than I was initially intending, but my balsamic vinaigrette was quite lovely in the beautiful red wine vinegar bottle.

So much for my cinnamon-scented kitchen.

Echoes

September is a baby, and wherever there is a baby, there are a few favorite pastimes that everyone around likes to engage in. One of the most prominent of these is searching for family resemblance.

Almost always, they spend a few moments unsuccessfully attempting to find Andy or me in her features. When they move on to her big brothers, they are faced with a different sort of dilemma. Nobody can quite decide which one of her brothers she looks like.

But one thing is certain. She bears a decided resemblance to both of her brothers, and not particularly to either of her parents. Which is very strange indeed, since Nathan and Isaiah look very much like us, and very little like one another.

But most people are agreed on this, so there you have it. The transitive property is very much applicable to equations, inequalities, and cranberry juice... but apparently not to facial features.

Even though her face doesn’t particularly look like either of ours yet, though, her soul does. As I look into my little daughter’s eyes, I see my own soul looking back at me. In an intangible but very real way, I sense that she perceives the world in precisely the way that I do.

She is a reverberation of my soul, and wonder of wonders, the echo is every bit as real as I am.

Rude Awakening

Waking up to a glass of cold water in the face is one thing.

Waking up to a glass of cold cranberry juice in the face is another.

Happiness is...

...rushing home after realizing that my fabulous Saturday morning with girlfriends had stretched muuucchh looonger than it was supposed to, and finding peacefully napping children, a sparkling clean apartment, and 18 gloriously red roses on the table.

And a wonderful husband.

The Transitive Property of Cranberry Juice

Nate-bug likes to pour his juice all over himself.

Nate-bug likes to give everybody lots of cuddles.

Now everybody's covered in cranberry juice!

Oh yes.

Blessings in disguise

A while back, we were at the mall of a Sunday afternoon, and stopped at Cinnabon to remedy one of those sudden late-pregnancy blood-sugar drops. And I marvelled at how absolutely scrumptiously cinnamony their rolls were. Ever so much better than mine. There's just a whole new dimension to the flavor that's utterly missing from my baking. I wondered if maybe they used cinnamon oil in addition to powdered cinnamon?

Well, it turns out that I must not have been the only one wishing to incorporate their marvelous cinnamoneyness into my own kitchen, since the next time I was at Cinnabon, the counter was lined with little jars of high-quality cinnamon for sale.

But I had lots and lots of cinnamon at home. I was still only about half-way through that humongous jar of cinnamon that I got as a wedding present three years ago. Of course, by now it tasted more like wood than like cinnamon, but it was cinnamon nevertheless, and there was no way I could justify buying more cinnamon until I used it up... in another six or seven years. (My cinnamon use was rapidly declining, as my cinnamon grew staler and staler.)

Last week, however, Mr. Wuggidy solved my dilemma. If the cinnamon loses its flavor, it is fit only to be flung about the floor and trampled on, so my sons did precisely that. It made quite a mess, but it vaccumed up easily, and the kitchen smelled wonderful.

And everytime I used the vaccum, the scent of cinnamon filled the air.

Er... make that the scent of cinnamon-ish wood.

Unfoldings

Last night September smiled. She's smiled before, but this time it was her own smile, not ours reflected back. Dadders made silly faces at her, and played ski-jump with her upturned little nose, and tickled the little snuggle-spot between her chins, and she smiled. She smiled and smiled and smiled, a beautiful, flickering, everchanging expression of her very own delightful delight.

A new dimension of her personality is unfolding for us, shedding light on everything we knew about her before. So utterly continuous with everything we've known of her so far, and yet so surprising and unexpected. The unexpectedness of it all is not so much who she turns out to be, but the fact that it is who she was all along. Indeed, given everything we've known of her over the past months, she couldn't possibly be any other way. And yet we didn't know her, know this part of her, until last night.

It's like staring at a half-finished jigsaw puzzle in bewilderment. Suddenly, you look at the box and everything makes sense, and you no longer can comprehend how you didn't see it all along.

Birth was the same way. When I was pregnant with the twins, I was very conscious of lots of in utero bonding going on. My whole life revolved around them, so of course I felt a powerful bond. But when I was pregnant with the Persephone-child, my life still pretty much revolved around the twins, and I was dreadfully disappointed to find that I didn't really feel much of anything about the unseen little person squirming in my belly.

She was simply a part of me.

It wasn't until she was born that I realized just how well I knew her, had always known her. From time to time a look or a gesture takes my breath away with its utter familiarity. Now I see what I felt in my womb so many times, felt and hardly noticed, but oh, the memory is so clear and precious now!

Like the memory of the first time I kissed my little Isaiah, too weak and feeble and numb and scared to savor the moment...

Or maybe it was just that the moment was too big and too precious to be savoured all at once.

Redemption

There are two big amorphous messes in our home, that continuously grow, sucking everything in the vicinity into their disorder. Actually, there are lots of messes around here, and all messes seem to behave that way... but for the most part, we conquor them on the weekends, and they rise up again, and we conquor them again... Two messes, however, have managed to evade our efforts, week after week, month after month.

In the closet, there is a huge basket filled with yarn left over from sundry projects, many of which I abandoned because the yarn became entirely too tangled to do anything with it except leave it in a heap to collect sundry small items in its elaborately confused web.

The other mess is the toybox.

'Nuff said.

And so it is that I am knitting the leftover yarn into drawstring baggies with which to organize the wuggies toys. The duplos will be in one bag, the little people in another, and never the twain shall meet. The children will happily play with one neatly homogenous set of toys, until they decide to put it away and pull out a different one. Blissful order. And the closet will be free of the overflowing basket of yarn.

My mother is quite skeptical about my ability to solve the age-old problem of the disorganized toy box.

My husband is quite skeptical about my ability to see such a large-scale knitting project to completion.

They're probably both right.

But I have to try.

Of pots and kettles, beams and splinters

The snottiest-nosed of my children is going about the apartment rousing his sleeping siblings by wiping their relatively (albeit incompletely) clean noses witha cold baby wipe.

He protests greatly, however, when I attempt to wipe his nose.

The stubble rule--do unto others what you really ought to have done unto you, but would greatly rather not.

Investment Strategies

Nathan decided to invest in the Doopah-Mobile's stereo system.

Our van is now worth $.25 more than it was yesterday.

Honey, you turn me on

Being an itinerant math teacher, Andy spends a considerable amount of time each week roaming the freeways of SoCal in our zippy little turtle. (14 years old and 38 MPG. What a great car!) The time is well spent, though. Thanks to Blackstone Audio and the Cerritos Library audio-book collection, he gets to carpool with Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and Charles Dickens. Because of the fabulously long commutes, he actually has time to "read."

Yesterday afternoon, though, it was just him and me in the car. Well, mostly. We left the boys with a sitter while we went to the Huntington Library with only September for a chaperone. We spent more time on the freeway going to and fro than we actually did at the Library itself, but that was just fine. Driving is almost as nice as walking as a context for uninterrupted conversation.

As we got onto the 5, the wind whooshed noisily through the windows. Andy couldn't quite catch what I was saying about grad school.

So he reached down to the stereo volume control to turn me up.

I wish they made child-proof locks...

...for onesies.

Uh-oh.

We are completely out of Desitin.

We are completely out of clean laundry.

And yes, there is a connection.