chrysanthemum

Milestone

The first tooth was lost this summer on the playground at camp. Truly lost. In the grass.

This tooth came out (after days of tongue wiggling) after lunch at school. The school nurse gave him a teeny tooth shaped box to hold it in. The box was on a keyring with a lanyard tied on so he could wear it as a necklace. During P.E. This one was lost somewhere in the gym. Ben says it was small and dirty (shudder), so the Tooth Fairy probably wouldn't have left him much for it anyway. He wrote her a little apology. I'm sure she'll take it to heart.

I'm currently entertaining ideas of what the Tooth Fairy looks like. Savage, I expect, with a heavy necklace of teeth around her neck. I bet she has terrible bedhead and dirty fingernails, too. She'd need to be tiny, though, with an innocent(-ish) face so as not to scare any young ones who accidentally catch a glimpse of her. Ben says it's best not to look right at her because then you'd want to get her. Maybe he thinks she glows, like a firefly? A fairyfly with a toothy necklace. I like that...

37 and 1/365th

Yesterday was my 37th birthday. My sister sent me flowers. Aren't they luscious? They smell nice, too. Thanks, Meg!

I think pretty much everybody who reads this blog knows more than enough about me already, but in case you're reading and we've never met, here are 37 marginally to moderately interesting things about me:
1. I was born at 3:20 am.
2. Now that I've had babies of my own, I feel kind of bad for keeping my mother up all night like that.
3. I apologized for that two years ago.
4. I'm the oldest of five kids: four girls and one boy.
5. My youngest sister is 15 years younger than I am.
6. I spent a lot of my teenage years babysitting for my younger siblings.
7. When I went to college all of my friends called me Mom because I was the person who was always telling them it was time to go to bed or that they should wear a hat outside in the cold.
8. For years, I thought that their endorsement of my maternal instinct made me kind of special.
9. Turns out, all of my sisters were called Mom by their college friends too.
10. It's obviously not me who's special, but my mom, who taught all of her kids how to make other people feel loved and well cared for.
11. I think that's just about the best thing a mom could pass on to her children.
12. I'm happy to see that my boy, Ben, loves to take care of his little sister.
13. I used to be a voracious reader.
14. These days I'm more of a voracious knitter.
15. Thought this summer has been kind of slow, knitting-wise.
16. I almost always have more than one project in progress and several other projects in mind.
17. I very rarely quit a project before it's done.
18. I can only think of three abandoned projects: a pointelle cardigan for me that needs one more sleeve, a baby cardigan knit in sock yarn on size 0 needles, and a pair of too-tight lace socks.
19. I'm planning to rip the pointelle cardigan and use the yarn for something else, and I've already ripped the socks and made a different pair for Lyra.
20. The baby cardigan--I actually threw it away.
21. If I had to choose between chocolate cake and cherry pie, I'd pick the pie every time.
22. But only if it was real cherry pie, like my mom makes.
23. I do adore chocolate.
24. But a really excellent fruit dessert--even just a bowl of pristinely fresh berries with whipped cream... mmm...
25. If I'm going to eat chocolate cake, my preference is for yellow cake with chocolate frosting.
26. For my birthday this year, I didn't have any cake, but I did have fresh raspberries with Chantilly cream.
27. I also had bouillabaisse for the first time.
28. I shouldn't have waited 37 years to try bouillabaisse.
29. I love to cook.
30. But I often don't enjoy making weeknight dinners.
31. On the weekends, I like to makes tons of food to eat all week: pancakes, cookies, soup, bread, spaghetti sauce...
32. My husband loves my lasagna, but I think it's pretty unremarkable.
33. He's not so impressed with my oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, but they're excellent.
34. That means more cookies for me.
35. I cry very easily.
36. But my husband says I'm more likely to snort than laugh.
37. This year, I'm going to try to let myself laugh more.

Overdue

This is my nightstand. There's the alarm clock that took me a year to figure out how to program, the Itty Bitty Booklight that I find worthless and annoying and therefore never use but can't quite bring myself to throw away, my lavender-filled bunny who has a sad little hole from which much lavender has escaped (note to self: fix the hole!), a hair elastic, a beaded necklace that a friend made for me since I couldn't afford to buy a similar one at Tiffany's, and two tubes of foot cream. I'm intermittently obsessed with my feet and how it looks like I haven't had a real pedicure in a year and half. Sometimes I actually remember to use one of these creams, but it's so rare that they couldn't possibly improve the overall condition of my feet (note to self: get a pedicure!).   

This is the stack of books that I'm supposedly reading, but not really. The library kind of wants me to bring some of them back. Most specifically, Fast Food Nation, which I've evidently renewed too many times to be allowed to renew it anymore. It's a fascinating book, but I got to a point where every time I picked it up, I'd start crying. It made me want to run away and start my own... I don't know... planet? So I guess I'll be taking it back to the library. I'm currently reading the slightly less horrifying What to Eat (also on the list of things the library wants back, um, yesterday). It's galling, really, what passes for food and food safety in this country.

I have to take back Theft, too. I really liked the first 100 pages of this book, but then I was just kind of done with the characters. The novel uses two narrators: one is a has-been artist with a drinking problem and a serious lot of personal problems (not the least of which is his abrasive personality), the other is his brother, who is 'damaged.' For a 'damaged' guy, he's an amazingly articulate narrator. I don't know, I just got tired of both of them and didn't want to read anymore. The library tells me someone else has put this one on hold, so back it goes.

The library people did let me renew Middlesex which was highly recommended to me by both my mother and my good friend Melissa. I've had it for a few weeks now, but haven't quite gotten to it yet, so it's a good thing I get to keep it at least for another three weeks.

The Borrowers I'm actually reading now. I started reading it to Ben, but his eyes glazed over--just not old enough yet, I think. Michael has successfully read him some Roald Dahl books that I thought were too old for him, but I couldn't snag his interest in The Borrowers. It could be that I'm just not very good at reading this kind of story out loud. I tend to get so engrossed in what I'm reading that I just zoom ahead. It's hard for me to take time to make sure Ben's following along and enjoying the story. I'm much better at picture books, I think. Anyway, I've been dipping into this one at bedtime myself, and I'm liking it. I've never read any of this series before, which I'm sure is a travesty. I'm not finding it exactly gripping, but it is a pleasant bedtime story.

Darcy & Elizabeth and Rumi: The Book of Love are both my own. It's sad that since I actually own them, they're sitting there at the bottom of the stack. The library isn't pressuring me to read them, so I'm not.

There are also my two blue journals. The top one is my regular journal where I try to make semi-regular notes about what's going on in my little family, lest I forget it all in my old age and be unable to entertain my grandchildren. Baby books aren't really my style, so notes about the kids' little triumphs have to be recorded somewhere. Recent entries list Lyra's words ('yummy' is definitely my fave) and celebrate the day Ben decided he didn't need to wear pull-ups to bed anymore--hurrah! The bottom journal is my craft journal, started this past winter. It's quite underused. Time is so short for crafting--I don't have time to write lovely journal entries about crafting too. Especially not if I'm also going to blog about it. There's only so much navel-gazing one woman can do.

No picture is worth 801 words

Last night we—Torrie, Val and I, the remainder of our Thursday-night knitting group since two of our favorite members moved away in the space of two months—last night we went to the Mariners' Stitch & Pitch game against the… grey team… check the ticket stub… oh, yes, the Toronto Blue Jays. Maybe they were a blue team, but they looked grey to me. They won, but it didn't really seem important. Personally, I would estimate that I watched fewer than five cumulative minutes of the game. Possibly less than three, and that's if you include the minute where the guys who sweep the diamond were doing a little dance with their giant brooms. Wait, are those brooms? Maybe they’re more like rakes. I couldn't really tell from way up in section 344. Anyway, there was one moment where I was busily knitting away, and Torrie and Val and everybody else in the stadium cheered, and I looked up to see what was going on and realized that I wasn't even looking at the part of the field where the game was happening. In fact, I might have been looking at the scoreboard. I'm so not a sports fan…

But it was a really beautiful evening. The oppressive heat wave ended very early yesterday morning, and it was just a nice, normal July night in Seattle. We browsed all the little tiny yarn booths that the local yarn shops had set up. I finally got to see some Socks That Rock yarn in person. It's very soft stuff and the colors are pretty, but I have this thing about pooling—I really don't like it—and it looks to me like Socks That Rock pools a lot. At least from the sample pair I fingered. We mostly chatted, peeked at other people's knitting projects, and talked about what songs we would want to be our theme songs if we were ever to be played onto the baseball field or on stage at the Oscars or whatever. I picked 'Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes.' I pretty sure people do say I'm crazy, but mostly Paul Simon songs just make me happy. Those drumbeats, the lyrics… it's dorky to say, I'm sure, but they give me this little laugh that makes my chest feel tight and my eyes tear up. 'Born at the Right Time' actually makes me weep with joy. See? You're saying I'm crazy right now, aren't you?

Anyway, I meant to take my camera so I could take a picture of something to post, but then I forgot, so take my word for it: It was an actual major league baseball game with lots of people in the stands who were knitting openly, wearing hand-knit items, gawking at yarn and cheering wildly for crazy knitting-themed trivia questions on the big TV. It was fun.

I also need to show you my paint job in progress (but can't since I haven't taken a picture). The found can of light blue paint turned out to be unusable—it was covered with an inch of weird, yellowish, oily scum—no idea what that was, but I wasn't going to deal with it. It was 7 o'clock on Saturday morning when I figured that out, and I almost reverted to my Ionic Sky plan, but then I caught sight of this cone of mercerized cotton in a color I really love. I decided to see if any of paint chips matched, and I ended up with Rapture Blue. I picked a paler version of the same color for the ceiling and trim and ended up doing the center wall in the same light color. I'm really happy with it. I still haven't gotten to the floor, but I think it's going to be green. (Shamrock looks like it complements my two blues the best.) I've got various red and fuchsia chips all over the floor with the greens, and there's one red (Licorice Stick, maybe) that looks nice, but I think green will ground the room a little better. The red seems like overkill. Not sure if I'm going to be able to tackle this project this weekend or not. Maybe at night… It's a lengthy project I think: primer, two coats of paint and two coats of polyurethane. That's at least five nights, and in the meantime, the entire contents of that little room are spread all over the downstairs. Maybe I should start tonight in earnest. If I go back to the Despot, get the primer, paint and polyurethane, and mop the floor tonight, I should be able to prime tomorrow, paint on Friday and Saturday and polyurethane on Sunday and Monday. Assuming that Michael has no particular desire to see me at all for the next five nights...

Morning glory

Poor Ben comes by this kind of bedhead naturally. Lyra is temporarily saved since her hair is still so babyish and soft, but mine is an absolute nest in the mornings, and even Michael's tends to be a bit rooster-ish first thing. The thing is, Ben's hair was quite curly when he was a toddler, and we never really got into the habit of combing it. Having lived all my life with a nest of curls, if there's one thing I know, it's that you don't comb or brush unless you want your hair to look like some kind of topiary gone awry. So Ben's hair never got combed when he was small, and he doesn't tolerate combing very well now. He often goes to school looking like an absolute ragamuffin with his hair swooping off in four different directions.

Here's my rationale: one day soon enough he's going to actually care what his hair looks like, and he'll likely spend hours getting it to do just what he wants (whatever that turns out to be). And anyway, even flooping all over the place, I honestly don't think his hair looks bad. To me, he looks like Peter Pan.  (Check out Amanda's darling Peter players.) Poor motherless Peter, I know, but in a certain way, for at least a little while, he's such a lucky boy, getting to wring every bit of joy out of his youth. Didn't you feel that way watching Finding Neverland? That every second of youth was worth clinging to, because it just doesn't last?) Ben's got plenty of time to grow up and be self-conscious about how his hair looks. For now, I'm not going to worry about it.

And look at Lyra's hair this morning--it's like candy floss. And those goofy teeth! This is her expression when you tell her to smile these days. (I'm sure she'll be embarrassed about this one day, as well.) She's got three out of four two-year molars, but otherwise, only the bottom two front teeth. You can see, though, that there are about six more teeth on the front about to break through. Poor thing.

Michael went to play golf with his brother at 5:30 (!) this morning. Lyra and I made some banana muffins (OK, Lyra just watched from her high chair while scarfing down strawberries), and they were truly good--the muffins, I mean. I think I've finally perfected the recipe. You need three nearly black bananas.

 

Banana-Chocolate Chip Muffins

1 stick butter, softened
1/2 cup sugar
2 eggs
3 over-ripe bananas
1 tablespoon milk
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 cup chocolate chips

Cream butter and sugar until fluffy, then add eggs.
Mash bananas in a small bowl and add milk.
Combine dry ingredients, except chips, in a bowl and stir.
Add bananas to creamed mixture and stir.
Add dry ingredients, stir until just combined, adding chips toward the end.
Bake in muffin cups at 325 degrees for 25 minutes.
Cool on rack for 10 minutes, then dig in.

A shoe named Valentina

I can scarcely imagine a shoe less worthy of the name Valentina.

Well, maybe if Valentina were the name of your wrinkly, 89-year-old Italian grandma who only ever wears shapeless floral housedresses and suntan-colored knee highs that puddle around her puffy ankles.

This will probably accurately describe me some day (in 50+ years), except then the ugly shoe will be sporting the fresh-again and fabulously sexy name 'Jennifer' that normal people will associate with peachy skin and high, firm breasts, but that my shoe-designer grandchild will only ever match with me. And possibly, if s/he really likes me, with her/his wrinkly, puffy newborn baby girl.

Oh, I think I'm going to cry now.