Afterglow

Our dining room, here in our rehab-project colonial is in exactly the right spot to receive somewhat mystical evening sunshine, exactly as dinner is being served. It's a wonderful thing, as thought some thoughtful someone has zoomed in on your table and is spotlighting each dish as you serve it. Makes me look forward to cooking, and have a boost of energy and goodwill on nights when I drag myself to the kitchen.

In other news, we are back home from our family reunion with A's extended relations in Yellowstone National Park, and our family is one pair of cowboy boots richer. Ru and Dee picked them out together since they'll be hand-me-down treasures after our biggest boy is done wearing them. Was secretly very pleased that they wanted the viney stiching ones. :)

The trip was one of our personal best as a nuclear family, only one small interpersonal melt-down which was pretty briskly mended and overall low stress/high enjoyment. The extended cousiney, relative type interaction was well above par and left everyone with a much fonder regard at the end of it all.

We all were somewhat frantically counting the years until the next big get-together and thinking "Three years??? Too long....how else can we see these people?" You know you have a cool family if???? A has cool family. I feel lucky to be along for the ride. And I do hope that we end up getting at least one round of house guests out of the week together. There is also talk of a wild, bluegrass tour with the rels, sometime in 2013. Am dreaming about that!

Poetry Friday: A Watermelon Poem

 Happy Poetry Friday, everyone!

Today it is cold and rainy, again. We've been having quite a lot of those spells this summer. The handy thing is that I am spending very little time watering the plants and everything is growing like gangbusters. I am looking forward to a few more of those painfully sunny days now that it is officially summer.

It's important to have squint-your-eyes sunshiny days for watermelon eating. A's favorite fruit, and one of his very favorite foods is watermelon, a quintessential summer pleasure. He always asserts that it is "the thinker's fruit" which never fails to make me smile. Who doesn't have rosy memories from their childhood involving watermelon? Today's poem is a little intro to summers past in my brain, in celebration of the solstice this past week. Shout-out to my cousins, scattered all over the world but still as fond as ever!

Ode to Watermelon

I remember standing on my grandma's veranda
The grey wood, slippery with dry beach sand,
Ptoo!-ing black seeds into the curling sawgrass.
All the cousins, reunited for an elastic week,
Here together flicking the stubborn ones from
Crisp, rosy flesh with springy index fingers.
Proper technique also meant leaning far forward
All of us slanted togetherlike books on a shelf,
The whole deck tilting,like a summer canoe as
We dripped rivulets of juice down our arms
And let it plink in pink drops overboard.
I heard the aunt-sisters laugh from the kitchen,
An adult world of loud talk and ice in tinkly glass.
Behind us Grandma opened the grill and squinted
Briskly balancing the deck again by leaning backwards,
Dodging the smoke cloud from the shish-kabobs,
Carefully threaded on their funny blackened sticks.
Bellies full, we heaped up a mound of rinds,
Gnawed to pale crescents with a moat of juice.
And then clenched and unclenched our fists
Giggling at the tacky feeling of all that sugar
Dried to rubber cement between our fingers.


We still buy a lot of watermelon, we're a melon a week family at our house, but I miss the seeds. A thinks I'm crazy, but there's a little bit of evidence out there that perhaps the modern hybrid breeding programs that have culled the little black teardrops from our fruit have done some taste dulling in the bargain. I hope, eventually to accomplish growing my own old fashioned seeded melons. Next year I will actually be able to get plants in the ground at the right time and maybe that will be the clinching key. In the meantime, thank goodness for the farmer's market!

Check out more Poetry Friday poems at Carol's Corner, the host blog for this week.

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Hotter than blazes.....

Whew! It has been hot this week! Holy moley! We are all sweltering in our no a/c house....even though I am sure we would have been hotter at our old house minus that lovely central air. This house is much cooler...I think honestly, even though its in the city it is a cooler spot....less massive parking lot in front of the door and many more trees and big grassy yards which are very relieving. I know that not having a solarium facing our parking lot helps a lot too. That solarium kitchen sure was nice in January but in August....not so much.

Even though its been so hot, it still seems good to get out for a little bit of time every day. Five children, four and under is a lot in one space, however rambly the house. Mommies start to slowly melt down if there is no outdoors time. Today we took a little stroll through the nearby business district (neighborhood exploring!) and found all kinds of good things: Cuban food, Guatemalan food, karate, Chinese take-out, a drugstore, a laundromat or two, convenience stores, and lots of other great little assets.  

It was also Nib's first time ever in a stroller. He liked it quite well and promptly slept through pretty much the whole walk, snuggled down in a corner. Cute man.

Also of note: Last night he slept through the whole night. He's three months old! I can't believe it. I'm not saying this is any kind of pattern, I'm just saying its amazing....that's all.

We're getting to the end of the cousin visit. Tomorrow they pack their rental car and head off for parts further south to say goodbye to the other side of their family before they head home to Germany to get ready for their Daddy's return from Iraq. We're so honored to have had them visit, we've all been having so much fun together and we've been having a blast the last day or two recounting all the lovely ways our kids have influenced each other....from eating more fresh produce to learning how to teach your baby doll to walk, there's been fabulous give and take on both ends.

Girl cousins are the best. How else is a fellow to learn about these sorts of things?

I also had to share this shot of our tiniest cousin, hugging Nib. She can't keep her mitts off him, hugs and kisses and pats on the cheek without end...I have taken to hiding him on top of the dining room table or back in the mudroom sometimes so he can get a little breathing time from all the love. Its hilarious how "motherly" she is to him, rocking him in his bouncer and kissing him when he's crying and putting his pacifier in....nevermind that she just learned to walk and is only 11 months old herself, he is clearly a baby and needs lots of mothering.

I also blasted through another last legion of boxes (not that I'm done yet....far from it) and I finally have another room completely clear of packing materials. Am starting to get the mad, mad decorating itch so, it will feel really great to finally get through all this putting away business and start slapping paint on the walls and adding the right hardware, rugs and paintings. Am just so dying to get into that part!

Here's a couple more little shots of the house. I need to take some with no macro lens. Sorry for the lack of pulled back, "big picture" style shots. I will try to get some of those with my other camera. This first shot is looking into the kitchen from the dining room. You can see one of the two kitchen windows, one of our fabulous radiators and the creamy tile floor in the room.

Here's the uncovered dining room floor, another little peek at that beautiful wood that was hidden by hideous carpet. You can also see how I need to add wood trim on the bottom of the wall to come down and cover the big crack between the wall and the floor. A little moulding should do the job, all I have to do is pick just the right stuff, in just the right size and paint and trim it to fit. Heh. Am slightly nervous but trying to not let on.

Here's a closer shot of one of the dining room radiators. Lovely old things. I can't wait to glossy paint them all again. They're so elegant looking.

And here's a couple of (urgh) close-up shots in the room I finished today which will be our homeschool room/playroom. It has all the toys, most of the kid books, and a little desk with a beautiful old Underwood, found at Goodwill typewriter on a desk for typing experimentation and letter learning as well as mechanical observation. Ru was thrilled and said something like "Oh wow, Mommy!" when he walked into the room for the first time.

The girls were most taken with the storybook corner and all the cozy cushions to snuggle in with books. Pretty lovely to see how enchanted the kids were with the space. I can't wait for paint and curtains and the like!!! Have big cool dreams for this space.

Leaving San Fran Behind...

So, when we first arrived (literally the first night), Dee came down with a wretched cold that his big brother generously shared during the plane flight over. We tossed and turned and sat up and back patted and offered sips of water and rubbed our eyes and somehow we made it through the night. There are times when its really nice to be two people parenting and not just one. We just kind of traded off when it got insane and we were wishing for toothpicks to hold our eyes open and between the two of us we both managed to scrape up survival levels of sleep. The next night was the worst (although mercifully Ru has improved more and more and has been sleeping like an angel every night) and then we had one more wretched night at A's maternal relative's home. The great mercy here was that they had us set up in two separate rooms (intended to be kid and parent quarters) but what it actually allowed was for the "off duty" parent to get some quiet, closed door sleep while the other person took a shift. A and I both slept more deeply, even though there were still not really any more hours of shut eye between us. But folks, that was the blush of dawn on the horizon...last night there was no wheezing and many fewer wakings and so much less anguished wailing. Praises be...we felt downright normal in the morning. So, here we sit, preparing to dig into the quilts at a new mom and pop joint and we have every hope of getting decent rest for the second night in a row and ending up positively giddy on the road to Hearst Castle in the morning! *glorious whoops of victory all round*

What else has happened? Well, both A and I were surprised how sane and reasonable San Francisco struck us. New York feels considerably more grubby, fast paced and harried. A even ventured to say that San Fran felt like a "town" to him and although I would personally never go that far, I do have to agree that it doesn't have the staggering metropolis feel that NYC feels swathed in. We're both curious how L.A. will strike us.

Another surprising bit has been the fact that besides San Francsico and of course Los Angeles and San Diego (which we know are looming down the coast ahead of us), California feels like a long and fairly empty state full of wilderness, big trees, empty tracts of land, long winding roads and scattered small towns here and there for punctuation. We can't get over how the dominant conception of the state is materialism, city, urban, glitz and yet the real sum total of the state seems more like wilderness with a couple token cities. I guess, its a little like New York state that way although on a larger scale. New York-staters (I hesitate to write New Yorkers) are always complaining that they are not reasonably represented by New York City. Upstate has so little to do with the rush of Midtown. A and I are have learned that we need to quickly check our cell phone messages and rush to update our directions and mapping plans in the cities and bit towns we pass through because big swathes of the state have no cell coverage of any kind and are quite remote feeling, albeit really beautiful, keeps us on our toes with planning and is taking apart our conceptions and silly constructions.

Right now we're spending the night in Big Sur, one of those big wildnerness areas I mentioned, a redwood scattered, turquoise bathed coast with giant black rocks sticking out of the sea cliffs where our path, Highway 1 winds on and on. We both find it curious that the west and east coasts have a Hwy.1 that runs the length of the shore! We never noticed before. We're starting to toss around the idea of reproducing our idea here on the Altantic Coast just for kicks. A nine day drive from our home in Connecticut (or better yet from the top of Maine!) all the way down to Florida's tippy toe. Sounds like fun, no? Sounds like even more fun, knowing that someday I will be un-pregnant and that this imaginary trip might very well fall in that space in time.

(putting my puffy ankles up on the dash as we cross the Golden Gate Bridge)

The shine, I'm afraid, has worn off. I'm good and ready to have my body back. I think this week was the first time I've started to really feel like, "Okay, all this other stuff is all well and good but, I think when we get home...job number one needs to be Baby." I'm ready to be done. I can't wait to feel comfortable again, I can't wait to lie on my own stomach, I can't wait to just be alone in my own skin, call me an introvert...I'm ready for some personal space. I am also of course so excited to meet the baby and very interested in getting home and having a little time to get organized before the actually make an entrance etc. etc. BUT...but but but....I'm up for the next stage. Its time to be un-pregnant good and soon folks and that's the way it ought to be right about now.

So, that's the scoop at the moment, friends...life is good, California is different but different/good and we're about halfway down the state, squiggling our way towards my warren of maternal cousins in Orange County.

And one more thing...(how crazy is this bit of familial info that A and I just put together)....we both have, Aunt Nancys...who live in California, are teachers by profession and had sons named Matt. What are the odds, people? Nuts. Life is just wild.

So, goodnight California, quirks and wackiness and double-takes galore...we're glad we're here and we'll see more of you in the morning.