Terrarium

I really can't complain about the intensity of this winter, when last year was the Chiberia polar vortex deep freeze of total doom, right? Even though it's February and I've been bundling these two kids tip to toe since November, so I want to complain. It's tiring! It doesn't matter how all in you are for magical snowy childhood memories, and I am very in - four season parenting is hard. It's all dripping mittens and falling over in slush and mud until suddenly there's a freak late March heat wave and you've sunburned your toddler because you forgot UV rays were a thing. I wouldn't trade flurries on Christmas and Matilda's annual birthday snowstorms for anything, but even the most winter-positive of us have to admit that facing down the latter half of this season in Chicago is a bitter pill. Cabin Fever 2015 and all that.

Freezing drizzle plus fatty flakes. I know, THE BEST.

I needed to get the girls out of the house a few weeks ago, and after scrapping plans for the library when I realized I had no cash or checks and owed them $37.40 in fines (always. I am completely incapable of returning books on time), we wandered instead to the Lincoln Park Conservatory. We've stopped in a few times during zoo trips over the past few years, but since we usually hang at the zoo  in nicer weather, the appeal of the greenhouse was somewhat lost on me. However! In the middle of winter, it felt like retreating to a tiny humid jungle. Which is exactly what I want to do every day until spring. Matilda threw her coat into the stroller and ran around whooping, "It's so WARM!" , and then we stayed for hours while she explored basically every single plant and tree and koi fish in the joint.

We do not usually leave the house in fleecy reindeer prints, but it was Pajama Day at preschool and once I decided we were spending the afternoon out of the house it was a done deal, no going back for appropriate-in-public options.

Matilda has been badly wanting to Joshua to see the "Terrarrium", which has been her name for the conservatory since the day after our first trip, despite the fact that we never once called it that. I'm not even sure how she linked those terms together in her mind, but anyways, we headed back this week. After all the snow over the past weekend, there was dense condensation on the glass ceiling and water was falling in huge, slow, random drops. Naturally, we needed huge banana leaf umbrellas.

Little lady was beyond thrilled to have Daddy hanging out in the ferns and cycads with her! Cycads, of course, are a fancy kind of jungle tree I now know a lot about thanks to the time I had to read the signage in the Conservatory while Matilda "looked for dinosaurs". I wish I was better at taking photos (life goal), or was one of those moms who casually slings the DSLR around and ends up with an archival quality family outing picture, but so far despite actually having a nice camera I have not yet achieved anything close to that level of awesome. What I have is this:

Thankfully we randomly color coordinated to distract from the fact that there's a terrible filter on that picture making everyone look jaundiced. But we were so warm! And it smells like jasmine and orchids and so many other delicious things in the Conservatory, which almost makes up for the fact that when we left, it had snowed quite a bit. Our drive home was very slow and blustery and then of course we got stuck in the unplowed, snow-packed alley, and Matilda refused to put her mittens on and then cried because she was freezing. Despite that rough departure, I cannot recommend the "Terrarium" enough. All the green and growing things make me remember the way summer feels. Plus, cycads!

http://www.chicagoparkdistrict.com/parks/lincoln-park-conservatory/

Four

I saved this screenshot from the day I went into labor with Matilda. Snowmaggedon, snowpocalypse, whatever you call February 1st, 2011 - she was born at the very height of the blizzard.

It has a hushed magic about it, to birth a baby in the midst of a historic storm. Matilda's birth was not any more special than Louisa's entry into the world (birth story coming soon-ish), it just had the heightened drama of doctors snowshoeing to the hospital and my midwives discussing, while I pushed, where in the building they could sleep for a few hours after she was born. 

This morning, four years later, she woke up to another winter storm and another blizzard warning. It rattles my brain to think four years have passed, that I could be sitting here, writing this, and listening to both my daughters laughing and playing with their dad together. I remember that first day in the hospital, the hours we spent staring at Matilda's long feet and wrinkled forehead, felt endless in the best possible way. But somehow here we are with a preschooler who is wearing hot pink nail polish and who originally requested a private jet for her birthday, ("I want a plane? That I can fly on just with my friends and it's a real one that goes in the sky") but instead settled for a homemade Frozen cake and a yoga mat.

Kids age you, you know? The responsibility, the sleepless nights, the constant static stress of always, always worrying about them in one way or another. But they also let you relive everything about your childhood and that is what I'm most excited for about four. Matilda's imagination is boundless, she's living in a world where she has pretend dragons and monsters and her very special five piggies who are always being a little naughty and who have terrible immune systems. "PIGGIES ARE SICK AGAIN", she will announce mournfully from bed when it's 1.5 hours past her bedtime and we think she's sound asleep. She loves family snuggles in our bed in the afternoon and she tells us that her and Louby are the bread, and Joshua and I are the pickles and tomatoes. A seriously questionable sandwich, but she is firm on the ingredients.

Dear little blizzard baby who is growing up before I can even catch my breath, you have my whole heart. I love you in all the mother ways - a love that is both the most furious and delicate thing I've ever known. 

 Happy, Happy Birthday.

Restart

I forgot my password to log on to this site, which sounds about right based on the time I've spent not writing here.

Oh hey! We had a baby.

Louisa Kate - a second daughter, a little sister. We have two girls. 

I complain about grind of parenting because it's exhausting and all-consuming, and also because I'm really very good at complaining, but in all honesty, this little babe has healed up my soul. I fought tooth and nail to have these children and the journey left me fragile and bitter. When Louisa was finally born at forty weeks and four days late, after a nightmare of fertility treatments and losses, I felt like I was breathing for the first time in two years. She slipped into our family like water, filling up all the cracks and the dry patches.  Now did I recently tell Joshua that I would sell a kidney for one day completely alone in total silence? Yes, it was last Friday and both girls were being obnoxious and I meant it. But at the same time I have this deep, profound gratitude for the fact that I even get to want to be alone. These girls, they were the challenge of my life before they were even two pink lines on a pregnancy test. And now they're here and they're gorgeous and healthy and stubborn and one sleeps like a newborn even though she's eight months old and one asked me the other night why she can't hug God and how can he be real if she can't see him in her world and just, whoa. The little things are the big things, right?                                                                                                                                         

And they won't stop growing up either.

Matilda will be four years old this week. FOUR! Four feels very far removed from babyhood, even from toddlerhood. She falls asleep in the wildest, limbs akimbo positions and she is just so very long. She's lost so much of her...roundness? She is curious about things like death and how caterpillars become butterflies and if she doesn't understand something she asks, "Say that again, Mommy? Tell me again?" until she gets it, and then she tells her facts and tidbits to every single person she sees for the rest of the day. She is terrified of armadillos for reasons we cannot even fathom, having grown up in an armadillo-free zip code, and she is enamored of her preschool teachers and her school friends and sweet childhood things like being the line leader. 

Louisa is eight months old and is our string bean baby - probably because she has never stopped moving for a minute in her entire short life. It really doesn't seem right that the only person in our family to have defined abs is the baby. She achieved those after months of laying on her back and trying to sit straight up using only her core muscles, flapping her arms and legs frantically. In other words, Pilates. She's crawling now, a kind of modified crawl, crawl, slither, roll over, sit up, crawl, crawl, repeat situation. She pulls up on everything, has two teeth, a mop of fuzzy curls, and she is the founding member and president of the Matilda Fan Club. She claps and grins for everything her big sister does and looks at us like, DID YOU SEE THAT WOW SHE IS SO GREAT AT TALKING BACK TO YOU! GOOD JOB! 

They are really pure joy wrapped up in smooshy little bodies. With bows on top. So many bows.

I need to write again because it's been too long, not just on here, but this is a good place to (re)start. Now that Matilda is old to understand what Joshua and I do for our livings, it suddenly feels so important to show her that there's making money and then there's investing in the things you do well and fulfill you. If those are already the exact same thing for you, then YES! You are nailing it, and I'm jealous. We aren't one hundred percent there yet. Or even fifty percent. Parenting is so good and fulfilling, but it's also not the sum total of what I do, so here I am doing something else. Just little words on a little page, even if most of them are still about my kids and my mama life.

Work in progress.

Ironically, I will post this on Facebook.

I had a conversation with some girls at work last week about why we can't get ourselves together to make dinner for our families, or we make the same things over and over, or we forget to grocery shop and 6pm rolls around and the "meal planning" starts by logging in to GrubHub (that one was me. Sigh). We all had the same memories of our moms making dinner every single night and we were bemoaning the fact that this lost art of feeding our families well had not been passed down to us when someone jokingly said, "Well, they didn't have the internet to distract them."

I felt like all the bells and lightbulbs started ringing and blinking in my absolutely-internet-addicted brain. I've blamed a lot of my inability to pull it together with cleaning and grocery shopping and cooking over the fact that I am a working mom, and that night shift is pretty brutal on my schedule and my body. This is all true, but realistically I do have time to be organizing my life better. It's the time I spend scrolling through the Kardashians' Instagrams (I know! I know) and the time I spend mindlessly refreshing Facebook and the time I spend curating Pinterest boards as if organizing food I don't even make into savory and sweet categories is a noble pursuit. I started thinking about how Joshua and I barely watch TV without also reading the news or blogs or something on our phones, about how we frequently say we have "no time", about how in the fifteen minutes that I've been writing this, I've refreshed instagram about 3 times and clicked over to the Facebook tab in my browser at least once.

One of the girls' patients had coded earlier that night, and we spent a fairly dramatic few minutes together reviving him and then a long while settling him back down. This is a normal night in the NICU, but it made me laugh that a few hours later we were lamenting how exhausting social media is and how Facebook frequently makes us feel bad and inadequate. Because shouldn't we be writing suck it, Facebook envy! You people are graduating/engaged/married/pregnant/ on a tropical vacation/buying a new house but I just stayed up for 26 hours and brought a critically ill child back to life with my own two hands! (There are so many reasons why that is a bad idea, but intensifying your sense of self-esteem is not one of them).

I am really not writing some sort of anti-social media manifesto. I keep in touch with people through those avenues that I really never would see or hear from otherwise. I'm not quitting Instagram; that's part of how my far-away family is watching Matilda grow up. But there is certainly something to be said for how I personally need to manage it better - it is all so distracting and time-wasting and reinforces starkly that comparison is the thief of joy. And it really is an addiction.  We have made a great effort to not be buried in our phones or laptops when Matilda is around, but she still sleeps a lot (amen, so thankful, never change) and I could be doing a hundred other things during that time. I will consciously plan to do xyz and then end up doing a totally different xyz where x = fall decor on Pinterest, y = someone's travel photos on Facebook, z = fashion week photos on Instagram. I'm not more informed or better educated or better organized after that kind of an evening, and no one got any closer to eating healthy, well-balanced meals in my home.

I made almost everything in this picture. All the pillow covers, the beloved airplane blanket. I'll also take 50% of the credit for the toddler herself. I know that part of what has made my own internet/social media bingeing so much of a problem is that it's endlessly distracting, and we are in a season of life that warrants some distractions. It's easier to just not think sometimes, but I think I'm writing this to remind myself that I can distract myself with productive and beautiful things as well, and the end result is far more gratifying. I really don't have any advice as to how to put down the Pinterest and back up slowly, but I am trying, I really am.

Foam and Twerk

Spoiler alert: I've Arrived Late to the Miley Cyrus Meltdown.

It takes me a little longer than most people to fully form my opinion on controversial topics. I'm always impressed by 5,000 word blog posts and articles that appear seemingly moments after something newsworthy happens. I could never be a journalist for this exact reason - by the time I'd finish writing, 14 more relevant things would have already happened and I'd be like, "I'm still ruminating on that one." (Side note: someone recently said to me, "I'll have to marinate on that and get back to you," and it made me physically recoil. I don't want to envision you slipping around in lemon juice and a zesty blend of spices like a pale raw chicken! Try ruminating on it instead, it's a lovely little word with no bacterial connotations).

So I woke up on Monday, and as many of us with internet access and without concerns of imminent famine or bodily harm found, social media had completely exploded in the aftermath of the VMAs. I'd actually gotten texts from a few friends the night before that said Miley Cyrus was making them sick, but I wasn't watching the VMAs and to be completely honest, I'm not a fan of hers so this didn't really strike me as newsworthy. Which it obviously was. I still haven't seen the entire performance, which seems unnecessary in light of the constant news coverage since and the fact that I read several play-by-plays of the foam and twerk extravaganza. I don't want to see that.

I think at another point in my life, I would have had a very blase attitude the whole thing. My initial reactions were along the lines of; some people will do anything for the shock value, some child stars will do anything to shake off their Disney Channel image, is it me or does Miley Cyrus have dinner rolls glued on her head?

But then I saw a gif of her mom jumping up to give that performance a standing ovation and that was the hell no moment that woke up my lazy mama self. What in the world we were expecting from a girl whose own mother is applauding her degrade herself and flaunt her lack of self-respect? Because the point is not really whether or not you believe that performances like that are exploiting or embracing sexuality, the point is not really that Miley is uncomfortably young and Robin Thicke is getting rich this summer off a song that assumes men know what women want when they aren't cognizant of it themselves. Those things are certainly upsetting, and certainly worth discussing, and most of the world did that on Monday. But to me, as I arrive late to the party, the point is that this is a girl who is saying, what I do with my body is the most important thing I want the world to know about me. The only thing that separates me from the Hannah Montana Miley is that now I live my life right out of the urbandictionary playbook. I know Molly. And all that's lewd and crude about sex? I want you to know that I'm down with that.

And there's her mother, giving her a standing ovation.

If there's anything that I want my own daughter to know, it's that her body is the very least important thing about her. Oh, it's entirely important to be healthy, to be strong, to have self-esteem, to embrace and not loathe all the scars and ripples and curves she will have. It's important for her to have a healthy sexuality and self-respect. But her mind, her intelligence, her passions and her interests are far more valuable to this world than anything about her physicality. It's painful for me to realize that someday Matilda may love a benign show like Hannah Montana, and then could end up watching whoever the 2022 version of Miley Cyrus is declare that she's all grown up now, thanks to sex and drugs. Not because she got an education, or because she has an awareness of world issues, or even because she's matured and grown as a performer and entertainer. Those are all great and respectable things, but instead we've got Miley Cyrus in a nude bra, shoving her sexuality in the face in a million young girls, saying, this is what growing up is all about.

It sure as hell is not, and it offends me, the mother of a daughter, that Miley and her mother (who has been one of her managers and who was highly unlikely to have just shown up and been as surprised as the rest of us by what followed) chose to display that narrative through her VMA performance. It's hard enough to raise girls in a world that values flesh over brains in almost every arena. It's even more complicated when it's laid out this explicitly, and the subsequent uproar is positive in that it makes us reflect on what we're seeing and negative in that it drowns out the truly important things that happened this week. How do you even begin to prioritize when you're raising a girl in a world where CNN spends equal time discussing chemical weapons unleashed on Syrians and a foam finger being used inappropriately on a washed up pop singer with a one-off summer hit? I'm glad this performance didn't go by unnoticed, because that says that we aren't all ok with it, but I'm conflicted over the fact that instead it just played on a loop for days and certainly many more young girls who didn't watch the VMAs have seen it since.

Matilda's new favorite game is to pretend - anything and everything. Pretend we are taking naps. Pretend that her stuffed kangaroo needs a bath (he really does, though). Pretend that we are making eggs and pancakes in her toy kitchen. Is it so much to ask that in a few years she pretends to go to college instead of pretends that she's a Disney star? We cancelled cable recently, for a lot of reasons, but suddenly it feels like that was a really important parenting decision (it was not at the time, I wish I could claim that but really we were just trying to live a little more simply). I'm not at all knocking little innocent shows, but the industry of transitioning child stars into adult ones is one that values sex appeal over all other personal attributes. It's all blurred lines and subtle messages that either women are for men to use, or that their power comes only from their sexuality and how they use it.

I guess what I am saying, days late and paragraphs too long, is keep that away from my girl. I'm not stupid, I know you can't peel yourself away from these messages completely. I was a teenage girl, and I know what it's like to fumble around trying to make your mark and discover yourself as an adult. It's all awkward and uncharted but I don't think it's too much to ask that Matilda never thinks her life will be improved by twerking and getting to know Molly, pleaseGodplease. (Molly is ecstasy. It's already Friday so I've just been assuming you all googled it by now if you didn't already know). And I'm positive that she's never going to get a standing ovation for anything she does along those lines. This is the message I want little girls to know - that it should not be expected that your mother stands up and applauds you doing something stupid, something demeaning to who you are and what's important about you. That you are so, so much more valuable to society when you keep your clothes on in public and fling your intelligence and your insight and your curiosity out there at the world instead of your ass.That you are making the world better for every girl when you don't allow yourself in the same room as anyone interested in crossing blurred lines, let alone dance with them. That achievement is not ripping your clothes off for the viewers at home.

So sit down, Miley's mom. Put your clothes back on, Miley. Write an apology note to the foam finger company. Go to college. At this point, nothing would be more shocking than that.

the dog days are (almost) over

 Joshua and I have always had a sort of an obsession with light. Natural, artificial, too much or too little, we are very conscious of the role light plays in our life. And since we've been together now for over ten years and we've watched the seasons fade into each other approximately forty-twoish times, you might think we would stop mentioning the changing light each year. But we never do. I can't think of a summer where I haven't said a dozen times that this is my absolute favorite time of day. This happens most frequently around 8pm on clear days in July, when we're passing by fields or even an empty overgrown lot that's lit up in the evening sun, and I am all, "look at those amber of waves of grain! I love it here in America!" because the light makes me feel this strange mix of childhood nostalgia and patriotism (other things that make me feel this way: dogs playing fetch in the backyard, every version of Don't Stop Believin' ever made, anything involving football).

Tonight Helo and I wandered through the neighborhood, well before 8pm, and the light had already settled into a just-before-sunset bronze. It's this time of day at this time of year that makes me run right home and tell Joshua that fall is right around the corner, I can SENSE IT! As can anyone else who calls planet earth their home, or owns a calendar, but it feels like a personal and bittersweet epiphany each and every year. 

Despite all that I love about summer; the evening light, the smell of sunscreen slicked into Matilda's curls, the way that it takes thirty seconds to throw her in a dress and sandals and run out the door, I'm practically clapping for every brittle and fallen leaf I see these days. A change will do you good, and all that. I'm not usually the one who takes Helo out in the evenings, and it felt serendipitous that I decided to spend this fading part of tonight outside. It's going to be scorching all week, but it's not really the heat that makes it summer for me. It's the light.

I could not love this adorably threatening sidewalk chalk barricade any more. I was a little worried that tiny children were going to jump out at me as I went ahead and strode into their sacred space, but I think they had been hauled off to homework and bedtimes so....Do Not Pas this Lin, summer! We are moving on to crisper and brisker things.

This Has To Be A Record for Posts In One Week Written By Me

Joshua is home from the summer of productivity/doom and he is ready to party!

yeah...

That was approximately two hours after he arrived home and exactly 34 minutes into an episode of the West Wing, which I will no doubt recap for him when we start the next one and he has no idea what's going on. His exhaustion was completely legitimate, but now that I'm thinking about it, Joshua stays awake for approximately 75% of anything we are watching. He's lucky that I haven't exploited this entertainment narcolepsy. (Such a bummer how Dwight brutally killed Michael in a fit of rage as part of Steve Carrell's exit from The Office, right? I'm going to try this one.)

The house was pristine when Joshua arrived last night, because I'm really good at shoving things in closets and drawers and lighting candles and creating the illusion that our home life is nothing if not a well-curated Pinterest board. I do not just survive my solo parenting weekends, I thrive!

However, this morning I was reminded that toddlers are little vortexes of destruction, hell bent on ruining your dreams of catalog living. If the work of childhood is play, the work of parenthood is not punching yourself in the face after picking up the same blocks and beads and crayons a zillion and one times a day. And we weren't particularly neat or fastidious people to begin with, so you can imagine that when our powers combine, the outcome is that on mornings like this one we are one dead cat away from a hoarders episode. 

In the picture above, Matilda was explaining in no uncertain terms to Joshua that her beads needed to come out of the whale tub (which is still kicking it in her closet as a toy) and he was politely but firmly declining her request on the basis that we had reached our limit of Items Underfoot.

We decided the best thing to do when faced with a major clean up project would be to leave.

And now for a quick and not very cohesive report on life outside our chaos-littered condo...

We are on the cusp of fall, people. See above! For every luscious heirloom tomato someone picked today in the community garden, ten chlorophyll-depleted leaves hit the ground. 

Matilda apparently loves hats and was especially fond of this jaunty herringbone number. Also, to my great shame, I'm wearing sunglasses inside in that picture and I apologize for falling victim to one of my own pet peeves. It was just so bright that I forgot to take them off. Joshua was literally turning into a sunbeam at the exact moment I snapped that shot, so...I promise it's not a thing I do regularly.

Chicago is so gorgeous in every season, and we couldn't possibly see enough of it these days. We are so grateful that this is our city. I'm thankful that we can walk outside and feel a sense of relief that we are 1) not as likely to slip on a pile of crayons and break something as we are indoors and 2) that we are most certainly living our lives in the place we are meant to be right now. Days that we are all together exploring and wandering and being a "really nice family!" (Matilda's words, and the sweetest ones since the last phrase I deemed the sweetest) are just so precious.

She is gentle! She is wild!

She's a riddle! She's a child!

She's a headache! She's an angel!

She's a girl!