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the birthday edition
Here I am, 35. Weaning my fourth daughter, thinking about buying a lamb. Saying “last baby,” in the way that people who believe in last babies say, because they want to see it coming and say goodbye.Baking bread, simmering beans. Wish I cared less about messy corners.
Once I believed in no shampoo. Once I believed in all shampoo. Now I believe your body changes what it needs and you should look in the mirror and decide then.
Did I ask for anything for my birthday? yes. I asked for new slippers because I wore mine nearly every day last year and they simply gave up on day 360. I asked for oysters and a cake by mail. I received a handwritten book (“My Story” by Lux Ringenberg), a cherry wood platter sanded to gentleness by Joan, and a small box for my drawer of chaos crafted from wood and glue by Alma. There was also a sawdust cake topped with real candles and sprinkles (ferried away from the kitchen without my noticing), with frosting made from flour and water.
This week the girls learned about valkyries and watched The Ring Cycle opera which is available on the Metropolitan Opera’s streaming service. The fact that the Met has a streaming service is a thing I never would have bothered to google if not for this being week six of family quarantine. Thanks to Ronia (Netflix/Astrid Lindgren) the girls already love harpies. The valkyries seem to be an even fiercer inspiration for them to contemplate.
I did not watch it with them but I listened from the other room and overheard the selective reading aloud of subtitles. “Giant. I think that’s a giant? ‘Unless you are honest and keep your word. A simple minded giant tells you this–wise woman, heed what he says.'”
I came in to watch a few minutes. “Mom, you’ll love this, it’s so cool. It’s freezing cool.” said the four-year-old who cannot read subtitles.
If you can’t make a list of what you love in life on your birthday, when can you? A few things:
I’m in love with the anti-fragility of google forms right now. I feel like everything wonderful has migrated to a google form of one sort or another. Sign up. Volunteer. Spread the news. Let me know.
example: This farmer in Southern Vermont grows the most beautiful and obscure flowering plants of all sorts in her greenhouse, and then sells them from her front yard. She has a google spreadsheet order form posted up for spring orders. Place the order, drive and get your plants sometime in May. Bunker Farm Plants (click the link in her instagram profile for the order form.)
Bon Tucson: such a classy shop that seems to carry only the most lovely things presented in the gentlest way. I so admire their style.
The cookbooks story on Tonke’s instagram account. What a pretty collection she has, and her reviews are wonderfully precise. It’s the most recent story listed.
Our monthly coffee subscription from my hometown coffeeshop Madcap (Grand Rapids, Michigan). It is the best most delicious coffee I’ve ever had, they strive to pay more than fair trade prices to their growers, they are obsessed with quality, and they ship three bags once a month. It’s been perfect for the last year and I’m so thankful for it.
Speaking of cookbooks, Tim of Lottie and Doof told me about Midnight Chicken and it’s one of the books I happened to have with me during quarantine. My quaran-team. A thoughtful reflective cookbook filled with short memory-essays and encouraging ideas. Extremely British. It is the single reason I buy more expensive butter for toast now (strictly for slathering) than I did before.
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Papers of All Sorts
We are in day two of deep engagement with scantily clad golden age Greek paper dolls. Scraps of paper are blowing hither and thither around the house, but the girls are loving cutting and coloring these detailed creatures and as previously mentioned, I have zero better ideas. They are using ones copied out of the Story of the World Activity book, which I unfortunately can’t find scans of online. But the blog Practical Pages has fun detailed ones which you may print off for free.
I’m feeling disinterested in making meals right now. I think perhaps I’ve parceled them off too much? Taken the glamour out of the evening meal? It might be the gradually more meager supplies at the store influencing me too. Simplicity feels smart. I only want to eat pesto, bread, pink pickled onions, and cheese on repeat.
I finished my book this morning and I miss it already. Girl, Woman, Other. A collection of chapters each about a different human, often related to each other as friend, child, mother, grandmother. The writing was lovely and poetic and the chapter style made it easy to pick up and put back down. The characters were so interesting and most of their stories had quiet endings as if of course, isn’t life itself interesting enough?
I’m codependent on books right now so I’ve already ordered another. The local bookstore is offering porch drop offs (lovely!). I ordered Weather by Jenny Offill. Went for the hardcopy, because maybe Joe will want to read it too.
Aloud, I am reading the Railway Children to the girls. We love it. The writing is fabulous, and the family is isolated and self-entertaining like the rest of us.
In a rare moment of prescience I bought the supplies for egg nests back in February and saved them until now. These are so easy to make but the girls turned them into a really lengthy project this time–spooning the sugar into the bowl by spoonfuls, trying different designs of nests. I typically expect projects of being 1:1:1–equal ratios of time spent setting up and cleaning up, to the time the project was actually engaging. It’s unexpected when it turns into something longer. The girls each selected one nest to save for Easter morning.
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descend on our whole horizon
I keep waking up with a feeling of profound anxiety. When I wake the anxiety momentarily balances, like a hat resting on a doll, upon something I am not truly anxious about–the state of the kitchen dishes, a friend I forgot to call back, I never did write that thank you note…then the soapy water of sleep swirls away and the thin drain appears: the pandemic.
In general I am not an anxious person but I do like to forecast forward, and I am pessimistic. I have realistic projections of situations, and because of this I am rarely surprised by things. Though we read the news of the virus, the lockdowns, and the rate of infection in China in January, looking back if feels like we treated it as deeply other, as a nearly fictitious level of science reality. The way in which the pandemic has been handled by American federal authorities has been so outrageously bad that it feels like no projection can get too dark. The lack of oversight of infections and travel, the lack of ventilators for the hospitals, the untruthful communication and lax restrictions. The time they had, that they wasted. Putting our healthcare professionals on the front lines, as if as innocent sacrificial lambs for the sin of arrogance.
It is an astounding experience to be in.
In April of last year I had an infant, a big messy house, three children at home all day and a thick layer of snow on the ground. One early morning, predawn, I was sitting under the blankets, nursing the baby in the dark, with my layers of socks and frozen windowpanes. A vision appeared: waking up in the morning with the baby, making our coffee, Joe and I sitting on the porch in the sun. Birds singing. Grass growing before our eyes. Though it seemed unbelievable, it was a totally attainable vision. A month or so later, as soon as it warmed up, we woke up earlier, crept downstairs more quietly, made our coffee and sat outside. Every day. For nearly the whole of the summer. And it was glorious.
I often wonder if we would have bothered to get out of bed, or ever discovered the beauty of that thirty minutes, had I not had that vision in the darker spot. It is the case that you can hold both dark and light projections in your hands at the same time.
I am savoring these words of Brian McLaren’s, quoted on the Center for Action and Contemplation’s blog yesterday:
Anxieties can gray the whole sky like cloud cover or descend on our whole horizon like fog. When we rename our anxieties, in a sense we distill them into requests. What covered the whole sky can now be contained in a couple of buckets. So when we’re suffering from anxiety, we can begin by simply holding the word help before God, letting that one word bring focus to the chaos of our racing thoughts. Once we feel that our mind has dropped out of the frantic zone and into a spirit of connection with God, we can let the general word help go and in its place hold more specific words that name what we need, thereby condensing the cloud of vague anxiety into a bucket of substantial request. So we might hold the word guidance before God. Or patience. Or courage. Or resilience. Or boundaries, mercy, compassion, determination, healing, calm, freedom, wisdom, or peace. . . .
From Brian McLaren’s Naked Spirituality. Quoted on CAC.
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the garden congress
I’m carefully picking my way through spring tasks like thinking about the garden and typing up the girls’ portfolios for the year of homeschooling to send into Vermont state. The state office that oversees home studiers invites parents to begin submitting portfolios in March. Though most of my friends submit in the summer, last year I submitted ours in March and now I think it’s become a tradition for us. Something about acting like the year is already over helps me see how much we’ve done, and what I’d still like to do. And the change in perspective, the “this is all extra” reframes things as special and fun again.
Raising children has so much repetition, it’s so helpful to find these mirror-flip moments for yourself, catching the light and flinging it back on what you’re doing, in a new way.
Like when the four-year-old asks “to do potions” versus when the eight-year-old tells me she wants to do a science experiment. One sounds delightful and easy, the other sounds intimidating and fraught with possible errors. In reality, they are same experiment, the same work, the same amount of engagement.
Back to that other spring task: thinking about the garden.
I could list all sorts of things we did wrong in last year’s garden. It was neglected, beloved, dehydrated, crowded, and much of it was planted in too much shade. But upon looking through the seed catalog one last time before ordering, I realized I could at least claim to be totally different than the person who went through the seed catalog, for the first time ever, last year. I read for different details, paying more attention to things like days to maturity and transplanting than I did before. So even though I don’t think I’ve learned all that much, I can tell I’ve learned a little bit. And that’s how it goes.
Whenever I talked with the neighbors about the garden, I naturally listed all the things that weren’t going quite right. But then I always added, “I just love it though.” I noticed that all the time I spent in the garden, I enjoyed. It was a deeply relaxing place for me to putter around. it was a place that was quiet, patient, and tranquil, three attributes to which I constantly aspire.
In our part of Vermont, gardeners wait until the end of May for a last frost. People plan to plant on Memorial Day weekend. So I still have some time to get things going around here. Last year I learned that all of the major seedling sales are in May, so I’ll be prepared this year to buy things that I don’t want to start from seed, like broccoli, tomatoes, eggplant, and pumpkins. Another thing I learned: those sales happen once, and then they are done! If you see them, it’s very nice to buy a few strawberry seedlings and put them in a container on your porch.
young corn 
borage, post bloom 
The other day my friend Bridget asked me what I will plant again, so here’s the list of what I’m thinking through. I link to Johnny’s because that’s who we primarily ordered from:
- Zucchini: I’m linking to the type that we planted, I loved it. It had lovely coloring and the blossoms were gorgeous. Several times I fried the blossoms up (never bothered with stuffing them) as a pre-dinner snack.
- Basil: I loved having several rows of basil. Such abundance! I could use as much as I wanted, and make as much freezer pesto as I wanted. I pinched off the flowers whenever I saw them beginning to appear and was able to eat off that first planting all summer.
- Beets: Our beets did not get big enough in time for the season. I cook with beets infrequently, and anyway I do like getting them from the farmer’s market, where they seem to spill over with abundance.
- Borage: an easy plant that shot right up and was soon covered with dozens of soft purple and blue edible flowers. The bees adored it and the kids did too. We’ll do this again.
- Kohlrabi: This is a forgiving cheerful little plant that we like to eat raw. I planted too much of it, and will likely just do a small row of it this year.
- Beans & peas: These were planted in an area with too much shade. I will try them in a new area this year.
- Tomatoes: I had terrible luck but I will try again, of course. Likely with the Sungold cherry tomatoes, which are so delicious
- Carrots: I spent quite a bit of time replanting carrot seeds after rain downpours, so this time I will buy pelleted seeds that (should be) easier to keep track of.
- Corn: The five stalks of corn that we grew did not provide us with more than a meal or two’s worth of corn, but it was so fun to watch it grow. The plants are fascinating, tall lean Abraham Lincolns standing stately in the garden congress. We’ll try a few more varieties this year, just for fun.
- Lettuce: I only planted one type and it thrived. I was totally bored of it within a week or two. I’m leaning into greens this year. They are so interesting and relatively easy to grow, mine seemed to do well because they got shade from the afternoon sun.
- Kale: Same as above, but I never tired of our kale, beginning in July on through September. It was so delicious.
- Herb bin: all the herbs, besides the basil, were in a container near the kitchen door, which was lovely. I encouraged the girls to eat whatever they wanted from the container. This year I will plant basil and dill in the garden, but keep parsley, oregano, mint, and chives in the handy container.
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This is Hard
Such homeschooling! No homeschooler I know would voluntarily sign up for a homeschool devoid of libraries, parks, friend meetups, rousing trips to the coffee shop and long days at the museum.
Not to mention we’re all walking around like pale atlases, trying to hold up under the relentlessly grim news.
This isn’t homeschooling; this is HARD.
Let’s get that straight now, before we spend the next eight weeks doing it.
Now, when we should be bolstering our natural immunities, I’ve been craving sweets. Typically I live and breathe a savory palate—salt, vinegar, fries, oysters, etc. When I crave sweets it’s a sign that I’m feeling denied. Mind controlled. Like the word CANT is stamped on my forehead. Craving sweets told me my psyche was truly battling with all the NOs flooding my inbox. Closed. Done. No idea. Shouldn’t.
(That photo is banana bread which was good, but a tad mushy on day 2.)
As an extrovert at home with our outings cancelled, I immediately began hunting for further intellectual engagement in my daily life. I can’t believe I didn’t grab more books from the library when I was there three days before they abruptly closed. I had one giant bag of books for the girls—couldn’t I have grabbed a few novels for myself?!
That’s how you become the generation who always carries six books around with them. “What if these were the last books I could check out for weeks?” we’ll tell our grandchild when they ask why granny insisted on carrying the bag to lunch.
But I found some other projects in short order…. I’ve wanted to understand naturally leavened bread for FOREVER. I have the Tartine cookbook. I understand patience, dough, and staying calm when everything is sticking to your fingers. I own flour. The last time I read the cookbook it seemed unintelligible. What was it saying? Why did single step directions seem to take pages to explain?
But this week I took a look at it again. All of a sudden it didn’t seem so hard.
If there’s one thing teaching kids has taught me, it’s that the first draft should be sloppy. Gratuitously sloppy. Pool splash sloppy. Round two might be a little better. Round three—just imagine!
Here’s round two. It was super sloppy. First draft style. On to the next batch! Honestly I’ve never cared less how my bread turns out. I just want something, something else, to mull over for a little while.
In the spirit of adult engagement, here are few more things I’ve been enjoying lately:
These soft spoken interviews with fiction writers. They may make me fall in love with reading fiction again. This fall I read The Incendiaries by R.O. Kwon, a fiction set around the romance of a zealous Christian and a former Christian, and a circling cult leader. Her interview was superb. Here, on her sense of being since losing her personal faith: “I’ve tried to find more value in ephemeral joy than I did when I believed I would live forever.” The most recent Jenny Offill one is so good.
Signs of Bloom’s anything & everything pinterest board. Such a pretty collection.
Bright orange zinging ice cubes of immunity. You can do whatever you like with them, I like throwing them into green smoothies.
The titles of Lullatone songs. There is one Lullatone song that Esme falls asleep to sometimes when we’re driving–Falling Asleep with a Book On Your Chest–but reading their titles is like a perfume squeak of happiness to your wrist. Going to Buy Some Strawberries. Here Comes Sweater Weather. Adventures Songs for Migrating Birds. Finishing Something You Worked Really Hard On.
Bright orange carrot dressing with ginger and turmeric. Try it on soba noodles, and relish the flavor of anti inflammatorys!
Let me know if you have a favorite mental mulling escape to add to the list!
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Consider the Bedtime
Because of the crazy times, people are suddenly home with their young children for extended and unexpected periods of time. I’m writing up a few general ideas I’ve learned over the years of being at home with one, two, three, and now four children.
General idea number three…
Consider the bedtime.
Is it working for you? What is it that your family needs out of bedtime if your schedules have changed? What do your energy levels look like in the evening right now?
When sharing a house all day with children, bedtime is a method to close up the day so that you still have a few hours of thoughtful mental space before you fall asleep.
A bedtime after a day apart and full of activities is one thing. The bedtime after a day together is a garden feature of a different sort. It is a hedge between two yards. On one side of the hedge, adults relax on the couch with books, silence, glasses of wine. On the other side of the hedge, bedside lights are lit, piles of books threaten to fall off the bed, there’s talking, there’s gazing off into space.
Some things to consider:
- Is bedtime early enough? Not likely–on average American children do not get enough sleep. Nine hours at a minimum for ages six and above. We plan on twelve hours in the bedroom, more on that below.
- Is the process itself beginning early enough? If bedtime has always been your cozy time together to unwind, consider beginning it earlier than usual so that you can take it at a leisurely pace–the teeth brushing, finding the pillow, resetting the blanket. The goal is to have two hours to yourself afterward before you need to sleep.
- Wakeful bedtime allows children to practice time apart. You may be surprised to see how much a child wishes to accomplish when suddenly freed of the mundanity of adult availability.
- If they stay up, let them sleep in. This is one of the greatest perks of not having to get the children out the door by any specific time in the morning! I like to project a 12hr cycle. (Here’s a sleep chart by age by Dr. Sears, though 9 hours does seem like the absolute minimum for a six/seven year old.) If they stay up until 9pm, wake them around 9am. If they stay up until 10pm, it’s up to you, but I like to wake them up at 9am anyway. If they wake up at 8am but you wish they’d slept in, be sure to let them stay up until at least 8pm.
Here’s what we do, having been on a homeschool schedule for over a year. I do not expect it to be guidance for you in any way, this is just what works for us right now. 7pm: Baby in bed. 7:45pm: Begin bedtime for the older three. 8pm: Girls in bed. Parents out of the room. 10pm: Lights out, but nightlights are allowed for those still reading.
In the morning, the baby and I will wake between 7-8am, and have some peace to ourselves. I often write for a twenty minutes or so during this time. The four-year-old will wake around 8:30, and the older two will likely have to be waken at 9am. They would sleep until 10am but that doesn’t make for a great morning cycle for us.
xo
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Read Aloud
Because of the crazy times, lots of people are suddenly home with their young children for extended and unexpected periods of time. I’m writing up a few general ideas I’ve learned over the years of being at home with one, two, three, and now four children.
General idea number two…
Read Aloud.
You don’t have textbooks, curriculum, flashcards, or workbooks. But you have a something wildly more powerful than any of that. Something that will increase their vocabulary, strengthen their listening comprehension, give you a shared language of characters, and all but guarantee that they will love books as adult. And if they love books, then they love learning, and (dusts hands) that’s the best it can get.
To begin, plan to read aloud for one hour. But aspire to two hours. You will get there sooner than you think. Pick a few books to move between within that hour. Books with long words and dense story lines that one can listen to while sprawled on the floor, staring at the cracks in the ceiling.
Books like Anne of Green Gables, Birchbark House, The Hobbit, Chronicles of Narnia, The Laura Ingalls Series, The Penderwicks, Twenty-One Balloons, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle series, Dr. Dolittle, and My Father’s Dragon.*
After you read one chapter, ask “Should I read another chapter?” And they will likely surprise both of you by shouting,”Yes!”
But if they say no, move on to the next book and read a chapter of that. If you have a book of poetry, or Winnie-the-Pooh which is basically poetry,` read a few pages of that. If you have something really dense, like actual history like The Story of the World or Our Island Story, read one chapter and don’t expect more.
I like to read in the morning, right after breakfast. Morning energy is often a little wild, creative but not directed quite yet, and very cuddly. For whatever reason, in the morning, it’s easiest for all ages to find a comfortable place to sit and to listen for a few hours. After an hour or two, I get up and say something like, “Ho! I have to start lunch,” and walk off and the rest of the day begins.
If you have a child younger than age four in your group, there are a few things you can do to include them. 1: Read several illustrated books of their choice to begin with. Read to them first. 2: Provide something for them to do nearby while you read aloud, like markers and paper, a puzzle, magnatiles. They’ll do it for a little while and likely wander off. You will have to remind them not to interrupt you. They will forget, of course, but they will begin to get it, over time.
* We’ve read all of the books listed above to children ages five and older, and they loved them. But lighter options that are great for reading aloud (I think of these as afternoon books) include the original Boxcar Children (any book between #1-20) and the older American Girl series books: Samantha, Kirsten, Addy, Molly, Felicity. There are loads of book lists online, this is an educational approach you can really lean into. If you need more ideas, let me know.
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You are Not the Entertainment.
Because of the crazy times, lots of people are suddenly home with their young children for extended and unexpected periods of time. I’m writing up a few general ideas I’ve learned over the years of being at home with one, two, three, and now four children.
General idea number one…
You are Not the Entertainment.
You are a provider who sources food, keeps a roof intact, equips a bed, encourages brushing teeth, and coos softly over headaches and stubbed toes. You are not an entertainer.
With the exception of one highly concentrated 45 minutes a day, you are not available to play.*
You are a pond, and your child is a frog. You are lily pads that they like to hop on every once in a while. You do not have good ideas for interesting games. You do not know what might be fun. You have a speckle of imagination, a leftover algae of green krongu imagination, to their utter essence of it. One of your imagination speckles is actually something they told you they were interested in, and you can periodically repeat this back to them.
Your child is returning to you from a scheduled environment where they have been interrupted ceaselessly: just settled on a good game? Playtime is over. lunchtime? Is now over. You were still writing? Stop writing. They adapted to interruptions. Now they will have to adapt to no interruptions. It may take three days. It may take four. They will adapt, I promise.
Don’t think for a moment that you have better ideas of what to play than they do, because you don’t. And if you think you do, you will confuse them and they will believe you, for a little while.
You are boggy and slow moving and they can splash through you and swim around to be reminded of what it feels like to be underwater and slow moving. Not only is this a useful approach to keep in mind, it is absolutely the truth.
*Play whatever you and they want during this 45 minutes and live it up. Tag. Hide and seek in a room that has one piece of furniture. Pillow fight. Card game they adore. Extraordinary slow-moving board game that has no winner.
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18 Wonderful Things in Los Angeles Last Week
A few best things from California last week. Right now I’m contemplating ordering food-safe five gallon buckets and how to go about filing them with beans and rice, so this is a nice thing to think about alongside. (Though if I read one more “bro goes grocery shopping” coronoavirus prepper article, well, I will be forced to write my own.)
So the plan was this. My sister volunteered to take the older two girls to Disneyland with her husband. First it was one day. Then they decided to go for two. Meanwhile we planned to settle ourselves with the two younger girls in Santa Monica. Then we picked the older girls back up for four more days after their Disney time. We rented a car and drove back into downtown several times, but always at off-hours to avoid the worst of the traffic.
Once it was decided that the older girls were going to Disneyland, that it was really happening, we turned our attention to playing catch up. As of last month, they hadn’t seen Cars, Toy Story, Snow White, Bambi…so many things!
We homeschooled that stuff and caught. up. It was really fun. I’m not sure we would have even tried to catch up at all, had not Disney serendipitously opened the vault at the beginning of this year, allowing unlimited downloads on (nearly) unlimited devices through Disney+. I couldn’t believe I could download Mickey cartoons from 1940s as a way to learn about Pluto.
Was it ok that you didn’t see Lion King? I asked them later. -Yes. It was fine, they said.
But I’m so thankful we didn’t try to do Disney ourselves with all four kids. And I’m so thankful my sister and her husband were willing to be excited Aunt and Uncle and take the girls. They just modeled how fun it could be for Joe and I. It was an incredibly special and memorable experience for the girls.
As part of the trip prep, I spent a strange amount of time looking for dresses that said *festive special* and *could be worn to other occasions.* I had the best luck with selection at Dillard’s. In case you happen to be in the market as well.
Here’s an itinerary scheme that I’m definitely going to use again in the future: my sister and I and our husbands had a shared note using the Notes app on our phones for weeks before the trip. This helped me suss through the itinerary and not feel so in-my-head like I sometimes do when travel researching. My sister had lots of good ideas, naturally, and this was an easy way for her to get them all to me concisely. Plus we could reference the note whenever one of us forgot what was coming next. Another tip: we wanted to use street parking around our hotel to avoid the steep valet fees. My sister suggested using the app SpotAngels which helped me find afternoon or overnight meters in convenient locations.
in no particular order…
1 Meyer lemon pie in the park with Noelle. Noelle and her son and I met in the pleasantly dusty park at the base of the Griffith Observatory where there is a tavern that serves pie with fresh whipped cream on the side. Joe and the older girls hiked up on the hill to the Observatory without water, in the sun, only to find it closed, but that’s a story for another time.It seems as if in LA the traffic is bad, but once you get to a destination, parking available everywhere. A nice thing. (Noelle and I met up in 2012, and 2017 too!)
2 Noelle suggested getting notebooks for the girls at Muji in Santa Monica. Now, we have a Muji in Boston. And we several times we have bought notebooks for the girls there. But I frankly have no idea where those notebooks are, and why am I being parsimonious about notebooks? What a fun thing to buy on vacation.
3 Here’s what’s really fun to put in vacation notebooks. Scratch-n-sniff stickers that smell like hot chocolate from In-and-Out. You can put them in while you wait for your food, so excited for shakes and fries and yet smelling hot chocolate, while sitting in the sun.
4 The Santa Monica farmers market felt otherworldly. The trays of strawberries covering the table felt like virtual reality. Surely they couldn’t be this beautiful and edible and real? I thought of the pirate captain in Pirates of the Caribbean who longed only reverse the curse and eat an apple. We ate mid-winter, post-curse strawberries. And we peeked into the crates and crates of vegetables labeled to head to the city’s best restaurants.
5 I loved all the “gentle handle with care!!!” signs propped around the ripe avocados. The precious babes of the market.
6 Artisan doughnuts are safely a nationwide thing at this point, but having them within a drive of the beach like Sidecar Doughnuts does is really something else. Their coffee is excellent as well which was lovely because the baby woke up between 3-6am PST every morning. Over the years people have asked me if the babies sleep well when traveling and no, they never do. It’s not really the point of travel, I’ve found, to hope to sleep well. Set that idea aside and it won’t bother you.
7 With doughnuts at our side we alighted on El Matador Beach for a morning. So gorgeous, a beautiful beachfront with giant stone sculptures strewn across it. I expected Ariel, with fins, or her sisters (whatever happened to her sisters?) around every corner. We had no problem finding parking in the tiny beach lot because we were there so early! Grateful to Ashley’s perennial favorite travel posts for this idea.
8 On this trip we visited the Getty Villa for the first time. The Villa is modeled almost exactly on a Roman villa excavated in Herculaneum. It is framed by a modern building and has incredible views of the ocean. You are supposed to make free reservations ahead of time (we didn’t, and it was fine on a slow Monday), and parking costs $20.
9 The girls were thrilled by their Percy Jackson themed audio guide. And I was super impressed with how fun their their family activity room with Greek shadow play and look-alike ancient ceramics for coloring.
10 Brown rice porridge at Sqirl. But you probably knew I’d say that. I have to try it at home!
On one of the days that the older girls were at Disney, we decided to visit the rather incredible retail of Venice. Abbot Kinney has become startlingly hip, but the Rose Avenue area is still calm and pleasant and Gjusta takeout is just around the corner from the shops mentioned below.
11 Here it is 2020 and I’ve never been to a Jeni’s Ice Cream! This was such a treat. They have a tasting tray available, with the flavors selected and annotated by Jeni herself. I would not have ordered the brown butter almond brittle on my own but it was my absolute favorite!
12 After visiting Rudy Jude, Parachute, and Jeni’s, we continued our allstar stroll down Rose Ave to Moon Juice. I loved the vibes in there, and it wasn’t just the fungus-based adaptogens in the air. All the lattes have a coconut-almond milk blend base with cacao so they are incredibly delicious, moon dust or not (moon dust doesn’t hurt though!).
13 We bought snacks—-fruit, kefir, avocados (precious!), bread and extremely good butter—for the hotel room at the farmer’s market. We also bought things like cheetos for the pool, and those cheddar-and-club cracker packets for random times in the car. Grocery snack novelties are so satisfying when you’re traveling.
14 Without a highchair, every morning I would put a towel down and feed Esme on the floor, which allowed me to see the amazing way she prefers to sit away from her plate and reach, yoga-style, over to the food.
15 We stayed relatively true to our time zone and often tucked into bed with books around 8pm. Once or twice we caught the sunset on the beach before heading to bed.
16 The girls played with the built-in gymnastic equipment at “muscle beach” in Santa Monica. They love monkey bars and gymnastic bars at home, so it was fun to be out with the workout adults in the morning and doing our thing together.
17 I packed minimally for all of us but Alma ignored everything I brought and wore the same outfit every day. It was a brilliant move. She fit right in and it’s an outfit she tries to wear at home but, old house in the winter in Vermont, it never works.
18 My sister and her husband babysat all four girls one morning so Joe and I could go to a museum and out to lunch. It was a time filled with lots of silent contemplation and reading all the paragraphs on the wall at the art museum, which is something I dream about doing on family-museum-visits. When we came back to their apartment they’d gone out to a playground, and so we sat on their porch and read our books. When they came back, her husband made margaritas and we ate take-out from the taco stand down the street and watched Jeopardy together. An amazing memory.
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September
September was a cartload of treasures pulled by steady mule over the hill of suddenly bone chilling nights–the flannels did not make it onto the beds until the end of the month, replacing terribly smelly summer sheets–and creaked slowly to rest in the sunny afternoons.
The yard became strewn with crimson leaves. A sewing machine was finally settled on a desk cut to size, threaded with red thread and ready for projects. Maple soft-serve at the state fair, and the last bouquets of a flower subscription. Properly sized boots and warm tights were ordered and arrived in boxes. Woe to the generation (’tis mine) that killed off the storefront shoe shop where one could have (once upon a time!) walked in with three children and walked out with three pairs of shoes that fit. My due punishment are boxes of wrongly sized, misunderstood pairs of shoes, return to sender.
Old sweaters and cozy layers were pulled out of the closet to be washed and handed-down. I emptied drawers of one-size-too-small wardrobes, tsked the abundance of it all, and tucked these back into the very same boxes to be passed down next season.
Esme turned six months old and in the blink of a midnight chime, I realized I was no longer carriage, only pumpkin, and needed to sleep train her for our sanity. She began eating mashed food of all sorts with gusto. I offered these foods to her as a perplexed dining companion, entirely caught off guard by her early interest.
Bright and shiny sunflower maze.
Once more to the pond.Homeschooling began and was scary, and then delightful, and then ordinary and soothing. I made new homeschool friends at local events and we made conversation about expectations, and savoring the little things, as is our way. I started a newsletter to write about homeschooling in more detail, so as to avoid attaching too many ribbons to my blog’s (already fitful) kite. You can sign up for that newsletter in the little box on the righthand side of this blog.
It is monthly and there has only been one issue, so you can catch up quickly.
Out for a walk.Presidential candidate Andrew Yang has suggested the idea of a monthly universal basic income. The banality of those words universal, basic, income cause it to drift rather quickly into a divisive debate that you might find yourself arguing–does $1000 really matter? Wouldn’t all costs just become $1000 more expensive? Would we find raccoons lining up to demand their $1000 and if so, what would we say to them? And so on.
But behind Andrew’s theory is this wonderfully complex double helix idea of unobserved labor and the labor that is now, or will soon be, in the hands of robots (he mentions retail, customer service, food prep, and transportation as soon to go). One strand of the idea is the headache of society, a word that strikes fear in every political heart: unemployment. The other strand is the unobserved, unpaid labor that we rely on: merry volunteer coordinators, reliable child-rearers, cheery bake sale makers, careful wikipedia-entry custodians.
There is a delicious savor to unobserved labor, it silkens and soothes society’s function, it is the very butter to our brownie mix. It is behind every Why do you do this? -Because I want to help. We see it, of course, but how often do we not see it? And how does the person behind the unseen feel, from time to time? That is the intriguing prompt buried in Andrew’s proposal.
And it was on my mind when I considered that of the thirty dinners hath September, I made 26 of them for our family of five. I say that not as a compliant, but rather an observation of something that was not noted on my calendar and may therefore go unreflected upon. We went out to eat three times, each was a spot I’d meant to bring the family all summer: pizza by the pond, fried clams by the river, and a fancy meal on the patio behind a hotel in town.
Hammering petals into fabric.