Fiction vs. Non-Fiction

Delusion:

I just finished a great learning toy for the boys!  I cut numbers out of fabric, then sewed them onto felt with a zigzag stitch (which always seems fancy) and they are all hanging on a ribbon in Rush’s room.  I have a list of different games we can play using the numbers.  Rush and Tate are both learning to count!

Reality:

Today we were the people running through the library stacks at full speed and using the beanbags in the children’s section as trampolines, then rousing a friend from his book to wrestle.  We had to leave and go to the park.  I had fun making these numbers and now they spend their time on the floor, along with the wooden alphabet.  Rush once took a nap with the number two.  Our magnetic fridge letters went to Goodwill last week after enjoying a nice run as projectiles.  We’re not going to be learning the alphabet using anything that has 26 pieces.  And we’re not learning to count with anything that has an infinite number of pieces.

As long as we have big spaces to run and yell and drain energy, we do spend nice moments reading.  I’ve been adding pillows to Rush’s reading nook and it’s making it that much nicer to curl up with Chowder and Flight of the Dodo.  I turned his (stained and long-sleeved) Big Brother t-shirt into a pillow and the end result was excellent compared to the time spent making it.  Tate has a monogramed romper that will undergo a transformation to pillow soon.  Rush’s favorite new pillow, however, is the cowboy pillow directly to the right of the Big Bro pillow.  It’s his choice reading spot.

So here I am, ever transforming from the person reading at the library to a part of the ruckus, sewing primarily in blues and greens.  It’s naptime and the garbage truck just drove down the street.  I felt guilty not going out to say hello.

Party People

Say that title in your head just like it’s the beginning of that old (hip hop?) song.  You’re going to have to get there on your own; I can’t remember anything else about the song other than I think it starts with someone going “Party peeeeople” and I periodically get it stuck in my head.  It could say something else.

Anyway.  If either –or both- of these guys ever writes a memoir, I hope they mention that their mom made extra treats for them when she was making party food.  Then they would sit on the kitchen floor eating delicacies while their parents got ready the party.  Rush might mention it, but Tate was so incredibly appalled that I didn’t give him any chocolate covered strawberries that he might not have such a glowing review of me.  You’ll get your own bowl when you’re bigger Tate, I promise. 

Really though, look at those eyes.  Appalled.

Bittersweet

It’s happening again, more close friends are moving to Austin.  Now almost all my favorite people will be crammed into one city that I will never, ever voluntarily move to.  I am very excited for them because it’s a great move for them, but also very sad for us.  It’s going to sting this time. 

I haven’t lived in the same city as my other Austin friends and family for years, so I’m used to e-mails and weekend visits.  But the Johnsons are a staple of my adult life.  We invite them for dinner without cleaning the house and then head to the grocery store once they get here.  They have never complained (to our faces) about driving to the suburbs to visit.  We’ve been on vacation with them.  They came to visit us at the hospital after the births of both boys and are godparents to both of them.  We’ve shared countless dinners and drinks with them.  One of my top 5 Houston moments was meeting up at the Black Lab as soon as we all finished The Deathly Hallows so we could properly discuss Harry Potter in a British environment.  They’re the people we invite to every party we throw.

We had a dinner party last weekend to celebrate with them before they move next month.  It was a challenge for us to make it as special as we could, because these are people who have taught us about the details of life:  glittery birds hidden in the trees outside their house for their annual New Year brunch, china plates instead of paper when they brought a cake to a pottery studio, homemade caramel sauce and peanut butter cups for Christmas presents.  Now we’ll just have to take those life lessons and keep applying them to our everyday.

So, sigh.  I know they’ll have a great time in Austin making new friends and getting super educated and finding all the good restaurants.  We’ll visit; we’ll have to visit.  Too many close friends live there to stay away.  I’m just getting ready to mourn the geographical closeness and convenience and comfort of their friendship.  But I know Kellaura is a terrific pen pal and anyway, I’m hoping the volume of Episcopal churches in Houston will draw them back in a few years.  Until then, keep it weird Austin.  Your weirdness is my hope of driving my friends back to Houston…

Baby Gift #2

Most bloggers find a pretty background to showcase their projects in photographs, maybe a distressed table with a vase of flowers or a fence with vines growing on it.  I haphazardly threw mine on the bathroom counter – great.  It’s too late to get another picture because I already mailed the gift.  If it’s any consolation to your eyes, I only took the picture in the bathroom because the craft room was too messy to even attempt a decent shot.  I guess I was in a hurry and couldn’t walk another few feet to any other space in the house…?

So anyway, I made a shopping cart cover for my new –almost here!- niece or nephew.  I’m (obviously) not obsessed with cleanliness, but I have seen people sneeze into their hands and then immediately grab the handle of their cart at the grocery store.  And my children tend to want to suck on the handle and I assume they’re not the only ones.  Even if not for any sanitary reason, it’s nice to have a little extra padding in the seat because sitting in a seat made of metal rods doesn’t exactly sound comfortable.

My mom found the great number fabric.  The shopping cart cover I made for us a few years ago has state and capitals on it, so it appears my subconscious has a need to make grocery store trips educational.  Learn while you shop baby!

Copycat

On any given day practicality overrules certain aspects of life, like waking up and putting on shorts instead of a dress.  But one thing that I can’t be practical about is furniture.  We may be sleeping, sitting, relaxing, eating on it, but form trumps function every time.  Our couch does happen to be comfy, but that’s just a bonus.  When we were looking for a canvas khaki couch and visiting a million stores weekend after weekend, that’s what we got.  Looking for simply a comfortable couch would have been a lot easier. 

By no stretch of the imagination is our house full of crisp clean lines and straight backed chairs.  It generally worked out that the things we picked out by looks alone have been easy on the bones.  Excluding the rocking chair…



I previously assumed that if you can buy a white crib, white bookshelf, and a white dresser, a white rocking chair would also be easy to find.  But that really didn’t work out for us.  A glider or one of those armchairs with hidden rockers would be great for holding babies and singing.   But as many places as we looked, we couldn’t find one to match the nursery.

If I had selected a rocking chair on comfort alone, there would be a Lazy-Boy recliner right next to the bookshelf.  But because I really couldn’t figure out how that would work with the white wooden furniture motif, we bought an outdoor rocker from a hardware store.  It’s the most uncomfortable chair I’ve ever sat in, but I’ve been rocking children in it for almost two and a half years.  Making cushions seemed daunting, so I just toughed it out – literally.

Then last week I talked to my darling nine months pregnant sister who told me she made cushions for her rocking chair using two pillow shams, two bed pillows, some grommets, and ribbon.  It was the most genius idea and I copied her 100%.  I didn’t copy her a little; I copied her as closely as I’ve ever copied anything.  We had really similar bedspreads for awhile, so the pillow shams I found in our closet are almost the same pillow shams she used, just a different color.



Ta-da!  I didn’t even have to sew a stitch.  At some point I might make a stronger tie for the front because right now I’m just using a scrap of ribbon I found in a box, but for now it’s working.  Many, many thanks to Casey for the great idea – and for being a good sister.

Or Nectarines and Books About Pizza

So how are we spending our summer?  We’re doing weekend and evening pool trips (I don’t have enough faith in the 16 year old lifeguards to take these two to the pool on my own), sprinklers in the backyard, weekly trips to the library (where we always check out books on pizza at Rush’s request), and consuming lots of lemonade, popsicles, and fruit. 

And some of us are being little bit devious.  There’s just something about being two…

It’s a little amazing to me that we can keep such a lazy summer days feel to our lives right now.  We’re in the ultimate time consuming stage where Tate is nursing or having bottles and eating baby food and are not yet old enough to eat anything on his own.  I’ve calculated and we have about 3 1/2 hours per day of non-napping, non-eating free time.  Tate’s loving it, although I know he’s ready to move forward as soon as he can.  He’ll try to grab any and all food – steak, baked potatoes, rainbow sherbet, anything.  It won’t be long.

Even with all the eating and swimming and hot weather and growing children, I have a feeling I’m going to look back and go “Remember that summer when all we did was read The Hunger Games and Scandinavian thrillers and watch Modern Family and drink iced coffees?”

It’s just the way I classify my adult summers.  There was the summer of eating frozen blackberries with sugar and reading Harry Potter and there was the summer of watching VH1 and Down with Love and eating peppermint bark.  So I’m on my way to make an iced coffee right now.  It’s amazing what a little whipped cream and caramel sauce can do to spruce up an afternoon.

Nappy

I have a really low tolerance for naps.  A low tolerance for adult naps, I swing far to the other side regarding naps for my children.  If you’re a baby or child, you should be sleeping during the day.  But unless you’re sick, pregnant, or just coming home from  Project Graduation, stay awake and find something to do.

It’s a hard life for Trent, who gets up early every morning, can fall into a deep sleep under almost any circumstance, and probably loves naps more than most things in his life.  On of his favorite hobbies –like any 65 year old man- is falling asleep on the couch to the soothing sounds of football on tv.  He always manages to fall asleep in the most uncomfortable positions and he always has his shoes on.

Every so often he gets to take an authorized nap.  It’s rare, but it happens.  He’ll probably try it this weekend, but I’m planning on waking him up to go swimming.

Stars and Stripes 4-EVA

We celebrated the 4th of July the way we always do [if the holiday falls near a weekend] -

at the beach! 

The beach was consistently beautiful last year, so I forgot that excessive seaweed if normal for the middle of the summer.  I quickly remembered as soon as I walked down to the beach on Thursday evening and every available stretch of sand, from the dunes to the water, was covered in seaweed, with more washing up with every wave.  It just continued to build and build, so I didn’t spend an excessive amount of time actually on the beach.  We were lucky to go down early and snag a spot that someone cleared the day before.  Then we broke the rake trying to clear a path to the water.

So I wouldn’t call any trip with two very small children relaxing, but we did have our moments.  Tate was relaxed, spending most of his time with GABA (aka Great Aunt Betty-Ann).  Even though she has four children of her own and is a pediatrician, I’m always surprised by how much she loves babies.  I’m not sure that Tate was happy about having to sleep in a crib today instead of her arms.

Rush likes donuts, by the way.  I’m with him on that one.  At some point in life I’m going to mix a glazed donut into chocolate ice cream – it’s my fattening food disaster fantasy.

I’m on sabbatical from reading on the beach, which has given me the opportunity to discover that I love building sand castles.  I have big plans for future beach weekends…if I start collecting now, I think I can get together enough army men and Happy Meal toys for a giant sand fortress.  If we throw in a few dump trucks, we should be set for the day.

Celebrating 4th of July on a Monday at the beach is a little weird because it’s the day you go home and July 4th isn’t really a moveable holiday.  So while we had our fill of hotdogs over the course of the weekend, there were no hamburgers, no watermelon, no red, white, and blue sprinkled cupcakes to eat on Independence Day.  Plus the boys wore their flag T’s on July 3rd, so we didn’t even have the proper attire.  The fireworks ban meant no dusk til dawn amateur fireworks show and a car ride home and bedtime for tired boys meant no professional fireworks show for us.

But Trent and I did use the ride home to sing every patriotic song we could think of, from the Star Spangled Banner to She’s a Grand Old Flag and even a rendition of Tie A Yellow Ribbon, which is actually about a man coming home from prison.  But once I start singing about the flag, then it starts to get stuck in my head and I have to sing it. 

Next year we’ll do better –more patriotic clothing, more flags, more decorations, more color coordinated food.  For this year I just have to be content with knowing in my heart I’m proud to be an American.   But really, next year, we’re doing the blueberry and strawberry flag cake.