This Moment

My weekly post. A moment from our week we'd like to share and remember. Have a great weekend!

Executive decision

Bela has a list of go-to adages and other cliche sayings she likes to use when she's feeling frustrated with her position in life: it's not fair, she always gets her way, you just don't understand, and my favorite, grown ups get to do whatever they want. 

Just to prove her right, Chris and I made a pair of executive decisions recently regarding the current state of affairs in our family. These may or may not have been made after multiple glasses of wine, but they just go to show that, dammit, sometimes grown ups DO get to do whatever they want.

 1. Pardon my language, but screw cloth diapers. For baby #3 it's disposables all the way. Gill grew out of her size small back about 3 months ago and I never bought more. And I'm not going to.

 2. Chris has declared that from here on Gillian Fern, shortened to Gil, shall now be Gillian Fern, shortened to Gill. Double 'l', ya hear? Now, if only I could do whatever I want and take a nap.

Waiting

Mortgage application, all over the floor. This was March.

We're still here, waiting. Cleared to close, waiting for the lawyers involved to fit us in to their busy schedules.

Waiting, waiting, waiting. An enormous pile of things to do, looming on the horizon.

I'm really bad at waiting.

And this is what our house looks like now. Almost June. Waiting.

This Moment

My weekly post. A moment from our week I'd like to share and remember. Have a great weekend!

The House

If I had known that the process of buying a house required inhuman amounts of patience mixed with a lot of stiff-upper-lipped-ness and a little fake ambivalence, I wouldn't have done this. I am not cut out for this sort of large scale purchase, as it turns out.

This little blue house has been in the works for us since the first week of March, and I have cried much more than necessary.  It really didn't seem like it was going to work out; our timing was all off. Tax returns, late pay checks, bills... the stars were not aligned in our favor.

But then it all did just work out. Isn't it funny how that usually happens? Apparently, we fooled someone. Because we got it. We should be closing very, very soon. (These three words have been used a lot around here in the last 12 weeks).

We will go from 2 bedrooms and a (sewing) nook to four bedrooms. From one bathroom to three. Our backyard will be smaller. Our front yard will be bigger. There is a chicken coop attached to the garage, and oh so many more details I won't list here.

So here's to new adventures, to a house for my girls.

This Moment

My weekly post. A moment from our week we'd like to share and remember. Have a great weekend!

Helen - the original blogger

Grandma E is the gal sitting on the swing.

My grandmother, Helen Ellis, was a home-ec teacher; she knew how to do a lot of home-ec things really well. She made a lot of casseroles heavy with celery and béchamel. She used a lot of wax paper in her kitchen, kept a tidy little home, wore galoshes. She and my grandfather Harry tended a meticulous backyard garden, canned tomatoes and beets, maintained a compost pile.

She was an obsessive organizer, everything labeled and in its place. She crocheted, she sewed. She took hundreds of family photos which were later, of course, organized into a very orderly photo album library. For fun she would cross stitch. Play rummy cube. Put together those puzzles with no less than 5000 pieces. 

I loved her dearly, but as a child I definitely did not find her to be fun or silly, not in the way that Harry was. I appreciated her but did not relate to her.

Now, 36, I not only find that I relate to her, but that I have become her. Wife. Mother of three girls. Crafter and cataloger of all things domestic. And I dwell sweetly on my memories of her - my mother's mother. Who could have guessed we would have so much in common?

I have inherited her love of making things. It's not simply a desire to acquire new skills, add new hobbies to the list, but a real intense attraction to the process of making something by hand. The satisfaction you draw from that, employing your skill, your time, your bits of creativity. I can only imagine she felt the same attraction.

I have inherited her desire to label. If Chris would let me, I would arrange and label every linen closet, basement shelf, and pantry cupboard. If real life allowed, everything in my home would have a place where it belonged, and those belongings would be sparse and never out of order.

I have inherited her love of documentation. As a kid we spent a lot of time rolling our eyes at the constant clicking of Helen's camera; the cutesy little captions she would put in her photo albums; the stories she would write about us. But now it occurs to me: Helen was the original blogger in our family.

Ruth, Hazel, Helen

As I flip through the pages of the little story she wrote - "Life with Katie", a small accounting of a week I spent at her house when I was 2 - as I look through her photos, fold up the afghan she crocheted me for my high school graduation, process another batch of canned tomatoes, gel another batch of jam... I find myself feeling awfully sentimental. I find myself getting carried away with thoughts of motherhood, homemaking, family, mortality.

We certainly don't need Mother's Day to appreciate the role that mothers play in our families. Whether they are ours or not. We certainly don't need an invitation to look back and appreciate with humor and a little irony the paths our lives take, the people who influence those paths, and, ultimately, the women (and men) we become.

So here's to you, Helen. The original blogger. The cataloger of all things domestic. Crafter extraordinaire. I love you. I miss you. And I'm so glad I knew you.

 mom, Aunt Joan, Aunt Nancy - looks like Gil and gma lou have a lot in common too. chubb-a chubb-a.