No matter

No Matter: 

If I'm worried;
If I didn't sleep last night;
If I yelled at my kids;
If I'm feeling low;
If my husband is out of town;
If I haven't had a chance to eat;
If it means the kids go to bed really late;
If it means I'll be up all night grading exams;
If I'm feeling sad and exhausted;
If the cat barfed on my pillow;
If I forgot to do the laundry again. Again;

When I leave that class, I'm smiling like a lunatic.

Thank goodness for that banjo.

PS - Chris is letting me pretend like one of his fancy pants cameras is mine. He is a generous man and I love him.  I am playing with the pictures, will soon find some time to read up on f-stops, shutter speeds, ISO... In the meantime, you should check out his much, much, oh so much cooler photos here.

When the cat's away...the lemmings will play.

My first baby

  Chris took the girls to his Mom's for the weekend. Well, actually, he took them to some water-filled rock quarry in some woodsy, undisclosed location in Central Illinois where Paula has an equally woodsy camping spot rented for the year.  And it's not  truly undisclosed. I just haven't been paying attention.

Chris, Bela, Mae...that's 75% of the clan. You must, by now, understand what this means. Yes, folk(s). I stayed home all by myself.  

Won't you be lonely? Mae asked me as I was pushing her out the front door Saturday morning.

Oh, I will, but I'll be ok Mae. Thank you for worrying about me. I threw her blankie down the front staircase. 

You're going to stay here all alone? She looked concerned and kissed me sweetly.  

I am, I'll miss you, but I'll be ok. I tossed her shoes out on the front sidewalk.

Alright. Judge away. I love to be alone. I love my kids passionately. I would throw myself in front of a bus for them.  I would eat worms if it somehow guaranteed their safety. I would go on play dates with total strangers just to entertain them... But I love to be alone.

I know Chris is dying to know what I do when I'm here by myself. I imagine his curiosity rivals that of Charles Martin Smith's character in Never Cry Wolf as he sets up camp to observe the secret goings-on of a group of wolves in the Arctic wilderness. Well, I'm not eating lemmings. There is no big surprise. It's actually, sadly, quite quite boring.

You would think that Moms, when they get the chance to do whatever their little hearts desire, would engage in activities that were more, I don't know, exciting. But my day went something like this:

Get up and eat bacon. Drink coffee. Eat more bacon. Drink more coffee. Be of absolutely no help packing the kids up, getting them out the door (except for the final shove). Sit on my couch and stare at the floor. Iron. Go to JoAnn Fabric to buy $80 (shhhhhhh!) worth of pinwale courdoroy. (Don't ask). Return home. Sew. Look up at the clock and realize that it is 9pm and I haven't eaten since bacon bacon coffee coffee. Eat cereal. Sew. Watch Jaws. Sew. Hang out with the cat. Go to bed at 1am. Sleep until 10:30.

What I did not do: Run. Laundry. Wash dishes. Clean anything. Shower. Brush my teeth. Brush my hair. Make my bed.

Why do I love it so much? I think it's the total silence. I think it's the uninterrupted pleasure of wildly impossible waking-hour fantasies. Usually, just as soon as I get to the good part of my day dreams, some one needs a band aid. Or help wiping. How's a girl to live out a fantasy life if she constantly has to wipe rear ends? Even cute little ones like the ones that run around my house?

My day wasn't completely silent. I've been listening to a lot of sad girl banjo music lately: Po' girl; Frazey Ford; Ruth Moody.  Nothing makes me happier than sad, and that's the truth.

Hope you all are having a wonderful weekend. Enjoy these photos of what Miss Bronte and I did. She is getting pretty good with a needle and thread.

This moment

Every Friday, over at Soule Mama, Amanda Soule posts an image with no words of description. She calls it "This Moment" and encourages others to do the same. Happy Friday.

These days

knitting - literally- on a bed of Spanish compositions

These days I'm feeling pulled in a few too many directions. When this happens, when work tends to start piling up, well that's when you'll find me engaged wholeheartedly in a lot of superfluous activities. Really inappropriate and not terribly important ones.

Dozens upon dozens of Spanish compositions to grade? I'm going to hang that shelf above the bed and install the reading light. Create a syllabus for that second job I just took? I think it's time to drill a gigantic hole in our tv cabinet so the cords can be re-routed through the back. Doctor's appointment to be made for the girls? Have I organized my yarn stash lately?

I have a lot going on right now. Which means my house is cleaner than usual, extraneous projects are underway, and my facebook page is exploding with unnecessary status updates. In the meantime, I think a whole lot about sewing and knitting and reading (especially this, this, and this), and have been - as best as I can - participating in this week's Kids Clothes Week Challenge.  The following pictures are proof of that.

The purpose of this challenge is to motivate you to spend some time sewing clothes for your kids. Or knitting. Or crocheting. And the goal is to spend one hour every day, minimum. Monday I spent an hour just washing, pre-shrinking, and re-ironing all the fabric I want to use. Tuesday I knitted. Today...the good lord only knows what I'll accomplish. Between teaching my own four classes, subbing for a fifth one, lesson planning, contract signing, and banjo lessoning, I'll be surprised if I touch a strand of yarn or a sewing pattern all day. But I ain't about to give up just yet. I'll check in later this week, maybe show off some pictures of Bela and Mae in their new clothes.

Maybe.

A lot of fabric to choose from...

Plenty of Japanese patterns to decipher...

Mucho ironing...

Lots of yarn winding.

Weekending,part II

 And before you know it, it's Sunday evening again. How does that happen? So much pressure these days are - the elusive weekend; the Saturdays, the Sundays. How many in a year? How many in a lifetime? Do these weekend days feel long and lazy to my children, the way they once did to me? Or are they gone before they're tasted, like they are for me now?

How do you prefer to spend your weekend? What do you fill your time with?

After some lazy time spent cuddling in bed together this morning, I got the kids busy in one room so I could attack the other. Soup. I had to finish the soup.

1. White bean and kale with tortellini and kielbasa? Check.
2. Black Bean? Check.
3. Chicken Vegetable? Double check.
4. Lentil with kielbasa? Check. Check. Check.

The soups barely made it to the freezer. Yum. Nothing was prepared with the cabbage. Not one thing. In fact, the cabbage is still sitting on my kitchen table, pretty but lonely. 

Bread was made and eaten. Projects finished. Laundry folded and put away.


The girls' brains were spared from yesterday's digital marathon. In celebration of our anniversary, we sent them off to the babysitter's for a handful of hours so we could, well, knit. Read books. Lie on the couch. Drink more wine. Nap.

And clean the kitchen.

















I did manage to make it out for a short run, and in so doing ran into my lovely friend, Leslie, who happened to be wearing a little thing I knitted for her earlier this year. Never one to pass up a chance to document something I've made, I snapped these pictures of her at Wicker Park - she is such a good sport.

And so they come and go. It's been a strange weekend here, but I am so, so..........sorry... that it is over...

Weekending, part I

"Entre la sopa y el amor...

la primera es mejor"

I might have this refrain wrong. I'm translating it to Spanish from something I read in English, but it means between soup and love, the first is better. Only in Spanish, it rhymes. 

I may be overly ambitious, but I have a lot of plans for this weekend. I plan to sleep, drink wine, knit some lace, play some banjo, get some patterns ready to sew (kids clothes week challenge starts on Monday), read The Road, grade about 50 Spanish compositions, go for a run, and make lots and lots of soup. Soup to eat now. Soup to freeze and eat later. 

1. White bean and kale soup with tortellini and kielbasa

2. Black bean soup

3. Lentil soup with Kielbasa

4. Chicken vegetable soup

5. Something with cabbage. We have a lot of cabbage.

I also plan to make a gross amount of waffles for the kids and freeze them; roasted beets; roasted and salted pumpkin seeds; bread; hummus. 

I think this means that Fall has arrived. My world has changed. I was born in the Fall and I hope to die in the Fall. Everything I love in this world has to do with Fall, it seems like. Knitting, cooking, running...I can do these things at any time of the year, but I prefer to do them between Labor Day and Christmas.

And what, you may wonder, do my kids do on Saturdays when I spend hours in the kitchen, drinking wine, playing the banjo, sneaking off to nap? They watch T.V. They look forward to Saturday T.V. with as much fervor as a little girl waits for a Christmas doll. Today, they have watched T.V. all day. All. Day. The secret of Nimh. Aladdin. Pete's Dragon. The secret of Nimh again. That's four movies. We're talking 5-8 hours of televised entertainment. Mae can't take it. She keeps sneaking off, to try to play. I don't even think Bela has eaten or gone to the bathroom in 6 hours, on the other hand.

PS - As I wrote the words above, my sweet little Mae pulled two weeks of lace off the knitting needles. This is one of those moments where I have to be a grown up. This is one of those life lessons moments.What I want to do is stomp my feet, fall to the floor, scream. 

Instead, I'll go have a glass of wine. Eat some soup.

Happy weekend to you all. What are YOU going to do?

Happy Anniversary, Chris. Remember this moment?

Every Friday Amanda Soule, over at Soule Mama, makes a post called "this moment". She shares an image, without words of explanation, that captured a moment perfectly. I think she is super cool. I love her blog and I find her to be such an inspiration.  And so, partially because I want to be like her, and partially because she encourages it, I will also be turning Fridays on my blog into  "this moment".

Why are we scared of dirty?

My kids are dirty. There. I said it.

My house is dirty, most of the time.

Why are we scared of dirty? Why do we work so hard at clean? I've been thinking a lot about a conversation I had recently with my closest friend (and one of the four followers of this blog), Karen. When we get to talking about ourselves and what we like about us and our friendship, and how cool we think we are (this happens more often  than it should) we like to label ourselves as "troopers." We aren't afraid to work hard. We aren't afraid to walk 30 some odd blocks through New York City with toddlers strapped to our backs, dragging suitcases. We don't shy away from climbing on ladders at 8 1/2 (me) and 4 1/2 (her) months pregnant because I decide to move to the apartment upstairs and paint 7 rooms a few weeks before Mae is born. We dig in the dirt. She makes her own yogurt. We run twenty miles in the rain.

And yet everywhere you look people are sterilizing their lives. Homes look like the pages of a CB2 catalog. We can't jump on the couch because it will get.....soiled.  We can't dirty our clothes because they will get...dirty. We can't live in our houses because they will get lived in. We work so hard at perfecting our appearances, at minimizing the chaos and disorder in our lives.  *Doctors and hospitals "sterilize" our birthing experiences. Pregnancy is treated like an illness that drags on for nine months only to end in a numb, medical procedure. No pain. No surprises. Little mess. Okay, this is getting preachy.

For as much as I like to embrace the tough, messier side of myself, I too am really guilty of controlling the experiences of my children. Every time I get called out on this I fight back, but the truth is that it is the truth. I let them run around barefoot, I let them tromp through sheep poop (not barefoot), I even let them eat food off the floor - and if that floor lives in my house, it is probably dirty. But I have been known to lose my cool because the crayons end up on the floor every day, and the tracing paper is scattered to the four corners of the universe. I've been known to stomp my feet because watercolor paints end up on my curtains. Why? Why do I care? Why can't I let go?

Kids are messy. Their language is messy. Their art is messy. Their growth is messy. It's chaos, really, and it needs to be embraced. Fighting the mess daily is like swimming against the current. It's exhausting. I'm exhausted. I need to let go. I need to let my kids get their hands dirtier. And if that means that everything they touch also gets dirty, then so be it.

Why are we so scared of dirty?

 *Being an inhabitant of the 21st century, I do acknowledge that the "sterilization" of the birthing process, in a certain medical sense, is necessary and recommended. But I'm not referring to germs in the paragraph above.

Checklist

Runner's pre-race checklist:

• fuel
• hydrate
• pee
• stretch
• get to race on time

I was zero of 5 on this one. I think I must have left my list at home.

Yes, that was me (and a few hundred others, I believe) running against the crowd at the beginning of the 14th Annual Chicago Half Marathon this morning. We were late, so very very late. I knew it would happen. I shed a few tears. We sped. We got stuck in race traffic. And Bears traffic. And 'we're going to shut down Lake Shore Drive so a bunch of crazy people can run on it' traffic.

I ate nothing before this race. The only hydrating I did was my venti Americano with 4 shots of espresso and a splash of milk.  I pulled up to Jackson Park at 7:02 (note: after the race started) and still had to run a few blocks to find the starting line. I had to forgo the john.  I spent the first 4 miles of the race peeing slowly but methodically in my pants. With every cough. With every elbow jab (it's tough in those crowds sometimes). As soon as the pee met up with the sweat I felt a whole lot better about it. Still, at mile 4 I stood in line to use the port-a-potty and then it was go time.

I don't know what came over me. Maybe it was the Otis Redding on my play list, or all the rad banjo music I added in there. But I ran the fastest half marathon of my  career. I finished in 1hr 53 minutes.

There is very little photographic evidence that I was present at today's race. After this morning's events, Chris and I have come to an agreement that will most likely prevent the dissolution of our marriage: he is no longer allowed to come with me to races unless he leaves the kids at home. Chris + Bela + Mae = nobody ever actually makes it to the race course to witness me run. Or cheer me on. I usually have to go looking for them after the race...at the park. Or at a restaurant eating pancakes. Enjoy this photo I made him take. You know, as proof.

PS - I am (most likely) being unfair here. But at least now I'll know if he reads my blog or not :)

Sheep. And wool.

Wisconsin Sheep and Wool Festival - Jefferson, Wisconsin.

We saw sheep.

We saw lambs.

We saw a man who looked like a sheep shear sheep.

 We saw sheep getting milked.

We ran around the barn, looked at yarn, ate bbq pulled lamb sandwiches (at least, I did), and in general, had a grand old time.

Now off to bed! Tomorrow is the Chicago Half Marathon.