WHAT DO YOU MEAN, YOU HAVEN'T POSTED IN A MONTH?!?!

You guys, I know, I know. I totally disappeared, and honestly? There's not really a particularly trenchant reason for it. Just - summer stuff. Lots of playing outside with water, which doesn't always mix with camera equipment in a relaxing way. But I have definitely been missing this space... so yeah, let's get on that, shall we, little miss forty-two roads?

Oh, that face up top? That's Jakey's "Angry Bad Guy" face. Usually made while loudly declaiming, "Ang'y! Bad! Guy!" and punching any nearby surface for emphasis. (Partial disclosure - sometimes that surface is a parent. Full disclosure - we should probably sternly say "no hitting" or something in response, but we usually just laugh at the hilarity. Mixed signals, shmixed shmignals.) Incidentally, the favorite bad guy of the moment is the little apoplectic chef from "Ratatouille", which Jakey calls "the bad guy movie".



On another front, project "BFF siblings" is progressing nicely. Is it odd to be trying to socially engineer this rather than just letting nature take whatever course it will? Well, maybe it's because I'm an only child, so my approach to this is necessarily from an outsider perspective, but my sense is that fake-it-till-you-make-it works for all sorts of situations in life. So if, say, sharing with your sibling isn't your strong suit, mommy institutes mandatory sharing of treats. Sure, there'll eventually be two cookies for two kids, but you'll get them one at a time and will have to break each in half and give half away. Or, for example, if you constantly demand that only mommy fetch you things on long car trips, you will instead ask your sibling for them nicely or not get to play with them at all. So far, a little bit of this kind of armchair psychological trickery seems to really have created a baseline of cooperative, affectionate, concerned, and helpful behavior... but of course all baselines are made to be overstepped.

So, how's your summer been going? Any social programming going on at your house?

Deep Thoughts

Conversation with Lara as she is looking at pictures of her dad and me from when we were still dating.

L: Hey, look, that's you and daddy! But where am I?
A: Oh, that was before you were born.
L: But you and daddy were born?
A: Yes, daddy and I were born a long time ago. You were born three years ago, but I was born thirty years ago!

Lara looks at the pictures again and thinks about this some more.

L: Oh. Was I at home because I wasn't born yet?
A: Well, not really at home. You were a little tiny dot in my tummy. Remember how Jakey was in my tummy before he was born? You were in my tummy before you were born also.
L: So what happened? What happened when I was born?
A: You became our little baby daughter. And I became a mommy. Before that I was a woman.
L: But you are a woman!
A: That's true - now I'm a woman and a mommy.
L: And I'm a daughter and Jakey is a son.

My Two Smalls

I don't have siblings, and thus am completely fascinated by the idea that the quintessential experience of Lara and Jake's family life is something that I can only vaguely guess at. I can predict the certainty of joys and frustrations of needing to carve out a niche role in the family structure; of navigating the complexities of sharing and the ins and outs of mine, yours, ours; of the stresses and victories of inevitable comparison. It reminds me a little of the thoughts I had when Lara started nursery school - that she was about to start her own life, with a daily set of experiences that I would not share. But this time my exclusion is so much more profound because even with constant presence I cannot really know what it is like to have a brother.

Right now Lara's relationship with Jake is heavily imitative of our relationship with him. For instance, he hates the car with a passion and her responses to the stress of his screaming are filled with the vocabulary I have given her (partially in an attempt to keep it neutral, but still give her room to complain). Already though they are forming their own connection. She keeps a close watch on me as we leave the house to make sure I haven't forgotten any of his accouterments. And yesterday in the car we were treated to a vision of the future: "Hey that's my toy! Daddy that's mine! Jakey touched it!" "Honey, that's ok, it's still your toy." "But he already touched it with his hand!" Of course, in order for him to have reached it in the first place, she must have been putting it in his hand to play with.

Changes

We recently moved Lara from a crib into a big-girl bed. And when I say moved, what I mean is that we contemplated going to IKEA to get a low twin, decided that the effort to get one, bring it home, and rearrange all the furniture in her room to accommodate it was too tiring to even think about... so we just took one of the sides off of her crib, put it into storage, and I sewed her a little pillow and case. Is three and a half late to make the switch? Well, we were worried about what would happen once she knew she could escape the bed at will. We were anxious that naps would fly out the window, and that rebellion would ensue. After all, we thought, she never really climbed out of the crib, so what's the rush?

Turns out we needn't have worried. It took one day for her to fall in love with her new little bed. She sleeps in it fine. She naps. She escapes only a few times just after bedtime with a smiling mischievous face that I love (I have to hide my giggles in my attempts to be stern).

The here and now

One of my recent promises to myself is to focus more on mindfulness. I am generally very drawn to the idea of fully absorbing the experiential - it's one of the reasons I really enjoy yoga (but not prenatally, as it turns out... can't wait to pick it up again). I have been intrigued by the practice of meditation, but for some reason it seems too intimidating, like something you need to first read books about before doing.

Mindfulness on the other hand? That's just lingering in the moment, living through the process, having the ability to dismiss distractions just long enough to actively capture the here and now. I can definitely do that, especially since life with children is so consistently filled with interruptions that almost any project you undertake is more process than result. You really have to be able to shift attention away from your vision of the finished product and just accept the beauty of the act of doing. Which, admittedly, is difficult, especially for the slightly more type-A accomplishment-driven folks among us.



But when it happens, when you will yourself to let it happen, the quiet delight of the everyday is enough for a happy peacefulness.

Inspiring Creativity

I'm feeling a bit of creative drag these days. Maybe it's because I am immersing myself more in the dissertation, maybe I'm just tired after the holiday hoopla - either way, I'm not really feeling it very much right now. But it amazes me how different my fount of creativity is from Lara's - how for her, there is no need to define a motive for making beyond what strikes the fancy at any given moment.



I love learning through her the evolution of our most basic drives. The need to make seems completely universal. It is fascinating that it is such a primal drive, that it is in fact not necessity that is the mother of invention as the proverb would have it, but that instead invention precedes need, purpose, goal, and exists most primordially as a force that propels play and exploration. "Mommy, see what I made?" Lara asks frequently, holding up with equal pride a couple of stuck together legos, some complex project from daycare, a toy arrangement, or pointing to one of her artworks that we hung on the wall. Yes, my love, I do see what you made. And I know exactly the deeply warm satisfaction of looking at it that you feel - after all, isn't that what this blog is, me asking all of you to "see what I made"? I am so happy you already get to have that feeling.



From the first, creativity is also interpretation. "I'm a Mummer too! Now I'm going to dance," accompanied this ensemble during the parade on New Year's Day when it was too cold to see the regalia'ed men in person and we instead happily watched it on TV. Headband, sash, bracelet, sometimes a cape, sometimes fancy shoes - creative recasting of the self into ephemeral roles without purpose or order, just as a way to try the whims of the imagination on for size.

I wonder if that kind of creativity can be recaptured or approximated. I'm not sure I could do it. You?

Flowers for me...

...from me.



Peonies are my favorite flowers, and as soon as I saw these today they were calling my name. It's lovely to get flowers from others, of course, but also quite important to sometimes just give them to yourself. "You've been doing a lot of hard work, Self. Don't think I haven't noticed the effort."

Family flowers perch on the kitchen counter, jostling for space with incoming mail, in progress kitchen prep, and the steady flow of things through daily life. But these flowers are my own private decoration, lightly dusting my immediate space with their softly sweet aroma, sitting on my emptied desk in full view of just me, (the only way that I could notice, for instance, how perfectly they contrast with the starless nighttime behind them).

It begins again...

... the handmade holiday season, that is.

I was actually going to buckle this year and buy things instead, so we loaded the family into the car and headed out to the mall yesterday evening. It was quite an eerie experience. There was no one there. At all. We saw one family taking pictures of their kid next to one of the numerous Christmas trees decking the empty halls, and another lone little girl cajoling her mom into letting her go talk to Santa in his huge cage-like enclosure. The only highlight was a brand new board games store, which also had some Lara-approved animatronic stuffed animals in the front display. The teenager working there was so bored he actually came over and turned them all on for her. Otherwise, our trip turned out to be just be a nice walk indoors. Lara ran with delight from one plastic reindeer to the next without the usual danger of colliding with adults not monitoring below-knee activity. We wandered after her, slowly more and more shocked at the emptiness, which is probably the first real sign I've seen of the economic disaster.

And of course I'd rather give people things made by hand than mass-produced ones.* I'm not really a complete corporate snob - just bought Lara another bunch of sleepies from The Children's Place, and a pair of winter boots from Target. But gifts seem different somehow than necessary objects. We are expected to have thought them through, to have taken time to wonder about the taste and needs of the recipient, to have factored in the complexities of our relationship with that person and the unspoken meanings a gift may carry. It's really hard. There are people in my life whom I love dearly, and to whom I am incredibly close, who have yet to ever buy me something that I actually like. I am sure there are people in my life for whom I am that horrible gift giver. But at least a handmade present, by virtue of the time and creative energy it embodies, is a symbol of some of that necessary gift-giving care and attentiveness.

This Hanukkah, someone is getting a set of the wine charms (or I guess napkin rings) that I like to make:



In case the picture makes it hard to tell, they are basically just short beaded lariats meant to wrap around the stem of a wine glass or a rolled up napkin, with the large bead on the end threaded through the lariat loop. More doodads to come.

--------------
*I think books count as handmade. Or at least they do in my gift world.

forty-two roads in Print!

My enormous thanks to Good Housekeeping magazine for turning one of my blog posts into an article in the December '08 issue! If you are here because you stumbled on my blog through the magazine - welcome!



Here is a blurry picture of the article (the inset is the magazine cover), which is a combination of last year's Hanukah posts and which features a couple of cute photos of Lara amidst the holiday decor.

Found II

I've been having fun playing with my camera. The instructions that come with it are about the size of a small dictionary, and I always have this nagging sense that if only I read them I would be capable of feats of photographic wizardry. I am actually often beset by this sense of missing out. What if I started reading that Photoshop magazine and learned about vectors and unrasterized layers? How much better would my images be, how much more streamlined my processes of creating them! Ah, there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

But for now, I don't even have a tripod and have to rely on the steadiness of my hands. I don't have a light tent and am at the mercy of the weather. Mostly though, I don't have time to become a master of the technology that surrounds me, so I will try to be happy being only its jack.

Newport

A beautiful, wonderful weekend in Newport, Rhode Island, watching two amazing people promise each other that they will be together forever and ever. I really love weddings for their earnest seriousness, for the emotional and deeply felt public avowals of intimacy and love, for the communal affirmation that souls can be matched in lifelong partnership. I love seeing other couples in the audience smile at each other as vows are recited and squeezing Misha's hand when an officiant talks about the meaning of marriage. The ritual is individual enough to be forever cemented in the heads of the bride and groom as their own - but in the most truly comforting way it is repetitive too, and I sit and play with my wedding ring and feel the present enmesh with memory.

Todd and Erin were married on Saturday on Goat Island, a tiny piece of land off the coast of Newport. It was unbelievable, and perfect in every way. Here is the view from the green on which the ceremony was set up:



Todd, Misha, Sam, and Avi sit on the seawall at the rehearsal:



What the ocean looks like behind them:



The picture-perfect sunset after the ceremony:



Misha and I clean up cute:



I wish I had gotten more pictures, but of course we forgot our camera and were limited by the sad capacity of our cell phone cameras, which have no flash and thus do not function after dark. But it was a marvelous party, with dancing and drinking and laughter. Congratulations, Erin and Todd - may you be forever awash in the love that flowed all around on Saturday.

Dreams

When do children start to understand the idea of dreams? That they see images when they sleep - images that are part of an altered state of consciousness, that feel real but aren't actually happening? Many of Lara's books feature characters dreaming, a plot point usually illustrated by thought bubbles coming out of the head of a sleeping figure. But interpreting this image seems more akin to learning that a stick figure with down-turned eyebrows signifies anger and that wavy lines drawn around a body part represent movement - in other words, learning about thought bubbles in illustrations is more closely related to reading, to slowly internalizing the abstract squiggles we use as notation. How would a child connect that to what is happening in sleep?

I have memories of childhood dreams - a recurring nightmare and a recurring happy flying dream - but clearly to have a memory of telling someone else about them I must have been much older than Lara is. Of course I have no sense of when I learned that however scary or exhilarating, they weren't experiential. Was there ever a time when I woke and thought that I had actually been flying?

Recently we started asking Lara, "Did you have any dreams? What did you dream about?" as part of her waking-up routine. For a long time - maybe a month? - her answer was a repeated "I dreamed about bones!" We can't exactly figure out where she got this, but it seemed somehow related to Lady and the Tramp, which she saw the day before the first "bone dream", and the scene of Jock hastily burying his bones in the ground before Lady sees where his hiding spot is. I think we were so excited to have her say she dreamed about anything that she then decided this was the right answer to the question. You know, along the lines of "How are you?" "I'm fine." - just something you say. Then I think as she got more of a sense of the word "about" as it relates to stories and books, so she would sometimes answer, "I dreamed about Mommy!" or another person. Today, after a couple of weeks of having no answer at all, she said, "I dreamed about doggies," which made me to wonder - at what point is she actually remembering a dream she had? Maybe she really did dream about doggies this time?

Ties into headbands for my mom

These were a big hit, so I just made my mommy some more, this time out of ties. These tie ones took much longer than the cotton ones since I have no idea how to sew silk with a machine and thus did them by hand... there must be some kind of secret foot to deal with the slippery material, right?

In any case, the added fun this time is that my mommy is actually here now, and so I have the pleasure of seeing her wear the headbands as soon as I snip the last thread. There is so much joy in making things for other people - especially things that will get used. Not to offend any crafters out there, but I often see people making things that just seem unnecessary to me - very elaborate, but functionless objects that clearly took enormous talent and energy but will most likely just sit in the corner of someone's room. I try very hard to limit the scope of my creations to the needed, or at least the wanted and useful; frequently I have to remind myself that just because I can make something, doesn't mean I should.

My quibble I guess is with the idea that just being handmade somehow imbues an object with greater value, however valueless it is otherwise. On the Craftster boards, for instance, there is much complaining about those people who do not appreciate handmade presents, but when I try to check out what the posters make as often as not I find bottles of colored sand decorated with lacy ribbons, or strange tiny pillows, or shoddily sewn t-shirt bags. I would bet that a truly thoughtful handmade present - one made well and clearly geared to the recipient - will never fail. I hate the idea that it's the thought that counts, and so if you balk at the execution and follow-through you are somehow a heel.

Hmm... all this over a couple of headbands? I'm going to go eat some chocolate.

What Lara Thinks Things Are

I just came home from meeting with my dissertation advisers about the chapter I just finished (a great meeting, by the way - they are very happy with me). Professionally, as a specialist in 19th century literature, what I basically do is find patterns. The works I study have already been created, and since I am not a historian, I am unlikely to unearth new primary information about them; so in order to have original ideas, I have to look at unlike objects/ideas/styles/aesthetics and find some kind of novel connection. "It has not occurred to anyone until now," each of my essays says, "but when you look at these three disparate books, they exhibit a curious similarity - one which I will now demonstrate and explain." The most difficult part of this work is to break through the standard associations that have been burned into my brain's pathways by habit, custom, common knowledge, and other dulling and unquestioned routines.

I have been thinking a lot about this kind of intentional search for connections, because it is exactly what Lara does when trying to understand new things in her world. It is so fascinating to watch her quickly try to categorize the new and place it into her ever-expanding, but still fairly small knowledge inventory. I love seeing this process, and I am proud of how confidently, how bravely she sets out to explain what she sees to herself. She is undaunted by any suggestions from us that differ from her own perception, arguing with conviction that, for instance, Mickey Mouse is a bear, or that unlike the rest of the dogs, Tramp is actually a kangaroo:



Often, there is an element of fun puzzle-solving in figuring out Lara's leaps of analogy. We passed a guy dressed like this in the street:

Yorkshire Men
Originally uploaded by Lesley A Jones

and she called out, "That's a fahmer! That man's a fahmer!" Why a farmer? Oh, of course - because her only knowledge of farmers comes from Babe, where the farmer looks like this:



We no longer correct her. There will be plenty of time for her to be conditioned into conformity. For now it is far more interesting for us to be shown the world anew, to gasp with delight at the connections only someone without the burden of mental habits can see. How else would we realize that the way the storks drop the baby animals in Dumbo looks exactly like jellyfish swimming, if not for Lara pointing at the parachutes and yelling, "the dellfish are coming! the dellfish are coming!" See for yourselves:





There are many more examples of course, and there is nothing quite like watching her mind at work. I marvel daily, hourly, minute by minute.

I've been tagged!

I got tagged by Julie at Red Hen Studios! How super fun!

The rules for this are easy:
1. Link to the person that tagged you. (done above)
2. Post the rules on your blog. (done here)
3. Share six non-important things/habits/quirks about yourself. (will do below)
4. The rest of the rules call for tagging other people... but I'm not going to. If you feel like being tagged by this meme, consider yourself tagged!

Okee doke, here are six random things about me.

1. Have I ever mentioned why this thingie is called forty-two roads? I'm hoping some of the geekier readers have already gotten the allusion, but for everyone else, it's a reference to the Hitchhiker's Guide series. One of the plot lines of the first book follows a pair of alien scientists who build a computer to answer the question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. Eventually, the computer arrives at the answer - "42" - and the scientists realize that they don't know the question. So they build an even bigger computer to figure out the question, but just as this computer is about to yield the answer, it is mistaken for a planet (the computer is actually Earth) and destroyed to make way for an intergalactic superhighway. The two scientists, scrambling for grants and tenure, decide to make up a question, eventually settling on "How many roads must a man walk down?" I have always found these books, and this plot line in particular, to be totally hilarious.

2. If I could, I would cover the walls of our apartment floor to ceiling with original artwork, Barnes Foundation-style, with almost no spaces in between. Too bad we're not swimming in money.

3. I can't whistle, fold my tongue, raise one eyebrow, wiggle my ears, bend my thumb to my wrist, or do a single other one of those small genetically-determined tricks (I've decided that whistling is one of these since no one has ever been able to teach me how to do it). The only thing I can do is unfocus my eyes and instantly see those three-dimensional "Magic Eye" puzzles.

4. My favorite dream ever was a recurring dream I used to have when I was around 12 years old. The dream was basically of me falling softly asleep with my head on my desk on top of my hands. The image was just the close-up of my hands and the desk - exactly what I would see if I were actually lying on a desk at school. That I was having this dream meant I was having the best, most relaxing, least worried sleep possible. My least favorite dream was a recurring nightmare from when I was around 5 or 6. It involved trying to get away from a dragon that was flying around the infinitely high ceiling of my grandparents' apartment. At the end of the dream, my grandmother would realize that I could escape by holding a white handkerchief above my head (camouflaging me into the floor from the dragon's perspective), and so I would manage to escape but my grandparents would still be trapped inside.

5. My favorite going-out activity is to eat at a quiet - really preferably almost empty - restaurant. Really just that simple. I just want to sit somewhere, chatting with friends and loved ones, while someone else brings me food.

6. I wish I had a huge woodworking shop and could learn to build furniture. Even more secretly, I wish I could build us a house from scratch.

My X-man power

I might love the X-men. Let me rephrase that - I really really LOVE LOVE the X-men. I read every comic book in the franchise, I know the whole soap opera back stories of all the characters, and I am basically about as geeky about it as a grown 30 year old woman could possibly be. What I really like is the way Stan Lee designed their powers. It's not boring Superman, with super this, and super that, and invincibility, and flying, and whatever else. Instead, each X-man is able to do only one special thing - and usually it's a skill not useful for physical combat. One is able to pick up radio wave transmissions without a receiver, another can dissolve into dust, several can shapeshift into animals, one really sad one just looks like a chicken. In order to actually deal with the villains they have to constantly be training. Think about it - have you ever seen Superman practicing anything?

I kind of like to think that everyone has an X-man power. Just one thing, probably a totally useless thing, that you do better than anyone else. Something slightly magical, most likely something that only you have ever noticed about yourself. My X-man power? I reasonably infallibly order the best thing on the menu in a restaurant. My food pretty much always tastes better than whatever everyone else has chosen. I've noticed this for a while, but I think I recently figured out why - I have a good sense for what foods would taste good in combination. Have you ever seen the movie Ratatouille? There is a scene when Rene the rat chef is tasting foods first separately and then together to see how they complement one another. This is drawn beautifully. On a black backdrop, cheese is a set of boppy yellow circles, and then strawberries are represented with a fading pink paisley-like pattern. Together, they are a swirling mass of orange fireworks. (Here is a link to a YouTube clip.) It's a little like that in my head.

All of which is to say that if you saute some onions with green beans and potatoes, nothing will top that better than Greek yogurt (tzadziki). Better than sour cream, better than regular yogurt, better than Indian yogurt (raita) - it has an extra note of tangy sourness that makes this a fast but really really delicious dinner.

Fashion Show Tuesday

I might have a secret dream about the way Lara would always be dressed. You wouldn't know it from the mostly comfy boy's-department things she usually has on, but in my secret dream she is wearing clothes in a style that is hard to describe exactly - a cross between bohemian, Anthropologie, cool hippie, and handmade. Stylish, yet not quite mainstream clothes; colors mixed wildly, but with a sense of vision; seemingly haphazzard layers mixed to perfection. This is a secret dream that is hard to achieve - certainly not in the winter, certainly not on a budget, certainly not if I don't want to dictate my tastes to my daughter. But still, on a 60 degree February day, small dreams come true... How cute is she in these little clothes? I kind of want all of them in a big size for myself. Because of course in my very secret dream, it is I who get to dress like this every day.

Napoleon

Sometimes I will get one of those email questionnaires from my friends - you know, the ones asking you to fill out a bunch of trivia about yourself. I never know what to answer. "What's your favorite movie?" That one varies depending on my mood and the intensity of my desire to impress whomever sent me the email. "What's your favorite place?" Always something vague. I guess a beach? My couch when the house is warm? The park?

There is only one question I can ever actually answer. "What's your favorite food?" Hands down, bar none, no ifs, and, or buts about it, it's my grandma Lena's Napoleon. I only have one bone to pick with the question - Napoleon is not food. It is ambrosia from the gods. Eating it with a cup of tea in her kitchen (sadly all too infrequently since she lives in San Francisco) is so deeply comforting and relaxing that I can't even fully imagine or remember what it feels like unless I'm actually doing it.

Do you know what Napoleon is? It's layers of initially flaky pastry mixed with layers of custard. The custard soaks into the pastry, moistening it just enough to no longer crumble. It is served chilled, and as you bite into it, the sweet creaminess of the custard coats your tongue in a feeling of safety and contentment. It is the quintessential dessert - less demanding on the palate than chocolate, less flamboyant than cake, edible in far greater quantities than cookies.

And yesterday I got to make some for myself for the first time. My amazing grandmother baked and sent me the pastry pieces. Sorry, folks, get your own super awesome grandma. This one's taken. I nervously made the custard, put the layers together, and today got to enjoy my bliss. Totally amazing. Even better, I got to share it with Misha and Lara. He loves it. Her verdict? "Poyon cake is yummy yummy yummy! More poyon cake pweeze!"

I hope your flight was good, Mommy!

It was a really wonderful visit, and I am so happy my mom was here for as long as she was - almost three weeks.



It's extraordinary how much Lara can change in that time, and I think for my mom, just watching her suddenly have a new grasp of complex, preposition clause-laden sentences was really a gift, since she doesn't get to see it often in real life.



The evolution of speech from short bursts of syllabic noise to long convoluted descriptions of everyday life are a miraculous, precious, living experiment. I am so grateful that I have spent so much of my life in the minutia of language - enough to not only clap with wonderment at each new tiny step of Lara's learning, but to also be able to name what she has learned. Look, the present perfect! - and of course it makes sense that this would be the tense easiest to learn since she exists to herself solely in the moment. Look, an instinctive ability to determine parts of speech! - and can anyone explain how she would come to instantly realize the first time hearing it, that in the phrase "Oh, that's interesting!," the word "interesting" is an adjective and instantly create her own version of the exclamation - "Oh, that's an in-testing wall!"; while at the same time knowing that in the sentence "Oh, look at that hippo!" the "hippo" is a noun that can be replaced only with any other noun? I marvel at the brain's ability to make such exacting sense of the miscellany that surrounds it.

Ok, enough awe. I have to tell you about January 1st. On every New Year's Day here in Philly, we have the Mummers Parade, which... well, just click the link because you kind of just have to see the pictures of these guys. We took Lara to Broad Street to check out the action, but it was cold and full of drunken frat types, so we
opted to watch most of it at home on TV. When I tell you that Lara was absolutely consumed by the costumes, the music, and the dancing, I am underrepresenting the level of fascination. For a while she just looked, but quickly she began to also dance - and not just dance, but dance with her back right against the screen so that she would be leading the brigades. Then she grabbed her colorful place mat and danced holding it behind her head to make herself a mumming costume! We were dying, as you can imagine. The place mat was kind of a weak costume so I busted out her Jessie Cowgirl Hat (always the full title, the way Lara identifies it), and every single day since she has demanded to wear this hat while we sing either "Frosty the Snowman" or "Old MacDonald" and she prances around the living room saying "yike
parade! yike parade! you in the movie! you in the movie!" She's still working out which is "you" and which is "I". Oh, and hey - while doing all this daily dancing-prancing, she has figured out how to jump with both feet at the same time.



(No, that's not our house - Lara is just obsessed with sitting on every stoop we pass. Although, if we were Christian, wouldn't this make a great Christmas card? We'll have to find a blue door next year.)

A little rant

The colors on this one are really striking. I'm always impressed by those brave enough to put art in very strong colors on their walls. Here, my initial response to the request for a red background was a muted, grey-specked affair, but Rychelle insisted on a dark barn red - with great results.



Incidentally, I added a flower applique onto a new grey hoodie, using some iron-on interfacing on pieces of old clothes. The hoodie is from the boy's department, and was so blank that I thought it needed a little something more.



Speaking of which, I have a bone to pick with the manufacturers of girls' clothing. Boys' clothes are practical, sturdy, and season-appropriate. Right now, for winter, they have warm sweatpants, fleece-lined khakis, thick sweaters, and the like. Girls? Girls are apparently never supposed to go outside. Ever. Their clothes are a mockery of winter clothes - miniskirts made of corduroy, edged with fake fur. Tiny denim dresses with short sleeves, with snowflakes embroidered on them. "Sweaters" made of the thinnest possible knit cotton. And of course everything in the pinkest pinky pink. And people seem to buy this idea that girls should just be cold. I cannot stand the very frequent sight around here of parents walking, swathed in heavy puffy winter jackets, pants, and boots, while their girls walk next to them shivering in tiny "winter" skirts with bare legs (I'm sorry, but tights don't count as pants when it's 30 degrees). What's the deal? All I know is, Lara is dressed head to toe in what I find in the boys department.

Ahem. Rant over. Carry on.