Enjoying the Small Things

Enjoying the Small Things

Passport to Italy

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I would have posted sooner, but I’ve been running in wooden shoes the last couple days. Cannot get out of Holland, and my in-a-funk posts are just not cool. I’ll spare you. Needless to say, this here totally blows. Like painful blisters.

But, as I told Heidi in my ten-minute tyrade on the phone this morning, there is no law that says I can’t get out of Holland and if the planes out are halted and I want to go to Italy, I’ll take these damn wooden shoes, smash them into splinters and use the wood to build a dingy on which I will paddle through the English Channel, so help me God, with Nella and Lainey strapped to my back until I land in Italy. And I will eat gelato and take pictures of the Roman Cathedrals and, by Golly, I will write the map of Italian tourism if I so choose.

End of tyrade. (standing ovation anyone?)


Well, hello there little tourist.

‘Tis with this passion I paddled out of Holland this morning and albeit a crazy day already (try shaving a leg with one hand while shaking a bouncy seat with the other…bloody cut-up ankles to say the least), I’m beginning to smell spaghetti and what’s that I hear? …ah, Pavarotti. Ain’t no one gunna tell me I’m banished to Holland. Nuh-uh.

And I asked myself what exactly would push me out of Dutch-town?

So, I began to make this little mental list of all the spontaneous things I’ve done over the years that make me happy…even if they are menial tasks like sipping a cup of hot tea in a real teacup or painting my nails a super sexy red.

And I, in a moment of bad decision making, chose the latter first. Needless to say, two seconds after spanning all ten fingers out in a moment of “damn, they look good” admiration for my manicure, I realized I’m a mom of two kids and Lainey’s begging me to peel the foil off her yogurt cup and Nella’s crying for her swaddle to be tightened and, well…three smudges and two polish remover-soaked cotton swabs later, my hands are…redless.

Minor setback. In fact my manicure failure only fueled my fire. I became the crazed tourist, madly making my way to Italy. Don’t get me wrong…I’m content with Holland, really. Windmills save energy and all, but, Dude, don’t tell me I can’t go to Italy. ‘Cuz now you ticked me off and I’m just gunna prove you wrong.

So, I went mad today. I took a bath with both my girls.


The Return of the Pouty Lip

I cleaned the house, I rearranged. I took a half hour to sit on the couch and look at our wedding album until I was crying happy tears and remembering just how awesome that day was (I’ve decided heaven is just going to be one big rewind of our wedding day…except our babies are with us too). I dug through my closet and found my favorite tweed linen pants I bought before I was pregnant and…voila, they fit. I curled my hair, curled my lashes, and then curled my lips into a big fat pout and told my mirror self convincingly that I was fabulous and bound for Italy. I took pictures and journaled and caught up on some editing. I read books to Lainey and sang songs to Nella. I listened to Ingrid Michaelson and pretended I was on stage with her…and I sang really loud…to outdo her, you know. I changed the sheets and sprayed forget-me-not linen spray to remind Brett when he comes home from Atlanta tonight that I indeed forgot him not. I texted him that he, just by being he, makes me so entirely happy. I read Lainey the story of when she was born…and made it through without crying. I did a cartwheel in the front lawn just to say I did and then watched Lainey as she attempted to copy me with the cutest up-legged crooked tumble.

…and somewhere between slipping on my linen pants and watching my little gymnast do a tumble, I heard the pilot…

…Welcome to Italy.

Booyah.

And now that I know I beat the odds and went to Italy and can go there anytime I please, I’m fine to settle back into the comforts of Holland.

And, for the record, look what shoes I’m wearing today…

See what those soles are made of? That’s right. Wood, my friends. If I’m wearin’ wood shoes, I’m gunna style ’em up and do it my way.

…and a few pics…

Reading Books to Little Sister in the Morning…


Playing Hide-and-go-Seek with friends…

Happy Friday.

P.S. I will answer some F.A.Q.’s in next post re: baby knits and such.

Setback.

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Today was one of those days.
Where wacked-out hormones blend with exhaustion, the tail-end of sickness and an incredibly emotional month to brew this lovely shade of gray.

I knew these setbacks would come. And I cried. And slept. And struggled to be patient and hide my pain from my little blonde free-spirit who wanted to read books and water flowers.

I dreaded Nella’s afternoon doctor appointment today because I thought the onslaught of info would begin…the hardships, the differences, the therapy, the scary things I didn’t want to hear.

I cried on the phone with my sister on the way there. And then Lainey fell asleep in the car and I forgot the stroller and I couldn’t bear waking up her tired little soul for her little sister’s appointment. So, I schlepped her sleeping body over my shoulder, twisting uncomfortably to keep her head from falling and balancing a diaper bag and carseat with 7 pounds and 4 ounces of baby in the other arm. And then I walked through a parking lot, breathing heavy and chanting to the rhythm of my jeweled sandals hitting the pavement…I’m a rockstar. I’m a rockstar. I’m a rockstar.

In the midst of my pain and sadness in life, my sarcasm often brews. I usually don’t mean what I say, but I say it because it feels good and the wit it takes to concoct something halfway funny and caustic distracts the part of my brain that feels pain. And because I’m sad, I usually don’t feel guilty for biting satire.

Which is why I didn’t feel bad when I said “F#@! Holland” today or “I hate wooden shoes.”

My sister always says exactly the right thing when I call her crying. She knows when to cry with me and she knows when I need to stop. Today, my Obi Won had good things to say.

“The very first line in The Road Less Traveled,” she told me, “says…

…Life is Difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. Once we truly know that life is difficult–once we truly understand and accept it–then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.”

Oh, the truth.

And, though I may have cursed wooden shoes and Holland, I came to the realization that, in any parenting situation, there are a thousand Holland situations. And a thousand Italys too. (Warning: Going into far-fetched Analogy Zone. Hang on.) And there’s air traffic control monitoring this constant stream of flights, for any given child, that take off and land in both the beautiful expected and the unknown lands where we must search for beauty. Perfectly “normal” children with 46 chromosomes take their parents to Holland. When girls grow up and tell their moms they aren’t having children, thus crushing grandchild dreams. When boys choose art over football and disappoint their fathers. When children move away and don’t come home for Christmas. When girls become teenagers and slam doors and call their mothers b-words.

And who says Nella will never take me to Italy? I feel like she already has…when she’s breathing heavy on my chest at night and the weight of her tightly-jammied body sinks right into my soul and I smile thinking, “this is just like Lainey.” When she takes her first steps someday. When she says ‘mama’ or ‘I love you’ or reads her first book out loud.

It’s just a mess of flights and destinations for every child…some good, some bad…but that’s parenthood. Period.

Our doctor appointment ended up going beautifully. Not daunting or scary at all. I smiled and told Dr. Foley it didn’t seem any different than Lainey’s one month appointment. Sure, we talked about steps ahead, but they don’t scare me. And we are fortunate to have a pediatrician who delivers all this information happily…like a mom…like someone who cares but knows that deep down inside, we just want to love her and enjoy her. It felt like Italy.


Thank you, Laura Weber for our new hat! We love our hats!

Setbacks come and go, and we move on. Because Life is difficult…but I’m accepting that and already…it doesn’t seem so bad.

On days like these, I get excited to go to sleep at night…to snuggle between the girls, feel the weight of newborn on my chest and know that tomorrow is a perfectly blank slate. We can walk to the lake, have a tea party in the yard, paint and color and bake. Tomorrow, it will be Italy.


(Thank you to the person who so kindly sent this beautiful hat we received today for our bunny. Wish we knew who it was from!)

And, for the record, I still hate wooden shoes.
…but I love tulips.

…and her birth announcement:

~k

Week 1,619

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I began to title this post “Week 3,” as in our-third-week-into-this or three-weeks-since-the-big-day, but I am beginning to see this differently and, as this is simply one step on the grander scheme of life, I am rather officically 1,619 Weeks into it. Life, that is. That’s 31 years, give or take a few weeks.

Last night, a friend sent me a passage she had underlined in her copy of Maya Angelou’s Wouldn’t Take Nothing From My Journey Now, and I smiled reading it.

“Life is pure adventure, and the sooner we realize that, the quicker we will be able to treat life as art; to bring all our energies to each encounter, to remain flexible enough to notice and admit when what we expected to happen did not happen. We need to remember that we are created creative and can invent new scenarios as frequently as they are needed.”

And oh, how true that is…and our real-life has exemplified a new understanding of that these past weeks.

Life as Art.

I have consciously been able to control my sadness and coming-to-terms with all of this quite well, but the past few days, that subconscious sadness–the part that can’t be controlled with self-talks and good quotes–that cloud of can-this-be-happening? that seems to follow and shadow me no matter how many times I watch The Hangover (four, in a row, to be exact) to mask the seriousness of it…well, it was beginning to get to me.

I hate “The Bus.” I tried to lapse on payments so the repo truck would come and drag it away, but it lingered, not so much running over me like a few weeks ago or even hitting me, for that matter. I still have the grill marks on my face from the last hit, so that was nice of the bus; however, it’s the threat of a hit…the unknown…the smell of the exhaust or perhaps the memory of the pain of the last hit. And, I’ve been known to take a good analogy and fly it to the moon with exaggeration, so I’ll chill on the bus thing before you’re left scratching your head, but I’ll have you know I once likened one of my sister’s bad days to cows in pasture eating grass or somethin’ or other and, by the end, the cows had run out of the fence, the grass had been eaten, I think there was manure, and my sister and I were left laughing hysterically by the end of the analogy because we had no idea what we were even talking about anymore. I am often asked, in the middle of an elaborate analogy, “Where are you going with this?” And the answer, I tell you, is…to the moon.

Back to the bus. The thing is, I hate being sad. I hate being negative. And while I may be teased on my over-positivity or need to find a cape emblazoned with “Enjoying the @#!*-ing Small Things,” I too wallow in a bad mood from time to time. However, I’ve found I am quite healed by the Fake It Till You Make It Strategy–searching for the good (and there’s lots to find), writing about the good, taking pictures of the good, talking about the good–basically bathing in the many little things that bring joy to our life until I am no longer faking it, I believe it completely and have allowed the good to rise above the bad in that ever present glass of “Half Full.” Unrealistic? Perhaps, but I don’t think so. Regardless, I’d much rather live life as an unrealistic optimist than a realistic miserable pessimist. It’s so much more fun.

So, we’ve continued to do that…and it’s not just this whole thing that has challenged us. We’ve been doing it for years.

And if we had a gallery, we would exhibit pieces of our life this week. Slices of wonderfulness.


Life as Art: An Exhibit of our Week…

The Art of an Afternoon Cup of Coffee.

…enhanced by the accompaniment of a snuggled baby.

The Art of an Evening Picnic at the Lake with Cousin Joann.

The Art of a Dog Pondering Life in the Eastern Sunlight

and A Little Dog Protecting a Little Baby

The Art of Two Little Friends

(and I have to say, my girl’s friendships have meant so much to me these past weeks…I just want her to be happy. I want her to be unaffected by the emotions, the change. And seeing her in total bliss, skipping around with her little gap-toothed grin and wayward pigtails…well, that makes it all seem better).

The Art of New Baby Feet
(which, in my opinion, may just be the most delicious form of art there is)

The Art of Watching the Littles Entertain the New Baby
(and her little eyes taking it all in. Yes, she is loved…and that is how she will learn to be just as fabulous as she will be…which is very, very fabulous.)

The Art of a New Space
It’s been awhile since I did something new to the house…and it always makes me so happy to “feather our nest.” A friend stopped by a couple weeks ago when we brought Nella home and completely surprised me with two beautiful chairs for my girls from the furniture store she works at…and I fell in love hard and heavy with their quilted fabulousness and have been waiting to highlight them deservingly. Finally, yesterday, with a small handful of Craiglist earned cash, I walked into Homegoods and found a clearanced slightly damaged trunk, a lamp, an old suitcase and a few picture frames…all for less than that handful of cash. Then rushed home to set it up and hence improve the quality of my day a trillionfold.
So, out with the big clunky couch and in with the…

Superfun Play/Workroom

(p.s. Trunk double duties as storage…all my photography props fit inside, and the suitcase stores my printer paper.)

…and our gallery continues to grow.

…bringing all our energies to each encounter. …and we don’t have to fake that to make that. It’s real, and it’s beautiful.

1,619. That’s a really good number.

…and it’s only gunna get better and better.

The daddy comes home tonight…and we are anticipating his arrival like a soldier’s welcome home.

Life as Art…painting it beautifully. ~k