By the Way!

Edith Emily's birthday was wonderful. Thank you to everybody who came, and especially to Jill and Paul for hosting us, to my mom for making a special cake from the shredded coconut company booklet of birthday tradition (The rocking horse cake was the same one my sister enjoyed at her first birthday as well), and to the Hopper family for flying all the way up from LA. Edie is a lucky girl.





Sometimes I forget how much I have to be grateful for. A whole year spent getting to know this great kid, watching her grow and make new connections in the world every day. Family and friends who never fail to support and care for us. Food in the fridge, roof over our heads, it's too much to consider when every day there are little hassles to get irritated about. So, I think I'll follow Soule Mama's example and focus on the little things that make me thankful.

Today I'm grateful for:
bare baby toes in clean sand
an afternoon with Kimb and Clementine, who let us stop by for a visit
Edie pretending a banana is a cell phone
A beautiful January day which was more like July
Orange, yellow, and pink poppies in bloom along the road
Having an iced mocha at the best coffee shop in LA with Kenneth
and a pile of yarn the color of wildflowers waiting to be knit into things.

homesickness

Things have been a little cranky around here lately.

that's a way of saying that I've been a little cranky, without actually assigning any guilt.

you could say that I am ready to go home. To have a home of our own. Something kind of brownish green, tucked into some trees, surrounded by loamy needles and cones and diamonds of rain. Something wooden and warm and garlicky with a chalkboard and soft floor rugs. Windowsills cluttered with spice jars and colored glass that we found on a walk, with dry goods stacked and fruit hung, pots and pans dangling like party decorations, with homemade smells fogging up the window glass every day.

Something might have a corner full of instruments - the toy piano, tambourine, the violin, empty popcorn tins and loose seed pods for shaking. A bowl full of sticks for drumming on things, not people and not animals. Another corner with a cat for company, a table of books, a teapot ready. Drawers full of yarn and fabric scraps, sewing needles for big fingers and little. A typewriter and sheafs of paper embroidered with letters, spelling out simple moments in time, the ones perfumed by the magic of life. Somewhere, a bed which is really a boat set adrift in the mysterious sea fog, fortified with a shelf of books, a basket of knitting, a bell, and a journal for recording the impossible things in between.

I hope that all this daydreaming I do in the offbeats, the bits of time when the diaper is dry and that warm, tiny body is settled into my lap or deeply focused on some private thoughts of her own, I hope that it is serious work, that the glimpses I get of a rain spattered window reflecting a cozy and flickering fire, the girl busy with her games on the floor, the quiet unshattered peace of a place all our own, I hope that it is being dreamed into existence, that each glimpse erects another beam in a reality that I will someday soon meet, and recognize. We will wipe our boots and leave them by the front door, on the porch, and hang up our coats and scarves before racing to build a fire and dry off, now that we are home. I hope that this place already exists with us in it, and all that's left is to follow the steps leading up to it, like a scavenger hunt with the inevitable conclusion of us, happy in the place we were always meant to inhabit, the place which for so long has inhabited all my waking dreams.

oh okay blog.

sorry blog. I've been neglecting you.

I've been knitting a whole bunch. I scammed Kenneth into buying me a delicious skein of candy colored yarn and the right size needles to knit Edie some mittens, because baby it is cold up here in the NW! When she tried them on she made them talk like puppets. Then tore them off.

Why oh why did I start knitting? I coulda hadda book all rote by now, but all I got is a bunch of stuff made out of yarn. Silly stuff, that only knitters or friends or kids of knitters wear.

For that matter, why did I start reading the Sookie Stackhouse novels? Why did I start watching American Idol? Why oh why oh why am I trying to finish scrapbooking the first year of Edie's life when she's already plunging headlong into the second one?

Sorry blog. Sorry friends and family who read blog. Sorry Kendal. You have been writing stories in my head but my fingers took a vacation after finishing that orange kool-aid baby hat made with tiny needles. I didn't write it down!?

What happened here?

We had christmas and we had new years and we had a first birthday at the farm. We looked at the Space needle and we looked at EMP and we drove through Portland, very fast, so Kenneth could meet with store leaders about transferring. Emily kid learned about climbing stairs, and then she figured out throwing things down stairs.

Blocks...cackle cackle.

Shoes...cackle.

Water bottle...Hilarious!

Then we caught her in the kitchen, pulling a bottle of wine from the rack, presumably in order to throw it down the stairs as well. She must have gotten the idea when I spilled my wine glass all over Jill's carpet and my friend and ex-boss Lisa's back. Oh probably not. But I had to work it in there. Clumsy, yes. I haven't written in a month.

What the heck!?

There have been words, like I said. Words ran through my head and I thought I should corrall them in a holding pen, write them down somewhere, like here maybe, but then. Then again. What then?

Then somebody threw something down the stairs and giggled, and we all ran to see.