home

When we're in Michigan, the first thing to do is go to the lake.

After a year of feeling perpetually uncomfortable and hungry, of reaching and trying and keeping myself aloft, I can rest and be filled up on this lake. 

Jason and I celebrated our 10-year wedding anniversary; the kids are bingeing on cereal and TV. It is undeniably easy to be here... It's too easy. I feel guilty.

But the light on the water at eight o'clock is like something sinking into me, smoothing over what has been ragged and hyper and demanding, reflecting back something pure and unsayable.

Driving home at dusk last week, I watched fireflies light up the ditches by the side of the road -- astounded, in reverie, that there were so many. They lit up the edges of our way home, they kept flashing, pulsing, flickering... What is it? I thought. What is it like? It's so reassuring, how they are there they whole way, no matter which way we turn.

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the lake

Our camera of eight years bit the dust not long after we got to Michigan. It was a good excuse to do some plein air painting at the beach:

If I were going to do justice to the lovely Lake, though, I would need a few more panels of just water in the middle there.

It was great to free up with the palette knife some more, and to work quickly before the light changed.

I think the Impressionists did their work after the advent of the camera -- they were free to paint a loose approximation of the scene because they no longer had to render things in exacting detail.

We've since gotten a new camera, but for me, photographs can't compare to haphazard blobs of paint arranged on a canvas.
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Michigan

Back in the spring I hatched this harebrained idea that my dad & step-mom would drive to Providence in early July, and the kids and I would ride back to Michigan with them and spend a few glorious weeks there. I knew Jason would not want to be gone that long, and I knew I would not be satisfied with anything less... so he joined us mid-way into our vacation, and we all rode back to the east coast together.

I have a lot of harebrained ideas, but most of them never come to fruition. This one, I'm happy to say, worked perfectly. And it also featured lots of glittery water and naked children:

Long hot days at the beach, discovering Uncle Matt's REAL bow and arrow at the cabin, lazy naps on nana, real live sink baths, outdoor concerts, hanging out with both my siblings, fireflies, sleeping in late, seeing my kids and their grandparents so in love with each other...  I want to go back and do it again because I'm not sure I enjoyed it enough while we were actually doing it.

I'm not mentioning the sporadic crabbiness or how hard it was to operate without Jason for 10 days, or Isla's total pre-nap-meltdown-pee-on-the-floor incident at the store, because despite all those things this vacation was Perfect.

I also surprised myself by truly missing Providence. It was good to realize that I've made friends here, settled in to a nice rhythm. I guess the only thing to do is find out who to petition to remove all those pesky states between here and there that make these visits few and far between.

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winter, outside

catching up, now with pictures

this post brought to you by my mom who took the babies so I could complete a sentence for a change

Well!

It's now exactly one month after the move, and I just had my first moving anxiety dream. It was remarkably similar to the move itself: packing the truck to its gills and looking ruefully at the pile of stuff that had yet to be packed. In the truck. That was already stuffed. Like, take-the-paper-towels-out-of-their-package-and-cram-them-into-the-few-remaining-spare-inches kind of stuffed. So, duh, subconscious mind, that one's not hard to de-code. Funny how there's always a lag-time with dreams, though. I heard a story once about a guy who was paralyzed in an accident, but had walking dreams for 11 more years.

I even managed to cram houseplants into the cab, ask Jason!

I know moving is not exactly trauma, but throw in a toddler, a baby, a stay of unknown duration at your parents' house, a future of uncertain job prospects, and the dramatic hyperbole of an underslept mother, and wheeee! It's a close second!

Auden was the age Isla is now when we first moved to Milwaukee, and like she is doing now, he elected to start crawling during that major transition. It seems fairly obvious, looking back, that a move on top of a major developmental milestone WOULD throw him off kilter for a while, further fragmenting his already-fragmented sleeping habits. So, I kind of? Knew? To expect that? Again? But still, after these four weeks of multiple night wakings and nap schedules full of holes, I'm feeling punchy.

We thought Isla was teething, what with waking up every two hours some nights, so we tried dosing her with baby tylenol and swabbing her gums with baby orajel, just in case. To no avail. I would have thought the second time around I'd feel better prepared, more magnanimous, more tolerant of what will surely be a BRIEF DISRUPTION in the big scheme of things. But no! I'm just as ornery, just as prone to 2am second-guessings and giving-in to feedings. Isla, you were supposed to be my good sleeper! Blowing raspberries in your crib at 5am is NOT OKAY.

One can only imagine what she and Auden are dreaming about.

On the bright side, though: we've been spending weekends at the lake







Grandparents are manna from heaven



We get to have date night now

We stayed out until 9:30!

And my new best friend, a hip mama I met at the Children's Museum (what? moms pick up other moms at parks the way hipsters pick up other hipsters at alt-indie-margin-outlier-rock shows) is lending me her double stroller which is VASTLY preferable to the pack-mule configuration I was assembling, righteously, before.

Gateway drug to minivans!

Also, there is much cuteness: Isla pulls herself up on everything


She loves being manually rolled and tumbled, and does a fearsome jowl-shaking strong-man impression where she threatens to bend the very bars of her confining sassy seat. Auden knows all the lyrics to "Book of Love," by the Magnetic Fields; the opposite of "opening" is "closening"; and girl is pronounced gee-yul.

Coming next -- God Does Have a Sense of Humor: Poop edition.

Hope you're doing well! Hope you're not moving! Pray for me!

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box man

I like to think of this blog as my own personal answer to the Slow Food Movement. Like, really slow.

Because hot damn, I've got THINGS TO SAY, a whole backlog of 'em, and it's just not going to happen until we switch sides of Lake Michigan. Departure is set for Sunday, cavalry is coming tomorrow in the form of grandparents to corral the children, and you'll just have to imagine that our moving truck will be festooned with palm fronds and marigolds and ripe pomegranates and little swamis chanting good-luck mantras. Because I'm not going to post any pictures.

Hey, you should try this mixture of no-sleep, stress, and hormones, it's groovy!

So, Auden. Bless his little heart. We saw a contortionist at Bastille Days a few weekends ago, and he has been OBSESSED with the part of the act where the big tall man in a neon-green leopard print bodysuit folds himself into his tiny box. He calls him Box Man, and has been compelled to re-enact the routine at home. Like, all the time. And box man wears cool shoes, and box man does a funny dance, and box man walks LIKE THAT MAMA, MAMA WATCHING YOU?

He dumps out the recycling bin and crouches inside, he dumps his trucks out of their plastic bin and eases his butt down into it, he squeezes both feet into his potty and hunches over it, exclaiming, I'm a BOX MAN! He can do box-man in just about anything.

Fortunately for him, there are lots and lots of boxes. Boxes everywhere. Everything boxed. We are a Box Family.

After we move: video proof of these shenanigans, Isla crawling, and a story about a surgery from all the way back in April! With before and after pictures!

And I'll make 75% more sense!

Milwaukee, we'll really really miss you.

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signs abound

Oh, hello -- June? Is that you? I didn't even recognize you! Did you change your hair? No? Hmmm. Maybe it's the brisk 60 degree weather? Come on June, no need to pretend you're April. You're waaay warmer than her.

Okay. What I really wanted to tell you, aside from the fact that I've been too cold to blog all month, is that Auden is becoming a signing genius.

We've been watching baby signing dvd's every day for two months, and the only progress I noticed was my own increasing annoyance at the host's maniacal smiling. Oh, but she's effective. If I sing the theme song -- join in if you know it: baby, baby, baby signing time! -- he'll run to the TV, going "BEH-beeee, BEH-beeee," and insist on watching it. The other day I absent-mindedly sang the song about moms and dads, and I'll be darned if he didn't stick his little chubby thumb to his forehead and sign "dad."

His first and most vigorous sign was "dog" (an easy pat on the leg), which he does ALL THE TIME. He did "cat" for the first time on Monday while looking at a picture book, and then beamed at me, cleary pleased with himself. "Bird" is a favorite, too, I guess since we see a lot of them. He does the sign backwards, but we know what he means:



He does it when we go outside, he does it when he sees the fake seagulls hanging from the ceiling at Trader Joe's. The other morning, he did it at breakfast, totally confusing us, until we realized he was looking at this:

Genius!

Every day he pulls out a new one: Tuesday it was "shoes", Wednesday it was "truck". Or maybe it was "bus". We'll say any big vehicle that makes a loud noise.

It's so awesome to watch him put it all together and get excited to tell us about what he sees.

And here's this, only because it's totally cute:

i just blinked

A trip to Grand Rapids, a trip to Atlanta, sleep schedule all messed up, computer on the fritz, and egad, a month has gone by...

I have been composing posts in my head only to have them wither into lame Facebook status updates by the time I get a few minutes to myself. But OMG, we totally took the train and saw the grandparents and I had a raging hangover after a night out with some old high school pals, and I got a facial, and then we went to Atlanta to visit Jason's sister and Auden met his cousins and it SNOWED in Georgia and Auden flirted with our neighbor on the plane and he's doing this hilarious thing where he imitates the way I throw my head back and laugh except he just opens his mouth with no laughing, and he's also suddenly copying the way we hold the phone to our ears and what's next, I'll have to stop swearing?

I'll post more pictures soon but for now I'll slap up some videos I managed to take of Auden's emerging Evil Kneivel-ness.

From first tentative steps:



To accomplished tumbling:



To tumbling out of his crib:

[What, no video?]

Um, yeah. No.

Jason was on bedtime-duty while I was out at figure drawing class last night and when I came home he told me he went to check on Auden because he was crying and then he heard a big thunk and realized before he got into the bedroom that THIS KID IS NOT IN HIS CRIB. It's nobody's fault, just, arrggghhh, I thought to myself that morning "Hmmm, he's getting kind of taller and maybe we shouldn't leave the crib gate down anymore...like, I think the instructions say don't leave it down EVER." Don't turn us in to CPS, please.

So.

Now it's March! And in a few short weeks Auden turns 1. Egad.

I'm composing another ode to my quick-growing baby, because holy cats when did a whole YEAR go by? I can't garauntee it will actually coincide with his birthday, but stay tuned.

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send in the st. bernards

You know, with the casks of whiskey around their necks?

Because our furnace crapped out sometime during the night, and although I reached our landlady at 7am to tell her so, it's now 10am and no word. It's -12 degrees outside, people.

Our upstairs neighbor was nice enough to let us hang out with her for a couple hours -- apparently her side of the furnace is working just fine -- but she had to get on with her day, and I had to put Auden to sleep for his morning nap.

Yesterday, in lieu of going out for a walk, I bundled Auden into his stroller and just walked him around the house. Which is kind of funny if you've seen our house, because it takes all of 20 seconds to walk from one end to the other. But the wind chill was like 4o below, and there was no way I was going around the block. I did the same thing today, except it kind of feels like we actually are outside.

So, for the moment he's sleeping, and Jason and I are under the covers in bed, waiting for a phone call. This is so Not Cool.

It's frigid. It's ARCTIC.

SEND THE DOGS.

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Dear California,

love,
Robin

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hello, Milwaukee

A few weeks ago Jason and I watched the entire Planet Earth series straight through. Amidst all the marvels and the superlatives (damn you, David Attenborough, which is the deepest lake? the tallest tree? has the most biodiversity? the least? ack!), one random thought is sticking with me: why don't humans have an easy way to lie down?

I mean, nevermind the breathtaking footage of a mother snow leopard and her cub, gently shrouded in falling snow, nuzzling at the entrance of their den -- look at how comfortable they look just lying on the rocks!

What kind of design flaw is this? These are the things I think of when I'm breastfeeding Auden, lying on my side (propped by pillows, of course), in the middle of the night.

Ahhh, but it's wonderful to be in my own bed again.

We had a whirlwind visit to Michigan, where Auden was properly spoiled and cuddled by all his grandparents. Then we camped out at our new place in Milwaukee for a couple of nights (sleeping on an inflatable mattress, also not found in the wild), waiting for our stuff to arrive in a giant truck from California. Now we're waist-deep in boxes, going about the exhausting but rewarding task of settling in.

Auden seems to be handling all this chaos fairly well, despite a handful of wonky nights adjusting to the time change. He's even making determined attemps at crawling, getting up on his haunches and doing face-plants in order to move toward a desired object -- usually a plastic bag or his potty. Not that we let him play with those things.

At some point in Michigan he became swaddle-resistant, though, I guess because crawling is too exciting and one must also practice while sleeping. So now he can wiggle right out of the straight-jacket technique I'd perfected -- a regular Houdini, this one -- and rock n' roll to his heart's delight. With all the thrashing, papa ended up on the floor, and mama built a barrier around baby to prevent excessive kicks to ribs.

I'm sure you (and David Attenborough) have noticed that no other mammals swaddle their young. This is why the good Lord invented cribs, which are totally natural. I'll be eating my words in the next post.

But look! Here we are in our new city:





Yes, that's the Bronze Fonz. Milwaukee!

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golden

Today was my golden birthday: 31 on the 31st.



We had a perfect day at the beach. Looks an awful lot like that last shot, but if you look closely you can tell it's the lovely Lake Michigan.

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goodbye, California...

Sunday afternoon we strapped Auden into the bjorn and went on a long walk in Los Penasquitos Canyon.

It was a typical southern California day: wide blue sky, golden hills, relentless sun. We spent most of the walk with our heads in the Midwest, though.

Jason was offered a post-doc position in Milwaukee, so come August we will be packing up and leaving the Golden State for good.


We are thrilled to be leaving behind high rent and the Santa Anas, and are looking forward to thunderstorms, seasons, Lake Michigan, and living much much closer to all the grandparents. Native Californians think we're crazy for voluntarily moving back to a region with weather of any kind, and I'm sure we'll wax nostaligic about 70 degree days in January when we're up to our eyeballs in fleece and scarves and scraping ice off the car, but this Michigan Girl also remembers a certain romance to the cold months.

And, selfishly, I want Auden to grow up shuffling through Autum leaves, going sledding and eating snow off crusty mittens, rejoicing at the first crocuses to poke through in Spring, and luxuriating at the beach in the long days of summer.



I wonder if he will see these photos of his first months and wonder about the palm trees, the impossibly clear skies, the hillsides electrified by purple and pink bouganvillea, and wonder why we chose the Hometown of Schlitz over Our Dreamy California life.

And we will say, You wouldn't have had any character if we'd stayed in San Diego. Also, you would think it's acceptable to wear flip-flops year-round.



Then he'll giggle gleefully and go back to shoveling the driveway.

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square peg

We're staying with my husband's parents for about a week before we head off to Japan. We've actually spent the whole summer at home in Michigan, shuttling between his folks and mine, which is a glorious kaleidescope of memories and tensions. I love the humidity, the fireflies, the blueberry picking; I hate not having my own house, my own groceries, my Sunday morning paper, privacy... but these are things I willingly sacrificed, so no complaining.

We're in the suburbs now, though, which makes me feel even more like a square peg than usual. What is it? The uber-green lawns, the chatty gossip, the quiet sameness? In general I tend to dislike the things that large groups of people like (or are supposed to like) -- if there are large groups of people heading in one direction, I'm more likely to veer off the other way. I say this not to be self-righteous, but to somehow figure out where I belong. Here, it's sort of a process of elimination: for example, I know I don't belong at Target or Ikea on a Sunday afternoon with the rest of the hoardes. What ever happened to Church?!

I also feel it -- the square peg-ness -- acutely in the "pregnancy/child care" section of the book stores when my curiosity gets the best of me and I have to browse. I remember going through the same thing when we were planning our wedding: the sudden crushing pressure of glossy-paged advice from an industry defined by trends and categories like "bridezilla" and "anti-bride." Spare me! It just doesn't have anything to do with my life.

Granted, most pregnancy books have useful medical information, but that says nothing for the dearth of "pregnancy journals" and "planners" and "your changing body" books -- you know, the ones featuring a genteel-looking white lady on the cover, usually wearing all white and holding flowers. I've sort of come to expect that mainstream media like this won't really reflect my lifestyle or the choices I'd make, and I realize most women probably feel left out of the generic stereotype too, but that still doesn't keep me from being annoyed by it. Best to just avoid that section altogether. Talk to real people.

I'm almost 11 weeks along. I read that the embryo becomes a fetus at this time, an exciting graduation, but still not a whole lot of sensation within me. I'm one of the lucky ones that is not suffering through morning sickness (halelluia for my prenatal vitamin), or debilitating headaches, so some days it's easy to forget I'm pregnant at all.

Next week we depart for three months abroad, in Kyoto, my enchanted city. My husband is working for a Study Abroad program, and I get to tag along, explore and make art. We lived there for a year and a half, from early 2005 to mid-2006, and ever since our repatriation I've been campaigning for visit. The gods have listened and have granted us a full-length tourist visa stay. Cheers! I can't wait. It's much easier to feel like a square peg in Japan.

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to do

The list of things to do perpetually includes Write Emails, Make Phone Calls, Organize Things -- all of which seems to take days and weeks, and I'm not even employed. How do we get anything done? Especially in these first tender weeks of pregnancy, when it feels like someone is pulling the plug every afternoon at 1pm and then again at 5pm. And again around 8pm.

We're staying with my dad & step-mom for the next couple of weeks, and I've set up a little studio space for myself in the basement. My list of things to do now features Draw Every Day, so that I don't atrophy. Since I'm occupying dad's work room, I'm sharing space with tools and hardware and art supplies galore: racks of solvents, mediums, adhesives; cabinets of nuts and bolts and sandbelts and washers, drawers all organized and labeled (now I know where I get this from); dad's old canvases stacked neatly in the corner; archives sharing shelf space with slides reels from my childhood.

So I'm anthropomorphizing and drawing tools: here, a mama pliers and her baby.

We spent the weekend at the Lake, where the list of things to do was pitched entirely and revised to read more like Bask in the Sun, Read Lazily, Kayak out to See the Shipwreck, and Eat Constantly. I know, life is certainly rough. Here's J reading Harper's in a beach chair with a funny head-wrap:

The weather was glorious, the water a perfect 73 degrees. We caught part of the Pleidean meteor shower after dark, and later woke to a humdinger of a thunderstorm. All of this is exactly why I wanted to be home in Michigan for the summer. To do: Slow Down and Enjoy.

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