The Beatles

This week we introduced Charlie to Abbey Road. If "Here Comes the Sun" isn't the most perfect pop song ever written, I don't know what is. Charlie, like everyone else in our family, is really into music and he was just blown away by this album. This is exciting for me and Josh who both grew up loving the Beatles as the toppermost of the poppermost. It's one of those great things about parenting to introduce your kids to your most beloved things. It's also great when they introduce you to new beloved things that they have found.

I have a picture somewhere of me walking the cross walk outside of Abbey Road studios that was taken while I was skulking around London with my friend Krentz sixteen (16!) years ago. It make me think I'd love to recreate that picture with the boys. Astrologically, we have 3/4 of the Beatles in our kids: Nate is a Cancer (Ringo), Ellis is a Pisces (George), and Charlie is a Gemini (Paul). Perhaps we should try to have a Libra fourth child to represent John, our favorite of the bunch. There's something in my Rain Man-like mind that loves the idea of that.

Later, January

January came and sat on my chest and wouldn't let me up. It's almost over now and not much happened and a lot happened. Every season has its own rhythm and winter's tends to be one of just gettting through for me. I dial down activity to the basics of ordinary life, rely heavily on routine, and struggle internally the whole way through. I'm an action kind of girl. I like to do things - big things, spur-of-the-moment things, a bunch of things at once - but when the weather is basically trying to kill you and every activity is bookended with putting massive amounts of clothing on yourself and all your progeny to keep warm, it sort of kills the whimsy. I suppose that eventually, if I continue to live in places that have real winters as I have all my life, I'm either going to have to learn how to be as active as I like in the cold weather or learn to enjoy being less ambitious and a little more sleepy. Or I can keep bitching about winter.

Because I want to go to a place that's a little more grateful and a little less surly, I'm going to try the strategy of focusing on the good sweet little things that the slower life has provided this month:

1. Most of my time out of the house has been spent at the YMCA and there's nothing like stretching out in the sauna after working out on a freezing cold day.
2. Brown ale tastes pretty good when it's cold and there's this great Chilean wine called Crucero that our favorite wine store only stocks this time of year.
3. Waiting for the school bus with Ellis is a little challenging, but on the days that it's milder, say in the 20's (which actually feels like a heat wave up here), Charlie and Ellis and I have a lot of fun trudging through the snow for a morning adventure. On the days it's too cold for Charlie (who probably hates cold more than I do), I get to stretch my mom worry muscles by letting Ellis wait by himself and show just how capable he is.
4. There's something about shearling slippers, down coats, cozy pajamas, and layers of sweaters that feel good. So does using a deep conditioner and slathering lotion on your body. So does not being so conscientious about shaving your legs.
5. There's a sweetness to spending a lot of time in a small space with the people that you love the best. We snuggle, we read, we marvel at all of Charlie's new words and Ellis's ability to have real conversations, we listen to music and sing along. We probably watch a little too much tv for those judgmental types who most likely live in places where December's snow isn't still on the ground in April, but I feel that if the Ingalls family had access to such things, PBS Kids would have been one of ma's best friends.
6. Waiting patiently for my seed catalog so I can dream about this year's garden...

Wishes for 2010

The idea came from Ellis to write down our wishes for the next year and put them in one of our Happy New Year hats. My addition was to use some of my cache of joss paper purchased at the Pearl River Market years ago when I lived in New York City. The wishes will be stored with the hats in an upstairs closet with the rest of the holiday decorations. Next year on New Year's Eve we will bring out the hats and read our wishes in the early part of the evening and see what came true. Again at midnight we will write our wishes for the coming year. Thus a new family tradition is born.

Retrospective 2009

In contrast to the preceding four years, 2009 was perfectly ordinary, undramatic and almost sleepy in its tenor. It was a good year...

January: On Chinese New Year (January 26), Josh and I made it legal at the Ramsey County courthouse. It was a Monday, bitter cold, and Charlie had some nasty stomach bug, and it was one of the happiest days of my life.
February: A squirrel broke into our front porch through the broken storm door and insinuated himself into the bag of bird seed. He stayed until spring.
March: Ellis turned six. Alaska grandparents stayed for a month. My 1993 Honda Civic was stolen from in front of our house.
April: I moved to a part-time schedule at work and got two extra days a week at home with Charlie. With the help of a conscientiously maintained budget, we managed to stay in the black and even purchase "the Ax Van," the sweetest ride for a family of five there ever was.
May: We got the garden planted. We enjoyed our first crop of rhubarb and resisted harvesting the asparagus to give the plants one more year to take hold.
June: Charlie turned one. Nate turned fifteen.
July: We foraged for wild black raspberries all over the Twin Cities. I found I couldn't stop planting this year, so I added perennials in the front yard and planted late crops in the vegetable bed. We traveled to Chicago to say goodbye to my brother-in-law's mom who died early in the month.
August: Note for next year - plant more tomatoes. Cherry tomatoes straight from the vine, larger ones sliced and salted or made into salsa were like directly ingesting summer to store up sunlight for the coming winter. It was never too hot so we got outside as much as we could.
September: Alaska grandparents stayed for two months. We snuck in a quick trip to Lake Superior's north shore.
October: I turned thirty-six. Work got crazy for Josh and me at the same time. It snowed and then it got warm again.
November: Josh turned forty-four. He and I started working out regularly and found that we yelled at the children less.
December: We got lost in a wave of holiday-induced nostalgia. It snowed a lot. Josh and I were so grateful for each other and for the life we have together with the kids.

Happy New Year!

'Tis a good snow...

This is the kind of snow that makes me love Minnesota. Big, fluffy and wet with mild temperatures to go with it. It's the kind that makes me smile even knowing that I will be up in the morning digging out the cars to move for the snow plows. Even knowing that this much snow means that my six-year-old may be stuck in Wisconsin with his dad and grandparents instead of back here on Christmas morning and I'm not really sure what's "Plan B." This is the best of winter - inconvenient and beautiful. You could spend a bunch of time thinking about the former, but if give yourself fully over to the latter, it seems like yet another one of those strange miraculous things. Wishing you all a peaceful Christmas Eve.

Quiet House

St. Paul schools are in session through the end of today, Josh is at work and Charlie is at daycare. It's a Tuesday morning and I'm in my house alone. Outside there's a fresh dusting of snow and the sky is a soft, sleepy gray. I've filled the bird feeder and retreated to a quiet house to listen to the laundry turn over and over in the dryer and the sound of my own breath. I have never appreciated silence as much as I do right now.

There is a part of me that is seldom nurtured these days. The times when I am alone are brief - in the car during my commute, working out at the Y or running errands without kids in tow. At each of these times, I still encounter other people, so the solitude is not really complete. The times when I am alone in my own house with the whole world shut out border on never. So I'm using some vacation days to give my inner hermit her due - the part of me that yearns for a house in the woods with a narrow bed, a woodburning stove, some good books, and days and days in between instances of human contact. I want to hear my quiet mind, I want to hear my inner voice, I want to hear nothing.

Christmas Cookies

Ellis woke up with an ear infection on Saturday. I had something funky going on with my sinuses. This was the day that we had planned to make Christmas cookies. We did, but the vision I had in my head about how it would go wasn't quite what happened. The holidays have been like that for me since I was a kid. Expectation and excitement that turns into disappointment and stress. I can say that by this point in my spirtual development, I am at least aware of this pattern in me and can turn it around when I see it happening.
The vision for Christmas Cookie Day 2009 was one of the kind loving mother providing her kids with a holiday experience that would be etched in their memories as an example of the Norman Rockwell-like existence they grew up in. We would make perfect beautiful cookies and laugh and talk together. Instead, I was Cranky Mom with heaping helping of Control Freak Mom. As is often the case, the strength of my vision was directly proportional with my inability to play well with others. I caught on to what I was doing, but it was certainly difficult to come out of the spiral of negativity. On the up side, Ellis said that it was fun anyway, even though I was sharp with him about dumping out a big pile of sprinkles, and everyone enjoyed eating the cookies (or as Charlie calls them, "cahcos").