The other morning, I walked into the downstairs bathroom that is pretty much the domain of Edie. There I noticed peeking behind the shower curtain, a Hello Kitty bath toy perched on the spout of the tub. I wanted to capture it in a still life – my first thought was I admit, to post it on instagram, like the purple duckie shot from a few weeks ago. Only unlike the purple duckie on top of the soap dish, any shot I attempted to get of Hello Kitty seemed to spotlight the funk of the tub. Continue reading
Category: the house
Call and Answer.
The other day as I was out running errands, I felt the call of the thrift. If you’ve never felt that call before, it’s hard to describe. It’s a gut feeling that if you don’t go to the thrift store right there and then, you will miss out on something that needs to come home with you. I have a love/hate thing for the SPCA Rummage Sale Store, but I found myself pulling into the parking lot Wednesday afternoon just as a parking space magically opened up. Clearly, the fates were aligned.
DONE.
After fourteen years of being put off and a month of living in a mess, the dining room is DONE.
Alright, so there are still some little details to be addressed, like painting the radiator, swapping out the outlets (as recommended by the inspection when we bought the house), replacing the outlet covers and finishing the the french doors. But these are things that can happen with the room back in use. Continue reading
Summering.
I’m taking a wee break from watching paint dry (as I type this, the dining room ceiling is DONE and the first coat of Parakeet Green on the lower half of the walls is drying) to say hello out there. We have thoroughly immersed ourselves in summer here, with sleeping in, long days at the pool and late dinners at the picnic table. The garden has suddenly gone gangbusters, which has not gone unnoticed by the squirrels, who are knocking on the back door looking for handouts again. Bugs helped themselves to an entire row of kale, much to my horror and Edie’s delight. (Apparently I’ve been serving a few too many greens lately). Saturday I swapped some of my strawberry jam for things like Stephanie’s Green Bean Relish and Hunter’s Lemon, Onion & Oregano Jam. Those treats will be served up for dinner one night soon along with bread & cheese. I love summer dinner. I love summer. Those lazy days where sometimes the best thing you can do is just hit the pool with a good book in hand and a bag full of treats to nibble on all day long……
We are definitely soaking it up.
So far this week.
I bought beets at market last Saturday. I roasted them in a foil packet in just a wee bit of water at 375 for just over an hour. I let them cool, peeled them, tossed with with salad greens, goat’s milk feta cheese, salt & pepper, olive oil & red wine vinegar. We liked them. So much so I bought more beets at market this Saturday and when I suggested making that salad again today, Edie said okay. Which means she likes them I think. Dare I say we are starting to like beets? Continue reading
Start.
When we made the offer on the house, we swore the first thing we were going to do was the dining room, especially since we had nothing to put in there. Upon moving in, we suddenly ended up with my grandparent’s dining room furniture, which of course went directly into the dining room and there it has ever been ever since.
Getting Crafty.
Somewhere between my front porch and the vegetable garden where I re-potted several planters yesterday (keeping a dirty job around the dirt dontcha know) a chain from one of the hanging baskets on the front porch deteriorated. Continue reading
72 hours.
The last 72 hours in the life of our Tulip Magnolia in the front yard.
Continue reading
Go big or go home.
I come from a game-loving family that as you might guess, is also slightly competitive. We play to win and we don’t always lose well. On a beach trip 30 years ago, I beat my cousin Bob in one miniature golf game, a loss that he has yet to let go of, even though the entire trip after that became a nonstop rematch where he trounced me every time, at every last putt putt course in Ocean City, MD. There are pictures from my wedding of us visibly arguing about that game. It is the one time I’ve ever beaten him at a game and he will never ever get over it.
There was a beach trip with my extended family a few years ago where Pat discovered that I came from a game playing family. “How did I not know this about you? How do you come from this family and you hate to play games?” he asked. “Give it a few days and you’ll see” I answered. By the end of the week, my cousins had announced they would never again play poker with Pat – who managed to take most of their cash in a completely annoying idiot savant way. “Wait, I won?” he was quoted as saying when he laid the cards down on the winning hand in question. There may have been tears involved. He did indeed figure out by the end of the week why I don’t play games, especially with my family.
This means of course, that Edie comes by her competitiveness honestly. Once, during one of our marathon power outages that lasted days on end, the neighborhood gang started a monopoly tournament. The big boys taught Edie to play, I’m sure thinking they could easily win, only to realize that she was incredibly cut throat and serious as a heart attack about beating them at their own game, which she did of course. She has since been banned from their monopoly games and they are steadily realizing that it’s not just monopoly she plays to win at, it’s every game. She might think beating them at Madden Football was a fluke, but they don’t.
A few weeks ago, The Civility School announced a “Messiest Room Around” Contest on their Facebook page. Given my lax housekeeping skills combined with my hands free parenting philosophy of letting my daughter express herself in her space, I thought for sure this was a contest we stood a chance of winning. However, when I mentioned it to my daughter, she quickly dismissed it. After all, the prize was a credit with the school or a $100 gift certificate to Amazon. I snapped some shots of her art supply dump in the sun room – which this time of year is too cold to be used for anything but storage. It’s February, getting very close to the annual deep cleaning of that room, so it was in prime condition to win a messy contest. However, once my girl saw the shots as well as the rest of the competition being posted, she mumbled to herself, “I can do better than that” and so she set out to make her room look like this:
Not that it was a great deal of work – 20 minutes, one loud crash with a very mama sounding “I’m okay!” and she was ready for me to capture it and submit it. In it to win it she was. And win it she did. Saturday morning the winner was announced, which is when Pat realized I posted the above photo on the Internet. Go big or go home I say, so if a photo of our house is going to be plastered on the Internet, might as well make it the entire web, right? (Although I am holding back on pinning it. We’ll see if it shows up on there.)
I do have to follow that shot up however, with the announcement that after trashing her room, she then proceeded to clean it and has kept it neat ever since (and I will get around to shooting photo of it and posting that one as well, really). Because she’s kept it clean, I’m going to let her choose her prize. While I’m disappointed she won’t be choosing a credit for the Civility School, I do take comfort in the knowledge that she has fairly impeccable manners – knowing her, she’d have herself a job lined up as a T.A. by the end of a modern manners course there because that’s just how she is. In it to win it as politely as possible.
In with the new.
Another holiday season has come and gone, a new year has been rung in and I’ve managed to survive them relatively unscathed. You can’t seem to escape the idea that you are supposed to be around family for the holidays – even with the admittance that everyone does not have the picture perfect family scenes that seem to dominate in the songs and images of the season. For someone like me, who a few years ago realized that my own family was in fact so toxic that it simply wasn’t healthy for me, there are landmines all over the holiday landscape. This year I came to realization that I do a bit of grieving for my family around the holidays, which is no doubt normal and to be expected and honestly, that realization made it easier for me to accept the time I spent in my own head about it, while also not allowing me to wallow. In other words, there were moments that were hard, but I managed to name them for what they were and move on. It felt like progress. After all, isn’t admitting there’s a problem the biggest step in solving it?
The three of us spent the week between Christmas and New Years lounging around the house, eating leftovers and having movie watching marathons. There was some serious progress made on projects that require me to just sit for a spell, like Pat’s sweater and another project I started with the intent of surprising my husband with for Christmas only to realize it was far more work than I had anticipated. Isn’t that always the case?
It was all quite lovely and much appreciated, that week where we just slowed down, not always answering the phone or turning on the computer, just lots of sleeping in, hot tea and cocoa, waking up to some sort of winter precipitation every other day. At one point though, Edie did get a bit bored with us, which then found me apologizing to her that no one was available to play because they were all doing family things with their extended family and that we weren’t seeing extended family, this sitting around and just chilling, this is what our family does after the holiday while everyone else sees their grandparents, aunt, uncles and cousins. Which of course, was starting to go down that little path in my head where I start to feel sorry for myself, where I wonder if making that break from my own family of origin was really so right for all of us, when that dear sweet child pulled me back off the edge of the cliff, reminding me that we were indeed seeing family this holiday season, because weren’t the Smileys coming for New Years and aren’t they family?
Why yes my dear, they are. And just like that, I realized yet again how grateful I am for the friends and neighbors that surround us with love, that are in fact, our family in so many ways. And so we rang in the new year with what we like to call our “Virginia Cousins”.
One of the things I love the most about visiting with the Smileys is cooking with Mollie – there’s no real menu planning for our visits, you just bring what you have on hand and see what happens. Edie & Abigail still have more definite ideas about what they want to cook together, but watching them cook together? Such a happy thing.
Of course, after making their one bowl of guacamole, they were quite content to let us do the rest of the cooking. This is what my kitchen counter looked like New Years Day early evening.
Which, minus Granny’s crystal champagne glass, is about what any kitchen counter looks like when Mollie and I are together. Keeping 4 kids, 2 husbands, a dog and ourselves fed is a nonstop process. It doesn’t hurt that we both love to bake together.
This is where my stacking baking racks really came in handy. On the bottom layer are mincemeat tarts, baked in mini-muffin tins, while the top rack is a dairy free cookie Mollie whipped up using chick peas, peanut butter and dark chocolate chips. Both were delish. And on a sidenote, I want to add that using southern biscuit flour in your pie crust instead of regular all purpose flour yields the flakiest crust I’ve ever made. For reals.
And when Mollie finishes tweaking that cookie recipe and sends it along, I’ll share. Promise.
Their visit was a nice extension of our cozy, lazy week, with the exception of Owen’s constant calling for someone to please play Twister with him, which the girls were quite good about, for the most part. Then again, it’s hard to say no to someone who would take it upon himself to move all the furniture out of the way and set up the game by himself. Owen is really good at moving tables.
This, with the kids fussing at each other, the baby crying, the dog barking, the new year rung in with everyone still awake piled in our bed, the husbands deciding to head out to a bar to watch a football game together New Years Day while Mollie and I make breakfast, lunch and then dinner in our PJ’s while sipping champagne from family heirloom glasses that don’t get used nearly enough, this is the sort of family gathering all those holiday images talk about I think. Where Owen torments Edie to the verge of tears, to have me comfort her telling her this is what it’s like to have a brother while Abigail pipes in with full agreement to that experience. Where Edie decides to have her own little revenge on the candy cane eating monster known as Owen by rearranging all the candy canes on the Christmas tree just out of his reach, so that he thinks he’s eaten all he can reach by himself. Where the look on her face when I asked her if she had moved the candy in question was priceless. If that’s what makes family, well then, that’s exactly what they are.
And nothing sends that fact home more than the only picture that was taken over 3 days where all four kids made it into the shot.
Happy 2013.
Chicken Wire & Paper Flowers 