Living in someone else's house, while financially liberating, is creatively a bit stifling. The furniture is arranged, the walls are painted and being in the middle of the ocean, all things purchased or created must be packed into airplane approved luggage at the end of our time here. So I've been working on "small space" projects like photo album/baby books for the boys and sewing seat covers promised to a friend in Indianapolis and thinking about making henry a little man suit for my uncle's wedding. But I still spend a really shockingly large amount of time thinking about beautiful things that cannot currently be mine and searching for them online.
Here's a little list, I'll call it: "someday, we'll be home together"
These notebooks on etsy would almost be too beautiful to write in...but I would try just so I could turn the lovely covers and leaf through the vegetable dyed pages.
I think I have the taste of a nineteenth century old woman because if I could afford to wallpaper every room in my house with these wallpapers, I think I would.
Mornings with this stovetop cappucino maker would make me feel like a well bred european with a flat in the city, and a cottage in the country with an aga oven, a few spaniels and some wellington boots...basically a character from a rosamund pilcher novel and my dream come true.
I'm all for the modern conveniences looking like electronic fossils of bygone eras so this and this would likely find a place in my future (dream) house (where money were no option).
What joy to stir my cappuccino with this spoon!
Sort of trendy but seriously, who wouldn't want a pop art poster of an owl, typewriter and or telephone pole?
Who says these roofs are only for pole barns and outhouses? I want one on my house.
And of course, all things anthropologie but especially this towel and this table cloth
Inspired by Laura's blog about her twins and the idea that even a routine--when thinking about posterity--is interesting, and as an ego centric log of how much I do in a day, here is a sampling of our days, with today as model.
5-6am feed henry, give jake bottle #1, change first two diapers
6-7am get jake, henry and finn up, change diaper #3, feed all three breakfast.
7-8am clean up breakfast, change diapers #4 and #5, henry goes back down for morning nap
8-9am play trucks on living room floor and keep jake from mangling stereo system. finn in time out #1 for pushing jake. Gardener William arrives to finish trimming fig creeper on pool wall and clean out flower beds.
9-10am Jake in timeout #1 for screaming, Jake goes down for morning nap, change diaper #6, color with Finn on the back porch, henry wakes up, feed henry.
10-11am jake wakes up screaming, give him bottle #2, get him up, change diaper #7 and #8, retrieve four pieces of cat food from Jake's clenched jaws and clean up large puddle of cat throw-up. talk to next door neighbor about collecting her mail while she is away next week while finn pours contents of his sippy cup into pots of herbs by back door. finn in time out #2 for screaming. james off work for break, run to post office to mail lease to tenent in Indiana.
11-12am come home, cook brats on grill for lunch, finn colors on back porch, jake chews on plastic ball pit balls in playpen and henry rolls over on baby mat/gym thingey. bring everyone into kitchen for lunch, eat lunch, offer william the gardener a brat and let unknown pool guy into backyard to check saline function (?) sounds suspicious, he says andy sent him, andy not known to me.
12-1pm bring james lunch, put finn down for nap, change diaper #9, follow jake around house as he follows cat around house, feed henry.
1-2pm put jake and henry down for naps, change diapers #10 and #11. clean up lunch dishes, puddle of spit up and four more spots of cat throwup discovered in dining room. rearrange furniture on back porch and replace pillows with baby gates to block off non-baby-proofed half of porch. Watch part of episode of Jon and Kate plus 8, which makes me feel better about my life.
2-3pm sit by pool and read magazine, take short dip in pool and get dressed, talk to terminex guy who is coming to check on termite traps (did not know we had termite traps), get all three babies up, change diapers #12, 13 and 14, make bottle #3
3-4pm feed henry, hook up trailer to bike with james and take all babies on ride to library.
4-5pm jake in timeout #2 for screaming, make dinner while finn sits on counter asking for a bite of everything, jake goes down for evening nap.
5-6pm feed all babies dinner, james gives jake bath, clean up dinner dishes and play trucks on coffee table, share bowl of ice cream with finn.
6-7pm eat dinner standing up in kitchen with James, put Jake to bed with bottle #4, give finn bath, read books and put him to bed, feed henry and put him to bed.
7-8pm watch recorded episodes of the Colbert Report and Project Runway.
8-9pm take contacts out, read in bed, go to sleep.
Take away the terminex guy, the neighbor and the post office and add sick scott at home, trips to safeway for gatorade and making cups of chicken broth and you have yesterday's schedule.
"The dream and the knowledge of alternative futures is with me. I choose my life with every breath I take."
James and I have a deal. On Saturday mornings, I get up with the boys and he can sleep in as long as fancy strikes him. On Sundays, I sleep in. This is not entirely a foolproof plan for a number of reasons including the fact that I wake up with every stirring in the house be it animal, vegetable or infant and James has programed himself so thoroughly to wake up at 4:30 that he finds it difficult to sleep past 7am. But regardless, it's a really brilliant and loving set up for a number of reasons:
On Sundays, after I have woken up at 5 or 6 to feed Henry...I go back to sleep. I'm not sure you all realize the magnitude and revolutionary-ness this represents. On weekdays and Saturdays, I wake up to feed Henry, maybe put him back in his crib maybe bring him to the kitchen to pour a cup of coffee and make Jake a bottle and turn on good morning america while I lay out breakfast for the three boys, and the day has begun.
On Sundays, when I wake up again, to the noise of a breakfast I am not making or the cats running hissing away from Finn's smacking feet on the pergo floors or Jake screeching to be given a bite of whatever Scott is eating, I can go back to sleep, as many times as I want.
And on Sundays, when I have finally slept as long as I possibly can, I lay in bed for a number of minutes and rub my eyes. And then I sit up in bed and look out at the yard or the sky. And then I swing my feet over the side of the bed and wait to let the blood adjust to my legs and my head and then slowly, walk to the bathroom, put my contacts in, maybe trim my bangs or cut my fingernails. And then, when I am fully awake and slightly more groomed and in a significantly better mood than when I fell asleep, I come out to the kitchen and greet the boys with a temporary surplus of patience and magnanimity.
It's a wonderful thing to sleep and wake of my own volition. Where waking is normally instantaneous and unnoted, a springing (or more likely a trudging) to action; Sundays are languid and unrushed. In my current role, the luxury of languishing is really indescribable.
I've just finished reading The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, Nights in Rodanthe by that incorrigible Nicholas Sparks, gave up reading a tedious German novel called Stones from the River after about 300 fruitless pages and started up The Constant Gardner. This strange combination of narratives is swilling around in my head and I'm quite certain will produce some gem of a thought about gender and childrearing and the overlap of the feminine voice in various stereotypical roles.
But that epiphanic connection has not quite coalesced yet. So I thought instead I would tell you, "dear void" that tonight completely free of children, I drove my sister and brother-in-law's flashy yellow convertible to the local movie theater and saw the Dark Knight. As it would happen, a couple with my exact identical Phil&Ted's stroller wheeled their sleeping infant into the theater behind me and took the seat on the aisle beside me, the stroller wedged in the handicap spot between us. So much for getting away from the kids for the night. I shot them very dirty looks in the darkness between previews. The baby must have sensed my hostility so made not a single peep throughout the entire, rather ear splintering movie. After jumping out my own seat a couple of times, I actually started feeling bad for the kid and marvelled at his or her resilience.
The movie was very good actually but it seemed strange sitting in the theater on my own and then coming out into the parking lot in the pouring rain and driving home without talking to anyone about it. And James hasn't seen it yet so I feel a bit untranslated-the curse of the extrovert-not having processed the experience of the movie with anyone else. So have any of you seen it? And if so what do you think? Without spoiling it for any one who hasn't, I'm really interested in the Joker's theory about chaos and motive and the whole sense of balance in the movie; the hero they need, not the one they want; Batman and the Joker's mutual reliance on one another...I don't know. The whole sense of the power of fear to create chaos. It's a very thickly layered movie, if you want it to be.
"Things are looking up" or "Finding more ways to get out of the house"
3 comments Posted by Kate at 4:45 PMSince James got home and we've had a chance to really settle in to our "real" schedule, things have been going much more smoothly, or I am less of a basket-case, or the boys are behaving better, or Meg's visit dissipated the bulk of the chaos, or the stars have aligned, or whatever concoction of elements has come together to put me in a significantly better mood. Sorry for those last angry posts representing the emotional overflow of our first and last experiment with solo tri-baby-watch or as I will forever remember it, "the weeks of the screaming trio".
All is looking much brighter now, especially with the addition of two brilliant Craigslist purchases--the kiderooz bike trailer/double stroller and an old school, hang off the back of your bike kid seat (just like the one I sat in back in the eighties) making for one heck of a caravan behind Mandy's teal beach cruiser. After a trip to Wal-Mart to buy an enormous planetary-orbit-of-its-own-
The unintended comedy of this picture (I seem to be cultivating my circus acts-we just need a monkey) is that the bike cruiser has an enormous, cushion-your-big-fanny-seat and the bracket to attach finn's seat barely bolts to mine with room for his legs. So he sits so close behind me that his huge helmet bumps against my back as he turns his head to look at passing traffic. Which I think in Native American would make my name, "sunburned woman with large headed papoose pulling two dazed babies and a noodle".
I love the whole contraption though. I feel free, as strange as that is to say, and I foresee long productive rides to the grocery store or the coffee shop or the scrapbooking store where upon arrival, I lock up the bike, unhook and attach a front wheel to the trailer to convert it to a stroller, take finn by the hand and...voila! My dad would be so proud.