In my kitchen RIGHT NOW...

...you won't believe it...is a real-live Duke basketball player.  If your name is Eric (big or small), you fell all over yourself preparing for this major event.  Big Eric hurriedly removed the jumble of shoes, dirty socks and candy cane wrappers from the front porch so it wouldn't look, as he said, "so redneck".  Then he swept the floor and shooed me out of the kitchen where I was in the middle of frosting Christmas cookies.  Little Eric brought in his basketball from the driveway, combed his hair and hopped around saying "Is he here yet?  Is he?".  Brigham and I didn't know what all the fuss was about- I mean the poor kid is just a walk-on who needs help with his Econ final.  I'm more excited about the money, frankly.  But it was kind of fun to see them so excited.  He was very gracious and sweet with the boys- Eric got his ball signed and Brigham offered him a menorah he had made out of tin foil.  

This afternoon we went to the park with our good friends the Alders.  As we were leaving another boy asked Eric and Brigham why they had two mommies.  I laughed as his Dad explained that I was their mommy and the other lady was their friend.  As I drove away I understood his confusion- Carson and McKenzie are just as happy to have me watch them do a trick on the swings as their mom.  My kids will ask Linds to tie their shoe or show her a cool bug.  Our friends are truly like family to us and we are so lucky.  It seems like more and more of you are far away from us, but we think about you all the time...

Eric told me last night that he had gotten a $150 ticket for driving with expired tags.  Which prompted me to think that I am also driving with expired tags (but least mine were good until October- his expired in August!).  "They never sent me anything in the mail about it!" is what I said, which is verbatim what I also said to the police officer when this happened to me a year ago.  When will I learn?  Apparently due to cost-cutting measures, the DMV has decided to just stop sending out registration reminders and leave it up to drivers to remember when their tags expire.  I say that's discrimination against people with bad memories.  It's a MEMORY TAX!!  That is so unfair.

Survival of the merriest

Before recapping our weekend, may I just say that it's taking every ounce of willpower I have not to cut this child's hair in his sleep...

We survived the department Christmas party with our dignity intact- but barely. Basically I spent the whole afternoon rushing and snapping at the children so that we could be on time and actually have a place to sit this year. Honestly, us arriving on time anywhere is cause enough for a party...

THIS boy gave me a heart-attack, though it wasn't his fault...
He needed to go to the bathroom partway through dinner, and it being Eric's Christmas party, I offered to take him. As we approached the bathroom, Marley on my hip, I told Brigham he could just come in the ladies' room with me since I had to go too. A man standing in a nearby group of people interjected to say that he would take Brigham in. He looked sort of offended that I would take a six-year-old boy into the ladies' room. I demured, of COURSE, but he insisted and before I knew it he had taken Brigham into the bathroom. I had no idea what to do, so I turned and ran through the crowd until I found Eric and announced "IneedyouitsanemergencyamantookBrighamintothebathroomcomequickly!!!!" We both trotted as inconspicuously as possible back to the bathroom, which Eric found empty. That's when panic set in. Eric went back through the crowd to look for them and I ran outside, bouncing the poor baby's head all over the place, yelling "BRIGHAM!" I saw two teenage boys that I thought I remembered had been talking to the man. I ran up to them and asked if they'd seen a little boy. They looked at me like I was a crazed lunatic and told me he was inside with their DAD, looking for me. Then they indignantly informed me that he was a Duke professor and a father of three, so I didn't have to worry. I thanked them awkwardly and ran back inside where I imagined Eric was by now standing on top of a table yelling for everyone to help us find our son. Thankfully, he had found Brigham without having to resort to anything that drastic. We still don't know who the man was. When I got back to the table and calmed down I gave Brigham the third degree about whether anyone had touched him ANYWHERE, just in case. I thought about it a lot afterwards and decided three things:

1. Six years old probably is a little too old to be going into the ladies' room.

2. I should have firmly said, "No thank you, I'm not comfortable with that."

3. Had the man still taken Brigham into the bathroom I should have marched in after them rather than running off into the crowd.

Had this whole thing happened in a public place, I'm sure I would have done those things. It was the fact that we were at Eric's school party and I worried about making a bad impression for his sake that made me so confused and panicky. But I still think that man was being TOTALLY inappropriate.

But enough of that...Marley got to wear her Christmas dress to church yesterday! Cindy made it to match her daughters, Jenna and Rachel (the female two-thirds of her triplets). Have you ever seen anything cuter!?

You can just see how proud she is to be with the two big girls.

The baby doll shopping went very well, if you consider coming home with two dolls instead of one a success, which Eric did not. I couldn't decide between one that was a baby, and would simultaneously suck and blink when you put a bottle in its mouth, and another doll that was more of a girl, with long brown hair and long eyelashes. I knew that the girl doll was too big (practically the size of Marley) and too heavy for her to carry around, but I wanted that doll. Anyway, I realized that I could just get the bald baby for Christmas and wait and buy the hair-doll next year or for her birthday, but then I worried- what if the doll company that makes it goes out of business before then? You never know in this economy! So I bought them both. And I even made it back to the school to pick up the kids and then to Eric's concert FIFTEEN whole minutes early. What's happening to me??

My early Christmas present...

All week I've been walking around with a general air of excitement without really knowing why.  I tried to guess- is it the Pitchfork's Christmas concert this Friday, in which I get to see my cute husband sing while wearing a tux?  Nope- love the Pitchforks, and my cute husband, but this event- several hundred people packed into Duke's Gothic reading room- not a single one of them with a small child on his or her lap, let alone THREE, is always more stressful than it is fun.  Last year Brigham fell asleep in his chair next to an elderly woman in a fur coat and peed himself in such quantity that I, sitting two seats away, had to stop breathing through my nose for the rest of the concert.  

No, not that then.  The Economics department Christmas party at the country club?  Um, no.  Last year we arrived a few minutes late to find that every single chair at every single table in the club was taken, so we got our dinners and sat in the chilly lobby, where I proceeded to have to nurse my two-month-old in front of the entering parade of stuffy professors and their fur-coat-and-pearl-earringed wives.  I'm sorry, stuffy professors.  I do thank you for your efforts at educating my husband, but I'm just not looking forward to spending my Saturday evening with you.  Let's see then........

Ahhhh, YES.  This Friday night, before the concert, is the annual parent's night out at the elementary school.  The idea is that we get to leave our kids at the school to watch movies and eat pizza while we moms and dads get a chance to do some Christmas shopping without them in tow.  Since Eric will be doing vocal warm-ups and stuffing his pockets full of ding-dongs (don't ask) at that time, I'll have to do my shopping all by myself.  And there's only one person on my list.  Would you like to guess what I'm going to buy?  A BABY DOLL!

Finally, I get to buy a present for my offspring that doesn't have a scowling mechanical face or the potential to be aimed and fired at my butt while I'm cooking dinner!  It has to be the best baby doll in the whole world.  And I want accessory bottles, one with milk and one with orange juice- the kind you can turn upside down and it looks like they're draining.  And if they still make dolls that poop and pee into a little fake diaper, my daughter will have one!  No, of course my mother didn't deprive me of just such a baby doll under the pretense that it was "tacky."  Why would you think that?

Anyway, needless to say, I am very, very excited for my Friday night.  Even though I have a small suspicion that Marley may at this point be more interested in stuffing the baby in the toilet, or down an air vent than she will be at feeding it a bottle. But we must start them young!  All you moms of girls- any tips on where to find the best baby doll in the whole world?

Paris in the fall

*I should note that all of the amazing photographs from France were taken by my very talented photographer-cousin, Laura.

We spent the second part of our trip to France in Paris.  I'll be honest: saying goodbye to the boat was sort of a happy thing for me.  It was fun, but it would have been much more fun without a crawling infant aboard.  And...with a little more room.  And...a normal toilet and a microwave.  Nonetheless, we turned in the keys and embarked on Death March #2 toward Paris.  I literally almost had my arms snapped off in the metro.  I agree with the French that our health care system is barbaric, but so is their metro system!  Eric literally had to pry the doors open to release my arms.  Anyway, I'm sure we afforded the locals a good laugh with our huge group of people, bumbling ways and periodic shrieks of "WHERE ARE THE CHILDREN!?!?!"  and "WHERE IS GRANDMOTHER?!?!?"  I found that the best strategy for moving through the gates was to feed the children's tickets through for them and then yell "GO, GO, GO!!!" in a loud and urgent voice, while pushing them from behind.  I'm sure we were very entertaining.

We finally made it to our hotel in Paris, which appeared deceptively clean and well-kept...more on this later.  For the moment we were just glad to have normal-sized beds and showers that did not contain toilets.  After doing a little celebration dance, we headed out to see Notre Dame and the Sainte Chapelle, two of my top priority attractions.  The Sainte Chapelle was being cleaned, but even so, it was everything I had always dreamed it would be while sitting in a darkened Art History lecture hall in college. 

We had a Joshua Bell moment in the subway, and after reading this article a few years ago, I insisted that we stop to listen just in case these were world-class musicians.  I'm not sure if that was the case, but they sounded pretty amazing to me...

[The video of this special moment is the reason why it's taken me over a MONTH to publish this post!!  I cannot get it to upload, so you'll have to imagine...violins...cellos...French subway- it was cool.]

The next evening Laura very kindly watched the kids for us while Eric and I went out to dinner.  We rode Velib bikes to the Marais district and searched out the little restaurant where Eric remembered eating incredible chocolate mousse on his earlier trip.  If I hadn't been suffering from post-baby level sleep deprivation at that point I think I could remember more details

One of my favorite days of the whole trip was the day we spent almost entirely in the Jardin du Luxembourg, which was right across the street from our hotel.  The first thing we did was to rent a little wooden sailboat for the boys to push around with a stick in the fountain- surprisingly entertaining.  

Then we stumbled upon the sweetest playground you've ever seen.  Little Eric tried to join these two French boys in a game of basketball, but they seemed not to understand...(I'm working on figuring out how to shorten the video so I can post it)...

We substituted hot chocolate for lunch at a little cafe a block away and then returned to the park for pony rides (Brigham was disappointed that he didn't get the odd-looking pony with the big ears- actually a donkey, I think)...

...and a puppet show of which we understood about two words...

Then it was back to the Eiffel tower to see it sparkle close-up, where the boys got caught in a freak mini-monsoon.  Laura, Marley and I were waiting on our dinner at a restaurant a few blocks away when we heard thunder and Laura decided to walk down to the tower and check on the guys, whom we'd left waiting in line.  We thought maybe they would stop letting people go up in the event of thunder or lightening and she wanted to tell them where we were in case they needed to come find us.  A couple minutes after she left the restaurant I noticed that tables and chairs were blowing past my window.  She returned a half an hour later soaked from head to toe, to report that the tower was open for business and she hadn't seen the boys.  Indeed, we found out later that they were up on the second level when the storm hit and had watched the wall of rain come toward and then engulf them.  I think that might have been the highlight of their trip.  Either that or the small snail they found in the subway.  

We returned to the hotel that night happy, but exhausted and excited to be going home the next day.  I curled up in bed and read for a few minutes while Eric checked our flight status in the lobby.  Just as I was falling asleep, I felt something sting my neck and I quickly turned on the light to find a giant bedbug on the sheet.  Well.  After the worst night's sleep of my entire life (and that's saying something), we packed up our stuff and Eric headed down stairs with three sample bedbugs on a napkin, where he got the manager to give us our rooms for free.  It was about this time that we all started to itch.  After a long flight home, during which we entertained ourselves by mentioning our encounter with bedbugs and then observing the panic in people's eyes, my aunt and uncle met us at the airport in Baltimore with a box full of trash bags and a roll of duct tape.  We sealed up everything except our wallets and car keys and a few diapers and drove home, where we faced the task of de-bugging everything.  Anything that could be washed Eric took to the laundromat, and the rest of it we either submerged in soapy water, froze or heated in the oven, including the lap-top, i-pod and cell phones.  I think it's safe to say by now that we're bedbug free, but I can tell you that I will not be staying in a hotel for a very, very long time!

So all in all, we had a great time.  There were a lot of very human moments- some misunderstandings, some tantrums, some sleep-deprivation-induced snapping, but with the passage of a little time, those things seem to have faded, leaving us with lovely memories of smiles and looks of wonder on our kids' faces, incredible sights both grand and quaint, croissants, chocolate and boeuf bourgignon.

*My crafting-talented friend Cindy Lynn is starting an Etsy shop- check it out!

Welcome to France

This picture sums up what it felt like travelling through France with three children.  We were pretty much in a perpetual state of breaking some unspoken rule.  Or spoken, as the case may be.  The funny thing is that Laura and I could not figure out for the life of us what exactly was being prohibited here.  Holding hands with kids?  Kids in general?

We went to France to celebrate my Grandmother's 90th birthday.  We drove to Baltimore on a Saturday to attend her birthday party that night at my Uncle Bill's house.  We dined on crab imperial and baby lamb chops and a giant birthday cake made by my Aunt Rachel that actually had ninety candles on it.  The cake was carried out, all aflame, and the guests began to give tributes.  One man rambled on and on and on until we all thought the smoke detectors would go off before the candles could be blown out.  Little Eric stuck close by my side the whole night, as did Marley,  but Brigham worked the room.  We kept hearing from people about how charming and entertaining they found him.  Lucky us, we get to live with him all the time:).

We caught the 4 o'clock flight to Paris the next day.  The kids did amazingly well on the plane.  The only snag was that they wouldn't let (big) Eric on the plane because he (as usual) wasn't wearing shoes.  It seems that you must be wearing shoes when you board the plane, but you're free to take them off during flight.  (Uh...okay...)  We actually had to have a baggage person dig our bag out from the bowels of the plane so that he could get his flip flops out.  The plane was just about ready to take off and there was a lot of grumbling and evil eyeing directed our way.

We landed in Paris at about 2 A.M. our time and my inner monster- the one that hides inside me and comes out when I don't get enough sleep or food- started to grumble as we navigated the Paris Metro in order to catch a train to the small town of Corbigny.  My brother accurately described this leg of the trip as a death march.  I think his exact words were, "It wouldn't be a vacation with Mama if it didn't include a death march."  My mother possesses the uncanny ability to not eat.  Ever.  Thus we did not stop for food until we reached our departure port late in the afternoon.  Let me just drive that home:  Red-eye to Paris...three children...two metros...two trains...two taxis....no food.  

In Corbigny we settled into what would be our home for the next eight days: a houseboat, that we were to drive up the Nivernais canal to the city of Joigny.  The nice French man from the boat company paced around muttering unintelligible instructions and occasionally doing little pantomimes while Laura and I looked at each other with a mixture of fear and hilarity, and Jeff, who was to be our captain, scrambled to write everything down.  Fortunately, we did comprehend the most important lesson: how to flush the toilets.  It was surprisingly involved...

There was a lot of switch flipping and pumping, so that everyone on the boat was aware when anyone flushed a toilet and would say something like: "Uh oh, Grandmom's dropping bombs again...".

The canal was beautiful.  Along the way we passed through locks, where we had to hop off the boat, tie it up and help the lock keeper open and close the gates to raise or lower the water level.  This is what we saw as we puttered along:

And here is a video of a lock filling up:

It was sort of incredible- the lock keepers lived in these beautiful little cottages with flowers and maybe an apple tree in front, and firewood stacked up against the side of the house.  They would let you through and then drive down to the next one or two locks to open those for you, at which point the next lock keeper down the canal would take over.  I admired the French for staunchly clinging to quaint tradition over efficiency and modernization.  We picked fruit from apple, pear and walnut trees and stopped in all the tiny towns along the way, like this one:

My favorite memory from the boat was on the second morning, when Eric and I snuck off for a 5 mile run that took us through two medieval towns and up a hill to a 12th century church that looked out over the Yonne valley.  I also liked falling asleep at night to the gentle rocking of the boat.  And of course spending time with my wonderful family.  

That concludes installment one of our trip to France...more to come!

*Left to right, top to bottom: Eric, my mom's husband Jeff (the fearless captain), my brother Adam, me, Marley, my Mom, little Eric, my Grandmother (the birthday girl), my cousin Laura, and Brigham.

**Post-edit: I just now realized the irony of writing about how hard it is to live on a student budget and then following it with a post about our two-week trip to France.  I'm thankful for a generous Mom who loves to travel with her family!

Mile 18

Last week I came to the conclusion that if graduate school were a marathon, we would be at mile 18 about now. Year 7 of 9. And that's not counting the two years of undergrad we still had left to do after we got married. Mile 18 is not a good place to be, and here's why: the exhilaration and newness of the race has long since worn off and the soreness and fatigue have settled in, gotten comfortable and decided to stay. You long ago abandoned your dreams of a PR and have downgraded to the more humble goal of just finishing the race. And yet. You still have so far to go! The finish line is still miles and miles away!

This time next year we'll be busy dreaming and planning and jetting off to cities up and down the west coast (oh yes!) to woo and be wooed by prospective universities. But right now that all seems so far away and I'm flat out tired of being in school. I do realize, of course, that there are lots of people in the world who are much worse off than we are, but I also think it's important to acknowledge that supporting a family of five on a graduate student stipend meant for one has been a challenge. Seriously- my food budget is lower than what we would get if we were on food stamps.  Yeah, I don't often keep to my food budget- I'm just saying.

Yesterday we decided we needed to hit an aid station and have a little pep-talk. Sometimes (well, most of the time), during these discussions, I try to appeal to Eric's inner economist by using terms like "investment", "utility" and "consumption smoothing". That's the idea that if you think you're probably going to be earning more in the future, it's cool to borrow a little now to "smooth" out your standard of living.  I really like to consumption smooth. But I also know that the money we borrow now will accrue lots of interest by the time we're able to pay it all back. So we're recommitting ourselves to following a budget and living within our means.  We've kept a budget in the past, but it's always been punctuated by little bursts of spending- budget fatigue, you might call it. No more.  We're in the home stretch and even though we can't quite see the finish line yet, this is our chance to really prove to ourselves what we're capable of.

So, I made a list of my temptations to overspend:

1. groceries
2. eating out

You may notice the absence of clothing. I'm really good at not buying new clothes.  Also, toys for my children. I'm never, ever tempted to buy them stuff that I know I will soon be begging them to pick up and put away. Home decor- this has been a little bit of a challenge in the past, but there isn't a whole lot left to do in our house, so I think I can resist that one.  My problem is is really with food. I really like the way I feel when I eat healthy food and lots of fruits and vegetables. And I like to feel good about feeding my family those things. I also don't love to cook. I don't hate it, but when the weekend rolls around or the fridge is empty, I can be easily persuaded to eat out. Even at inexpensive restaurants, that adds up very fast.

So, the other day I was talking with my friend Becky, who I can only describe by saying that she is a true Home Economist. She relishes creating efficient systems for keeping her house clean and her family well-fed. I got kind of jaded about using systems, because they never seem to work out the way you hope they will and then you feel like you've failed. But I noticed that Becky looks at a system as an evolving entity and enjoys experimenting and tweaking things until they work well for her family. Huh! So that's my new goal for fall: GET SYSTEMS. TWEAK SYTEMS AS NEEDED. WHEN SYSTEM DOESN'T WORK, VIEW AS FAILURE OF SYSTEM AND NOT ME. DON'T GIVE UP!!

Since food is my biggest budget-undoer, I'm starting with a cooking system. I've got breakfast and lunch down, but I really need to work on dinner. I have a good number of recipes that we like, are easy to make, not too expensive, etc., but I don't have a unified system for organizing them. They kind of live all over my kitchen, on the internet, and in magazines that I may or may not have thrown out. I feel like if I had a notebook with categories that our family likes, like pasta, rice, salad, soup, eggs, etc., then I wouldn't feel like I never have any ideas for what to make. Like last night we had oatmeal pancakes which were easy, cheap, healthy and yummy, but in the past I would have forgotten all about them when it came time to plan next week's meals and maybe never made them again. So that will be my first system- a recipe system.

Do you have a system that works really well for you family? Please tell me about it- I need all the help I can get!

*That picture was taken like 7 years ago in Forest Park in Portland.  We went running with some of Eric's high school friends and he had them take a picture of us running past- it was really awkward!

Marley's big day

I've been holding off posting because I wanted to write about things in chronological order, which means first I have to post about our trip to France, but I'm still waiting on the pictures from my cousin (Ahem!), so I'm going to go ahead before all these other thoughts get tired of hanging out in my head and decide to leave.  First up: Marley's birthday...

We spent 9 1/2 hours on an airplane together, which was lovely, but not exactly a one year old's dream birthday, so we had a take-two the day after we got home.

Can you tell how utterly exhausted she is in this picture?  I've decided that although we had a wonderful time in France, the physical deprivations of travel are just too much for me right now.  I need sleep, decent food and exercise and I need for my children to have those things. We're on travel hiatus, so if you want to see us, you have to come here!  

Marley took the brunt of it, I'm afraid.  14 days of nothing but bread and chocolate to eat and 6 hours of sleep a night with maybe a one-hour nap here and there really took it's toll on her.  We've been home for a week now and she is still sleeping a solid 13 hours at night and taking 3 1/2 hour naps everyday to make up for it.  

I've been thinking a lot of "this time last year" thoughts as her birthday approached.   Our family is different after one year of Marley-ness.  Busier, messier, sleepier, gentler, slower, pinker, funnier and, of course, bigger.  I got in the car the other day after Eric had been driving it with the kids and I had to smile.  We just moved Marley to her forward-facing seat, and the rear-view mirror was tilted down, so that I could tell he had been sneaking peeks at her while he was driving- something I've been doing too.  I love those moments when you feel like two peas in a parenting pod.  

I told him that when Marley started crawling a few months ago it was like my nose hopping off my face and turning to look at me from across the room.  I was so used to always having her in my arms that it felt strange and different to see her at a distance.  She still likes to be held and will rest her head on my shoulder and twirl my hair in her one hand- oh I love that.  Her hair is getting darker and thicker and already I'm circling, ready to pounce with the bows and barrettes, if she'll only have pity on me and leave them in for more than two seconds.

She's a climber- I'm sure she'll outgrow the crib soon, unlike little Eric, who stayed in his crib until he was 3 1/2.  One day his friend Tucker was over and unwittingly demonstrated for him how to climb out of it.  I thought for sure the crib days were through, but you know what he did?  After that, if there was something he wanted, he would climb out, get it and climb right back in!  Marley is cut from a different cloth, and I can already tell that she will be hard to contain, in every way.  Yesterday, at her one-year-old check-up, she had to get her finger pricked.  The part that evoked a sustained, 90 second, ear-splitting scream was not the prick but the fact that the nurse would not let go of her finger.  

Bella-girl, you are beautiful and bright and strong.  I promise to always try to be your rock but not your cage.  Already I can see our differences, but I hope that we can use them to teach each other.  You have already taught me so much in one short year.  Happy birthday sweet baby.