How I have changed

Yesterday I got a comment from Shades that made me just stop in my tracks and evaluate things in my life.

Earlier you stated that you weren't maternal by any means (and that you'd rather go to graduate school and be a writer or a therapist, enjoying the undivided attention of your husband and all the extra income, etc.).

Now that you have Atticus, do you still feel the same way? Have you become maternal now, or do you still wish you could've done all those things?

I really had to stop and ponder this one. As I mentioned the other day, motherhood has not at all been what I expected. And honestly, I'm not sure that I'm the best person to be very representative because my own journey into motherhood has been so bizarre. But I'll give it my best crack.

I still don't know that I'd describe myself as maternal. Every time someone new gets called to Primary (the children's sunday school program) I give thanks that it's not me. I still don't get all warm and squiggly looking at baby clothes, I don't relish discussing all the minutia of baby life with other moms, and if someone asked me to watch their kids for the day I think I might have a panic attack.

I still have goals that go beyond the home and the immediate demands of my family. In fact, in late August I'm going to start an accelerated culinary school program, and as I wrote last week I just finished a book proposal I'm shopping around. I would absolutely love to go to grad school, and I haven't ruled that out as still happening some day far off in the future.

It's funny to me because I think I really expected motherhood to change me more. All these years my friends have been having children while I stood by and watched, I kept hearing about this massive change that occurs once the mantel of motherhood falls on you. How your priorities change and nothing in the world becomes as important as this little person that you would fight and claw and die for. Coming from the scrapbooking world, full of sweetly sentimental people cataloging every shining moment in the lives of their precious precious babies, I think I really expected to become emotional and sensitive and suddenly turn into someone like my mother-in-law who still, 30 years later, can't bear to throw out the simplest little doodle one of her kids made in kindergarten.

My priorities have changed. I love this little guy with a ferocity that is overwhelming. I would fight and claw and die for him, as I've already had to prove. I find myself craving him like food. Even when he just takes an extra long nap I miss him and have to force myself to let him sleep and leave him alone. A couple weeks ago Bear gave me a spa day and arranged a few other activities to let me have my first day to myself in six months. I bailed and came home before it was halfway through. Even when we went to see The Dark Knight (which I freaking LOVED) I found myself checking my cell phone every few minutes to see how much time was left before I could get back to my baby.

And yet I'm still somewhat unsentimental about it all. I find myself easily distracted by all the things that need to get done, by keeping him happy and fed while my house meets basic standards of hygiene. I make sure to take pictures once a week or so because I know I'll want them in the future, but I have to remind myself to do it. I still hand him off to Bear when he gets home so I can get some creative time in my studio. I don't think he's the most perfect bit of perfection that ever perfected. I see him as a marvel, I think he's exceptionally cute, I'm so proud of how soundly he's beating all the odds against him, but he's still just a little person. I don't see him as some living embodiment of all my hopes and dreams and every success I'll ever have in this life. I just see him as my special little guy. Although I do have to confess to the odd moment where I find myself reenacting Holly Hunter from Raising Arizona. :sob: I just love him so ho ho ho much :sob: But those usually only come when I haven't slept in days and I'm so grateful he finally fell asleep.

I think I expected motherhood to completely overwhelm my heart and wipe out every other desire. And it just hasn't. Those ambitions and goals for growth and personal success are still in me looking for satisfaction. For now I'm content to reinterpret them in ways that benefit my family more than myself. Instead of starting an intensive grad program, I'm getting my educational fix by going one night a week to study the culinary arts - a skill that will certainly come in handy in the home. Now I've decided that my ambitions aren't an obstacle to my developing maternal nature. I will set an example to Atticus of the value I place on education and that he should not only respect an accomplished woman, but desire one as a good partner.

So yeah. I've definitely changed, and I'm the same person at the same time. I think instead of overwhelming my heart, motherhood has knocked down the walls and made it three times bigger. Instead of shrinking all my personal ambitions, it's enlarged all of me.

Year of Pleasures #13

The great table collapse of '07 destroyed nearly all of my dishes, and most of what remained (after the mover destruction of '03) of my original set of china. I really grieved this loss because beautiful dishes are symbolic for me. It's what I have to offer the people I love. They are tools I use to create a life of beauty and grace as I nurture everyone who comes in my circle. I'm a firm believer in using what you love and not postponing the best because of the fear of wear and tear. I pull out china whenever I feel in the need of a pick me up. Whenever I make a really good meal I want to set off with importance. Whenever a guest is over and I want to make them feel special.

My mother-in-law Sally took pity on me when I lost my dishes and gave me the set her mother left when she died. While I normally have an irrational bias against anything gold, I just adore these dishes. The quality is outrageous. I don't think you could get dishes like these in the states for love or money, and while I'm not normally a sentimental person, I treasure that Jared's grandmother, a woman I knew and loved, carried these back from Germany herself.

The porcelain is so fine it's translucent, and yet I'm never afraid to handle them. Which, now that I think of it, reminds me of Jared's grandmother. Grams was a lovely, tiny, bird thin woman, always with a wiglet of curls over her pinned up hair and covered in layers of sweatshirts to try to stay warm. You'd never know to look at her what a mighty force she was in the lives of her family - raising her brothers and sisters as a teenager during the depression, earning food by working as a laborer at a turnip farm, teaching her family the gospel and keeping generations of family tightly knit together. To this day Sally and her siblings and generations of cousins go to Utah every summer for a family reunion with the children and grandchildren of those siblings Grams helped raise.

I've never been one to cherish the story behind an object before. I think that motherhood is injecting life into my robot heart.

Moan..whimper..moan

Atticus and I seem to have caught some kind of a stomach bug. I've been up all night for the past two nights spending some quality time in the bathroom, and Atticus has had some crazy diapers for the first time in his little life. On top of the stomach bug, I wrenched my back somehow over the weekend hauling stuff around, so I'm stiff and sore along with being dehydrated and weak and in constant awareness of how far I am from a bathroom at any given moment.

Monday night I was so exhausted between my sickness and his that I went a little delirious at his 1 am feeding. I couldn't seem to manage to make the bottle by myself for some reason, so after I filled the bottle with water and still had the nipple in my hand, I woke up Bear and passed it off to him to add the formula. By the time he handed it back I had completely forgotten that I was still holding the nipple and, while Bear kept saying, "the top. put the top on. Tree, the top." I poured the entire contents of his bottle all over the inside of his co-sleeper. Luckily he had squirmed enough in his sleep that I ended up just drenching his feet instead of giving him a head to toe formula shower. He didn't seem to mind an awful lot either. Bear changed his jammies while I stripped the bedding, and he was back to sleep before we even got him back in his bed.

My little guy is such a good baby, there are seriously times I feel guilty about it. He never cries unless there is a reason for it, and yet there are still moments when I just have to take a deep breath and marshal my patience. What would I possibly do with a baby with colic?

So far this week I've accomplished nothing. I don't know why I continue to allow it to surprise me, but once again I've had to toss out my grand plans and just snuggle on the couch as we whimpered together. Motherhood has turned out to be so much more demanding and yet also so much more tedious than I ever imagined. I need to be holding him at all times, and yet holding him doesn't require all of the attention I have to give. Just snuggling him doesn't require a ton of me, while it simultaneously requires all of me. I don't know what mothers of newborns did before Netflix and the internet.

This explains things...

Maybe this is why it takes me so long to get anything done.

I did it. Holy Cow.

If you've been paying any attention to my progress bars over there, you may have noticed one ignored forlorn little bar mysteriously titled "my craft book". You may also vaguely remember some time around, let's see....TWO YEARS AGO that I was asking for titles for a book proposal. And then of course my life exploded as I've diligently documented and all previous plans were tossed right out the window with the whole struggling not to go insane bit.

The other day a couple of the teenagers I work with at church came over and we had ourselves a crafty geek-out when we all realized we were in to the same stuff. I started showing them some of the things I'd made, and they got so excited about it all, it totally jump started my interest in finishing this book project off.

I've had it on my to-do list for the whole past two years, but it seemed like such an enormous undertaking. I kept thinking that there was so much work still to go into it that I'd never be able to get a handle on it. Right now I look for projects that can easily be broken up into ten minute chunks and done with one hand. Something that required so much organization and energy....I just couldn't see it happening anytime soon. Having my girls cheer me on motivated me to at least take a peek at where I left everything to see what I could do with it, and I was astounded to discover that I had two projects to finish, and pictures to take. That was all that was keeping me away from being far enough along to see if anyone would want to publish it.

I finished the projects over the weekend, took the pictures about four dozen times over Sunday and Monday (San Diego does not give you ideal overcast picture taking weather. Oh I wish I was a better photographer), printed the photos and gathered all my writing together yesterday, and now my finished proposal is ready to send off into the hands of the publishers at Deseret Book.

I've been so close so many times with this creative stuff. The guys behind the kids show Yo Gabba Gabba are family friends of ours, and over the 4th I was talking briefly with one of them. We were joking about their fifteen year long overnight success and how many times they almost hit the big time. I had to just shake my head. If any one of the dozens of things I've tried had happened, I would be set. And so many of them were *thisclose* before they fell apart. I remember when Bear was still in law school, we went on a walk one night where he did the math on one of the deals that nearly went through, and it was big. Not just starving law student big, really big. One day I was emailing with Chinese manufacturers, and the very next the company had to completely restructure to stave off bankruptcy. And there went my big deal. The creative life is not for the faint of heart.

After all this I know so much better than to start planning for this to happen. There are a million reasons why the publishers could take one look at my proposal and throw it right in the trash. Maybe they think there's not enough interest, maybe they're already publishing something similar, maybe they think it would be too expensive, maybe they don't get it, maybe they decide they don't like me just by reading my letter, maybe they hate everything I made; who the heck knows.

After all these years of professional creativity, I've learned that all I have to offer is myself. I've done the very best I can with what is in me, and after that it is out of my hands. I have no way of predicting the response to it. This is a project I really really believe in. I'm so proud of what I've made, I really feel like there is a need for it. Despite all my caution, I still can't help but think that this has a real shot.

Does this remind you of anyone?

Hmmm, where have I seen that face before.....

Worlds Most Basic Quilted Coasters

One of the biggest adjustments for me in moving into this house was going from nasty crappy apartment carpeting to hardwood floors. There are so many things about having no carpeting that is just fantastic - especially to someone with OCD and three long-haired cats. I geek out on a regular basis about just how pretty the floors look, especially up against such vibrant paint colors.

They have proven a bear to keep clean though. I always thought it was a simple sweep and mop on a regular basis, but that never seemed to cut it. Even after we finished the majority of the construction and I was finally able to scrub the floors, it never lasted. We walked around with black gritty feet for the first six months we lived here. I used to go stand in the shower at least three times a day just to wash off my feet. I bought three different brooms and four different mopping solutions, and the problem was always the same. The floors looked gorgeous for a couple of hours, and then the first time anything touched it - a foot, a sweaty can of Coke, a kitty paw - a mark was left and all my work was ruined.

I finally found the solution after asking around, and this was recommended by some wood floor installer guys. It's fantastic.

Before I found my long-term solution, I kept trying to find ways to make the life of my clean floors last a little longer, and since I never successfully managed to keep the cats from walking across whatever I just mopped, the best short-term solution was to use coasters to keep anything I could from touching the ground.

Here's my little simple tutorial for you. If you've ever sewn at all these will probably be intuitive, but if you haven't, this is a great place to start.

1. Cut your fabric pieces to size. You'll need one square cut to 3"x3" for the center, one square cut to 4"x4" for the back, two short sides cut to 1"x3", and two long sides cut to 1"x4", along with some kind of batting cut to 3"x3".


2. Sew the sides to the center piece. Start by sewing the short side pieces to the center piece across from each other and press open. Then sew the long pieces to the other two sides and press open.


3. After you've pressed the front, lay the front of the coaster onto the back of the coaster, right sides together, and sew all the way around, leaving an inch or so open at the bottom.


4. Turn the coaster right side out through the hole you've left behind, and press. Stuff with your batting.


5. Sew around the outside of the coaster with a cute topstitch to close up your hole and to keep your batting in place. I also used a tiny stitch width to do an easy machine quilt around the flower pattern.

If you have a great memory, you might recognize these fabrics as left overs from an apron I made. The teal cotton was so heavy that it was impossible to get a crisp edge. If I had used a quilters weight cotton I probably could've made it look much less homesewn, but I was going for using up stash. For the stuffing I just used some fleece I had left over - again, using up stash. These coasters are not only ridiculously simple, but you can toss them right in the washing machine when they get nasty.

This is what I've become.

My new job function - family pillow.

He's really really really ridiculously good-looking

After Atticus' blessing, a lady came up to me to talk about how cute he was. This by itself was nothing out of the ordinary. Excuse me while I brag, but strangers are constantly stopping me to comment on my beautiful baby. I can't get through Target without getting stopped in every other aisle, and the other day at Rubio's a lady got out of line to come and gaze upon my perfect child for awhile. For a minute or two there in the hospital I honestly wondered if I was going to have a homely kid. His poor little face was so swollen and distorted, I really thought he was going to end up with some random genetic combination that left him totally weird looking. It turned out to be quite a pleasant surprise that he's so darn cute.

Anyhoo, this particular lady is launching a clothing line and a website and she wanted to use my little guy as a model for her newborn layettes. We went for the shoot a few days later and I just got the pictures back.


He was such a little stinker through most of it. We had to keep catching shots in between cries. Then I mentioned to the photographer that I still needed to send out his birth announcements and she decided we needed to strip him down and get some nekkid shots. As soon as we took that diaper off, we didn't hear another peep out of him. I think somebody likes public nudity.



We got some really really cute shots, and one I'll definitely be using on his birth announcements. If I can figure out how I'm going to do them without photoshop.

Mr. Baby's 4th of July

Have I mentioned that we keep calling this kid Mr. Baby? It sprang up completely unbidden, but it is so very very accurate in describing him. He is such a somber little contemplative guy. He knows how to smile, but he's stingy with them. I only get maybe one or two a day. And when someone coos and makes faces at him, he just looks at them with a scowl as if he's embarrassed for all involved. He's a deep thinker this one. He has no time for this baby nonsense, he's busy hatching plans for the betterment of all mankind. I just got a response from Senator Feinstein over an issue I didn't remember writing about. I think this kid might just be secretly politically active while we're asleep.

This past weekend we drove up to Bear's parents house. With the gas prices the way they are, we haven't been seeing a ton of them lately, so we were excited to let Atticus have some quality grandparent time while we snuck in a quick date.

We went out Thursday night to see WALL-E and it blew my mind. It's seriously in my top ten movies. OK, maybe twenty, but still. I loved it. It was not at all what I was expecting, but instead a beautiful love story. You fall so in love with this sweet little robot.

Friday was full of the usual barbecue fun, but since Bear's parents have the craziest pool you've ever seen outside of the playboy mansion, it also included a huge pool party with all kinds of family and friends. I made my famous beans that are now requested at every family get together, and Mr. Baby went swimming for the very first time.

On his first try he wasn't such a big fan.


Then we took him into the jacuzzi (which wasn't heated, we're not entirely stupid) where he was away from most of the splashing and the water was a little warmer because it wasn't shaded by trees. He was a huge fan of the bubbles.


Also, check out the teeny tiny little board shorts he was wearing thanks to Aunt Marsha:


Could you just go diabetic with the sweetness?

Overall I think this kid is going to take after me and not be a sun worshiper like his grandparents. Hopefully he'll be a little less of an indoor kid than I was, but I think one day of sun and swim was enough to hold him over for a while.

Guess What!

I mopped my floor today!

I don't even want to discuss how long it had been. The only complaint I have about an open floor plan like mine is that you really can't tackle cleaning one room at a time. Giving my floors a good thorough clean takes a solid hour. And I don't seem to have a solid anything anymore.

I hope everyone had a great fourth of July. I was away at my inlaws and I have great pictures to share. Then we finally got a new computer to put old Sparky out of his misery. I can't believe how much computer prices have gone down in the last five years. We recycled our monitor and all the accessories, so we just bought the tower alone and went for a model that didn't have all the crazy bells and whistles. The salesguy was kind of relentless, but why do I need a computer with everything necessary to watch movies and TV right on it, when it sits four feet from our regular TV? Making the switch was a huge pain in the neck, and I can't seem to find a way to save the games I've downloaded or Photoshop. The games are no big deal because they're a huge time waste anyway, but Photoshop is kind of a necessity for me, and I no longer have the CD's. Uh Oh. Now I'm sitting here contemplating what my options are, because I think $600 is a bit much for a program that is about 80% over my head.

I've been making stuff like crazy lately. I'm trying to dig out my studio and dig myself out from under my roughly 347 half-finished projects. Since this year kind of got away from me, I missed absolutely every birthday, so I'm trying to catch up a little. And I've had a few projects just burning holes in my brain. There has been more than one night when Bear walked in the door, I passed off the Rookie, and I locked myself in my studio with my podcasts, only stopping when Bear dragged me out to go to bed. I seem to be struggling to find a balance.

Get used to this, kid.

Year of Pleasures #12

A few years ago Bear's cousin Sunny gave us a matching set of cocoa mugs - T for me and J for Jared - and it was one of my favorite gifts ever. So of course they died in the great table crash of '07. Rest in peace sweet little mugs.

I am quite the hot cocoa connoisseur. I prefer homemade whenever I take the trouble, but ordinarily I'm not that picky as long as it's rich and creamy. I also love the flavored cocoas. A little shot of raspberry syrup is just the very best thing. Or peppermint if I need a quick shot of Christmas cheer.

This, a good book, and a cat on my lap are really about all I need to get me through the roughest of days.