Annie (6) has a squishy hot pink pillow. It is a kid-sized pillow, meant to be put in a pillow case and used as one would a typical pillow on a bed. That’s not how she uses it, though. Pillow cases be damned, this cute hot pink pillow cannot be covered. And it’s not for putting your head on, silly. It’s for clinging to.

She lays down in bed, and takes the squishy thing into her arms and pulls it close to her. She squeezes it, and hugs it in a cozy and loving manner. This is what she calls “clinging” to the pillow. Sure, sometimes she takes the stuffed animal of her choice to bed with her, bestowing upon “Calico” (a cat), or “Cloe” (a bear), or
“Sammy” (penguin), or even sometimes “Steel” (a labrador puppy), her good graces and unmitigated kid love. But the hot pink pillow remains a constant in her bedtime clinging routine.

The other constant is wanting snuggles. From me, or if that’s not an option, Drob is another acceptable snuggler. Tonight she waited up for me to come give her snuggles. It was late; with my work schedule and such this week, we didn’t eat dinner until well after 8 PM, perhaps even after 9. We gorged ourselves on this fantastic rhubarb cobbler and Drob read from the chapter book we are currently engrossed in (Peter and the Star Catchers).

So it was quite late when bedtime came, about 10:15PM. I was bustling around (I’m in a really really good mood, though I can’t really say why) and I didn’t want to go snuggle right away. I figured that with how late it was, and what a long busy day, that her eyes would shut and she’d be out cold before her head even hit the pillow. Or at least as soon as she started to cling to her pink pillow.

She called out to me, from her room, however, asking for snuggles. I bustled five more minutes, wanting to get the most out of my unusually high energy level. Walking down the hall to put away some stuff in the linen closet, she heard my footsteps and called out to me again.

“I’m WAITing here, you know!”

I was very surprised that she was still awake. I finished putting away the sheets and towels and walked over to her room.

I laid down on her bed, and drew her into my arms. She was clinging her pillow, and I was enveloping her into my arms. She told me, “Ah! You’re clinging me!” I was, too, I was holding her in a tight kind of snuggle, all wrapped up safe and close in my arms. She had her pink pillow in her arms, cozy and secure. I realized that for her, the clinging she does to her pillow is a kind of replica of the kind of snuggles she wants from me.

“Mommies are better for clinging than pillows, I guess,” I told her. She answered, “yeah and they smell better than pillows, too.” This is not surprising, especially since her cling-pillow is one which doesn’t have a pillow case to keep it fresh!

I laid there, and held her as she fell asleep. In the dim light coming from the hallway, I could see her sweet features up close. Her eyes, closed, I could see her black eye lashes resting on her soft pink cheeks. I could see the tenderness of her clinging to her pillow, and watched as she slipped deeper into sleep. Her grip on the pillow relaxed– she was clearly getting some good rest.

How much longer will I be able to hold her and watch her fall asleep, content and safe in my arms? I am a little sad that I don’t still do this with Carla, her older sister. I think I still would snuggle Carla to sleep if only a) she didn’t have a loft bed or b) if she didn’t wet the bed. Carla is a kid who seems to want extra physical affection. She still loves to sit on my lap and get lots of hugs, and piggy back rides. I make a point of giving her the opportunity for physical closeness, because I know that eventually she’ll want more distance as she becomes more of a tween.

The tenderness of holding your child as she falls asleep is wonderful. I adore both of my girls tremendously, and I swell with pride at their many acheivements. It’s no wonder that the simple joy of watching them sleep still fills me with happiness.

At least, not for much longer!

I am so delighted because our CSA begins on Monday. Wahoo! Yay!!!

For the uninitiated, CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture– but what it really amounts to is a kind of food buying club that gives the buyer an opportunity to get the freshest, local organic produce delivered to a nearby pickup location each week. My family paid $750 in advance, early in the season, directly to a group of farmers. In exchange, each week we get a large selection of yummy fresh veggies!

So on Monday, I’ll be picking up my asparagus, radishes, rhubarb, wildfire lettuce mix, spinach, arugala, white mushrooms and scallions. All this fresh stuff is so much tastier than the winter fare I’ve been getting; spring has truly sprung now that CSA time has begun.

It fits right in with my new resolution to cool my love affair with sugary treats and fan the flames of love of all things green and fresh. I’m also so happy to be doing something a little greener in the sense of using resources carefully. Our family is supporting the small organic farms that participate in this CSA program– rather than spending our money on veggies that are shipped from California or other far flung places. Such a win-win situation! The environment! Our food! The farmers! Yay!

I just had my birthday recently; now I’m 36 years old. It isn’t one of those big milestone years like 30 or 40, and certainly not worthy of the huge and feisty debauchery that marks one’s twenty-first year. No, it’s just a quiet little nudge toward forty. And I took my quiet little birthday and spent it having my cat’s tail examined at the vet, and then running to see my kids in a talent show (they were awesome!) and then out to lunch and then zoom to work with a small group of kids, some of who are markedly talented at whining. I followed up my evening by having soup for dinner at my inlaws. I felt like collapsing into a heap, and I wanted to simply slip into a deep sleepy oblivion on the couch. Plus my feet hurt, which made me feel OLD.

Now that I am 36 years old, I’ve decided it’s time to really think hard about whether I want to end up wearing a tent for clothing or whether I want to do something now to prevent such a fate.

So as of this morning, I’m on a sugar strike. Which means I’m not eating sweets, except in extremely small amounts and in a furtive and sneaky way. Also: this coming Sunday I’m attending a birthday brunch and I’ll allow myself ONE piece of cake. I also decided that when served things like delicious homemade lasagna, I will be content with ONE piece rather than three; and I’ll have a big heaping salad rather than a token dash of greens.

Another way I’m cutting back on my intake of potentially fattening substances is to eat less of the tasty but high calorie foods I’m used to consuming. Two pancakes, not eight, and with a sprinkle of cinnamon sugar, not a huge pile of syrup. And a very modest smidgen of butter, not two generous pats.

To make up for these smaller portions, I need something yummy and quick. I discovered just the right thing, in my freezer! Yes, frozen peas! They are yummy straight from the freezer. Yup, I eat them FROZEN. They are sweet, cool, refreshing. They boast fiber and protein, and are low calorie.

WEIRD, but hey, if it works? Why not? I am also a big fan of edamame, those green soy beans. They make a tasty snack, but I don’t like them frozen, I like them hot, and with sea salt.

Does anyone else out there have a WEiRD but somehow yummy or satisfying diet food?

I can’t remember a more active, productive, and social weekend than this past one.

I am so tired, and it’s such a Monday.

It was a good weekend, though, and I still can’t understand where I got so much energy?! Saturday morning was a flurry of house cleaning to ready the house for an appraisal, while I shooed the kids outside to play with three neighbor kids. Somehow we managed to at least make the house seem more like average people live here, instead of say, crack addicted squatters. And, how it was possible for me to go out on Saturday night, get a tad lit, and come home at 3 AM… and then rise and shine at 8 AM the next morning, when I brewed some coffee, made pancakes from scratch for my family plus my friend and her daughter who’d slept over to babysit while I was out (thanks!!!!)… and the pancakes were GOOD! They had a choice of plain, apple, banana, walnut, and chocolate chip, or some combo therein.

Then after my friend and her daughter went home, I raced to the food store, did a quick grocery shopping just in time to get home for me to karmic-ly repay for the babysitting, as Annie’s friend Maggie came over for a 6 hour playdate. And it was hot out. We had fun with water play, I can tell you that for sure.

Plus, somehow, before the weekend was out I managed to clean out all the cat boxes, do about 5 loads of laundry and thoroughly clean the guinea pigs cage.

PLUS, I even managed to squeeze in a phonecall to my mom. PHEW!
I am exhausted just thinking about it. I need another weekend to relax, now, please?

We’ve decided Enough is Enough!

We’re moving to a small farming community in a rural area. Our new community is cooperatively raising chickens and ostriches for meat. We’ll be helping to grow an all-organic garden for the family’s consumption. I’ll be home schooling the kids, but mainly they’ll be schooling themselves along with the other children who live on the communal property. There are about 5 families already doing this who have kids close in age to Carla and Annie.

Reading books and doing hands-on projects around the farm will be their education. We’ve simply had it with the complexities of life in the city, and dealing with education in a school environment. We’re tired of the daily grind, running around, with meetings at work and school.

Done! We are done with all, and we look forward to our future life of simple, hard work.

Tonight I threw together some steamed chicken dumplings, using left over chicken breast, some fresh garlic and ginger, and won-ton wrappers. The trick is to beat an eggs, add some soy sauce, and then add whatever you want to try out. Tonight I threw in some diced portabello mushrooms and green cabbage. If you don’t have an Asian market near you, you may have a hard time finding won-ton wrappers. We are lucky to have a really big Asian supermarket not that far from us, and we bought some wrappers and can keep them in the freezer. Annie really liked the dumplings, though Carla thought them too spicy. Perhaps too much garlic and/or ginger for her tastes. I also made scallop dumplings, using some sea scallops that I’d had in the freezer. I was delighted to find that they were still quite good. The garlic and the ginger really cut any fishiness from the dumplings. Too bad Drob doesn’t like scallops. Alas, Cammy and I had to eat them all ourselves. Sigh.

The other goofy thing that happened this weekend was that we had this Cat Lady visit us to see our house, and meet our cats, to see if the cat she’s supposedly fostering (ie, trying to find a home for) would be well served to live here. Hah, a no-brainer right? A nice family, pet friendly, everyone is nice. We met this cat– Mini– at Cat Lady’s house, and she’s super sweet. We thought, great, that’ll be it for us. Four cats. I know, I’m nuts, right? But we kind of all fell in love with Mini. I thought for sure we’d have adopted her by now.

But no. Cat Lady called me back yesterday and said she’d become too emotionally attached to Mini to give her to us, as yet. She might be able to do so, but she isn’t sure. Okaaaay. So meanwhile my dear children have cleaned their rooms, made cat presents, concocted various schemes for helping Mini get acclimated, etc. They were disappointed to hear we’d been, essentially, turned down by Cat Lady.

What kind of cat rescuer turns down an adoptive family?? I ask you.

Memo to myself: Do not answer the cat personals anymore. They are not really written by cats, but by nutty Cat Ladies who will probably screw with you.

Just before the holidays, I felt impelled to think about making all the presents for people. Here’s how it actually played out.

Handmade Holiday Gifts:

- Home-made Biscotti — I made chocolate almond with orange zest biscotti, and drizzled them with chocolate. Then I put together little plates of these cookies and gave a plate to my mom, one to my in-laws, and one to my grandmother in law.

- Pictures in frames / books — Not exactly homemade, but personal at least. I gave some photos of the kiddos to all of the above.

- Pumpkin Butter – I gave a jar of my homemade pumpkin butter to my mother in law.

- A handmade knit hat – It wasn’t knit by me, but it was really nice. Gave to my mom.

Re-gifted… I gave a crystal water pitcher to my mom. I think it will go better in her china cabinet than mine.

I did not write my children’s book to give to my kids (should really get around to that. Maybe for next year?!)

I did not sew anything this year. (Too bad, I love sewing!)

I did make a really nice big dinner on Christmas — that was fun and tasty too.

It was a good year for handmade stuff, in general. I will try to do more throughout the year, in hopes that next year I can do Handmade Holidays again.

Baby steps, right?

So, you know how Christmas is NOT supposed to be all about getting things? Well, it’s not. At least I don’t feel that it is for me and my family. My kids certainly do love getting gifts and they might like that just a tad more than anything else. Meanwhile, since I am not religious, at all, it’s not really about God or Christ, either. I also celebrate Hanukkah with my family, though we aren’t Jewish (though some relatives on my husband’s side of the family are actually Jewish.) I do light the candles on the menorah and think about miracles of oil lasting, but I don’t really connect with that on any kind of LITERAL level.

So one may find it at first a little odd, if they were to peek in our window (but not in a creepy way, thanks) to see what traditions we have around here. I like to make HAM for Christmas. Christmas and Hanukkah overlap, often enough, so there are times when we have a nice big HAM on the same table as a MENORAH. Is this sacrilegious? Ham is made from the noble creature, the pig. Pork is a big NO-NO of course, never being kosher no matter how much one may pray over it. Our Christmas tree was itty bitty, and some of my houseplants were about equally adorned.

We do hang stockings by the fire with care. And I love singing Christmas carols – and even am guilty of going to Pandora.com and playing Christmas music for hours on end.

Not everyone likes this sort of thing, this casual adaptation of religious holidays. I know the cynical folks out there are likely to scoff at us, thinking we are wrong to celebrate holidays when we are not religious.

But my point is that there are a series of traditions we follow. They don’t exactly go together, this mixed bag of delights. Lighting the menorah and eating ham, or singing Christmas carols but also reciting a prayer in Hebrew — a language I don’t speak at all other than to know this ONE prayer for lighting of candles on Hanukkah.

And what is the purpose of celebrating a holiday that is associated with a religion that you don’t even participate in??

The purpose is simple. It’s family. It’s being home with people you love. It’s taking time and effort to make traditions that are fun and real and loving. This isn’t about some external commandment to be a certain way. This is about finding the love and the home and the family.

So I had a great Hannumas/Chrismakkah, and it wasn’t all about What I Got for Christmas.

However, that said, I got some GREAT STUFF. I asked for– and received– a Rice Cooker and a cotton duvet for my silk comforter. Tonight I made my first rice dinner in the rice cooker, and it was really easy, and fun. My thoughtful inlaws also got me a big cookbook to go with the rice cooker– it has a zillion recipes of things that you can make in a rice cooker. (Rice! Brown Rice! Basmati Rice! Sticky Rice! Fluffy Rice!) Seriously, though, you can also use this appliance for steaming veggies, and you can make all-in-one meals by dicing other ingredients and mixing with the rice.

Tonight I used leftovers plus rice to make a really savory dish. I diced leftover Christmas ham (naturally raised, no anti-biotics, humanely treated, local pig: what we around here call “Happy Pig”) and artichoke heart, tossed in some sweet corn that I’d put up in the freezer this summer, and about a half cup of diced leek. Together with basmati rice, this was a really nice little dinner. Carla and Annie even said it was good!

The duvet is nice, too. I took a nap under it today, while my children systematically destroyed the house played nicely together downstairs.

I am so much enjoying my time off. The kids are, too. We went to NYC yesterday and had a really fun time. We did a bunch of walking, and also managed to spend some time in taxi cabs as well. It was a beautiful day, and we successfully navigated the city, taking in Rockerfeller Center and its enormous Christmas tree, as well as visiting the American Girl store. My kids got to each bring home a little pet from there– a cat named Licorice and a dog named Sugar.

Licorice was especially exciting because Annie has been wanting Licorice for over a year. We went to the store, figuring we could simply get a Licorice cat. When we asked one associate about it, we were told that Licorice had been discontinued– in fact pulled from the shelves to make way for their new inventory. Oh No! But then one other person working there suddenly said, “oh wait! Looks like there’s JUST ONE LEFT!”

So there it was… THE LAST LICORICE CAT LEFT IN THE ENTIRE WORLD, or so says Annie. She was so sad for the rest of the world, that nobody else would ever be able to get a Licorice, but she was pretty delighted to have snatched up the VERY LAST ONE, anyway.

After we successfully rescued Licorice and Sugar from the store, we hopped into a cab on Madison Avenue –

[Me: Mom, if we walk over to Madison, we can get a cab from there, it goes in the right direction. Mom: Oh, OK. (starts walking in wrong direction) Me: Mom, Madison Avenue is THIS way. (Thinking: Who's the one who isn't WITH IT?)]

– and off we went to Central Park West, where we snacked on hotdogs from a vendor (ew…. I know…. but it is kind of a NYC tradition… yuck) and a variety of kid-friendly foods that I’d packed. After that, we braved the ultra crowded American Museum of Natural History. I think we closely examined every single mineral, precious stone, and gem in the large and incredible gem room. We marveled at the dinosaur bones. We oogled the meteorites. We dashed through quickly but admiringly observing the many different skulls of mankind. It really brings to the forefront the fact that humans are just one species of many– Evolution is real! Wow, neato!

Then via taxi we headed back to Penn station, and a train ride back home. A very full day. I really enjoyed that last taxi ride, because we went down Broadway and I got to see Times Square.

I like NYC. It’s all crowded and bustle-y. But I am glad to be home. I spent today in my pajamas. Yay for winter breaks.

I hope all of you out there got what you wanted for Christmas– and I wish you all a very Happy New Year.

I am back home. I just met my word goal for the day, 34k. It is starting to look like I might actually write 50k before the end of the month, as long as I can keep up the pace.

It’s after one in the morning and I think I will go to bed. Tomorrow we are having a large family get together with Drob’s extended family, and I don’t want to be too tired to enjoy it. The more annoying elements of his family are not going to be there, or so I’m told, and so I am really looking forward to the event.

My mom sort of gave me a non-apology apology for having criticized the kids making a ‘mess’. It was not really all that messy, but mom’s used to having everything spotless. She made comments to me about the mess, which annoyed me, but I blew her off saying, “News flash! Children create mess using small toys! Film at eleven!” I chuckled and told her not to worry, that we would clean up before we left.

We brought home the remains of the turkey, and I cut away the meat from the carcass, then placed the bones in the crock pot to make soup. Soup and writing and writing and soup. The house is already starting to smell delicious.

Tomorrow, we feast again! No wonder we are a culture with lots of extra pounds around our waists… our culture is food obsessed. Or, at least I know that I am. Maybe I can work this into my novel somehow.

I know I’m deep into thinking about these characters because for the last couple of nights, they visited me in my dreams. Hmmm… dreams are a fun thing to put in a novel.

There is a lot of thinking going on in my novel, but not much action. Hmmmm…. action is something that is fun to put into a novel.

Anyway, I’m at 34,178 words if you want to know and now I am off to bed. Goodnight!

The novel is coming along. I am still at my mom’s house, but things are somewhat less tense, and I’ve been doing a lot of writing and a lot of cooking.

I had a great time cooking. My favorite thing so far was pumpkin soup cooked and served in its own shell. Thanks, Barbara Kingsolver, for the wonderful recipe. Here’s a picture, and then I’m going back to the novel.