cover art

I'm collecting potential album covers for Owen's future career as a
genre-bending recording artist.

First, he'll start with a teen-heartthrob album, just to get on the map.

But his sophomore album, an alt-country/bluegrass EP with loads of guest artists will prove he's no one-trick-pony.

The post-punk album will be next, a bit of anti-establishment, protest rage.

Then he'll bust out the long-awaited hip-hop album.

And, of course, a collection of holiday songs. One the whole family can enjoy.

a real resolution

My tendency toward self effacing humility and sarcasm, while acceptable in social situations, is entirely unproductive in my professional life. In 2012 I will cut this shit out.

i love a man in the kitchen

we know how to party

Thursday: 8 hours in the car.
Friday: 8 hours of crazy committee meeting prep, delivery & debrief.
Sat: 8 hours in the car.

Today: Post Successful Committee Meeting Hangover. (& not from celebrating-- unless you call a Wendy's hamburger from the drive-thru in central Illinois a celebration).  I opened my computer to make a few edits and send a few follow-up emails and my eyes crossed immediately.

Bright side: They said I'm on track to defend in the spring!
#grad2012 #longtimecomin'  #PhD

Owen was so excited for me that he did a little victory dance.

This trip back to STL was my first time away from Owen.  We both fared very well, thank you very much, although Owen seems to have grown 4 inches and put on 5 pounds while I was gone. He is enormous.

we're still here, it's just that here has moved.

In the interest of (practically abandoned) blog-as-(poorly updated)-journal, I suppose I should mention that  we're in Ann Arbor for the year.  Adam is spending the year doing this.  I'm spending the year doing this, this, and this. I'm also trying to not be too distracted by his thing, which is way more fun and involves interacting with fantastically interesting people, whereas my work involves dropping the kiddo at daycare so I can stare at my blank screen in peace.  Actually, I wish it were blank. [No, no, I don't.  Dear Lightning Bolt: I kid!] But it would be more serene that my two options right now: a) a screen full of three colors of Track Changes; b) screen full of source code and error messages (Serious Nerdery).

My other big plan for the this fall is to sample every cider donut in a 50 mile radius.
Go Big or Go Home.

vacay

NINE! Count 'em, 9 months.

I don't know how we managed to get this far along, but here we are.

Trite things people say, that are completely, 100% true:

• It Gets Better
• Babies are Awesome
• Don't be too excited for your kid to start being mobile
• My baby is brilliant

do not drink this.

The first thing that you need to know is that I do not like pink drinks.

When Adam & I got together he was spending the summer working as a bartender. I batted my eyelashes at him and he sent over a Stoli Razberry & soda, which I promptly returned, thank you very much, and asked him for a whiskey instead.

I guess that drink wasn't actually pink, but it tasted pink. I like my liquor brown.

One advantage to liking whiskey is that it does not require fancy drinks-mixs-ings skills. I don't even really like to mess with any ice, unless I'm trying to pace myself.

But I'm not drinking whiskey right now, as I am still breastfeeding. I feel comfortable with a little nightcap of beer or wine, but I feel a little shifty hitting the hard stuff too much when the beast could wake at any moment. The only thing is that the weather around here has been nearly PERFECT for three days straight. PERFECT! In the STL! It is positively unheard of. It is regal. It is epic. It calls for light refreshing cocktails. Plain old beer & wine will not cut it in weather such as this.

Meanwhile, these people have all been twittering it up about this new rhubarb flavored soda & and the ways in which they are mixing magic with it & various form of the hooch.

And so I started thinking...

I like rhubarb.

I like strawberries.

I like refreshing beverages.

And so it came to pass:

Ingredients:

-Vodka

-DRY Rhubarb soda

-Strawberries

-this really licorice-y basil from my garden

Slice strawberries and place in shaker with the basil. Keep one of each for garnish.

Muddle a bit.

( OK, so it turns out that it is kind of hard to muddle strawberries that aren't overly ripe. Hack at them as best you can)

Pour in some vodka. (make sure the lid is on tight or it will leak * ehem*)

Shake. (make sure you let it all drain back down before you pop the lid back off, or it will leak all over your counter *ehem*)

Strain into glass.

(So.... I don't know if it is my shaker or if the strawberry chunks were in the way or what, but the liquid wouldn't come out. So I had to pop the lid and pour it into a big strainer)

Add Rhubarb soda & garnish.

And there you have it.

And what you have, sir, is pink.

And not very good.

Not at all like the strawberry rhubarb pie that I'd imagined.

Some things that might perk it up:

-sugar. Eventhough I hate sweet drinks, I think this one could use a little more.

-limes. Because what cocktail doesn't benefit from limes?

-or, ideally, both. As well as some other kind of fancy liquor that I don't know about.

I never claimed to be a bartender.

first father's day (belated!)

Well done, sir.

Pops

Happy Father's Day Dad!
Happy Birthday Grandpa!

I coulda been a contender

I started this weeks ago and saved the draft because I thought it needed a third section, and SURELY I should have time to finish this soon. Riiiight. So, anyway, here's an incomplete post.

I. Suddenly everything around me is all brackets and basketball and people running long distances for pleasure. And it got me thinking about competitive sports. There are competitions for some crazy things out there (eating hot dogs, sweeping large rocks across ice). Maybe I could be a winner if someone would invent a sport involving the things at which I can be competitive. Such as:

1. eating jelly beans
2. piling paper
3. distributing bobby pins across a household

II. On the street today:

1. A man with the World's Hairiest Shoulders walking around in a tank top. And this wasn't just an "Oh, I got caught off guard by this hot weather, I think I'll walk home in my undershirt" kind of tank top. No, this was a full on "My shoulders need to breathe, I think I'll wear this sleeveless shirt" kind of a tank top. Bravo to him, I guess?
2. A different man: tall, thin, pocket protector, and a plastic bag full of tall boys of Busch. Spicing up the chess match, yo.

Clearly I need to get out more.

the calculus of sleep

I think when you get right down to it, I get to blame Isaac Newton. In order to develop his various laws for motion and gravity he had to ramp up conventional mathematics into what we now know as calculus. I haven't taken calculus since high school and I wasn't particularly great at it then. Little did I know when I got pregnant that I should have started a crash course to bone up on my skills.

I knew vaguely that once I had a kid my relationship with sleep would be altered. But I imagined it to be a basic arithmetic problem:

(the amount of sleep that I would like to be getting) - (# of times I get up to nurse the baby)* (the time spent on the big rubber ball bouncing him back to sleep) = the new amount of sleep that I would be getting.

And for the baby:

(the length of each nap) + (the amount of time he sleeps at night) = the amount of sleep he gets in a 24 hour period.

Simple, right?

WRONG. So so wrong.

Instead of basic addition and subtraction my life now revolves around complex logarithmic functions where to calculate the amount of sleep I am getting you have to find the area under that tail of the curve that is approaching some infinitesimally small number. And that's the simple math.

When it comes to the baby? I don't even know if there is a name for this. There is probably some brilliant Eastern European mathematician holed up in a garret somewhere crumpling balls of paper and pulling out his hair trying to flesh out the laws & theories behind the math it takes to deal with the sleep habits of a 5 month old.

and for my next trick, I will put away the laundry on the same day that I washed it

A few months ago, when you all were trying to assure me that there would come a day when I'd put the baby to sleep, eat dinner with two hands while reading a book, and settle in for some work before bed.... I kind of wanted to hit you.
But, crazy enough, here I sit. Having done exactly that. And I went to the gym too!
Thanks for keeping the faith, even when I was totally sure that my teeth were going to rot out of my head bc I'd never have the time or energy to brush them again.

this & that

So, Owen started daycare a few weeks ago and it turns out that there is nothing like paying good money for the privilege of going to work to really light a fire under me. I haven't been this productive since... well, since I got knocked up, probably.

I have all the requisite ambivalent feelings about handing my infant over to strangers, but all-in-all having the defined schedule of Work Time and Baby Time is going a long way toward assuaging my guilt about not spending enough time devoted to either of those endeavors.

Work is now done during Work Time, and I can (for the most part) hang it up when I go home, and on days that I'm at home with the baby I don't feel so much like I ought to also be spending some time writing my next dissertation chapter while the baby naps*.

It is revolutionary, I tell you. I haven't had this little guilt about not working when I'm not working in years. I really recommend having a baby to anyone out there who is struggling with priorities.**

Of course, the voices will probably kick into overdrive right as my next deadline rolls around, but for now things are copacetic. It helps that this kid is so social and seems to absolutely adore being at daycare. He does this whole body smile thing when he's super happy, where he balls up his fists right by his face and kind of contorts his body back and forth (hard to explain, but god it's cute) and today when I picked him up I could barely get his coat on because he just couldn't stop being absolutely tickled by the general state of the world.

But, it also turns out that apparently blogging was one of those things I used to do when I was busy pretending to do real work. Thus it falling by the wayside of late. I swear to god yesterday I only procrastinated for maybe a grand total of fifteen minutes all day. That's including non-work related emailing. I was exhausted at the end of the day, but still not nearly as tired as I am after a day home with a baby. Three cheers for full-time stay-at-home-ers. I had to get back to school so I didn't die of exhaustion.

-----

*If you don't have a new baby you're probably thinking, "But, surely you can find some time while he naps. What are you, lazy?" I am now going to ask the person sitting next to you, who does have kids, to flick your earlobes.

But with that said, it is getting easier to cram other things into my day. Just not deep intellectual thoughts. More like brushing my teeth and cleaning cat litter.

**I kid! (kind of.)

sharing fluids

Yes, the act of breastfeeding is emotional and intense. Either in a painful way (at first, when you're breaking in the equipment) or in a sweet 'i am connected to my baby' sort of way as it is now. But really, there is something even more intimate about picking that baby up after he's done nursing, having him snuggle into your shoulder... and then puke it all back up right down your neck.

2011

Ways in which it started right:
-neither Owen nor I seem to have caught the bug that had Adam puking through the entire state of Illinois yesterday.
- our cat didn't destroying anything worse than his usually roll of papertowels while we were gone
-brunch @ Black Bear Bakery- those anarchist make a mean quiche
-naps all around

Elements that contributed to a less than auspicious start:
-anarchists seem to not care about serving cold pancakes.
- large pieces of our house blew off in the crazy storms yesterday & are now laying about our yard.
- after a month of an extremely happy baby we seem to be entering the teething phase. Hold on to your hats.

I don't get misty-eyed about the arrival of a new year and I don't do resolutions, but I will say that 2009 & 2010 were completely insane, and if I am really going to finish my dissertation then 2011 is not going to be a walk in the park either. Despite the sense of impending doom, in 2011 I plan to cuddle my baby as much a possible & read more books & fewer blogs. Ready? Let's do this year.

merry, merry, merry

navigating the Sunday Times

• Cursory glance at big headlines to see if there is something I'd like to read about in more depth
• Modern Love column
• the rest of the Sunday Styles section
• Book Review
• Week in Review
• the rest of the first section/National news
• NYT Magazine (read over the course of the week)

How do you read it?

two months in

I know. It's insane. Take a minute if you need to recover before reading further.

Well, more like 2 months and a week. We are still working on having things happen on time around here. In the two weeks that it has taken me to write this post Owen has been growing & developing in leaps and bounds. He's smiling at us like we invented the world, mimicing our gestures and 'talking' back at us with awesome ebullient gurgles and coos. He is, in short, amazing at everything besides sleeping.

(turn your volume up for full baby gurgle effect)

In that first bleary month there were so many wonderful friends who reached out to say "It will get better!" (thank you all times a million).

And they were right, sort of. It is better, but I don't know if it is easier. I think that "it will get better" is a code that experienced parents use to actually mean "you'll get used to it!" Used to tired, used to crying (mine, as well as his!), used to doing nothing but baby. And you will settle into it. It took a while for me to let go-- let go of expectations-- of dinner making, of diaper washing, or work doing, of anything and to just be present. And that letting go was the turning point for me, I think. That and the day when Owen decided that Adam could put him down to sleep too, it didn't have to always be me. The freedom!!!! I am drunk with it.

Verging on gratuitous amounts of baby cuteness in this post.

Anyway, Owen's not the only one developing mad skillz.

Since my hands are always full with the babe I have learned to do the following with my feet:

-open/close doors

-pick up phone from the ground

-open/close vegetable drawer in the fridge

-turn on bedside lamp

-change the channel on the tv

colors

Yellow

Green

Blue

Pink

White