Baby Goats on a Hill... and Jonathan Richman

Today was a full day. The man and the boy had breakfast in the Western Addition (that place I continue to refuse to call "NoPa") while I worked. Later we drove over Grand View and saw the amazing collection of cute woolly grazing goats hanging happily on the side of the hill. We had Bursa kabob with friends Sandi and Mark, and then headed over to the Miraloma Clubhouse for a short Jonathan Richman set and a whole bunch of jazz that impressed the hell out of Des. I think the kid is going to be a trombone player-- he was hypnotized. I tripped over my tongue talking to Jonathan and his pretty date. I wish I weren't so shy but those are the breaks. We had a great day and Staycation has officially begun. Now: grilled cheese and spicy salsa sandwiches with a nice glass of pinot noir. Tomorrow, Eat Real in Oakland with Megan and Brian. The sun is out and life is good.

Happening at the Zoo

On Friday night we went to a party benefiting a midwives’ education group and celebrating Abby Epstein and Ricki Lake’s new book about choices in childbirth. It was fun to see our homebirth education teacher, a whole mess of pregnant ladies, some interesting art, some brand-new babes, and our beautiful midwives. we snapped two pictures of the baby with midwife Nancy and wish we could also have gotten some with midwife Michelle, but the room was way too crowded by the time we saw her.




We took il Ducino to the zoo for the first time yesterday. We had a great time, and watching him crawl around and take in all the sights around him had me, for the thousandth time this week, all boggled and and tearing up about the millions of ways that this little boy I see has overtaken our little baby, seemingly over night.






Today it's cleaning and preparing for the week ahead. No news, goood news. It's been too long since we've had a productive Sunday at home.

My Baby Blue is a New Star in the Sky

Saturday we celebrated the anniversary of my labor at the hospital we planned so fervently to avoid. We bought an ice cream and a coffee at the UCSF cafeteria, then took the lift up to 15 Moffit and walked the long hall down to Labor and Delivery.

Easily walk a long hall—carrying 20+ pounds of another person!— that you could barely cope with in a wheelchair or with a walker when you last encountered it and you are bound to feel some gratitude.

In L&D a very kind nurse let us into the birthing suite where we first met our boy. The city view was glorious, bathed in the same 5pm sunlight that it was last year when I was admitted. The grownups toasted eachother, feeling happy and grateful, and then went home to eat some chicken katsu loco moco and listen to Air.

Sorry I'm Broken

The man's birthday celebrations continue. Tonight should be the last one, dinner with yet more family, hosted - how can this be? - at our house. I'll make a sole picata, spinach salad, and cream cheese frosting for some choco cupcakes that after a long story are chillin' in our freezer, and call it a day. Pictured below is the delicious (!) if blurry cake I made for him on the actual day. I was going for a tropical theme since we're kind of dorks for tropical. It was a basic yellow cake with a layer of kiwis in the middle, topped by a key lime icing and strawberries, mango and macademia nuts. So totally delicious. The limes made an otherwise supersweet cake into something really nice and special. I mean, sure, my teeth still wanted to fall out of my head when I ate it, but there was a tanginess there too, which made me think of Vitamin C and someday getting back to being healthy.


So perhaps I've been eating too much sugar. (Cake of some form every day since Easter. What?) My weird hand thing has broken out into a weird face thing too. Again, ironic and hilarious, considering I work with my hands and make people's skin pretty for a living. Anyway, that weird 100 degree weather last week that was followed by days of brutal and irritating wind brought with it some serious allergens that my sugar-loving, sleep-deprived immune system was totally unprepared for. And so this week, I feel like this:


We spent last weekend having family birthday dinners and then celebrating with our friends at Lucky Juju Pinball in Alameda. What a fun place! It's all volunteer-run and so friendly and welcoming. A $10 cover ($5 for kids under 12) buys you "all you can play" games on some classic vintage pinball machines, including

4 Million BC

Monaco

and that old fave,

Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy


and a buck buys you all-you-can-eat popcorn. Jukeboxes are free to play, too.

When we walked in, my favorite room (painted minty blue with gigantic 1950's Space Hotties murals) the jukebox was playing Patti Smith and the baby and I admired a poster of 1930's Alameda amusement park called Neptune Beach.


People who know me at all know that places like Neptune Beach (the fact that they once existed and are gone now) make me lose all control. Seriously, every time I see this:



and think that it used to be a short jog from my house, and that people once actually left their houses and TVs to swim and bathe together, I want to cry. Okay, I am tearing up a little just thinking about it now.

So now you know: I am a dork. And this one is the dork of the future





This weekend, it's rainy and cold. A friend's birthday brunch is toaday. (Waffles and crepes and Nutella and friends and champagne! It would sound heavenly if this weird allergy weren't making my face look like I somehow magincally skipped two decades and smoked two packs a day my whole life. I want to hide in my house and do crosswords.) I have organizing to do in my new studio space and the dinner tonight with the 'rents. After that, I hope for many long moments drinking hot beverages with my bum surgically attached to the sofa. It's been a busy couple of months and I miss that sofa so.

Hot Summer Nights in Spring

Last weekend we began celebrating the husband's birthday by spending a couple of lovely nights "staycationing" in our own back yard. Our view looked like this:


and we spent the days reading the paper, lounging in the park, riding the cable cars and eating delicious Italian food in North Beach. Our good friends came by the hotel to look after il Ducino while we went out for much-needed Thai massages. Mine was good. Even the part when I told the therapist that it was too much and she had to stop. "I can't take it!" I whimpered, and she whispered, "You can take it," elbow firmly implanted just south of my cringing left scapula. The weekend was fun, though I won't lie: a real vacation would be so, so nice right now.

So on Tuesday, we got our Polynesian Pop on and attended a fun and spirited (har har) class on the History of the Tiki Bar and the Rise of the Exotic Cocktail at Bourbon and Branch. We tasted a lot of very nice rums, mixed some exceedingly good drinks, met some nice folks and generally had a great time. It made me miss being in Hawaii, and it made me really miss the imagined 1950's Hawaii that never existed, but you'd be surprised at how much that mood is improved with a little good hooch and fresh juice.




The next day was Earth Day, a sober one back in Recession-era 2009. After buying the makings of a nice birthday dinner (and a yummy cake with lime icing, fresh mangoes and macademia nuts) for my honey, I saw this guy handing out resumes outside the Ferry Building.


It was a genius schtick, and amazing to me how no one would even take the man's CV.

Things are so tough right now and I know we are incredibly lucky. Even with global warming and 90 degree weather in fair, foggy San Francisco. So I count my many blessings and I turn the extra lights out and wear my sweater rather than using the heater, now that it's cold again.

Spring Sprang Sprung

This past weekend my little family poured our everything into our traditional holiday ritual.

It is our four-seasons ritual. We do it in the summer when it's hot. We do it in the winter when it's not. And always in the springtime, always in the fall. In woolen undies, pink pajamas, and with nothing on at all. The ritual happens in all weather and for all state- and church-mandated occasions.

We do it, our special holiday thing, though we can't always remember why. It's the thing that defines our sacred family moments. It it our shared heritage, and as the youngest generation it is our birthright.


We spent this holiday weekend as we spent all holiday weekends: in a rented car, schlepping from parent's house to parent's house to parents' house. It's just what we do.


The upside, of course, was three separate Easter baskets for il Ducino. And more sugar than his two grown-up servants have been able to sleep off in three days. I'm enjoying the fact that the kiddo as yet has no idea what candy is. Or what presents are, for that matter. Next year, perhaps we'll have no such luck. This year it was all about the grandparents' cuddles, the sunshine just a little way's out of our socked-in town, and listening to the radio.

And the car. And baskets full of things. And the car.




Life -it's true!- is sweet.

Sweet sweet sweet

While I search for healthy cake ideas for a child who isn't strictly speaking allowed to eat cake just yet, I have come across these delightful candy platters from www.bonbonsconnexion.com . All the old sugary favorites of my young childhood: the coke bottles, the Swedish fish, the gummi bears and their gummi cousins, the worms... I would save my allowance and buy them by the scads at Buttercup, we sticky-fingered kids digging into our sweet bags of booty under the bridge in Creek Park.




(This was before I discovered Mrs. Grossman's stickers and the Sweet Valley High novels that forever burned into my brain thoughts on wearing a watch, when the party starts, and what constitutes a "perfect" sized figure - hint: it's a lot smaller than mine, and significantly larger than the zeros I see in every Gap and Banana Republic in the universe).

Sweet, sweet party platters. Will they go with my tamales and lemonade party theme?

Deflated

zzz 059, originally uploaded by fairbanks-girlbanks.

My child is teething. He nurses constantly. Lately I feel I am beginning to look like this lady.

At least I'm not this dumb woman.

Always Room for

Sunday night I planned to make a blueberry crumble but the weather turned out to be much better for a gelatine. So I made this - a firm and delicious gel with tart grapefruit juice, blueberries and mandarins. So good! We've been eating the jiggly blocks for days.

And now, so as not to totally gross you out if you don't swing the gelatinous way:blossoms outside Forest Hill station. A nice thing to see on my short walk from work.
Just before some refreshing jello.

"Run Fast When You Have No where to Go"

Our Sunday walk to the beach (fortified with hot pastrami sandwiches!) was out of this world. A lovely day and so nice to start with coffee in West Portal at our favorite coffee shop. The baby D loves flirting with the girls behind the counter and I don't blame him- the place attracts a pretty barista.


We read the paper and chatted with the locals before heading outside to walk through the arts and crafts fair on the street. It was full of fun stuff to look at and nothing I was overly inspired to buy. This is my favorite way to shop - the way that involves looking but not buying anything.

The one booth that would have been tempting to buy from was a nice collection of wooden children's toys. Fortunately for me, my dad makes more gorgeous handmade wooden toys than any I have seen anywhere else. And thankfully I know they are completely safe and non-toxic, because just look at this diaper-bummed baby going to town on it with his sore gums and new teeth.





Later, the walk down our long street toward the beach. This one is always a mind-bender: you'd think that real estate so close to the beach would attract all kinds of fancy schmancy businesses. As it is I've had to completely give up the search for even a decent cup of coffee. The architecture is overwhelmingly blah and the shops (what few there are) are old and sad and have seen better days.



So the economy is tanking. But the beach and its weird flotsam are constant.


Living so near the beach always makes me feel lucky. To live on the edge of the earth! And the train goes right to it! It's such a neat thing, and something I'm glad to be able to share with the baby, even if he'll never touch a foot down on the sand, for all my fear of gargantuan jelly fish.

Happy Sunday

Sitting in the window and watching the leaves of the zucchini plant droop. The plans need watering and bigger pots. Today's agenda includes replanting, finding everyone a nice permanent place in the sun, and hanging a laundry line in the newly minted-turquoise bathroom.

(Please don't look too closely: the trim hasn't been done yet.)

The boys are napping (again today) and I'm planning dinner of fresh trout with home-grown cilantro and garlic butter. Kale, chard and whatever other veggies we have left over from the farmer's market, plus a yummy baked dessert with blueberries and cream. I will post pictures if it turns out looking good.

Less than a year later. . .

So this is it, back to writing a blog. A quiet life with no secrets to share and no readers to share with. My two guys are asleep in the bedroom after a long night at a wedding and with a babysitter, respectively. I'm the one who needs the nap, but I also need the peace of having a couple of minutes to myself to get this ball rolling again.

My current occupations are always work and motherhood. Being a mom is fun. The trips on the bus when everyone talks to us and we make pleasant conversation, story time at the library, and me pre-chewing little bits of carne asada at the taqueria, feeding my baby bird on the sly in a grimy high chair. Being his mom is surprisingly easy, except in the rare case that I become annoyed with all-night nursing (hooray! another growth spurt!) or I realize, as I did last night, that I don't get out much and I can no longer drink like a pro. (I awoke this morning with a tell-tale dry mouth and faint headache - the end result of the first buzz I've had since 2007. )

I work with my hands and my hands are telling me in no uncertain terms that I shouldn't be using them: between diapers and working, I wash the poor things at least 20 times a day. So while I've never been a person with allergies suddenly eczema dogs my fingers and creates an itchy little stigmata-like patch in each palm. A baby-bitten right pointer finger; a bruised left pointer from the diaper clip's tooth; a sliced right thumb from dish-washing last week; a frayed greyish band-aid wrapped around my right f-u finger, run afoul of a splintery patio seat at yesterday's wedding in a small seaside town. Wedding rings shining on the wrong hand because the right hand, my left one, is too itchy to wear them.

So this is me today: a happy heart, a mild hangover, and typing with two annoyed fingers. It's sunny in the 'hood, and later we'll walk the thirty blocks to drop off the rent check and then head to the beach. I have coffee and the plants are dancing in the breeze by the window. I hear the squeals of a happy man and a toothy baby from the next room. It's time to go in and play.