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.