Turning 40

Of course, I’m not the first person to reach the age of 40 but I am someone who has been spoiled more than most on her birthdays. Thusly, I prefer to not let my birthday pass without recognition--like some other, more grounded souls can--and this milestone of a birthday is hardly an exception. You see, Folks: next week, I enter middle age---or truly what I hope is middle age, or the middle age(s), so as to not give myself such a specific stopping point---and the celebration has got to be big. I calculated that it was too much pressure to put on just one day and decided to spread my birthday out over several---40, to be exact. Starting a couple of days before my actual birthday, Amy Cole Farrell’s Forty Days of Birthday will begin. It will be part mini midlife crisis, part soulful journey. It will be a lot of work to maintain festivities for over a month, but I had a revelation earlier this year: I managed to keep myself alive for 40 years! A grand recognition should be made.

I’m not interested in scheduling the joy out of these 40 days, but I do have some ideas about stuff to do. I’ll still have to do things like raise my child, be a wife, clean house, and research my PhD, but beyond the daily of life, I’ll present myself with exceptional tasks each day. I would love suggestions.

Visit museums

Run

Spend an entire day speaking only German

Bake and decorate a cake

Sit in silence for 30 minutes

See movies

See live music

Drink champagne

Perform a premeditated, random act of kindness

Visit castles

Work in the studio

Dig for potatoes

Throw a dinner party

Teach a class

Crack the spine of Mastering the Art of French Cooking

See theatre

Take a dance lesson

Spend an entire day just playing with my son

Make myself a birthday crown

Fly a kite

The beauty of the best-laid plans is that they are bound to be interrupted by even more delicious prospects. Anything could happen in these 40 days. Sadly, I don’t wake up every morning with the same wonder and presence I hope to have during my Birth-Days. It won’t be without its challenges but maybe I’ll emerge transformed, with 40 priceless gifts.

Photo: Me, on my 35th Birthday, celebrated in 1 day.

Out of The Nest

I’m back.

I did write while I was away but was so overwhelmed with travel, moving house, and children’s birthday parties that nothing made it to my blog. I don’t want you to feel like we’re strangers now and I offer the peace pipe below as a small slice of my past couple of months. Please know that you were missed:

16 August 2012

My experience so far is that moving house is hard when you’re caring for a very small child. In fact this is my experience at this very moment, or up until five minutes ago when I put my small child to bed. Now I’m eating chocolate and trying to untangle my feelings through writing. The other option was drink an entire bottle of wine. I feel I’ve made the mature choice. If I’m to be truly authentic here, I should tell you that if I’m able to complete this post I’ll have the bottle of wine anyway.

My phone just ding-a-linged. A text from my husband who’s working late tonight. Not only is my phone in the bedroom with the small sleeping child, the text from my husband contains a request to do yet another thing before the end of the day.

Just uncorked the wine.

I need to take a photo of Lennon for his daily blog. I knew I needed to do this even before my husband texted, but today has been so joyless, I decided to not engage in the hopeful act of photography, out of sheer protest. Several camera perfect moments floated in front of me today and while I did feel a little guilty for not capturing them, I reminded myself that we’re in wartime: allen wrench calluses on my hands and piles of card board--I simply can’t be bothered. But now, my husband has taken time out of his twelve-hour workday to remind me to take a photo. It’s time for me to enter the calm eye of the storm, get a hold of my damn self, and snap a bloody picture already. I stumble over a poorly placed box full of heavy books to get to the camera and snap a sloppy photo of my sleeping child.

Back to the wine. Pouring myself another glass, in fact. These two glasses will probably mean that I’ll not sleep well enough tonight. They’ll likely ensure that I’ll have an annoyingly foggy headed day tomorrow, frustrated with my sleepiness, the mountain of boxes, and all that God forsaken fiberboard furniture I have to put together.

…………

But listen to this:

“The essence of life is that it’s challenging. Sometimes it is sweet, and sometimes it is bitter. Sometimes your body tenses, and sometimes it relaxes or opens. Sometimes you have a headache, and sometimes you feel 100 percent healthy. From an awakened perspective, trying to tie up all the loose ends and finally get it together is death, because it involves rejecting a lot of your basic experience. There is something aggressive about that approach to life, trying to flatten out all the rough spots and imperfections into a nice smooth ride. To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest.” –Pema Chodron

…………

So much of the pain I’ve felt this week has come about because of rough spots and imperfections, annihilation of routines, disruption of peace. I almost started crying in IKEA Tuesday over counter tops. I’d like to be someone who views change and challenge with a spirit of adventure. In those moments, I want to think: “what can I learn here?” Currently, fuzzy brained panic is prevailing. There’s also the concern of being too fastidious in my pursuit of laidback-ness, where ‘allowing for messy’ becomes yet another thing with a deadline.

Just finished the chocolate. Sipping the wine.

I can feel myself tense as I hear the noises from the street. Our old apartment was in a Hof and though we had little sunlight, we had near to no noise. Here, I’m very aware that I live in an urban environment. Just had to put Lennon back to sleep. When I come back to my wine, a fly is perched on the edge of my glass.

Chaos. Mess. Drunken, messy chaos: I will try to enjoy you.

No. No try.

I will enjoy {whispered as she jumps from nest}  

Photo source found here.
Information on Pema Chodron found here.

Be Careful What You Wish

In August, my family and I are moving to a new apartment in Berlin. This new place really feels like home—Lennon will have his own room, I will get an office and sewing space, there is a big, beautiful bathtub, an updated kitchen, and the building’s live-in owners—who happen to be friends of ours with a child Lennon’s age—are planning on installing grass and a swing set in the private Hof out back. Our new apartment really answers several requests I have flung out into the universe over the past two years. I feel incredibly lucky to have the stars align in such a way to provide us with the perfect home at the perfect time.

Be careful what you wish.

The night after viewing the new place, falling in love with it, and determining that we could in fact afford it, I tossed and turned in bed, haunted by an aching anxiety. Our current apartment has always been a temporary one. We’ve done a lot of cosmetic fixes to make it livable and a space we’re proud of, but it’s lack of a bathtub—shower only—and it’s single bedroom, made us know that we couldn’t stay here forever with a child. This neighborhood isn’t our ideal, either. Calling it trashy is being kind. We’ve been passively looking for a new place for about a year, so finding the ideal one now didn’t come as a surprise, but the reality of moving into a more long-term home brought to the surface how attached I’d been to ‘temporary,’ at least as far as Berlin is concerned.

Nicholas and I have always talked about how Berlin is the right choice for us now—how ever long now decides to be—with his teaching becoming increasingly more fulfilling, my PhD in progress, the great healthcare in Germany, the benefits here for raising a child, and Berlin’s international schools. Someday, we’ll return to the U.S., but armed with a truly compelling reason to leave Berlin. I have agreed with all these plans and believed them, but when given a brick and mortar version of not-so-temporary Berlin, I realized I’d been in denial. Secretly, in my heart, I saw my family back in the U.S. much sooner than our plans. Because this wasn’t really a conscious, well thought-out vision, the logistics of leaving Berlin were not included. Leaving now, or anytime in the near future, would result in painful sacrifices for us—me not finishing my PhD or being able to stay home to care for our son, for example. Nonetheless, I have been resistant to fully embracing our life here. To be fair, Berlin can be rough: not fully knowing the language, the dreary winters, and the general culture shock of living in a foreign country validate my hesitation to jump right in. But how can you truly embrace and immerse yourself in a city when your heart is secretly living somewhere else?

I probably wasted a lot of time in Berlin giving it the ‘temp’ treatment, but I’m ready to change.

First step includes some housekeeping: I need to finally let go of pictures I’ve been carrying that depict a life I’m not living: images of California, of taking my son to the pumpkin patch in Half Moon Bay, him sitting on Santa’s lap at a big, American department store, us all wearing shorts in January, and most of all, him seeing his grandparents on a weekly basis. As pretty as those pictures are, they’re fiction and a distraction from all the wonderful things that my ACTUAL life is trying to show me. In any scenario, true LIVING happens in the present, with my family, in this place that is currently offering us so much—including a beautiful new apartment to call home! Come the end of September, I’ll have completed forty trips around the sun. Time to fall in love with ‘now.’

My bowl of wisdom came into play in all of this philosophy, of course. You can’t convince me that drawing #39 was just a coincidence:

Don’t dwell on the past or worry about the future for too long.

Right now is life.

Live it.

Photo source found here.

I Am Over You

I feel grateful that Time magazine waited until last week to print the cover featuring Jamie Lynne Grumet breastfeeding her four year old son, with title of the enclosed article, “Are You Mom Enough?” looming along side. I’m not interested in becoming a subscriber and wasn’t able to read the article, but it caused such a Scheiße Sturm online that there were plenty of free written words to be found on the matter. This free commentary and the cover itself are what I'm concerned with in this post. To summarize what I've gathered from the interwebs, the article itself is purportedly a fairly level-headed discussion of Dr. Sears and his Attachment Parenting model in the U.S. today, though some have commented that the cover photo implies how this parenting model has bred extremist super moms, extending themselves well beyond what Sears himself recommends for a loving bond between mother and child. 

Months ago, you might have found me going to bat for Attachment Parenting as elements of what Dr. Sears suggests have worked for my family, but on this Mother’s Day, nearly nine months into my career as a mom, my initial reaction to this cover was saddened apathy: I am over you, Attachment Parenting. More specifically, I am over any model of parenting that prescribes a ‘model.’ I just want to parent in my own way. I don’t want to feel guilty about not doing it ‘right’ by another’s standards. I want to trust in love and the deep caring that my husband and I have for our baby. I want to trust my common sense and my thirty-nine years of experience as a human on the planet. I want to even put faith in my flaws, that they’ll teach me along the way as I learn from my mistakes. My renouncement may sound like sour grapes for not having all of my Attachment Parenting fantasies come true—Lennon hated being worn in a sling and we had to start supplementing my breast milk with formula after two months, to name a couple of broken dreams—but my sullenness stems mostly from the article’s title which asks me to measure my enough-ness against a specific mothering ideal, putting myself and many others on the defensive.

Even the writers whose pieces criticized the article, qualified their criticism with examples of their own parenting prowess or used their personal Attachment Parenting successes as support for their argument. Sabrina Parsons, a contributor to Forbes, wrote that she’s bothered by the article’s implication that you need to be a stay at home mother to practice Attachment Parenting—though Dr. Sears himself says the opposite—and explains how she, as a high-powered CEO, breastfed all three of her boys beyond eighteen months, co-slept, and often conducted business in the office with her babies in a sling, strapped to her body. Bonnie Fuller, in her column for Hollywoodlife.com, commented on the extremeness of mothers like Jamie Lynne Grumet—stating that while she herself was a breastfeeding mom of four who “happily” carried her breast pump to work, Ms. Grumet took things too far. As far as Attachment Parenting is concerned, I’ve done far less than Ms. Fuller, Ms. Parsons, or Ms. Grumet and I’ve probably done much more than some other mothers, but to me, the specifics they relate in their articles and those of my own experience are meaningless and I think can be damaging when presented as paradigms for comparison. You see, I think what Ms. Fuller, Ms. Parsons, and Ms. Grumet did for their children is wonderful, but I don’t think it’s any more wonderful than what I do for my child or what you do for your child. Why? Because this is what I believe to be true about mothers like you and I: What we do is so very enough because we’re doing the best we can.

For the past few weeks a family has been subletting the apartment across the hall. They have a son who looks to be around seven years old. I’ve only ever seen them in passing—the father helped me with Lennon’s stroller one day—but I can tell that their sweet boy is not well. This is made clear to me, however ignorant and misinformed my assessment may be, by how he moves—with much help from his mother—how he speaks, and how he interacts with others. I notice that they leave daily as a family and I’ve wondered if they go to see a doctor—a specialist that practices only in Berlin, maybe. Perhaps they’re subletting the apartment so their son can get specialized therapy that could truly help him. Tonight, as I was writing, I heard the family come in from their outing, their sweet baby boy screaming in agony as they walked through the hall. My heart shattered as I wept along with him.

Shame on you, Time.

Photo source found here.

Looks Like We Made It: Gifted Babies, A Pictorial

Handmade projects are a wonderful distraction from my PhD research! I really have no business taking time to do anything besides read theory and raise my child, but I can’t help myself. Unlike my PhD research, crafting provides a certain and finite process. It allows me to actually complete something. I won’t have that kind of sense of accomplishment with my PhD for three years, if all goes well. There is no sense of completion when raising a child, so it helps in that area also. I’m sure I don’t need a disclaimer for why I’m posting my craft projects on a blog that is primarily about more heady, hearty matters, but allow this introduction to serve as one. Maybe someday I’ll relegate all crafty things to another blog, sparing those readers who’ve no interest. Until then, please accept that I am a polymath. Or scattered.

There are lots of babies in my life and there is soon to be another! This quilt was made for a little bundle expected in July. There is a secret about this quilt that I am happy to reveal here, though I’m deviously hoping the mother of its recipient isn’t reading: the appliqués are covering up a small rust stain from my iron. It turned into a happy accident, really, as I think the wee birdies are rather nice on their perches.

The patterned fabric is by Amy Butler and was purchased as quilting squares from Etsy.com. The unbleached cotton is from my favorite market stall cotton vendor here in Berlin. The seam binding and batting is also from the market stalls. Gütermann brand thread always in effect on my trusty, borrowed Tchibo machine.

Quilt completed and I was onto making a dirndl for my niece, Stella, who just turned one year old. A dirndl refers to traditional costume for women most commonly associated with Bavarian Oktoberfest. The term is also used to refer to a type of skirt shape in dressmaking circles, clearly stemming from this traditional style.

I struggled to find a Bavarian Oktoberfest dirndl pattern for a toddler, but instead located this adorable vintage pattern from the 1970’s. With minor alteration and the right fabrics, a dirndl it became. The fabric for the skirt is vintage and gifted to me by my mother from her collection. The fabric for the blouse is unbleached market stall cotton. All other fabrics, trim, and bindings were found in the market as well. Gütermann thread, a new spool, got us through.

Simply, I divided the dress, using two separate fabrics, giving the illusion of a blouse and skirt combination as is traditional. To give the illusion of a cinched bodice, I added decorative buttons and rick rack to the full apron. At the very last, I made an elasticized scarf for the wee one’s head. The look is clearly not authentic, but rather inspired by the Oktoberfest Maid’s frocks, and the long sleeves will keep her warm during evenings at the Biergarten.

 These vintage labels for handmade items were found on Etsy.com.

After the quilt and dirndl were gifted, Lennon and I were invited to our friend, York’s first birthday party. York’s mother has shown me his baby bedroom and I thought a banner would be a lovely addition to the dreamy décor she had already included. I always like to be resourceful and found that my collection of materials was readily stocked to make this project.

The fabric for the banner is sturdy, leftover cotton curtain sheeting from Ikea. The letters are made from felt yardage thrifted last year during our trip to California. Incidentally, wool blend felt is one of my most favorite things. It’s stiff off the bolt, but once washed it takes on a bumpy, textured softness that is irresistible. The letters are trimmed with four different embroidery thread colors from my collection, many of which came from my Grandmother Connie. The binding that holds the banner flags together was purchased from the sale bin at Joann Fabrics this April in Central Florida. Luckily for me, I still have yards and yards of this sweet binding left. Thread by Gütermann, of course.

The blanket stitching on the outside of the letters was the most time consuming of the process, but a rather relaxing way to spend a bit of a Sunday.

Mess

This week has been trouble. We’re transitioning Lennon from our bed into his crib. The crux of his ‘sleep training’—a controversial practice, to be sure, and a term I use loosely here to describe adjusting his sleep habits—is to have Lennon learn how to soothe himself into a sleepy state without needing to be in bed with Mommy. This alone might result in a lot less sleep for me than usual since babies don’t often appreciate their routines being disrupted, but his crib sits just at the end of the bed in which he’s been evicted, making the situation all the more complicated. About every other hour throughout the night he cries, “I know you’re there. I can smell you.”

What’s more?

Lennon is teething. He has had two teeth break through in the past twelve days. The two ‘biggie’ teeth—named so by other moms I know for their trauma-drama factor—are the upper fronts and they are showing definitive signs of popping; bulging white just beneath the skin. Lennon is in pain and at night.

Also:

Lennon is about to start to crawl and spends every moment that he’s on a parallel surface flipping himself from his back to his chest and kicking his legs. Supposedly, when a baby goes through a motor milestone such as crawling, it’s not uncommon for them to wake up in the middle of the night and practice their new skill. When Lennon wakes with teething pain, generally cross for finding himself in his crib and not the family bed, I often discover him on his belly ready to crawl away.

Not to mention that:

We just returned from a trip to the U.S. last week and I truly believe we’re just now getting over our jet lag.

To say my sleepiness has made me feel defeated would be an understatement. I’m pretty sure no one is at their best when sleep deprived but my symptoms feel very acute. Compounding the chaos, Nicholas is out of town chaperoning a school trip to Prague. When Nicholas is away, it becomes glaringly clear how much I depend on him for emotional support—something I’m not ashamed to admit since our wedding vows talked about doing just that. In all fairness, it was my benevolent idea to transition Lennon to his crib this week so Nicholas wouldn’t be sleep deprived, as he needs to be up early each morning. I stand by this decision, but I’m missing his tender perspective this week.

While Lennon is getting enough sleep—in fits and starts—being bathed, eating healthily, exercising, and playing, his mother is a mess. I’ll be honest with you—I showered for the first time this week just yesterday. Gross. Food wise, I do okay with first two meals of the day, but by five o’clock, when my body screams in protest from lack of sleep, it’s all I can do to open a bottle of non-alcoholic wheat beer and a bar of Ritter Sport chocolate and call it dinner. We have been outside each day this week for lengthy walks, a testament to the fact that while I may have lost some sense of self-pride, I have my wits about me enough to rally so my son can get some daylight and fresh air. I haven’t had many face-to-face conversations with adults this week and when having lunch with a friend yesterday, I noticed that it took me a good half-hour to find any coherence in forming sentences. The academic term at Freie Universität began April 1^st and I’ve slowly started my research, but the idea of working on it this week makes me want to impale myself on my retractable highlighter.

Last night, after a supper of eight or so—maybe more—sandwich cookies, a bar of Choco-Cherry Ritter, and a nonalcoholic wheat beer, with Lennon asleep in his crib, I treated myself to the 1975 documentary, Grey Gardens. I’ve seen the film more than a dozen times and find that watching Mrs. Edith Beale in her East Hampton house makes me feel better about myself. Last night, it served as a cautionary tale—a potential destination should I remain on my present course: filth and liver pate and forgotten dreams and unbathed octogenarians and raccoons in the attic and resentful children.

I really need to learn how to self-soothe.

Luckily for my family and I, I’ve seen enough years to know not to make any rash decisions or judgments about myself when I haven’t had enough sleep. So as much as I wanted to call it quits on the whole lot of life’s ambitions and only do things that would allow me to never leave the house, I decided to sleep on it—even if for just an hour at a time. Before I did, I went to my blue bowl with the fifty curled papers of wisdom and pulled out this little token of the toughest love:

14. Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it.

Photo source found here.

Vintage Thrifting in Central Florida, a Pictorial

As my husband explained to my Father-in-Law outside of the Ocala, Florida Goodwill Thrift Store, “This is Amy’s Fenway Park.”

As a little girl in the decadent 1980s, I resented that my mother bought so much of our goods at thrift stores. Nowadays, I’m simply grateful for having inherited her serious skills in the art of thrifting. I don’t like to boast, but I can find treasures in even the bleakest of second hand stores. Wasteland deserts of flea markets and yard sales turn to gilded gardens under my gaze. The trick is, of course, that I’m likely looking for things others could care less about. You can have your auction worthy antiques and collectibles. I’ll take diamonds in the rough, thank you very much. Lately, I have a passion for vintage fabric and crafting materials, stuff I can refashion into objects of considerable desire. Here is what I procured on our recent family vacation to Central Florida. Not all the items I found on this trip can be strictly categorized as vintage—some are best described merely as ‘used.’ However, I was picky and only took home those things that spoke to my soul. An intimate bounty, to be sure, but nonetheless charming.

On the way home from a lovely tour of the Gypsy Gold Horse Farm, we made a stop for Mexican food in the small town of Dunnellon, Florida, which happened to be dotted with thrift stores. Knowing I couldn’t convince my companions to visit every single one, I chose a shop that looked as if it had the widest variety of wares. Painted on the building was one word: Thrift. Good enough for me. Lucky me to have found these two bundles of vintage fabric—$2.50 for the orange flowered cotton and $1.00 for the brown.



And these yarn rope wooden dolls. I’m sure they have a proper name for their use, but I’d never seen such a thing before. My Mother-in-Law explained to me that one wraps yarn around the little nails, flips each loop over the other, and eventually, through the hole in the middle, a rope of yarn is formed. $1.35 each. Delightful!



A new day and the next stop was the Hospice Thrift Store in Ocala, Florida. Not wanting to take advantage of my Husband and Father-in-Law’s generosity in driving me around, it behooved me to hustle in and out of each store visited. There were two on the agenda that day and The Hospice Thrift Store was pocket sized, making shopping at a clip all the easier. Lucky for me, I came across this perfect little vintage hankie from Liberty of London for $2.00. Love at first site.



I also spied this unusual Victorian-esque framed butterfly in the fifty cent bin. Yes, please.



Later that day, at the Ocala Goodwill, I found this truly radical LL Bean anchor skirt, just a few seasons old, in my pre-pregnancy size for $4.50 and this Super-Country, baby-sized, homemade quilt for $2.00. They also had an amazing pair of new, old-stock Bass boat loafers, circa 1978 in size 9. While they were two sizes too large for my wear, I would have snatched them up right quick, were it not for the $12.50 price tag. Though I found them on the rack without a tag, the kicker was that when I requested the price, the manager took a good look at my husband and I, whispered something to the cashier, and then proceeded to quote an amount far above the other shoes available. City folk. She saw us coming a mile away.





Onto Lady Lake, Florida for the small consignment shop, New2U. Normally, I don’t care for the previously sorted, curated stock of consignment stores, but I came across something I couldn’t live without at this one. I have a collection of Vera brand scarves that started with a set of graphic psychedelic napkins purchased at this church thrift shop ten years ago. Since then I’ve acquired half a dozen or so scarves. I’ve gotten really good at spotting Vera prints with remarkable accuracy. This one was a classic at $2.00.



Next stop was by far my favorite of all Central Florida second hand stores: Ye Olde Thrift Shoppe. First of all, the name is truly kitsch-tacular. It is run as an auxiliary by volunteers—always the best kind of second hand shop, for my money. The store resides in a sweet, little house whose insides found me overwhelmed with heart-racing, gather-hungry fever. In an old upright trunk, I found the following pairs of gloves, my favorite is the long felted, mossy green pair for $1.00. The most expensive of the set was the long, pale pink pair selling for $2.00.







In the same trunk I found two coordinating Vera brand chiffon scarves for $1.00 each. Major win.



This super sweet kerchief with a repeating green pattern of village houses. Again, $1.00. Love.



And these lovely interchangeable purse bags missing their button-on wooden handle. Nevermind, the lining fabric is worth the $1.00 per.



Also was scored in the very messy and unorganized—and therefore wonderfully dreamy to rummage through—section of the Shoppe, these lovely boards of rick-rack, of which I have a particular fondness. Fifty cents a piece.



A thick and old spool of orange-red, stiff, burlap-like ribbon for $1.75.



A pack of 100% cotton pipe cleaners, perfect for crafting. Or cleaning your pipe. Thirty-five cents.



A gaggle of “Craft Circles” for fifty cents, perfect for making lovely little things like this.



And who can resist a vintage unicorn appliqué for ten pennies? “Not I,” said the fly.



Upstairs found me some darling, deep brown flowered table napkins—$1.50 for the set.



And a twin flat sheet of the prettiest pink flowers for just $2.00. So many things to be made from this beauty.



And just when I thought my thrifting was done in Florida, at an early morning yard sale in the retirement community of The Villages (we commuted around by golf cart!) I came across this impossible find: A Wilton cake decorating storage case teeming with cake decorating goodies—all for $2.00! That’s two dollars, Folks. No zeros missing. A special shout out to my friend Denise Delaney and her awesome blog, The Iced Queen, for inspiring this new interest—as if I needed another interest to occupy my time.



I would call this vacation a thrifting triumph. What made all of these rather disparate purchases seem like destiny was that they all fit nicely into the three suitcases we had budgeted for. What sent the whole scenario into the stuff of legend? The airline didn’t charge us the standard $60.00 for the third bag. Gorgeous.