Little Bits and Pieces

Strawberry fields forever ...

1. I went strawberry picking last week. The strawberries this year are small and oddly-shaped because of all the rain we've had this spring. They still taste mighty fine, and I'm going back soon to get some more. Time to make jam!

2. Thanks to my friend, Sarah, I have discovered the most amazing service in the world. For $4.95, I can order my groceries online, and then pick them up at the store. Sarah has been doing this for years, and I've always assumed it cost an arm and a leg. Of course, when you have three children, two of them five and under, an arm and a leg is a bargain, so I understood why Sarah was willing to sacrifice so many of her limbs.

But it turns out she's been paying a pittance! In fact, this service pays for itself, since you can't make impulse purchases when you shop online. My grocery bill for the week was about twenty dollars less than it usually is. Bargain!

3. Another great deal: Buying reading glasses on line. Last week, I bought a package of five reading glasses on Amazon.com, including a pair of reading sunglasses. Total cost: $29.95. They're cute and funky, and now I have reading glasses spread out all over my house. I feel rich! (If you're interested, go here.)

4. The tyranny of May continues ... This week we have the 4th grade class play, a BIG deal, Jack's final band concert, baseball practice, and on my personal docket are two lunches with friends and my monthly book group meeting (we read Open by Andre Agassi, and I was surprised by how good it was). Two weeks from now, fourth and eighth grade graduation, fourth and eighth grade pool parties, and eighth grade graduation party.

I know I'll miss my children when they're grown and gone, but I will not miss school days in May. I don't remember it being this busy when I was a kid, do you? I remember field day ... and that's it. I'll have to ask my mom what she remembers.

5. Last week my friends Amy and Danielle came over for lunch. We ate this cake that I made with the strawberries I picked:

It tasted good, but was rather ridiculous. The recipe called for cutting two cake layers into four layers, but by the time I tried to put the fourth layer on ... well, just forget about it.

Anyway, Amy, Danielle and I have been friends now for fourteen years. We met when we were pregnant with our first babies. I am probably more myself with them than anyone else I know, other than the Man. I have no idea how they've put up with me for this long.

6. Got my first Durham Bulls' post up on the Bull City Summer Blog. If you want to read it, go here. My next piece is going to be on an elderly woman who goes to every single home game. That's how I'm going to be when I'm old--drinking a beer at the ballpark while I listen to the game on my transistor radio.

7. Is that enough stuff? Are you ready for summer yet?

I Am Having a Good Time

 The fridge at the Pomegranate Kitchen

As most of you who read this blog know, I'm a children's book author. I'm very fortunate and blessed to make my living doing this, and I love it. But I love other kinds of writing, too, and for a long time have wanted to write more about where I live and some of the things that interest me.

Tomorrow, I'm going over to the Durham Bulls baseball park to talk to the groundskeeper about foxes. Apparently, for awhile this spring two foxes made their home there. And as it just so happens, my last book had a mystical fox running through it, and as it just so happens, there's a big documentary project taking place this summer called Bull City Summer, in which ever single Bulls game is going to be documented and blogged about, and as it just so happens, a friend of mine is involved in this project, and when she heard about the foxes, she emailed me and said, "You have to do a blog post about the foxes living in the Durham Bulls park!"

So I emailed the park's groundskeeper, who emailed me back and said, Come on over!

I could not be more thrilled.

First of all, I'm a baseball fan, and I'm a Durham Bulls fan in particular, and the idea that two foxes were making their home in this humongous, AAA park tickles me to no end. That I get to write about it tickles me further. That my friend who's involved with the documentary project just told me she's going to try to get me a press pass so I can go to whatever games I want and write about them? Good grief! I can't even tell you how happy that makes me.

Another happiness: I have been contributing some posts to a blog that covers North Carolina foodways. Tomorrow, they're publishing my post about a nearby Persian restaurant that's not really a restaurant--it's called Pomegranate Kitchen, and it is, in fact, just a kitchen. You buy your food, and then you take it somewhere else to eat. Have you ever eaten Persian food? It is to die for. If you told me I'd fall in love with a dish called pomegranate stew, I would have told you I don't think so. But it's amazing! And the woman who owns this place and is the cook is fabulous. I walked in on Tuesday afternoon and said, "Can I interview you for this piece I'm writing?" and she told me all this interesting stuff about Iran, where she's from, and how people cook there.

The drink selection at Pomegranate Kitchen

This made me very happy, too. And tomorrow, the Man and I and our friend, Rick, who leads my Bible study and also speaks fluent Spanish (he owns a landscaping business and all his employees are
from Mexico--and documented, Rick would want me to tell you; he insists upon this, and every January he or his partner travel to Mexico with their workers to help them get their papers renewed), and another friend of ours named Cricket are going to a Mexican grocery/taqueria called La Superior for lunch so I can write about it (and the Man can take pictures to accompany my story--the Man is also coming with me to take pix at the Bulls stadium--so convenient to have a husband who's also an amazing photographer!). And this makes me happy, too. It makes me happy to live in this small city, where all sorts of interesting things are going on.

But I have to admit, all this excitement is also a little exhausting. I'm happy for it, but I'm also happy that things at home are quiet, and that I have Bible study every week to keep me grounded, and that I have my friends who are steady and helpful and kind.

So I'm having a good time, and now, just writing about it, I'm ready to go to bed. I think the entire month of May is going to be like that. I'll keep you updated.

Jack turns fourteen on Saturday. He seems to be of the opinion that he's turning twenty-one, but he's been of that opinion for a couple of years now. I'm sure it outrages him that we won't let him drive himself to school.

Having a (nearly) fourteen-year-old child has been interesting. I've had a couple of occasions recently where I've really had to make myself step back, mom-wise. For instance, the day before the eighth grade left for their three-day trip. One of the items on Jack's packing list was a rain jacket. Where was Jack's rain jacket? At school, of course.

The Man left Jack a note that morning that read, "Don't forget your jacket!" When I dropped Jack off at school, I called after him, "Don't forget your jacket!" And yes, I emailed him that afternoon to not forget his jacket.

In spite of this, what were the odds that he'd forget his jacket? Really, really good. So I decided to email his advisor, Mr. S. I began by writing, "Dear Mr. S., I hope I don't seem like one of those helicopter parents to you, but ..." and then I stopped. I deleted the email.

Jack is too old to have his mom email his advisor about a jacket.

The other recent situation: Jack has been having a group of friends over on Sunday afternoons to play Dungeons and Dragons for a couple of hours. Every week the guys all say they'll be there, and sometimes they are, but other times only one or two of them show up, and one week no one showed up. The Mom in me wants to take over, to email the boys' parents on Thursday nights, "Please confirm that your child will be here on Sunday. They claim they're coming, but you may have entirely different plans for them, and it would be good to know."

But I can't. It's not my job to run that part of Jack's life anymore. He can figure out a better way to confirm who's coming on Sundays, or he can live with the suspense. Me, I don't have a pony in the race.

The hardest thing for me right now is backing off on hygiene patrol. Every once in awhile I get pushy about his skin, but even that is starting to feel like trespassing into territory that isn't much of my business anymore. I feel okay about reminding him to shower (and can't wait for the day when he doesn't need reminding) and have no scruples about forcing him to get his hair cut. But he knows when his skin is broken out, and he knows what to do about it. There's something undignified about me standing outside of the bathroom door while he's brushing his teeth and calling, "Don't forget to use your skin stuff!"

I have no doubt that one day soon, maybe this week, maybe next, you'll find me outside the bathroom door calling, "Don't forget your skin stuff!" I haven't quite gotten the knack of being a mother to a fourteen-year-old boy. Confession: I pretty much packed Jack's bag the night before the 8th grade trip. I didn't want him to forget anything, and I didn't want his clothes getting all wrinkled because he'd scrunched them in instead of folding them first.

But even while I was doing it, I knew I should be letting him pack. He was just standing around watching me,  not eager to help, but not entirely comfortable with the fact that I'd more or less taken over his life. Again.

 Well, I'll know better next time. Seem like we're all on a learning curve around here.

P.S. Jack remembered his jacket. My baby's growing up!

Catching Up

So, it's been a while, my dears, and I can't explain exactly why. I feel a big chunk of my life has been given over to driving boys hither and yon. But there are other things as well. Last week, I drove to Kentucky to meet my mom so we could drive to Cincinnati for the Cincinnati International Quilt Festival. My mom is a good traveling companion and quilting buddy. We took two classes and wished we had time to take more.

                                                 Me and my mom at the festival.

Two weeks ago, I went to Uncle Eli's Quilting Party in Eli Whitney, NC. It's a gathering of quilters and other local folks that happens the first Thursday of every April, and has been happening now for eighty-two years.

I brought my audio recorder and interviewed a bunch of people. One of the women I interviewed was 84 and said she'd been coming to the quilting party all of her life. She said her mother had made quilts, but she never did. She had five children and worked in a mill and there just wasn't time.

The whole morning I felt like I was surrounded by the Man's aunts. Good country people who pretty much have stayed put, worked hard, raised their children, and found creative outlets when and where they could. Ten years from now, a lot of the folks I talked to will be gone and so will their way of life. I hope that Uncle Eli's party will continue, but I wonder.

When I was at my parents' house in Kentucky, my dad asked me to take home a bunch of my boxes that had been stored in the basement. His latest project is getting all the junk out of their house so we children won't have to deal with it when he and my mother die. This sounds a touch morbid, but given that my father--my very healthy father--has been preparing for his imminent death for twenty years now, I'm used to it.

So anyway, I brought home the boxes, which are most filled with books I'll end up donating to the library. But there are several boxes of papers and photographs from college and grad school, some of which I've gone through. A lot of it is pretty cringe-worthy stuff--bad poetry and even worse academic papers, lots of pictures of me in one silly incarnation or another--and some of it hints at the adult I would become (including a journal I took with me on a trip to Berlin with friends when I was twenty-four, in which I confessed how embarrassed it made me to mostly just want to be home--twenty-five years later, I feel exactly the same way).

My favorite finds (and I would not have predicted this when I was twenty-four!) were pictures of my family back in the day--my little brother caught in the act of being goofy in his laid-back, cool way, my big brother trying to look suave, my mother looking young and beautiful at age forty-eight, the age I am now. And my dog! How fine it was to see my old dog.

Those are the pictures I'll keep. The one with the guy throwing back a beer at a frat party, a guy I don't even recognize and who's not even cute? That one goes.

Spring Has Not Sprung

(This is the quilt I'm making for the director of Our Fine Lower School. It kind of looks like spring, even if our weather doesn't.)

We are all getting a little impatient for spring around here. Usually by now we're basking in its warm, fragrant goodness, even if only for a couple hours in the afternoon. Instead, everyone is still bundled up in winter coats--except Will, of course, who wears shorts and a hoodie sweatshirt all year round.

Lots of stuff going on. Will had his first real Little League baseball game on Saturday. He pitched two innings and generally rocked the house. After a long and dismal basketball season with the Worst Coach Ever, I have to say that Saturday's 15-2 win for the Rangers proved quite a balm. Usually I'm not one for blow-outs, having spent too much time on the blown-out side (also, they're sort of boring), but just this once I was glad for such an overwhelming victory. Will needed it.

On Sunday, I learned an important lesson about reasoning with fourteen-year-old boys: Don't. Jack is tall, and he's a pretty bright kid, and I keep forgetting that despite the fact he can at times be quite logical, especially when planning World of Warcraft raiding parties, in general, the logical/reasonable/rational part of his brain is underdeveloped. I found myself in a middle of an argument with him about why spending fourteen hours in a row on the computer was unhealthy, and then suddenly, I stopped. It was just so much easier to say "no." I like saying "no." It's the most fun I have as a parent.

Today I went in for my annual skin check, and my dermatologist took off a suspicious-looking mole. No, not a mole--a freckle. The funny thing to me is, the moles and freckles I find suspicious-looking bother my dermatologist not one bit. It's the innocent freckles she goes after. "Let's just shave this off," she said to me, pointing at the cutest little freckle on my leg you ever saw. "Could we call it something other than 'shaving'?" I asked her. "How about 'biopsying''?" she replied. "How about 'benign removal of a cute little freckle'?" I countered, and she agreed that would be fine.

In the last month, I've had a teeth cleaning, a skin check and a mammogram. It's Lent after all. I'm not supposed to be having fun. Now all I have left is the annual visit to my lady parts doctor in May, and if I'm really up for a good time, a physical with my family doctor. Can't wait until I turn fifty next year, when I can add colonoscopy to my list of annual good times.

Right now I'm having a hard time imagining that it will ever be spring. There's a point in every winter you worry that maybe this year God has taken spring off the docket. The good news is, Target sells Easter candy whether it's spring or not. The bad news is, I'll eat it.

Spring Break

I made place mats for Valentine's Day and am finally showing you!

Spring Break at Our Fine School comes absurdly early. In fact, it's not even spring yet.That means that every year we have a week of cold, rainy weather to frolic in. There are mud puddles galore and great opportunities to give your winter gear one last workout.

The wealthier families at Our Fine School--of which there are many and of which we are not one--avoid the icky early March weather of central North Carolina by flying to Europe to enjoy the icky weather there. A friend of mine has taken her daughter to London, where according to her Facebook updates, it's snowing.

We, of course, are staycationing. I'm under a deadline for a book, so my staycation involves writing in my jammies, which I don't usually get to do. Whee! Jack's staycation is all about sleeping in and then living on his computer. Will has a circuit: computer, outside to play basketball, upstairs to his room, computer, outside to play baseball, upstairs to his room, and so on. On Sunday, he took up origami. He really did. Last night he worked on a Paint-by-Numbers painting. Today, he took approximately forty-five minutes to complete a wildly expensive Lego kit that I bought for his staycation present. It was supposed to keep him entertained for the rest of the week.

The Man is spending his staycation going to work. You should see his tan.

This is my mosaic quilt. I've completed twenty-five blocks and have seventy-five more to go. It should be done sometime around Will's college graduation.

This week, I've been working on accepting my family for what it is, which is not one of those families that has interesting, educational vacations where many important lessons are learned. When we go on vacation, we all tend to do what we do at home, which is putter, work on projects, mess around on the computer, laze about, read and snack. I was starting to feel okay about this until I read an article about this doctor who's doing groundbreaking work in the field of food allergies. She has five children and prints out charts for their daily piano practice--they have to check off a box every day to show that they've done their time.

My children do not take piano lessons. If they had asked to take piano lessons, I would have signed them up immediately. I have asked both of them if they wanted to take piano lessons, and neither of them do. I could have forced them to, I guess, but I'm against forcing children to do anything besides homework (which mine actually do without force or even prodding), teeth-brushing, chores and saying "please" and "thank you."

Let me tell you a story about Jack. A few weeks we had a conference with his middle school adviser, just the usual semi-annual deal. As always, Jack had to fill out a form before the conference in which he attested to how he felt he was doing in his coursework (he felt good about it), what his favorite class was (Language Arts, per usual), and also how he felt he was doing socially this semester. His response to the last one? "I fail to see how this is relevant or anybody's business."

That's my boy. I have no fears that he'll ever succumb to peer pressure. He's a rock. This, by the way, has its good points and its bad points. My point is, just try to make this kid take piano lessons. I mean, really. Give it a go.

And Will? I asked Will if he wanted to do a poster for the Water Conservation Poster Competition. Will's pretty artsy-craftsy and likes to draw, so I thought this might be a good Spring Break project. His reply? "I don't want to do it, because if I won, then I'd have to go on stage for the award, and I really don't want to do that."

The funny thing is, I totally get that.

My children are idiosyncratic, stubborn and fairly set in their own ways. I've decided that as long as they do their homework without prodding, their chores without complaint (they really don't complain; on the other hand, they do take their time), get good grades and don't get in trouble at school, I'm not going to worry too much about them. I'm going to resist signing them up for things they don't want to do (other than school). I hope to take them to Europe one day, but not in March.

February Notes

Well, it has been a long, gloomy month in my neck of the woods. A few weeks ago, I broke down and invested in a SAD lamp for my winter blues, and either it really works or I'm highly suggestible. Okay, I am highly suggestible, but that doesn't mean the lamp doesn't work. Could be both.

Whatever's going on, I've only had one or two days of feeling lackluster and sort of "Oh, what's the use?" I think one of those days was because I hadn't been sleeping well, and the other was because I live with an adolescent who believes himself to be God or one of His close associates. You'd have to sit in front of a SAD lamp for days at a time, maybe years, to not feel depressed after dealing with a cranky teenager.

***

One of the great things about being a writer is that you can go down all sorts of rabbit holes in the name of "research." Recently, I've gotten very interested in quilting in the 1930s. It all started when I watched a wonderful PBS documentary called "A Century of Quilts: America in Cloth." Quilting took off like a house on fire after the Great Depression because it was something a woman could do that didn't necessarily cost a lot of money. Newpapers printed patterns and ran columns such as "Nancy Page's Quilting Club"* (Nancy Page being the nom de plume of Florence LaGanke). There were quilting bees and lots of contests, and you could buy yourself a copy of Needlecraft magazine for a dime.

Domestic history has always been one of my favorite areas of study. I like learning about how families lived throughout history, and what women's lives were like. I especially like reading about what women cooked and what they made. Last week I bought a couple of books about quilting in the 1930s, and both of them are chock full of amazing, beautiful lively quilts. Hard times, yes, but sometimes I think the greatest art is made when life is less than easy.

***

I'm about ready for spring, aren't you? Do you have any spring dreams? I think my spring will revolve around writing and quilt making. My mom and I are going to the big quilt show in Cincinnati in April, and I'm set to make quilts for the school director and the administrative assistant for Our Fine Lower School. 

 

This is our last year at Our Fine Lower School, and I'm feeling sort of sad about it. I went to a lunch at the lower school library last week for a visiting writer, and all the teachers there told me funny stories about Will and wanted to know how Jack was doing. It's such a loving, nurturing place, unlike Our Fine Middle School, which is a jungle. Okay, not a jungle. Maybe more like a big city where no one knows your name.

Anyway, I'm going to make springlike quilts and plant some flowers in my garden and look forward to May, when I can go strawberry picking. These thoughts, I hope, will carry me through the next few gloomy weeks. What will help you make it over to the other side of winter (or summer, for those of you suffering through the heat down under)?

 

*for an interesting video about Nancy Page, go here: http://vimeo.com/28386634