Resolutions 2012 recap!

So for the last two years I've set some goals for myself for the coming year. Last year's post was written exactly one week before our foster daughter arrived, and about five months before I got pregnant the first time, so it's kind of funny how little I got done. Let's take a look:

1. Get our kitchen knives professionally sharpened.
Still a no, but I did call two different places to at least try. One of the places only does commercial stuff, and the other never responded to my emails.
2. See a dermatologist (bonus points if he/she uses primarily natural stuff).
Nope, but I started using only organic and hippie-type shit on my face and my skin is way happier than it's ever been. I wash my face with raw honey and I use an organic lotion, to which I add a bit of jojoba oil because my skin is really dry, and most of the issues I had in the past are cleared up.
3. Take a picture of every item I knit.
Ha, not even close. I do have pictures of the baby wearing the things I've made for her, but that's it. Um, I can't actually think of anything not-baby-related I've finished, though, so I guess that makes this a maybe?
4. Knit myself a sweater.
Nope. Didn't even finish the sweater I started for my mom LAST Christmas. Oops. Turns out parenting takes most of my free time, and when the kid's asleep, pregnancy has made me too tired to even think about figuring out the weird pattern issue that stalled that project.
5. Take at least two overnight trips with Andy.
YES! This is one that we did and it was as awesome as it always is. We went on that awesome weekend trip to a farmhouse in Endicottville with our good friends, and we went stupid camping, and we went to Virginia for my great-aunt's funeral (which hardly counts as us-time but was still an overnight trip), and we went to visit the Kid her family. Here's hoping we keep doing overnight trips even with a second kid in the coming year.
6. Get tattoo (and artist's mockup, for customized stationery, because that's so badass).
Nope. Not even close. I've spent half the year pregnant, so that's part of it, and the other part is that suddenly spending money on a tattoo seems a lot less reasonable when there's a kid to feed and clothe and stuff.
7. Take multivitamin, fish oil, and Vitamin D supplement at least five times a week.
Pretty sure I did meet this goal, if you average the whole year. I was super dedicated for most of the year but have been SO FORGETFUL with this pregnancy that I'm taking them more like twice a week. Oops.
8. Find some sort of health/fitness class to do at least once a week.
Sort of! My mom and I just signed up for AQUA ZUMBA and have had one class so far. It is ridiculous in the best ways possible.

So, in total, I met three out of the eight goals. I'm going with "hey, that's not bad!" with all the extra shit that's been going on in our life. I haven't even thought about goals for next year, aside from "keep parenting this baby as best we can for as long as they'll let us" and "do the best we can with NewBaby too".

I really like reading year-end reflection posts, but all I've got is that Andy and I are stronger than ever and work really hard on communicating clearly, and that our life together is so much more full with a kid than we could have ever imagined. 

Work and temporary single momming

I've been in my new position at work for almost a month now, and I had my first monthly review meeting with my boss today. She said she's gotten good reports from the trainer and I'm doing really well. Yay! I even asked if she had any concerns or things I needed to work on and she said she didn't. So that's cool. It's nice to hear that I'm doing well.

Andy's been on a business trip since early Wednesday morning, so I have gained even more respect for single moms - and I already thought they were incredible, so that's saying something. The baby has a cold and wants her pacifier in all the time but frequently spits it out with coughing, so I got up seven times between 1:00 and 2:30 in the morning to put it back in for her. That sucked. It's been weird having to take care of every single thing that needed doing around here - dogs and baby and self and food and not destroying the home. He gets back in very late tonight and I can't wait to see him.

I think in the morning we'll go to the farmer's market to get fresh local strawberries and asparagus (hooray! things are growing!) and see if we can find something decent for our moms for Mother's Day, because I totally forgot that was this weekend. Oops.

On parenting

It has surprised me how natural parenting has been for me and Andy. I'm not sure if that's human nature or the fact that we're both very nurturing people or what, but there hasn't been too much of a learning curve - even for Andy, who had a lot less experience with babies than I did.

I posted early on in the placement that any time the baby fussed at night, I woke up immediately and completely. I still wake up whenever she makes a noise, but sort of doze while I wait to hear if she actually needs something or if she'll go back to sleep on her own (which is most of the time). (This baby is very awesome and has been sleeping through the night since she was about two months old. She does occasionally need her pacifier stuck back in, but we haven't fed her in the middle of the night in months.) I do have to occasionally remind myself (and Andy) that even if picking her up is enough to get her to stop fussing, it's a good idea to check her diaper anyway, but other than that things are pretty smooth.

I still get a little defensive about people's opinions of how we should handle the baby's attachment issues. She is okay with being held by me and by Andy and by two out of five ladies at daycare, and that's pretty much the end of the list. If she were a "normal" baby who hadn't spent a month learning that adults couldn't be counted on, I would let her fuss more with other people, but she needs to know that Andy and I will take care of her, so we take her when she starts to cry. The funeral we'll be attending soon will mean introducing the baby to dozens of family members, many of whom will want to hold her, which will mean a crying baby, and me taking her back from confused people who want to tell me what I should do instead. I'm working on repeating "This is what's working for our family" (via k8t in this metafilter thread) often enough that it comes naturally.

In the past three-plus months, I have also developed WAY more respect for single parents, who I already thought were pretty awesome. Seriously, I don't get how single parents with infants manage to keep themselves clothed and showered without someone to tag-team with. And yes, I am saying this as someone who has recently had to poop while holding a baby who decided that sleeping in her carseat was a totally unacceptable situation. (Fun story to tell her prom date?)

What awesome parenting tips do you have with your kids or remember your parents using?

More baby info

If you aren't interested in babies or whatever, maybe just go read my archives for a while, because I haven't really thought about anything else since Thursday afternoon. (Don't just stop reading, though! I love you! Have you seen my extensive archive?)

So. Here's a little more about this baby, and our time with her so far, as it comes to me and in no particular order.

• She was a month old on Friday. 
• She was almost certainly a preemie, as she weighed 7 pounds, 10 ounces at her checkup on Friday. Many of my friends' babies were significantly larger than that at birth.
• She practices smiling when she's waking up and falling asleep. She smiled at Andy the first night she was here, and now she owns him for life, I think.
• Andy is a natural caretaker, which means things have been pretty smooth, as these things go. He also needs less sleep than I do, so he is happy to get up with her in the night (as long as I wake him up and tell him to). He also is doing extra work to take care of me, like making sure I've got enough water around and that I've eaten recently, because:
• For the first time in my life, I've been forgetting to eat. Usually when people are all, "Oh, I forget to eat sometimes!" I'm all, bullshit, lady, that's called anorexia. But my sleep has been so messed up that my body is reacting by just being sort of confused, which means I haven't really felt hungry much. I forgot to eat lunch on Saturday. Just realized at, like, 5 p.m. that I hadn't eaten anything since a piece of baked oatmeal that morning. So Andy's been working on making sure I've had enough food. Also, writing this bullet reminded me to eat breakfast.
• I have always been a very deep sleeper, so it's a huge shock that the instant the baby fusses, I am on FULL ALERT - wide awake and ready to fix things. The FULL ALERT takes a little while to wear off, which sucks. Like, sometimes she just wants her bassinet jiggled for a minute, but then I lie there, wide awake, for another twenty minutes. That happened last night and Andy was lying next to me, snoring quietly, and I was actually really jealous of him.The FULL ALERT also makes it really hard for me to nap during the day so far, even when Andy has the kid in another room and I know everything is cool.
• We know the baby has a three-year-old brother who we're pretty sure is with the grandma. The matcher told us part of the reason they picked us is that if it comes to that, we could take the brother too (we're certified for up to three kids). We've discussed it, and obviously we'd take him too if they ask us to.
• To further confirm my belief that people give you things when they find out you're fostering, so far:
• A good friend stopped over with two bags of newborn clothes, some of which her kids have outgrown and some of which she stopped and bought for us when we told her how tiny the baby is.
• My aunt and uncle overnighted us a stroller. Their last name is McLaren, so their go-to baby gift is a MacLaren stroller. They didn't know if we had a stroller, so they had one shipped to us. What the what? (The funniest part, to me, is that a kid needs to be able to support herself to sit in the style they sent, so we can't use it for another five months or so, if we get to keep her that long.)
• On Friday, some good friends of ours ordered our favorite items from our favorite Mexican joint and came over with several bottles of wine so we didn't have to cook. When we were done eating, without me or Andy even noticing, they cleaned the kitchen and loaded the dishwasher. 
• My brother and his wife and her sister (so my sister-in-law-in-law, I guess) stopped over yesterday. My brother's wife and her sister are both pregnant (and due three weeks apart!) and while the sister was out shopping for some baby stuff, she picked up a few newborn-sized sleepers for the baby, just to be nice.

Okay, this post has gotten a lot longer than I expected. Let's blame that on sleep deprivation and coffee, shall we?

What else do you want to know?

Obligatory holiday post

Morning! I hope you are all having the best possible Christmas. We had a pretty awesome morning - I had a delicious almond latte, thanks to the milk frother my friend in Brooklyn got me, and I could have put it in my badass, super-tough new Thermos travel mug from my sister and her husband, and I'm wearing a new cozy flannel shirt from Andy, who took the time to find one that would actually button over my boobs without gaping everywhere. So, yeah, definitely feeling the love.

Two more awesomes: I got a scratch-off ticket in my stocking and won $40, and also Andy special-ordered me a rubber stamp that reads BULLSHIT, and also a bright red stamp pad, so I can properly label everything at work now.

We're heading to my folks' in a few. I sincerely wish you all the merriest of holidays, and I hope you are feeling loved too.

Merry Christmas!

Doing all the things!

So Andy got free tickets to today's Bills/Dolphins game through work. There are so many awesome things about this:
1. He's never been to a pro football game, but has always wanted to go.
2. The tickets were free.
3. He's a huge Miami fan (but not in such a way that he is an asshole all night if they lose, which was high on the list of attributes that made him marriage-worthy).
4. The first person he thought to ask was my brother, who is a Bills fan. I thought that was sweet.
5. Normally I'd be bummed at spending a full weekend day without Andy (seriously, we just like hanging out), but he's already getting tired of Christmas moves so it's okay that I get full control of the tv all day.

I also have a million-and-one things to get done today, many of which are secret and Andy-related. On the top of that list: I knit him this sweater two Christmases ago. It was my first sweater ever, and I didn't take into account that the pattern doesn't include any ribbing to keep the hem from rolling. Which it does. Enthusiastically. So Andy never wears the sweater, because it ends up sitting just about level with the top of his pants. So today, I'm picking up a bunch of stitches around the edge, and knitting several inches of ribbing. This is the one thing I was pretty sure I wouldn't be able to find time to do before Christmas, because when would I have a chunk of several hours without Andy? And then the gods of football smiled upon us, and his sweater will be done today.

After the knitting, I'll be wrapping all of his presents, so he's allowed to go in the library again. Then it's back to knitting, so maybe my mom's sweater will be done by Christmas!

Are you done with Christmas shopping yet?

Feeling festive!

It's December 1, which in our house is Christmas Decorations Day! I just finished setting up the tree. This is by far the biggest pain involved in decorating our house for Christmas, as we have my parents' twenty-year-old seven-foot monstrosity. I like to get it set up before Andy gets home so we can start in on lights and ornaments while we watch a Christmas movie. This year it's Elf, which has just given me yet another reason to love it: if you leave the menu up without selecting anything, THE MUSIC STOPS PLAYING after one loop! This is so great!

I have a big pot of chili on the stove ready to go, and I'm going to put up the garland and lights we loop over the weird bannister thing we have.

The one thing I am still working on for this year is a good pine-scented candle. Last year I just got one at Wal-Mart, and it was fine but not spectacular. I think I'm going to try one of the Balsam Fir ones from Bath and Body Works, as I've been assured it smells just like an actual pine tree instead of like gross chemicals.

What holiday set-up traditions do you have? 

Daylight savings dreariness

This weekend we all dutifully turned our clocks back an hour. It's just past 5 p.m. and it's very much dusk here. Andy gets super bummed about having to work from before it's light until after dark, so I'm trying to think of ways to cheer him up when he gets home tonight!

I think, first, I'll have the blinds drawn, so he can't see how dark it is outside, and I'll have lamps going and probably light a couple of candles. I'll also make him some spiced cider, which I know he loves but which he rarely drinks. Maybe, instead of Arrested Development (my choice), we'll watch Parks and Recreation (his choice). And after dinner maybe we'll have some hot chocolate. And maybe we'll add some Bailey's. Because why the hell not?

I don't really mind the time change, except that it feels like it's way too late to do anything by, like, 7:30. I had an irritating day at work - everything too three times as long as it should have, and everything I picked up had some stupid problem that wasn't obvious until I had already spent an hour doing twenty minutes' worth of work - but none of that is related to the sun rising and setting. Pretty sure it was just an irritating day in the office.

I don't think Andy has Seasonal Affective Disorder, but I'm reading through this list and thinking of ways to keep him cheerful: Give me your best SAD hacks! at Metafilter.

How do you feel about the time change? Any suggestions for a cheerful evening?

Low-key Friday evening

Have you dudes ever tried roasted Brussels sprouts? Turns out: they're fucking magical. 


Andy and I like those things to begin with, but roasting brings those tasty little bad boys to a new level. And they're easy as hell to make! Easier than steaming, even, which, until today, was our go-to method.


I had a few parsnips (we got two, for some reason) and a buttload of carrots from our CSA to use up, so I chopped that stuff into biggish chunks, slapped 'em on a baking sheet with the cleaned and halved sprouts, tossed everything a few healthy glugs of olive oil and some generous pinches of salt, and roasted them at 400° for about half an hour. We ate them with some pork chops that we smeared in peach butter. It was delicious.


Now we're about to watch a movie and veg out, to celebrate not having any plans tonight. This is the first night this week that we're just staying home, so I'm knitting and we're probably going to bed early. Hooray!


I'm going to try to talk Andy into a Christmas movie. The lace knitting I'm doing on my mom's sweater takes a lot of concentration, so I can't really knit and watch something with an intricate plot, or I'll fuck the lace all up (again). But if we watch a movie I know by heart - basically, a Christmas movie or Newsies - I can be entertained AND the lace survives!


Wish me luck. Something tells me Andy will be resistant to my brilliant logic.

Nursery decor

My computer still isn't fixed and I find Andy's seventeen-inch Powerbook less comfortable to use, so I've been enjoying a reduction in the amount of time I've been spending online. It's been kind of awesome.

I think this weekend I'm going to drag the old, hand-me-down nursery nightstand out to the garage, strip it, and repaint it. In order to know what color I'm going to paint it, I have to know if we're going to paint the walls in there. I really, really want to paint the walls - our whole upstairs is covered in pine panelling,  Andy and I agree that the panelling isn't a look we love, and to be frank it's not likely to be in style again for a very long time. But it is kind of an irreversible thing to do to a room, so we haven't bothered in the nursery yet.

I want green to be the focus in the nursery. If I had my way, I'd do the walls a nice dove grey then decorate with emerald green. I doubt I'll be able to talk Andy into grey, though, so we might do the walls green. Which would make a green nightstand overkill.

Either way, I want to get or make a giant print like this to hang over the crib. I've actually had that Pinterest page open and shrunk down on Andy's computer for four days, so I don't forget about it. The only art we have on the walls in there right now is a wooden elephant carving my sister gave us, which is gorgeous but is just about impossible to see against the wood panelling!

Any recommendations for affordable, positive-message, kid-friendly art sources?

How we met

Did I ever tell you all about how Andy and I met? It isn't really meet-cute, tell-the-grandkids stuff, but it's funny, I guess.

I went to school with a bunch of dudes who were in a band together. I had a major crush on the bassist, for, like, ever. He dated the same girl pretty much straight through high school, so I never told him how I felt, besides flirting outrageously at any chance I got.

Andy was in a band then too, and the two bands were often booked together at a terrible, disgusting dive bar not far from us. The dudes in the two bands would hang out a bit before and after shows, until Andy somehow became a peripheral and then a regular member of the group I hung out with.

I want to remind you all that I have an absolutely terrible memory, and that I count on Andy a lot to remember stuff for me. In this case, I believe this is how it happened, but man, he comes off looking way better than I do.

The day we met, the bassist I had a crush on was coming over to pick me up for some group event - I didn't get my license until I was 19, so someone was always coming over to pick me up. I had great friends. ANYWAY, this dude stopped by, and Andy was with him. Or so Andy says. I honestly had such a crush on the bassist that I don't even actually remember being introduced to Andy! I just know that he became part of my group of friends that summer.

Later that summer, the bassist's long-time girlfriend (the same one from high school) was revealed to be a horrible cheating scumbag, right around the same time I broke up with a douchebag I had been dating for a little while. The stars aligned - by which I mean we got varying degrees of wasted and talked on the phone - and I told the bassist that I had had a crush on him since eighth grade. No big deal, right?

Bassist-guy and I dated that summer for a few months, but agreed neither of us were really in the right place for a relationship. Plus, being with him wasn't as awesome as I had expected it to be. There was nothing wrong or anything; we just weren't the right fit. We broke up very amicably and continued hanging out with the same group of friends as always. While I had been dating that dude, though, I had started to develop a real friendship with Andy.

At the end of the summer, our friends all started drifting back off to school. Our big group of friends dwindled, until it was just me and Andy and one other guy/girl pair. The more time I spent with him, the more I realized how awesome he really is (my sister is gagging right now) and the rest, as they say, is history.

Oh, and I'd like the record to show that I remember our first kiss very well, as I'm the one who initiated it.

How did you meet your beloved? Do you at least remember it?

Productive

I shook off yesterday's grumps and got a lot done today. In addition to my usual eight-hour workday, I have done the following things:

• Read the entirety of a former classmate's blog. The girl who was my neighbor when we were kids got into some serious shit when we were in high school - like, drugs and trouble with the law and stuff - and I hadn't heard anything about her in probably five years. Recently, a friend sent me the link to her blog, and it turns out she was into even worse stuff than I had heard about, by a lot, but has since found Jesus and has been clean for over a year and is working on becoming a minister. So, good for her. 
• Called the Western New York something-or-other to get the list of approved daycares that my county works with. We don't have a placement yet, but our caseworker suggested it's a good idea to start looking for places with available space and interview a couple, so that we're not scrambling to find a place we like and that has room once we get a kid.
• Made granola bars for the friend who diagnosed the problem with my netbook. She didn't actually do anything to fix the problem, so she insisted that granola bars weren't necessary, but she contacted Samsung for me and found a few possible solutions, which means baked goods are in order. Today I added dried cranberries and golden raisins. Should be awesome. 
• Bought a Harvest Pumpkin Chocolate Chunk cake (from Wegmans, which is the only store ever with amazing store-produced bakery items. I will fight you on this one). I'm trying to decide if I feel like going to Pints and Purls and bringing the cake to share, or if I want to stay home and watch Arrested Development on Netflix for three hours and have the cake with Andy.

Sometimes I like to do a review of my day like this so it looks like I've gotten so much done. I'm also one of those people who rarely remembers to make a to-do list before getting stuff done, but who loves making one afterwards so I can cross everything off all at once.

What awesome stuff have you gotten done today?

Death row meal!

If Andy were ever on death row, he says his last meal would be corned beef and cabbage. I think mine would be some sort of extravagant seafood bonanza, with a whole steamed lobster and fried clams and scallops (ideally, from The Red Barn in Maine) and french fries and corn-on-the-cob, except that I always cut off the kernels because they get stuck in my teeth. And a green salad, which I probably wouldn't eat because I'd be saving room for the lobster and clams and scallops. And a Coke (NOT DIET SO HELP ME) and also a good lager beer. And chocolate cake with vanilla ice cream. And now I'm really hungry.

Yesterday our CSA share included both cabbage and potatoes, which are two of the four ingredients necessary for Andy's favorite dinner - the other two, of course, are corned beef itself and carrots. I pulled a big hunk of corned beef out of the freezer to defrost, and will have to grab carrots from Wegmans later, when I stop to get beer, because drinking anything else with that meal will be silly. Oh, and here's a fun thing: turns out that putting corned beef in a Crock-Pot on low for nine hours is just about the perfect way to cook it. We like the vegetables to still taste like vegetables, so we don't cook them together, so I'll just cook that shit up separately when I get home, and we will eat like convicted inmates, or something.

You all might as well know now that I seriously love corned beef. It was the last meat I ate before I became a vegetarian twelve years ago, and it was one of the first I ate (after my body was used to animal protein again, so I didn't get sick) when I started eating meat again two years ago. It remains the only meat I will ever "snitch" - like, I'll open the door to the fridge to get some cider, or whatever, and, oh, while I'm in here, might as well grab a bite of corned beef. Oh, what's that, honey? Want me to grab you something from the kitchen? Sure. While I'm in here, I'm going to stand in front of the open fridge and eat a chunk of this stuff with my hands. It is the only meal I cook where I will fight Andy for the last bite. We buy slabs of it at Sam's when they're cheap and keep one in the freezer for corned-beef emergencies. It makes me happy that it's one of Andy's favorite things, because then I have an excuse to cook it more often, and still seem magnanimous and caring and wifely instead of gluttonous. This paragraph isn't going anywhere. It's basically just a love letter to corned beef. Dang, I'm pumped for tomorrow.

Only sort of related, but interesting: final meal requests from Texas's department of corrections, updated through 2003. Made me hungry and also slightly sick to my stomach at the same time.

What would your death-row meal be? Be creative!

On football

So in case you haven't noticed, it's autumn in America, which means football season is upon us. I decided last year that I was going to be a die-hard Redskins fan, and I'm super-psyched that they won yesterday but I can't help feeling that I'm a failure as a die-hard fan, since I can only name a handful of players on the team.

You might have guessed about me that I'm not really into sports. Most of them take place outdoors and involve being active, so there's two strikes against it to start. But football? I like football, mostly, I guess. I don't live near enough to any major sports team to have to sit outdoors in crappy weather in uncomfortable seats, which means that most of my football is observed from a living room. This suits me just fine. And usually, football is an excuse to eat shitty food and yell a lot about things that don't matter in the long run, which is also fun.

Andy is a Dolphins fan. His dad is a Bills fan, and the Bills and Dolphins have some sort of rivalry thing, so it was a pretty natural move for little-kid-Andy to pick the team that his dad hated (if you're new here, read that post for some insight there). He also was a fan of Dan Marino, who played for the Dolphins, which fact I totally already knew, but only because of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. Andy will happily watch football, but is okay with the fact that not having cable means he misses a lot of games. He also doesn't sulk all week (or at all) when his team loses, which makes me love him even more, because that shit is childish.

So. How the hell did I become a Redskins fan? Well, I picked the team with the most racist name, and I don't like the Braves' colors. No, just kidding. (The Braves are a baseball team, anyway. I looked it up to be sure.) No, the real reason is this: my mom grew up in northern Virginia. Her dad, my grandpa, loved his adopted region enough to become a big fan of the 'Skins, and he started instilling this love in his grandkids when we were still quite young. I remember learning the Redskins Fight Song when I was a toddler, no joke. And I don't really care enough about football to have a loyalty to any team, but I decided I wanted to learn more about the sport. There's too much to try to learn it all, so I decided to pick one team. And as my grandpa died a few years ago and I miss hearing him sing that song, I picked the 'Skins. As far as I can tell from people's responses, "they were my grandpa's team" is as reasonable reason as any other.

Last year by the end of the season I had a decent grasp on major players on the team, but it seems I have lost all of that knowledge in the meantime. So we're going to a bar tonight to watch the Dolphins play, and I'm going to bring a printout of this year's roster and some index cards to make myself some Redskins flash cards. Because I am a giant nerd, and also I want to represent.

How do you feel about football? Who's your team?

What I ate today

Dudes, I hate when people are all, "Oh my gosh, I had the best salad today! Here is the recipe!" because come on, salad is pretty much salad, unless it's like egg salad or something. Basically, you combined vegetables and were happy with the results. This isn't alchemy; chances are it was going to turn out okay anyway.

But I ate a salad today that was pretty cool, and I had never before combined these ingredients, and I was sad that I hadn't, and I thought maybe you would like to try it too. It's pretty awesome. I mean, it's not going to change your life or lower your taxes, but it will taste good.

Mostly this salad happened because I had all the ingredients on hand and was trying to use them up. Here's what I combined:
-Half a grilled chicken breast.
-Maybe 1/4 cup feta cheese. (Okay, probably 1/3 cup. That shit's delicious, and you can buy it in one-pound bricks at Sam's and then freeze half of it. YOU'RE WELCOME.)
-A quarter of a white cooking onion.
-About half a cup of beets, which I steamed the other day.
-Half a cucumber, chopped up.
-A serious drizzle of balsamic vinaigrette.

That's it. If you don't like beets (Andy thinks they taste like dirty corn), then this isn't for you. If you do like them, or are willing to give them a chance, remember that they can turn your pee pink and that it's normal and you probably aren't dying.

And just to be thoroughly boring and food-related, here's what I'm about to start making for dinner: kale and white bean soup!
 
Do you like beets? Do you also hate salad "recipes"? Are you jealous of me for eating so well today?

How to be a domestic goddess

1. Leave work 17 minutes late, to make up for arriving at work 17 minutes late.
2. Stop at weird small-town grocery store on the way home. Go to the complete wrong side of the store on a hunt for milk. Who the hell keeps milk way over there? Realize as you wander through the meat department that you have absolutely no idea how much meat is supposed to cost, as Andy is in charge of all meat-buying decisions in our home. Find the milk. Balk at paying $1/gallon more than you would have if you planned an actual grocery shopping trip.
3. Get home. Preheat oven. Peel several quarts of peaches. Do cobbler-type stuff to them. While they're heating, make bread-type portion of cobbler. Split bubbly, delicious peaches into several pans, as these cobblers will be shared.
4. While cobblers bake, halve and pit a few quarts of plums. Clean out weird lidded container that will have to do for storage. Dump plums into container, top with a gallon (!) of brandy. Shake carefully, as lid hasn't given any indication that it's watertight. Put on bar in basement. Cross one more item off mental list of Christmas-type things.
5. Start cleaning kitchen. Take cobblers out of oven. Keep cleaning kitchen.
6. Take one cobbler to neighbors. Wrap one cobbler with tin foil to take to coworker whose daughter outfitted our nursery. Put lid on final cobbler to take to housewarming party tonight.

I'm on Step 3. So far, I've done really well with leaving work late and taking forever to find the milk in a weird grocery store. So, you know, we'll see how much of a domestic goddess I am when it's 8 pm and I'm supposed to be walking into the party with a perfect cobbler.

Dream vs. reality: Friday evening edition

What I am doing this evening: (Note: All pictures are google-image-search results designed to illustrate and not actual pictures of people, places, or events in my life. Duh.)

Rehearsal for tomorrow's wedding

Rehearsal dinner

Deal with Bridezilla, who seems to think I agree with her crazy

Avoid giving her too much side-eye

What I want to do tonight:

Drink cheap and delicious pinot grigio

Take a bubble bath (in a still, apparently?)

Relax with a book (Isn't this painting gorgeous?

Go to bed early.

Sorry for the most obnoxious post ever. Putting my game face - and some jeans without a hole in the crotch - on for the night.

Sweet canning stuff

Disclaimer: if you are my sister and you read this, you're contractually obligated to still act surprised come Christmas.

So with the eight quarts of free peaches our CSA share got us last week, we have successfully made enough peach butter to give some to everyone we love for Christmas. Andy and I decided that was an awesome idea but sort of a lame add-on: Here are some dvds and that shirt you wanted, and also some homemade fruit spread! So we've decided that our loved ones will be getting little gift baskets with peach butter and various other homemade delicious things. Andy prefers a sweet-themed basket to a mish-mash, so he shot down my idea of corn salsa. He did approve homemade applesauce (which we'll make later in the fall).

And that's where you come in. What else would you want in a basket of lovely homemade fruit-type things? Our criteria are as follows:

• Readily available (local) in upstate NY. So, like, kumquats are out.
• Not too sophisticated or bizarre in terms of taste. I can't imagine my dad loving blueberry-sage jam, for example. 
• Sweet, not savory. 

Booze, fruit, and I guess nuts are all acceptable options. Kid, feel free to make a request here.

Throw 'em at me!

Donating!

So the wine tour went better than I could have expected, mostly, and at my request yesterday we had a day where we didn't have a single obligation. We went to a hoity-toity, super-granola farmer's market in one of the richest suburbs of my city, and split a piece of cake for breakfast (and a $3, naturally-sourced, fair-trade, ethical-sugar-in-the-raw cup of coffee). Then we went and checked out Border's, which was a depressing wasteland playing loud country music (in an effort to keep people from browsing too long?), where a lady pretended for eleven minutes to not realize that I, too, was trying to look at the single shelf of knitting books.

Then we came home, and Andy suggested we tackle the office. I gasped.

The office, since we moved in, has been the room where things just get dumped. The door stays closed most of the time, so it's really easy to chuck stuff in there before company arrives and then just add more stuff on top. It also has bunches of drawers that end up full of bizarre, unrelated things, and a closet that a whole lot of crap, most of which we didn't use. Of late, the office has also been the room that holds all the baby stuff people have donated, which is not an insignificant list.

So we cleaned it out yesterday! Here's a picture of about two-thirds of the stuff that will be heading to Salvation Army when Andy gets home:

That's my kitchen! Please don't rob me! You'll note the circa-2001 nineteen-inch TV/VCR combo there, and its companion DVD player is perched somewhat precariously on top of a bin full of VHS tapes. There's a shower rack thing that we don't use since Andy prefers the detachable-head shower thing (I don't care, because I can't reach the thing anyway). There are something like four sets of curtains in that gigantic trash bag, most of which were here when we moved in and which we stuck in the office closet "just in case," even though we hated them. There are also two pillows, some towels we've never liked, the old bedspread from the guest room, my prom dress, four too-big sportcoats that were hand-me-downs from Andy's dad, several old cell phones, a giant vase, and some cheap cookie sheets that have since been replaced with the good shit.

I thought I had written before about our differences in keep-vs.-donate, but I just searched for a solid ten minutes and found nothing, so my apologies if you've read this before and I just can't find the post. Andy is one of those guys who wants to hang onto things. More than once, he's asked me, indignantly, "What's wrong with stuff? I like stuff!" On the other hand, I subscribe to Unclutterer. To me, if we get a new coffeemaker, we should get rid of the old coffeemaker, period. To Andy, the old one worked fine, we just wanted one that ground beans fresh, so we should keep the old one in case the new one breaks or something. He wants to have a fall-back plan for a coffeemaker. And our old TV. And a metric shitton of t-shirts. There are some things I keep around: yarn, for example, and books, and sweaters (I'm always cold, so I have a dresser that's almost entirely full of sweaters). But other than that? Out it goes! Someone can use it! We don't need it!

Andy has gotten much better about this since we bought the house, I think. When we got married, we were given several picture frames, which sat on a shelf in the office (some without pictures) until yesterday. One of them was from Andy's grandma. It was heart-shaped china with little birds and flowers sticking off it and it was really, really ugly. It went with exactly zero things in our house. But Andy's grandma died not long after the wedding, so he wanted to keep the frame, even without a picture in it, even though he was the first one to point out it was hideous. Yesterday, he agreed that it was time for it to go. Same thing with the giant crystal frame that weighed more than Pancakes that we got from our neighbor, who has since died. He seems to be realizing that getting rid of things isn't being disloyal to the person's memory, and that there are better ways to remember Grandma (or the neighbor) than shuddering every time we look at that weird thing.

I told him I've been considering selling my wedding dress. He said that was fine with him either way, but that my wedding dress is the only physical thing he's seen me be sentimental about. That gave me pause, but I think he's right. I mean, I don't need to hang onto the first set of dishes we got, because they're cheap and crappy. I don't need to keep the skirt he got me for my birthday when we started dating, because it doesn't fit and my style has evolved a lot since then. Mostly, I think things are things and people are what's important.

I don't know where I'm going with this. I guess I'm glad to be getting rid of a truckload of crap that stressed me out every time I looked at it, and I'm glad Andy didn't feel coerced into donating things he felt were important (we're good middle children and discussed it more than once). I also feel glad that we're fortunate enough to be able to replace anything that we need to, even if we don't have a backup coffeemaker.

Where do you fall on the spectrum of Spartan, no-decorations-living and better-keep-this-complimentary-mug?

Trying to stay awake.

Here is what we've been up to this week:

• Monday: Met up with a friend I hadn't seen in months right after work, then two hours later we were joined by our menfolk for a lovely Mexican dinner at our favorite joint. Returned home around 8 to do two hours' worth of homework for foster class.
• Tuesday: CSA errand, doggy break, foster class, after which we discovered that one of the couples in the class is planning to do this awesome program where they'll foster babies between birth and six weeks, at which point they could come to a home - like, say, ours - with parents who work full-time, as babies in our state can't enter daycare before six weeks of age. This conversation was awesome but took a while, so we got home around 10.
• Wednesday: Art Night, which is a weekly thing where our good friend comes over and we all work on whatever respective art project we've got going. She was over from about 5:30 till a little after 10.
• Thursday: Dinner up the street with friends at 5:30, followed by Knitting Night with the same friend we do Art Night with. Got home around 10:15.
• Today: I'm waiting for the jars to finish in the dishwasher so I can can the second batch of peach butter, and then we're going out for birthday dinner then drinks for a good friend. Her birthday was earlier this week and also was the same day as her grandpa's funeral, so I don't feel particularly inclined to beg off tonight.
• Tomorrow will be a fourteen-hour-long fiasco train-wreck of a combined bachelor/bachelorette party for a wedding Andy's in at the end of the month. We're going on a wine tour, which sounds great, right? Well, we leave at 9 a.m., which means our first tasting will be around 10:30, we're in a limo with 28 other people (of whom I know maybe 10), and some of these people are the sort who think bringing coolers of cheap beer to pregame the first winery is a great plan. Oh, and after we get home from the day-long, drinking-in-the-hot-sun, Rachael-will-get-heat-exhaustion-so-she-stays-sober event, there's a barbecue/bonfire at the home of the bride and groom - who are nice enough or whatever but who are not people I would typically choose to spend 14 hours with. Remind me sometime to tell you about the wine tour we went on with these people last year, which ended up with the bride starting a fight and then storming off in tears, with the groom following her. Oh, and they were our ride. Cool.

Ugh. All I want to do right now is take my pants off, eat some chips and salsa (we made salsa!), and curl up with the four books I got out of the library. Is that so much to ask?

What advice do you have on how to be a good sport for fourteen hours spent with people you're done with after two?