J'Espere

Oh, sweet friends who are due in the year of a royal birth, take note.   Don’t forget to bring your favorite heels and hairdresser to the hospital. I mean, I love Kate as much as the next person, but seriously? TEN HOURS after birth she appears, radiant, as if she had happened to be passing by and dropped in to scoop up a bundle of joy. Not as if she delivered an 8-pound baby. See below (taken from people.com)             Looking at the photos and then comparing them to George’s birth photos, I did see that she looked, oh, slightly more polished this time around. But….I am actually having trouble finding the words for this…maybe I just need one…HOW? I saw lots of comments about how she had a team of people, blah blah blah, and wanted to just say (but resisted)…yes, but SHE was the only person who DELIVERED A BABY.    No one else, as good as their intentions may have been, were able to get that child out of her ...

            Last week I had to be a grown-up. Again. Normally I can squeak by in what I lovingly refer to as “pseudo-grown-up” world. That’s where you are technically at a physical age in which you are considered a grown-up, but secretly you are still treating said activity/excursion/event in the same way a much younger version of yourself would.   I live on the edge.             But last week I had a realization. I would call it an epiphany, but I like to think those refer to something positive and this wasn’t.    So I will call it a realization. Months ago, on a high from running the 4 mile Fleet Feet Run in Chapel Hill, I signed up for the 10 miler (at a steep discount, I might add!) KNOWING that if I could run 4 miles with a 10 month old, I could doubtless run 10 miles with a 22 month old! Because 22 months is much easier than 10, right? In my head she would already be a p...

I have no idea when Mercutio spoke that line, or if he even did. And I would definitely fact check it, but I am actually physically so worn out that I don't even care. We have a plague upon our house. It started a couple of weeks ago when things were going really, really well . Like suspiciously well. I was getting coffee every morning, the days were the perfect weather/daylight balance for running, and I had just discovered this new workout called barre3 (more on that in a later blog). Meals were being eaten at a reasonable time by adults and SL was finally saying "Mama". Did I mention laundry was also folded and in drawers? Because this seems to be an important detail. Next thing I know I am getting one of those urgent calls from our sweet babysitter that SL has a fever and isn't feeling well. There are very few things that are sadder than a sick toddler, and our sweet baby proved it. She was miserable and her nose was an unstoppable faucet. She also still...

True Story. I am not a minimalist. Don't be shocked. Over the years, I have read a ton of books about organizing, decluttering, making room for more by having less. I went through a phase when I was a teenager (thus procuring me the nickname "Buddha") when I tried to get rid of everything. I remember reading some novel in which the main character's sister did this, and the parents ended up just sneaking all of her stuff up into the attic. In the story she subsisted on something like three pairs of socks and a pair of jeans. It didn't work out for her. It didn't work out for me. I was fantasizing about living out of a backpack, kind of like a hitchhiker. Doesn't fly for a southern girl. In what kind of world do you not hang on to your mother/aunt/grandmother/someone you met once's....something.     If you've been a reader for a while, this might not sound like anything exciting or new from me. "She's reading a new organizational book, she...

     Today is SL's second day of daycare. You might be wondering why, considering I'm still off for the summer and have a few weeks left. But right now, as I sit and type this, my baby is being fed lunch by someone else. A delightful someone else, but someone else nonetheless. And so, the house is silent. I will explain.      We learned last spring that our current babysitting arrangements were not going to be able to last this year. So we did what any American working family does. We panicked. I spent hours after school driving from daycare to daycare, each time leaving in tears at the thought of my sweet baby being one of many in a room of cribs. Sweet women led me down hallways and showed me curriculums and play areas, and children who were having fun or eating or sleeping or simply waiting for their parents. We talked about tuition payments and deposits and if they would put on sunscreen and naptimes. And I would smile and take my packets and walk to m...

Dairy free and holidays don’t go hand in hand. Actually a dairy free lifestyle is a fascinating creature to me. If you know me, you probably know that I’m lactose intolerant naturally- so I don’t eat ice cream, or drink milk, and try to keep cheese to a minimum (which is REALLY HARD BY THE WAY). So when someone suggested I go dairy free a couple of months into motherhood in the hopes that it would help SL’s reflux, I thought, Sure. I’ll quit eating yogurt for a while. So. Wrong. Dairy free is not the same as lactose intolerant at all. Dairy free is a complicated process that involves reading labels like it’s your job. Which is awesome since you have so much free time to analyze the differences between monocalcium sulfate and polycalcium sulfate. And it’s really awesome at a restaurant, when you have the opportunity to make a waiter scurry back and forth to the kitchen. Maybe that’s why I’ve only been out to eat once since SL was born. Sometimes it feels like my whole world is wrapped...