My old life

My old life is gone, you know, and I'm okay with that. With a new baby, there's very little time to grieve the hundreds of little things I'll never, it seems, have time to do again, like go to a restaurant or see a movie (I know, everyone says we will do those things again, but that remains to be seen). Tonight, though, I'm feeling a bit soppy over the dumb, fun things I used to sometimes have the opportunity to do. I've been reading one of my favorite blogs, written by an unusually smart and thoughtful* 20-year-old college girl who bobs about going to classes and visiting yarn stores and eating in sandwich shops, and, wow, nostalgia just grips me as I do so! Tethered as I now necessarily am to the house (and for Christ's sake the Minnesota snow doesn't help), I miss a few small things, you know? I miss walking around downtown (any downtown) and popping into shops (oh, used bookstores!) to kill time, all the while wearing a cute vintage thrift-store coat, and then wandering about until I'm hungry and irritable, and stopping for a coffee and an onion bagel, and then relishing the relief of getting back home again, and taking off my shoes and picking up my knitting or a book, and cozying up next to the radio to hear the news as I knit or read or think about what to make for dinner.** Spending time alone, and having the pleasure of getting home after being (imagine!) away from the house for an afternoon -- those two things sum it all up, because that's the thing about this new life, Dear Reader: there is time for verily nothing besides taking care of my sweet little girl.*** And that's alright, and God knows I'd do it a thousand times over to keep her happy and healthy, but I will find myself remembering the unhampered flitting-about of my early adulthood. It can't be helped. In fact, I'm quite sure that a bit of fond, benign remembering of one's days of comparative liberty (and of the wearing of thrift-store coats) is a time-honored tradition among new moms, and is to be anticipated.

So many things about this new life, I assure you, make me immeasurably happy. You would not believe, for instance, how I love this baby's scent. It's quite dizzying; she just... smells like my baby. I love when she looks up at me with milk on her face, big-eyed and blissful. And how she sleeps with such sweet abandon. And even this: I hold very dear indeed the sound of angry protest Bee is capable of emitting when jostled a bit too much -- the very fact that she expresses herself so ardently and with such assuredness of her right to not be jostled. I adore it. And she smiles and laughs so easily -- a wide, toothless grin and a mirthful, hilariously voiceless laugh. I love, too, that -- for now at least -- Bee needs me, and seems so happy to see me when she wakes. So I will always be here. And someday when I can't hold her in my arms anymore, the world outside will still be waiting.

---

* It's because she's British, I'm sure of it! How many American college students do you know who write/think/knit like this?
** Proper dinner, not the by-the-seat-of-our-pants power meals we've been bolting down each night to, all too often, the sound of a crying baby.
*** I can blog (one-handedly) and examine the Internet while sitting up with Bee all night every night. Every cloud has a silver lining, and in this case that silver lining involves groggy blogging.

Undocumentable.

I'm nineteen weeks pregnant now, and these months are slipping by with slightly alarming speed. I know time might seem to slow down toward the end of these nine months, as things get, you know, BIGGER and MORE UNCOMFORTABLE, but right now I feel a sort of desperate guilt about not documenting these months more closely -- in, I don't know, some sort of [private, non-blog] journal or something. I wish I could slow down time in order to appreciate more fully this special period of time that is destined to come to such a complete and definite conclusion in November.

I suppose I could at least be documenting this time a little more devotedly. I'm already forgetting some of the details of things that happened at the beginning of this pregnancy, and maybe it's not important to remember exactly what happened the morning I got up in the middle of the night because I was so excited about peeing on the pregnancy test stick -- but maybe it is important, somehow -- that's the feeling that badgers me a bit. It's crazy... this nagging feeling that something utterly irretrievable will be lost if I don't remember exactly what time I got up that morning or precisely what we said to our friends when we finally shared the news.

But it's been hard for me to find words, or to feel the necessary drive to do the work of writing things down, except in a cursory and public* manner, with everything else that's going on in our lives this summer. And anyway, I so often find myself thinking, what can I possibly say about this experience? Not only because I surely can say nothing that hasn't been voiced by a billion pregnant ladies before me, but because, if you'll pardon the wide-eyed wonder, I am frequently, these days, left speechless by the beauty and marvel of it all. Perhaps I should at least be keeping copies of my letters to friends, à la Clarissa Harlowe, but I've not taken the time to do so. It may turn out that this silly blog, and some illustrations** I've done this summer, will have to be documents enough.

* Theoretically public, if anyone were to actually read this blog.
** The uterus, above, isn't really one of them. It's just a little thingy I cut out of black paper and thought was cute.

Freud, welding, and me

Today a series of small, non-dangereux mistakes has kept me from learning how to weld. Since I've been terrified of welding since I first heard (on a visit to MCAD three years ago) that I'd have to engage in metal-melting, I wonder if what Freud would say is correct. (I think the famous psychoanalyst would infer that I purposely--though not consciously--left the project instructions at home, for example. Along with my protective gloves. Of course, I think my husband, who knows me better than Freud does, might say that I just forget things. Which is true, I do.)

Accident or "accident," I now have several hours to kill before class, with no welding project to keep me busy.

You probably know this already, but a Freudian slip doesn't just have to be a slip of the tongue, and it definitely doesn't apply just to sexual-type stuff (e. g., "Hi, Prick! Um, I mean Nick..."). Or, hearing a word incorrectly because we are obsessed with something else could be a Freudian Slip. These slips are different from simple mistakes without meaning, because Freudian Slips reveal something of our true feelings and thoughts, know what I mean? Another example might be unintentionally (but maybe a little intentionally) leaving your welding equipment at home because you secretly don't want to do the welding project.

A great take on the Freudian slip as it relates to sending e-mail (the Freudian Send!) can be found here.

My misspent summer

My long and magnificent summer vacation is over. I didn’t
do absolutely everything I’d planned over these three
months, like attend an outdoor evening concert with Ben
and bring a picnic basket dinner.* I didn’t bike the awesome
Minneapolis bike path nearly enough, either. Or make much
art, or work on my zine. But I did do some of the things
on my long and merry list. For example:

went to the Minnesota state fair with Ben and ate French fries and saw baby animals

knitted thirty cupcakes

ate prodigal amounts of fresh summer fruits, especially peaches and blueberries

finished reading the longest novel in the English language

grilled on the patio

haven’t worn long pants** since early May

sat on the porch and ate watermelon and spit the seeds in the yard

finally traded my Washington state driver’s license for a Minnesota driver’s license

made big batches of homemade tomato sauce

planted a backyard garden that actually yielded vegetables

listened to lavish amounts of NPR

baked a tart

kept the house groundbreakingly clean, and scrubbed the kitchen floor three times

enjoyed burritos, one of my favorite summer meals, for dinner at least ten times—with lots of fresh tomatoes and spinach and salsa and sautéed veggies and avocado…

finally hung out at the Tea House on 26th and Hennepin

made homemade ravioli***

watched fireworks

froze several pounds of fresh blueberries for winter

rested

* No particular outdoor evening concert. My passion for packing a picnic and taking it to the park for an outdoor evening concert cannot be overstated. It began to develop four years ago when Ben and I discovered Opera in the Park, an event at which Madison, WI locals eat delicious food and drink wine and listen to opera under the stars. It’s free and wonderful.
** Or closed-toe shoes, for that matter.
*** And pierogies!

Homecoming

My laptop is home again, fixed. After the
Apple repair place got through with it, I had
to take the poor thing to school and have all
of the software reinstalled on it, and now I'm
spending the afternoon trying to get all the
settings back where I like them.

I'm also trying to remember the address of anybody's blog,
since all of my bookmarks got wiped out. So if you know or suspect that I read your blog, could you leave a comment with your blog address? Because I'm just not smart enough to remember all those addresses, dears. This means you, Pavotrouge, Candy Penny, Sara, Roxanne... and others...

In other "news":
a) I'm thinking about buying a Wacom Tablet. I love using these digital drawing tablets, with their robot pens, for digital illustration and comics.
b) We've had some gorgeous green beans from our backyard garden!
c) I slept like ass last night. I lay awake thinking about some sad news I found out yesterday about a couple of Cleveland friends.
d) A swap I was in over at the 'Bot got canceled. Which was too bad, because I'd already made my toadstool stuffie. So, if anyone out there would like to swap toadstool stuffies with me, drop a line, yo.
e) School resumes in a week and a half! And, like a lazy teenager, I've wasted the entire summer!
f) Ben and I are going to the farmers' market tomorrow. We haven't gone all summer, if you can believe that! Ingrates!

End transmission.

Vegan chocolate cake

But not even a recipe for you look at! Soy una blogstress mala. Sorry!

Too lazy to be a real artist

Grabbed coffee with a school chum today and was completely floored by her account of how she's been passing the summer break (which is only two weeks old). A papermaker, she has already finished a slew of handmade books, taken a weekend box-making class at the MCBA, cleaned her house, and had friends over for dinner. I haven't done anything arty, really, so I feel like a total wastrel. I'm not sitting around all day or anything, but reading, baking, biking, and knitting aren't going to make me any better at drawing.