I was playing the role of a tablescape designer for my brother-in-law’s birthday celebration. A few people asked about the flowers that I used to create the casual, effortless spring country arrangements. I am no Martha Stewart, but I think they turned out okay.
They were Ranunculus (see below)
and Lilacs. The ranunculus are best when arranged free-form and the lilacs just add an immense aroma. Actually, I forgot all about lilacs and when I smelled them at the store, I remembered where I smelled them last — my Baba’s house. I am now on the hunt for a lilac bush to plant in my garden.
This post is dedicated to my sister who is also my other mother and the mother of my amazing nephew.
Never have I known such patient love. My sister deserves her own post because she is not just my sister, but was as I said, my other mother. Since we’re 10 years apart, she has had a significant (lucky for me) role in my upbringing. I don’t know quite how to describe my sister as a mother — just an incredible person. I know this because I have seen how she loves me, and how she loves her own child.
What I have found to be extraordinary is that I see how she loves my child … as if she were hers. She dotes on my little girl and Sophia loves her back. She “talks” about her all the time. Not a day goes by that Sophia doesn’t ask about her and it isn’t surprising. We see my sister’s hand everywhere in Sophia’s room; from the quilt she sewed for her baby naming to the rad raincoat she bought her.
One of the saddest days of my life was when my sister went away to college. I was sad for a long time. She was far away and it would be months before she would come home to visit. I remember wondering what she would be like when she came home for winter break. … and then, she came home and brought me lots and lots of board games. We played each and every one of them for as long as I wanted. From then on, for the next few years, my sister brought new board games for me every time she visited. I remember thinking that I couldn’t wait until my sister would be back from school for yet another break moments after she left. It was great and very little has changed since then; I still look forward to every one of her visits just as much. We don’t play many boardgames now, but we play with our children, we talk, and we laugh. We are at the same point in our lives — we are mom’s. In our minds, though, we are two little girls playing board games.
Mother’s day is this Sunday! Hardly enough time (just 24 hrs) to devote to celebrating the endless, tireless duties of a mother. This is why, I am going to devote a few posts to the topic of “Mothering”.
This post is about the little person who gifted me the honor of being celebrated on Mother’s Day. I am not in love with Sophia. If I were IN love with her, then I could be OUT of love with her and that’s not possible. As a side note, I believe that you can only be in love with men and accessories.
As for Sophia, I simply love her [unconditionally]. My feelings are full of juxtaposition — She is my most significant accomplishment and my biggest fear. She is a project that I cannot afford to fail; I have made too many sacrifices and there is no going back. The road she and I are embarked on is nothing short of magical. Our pitstops are her accomplishments and those are the little things that make the biggest difference. First smile, first belly laugh, first time she rolled over, first word, first “Mama”, first step… the list goes on.
Sophia has her own personality and I can see now that she was born with it. She is cautious and careful — an observer in new situations. She quickly turns into a fun-loving, laughing, vivacious and happy-go-lucky little girl as soon as she figures the situation out. … likes toast, kiwi, avocado, blueberries and pasta. … likes to sing, tickle and be ticked, too. She is compassionate. She is loving and she is loved.
Last and most important … I love those eyes. They are perhaps her most expressive way to let her feelings be known. Whether filled with tears or lit up with mischief, they say everything about her.
Spring is officially here and it doesn’t look scared enough to run back and hide behind winter. Whew! We traveled to see family again this weekend. I promise, we will stay put for a while now. Sophia, as we found out, gets motion sick and travel is really unbearable with her. She vomits after 10 minutes in the car. 🙁
Anyway… Back to the rest of the post; my brother-in-law turned the BIG 4-0; I gave him plenty of grief about it — had to or else he’d think I was going soft in my old age. My sister threw him an A-M-A-Z-I-N-G party yesterday. 40 guests and the whole thing was homemade! Wild! Anyway, I helped yesterday morning — it was the least I could do. Here are my contributions:
I also cut what seemed like an impossibly huge amount of Russian potato salad. My brother-in-law is the only man I’ve ever made the salad for and that is how it will stay — sorry, hubby, dearest! I hate that salad with a vengeance–overdosed on it as a teenager.
After the candles were blown, the cake cut, and the plates cleared — hubby, Sophia and I headed home (aka the All Inclusive).
It was inevitable, I suppose that little Sophia pick up some unwelcome guests somewhere and from someone during our weekend excursion. I am not overreacting when I say that a sick child is pretty terrible and impacts all aspects of your life from extra clean-up due to vomit to staying up all night long because your child can’t sleep well or at all. I mean, really, who can sleep with a high 102 fever?
I never used to understand why parents fretted so much when their kids got sick … and I suspect most other people who don’t have children do not either. Your otherwise hectic life is immediately put on hold as is your sleep, showering, and eating. It is hard to leave a sick child at home and for the first time in a while, I envy stay-at-home moms. There is nothing harder than walking out the door at oh-dark-ugly hour seeing your child reaching their little arms for you screaming “Mama no go”…
Spring is here — albeit a slightly chilly one. We’ll take it anyway … I hear it didn’t show up in Canada. Sunny weather willed us out of the house and some help from my parents in the form of babysitting enabled a day out and about.
What to do, what to do? You know, when you don’t go out regularly and are so busy with work and house and baby to the point of being seriously overwhelmed, you don’t even know what to do when you do get a chance to get out.
We decided to go into D.C., since we don’t often go there unless for an appointment and it feels great to be among people. The city is finally green and the drive on a windy road along the Potomac River, sans traffic, was beautiful. Once in the city, we made good on our promise to see Faking It — a photography exhibit that explores manipulation before photoshop. While at the National Gallery of Art, we walked through the American Furniture exhibit which displayed gorgeous pieces.
A brief respit and nourishment in the form of tacos — cow tongue anyone? — and we were off to see the latest in construction, design, architecture and styling of homes at the 2013 D.C. Design House.
The house was large and very lovely. In fact, it was far larger than it appeared on the outside and that perhaps is one of the things I liked about it most.
Courtesy of D.C. Design House
If hubby and I were ever fortunate enough to have an opportunity to design and build a home for our family, we would strive to design it such that it appeared smaller than it was. It didn’t feel sprawling and yet was spacious.
Before going into the house to take a look, hubby and I agreed to look through the house (also currently listed for sale) and then guess the price to see if we were right. We couldn’t have imagined the asking price — a whopping 14.9 million dollars. But then again, 10 bathrooms, 5 bedrooms, a 4-car garage, a pool, two kitchens, two laundry rooms, a living room, a media room, a breakfast room, and much much more probably costs quite a bit. It didn’t have a huge lot, but it was in the Palisades — a tony part of the city. I have quite a few ideas of how to decorate our very empty and very-much-in-need-of-remodeling house. As we headed home from the exhibition, I remember saying to hubby that I guess I could be forced to live in a place like that. I was jesting of course — it would be absolutely glorious. That said, none of it would be the same if you don’t have a family to share it with. What makes a house like that sing is laughter, children’s voices, family.
Believe it or not, my biggest supporter and harshest critic are the same person — my husband.
I have always made it a point to choose friends who make me want to be a better person (in some respect) and to whom I can look up to. I do this at work — I would rather be surrounded by a whole lot of people who are smarter than me than be the smartest of them all. How else can one learn and grow?
That being said, it is sometimes hard to reach that magical silver platinum bar he has set for me and would I be the same if he were one of those super-supportive, anything-you-do-is-amazing husbands? My single biggest take-away is that I can work very hard at something and still never achieve it (i.e., perfectly composed and grammatically correct articles). It takes a great deal of strength to come to terms with knowing with absolute certainty that I will never achieve or have something. I always look on the bright side though [queue Monty Python’s song] — I can speak two languages fluently. Our lives are always a balance. Each one of us has something that someone else does not — [and we learn to] live with it.
The same question uttered by many different people: why do this blogging thing? The answer is fairly simple… and yet requires quite a lengthy explanation.
Life, despite what you see on your Facebook, Twitter and Instagram feeds, isn’t one continuous trail of smiles, plates of beautifully arranged food, and lovely scenery. Even the best writers and the most poignant pictures cannot and sometimes do not want to describe everything in its entirety.
What this blog hopefully shows is how we turn our every-day, ordinary life into a series of extraordinary moments captured in pictures and savored as memories we reminisce about. There are as many happy posts as more serious ones. What I don’t wish to do is showcase an idealized existence. I try to write posts that cultivate introspection and thought on the part of the reader or have a specific message that can be applied in a more global setting.
Although appealing, I try to stay away from sensationalizing the blog. I also try to stay away from disclosing unimportant information about myself; No one needs to know that I can still do a perfect split or have an uncanny talent for instantly coming up with rap lyrics on any subject. More importantly, I am fully aware that no one cares, trust me.
Like everything else I do, I always ask whether something I put on my blog today served a worthwhile purpose for a wider audience.
If you’re a somewhat regular reader of this blog, you know that I have on more than one occasion discussed our past 18 months and 7 sleepless nights. I thought sleepless nights were par for the course for the first few months after Sophia was born. I really didn’t expect the sleeplessness to continue (at least to such a severe degree) well into the second half of Sophia’s first year. The advice I get from most people after the initial shock of hearing that Sophia still doesn’t sleep through the night is that things will get better.
And I believe them, too. I mean, honestly, how many 25 year olds do you know who still sleep with mom and dad and wake up at night do you know? But what I want to know is: when?
Before becoming a mom, I approached the prospect of parenthood much like I approach my job: there are guiding, logical principles by which everything works and all problems can be solved in a systematic manner. Once I realized that a continuous stretch of sleep (at least 5 hrs) was seemingly unattainable, my beliefs regarding parenthood faltered. Sophia didn’t develop like the book said, she was ahead in some things, behind in others and seemed to generally be on her own schedule whether I liked it or not.
I spoke to child psychologists and cognitive development specialists (thankfully, for free since they are good friends of ours — it pays to have good friends, btw). I spoke to moms and pediatricians and everyone had a slightly different bend on the situation. The pediatricians mostly said that at this point, I should try and stick out the Cry It Out Method and that the sleepless nights are a bad habit that needs to be broken. The parents said that they had never seen such a thing and only head of a few instances from a friend of a friend of a friend. Child psychologists also mostly said that I have to establish boundaries for what is acceptable behavior and be tough. Some moms who have had similar experiences (again, a rare occurrence) said that there is no reason for this and this will self-correct.
Well… I’ve had quite some time to mull it over and since I am a mom too, I can now offer my own opinion. In fact, this is not just a mom’s opinion, but an opinion of a person with a degree in the sciences where I learned that everything can be explained and proven. So here goes:
Everything happens for a reason. I repeat: everything happens for a reason. Also, there is a solution to everything that will become evident once you uncover the crux of the problem. The crux of this problem lies in the understanding that every child is different. Some children are more sensitive to stimuli than others. Information and its input via the various human sensory modalities can contribute to overstimulation and hinder the child’s ability to calm-down and self-sooth (a necessary component of falling and staying asleep). So, if we consider that children develop at different rates and that some children are easily overstimulated but that stimulation is a hindering to self-soothing, we can deduce that decreasing exposure to stimuli should help a child to fall and more importantly stay asleep.
If we consider overstimulation to be an irritant (much like loud, thumping music in the middle of the night), we can also name other irritants such as teething pain, indigestion, allergies, etc. Irritants are just… well just what they sound like: irritation. Have you ever tried to fall asleep with a tickle in the back of your through or an itch? Difficult, yes? So, to remove irritants, we should consider our environment including diets.
So we’ve changed our routine a little bit to reduce overstimulation and minimize the impact of potential irritants. We are cautiously optimistic and I will share progress when Sophia’s sleep patterns conform to a Gaussian distribution. Until then, I have devised a set of parenting principles by which we now live and breathe.
Children develop at different speeds and there is absolutely NO need to rush any developmental milestone. My child will walk, crawl and crawl down the stairs backwards when she is ready.
There is NO need for my child to be pressured into doing anything she doesn’t want to do. If I see you do that, I will ask you to cease and if I ask you again, you will likely have lost a significant amount of trust in my eyes.
Children do not need many toys. Toys provide visual and audio stimulation and too much of that can lead to overstimulation.
Children’s diets need not be crazy or complicated. They need to eat real food and in moderate portions. Your toddler’s portion should be at most 1/3 of your portion.
Last, but not least and perhaps the most important one:I am the mom and hubby is the dad — what we say goes. No ifs, ands or buts about that.
I leave you with a final thought: the people who tell you that you should do X or Y are not the parents and their connection to your child is clearly not as significant as yours especially if you’re the mother. You know your child best and you know what’s best for your child.
… Just wanted to make an announcement that much to our surprise and Sophia’s incredible pleasure, she’s mastered to walk backwards. We usually wouldn’t make such a fuss, but you have no idea how much pleasure it has given her. No picture to accompany as no picture can truly describe her careful stride and over the top joy.
