the snowy weekend

oh me oh my, what a lovely weekend we had here. it started on friday with a nice walk in little italy with the boobla snuggled up in the ergo with our friend S. we stopped at the sicilian cafe and ate tartufo and then we spent an unseemly amount of money on new glasses from rapp optical. my old glasses (which i haven't seen hide nor hair of since the summer) are about 10 years old so it was time for an upgrade. was it time for an upgrade to something that cost 1/10 of what our car cost? that i don't know. i will say though that rapp has some of the most unique frames around and the salespeople are top notch - really focused and experienced and offer quick, unbiased advice and opinions.

i had gone in wanting those updated hipster-y vaguely academic frames...the slightly larger buddy holly style in a tortoiseshell. and i found a pair that looked pretty good on my face, but then she whipped out this other pair, and i dunno what happened, but it was instant match made in heaven. there were a few other things at play that day. i wore my hair down, which i almost never do, because i have bushy, thick, unmanageable, horse hair that doesn't do what i want it to do, but for some reason, friday it was behaving and framed my face with lovely waves. i also put on a bit of makeup to go out and went i went into rapp, i looked like a person again, a real, live, potentially pretty person. someone who could be considered attractive and not wan, pale, harried and over-tired. i don't know if the salesperson at rapp played me like a fiddle, but when she said that i was easy to fit with frames and that you could throw anything on me and they would work, it certainly made coughing over wads and wads of cash on frames easier to swallow. playing to a new mom's long subsumed sense of vanity will do that for you, i guess. it also helps that my vision care will foot half the bill.

so we did that, and then i came home to the dotytron and cooked up a meal of meatloaf (pork, beef, veal) with ginger maple carrots, and mashed acorn squash. the meatloaf was perked up with some of my cranberry, apple, pear relish:

saturday morning we awoke and wonders of wonders! almost a foot of snow lay blanketed across the city. it was completely unexpected (i have no idea what's going on in the wider world these days) and so the dotytron called in to his saturday lesson and i baked us blueberry muffins and make fried eggs with english bacon and chimichurri on a pita for breakfast:

then we headed out on the slushiest grocery mission ever, followed by back to back massages, followed by epsom salt baths, followed by the discovery of a small leak in the bathroom into the kitchen. thankfully, our kitchen is a write off and is not long for the world, but i still gotta call a guy to come and take a look at it.

le sigh. on sunday morning we headed to the weston golf and country club to have brunch with nany. how lucky is master T to have the opportunity to be kissed and cuddled and to get to know his great nany? pretty damned lucky. she also taught me the basics of crocheting and we recorded her reading "the night before christmas" in one of those hallmark recordable storybooks i love that lady. look at the two of them, best buds 4ever:

we had l'army and the roomie over for a simple dinner of seafood chowder (salmon, mussels, shrimp, clams), bread, and salad:

and the roomie told stories from the birth of master T that i had completely forgotten/blanked out. the most notable one involved me turning to my lesbian midwife, when i was 7 cm dilated, looking her straight in the eye and saying, "S, do me a solid, and fist me open to 10 cm. c'mon. just do it for me." lol!!! so crass and offensive! the roomie was trying to say that when they placed the boobla on my chest that it was love and first sight, and i was like, ummm...no. it's gross. they're covered in that waxy white goo and they smell like skanky undies.

but then look what happens. that wriggling, fat pair of skanky undies turns into this sweet-faced little pudding pop, who is about to turn THREE MONTHS OLD on tuesday. where is the time going?!??! how can i make it stop?!?? stephen hawking, i'm looking at you, here! the little guy is fully busting out of his 0-3 month sized clothes but i'm finding it hard to put them away and move him up a size, so instead i've got him in 3/4 sleeve sleepers that his little toes are wearing away holes in. just kidding. almost that, but not quite. why do they have to get bigger? why can't you always have a delicious, yoghurt-y smelling, smiling, yelping, cooing little mass of soft skin around?

blargh. i feel like time is running away from me.

good thing i had the incredibly STUPID idea to do school while on maternity leave instead of just leaving well enough alone to soak up every minute of the little booger's growing awareness. so dumb.

back to the grind.

fin.

the comfort of routine

a somewhat frenzied, depressed, scattershot and piecemeal start to 2011 has now settled into something of a routine that seems to be working for all parties in the dotytron lagerfeld household.

the babe has been going to bed around 10-10:30 and staying down until around 6am or thereabouts. the dotytron and i, in light of our respective responsibilities and creative pursuits, have settled on a divide and conquer approach. the dotytron wakes up at 6 and barring any supply teaching responsibilities, does his lesson planning, life-stuff, guitar playing in the morning while the boobla snoozes with me after his 6am feed. when the dotytron comes home at night, we eat dinner together and then he takes over baby duties so that i can work on school, and then we converge again at 9ish to bathe, read, sing, and put master T down.

this is all working so far, but things are going to change. monday and tuesday nights the dotytron isn't home until 8pm, after teaching his private lessons. wednesday nights i have school, and we've all signed up for friday night dodgeball. so it's working for right now, but once things ratchet up, it'll be tough to keep that nice and tidy division of labour going.

my day is divided into two rough chunks of productivity centred around naptimes. in the morning i do my administrative housey type stuff: making phone calls, answering emails, house cleaning. then we either go on an outing or stay in. afternoons are for dinner prep and school work. i wish i wasn't so busy, but i guess that's just our lives right now. i sometimes find myself gazing covetously at ipads and iphones, but then i realize i don't really have the free time to occupy myself with apps. i'm not an app person. there isn't a ukulele practicing app, or a knit a scarf app, or a make a quilt app, or a cook a dinner app, or a have brunch with friends app...so until there is, i don't think i'd get my monies worth. we barely watch tv in this house...our cable bill is a complete wash.

the boobla has started doing this thing which is beyond awesome. well, there are a few things. first: he's super-fixated on me right now. if me and the dotytron are both vying for his attention, he inevitably zeros in on my face and saves a lot of his special smiles for me. he is smiling A LOT. and so much of my day is spent engineering and coaxing out the big, hearty, open-mouthed lappy grins that turn his cherubic face into a conferences of semi-circles. eyes squinting with joy, his little mouth open and gummy, his cheeks lifted and further rounded into edible smooth peachy bites. the other morning, i was feeding him and he looked up at me and made one of his cooing "aahhgahh" noises, that i repeated to him. he looked at me, and you could really see that he was comprehending that i was matching his sound and it thrilled him. we talked back and forth for a while and my heart broke into a billion rainbows. each time i repeated back his noise, he would pause, and you could watch the dawning awareness of his understanding that he was being heard and mimicked...watching the synapses fire and watching his little brain soaking it in was incredible.

i've sent an email off to this organization, roots of empathy, to see if he and i can volunteer to be a "seeds of empathy" family. it's a non-profit organization committed to building community. you basically bring your baby into the classroom of kids on a regular basis so they can watch a kid grow and feel a sense of empathy with others and build a sense of reflexivity. we'll see if i get picked.

we're also going to the open house for the alternative school in our neighbourhood. i know, i know. so flaky and mama dread! the thing is, the alternative school is in the same building as the school we're in district for...so if the kid is heading out that way anyway, why not at least check out what the alternative school is about? the dotytron has been put in charge of "checking out schools" duty and he said that the school has their own facebook page and is SUPER white and flaky-waldorf-y about it. which to me, is all the more reason why they need an inter racial wu-wear-wearing little o.d.b. and his cray-cray, curmudgeon, contrarian, loud-mouth mum. just to mix things up a bit. i've already determined that i'm going to be the scourge of parent council anyway. might as well be tussling with other mama dreads. is there something to be said for your kid toughing it out in public school with the great unwashed? hells, yeah. it worked for me (although going to school in the burbs is a great equalizing factor). but i also thing there's something to be said for your kid going to school and not being overlooked just because he doesn't rest at either end of the spectrum.

anyway, we'll see what we think post-info session. it's a lottery system anyway (how, "waiting for superman"!)

so my mom is reading my blog all the time...and sent me an email with the subject line: "chinkglish" about how i accidentally wrote "one an award" instead of "won an award." lol! thanks, mom. p.s. i'm writing these posts in a frenzy during T.V.'s nap time! cut me some slack!

random story: over the break, my deadbeat dad invited us all over for breakfast at his house with his crazy jacked up wife, lucy. so obviously, my sister feels guilty and obligated to go, s-dawg feels sad for the guy and obligated to go, and i emphatically could care less and am ambivalent about going (i'm mad about wasting a meal while in markham and i'm also mad that my deadbeat da' has suddenly decided to feign an interest in his grandchildren, borne out of retirement boredom and the fact that he married a woman who is an idiot and probably makes exceedingly boring company for the long years of your dotage.) the day before, i had pretty much rallied the troops to make sure we could make our excuses and not have to go, or at the very least, meet him at a neutral location (mcdonald's - our usual meeting spot, where he is notorious for a) not paying for breakfast; and b) ordering and eating his breakfast before we get there).

anyway, i called him and was trying to make our excuses, but he said he'd already bought the stuff for breakfast, and specifically mentioned, "ham, sausages" so then **i** felt bad and said we should go. well, well, well. when we show up, we are treated to a totally insane, immigrant spread of: deli ham (like, not even black forest ham...like the cheap, flaccid, pale, blotchy pink stuff in paper thin slices that's been formed into a rectangle), OVEN ROASTED HOT DOGS (immigrant "sausages"?!?), toast that was toasted easily 45 minutes prior, kraft single slices, juice, and peanut butter that has separated into cemented peanut goo on the bottom and an oily slick on top. the dotytron and i were the first to enter, and lucy was bustling around asking us how we wanted our eggs. because it was a whole heap of us (including all significant others AND c-hova) i suggested scrambled eggs because it would be easy for a crowd. "no, no, tell me how you want your eggs, i can do any kind you like," she insisted. the dotytron and i exchanged a wary glance and then put in our usual, over-easy. when the plate of eggs finally emerged from the kitchen to be passed around, i almost vomited. i doubt that a blind manatee could have butchered eggs more. it was comically bad.

master T, showing infinite wisdom, slept through the whole ordeal. the dotytron swears that at one point, he saw the boobla open one eye, take a look around, realize he was still there, and then promptly decide that feigning sleep was his best defense. he was right.

tuesday night's dinner of baked macaroni and cheese was scrumptious - very carb-heavy and cheesy:

last night we had freezer turkey noodle casserole, which had held up amazingly despite being almost 3 months frozen. i sided it with sautéed brussel sprouts and roasted parsnip chips:

bonus shot of the boobla looking like a baby pope:

and now i have to frantically go dust the entire house before he awakes from his morning slumber.

fin.

wracked

two things are making me feel guilty se jours (in my head i think this means "this day," but i'm not 100% on that.)

the first is that over the break i was having a confab with my niece and i told her that panda bears are marsupials and then i got all "teachable moment" about it and asked her what other animals are marsupials that are also called bears and that aren't (ie. koalas) so my sister emailed me yesterday and told me that miss ramona went to her teacher and told her that panda bears are marsupials and her teacher said that they're actually bears and my sis and uncle rico looked it up and they are bears. so i totally got my poor niece pwned by her teacher. i feel awful! mostly because she trusted me and then relayed that info to her teacher. i've lost all credibility with her.

the other thing making me feel bad is that for the past two nights we've been trying to implement a ferber sleep system for the little boobla. the idea is that you basically let the baby cry it out and don't pick the baby up so that they learn how to self-soothe. this is all very well and good, but the little boobla is fully capable for crying for a full hour and it's pretty tough to sit by and not comfort your baby when they're crying themselves hoarse and their face and body are transmitting pure anguish. i mean, according to the ferber method (or the synopses that we've read online), you CAN go into the room and pat them and talk to them, but you can't cuddle them to sleep. so we did it on sunday night and he bawled his eyes out until finally i went in and stroked his head and talked to him until he fell asleep. then last night it was another hour of him freaking out until the dotytron came into the bedroom where i was anxiously sitting up trying to distract myself from the baby and told me that actually, you're not supposed to try ferberizing BEFORE SIX MONTHS. because the baby CAN'T UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU'RE TRYING TO ACCOMPLISH. so we both felt like giant a-holes and sprinted into the room and picked up the boobla who promptly sucked on the boob for a bit and then conked out.

ugh. i think the main problem right now is that one small thing manifests itself and we kind of freak out. so he rejects the bottle one night and then we spiral off into him never wanting to bottle feed again and try a billion different things. update: he takes the old, non-space-age bottles fine now! or, he's a little fussy about going down to bed one night and then we up and decide that we have to sleep-train him right then and there because that ONE night is a slippery slope and before you know it we're never sleeping again. i think we just have to relax a bit and be a bit more macro about everything. i mean, obviously babies and people are creatures of habit, so you don't want to indulge slippery slope activity, but one night, or even a couple, isn't enough to establish a fixed pattern so we got to let up on things. plus, babies are changing all the time. plus, he's actually really good about going to bed in the crib and giving us an extended "night time" stretch of sleep, so we just have to remember that and treat this like the small blip it probably is.

i'm also feeling a little guilty about dressing my kid like this to go on a walk yesterday:

hehehe. the kid looks like a cross between a cirque du soleil participant, carrot top, and i don't know what. i bundled him up in like 4 different layers. the socks go on over the pants because that's the only way they stay on, and he's wearing this lion hat UNDER his hood. lol.

P didn't end up staying for dinner last night so we had that spicy grain soup with fred's olive chipotle bread and butter:

the spicy grain soup is a recipe for post-holiday-excess virtuousness. it's got bulgur, farro, and barley in an ancho-chile spiked tomato broth with chopped carrot, zucchini, and sliced shitake mushrooms. the recipe is from food and wine is available here. one of the most full-flavoured and tasty vegan soups i've ever had.

okay, book reviews.

in the last few months, i read all of suzanne collins' "the hunger games" trilogy. this series is already the next HUGE young adult phenomena, and is touted as the next "twilight." that description does the series and the author an incredible disservice, as it's a trillion times better written, has a more progressive female protagonist, and is altogether a more sophisticated piece of writing. it's hugely addictive and has sold like, 2 million copies. my sister hepped me to it. they're also making a film adaptation. i'm not sure why it hasn't generated as much buzz in canada, but maybe it has and i'm just not up on it.

the story takes place in a future version of the U.S. in what used to be known as america, after an epic uprising there are now 12 districts controlled by district 1. to publicly illustrate its control over the other districts, district 1 demands that each district put forth 1 girl and 1 boy to compete in the hunger games, which is a publicized fight to the death with one victor. the book is kind of like a young adult running man. the main protagonist is a girl, katniss everdeen, who steps forward to take her sister's place in the hunger games and over the course of the 3 novels, unwittingly sets off a chain of events that leads to a rebellion against district 1.

of course, there's also romance and it's a good one, with peeta versus gale, easily eclipsing the whole jacob versus edward malarkey. i can't recommend this series enough.

my book club read dionne brand's "what we all long for," which one the city of toronto's best book award in 2006. it's a love letter to toronto and it's multicultural diasporic make up. it tells the story of 4 friends, different ethnicities, in their early 20s making a life in this strange, swirling, identity-bleeding metropolis. the central character is a vietnamese girl trying to make it as an artist, in love with her best friend carla, and whose family accidentally left her young brother behind in vietnam when they were leaving the country. the book is intensely poetic, with beautifully descriptive passages that create a sinuous and intoxicating portrait of toronto's grimy exoticism. it was a very contentious novel for book club though. it resulted in one woman QUITTING the club over some heated discussion that happened before i arrived (late). crazy, huh? i think that some of the women were put off by the depictions of raving and drug use and general early-20s bohemia. it didn't ring true to them. my book club is made up of women who are primarily very straight and narrow, so they found it a little too indulgent. personally, i think i've read too much diasporic post-colonial literature to really appreciate the book. it's fine, but nothing i would willingly pick up again - almost too literary and rote for that genre, but still beautifully executed.

finally, i finished "the immortal life of henrietta lacks" last month. this is a non-fiction story of the "immortal" cells of henrietta lacks, a poor black woman from the south, whose cells were taken without her permission and ended up proliferating and used in countless research studies. apparently there are trillions of her cells that have replicated through the years and cell companies routine sell her strand to researchers and hospitals around the world for use in clinical trials, cancer studies, etc. meanwhile, her family and children had no idea about their mother's legacy and grew up beyond poor. it's a pretty fascinating account of medical ethics, race, and economics, through the aperture of this one woman's cellular legacy. i did find that it dragged a bit in the middle, but the author does a really fantastic job of bringing to life her extensive research.

so that's what i've been reading so far. it doesn't sound like much, but i think it's pretty good considering how little time i have for everything. i'd probably get a lot more reading done if i had an e-reader. but despite my numerous hints, no one got me one for xmas. i had been leaning towards the kobo, just because it's so cheap, but i'm not liking the lack of search functionality. i'd get the kindle but i'm worried about the proprietary format bizness...i want to be able to buy books from anywhere and read whatever the heck i want on my reader.

fin.

resignation, resolutions

post-holiday doldrums accompanying the resumption of normal life? present! there's nothing worse than going back to "work" after the frenzied whirl and bustle of the holidays. i always think the best time to have a vacation would be for the two weeks AFTER new year's. that way, you could always plead work as a way of getting out of holiday obligations and you get that extra time to decompress. christmas and new year's are way too buck inevitably to offer much of a respite. you really only get a day or two before you're feeling the winter blues at the prospect of returning back to the grind.

i am welcoming the return to some semblance of a normal routine. my resolutions for 2011 involve:

- being better at engaging my child
- spending less time dicking around on the internet (direct correlation to the resolution above)
- incorporating daily doses of school into my schedule instead of slacking
- daily walks with the boobla
- more local, seasonal veggies in our diet
- finding a balance between socializing and home time
- getting a new pair of glasses
- printing and putting the worthwhile 2009/2010 photos into albums

i'm not going to bother recounting what i've been up to for the past two weeks, suffice to say that our holiday was very very busy and filled with lots of adoration of this little guy, who made out like a bandit in the xmas prezzie department:

that's him in one of the multiple sweaters that great nany knit for him. so cute! she also crocheted him the most amazing blanket and pillow set that we're going to cherish forever and ever:

there's nothing better than homemade knitted baby gifts. no question.

we've been dealing with a bit of a fussbudget lately around here. he's been having super bad toots that scare the bejeezus out of him and consequently result in a lot of tears and wanting to be carried to settle his stomach. this all means that we've been baby-wearing like whoa. i'm pretty sure i've found my favorite baby carrying device. it's called a cross weave wrap, with the most popular and widely available one made by the german company, storchenwiege. they're not cheap. but apparently they retain their value well and you can sell them often for more than you bought them for, as people like used ones. we borrowed ours from the dotytron's hippie friend. this wrap is pure hippie. his friend is pure mama dread and the smell of patchouli impregnated in the wrap is only now starting to fade. out of all my baby-wearing devices (and i have 4 now), it's tops on ergonomics and versatility. but there's a pretty steep learning curve and it's not for the faint of heart, especially if you want to do the back carrying, which is the most useful carry of all. in a lot of wraps, you can't put newborns and babies on your back because of the lack of neck support...with the storch, it's totally possible and is the chief selling point. wearing a baby on your back is a million times more comfortable than doing a front carry AND it allows you to do things like cook, eat, clean without having a 14lb turkey hanging off your front and throwing your balance off (not to mention the inherent danger of frying bacon and having a forward facing baby as a grease splash guard.)

here's a photo of the dotyron "carrying my inca child" (which is what he calls wearing the boobla in the wrap):

i can't believe what a mama dread i'm turning into. i mean, i've always had hippie tendencies, but the wrap makes those tendencies visible to the naked eye. the reason why i like it better than the moby wrap or wraps similar to the moby, is that the storch doesn't have stretch. when you fit a baby into the moby, 15 minutes later, you find that the stretch in the cotton allows the baby to sink down, down, down, until before you know it, he's hanging at your knees, and that is a recipe for back disaster. the aforementioned ability to carry even newborns on the back is an additional point in the storch's favour, as is the fact that when the boobla is asleep, there's no maneuvering to get him out. i just crouch with my back towards the bed and tilt back while untying the wrap and depositing him on his back onto the sleeping surface. 9 times out of 10 he's still sound asleep. so yeah. this + cloth diapers + homemade baby wipes + plans for elimination communication (aka early potty training) + baby led weaning = mama dread is in the house!

last night for dinner we took leftover christmas prime rib and served it on top of fred's bread's chipotle olive bread (lightly toasted) topped with a welsh rarebit (think, cheesy, beer-y, mustard-y sauce) and ate that with sliced salted tomatoes and quick dill-cucumber salad:

my friend P is visiting from egypt so if he stays for dinner tonight it'll be macaroni & cheese with toasted garlic breadcrumbs and salad, and if he doesn't, we'll be having spicy grain soup with bread and butter.

saw a few movies over the break...not as many as i'd like to (i've been waiting for "blue valentine" to come to theatres for SO LONG!) but here are my reviews:
i'm one of the few people out there that didn't unequivocally love "black swan." my principal complaint was that it required a bit more directorial restraint. i agree with david denby's review that the film insists on bludgeoning you over the head with cheap, thriller tricks and consequently tips over into the lurid and schlocky. the story is rife with meta-symbolism and duality - th story of swan lake itself, natalie portman's nina's psychological doubling, the virgin/whore dialectic, mila kunis's character, the stage mother played with brittle mania by barbara hershey that present a high-minded take on the visceral, bodily and mental masochism of the ballet world specifically and of artistic creation generally. however! aronofsky doesn't know well enough to leave symbols alone and thus likes to over-play his hand, troweling on the message so thickly the film slips over the edge of good taste and true brilliance, in my opinion. which isn't to say that i disliked it - there are beautiful scenes (in particular, the whirling, tight dance sequences provided a wonderful stage-eye view of what it's like from a performer's point of view) but the overall effect is like some kind of baroque soap opera - helped along by some over-the-top performances (winona ryder's aging ballerina being the worst.) i love mila kunis but i don't think she deserves a best supporting actress nomination - barbara hershey does a much better job and kunis' role is under-written.

"the town" is a decent genre film that's undone by the poor story. overwhelmingly great performances from all the leads and the directing keeps things going at a satisfying clip, but there are some wasted characters (jon hamm's FBI agent, blake lively's floozy oxy addict) and the movie ultimately fell apart for me with the implausibility of the central romance between rebecca hall's unwitting bank manager hostage and ben affleck's trying-to-reform boston bank robbing neer do well. when a guy from the wrong side of the tracks is looking for redemption, then the gal providing the catalyst has gotta make it seem WORTH IT. hall's character is kind of flat and stupid and lame and that was a major issue for me. the movie is definitely entertaining and worth a rental fee but i'd give it an okay vote.

"easy A" is trying to be a john hughes sexy, funny teen film but falls WAY off the mark. what it's missing: heart, endearing characters, believability, a story. that's a lot of stuff to be missing from a teen film, folks. not even a believable villain! no message!!! ugh. i wanted to like it - the dialogue has a snappy feel and i liked patricia clarkson and stanley tucci as the parents of emma stone's olive, but at the end you're just, meh. emma stone is gorgeous and did give a breakout performance - the problem is: it's kind of hard to believe that a girl that gorgeous, funny, and smart-alecky would be a friendless, virginal loser.

tomorrow will be a book review omnibus post - i'm using entertainment weekly's "best fiction of 2010" as my guide, but i can't keep up. i've got 3 out of the 10 top picks from the library but have to return them as i can't read them fast enough.

finally: did anyone notice that i gave birth to alfred hitchcock?



definite winner in the best cheeks of 2010 category.

fin.

holiday buckfest

has officially begun in earnest.

this weekend was intensity in ten cities. friday was a relatively low key evening, with my definition of low key involving pumping out 96 mini red velvet cupcakes, an angel food cake (which was a total, dense, non-angelic gummy bust - it's okay because i only did it to use up 8 egg whites i had in the fridge) and dinner, which happened to be AMAZING! i had frozen some leftover pork shoulder carnitas (pork shoulder braised in milk and orange and oregano until it falls apart, then you fry up the meat in lard so it gets crispy) from a dinner with J & S & L ages ago (pre-master T). i cut up some potatoes and fried them with the carnitas and made tostadas (i fried corn tortillas until crispy) and then topped it with thinned sour cream, diced avocado, salsa, and shredded iceberg lettuce. they were DELICIOUS:

here are the mini red velvet cupcakes:


saturday was mental. i spent an hour or so power shopping in babies r us and joe for little gifties for friend's kids and then the dotytron picked me up, we cleaned house, had a visit from uncle avi:

then got our shiz together to go to a supper club friendsgiving at our friend's B & G's house. look at this table and the spread - it's straight out of a vermont postcard:


so our hosts made the turkey, gravy, brussels sprouts, and roasted parsnips, as well as a DELICIOUS chestnut breadcrumb stuffing. L & B brought a broccoli salad, P & R made mashed potatoes, and L made little french haricot verts bundles tied up in chives, served with a shallot vinaigrette. i made a sweet potato pecan pie, which to my chagrin, we didn't get a chance to eat, because we had to leave early to catch uncle avi's second set at pero lounge.

this is master T with his buddy baby D. baby D's mom fakes like she's all negligent mom, but in fact, is like, mom superstar. we were talking about smells and somehow lavender came up, and she was like, "oh D loves the smell of lavender, i give him a massage after his daily bath with this lavender lotion and he loves it" and i looked at poor master T and i was like, "awkward."

this is what went down in terms of master T's grooming before we left the house. so, i thought i was kind of being awesome implementing an every 3rd day bath. for some reason, bathing the baby seems like a major ordeal for me and the dotytron, even though it literally takes like 15 minutes. so for some reason we're always putting it off, until i finally decided that every 3 days was a reasonable schedule. my other less lazy-induced rationale is that babies don't need to get bathed all that often, and that i don't want him drying out (i was born with pretty sensitive skin.) ANYWAY, so he was due for a bath on friday night, but somehow the night got away from us and he was being an a**hole about taking the bottle so we ended up skipping it. saturday morning i could see that his head was getting greazy with a capital Z (like, the hairs on his head were all delineated in oily clusters) so i said to the dotytron, "we HAVE to bathe him before we go out tonight!" and then somehow the afternoon/evening got away from us and before we knew it, we were already running late for dinner, and i was wailing, "what are we going to do?!???" and the dotytron comes in and says, "okay. how about we give him a hungarian - i'll soap up a washcloth and we'll wash his head and face and then i'll get another wet washcloth to soak up the soap" and i was like, "done!"

so while baby D's mom is fretting over her parenting skills and giving her baby the full daily spa treatment, me and the dotytron are like, letting our baby fester in his own filth and then, when push comes to shove, FAKE BATHING our baby and just basically giving him a head wash to make him semi-presentable. worst. parents. ever.

the good news is that i spent a bajillion dollars on all kinds of bottles and he seems to have gotten over his rejection. of course he loves the super expensive "tommee tippee" (i know. i didn't come up with the name!) bottle that's like, super high tech and looks insane and takes up all the available cupboard room:

so buck. but at least he loves it more than life itself. so we're over that little hiccup, and i can go out to eat and watch movies and leave him with grandparents. woo!

so we had to leave friendsgiving early to catch uncle avi's show. baby's first jazz gig! it was cute. we caught up with a lot of the dotytron's old crew. also, uncle avi's last tune of the night, he called out, "is thelonious in the house?" and then launched into "blue monk" by theolonious monk, which was really sweet:

of course, we didn't get home until 1am and then we had to get up super early the next morning for dotytron family xmas party in oakville.

i dutifully ordered a nice, white-person fancy outfit for master T for his first dotytron family xmas party and of course, once we get him into it, the dotytron turns to me and says, "you know, if we just button the top button he'll look like a latin gangster" so that's what we did:

i call this look, "blood in, blood out" or vatos locos forever!

dotytron family xmas was buck...so much food! i ate a billion deviled eggs and crock pot meat balls and stuffed myself with shortbread. then we came home and had a massive family nap. and then we decided to take over momma and poppa d's house so we hustled into the car in our pajamas and took over their living room with their big screen tv.

now we're trying to get back to semi-normal life. i'm supposed to be researching my term end paper but instead i've got a cold and am feeling mad logey. the little boobla has picked it up and spend all night miserable and snuffly. we finally woke up at 4am and ran the shower on maximum heat for 20 minutes and let him schvitz in the bathroom to help him decongest. we're getting a humidifier for his room today and some eucalyptus oil that we can drip into the shower to help him clear the passageways some more. yay for hippie parenting! everyone thinks i'm psycho because i'm also making my own diaper wipe solution. i have to say though, so far, he's been spared diaper rash and i think the cloth diaper/homemade wipes combo works!

it is SO NICE to be off with the dotytron!!! i'm so excited already for march break and the summer - it's amazing to have the both of us off with the bambino. anyway, today i'm going to try to get a leg up on my non-thinking to do list (aka baking my family's xmas dessert, working on master T's xmas stocking). this might sound like procrastination to you. to which i say, "change of subject. i don't got to tell you s**t."

fin.

valley of tears

mine, the dotytron's AND master T's.

so last night, we caught the tail-end of a charlie brown christmas, and we got to this part:

and it TOTALLY MADE ME WELL UP. and i like, am SUPER-DUPER SKEPTICAL OF ANYTHING TO DO WITH HIS LORD, J.C. this is after the dotytron made the comment that "schroeder is the killingest 8 year old jazz pianist of all time" and after we watched the segment with lucy giving schroeder a hard time about not playing jingle bells properly, we came to the conclusion that i am lucy from charlie brown. i basically give everyone a hard time and have no appreciation for sophisticated music.

and then we got to this part:

and i went from welling up to spilling over. this gets me EVERY YEAR. well played, vince guaraldi, well played.

then, i cued up judy garland, in "meet me in st. louis" singing "have yourself a merry little christmas":

and that sweet judy garland vibrato made me and the dotytron start bawling our eyes out. it reminds us of poppa and of the dotytron's grandpa. so i basically brought the whole vibe of the house down. like, bigtime.

THEN master T started on his journey down losing-his-s**t alley...he's started rejecting the bottle. if you google "baby suddenly rejecting the bottle" you end up wanting to tear your hair out, because it looks like there's a million and one solutions and a billion and one testimonials of NOTHING working and the baby just wanting boob. so for the past two nights, he'll take a few gulps of the bottle from the dotytron, and then you can hear it gurgling in his belly, and then he loses his mind and starts freaking out and doesn't want it. but he will take boob. but i didn't want to start down the slippery slope of all boob no bottle, because the bottle is what allows us to go out for extended periods of time and is what what gives me a break.

it's REALLY hard when he's crying himself hoarse though. eventually, after almost two hours, he calmed down enough to take a couple of ounces with me holding him. this involved me and the dotytron practically getting a divorce in the process - it was extremely trying. you get frustrated with the baby and then you either take it out on the baby or each other, and then you feel bad, because it's not the stupid boobla's fault - he's just communicating the only way he knows how, and like i mentioned, when you see him going all mr. tomato head with fury and he's squeezing out tiny drops of tears and his fists are all clenched and he's yelling at you, it simultaneously makes you want to throw him in the trash AND give him the world.

i've had a cold lately, which i might have passed on to him, so he might just be extra needy lately. we're going to try the dotytron giving him a bottle tonight, when he's not so hungry, and leaving the before-bed feeding to me. hopefully it'll go a little smoother. i didn't really believe this before, but my cold, clinical robot-self is learning that breastfeeding is as much about bonding as it is about nourishment.

this is a photo i looked at last night to remind myself why i'm not going to chuck out the boobla:

and here's another blurry photo of him looking cute wearing a onesie that H bought for him:

we had a lovely visit with H yesterday...here's evidence:


last night for dinner, i made us cannelloni. did you know that the powers that be had the good sense to make oven-ready cannelloni? sheer brilliance. on sunday, our friend L sent me home with the leftover spinach-basil-ricotta-mozzarella mixture he used in his lasagne, so i took the ziploc bag it came in and piped it into the noodles, topped the cannelloni with my tomato sauce and laid some strips of proscuitto over top. it was AMAZING. so good. the proscuitto put it over the top, adding the salty savoury hit that the dish needed:



tonight the plan is to defrost some pork carnitas (pork shoulder slow braised in orange and milk, that you shred and then re-crisp in lard) from the freezer and turn that into a carnitas-potato tostada (a tostada, as i understand it, is basically a flat corn tortilla that's fried and then topped with stuff), topped with tomatillo salsa, diced avocado, iceberg lettuce and chopped tomatoes. and eat that in front of the tv, with a relaxed and scotched-up dotytron, who is going to be so pumped to finally be on winter break.

the neighbours this year (the ones we're on speaking/friendly terms with) are getting little packets of which chocolate cranberry orange biscotti. the people we share the wall with, whom we really like, have a mother who comes and does mad stuff for them. she cleans their house, picks up their kid like 3 days a week from daycare so he's not in daycare all day, and does yardwork for them. it's amazing. yesterday morning, the dotytron looked out the window and said, "man, why don't we have a mrs. kim?!" because she was outside shoveling their walkway and sidewalk for them. so lucky. i wish i had free help like that!

i'm going to try to rally the dotytron to do the housecleaning when he gets home tonight, but i think it'll be a tough sell...our house is starting to get a little rugged though, and we have a jam-packed weekend ahead of us.

fin.

what must it be like

to be terrified by your own farts? i can't imagine, but i get a daily glimpse every day when the boobla lets out a toot, pauses, and then promptly loses his s**t:

and on a scary note, it's kind of disturbing how much he looks like my dead beat da' in that photo. not buddies.

working hypothesis after watching "wayne's world" last night - that movie kick-started the whole "that's what she said" rejoinder. true or false?

ugh. when i started this post this morning my head was filled with words - book reviews, my thoughts on the whole wikileaks eebacle, and so on and so forth. now, after a full 12 hour day alone with master T (the dotytron went in early and stayed late in the service of holiday concert servitude) i'm exhausted. it is exhausting staying home with a kid sometimes. i mean, a lot of it is FUN work, and i did manage to bake off a sweet potato pecan pie, the oat cookie for the momofuku crack pie crusts, and a sticky toffee pudding, but still - i hate seeing the little chicken cry but when he does it for hours on end and the only thing that'll stop him is being in your arms and you've got a million knots in your shoulders and lower back pain from just that very thing, then it's really easy to ignore his crying OR get snappy with him.

but then you see the little tear he's squeezed out after wailing and turning into mr. tomato head pooling in the corner of his eye and you hear his hoarse voice from how he's cried his mouth dry and you feel like history's greatest villain. machiavelli ain't got nothing on babies.

monday was a bad night of cold and dark and a too-late start on dinner resulting in panzerotto pizza delivery (incidentally, one of the cheapest, widely available delivery options around. $10 minimum? $5 for a totally filling deep-fried pocket of pizza love? hells yes.) last night i made that tagliatelle with sautéed radicchio and bagna cauda dish, topped with a poached egg that i overcooked (boo):



tonight i had a visit from the roomie, which was nice because master T loves to put on a "i'm the best baby ever!" show for friends/family/strangers so he was on his best behaviour while she was here and she gave my arms a rest for a bit while i ate leftover dal and brown rice from last week.

bah. i know i've been boring lately...the words are there, somewhere...i promise more scintillating updates soon.

fin.

the lucky button chronicles continue

first up, allow me to share some of my sister's photos from our weekend in geneseo. don't these two look like they're about to start freestyling?

as my sister put it, my nephew's face says it all in the above photo. lol! he hates babies. i asked him if he gave baby markus a thumbs up or thumbs down and he instantly said, thumbs down. my sis' new car however, got an enthusiastic - and quick! - thumbs up. poor little guy. it must be hard going from being the baby of the family to being the middle child. i grew up the middle child, but i don't think i remember being threatened by the arrival of s-dawg. i just beat the s**t out of him and spent my childhood swanning along, supremely cocky about how smart and capable i was (as you can see, nothing much has changed.)

on friday i finished my latest crafting project, a yarn-wrapped wreath:

modern yarn-wrapped wreaths are burning up the charts on etsy, so in the grand spirit of copying...i copied the idea and executed my own. it's really very easy. because you're wrapping everything onto a styrofoam wreath form, i was worried that there would be sewing, but as it turns out, it's all held together with pins. the hardest and most time consuming part is wrapping the form with the yarn. then all i had to do was dig through my felt stash, cut out varying sizes of circles, overlap them, and then pinch the bottom to make petals and arrange them on the wreath and secure with long, round headed sewing pins. easy! and i guess theoretically i could change the design every year too. i have another, bigger styrofoam wreath form but i think i'm going to put that on hold until next year.

although, after visiting smckay's amazingly gorgeous and huge apartment on friday night with all her cute holiday decorations, it made me want to revisit my no-holiday-tchotchke stance. she has such great taste for all things cute. i think too many visits to white people's houses with questionable xmas house decorations made me wary, so next year i'll be scouring etsy for cute decorative things i can put around the house to make it festive. my plan next year is also to make a homemade felt advent calendar for master T, along with another wreath, and maybe some kind of holiday garland. i absolutely love working with felt. it makes everything look so cute and dear and homespun and best yet: no hemming of raw edges! YAY!

this is wednesday night's lentil curry with the brown rice - it was DELICIOUS!!!:

this is the apple cake i made for smckay's & A3's hannukah/xmas party in guelph. i've made this cake before...it's so dead easy and what i love best about it is - it's all stirred together in a bowl, so i don't have to haul out my mixer for it. because it's made with oil instead of butter (hannukah appropriate!) i don't have to cream anything, so it comes together really quickly - it takes forever to bake, but the end result is tender and filled with bites of soft, cinnamony apples. because i can't leave a good thing well enough alone, i prefer to serve it with a plog of whipped cream and a drizzle of bourbon toffee sauce.

friday was so much fun. i love kdubsguelphtdot crew more than words can say. the only bad thing is that we see each other so infrequently that i'm always left wanting more! we did a secret santa/yankee swap type of exchange, where you get to steal other people's gifts. my contribution this year was kind of a bust. i had committed to buying a pantone mug

and then making a jar of homemade hot cocoa mix, and adding in homemade marshmallows, and homemade cookies. then, a few days prior to the event, we got an email from jsculls warning us to make sure we brought good presents for the yankee swap because she'd just been at a work secret santa where nobody stole anything and everyone got super-lame presents. she ended the email with the line: "and keep your bloody mug with a hot chocolate pack in it!" but by that point i had already committed to the present and i didn't have the time to drag master T around. so let's just say i defo had the worst present under the tree. lol! A3 totally was a sweetheart and came to my rescue and took my gift which was very nice of him.

on saturday the dotytron went and grabbed our tree and dr. rei came over and witnessed the hilarity that is wrestling a tree into the house, giving it a fresh cut, and then straightening it in the CHEAPEST TREE STAND OF ALL TIME. i had wanted dr. rei around for the tree-trimming, but i forgot that you have to let the boughs fall for a full day before you can decorate...the downstairs of the house smells absolutely delicious right now, though, which is the only reason we'll probably never do the fake tree thing - the smell is so fantastic and seasonal. even if you end up cursing your slavish devotion to nostalgia come january, when the tree is nothing but a shell of it's former self and the smell is gone and all that remains is your own post-holiday-pre-work depression and a carpet of brown needles strewn all around.

saturday i also witnessed THE BEST SHOPLIFTING OF ALL TIME! i was at a shoppers and the clerk looked behind me as i was cashing out and said, "sir, sir, could you take that out of your jacket please?" and i turn around and see this sketchy, stringy-haired, middle aged, super-rangy rubby wearing one of those puffy, 80s nylon ski jackets, gaping open, WITH A GIANT TIN OF CHOCOLATE COVERED COOKIES half hanging out of it. when she addressed him, he kind of did this half-skip dodge thing and loped out of the store. it was awesome! he didn't even TRY to hide it! lol!

saturday night was a blissful night spent AT HOME with nothing to do but watch movies and cuddle master T and eat cookies. it was amazing. we had jerk oxtail, with coconut rice'n'peas and sautéed swiss chard and nutella brownies with ice cream:

sunday was an epic day. we slept in, woke up, trimmed the tree and i made us a chorizo, potato, and roasted red pepper frittata:

then we went to momma and poppa d's house so they could visit with master T and we could help them put together an entertainment unit. then we went to J & S's house for a quick visit to drop off and receive xmas cookies. finally, we ended the night at J's bro L's house for an amazing dinner of caesar salad, lasagne with HOMEMADE PASTA and apple pie with ice cream. i was a colossal pig and ate 2 servings of everything, even though i swear the lasagne was like, 6" thick. poor master T kept conking out and waking up in a new house. he was surprisingly cool with it though.

i just keep thinking of how full of love and great relationships our lives are and how lucky we are for it *knocks on wood x 100000000000000000000000000* i'm so looking forward to the two weeks after this one. the dotytron will be on xmas break and the time will be filled with family and friend visits galore.

i mean, i have to write a 20 page research paper somewhere in there...but i'm pushing that to the back of my mind at the moment.

fin.

it's a tough slog

to all the people who said that doing my masters while on mat leave was crazy - yous was right. it's too hard carving out the time, when you've got master T in his 4 states: crying because of upset tummy, crying because he's hungry, crying because he's over tired, the 15 minutes of grace you get of not crying after having spent an hour addressing one of the other three states of being.

but then...but then...in those 15 minutes, you get stuff like this:

and even though the pictures are blurry as all get-out...those 15 minutes of prime time T make it all worth while. things of note in the above photos:

- i love his chubbo, super-distended belly and how cinched it gets by his diapers
- i love his smile, which is now frequently accompanied by a version of cooing. i call it a version of cooing because it's more like baby raptor squawking.
- i love how the second photo is pure, "yesssss!" accompanied by a fist pump.

we've been avoiding doing any reading on 1 month and 2 month milestones, because a half-hearted venture into the fear-mongering annals of "what to expect the first year" made us feel really bad for poor, el chupido, master T. they're saying that he should be able to hold up his head at a 45 degree angle, focus on a small object like a raisin (!!!) and smile in response to us smiling, among other things. when we read through the list of "should be able to, might be able to, may possibly be able to" the dotytron and i turned to each other, tugged on our imaginary collars, whispered "awkward" and then tucked the book away, never to be looked at again. lol! look, i love my wall-eyed dummy of a kid. as the dotytron said, "it doesn't matter, look how cute he is!" to which i replied, "yeah, but there's a statute of limitations on how far that will carry him!" in summation: it's best not to think about it.

so, guess who was a crying mess on sunday night at the thought of the boobla going to sleep in his crib? ME, OF COURSE. blah. because i'm a big softie. because i'm all too aware that the moments are flying by and i want to revel in each and every one of them. because i love waking up and turning my head and seeing his sleeping, open-mouthed little face next to mine. but i've been semi-strong. he's gone to sleep in his crib for the past 3 nights and stayed there for the most part. last night i brought him in with us only because he didn't get up to feed until about 5am and i groggily justified it to myself as okay because it's so close to our waking time.

we just picked up a new set of $20 target flannel sheets that are THE BOMB...so soft and smushy and warm and cozy. oh man, target in canada better be as good as target US, otherwise, what's the point?

i did a very half-assed job on tonight's presentation yesterday. i'm forgoing the powerpoint presentation, even though one of my classmates, when i mused about just doing an oral presentation, turned to me and asked, "how would you do a presentation without power point?" in all seriousness. it's only worth 10% of my mark, so i think i'll do okay. i'm pulling a mid-80s average in the course already. then, in a bid for thrifty-studentness, i'm basically just slapping some headings onto my presentation, reducing the font size to a more reasonable 12pt (i like a large font for presentations) and then submitting that as my research paper proposal. ta-da! then all i have to do is the actual research paper - 20 pages, no biggie, right? *weak laughter*

this is what we've been eating lately. monday night i opted out of making the lentil curry in favour of freezer soup with my new favorite sandwich: grilled aged cheddar (NOT made on the panini press), white onion, and hot pepper jelly. last night i made a big batch of chicken noodle soup for the dotytron who has been whinging about coming down with a cold lately. we ate it with warm, crusty, olive chipotle bread from fred's breads:


tonight is the lentil curry with steamed brown rice.

okay...i have to do a billion NON PRESENTATION RELATED THINGS (thanks, mum for making me edit your paper!) before class tonight.

fin