Vacation Pictures

So the first stop on our vacation was New York City. We stayed at the shabby but conveniently located Holiday Inn Soho (which is really in Chinatown, if you want to be technical about it). The first day we got cupcakes from the Magnolia Bakery in the West Village and took the kids to Abingdon Square Park, where we met up with a college friend and his wife and new baby, while Mary made three new life-long friends whose names she didn't bother to learn. I love that about her -- she goes up to strange kids at the park and asks, "Do you want to play with me?" They run around screaming until the other kid has to leave, and then she moves on to the next kid. I don't know what this says about her future love life, but I can only admire her confidence.

We ate at a few good restaurants that were hip enough not to feel depressing but were quite child-friendly. All three were downtown: Kitchenette and Bubby's, which both serve yummy comfort food and have a nice shabby chic atmosphere, and a great Cuban restaurant called Havana Alma de Cuba. Here are James and Mary at the Cuban restaurant:



And here is James sitting in a restaurant highchair (for the very first time!) at Kitchenette:



I took a quick trip to the fabric district with Mary. We went to the Tinsel Trading Company, which has a wonderful selection of new and vintage ribbons and trims. We also went to B&J Fabrics, which I'd never been to before. Nothing was cheap, but they had a huge and swoon-worthy collection of fabric, including a lot of printed cottons. I eyed the Liberty prints with longing, but finally splurged on two yards of Japanese cotton.

After we left New York City, we drove through a little bit of Connecticut and then up through the Berkshires and Vermont into New Hampshire. We spent a wonderful week at the lake. Our favorite thing was definitely the drive-in. Parents of babies never get to go to the movies, but we just stayed inside and let James yell his head off without bothering anyone. The drive-in was in Fairlee, Vermont, about a half hour drive from the lake. The first night we arrived too early, so Bill and Mary spent a lot of time chasing each other around the empty field. The small refreshment stand, run by the two ladies who I think must own the drive-in and the motel right in front of it, served popcorn with real Vermont butter and cheeseburgers made from local beef. Okay, made from local cows. I'm sorry! They were delicious.



The second time we went, on a Friday night, they showed "Sky High" and the place was packed. There were lots of families -- kids throwing footballs around -- and vans full of teens. People brought lawn chairs and blankets and sleeping bags. The speakers were playing oldies -- good ones, like "Build Me Up, Buttercup." It was awesome.

After we left the lake we drove across New Hampshire and up the coast into Massachusetts. We ate at the Clam Box in Ipswich, where I recommend you get the whole belly clam, rather than the milder-tasting "strip clam."

Here's Mary in front of the Atlantic Ocean.

It's taken a while to settle in after our vacation. We've spent the last ten days glued to the television watching hurricane coverage, or scanning the Internet for fresh outrages and then calling each other on the phone to say, "Did you see the footage where Shepard Smith blows up at Sean Hannity? Did you hear Michael Chertoff on NPR saying that as far as he knew, there weren't any refugees at the convention center? Did you hear the president of Jefferson Parish on 'Meet the Press?'" And so on.

This clip of Charmaine Neville, neice of Aaron Neville and a talented performer in her own right, brought me to tears. I found it via a link on Andrew Sullivan's site. I stopped reading political blogs after the last election because I couldn't endure the gloating, but I like Andrew Sullivan, and have enjoyed, in a grim way, reading about his growing disillusionment with Bush and the Republican party.

Bill suspects that the peoples' outrage at the government's fatally half-assed response to the hurricane is waning, and that the media has been cowed by accusations that they're playing "the blame game." We have a reproduction of the little sign that Harry Truman used to have on his desk -- "The Buck Stops Here." Wouldn't it be incredible to have a President who could stand up and say, "I take full responsibility for the mistakes of my appointees, and I'm going to do my absolute best to make up for it"? This one never will.

A lot can be said about George W. Bush, but I think I can sum up his character thusly: George W. Bush is the kind of guy who, if you were married to him, would never, in a million years, ask for directions on a road trip, but would just drive around for hours with the kids screaming in the back seat, rather than reveal his "weakness" to a total stranger at the gas station.

On Vacation

We're on vacation. First we spent a few days in Manhattan, and then we drove through the Berkshires, up through Vermont, and into New Hampshire, where a friend's parents have kindly given us the use of their lake house for a week. Bill and I were married here in 1991. It's also the place where I'd forced him to propose to me in 1990. I was twenty-three, he was twenty-four, and we had been dating for about eight months.

For years I've wondered, what the hell was I thinking? I couldn't, for the life of me, recreate the thought process that sent me rushing pell-mell into marriage, pulling poor helpless Bill along with me, when we were barely out of college. I had an epiphany on the way up here. It wasn't so much that I wanted to get married. I knew that we were too young, that getting married was crazy, but the craziness of the idea was part of its allure. Specifically, I wanted Bill to be crazy. He's one of the most rational, clear-headed people I know, and I wanted him to be so in love with me that he was willing to do something uncharacteristically rash and stupid.

In retrospect, that's maybe not the best reason to get married. But it all worked out. I'd like to think that it was due to an unusual amount of perspicacity on my part. But it was really just dumb luck.

Tonight we all went to a drive-in in Fairlee, Vermont, and saw "The Island."

Up Late

Today James and I went in to record commentary for the seventh season Simpsons DVD. I think everyone was surprised and (mostly) amused to see a baby at the record, but he was quite good, and I like to think that some day he'll get some mileage out of it.

We recorded the commentary for "22 Short Films About Springfield," which I still think is one of the best episodes ever. (I also love "Bart the Lover," "Lisa's Substitute," "Krusty Gets Kancelled," the Treehouse of Horror episode where Nixon says "I'm not dead yet! I just published an article in 'Redbook'!" and the controversial George Bush episode. And the baseball episode. I love that one.) I wrote the bit with Bumblebee Man. When that part came up I explained how I hadn't known the Spanish word for "woodpecker," so I called my mom, who also did not know the Spanish word for "woodpecker." But Bill said it was okay, because there was never any intention of using real Spanish anyway -- it had to sound Spanish, but be easily understandable for non-Spanish speakers. We ended up calling it a "woodpequero."

(I also said that the design for Bumblebee Man's wife was based on an old boss of mine, a woman who terrified me so much that some mornings I barfed before going in to work.)

That episode was written in 1995. Back then I was still in my twenties, with no gray hair, no children, and no immediate plans to have either. This is how much my life has changed: after the record, I put James in his carseat, tried to eat some of the delicious (free, and not cooked by me!) food they'd set out, ended up spilling mozarella caprese all over the front of my favorite new shirt from Target, wrapped up a sandwich in a paper napkin and snuck it into my bag to eat in the car later, realized I was late for picking up Mary at day camp, realized I'd lost my car keys, and then realized I'd left the car keys in the car.

I have not become the writer I had hoped to be. I'm not even really the mother I had hoped to be. But. But. It felt good to remember who I was for a while. It felt even better to do it with a beautiful boy on my lap, and a beautiful girl waiting for me to pick her up, and my sweet husband next to me.

Much to Do

It finally struck me that we're going on vacation next week and that I can't possibly finish all the things I'd been hoping to do before then.

Before we leave, I hope to make a sock monkey for the son of a friend who is letting us stay with him in Boston during our visit. We're also going to New York City for a few days and spending a week in a friends' parents' house on a lake near the New Hampshire/Vermont border. Ben & Jerry's Factory, here we come!

I also want to do a quick paint and decoupage job to this table before we leave. I found it at the Long Beach flea market last month. I wanted something cheap and small to put next to the glider. I didn't want anything too elaborate, or too nice to decoupage, and I didn't want to pay extra for the layer of chalky white paint that flea market types always add to their old furniture to make it "shabby chic." This little table was $15. Perfect.



James had a check-up yesterday. He's gone up to the 85th percentile in head size. We're pleased, because his head size was initially in the 50th percentile, which is perfectly normal anywhere but in this family. We all have huge heads. Heads of Pufnstuffian proportions. So we were all a little surprised to find out that James' head was merely average. I joked to Bill that James was going to be like Marilyn on "The Munsters" -- normal to everyone except his freakish family. But now he's one of us. Gooble gobble.

Addendum

Today's original post was too grouchy, even for me. If I have a pet peeve, it's people who don't know how good they have it.

I leave you with these words of wisdom:

Rachel Pulido
October 5, 1981
Old Testament
Block E
Sister Mary Patrick

It seems that the more people win, the more people think we're incapable of losing. Instead of being thankful, we think it's all because we're great. We rarely give God the credit, and so we lose our humility. And when a person loses their humility, they're usually in for a big disappointment. Suzanne Somers, for instance, thought she was so great she was worth an enormous raise in salary. She found out she was wrong and now she's all upset because they fired her.

Bib

This is what I made this weekend. I based it on a pattern in a Japanese craft book that I got a few weeks ago at the Asahiya Bookstore on Sawtelle. I had to tinker with the shape of the bib a little so that it would fit around my baby's fat American neck.

I really just wanted to find a use for the little patchwork thingy I'd made. Making tiny little patchwork thingys is fun! Maybe instead of quilts, I should make coasters.



I had a pretty blue vintage button that I wanted to put on the bib, but I've never made a buttonhole, of course. So I was forced ... to read the manual for my sewing machine. The sewing machine and I have have a distant but cordial relationship. I am reminded of a Janeane Garofalo routine: "I still have the 'don't ask don't tell' policy with my vagina. I don't bother it. It -- she. She minds her own beeswax, I stay up here. She doesn't sass me. You know, no back talk. None of that. She's not flippant at all with me."

I have a similar relationship with my sewing machine. I can sew a simple seam, refill the bobbin, change a needle, but any action that requires reading the manual is generally the type of action I avoid, and I like to think that the sewing machine ("Bernina" is her name) appreciates my not screwing around with her. My negligence allows her to pass her life in serene contemplation, dreaming about her childhood in the Alps.

There's a good reason why I avoid reading manuals. The older I get, the more I realize that my brain's capacity is finite. I remember my kids' birthdays, the phone number of the house where I grew up, the first stanza of Byron's "She Walks in Beauty," the names of a lot of crappy '70s TV actors (Bernie Kopel!), the circumstances surrounding my first kiss with my husband (spring, 1988, post-party snog), the circumstances surrounding my first big fight with my husband (he was reading "The Silence of the Lambs" and ignoring me), and many other things, some useful, some not. I don't seem to have any control over what gets saved and what gets lost. For example, I remember the middle name of every friend I've had since grade school, but I left the Japanese craft book in the Xerox machine at FedEx/Kinko's when I went to make copies. If I learn how to use a zipper foot, some other bit of knowledge might be obliterated forever, and who knows what it might be? I might forget Shaun Cassidy's birthday (September 27, 1958). Or the way my father's hand looked -- strong and brown, with big ropy veins -- or the way he would rub the ball of his thumb over the edge of my thumbnail when he was holding my hand. There's only so much room up there, and there are some things I don't want to lose.

Anyway. I dug out the manual and learned how to make a buttonhole. Turns out there's a lot of stuff Bernina could do, if properly coaxed. I believe it's time to move our relationship to a new level.

James can't believe I put this much effort into something he's just going to drool on anyway!