Like Mother, Like Daughter

{pretty, happy, funny, real}

2012-01-26T00:01:00.006-05:00

~ Capturing the context of everyday life ~

Every Thursday, here at Like Mother, Like Daughter!

{pretty}

{happy}

{funny}

{real}

The Chief can always be found on the floor when there's a baby in the case.

I made a travel journal...

2012-01-23T17:23:00.000-05:00

... and I'm not exactly sure how it turned out.

My perspective is gone. I wrestled those items that could possibly be made into a travel journal, however eccentrically conceived, into a form that may or may not be worthy to be called a travel journal, and I now lack the ability to assess the outcome.

Feel free to mock me in the comments!

I do love making little notebooks. The appeal of paper cannot be denied.

In the course of pinning inspiration to my Pinterest board, I realized that a conventional journal represents too much of a demand on me. I can't face up to all those blank pages and that uniform structure. I can't commit to being able to fill so many pages and no more, or to sure that all my thoughts and memories would live up to the imposition of a certain form.

But something flexible like what I started seeing around the 'nets (and once again I will credit other people's real ingenuity for sparking my possibly lame interpretation) got me crafting.

Thus it came about that for Natasha this Christmas, I fell into the grip of an obsession to make a travel journal.

I can't explain these creative urges -- they come over me all of a sudden, and the recipient just has to deal with the result. (A few years ago I decided that Sukie and Bridget had to have Mammy dolls. I don't even know if those are even politically correct (nor can I explain why those two had to have them, but not necessarily the others), but I had to make two. I spent hours -- literally hours, possibly even days -- looking for vintage rag doll patterns online. I cut. I sewed. I embroidered. They came out really adorable. Not sure if the girls really wanted them.)

Using the accumulated paper stash of a lifetime (also of my mother's lifetime; also of my father-in-law's lifetime if you count the stamps, which clearly you should), I put together something that hopefully won't feel constricting, although it might feel... random.

I also tried to incorporate some elements from Natasha herself -- like her name from one of her cards, for which the lace didn't add exactly the embellishment I had hoped, after mod-podging it onto the plastic cover. And the yellow ribbon and monogram circle had wrapped her wedding favors (adorable greeting cards, naturally) after the reception.

The covers (which are sturdy plastic) and the printed pages are from an old planner/calendar (a kind I really liked and now don't see. The paper was of excellent quality and I made many notebooks out of its pages.)

And of course, there's always a place for vintage trim, monkey clips (Natasha loves monkeys! I think.),and whatever is handy.

Some of the maps I used were from the days when we had a National Geographic subscription. Do they still send out those unusual maps? I know that Germany is one country Natasha would like to revisit, so I included this tourist map, and of course, everyone needs to be street smart in New York. I chose not to bother with 16th century Spanish exploration or 18th century east-coast American development.

I used a lot of office supplies like binder rings, big paper clips, manila envelopes, glassine envelopes, cut-up file folders, and ledger paper. Things I just have lying around! Although: More glassine envelopes, STAT!

A hole punch and a paper cutter are essential (oh, I wish I had snagged Grandpa's old-school heavy-duty paper cutter! But where would I have put it?).

And can we just admit that the concept of a travel journal that includes such embellishments as possibly outdated hotel information, time zones, and business vocabulary -- in this age of Apps and instant Googling -- just might be superfluous?

However, Natasha, although well provided with the proper electronic equipment, really does appreciate paper. Hopefully this gift was something she could use -- either on a future trip, or to document a past one. Anyway, she can get endless amusement out of how wacky my ideas are!

Want to hang out with us?

2012-01-20T15:43:00.001-05:00

Auntie Leila is going to be in town, and we had the idea of trying to organize a last-minute Southern California LMLD Meetup!

We were thinking of setting up shop at a park (in North County San Diego) with the kids and some snacks and maybe a little knitting (well, I don't knit, but I do have a toddler to chase), and chit chat with anyone who joins us. Does that sound like fun? Would you be interested in doing this?

We're going to plan it on our Facebook page, because that seems more convenient than going back and forth in the comments box. Do you "like" us on Facebook? It's another way to stay in touch, and maybe even we can do more events like this!

{If you aren't on Facebook, but want to be in the loop on this, leave a comment or shoot me an email. (my address is on the sidebar there on the right)}

So go "like" us if you don't already, and let us know if this sounds like a good idea! And like us no matter where you live, because you never know when we may turn up!

ps - Don't forget, you can link up to {pretty, happy, funny, real} all weekend!

{pretty, happy, funny, real}

2012-01-19T00:01:00.001-05:00

~ Capturing the context of everyday life ~

Every Thursday, here at Like Mother, Like Daughter!

So things are at sixes and sevens here in LMLD-land.

Someone told Deirdre that I am "the perfect combination of drill sergeant and cheerleader" -- how funny is that? But {insert evil laugh}I do have lots of things to yell at/affirm you about. My mind is a veritable fertile swamp or other fertile place, maybe not so unattractive, but probably just as difficult to maneuver in, of blog posts, thoughts, ideas, yellings, and affirmations.

But, I am also trying to help plan some weddings here (it's really crazy to have two back-to-back weddings, right?). And wow, I am tuckered out after having the troops here. I hit a wall. Honestly, I spent many years churning out the meals, breads, rolls, and buckets of food, and now I'm just not in shape for it! I can tell you how to do it, though :)

But not right now.

{pretty}

So one thing is that it feels {pretty} to get Christmas decorations out and clean up. We always enjoy our Christmas things until after the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord -- sometimes even up until the Presentation on February 2. The tree was holding up well (I get very antsy if it starts that thing of suddenly dropping all its needles when you brush up against it!), but it was time to go.

The light, if there be light, heartens me. The open spaces make me feel buoyant. Usually it takes several rounds of putting gifts away, tidying spaces where there were decorations, and rounding up stray gift bags. I have a sense of accomplishment when it's all done.

Another {pretty} struck me in the pantry, which is also my working space (in this old house, the pantry is an actual room, with a window!).

The banner was made for me by Joseph one year when he was little. It was stapled to a dowel so that I could fly it like a flag. It's considerably faded now, but I do love it.

The origami was made by Rosie a few Thanksgivings ago, to hold name cards for our guests. They were meant to take their little paper boxes, but didn't. I couldn't throw them away, could I? It was a brainstorm to make them into a garland!

After I painted the third-floor stairs this green, I decided to use it to paint the trim on my window here. Doesn't one window cry out for something whimsical; nay, funky?

Can't do a curtain of any kind, because there is no one to look in and no reason to block the little light there is! So crazy trim it was.

I haven't shown you properly, as a reveal, so I thought I'd pop it in here.

{happy}

For me, the Garage of Death has its upside. True, there's a lot of stuff out there, to understate things radically. True, it's not like you could put a car in it. (Did I ever tell you about Bridget's incredulity when she was about five? She told me in wondering tones, "Mama, some people put their cars in their garage!" Crazy, but that's how some people do things!)

My garage yields oddities such as this iron hook, and that's my kind of garage:

I'm not {happy} that the boys finally left, but I am happy looking at this photo of Joseph's guitar (it's actually Deirdre's, but he played it -- with Bridget on the fiddle -- the whole time he was here).

{funny}

This is my rocker, from when I was a little child.

It did used to be very sturdy. Grown men would sit in it if nothing else was available. But certain sons have proven too much for it. So they don't actually sit in it any more....

{real}

You guys always crack me up with your photos of your laundry in your {real}s. Well, here is about 1/43rd of mine this week, because I haven't pictured all the sheets and towels that I finally got to. But I just don't have the attention span to get through it all without a little break for knitting and a sip of tea!

So by way of a little drill sergeant-ing and cheerleading, let me comment on something I've noticed when ladies talk about laundry. They seem to think that you must sort, wash, dry, fold, sort again, and put away -- all at once! Do you think that? Go read my laundry posts there on the sidebar! If you have more than two children, how about viewing them as different chores that you cycle through at different times of the day?

Let your children give you a hand with the various parts of the process, and let them put away their own clothes. If there are too many to put away, there are too many clothes!

But don't try to do it all at once. Don't beat yourself up that it's never all done. It's just too darned much!

{pretty, happy, funny, real} ~ Deployment Day Edition

2012-01-12T00:00:00.000-05:00

~ Capturing the context of everyday life ~

Every Thursday, here at Like Mother, Like Daughter!

{pretty}

How do I know my husband loves me? He stood in line at the cutting counter at the fabric store for my Christmas gift. (Goodness, that's something I'm hardly willing to do for myself!)

He knew I have all sorts of plans for crafting projects to tackle while he's gone, and so he decided to help make sure I have lots of supplies to work with. Some pretty fabric, felt in every color, bright embroidery thread... even some scrapbook paper! The plans are percolating already...

{happy}

I loved watching Pippo watch his dad pack all his gear. He has been very interested in Putting Things Into Other Things lately, so the entire process had him entranced, and wanting desperately to join in.

Are you sure you won't need this shoe in Afghanistan, Dad?

He is one busy little man.

{funny}

This is a little bit funny "haha" and a little bit funny "uh-oh," but mostly it was just a big mess.

Would you believe that this chaos packed up so neatly into the back of the car?

{real}

Typical: they left several days before the start of the departure window we'd been given (ouch, that hurt!) and in the middle of the night. (Goodness, it's as if they didn't even consider the babies' schedules when they planned this thing! Who's in charge around here?) Pippo was so good, despite being rudely awakened and bundled into the car at one in the morning.

The church that sponsors our battalion had a team of volunteers there to make us all a hot breakfast, pack lunches for the guys, and generally provide kind words and support for everyone... all this, mind you, several hours before dawn. Talk about works of mercy! I am so impressed with and grateful for the ministry they have to military families.

One last family shot, taken with my cell phone. At 3am. I think it's pretty good, considering!

It was sad to say goodbye, for sure, but a great comfort to know that we are supported by so many prayers offered on our behalf. Now we are looking forward to his return... and getting started on those projects!

(Dear Internet Creepers: my husband did not leave me unprotected.)

Wonder and the Nativity ~ A post from Habou.

2012-01-11T08:32:00.000-05:00

During this Christmas season I finally neared the end of John Saward’s Cradle of Redeeming Love. I started it Christmas 2010 and usually get to read a few pages or a chapter per week. This book was a cherished birthday gift from Nick.

I was delighted when reading the section he entitled The Metaphysics of the Manger.

He writes:

“The Christmas mystery inspires wonder not only at the God who humbled Himself to assume human childhood, but also at the human childhood elevated through its assumption by God.”

How wonderful is that?

Another quote that I love dearly should remind us of all children and their reactions to their world. Reactions which surprise and delight us.

It reminds us to call upon that wonder which we surely had as little children.

Pippo amid all the Christmas wrappings enjoying a gift card, while ignoring the toys he received.

Saward says:

“ His [the child’s] mind is receptive of the glorious reality of the world, and he is amazed that things are, even before he knows exactly what they are. That is why he tends to be captivated by anything--for example, by the wrapping of his Christmas presents rather than by the toys they contain. The child in the garden knows that the grass is, but his wonder at this apparently ordinary thing seems to indicate that he is surprised that it should be at all. ... Now from such childlike amazement at being, at the extraordinariness of the ordinary, flows the whole of metaphysics and natural theology.”

He just loves looking at the cards.

Mt 8:2-4 “And Jesus called a little child to him, set him in their midst, and said, “Amen I say to you, unless you turn and become like little children, you will not enter into the kingdom of heaven.”

Join us tomorrow for {pretty, happy, funny, real}! Share your contentment with us -- we look forward to seeing you!

Other people's craftiness, and a lovely cake.

2012-01-10T12:24:00.001-05:00

So many gifts flying around!

Since technically, we can consider as part of the Christmas season anything up until the Feast of the Presentation (especially if we are the kind of people who need to un-decorate the house slowly, and if we are, may I recommend doing a little each day, rather than completely neglecting it until Mardi Gras forces our hand), I want to show you a couple of other crafty things.

I also finally made an almond cake I really like, so I want to tell you about that!

{By the way, the Presentation and Candlemas are the same day, February 2. This isn't a case of random piling up of feasts -- it never is! I fully realized how the tradition arose last year, when we worshiped with our favorite Anglican Use parish, St. Athanasius. The Anglican hymnody (which these Catholics are allowed to use) is rich in choices for any and every feast, and the hymn we sang that day taught me the connection between the blessing of the candles and the presenting of Our Lord in the temple.}

Anyway, on to crafting.

Long-time friends here will remember my kitchen faux-renovation (meaning that we just made do with what we had where possible) and ugly tiles.

Please ignore old grout.

For a while I covered them with pot holders, but two problems -- pretty pot holders aren't that plentiful in this day and age of seasonal kitchen linens, and also they get dirty up there, and when you wash them, your ugly tiles are exposed again, for however long the laundry takes. I realize some folks might be into late-70s kitsch but I am not. It's the comments to this post that made me see this sad reality, and also that the pot holders might be a lesser, also somewhat kitschy, solution than I thought.

So in the back of my mind I was thinking about a solution... but Habou beat me to it with this awesome owl board. If you follow me on Pinterest you know that I love birds and especially owls!

She painted it herself, of course, and poly'd it so that it can be easily cleaned. It just fits beautifully! As it has to hang quite low to completely cover the three ugly tiles so cleverly strewn across, I decided to embellish with the pear branch. I think it adds balance overall. A branch and a piece of driftwood. And owls. Sigh of happiness!

Also, I don't know if I've shared this tip with you, but have you ever noticed the freezing-cold air pouring in your kitchen via the hood fan? I do use my fan and lights, but I keep these two foam plates tucked in there when the fan is not in use. You just remember to take them out when you turn it on (trust me, you will get a reminder :)

And then Rosie had made me this owl pot holder! How cute is that! She saw one on Etsy and thought, I can do something like that! She says that she actually struggled quite a bit with the design to wrestle it from concept into actuality, and perhaps its somewhat anxious, droopy-eared expression belies that process. But I can relate to him! My ears don't always point up either!

Now, on to the cake, which, due to some serious craziness on Sunday, we didn't eat for the Epiphany. No matter, we had it last night for the Baptism of the Lord. It's just so good! Like a light almond pound cake. And super simple.

I used a recipe from Jacques Pepin, but I did change it. For the simple reason that it just doesn't make sense, when a tube of almond paste is 7 ounces, to have a recipe that calls for 4 ounces. I mean, what are you going to do with the rest? Eat it? Which is just what I would do, too, because I find that stuff irresistible. That hardly seems prudent. So in the cake it went.

I used a bundt and crushed up some almond cookies, sprinking some in the bottom of the pan and also on top of the batter. I just wanted more almond flavor, as the cheaper kind of paste I bought wasn't satisfactory, really. Buy the more expensive one, I guess. I also added almond extract and poured Frangelico over afterwards. All delish.

The cake is moist and tender and foolproof. We didn't even have time for any of the extras he calls for (I can't pretend that pouring liqueur over the cake is the same as making a sauce for it), although I did have raspberries in the freezer. Just no time! Didn't matter. It was lovely.

More crafty reveal.

2012-01-06T10:32:00.002-05:00

The problem with being a child-bride who spent all her time reading rather than doing is that I'm so, so, so very behind. As I told you, I'm only now getting my own Christmas stockings together, decorating my kids' rooms, and putting the finishing touches on/finally starting our family traditions. (As you prepare your Epiphany celebrations, have a few brain cells to spare for Candlemas, which is soon.)

I have a vague idea that Nick and Natasha do have Christmas stockings (correct me if I'm wrong), and I know that Annie made her brother the Lt. and Rosie (and then Pippo) theirs -- that girl is a crafting whiz, let me tell you. While I'm dithering over ancient projects, she's whipping up wedding quilts left and right, and doesn't let the excuse that she just had her 3rd baby stop her! (This is by way of announcing a new outlaw, Christopher Edward! And he's a darling!)

So I really thought that I had better put in a good showing this Christmas with stockings for the engaged ones.

Here's my thought process, in case you were wondering, and what took me so long in the first place.

I can't quilt or embroider or needlepoint or knit or otherwise implement any intensive crafting process to make stockings, because it is Christmas, when you have so many demands on your time, and besides, you just know that you will end up needing ten of them, and who has that kind of time for needlepoint? The thought is just too overwhelming.

I was also a little paralyzed by the worry that today's cute craft will be tomorrow's embarrassing relic.

But cutting fabric and embellishing it a little -- that I can do. The key to longevity, I believe, is to use real fabric -- wool, cotton, linen -- and the key to do-ability is to aim for overall effect, not fussy details. I mean, if you want to embroider the Christmas stockings, go for it. I just know I don't have it in me.

And I worry about imposing my thoughts about what the tradition should look like on someone else. But, I bit the bullet and here is what Deirdre and Sukie got for Christmas this year:

As I looked around to see what I could make the stockings from that would be textured, more or less neutral, and seasonal, I remembered this toweling I bought at a yard sale a couple of years ago:

It's a nice length (I mean, several yards for next to nothing!) and every time I got a glimpse of it, I'd think of all the things I could do with it: table runner, chair cover, pillows, actually making a roller and using it for its original purpose of a tube of toweling (and I still have lots left, so maybe I could do that after all!) -- so many thoughts!

But the natural color, the green -- they called to me. It's easy to make a template of a nice-sized Christmas stocking with a piece of paper, quickly cut out (cotton muslin) lining and stocking, sew them together (a matter of minutes), and finish off with red rick-rack (joy! -- except, I'll be honest, my machine did not like sewing that rick-rack on, no matter what I did to coax it) and a jingle bell.

The finishing touch is to press them well -- the lovely thing about linen, especially old linen, is the way it takes a pressing.

Later we can think about how to label them. Maybe the girls themselves would like to indulge in a bit of embroidery?

Still plenty of time to join in on {phfr}! We'd love to see you!

{pretty, happy, funny, real} ~ Building the culture of the family.

2012-01-05T00:01:00.010-05:00

~ Capturing the context of everyday life ~

Every Thursday, here at Like Mother, Like Daughter!

{pretty}

Deirdre with John, before our party, probably getting ideas for crazy party games.

{happy}

Every year we have a big New Year's Eve party.

It all started when the Chief and I got panicky about our teenage boys wanting to drive to friends' houses down a dangerous "highway" (read: scary fast road with no barriers dividing the traffic).

We do our best to host something that combines a family party with a celebration that lasts into the wee hours, complete with crazy party games and a champagne toast. And singing.

We try to make a gathering that satisfies the teenage need to par-tay, and yet establishes a benchmark for real fun, hopefully excluding the idea that simply drinking constitutes fun. Because we have wonderful friends, they have been on board with the concept of a party that significantly interferes with our generation's need to sleep.

Don't get me wrong -- the kids have sometimes mightily resisted this party. When they get safely out of the teen years, they are free to do something else, and we concentrate on the next ones coming up. They might, even now, be sort of mocking me as they read this. And not every family can make the investment to make it happen, which has sometimes made it hard for us to keep going.

Believe me, I appreciate the thought of staying home with Chinese food and board games! As long as your gang is happy doing that, go for it!

But my kids are so sociable, sort of crazily so (wonder where they get that from, anyway!), that it's been worth the effort to keep this tradition going. They humor me, and hopefully some day they will understand what we are trying to do. I mean, the really big picture of what we are trying to do.

Let me 'splain it to you.

Some years, when New Year's Day isn't on a Sunday, we can go to the Vigil Mass for the Holy Day (The Mother of God), and the party is a supper that goes on into the night. Since it's also the 7th day of Christmas (until it becomes the 8th), we ring in the New Year with Christmas carols, singing all the verses to as many carols as we can manage.

The party, in the past, has ended as late as 3 am, with Joseph and his friends playing jazz in their little band for us, and Will, as always, managing the logistics and general hilarity. (The grandparents of friends missed this year for the first time in ages, now that they are well into their 90s! In the past, they have been the party closers, keeping everyone laughing with their antics. And we have tried, somewhat in vain, to convince little ones to lie down on blankets in the living room and just drift off.)

Sukie has always led our caroling on the piano, and she and Mama have a similar mission to exclude all "mall" versions of holiday songs, putting the strong kibosh on Jingle Bells in any form. Once you begin to explore the world of carols, you realize how very lovely, wonder-filled, and catechetical they are, teaching in their beauty and poetry all the lessons of the miracle of the Incarnation that take theologians volumes to convey.

This year, with New Year's Day on Sunday -- as well as a changing demographic that again includes younger children -- we moved everything up to more or less end at midnight, which is fine with us.

Parties -- celebrations -- are an important way to form the culture. In a way, the kind of parties you have says a lot about what your culture is. You see, culture itself arises from the celebration that emerges from true worship. (Remember reading Leisure, the Basis of Culture, a while back? This is what that book was about.) This isn't an abstract notion. It's as real as can be.

The problem with our society is that as worship has degraded into entertainment, entertainment has seemed strangely unfulfilling. Each family, to restore the culture, has to find a way to re-join the two in their organic relationship: true worship and lively celebration! Order and wonder! Ritual and elation! We can't be satisfied with weak liturgy, and we can't be satisfied with wimpy, superficial, barren fun.

And we can't be satisfied with our own warm memories, if we are lucky enough to have them, or dreams of some day. We have to try, here and now, with our own imperfections, to get going on the project of saving Western Civilization. I beg you, don't make the Super Bowl the most satisfyingly fun thing you do all year!

A really fun party, then, will often be linked to a really big feast day (and of course, every day in the Christmas Octave is a big one!). And it will almost always include all the ages.

{Of course there is a place for the strictly age-segregated event. I enjoy a couples' dinner or a cocktail party as much as the next person. For kids, there is a time when they benefit from being together on their own (bonfires are great for that bonding time). They need to form their friendships and have silly fun with no adults around!
In my opinion, New Year's Eve isn't one of those times! It's just too darn dangerous, and late, and besides, with the next day a holy one, with the need to get to Mass, it's a great opportunity to make the connection between worship and celebration.}

I hope this is making sense, but to keep it practical I will give you the nitty-gritty on what we do, keeping in mind that the whole shebang is our best effort, but by no means the last word on great parties. Don't get me wrong here and start thinking that this is an unreachable ideal. Far from it. I'm sure our guests would tell you all sorts of ways that things could be better, and I'm only here to tell you that if we can do it, so can you!

Party essentials:

• A room where kids can hang out at the beginning of the party, maybe with a Foosball table or board games. Keep an eye on where the beer is going.

• Food and drink. It's important to have something you serve every year, I think. In this case, it's ham and a big pot of potato chowder. Somehow, people look forward to things being the same. With, of course, interesting variations (which I will tell you about another day).

• Carol booklets or hymnals with good old-fashioned carols, all verses. If you must have Frosty-type songs, get them over with at the start, and please, for the love of all that is merciful, keep it to a minimum. As far as I am concerned, the stores have destroyed these songs and they had very little value to start with.

This might take some work -- collecting beautiful carols in one place and having enough copies for everyone. I recommend this book, Take Joy, to start:

(It's well worth in the $20-$30 range for a used one in good condition.)

And this one, The Trapp Family Book of Christmas Songs:

(The Amazon links are being tricky. Try refreshing your page if you aren't seeing links to the books.)

• Champagne and sparkling cider for the toast. Toasts if people are up to it.

• The singing of Auld Lang Syne.

• The singing of the Salve Regina Chant to herald Our Lady's Day. (It happens that most of our friends and family know this chant very well. If that's not the case for you, you can learn it! You have a year!)

• Fun-loving friends who are in it for the long haul! Start when your kids are young and go to bed early. By the time they are teens, they will be up for this kind of thing.

Games we like to play, once everyone has gathered (we don't always play them all every year):

• The Murder Game (although, one year, we had a guest who had actually been the victim of an attempt on her life -- yikes! -- so we changed it to the Thief Game). Our version is quite scaled down, with little pieces of paper determining the roles. The conversation at the beginning of the evening is punctuated by screams from "murdered" guests. Some of our friends really relish making the most of this dramatic moment! At the end, before the toast, we have a trial to determine the perpetrator. With this crowd, that is one noisy trial.

• The Guess Your Character Game. Everyone loves this one, and you can have fun matching your guests to their alter egos/nemises. (We tape the name to the person's back, not their forehead, which just seems a little invasive.)

• The Party Quirks Game. Deirdre and Bridget, with assists from others, come up with amazingly funny scenarios beforehand. Some examples from the past: You are watching your sister's kids in a china shop. You are a dentist trying not to notice people's teeth. You are obsessed with the color red. You fall asleep unless you are asked a question. You think the world is ending tonight and are trying not to panic. Etc. Announce the quirks to the group while the host is out of the room. (Be warned if you choose to watch the You Tube videos of the Whose Line is it Anyway skits -- they are hilarious but often quite rude. We are G-rated only.)

• The New Year's Resolutions Game. Write resolutions (stay away from losing weight--type ones, and go for "learn to Irish Step dance"--type ones) on slips of paper. One guest picks from a hat and chooses another guest to give it to. Start off with pickers who understand that the less matched-up the recipient is to the resolution, the funnier the moment will be.

{funny}

Getting tired... but still game!

{real}

Real #1: Don't be thinking that I have it all together and that's why I can do this. For instance, this is the first year that our guests were able to come in the front door! (Oh, that's another post!) The parking in our dark yard is always an adventure, I know. And I'm sure they could give you an earful about how I am just a tad aggressive when it comes to making them play games, and how I berate them when they try to sing the Jingle Bell Rock. They have been rolling their eyes through this whole post, I have no doubt. That's okay. I don't claim to be perfect, only trying. (I will say this -- if no one makes them play or sing, they won't do it, but that's what they enjoy in the end. Hard my row is to hoe.)

Over the years, we have invited the families of our children's friends. That has meant that not everyone we love has been included, and that has been hard.

Every year we think we are not doing it again. But this and similar things need to be done, organically and according to your own circumstances. You can do it.

Real #2: Everyone needs a nap before the party!

And Mama needs an obligatory Will-under-a-blanket shot!

Crafting: It can now be told...

2012-01-04T10:27:00.001-05:00

It's really hard for an inveterate revealer like me to keep crafting under my hat for the sake of gift-giving. Even to the person involved, let alone cyberspace. I just want to share every step of the way (particularly the frustrating glitches, but also the triumphs), and Christmas or birthdays can't come too soon for me!

Today, now that it's no longer secret, I will show you my very first fabric bucket.

I've made plenty of bags, which are so very appealing in their easy cuteness. Once you have the basic idea (which is super challenging in that spatial way, at least to people like me -- you feel like you are straining every nerve to visualize how this flat, odd shape becomes the final three-dimensional product, and there is an origami moment in there that is a little breathless).

After going to the Music Together class with the little outlaws, and of course after raising my own children with various castanets, tambourines, and, yes, drums, I was excited to find a little music set for my darling Pippo.

Something like this, only it was at Marshall's and not in a cute wooden box like this one.

So I thought it would be nice to make a little fabric bucket to store the noisemakers in, as well as any future additions to the set.

The chicken fabric has been in my stash since forever (October 6, 2007, to be precise) and, while perhaps a music-themed design would have been more appropriate, the cuteness is undeniable.

I used muslin for the lining, leftover batting pieces for the inner layer, and some blue solid that was in my stash for the bottom.
The handles are cotton twill that was used at one point to wrap something. Always keep nice ribbons and twill tape!
Some tutorials tell you to put interfacing in there for stiffness. It happened that I don't really have enough interfacing for this project, but in any case I'm a little wary of it. It seems so wrinkly/bunchy. If you use it, iron it onto the lining, not the outer fabric. The batting does seem to provide enough heft. I think that, although I did actually machine-quilt the bottom of this bucket, the sides should have some quilting as well. That way, when the thing is tossed in the washer, the batting won't shift. But since it's now on its way to California, that will have to wait until I get out there!
{By the way, when you are making a quilt, you will almost always have leftover batting. Never throw these smallish pieces away. There are plenty of little crafts that use batting (pot holders, place mats, bags, buckets, doll quilts) and why cut into a new one for that? Not to mention that many a time my brainstormed quilt has been a wee bit too big for the batting I have, and I've pieced my remnants to make up the difference. After all, once it's quilted, no one knows whether the batting was all in one piece or not.}
For this fabric bucket, I used a tutorial that I found on another blog. A nice round-up of tutorials is on this Skip-to-My-Lou blog.
Of course I can't point to one in particular because I jumped around and hacked away until I got what I was thinking of.

While I was motivated in my crafting and buying by thoughts of my little angel's musical career and overall integrated development, the Chief calls this gift "The Grandparents' Revenge."
Funny Chief.
Are you up for {pretty, funny, happy, real} tomorrow? We'd love to see you!

Hanging in the kitchen.

2012-01-03T11:03:00.003-05:00

I tried really hard yesterday to write you a New Year's Resolution Post, in which, you know, I tell you to know what's for dinner instead of trying to lose weight, becoming more angelic overall, and organizing the jars by size.

I was even going to go a step further, based on some crazy news reports I've been reading about how Western Civilization will shortly consist of a few crumbling old monuments surrounded by Jersey barriers, with roving bands of guys in Nike hoodies trying to figure out what to do with their free time.

I was going to suggest that if we make any resolutions, they center on just being a little braver about what is clearly our task, namely, to hold down our little corner of peace as best we can, perhaps mustering enough energy to furnish it with discarded books that, while we might not get to reading them, will provide a future generation with something to go on as they survey the rubble.

But I couldn't get it written because I was So. Tired. The kind of tired that makes you write the above-type sentences, full of rubble and roving bands. Actually, today I'm only a little tired -- yesterday I could only vaguely wave the hands of my mind -- not my actual hands, which would have taken too much energy -- in the general direction of rubble, not even capable of mustering any nouns to describe it.

Never mind all that.

Instead, let's just look at random pictures.

The Chief and I sort of plowed ahead with some projects that we had left until our vacation, even though we were entertaining Important Guests -- to wit, the girls' fiancés. They seemed to be up for building a maple-syrup evaporator/outdoor fireplace/"refinery" (no photos of that, sorry -- I'm so lacking in commitment to take photos all the time), and for helping to bottle the beer.

If they weren't up for all that and would have rather gone sight-seeing or roller-skating they certainly weren't about to tell us.

It's a marvelous thing, this aiming to please by the prospective family members. It's a wave you just can't help wanting to ride. One's own sons do not seem equally motivated in all departments. Oh, they do some heavy lifting as well, don't get me wrong. They don't actively obstruct, being essentially good guys, and I am sure that they will, someday, appear miraculously handy in other households. But they have a more jaded view of the crazy ideas perpetrated by their parental units, choosing to appear at strategic moments only.

So we have a lot of thank-yous to John and John. And a few for Joseph and Will -- we do love you boys as well ;) And Nick -- we missed you!

As for me, I left them to it, returning at suppertime.

The evidence of work was there when I got back, in the form of some water on the floor and a few pieces of broken glass in the sink -- the remnants of some sort of strife involving the bottle capper. Everything else had been whisked away. This was the night we had pork barbecue sandwiches, oven fries, and "crunchy salad" (you know, that salad that's glorified cole slaw with ramen noodles and nuts mixed in -- leave out the MSG-laden "flavor packet," adding dried garlic and mustard powder to your dressing instead. Guaranteed to please any cole-slaw-despiser).

Naturally, this is the only photo of that meal, taken by someone else. People, I was feeding the hordes, not taking pictures. Maybe my resolution will be to do better with food posting!

So, those are my great thoughts so far for 2012. How about you?

{pretty, happy, funny, real}

2011-12-29T00:01:00.002-05:00

~ Capturing the context of contentment in everyday life ~

Every Thursday, here at Like Mother, Like Daughter!

{pretty}

{happy}

Roxie, breaking the rules... happy!

{funny}

Chicken fight at the reservoir!

How to get the star on the tree when you're short and the presents are already all around on the floor!

Will hiding Joseph's gift for Bridget -- a mandolin (cleverly replacing the old mandolin that was up there, but still, she noticed as soon as she looked up in that direction -- she's such a noticer) -- while Joseph leads her on a goose chase all over the house.

And how absorbed in a gift tag can a little boy be? With toys everywhere?

{real}

Merry Fifth Day of Christmas!

{pretty, happy, funny, real} ~ optional edition

2011-12-22T00:01:00.001-05:00

~ Capturing the context of contentment in everyday life ~

Every Thursday, here at Like Mother, Like Daughter!

We understand if you are too involved in Christmas preparations to participate this week -- we really do! We won't be offended if there are only a few links. We almost didn't make it ourselves. But then it turned out that there were pictures after all (and Rosie spent some time trying to teach me a few things about my camera)....

{pretty}

Photo by Rosie.

Rub-a-dub-dub! One of our favorite ornaments, a bit the worse for wear!

Waiting for everyone to be here... to put the star on top.

{happy}

Of course it is so happy that Pippo is here!

Habou's gift was a hit... maybe most of all with Rosie! She really wanted this toy for Pippo!

I thought you might like to see the stockings... which also made me happy (in a less permanent way, of course than Pippo, but still... ). Finally the tops are done, the nametags are on, and I even figured out how to hang them from our marble mantel without eleven of those hanging brackets booby-trapped just so to fling the delicate contents of everyone's stocking onto the floor, dragging the mantel ornaments along with them. Instead, I used only two of them, duct-taped to the mantel (and the tape concealed by the antlers -- yes, they are real antlers found in the woods by the boys), with a pear branch (cleverly not burned by me) across. And, after much brain-wracking, I found shower-curtain rings at Lowe's that don't clash terribly, after striking out in the hardware section. S-rings are just not big enough or not thin enough.

Photo by Rosie.

Finally I am happy with my stockings!

But, oh, this darling! What a treat to have him here!

{funny}

{real}

For your added viewing pleasure, I will not forbear to point out the jumping girl, the game-interfering, nativity-sacking child, and the disappearing dog behind the Lt.'s head.... Where is she? Or does he really have a tail coming out of his head?

Making ready.

2011-12-16T15:26:00.001-05:00

Today I am...

... Baking bread to be ready for when I won't have time to bake, but will be feeding lots of large, bread-eating people. Today it was spent-grain bread. Already in the freezer: Italian bread (3 loaves) and sandwich bread (2 loaves) and rolls (30).

Every day I make some...

But we still have to eat.

I am wondering why I don't look at my crafting books earlier in the year...

... And still needing to bake for the girls' Bible Study.

... Just about finished with the stockings...

... Needing to get to more crafting...

...Remembering that I have jingle bells...

What are you doing today?

{pretty, happy, funny, real}

2011-12-15T00:01:00.002-05:00

~ Capturing the context of contentment in everyday life ~

Every Thursday, here at Like Mother, Like Daughter!

{pretty}

I love the Christmas stockings I finally (finally! after 30 years!) made for my family. I love that I was able to use some outrageous Scottish wool skirts and suits that a friend gave me to "figure out what to do with." It made me {happy}!

But... the ribbon was a quick fix. I didn't have a vision of how I could finish off the tops.

{funny}

I do laugh at myself for this mayhem, when I should be calmly crafting presents or baking Christmas cookies. Or maybe humming Advent hymns while I prepare baby Jesus' bed in my heart.

{real}

This photo was supposed to be for when I got around to showing you how I used the stair paint, on a whim, to perk up the trim in my pantry.

But never mind that right now, although it is super interesting and pretty.

If you look there, below the window... see? on that little cute bin? See? It's summer, right? Out that window?

And I had put the stockings there, under my nose, directly after last Christmas, so that I would avoid just this -- the mad, week-before-Christmas stocking re-do.

Plum pudding, a tutorial.

2011-12-14T13:05:00.004-05:00

{The recipe and instructions for flaming your plum pudding are at the end of this post.}

Our family is so Thanksgiving-pie-oriented that by the time Christmas rolls around, we really are ready to have a dessert that is not pie.

But, in the early days when we were settling our traditions for the holidays, I wanted something fabulous, of course. However, cake was out as well, as all the December birthdays we are blessed with have created a surfeit.

A Continual Feast to the rescue! Early on in our married life I got myself this book (only in hardcover, which I wish were still available):

If you want to incorporate food in a traditional way into your celebration of the liturgical year, this is a great resource, and it has that helpful air of letting you in on actual traditions, rather than retro-fitted made-up ones, that I appreciate. It makes a lovely wedding or shower gift! Or hey, Christmas present!

I pored over it, and at some point decided that plum pudding represented the dessert that would most bring out the Dickensian aspect of Christmas that a literary person such as myself finds indispensable, as well as release me from any last-minute exigencies.

Because not only are we not in the mood for pie (although I have made my share of mincemeat), or cake, we are -- I am -- in no shape for much cooking on or even near this glorious feast.

Why not feature a meal-ender that

1) is so laden with emotional, as well as gustatory, freight that it lives up to the challenge and

2) can be set on fire, allowing you to over-awe your little ones with the explanation that for their birthdays you light candles, but for Jesus' birthday you light the whole cake. Trust me, they will be beside themselves to the point that it will matter not one whit that many of them actually do not prefer the taste of this treat.

Which leads me to the next virtue of plum pudding: One recipe will make at least two cakes, and it will keep for at least a year. So if you heed well my injunction to make dessert first, you simply can't go wrong with being able to make dessert a whole year or more in advance.

Another excellent feature of plum pudding is that it requires no expertise whatsoever to produce. You don't need to know any particular techniques of cake-making to furnish your eaters with a tasty (some say, others don't) treat.

You don't even need any exact recipe, and in fact I have blended the features of several recipes together in the course of my years of browsing and perusing and attempting various types. It was hard to resist Gourmet Magazine's "Royal Family Plum Pudding," for instance, even while remaining true to the Vitz version, as being the first one I had followed. But as I experimented, I realized that it was not going to be possible to go wrong, as long as you have enough suet, sugar, and rich fruits. It's all good.

You do need to buy certain things that you may not have on hand (consult the actual recipe at the end for the ingredients; here I will point out the more arcane ones):

A pot big enough to steam two quart-sized dishes, with two racks that will fit inside (see photos for a hack)
Suet (tutorial-within-a-tutorial below)
Nice dried fruits, but no particular kinds

Everything else you will have on hand, and you may already have everything but the suet, I'd guess. You can probably do this today or tomorrow!

I have learned over the years that it's helpful to separate the recipe into three conceptual building blocks.

1. The fruit --dried and candied -- which will need to steep in alcohol for at least an hour

2. The dry ingredients and spices -- which include a cup of fresh breadcrumbs, which might take you another step to prepare if you don't have a stash in the freezer

3. The wet ingredients -- which include the suet

Fruits:

Usually I focus on prunes, with raisins and even figs thrown in. But at this moment it happened that we had a lovely super-ripe pineapple, and I decided to make this year's (and, perforce, next year's) plum pudding "Jamaica-style," which is perfectly historical and acceptable.

And as my local store neither had candied fruits of the usual kind, nor do I really want them even if they are available, because they are, honestly, tasteless, pineapple it was.

I also never really succeed when I follow others' directions on candying one's own fruit, so I just did it my own way. Viz:

Put your fruit (in this case, about two cups chunked pineapple, core and skin removed, obviously) in a pan with some nice thick orange and lemon rind. I use that little tool up there on the right to get my peels. It works fine.

Pour over it about a cup of sugar syrup. {Sugar syrup is made thus (I truly did just have some on hand, from the bee-feeding days of the fall): 2 parts sugar, one part water, brought to the boil, simmered for about 10 minutes.}

Simmer the fruit for about 5 minutes and then remove it to a bowl. Boil down the syrup, pour in any collected juices from the bowl, boil down some more, and when you have something that is thick and sweet in your pan, pour it over your fruit. Do not stress over this (or any) part, but also do not stray far from the stove or you will have burnt sugar in your pan! You can skip all this if you have located nice candied fruit. Maybe Trader Joe's has some?

The dry ingredients:

Just follow the recipe - no particular tricks from me.

This time I used dark brown sugar because that was what was open in my cupboard. Another time I might use light. For some reason I'm out of cloves; I used allspice instead.

Mix them all together in a bowl.

You can do all this while homeschooling, she said, airily, with one studious teenager to watch over. But I have been doing this for years and years! Including pregnant! And nursing! You can do it!

Wet ingredients:

Suet: If you are not used to working with suet, or know what to look for, I herewith provide the following information; and I would like to alert you that some markets do pass off as suet something that is just... fat.

But suet is more than fat. It's the pure "leaf" fat that surrounds the kidneys, and it has a light, delicate, sweet taste that will not make you feel like someone put a steak in your after-dinner treat.

You can tell by looking at it:

Go ahead and buy a bunch, even though you don't need a lot in your recipe, because the birds love suet, and they need a Christmas treat too!

Here it looks almost like there are some really gross guts on this super decayed suet feeder, but actually that's apple peelings on top of pieces of suet. Put the rest in the freezer -- you can put it out already frozen.

Below, I've pulled this hunk-o-suet apart so that you can see (and can you almost hear?) how it separates into these chunks, netted with a very thin membrane.

No rinds, no veins, no gristle... if what you see in the store doesn't have this white, rounded appearance, it's not really suet.

Now, suppose you bought almost 2 lbs, like I did, and you want 1/3 lb.

Well, cut your chunk in half. Now you have 2 just-about-1-lb pieces.

Yes, we are eye-balling it. It's fine, because you can pretty much be accurate this way, and anyway, it seriously does not matter.

Now divide one of those halves into three more or less equal pieces. Voila! 1/3 lb.

Remove any larger membranes by pulling gently. The fat will fall away in nice chunky pieces.

See how smooth and lovely it is? You could also render (gently boil) your other pieces and fry things up in it. I remember -- I am old enough to remember -- French fries from McDonald's that had been fried in suet. Oh my, they were so good that today's fries taste to me like cardboard.

Process until finely grained. To prove to you that we have 1/3 lb here, I weighed it on my scale.

A pound is 16 ounces. One third of that is a little more than 5 ounces.

I promise I didn't cheat!

{Why not use butter, you ask? You could. Or in this Jamaica-style pudding, even coconut oil. The latter would be very stable. The former might -- might -- become rancid over time, although I doubt it, what with soaking it in all that booze. I have used butter. But suet is nice, it really is!}

Now mix together your suet, eggs, and chopped apple. Since I spaced out and did four, not two, eggs, I didn't use the other liquids (the recipe calls for beer, ale, stout, or milk -- sometimes I use cider if I have some funky dregs lying around). I figured I could add it in at the end if things didn't seem moist enough to me, but what with the liquid from the fruits, I suspected I'd be good, and I was right.

So now you have your three basic elements ready. You need baking vessels. In the past I have used the traditional tin charlotte mold, like this one:

but it's really too big, with another pan, if you are making two.

I like using these serving bowls. The one in the back has a narrow base, which comes in handy for the rack arrangement in the pot -- you'll see.

Generously butter and flour the dishes, and put a round of wax paper in the bottom as well, buttering it too. There is no point, people, in skimping on this step. Do you want to be miserable or do you want to be happy? Okay.

Start mixing your ingredients in a larger bowl. No skill required.

Notice that the suet does give a lumpy texture. That's dandy.

Using two layers of foil, cover the dishes tightly -- tightly or steam will get in there and make everything soggy! -- and fasten with a rubber band. Go ahead and use two rubber bands. The other thing that makes these dishes good is that they have a lip to hold the rubber band in place. Look around and see if you have something like that.

Get your big 15- or 20-quart pot, and put something in the bottom to hold the first dish over the water. (If you are making one pudding, you can use an 8-10 quart pot, but be aware that you will have a lot of plum pudding left over.)

If I had two round cake racks, I would use them, but I only have one, and I need it to separate the dishes. So I use this iron trivet. You could use tin tuna cans with the tops and bottoms cut out (you'd need three and they'd need to be very clean or your cake will have a tinge of the sea), or possibly cookie cutters? Not plastic ones!

I put this rack on top of the first dish with the little legs sticking up, so they wouldn't poke through the foil. Now the narrow base of the one dish comes in handy, as it nestles in there, between the legs, really well.

You should have a good amount of water in the pot -- up to the base of the first dish. And have a kettle with hot water nearby in case the water boils down. Pop the lid on and set her to boiling! Have the heat at a good steady level -- you want steam but not crazy clouds of steam in your kitchen!

Here's what it looks like when you are done! If you had used lighter sugar, it would be lighter. Don't worry! It will be tasty! (Well, so say some. But everyone has to have a bite! Eventually they learn to love it! It's tradition!)

Put one in a tin and one in a plastic container. Pour more of whatever alcohol -- brandy, rum, orange liqueur, sherry -- you've used all over it, and put wax paper on top before you stick the lid on. The one in plastic you can put in the back of your extra fridge or in the freezer -- it will keep for a really, really long time. Two years is my personal max.

The other one you want handy for this Christmas.

And here is last year's serving (which was really plum Plum Pudding, non-island-style). Doesn't it look good?

These last and first photos of the pudding being served are from Rosie!

Flaming Plum Pudding, Like Mother Like Daughter.

It is good to start this process in the first week of Advent. But now is fine.

Have ready one charlotte mold or two quart-sized oven-proof serving dishes, depending on whether you want one large or two smaller puddings. Know that a smaller one will easily serve 12 people, as each person will only want a spoonful, if that, because it is so rich and dense.
Also, a big pot and two racks; tin foil; two, or better, four, rubber bands.

Cover with 1/4 cup brandy, rum, or cider:
1 cup mixed dried fruits such as golden and or dark raisins, currants, chopped prunes, chopped figs
or
1 cup of candied fresh pineapple (see procedure above) and 1/3 cup golden raisins
1/4 cup candied orange and/or lemon peel, or add the grated rind of those fruits to the pineapple

Set aside to macerate for about an hour. A day -- while you go buy the suet, for instance -- is even better.

Mix dry ingredients:
1/2 cup fine breadcrumbs, fresh or dry (if you use the processor to make your crumbs, don't wash it out -- later you can chop your apples and suet in the same bowl)
3/4 cup light or dark brown sugar
1/3 cup flour
1/2 tsp. each: cinnamon, ginger, cloves or allspice
pinch of nutmeg
1/2 tsp. salt
3/4 tsp. baking powder
1/4 tsp. baking soda
1/4 cup finely chopped almonds or other nuts

Mix wet ingredients:
2 eggs (the original recipe calls for 4; this year I used 4; often I use 2 -- I can't adequately convey how little it matters)
1/3 lb. beef suet, finely chopped
1/3 cup peeled and cored apple, chopped

When your one or two dishes are ready -- buttered, waxed, and floured as described above -- mix all the ingredients together well.

If things seem dry, and this depends on your fruit, add:
up to 3/4 cup stout, ale, beer, milk, or cider

{If you knew you were doing dry fruit, you could put your beer over your breadcrumbs separately from the dry ingredients, and then add that to the wet ingredients. The difference would be slight, but soaked fresh breadcrumbs do add a silky texture.}

In the end, you want the whole thing to be like a loose-ish quick bread batter.

Pour into your dishes and place your dishes, stacked onto each other with a rack in between and tightly covered with foil, over water. Bring to a boil, with the cover of the pot tightly fitted, for 2 hours (for the two dishes) or 3 hours (for the one pudding). When the pudding is close to being done, it will smell like Christmas at your house, and the center will be puffed. You can pull out the dish and open the foil covering -- be careful when you open the pot, because steam burns!
Put the dish on the counter and use a knife to test the center. It should slide out clean. If the pudding is still sticky in the center, cover it up tightly again and replace it. You can add hot water to the pot as you go.

Pack up the cooled pudding as suggested above, using plenty of booze. When you serve it, re-heat it in the same dish by warming it in the oven or in another steambath -- or in the microwave. Only -- try to just heat it through so that your alcohol doesn't burn off.

To light your pudding on fire:

Take a 1/4 cup of brandy or rum and warm it gently. I use the small pitcher I am going to bring to the table. It needs to be quite hot to the touch but not boiling, or the alcohol will boil off and nothing will light!

Put your warm pudding on a warmed serving dish that has sides -- no flat cake plates or the flaming liquid will spill right off onto your tablecloth, and you will have ruined Christmas all by yourself.

Bring the serving dish and your warmed pitcher of alcohol into your serving area -- and make sure the lights have been turned off! Just like at a birthday party.

Now, strike a match into your pitcher, or have someone strike it as you tip the contents, getting ready to pour. In the dark, you will see the very blue flame of the lit liquid -- only, it's hard to see! Look carefully!

Now, pour the liquid slowly over the pudding, letting it soak in. Try not to panic, as you will then send flaming spatters all over. As you begin to pour, hopefully the warmed (but uncooked) alcohol in the pudding will also catch flame, and you will have several minutes of a beautiful show for your family and guests. Let them really ooh and aah! (If things don't alight at first, warm them a little more and try again. It's almost certainly that things weren't warm enough that is the problem.)

Before and After: Dresser Makeover (with awesome knobs!)

2011-12-12T13:30:00.003-05:00

I have a backlog of projects to show you, and I am starting right in the middle with this dresser, which was my husband's before we got married, and still is:

This is not our bedroom.

It is unfinished pine, well-used, serviceable, but really Nothing Special. I have been trying to find him a dresser more befitting the Man of the House ever since we got married, but have not yet come upon that elusive Handsome Chest of Drawers in My Price Range.

It was rather beat up, as well-used unfinished furniture tends to be (especially after you move it around a few times), and I confess that when I last rearranged our bedroom, I had stuck it in the closet:

This, on the other hand, is our bedroom. I just looked too hard at the odd door/doorway situation and got very confused. The closet door is behind the other one.

It's a big closet, and he didn't really mind, but still. I felt a little bad about that.

Someday, I told myself, I will find him a nicer dresser, and that can go out in the room. And then I'll paint this one and use it for Pippo.

But of course, that hasn't happened yet, and he's been making do with this dinky little dresser in the closet.

Lately, though, I've been trying to just get things done. (It's more like Get Things Done, actually. I'm trying that hard!)

I usually tend to sit on ideas and mull them over and plan them in theory and wait for just the right moment... it's DIY committment anxiety. I'm trying to get over it, since the perfect circumstances rarely come together (especially with an energetic toddler in tow) and a mostly-good project is better than no project at all! (On those occasions when that isn't true, the good news is that most projects can be undone, or at least redone.)

So as soon as I put Pippo down for his morning nap the day the Lt left for the field a few weeks ago, I marched into that closet, dumped out all the drawers into a laundry basket, and hauled the dresser downstairs and into the garage.

Apparently I didn't take pictures of the process, but believe me: it was nothing special. I sanded the whole thing down (it didn't require too much, since there was no finish on it to start with), slapped on a coat of pre-stain (since it was raw pine -- it helps the stain absorb more evenly), another of stain, and then a few coats of polyurethane. I just got a little bit done every naptime, and it worked great.

I don't have "in progress" photos, but I do have a picture of my baby napping!

(The most confusing part was figuring out how much of the drawers to stain, which required some googling, consulting of the insides of the drawers in our other furniture, and asking my sister-in-law. In the end, I stained the fronts, sides (which you see when you pull the drawer out) and top edges of the inside. But not the inside of the drawer where you put the clothes. I am happy with my decision.)

The most exciting part was that I did it all with supplies I already had in the garage! That's right, world: I have done enough projects that now I can refinish a dresser without buying anything new. I have arrived. (And I am a nerd.)

Actually, the most exciting part is the knobs. I am inordinately proud of these knobs.

A long time ago I came across this post, in which she described making homemade decorative knobs by painting a ceramic knob with acrylic paint, then finishing it with some glossy polyurethane. (You should click through the link and see the pretty blue and white knob she made -- it looks like Delft pottery!) I've been wanting to try it ever since, but haven't had the opportunity. This was it.

Trouble was, I took inventory of our paint, and here's what we had: white spray primer (almost empty), bright green and bright red spray paint, and gold acrylic. And zero dainty little paintbrushes. I couldn't figure out how to make that work, and I was determined not to go to the store.

I did a quick phone consult with my mom, though, and she suggested decoupaging some paper on them -- brilliant! I dug through my pretty papers, and found the perfect thing. It's wrapping paper left over from last Christmas (I got it at World Market), and it had these fancy ornaments as part of the design that were just the right size to cover the top of the knobs.

I whipped out that gold acrylic paint (perfect!) and used it on the entire knob. Then I carefully cut out the ornaments and Mod Podged them on. A few topcoats of Mod Podge, a few of polyurethane, and we were good to go.

Applying the polyurethane and letting them dry was a little tricky, but this worked well.

They remind me of those beautiful knobs you find at Anthropologie, but they didn't cost $8+ each.

Ain't she a beauty?

Banished to the closet no more; it's now the first thing you see when you come in the room!

This is not the view from the door, but it is the view that disguises the very bare wall behind the dresser. It's on my list.

And of course, it's not perfect. I'm not entirely happy with how the stain turned out: it was gel stain, which I hadn't used before (it was from a project of the Lt's that is also on my list of things to show you), and I think I left it on too long. I put on a coat and wiped part of it off after a few minutes, but it wasn't as dark as I wanted it to be so I decided to leave it on a little longer. But then the baby woke up and it just never got wiped off. It could be more even (not that you can really tell in this picture).

And the dresser is still really not a Man of the House Dresser -- for one thing, he needs more room for his socks! (Men who wear thick boot socks every day need lots of room in their sock drawer.)

My brother and sister-in-law gave us this beautiful Nativity set last Christmas. It's so tiny -- Baby Jesus is about the size of my thumbnail! We don't have anywhere to display it downstairs right now where it will be out of reach of curious little hands (it's not what I would call toddler-safe!), so we're enjoying it on the Lt's dresser for this Advent.

But you know what? It's great! I Got It Done, it's so much better than before, and my husband loved it. I hadn't told him I was going to do it, so I got to surprise him when he got home. His reaction was most gratifying: he opened the drawers one by one, declared it "absolutely perfect" and asked where I had found it (he didn't recognize his old dresser). Then he asked where I had bought the knobs. And then he oohed and aahed in a very appreciative way. He's a good appreciator.

Someday, maybe I'll come upon that perfect Man of the House dresser. But for now we're making do with something a little more special, and I am continuing to chip away at my DIY commitment anxiety. Do you suffer from it, too?

{pretty, happy, funny, real} -- two unrelated things edition!

2011-12-08T00:01:00.006-05:00

~ Capturing the context of everyday life ~

Every Thursday, here at Like Mother, Like Daughter!

A very happy Feast Day to you all!

Yesterday here's what I did:

Since dear Annie (Rosie's sister-in-law, the girls' friend from high school, and our good friends' daughter) is really, really pregnant right now, she understandably has a little trouble doing her children's Music Together class with them, as it involves a lot of sitting on the floor, jumping, rolling around, and running!

She asked, oh so sweetly ("Only if you'd think it was fun!") if I would like to do the class with Ann and Jack. Why, yes! I would!

I would be {happy} to!

{funny and pretty}

Little Ann very seldom, in my experience, vouchsafes more than this wide-eyed look. She did smile twice during the class! But mostly, this is what you get:

She's seriously absorbed in whatever she is doing. She's a serious little girl, mostly on a mission.

{pretty}

In other news, I've been brainstorming about what to do about the curtains in the kitchen. It's been a problem, because the sliding door, which is oh so wonderful in the summer, can be a problem in the winter. It's just a big, black window into the dark coldness, you know?

And then there's the window next to it, that looks over the deck, but is recessed. That makes it cool in summer, and that is the picture I can find right now for a "before":

But see that radiator? In the winter, you want the storms in place and that window covered up, or the heat is just going to go right out!

I had gone the conventional route and put up a pinch-pleat drapery there -- a kind (not cheap) that was lined and was supposed to offer some insulation. The negatives were that a) I really hate them, not being a pinch-pleat, polyester kind of gal, and b) the one for the slider didn't actually completely satisfyingly reach to the edge of the door!

Which was a bummer, considering how very hard it is for me to commit to draperies of any kind, let alone ones that require two rods, pull cords, and those annoying pins that hold the pleats onto the little thingies that pull them across, almost all the way.

Well, last year, during the very severe snow/ice/ice dam/winter of freezingness, water poured through the top and bottom of the slider! It was a disaster! There is still damage on the molding that I have to repair. And the drapes were destroyed. Domage. Can't say I was too sad.

What you don't see: Water pouring in from the top of the door. This year I am going to personally shovel the deck with my two bare hands if necessary!

In the summer we didn't need them, and this fall I had to think hard about what to do.

Here's my solution: A matelessé quilt. I was looking for a king-sized one, but this double/queen was on clearance at the Home Goods store! I think it was $30! And it fits -- with pulling all the way over to the other side!

I hunted on the internets for a good solution to the rod issue. I tried copper pipe, as in I went a couple of places to find the right length, but in the end the guy in the plumbing section convinced me that copper pipe wouldn't be strong enough to hold up a quilt -- that it would bend.

So, electrical conduit pipe is cheaper! Way! And I don't mind how it looks at all. Some folks spray paint it, but I don't actually think that would work, since we slide the rings (they are those metal rings with the clips -- nice and strong!) a lot. I think the paint would just wear off.

Now I have to figure out what to do with the ends -- I need some funky finials! You know, this make-do look suits me better. You probably think I'm nuts, especially when I tell you that the curtain over the radiator is the old poly curtain (washed), repurposed as an insulating liner, with an old Irish linen tablecloth sewn onto it!

My curtain is an old tablecloth!

{real}

I'm not happy about the brackets, actually. They are too utilitarian, without having any real industrial-chic vibe to them. Don't tell the poor overworked Chief, who had to hold a firm line about putting them that close to the window frame (width-wise), due to stud issues/heaviness of the load, but if I think of something better, they're gone.

And, since this curtain is real linen, it's wrinkly! It was ironed, and starched! -- and then of course I wrestled with it to get it onto the other curtain, and now... it's wrinkled! And when do you suppose I'll get to ironing it? Hmmm???

*By the way, it's my friend Nancy Bell who teaches the Music Together class, and I honestly can't imagine a more enthusiastic, cheerful, and all-round kid-oriented musical person to do the job. If you are in the Leominster, Massachusetts, area and are interested in doing this fun activity (and I say that as a very un-activity-oriented kind of person), you should sign up now for the course that starts in January.

Leave room for wonder.

2011-12-06T11:05:00.001-05:00

The dining-room wreath -- these days we don't eat in there! The candles will be lit maybe for Thursday 's Feast!

This year Advent lasts the full four weeks -- this is as long as it gets! I hope that you will give yourself permission to leave room for wonder.

As I go around reading ideas about how to celebrate Advent, I cringe just a little on the emphasis on activity for its own sake.

We so desperately,and with such good intentions, want to teach our children certain things, that we have forgotten that learning is a process that's accomplished with a good deal of mystery. If this is true with seemingly straightforward facts like the multiplication table, how much more so with things of the faith.

{You know, I remember well being in the car and repeating my multiplication facts to myself, over and over. I'd be looking out the window -- for some reason I remember it streaming with rain -- and pondering the intricacies of the fives, fluctuating between numbers that end in 5 and those that end in 0. I remember thinking about tens, and how the zeros just plunk themselves down there so you don't even have to think about it. And on and on. When I remember all this, I become convinced that no amount of drumming on our part can take the place of a quiet place and time for the child's mind to reach out to the realities on its own.}

And now, as I think about the new translation of the Mass, I think about how for so long, experts have been trying to convince us that the bare facts contain the whole meaning of what we are approaching. It's true that a sentence is made up of subject and predicate. True, but not complete.

If "Don't Walk" is a message we need to get across, then fine. Subject (understood) and predicate will suffice. But the higher you go, the more you find that an integral part of meaning, beyond subject and predicate, is beauty.

Beauty isn't a dispensable aspect of the message of just about anything higher than street warnings. It's as wedded to the message as grace is to nature. A lot of people try to deny that nature/grace dynamism. The nature people want us to lose hope, and act as if the raw material is enough to sustain us. The grace people want to leap right over the concrete reality of expectant days, waning sun, fallen pine cones, cold earth -- as if those things are just an incidental part of the Divine plan.

Advent is the time of re-uniting heaven and earth. Don't leave out the wonder and the simple beauty. Let them - wonder and beauty -- do the work for you; or rather, let them be, and teach us how to be.

The simple act of lighting a candle in the home, if done peacefully and attentively, can open the door to wonder. Wonder is at the heart of Advent.

We can get frazzled and feel that we're not doing enough, that our children don't understand enough. Really, their understanding will grow with each year that they experience the same beautiful, simple rituals at home and at Church.

{Bridget was just mentioning how, when she was little, she felt the excitement of Advent growing each Sunday, as the readings at Mass, the lighting of the candles, and the singing of the Advent hymns brought us closer to Christmas. She really pities those children who don't go....}

The paradox is that children are also perfectly open to our introducing something to our devotions that we hadn't known about before, on account of our living without a collective memory and all. We shouldn't feel like we've failed if we are just starting on this road, no matter at what point we joined it.

Another paradox is that once we've let go of the purely didactic aspects of all our activity, the crazy practical preparations actually do become infused with meaning as well.

What I think the children tire of, eventually, is our jangling attempts to elicit some response from them, which, in the end, comes to this: That we seek affirmation from them. When really, we should confidently offer them what we know to be good, and trust that the good will be accomplished.

Once we free ourselves from this need for results, and remaining ever more responsive to beauty, we can try to provide those few elements that will leave room for wonder: a candle, a song (preferably ancient -- O Come O Come Emmanuel is wonderful, but do look into the other verses lest it get a bit tiresome; learning all the words is a challenge they will live up to), a book, an image, a symbol.

Advent is a penitential season of expectation, so let's remember to foster little extra acts of self-denial and charity in each other, gently, with mindful anticipation. Not only is it crazy to turn Advent into 24 days of gift-giving, it's liturgically inappropriate!

What will be left at Christmas? Jaded, tired little cranky tots whose sense of wonder will have been ground down to a nub.

In Advent, the traditional helps are the Advent wreath, the calendar (preferably with Scripture verses of prophecies and Gospel passages), and/or the Jesse tree, if you can swing it (don't try to do it all at first -- little by little).

Really live this season with a liturgical heart. Pay no attention to the voices, within or without, that say you are not doing enough. Follow the wisdom of the Church in building up gradually to the revelation of Christmas -- don't expect to burst forth ready-made, um, two weeks ago. Advent is a journey for the child within! Little by little....

Doings.

2011-12-02T10:27:00.001-05:00

Just catching you up on some doings! No crafts to speak of.

The gorgeous weather of the past few weeks had us frantically yet also peacefully making inroads on the storm-tossed- and-battered landscape we call our yard. There is so much to do, but working outside, especially when the days are warm but also mercifully short (since we will just keep hacking and hauling and raking and cutting as long as the sun shines, and too many hours of that are just exhausting) lifts the spirits wonderfully.

I'm not going to lie. I won't be sad if we have a mild winter. When I drive along, I see ongoing repair of last winter's floods. The most recent events (the hurricane and the October snow) have left damage that hasn't begun to be addressed.

The Chief cat-proofed, hopefully, the bluebird houses (over on the left), and we have the makings of several fine burn piles in the brush there.

I have this inner dialogue of futility. Do you have it too? The sheer amount of work to be done weighs down on me, and I spend a lot of time telling myself that there is no way it can all be accomplished. However, I've learned two important things:

1. You can do a lot in an hour. And:
2. You can do a lot in a day.

Because we've been battling on other fronts, the pear trees have been neglected.

They grew very tall.

That seems like a good thing, but being neighbors to a big orchard has taught me something: you really have to hack away at fruit trees, because you have to be able to reach the fruit! When we first moved here, I thought the owners were mangling their trees. I didn't understand how they could lop off the tops the way they did, because of course, if you do that to a shade tree -- cut off the main trunk of a maple, for instance -- you ruin it.

Now I see. Now that a couple of years have gone by with pears lying wasted on the ground simply because we couldn't reach them and there were too many.

Pears, by the way, are unlike apples. You have to pick them before they are quite ripe, or they won't keep at all. Of course, you mustn't pick them too soon. Figures that I'd have pear trees, with their mysterious, complicated, unknowableness. No straightforward apples for me!

You know how sometimes a pear looks lovely on the outside but reveals a mushy interior? Well, it ripened on the tree! The ones that fall on the ground are useless. That's very different from chestnuts, by the way, which are only good when they fall. I found that out because my neighbor has (Chinese, not American, but still edible) chestnut trees, and I studied up on them after he offered to let us collect the nuts.

It's not only being absorbed with other things that prevented me from pruning the pears. It's not being strong enough to handle the big trunks or knowing which saw to use. It's also being paralyzed by too much reading.

Naturally, people who have great experience with growing pears, and do it for a living, have very particular ideas about how you should prune the trees. Their instructions are so precise that they are impossible to follow. Like many other things in life, to understand finally, you must learn a bit but also just do.


Both the Chief and I started out, on our respective trees, on our rickety ladder with great concern for our safety and a healthy mistrust of the heights. By the end, I think we would both have swung on a vine if it had gotten us within reach of the place we needed to be. Bridget manned the rope.

So all that talk about crossing branches and suckers and angles of cuts is just fine. But this operation needed to be performed now, and drastically. No room for fine tuning. We needed to be the ruthless hackers of our orchard. It was so bad that the grapevines (which are going to swallow us up one day) had climbed over the largest of the three trees, making a sort of cave under it!

Wouldn't I love some sort of bulldozer of my very own....

We'll see next year if we've been overzealous. Maybe the books will have the last laugh.

Anyway, Thanksgiving came, with its Mass, football game with the monks, making of name cards, and subsequent exhaustion.

I will leave the food as read. No need to bore you. We had turkey.We had pie.

Then back to yard work! Branches! Storm cleanup! The never-ending war against the elements! When will I knit!? (While they removed this bad boy, I mowed up the leaves and took pictures.)

Does that branch look small? The base of it is the size of a respectable tree!

And then we were so tired...

There is a person under there.

{pretty, happy, funny, real}

2011-12-01T00:00:00.001-05:00

~ Capturing the context of contentment in everyday life ~

Every Thursday, here at Like Mother, Like Daughter!

{pretty}

The Lt's brother flew out to spend Thanksgiving with us, which was just so much fun. One of the things we did over the weekend (one of the few activities that didn't involve eating vast amounts of food) was bring him to one of our favorite local sites, the Mission San Luis Rey.

{happy}

Pippo showed his uncle one of the beaches near our house before we had to say goodbye. This baby loves the water -- even when it's cold!

{funny}

(sorry about the phone pic - my real camera was too far away!)

Pippo was shy and couldn't quite decide if he could trust my poor brother-in-law, despite Edward's extreme overtures of friendship. (Oh, how far we are willing to go to win a baby's love!)

{real}

Are you familiar with the liturgical color of orange?

I tried so hard to be ready this year, but wasn't able to find Advent candles at any of the three stores (plus two church gift shops) where I'd looked for them. And really, there are limits to the patience of a squirmy eleven-month-old, even in the search for pink and purple tapers. I finally admitted defeat and started on Sunday with candles I already had. Which were orange.

(Public Service Announcement for anyone who, like me, is a little behind this year: I finally found them yesterday at JoAnn's: they were with the Christmas decorations, not the candles, and they came in a pack. I bought two, in hopes of avoiding the Orange First Sunday of Advent next year...)

In happier news, I'm pleased with my wreath. It's made of rosemary (snipped stealthily from the side of the road in my usual fashion), which makes it so fragrant!

Ask Auntie Leila: Five steps to feeling pretty after the baby.

2011-11-29T14:19:00.005-05:00

Dear Auntie Leila,

I am loving reading the posts on your blog. I am awed by all these lovely women who have lots of children. My question is whether you can share some wisdom about body image and marital intimacy.

I guess for me I feel like since having my (first) baby 2 and a bit years ago (it was a complicated birth and took a long time to heal from physically and I think perhaps longer mentally) I am constantly revisiting how I feel about my body.

I am gradually trying to let go of the weird perfectionism thing that makes me think I need to look like a supermodel, without the personal make up artist, thousands of dollars and the lack of eating!!

I wonder how you (or others) maintained (and maintain) your idea of being an attractive self whilst pregnant or breastfeeding, at different stages of life, and so on. How do you hold the two "selves" together? And how do your husbands? (I guess it's telling that I think of myself as two people - the mother and the pre-mother who had her own life and felt attractive?! Ideally I'm sure I should be one person!)

Thank you for all your down to earth wisdom!

Ellie

Dear Ellie,

Okay, it’s going to seem really random to you that I find this question very… Advent-y.

Stick with me because I’m going to be practical, but also show you how these issues we have can be resolved by our Advent devotions, and we will also get input from the Chief, Sukie, and Rosie.

So, motherliness and maintaining your sense of attractiveness as you go through various stages… ah, yes.

You see, you are not alone in feeling like the post-headlights deer after you have a baby. Not everyone feels this way, and I have nothing but wonder for those who do not. As a 19-year-old, thin and not very strong, undergoing an extremely difficult labor and delivery, my own devastation would have been complete had I not been too numb to contemplate it.

What had happened to my body was only part of the larger question of what had happened to me. Even though, six weeks later, I fit into my teensy clothes, I felt so strange. It’s not so much that the physical changes affected my sense of attractiveness, although they did, while I’m sure others hardly noticed anything different. It’s just that I didn’t feel like myself, and the change in my body was a small part of the overall upheaval.

So I know what you mean.

It’s true that the majority of images we see are of women who look girlish after giving even multiple births. It stands to reason that some will, applying the ever-handy 10-80-10 rule: That 10 percent of average women will balloon, 80 percent will be a little different but not much, and 10 percent will be thin or thinner than ever. Breastfeeding helps get you back in shape (and most women don’t realize that), but a lot of it is just the luck of the draw, inheritance-wise.

The market, which uncannily detects anxiety and ambivalence, naturally caters to the way we, at the moment, wish we looked – by ever so helpfully waving under our noses images of only the 10 percent who are endowed by genetics, hard and possibly destructive work, and computer manipulation to look like they are freshmen in high school, despite their reproductive activities.

Let’s never mind all that, on the grounds that it’s just not helpful to getting us to our real goal, which is really enjoying the process of figuring out how integral this motherhood thing is to our womanhood.

It is, you know. Even when a woman isn’t a physical mother – if she is a religious sister, or not given the gift of physical children in her marriage – she’s called to motherhood as the fulfillment of God’s plan for her.

Let’s do some practical things to be happy with how we look right now, and possibly learn some deep truths about womanhood along the way.

Before we get started: Take a shower and wash your hair. You will already feel better.

The goal here is going to be to get in touch with the prettiness of the new you. So let’s start from the inside out.

1. Trim your nails (all) and shave your legs. Treat your feet and do what you can to just smell fantastic.

Get a nice haircut. One’s hair is super important, and the cut and style have to be fabulous but not fussy, so that you can run around with your child. Use the proper products (I discuss this in my showering post, a true treasure-trove of TMI). A woman’s hair is her glory. Make it the best it can be. If it’s long, don’t just pull it into a pony. Try a messy bun if you like it back, or a loose French braid. If it’s short, make sure it’s feminine and not utilitarian. A little more volume flatters. Nothing will look right on you if your hair is not becoming, and everything will suddenly look better if it is. If we wore a head covering (and every mother of a toddler has to wonder why we don’t), we would just have to choose a pretty one. But this isn’t medieval Norway and we probably don’t. So style your hair.

Use a little make-up if you want to. If you do, use it every day, first thing in the morning. I’m not telling you that you have to wear make-up. I am going to say this: It’s better to use none than to only perk up to go out, but never put in the effort “just” for your husband at home. As I tend to be a little ruddy, I use a little foundation, a dab of blush, eyeliner (my eyelashes are skimpy), and a smidge of lip gloss. Could you manage that much? Pluck only stray hairs on your brows and do give them a little lift with the liner. Brows are the fabulous accent marks of the face.

2. Have the right underwear. It needs to fit and not be an embarrassment in case of ambulance rides. Once you are over 13, and I am assuming you are, you need more than just a bra – you need camisoles and slips and the right kind of spandex for certain outfits. Only recently having recovered from the 70s myself -- with all that implies in the lingerie department -- I have come to see the value in these items. If you shop at a Marshall’s/T J Maxx type of place, you don’t have to spend a lot, but you should consider every penny you spend as well worth it.

In the same vein, have some cute bedwear. This is definitely a G-rated blog – I really mean just have nice things to wear to bed. When your size changes, the overwhelmingness of having to replace everything results in the pjs and nighties morphing into hubby’s sweats. Nevertheless, cuteness is a priority, and I say that as someone who wears flannel from October to May. It’s cute flannel!

3. Now let’s think. Every woman has at least a few items of clothing that she feels just work for her – so much so that it’s hard to let them go when they get a little… antique. We need to make a mental list of what the exact characteristics of those items are so we can replace and amplify them.

For instance – does the pair of jeans you really love have a waist that hits you just so? Is that old shirt you reach for just the right amount of blousy at the hips? Do you wish you had that pleated skirt from your aunt’s closet again? Did you think that a jacket nipped you in at the waist just so?

Make some rules for yourself. Here are mine (I’m average height, thick through the waist, small hips, nice legs, short neck, bad posture, 51 and not ready to consign myself to the dust bin of fashion, but not able to wear just any old t-shirt either):

No crew necks, ever. No sweat pants. Nothing short at the waist, like a short cardi, cropped shirt, etc. A longer look is better for me. Nothing above the knee – the only exception is just-above-the-knee skirts for hot weather because I will never ever wear shorts again, and that’s fine by me, and my knees aren’t dumpy yet. Nothing dropped-waist if it doesn’t also flare out, because something A-line makes me look fine, but anything that nips in under the belly just looks horrible.

Don't be distracted by the gorgeous top. That skirt would make me a laughing stock.

Nothing fussy at the shoulders, but a ruffle on a v-neck is fabulous, as is anything to soften the neck area, such as a portrait collar or any little detail. But poufy sleeves make me feel stuffed. Nothing that bulges at the waist/abdomen, like a bow or zipper/button combo. But I don’t like low-slung jeans. Mom jeans (high waist, wide seat) are obviously out, but it helps to have something pulling you in right there if you’re like me.

Unfortunately, most knit/crochet patterns are like this -- unfitted and too cropped. She looks great! But she'd look great in a paper bag. Actually, I think if we met her, we'd feel she was painfully thin, or else we'd realize this photo had been shopped.

See? Only a model can wear everything, and then only because she’s captured in that one (usually odd) pose, and even so, maybe she’s not comfortable in every single thing.

Start making your list and sticking to it. Get only clothes that make you feel at least confident and comfortable. When you meet someone who seems comfortable, cute, and put together, ask yourself why. Is it that she has a nice cardigan? Always wears earrings? A necklace? A nice scarf? I’m sure one thing you’ll notice is that she works with her figure, not against it.

Same model (admittedly, there might be something post-production going on with the photos, but still): If I were she (and she’s gorgeous), I would not feel comfy in the outfit on the left, but I would in the one on the right. Among other, more obvious, things, the belt is dumb but the necklace is adorable.

Some of the sites that are often recommended as offering more feminine clothing still fail to please me in that their skirts are too stinkin short.

If you aren't so thin that your legs are 4 inches apart from each other at the inner thigh, you are going to look like a stumpy white whale in this dress, I'm sorry to say.

Also, let’s have some sleeves. Sleeveless just doesn’t look great on most people (don’t get me started on strapless!), and it makes me angry that they are eliminating the most time-consuming aspect of dressmaking but still charging a lot.

Rosie says, “Watch What Not To Wear. It helps you see that each woman can look her best right now, and emphasizes the feminine. Just get clothes that fit, and don’t worry about the size.”

The genius of that show is that it does something paradoxical: It teaches us that changing the superficial leads to deep results. A lot of the women they work with seem like they could use a psychiatrist, honestly. Yet after their transformation, which is completely cosmetic, they seem to be able to grapple with a lot of problems that were overwhelming them. I wholeheartedly subscribe to this approach. Might as well try it! It’s cheaper than therapy, even with the shopping.

She also says, “I ran into a friend who has lots of kids. I’m sure she felt a little ungainly, because she had just had a baby, but she exuded joy and kindness and looked radiant. She was truly, physically, beautiful. That’s how I want to be.”

Sukie says, “I’d rather know that I look nice and put together than have a lot of outfits. I don’t want to be uncomfortable or spend time thinking about what to wear. I have to know I can do anything in my work clothes [she’s a teacher] – sit on the floor, pull down a map, etc. Nothing low-cut. I don’t like high-waisted things, as they make me feel short. If I feel unattractive, I find it’s best to concentrate on looking put-together."

Becoming a mother made me realize that I had to have a practical wardrobe, and that took me years to achieve. For one thing, it was the 80s, and clothes didn’t fit on purpose. I’m really sort of bitter that I spent my most attractive years wearing “man-tailored” –type clothes. And shoulder pads. But for sure, you need to supply yourself with exactly those items that you reach for, but aren’t there.

4. Colors. Back in the day there was something called Color Me Beautiful. Once again Auntie Leila reaches into the mists of time for a how-to book that really worked, although you will laugh at the styles because they are truly priceless.

The main idea is to ascertain where you fall in an overlapping grid that has two variations on two main ideas: Warm skin tones, cool skin tones/Muted tones, clear tones. I think that now they’ve changed it to be about hair color, but the author, Carol Jackson, specifically said that hair color isn’t the main factor for all but a few people -- it’s skin tone.

I think I would love this vintage dress; the slight gathering would be so flattering, and the A-line skirt would not add bulk but would hide what bulk there is -- but the color would make me look a bit ill. I need clear cool colors. It's not that green wouldn't work. It's just that this green wouldn't work.

Again, thinking about what you love to wear already – what makes you feel like you -- will guide you. Every woman can wear just about every color. You have to figure out if you need the warm or cool version of the color as well as the muted or clear version. Trust me, it works so well to help you zero in on what makes you feel wonderful and attractive. It also helps you decide when to spend money on something. If it’s not in your colors, skip it.

5. Re-train yourself to see things in their proper light. Analyze photos for their reality content – both as to whether a style could work for you and if it’s being presented realistically.

Sweet skirt. I wouldn't tuck in the top, but that's fine. If your tummy is not the problem, this would be so flattering just like this, even if you're overweight. If your style is different, that's fine!

The fact that styles favor the emaciated and immature doesn’t help. After all, it can only be a truly warped and perverted fashion mind that only offers horizontal stripes, short skirts, and stretchy fabrics that hug the body. Seeing is so related to reality. We pervert our ability to see when we constantly subject ourselves to unreal images as if they are real!

We have to make a conscious effort not to look at those images and compare ourselves.

{At least you are young! Try searching for Mother of the Bride attire and have a good laugh at what image is being projected there. Apparently Mothers of the Bride are meant, in popular imagination, to be a cross between a Barbie beauty queen and a particularly immodest mermaid.

Seriously, I searched "mother of the bride" and this was the dress at the top, but hardly unique. MOB as vamp, anyone?

But enough about my problems.}

And here is where Advent comes in for you.

You see, Advent, the season of preparation for the Incarnation, has a charming side that revolves around Sundays – that makes us look eagerly for each Sunday when we light another candle and are closer to the great feast of Christmas. Well, what do you know -- serving God starts with living our Sundays well.

Advent is good training if we’ve let that slip.

I just want to remind you of what dear St. Augustine always says – “Do thou serve Him who made thee, so that that which was made for thee (your body, for instance) may serve thee.” – so that your body may not be a source of sorrow for you.

Rosie says, "Make sure you hold the baby in front of you for photos. And a couple of pins in front makes a ponytail more put together!"

Your question, involving as it does the sense of division in your person, and the uncertainty about the ends for which you were made, turns on this need that Advent addresses: The need to reunite earth and Heaven. God gave us our bodies with a nuptial meaning – which just means that a woman, loved by her husband, becomes a mother, and that makes her more beautiful in every way.

Here is what my husband says: "The husband wants his wife. He knows who you are. Yes, you want to look good for him, but he understands you and what makes you the way you are and look – it’s you he wants. You should realize that with each passing year (and each new baby), you become more distinctively you: The flesh-and-blood woman he loves. The good part of him wants only the real you, not some Hollywood (or worse) false image. He has to feed that good part and deny any bad part that would take him away from reality, and you have to help him by being open and honest as well as trusting. You have to help him a lot, because he’s always battling with those false images."

He’s meant to help you through this time of change, with his loving protection. To do that, he is going to have to set out on the Advent road, determined to be worthy to kneel at the Infant’s cradle with his gifts. And he should want to be loving you exactly how you look, especially after the baby comes and while you are nursing it.

You know, a lot of husbands go through trauma of their own when the baby comes, and don’t dare say a word about it because clearly, what their wife has experienced trumps everything. But this event merits a conversation or two. He has to be encouraged to affirm his wife’s value, and to overcome the fear he has that he will be able to take care of what has been entrusted to him.

Wives, don’t underestimate that fear. Your fear is assuaged by the undeniable, immediate gift of the baby. But his fear is only fed by everything he encounters, since the manly virtue of providing for his family is not worth much to those he deals with, most likely, and doesn’t bear fruit for a long time.

You can make him want to be brave by your appreciation, and he will be emboldened to express how much he loves you in your new, more womanly mode – because what he really wants out of this life is a loving home, a devoted wife, children who will honor him, and to not die alone. All this, and more, he will get -- if he too keeps his eyes on what is real. For us, the lust of the eyes is really this longing to look like someone else, and we have to resist it. For him, the lust of the eyes really is lust in its specific sense, and the only remedy is to love someone truly beautiful.

Husband and wife are like Adam and Eve in the garden (they really are, as marriage leaps right over the divide of the Fall and takes us back to the original plan God had in mind). Those two didn’t need any pictures. They were writing their own marriage manual when it came to intimacy, and each married couple does the same, all over again. Each husband and wife are the new Adam and Eve.

There is no comparing in love.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

{I would love your thoughts on Ellie’s question. I will be super vigilant with the comments, though, so make sure you keep in mind that many very young girls read what we say! If you don’t see your comment (after a while), try saying it again, only more G-rated. :)}

Ask Auntie Leila: No, really, how do you prepare for Thanksgiving?

2011-11-19T10:32:00.004-05:00

Dear Auntie Leila,
Any chance you could post about the things you do to get ready for Thanksgiving?
Love,
Susan

You mean the magazines aren't helping you with their advice to set the table the day before? You say you actually use that table at every meal for your impossibly large family? And even if, during those crazy prep days, you could simply hand them food out the dog hatch, telling them that it's normal to eat meals on the porch in November, your nimble toddlers would slip past you and make short work of the china and glassware? You don't think it would be wise to set the table more than a nanosecond before everyone sits down, even with your linebacker brothers to guard it while you keep the other toddlers from standing on the dishwasher door? Because you have an infinite supply of toddlers?

Yeah, I hear you. I don't have any brothers, so it was even worse for me.

Maybe some of these ideas can help.

Keeping in mind that this post is really for large busy families who aren't old enough to contribute by bringing all the dishes to you, and that I am usually stirring gravy with one hand and forgetting to defrost the pie dough with the other, here, in telegraphed form (because it's already less than a week to go) is my little list of helpful hints.

♦ Know that when you have little ones, you are not going to have that one day that you can devote to giving the extra turn to your puff pastry, making individual miniature cornucopias as favors, or blanching your almonds.You need to embrace that.

But it's your duty now to schedule in -- rather than be in denial about -- the need to sit down and nurse the baby. By the way, this is where I think baby schedules get a bad rap. The schedule is for you -- so that you don't push your baby a little past his limit with your busy-ness, but are fully aware that yes, it's been two hours and he really does need you. Not for a quick sip but for a good, hearty nursing. If you bottle feed your baby, no, you can't just hand him off to others while you run yourself ragged. The baby is like a big speed bump in the road. Slow down.

Pace yourself. You know for a fact that the baby will need to be held, and, exasperatingly, more often when your level of frantic activity is up (there is a direct correlation between children desperately needing you and your distractedness -- this has been documented by countless women, or would have been if they could have found a pencil).

Even if he seems fine (and he's not, because to him it's just a day, not a "special" day, and he wants you), you'll get sick if you put him off. At least, if I didn't stay with my babies' rhythms, I would get a breast infection -- no fun and no good for anyone.

On the other hand, you have lots of little helpers who can do charmingly naive approximations of place tags, fashion turkey decorations and garlands, and bring in pine cones.

So decorating is taken care of.

♦ Make dessert first. Basically, that means make your pie crusts sometime before Wednesday. Once that part is done, the pies are easy and can be baked before you put the turkey in (I really do like mine freshly baked on the day, other than the pecan pie, which can be made the day before -- it's a little late now to be freezing it, but it does freeze well, for future reference). Any little touches that you really want, do them now.

♦ Pay your bills and go through your papers before Monday. This year Thanksgiving is a little on the early side, so that's good, but you will be vexed if you get a late fee because you let yourself lose your concentration.

♦ Sometime before Tuesday: Clean your own room. Do it today. If you want peace in the next few days, you need to know that your house is in order. That tense feeling of paralysis comes from the vague sense that you have too much to do, which is in turn fed by those little strolls you occasionally take through the house and yard.

{I say this as someone who once, on the eve of the big T-day, told my returning kids (including poor dear Natasha, who has likely never recovered), "Clean the windows in the dining room," and went to lie down. But that's because the dining room table was being finished that day, in that room -- and by finished I mean the legs were being sawed down because I felt the whole thing was too high. Well, it was. But that meant there was sawdust everywhere....}

If you just do a big chunk of it a few days before -- the non-turkey-related chunk -- you will experience a lightness you never knew you could have.

The fact is that roasting a turkey isn't all that hard. Phil's brother once pointed out, after having fussed over a chipotle turkey with ancho stuffing or whatever, that in the end, Thanksgiving dinner tastes like... Thanksgiving dinner!

No matter what you do!

So go ahead and keep it simple, and rather than thinking all will be lost if you don't have five-spice squash, just make good plain squash and do your chores ahead of time.

Complicated Thanksgiving recipes are creatures of magazine editors who sit around all year thinking up stuff for you to stress out about --

--and then get their own Thanksgiving dinners catered.

Actual thanksgiving, on the other hand, is about the bounty of nature (among other, more lofty things). Na-ture. Put butter on it and it will be lovely.

♦ Give your whole upstairs (or sleeping zone) a "Moderate Clean." Now is not the time for turning mattresses or any of that deep-cleaning fancy stuff. De-clutter a little, wipe things down, tidy up -- including your messes that you can't deal with right now -- just go ahead and make them as tidy as you can -- and vacuum.

By sometime on Monday the unseen regions of your house will at least stop giving you that sinking feeling that you will expire soon. Get the bathrooms in shape. When you wake up next week to the reality of cooking for your crowd, you'll have the satisfaction of knowing that a Blitz will have you in good form.

♦ Do a lot of laundry now. Fold it and put it away. Notice today if your family actually doesn't have enough underwear to get them through Friday. If that's the case, get thee to Target and buy some. You'll still have to do laundry every day (probably including at least processing some on the day itself) but giving yourself breathing room is the way to go.

No matter how efficient you are, and especially if you're like me and really like to make things from scratch and have them fresh on the day, you will be super busy on Wednesday and Thursday. You don't want a lot of dirty or wet or jumbled sheets and towels mocking you every time you walk by wherever you stack all your unprocessed laundry.

♦ You know that feeling you have that's like this: "I wish I had time to sweep the porch!" "I need to vacuum the stairs!" "Ugh, there are cobwebs in this room!" "Under the trash can the cabinet is so dirty!" "The chairs need to be dusted!" "I can't even think about the car!"

Well, those are all things kids could take care of. It won't be worse than it already is. Put them to work and see if you don't get a bit ahead despite yourself.

♦ When the nether regions of your house are moderately clean, your laundry is put away (I know there's more, but you're on top of it), and your bills are paid, you can take a little breath. Sit down (with the baby, of course) and start your lists.

These are the lists you need:

Details of the cleaning that is yet to be done -- guest areas and kitchen.

Non-food items that you have to purchase: dress shoes for the boys, new kitchen towels (please resist the brown and orange ones or you'll have to start all over again in a week), a gravy boat (just get one -- it's about time -- it doesn't have to match), and candles (don't forget the ADVENT CANDLES -- because yes, Advent starts next Sunday).

Extremely specific menu plans for every instant from the moment your guests -- including returning children -- arrive. You need to try to picture in your mind exactly what you want to be serving for breakfast, lunch, appetizers, dinner, and snacks for the whole weekend. Then throw in a menu for the day before anyone arrives -- something simple and quick like soup or pasta with ham and spinach. Your menu list should have three parts: the menus, organized by meal; the prep work for each meal, the better to delegate, since even the youngest child can peel a carrot or wash broccoli; and a shopping list. Arrange your shopping list by aisle and department.

You don't have to clean out your fridge because the power being out for five days recently necessitated a scouring that likely would not have occurred otherwise. Oh wait, that was me. If you had your power, then spend the next few days eating and throwing away, depending, whatever is in there.

Armed with your lists, you can easily tackle the rest. Here's how:

♦ What's really great about this particular dinner is that you can make almost all of it in advance. Since you are likely also having to feed your family on a regular basis until then (why? why do they need to be fed so often?), you probably won't be that housewife who calmly mixes herself a martini an hour before the guests arrive. But here are the things that you can do while you are getting through the non-holiday days:

Four packages of cranberries. By the way, I have never ever in 30 years done anything other than dump the cranberries, sugar, and water together in the pot and boiled them. The recipe says to cook the sugar and water together first, but by then the package is in the trash. So I can definitively say, no need to separate the steps.

If you can roast a turkey along with your Sunday dinner, do. That allows you to have already carved meat and gravy, sparing you the last-minute frenzy. You can still roast one on the big day, but it will be mainly for show. One turkey isn't really enough for more than eight people anyway. Even a big one, which is mostly bones and cavity.

Cranberry sauce: Since this has to be cold anyway, make it right now. And yes, it's worth it, even if you just follow the directions on the package, leaving out the lemon zest, hand-picked hazelnuts, nori cultivated in special Japanese sea gardens, and/or varietal red wine reduction.

Canned cranberry sauce tastes like sugar (or more likely, corn syrup) that met a cranberry sometime in the distant past and can't really remember its name. And which one of us hasn't been smacking ourselves on the head on Thanksgiving morning, foreseeing all too clearly the inevitability of warm cranberry sauce, having forgotten about it until then?

While you are at it, make enough and freeze it. It's just so good.

Stuffing: Any time the oven is on, put a tray of cubed bread in there. There's a bag in my freezer...

Last night while I was making pizza, I got the cranberry sauce done, as well as a nice batch of onion confit, this time with figs, ginger, and coriander. I was slicing onions anyway for the pizza, so I just saved a step and did a bunch. If all my dishes are pretty plain (but super yummy), the confit will be memorably interesting, and that will be enough. Even someone with twins could get that much done five days in advance! I guess. I've never had twins.

When the oven was still hot from the pizza, I put the sweet potatoes in (on a pan lined with foil, because don't do that to yourself -- don't give yourself a pan of burnt sweet potato guts to deal with). Those can cool for however long it takes me -- days, even -- to peel them and toss them with butter and salt in a serving dish. Snap! Done.

When you make your dough for the rolls, make enough for several loaves of bread because what really matters about this holiday (I mean, other than the gratitude and all) is the sandwiches afterwards. For those, you need some really good bread! Freeze it so no one eats it before the right moment.

Look at your list and try to get a couple of things done each day. They will keep just fine in the fridge or the freezer -- even, in the case of sweet potatoes, squash, beets, and such, on a cool shelf in the pantry for a day or two.

On Tuesday you can do your final shopping, knowing that your house is reasonably clean and if all else fails, you will have pie and stuffing with cranberry sauce.

On Thursday morning, make everyone take a long walk. If they stay inside, they will just get the house dirty. I won't say you'll have that martini, and that's probably just as well, but it's the best it will get until they are old enough to invite you to Thanksgiving dinner!

Other Thanksgiving posts:

Rosie's baking fail, super cute. Being pregnant and far from home excuses all.
Prep talk.
Not a "before", but does include our fun game.
Thanksgiving is a proof of the existence of God, and more prep talk.

{pretty, happy, funny, real}

2011-11-17T00:01:00.005-05:00

~ Capturing the context of everyday life ~

Every Thursday, here at Like Mother, Like Daughter!

Note that you actually have until Sunday to join in the fun! But next week, no {phfr}. Happy Thanksgiving!

{pretty}

I got this mat from Target, and replaced the two inadequate ones that were all I could find at the time. {Mats at the door are a must. Pleasepleaseplease get some sturdy "waterhog" mats that are big. There on the right is a really big one that dogs and people have to walk several steps on while taking off their coats, before entering my kitchen. Then there's another mat inside the kitchen door. You will invest under $50. So much cheaper than therapy.}

{happy}

I tweaked some things in my mudroom -- nothing grand, mind -- but I'm just happier with the use of space and the pleasingness to the eye. Remember the front door exercise? I needed to do this.

Here is a before:

Almost the same, but I decided that -

a) I love my old utility sink and would like it to be what you see when you come in, rather than that trash. Taking for granted that you are okay with seeing my laundry room. A big assumption. More on that later.

But the room is such that there is almost nowhere else to put the bin, except behind the door, which would be perfect, but then where would I put my dryer lint? (And more on that later!)

b) I also didn't want you to see my laundry detergent (usually a big box of powder, but I guess liquid was all I could find at the time of the photo). But being a time-and-motion nazi and hasty to boot, I couldn't feature opening the cabinet every time I wanted to do a load of wash. Nor could I think of a container that would be functional yet cute. So it just stayed.

I realize that now I should address pipes and paint splatters. But isn't this a step in the right direction?

Can I just say:

It has done my heart good to go around to your {phfr} posts over the weeks and see how you've taken the idea to heart. Some of you have mentioned how you have been noticing contentment more.

I think that's actually just incredibly important. I love how the internet can give us all sorts of wonderful ideas and thoughts. I can't imagine how I lived without this constant stream of creative input. Well, I do remember going to the library and checking out mostly poorly illustrated books. And devouring magazines.

But there is definitely a downside, isn't there? The fact is that advertisement, including the kind that's embedded in the content, works by making us dissatisfied with our lives. I love the idea of a good product (like those mats). I appreciate being told about it. But I don't like feeling that I have somehow failed when I click away.

I cringe when someone says that something I've posted makes them feel envious -- even if they mean it in the friendliest way, which I'm sure they do! It makes me nervous when anyone thinks my life is perfect or things always go well for me.

I'm trying, and I think these particular photos demonstrate this, to be that person on the part of the spectrum who makes you think, "Well, if she can do that, what's stopping me? Things aren't that bad over here in this life of mine after all!"

{phfr} is meant to share that sense with each other -- that it's all good. One mom made my heart sing by saying she let go of her perfectionism and let her children decorate some wooden dolls. And you should have seen how adorable they were! The dolls -- and the children :)

I sang because I am that mom too. Constantly comparing, constantly afraid to show any weakness -- which is of course absurd, since one look reveals all!

I like to show you things I've been doing, because that's the kind of person I am. It's fun. I hope it energizes, and doesn't deflate, you. I know that you energize me! So thank you!

{funny}

Actually, the whole project of small steps in this room to up my contentment quotient began with a stray comment from a friend about the usefulness of dryer lint as a fire starter.

Hmmm.... maybe I don't have to step all the way across the mudroom (I feel faint just thinking about it) to throw away my dryer lint! But I need a cute container for the lint! And what about the laundry detergent, anyway?

So I cleaned out this enameled pan (I use it for all sorts of things -- lately on top of the woodstove during the power outage for a hot water supply). And the covered crock is just right for the lint. I may find other things to use instead, but I'm well on the way to more cuteness, don't you think? (The rubber mat is so that my dryer doesn't get scratched up, since things will get put on there.)

{real}

Now this is not so much about the unfinishedness being the {real} -- it's more about my anxiety when it comes to ordering big loads of heavy stuff requiring large dump trucks. Anxiety. Attack.

It's all so final. What if eight yards of 3/4 golden brown is not enough? What if it's too much? What if I am not actually that fond of it? What if I'd rather sew up a hem?

But when the stone is raked out and the light fixture is put in over the front door, then people can come in this way! And not through the laundry room! I mean, good old friends always come in the back door, but you'd like an option that isn't sort of creepy and spidery, right?

I'll let you know what happens.

{I'll try to keep up next week, but you know me, the desultory blogger. We won't have {phfr} next week, Thanksgiving Day. We'll see you after that, though! So don't forget to keep taking those photos!}

Yarn woes.

2011-11-16T09:38:00.001-05:00

A quick post here to join Ginny's Yarn Along. She's quite the knitter! Lovely.

Casti Connubii, the bag that holds my little projects in my purse, and my little project.

I could have saved this for tomorrow's {pretty, happy, funny, real} -- as my real -- but as it's knitting, and I haven't posted any knitting for a while, Yarn Along it is. (Don't forget to join Like Mother, Like Daughter tomorrow with your contentment!)

The reading is Casti Connubii. If you just can't imagine what on earth Catholics could possibly be thinking by opposing birth control -- if that just seems like the most outlandish thing you could think of, with about as much sense as being against taking antibiotics when you have an infection or opposing a wide range of ice cream flavors or indeed taking a stand against any other wonder that modern life has brought us -- you might want to take a peek at this.

I'm working my way through it now, having spent long years on other writings of more recent vintage. It's amazingly, mind-bendingly full of wisdom, as well as breathtakingly prescient, that's all I can say at the moment.

What's also amazing, but not in a good way, is that the knitting that you can barely see there because I don't want to give away my surprise consists of two wonderful items that are cabled. Beautiful, huh?

Love the color, love the pattern.

Too bad that one of them is cabled every four rows and the other, every three. Too bad I can't count.

And the yarn, Knitpicks' Risata in Clementine, is discontinued.

Why not? Why not discontinue the cutest yarn in the most adorable color? When if you had it in stock, I could buy two more skeins and simply make four of these secret things, rather than rip one of them out?

I have pinged some people on Ravelry to see if they have any they want to sell. No luck so far. Sigh...

Before and After: Third floor bedrooms.

2011-11-15T10:19:00.002-05:00

When everyone was home, we had all our bedrooms in full use, including what is now the rec room. Seven bedrooms! {We actually have eight, because there are three on the third floor, but one of was used as a kitchen for a little apartment organized by the previous owner -- for some Vietnamese boat people -- isn't that amazing? Not having the energy to convert it back, I use it as storage right now. By right now I mean I always have.}

Okay, get ready for an intense remodeling experience! This is going to rock your world! Close all your Martha Stewart tabs! You don't need them!

Will's room.

In this as in everything, my idea is to use what I have where possible. Do you know how expensive bedding is? And let's not be buying cheap bedding, as in cheaply made. By all means try to get a bargain! Bedding must last and must withstand many washings.

The first bed, closest to us here, was Phil's when he was growing up; the other one was mine.

I made the green and white quilt for Will -- it's all handstitched, and I totally stole the pattern for it from some catalog I got long ago -- and the other one is my shirtings quilt that's all machine-quilted. I think they look nice together. Will's quilt isn't a full twin (if you know what I mean by that somewhat misleading designation), because I made all my children quilts that could be dragged around and used on sofas in case of illness or cuddliness. I find this size ("throw" size, not any set dimension, although mine got bigger as I got better at it -- let's say about 40" by 55") very useful also in that it fits on the top of a twin bed and looks just fine.

If you want to begin quilting, I highly recommend that you go with "lap" or "throw" or "crib" size to start. You will be merely whelmed, rather than overwhelmed.

I've stacked up some suitcases and would love to find a little soft chair to tuck in that corner. The suitcase in the middle was my mom's and has her initials on it. I found the bottom one at a yard sale, and the wicker one we've had since I was in high school I think. On top is a wooden cigar box, and I do have a lamp to crown it all with. And an outlet to plug it in!

What's so glorious about these rooms now is the tightness of the walls and ceilings.

Do you see the batten idea in action? I can't tell you how much it delights me.

Before: Just not attractive, with crumbling plaster and stained walls.

Before: This built-in desk thing seems fine, but was actually too high and deep to be useful. And I could never really get to the window to clean it - not without climbing.

Moving the bookcase into the newly created space under the window opens up a bit more room in front of the bed.

Up on the third floor it's either freezing cold or super hot. So ceiling fans are a must for summer. I guess in the winter they will freeze.... Just kidding, I hope. Now that things are so well constructed, I'm hoping the heat stays in.

Do you think this is too much geometry in here?

I painted the closet floor in here and all the door thresholds with oil-based paint from the front door and porch! It's a red I love.

The fabric for the bedskirts was marked down to about $2.50 at JoAnn's, and I really love it. I wish I had the patience to make them more full, but I don't and that's all there is to it. Maybe my lack of patience will lead to me taking them off and re-doing them by adding pleats retroactively, and won't that be efficient.

Bedskirts are really important around here because under each bed there is -- another mattress! It happens that sometimes there are so many people here that they outnumber beds, and it's nice if they at least have a mattress to crash on. But those mattresses are unsightly, so bedskirts it is!

Sukie's room.

When we moved in, Sukie chose this room at the top of the house and painted the trim blue. I thought it was pretty, although our old dog, Tootsie, did a number on the windowsills, pretty much right away. Why do we even have pets anyway??

Before: Paint gets old.

Before: Getting ready for the work.

After: All white! Fresh! Clean! No gaps in the seams! Remember this black thrifted bedside table?

My idea for this room was color. It started with the iron bed, which I just wanted to paint red in the worst way. Then, when I found the green (pseudo) quilt, I questioned my decision. But then I decided that this was my ticket to COLOR!

Sukie had gotten me this mocha fabric for Christmas one year -- eight yards that were the only thing I liked in a quilting store nearby, and fortunately, on sale for $25! Not that I know how much my gift cost :)

I just think it adds something to this ensemble. When I was discussing my bedskirt plans with Natasha, and telling her about my color idea, I mentioned that my vision included ball fringe. Well, Natasha lives in a place where textiles, trims, and all things haberdashery are so very abundant; and besides, she is the sort of person who enjoys getting you the things you want.

So she went to an amazing haberdashery and got me a whole bunch of ball fringe! And sent it to me!

I promised you ball fringe and I deliver!

Not only is the skirt pretty and adding pizzazz, and not only is it hiding stuff under there, but when you come up the stairs you can see right under the bed! So I really needed to make one.

Papasans are a little passé, maybe? I was about to give this away, but actually I think it works there.

The pillowcases are thrifted from Salvation Army. They are truly over the top -- incredibly bright and garish. The dresser was given to me by a friend; I painted it that color of apple green about 10 years ago. I mixed the paint by pouring a bunch of cans' contents together, and I have loved that color ever since! *By "I painted it" of course I mean "Sukie painted it." I love it and I bet my friend is sorry she gave it away :)

That is Sukie's hope chest in the corner there, found at an antiques shop in the city. The bookcase, rug, and table are hand-me-downs.

This room got a ceiling fan as well, and another time I will show you what's around the corner there. Not quite done yet, thank you power failure!

And I haven't put one thing on the walls of any of this space up here, so that's a challenge before me. I'm looking forward to it! I hope you like a clash of colors in here as much as I do. I'm very pleased with this room! It makes a good guest room for our married couples (although obviously there's plenty of room elsewhere, and I have my eye out for a sofabed for the rec room), and now it's clean and fresh, thank goodness! I am very grateful for that!

{By the way, where do you put your married children? Or stay when you visit your parents? I know that most people don't have 7 bedrooms. Do you send them to hotels? Pitch tents? Give them the bunkbeds and tell them to stop whining?}

Before and After: Third floor stairs and hall.

2011-11-14T16:17:00.001-05:00

In May we started a project on our third floor that was a long time in coming. You know that parable in the Bible about the man who builds a tower without really thinking through what it will cost? Yeah, well, that might be us and this house.

In our defense, we sort of needed a big house (although I think I am more of a cottage person), what with having my mother here, homeschooling, Phil working at home, and being sort of crazy. But also, it was the only house available at the time that we could afford and that wasn't either the size of a double-wide or a young hotel. I mean, we saw houses that you could rollerskate in, and by the way, didn't have a kitchen. And weren't cheap!

We just aren't the building type. In real life. We needed something with actual walls.

So here we are.

For a few years, you can show people around, saying, "We just moved in and are slowly fixing things up." After a while, that excuse gets a little lame and people are just left wondering why you live this way. You stop seeing the bare bulbs and peeling wallpaper. They see it. You don't.

And another very discouraging thing, when you're as slow (and not rich) as we are, is how the room you "just" painted is now in need of redecorating. It's been that long.

Before: The stairs up to the third floor, before. I am responsible for painting the stairs swimming-pool blue.

Before: At least someone else had refinished the floors at some point.

Before: Bad hollow-core door. Bad outlets, if any.

So before we started re-doing things we've already done, we figured we better get some spaces up and running. Specifically, the 3rd floor, which is way, way up there. And it's under the roof (obviously), which, while not a glamorous object, did need to be replaced a few years ago. Since then, walls were crumbling from old leaks. There was dust. There were bugs.

And yes, there was a bare bulb up there.

Before: sad and sorry. But I do love the floors and the beautiful railing.

These befores are embarrassing.

I hate to even show you these before pictures. I hated taking them, which is why they are not in focus -- that, and the fact that it was dark and raining, as was the norm here in the spring and summer. All my energy was going into the decisions and the preparation, and I almost forgot to take any photos at all!

A huge decision was not to go with drywall up there.

If I can take an Auntie Leila moment here to share my thought process, in the hopes of helping those of you who are just as much babies about construction as we are, I would like to say that since the temperatures and moisture levels do fluctuate a lot on the third floor, and indeed it isn't in use for a good part of the year, now that the kids are mostly out, I think it's a good idea from a housekeeping point of view to have a ceiling and wall material that will resist cracking and creating dust. I think that plaster is a good material, but expensive to recreate.

We went with a thin paneling board and, in the rooms, a batten effect that I really love -- I'll show you tomorrow. (You can see my inspiration photo here on my Pinterest board.)

After: This is what the stairs really look like, only in a photo, it doesn't work. Lights on, weird effect. Lights off, dark. You pick :)

AFTER! Here you go, up the stairs! They actually aren't this super green. It's hard to take a photo that gives the right idea of them. The green is strong but not overwhelming. (Do you love the laundry basket over there? Can't concentrate on more than one thing at a time, I guess.) Additionally, note the red carpeting on both levels. That carpet goes everywhere in my house and it's a good thing I don't absolutely hate it. I realize that a more fearless person than I would have ripped it out long ago. But I can't commit to that. So things have to sort of go with it.

You can go here on my Pinterest board for the thought process that went into this staircase color!

But I can hardly express to you the excitement we all feel at there being actual light fixtures -- two of them -- that turn on and off -- with switches! Before, the bare bulb stayed on all the time, because the cord that you pulled broke off.

It was a little third world on the third floor.

After: A schoolhouse style light fixture. One of two.

After: I left the bathroom door open so that some natural light would help me out here. It's one of the few south-facing windows I have!

After: the hall and a peek into Sukie's room, which is also a guest room with a double bed.

On the stairs and in the hall, we kept the walls plain, without the battens (we were running out of money and they look fine).

For all the ceilings and all the dormer slope-y places, we put in tongue-and-groove wood. Seal those ceilings! That's my thinking. Anyway, I really hope that the materials we used will be clean.

We need to put in a railing, and I am, with my branch/log/rustic mode fully engaged, on the lookout for a sturdy sapling to employ for this task. Wouldn't that be fabulous?

I've learned over the years that sometimes, the cleaning issue isn't really my fault! Here's a revelation: Some materials are easier to clean than others! Even paint quality makes a huge difference.

The paint for the stairs is Valspar French Olive in Latex floor paint. The walls and trim are all Benjamin Moore Calming Cream in pearl finish. That was my decision -- to put something durable up there (since pearl is more durable than flat or even eggshell) and not worry about having a separate trim paint style.

I wanted something light and airy and bright, but not starkly bright like a very white white. Calming Cream looks yellow on the paint chip but is a lovely true cream. I think it fits the style of our house and goes with the trim in the other rooms.

Here's another before-and-after:

Before. Pretty, but musty.

A couple of years ago I found this Crate&Barrel hamper that someone had set out on the side of the road. It came with the cotton liner and was fairly brand-new. But, as I discovered, it smelled very musty and nothing I did -- hosing it down, cleaning it with a stiff brush and hot water with bleach and detergent, leaving it in the sun -- made it smell better. (I did wash the liner in hot water and bleach, and that came out fine.)

I almost threw it on the burn pile.

Then I thought -- what if I spray painted it? Maybe the paint would seal up the smell.

So after many more passes with the black spray paint than it would have gotten if it had smelled just fine, inside and out, here it is! It sits at the top of my new stairs, in my new hall, holding extra blankets!

There is the story of the stairs and hall. Tomorrow I will try to post about the bedrooms! I think you will really love them. I know I love them, because they are fresh and bright and easy to clean! And ball fringe! I will post about ball fringe!

Stormcation.

2011-11-11T08:20:00.006-05:00

You can still post on {phfr}!

Since before my stormcation I had pretty things to show you, I'm going ahead and posting those pictures. This is a catching up post and you'll just have to bear with some anachronisms here!

One day we were enjoying fall, and the next day, BAM! The Chief was worriting about who would help him get the plow rig on the Suburban, since we are woefully lacking in sons these days.

We did have a surprise visit from Nick! Yes!

How does someone who lives in Hong Kong drop in on you?

Well, he has a meeting in New York that he can't avoid (I mean, what's traveling around the world when your words of wisdom and experience are needed?), and he decides to pop up to good ole Massachusetts to see the fam!

Of course, I didn't get any in focus photos. What is wrong with me! Anyway, it was lovely weather while he was here, and normally we put the plow on at Thanksgiving, when the boys are home and can help. So we never thought to ask him.

But Bridget and I manned up and got the job done. I am woman hear me roar. That is a 70s reference. Sorry.

And may I just say that now that it's getting a little old, that dumb contraption (the plow) is the most persnickety thing. The whole rig's movement depends on three teeny tiny little wires that connect when you put the ends that dangle -- all year, in all weather -- out of the truck into the ends that dangle -- all year, sitting in the garage sort of rotting away, with the cat and the pollen and the dirt --out of the plow.

Listen -- when you get your new plow you should really wrap those things up but good. Use duct tape and plastic bags and maybe sew a special cover for them. Because why such an important connection should be left up to these flimsy little plugins that hardly even feel like anything is going to happen when you ineffectually join them -- and usually, you know what, nothing does happen. Did I mention that they -- the wires and their little pluggy thingies -- are small? And no-account?

If I were designing those things, first, the wires would be BIG. They would be the biggest wires, instead of the littlest ones. Right? They are what make the plow work. I would go ahead and spend the extra $1.97 and use heavy-duty big wire, not sure of the technical term.

And I would want them to snap together in some sort of satisfying clicking way that told you they were together. Instead, these things kind of rest near each other in a spineless manner, possibly making contact in there under the unconvincing plastic, and possibly not, and anyway so covered in crud that, yeah, they are not. Making contact.

He ended up hard-wiring them after many dispiriting attempts at pushing the ends together --attempts resulting in the person in the truck (me) working the controls, with the only effect being that dreaded electrical dead-end thunk that tells you that it's not going up, down, side-to-side, or pushing any snow anytime soon. Mind, this is always going on when it's getting dark and cold and sort of damp in that ominous, it's-going-to-storm-like-heck-and-your-plow-goes-thunk kinda way.

I guess that since the boys do it every year I just never knew how silly the engineering of that thing is.

The three photos above are not of THE snow. They are of the snow two days before.

I was so so right that there wouldn't be much snow anyway -- six inches say we, eight says our neighbor whose chestnut tree fell across his already inaccessible driveway -- but that we would lose our power.

Gosh golly. Five whole days and parts of a day on either end! Good thing it was warm afterwards (outside) or the Chief was going to have to buy me a generator. (We did get the loan of one from our generous friends/outlaws the Turners {aka Rosie's in-laws -- isn't that what our relationship is called? Outlaw?}, whose power came on sooner, and that saved all my food in the garage!)

And even so, I was beat, keeping warm, cooking, and not being clean. Not showering is tiring. Showering is exhilarating. You can get many things done if only you can take a shower! In this sense I am not old-fashioned. Uh uh.

Darkness is also tiring, as is constantly refilling oil lamps and shuffling candles. At one point, after exhausting my (rather ample, I had thought) candle supply, I went to the grocery store and bought all their white votives and also one blue Miraculous Medal one because I am strangely drawn to the Blessed Virgin votive candles, and would have gotten a Guadalupe one if they had had any. An emergency apparently brings out my non-Irish side....

The store's power was out also. (Everyone's was.) And you know what? It was lovely in there without the "music." I call it "music" because music is for listening to and what is in the grocery store is precisely not to be listened to.

I told the manager how much I was enjoying being there without the "music" and he just kept laughing, way more than is normal in a conversation of that kind. Considering what an excellent customer of theirs I have been over the years, I think he should have paid more respectful attention to me.

While the sun shone we got some stuff done, actually. It's useful to try to figure out what you can do without power tools, glue gun, crock pot,and other things you automatically reach for. The weather became so warm, Bridget and I escaped the impossible pit our house was becoming and did yard work.

We raked! Bizarre.

At last the power was restored and I commenced scrubbing. Thank goodness it came on in the morning, because I don't think I could have gone to bed knowing that I had the capability to plug the vacuum in, get hot water in a bucket, and run the washer, and yet not do any of that! My kitchen (where we spent most of our time) is now immaculate. My refrigerator looks brand-new.

Part of the reason for my deep-cleaning achievements is that the internet failed to come on for four more days. Apparently, it's not enough to call the cable company and tell them that you have been out in the woods and seen the line on the ground, and that in addition, their competitor, who was out there fixing his company's line, confirmed that it was indeed their line. (Let's pass lightly over the question of why one of them can't just fix both lines and charge the other. Apparently only a housewife would think of something so practical.)

It's not good enough to tell them that every day for six days. When one of them finally believes you, evidently he has no means by which he pass the information to the appropriate party in order to get the job done, despite its being a communications company. They seem to have no issue with sending out multiple repairmen to tell you that they are not the kind of repairmen who can get a line back up on a pole. They don't feel it's a waste of time, somehow.

And then, in a sort of unexpected miracle, a guy shows up and fixes it, and shakes his head. Because he well knows he is doomed only to randomness in his actions. We just got lucky, that's all!

I did have a triumph of cooking an entire meal from scratch (as opposed to heated up already cooked food pulled out of various stashes for about three days) on my little woodburning stove (well, the stove is quite big, but the top of it is not ample, due to the placement in the fireplace -- see photos) I have no pictures of said triumph, as it was, well, dark.

And then I was done. No more food prep in me. I vaguely gestured towards the peanut butter. My inner Ma had fled. No where to be seen. Wednesday the Turners fed us. Thursday dear Erin fed us. We showered here, there, and anywhere a friend would let us, strategically fending off the slow grind of dirt and cold. Friday the power was back.

It was all good. Do not pity us. I'm only explaining the exact details of why you haven't heard from me, and clearly I needed to talk to you.

I love electricity. I really do!

{pretty, happy, funny, real}

2011-11-10T00:00:00.001-05:00

~ Capturing the context of everyday life ~

Every Thursday, here at Like Mother, Like Daughter!

Wow, has it already been another week? That was fast. I'm sorry it's been so quiet around here; it's totally my fault. Well, mine and my parents' power and internet cables' fault.

They finally are up and running again (but dealing with the aftermath), after a week without electricity and several more days without phone and internet. Hopefully things will be back to normal there (and here!) soon.

{pretty}

Our rosebush is blooming again! Fresh flowers for Our Lady in November: one of the joys of living in Southern California.

{happy}

Pippo and I got a present from his grandmother (aka, Auntie Leila) in the mail the other day. What was inside the box was something pretty fabulous she made for Pippo's room (I've failed at taking a good picture of it so far, but as soon as I do, I will show you!), but I think there are few things that make a baby happier than playing with packing materials.

{funny}

I love my Marine!

I don't get to dress up and go out with him very often, but the Marine Corps takes its birthday (today!) very seriously. Every unit has a ball to celebrate, and ours was last week.

None of that is particularly funny.

What is funny is that we didn't take any pictures on the night of our ball! I was so flustered that evening (see below) that I just completely forgot. I was so disappointed -- we didn't get pictures last year, either, and it had been my one goal for the night!

But the Lt was getting all dressed up again a few days later for the Division ball, and while I didn't go with him that night, I did pin my hair back up after putting the baby to bed. When the Lt got home I popped my dress and jewelry back on and set up the camera on the counter with the self-timer.

So really, this is (pretty much) what we looked like at our ball, I promise. But the truth is that ten minutes before these were taken, I'd been sitting on the sofa in my pajamas watching Top Chef and waiting for my husband to come home!

I know. I'm a silly girl. (But don't even try to pretend it wasn't a good idea!)

{real}

Why was I flustered on the night of our Birthday Ball? There was an accident on the freeway; a big truck (part of a Marine convoy, actually) flipped over, and while thankfully no one was seriously hurt, the traffic was outrageously bad. A drive that should have taken 45 minutes took me nearly 2 1/2 hours! They actually postponed the start of the Ball because of it -- no one was there when it was supposed to begin!

The Lt was part of the ceremony this year (he's one of the Marines lined up there inside the doors. The ones outside are waiting to escort in the birthday cake!) and so I was to meet him for the cocktail hour, since he had been at the hotel all day practicing sword drill.

I should have been early, but instead I missed the cocktail hour entirely and arrived just about one minute before they marched in to begin the ceremony: in time for him to see that I was there, but too late for them to let me into the ballroom. I snapped this photo with my phone as I watched the whole 45-minute ceremony from outside the doors (with about 50 other people -- at least I wasn't the only one!).

The good news is that I was stressed out enough about how late I was that I barely had time to worry about leaving my baby for the first time! (A friend of mine sweetly stayed with him. He was in very good hands!)

Happy Birthday, Marine Corps!

{pretty, happy, funny, real}

2011-11-03T00:00:00.001-04:00

~ Capturing the context of contentment in everyday life ~

Every Thursday, here at Like Mother, Like Daughter!

Well, that crazy October snowstorm on Saturday really did a number on my parents' area -- they're still without power over there! It sounds like it's been quite an adventure. I've been missing fall weather; Southern California has a lot going for it, weather-wise, but it's got nothing on a New England autumn.

An October snowstorm, though, is just crazy.

{pretty}

We may not have fall colors, but we do have beautiful sunsets over the water.

{happy}

Pippo was a farmer for Halloween, which is to say that he wore overalls and his plaid shirt all day, and then we posed him in his dad's truck with a stalk of wheat before the trick-or-treaters started to arrive.

{funny}

I only took photos of our pumpkins with my phone, so this is the best I can do.

In case you couldn't tell, mine is the one with the flowers.

(Part of what is funny about this is that I have been wanting to carve a pumpkin like this -- not cutting all the way through in parts, so it glows -- literally for years. Finally, my pumpkin dreams have come true!)

I am a much less efficient pumpkin carver than my husband, so he did Pippo's as well, according to my instructions: "It needs to be wicked cute and have seven teeth, just like Pippo.."

{real}

We took some pictures at first among the tomato plants, but the farmer kept trying to eat them!

Christmas Card Giveaway - Winner! (and discount code)

2011-10-29T14:14:00.001-04:00

The random number generator has spoken, and we are excited to announce that our $250 Minted.com giveaway winner is...

Geneva!

Who says, "love the Religious ones... ANY of them! So beautiful!"

We agree!

(Check your email, Geneva, for information about how to claim your prize.)

Thank you, Minted, for inviting us to host this fabulous giveaway, and thank you all for your comments.

*********

{Remember -- even if you didn't win, you can still use the code LIKEMOTHER to get 20% off your order from Minted.com until November 1!}

*********

{pretty, happy, funny, real}

2011-10-27T00:00:00.000-04:00

Have you entered the awesome $250 Christmas card giveaway from Minted? There's still time -- it's open through tomorrow night!

~ Capturing the context of contentment in everyday life ~

Every Thursday, here at Like Mother, Like Daughter!

{pretty}

Habou's visit was a month ago, but while I meant to post about it, I never actually did. And since I didn't have any pictures from the last week that were particularly pretty, I thought I'd dig back in the archives for these.

We had such a wonderful time with her! I kept telling Pippo how lucky he was -- not every little boy has a great-grandmother who's up for hopping on a plane and flying all the way across the country to visit him!

We took these pictures at the old Mission San Luis Rey the day before she left: we made a visit at the church, walked around the grounds, and then Pippo and I played on a blanket on the grass while Habou sketched for a while.

It was (as you can see) an absolutely gorgeous day, and Habou is a very pretty great-grandmother (or G-G-ma, as she kept referring to herself).

{happy}

I've been buying applesauce for Pippo, and it comes in nice glass jars with labels that come right off, so I have a lot more empty jars than I used to (I've scrounged up a few more, but somehow none of my other grocery items come in jars... how is this possible?). I've been using them to tidy up my little pantry closet, which was starting to overwhelm me with all the half-empty bags of ingredients secured with rubber bands.

Opening the door and seeing this instead (even though the jars don't all match, which would be lovely and oh-so-Martha-Stewart, I'm sure) is a small, but very satisfying, housekeeping victory.

{funny}

Pippo loves to play in the laundry room while I work in the kitchen; he climbs around the baskets of laundry (clean, but unfolded: the story of my life) and swings the door back and forth (I've rigged it so it can't pinch his fingers) and generally just has a great time. This evening I poked my head in the door and found that he'd pushed his little cart in there and then gotten stuck in it!

(I helped him out, and as he toddled on his way, I realized his pants were riding a little low. Of course, he wouldn't notice himself until they tripped him!)

(He's walking - did I tell you that? I don't remember if I did.)

{real}

Is the "real" the poor, tired baby at the end of the long day?

Or the heartless mama who takes a picture instead of comforting him?

(The main point of this photo is that I love these pajamas.)

(And I did comfort him, eventually. Obviously.)

Ask Auntie Leila: Six Strategies for Sibling Rivalry

2011-10-25T14:35:00.004-04:00

{Don't forget to enter the amazing $250 Christmas card giveaway from Minted! Still open!}

Dear Auntie Leila,

Thanks so much for your blog!
As a (grateful) convert to Catholicism and an only child, I love reading your blog for Catholic motherly advice and to see your large family enjoying each other and enjoying life. Being an only child, I am sometimes flummoxed by the bickering the children engage in and am not sure whether to ignore it or constantly get involved; if I don't stick my nose into it, will I miss a "teachable moment?" Shouldn't the kids act more loving to each other most of the time? What's with the teasing and, what appears to me, mean spiritedness? Am I creating an environment that encourages bickering? I don't think so but what else to blame? My husband has one sibling, an older brother, and says they 'fought' all the time and our kids are perfectly normal and fine. (But really, is he an expert?) I know you'll say you aren't either - an expert - but I would appreciate any advice.
Thank you,
God bless,
Jacki

Dear Jacki (and all the other Moms who wrote to me on this topic -- I told you I'd go through my emails and now I'm doing it!):

The trouble with parenting advice is the expectation that things are going to go perfectly right when you implement it. After all, when you look up why your car is running poorly, you don't want someone to tell you something like, "Do these things, pay this money, put up with the noise, and in a few years things will look up."

Can you imagine that? of course not.

Family life is different. We can't fix things in that sense.

But what do we know? You're an only child, I'm an only child, we're taking advice from people who only have one child -- ! It's crazy.

What I'd love you to understand, and I hope you can see me here in the third decade * (edited to say that Sukie says: "I think you're in your fourth decade of parenting now!" --yikes), alternately wringing my hands and waving my arms, is that the first decade is one thing, and the second decade is another.

All too often, the advice you get is for that first stage only. Ninety-nine percent of it is designed to make you feel super wonderful and avoid the reality of how very uncomfortable being a mother or father is. One percent is harsh, with no attention to how everyone grows in virtue little by little, according to human nature -- parents too! But this latter kind is such a small threat that I only address it to strike it down as a straw man, the only real function of which is to frighten us back into wimpiness. Yes, we are paralyzed and dare do nothing more than cajole, bribe, threaten, sigh, and deep down feel like we got cheated.

After that? Got brats? You're on your own.

Well, indulge me by working backwards on the premise that we don't want to end up with unruly teenagers, an unhappy (or worse) marriage, and a sense of missed chances.

Here's what I hope for you: That your marriage, which has weathered some big changes, will be a friendship that is growing. That your habits towards each other, husband and wife, are those of kindness and delicacy, but that you haven't lost your sense of humor. That your children are people you like to be with. That if when they were little, you didn't notice anything in particular about their interests or personalities, you will be surprised now to see how much themselves they are becoming; and if you knew from the start that they were headed in a certain direction, you will rejoice in seeing that it turned out to be a good direction.

And that you will have done something more with your life than simply reacted to everything your kids did or didn't do! (My first rule of parenting, remember? Act, don't react!)

In that second decade, you become aware that the babyhood and toddlerhood and childhood of these persons were important for the bonds that developed between you -- the trust, the love, the respect -- and not for the success or failure of the individual days that you went through to arrive here. (My second rule: Don't seek affirmation from your kids! Why? Because true affirmation takes a long time!)

Making it to the second decade isn't easy because of the traps, which include thinking the "little" stage lasts forever; not liking your children (because you fail to teach virtue -- they have no self-control!); not being united with your husband because you blame him for your discontent; and in general not building up your home in the first years, when the opportunity was ripe!

So in a way, you have to live through the first years with your eyes on the prize beyond. It's a paradox of time: While you are living in the here and now, appreciating the good things that surround you, you must also look ahead at yourself looking back and seeing these children as very little. Look at them from far above. Move your face closer to God's and try to see things as He does, with the long view.

I promise you that you will have all the grace you need to meet the challenge if you have the right goal in mind. The grace comes from God and is the fruit of marriage. Marriage isn't just a handy way to save on rent. It's the one and only institution that gives a man and a woman a fighting chance at surviving that second decade without wandering away from each other -- and being able to offer the world children who will be a blessing to it.

God will give you the grace. I'll give you my six ideas for avoiding sibling rivalry -- as long as you understand that nothing is perfect in this world. Jacki, your husband is right -- some sibling rivalry is part of growing up. Especially a girl and boy are not going to get along well -- not the way we moms want them to -- and maybe that's a biological safeguard, you know? Because if you love your brother in the way we wish our daughters did, how would they ever leave home to marry anyone? It's hard enough as it is.

Six ideas for quelling sibling rivalry:

1. Children bicker and fight because they are in the habit of doing so (and because yes, they get some sort of attention for it). A habit is a repeated behavior. Right now, today, start creating an atmosphere of good manners and kindness. It's your job -- a God-given authority -- to rebuke, correct, and punish; but you also have to be loving.

Strict. And warm. Think and pray about how you can be both.

Don't tell your children to have good manners, make them have good manners, but warmly. Have you ever heard some moms? They are so rude in the very act of telling their children to behave. Some mothers interrupt their children at the moment they are greeting Mrs. So-and-so in order to "correct" them and tell them to greet her!

Listen to yourself! Would you talk to your best friend in that strained, artificial, frankly obnoxious tone? Not that you do that. Those other annoying moms do that. Still, these are your precious children! Use a reasonably normal tone of voice.

Tell them beforehand how you expect them to behave and then see if they do it, even if in their own way. There's always next time. Have an occasional role-playing session where you make a game of showing them exactly how to make eye contact, shake hands, be heard to ask and answer politely.

Be polite to your husband and don't treat him like one of the kids.

Insist that your children be polite and kind to you and to him -- no "free passes" on this one. They shouldn't whine or yell! I mean, do they have the habit of whining just to get your attention? My kids could say whatever they wanted, but if their tone was not at least respectful, I stopped them and demanded a redo. If I was in the car and everyone was whining and complaining, I stopped the car. Just pull right over and tell them you are not going another inch until they can talk nicely. It's funny, because they usually don't actually care about going anywhere, but somehow, it gets their attention when you just won't move.

For one week, make this a priority -- clear your mind and work on this. Tell them: "We're getting in the car now. If you make one noise that isn't pleasant, you will get a spank." "We're getting out of the car now. If you can't do it pleasantly, you will stay in for five minutes and try again." Imagine getting in and out of the car with harmony!

Make them hand the toy over again, this time with no grabbing. Make them walk by again, this time with no shoving or barging. If one is shouting, "SHE BUMPED ME!" then make her say it again. I bet you corrected the bumper but not the shouter! "How about, 'My dearest, darling sister, please don't bump me!'" If we are all laughing, we can't be bickering, right?

Don't lecture. Just get them to do it. Naturally! And kindly.

2. Don't be the judge. Children are opportunistic little buggers and will take whatever advantage they can get. It's all a power play to them. Adult power plays are cases of arrested development! Think about this!

Now, developmentally, it's unrealistic to get a very young child to see things from others' points of view. That comes later, and much bad advice results from doing what is developmentally inappropriate.

Concentrate on letting small children know that there is no reward for their attempts to gain advantages over each other, rather than on trying to get them to feel what you consider to be the proper feeling. (Please, just give up on that. It's seeking affirmation from them -- a no no! -- in a very sneaky way.) How can you know what they are feeling? Do you remember being a child? Do you see how the adults had no idea what you were feeling, unless they had extraordinary insight and could see beyond your attitude?

Just concentrate on the action.

This means don't allow tattling. The tattler should be punished. If there is evidence of wrongdoing but you didn't actually witness it, punish everyone! Seriously!

Watch carefully so that you are not manipulated into the role of judge, because if you didn't see it, you will be an unjust judge! Even physical evidence can be misleading. I never knew the depths of childish depravity until one of my children, then grown, admitted that she bit her own arm to produce tooth marks in order to implicate her brother! Oh, I hear you thinking, "My children would never do that!" But you don't understand. I have the best children anyone has ever had. And they did stuff like that.

By punish everyone I mean take away the ball or doll or whatever is the bone of contention of the moment; make them all sit on the stairs; put the game on the high shelf; send them all outdoors; deprive them all of dessert; etc. Something immediate.

The result will surprise, astonish, and delight you, because what will they do?

They will unite with each other against you! They will giggle, find something useful to do, enjoy some long-neglected game, or decide to read to each other. In short, when you are the bad guy, they cease to find one amongst themselves. And that's what you wanted all along.

3. However! Observe them carefully and act, rather than react! to their tattling and complaining.

Don't react to the situation as they present it to you, but admit (at least to yourself) that you should have intervened five minutes earlier because you knew someone was getting tired or pushed beyond their limits, only you didn't have the self control to stop what you were doing to handle the issue. You talked an extra five minutes on the phone or took advantage of their absence to stay on the computer. If you have self control, they will (some day). If not, not.

Notice that they were getting bored and should have been put to work. Notice that one is truly picking on the other. Make him stop. Notice that one is intentionally passive because he knows you will come to his aid. Make him take his punches and stand up for himself. Better now than later.

Some children are indeed more compliant than others, but don't let this turn into a negative trait. Have you ever met adults like this? The ones who apologize when someone is rude to them? Auntie Leila says nip this in the bud.

4. Give the elder child more privileges. It's hard being the eldest and he or she should get something out of it. First dibs in certain choices, whatever the contested seat in the car might be, the spot next to you while you bake.... Yes, they have to carry heavier bags and chase toddlers while you are nursing. Let them have some favors as well.

5. Don't expect the younger child to be developmentally the same as the eldest, even if they usually play together, and especially if for some reason the younger one is a bit on the large side. Tall children have a hard time sometimes, because they are expected to act more mature!

But don't let him be a pest, either. Be fair and sometimes punish the younger one. He can't always be the victim; it's just not possible. Everyone has to try to be polite and kind, according to their abilities. Even a six-month-old can be taught to stroke a cheek, not scratch!

6. Most of all, build family honor and unity. Put it into words.

Say, "Smiths don't act that way."

When you are out somewhere, remind them to help each other and defend each other. Talk about "the honor of the Smiths" and how "no one messes with a Smith!" Remind them that "we Smiths stick together."

Sometimes it's best to simply say, "We don't do that."

I'm for less talk overall; less coercive speech from Mom. But if you must talk, make your talk be not about how disappointed you are, blah blah blah -- but about how their friends will come and go, but sisters and brothers will be each others' best friends and have each other forever. Tell them to be good to each other.

Quote Psalm 133: Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!

Remember my family motto post? Why not discuss with your husband the whole general idea of building family unity, according to your own tastes and hopes and dreams? Not for today -- don't expect much today! For the second decade.

Minted giveaway ~ Fabulous Christmas cards!

2011-10-24T14:36:00.001-04:00

{Comments are closed! We will announce the winner soon! Meanwhile, don't forget to use the code LIKEMOTHER to get your 20% off all Minted cards -- till Nov. 1!}

We are once again offering a giveaway of some very lovely cards! As you know, Natasha, my daughter-in-law, has the position of impresario and general factotum at Minted.

My inside connection enables me to offer you this chance to win $250 worth of Minted cards this Christmas! Details at the end of this post!

You know me, I'm probably not the type to a) get my act together enough to get a photo together and b) spend a lot of moula on cards, although I do love sending them.

But I think if I could win the cards I would be motivated to figure things out, wouldn't you?

And I will say that Minted has it all - beautiful paper, graphics, typography, ease of customizing. In fact, you can put your own words on these cards - you could add in a verse from Scripture with your message if you choose the folded card!

I find that very appealing.

Here's the thing about sending a Christmas greeting. Once a year we are given a chance to do two things: Touch base with those we might otherwise drift away from, in an awkward-free fashion; and offer friends and loved ones a little taste of what we actually believe.

People are grateful to know that you want to share the truth with them. They know that it means you love them. Christmas is the celebration of Christ's arrival into our sorry world. It's the celebration of the sanctification of human nature -- of our salvation. We don't have to -- and we shouldn't -- hit anyone with that reality. We don't want to turn "Merry Christmas" into a kind of bludgeon or rebuke!

Instead, we can confidently offer our greetings with love! Simple -- and beautiful -- a benediction! Yes, people have commercialized Christmas to a degree that makes those with faith wonder if we should participate in any of it. I worry about that too. But I've come to the conclusion that this custom of sending cards at a certain time each year can be used as a force for good!

So yes, even this thrifty, disorganized, and distracted mama has kept the resolution to send Christmas cards. I put postage in the budget. I think of it as almsgiving; as part of my tithe -- I really do. I hope God does too. To me, it's a work of mercy to send a card -- not that I think I'm that important, but I know how much I appreciate getting a card from a friend, and figure that it's something like that for them.

So head on over to Minted and browse around! They have a holiday card category (which has a lot of Christmas-oriented cards as well), and a specifically Christmas one.

And, speaking as a Grandma, I have to encourage you to check out these little minibook cards. Oh my. This amounts to a luxe gift, in my opinion! What grandparents wouldn't love to have this in their baby-starved hands! And again, you can customize everything about it! Even order it now and supply the photos later.

It also strikes me that you can get good ideas for what photos to choose or quickly snap. The photography is inspiring, isn't it? Lots of the pictures aren't particularly holiday-esque, so let that encourage you to get a fun shot of the family, even if you don't have everyone in matching reindeer outfits.

Not only do we have this giveaway, but for this week only, if you enter LIKEMOTHER in your order, you will get 20% off!

So, to put it all in one place for you:

Go to Minted and look around.

Come back here and leave a comment telling us which one(s) you like. Feel free to tell us why!

If you Tweet or Facebook the giveaway, leave another comment and you'll be entered again! Meaning you could enter up to three times!

We will choose the winner with a random-number generator.

Even if you don't win, you'll get 20% off (use LIKEMOTHER at checkout) anything you like over there. That code will be good until November 1.

Giveaway ends at 10pm on Friday.

Good luck!

Like Mother, Like Daughter

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I made a travel journal...

Want to hang out with us?

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More post-Christmas crafty reveal: Fabric Memory Game

{pretty, happy, funny, real} ~ Deployment Day Edition

Wonder and the Nativity ~ A post from Habou.

Other people's craftiness, and a lovely cake.

More crafty reveal.

{pretty, happy, funny, real} ~ Building the culture of the family.

Crafting: It can now be told...

Hanging in the kitchen.

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{pretty, happy, funny, real} ~ optional edition

Making ready.

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Plum pudding, a tutorial.

Before and After: Dresser Makeover (with awesome knobs!)

{pretty, happy, funny, real} -- two unrelated things edition!

Leave room for wonder.

Doings.

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Ask Auntie Leila: Five steps to feeling pretty after the baby.

Ask Auntie Leila: No, really, how do you prepare for Thanksgiving?

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Yarn woes.

Before and After: Third floor bedrooms.

Before and After: Third floor stairs and hall.

Stormcation.

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Christmas Card Giveaway - Winner! (and discount code)

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Ask Auntie Leila: Six Strategies for Sibling Rivalry

Minted giveaway ~ Fabulous Christmas cards!