Snow Day!

A fun day with my troops. These three kids (don't forget Bijou) LOVE the snow.

An unexpected snow day, a snowball fight between a toddler and a poodle, and a pizza playdate made today a good one.

A new perspective

Mia strode into swimming today with all the confidence a cute new haircut brings and said to the receptionist, "I cut my hair. Myself. But then we had to go to a salon and get it fixed. Also, lemme ask you something. I'd like to know how much those M &Ms are."

The M&Ms Mia was referring to sit on a snack shelf near the front office. We've never purchased them, or even talked about them before.

I stood back and watched as Mia, her hands firmly planted on her hips, chatted with the receptionist about haircuts and the possibility of buying some chocolate candy.

For all of my annoyance yesterday at the haircut, I watched her in total admiration today. She is wearing that little pixie cut like no one else can. And this new confidence seems to have grown in long curly strands where her hair once was. I heard her telling some kids and her swim teacher the story (of the incident now simply known as "the haircut"), and Mia beamed. She bobbed in and out of the water, like an edgy mermaid, and waved to me, giggling. I waved back, and it really did feel like I was introducing myself to a new girl - a more grown up one, a slightly more mature one. Luca held onto my pant leg and we watched her dive under toward her teacher. This is what parenthood is: helping your kids navigate through the obstacles of youth so they can surface into adulthood as happy confident people.

Mia's on her way.

Mia

Even though the light from the window distorted Mia's head in the photo of her running, I love it. I love the movement. The energy. Her spirit is almost tangible. Yogurt on her dress. New short

hair. And she still sparkles.

Shear Beauty

There was a twenty minute time period today that I got a lot done. A lot. I made a phone call to our insurance company to inform them that we are under contract for a new house (!), did some comparative online shopping for furniture for that new house I just mentioned (!), and made another phone call to a moving company to help us relocate to our new house (!).

Mia got a lot done too. A lot. Most of her work was kept private as she was in the playroom while I was out in the family room. One of her projects became very known though as she danced up to me and said, "Look at me! Look at my beautiful dress!" She twirled around in a cute tank dress. To that I responded, "I see the dress. Now can you explain where your hair is?" Chunks of Mia's darling chic bob were missing. Gone. Vanished.

Her face fell. "I'm only allowed to cut my hair in the salon?" She asked, seeming filled with regret.

I found her lovely chunks of hair all over the basement floor. The moment was tense, to say the least. I uttered more than a few f bombs (out of ear shot mind you) and wondered aloud why three year olds have to act so.....THREE.

All is well. Mia, of course, is rocking a new super short do. After she got it cut she said, "I look stylish, don't I." It wasn't a question either.

It was a statement.

Half and Half

My kids are hapas, as the Hawaiians would say. They're mixed. Half of something. Half of another. Their brilliant blues belie their Italian blood and their melodic and poetic names bury their Irish genes. So, here they are, looking Irish but sounding like Italians.

How's that for confusing?

Because the name Pellegrino is such a show stopper....a dead give away for my dear sweet husband's origins....and therefore my kids', I have to quietly remind them often that they are, indeed, part celtic too. They are fiery and independent. Smart and scrappy. Loyal and funny. Half of the blood sloshing around in their perfect little forms, is blood from Ireland.

Why is this so important for me to remind them of this? Because when they look in the mirror and they are greeted with eyes the color of crystal clear waters and skin that burns red hot if left out too long, they are greeted with a gentle reminder of where they come from.

Half of where they come from of course.

This St. Patrick's Day I carefully dressed them in their celebratory outfits. Mia recited what she was going to tell her teachers, "that I'm half Irish too, my mom is Irish" (I made her practice.) They willingly put their arms to the sky as I pulled green shirts over their heads and explained why we wear the color on this day. They gazed back at me with those ridiculous eyes, and I felt my heart swell a bit for my hapas. My halfsies.

After dinner, the shirts were covered with who knows what and when I gathered my troops for a St. Patty's day portrait, I got what you see above. A bare chest and a tongue.

They look like every other kid just before bedtime: windswept, sticky, crusted over with film from the day. But, buried under the normal is something unique and special - a heritage that is all their own.

A belated St. Patrick's day post from an Irish woman hiding behind an Italian name, with two hapas at my heels.

Luca at 10 mos.

The whole bib thing is always lost on me. I get Luca into his seat, get all of his nibbles and chunks and goodies to eat, and off we go. Midway through our meal, I'll notice that he is covered in food. Here he is actually beginning to eat a lid. I simply can't keep up.

I'm happy to report that he's beginning to grow out of his stranger anxiety, as they all do. He is down right charming at times to strangers now.

A woman mosied over to us at the park yesterday to comment on the chubby cheeked kid in the swing, my little guy. Luca was playful, batting his lashes and flashing all kinds of grins.

He cried out last night, which he hasn't done in a few months. It was 3:30 a.m. Something in his cry was different than it had been when he was still getting up in the middle of the night. This cry was needier. More sincere. More desperate. I went willingly to him and snuggled with him in his chair. We both fell asleep. I woke up and his hand was laced in between my shirt and my body. He was holding the fabric loosely. I untangled myself from his grip and put him back to bed.

I'll miss him when he grows up. This little tiny boy.

Did I just say that?

There is great power in repetition. (Have I written about this before? Am I repeating myself here even before I begin?)

People often cite power is the reason they withhold 'I love yous', 'thank yous', and 'I'm sorrys'. They claim that if they gush too much, if they compliment too frequently, if they apologize too regularly, than the words have somehow lost meaning. The words have somehow lost power.

How can this be? When V turns to me in the car to tell me something but instead says, "I love you. Did I tell you that today?", the words still ring truthfully and poetically. Even if he has indeed mentioned it already that day. When I shout down to Mia, "Bananas or apples with your peanut butter?" and she shouts back her request, I'll sometimes say, "Hey," catching her gleaming eyes, "Thanks for being such a good kid. You know that right? That I love you and appreciate you each and every single day?" "Yeah. I know that Mom" she'll squeal back, sometimes without allowing the weight of my words to sink into her tiny core. Most of the time my words fall on deaf ears. Ears that have quickly and efficiently moved on to the next activity or adventure that only a three year old can discover.

She hears me though. I know that. Even busily moving between her toys and crafts, she hears me.

The power and weight of words often don't sink in until later. Sometimes much later. I still carry memories of childhood compliments that didn't really register until childhood was long gone. I remember being mid sentence in a conversation with my mom as a kid when she interrupted me. "You're so pretty, so very pretty," my mom sighed and then allowed me to finish my thought.

Hearing that, no matter how frequently, has power.

So where did all of these thoughts come from? These thoughts on repetition and it's worth? V is reading "The Politician" by Andrew Young. Young tells a story of when John Edwards and John Kerry were engaging in a conversation after it was announced they would be running together in 2004. Edwards had lost his son years earlier and was recounting a moving moment to Kerry. He was telling the story of how he held his dead child's body against his chest in a morgue. Kerry interrupted him and said, "You've told me this before John."

You've told me this before.

You're repeating yourself.

The act of repeating oneself is somehow offensive. People assume you've forgotten that you've told the story before. They assume that by retelling the story, or repeating a familiar phrase frequently, you've lost power. What they don't see though is that you're repeating the story because it has power. It's become who you are.

My dad was a famous storyteller. The best of the best. We grew up often hearing the same stories told so frequently that they became like the veins you can trace on the back of your hands without looking. They became our very fabric. He was such a master story teller though that each and every time he told a story, it had weight, and meaning. I noticed that my mother never interrupted him to shush him. At parties she would look on admiringly, with a knowing smile. The stories my dad told defined him. And us.

They had power.

Now, as a wife, I have my own man to smile at knowingly. When I see V begin a story that I know well, I kind of beam inside. I know the punchline. The outcome. I know why he's telling the story. I know the feelings the story conjures inside of him. I know that the story needs to be retold in order to survive. I know it isn't just a story, rather a part of the man. A part of me.

We're all so conditioned to be innovators. To be thinkers. We're fed efficiency and pumped full of time management articles and time saving techniques. I'm going to take a step back from all of that though and repeat myself, because my words bear repeating. I'm going to tell my stories, even if I've told them before. I'm going to say 'I love you', even if I've already said it. I'm going to say 'thank you' and 'I'm sorry' too.

Because some words never lose power.

Home is where we are

A lot has happened in three weeks.

We put our house on the market. Mia got croup, and I got the stomach flu. We sold in 10 days. The buyer walked from the deal citing the location as her reason. Two days later, we got another offer and I got a sinus infection that rivaled all other sinus infections. Luckily, the second offer stuck (we're under contract) and the sinus infection is being phased out thanks to a heavy dose of antibiotics.

Now, we're all healthy and the house is teetering on the very precarious fence separating us from them. "Them" being the new owners.

We staked a FOR SALE sign into our lives, our nest, and hoped that someone would want to take what we've created and make it their very own. Staging the house and getting it ready to show felt a bit like splaying my soul, and asking for feedback. Laying out my heart and asking for others to come and comment on it's storage options and square footage. Opening my core and inviting others to run their fingers along the finishes and ledges.

As I packed up the kids for the showings, hiding the boxes of tissues and the humidifiers littered in every room (don't forget about my heinous sinus infection at the time), I always thought, 'Of course they'll buy this place. I mean, it's us. Who wouldn't buy us?'

The walls that I painted the months before I got married are here. The room that I carried both of my babies into straight from the hospital is here. The cabinets that stored ovulation kits and tampons, eye lash curlers, and V's shaving cream is here. The kitchen that watched me learn to cook is here. The dining room that housed the table where croissant crumbs landed as my dad and I shared breakfast just a few months before he died is here.

Here. This is the house that held my hand as I morphed from who I used to be into who I am.

And now it almost belongs to someone else.

We went out with our realtor today to look at some potential new homes and we found a contender. A sweet house in which we felt comfortable. Mia ran through the backyard in her green froggy rain boots (ah! A backyard!) and pointed to the fenced area with a quaint little gate and screamed, "That's where we'll put the garden!" She tore upstairs and looked at both of the bedrooms and appropriately chose the bigger one for herself, naturally. She peeked into closets and asked where we'd keep her toys.

The chatter of the realtor and V, and Mia's squeals, and Luca's babbling, faded out for a moment and I was left standing in this foreign place that just might be my future home and I was reminded of a sign that hung in my house when I was growing up. When my parents bought their first house, my dad wrote in black permanent marker on the side of a corrugated box. He neatly printed the words "Home is where we are". My parents, the young newlyweds propped that sign up in their house, and gazed at it, knowing whatever lay ahead would be o.k. They framed that sign and it hung in every house we lived in, lording over us in a way, reminding us that everything would be o.k.

It's true. Home is where you are. Where ever that may be.

While I'll miss this place, I'll be bringing everything that makes it us to our new house. It'll take some getting used to but I feel better about stepping into someone else's shell and making it mine. It is just a shell after all.

Stay tuned for the next chapter.

H is 8

Thanks to sissie for inviting us to a fun b-day party at the aquariam. Watching H run around with her besties from school was adorable. There is something super endearing about watching hand clutching squealing second graders. The cousins all stuck close together, leaning their heads against the glass cases and admiring the creatures we land locked people don't see often enough. Cake, face painting, dead fish to feed the sting rays....what else can a kid ask for? Happy happy day to you sweet H. We love you.

V and Luca

I love it when I find a self portrait taken by V on the camera. It's like he's here, even if he's not.

Thoughts conjured from an old photo

I didn't start blogging until Mia was about five months old. This photo was taken the month before; the month of my dad's death.

I love this picture for some reason. I get such incredible joy from my kids. A joy I can't really even begin to write about properly.

I like the expression on my face. I like Mia's pudgy belly.

I think I love the context of it all, that even in a month that became my darkest hour, I still had the most amazing little gift - this bald and beautiful little human being - to be happy with - to be happy for. My sister has said that when I gave birth to Mia, I somehow must have birthed a calmer demeanor. Easygoing isn't a word a single person would ever use to describe me but I am pretty damn close to it now (well, "close" is a relative term).

Here is my theory: I don't think I expelled some crazy calming chemical when Mia arrived that fateful day. I think I just met myself, the real me. I like to think that huge moments in our lives - catastrophic or the exact opposite, like the awesome experience of a birth - introduce us to who we really are. All of the huge moments in my life were giving quiet introductions to this woman that I knew wanted to be - myself. Mia's arrival somehow gave me permission to wave away the formal "how do you dos" and to just bear hug that woman buried under the layers of the rest me. I welcomed Mia that day. And I welcomed myself.

It's so very hard to explain. Or maybe it isn't. I guess it's pretty simple. Maturation. Evolution. Whatever you want to call it, I think it's fair to say that we all reserve the right to fully reveal ourselves slowly. We can all unfold and become the people that we actually always were.

Happily Ever After

Mia has entered her princess era. One day, she was just a girl skipping around the court, collecting bugs and leaves and the like, and the next she seemed to unveil herself in full princess attire, ready to take on the REAL stories behind the characters that have confused her up to this point. In the past, when I would begin a story with the words that can take me immediately to my magical place of whimsy, Once upon a time a long time ago in a faraway land, Mia would quickly interrupt me with very practical questions. Where? Who? What does "a long time ago" mean? I thought that I might just be raising a girl child immune to the wonder of royalty. Purely uninterested in privilege. Positively maddened by chivalry.

I was wrong.

The past several weeks Mia has been begging for more stories about these female creatures that she has come to look quite fondly on. Even identify with. She dances around the house in her costumes and asks me to be mean when I play the queen, but not too mean. These pretty fragile figures in her stories intrigue her enough to want to pretend to be them, but without the brutality. Without the horror. So, when we play Snow White, I carefully leave out the part about the queen really demanding Snow White's heart be carted back by her man servant after he is supposed to murder her in the woods. I leave out the vicious jealousy of Cinderella's step sisters. I omit the terrible loneliness Rapunzel must have felt locked away from everyone.

Instead, we focus on the costumes. We talk about the general plot. Some of the twists. Being a literacy teacher it's in my nature to dig a bit deeper. I always ask Mia how she would feel if she WERE the character. Tough stuff for a three year old. I sometimes get "I would feel happy because princesses are fun" or "I would feel sad that Dopey never talks. Why doesn't Dopey talk?"

Tonight, though, I got the most fascinating response to a fairy tale, totally unprompted with a question from me. We were laying in bed and I finished up the story with the prince planting a passionate kiss on his beloved and the two love birds living happily ever after. Mia rolled over toward me and said, "That's my favorite part. I bet that they are happy."

My mind was exploding with my ever present thoughts. Am I teaching her that women are somehow beholden to men? To the concept of love? Am I teaching her that to wake a woman's spirit, she must be involved somehow with a lover? Do I need to interject here and say that Daddy and I are madly in love too? Just to prove that happily ever after can happen even in normal homes with moms who have raging sinus infections and dads who sometimes forget to do what the wife politely asked four times? Do I tell her that these women in these stories are just one dimensional figures? Do I tell her that they aren't fully developed women with truths and strengths and some deception and weaknesses too?

I said nothing. "I love that part too" I sighed. Because I do. It's pretty. And welcoming. And so genuinely loving. We women are evolved enough by now to know that we can be homemakers and still be fiercely smart. We can be CEOs and still be loving mommy figures who bake cakes and play games. We can be chunky and still be sexy. We can be thin and still be strong. We can be wives. Girlfriends. Or none of the above. We can be it all. All of that is kind of no brainer.

Right?

I think I'm coming to terms with a reality. I think I'm beginning to figure out that all of that no brainer stuff is much more complicated than I have given credit for. We can't be everything. But, we can be who we are. Some days I am a princess trapped in a tower with only my meek voice to rely on for rescue. And sometimes it is a man that comes traipsing home to fix what I have done. There are days that I am a wicked and terribly queen, whipping my fury in the direction of anyone who breathes funny. There are days when I am actually the prince, feeling valiant and strong, and maybe a bit full of myself. And there are days when I'm like a three year old girl - totally delighted by a happy ending.

And maybe that's where the misrepresentation lies with fairy tales; they are stagnant. They never change. These women are stuck in their same roles for all of eternity, mesmerizing the rest of us who are constantly in flux. Do we change that though? Do we free them of that burden? Or do we keep them planted where they are, as they've always been, and know that when we need something to anchor ourselves to, they will be there - ready to hand us a happy ending.

Tonight, I want to leave them where they are. Tomorrow, I may change my mind.

My Life

Dinner was a little bit of an embarrassment. Truly. Some steamed veggies with a bit of hamburger cooked in the oven for Christ's sake. For Mia. Dipped in ketchup no less. My sinuses are a mess. I blame them and my current love affair with the Neti Pot for my blatant disregard for my family's nutritional well being.

Luca and Mia are a bit of magic though aren't they?

I just need to post how I love my community....all of them. Did you ever think about all of the communities you partake in daily? And not just within your immediate neighborhood.

I love how when we check out books at the library we always seek out Dan, our checker, and he whispers to me, "She's my favorite" pointing to Mia, and I whisper back, "And you're ours."

I love how when I went to the gym tonight I sat in the steam room to have a heart to heart with my disgruntled sinuses and I met Fernando from Puerto Rico and Darhma from India. And we talked about cleaning our colons, and our sinuses. We talked about why we love steam. And beaches. And why all of us, mid 30s to 40s, want to feel even better physically. They also gave me some pointers about ab work, at which point I defensively told them to shut their faces (more politely of course) because I have grown two human beings. (Thanks though boys. Points taken.)

I love how when I stopped at Whole Foods afterward my favorite checker shouted over to me, "No kids tonight?" And I sifted through oranges and said, "Nope. Sick leave. Daddy's on duty." He gave me a thumbs up and I smiled, even though I was still pissed at my sinuses.

And I love my community here. At home. Even though when we play Snow White lately Mia insists that I play Dopey or the "terrible evil queen" and I have to squeeze myself into a costume designed for a child.

It's nice to be known. And loved. Despite being so very flawed. (I'm not just talking about my sinuses either. Although, if you think that's my only flaw, you can go on thinking that.)

Stolen from Sissie

My sister just posted this on her blog and I adored reading it and probably would've chosen the same words to describe her. I feel I know her just as well as I know myself. I thought it would be fun to do it myself. Interestingly, or not so interestingly, some of my responses were the same as hers!

a month, I would be: May
a day of the week, I would be: Saturday
a time of day, I would be: 6am
a planet, I would be: Earth
a direction, I would be: West
a historical figure, I would be: Queen Victoria
a liquid, I would be: water
a tree, I would be: Lemon Tree
a plant, I would be: forget-me-not plant
a flower, I would be: tulip
a kind of weather, I would be: hot
a musical instrument, I would be: violin
an animal, I would be: a horse
a color, I would be: blue
a fruit, I would be: apple
a sound, I would be: rain
an element, I would be: oxygen
a song, I would be: The Wedding Song, Bob Dylan
a book, I would be: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
a food, I would be: fish
a place, I would be: the beach
a word, I would be: serendipitous
a scent, I would be: florals mixed with some woody hints
a body part, I would be: shoulders
an object, I would be: a stainded glass window
a cartoon character, I would be: old school Mickey Mouse
an event, I would be: a wedding
a number, I would be: 10
an occupation, I would be: actress
a mythological being, I would be: Athena
a feeling, I would be: happiness
a mineral, I would be: Diamond
a religious icon, I would be: A Byzantine Virgin Mary
an art form, I would be: a pencil sketch
a symbol, I would be: a word (words are just symbols that define our language)
a constellation, I would be: Taurus