The Holiday Card

I remember as a child watching my mom write out holiday cards to friends and family.  She would write long notes in beautiful note cards and send them off.  Fast forward a few decades and the clear trend is to send photo cards these days.  I have heard a lot of complaining (OK, mostly on Facebook) about how impersonal these cards are, how expensive they are, what a waste of paper cards in general can be, and so on.  And it's true, many people, including me, send a pre-printed card in an envelope with a printed address label.  There's no hand-written anything, no personal sentiment, just the same card and general holiday note to everyone on the list.  I understand the complaint but I disagree that it's a waste.  In fact, I love checking the mail in December.  I love pulling out all of the holiday cards and opening them up to see smiling face after face.  I love the holiday letters, cheesy and all, I love seeing how much children grow, and I love hearing from people that I may not have been good enough about keeping up with during the rest of the year.  And sometimes I'll even pull out my box of old holiday cards and look at the pictures over the years.  Remarkable how a tiny baby one year is often a big kid holding a new sibling a few years later.  It never feels like that much time has passed.

And so every year in the late fall, we meet up with our dear friend Franklin who happens to be a great photographer for a family holiday shoot.  It often happens quite spur of the moment - the moment comes when we have time and he has time and the mood just strikes us.  I've gotten my entire family dressed in quasi-matching outfits in less than 10 minutes in years past!  Last year, we couldn't get a smile out of Ella until I promised her some of "those red and green things" (i.e. M&Ms) and she lit it up while Franklin snapped away.

This year, I'd been thinking about doing the shoot somewhere that really highlighted Durham and I had my eye on the American Tobacco Complex, a renovated area of downtown with plenty of historic features and interesting architectural details.  Here are a few of the outtakes, and then finally, the finished card.  I hope that the people who got it enjoyed the photos of the growing kids and know that even if the sentiment wasn't hand-written, it was heartfelt.

A great view of several of the old buildings in the background:

Gorgeous fall colors and Dash breakin' it down:

The blue-eyed boy:

The sweetest girl:

Ella, starting to lose her cool with the endless smiling:

And, finally, the winner! 

 

Random acts of Ella art

Ella really loves art as I've mentioned many times before.  Her latest obsessions are scissors and tape.  She has pretty well mastered kid scissors and spends a great deal of time cutting up pieces of paper into various shapes and sizes.  She has trouble with rolls of tape but I bought her a pop-up tape dispenser and now our only problem is the second mortgage we will have to take out on our house to pay for all the refills she goes through.  The best part of her creative genius, though, is that she makes new pieces of art and tapes them up around the house for us to find.  This is what I found on the porch door recently:

Young hoarder?

I count 3 pacifiers in Dash's crib and I have no idea how he got all of them in there.  Is he too young to be a hoarder? 

The Ornament

Ella spent the afternoon with her Aunt Leah (Bebe) recently while I took Dash to his 12-month check-up. 

An aside:  after months of being potty-trained, Ella somehow managed to both pee and poop on the floor of the doctor's office at a previous Dash check-up.  Since that horrendous day (do you really want to be on your hands and knees scrubbing an exam room floor at a pediatrician's office? No, me neither), I have decided that taking them separately is preferable.

But back to the crafting fun.  I'd bought a little craft kit to make a gingerbread man ornament with a picture in the middle.  I didn't have a photo printed but I figured we could add it later.  When I got home, though, I found that Ella had created something a thousand times better.  When there wasn't a photo available, she announced to Aunt Bebe that she could just draw a picture of herself.  Which she did.  And it now hangs proudly on our tree.  Kind of looks like the gingerbread man (woman?) is pregnant with a smiling seal, doesn't it?  I love it.

Holiday gifting

As the parent representative for Ella's preschool class, one of my recent tasks was to gather money from all of the parents to give to the two teachers at the class Hanukkah party next week.  The preschool board recommended that we ask each parent for $10 per teacher per child, so $20 per family (except of course for the parents of the twins in Ella's room who got socked twice).   This amount seemed very reasonable and all of the families gave their contribution readily.  With 12 children in the class, this would be a gift of $120 to each teacher.

At the same time, I was talking with a friend with whom I take a weekly semi-private pilates lesson (meaning just the two of us and our teacher) about what kind of holiday gift to give our teacher.  We agreed on a Christmas tree ornament and a gift certificate to a local restaurant for her and her husband.  Each of us agreed to put in $60, $10 for the ornament and $50 for the dinner.

That night, though, as I sat sorting out the various cash I'd collected over the day, I started to feel like there was a great imbalance.  I want to state clearly that I LOVE my pilates teacher.  I love her kind and sweet personality, I love that she makes me work-out until I want to cry, and I love that she has helped me fit back into my skinny jeans again.  She is wonderful with no caveats.   But I see her for one hour a week.  I also LOVE Ella's teachers.  They are exceptionally kind and talented women especially in the art of bringing out the best in a three-year old which is no small feat.  They listen to Ella as she tells them long elaborate stories, let her chase them on the playground, encourage her love of art and books and music, and just generally create a nurturing, loving, and stimulating environment for my child.  Eighteen hours a week.  And did I mention that their job also involves bathroom duty? 

So $120 to my pilates teacher and $120 to each teacher (but only $10 actually from me)?  It just didn't feel right. 

My solution was not all that elegant.  I returned (or will, really, if you are reading this, pilates buddy) some of the cash and got my pilates teacher a nice ornament and a $60 gift certificate for dinner instead of $100.  And I threw in an extra $20 to the envelope for each of Ella's teachers.  In an ideal world, all of these wonderful people would be getting rich from careers devoted to bringing out the best in my family.  These gifts will not do that.  But I think it feels more in balance than the original plan, and hopefully, regardless of the amount, will let all of these special people know that I really do appreciate what they do for me and my child.

The Me Hour

A few months ago, Josh and I were fretting about how little time we "get S**T done".   When the kids are awake, our days are a blur of playing with blocks, filling sippy cups with milk, and wiping tushies.  When they are asleep, we do the mad toy clean-up/laundry/dishes/make lunch dash.  So we decided to start getting up earlier than the kids to enjoy what we've termed The Me Hour. 

Our kids get up by 7:00 usually, so we set our alarms for 6 a.m. and get to enjoy an hour of quiet time to ourselves.  Josh, being just generally a much better person than I am in all regards, has strict rules for his Me Hour.  His rules are No email, No Internet, No Twitter, and No Work.  He does things like read, meditate, and write.  Sometimes he even goes running in the freezing cold.  Hmph.  My general activities are shaping up to be: read online celebrity gossip, do copious online shopping, edit photos of the kids, and frantically catch up on work.  So we have two different approaches to our Me Hour but we both love the found time. 

And here's the part that I find fascinating.  Before, when I dragged myself out of bed to the sound of an awakening child (usually Ella, and usually to the tune of "Mommy and Daddy!  I am a-wake now! I am A-WAKE now! I AM A-WAKE NOW!"), I felt so groggy and grumpy in my first daily interactions with them.  But now, after enjoying the Me Hour, I am so excited to greet them, have much more patience and energy for their needs, and yes, I just feel more awake and alert.  So less sleep means I feel more awake for the kids. I don't get it but I'm going with it.

See you tomorrow at 6 a.m.

Dash's First Birthday

Today is Dash's first birthday. Yesterday I kept thinking that a year ago today, I was still enormously pregnant.  I remember that day, Dec 6, 2010, so well.  It was cold already (very unlike today when it was 70 degrees and I took a walk in short sleeves!) so I went to the Y for a loooong walk on their indoor track.  I was 39 weeks pregnant, two weeks more than I'd been pregnant with Ella, and I was determined to get that baby boy moving.  In between laps, I'd stop and do squats which must have been quite a sight for all the folks in the weight room overlooking the track.  I came home, did some work, and hosted Ella's playgroup that afternoon.  An uneventful evening was followed by four very eventful pre-dawn hours and Dashiell Rowe was born at 7:16 a.m. on December 7, weighing in at seven and a half pounds and with a head of golden hair that made all the nurses at the truly wonderful NC Women's Hospital swoon.  Fast forward a year and we have a twenty-five pound babbling, scooting, kiss-blowing, bye-bye waving, giggly ball of little boy.  All those changes in the first year sure seem good reason to celebrate.

So that we did.  This past Saturday, we hosted thirty-something friends and family in a celebration of Dash.  Amidst the busy holiday season, we decorated the house with brightly colored paper lanterns, lots of framed photos of the birthday boy over the past year, and a colorful banner from Etsy, my most favorite source of all things unique and lovely.  The decorating seemed unnecessary for a baby's party but when I carried Dash downstairs on Saturday morning after he woke up, he pointed excitedly at all the colored lanterns and let loose a long stream of babbling that could only have meant "Wow, Mama! I love what you've done with the place!  It looks so bright and colorful in here!  Time to par-tay!"

Decorations for Dash

I gave a lot of thought to Dash's first bite of cake.  Josh is not a fan of giving sugar to small children so in the end, I made him a tiny layer cake all of his own with a pumpkin cake base and cream cheese icing (heavy on the cream cheese, light on the sugar).  The mini-cake was so darn cute but I thought it needed some decoration.  Sprinkles were out (all that sugar!) so I decided on Puffs, those airy cereal-like snacks that babies seem to love and I personally think smell like fish food.  To satisfy my own sweet tooth and for the non-puffs loving adults, I ordered beautiful cupcakes (full of yummy sugar!) for the adults from a dear friend who just happens to be one of the area's best cupcake bakers.

Cupcakes for grown-ups

Birthday boy's special cake

For a boy who likes to bang toys together and will turn just about anything into a drum, Dash was mighty circumspect about his cake.  First he plucked off the puffs around the top and ate those.  He poked a little at the cake but there was no great show of cake bashing or icing flying.  I finally put some icing on my finger for him to try and picked off some bites of the actual cake.  He seemed to like both all right but was definitely more interested in the big, shiny Mylar balloon his friend Sofia brought for him.  OK by me.

Birthday boy starts to dig in



Icing?  Maybe.

For his actual birthday (today), Josh and I got him up at 7:16 a.m. and cooed over how big he is, how special it was to celebrate the minute of his birth, and generally fought over who got to hold and snuggle him.  Dash just pointed around his room (his new favorite skill), repeatedly said "Ba! Ba!" (his favorite word), and seemed generally unimpressed with all of our emotion.  Tonight we'll let him attempt to open a few gifts and see how quickly he tries to eat the wrapping paper.

Happy birthday, my sweet little guy.  I love you to the moon and back.