What your mailbox (and lawn art) say to me

Rain or shine, freezing cold or burning hot, I try to take Sweet Dog and E for a walk every day. It doesn't always happen, but maybe five days out of the week we make a loop in our neighborhood specifically chosen for it's relative lack of scary backyard dogs.

I got lost a bunch of times walking in our neighborhood when we first moved here, sometimes choosing streets full of fenced-in dogs who were SURE we were intent on invading their homes to carve out their owners' hearts with E's sippy cup lid. Now that I've got my perfect loop, I stick to it.

The things I noticed first were the mailboxes. Everyone in our neighborhood has one, right beside their driveway, out at the curb.

Saying: "STEAL MY MAIL. IT'S RIGHT HERE."

(Isn't that what they're saying? Or is this is what happens to your brain when you've lived in urban California for too long? It took about three months of me running out to retrieve the mail as soon as it was delivered to realize that even if I left it there for a few hours, or even several days, NOTHING WOULD HAPPEN TO IT. Except maybe your kindly neighbor would take it in for you and bring it you with a plate of home-made cookies.)

Most of the mailboxes in our neighborhood are run-of-the-mill black ones.

A basic mailbox: white post, black mailbox, red flag.
(Weeds around base, optional or, in our case, inevitable.)

Some neighbors change their mailbox sleeves to match each upcoming holiday. You know which neighbor is going through a hard time when you see a snowmen mailbox sleeve in June. (Urban friends: Yes, they make decorator sleeves for mailboxes. I KNOW, crazy, right?)

There are a few favorite mailboxes on my route that always call out to me and now they feel like old friends with whom I can converse.

(Okay, yes, I could use a few more friends here.)


This one reminds me of my grandparents' old airstream trailer, which my toddler brother called a "crailer". Hence E greets this one with: "Hi crailer me-box!"

This one calls out to me: "Feel free to rest your Big Gulp Slushie right here!"

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Mailbox.

Top rack dishwasher safe! Caution: may warp and/or acquire stubborn tomato sauce stains with regular use.

Often, there will be a seemingly endless row of plain black mailboxes and then...
*BAM* "I LIKE FLOWERS!"

Okay, can we talk about this for a minute? Any Southerners out there care to help me understand this one? This "lawn ornament" is out front of a neighbors' house. In case you can't see it well, because I was too polite/chicken-shit to get close enough to take a proper picture so I had to take it from a moving vehicle, this is an African-American lawn jockey. On the lawn of elderly WHITE neighbors. W. T. H. In what universe is this not offensive?

This is the South: Neighbors put racist statues on their lawn, and then bring you your mail with a plate of homemade cookies.

Perhaps Virginia didn't get my memo

DUDE.

WTF.

We were supposed to fly out to Arizona this morning to visit my in-laws.
After shoveling the 34 and a half inches of snow that fell here, we hope to make it by Tuesday.


MEMO TO VIRGINIA:
I may be from New Jersey but I've lived in California for the last 15 years.
WOULD IT KILL YOU TO GO EASY WITH WINTER?

The right fit

I finally got my wedding and engagement rings resized on Friday. They have been too tight since I got pregnant with Z. I went ringless starting in my first trimester and finally squeezed them back on my sausage-y man-hands about 6 months after Z was born. They were so tight after that that my ring finger wound up with a waist. When I got pregnant with E, I gave up the fight and buttered up my finger (mmmmm buuutttterrr) to take them off. Every time I tried them on since then, they still didn't fit.

Until now.

After picking them up at the jewelers on Friday, I put them on for the first time in over a year and remembered that warm April night when CG pulled out a little box, got down on one knee in the middle of a fancy pants restaurant and told me he needed a little help with his birthday wish, would you marry me? I sputtered and put it on and had to be reminded to say yes.

Yes.

It amazed me then that the ring was the right size. It fit perfectly. This ring, the one that he earned the money to buy by participating in a long, inconvenient, uncomfortable medical study, slipped right on my finger. He thought it would be a place holder until we had one made.

But it fit.

They fit.

(and are apparently quite tasty)

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I bought Z some new uniform pants for her school. I used a much coveted free time slot this weekend to hem them (as she is cursed with her mama's Long Waist/Short Limb Syndrome).

I hope it wasn't a waste of time.

We have yet to meet with Z's teacher and continue to wrestle with ourselves about whether to look for another preschool. I'm trying to not overreact, to calm myself a little bit about my inconsequential knit-picky issues like typos on the promotional material and focus on what really matters: whether this school, this class, is the right fit for our kid.

We want to give her, and ourselves, a chance to adjust to this new school. We don't want to act rashly when there is so much going on that could be clouding our perceptions.

When I try to get the root of my issues with her school, I keep coming back to feeling disconnected from the classroom, like I'm purposefully being kept at arms length. The drop-off/pick-up line (where we drive up and have our child met at the door by a staff member) seems so cold and leaves me with NO sense of the vibe of the classroom that day. I never see how the teacher interacts with my kid. I never see any of the other kids or parents. I feel like Z gets dropped into a black hole for three hours.

So I'm reduced to pretending to be nonchalant as I grill her for detailed information. She tells me about how, at her old school, she could cut any way she wanted but at her new school, she has to cut on the lines. She notes benignly that there aren't any "toys" there, only "works" but seems a bit put off by the conspicuous lack of baby dolls. She complains that some of the "works" that she's interested in are reserved for older kids. I find myself thinking: shouldn't preschool be a magical place where, as long as you are safe and respectful, you get to play with whatever you want, however you want?

Then there's her crazy behavior of late, for which I'm always searching for some external cause. (When she was a baby my go-to explanation was always TEETHING! When she was a toddler it was IMMINENT ILLNESS!) When I pick her up from school, she often screams from unspecified frustration (Z: "AAAHHHHH! I'M FRUSTRATED!!!", Me: "I can hear that. What's frustrating you Z?", Z: "WAAHHHH! I DON'T KNOW!"), refuses to cooperate with anything I say and throws a tantrum at the drop of a hat. It is at lunch time and the school's morning snack is earlier than she's used to. Is it low blood sugar? I always pick her up with E in the car with me. Is it an attention getting/ sibling rivalry thing? This new school is the last of a ton of transitions in her life recently. Was it the last straw? She's three and has been challenging in all kinds of new ways all summer. Is this just the age? Her sleep has been A MESS lately with naps mostly a thing of the past and all of us are unsure if it's better for her to nap or not. Is her messed-up sleep causing all this or is it the other way around??

Is this school the wrong fit for her? Is the classroom so structured that frustration builds up in her until it is safe to let it out?

She does tell me about older kids helping her out; one girl reminded her to use a tissue, another helped her up when she fell on the playground. She asked to bring some cookies that we made at home (mmmmm coookkkies) to her teachers. She proudly shows us her "work" that she brings home at the end of each week. She got upset when I had to pick her up early this week for a pediatrician appointment because she didn't want to miss playground and music time. She tells me repeatedly that she wants to be a "full dayer" like some of her friends.

She has moments of anger and frustration and INSANITY on the weekend that are just like when she gets home from school.

Color me confused.

Time to make an appointment with the teacher.

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Today (YOU ARE MY WITNESSES) I am taking the girls to a local moms' meetup. I've been lurking around their board for weeks now. Today I will try my hardest to be Normal Friendly and pray that I find some other moms that I hit it off with.

It is so hard to be looking for friends at this ripe-old age. So far there have been very few opportunities for me to meet other adults. Mostly I try to chat up moms at the playground with my usual Strange Friendly I've-been-at-home-talking-only-to-children-under-three style. Not surprisingly, this has not been too successful yet.

I feel like I'm still at the very beginning of building a life here.

I hope I find a good fit.

Clueless But Hopeful Mama's Top Ten Tips for Moving Across the Country with a Preschooler and an Infant

(What's that you say? No one but me is crazy enough to do this? So these tips are useless to anyone but me, circa two months ago? Pshaw!)

1. Don't be so concerned about how hard it's going to be to move with an infant. Your 2 month old infant is basically a heavy, liquid-producing-and-consuming piece of luggage. She will make you a bit more tired, and require you to sit down and pay attention to her at somewhat regular intervals, but mostly, she'll smile a lot and sleep a lot.

2. Your three-year old? The one that whines, requires constant stimulation, and is prone to fits due to changes in her SNACK CHOICES let alone changes in everything and everyone in her known universe? That one? Yeah, that's the one you need to worry about.

3. When buying your house without seeing it in person (What's that you say? NO ONE but me does that??), it's best to avoid studying the pictures too much lest you spend the first few weeks in your new home with a bad case of vertigo from walking around inside what you KNOW to be a two dimensional scene.

4. Definitely go to your daughter's new preschool "social". Definitely don't spend most of it alternating between staring at your shoes and smiling strangely at people when they pass you by.

5. Join a mother's meet up group. Spend hours lurking in their online message boards. Try to imagine actually, uh, MEETING UP.

6. Don't feel too guilty for feeling just a wee bit relieved that you no longer live in the crazy wildfire zone (or The Big One zone, for that matter).

7. Get to know the neighbors. Try very hard to keep an open mind, even though you think the previous owners of your new house were almost definitely a-holes and you know which neighbors were friends with them and which weren't.

8. Decide to stop fighting the previous a-hole owners over the stuff that they were supposed to fix but BROKE WORSE by trying to fix themselves. Your life is too short and your current life is TOO STRESSFUL to add lawsuits to it.

9. Smudge your house tomorrow whenever the baby is asleep and the preschooler is at preschool to rid house of all the bad juju that must be in here.

10. Understand that one day, you will stop feeling like you are on some very strange, very stressful trip that will end with you back in Pasadena in your old house with your old life. This is your new life and it will only get better, richer, fuller once you really start ACTUALLY UNPACKING living it.

The next chapter

We are here.

Our mailbox has a roof.

Zoe's bedroom has a bright orange wall, just like she wanted it.

Her closet is yellow, just like she wanted it.

My favorite spot already: our kitchen's blogging eating area, complete with skylights and a view of Zoe's "play structure" in the backyard.

Zoe seemed to figure out our crazy new fridge before I did. She will lose interest in making ice at some point, right?

This is the one corner of our bedroom I can show you without moving a metric ton of CRAP.


The one thing missing?

Our first girl. Who arrived Thursday after her flight on the brand new pet airline.

The family is all here.

Our stuff is all here (somewhere).

Now the real fun begins.

Postcard from Vermont: Seeing is believing.

When discussing the details of our birth plan, our doula told us that a newborn, placed on her mother's chest immediately after birth and not forced to latch on, will wriggle and squirm and latch on themselves. This seemed like some impossible natural childbirth baloney, like "orgasmic birth". (As much as I felt empowered by Eliza's birth, I would have to say that the physical sensations I experienced were pretty much the POLAR OPPOSITE of orgasm.)

A newborn, who has little control over her movements and can barely see, can latch on by herself?? I would believe it when I saw it.

When Eliza was born, after the initial bottle they had to give her because she was so big, the nurses placed her on my belly and left her there. I resisted the urge to move her to my breast, or at least a little closer to it, and just waited. My minutes-old babe, eyes barely open, started to wriggle and elbow-drag herself across my belly toward my chest. My mouth hung open in disbelief as she found her own way onto my breast. All by herself.

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Friends had told me that one day, Zoe and Eliza would start to interact without me. That Zoe would be helpful in ways I couldn't imagine.

All I could picture was baby Eliza crying that crazed newborn squawk and my sensitive Zoe covering her ears and adding her voice to the din. "I'll believe it when I see it," I said, ever the optimist.

At the beginning of our time here in Vermont before CG got here, I was fragile, brittle even. One day, I was trying to get Zoe and Eliza in the car and off to Zoe's swim lesson. Eliza was overtired, crying in her carseat. Zoe was dawdling and whining and helpfully informing me repeatedly: "Mama! Eliza's crying!".

I forgot my wallet and ran crazily toward the house, Ellie's crying seeming louder the further away I got. By the time I grabbed the wallet and got back to the car, I was a sweaty, twitchy mess. I opened the car door and jumped in the driver's seat, braced for a chorus of cries and screams.

What I heard instead? Zoe singing a made up song to a silent Eliza. There was only one verse: "Don't cry Eliza, don't cry. It's okay Eliza, it's okay."

I'll give you one guess who was the only one crying at that point.

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This Wednesday, we finally leave the lakehouse here in Vermont. After two short flights, we'll arrive in Virginia where I'll drive our new car to our new house.

Everyone says it will soon feel like home. That I'll make new friends and find my way around. That all will be well.

I'll believe it when I see it. (I'm SO READY to see it.)

Goodbye. (Hello.)

Goodbye avocados everyday.


Goodbye lemons from the backyard.



Goodbye view of the neighborhood palm trees from my favorite spot on the hammock.



Goodbye mild winters and perma-sun. (Hello seasons and moisture. Humidity and greenery.)

Goodbye breakfast at Auntie Ems and Marstons' salads and Zelo pizza and the homemade smores at Parkway Grill. (Hello.... um, please tell me there's good food in Northern Virginia.)

Goodbye LA traffic. (Hello Beltway.)

Goodbye farmer's market. (Hello Polyface farm.)

Goodbye tank tops and cotton cardigans all year round. (Hello wool mittens and hats and scarves and rain coats and boots and ...... )

Goodbye City of Angels. (Hello City of Obama.)

Goodbye Kidspace and Shane's Inspiration and Travel Town. (Hello Smithsonian and, uh, the Capitol?)

Goodbye Venice beach. (Hello.... Potomac River?)

Goodbye four years of my life in LA. (Hello to a brand new life in Northern Virginia.)

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I will board a plane tomorrow with my mom (BLESS HER SOUL.) and my two girls. We leave for the airport at 5 am and hope to arrive at the lake houses by midnight. Can't tell you why it's going to take so long; I blacked out after hearing about a 4 and a half hour layover at JFK.
(HOLD ME.)

I hope to be blogging while we're in Vermont but without CG around, I can't promise much. (Though I have one in the pipeline because I finally got a Basic Blogger 101 understanding of a "scheduled post").

See you all on the flip side.

Meant to be

Thanks for all the congratulations on our simultaneous house selling/purchasing! It looks like we are proceeding along in both buying our house in VA and selling our house here in CA. What a roller coaster! What amazing LUCK! Am I really this lucky?!?! I couldn't have planned it better if I tried!

Have I used up my daily allotment of exclamation points?!?!

!!!!!!!!!

The way it all went down is enough to make me say it was "meant to be" and I'm not a "meant to be" type of person. I'm not religious or particularly superstitious and I tend to chalk up strangely perfect events to the random chance of a kooky universe.

But, seriously. This was all MEANT TO BE.

We've been watching the house listings in VA since we went out to visit over the holidays. We had sized up the neighborhoods, schools, kiddie attractions and knew the general areas we wanted to be in. CG had spent a day with our realtor out there every time he's flown out for meetings and saw tons of houses that were okay but just not quite right for one reason or another: too expensive, too big, too small, or too much work to make it "ours". CG asked me if I would consider making an offer on a house that we hadn't seen. I said "No way." MAYBE if he had seen it. But I was convinced we were going to have to just move there and rent for awhile while we found our house.

I should also mention that we were a little nervous to be working with our realtor since she lives and works a little far from the town we decided we wanted to move to. We worried she wouldn't have the local connections you sometimes need to make house purchases happen. But we liked her personally and we knew from buying our CA house with a GREAT realtor, that liking, respecting and trusting your agent are extremely important.

It was late Thursday when we were emailed the listing for this house. It was lovely, the right size, in the right neighborhood AND it seemed underpriced compared to other things we'd seen. It looked too good to be true. So we emailed our agent to see what was wrong with it. She told us that the seller's agent's office was right down the street from her office and she would try to get in to see it before anyone else. Which she did. And she confirmed that this was the perfect house for us, in great shape, on an awesome cul de sac. "One in a million and definitely underpriced", she said, and she's not prone to hyperbole. When touring it, she told the sellers (who have a three year old girl and a 4 week old baby!) about us and they said we'd fit right in with the other young families on the block.

We slept on it. And dreamed about it. And asked her to go back and check on it again.

Luckily for us, our agent knew everyone in the seller's agent's office and is highly regarded there (apparently, they've tried to hire her away from her company for years), so she had inside information about everything that was going down with this house. She told us that there was another serious contender, a couple that had seen it twice already and was writing an offer. She asked us to get someone, anyone, to come and see it for us so we could say someone other than our agent had seen it.

So we called my sister-in-law who has some friends who grew up in VA. Many phone calls later (OMG are you bored with this story yet??!?!) we got the husband of the friend of a friend of my sister-in-law to take time out of his Sunday to spend an hour going through the house with our agent taking pictures and trying to find things wrong with it. (My favorite picture shows a dead bug he found on the floor in a corner!) The man has never met us or even my sister in law and he did this for us! How crazy is that?

We decided we had to make an offer and got our agent to draw up the paperwork which we hurriedly filled out Monday morning. We wrote a glowing letter about why we thought this was the perfect house for us, included it with our offer and sent it off with fingers and toes crossed.

We got the call on Tuesday that they accepted our offer.

Meanwhile.....

We had started to get very discouraged about ever selling our house here in CA. Our neighborhood is a hodgepodge of people who've been here forever and haven't touched their houses in 60 years, people who've been here for awhile and don't care about their house/yard because they're too busy working their asses off or selling crystal meth and those of us who bought in the last 5 years because it was the only neighborhood we could afford and have totally maxed out the potential of our little houses. Unfortunately, it has been especially hard hit by foreclosures. So other houses in our neighborhood have been on the market for substantially less than our original asking price. And we had had lots of compliments but NO serious inquiries in the first two weeks of listing it. We decided to lower our asking price substantially to see if we could drum up some interest and get this thing sold before Lima Bean arrives.

Since open houses traditionally take place during Zoe's EXACT naptime (2-4), we decided to take some day trips to get away from the house in the morning (to keep the house clean!) and have her nap in the car on the way home. Hence Disneyland on Saturday. And we were thinking about the beach on Sunday but were so exhausted from Disneyland that we decided to take up our neighbors on their sweet offer to nap Zoe over at their house during Sunday's open house.

This turned out to be fateful!

We spent Sunday morning at home, cleaned up the house and headed over to our neighbors with the pack n play for Zoe's nap. Fifteen minutes before the open house was about to start, we got a call that our agent was throwing up and would have to cancel the open house because she couldn't find anyone to take it for her at this late notice. Since we just happened to be next door and NOT at the beach, CG was able to turn around and head back to host the open house.

The first person who came to the open house works at the same institution as CG and the two of them hit it off as CG took him around and showed him all the hidden (GEEKY) details of the work he's done to it over the last three years (you know, all that sunk time and cost and energy that you don't necessarily see but do appreciate once you actually live in a house. And are a GEEK science-type.).

The guy left the open house, sat in his car, called his agent and drew up the contract over the phone. For our asking price. (Our new, substantially lower, asking price but STILL! Our asking price! With our requested time-line!).

So many little things lined up in unexpected ways (our far-away realtor having ALL the right connections after all, the friend of a friend of a sister-in-law being a good Samaritan for people he's never met, the randomness of us actually being around and able to do the open house, the workplace connection that made CG the PERFECT person to hawk our house to our eventual buyer. EVERYTHING.)

It was truly MEANT TO BE.

(See, I did run out of exclamation points after all.)

My favorite river in Egypt

I am in total, complete and utter denial that we are moving from California to Virginia in August of this year. It's January and we all just took a family walk in the sunshine wearing long sleeve shirts. And we were totally sweating. It's going to be in the 70's today and I was out planting pansies with Zoe this morning.

What the F are we thinking?

OH RIGHT. There's that whole pesky JOB thing. As in, CG needs to have one and since the funding is caput on his post-doc in August we should all be dancing with glee that he received such a great job offer after very little looking.

I'm not feeling so lucky at this exact moment since I just checked weather.com and found out that it's 35 degrees in Virginia and there's a "wintry mix". Somehow I don't think they're talking about a medley of holiday songs.

We will be so sad to leave Pasadena. We love our little house with its happy, colorful walls and bountiful lemon tree and spacious backyard into which we poured a lot of blood, sweat and tears. We have friends and a life here. WE HAVE SUNSHINE, like almost ALL THE TIME. Moving is going to feel like ripping off a limb, with all the tendons and bones and gristle just left hanging there. With blood spurting and severed muscles fibers twitching...... oh sorry, were you about to eat something?

So instead of thinking too much about the emotional effects of this impending move, we are slowly, slowly starting to work on the physical aspects of moving, the OH GOD HOW DID WE ACQUIRE THIS MUCH STUFF part of the move. It feels good to go through closets and get rid of clothes that just aren't right. Every time I put something in the give-away pile, I imagine our moving bill, our proverbial load, OUR LIVES being lighter. But the actual move is too far away to REALLY purge the big stuff so I'm not exactly sure what significance my meager Goodwill pile really has.

I'm giving away the shoes I got married in. They are $40 Hush Puppies heels that I got at Shoe Pavillion. I don't think I need to keep them anymore.

I'm giving away clothes that I KNOW won't look good on me after two babies. It's just not worth the pain.

I'm going through toiletries and trying to use them up. (Now THIS is a truly pressing, deeply useful thing, don't you think? Who needs to find a preschool for Zoe for the fall or a house for all of us or figure out how we're going to pay for anything once we sell this house at a LOSS when I have two year old conditioner that I really ought to scrape out of its container and bandaids that need to be organized?)

I'm going through our bookshelf and trying to be brutal. I can keep it if: (1) I have read it and LOVED it and enjoy rereading/lending it to others/standing near it in the hope that some of its beauty and wisdom oozes onto me. (2) I have yet to read it but always glance at it and say "Oh yeah! I keep meaning to pick that up!". (3) I use it as a reference tool.

Out are: Books that someone gave me but I have no interest in reading. Books that I read but didn't like (why oh why do I keep them around anyway?). Books that I haven't read but really, HONESTLY never will.

Oh OH and we're seriously considering chucking our cd jewel cases and getting those cd wallets. We are clearly ready to move NOW right?!