Happy 13th!

Every single birthday, every single year, has been special and significant. That feeling grows with time -- it doesn't diminish, even if just a few of the outward trappings seem to become a little more low-key.

You have a smile that's easy, ready, and warm. Your eyes twinkle when you smile.

You care deeply about the people who are important to you.

You are kind, your heart is big and generous, and you can forgive.

You are curious, eager to learn, and willing to try.

You have a terrific sense of humor and you are willing to laugh at yourself.

It is a joy to hear you play the piano; you have a real gift.

You are interested in the world -- in people, places, ideas.

You love animals and it leads you to be knowledgeable about them, and willing to work hard on their behalf.

You love to play soccer and you put your speed, grace, and agility to such good use on the field.

As athletic as you are, you are also a true sportsman; you work hard to win but accept defeat graciously and are willing to put the feelings of others ahead of your desire to win.

You are terrific at figuring things out, at solving problems, at remembering.

You are a collector; you love to start, build, and care for collections.

You are a great friend, and people like being around you.

I love you, Dean, and I will always treasure this anniversary of meeting you, of having you join me here on this journey.

How old would you be if you didn't know how old you were?

I had quite the birthday!

Dean made and frosted a cake for me, with only limited assistance. Chocolate cake with coffee buttercream icing. Quite magnificent! Dinner out at Blue Ginger, and our first in-person sighting of an Iron Chef contender.

Neither 29 nor 39 caused me a moment's pause. But 49 feels a little different. My age has always seemed to be this arbitrary number, sitting out there at some distance to myself, fairly meaningless. This feels a little more weighty. I'm not depressed or upset, I'm just mindful, for once, of what the number means (or at least what it carries with it). I wondered briefly if I should be doing anything differently (hair style? cosmetics?) but Ken and Dean voted resoundingly against my changing things up. I'm looking forward to spring and being able to get outside again, and go hiking and generally being more active.

Meanwhile, it is snowing here. Again. But lightly, and hopefully not worth more than an inch or two.

Two in one

When I was growing up in Chicago, in the mid 1960s, at Easter time you could go to the regular grocery store and buy lamb butter -- that is, butter in the shape of a lamb. Lamb cakes, too, were readily available; vanilla pound cake baked in a lamb-shaped mold with white frosting from a star tip artfully applied. There was kind of a resurgence in lamb cakes -- or at least in the availability of the molds -- probably thanks to Martha. But lamb butter is a bit more elusive. My mold came from here, should you be wishing for one yourself (scroll down the page to find the lamb). And in the spirit of true disclosure: none of us has yet had the heart to cut in to the lamb, so here we are nearly 2 weeks past the holiday and he's still living in the fridge.

Also thanks to Martha, now that I think about it, is our tradition of buying two packages of Easter egg dye. For years we have been making brighter colors by putting 2 tablets in each cup instead of one. The wrinkle this time was that Dean didn't want to put 2 of the same color in each cup but instead he wanted to mix his own colors. I admit that this is still one of those times when I have to take a deep breath, think about who it is we're coloring eggs for in the first place, and let go of "how it should be." Sure! Mix away! I did feebly recommend that he think about what colors he'd be creating before putting the tablets in, knowing that this wouldn't be his approach. He's a process guy, not a product guy.

So we had two of the same mix, and some pretty intense mixes, and found interestingly that the dyes don't combine consistently with each other the way they do with two of the same.




And his favorite part, still, is playing with the colors afterward. Success, then!

Easter was also Dean's birthday this year, so we had an elaborate plan for celebrating both -- starting with a morning that was all about the eggs and the basket.

THEN it was birthday time.

Followed by an outing to spend some gift cards that were burning a hole in his pocket.




A sweet and successful day. Twelve seems at the same time an impossibly big number and exactly right. We celebrate who this amazing person is, how much his arrival changed our lives, how unimaginable life without him would be. He enjoys hearing stories on his birthday about how his birth day unfolded -- all those hours of labor, all that joy when he finally arrived, all the attention that our beautiful little boy received from the hospital staff, how very sweet he was right from the start. I do feel that we're turning a corner as a family as Dean steps into this new, older self. We struggle sometimes to find the balance, the flow -- to readjust our relationships and yet hold on to what's core for us. I try not to think ahead but to revel in the now.

If you have no daughters...

...give them to your sons! Hot cross buns. I was inspired to make up my first batch and we all loved them with our hot morning beverages. I see that other recipes seem to call for an overall glaze plus the cross; maybe next time I'll do an egg wash for the shiny appearance (Dean says an overall glaze would be too sticky to deal with). I love foods that are associated with certain holidays, and I love how ancient (*pagan*) traditions got incorporated into Christian traditions in order to make the new ideas hold -- at Easter just as at Christmas. (The old belief here was that cutting the cross shape into baked goods helped ward off evil spirits that might interfere with the baker's success.)

While mulling the cross form, I am endlessly fascinated with the way the paint wears away on the storm drains on our street; these always look beautiful to me.
So much to see in such a small, usually overlooked place.

A tiny, tiny pebble, trying to impersonate an egg, I think.



And tiny buds, waiting breathlessly to unfurl.

I've got photos and stories from the birthday/Easter combo just passed and will try to get caught up this week.

Twelve

Perfection

This was Dean's last week of summer day camps; he finished out with chess camp, which he attended with his best friend Max. The week had included a tournament, with finals on the last day. They wondered if it would come down to this, and indeed Dean and Max had to play each other in the last game for the championship. The air in the room was NOT charged with tension at all; all the kids were thoroughly enjoying themselves, and each pair would glance around from time to time to see how the other games were going.
Contemplating their good fortune and offering up their trophies, with Max as the first place winner and Dean as second. Dean was utterly delighted with the outcome, and acknowledged that Max deserved to win for having played the better game. We went home for a celebratory lunch of hot dogs, with ice cream for dessert, and an afternoon of:
badminton on the front lawn. I seriously do not think it gets much better than this. We've been playing badminton as a family this weekend and look forward to more matches today. Skies are blue, temperatures are ideal, low humidity, cool breezes wafting through.
I love this picture of Dean and his cousin, Hallie, skipping rocks at the beach during a break at a recent family wedding.

We've got nearly a month until school starts, and are about as content as we can be. We're getting ready to take a little trip to celebrate Ken's 50th; oh, I'll have lots of pictures to post when we return!

Kind of a list

Dean turned 11 yesterday. It's a simple enough thing on the surface; people celebrate birthdays everyday. But how monumental this passage of time is to me, I can barely begin to express.

My computer is struggling to keep afloat with all I've got loaded on it. It's making it hard to do much here, since every time I download photos from my camera I have to wonder if the old girl is going to be able to hang on. Ken promises me we can try to switch machines but there's so much backing up and saving and moving to be done first -- it's like moving house.

I feel very out-of-touch here. I need to get out to all of your blogs, to catch up with what's been happening with you, and figure out what it is that's been happening with me.

We go to Chicago for a few days mid-month, and I've got a list of things to do and people to see that would take a month. I just want to feel the way it feels to be there. Home.

Loot

I'm delighted that Kym received the swap package I sent her: a family of three very different bears. (It happens sometimes in families.) Anne set up the swap as a tribute to handmade toys, and I felt it had been too long since I'd had toes in the swap-y waters. Aside from the delight of putting a package together, I enjoyed traveling to some new blogs and meeting new friends of handmade things. Some of my regular blogs are temporarily illegible; there's a corrupted font somewhere in my Mac and we haven't been able to ferret it out. This comes of having billions and billions of fonts, loaded in several places. THIS drives poor Ken crazy. Oops.

As far as loot flowing into my own mailbox, this very wonderful and tiny little monkey arrived today; a birthday gift to me from my sister. Thank you, Paula! (No, I don't think this counts and yes, I will write a real thank-you note.) I also had a lovely birthday card from one brother today and my other brother called me for a nice long chat on the morning of my birthday. I do love when birthdays last and linger.

Today is one of those days when Dean looks very grown up to me; no question that childhood is NOT lasting nor lingering as long as I'd wish. The brilliant sun on the snow made us both a little blind, but not so much that it prevented me from seeing that he is changing. Growing.

Flashback Friday

Birthday party, Chicago, 1966?

A bit stuck on a theme, I guess -- sorry about that. I promise to move on by tomorrow. (Head of the table, nearest you; but you knew that, right?) There is something to be said for the olden days, when we dressed up for birthday parties and behaved so well that big groups of us could gather in each other's homes and nothing got broken.

Forty-seven...

...and counting!

Almost....

Kindergarten school portrait, Chicago, 1966

Getting ready by looking a little further back....

Happy Birthday, Ken!

49 candles on the cake today!

Voila!

And so it was! I took Ali Edward's weekend creativity challenge to use PhotoShop to add type to a photo -- nothing earth-shattering, but I thought it worked in this case so there you go. And despite the softness of this picture, I love it for the purity of Dean's joy that it shows.

Whew! Birthday party was yesterday, and while we'll be finishing up cake and extending birthday leniency for a few more days this one is a wrap. All good. We now re-join our usual lives, already in progress. Lots of housework to catch up on (always) and projects to get back to.

I tried a new recipe that gave amazing results for very little effort (my favorite kind) and can tell you honestly that if you or someone you feed is NOT a green bean fan, this preparation just might change everything. The original recipe calls for this to be a room temperature salad, but you could easily leave out the radicchio and serve the vegetables hot as a side dish.

Roasted Green Bean and Potato [Salad or Side] With {or Without} Radicchio (Adapted from Cook's illustrated magazine of March 2008)

1 lb. green beans washed and trimmed and cut to about 1 inch pieces
1 lb. red bliss or other small red new potatoes, scrubbed and cut in half or quarters
3 tablespoons olive oil
salt and pepper to taste
1/4 teaspoon sugar
2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
1 small minced garlic clove
1 small head radicchio, washed in cut into strips (optional)

Place an oven rack at the lowest point in oven, place large rimmed baking sheet on rack, and preheat oven to 500 f. Mix up the oil, salt, pepper, sugar, vinegar, and garlic in a large bowl, and toss beans and potatoes in there until they are coated. Use a slotted spoon to carefully transfer the vegetables on to the now blazing hot baking sheet and save the bowl with the bit of oil mix left in it. Spread the vegetables to a single layer and roast about 20 minutes (do not stir them once on the sheet). Keep a watch -- mine were totally done at 20 minutes.

Carefully transfer your beautifully browned, roasted vegetables back into the bowl and toss in whatever remains in the bottom of the bowl. Now here's where you have options. You could add in the radicchio and stir it up so that the heat of the vegetables wilts the radicchio, and then you could serve it hot or let it cool down to room temp. You could just serve the potatoes and beans without the radicchio. The original recipe calls for letting the vegetables cool and THEN adding the radicchio, but we found this weird (the lettuce was way too crispy to pair with the vegetables) -- the radicchio needs to wilt down and "cook" by the heat of the roasted stuff in our opinion.

Regardless, though, if you've never roasted a green bean I do believe you are in for a treat.

Ten

April 4, 1998:

April 4, 2008:
Dean, at this moment -- 6:17 a.m. -- is officially ten years old. I do not know how a decade slipped by us. It's hard to remember life without Dean, and yet it seems he got to this point in such a hop, skip, and a jump that it can't possibly have been ten years already. It is the constant song of parenthood: where did the time go?

Dean at ten is a kind, thoughtful, caring, funny, sometimes intense, always empathetic person. He sees humor everywhere, laughs easily, and clears his place when he's done eating. He loves Legos, he has no interest in candy generally but loves dark chocolate, he's an avid reader and he writes great stories. He says "please," "thank you," and "I'm sorry" without being reminded (almost always), and calls out "are you all right!?!" if he hears someone stumble or drop something or sneeze. He likes to get his own way but has learned to let go of needing to get his own way. He is knowledgeable about so many things -- animals, insects, geography, plants, Pokemon, birds, and football to name a few. He loves to be at home, and he's a great explorer. I cannot imagine life without him, and at the same time force myself to realize that if 10 came this quickly then tomorrow he'll be 20. We'll enjoy each step of that journey as we have of the journey so far, and appreciate him for who he is today.

Happy Birthday, Dean, to the best boy I could have ever wished for.

A Pledge

I wonder if somehow this thin ice formed while a leaf was still there -- underneath it -- but I don't think so. How did the ice form itself, though, in such a leafy shaped way? I don't know. I do wish that "leaf" or "ice" began with the letter "D," since that's my next letter in the ABC-Along but if I keep my eyes open and my curiosity active then something will catch my eye....

I promise, though, that I won't go cheap and use "dog" for the photo -- in fact, I make a solemn pledge not to let this turn into the all-puppy blog. It won't be so easy; life has changed entirely as I knew it would, but my goal here is to fight to keep my creative life alive even in the face of new (though welcomed) demands. I'll simply say for now that I honestly did allow myself to take a deep breath and appreciate -- drink in -- the beauty of being outside at 3:20 a.m. in 18f. weather. It's not that I wanted to be there. I wanted to be in bed. Sleeping. But the puppy needed to be out and so I was out but instead of being upset about it I listened to the nearby owl and had the perfect view of the newly full moon to make me appreciate the moment. Part of being up for getting the dog and being willing to be the one primarily responsible for house-breaking him was the knowledge that it would force me to be outside a lot and I wanted to get something out of that. Even at 3:20 a.m.

Jess asked me if I'd needle felted any doggies yet. I haven't, but may put some birthday gift $ toward the supplies. Go check out her Easter swap; I don't think I can resist this one!

Thank you for all the kind birthday wishes! I almost wasn't going to mention my birthday here just because it's the type of thing I'm usually fairly private about, but I wanted to share my enthusiasm for birthdays generally and wanted to encourage everyone to think that birthdays are good things and never something to be glum about nor to ignore. I encourage you to celebrate your birthday this year -- every year -- in a way that feels exactly right, but to celebrate. Dean even managed to do the thing I never seem able to do: get the photo exactly as the candles (a representative 3 rather than the actual 46 of Dean's card!) are being blown out....

A Very Happy Birthday!

Here's the magnificent card Dean gave me this morning for my birthday! It's cold here today but the sun is shining, and we're all together for the day to celebrate. I've had a wonderful breakfast, fresh coffee, amazing gifts, and we're off shortly to do some book browsing and exploring; tonight we're going out for a Korean meal and then back home to put some candles in the brownies we made yesterday. Sweet. I tell Dean to always enjoy and celebrate a birthday -- never be sad or waste your birthday in any way. Birthdays are precious, each milestone is significant, and your age is just an interesting number -- a marker for how far you've come and for remembering how wonderfully the journey has been going so far.

Happy Birthday

This picture was not taken today, so I can't say, "THIS is what 9 looks like," but it was taken recently and is a favorite and is what almost 9 looks like. It is simply unbelievable to me how time is zooming by -- the last 4 or 5 years especially seem to have passed in half the time they should have taken. Today, as is our tradition, we have all taken the day off to celebrate; Dean was overjoyed to walk downstairs this morning to streamers and balloons and presents, wearing the birthday crown. And sunglasses. Even though the poor little sun was barely, barely up yet. He comes by his early rising rightfully -- he was born at 6:17 a.m.

Spring dog

It is a staggeringly beautiful morning here on the eastern side of central Massachusetts. My computer is next to a window, and I had to open it up to hear the birdsong which is now rich with many, many voices. At this time of the morning, the owls are still hooting, joining in the song birds with their low bass notes. The air is crisp -- probably about 43 f. or so, and the quality of light is such that you would know, even without knowing, that it is spring.

If you don't have Jenny's scottie dog pattern yet, you need it. I am using my re-felted felt to make this little guy, who's intended for Dean's lunch box next week as a birthday countdown treat. (The felt is pretty stiff and thick -- it's working, but again I would NOT recommend felting felt.)I thought I was so on top of things when, yesterday, I heard Dean coming up the stairs so I stashed the doggie under a pile of fabric left out just for that purpose. But Dean looked down at the table in front of me, saw the pattern pieces all cut out and with pin holes in them and said, "hey, who are you making the dog for?" I just gave him the look, the "boys who have birthdays next week should not be poking around and asking questions look," which he understood. In as much as I intended to be surprising him, I cannot tell you the joy it gives me that my son can glance at pattern pieces and discern their purpose, AND that he's at the stage in his life where he gets what I mean by my looks and just smiles and walks away happy.

A very happy birthday

Today is my 45th birthday, and I am delighted. I believe I was born on a Monday -- have to double-check that -- so at least for now I'll think of this Monday birthday as a particularly special one [yup, it checked out -- I was indeed born on a Monday -- how LIKE me to want to start right in at the beginning...]. I love birthdays -- mine and everyone else's. I feel a kind of bemused detachment from my age; my age has always been some interesting number, floating out in space, of which I have been somewhat in awe (hey, look at that! I'm 25, 35, or now, 45 -- how interesting) but I've never felt defined by (and certainly not limited by) my age. Perhaps it comes from being the youngest in my family? I tend to assume I'm younger than most, although of course with each passing year this is less likely to be true.... But it doesn't faze me, in any case.

Above is the spread of collage and text from my handmade calendar (collage is always the left page, calendar the right -- standard set-up, I suppose). Still formulating my plan for today, since the party had to be canceled (see below). A fabulous start already with a wonderful array of gifts from Ken and a handmade card by Ken and Dean. A trip to a bookstore and fabric/craft store may just be the ticket. We always take each other's birthdays, and our own, off from whatever else we're supposed to be doing; it's lucky that today, Presidents' Day, is a holiday for all of us anyway. It makes me sad when people just slog through their birthdays -- none of that at our house!