the latest battle in the war on fabric

The war on fabric is less well known than the War on Terror or the War on Drugs, but it's been going on way longer than either. The rules of engagement are as follows: I am not allowed to buy any more fabric unless a) it helps me get rid of fabric that is already in my stash and b) the total amount of fabric in the stash decreases with the project.

Last night two minor skirmishes were won: an old skirt of mama H.'s was converted into a Top Secret Birthday Present, and a piece of grey paisley cotton that has been languishing for literally years was turned into a dress for baby. Here is a picture of it when I finished it late last night, thinking, oh, she'll be able to wear this when she's two-ish:

sweet, no? and here's a picture of it when i tried it on her this morning, and it turns out she's nearly bursting out of it already. oh well.

les feet ils sont a point de fall off

We are day 2/3 of baby & me on our own taking care of each other (babydaddy saw she was cutting a new tooth and has wisely jumped ship for the weekend to LA), and we are both getting a wee bit pissed off about the situation. I say she started it, and even if she thinks I started it she can't say anything to retaliate, because HA! she can't talk. Admittedly she can (and does) yell, but I have the ultimate trump card: if she gets too horrible, I can leave her outside for the nice homeless people who camp in the alleyway across the street from us to either take care of or barbecue up for their dinner as they see fit. I might do that. I haven't decided yet. I'll assess how hungry they look next time I look out the window.

Yesterday (seeing as how we just got back from extended travelling etc etc etc) I thought

I would be a Really Good Selfless Mummy and stay home doing fun baby things All Day Long: lying on my belly on the carpet singing inane songs and woggling toys at her in an effort to encourage to her crawl towards me (most of the time she just grins at me and flops around pointlessly, until she decides she **REALLY WANTS THE TOY** and then she gets this scary intense psycho killer expression on her face and commando-crawls at 50 mph until she has grabbed the plastic duck or the whale on wheels or the 1970's era mini-maraca or whatever it is I have been waving at her.) I also decided (since the weather was nice and we were at home) that we would ramp up the toilet training, so we spent most of the day diaper-free in the kitchen, bathroom, and back deck, which was very exciting (after which, I have to say that cleaning up pee puddles really doesn't take any longer than changing a nappy, and it's definitely got a smaller carbon footprint. I won't go so far as to claim it's environmentally friendly, since the house technically is an "environment," and an ammoniac pong doesn't quite say, oh, go on, come in and have a cuppa, but still.)

Today, however, we left the house! (blogworthy news, I know). After baby swim lesson at the YMCA (highlight: chewing on chlorine soaked blocks of styrofoam. Her, not me) we walked all the way to the Legion of Honor (that's like five miles, plus a bit if you get lost in the Presidio, which of course we did, but it wasn't totally our fault, because the trail we were intending to take was closed for renovation) to go see the Mourners exhibit - 15th century sculptures from the tomb of John the Fearless (Jean sans peur if you are being authentically Burgundian about it). The alabaster mourners were nice, but less than totally thrilling - I think I'd imagined them slightly larger than lifesize, somehow, like 8 or 9 feet tall, rather than 10" or so, and I was expecting to be able to walk in solitude among them in a spooky dim cathedral light rather than maneuvering the *&$! stroller around several dozen middleaged people with fanny packs drifting myopically around a modern little gallery space.

But! I _was_ thrilled by some of the other stuff at the LoH; I've only ever been to special exhibits there, and never bothered to actually go and look at the stuff that's in the regular collection, and thanks to the %^&#! stroller I had to go hunting for elevators, which took me through some of the regular collection, and there are some really really really really nice paintings. There's a lovely Raphael Madonna, and Monet Venetian Grand Canal (not usually my cup of tea but I make exceptions for the warm pinkypaleblueyyellowy architectural ones viz the views of Rouen cathedral), two Fantin La Tour still lifey things I quite liked, and a whole pile of portraits by Sir Henry Raeburn what I thought were way cool in a Singer Sargenty kind of way. In fact, I might go out on a limb, and say I like them BETTER than a lot of Singer Sargents!!!! omg. sacrilege. The only painting I've seen of his (that I knew about) previously is the famous one of the skating minister:

which is fantastically weird and wonderful and makes you think both Henry Raeburn and the Reverend Robert Walker must have had a sense of humour. I have ordered a Henry Raeburn book from the library, so I'll tell you for sure once it arrives whether he really is my new painting BFF. There's also some loverly medieval and Flemish Renaissance stuff what I will not bore you with because I spend way too much time drooling over anatomically odd Virgins and dour black-suited burghers in this blog as it is.

After the LoH we slogged home; a BOO to the evil bus driver lady who slammed the door on my face and a YAY to the nice bus passenger lady who opened it again and helped me carry the aforementioned *&$%?! stroller up the bus steps for me. And another YAY for the baby being asleep, the laundry being started, dinner being eaten, and a hot bath with my name written all over it.

etymology of boston = st. botolph's town

Did you know that? We learned that from the framed informational thingy hanging in the foyer of our INCREDIBLY snazzy little apartment/hotel what we are staying in, which frankly if I did not own one and a half housefuls of junk of my own, had no dependents (I am counting both my baby and my post-recent-appendectomy babydaddy in that designation), lots of spare cash, no employment obligations, and a desire to up and move to Boston, I would move into tomorrow. It's called "The Inn at St. Botolph's" (which in Bostonian is prounounced St. ButOFFs, as in move your buttOFF my chair) and is just the niftiest most stylish little compact urban living space EVUH and I LOVE IT. I would post pics, but i'm too lazy. So you'll just have to believe me.

It turns out that we were not quite at maximum gluttony during the montreal phase of the trip, since we did take the occasional time-out from eating to go for a daily dip in the hotel pool (for example). Ooh! that reminds me: baby has a new trick! It's kind of freaky, because it makes you think that she actually sort of understands words, when really there's no way she possibly can, right? what we do is this: she sits on the edge of the pool in all her glorious little fatness, and I count to three, and on three, she launches herself off the edge of the pool into my arms with a cannonball splash and when she hits the water she looks extremely startled, and then super pleased with herself, like HEY! check me OUT! I just found a cure for AIDS!" and laughs like a drain and clearly wants to do it again.)

So anyway, as I was saying, turns out we were not at maximum high-quality calorie consumption in Montreal, because we have actually increased both the quality and quantity of calories consumed since arriving in Boston, if only because our nifty snazzy teeny tiny hotel/apartment does not have a pool, so we spend the extra half hour per day eating instead. here is a list of what I have eaten:

Dinner the night we arrived: the best saag paneer and aloo paratha I have ever had in my LIFE (and I have eaten a lot of saag paneer and aloo paratha in my life. Every time I go out for Indian food, I think, "I should get something other than saag paneer. I always get saag paneer." And then I think, "But I really LIKE saag paneer," so I just get saag paneer, and it's usually pretty good, which reinforces my desire for saag paneer the next time I go out for indian food, but Imight never be able to get saag paneer again because it would never be as seriously scrumptious as this was. I think they sprinkled crack in it.)

Continental breakfast at snazzy hotel: yoghurt, bagel, OJ

Brunch out with nice friend people: tarragon chicken salad, soda bread with raisins, salad

Dinner at more nice friend people's house: grilled sea bass, delicious salad, more wine than advisable

Post dinner: pistachio icecream

First breakfast this morning: continental snazzy hotel bagel, yoghurt, OJ again

Second breakfast with nice friend people: cinnamon bun and part of a lemon ginger scone

Lunch with nice friend people: salumi plate, sweet pea & mushroom gnocchi, delicious rabbit dish that got sent from the kitchen accidentally, and for pudding shortbread with lemon semifreddo and blackberries yummmmmmmmmmmmm

Dinner tonight will be relatively restrained: leftover Indian food, I think. with maybe some leftover cinnamon bun and strawberries for pudding.

I had the morning off from babyduty this morning, which was lovely: I went to the MFA to go and moon over the Singer Sargents, and I ended up doing some unexpected mooning over some of the other 19th century American painters. A lot of the 19th century French stuff is too insipid and simpering for me, but some of the American stuff is great. I also had the lovely surprise of running into a Velazquez that i hadn't known was there - the portrait of the grumpy middleaged Don Luis de Gongora y Argote:

and you see it from across the room and think, holy shit I know that painting.I savoured the darley boit girls:and didn't let myself look at them until I had gone around the whole rest of the room that they are in. Such a truly excellent interesting painting.

So sweet to be tucked up in bed on a rainy afternoon full of good food and art with babydaddy asleep next to me and baby in her Captain America outfit (red trousers, blue t-shirt with white star on it) now awake and wriggling away trying to help me. OK time to rescue her - she has gotten herself wedged between the pillows and is squeaking.

quacking with the quebeckers

Bonjour eh from Montreal

I am lying in bed in our suite at the Hotel Square Phillips, laptop balanced on my bellyful of cheese fondue and apple crepe, having just had my first full day of being thirtyseven years old. it is a sign of my advanced age that I was unable to get out of bed to rally for the post-kids'-bedtime afterparty, but a sign perhaps of continuing compensatory immaturity that when the post-kids'-bedtime afterparty came to our bed (if Mohammed won't go to the mountain...) the final game of Loaded Questions was very, very bum-joke-centric. Tomorrow is a whole new day in which to be grownup. Maybe.

I like Montreal more than I remembered from my last visit: there are lots and lots of elegant little parks and fountains and olde worlde buildings and pedestrian-only streets and we have not had a single bad meal the whole time (except for the uninspired 'continental breakfasts' at the hotel which are boring (cornflakes, yoghurt, toasted bagels) but better than the stale donuts and styrofoam coffee which go by the same name at an American motel). Tantalizingly, we have yet to have poutine. We leave tomorrow after lunch. It WILL happen. (We have however had: macaroons, canelloni, crepes, fondue, raclette, ice cream, steak tartare, a red pepper mousse thingy with mozzarella foam, sesame buns, szechuan food orgy, and several other things that I am doubtless forgetting).

Babydaddy and I had a hot date last night sans bambina, which was very thrilling: we nicked a luggage rack wheely thing from the hotel porters (someone had left it in the hall), set up her little baby tent thing on it, and put her to bed; once she was asleep we wheeled her into nice friends' room, so they could babysit her while we went out and thankfully she required about as much maintenance as a suitcase. Such a good baby!) The intention was a glass of wine and possibly dessert somewhere, but instead it was mostly a strolling date: there was a beautiful outdoor exhibit of huge blownup aerial photographs of different places on earth with abstract geological formations (many taken around turkmenistan and the caspian sea, which I am now hot to visit), and we also sat on a park bench for a little while, watching the local nightlife go by (a lot of sequins, high heels, and postage stamp sized skirts; it's mcgill university frosh week and the fresh flesh is on display in a big way) and eating frozen yoghurt before settling on a little frenchy french place for our glass of cheap red wine.

I think on the whole it is definitely easier to enjoy the baby in rural settings than urban ones: in vermont, I could roll around on the lawn with her all day with occasional breaks for a dip in the lake and/or reading, and the principal pleasure of urban holidays is going out to eat. I declare that eating in restaurants with children is officially a pain in the ass. Restaurants plus children plus babydaddy's intensive standards of hygiene plus my standards of manners comme il faut is kind of an unachievable combination. Basically, everyone would be better off if the kids were allowed to crawl around eating dropped bits of food under the table: the kids would have more fun, the adults would be able to have a conversation that consisted of more than OH MY GOD TAKE THE FONDUE SKEWER AWAY FROM THE BABY BEFORE SHE POKES HER LEFT EYEBALL OUT AS WELL AND OH SHIT IS THAT HER RIGHT EYEBALL ALREADY FLOATING IN THE HOT CHEESE?!?!?!, the pediatric ophthalmological surgeon on duty at Montreal General Hospital would get to have a quiet night catching up on his/her Facebook updates, the waitress wouldn't have to sweep the floor in a five foot radius around the table afterwards because all the pieces of dropped frenchfries, lardons, cornichons, and other delicious debris would have been hoovered up by ravenous little subtable mouths. Et cetera et cetera.

But everyone suffers from an overwhelming sense of duty: babydaddy has to go to the loo to rinse off any baby-item that hits the floor, the waitress feels obliged to provide a high chair to strap the kids into, the kids feel obliged to scream and wriggle and throw things, and I feel obliged to not allow my baby to avulse her own eyeball with a fondue fork. argh. My baby's fucking cute now, but I admit I am looking forward to being able to eat in a restaurant like a normal person again, and not feel obliged to leave a fifty percent tip and avoid eye contact with all the other patrons.

Other highlights of the day: tea at a fancypants Chinese tea house (I had autumn jasmine flower tea, with one of the little sea anemone tea leaf bundles that opens out into a flower when you pour the hot water on it. fun!), cool echochamber art installation thingy, and the fact that babydaddy's new bedtime lullaby for the baby (learnt on this holiday) is the song about the three old ladies locked in the lavatory. He loves it, especially the part about the vicar.

OK eyes are closing involuntarily. Good night to all...

vermont holiday blog entry part la seconde

Nice friend's family's holiday house is totally fabuloso - rambling creaky 90 year old country house with enormous lawns rolling down to the lake, with a rickety little dock that I swam off every day except the first (because the hurricane was still going on, so instead we sat inside and drank wine and played "Loaded Questions" and sang kids' songs with the bambini gathered round the piano. it wasn't quite quite my ultrageeky fantasy of four part madrigals, but it came pretty close, AND I didn't even have to ask for it.) While overall the last few days were really fun, I will offer a variation on Sartre's famous dictum, that hell is other people's children, at least at night: an incubus possessed each of the children in turn at night, so after the first night, we didn't get an awful lot of sleep, whether it was S. (age two) throwing a two hour long shitfit about not wanting to go to bed, or I. screaming like a banshee at four a.m. "I HAVE TO GO PEE! I HAVE TO GO PEE! I HAVE TO GO PEE!" or, yes, even my own bundle of rapture failing to uphold her perfect reputation and deciding at midnight two nights in a row that somewhere there was a party going on, and dammit she wanted to be part of it. A. bless her was a good sleeper, but less competent on the urinary continence front, let's just leave it at that.

Three days of eating, cooking, swimming, sunbathing, reading my John Le Carre novel (which I have to admit I am a little bamboozled by; there are rafts of characters that I haven't been able to keep track of, and I am a little suspicious at this point in the book that he isn't keeping track of them either), and playing Loaded Questions. I will never be able to think about Rick Santorum in quite the same way again.... (those with a strong stomach can Google Dan Savage's attempt to redefine the words "Rick" and "Santorum," but you will likely regret it). The last two nights babydaddy (who, if anyone were in doubt about his serious machoness, stopped taking even ibuprofen a mere four days post-appendectomy) produced a magnificent barbecue dinner, and we had an oboe concert on the front porch as the sun set. What a good note to end a blog entry on....

arrives a Montreal - holiday blog entry!

Ooh, looking at the phrase "arrives a Montreal," (as in "nous sommes...") I wonder if it's possible to compose a grammatically correct sentence in one language that uses words that exist as real words in another language? too much to hope, I think, that you could get a sentence that was grammatically complete in both languages. If I knew someone who worked in language translation at Google, I would totally ask them to apply their massive brain to that entirely trivial problem. In the meantime....

New Experience numero un: hurricane! wow. we didn't actually experience full on Hurricane Irene, I don't think, but that was rain that meant Bidness with a capital B. We are getting to be seriously savvy baby-travellers at this point, a well-oiled babycare machine travelling at 600 mph at 37000 feet, safari pants-pockets stocked with extra pacifiers, sanitizer gel, spare nappies, tupperware containers of mashed fruit, etc. - and I get extra points on this trip for having a second dependent, as the usual hefter of heavy bags was too busy popping Percocet for his two-day-old appendectomy incision - but I have to admit that we were inadequately prepared for the gigantic wall of water that sloshed down on us as soon as we left Logan airport for Vermont in our trusty rental car. It was I think the scariest driving I have ever had to do: rental car + unfamiliar roads + dark night + precious if somewhat cranky cargo + tired from long flight + jetlag + long way to go + sketchy directions once we got into vermont + HUGE ASS QUANTITIES OF WATER, like someone had turned on a giant faucet pretty much right over the car. Windscreen wipers going frantically, multiple near spins-out-of-control-from-hydroplaning, tidal wave every time a truck passed us, etc. I don't think my back touched the backrest of the carseat once the whole way. We stopped briefly for dinner at a Burger King, where the baby flirted with the Latina lady mopping the floor, and babydaddy and I ate a meal which we lived to regret. I have not eaten at a fast food restaurant since watching the movie SuperSize Me, and even our feeble attempt at squeezing a 'healthy' meal out of the Food Industrial Complex felt like a total sellout (we had a "garden salad" (wilted iceberg lettuce with three slices each of a tomato that died of anemia long before we got to it), and half a minitray of "chicken tenders", about which the less said the better. I renewed my vows never to eat at a place like that ever again, and I don't think it will be a difficult vow to keep. Not entirely sure how/why we lapsed, other than we had five hours in the car without the prospect of anything else being open. Five hours without food would have been better. Ennyways.

Drive drive drive drive drive slosh slosh slosh slosh rain rain rain rain until we arrive at Caspian Lake in northern Vermont, where, after a short stint of pootling around dirt country lanes in the dark cursing the sketchiness of our directions and the absence of cell phone reception, we pass by a house with lights still on and voila! magic! through the darkness, nice friends can be seen having a convivial time framed in the lit window. Hooray!

We unpack car, baby, piles of stuff (no longer raining, but it is one a.m.) and get bundled straight into bed after lightning tour of the house (old creaky wood new england battered sofas old piano ancient kitchen sliding window shutters no noise at all except lovely little tree/lake related night time noises) and sleep the sleep of the catatonic for ten hours straight, baby included hallelujah. we really have the best behbeh ever. she's cute AND she sleeps. have I mentioned recently that I LOVE her???

ok am going to hit publish post now and continue adventures another day because it is bedtime delicious bedtime. bonne nuit (that's a foreshadowing of montreal :))