lilacs

My favorite smell in the world is lilac. Our backyard is lined with nine lilac bushes and they fill the air with the strongest, most fantastic lovely smell.

I remember last year, Rory and I were taking a walk in Gretna and found a backyard filled with lilac bushes just like our place in Minneapolis. We were smelling the flowers when the owners of the home came outside. By the time we left their yard they invited us to come back with vases and scissors to cut our own bouquets. And we did. A couple different times over the next 10 days.

I think that is how lilacs should work...if you don't have your own, you should really find someone to make you a bouquet. And if you have a whole bunch, you should be responsible to share them with others. The blooming season is just so short, it should really be enjoyed by as many people as possible. Let me know if you need a lilac partner and I'll hook you up :)

happy friday

motherhood, for me:

I have been trying to write a piece on motherhood for a few weeks now. I wanted to have something new on the blog for mother's day... sort of a reflective piece on 'life as a mom six months in..."

Turns out, I don't get as much time to write precisely because I am a mom. Also, everything I wrote felt accurate for some moods, and totally fictitious...depending on what kind of day it was. Yesterday I had a day that provided a bit of clarity for how I have experienced motherhood and I'd like to share this with you today.

***

I’m pretty sure I would sum up motherhood as a combination of two kinds of days. There are days when I feel like I've got it together, all plates are spinning in the air and I feel confident that I might just have this whole multi-tasking thing down. I walk around singing Chaka Khan's I’m every woman and enjoy a fridge full of food, the baby sleeping in his crib and the house looking clean and tidy. The laundry is clean and the dishes are done and the sunshine is pouring in through the windows. Right on the heels of those magical days come other days when I wonder if I could be any more disorganized, google recipes for what I can make with baking soda, A1 sauce and eggs that might be expired, do a double take to be sure those dust bunnies aren't actual bunnies and walk around the house singing Gnarls Barkley's I think I’m crazy.

Trouble is, when I wake up in the morning, there is no telling which song is waiting for me to sing.

For example, Friday I woke up ready for coffee with a group of women from church to celebrate a friend who is walking through a really challenging season. We were all supposed to bring something for her to enjoy, so the night before I baked chocolate chip cookies and found a few of my very favorite magazines, tied these gifts up with a lovely fabric ribbon, printed out the directions to where we were meeting and woke in time to get a shower in. I was about to leave my house with plenty of time to arrive right on time, directions in hand, feeling cute (read: showered) and I just may have been thinking proud thoughts like, “looks like someone’s got her act together.”

Checked my phone on the way out the door and the coffee had been postponed. It was a bummer, but Rory encouraged me to still use the time to do something by myself- he had Ivar.

The day was a great day. I went grocery shopping, bought birthday gifts for nieces and nephews and felt in control.

Fast forward to yesterday morning, the morning of the rescheduled ladies coffee.

I wake up and am not feeling super rested. The cookies that had been baked for last Friday have been consumed. No new cookies were baked. The magazines that were wrapped in a pretty ribbon were forgotten in the church nursery on Sunday morning. The directions for where I am heading were thrown away during a weekend cleaning.

I thought about taking a shower, but upon unzipping my son’s sleep sack, I realize that he is the one who gets to bathe this morning, as he is smeared in poo from the neck down. I have a flashback of me changing his diaper at 6 am and actually thinking, “I don’t need to keep my eyes open. Blind people change their baby's diapers all the time.” I regret not having opened my eyes during the changing as the diaper was only covering one butt cheek so that all of his poo snuck out the side, avoiding the diaper entirely. I made a mental note to leave blind diaper changing to the actual blind and to use my sight for all future diaper changes.

I call the church, and my friend Allie spots the magazines in the nursery right where I had left them.

As I leave the house, I am already late, though I still need to stop by the church to get my gift. I have not showered…in fact, I am sporting my glasses as there was no time for contacts. I carry no cookies and if we are really honest, I believe Rory and Ivar are probably relieved to see moody-me walk out the door.

The contrast between these two days is the very best way I can sum up what my new life is like as a mom. Some days I’m every woman, and other days I think I’m crazy. And yet, I have never in my life been so happy, been so hormonal, been so high, and been so humbled as I have while walking through this first year of motherhood.

Our Vegetable Garden

The weather turned nice in Minnesota and Rory and I hit the yard with wild abandon. We had been visualizing our game plan all spring-that-was-really-winter-still. So when the weather turned lovely, we got busy.

Rory worked on his raised bed vegetable garden and I planted a raspberry patch (more on that later). Ivar was a champ and either napped incredibly long naps or came out to kick it with us in the back yard. He is such a content kid.

Rory preps the ground for his raised bed.

One side of the frame is tarped to block topsoil weeds.

The finished frame.

Rory made his soil from scratch. He had to pick up bulk supplies from a garden wholesaler: compost (with manure of course), peat moss, and vermiculite.

The only way to mix the large quantities (almost 40 cubic feet) was rolling it around in a large tarp.

Rory followed a technique called Square Foot Gardening, where every crop gets planted in its own square. This lets him rotate the vegetables and stagger the harvest all summer long.
Next he'll plant lettuce, spinach, broccoli, squash, cucumbers, tomatoes, carrots, onions and potatoes.

morning snuggles

Ivar has been sneaking into our bed in the morning lately, unclothed and super cuddly. I don't know how he manages to get from his crib into our room, but it seems to be happening daily lately and might just be a new favorite time of the day for the rest of us. He's so soft and loves laying between us, moving his head from mom to dad back to mom and back to dad.