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OK, so I’m sitting here

For the second time in my life as a mom, my little girls have asked for me to let them put themselves to sleep like big girls.

So I read to them, got out of bed, turned off the light, turned on some lullabies, kissed them, told them I love them, tucked them in and slipped out of the room.

For the second night in a row, they feel asleep almost immediately.

Now I’m blogging, but just before that, I was just sitting here, staring into space.  I should be grateful that I have the night to myself, but I am in shock and not sure what to do with my time.  I should probably be going through files or packing boxes, but I feel disoriented.

We have always put our girls to sleep by reading them a story and then cuddling with them until they fall asleep.  Only then do we sneak out.  Lots of times, doing this makes me so tired that I end up just going to bed.

Sometimes, it made me crazed that I almost never had the evenings to myself.  My husband offered to put the girls to bed, but since I work out of the home full time, I really like bedtime so that I can spend time with the girls and read them stories.  I just wished that I had the energy after that to stay up and hang out with my husband and do other stuff, but so often I just don’t.

But then my friend Sandy told me to enjoy the bedtimes, that soon enough they would be a thing of the past.  So, I made peace with the fact that I just wouldn’t have the nights to myself for a while.

And now, here I am with a night to myself, and I just don’t know what to do with it.  I just want to snuggle with my girls, but at the same time I am so proud of them for wanting — and asking for — some independence.

I honestly can’t believe how fast they’re growing up.

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Adieu, sweet prince

Today we said goodbye to a family friend, the beloved dog of one of my closest friends.


Sweet Sam

We don’t have a pet.  We had some fishies for awhile, but we found it impossible to keep the tank clean. That, and Mr. Hubs doesn’t like to read directions or signage, and he inadvertently got a suckerfish that was actually for a tank double the size of ours.  The beast grew to the size of one of Mr. Hubs’ shoes and did nothing but suck the paint off all the tank decorations and crap long streams of skinny poo all over the tank, all the time.  Plus it scared the bejesus out of me, the thought that one day I’d lift the tank to sprinkle fish flakes in there, and I’d see the suckerfish, with its head sticking out of the water.  I imagined that I’d look close to see that the thing was finally growing land-lungs.

(Here, I pause to shudder as I recollect the horrible suckerfish.)

So I told Mr. Hubs to take care of things humanely, and when I came home one day, the problem was taken care of, and I don’t know anything more than that.

Our girls are true animal lovers, and we’ve told them that one day we’ll live somewhere where we can have a proper dog or cat.

In the meantime, they fell in love with my friend’s dog, a sweet, handsome yellow Labrador, a real prince.  He was always a perfect gentleman with my girls, a perfect dog for little girls to pet and to stuff with dog treats and to pester in that way that only little kids can pester a dog.  My family told me that I used to pester Walter, my grandparents’ yellow lab, just the same way, and he never flinched or complained.

After my heartbroken friend told me the news this afternoon, I thought about how we’d break the news to Dinah and Djuna.  I called my sister and asked her for the name of two children’s books about death, figuring I’d pick them up at the bookstore on the way home.  She read them to her son when we had a death in the family back in 2006, and I keep meaning to ask her for the titles …  But she was at work and didn’t know the titles off-hand and said she’d get them to me tomorrow.

So, we had to wing it.  I hope we did OK.

We told Dinah and Djuna just what my friend wanted us to tell them, that Sam just got so old that his body gave out.  They were very sad about it, and it broke my heart to have to tell them and to see them cry.  After a little while, they asked for Daddy to print out pictures of Sam for them to color so they could make my friend a card.  They colored dog pictures for the better part of the evening.

Today, on the day we lost Sam, we discovered that the pumpkin seeds are growing.  These aren’t just any pumpkin seeds.  These are seeds my girls planted a week ago, during our pumpkin carving afternoon, with my friend’s help.  The seeds are planted in an impossible spot beneath a fence, but my daughters were so excited about the whole project that they called it their “secret pumpkin patch.”


Giant, gooey pumpkin innards, and lots of seeds!


Planting the secret pumpkin patch under a fence.


Cleaning up

One of those impossible seeds has sprouted into a mighty seedling.  We think it is in honor of sweet, sweet Sam that the secret pumpkin patch has sprung to life.

Seems fitting, somehow.

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Watching my wedding clothes as they are dragged on the floor

My husband was desperately trying to meet a deadline this morning, so I got my daughters to play upstairs while I did some badly-needed clothes weeding.  He had the downstairs to himself, nice and quiet so he could concentrate on his work.

At some point, while scooting hangers from side to side in the closet, I remembered that I have been promising my girls that we’d look at my wedding clothes and that they could try them on.

Without too much trouble, I found the gorgeous cape that a close friend made for me to wear over my wedding outfit (a white close-fitting sweater with gold thread woven throughout and a creamy white floor-length trumpet-flare skirt, both very simple pieces by Nicole Miller).  The cape is creamy white velvet, with a deep red satin lining.  The red is the color of garnets, my birth stone.

My dear friend Nancy had worn a cape when she got married, and I had loved it.  Also, I thought a cape blowing in the wind would be very romantic.  Dwayne and I were married in Carmel, CA, on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

Djuna tried on the cape first.  Before I could say anything, she lifted up her hand — with the cape on top of it — to wipe her nose.  I winced.  But I didn’t say anything about it because she looked so excited to be wearing the cape she’s only seen in pictures up to now.  I told her to go down and show her father.

She headed down the stairs to show Daddy, and I stood watching her and the cape, my pretty, pretty cape, as it dragged on the floor behind her.  Then she came back upstairs to give the cape to her sister so she could drag the cape behind her on the stairs.

Remembering that my own mother used her wedding veil — to my grandmother’s horror — to make a mosquito netting for my fancy English pram, I watched Dinah sashay down the stairs to show Daddy the cape, and I figured, well, what else are wedding clothes for, for goodness’ sake?

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I actually made roll-out Halloween sugar cookies! (Gluten-free, no less)

Having a couple of Play-Doh fans for kids has meant promises to make cookies, the kind where you roll out the dough and use cookie cutters.  The kind I’ve never made before.  The kind everyone knows is a mess!

To boot, I need to make them gluten-free because one of my daughters has a gluten intolerance.

I looked around for a gluten-free sugar cookie mix, but I haven’t been able to find one.  So, I went to the fabulous Gluten-Free Girl blog and found her roll-out sugar cookie recipe and adapted it.  (Adapted it?!  I can’t even believe that I adapted a recipe.  Who am I?  Who have I become? But I did it.  We basically succeeded with our cookies, but what I *really* did was inadvertently discover a pretty good recipe for gluten-free shortbread.  More on that in a minute.  First, the cute pictures.)


Mixing Halloween-colored frosting


Here are some cookies, all rolled out, ready to bake!


We did it!

I originally thought that maybe we’d share these cookies with some of my friends at work.  But, after a bona fide licking party: licking fingers, licking knives, even licking the container holding the sugar sprinkles … once I even caught Djuna rolling the rolling pin uuuuppp and dowwwnnnn her clothes.  There were some sneezes and coughs thrown in for extra flavor.

So I decided, maybe I’d better not share the wealth this time.  Everyone will thank me for it.

The recipe I adapted from Gluten-Free Girl came out delicious and flaky, just like shortbread, really.  But it was hard to frost. The pumpkin-shaped cookies fared well, but anything with arms or legs, like the ghosts and cats, suffered casualties — multiple appendage loss, to be exact.  The cookies were just too delicate.

I followed Shauna Ahern’s recipe amounts exactly (note: in the comments section of Shauna’s recipe, Shauna added a note about not beating the shortening too much).

I used Whole Foods’ 365 Gluten Free All Purpose Baking Mix (it already has thickeners in it, so I didn’t add xanthan gum … but I might reconsider adding some next time).  Also, instead of 1/2 lb. of margarine and 1/2 lb. of butter, I used 1 lb. of Plugra style butter because I read somewhere or other that there is more fat in this kind of butter, and I thought it might help strengthen the dough.  I think this was a mistake from the sugar cookie point of view, but if you want gluten-free shortbread, this is the way to do it.

But I’m proud of myself for adapting a recipe — it’s probably the most daring adaptation I’ve ever tried, except for that time that my friend Allison and I tried to make cookies without a recipe when we were 10.  Of course, that was at Grandma’s house, where you could get away with experiments like that.
After our Halloween cookie adventure, we were exhausted, but the project was a blast, and I can’t wait to do it again with a new adaptation of the recipe and Thanksgiving-shaped cookie cutters!

P.S. I recommend listening to Jack Johnson’s soundtrack for the movie Curious George as you frost.  Lovely.