The Trivial Pursuit of Happiness

I haven’t updated about the house sale lately, because there is nothing to update about. Nothing is happening, and while we are told that that is pretty typical for this time of year in this market, it is hard not to let my brain go to that “We’re never going to sell our house” place. I’ve gotten lazy about keeping the house show ready, since showings are few and far between, and we keep flirting with lowering the price again. More houses are on the market in our neighborhood, and after a short flurry of sales in spring, things have slowed to a standstill. We knew it was a hard market to go into, and at least we know we will come out ahead when we do finally sell, but oh how I wish we were out of here already.

And just because it made me laugh out loud this morning: Zillow is on crack. Since we put the house on the market, it claims our home has gained nearly $100,000 in value, and ohhhhh my dears, that is funny enough to make me call Tom at work, wondering who he paid off. Hey people, Zillow says you are getting a crazy good deal buying this house, so, uh, come on over! Well, give me an hour to clean the bathrooms. Bring your big checkbook.

I’ve been feeling very quiet lately, both in words and in spirit. I am daydreaming more, doodling on the pages of my paper journal instead of scribbling down every impatient thought, and taking more deep breaths.

It’s a nice change of pace for me, since my anxiety has been running high the last few months, with trying to sell the house, traveling, and just being crazy anxious me. It’s as if I have rounded the bend in the river, and realized that the rapids are behind me, that I can just float for a while.

I found this Moosewood cookbook, Pretend Soup, at a garage sale the other day, and Ella fell in love right away. Each recipe has drawings of each step, so in the last week Ella has helped me make pancakes, quesadillas, and popovers. She ‘reads’ me the recipe, and does all the pouring and stiring. Measuring and using the stove are still my jobs, and Alice’s is to play with a spoon and a bowl of flour, and makes sure everything in the kitchen is covered in a fine silt.

Today Ella decided that she wanted to make “bagel faces”, so we gathered the supplies, and I let the girls go at it.

Before – we used broccoli sprouts, black olives and red peppers, but you can use any fruits and veggies that sounds good, or that you are trying to make enticing. Neither of my girls will eat red peppers, so I thought it was worth a shot (I ended up eating them all, I’m not complaining).

Alice’s bagel faces (I did the cream cheese)

And Ella’s bagel faces. I’m thinking that perhaps we should have called these ‘Joker faces’.

I can’t believe I didn’t post at all this week. I swear we are alive and well over here, even though this was one of those weeks. Ella fell off a chair and needed xrays (she is fine), friends were in the hospital (we are glad you are home Chels!), we got discouraging news about selling the house, it has been hot and my brain turns to mush over 95f, my car broke down, we had unexpected bills in the mail, Tom had a few stressful days at work, Ella had nightmares every night … it was just one of those weeks. But tomorrow is the weekend and we are off to the lake again, with my trusty sewing machine.

Last week I finished these little shirred tops in an hour and spent the rest of the weekend looking for things to do, so this week I am going prepared. Pajamas, hats, and possibly even a shirt for me is on the docket, which means of course that I will not even have a chance to unpack my machine. This week has really worn me down – I am already anticipating the worst.

Last week, as I was standing in the girls’ door way singing a improvised lullaby (“Go to sleep, go to sleep, oh god why won’t you sleep, Mommy loves you, but she’d rather, be sleeeeping right now…” ) I had an almost physical memory of walking in the bread aisle of the supermarket in Fairfax Oklahoma, six years old and laughing with my mother. It’s a family joke that I do not have memories, I have just memorised the stories my sister has told, but this was a moment from 20 years ago, suddenly real. I could smell the fruit pies, I could see the uneven floor, I could hear my mother laughing, but most importantly, I felt exactly what it was to be young, and adore just being with my mother.

I’ve been carrying that feeling around with me this week.  My love for my girls is unwavering, but sometimes the constant juggle to meet everyone’s needs, without the expectation of having my own met, is overwhelming. Mothering can feel like a job, rather than a gift, and their constant need for my attention (“Look mom, look, this is how I breathe!”) is more grating than flattering. But here is this moment, this memory, of adoration and love, a small child that did not need to know anything more about the world than that her mother was laughing. And suddenly I realize I have underestimated us all. My girls are capable of so much love, and I am capable of bringing that out in them. My job is less about feeding them, dressing them, making sure they have on sunscreen… it is about teaching them joy.

So today, on what would have been my mom’s 50th birthday, we’re going to throw her another birthday party, and we are going to laugh. We do not have time for anything else.

Another productive weekend at the lake. With Alice’s help, I cranked out two little dresses, and two pairs of capri tights, in two days. It makes me wonder what I could accomplish if we just turned off the internet. (Haha, yeah right. A week into it and I would be too depressed to sew. Downtime is not wasted time, folks.)

Ella picked out the pattern, and was only mildly disappointed that I nixed all the princess dress patterns that she picked out of the book at Joann’s. She sat and flipped through the books with me for nearly a half hour, talking about all the people, asking me when we could make this, or this. She finally chose this one because “it looks good for dancing”.

I am really enjoying sewing lately, but in true Ivory-fashion, I know I will get bored soon and move on to knitting, or beading, or underwater basket weaving. With my craft room packed up right now, it’s hard to justify buying new stencils/scrapbooking supplies/embroidery hoops though, so maybe I’ll get a few more weekends of sewing in before I get distracted. Maybe I’ll actually get to some of the patterns I’ve bookmarked in the issues of Ottobre my mother-in-law brought back from a quilt show for me. Maybe.

Saturday is day 21, the last official day of a possible chicken pox outbreak around here. I have been thinking of it as the day we get out of jail, since we’ve been under voluntary quarantine for the last few weeks. Hey, I’m a  hypochondriac for you, as well as me. I have enough paranoia to go around, I’m generous that way. And as much as I’m sure the girls miss their friends, I miss mine as well. Between  running away to Colorado and voluntarily exposing my children to the plague, we’ve seen very little of our friends this summer.  Lucky for us, N needed an emergency sitter for her little guy A (who has had the pox) this week, so the girls and I have been making the most of the company.

I believe in this photo Alice was saying “Mine! Mine, Oh no oh no, mine!” Who am I kidding, of course she was saying that. Alice, my darling little bully. Every day she reminds me that she will not be walking in her sister’s pacifist footsteps.  Every gentle correction is met with a scowl and a “NU-UH”, and no amount of cuddles will convince her that she doesn’t want to touch the oven. Hitting you may make her feel better though, so she will try that. There are times that I let the mama guilt get to me, and I wonder if it is because she is the second child; if I have not had as much time to nurture her;  if it was all that damn coffee I drank during her pregnancy;  maybe it was those months of struggle I went through after she was born, and there is always a myriad of other explanations where I am the catalyst for her aggression. Then, as I am scribbling about it in my journal, she will hit her sister in the face for trying to hug her, and I get over myself. There will be plenty of things to blame me for in therapy later, but she was also just born who she is. And that person is someone who doesn’t want your damn hugs.

Quick, what is cuter than a little girl in a rainbow skirt?

Two little girls in rainbow skirts!

What, you want cuter?

Fine, two little girls in bonnets and rainbow skirts!

This is what I did this weekend while Tom and Mike replumbed the upstairs of the cabin. The girls played with bugs on the deck, and I played with my new fabric. Since Tom packed up my craft room while we were in Colorado (thank god he has the clarity of mind to leave out my machine), I have been avoiding buying more fabric, but these precut rainbow strips were impossible to pass up. The bonnets are just fat quarters and a bit of timtex, and considering I did not have a pattern, I think they are pretty cute.  It’s amazing what I can accomplish when I do not have TV, internet, or phone service.

This weekend, out at the cabin, Tom’s stepdad Mike asked me if I had pictures of the cabin when they first bought it so he could compare them. I didn’t, since that first summer was mainly demolishing the main floor, building a loft, deck and dock, and digging out what is now the bottom floor. At that point “going to the lake” would have meant sleeping in the car, peeing in a bucket, and climbing down a rope to get to the water. No thanks, I’ll just stay in town. That was five years ago, and in five summers of every-other-weekends, they have managed to rebuild the place from the ground up. Now when we go out for the weekend, instead of sleeping in the loft and spending all night scared that Ella would a)climb over the ghetto baby gate and fall down the very steep stairs, or b) could fall down the cracks between the beds and the walls, we stay in the finished apartment downstairs.

Two years ago, this was a hole in the ground. I do not come from a family of builders, so the idea that three guys can transform a pile of dirt into a mini-home on the weekends kind of stuns me. The dock, and deck are also finished, and this year they are putting in new plumbing, electrical, windows, insulation and drywall upstairs, and then a new kitchen and floors. Oh, and ripping off the front of the cabin and rebuilding it, in three days (goes the plan).  Next year is a light load (reroofing the place, and taming the landscape), because  they will also be finishing the basement of the little house.  I wish I had taken more pictures of the progress, and less of my feet in the water (2005, 2006, 2007, 2008). So much for being the family record keeper.