More about that Dream

I noticed a few months ago that the blogs I read, the magazines on my nightstand, the books on my library request list, the shows that I like to watch all have one thing in common: HOME. I really, really crave stability and always have. Not a boring rut, mind you. Stability. To me, this means that I have a safe place from which to travel, work, stretch and grow. The one thing I desperately want for my family is to provide a place where we can always come home to safely regroup. This doesn't have to happen in Portland. No, it could happen anywhere I create it. I just liked Portland and it inspired to me to get back to dreaming about this.

There is nothing wrong with the life I have now. In fact, I rather like it. Maybe it's just perpetual school/training talking, but did you ever get the feeling that as much as you love the here and now there is a destination still to move towards?  This destination has been there in my mind since as long as I can remember but it's always been shapeless and vague. I know well enough that in order for it to happen my vision has to be clear and specific. So that's what I've been working on in my minds eye: the rich details. 

I know I'm asking a lot but Hey, I can dream...

• Summer will feel like summer. We'll get strawberries from the farmers market and make strawberry ice cream, make popcicles in tupperware forms, go swimming, play in the water hose, pick berries, canoe in a body of water, go to bed with light still in the sky and only a sheet over me, take a picnic, and go swimming to cool off. Then at the end of the season the air will be crisp, the shadows will grow long, and the trees will shed their leaves in time to make Halloween extra spooky.

• Winter will feel like winter. We'll walk through snow to get our Christmas tree and put lights on the outside of our house, build a snowman, go sledding, drink hot chocolate, make soup, put an extra quilt on the bed, and wear slippers, scarves, mittens. Then at the end of the season the sturdy leaves of the crocuses will push through the frozen dirt just in time for Easter.

• Our house will be big enough but not a McMansion. It has a fireplace, stairs, hardwood floors, central heat and air, a butter-yellow kitchen with east-facing windows, a bedroom painted Tiffany blue, a finished basement with a guest suite, and an awesome stereo system. 

• I want room to run, bike and swim... Without fear of being run over.

• I want to run into friends at the farmers market, yoga studio, the grocery, my kids classroom, the library. I want to have coffee with these friends every Tuesday morning after we walk our kids to school.

• My kids will grow up in a community where they can ride bikes on the sidewalk, draw with chalk in the driveway, have a lemonade stand, outdoor movies, be watched over by all of the parents, and have sleepovers in a tent in the backyard. 

•  My husband & I can walk to a dinner date. 

• I want to pull into my driveway. Where I will park my car. Then I will haul my stuff a short distance into the house. 

•  I want to have dinner with my family every night (except date nights).

• My kid(s) and I will curl up in bed to read picture books. 

•  I'll sew, crochet, bake, paint - and I want to to do these things with my kid(s) . My kid(s) will have a space specifically dedicated to creating art and crafty projects. And I want us to wear matching aprons.

• Some day I'll peek out the kitchen window to see my husband on the back lawn coaching our children in some sport. 

• In the backyard there is a vegetable garden in raised beds, a water feature, pea gravel path, hummingbird feeder, regular bird feeder, wind chimes, and maybe a pool.

•  In the front yard there are flowers like peonies and lilacs. Sometimes I will cut some to bring inside and put next to my bed. I want a large porch with a swing to drink iced tea on. Some day Tim & I will wave from the porch as Ada goes off to prom and clap our hands as she pulls into the drive with our grandchildren.

Oh, in my mind the picture is so beautiful.

On an entirely different note: Since I didn't get these up earlier here are a few pics of Ada in the pool with Tim the night before we left Oregon. The bikini is a birthday present from Auntie Diana ;-)

Portland continues

The longer I am in Portland, the more I love it. I'm sure that this enthusiasm is in part related to the fact that I really needed a break. Some of it is the company of an old friend who is happy to let you be yourself. Some of it is surely related to the fact that we're on vacation. There's still that "grass is always greener" aspect that touches all of us periodically. Still, I love it here. Every day that we are here I find one more reason to love it. It's nice to have an answer when Tim asks me, "If you could live anywhere..." There's no telling what might be in store for us but I am completely working away on that dream I mentioned earlier.

A few pictures from the trip...

Dinner at Mama's


Lunch at Fuller's. Best tuna sandwich ever...tasted just like my Mom used to make.


Anthropologie. I like to foster a good self-image for my sweet, sweet heart.


Reading the paper with Daddy in the hotel room. This was after she puked on the bed. Smells great in there...


Berries at the Portland State University farmers market, the most beautiful produce I've ever seen.


Powells bookstore. Look at this kids section. I mean, look at this!!!


Katie & Anson


Happy family. I love it that I'm part of this.


Anson pretends that he is a rap artiste and Ada loves it. He used to be in a hair band. That's awesome.


This is why we tip so well. Well, this and the fact that I waitressed for a really long time and I get how bad it sucks to get a sucky tip.


Why are baby piggies so freakin' cute? I love it that her middle toe is her longest toe.


Along with Mt. St. Helen, the volcanic one that blew up in the eighties, Mt. Hood watches over Portland.


Back seat self-portrait.

Dream a Little Dream

I recently wrote about the law of attraction, which basically states that you attract into your life the people and circumstances that harmonize with your dominant thoughts. I have always put a great deal of faith in this principle. The idea of it is terribly fantastic:

your dreams will come true.

It's been a while since I've lost myself in a grand-scale, future-changing, drive-your-life, consume-your-imagination kind of dream. Somewhere in the process of defending a dissertation, taking several exams on a weekly basis, boards, more boards, moving, working, etc. I fell out of the dreaming habit. Or I might have been too damn tired.
I know what happens when you fail to create a life through your dreams: the result is stagnation, frustration, restriction. It's terrible and I want to avoid it. So I've forced myself to list my goals and the like but the exercise lacks passion. It has been a half-hearted effort because I haven't known what I wanted outside of te really fundamental things like Tim & Ada. Like so many things, it's an organic process: you can't rush the creation of a good dream.

Thank God, it looks as though the dream-free dry spell is officially over. The re-awakening started with the birth of Ada. It's impossible to not have a child and have dreams for them, to imagine your life with them, to visualize the home you want to create for them. Since then I've been stretching my dream muscles and the pieces are starting to fall into place now. Oh, beauty!! Movin' on to better things...


Portland. Who knew? We arrived yesterday few expectations. Tim has an NIH grant-writing workshop so Ada & I are on our own to explore this city that our friend Katie has called home for a grand total of 5 days. Today we walked Tim to his thing and went on to walk around downtown Portland. Ada fell asleep so Mama kept walking.



What I found was a breath of fresh air: this place has real good energy. I like it here. People smiled at me and my child. This is a departure from our trips through the Castro where the best we can hope for is to be ignored but typically we are glared at while "breeder" is mumbled under breath. Nobody knocked into us. I wasn't cut off even once. Common civility reigned.There was cleanliness. I saw only 3 homeless people and none of them heckled me for money. There is a humility to the people here. I'm not one for much sparkle or flash. I like good people. Real people. From what I've seen it wouldn't appear that the vast majority fancy themselves as the exception. I half expected for little singing birdies to bring me a coffee while little bunnies put slippers on my feet.

I learned something about myself today. I was leafing through a real estate booklet and I saw a beautiful craftsman style house, so common here. My first thought when I saw the picture of that house? I love it. My second thought? I could never live there. I caught myself thinking this. Why not? I asked myself. Then I realized....when I see a house like this - a house that a FAMILY lives in I see all the stability that I have always craved. Somehow, in my mind to live in a place like this you have to have some kind of stable family history to give your efforts some credibility. It's ridiculous, I know it is. But there it was, unearthed from my psyche by a real estate magazine. I can examine that thought now and have decided to dismiss it altogether. If I want to live in an old farmhouse then that's exactly what I'm going to do, damn it.

Our first full day in Portland peaked with a picnic on the soft, green grass under the shade of a tree next to the Willamette River. It was a perfect day.

The other thing that I love about this city is how I feel here. Dreamy, is how I feel.

Ada's Birthday & Father's Day

My girl turned one year old yesterday. I must have pinched myself a million times over the past 72 hours cause I just can't believe it's been a year. A whole beautiful, magical year of Ada. I'm not enough of a wordsmith to make the magnitude of this past year make sense. By all other measures it has been a rocky time but this little girl saved me for sure. I would have become completely insane without her to keep me grounded.

So I threw her a little party. I made the invitations myself, I enlisted help to make strings of flags, and I baked 10 cakes before deciding one was good enough to be her birthday cake. It seems silly, even to me, but this party was extremely important to me. It felt a bit like giving the bird to the bad parts of the past year and saying,  

"Look!! The good triumphed!!"

The preparations:





Pre-party lovin':








Visits with new friends:






Presents!!












And, of course, CAKE!!!














Strangely and sadly I have no "good" pictures of Ada with her grandparents or Uncle Colin. She moves too fast or our camera sucks too bad, doesn't matter - the pictures are all too blurry because she was so excited and moving so much. I'm not much of a photographer and truth be told, I often forget to reach for the camera. I hope these will put together the story for her when she's older. I looked like this after the last guest left and she was napping:

Happiest, happiest birthday, my heart. Love you so. 

FATHER'S DAY

I always say that my man is a good egg. And he is.

I hear stories from women whose husbands won't stay with the baby or the woman is too afraid to leave them alone. Not my man. He is all Daddy, all day, every Sunday. Today he celebrated Father's Day alone with Ada - they went and did a very father/daughter activity: bought diapers and formula. It doesn't get much more authentic than that. Then he came home and grilled out for us on his new Weber.

With Tim it's something more than being a great team player with Mommy: I love the way he loves our daughter. He has a squeeky voice he uses only for her. He can snuggle her close to soothe her. He carries her as if she were feather-light. He talks to her, teaches her, cares for her...and she responds like a fish on a hook. I think she knows that she is completely safe with him. She adores him.






Today we said goodbye to Violetta. I will miss her so much. It as great to be with her again - I love my friend. My daughter loves my friend. And my V loves my A. In my estimation, my daughter's community of loving people could never, ever be too big. There is always room for one more. Is it possible to get too much love? I think not: