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The lucky winner of the $100 Tea gift certificate, chosen by random integer generator, is...lucky commenter #13, Kate! Huzzah! Enjoy those adorable baby clothes, Kate. Thanks to everyone for entering, for sharing your weekend plans and just for being here in general. You're the bee's knees.
Here is the little spokesmodel showing off her other new dress:
This was fun, wasn't it? I think we'll have to do it again sometime!
It is hardly a secret that I adore Tea Collection, since Felicity has been wearing their stuff practically since the moment she was born. The clothes are beyond adorable -- um, hello:
And, as if the cuteness weren't enough, everything from Tea is top quality, made of ultra-soft cotton that doesn't turn into a pilly, faded mess after lots of washings.
Here's Felicity in her newest Tea acquisition:
It might be my favorite thing in her whole wardrobe.
(I also got her this dress, which makes me die a little of happiness, and I can't wait to see her in it.)
As you can plainly see, Tea's designs for boys, girls and babies are totally unique, play-friendly and fun, and each collection is inspired by a different area of the world (the latest is evocative of Modern Mexico). The baby clothes make phenomenal shower/newborn gifts, plus gift-wrapped items arrive tied up all snazzy-like in a cloth Furoshiki Wrap -- imagine how smug you can be handing that pretty package over at a party!
To top it all off, Tea recently launched a Women's line, which is as fresh and comfy-looking as the kids' stuff (I was drooling over the La Rambla dress, but it is sold out in my size! Someone else go get it, quick!).
So! Now is YOUR chance to treat yourself or someone you love to some sweet Tea clothing, because the awesome folks at Tea have a $100 gift certificate for me to give away! ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS, Y'ALL. For one of YOU!
Enter by leaving a comment on this post -- one comment per person, please -- before 9pm Eastern Time on Friday, July 29, and I will announce a randomly selected winner on Monday (OH, the SUSPENSE!). Tea can only ship in the US, so unfortunately we can't have foreign entrants (sad!).
If you freeze over what to say in your comment (as I do in similar situations), you can tell me what your plans are for this weekend. But you don't have to! You can just say anything that springs to mind. Like how cute my baby was (and how BALD she used to be! But now she has hair! Miraculous!).
Good luck and happy shopping!
Tea Collection approached me about doing this post, provided me with a gift card, and agreed to give one away to you lovely people. Of course, the opinions stated are my own and I wouldn't do this if it weren't a product I felt strongly about. So there.
One thing I hadn't considered about having a kid is how much physical labor is involved. The hefting and the bending and the stooping and the grappling with the squirmy, dense little body AND with all the attendant gear. Getting through airports with a 25-pound child is at least a week's worth of exercise in itself, especially with a convertible carseat in tow (even with a set of wheels to ease the load).
At one point on our last trip, Joe was doing the child-taming while I was carrying that bastard carseat and my stuffed backpack and the carseat-wheels across the tarmac to the plane as the sun beat down on me and it seemed like I would be crossing that baking expanse of asphalt for the rest of my life.
And that was after having to get the unwilling child into her carseat, uninstall the carseat at the rental car drop-off, carry a child who very much did NOT want to be carried ("Down. DOWN!") through the parking lot, restrain said child from climbing all over every stationary object in the terminal, chase after her while she ran up and down a ramp while Joe waited on line to drop our bags at the counter (for almost an hour, JEEZ), wait on the security line with her thrashing in my arms ("DOOOOOWN!"), carry her through security (liquids out of my bag, everything in the bins, baby's shoes off (SIGH), don't drop the boarding passes, get her sippy cup tested for explosives (double sigh)) (Joe was getting the carseat through security, by the way, and he had been dealing with all our suitcases before that; it's not like he was sitting somewhere having a pina colada) ("DOWN!!!!!"), and entertain her for another 45 minutes in the gate area. They should really have sherpas for hire at airports, to get you from the curb to your plane.
The whole thing was EXHAUSTING, but even a simple trip to the park on a Saturday can be nearly as tiring. I'm just saying, while it's obnoxious for celebrities to say that they stay movie-star fit by chasing their kids around (because we are not STUPID; WE KNOW that is not ALL they are doing), the mothering gig is far more physically demanding than I anticipated. And I am tired.
Maybe being so tuckered out is part of the reason that I have become such a chronic foot-dragger these days. I have always done best under moderate pressure -- I thrive on clear deadlines and defined expectations -- and have always had a propensity for procrastination when things haven't been busy enough or whatever. But now even simple tasks go undone for AGES if I do not have a pressing reason to complete them.
For example, the cat has been due for a checkup for a couple of months. Mind you, he is solely an indoor cat and never encounters other cats, and his health has always been good -- there is no reason for concern. But of course I want to do my duty as a pet owner (even if that duty requires me to lure him by deceit into the bathroom, then have him tear my shirt and forearms to shreds as I shove him into his carrier). Nevertheless, I forget every damn day to pick up the phone and call the vet. The reminder is on my to-do list, which is right THERE on my desk. And yet... See also: the dental appointment I was supposed to make in June. Blergh.
On a grander scale, you've heard me whine forEVER about wanting to write a book, but aside from a failed attempt at National Novel Writing Month (I lasted, I believe, three days), I've done nothing to make that goal come to fruition. This is something I've wanted to do as long as I can remember, ever since I borrowed my mom's old typewriter when I was nine and started to peck out a heavily autobiographical novel (the original working title was "Me: Fourth Grade Tomboy", which I later revised to "Me: Fourth Grade Dreamer" -- do you smell a best-seller or what?). Maybe it's a fear of failure, maybe it's a lack of discipline, maybe I lack creativity or skill, or maybe I just don't want it badly enough, but despite several attempts, I've never gotten more than a few chapters into any project.
Over the weekend, I decided that it is time to DO SOMETHING about this -- to test myself to see if I have the desire and drive to do this, or if, in fact, serious writing is something I don't love as much as I think I do (or, more likely, if it's something that I'm just not very good at) so I can erase it from my mental list of goals and go on with my life.
This has been building for a while, as I've read a bunch of books in the past year that made me go, Really? THIS got chosen from the agent's massive pile of submissions and made it all the way to publication? THIS? I could do THIS! Not that I expect every novelist to be the next Hemingway or anything, but I expect, given how HARD it is to get someone to even LOOK at your manuscript, that what does make it to print should be of a certain level of quality. But it isn't! I'm not even talking about drivel, because that's a separate category in publishing altogether; I'm talking about quasi-literary or even good beach fiction that is just EH.
So I am planning to sign up for a writing class this fall. I haven't actually done it, mind you, because I have been coming up with STILL MORE excuses (it's on a weeknight! I'll get home just before bedtime! What will I do for dinner? I will STARVE! How will I find time to do the assignments? What if my work sucks and everyone laughs at me?). But I will. I will! Or...I should. Probably. Maybe. Well, we'll see.
Sigh.
(Possibly, I am just comfortable in my life the way it is -- maybe I don't NEED to write a book to be happy or fulfilled; maybe I don't hunger for it in the way you have to in order to accomplish such an ambitious goal. But you know, I mentally berate myself for not trying, and I get all het up when crappy stuff finds an audience, so I have to put up or shut up. Right?)
Anyway. Pictures!
Actually, two funny things. One was not so funny in the happening, but afterward we could look back on it and laugh. The other is just funny, period.
On Friday morning, Joe was about to get into the shower when he opened the medicine cabinet to get a vitamin. As the mirror swung open, one of my bottles of perfume slid off its shelf in the cabinet and fell toward the sink.
Now, you might think you know where this is going, but...no, you don't -- it's much more dramatic than a bathroom covered in verbena eau de toilette.
As the perfume bottle hit the sink, the sink itself and the entire vanity, which were made of a lovely sea-green glass, EXPLODED.
I was giving Felicity her breakfast, so all I heard was an astonishing crash from the bathroom; I thought maybe the entire medicine cabinet had fallen off the wall, as nothing else could have made that loud of a noise unless someone had lobbed a grenade into our apartment. I went down the hall and asked through the door what had happened. Joe, stunned by this turn of events, took a moment to respond and then told me that the entire sink had blown up, thanks to my L'Occitane perfume. I grabbed his shoes and went around to the door from our bedroom to hand them through. And there I saw the wreckage.
It was unbelievable. The glass was EVERYWHERE. In the tub, in the cabinet below the sink, on top of the toilet, on the windowsill, and IN THE BEDROOM. The force of this thing was like a rocket-launcher. From a BOTTLE OF PERFUME that fell from a height of at most 18 inches. Whatever L'Occitane uses for their perfume bottles, we should build planes and tanks out of it. Because not only did it shatter a shatterproof vanity, but the bottle itself REMAINED INTACT.
It took Joe two and a half hours to extricate himself from the glass-strewn bathroom, remove the larger pieces by hand, and vaccuum everything about a hundred times. His legs were cut up with shrapnel, but that was the only injury, which was pretty lucky considering the circumstances. He did an admirable job getting shards out of even the most obscure places (the TUB DRAIN), and so far none of us have cut our feet (or worse). We will hopefully have a new, non-glass sink and vanity in a week or two.
I only wish I had video of it happening, because I can only imagine the look of shock, horror and astonishment on Joe's face as the bathroom erupted in glass, with him standing there in the altogether. It could have been the latest YouTube sensation!
The second thing is this: also on Friday, and completely out of the blue, Felicity started doing this:
She just...started walking like a hunched old lady (not all the time, just for a few steps at random), and now when you ask her to do the Old Lady Walk, SHE DOES IT. ON DEMAND.
You guys, I have NO IDEA where she came up with this. I asked J, and she'd never seen Felicity do anything like this, and it's not something they do at their music class. She has pretty much never seen TV, so it's not from that. Perhaps she just has a true instinct for physical comedy?
Do you think we could revive the vaudeville circuit? Someone needs to make this kid a star!
I realize that I was fully present and conscious for the entirely of my pregnancy and for Felicity's birth, but I frequently find myself looking at her -- this KID, who is hardly even a baby anymore, even though she really sort of is -- and thinking, where did you COME from? It's difficult for me to look at her baby pictures and reconcile them with who she is today; the bald, wide-eyed, drooling infant has become this small PERSON who has a sense of humor and knows actual WORDS and stuff (though the drool is still present, thanks to the neverending introduction of new teeth). It is honestly one of the weirdest things I've ever experienced. But in a good way.
Her latest catchphrases are "Okay!" which I swear she picked up in the few waking hours she spent with Sam (whose adorable response to many things is a dry "oookaaaaay," as if she is only deigning to go along with whatever has been suggested, even when it's something she clearly wants), and "I know, I know." The latter she got from her daddy; when she is agitated about something, he'll say, "I know, I know, I know!" while he's trying to fix it or tend to her, and in the past week she started saying it herself.
She's really catching onto the power of language, learning every day more ways to convey what she needs or wants. Sometimes, I swear she says things just to see how quickly we'll respond. In Nantucket, she would say and sign, "Eat" about every half hour, even when it seemed IMPOSSIBLE that she could need to eat again. Either the sea air and all the extra space to roam around made her ravenously hungry, or she was simply amused by how everyone started falling all over themselves to get her a snack.
We haven't yet done any kind of Time Out with her, but she seems to have come up with the concept on her own for her apparently ill-behaved dolls. Every morning, she lines them up against her bookshelf, saying, "Shit! Shit!" and then she stands over them and admonishes them in harsh tones. I wish I knew what she thought she was saying. It's possible she has a future as a drill instructor.
In the mornings when I start blow-drying my hair, she comes racing to the bathroom saying, "Brush!" and takes my brush from me (I keep a spare as a decoy, but often this just results in her holding two brushes). Then she'll rush back into her room to brush Joe's hair. (Side note: I cannot wait til she is big enough to play with my hair. Is that not the greatest feeling, to have someone play with your hair?)
The part of her current development that I'm not loving is that sometimes she bonks her head on the floor or hits herself in frustration. We can usually stop the head-banging by saying, "No bonks!" but then she slaps herself instead -- not hard, but still. I hold her hands and tell her that I can see she's frustrated and that she can use her words to tell me what she wants, but it's still a sad thing to see.
I know we're edging closer to the time when she's going to start testing boundaries and requiring more clearly articulated limits and behavioral expectations (my friends with kids just a month older than she is are already experiencing this), and that kind of bums me out. Not just because it's harder than simply tending to her needs, but because it signifies a divergence between her and us as parents -- she's going to realize that we don't always want the same things and that we won't always happily go along with what she wants or how she acts. That's been true, of course, since the beginning in many ways, but she's going to become far more conscious of it in the near future (I read about this aspect of toddler development recently), and from her perspective it must be rather jarring.
I guess I shouldn't get ahead of myself, though, because time is passing quickly enough and it's wasted by anticipating the next thing and the thing after that, as I am wont to do. Because the here and now is full enough as it is. It's never been so full, or so astonishingly sweet.
Nantucket is one of those places that just fits me; it gives me a feeling of, "Yes. Here."
I first went to the island the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of college, for a cousin's wedding that involved five days of clambakes, cocktail parties and bachelor/bachelorette shenanigans, and culminated in a spectacular celebration on a bluff overlooking the beach in 'Sconset. The next time I went was with Joe in 2003, over Easter weekend a couple of months before our wedding. It was cold and gray, but we biked from Town out to Madaket and had brunch in a deserted Arno's on Main Street and wrote our wedding vows in a low-ceilinged B&B room that looked like it had been hosed down with cabbage roses.
Summer there is my kind of summer -- misty mornings, warm days, sweatshirt nights. Usually, beaches and I have trouble getting along; I don't do well in hot, humid conditions and I get rashes from the sun (I am a delicate flower), but the New England beach climate is ideal for my sun-fearing Northern European constitution. I can sit out for hours (under an umbrella, of course) and not break out in hives or faint from heat stroke. The ocean is cold, yes, but after a few days you don't mind the chill; it feels invigorating and thrilling to feel the surf pound around you. And if you have a pool at your rental house, all the better -- you can take a dip without fear of ocean life (Joe saw a SEAL in the water one morning!) or hypothermia.
I also love the weathered-shingle aesthetic of the houses, and the explosions of color in gardens tucked around gray cottages, and the prevalence of red, white and blue flying in front of houses and draped in buntings on picket fences. Plus, I'm a sucker for the classic New England village skyline, punctuated by pristine white steeples.
Felicity loved Nantucket, too. She had so much space to putter around in at the house that she almost seemed confused by the wide-open floorplan and the sun streaming in every window. She adored the backyard, especially the back-door and porch steps that she wanted to climb and descend about 1000 times a day. She also explored the little secret garden path past the yard, flocked by daisies and honeysuckle and feathery stalks that my mom taught her to use to tickle people's noses.
She was initially skeptical about the beach; we would carry her toward the water to show her the waves and she would say, "All done!" She did enjoy sitting on a towel or on our laps and playing with her baby doll, though, and by the end of the week she actually ran down the sand to the edge of the surf. If we'd stayed longer, she would have gone plunging into the water on her own, I'm certain.
And, oh, she had so much fun with her Grammie and Granddad (and I had so much fun watching them together). She thrived on having so many people's full attention for a week, and she was absolutely mesmerized by my mom's repertoire of children's songs.
The second or third day we were there, she was walking in the backyard with my mom and said, "Hand!" and reached up for her.
She called my dad "Dada Dada", as distinct from Dada, and was content to jabber at him with the apparent assumption that he knew exactly what she was saying.
We also had some midweek visitors, who were generous enough to haul over on the ferry with the world's heaviest Pack-n-Play for an overnight stay with us. Sam, I should tell you, is child-star beautiful and so much fun. Felicity thought she was the coolest person in the world; she followed Sam around saying, "Sham! Sham!" and the next morning before Sam and Jonna came upstairs she wandered around looking for them, calling, "Sham! Sham!" The girls danced and played in the backyard and we had a morning trip to the beach that was somewhat abortive but still a hoot, and Jonna and I packed as much chatter into their visit as we could. As with my parents and several other far-flung friends, I will never know why they don't live next door to us, but I hope we can continue to steal time together whenever we happen to be in each other's neck of the woods.
We biked and beach-combed and swam and explored and shopped and grilled and drank and played, and by the end of the day all of us were worn out. We were up with the sun each morning and ready to crash by 9:30 each night. But it was a good kind of tired.
Admittedly, our arrival that first day was a little rough, with an absurdly long wait for our bags and a VERY tired toddler and bad Google Maps directions, but once we arrived at the house and Felicity was able to collapse in her rented crib for a few hours, everything fell into place. By Friday, I was desperately wishing we'd booked two weeks instead of one -- we were just hitting our stride, it seemed, and getting into our Vacation Routine, and then it was time to say goodbye.
But we have next year, and the year after that, and on and on into the future. Yes. Here.
