7 weeks to go, growing a little reader

I was a big reader as a child, and still make regular trips to the library and semi-regular purchases at Half.com. I've been planning out baby J's reading material for a while, collecting books and book ideas since before he was conceived. I am using an old Moleskine notebook that I had taken with me on a trip to London in 2005. I was a children's book buyer for a bookstore at the time, so I wrote down a bunch of great books that I saw at the Tate Modern gift shop to order later. I don't think I looked at the list after I got back, but recently I checked it out and ordered some that I thought looked good. Two came in the mail today, one called I Saw Esau , which has funny poems and great illustrations, and the Everyman's Library book Lullabies and Poems for Children. The one book I couldn't wait to buy was a version of Jabberwocky, beautifully illustrated by Joel Stewart.

I wanted it for my future baby's nursery, and now we have two pages being framed!
My next search is for some Ant & Bee books, which I've heard are being reprinted this year (fingers crossed). They currently are about $100 each used.

Also on his shelves is a book my Dad gave me, which is still one of my favorites. It's an illustrated book of creation stories from around the world. It's perfect for a non-religious Anthropology major.
To end, I wanted to post a poem from the Lullabies and Poems for Children book that I found beautiful.

WOMAN TO CHILD

You who were darkness warmed my flesh
where out of darkness rose the seed.
Then all a world I made in me;
all the world you hear and see
hung upon my dreaming blood.

There moved the multitudinous stars,
and coloured birds and fishes moved.
There swarm the sliding continents.
All time lay rolled in me, and sense,
and love that knew not its beloved.

O node and focus of the world;
I hold you deep within that well
you shall escape and not escape-
that mirrors still your sleeping shape;
and nurtures still your crescent cell.

I wither and you break from me;
yet through you dance in living light
I am the earth , I am the root,
I am the stem that fed the fruit,
the link that joins you to the night.

Judith Wright 1915-2000

Help around the house

Biff has been renovating the kitchen from top to bottom, changing out the floor and counter, fixing and painting the walls and cabinets, and making the flow more cohesive into the small attached breakfast room. He's also painted and put together all the furniture in the baby's room. I keep telling everyone that he is doing this by himself, but that's not exactly true. He's had some assistance.

Prickle Socks has been very kind to test out the crib and changing table. She not overly enthusiastic, but she says they will work.

She also helped paint the cabinets. She thought the paint was too light, so she added some dark accents.


Balthasar is slightly less hands-on, but he shares his artistic opinions with us. He laid out a possible tile pattern which we actually really like.

Of course all this hard work is pretty draining for them, so they pass out after a long day.

current thoughts on living

Something about bringing a new human being into the world makes you really want to clean up your act. We've both had an almost reverse nesting instinct. We're trying to cut back on the amount of unnecessary stuff in our lives and household, much to the chagrin of excited future grandparents on both sides. I thought I'd post this to try to explain.

I was really inspired by this simple post "to buy or not to buy" and we had actually been following this philosophy to a large degree in preparing the nursery. We haven't bought a single new piece of furniture for him to date, everything has been Craigslisted or Freecycled. Freecycle also allows us to give away things that we don't need knowing that they are actually needed/wanted by the person who picks them up. We are borrowing a lot of things from friends and family who have recently had babies. With the speed that kids grow out of things like car seats, strollers, and clothes, it makes sense to just pass these around. We've also redone two pieces of furniture that we already had to go in his room, and repurposed others.

I love to shop for baby clothes, and a friend told me she had gotten nearly everything (and she has a really cute collection) from thrift and consignment shops. I make biweekly trips to the area thrift stores and have gotten many many cute things, which I can give right back to the community when he grows out of them. The one exception is handmade goods which we have found on etsy or locally.

Some lifestyle change successes we've had so far: We have only one car, and Biff takes public transportation to and from work in Chapel Hill. We use a clothesline for drying clothes. We save our shower water and use it to flush the toilet. We reuse what we can and recycle the rest. We compost. We (well me really) have been making weekly trips to the library instead of buying books. We have a farm share from Lil Farm, which gives us a box worth of local, organic produce each week.

Next steps in the stuff-reduction plan is to do away with all of the unnecessary cleaning and hygiene products and their plastic packaging. I'm searching for shampoo and detergent refills, with the eventual plan to make homemade laundry detergent. We're using up our current spray bottle cleaners which will be refilled with a simple vinegar, water and baking soda mix from the recipes in the How It All Vegan cookbook. I have several reusable shopping bags and am trying to get Biff to carry the one I got for him. I definitely have to curb my urges to just run to Target, or shop for shoes and clothes online.

Since most likely we will be living with a lower income and increased expenses, we need to scale back anyway. We still have the guilt of being Americans in terms of energy and resource consumption (25% of the world's total energy consumption, 4.56% of the world's population), you've all heard this spiel from me before....but we're trying to shrink our footprint as much as possible.

The Story of Stuff video is one of my favorites and sums up our thoughts pretty well.

around our house in July

This week we finally had a 200 year old dead read oak tree cut down that was literally a sword of Damocles over our house and two of our two neighbors' houses. We were sad that it had to go, but we were tired of cringing every time the wind blew. We imagine that it is becoming really nice floorboards for some fancy loft in New York or somewhere. Having it removed helped us to appreciate the rainstorms that we've been having and the incredible mushrooms that have sprung up around the yard. And finally, I just think baby clothes look really cute hung on the line. We hit the thrift shops every couple of weeks to stock up then wash and store.

Calla lily

I noticed that my boss had a nice flower in her office that upon closer examination had a secret. It was in a wine bottle, and the ends were curled up so that it could not be removed, like a ship in a bottle. It turns out that the person who had given it to her was also a friend of mine, so I requested one as well and documented its progress. It's a calla lily.

Picture one is freshly cut with a straight stem.

In a few hours it was beginning to curl.

By midday it was clearly spiraling.


When I left to go home it looked about finished.

When I checked back Monday morning I found it had curled even more.

Thanks Priyanka!

"What do you do?"

It's a question that I get asked a lot - by strangers at parties, on the phone with my parents, at home by my wife. Am I really that mysterious?

I collect historical documents and other stuff for UNC's "library." That's about as simply as I can put it without lulling you to sleep. Once in a while though, it produces some interesting stories or even photo ops. Like the one shown here.

This is a bust of Senator Sam Ervin, Jr. that was recently donated to the library. I was the one called on to drive out to Burlington and get it. Of course it made most sense to me to park old Sam up in the front seat and strap him in.

What a creepy bust, right? Well, he was all jowls, all the time - the artist didn't really have much to work with.

summer flora and fauna

I love how lush North Carolina gets in the summer, and here are some growing things that have caused me to stop and take a picture. First, I took a wrong turn into a road behind a shopping center near my house, and found this field. At the time it was filled with little yellow flowers, but by the time I came back with my camera, they had been washed away by a summer storm.

Next, as I was driving to visit some friends in Pittsboro, I saw a pond full of water lilies/lotuses. I love how they arranged themselves over the surface of the water.

I also have a thing for blue hydrangeas, especially when you find a big bush with a variety of shades. My favorites are the deepest lavender blues.

I've been searching for a great mimosa tree that is really pink and fluffy, and found the perfect one in my neighborhood.



After arriving home from being out and about on Sunday, I looked at our neighbor's yard across the street at what first appeared to be turkeys, but were in fact vultures, feeding on some roadkill in the street. These pictures do not do justice to their size, but they were skittish when I tried to get close.



Pretty ominous looking, but they were very helpful in disposing of the unsightly roadkill.

baby update

This was a big week in the life of the fetus. He turned 6 months, or more accurately, negative 3.5 months. We had a checkup, and he is fine. He did a lot of acrobatics in preparation for his circus career. We have also done a lot of preparation for his arrival. We hired our doulas, Teresa and Gail and began our 12 week Bradley Method birth class with Carol, who is also part of the Triangle Birth Network. We are really hoping to have a minimal intervention, drug-free natural birth, barring mal-positioning, pre-eclampsia or gestational diabetes. Considering that 99% of American woman have epidurals, this is not standard hospital procedure. We ideally wanted a home birth, but that proved to be to expensive (short version). The doulas and natural childbirth classes will help us to try to have the closest thing to home birth in the hospital. Good thing we live 3 minutes from the hospital and can hold off hon going until the last minute.


We also bought him a crib on Craigslist. It's pretty simple, but it converts into a toddler bed, full bed and love seat. We can't wait for his crib bedding to arrive to see how it looks together.

In Utero Playlists

I'm afraid it's going to happen. I'm going to be "one of those" parents that really pushes their kids to achieve, where "achieve" often is code for "fulfill one or more of the parent's own unrealized dreams." In my case, I'll be pushing my kid(s) to be the next David Bowie(s) or Johnny Cash(es).

Just the other day it really started to hit me hard that there was once a time that I really coveted the creative elements of my life - I wanted them to overtake every other aspect of my life, in fact. But now, my creative outlets have shifted so hard (towards potentially inconsequential things like blogging) or have completely evaporated from my daily routine (like no longer playing my guitar for hours at a time), that I can't help but wonder, "What if...?"

Luckily, one of my responses to these thoughts has been somewhat rational: attempting to integrate creativity back into my life. My life's not over, damn it! So, lately I've started taking more photographs. I've pulled the guitar back out of the closet. I've been sifting through old sketch books and drawings.

But, I guess the other response has been a little irrational - the whole imposing my David Bowie dreams on my soon-to-born son. I can't predict what he'll find interesting. But you know what? I also can't help but think about how much of a "perfect storm" his environment will be for fostering rockstardom.

His paternal grandmother is a music teacher. She passed a lot of this talent to me. His paternal grandfather is an art teacher, an artist too (if that's something different). He passed a lot of this artistic talent to me. He's got other musicians and artistic folks on this paternal side, too. His maternal grandmother is a great artist. She has passed on a lot of her talent to Kate. I also understand there are other artists on the maternal side.

He'll be growing up in a town with a strong musical heritage and a well-supported musical culture. Kate tells me that pretty much everyone growing up in Chapel Hill was in a band at some point in high school, or even earlier. He'll be growing up in our household, with our sensibilities and appreciation for self-expression and love of music and art.

If this kid doesn't grow up to be a rock star, then rock must be dead.

I can see it now. Jonas will be like 6 years old and I'll be saying, "You need to finish writing that concept album or you won't get any dessert." or maybe, "No doing chores until you've done your mixolydian arpeggios!"

Of course, I'm really joking. I'm not going to pressure my kid into doing something he doesn't want to do. I mean, maybe he'd rather be the next Morrissey - I'd be crushed, but I could probably live with that.

For the sake of sharing, here are some of the songs I've made Kate's stomach listen to recently (I'm sticking with a lot of "The Classics" for now, I'll branch out later):

Lou Reed - Walk on the Wild Side
Hank Williams - Jambalaya
Mott the Hoople - All the Young Dudes
The Beatles - Across the Universe
Johnny and June - If I Were A Carpenter
T. Rex - Mambo Sun
Old Crow Medicine Show - Wagon Wheel
Neil Young - Heart of Gold
David Bowie - Heroes
Prince - Little Red Corvette (sorry no link - Prince and Copyright have issues)
Television - Guiding Light
Flaming Lips - Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robot
The Rolling Stones - Angie
Roxy Music - More than This
Al Green - Take Me to the River

Baby curtains 2.0

Apparently, the fabric I originally chose was a heavy canvas not suitable for curtains, but I'm really happy with what I found instead at Tonic Living. It also sort of goes with this crib set that I found on an Odeedoh nursery tour page. I am embarrassed to say it comes from Walmart, which is so against our values, but it was also only $39 for the whole set....

Montreal trip Day 4 Sunday June 15th

On our final day in Montreal, we went to see the Yves St. Laurent Love exhibit at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. I'm not a big fan of luxury culture in general, but as art objects they are lovely. My favorites were the Matisse and Braque (pink below) inspired dresses here.


















My mom did a great sketch of one of the Matisse dresses here, as well as some fountains.

I heard that YSL's memorial service was held at his property in Marrakesh and the adjacent Jardin Majorelle. I was able to visit there in 2001, and have some old pictures that I (okay Biff) scanned. Although it is an amazing place, my recommendation is to visit Morocco a time other than August.




















I really enjoyed Montreal (and Morocco) and would love to go back, although all travel plans are on hold for the next few years.

Montreal trip Day 3 Saturday June 14th

Saturday I dragged my mom all the way to a suburban mall to go to H&M baby, which was well worth it, in my opinion! We got many outfits of stripes, woodland and safari creatures. We then had lunch at the Jardin Nelson, which has a large open air patio. My pesto/mango/olive/avocado salad was delicious.


In the afternoon we went on a sightseeing cruise on the Bateau Mouche.

We passed Habitat 67 a housing complex created from cubes for Expo 67.


Check out the 4 huge penthouses on top of this luxury building.



Finally, we ended the day with a meal at Le Nil Bleu, which was nice, although I think my favorite Ethiopian is Zed's in Washington DC. Not that I don't love Abyssinia in Raleigh. I keep hoping to make it to Ethiopia, where I hear the injera is much more sour and the spices spicier.

Montreal trip Day 2 Friday June 13th

Friday we went to the Jardin botanique de Montreal, which is the biggest botanical garden in North America. The Chinese garden, called the Dream Lake Garden, modeled after a Ming dynasty garden, was like a fairyland. I would highly recommend this for anyone going to Montreal.


They also have an insectarium, which was pretty neat. My favorite was the mini-exhibit on beetle jewelry from Peru.
On the way there I saw this hilarious flyer. It says: Missing fish. I have lost my fish. I need him. He is fragile. Help me find him. If you find him, please call me or email me at whereismyfish@gmail.com. Maybe he should check the percolator ....
For dinner, we went to a restaurant my mom had found in the guidebook called Chez L'Epicier in an old grocery store. It was probably the best meal I've ever eaten. It started out with a tiny skinned tomato with rock salt with a dropper of vinaigrette that you had to squeeze out while you ate the tomato. I then had a potato and mozzarella molleux and the cutest dessert ever, a chocolate club sandwich with pineapple fries and melon-mint coleslaw.