12 in 12 (September 2013)

This month's 12 in 12 (on the 12th) project found us running all over, from sunup to sundown. Usually when we have a busy day like this I feel wrung out by the end of it, but this day, our travels all over town really came together to highlight to me how much our city has to offer. I feel like this post is a love letter to Norfolk just as much as it is a recording of our ordinary run-of-the-mill day.

Dear Norfolk -- we love living in you. And dear readers, don't forget to pop over and check out Darcy's and Rebecca's 12 in 12 projects at No Monsters in My Bed and Not-So-SAHM.

7:30 AM: Mornings make me feel like this too.



10:00 AM: Anouk and I venture down to Ghent for a couple of hours to run errands. We have a lot of presents to buy, as pretty much everyone we know had a baby or a birthday (or both!) in September. We bought one of the baby gifts, for my friend A.'s little girl, from Kitsch, which is such an awesome store full of handmade goodies. If you live in the area, you should definitely stop in.




11:30 AM: Coffee break at Fair Grounds. Anouk sings along to the Beatles Let it Be album and I read a poetry zine put out by high school students while I finish my drink. Why wasn't I this awesome in high school??

12:00 PM: High noon on Colley Ave.

12:30 PM: We stop by Lafayette Park on the way home to run off some steam before lunch. I just adore the gnarly old live oaks that grow there; they might be my all-time favorite trees.




2:00 PM: Naptime.

5:30 PM: Aunt Kristen is in town for the day on her way to a friend's wedding. Anouk is SO happy to see her and I think the feeling might be mutual.

6:00 PM: We walk down Granby Street to visit our favorite of the Norfolk mermaids (Miss Definitely Downtown) before Aunt Bonne's birthday dinner at Hokkaido. Happy birthday, Bon-Bon! P.S.: I swear sometimes we really do eat meals at home.

8:45 PM: A quick bath before bed.

How was your day?

12 in 12 (July 2013)

I was supposed to take photos for the July 12 in 12 challenge on Friday the 12th, but my camera was in the shop for its yearly tune up. Ergo, these photos are actually from Monday, July 15th. It was a pretty average day -- not a whole lot going on -- but a good one all the same. Don't forget to check out Darcy and Rebecca's 12 in 12 projects this month and to let us know if you want us to link up to you for next month's 12 in 12!

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8:30 AM: Anouk wakes up before me and greets me with vibrant purple marker outlining her eyes. "Mommy, I pretty!" I alternate between being horrified that the ink might be toxic (it isn't) and impressed with her steady hand.

9:45 AM: Now that Anouk has finally (mostly) left the putting-everything-in-her-mouth stage, I feel like I can break out my favorite dangly-beaded summer sandals, which have been in storage since May 2011. Welcome back, friends!

10:30 AM: A trip to the garden reveals that a half-dozen tomatoes have started to turn red overnight. We pick them and put them in our window, lest the squirrels eat them before we can.



11:15 AM: Playdate at Adalae and Zeke's house.

12:00 PM: A. helps me and Miss Molly get ready for Kid's Clothes Week.

12:45 PM: Temper tantrum.



3 PM: After lunch, nap, and a trip to the store, I ask A. to help me clean her room.

24 minutes (and many entreaties, threats, and finally bribes) later, the room looks like this:

These photos are probably the best representation of how I spend my days.

5:30 PM: It's James's night to make dinner (venison burgers, grilled squash, and gazpacho). Since we're off dinner duty, A. and I head outside to for some sprinkler action. The weather is perfect for this, just a balmy 97 or so degrees.

8:30 PM: Anne is finally in bed and so it's down to the sweltering garage for a workout. A month or so ago, I mentioned wanting to get stronger and J. volunteered to train me in our home gym. He is a very strict trainer and our sessions usually end with me yelling at him but it seems to be working.

How was your day?

12 in 12 (June 2013)

As a stay-at-home mom, I'm often asked exactly what it is that I do all day. I have a hard time answering this question a lot of the time -- there's not really a pithy way to say that you ran around like a chicken with its head cut off and then sat and sorted miniature socks for two hours. Also, as I come up on the one-year anniversary of this blog, I find that I miss keeping a personal journal sometimes. I don't really have time for both and the latter really falls by the wayside. I miss the simple act of documenting, and reflecting.

So when Darcy of No Monsters in My Bed and Rebecca of Not-So-SAHM began a 12 photos in 12 hours challenge, I knew right away that I wanted to join them. (We're trying to make this a regular monthly feature, so if you want in, please let me know so we can all link up). Here's how an average Tuesday looks in my house -- so far, I think the main thing I've found to reflect on is that I take a LOT of pictures of my kid. Luckily, she knows how to work it.

8:15 AM: Breakfast. A. has asked for plums. So that's what we have (with a couple of scrambled eggs apiece). Turns out it's sort of hard to take pictures of plums. Who knew?

9:30 AM: Anouk has picked her own outfit today, which means a skirt from the ironing basket and fancy shoes.

10:00 AM: Coffee break with daddy, before he heads back to work (AKA his home office upstairs). Having a work-at-home dad is the bestest.

11:15 AM: We head to Kid Zone at the Pretlow library to meet up with some friends. The library has a new puppet theatre and a ton of puppets to go with it. Through careful Game of Thrones-style finagling, the parents manage to prevent the kids from going to war over it.

12 PM: A quick stop by the thrift store on the way home (it's the day they bring the new furniture out). We're sorely tempted by this $90 antique cash register but where would we put it? And what would Daddy say if we brought it home?

Not tempted by: the army of creepy ceramic kewpie dolls with BLANK EYES. Who what when where WHY IN HEAVEN'S NAME?

1:30 PM: Working in the garden after lunch -- we have a bunch of cherry tomatoes that need picking. Also a bumper crop of weeds.

3 PM: Anouk is down for a nap; I snatch an hour to work on a sewing project. 



4:15 PM: Getting dinner on the stove - chicken curry with peas and this Romanesco cauliflower, which we got in our weekly CSA box. Yum, fractals are delicious.

5:30 PM: It starts to rain just as I'm leaving for yoga.

8:30 PM: Dinner has been eaten, Anouk's been put to bed, and at least some of the dishes have been washed. Time to relax with a book or two. And a cup of fully-caffeinated tea that I will regret in an hour or so. But in the meantime -- ahhhh.

How was your day?

Azalea season

If there's one flower that represents Norfolk, it's the azalea. In the 1930s, the original founders of the Norfolk Botanical Garden surmised that the climate of the city was uniquely suited to growing here, and peppered the city with stands of the colorful fluted flowers. We have the old Azalea Festival complete with the Azalea Queen, Azalea Garden Road, and every year around mid-March, the whole city seems to burst into bloom.

To me, the coming of the azaleas will always be a sign that spring has sprung in earnest, no matter how cold or dreary the weather might be. They're not my all-time favorite flower (that honor goes to the camellias, who bloom their little hearts out right in the middle of winter) but I love the azaleas because they're a pretty little reminder to put aside whatever I'm working on and sink into the season.

The bank of azalea bushes at our house burst into bloom in earnest over the last week, and James, Anne and I have been hanging out in the front yard more than usual to bask in their gorgeousness. We've also been exercising our creativity and making azalea crowns and leis and clipping branches of flowers to bring indoors with us. A few days ago, while Anouk played, I took some quick portraits of her to put in her two-year book with the beautiful azaleas as a backdrop.

I've been uploading some of the pics of our azaleas -- and Anne -- to Instagram. If you've taken any of your own azalea photos, please share them -- you can tag them with #azaleaseason on IG or Twitter so we can all see them!

Have a great weekend, everybody! Hope it's a bloomy one.

 

Obligatory Halloween update

Why is it that on a random afternoon of no importance, I can haul out my camera and take 50 million amazing photos of basically nothing -- a pinecone on the ground, a droplet of water on a leaf, a slant of light coming through a pane of glass onto the floor? But on holidays and memory-making life occasions, I forget to put batteries in my flash, leave my memory card plugged into my computer, and have to rely on blurry iPhone snaps? This is the Murphy's Law of momtography. It happened on the day we brought A. home from the hospital -- all of our pics of her first precious (and hard-fought, after a weeks-long NICU stay) moments at home are orange-casted and weirdly halo-y. Quelle dommage!

It happened yesterday, too, of course. I got some really shitty photos last night. Greasy sugar-cookie fingerprints on the lens (my bad!), no time to haul out the tripod for night photography, people running around and refusing to sit still long enough for me to preserve their images for posterity. It was a very blurry, often underexposed Halloween in these parts.

Nothing says childhood memories like a big honkin' box of garbage bags. And a cranky aunt.

Here are some things I wanted to get photos of but didn't, because I was running around, finding shoes and barrettes and flashlights and buying union-made candy and assembling a makeshift bear costume (when Anouk decided not to tolerate the pumpkin in the morning for Zoo Tales): my baby trick-or-treating at each of her great-great aunts' and uncles' houses. My baby eating a lollipop for the first time. The look on her face as she saw the cat pumpkin we'd carved especially for her (cats are a big deal in Anoukland). Clapping along with the singing Elmo that my cousin Di gave to her , which belonged to Di's mother, a truly special lady. Anouk with her friends, her cousins, her family, her cats, her dad. I didn't get one single picture of James all night. He might not have even been there. If I outlive him, I am going to tell my great-grandchildren some crazy story about how he wasn't there that night because he was in jail or something.

Here are the things I really want to remember about last night: Listening to Anouk blissfully nom-nom her way through a miniature Hershey bar. Sitting on the porch to hand out candy and hearing her laugh from across the street as she visited the neighbors' haunted house with her daddy. The feel of her little sticky hand in mine as we climbed the steps of my Aunt Catherine's house, her first ever trick-or-treat experience. All of those moments I will try and relive, forever. And not one of these moments can be captured in a photograph, even if you try.

So maybe it's OK that I put the camera down for the evening and just lived them.

FWIW, I did end up taking ONE nicely staged pic of Anouk's first real Halloween. Out of about 400.

(But I might even like the shitty ones a little more).