the family room

After a series of events of interest only to fellow homeowners and possibly the loyal readers of my blog (that began with icky water and damaged carpets, followed by a leisurely-paced cork floor installation, followed by an unexpected new flow of water into the house, followed by two different gutter guys and much talk of down spouts, followed by completion of the delayed-by-water cork floor, followed by polyurethane and sanding with very fine grained purple paper, followed by furniture moving and rescuing of playthings from the scary cricket-infested basement, followed by many junky toys being hidden away in the recycling bin in the dead of night) the playroom is back.

Joyful noises were heard Saturday morning as the children descended the stairs to find a room that has been mostly off-limits for months miraculously restored. The toys were back!

I love being in this new space. The whole long, slow process has been a lesson in the good and bad of owning a home. What a headache, yes. What dull problems to occupy our minds. But what rewards! The room reminds me of the importance of our environment - how beauty, color, texture, and light inform our emotions. As nearly one-third of our house has opened up again, we were able to move many toys and books from the living room back to the playroom. Everything in its place. (Imagine me sighing with contentment.)

We are going to try calling this the family room now, instead of the playroom. Which is surprising, because I have always been opposed to the very idea of a family room. A house should have one shared room, a living room, with all the books and music and cushy chairs and art on the walls that make both family members and guests feel at home. A place for all to live. Right?

To me, family room suggests a back room featuring a funny smell, plaid-covered couches and scraped-up tables, a big TV, bad lighting. Such rooms have pristine twins: rooms with clean surfaces, lump-free cushions, and nary a pile of old magazines in sight; rooms where a family can put on a good face and entertain. Where exactly I got this nasty idea about family rooms, I'm not sure. There is a whiff about them that calls to mind the suburban values that fall decidedly under the icky column: concern with surfaces, keeping messes hidden away, overconsumption (who the heck needs two living rooms?). I am all for sharing the happy detritus of everyday life - stray crayons, books, neglected mail, piles of kid art - with anyone who comes through the front door. 

In short, I am for public dishevelment. A seemly modicum of domestic chaos that communicates to friends that it is a-okay to put your feet up and pour your own drink. (A note: moderate disorder is different from filth. I do clean, a little. Okay, a very little.)

(Another note: I hope my mother is not cringing as she reads this. I honestly think I formed a deep association between moderate mess and a hospitable house from the way she ran our home growing up. There were many spontaneous visits from friends and there were piles of stuff on the coffee table. I am sure the two are linked. She is the most gracious hostess I know.)

So, remember the icky column? We live in a split level in the suburbs. We have two living rooms! But part of the project of making a life here for ourselves is rehabilitating what it means to live in the suburbs. We love the space the run, to grow a garden, to host many trees. There are good things to be found in this strange new world, and so, it is time to embrace the family room.

The room is floored in warm cork that we picked out together at the surprisingly friendly Lumber Liquidators in Beltsville, MD. Our wonderful neighbor Thomas installed it and painted the walls. We put down a lovely green wool rug handed down to us from one of Mike's generous colleagues. We slid the big red chair out onto the rug, which once served as a smooth leather spaceship for my dad to ride in through his days of cancer treatment. It has a dark spot where his head once rested. I put up the adorable alphabet cards Edith sent for Gabriel's last birthday. The old-fashioned school desk we found in Lancaster sits next to the enormous desk that up until recently lived in Mike's parents' house. And on and on.

This is not a playroom, a place to sequester children (though it can, happily, work that way). This is our family's room. It contains things we chose, things we made, things we inherited and things we were given. It feels like a peaceful place to be together, a place that affirms us in the midst of all the complexity and uncertainty life invariably brings.

I smiled when I saw the forecast this morning: rain! A perfect day to do puzzles and read stories in the family room. Which is exactly what we did.

one happy kid

Well, there are two happy kids, really, but this is a short photo ode to Gabriel, with whom I have spent more one-on-one time over the past three weeks than in the entirety of his life up until Frances' recent departure for the greener pastures of Annapolis Elementary School.

I'm gaga for Gabriel. I feel like I'm falling for the kid anew, so forgive me for reveling in these lovey dovey days and sharing them with you. I have absolutely no perspective - and hence no shame. I hope it isn't too gross (I know, I know - stop the presses! Mama blogger's children are happy and she adores them!).

I have discovered, contrary to my fears, that being a second child is not tantamount to getting the short end of the stick. Having a big sister is pretty neat, and having parents who are more settled in their roles isn't bad either. That said, I do feel like it is finally Gabriel's time to shine in the sun. He gets lots of attention, he has more creative space to express himself without his big sister around to compete with, and he has enough distance from her to inspire wild running across the blacktop, shouting Didi!! Didi!! when she steps down the back steps of her school with the other walkers and car-riders at 3:35.

Greeting Frances today, who is showing Gabriel a sticker her new pal Halligan just gave her.

We usually hang out on the lovely playground adjacent to Frances' school if we get there early. Gabriel giggled crazily, so surprised and happy was he to discover he is able handle the big kid climbing challenges.

Speaking of new competencies...That right there, thank you to Milena, is a real bike with training wheels. He skipped the tricycle.

This is the kind of thing you need a quiet kitchen to accomplish.

Sometimes living in Annapolis isn't bad. This was taken today at the harbor downtown, just a few steps from where we pick up Frances. Gabriel woke up early from his nap and wanted to visit with the ducks before school got out. He told me every docked boat hailed from Delaware.

The yellow September light fits my mood perfectly these days. With a second child, one realizes how fleeting everything can be. Not that the future does not hold new, unforseeable amazements - but I am cherishing this particular moment.

tastes like fall

That's what Mike says about these, one of our very favorite cookies. Inspired by the beauty of the changing season, Gabriel and I made them yesterday. My qualms about not attributing this recipe to its rightful author (I wrote it down many years ago from some forgotten website or magazine) are totally overwhelmed by my wish that you fill your house with the scent of these molasses cookies, and eat lots of them, soon.

3/4 cup softened butter
1 cup brown sugar
2 large eggs
1/4 cup unsulfured molasses
2 and 1/4 cups white whole wheat flour, plus a bit more
1 tsp baking soda
1 and 1/2 tsp ground ginger
2 tsps cinnamon  **I use heaping tsps for both spices
raw, coarse sugar for coating

Preheat oven to 375. Grease a baking sheet.

Cream the butter and brown sugar, then add in the eggs and molasses and beat until well-blended.

In a separate bowl, mix together the dry ingredients, then add to the butter mixture. Beat until the dough no longer sticks to the sides of the bowl, adding more flour if you need to.

To form the cookies, roll balls of dough and then flatten them in your hands. Dredge each disc in the raw sugar (it turns out that this is an excellent job for a two year old). Place on the sheet 1 - 2 inches apart, and bake for 6 or 7 minutes. Watch out; don't let them get too brown on the bottom.

fresh eyes

At my children's request, the kid clothesline came out again yesterday. This year, it is situated a little big higher. And both kids now possess the fine motor skills necessary to hang underwear and washcloths and socks up with clothespins, which is very satisfying.


As I knotted the rope to the deck, I remembered a distant post featuring smaller children hanging wet rags out to dry. So I checked, and in so doing, I discovered it has been almost exactly one year since I began this blog. Amelia got me started on September 21, 2009.

Friends! So many of you have traveled the past year with me on Homemade Time, and for this I feel wellsprings of sincere gratitude bubbling up with fresh feeling, tightening my throat. It is no small thing to have friends and family like all of you. Writing to you - and reading your comments - has made mothering richer and sweeter. It has given me a creative place to think through the chaos of the day, and to make meaning from it. Thank you. 

It's been a whole year since Frances and I were reading The Folk of the Faraway Tree, and Dame Washalot inspired us to do some dripping wet wacky laundry of our own. Kind of funny that I just read this article by Cordelia Fine, which launches into a commentary about how bogus our gendered thinking about little kids is with her experiences (as child and parent) reading Enid Blyton. Like Ms. Fine, I do plenty of on-the-spot editing when we hit particularly egregious passages about girls being the weaker sex in our treasured oldey-timey children's classics.

But my elisions are a wee drop in a big bucket filled with all kinds of weird crap - much of which I probably do a fine job of perpetuating without even realizing it. I read a review of Cordelia Fine's book, Delusions of Gender, in the Washington Post last week. I don't feel any desire to read her scrupulous debunkings of pseudo-scientific studies that claim to prove the innate differences between girls and boys. But I'm glad she made the effort. Just reading the review did enough to get me back to thinking about gender more globally.

I felt a little sheepish reading about her book. I too am suckered in by all sorts of biological destiny-style accounts of gender. It lets me off the hook for those shortcomings of mine that seem mapped onto my gender, my persistent femininity. Too accommodating, too afraid to speak up and upset someone, lacking in sufficient personal boundaries, prone to harbor resentments rather than communicate directly about difficult issues. Etc etc. Oh, and I throw like a girl.

So when Science says it's all because of my chromosomes, those things I don't always like in myself become less personal in nature - more my womanly lot in life. An opportunity to relinquish personal responsibility is hard to pass up.

And becoming a parent, especially a parent of both a boy and a girl, has brought countless conversations with countless enlightened feminist types about the surprising "hardwired" nature of gender that we discover as we watch our children grow. Boys and girls are so different. All the preschool mothers agree. I am among them.

Yes, there are differences between most girls I've met and most boys I've met. The terms masculinity and feminity do make sense to me (more on this another day). But when someone comes along and scrambles my habits of perception a bit, I feel called out. I've been seeing through a particular lens that emphasizes certain behaviors and traits and relegates others to the periphery. Oh, there he goes with the trucks again! He's such a boy.

For example - here's some of the pervasive stuff in the big bucket I mentioned earlier - I name every non-human actor on our family stage a boy. I use the male pronoun with every backyard squirrel, stuffed animal, and Dr. Seuss creature. Where's he going? I ask Gabriel about the bird outside our window. What's that little guy doing? Oh, he's looking for worms!

Where are the girl bugs and teddy bears? (We read a book recently featuring a female teddy bear - a sidekick, not even the protagonist! - and honestly, it struck me as kind of weird.)

The only reason I know I blanket the world boy like this is that Frances corrects me when I use the wrong pronoun with her toys. Some are girls and she is truly offended when I slip up; she's like a first-time parent when a stranger gets a newborn's sex wrong. Frances also reminds me that the blood-sucking mosquitoes are mamas looking for blood to feed their babies every time I slap one and triumphantly shout: I GOT HIM!

This disturbs me, the way my language betrays my prejudices.

So tonight, I'm setting an intention: to resist the temptation of categorizing my children. To put up a speed bump at least, so I'm caught up the next time I attribute behaviors to their boyness or girlness. Or to being a typical first or second born child, for that matter. To being such a sensitive person, or a smart person, an athletic person or a bookworm.

What do those things really mean?


What do they have to do with Frances and Gabriel in all their glorious mystery? (Or with me?) It is hard to stand back and let them tell me who they are, to sit with not-knowing and give them that space for expression.

I am not always so good at it. But writing to all of you sure does help me a lot.