finally, the boy speaks

(if for some reason you can't view the video here, click here to see it)

joey. joey joey joey. he was a little slow to talk (although he's not even two yet so i should really back off, huh?) but now that he's figured it out, he can pretty much repeat any word that you want him to say. and he strings together little sweet sentences like "night night mama, i love you" which sounds something like that but a bit garbled. i love every second of it, and appreciate it even more because we waited a little longer for it (gray was born talking. freak!).

anywho, joey's got a bit of a crush on our cousin/author/amazing mama friend tabatha. he talks about her nonstop, and often can be found chatting on his play telephone with his "tabby". he loves to say "TABATHA...READ IT!" because tabatha is a children's author and often does readings for the kiddos. it's pretty much the sweetest thing ever. but you get a little whiff of some joey attitude when gray tries to coach him...

it's fun to mention that tabatha has her own sweet son named joey... i remember years back being at a christmas family reunion at my nanu's house and playing with tab's joey (or jo-jo) in the backyard and pretty much making the decision then and there that if i had a son his name would be joey and we'd call him jo-jo. that's how sweet tab's jo-jo is. and now i've got my own sweet guy who's obsessed with jo-jo's mama! what goes around comes around :)

life kinda sucks, so i'll buy myself a treat

this week has been so challenging on so many levels. like one of those weeks where it's really hard to get out of bed in the morning. where i find myself squeezing my eyes shut and thinking "i really can't do this for another minute". it's been a lesson in asking for help when i need it, a lesson in life presenting you with challenges because it trusts that deep down inside you can handle them. it's been a lesson in putting everything into perspective. a lesson that some days you just won't be able to make it to the grocery store. and that some days your family is just going to have to suck it up and eat cereal for dinner.

with the rain outside today, and my upcoming trip on the horizon, i feel stronger and better able to get through today. today i am laundry-mama- i am the ointment-applier- i am the shoulder to cry on and the crier-on-shoulders. today i just may ask you to come over and watch the kids so i can get out to the grocery store, and maybe buy myself a little treat.

xx

words of advice from the universe

take the time to find and see the beauty in nature

climb some trees even if it means a possible trip to the ER

play the music in your heart

have a good cry if you're in need of one

leaf-blowers and halloween costumes plus kids cracked up on candy equals fun

let's pray that this week rocks the casbah!

early branding

(nature collecting last week in the forest)


at the end of a long day yesterday, the kids and i sat on the couch, drying off from a bath, and reading some stories before bed. during our reading of "three billy goats gruff" (which i think is a pretty messed up tale but the kids luuuurve it) gray decides to turn the conversation to poop. why not, right? with the most serious of gray-looks, the girl turns to me and says-

"you know, i've seen a goat poop before. little m&m's fall out of their bums."

and i look at her with an eyebrow raised and she says-

"seriously! i'm serious! they have little m's on them and everything!"

gotta love early branding.

circle time

for years now, gray has been part of and a big fan of circle time in some form or another. at the end of her school day she'll report back to me about who behaved and who didn't, what they shared, what they read and who said what. i love debriefing about circle time and i heart what my girl takes away from being surrounded by her peers and sharing.

i've been thinking a lot about adult circle time lately, which just sounds dirty but let's pretend it doesn't. at some point in many of our lives it becomes weird, uncomfortable, and/or socially unacceptable to sit in a circle and share things. i vote that we reinstate circle time for adults, especially women, but more importantly...mamas. mamas need some serious circle time.

and this week, amidst the craziness that is my life of crafting and shopping and cooking and wiping butts and creating a christmas tree for the local festival of trees, i've been lucky enough to be circled by some incredible women. when i feel tired and i'm rocking the hugest black circles under my eyes, i can go to my friend's house and we can drink red wine and scrapbook and watch oprah (we heart kris carr) and then charlie brown's halloween special on tv. and when i need a middle of the day pick-me-up, another friend will join me for an organic lunch, where we will proceed to split (yes split) a whole stick of french bread (i ate most of it). and then there are the two beautiful women who i'm creating the tree with...us three mamas and our eight kids running wild, half-naked, creating magic around us. and in a week i'll be leaving for woodstock, NY for another type of magical circle- a blessingway.

it's an incredible life, filled with endless possibilities for circling, circle upon circle of love.

picture day: a lesson in letting go

gray tooth riot!

as much as i tried to get grace ready for her picture day at school, i realized deep down inside that it was completely futile. there were crusty boogers to battle, crazy short flippie hairs going nuts and being unruly and unclippable, a big swollen gash under her eye from yesterday when she ran into the corner of the librarian's desk at the library. then there were the black permanent marker marks all over her (from the pumpkin debacle last night), all over her hands and subsequently all over my jeans. then there was the outfit- i sent her (no lie) wearing a little sized 18 month shirt that shannon gave us yesterday. 18 months! she's 4 and 1/2! but it was clean, and on top of the pile. weird layers and white pants even though it's almost november. we just couldn't get it together this morning. but i took a deep breath and tried to remember that when i look back on this picture i will smile, because i will remember these things.

peeing waiting wishing

grace and i spent some quiet time alone this morning beefing up on our music knowledge. alternating between our itunes playlists and videos on you tube of some of her favorite artists, the conversation turned to jack johnson. we watched some of his favorite videos and i asked her:

"besides playing guitar and making music, can you guess what one of jack johnson's favorite activities that involves water is?"

and she said "yeah, swimming."

and i said "well, very close. it's something that you do in the water."

and with all seriousness on her face, she looked up and said "oh, peeing. jack johnson likes to pee in the ocean."

i guess surfing comes in a close second.

snippets from 4am

(seaweed mustaches are fun but stinky)


4am this morning-

"mama! mama! T is for TOOT....and for TATER TOTS! are you going to wear your boobie-bras today?"



this week has been one of those weeks. that's pretty much all i can say about it. so if i owe you an email, or a phone call, please be patient with me. sleepless nights, puking, and a tiny bit o'drama have been keeping me busy. happy almost weekend!

BOOTY CALL!

my kids are huge fans of the little puffy snacky snack called "pirate's booty". somewhere along the way, we affectionately started calling it "booty call". and joey in particular looooooves himself some booty call. so much, in fact, that the other day in the grocery store, upon spotting the goods on the shelf, started screaming "BOOOOOOOTY CALL! BOOOOOOTY CALL!" until we went through the checkout, paid, and got home. where i served him a bowl of booty call. people must just shake their heads in wonder at our kooky little booty-callin' family.

this morning i woke up to the sounds of "booty call! booty call mama!" from joey's crib. needless to say, we had a little booty call for breakfast.

xx

heartsongs and shorties

at the beach, i hear her exclaim "look mama! it's a heart! a real heart!" and it really is. this is why i love her, why my hearts pretty much bursts open every time i look at her little being. she is love. she's everything that it's all about. she's my little cheerleader that dances with me all around the house and sings "all you need is love" by the beatles at the top of her lungs. she knows more words than i do and even sings the "duh duh duh duh duuuh" part. and my heart explodes.

so what's a mama to do on a rainy day, when she's worrying about fires and a dear, sweet family and bff? we cut our nails. we cut our toenails. and make some dang quesadillas. and dance around to the beatles. and then i have gray strip down naked (even though it's freezing) to give her a haircut on the deck. i pretty much cut off all her hair, down to nothing. and then i ask her "so do you like having short hair" and she's all "yeah, i guess so, it's pretty cool" and i say "do people at school like your hair?" just because i'm curious about what other little kids say about her really really short hair and she stops in her tracks and says

"yeah, totally. they think i'm sooooo fashionable".

guess i walked right into that one.

in other other news, joey's been sick with the poop shoot riots, so we've been worried about him. what's a mama to do after taking care of a projectile-vomiting little guy all afternoon? well, after hanging over the bowl myself from empathy-pukes, we get in the car, go through the drive-through for more coffee, and then buy a kids book about the life of john lennon. what else is there to do on a rainy, poopy day?

finally, i'd like to thank pix for the email that made my day, and jana and co. for boo-ing our house today. the kids tore into the treats like you wouldn't believe. xx

date sounds

this weekend we had the opportunity to go on a real live date. a date that involved breakfast on the ocean, walking through the leaves holding hands, flirting in the aisles of a small bookstore, and then a walk through the forest. for this occasion i made us a special "date music" playlist on the ipod, which we listened to in the car.

here's our list:

::boy with a coin/iron and wine
::roscoe (acoustic)/midlake
::as i am/lori mckenna
::kissing the lipless/the shins
::breathe/alexi murdoch
::blackbird/the beatles
::collarbone/fujiya and miyagi
::james river blues/old crow medicine show
::wagon wheel/old crow medicine show
::when in rome/nickel creek
::undermind/phish
::holes to heaven/jack johnson
::i'd like to/corrine bailey rae
::thanksgiving/deb talan
::something burning/deb talan
::letter to elise/the cure
::for what it's worth/buffalo springfield
::small axe/bob marley and the wailers
::i'll be seeing you/billie holliday
::i feel it all/feist
::extraordinary machine/fiona apple
::little bombs/aimee mann
::paper wings and halo/lori mckenna

what's the soundtrack to your life?

these past weeks

these past couple of weeks have been filled with all the things that keep me: a whole bunch of sparkly love and snugglins, an ipod filled with new music and new playlists, a stack of new books from the library to feed my brain, watching baseball games and winning, plate after plate of delicious food, baby showers, baby talks, scrapbooks, photos, family, foliage. all the things i love.

in review...


a whole lotta this (from date night with jess and b):

a whole bunch of beach time (about four times in the past week or so- some with winter hats last week, and swimming in the ocean this past weekend):

hats, sweatshirts, ripped jeans, and sand in my crevices:

new boots, tailgating, pizza, wind, sun, surf:

date day, trees, rotting apple smell, crunching of leaves, love:



it's absolutely sickening, and i can't get enough.

to be a kid again

eating peanut butter cups for lunch
and swimming for an hour or so in the bathtub,
perfecting the art of holding our breath under water.
lollipops with grass stuck to them
and a big row of seashells just begging to be painted
with fat gloppy rainbows.
getting lost among the pages
of our favorite richard scarry books
while we drip clam chowder all over our new outfits.

i never want it to end.

our lessons

sometimes when i'm at the park with all my mama friends, i can get caught up in the comparisons. it seems like i'm always the one that's disheveled, i don't pack the right snacks (or any snacks at all, for that matter), my kids are a little bit dirty and a little bit unmatched. truth be told, it's just hard not to compare. it's human nature, and as much as i'd like to remove myself from it, it just happens sometimes.

i was thinking about these comparisons this morning while in the shower. aaaah, the shower...the one place that i get to be alone (sort of, most of the time...if you don't count the kids peeking in once and a while, where i stoop down and dole out wet kisses)- my time to process and think. what i was thinking about this morning was comparisons, and mainly about lessons. i swear we're the only family that i know that doesn't have our kids in some sort of sport or dance. and dance and gymnastics and karate and stuff is great and works perfectly for most kids. and i always have the best intentions to get gray into these types of things. but then she goes and says "but mum, i just want to play the tuba" and i have a hard time hucking her into a tutu.

so instead of getting caught up in the stuff that i don't have gray enrolled in, i tried to think about all the lessons that we do teach our kids on a daily basis, that don't cost us any money at all. our stacks of identification books, which we look through as a family, perusing through birds and butterflies and local trees. or our walks on the beach where we collect shells and talk about marine biology. or how gray can tell you all about lots of bones in your body and how they work. and today, when we got in the car to drive to school, and i turned on the radio and said "gray, who's this singing?" and she replied "bob dylan" and she was completely and utterly right. and then i said "what instrument do you hear right now?" and she said "oh, that's a harmonica!". she can pick out grateful dead songs, and jack johnson, bob dylan, and rusted root. she can tell you about food and recipes and ingredients, and wax poetic about "courtesy bites".

these are our lessons. instead of dance, this is what works for us. music, food, anatomy, identification. we're just a little bit different, and for today, that's good enough.

paring down

i get the holiday bug e.a.r.l.y. and this year it's actually a bit late coming on, but it's hit full force in my noggin. so i've been thinking a lot about things like stuff and accumulation and memories and lasting gifts.

in attempts to pare down the craziness of the holiday season, i've asked (or "proposed") some new traditions (instead of gifts for my kids) for this upcoming holday season:

::for my group of high school peeps, who are overly generous and amazing when it comes to gift giving- i've asked them to let me take a portrait of them holding my kids, so i can print it out and include it in a book that i'm going to compile for the kids for the holidays (or after). the book is going to be called something like "why we're so lucky" or "the people we love and the people who love us". and they'll have it forever. i told them to take the money they would spend on the gifts and take themselves out to dinner. my kids won't know the difference (although i made the mistake of trying to talk through it with gray and she was all "what?!? christmas is cancelled?" and i had to do a bit of backpedaling.

::for one of my most favorite mama friends, instead of buying gifts for our ever-expanding number of kiddies, i proposed that we do a photo swap of the "five best" moments from the past year- we each give each other copies of our five favorite moments. the best part of the whole deal is that it will actually be really hard to only come up with five, since each week is filled with insanely crazy beautiful moments. it's all about paring down. and we're going to get together for cupcakes or cookie baking with some good old fashioned face painting instead of ripping through gifties.

::as usual, my tribe can expect homemade goodies, simple gifts, little tokens of our love. lots of pictures, lots of lasting memories. i really don't want to buy too much shizz this year, not because i'm cheap but more because "why?" i tried to sit down and really think about what's important to me and what's lasting and none of the things i could come up with came from a store. so funk the holiday shopping sprees! if you are one of my peeps and would like to propose some alternative version of the holidays with the gilberts, please do! all the more better if it involves food :)

anyone else out there have any new holiday routines/traditions they are going to rawk out with this year? i'd love to hear about them. xx

today

today my goals are simple- soak up the pure, raw beauty all around me. embrace it. move through the day like it will last forever.

cry me a river- the FHP edition

up until yesterday, i had no clue what an "FHP" was. i'd never encountered the term, and this term had no impact on my life. yesterday morning, we were $285 richer. our bank account was fuller, happier. up until yesterday, my johnny had no idea what $285 worth of FHP's looked like slopped on the basement floor.

so yesterday, we spent $285 on drain king services, who lovingly (sarcasm) extracted $285 worth of feminine hygiene products from our pipes. FHP is the drain king lingo, designed to help uncomfortable drain dudes who huck a huge pile of tampons on your basement floor, leaving it for the husband to deal with. luckily i was only home for the "we have a flood in the basement!" part, where i get to run around the house screaming, and then proceed to try to fit a shower in, only to flood the basement more. luckily i was not home when the drain king dudes extracted all my tampons and baby wipes (who knew they weren't flushable?!?) and pieces of cotton fabric (sorry! we're quilters! they must have gotten in there somehow...but we're not quite sure). luckily i pretty much have the best husband in the world and he spent the day bleaching and bleaching and stepping in poop and then shelling over the big bucks all for the love of FHP's.

note to self: don't flush anything down the toilet. ever.

no mas!

"no mas, joey! no mas!"

despite the quiet spreading through the house right now, these words from grace are still ringing in my ears. for the past couple of weeks since gray has been in her new classroom, she's been obsessing about a fellow student who's struggling with the rules of the classroom. this student is also trying to learn both english and spanish, and the teachers have to constantly redirect him (and by redirect i'm pretty sure that means trying to keep him from beating the crap out of the other students in the class) by saying "no mas!" over and over. and "no, no, no" with a side order of finger-wagging in the face, evidently. gray, being the true-blue parrot that she is, has taken these disciplinary actions straight from the classroom right to the household- and is constantly telling joey "NO MAS!". me, never taking spanish...i had no clue what the hell this meant, and promptly googled it. evidently, it means "no more!" (duh). anyway, poor joey...since he is always doing something slightly bad and completely no-mas-worthy, has taken the brunt of the no-massiness. i'm trying to figure out if this behavior modeling is 1. healthy 2. something i should speak with her teachers about and 3. just totally freakin' cute and i should let her do it. something to ponder, i guess.

as an aside, i wanted to say that i was completely blown away by the responses sent to me by the "bellies and books" post. it was one of those stream of consciousness things that i really didn't think too much about in the moment, but jeez did it bring up some stuff for us. i loved the time and care that some of you put into our emails, and what you shared. we all have some sort of issue with our bodies...and find it so much easier to love the curves and bumps and lumps on our mothers and grandmothers and fellow-women's bodies. it's interesting, it's compelling, and i thank you for sharing. xx

hibernation

it's been hibernation nation around here in gilbertland, making quilts, wearing slippers, and hiding away from the world. well, with the exception of a house full of guests every day for the past week, we've been hiding away. our days have been shaped by new routines- darker mornings and darker nights, comfort foods, and halloween cupcakes. pumpkins crafts and new hats and quilts for the babes. when the seasons change, i always go through changes on the inside, and need a couple of days to process it all and stay healthy upstairs, if you catch my drift.

there's also been trips to farms and orchards, picnics at old castles, beads and flowers strung through hair in the sun, jammies at 12 noon just because, watching halloween movies and reading halloween books, clam and lobster bakes in the backyard coolness, sitting fireside with family and bringing the bedding outside to snuggle with my girl, trips to the fabric store with my johnny who quilts better than i can ever hope to, showers that are a little hotter than usual, listening to the wizard of oz on record, a trip into the city to visit dear friends and see their new house and drink coffee and hang out at a playground on the water, cleaning and organizing the house, soups soups and more soups. and loaves of bread...there's something about this season that just makes me want to eat loaf after loaf of bread. and coffee. can't forget about the coffee...

trying to stay focused and positive- good thoughts floating toward my mini-mama vacation with these wonderful women coming in november. i get to be by myself (not really but you get the point) in a wonderful city for a whole weekend. i just may go into wonderfulness-overload and need to make a habit of such retreats.

so that's it in a nutshell- soups, coffee, and bread. family, my couch, and my bum. and a whole lotta snugglin'.

what's new in your world?

bellies and books

(these are the thoughts in my little kittycat mind this morning- and yes i wear kittycat headbands over my hats)

so last night i was lucky enough to sneak out of my house and steal away to my book group. i heart my book group, and heart my dear friend that introduced me to it a year or so back. i took a bit of a hiatus when they started reading historical war novels because, well, that just ain't my thing. but this month's book was something that i've been meaning to read, and so i gladly read through it and anticipated going back to the meeting.

let me just state for the record that i'm roughly the youngest in the group by about 30-40 years. and i'm not exaggerating. but this may be the biggest reason why i love this group so much...because they are kind, and they welcomed me back with open arms. and we all sit around clutching paper coffee cups, and everyone is so loud that we have to close the door so we don't disrupt the patrons in the children's room. last night, not only were the words "girls gone wild" used in reference to members of the group, but a number of the women pretended to lift up their shirts and flash one another. and an added bonus was that i learned to swear in italian. so there you have it.

as i sat there last night, really zoning out and not listening so much to the discussion of the book (the book was pretty horrible really, but that's besides the point) i looked around at all the women. every single woman was wearing a watch (everyone but me, that is, surprise surprise). and every woman's body was particularly curvalicious, with round soft bellies and shirts stretched over them (including mine). the bellies, i was mesmerized by the bellies. some bigger than others, some more modest in size. i heart bellies.

which got me thinking about babies. and having babies. and all these women sitting around me, most (if not all...i'm pretty sure all) have birthed babies into the world. babies that have left their mark on their mamas bodies, leaving soft full bellies. all these women have stories to tell, and everyone's bodies were speaking so loudly to me that i got completely overwhelmed. i was struck by the power of the circle of life, of birth into old age. i got overwhelmed and i got feverish and i had to leave. i literally had to get up and awkwardly squish myself along the wall and make people scoot this way and that so i could reach the door and leave the library. i was overwhelmed by the beauty of women, by the beauty of life, and my the beauty of bellies, and i had to leave. it was all i could do to stumble to my car and get home, crashing into john's arms.