Zooropa

It's pretty much part and parcel that wherever we go on vacation, we go to see animals of some kind. It's how we roll. (PS: Proof that I actually saw the baby while we were out there.)

Usually it's the zoo, but we have been known to visit aquariums from time to time. Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago is one of my favorites because (1) it's free and (2) it has a big giant tractor.

Also: lots of places to pose the kids together, including but not limited to inside a "hollowed-out" log inside the gorilla exhibit, and in front of a male zebra. (Don't ask me how I know it's male or I'll be forced to tell you.)

It's a pretty zoo, too. Chicago is a pretty city. I am not one for "big cities," generally, what with the fact that I hate people and all, but at least the Lincoln-Park-Zoo-part of Chicago has lots of pretty things to look at (and excellent light).

Oh! And a carousel! Which was pretty much the hit of the visit. Anything that gets the kids to smile naturally is all right in my book.

Not to mention, the skyline makes a lovely backdrop for family pictures. (I still think Philly's is more spectacular, but Chicago's is quite photogenic.)

Point and Shoot and Cross Your Fingers

Because they are wonderful people who know how much I love toys, my husband and daughter got me a new camera for Mother's Day (which, yes, was a hundred years ago, but I have stuff going on, SHUT UP). Just a small little point-and-shoot, something in between Nikon-the-Wonder-Cam and the camera feature in my iPhone which is basically devoted to Instagrams of my garden because HELLO BEAUTIFUL SPRING. It's small, it fits in my pocket, and it will be great for those late afternoons in July when it's too danged hot and I'm too damned tired to carry my gigantic 12-lb. camera bag 500 yards to the playground.

Plus, IT'S PURPLE, y'all. They got me a purple camera. They were hiding under my porch because they love me.

You know you wouldn't be reading my blog if I didn't completely cop to "testing out the new camera" by setting up an impromptu "picnic" photoshoot in the backyard. Although in the interest of full disclosure, I wouldn't even have had the energy to do this if I hadn't gotten out of work yesterday at 11:30 due to an "evironmental hazard situation" (i.e., somebody got plaster on their desk from the work the roofers were doing and freaked right the hell out. Thank you, fellow hypochondriac with internet access!)

BTW, that isn't one of our cats hanging out with Shae. That's one of the semi-feral neighborhood kittens who lives under my back porch. We are not happy about this situation -- well, G and I aren't, but Shae is just thrilled. She calls them her babies and has named them all, even though technically their actual owners have (allegedly) named them. I don't know what Shae says their names are (I can't remember anything any more), but I call them Larry, Darryl, and Darryl because I can't tell them apart. (This one is Larry, the boy. I know he's a boy because he just loves to show us his, ahem, hairballs.)

Have to say, I really do like this camera. You can tell that the image quality is different from the Wonder-Cam, but for a point-and-shoot, it's pretty good. I still have to play around with the settings and stuff to figure out how everything works, to see if I can replicate some of the features of the DSLR, like the "Child" setting which is my very favorite because it's like instant Photoshop. I can't get that nice shallow depth-of-field effect that I get with my favorite telephoto lens because this camera doesn't have one, but like I said, it will be great for those late afternoons in July when it's too danged hot and I'm too damned tired to carry my gigantic 12-lb. camera bag 500 yards to the playground. (Also: easier to carry onto Space Mountain, when the time comes.)

I do need to learn how to work the focus better. I think it has auto-focus, but it also has a touchscreen, which is new and fancy and confusing and I'm such a Luddite that I haven't figured it out yet. Although, let's just admit it: it's going to be hard for me to get truly bad pictures with any camera when I have such a lovely model-muse. And it's not like I'm going to be able to get her to slow down or sit still or FOR THE LOVE OF GOD PLEASE LOOK AT ME AND SMILE no matter how sophisticated the equipment, anyway. (But that is why I have a niece who loves to look right at the camera and yell "Cheese!" At least for now.)

Wordless Wednesday: Columbines

Lilac With Heart-Shaped Leaves

This Mother's Day, I'm working with Clever Girls in support of Macy's Heart of Haiti to shine a light on the "trade, not aid" program, which provides sustainable income to Haitian artisans struggling to rebuild their lives and support their families after the 2010 earthquake.

What is Macy’s Heart of Haiti? Heart of Haiti is a “Trade, Not Aid” initiative launched by artist and social entrepreneur, Willa Shalit, The Clinton Bush Haiti Fund and Macy’s. Already, Heart of Haiti has led to employment of 750 artists in Haiti, providing financial benefits for an estimated 8,500 people in the country.


Each item is a one-of-a-kind design and handmade by a Haitian master artisan from raw materials such as recycled oil drums, wrought iron, papier-mâché and stone. The collection features more than 40 home decor items including quilts, metalwork, ceramics, jewelry and paintings and is made almost entirely from recycled and sustainable items such as old cement bags, cardboard, oil drums and local gommier wood.


Heart of Haiti products are available online at Macy’s.com.

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Like the story of Creation, it all begins in the garden.

We didn’t have pets when I was a kid. What we had were gardens – flower beds and rose bushes and hydrangeas and vegetables. I learned how to take care of small defenseless things and feel unconditional love by helping my mother tend to the gardens.

Clematises and strawberries are a lot like kittens, if you think about it in a certain way. In the beginning, they need the right kind of food and water and bedding or they aren’t going to make it. They need sun and rain and fresh air to grow up tall and strong. They need the right kind of nutrients and an endless stream of careful, loving attention or they aren’t going to behave the way they’re supposed to. They need to be protected from creatures that would devour them while they’re young and sweet and tender. They need to be trained, so they don’t get all leggy, their runners headed off in a hundred directions, leaves everywhere, but never flowering, never bearing fruit.

Same with kids, really. They need to be trained.

My mother trained us in her garden. Everything I know about how to be a good wife and how to be a good mother and how to be a good person – how to BE – I learned from my mother, in her garden.

All those garden-related adages you might have heard? They’re not just true about gardens; they’re true about everything, metaphorically speaking, if you think about it in a certain way. You have to know how long to keep your precious little sprouts safe and sheltered before they can be transplanted. Sometimes you have to keep their petals covered to protect them from the big cold world. If they don’t grow in one spot, maybe they need to be moved. Give them time to put down roots. A skinny little stick with just a couple of buds can grow into something huge and beautiful, if you give it space to spread and thrive. Love it, enjoy it, not for what it is now, but for the gorgeous thing it will become, when the time is right.

And remember: one man’s weed is another man’s wildflower. A rose by any other name still smells as sweet.

My mother is like an accidental Zen master who’s been showing me the path to true enlightenment for the last 38 years. I just needed to practice my active meditation, to pour forth all the necessary blood and sweat and tears, to dig deep enough into the soil to find the truth that my Mom’s been teaching me all this time. And now the student has become the master, for I am sharing the wisdom with my daughter that I learned from my mother, and that she learned from her mother, and so on.

She probably doesn’t know it, but when I am working in my own yard, digging in my own dirt, I take some words I’ve heard before, and I change them up a little bit, and just like a seed becomes a sunflower through light and love and magic, so too does this poem become a mantra, a prayer:

“The kiss of the sun for pardon,

The song of the birds for mirth,

I am closer to Mom in the garden

Than anywhere else on earth.”

It all comes back to the garden.

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Thank you to Macy's Heart of Haiti for sponsoring my participation in this “Share Your Heart" promotion. I was selected for this sponsorship by the Clever Girls Collective. All opinions expressed here are my own.

I Spy With My Little Eye

Despite all evidence to the contrary, we don't spend the entire weekend in the pool. Most of it, yes -- the vast majority, even -- but sometimes we do find alternative ways to amuse ourselves. Even in the 100°F-plus heat.

Someone got Shae a pair of these Sunny Patch binoculars for her birthday (there is also a boys' version). I don't know why we haven't gotten them out already, or how she even found them in the 80 bajillion metric tons of toys in our living room -- don't ask, you don't want to know -- but apparently she's been learning about binoculars while she's been on "safari" at school or something, because she knew exactly what to do with them.

She headed up into the cornfields behind my grandparents' house and tried to see what sorts of trouble she could get herself into. She didn't see much, but she enjoyed being allowed to run wild in the high grass and the soybean rows. At least, I think they're soybeans -- I'm honestly not sure. Maybe it's alfalfa? I know it's not corn this year (that, I can identify), and I'm pretty sure the farmer practices nitrogen-fixing crop rotation. Anyway, she didn't see much back there except dried corn husks from previous summers, but I came literally face-to-face with several locusts. Make a note: it really HURTS when a locust flies into your face repeatedly.

She also smelled my grandparents' butterfly bush ("it doesn't smell like anything"), which really puts mine to shame. Theirs isn't as tall as mine -- the one in our yard is about 12 feet high, no joke -- but it's much bushier, and it has tons of purple flowers. I love my butterfly bush, but it am partial to the purple-flowered ones, and I especially love the rainbow ones, which I have never actually seen in the wild, but they always look so pretty in the nursery catalogs.

Went To A Garden Party

After Shae had her tea party with Tinkerbell, she kicked around my mother-in-law's garden for a while, trying to see what kind of trouble she could stir up.

More than you might think, actually.

I am pretty sure that she found this impatien on the ground, and didn't pull it off a plant, but I can never be 100% sure with this one. She's kind of a ninja.

She also spent about 15 minutes tormenting a huge fat squirrel -- and while, in theory, I whole-heartedly approve of squirrel harassment (squirrels in my neck of the woods have far too much power), it's still not setting a good precedent to allow her to torture the neighbors by screaming like a tree-rat, so we had a brief time-out.

How she manages to turn even time-out into an opportunity to give "good face," the world may never know. I know I sure as hell don't.

The red mandevilla is probably my favorite plant in my mother-in-law's garden. I'm more of a "medicinal wildflower" kind of gal (my own garden has a lot of bee balm, purple coneflowers, and mountain bluets, plus the butterfly bush that ate Cleveland), and generally speaking I prefer roses and native perennials to tropical transplants (primarily because they're a hell of a lot easier to maintain), but I can appreciate a good showy vine once in a while. And the red of that particular mandevilla is quite otherworldly and divine.

Wordless Wednesday: Northern Redbud

Bonus link

Serenity Sunday #1

A new feature I am starting, which is a callback to an earlier post, wherein I discuss the Things That Are Making Me Happy Right Now, with a continuing hat tip to NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast. (Oh, and you know how some NPR shows have that "This is NPR" tagline at the end? This one definitely should, because even if you hate NPR for whatever reason, I believe that most people will find this particular podcast thoroughly entertaining. And their Facebook page is a hoot. Seriously, go check it out.)

Anyway: once again the things that are making me happy this week are garden-related. Because it's spring, and there are many things about spring that do NOT make me happy (ahem, allergies), but my garden ain't one of them.

This tulip is not from my garden -- it grows in the courtyard of the building where I work. Or at least it did until we had heavy rains and high winds earlier this week. Most of the time, the landscapers put in assorted annuals to fill in the "empty" spaces around the trees, but every year, there is one or two random bulbs that manage to sprout. I love the color of this tulip. It's so happy.

I love this flowering tree, also in the work courtyard. No idea what it is -- a crape myrtle, maybe? -- but it is lovely. I am not generally a fan of pink, but I love pink-flowering trees. I continue to adore weeping cherry trees, even though they're pretty much done at this point.

My lilac bush. I think I might have missed the "best" of the blooming, but I managed to get out there at least once to sniff the flowers. I wish that my allergies weren't so bad; I'd love to be able to snip some bunches and put them in every room of my house.

So that's what making me happy right now. What about you?

Happiness or Bust

In another tip of the hat to a podcast that I really enjoy -- NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour, which is truly outstanding and which also has a Facebook page that features the single best cross-stitch that I have ever seen anywhere ever as its profile picture -- I've decided to close out this week with a short list of Things That Are Making Me Happy Right Now.

• My gig over at Prime Parents Club. It is nice to be in the company of other talented writers who are equally awesomely flawed as people and parents. And yes, I actually do mean that as a compliment.

• These trees in the courtyard at work. No idea what they are, and I need to take a Zyrtec whenever I am anywhere near them because flowering trees = pollen = allergies = unhappiness, but as long as I take my pills, I am fine. And I love them.
• Related: weeping cherry trees. I love cherry trees in general, and weeping cherry trees in particular, and just this morning I saw one that was so pretty that my breath actually caught in my chest. I would have pulled over to take a picture but it was the middle of morning rush.
• My garden is also making me happy right now, even though the pictures you are about to see are terrible (cell phone + Instagram to cover some of the awful cell-phone-ness) and also my weeds need to be done and whatever. Still, I love the earliest spring flowers, when everything is super-saturated color and vibrance.

Those forget-me-nots are SO TINY, you guys. In just a few weeks they'll be tall and bushy and gorgeous and I love that color so very much.

• Not pictured: my peony shoots (still too hard to see in the weeds back there), the lilac buds (because I never trimmed the lilac bush or the butterfly bush back last year, and so it's hard to tell the new growth from the old scraggly stuff), the columbines (not old enough yet to tell the actual columbines from the random weeds).

So this is what's making me happy right now: writing, bad photography, and flowers. As the PCHH gang says: let me know what's making YOU happy in the comments.

Wordless Wednesday: Bluest Blue

Garden State of Mind

We visited with my mother-in-law over the weekend. She is still recovering from emergency eye surgery a few weeks ago, when she had a retinal tear and they ended up doing something with lasers and gas bubbles to fix her all up. I'm not really sure of the particulars, really, but she wore an eyepatch for a week or so, which Shae thought was awesome.

My MIL lives in a different part of the same town that my parents live in. Her house and yard are much smaller than my parents', and nobody really has a green thumb quite like My Anonymous Mother, but MIL's yard is still rather charming in its way. She has a lot of violas all over the place, and various things in pots, and these irises, which I love. Irises are periodically my favorite flower, in heavy rotation with hydrangeas, delphiniums, Gerbera daisies, and sunflowers.

She's set up her backyard to look like a little courtyard cafe is tucked back there. She has a lot of solar lights and tchotchkes and a beautiful birdbath made of mosaic tile with lots of reds and yellows and blues in it. And, since it had water, Shae spent most of the day playing with it.

All afternoon she would scoop out water with her little plastic shovel, pour it into her bucket, and after she did that half a dozen times or so, she would dribble the water out of her bucket onto some poor unsuspecting weed, or pair of shoes.

She takes right after my mother. It was more than a little disturbing, seeing a miniature version of my mom taking care of my MIL's garden. Very meta.

Secret Garden

Due to a family medical situation -- everyone is fine, don't worry -- we spent a good chunk of the weekend at my mom's. And it was chaotic and noisy and, surprisingly, a whole lot of Zen, too. Because of my mother's garden.

I think my mother has one of the most beautiful gardens in the world. It's like visiting another place, another time, another planet sometimes. It's a combination of heirloom plants, wildflowers, roses, bushes, and tchochkes arranged unlike anywhere else I've ever seen.

Things inside my parents' house can sometimes get hectic and rowdy, especially when there are extra people there and a baseball game is on, but walk outside and stand in the garden, take a deep breath and smell all that sweetness, and it's like inhaling an instant mood stabilizer.

It's one of my favorite places in the world to be. If she had a pool and a cabana boy, I'd never leave.

"The kiss of the sun for pardon, the song of the birds for mirth, one is nearer God's heart in a garden than anywhere else on Earth." -- Dorothy Frances Gurney

Happy Mother's Day, Mom.