Coast of Carolina

Oh yeah ... vacation. We've been home for more than a month, so it's probably time to put some pictures up, isn't it?

Truth be told, I haven't written about vacation yet because I'm practicing my usual Zennish strategy of better living through denial. It's like, if I pretend that vacation isn't over yet, then it isn't.

It was our usual family vacation: a chaotic mess of early rising, child limbs, Crocs, pancakes, ice cream, tantrums, Disney movies, mismatched outfits, and missing pacifiers -- and that was all on the first morning.

The weather wasn't the greatest, too hot the first few days and almost too cold after that, and the ocean was cold even by my standards (in the mid-60s, which -- look, I can tolerate A LOT, but I draw the line at hypothermia on vacation, you know?), but we barely even noticed, to be honest.

All the kids were just phenomenal. My sister's boys get more awesome every day, my niece is just the bee's knees, my kid was fairly well behaved most of the time ...

... there are even a couple of photos with ME in them, for a change, although let's be honest here and admit that I have GOT to learn how to pose so that I don't look like I'm made up of, like, 75% boobs and back fat.

I always hesitate to say that I can't wait to do it again, because that's such a gigantic understatement. I'm ready to go on vacation again pretty much the second we get in the car to come home. If I ruled the world and could do whatever I wanted, I'd arrange it so that we could all be together whenever we wanted, always.

Are we going back there, to the coast of Carolina?

As soon as possible.

PS - If you're interested in seeing ALL my vacation photos (all the good ones, anyway), you can view them here, including the Instagrams. If I can figure out how, I'll add my sisters' pictures, too.

Salty Piece Of Land

More pictures from the beach, because of reasons.

Boogie boarding: you're doing it wrong. And still, somehow, doing it right.

Shae says that at the next Olympics she's going to win first place in all the swimming events. I don't think she'll be ready for Rio in 2016, but maybe by 2024 she'll be the new Missy Franklin. And if that is the case, I hope that when Costas and company does a package on "how it all began," they include this picture.

Somebody is not sure whether 64°F is quite warm enough for civilized people. (Glad it wasn't just me.)

Now I really wish that I had put Shae in her suit that matches Makayla's. This is what I get for letting her pick her own clothes out - my perfect shot is ruined. RUINED.

We did a lot of jumping. Shae likes to jump. I hope she never discovers the pole vault, or we'll all be in trouble.

Those eyelashes KILL ME DEAD, every time.

It should be reassuring to me that EVERY.SINGLE.FAMILY.PICTURE. turns out like this, because it means it is not operator error, and yet. AND YET.

THOSE EYELASHES AGAIN. Gaaaah. Who do I need to speak to about an upgrade?

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.

Sunshine Lollipops and Rainbows

Some more pictures from the weekend. (With a lot of parentheses, just because.)

Ring pops: the great social equalizer. (Also, apparently, a paparazzi potential repellant.)

Passing the cake-eating torch. (Donuts totally count as cake, right? This one is frosted AND it has sprinkles. I think that's close enough for government work.)

How YOU doin', Smiley? May I eat your face? Please? (If you squint really hard, you can see two teefers in there.)

Clearly Makayla had something VERY IMPORTANT to say, which is why Shae and Joey are thinking about it really hard. (My guess? She said "Pop-pop." He's Kind Of A Big Deal in these parts.)

Nobody is looking at the camera except the baby, but at least everyone is smiling at (more or less) the same time.

It took four additional adults -- my sisters, one brother-in-law, and one cousin (and a partridge in a pear tree) -- to get everybody to look at the camera at the same time. And believe it or not, my parents were the hardest subjects to wrangle. EVERYBODY wants to eat the baby all the time.

Happy Birthday Nana!

Today is My Anonymous Mother's birthday. She is ... older-than-me years old.

This picture is totally gratuitous, but it's adorable, so it stays.

Happy Birthday, Nana / Mom!

A Very, Very, Very Fine House

I had a doctor's appointment today, because I caught my annual pre-Thanksgiving plague, and it isn't getting any better. I still go to see the same doctor that I have seen since I was about 12 years old, the office where I used to work in the billing office, with my grandmother and my grandfather and my mother as my bosses. Good times, those.

I took a half-sick day off work and went to my parents' house to have lunch before my office visit. As it turns out, my father was meeting my mother for lunch, so when I got there, I was the only person in the house. That is the first time that happened in at least five years, and possibly ten. Because there is always someone at my parents' house -- it's like Grand Central Station up in there.

In the spring and summer, my mother's garden is THE place to be, but the inside of the house is greatly underappreciated. I love my parents' house, not just because I lived there for so long and still spend so much time there, but because there are so many things in the house that say "Home" to me. Totally weird and random things.

Like this bowl. This bowl is my very favorite bowl in all the lands and the skies. Don't ask me why, because I'll be damned if I know. But it's always a special treat to me when I can eat out of this bowl, which I did today. Chunky Sirloin Burger soup will never taste as good as it does out of this bowl.

I love this grandfather clock, which we have had for about a hundred years. Well, okay, like 35 years, but still -- I always remember it being in my parents' house, so it might as well be generations old. It hasn't worked right since before I got married, I don't think. But when my sisters and I were little girls, it used to play a tune, and when my father would tuck us in at night, we used to sing the song together, and take turns being kissed goodnight on the long "BOOOOOING!"

This tatty old Monet poster is probably 20 years old. I got it when I was in high school, on the day I went to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and saw my very favorite painting for the first time. This poster has been in three bedrooms in my parents' house, plus four different college dorm rooms. Lucky for me that my mother and I have the same favorite color palettes, and this poster still matches the walls in the room that is now the "guest nursery." (Ironically, the poster is NOT a print of "A Bend in the Epte" -- the PMA did not have any copies of that poster left when I was there back in 1990.)

No idea where this weathervane came from, or why my mother has it, but her house generally has a vaguely-nautical-slash-beach-cottage decor, and this thing fits right in. This is in the guest bedroom, and sometimes when I'm sleeping over I will watch it reflect streetlights and headlights and taillights and the occasional tealight, and it helps me sleep.

If I recall correctly, my mom got this dresser either from "salvage" (i.e., she knew someone was getting rid of it and she picked it up and brought it home) or from a yard sale. Either way, she got it for next to nothing. It matches EXACTLY ZERO other pieces of furniture in my house -- my decorating style is more a cross between kind of colonial and a little bit Scandinavian and sort of hand-me-down -- but I call dibs on this wardrobe anyway.

On almost every available surface in the house, there are pictures. Tons and tons of pictures, of everybody and everything and every occasion, some of them literally decades old. Just in this one corner on my mom's living room, there are pictures of (clockwise, starting at top left) my wedding from 1999, my parents' wedding from 1973, me and my sisters from approximately 1987, my father's parents and their kids from around 1955 when my dad was still the youngest (there are only five kids in that picture, so my grandmother would go on to have EIGHT MORE children), a picture of my father and his brothers from my aunt's wedding in 2000 or 2001, and a picture of my mother and her siblings with my grandparents from I don't even know what year. Stuff like this is EVERYWHERE. My mother has my great-grandmother's elementary school graduation diploma on the walls. It's AWESOME.

And, OF COURSE, she still has roses blooming, because she and her dirt are made of magic.

Down By The Waterside

The Wednesday of our vacation was the one day where I allowed myself to go overboard. We took the day off from the beach that day, and sat around doing a whole lot of nothing. Watched movies and baseball games on TV. Went to the playground. Ate Doritos for lunch. My sister, her husband, my husband and I went to Atlantic City that night, had a great dinner at a steakhouse which included a very nice bottle of wine that cost more than my whole gambling budget, and my sister and I went to see a show -- an a capella group-in-residence at the casino that features a guy we went to high school with. I overshot my daily calorie budget by like 700, although I ended up making up for it the next night when we went to a boardwalk and I wouldn't eat anything due to a wicked case of The Skeevs (which I will tell you about later).

Anyway, today's blog post is all about overindulgence -- only this time we'll do it in pictures. I have a ton of pictures from the beach I wanted to post, but not a whole lot of stories, per se. The beach is pretty much the beach, you know? (See Monday: "We had a hell of a lot of fun, the end. On to the pictures!") These are not necessarily in any kind of order except the kind I am best at: arbitrary.

What do engineers do on vacation? Fly kites with their kids. We love kites in our family, even the cheapo-depot dollar store kind. For next time, though, I want to get one of those fancy brightly-colored acrobatic ones.

Do these kids rock the snot out of sunglasses, or what? And incidentally, my love affair for the Anniversary Camera continues unabated -- half of my pictures look like they were taken for a catalog.

Daddies of various stripes -- his, hers, mine.

Someone had a very nice time on vacation.

Well, two someones.

Okay, four someones. Whatever.