Embracing 2008, looking forward to 2009

Props to the hundreds of thousands of bloggers, especially those with children (whom I will NOT automatically call mommy bloggers :)), who can keep up with photos, videos and heck, even posts themselves this time of year. I find myself at the end of the holiday months, the longest and best I've had in years, if not ever. Work simultaneously invigorated and overwhelmed me. We welcomed lots of new friends in a new house. Julian could identify Santa Claus and open presents on his own. Ian and I kept up our positive attitudes and couldn't pinch ourselves enough to make sure all this happy goodness was real and not just some wistful dream from earlier in 2008.



People keep saying what a crappy year 2008 was. It most definitely held unprecedented lows, both personal and economic, but with a new president, a new job, a new partnership, a new home, a new social circle (even for Julian) and a new wardrobe and subsequent quasi-fame, I am having a hard time remembering anything but the good from '08.



In terms of my own person growth and change, 2008 was right up there, if not ahead, of 2001, 2003 and 2006. Look at the hardship and joy suffered in those years: starting college and 9/11, followed by exiting adolescence and living in Spain, then moving to Austin, losing Troy and embracing Julian.



I'm just thankful that this year, like the others, the lemonade we made quenches our thirsty lips.



My hope is that our collective momentum will continue into this new year. 2009, as every year before it, holds countless opportunities for my family and yours, and my wish is that we all greet them with open eyes and a straight head.

It's snowing in Austin, Texas!

What a delightful, unanticipated surprise.

Those are too few and far between these days.

A glimpse in the new house

We survived the stint without gas.


It's an incredible tale of perseverance, one I'm sure one day will be made into a Lifetime movie. Long winter nights in front of the fire place, boiling water to wash the dishes. Good thing for Scott's "loven," a halogen light oven that helped us make egg bakes and toast when we didn't have gas. Thank God for IKEA meatballs and egg noodles, too.




Scott, many of you may know, is a friend of mine from college. He's Troy's younger brother, whom I met when he was just a shaggy haired football player from Lockwood. He is on an adventure away from Missouri for awhile. We're lucky he picked Austin.

He just moved into his new place today, which isn't far from ours. It's our first night completely alone in our new house, so I'm going to try not to spend it all on the computer.

Here are a few photos from the past weeks. I'll keep this post restricted to new house photos and a Julian album, including photos of his new tricycle, will be posted soon.

One last highlight from the week that was: Pork tamales that came with a sauce that tasted enough like chili that I couldn't help but top it with Fritos. Mmmm, tamale Frito pie. Why isn't someone selling this already?


And now, Shiva's guided tour of the house as of last week:

Moving ain't easy

I used to love to move. Maybe it's because I moved so much I was forced to love it. A year here, a semester there. We spent two years in our most recent place, the longest I've lived in the same place outside my parents' home. That little old apartment was also the most dynamic of the places I've lived.

As the Pregnant One, I got off the hook when we moved in two years ago, letting my uncles and cousins trek up and down those stairs carrying heavy boxes. A few months after we moved it, the apartment served as the home we welcomed Julian into, the one where he'd eventually learn to walk and sleep in his own room. A television crew and two stylish celebrities also blitzed through that house, ridding of our lives more than just holey jeans and stretched-out shirts. I learned how to tip-toe down those stairs in shiny new shoes, and then I quickly figured out how to haul back up them -- still in the heels remember -- with bags full of new cookbooks, food magazines and product samples to try out.

We knew we'd need a yard and more space when Julian entered toddlerhood, which didn't exactly coincide with our lease expiring, but we made do for the months in between.

When it was time to find a new home, we looked for weeks and nothing stuck, until we happened upon a nice duplex with a big yard and a kind landlord just 200 yards from our apartment.

We signed the lease and started moving in the same day. Well, Ian started moving. Thanksgiving week happens to be one of the busiest for any food writer, so I couldn't do much until Wednesday, which is also when my parents arrived to help. By Wednesday night, I still wasn't doing much moving because I was bowing to the porcelain gods after a bad something or other at work. Triste, ineed.

By Thanksgiving morning, I was feeling better, and the family had most of the important stuff moved. We had dinner at Uncle Tom's house, but I wasn't that into it, either because of the menu or my weakened appetite, I'm still not sure. We decided we'd spend our first night in the new house on Thanksgiving, even though said kind landlord hadn't had the gas turned on, so we were without heat, a stove or a water heater. Mega triste, I know.

Thanks to a big fireplace, lots of wood from Uncle Tom's and a house full of folks, we made it through the long holiday weekend just fine.

My parents took off Saturday night, just a few hours before another Missourian arrived. Scott, who has been in the process of moving to Austin since spring, will use us as a home base while he figures things out this week. With all the piddling to be done, Ian and I are grateful for the help with Julian and for keeping that fireplace going until we get the gas going on Tuesday.

On one of our final trips back to the old place, I scrubbed and scrubbed to get the crayon off the wall, with little success. Ian vacuumed, and Julian shrieked as he playfully ran from empty room to empty room.

I forgot how hard it is to adjust to completely new surroundings. I think about what it's like for the little guy, who now, in addition to having a whole new house to adjust to is also learning how to sleep for the first time in a bed, not a crib.

To be continued when I have time to add photos and update on the new house with gas and Internet...

Our evening with My Morning Jacket

My Morning Jacket played Stubb's on Sunday night, and neighbor friend Katie and I gathered the energy that was left after our already intense weekends and headed downtown. Glad we pushed through the 3-hour set, much of which you can see though this set of YouTube videos. A little too ethereal and jam band at times, but in all a fantastic show I'll surely remember for awhile.

The boys are back in town

Ian and Julian were in Waco for a few days this week, which left me alone in this house for more hours than I've been alone here since Julian was born (not much of an exaggeration, even with the long days of work I had this week...). Toddlers don't leave you much space or time for yourself. It's just a fact that parents of young ones grow to accept. I fight it still (Putting him down for a nap at 9:30 instead of 10 or ignoring his shouts of "mom" that start 20 minutes after we both go down for a nap, for example.) but there's little use. He's interested in everything in the house except his things. The DVDs are particularly of interest, especially since he's figured out how to reach the eject button even though it's as high and far from his reach as we can get it. Friends, babysitters, even family members — everyone but fellow newish parents — have a hard time really understanding the attention and energy required to tend to, much less entertain and educate, a 19-month-old.

That's where Ian gets the super gold stars. I've officially decided that staying at home with Julian full time is not anything I'd want or would be capable of doing. It's getting to the point where Ian, too, is having to make the conscious decision to continue with the current childcare situation. We've been talking about finding somewhere for him a few days a week, which I hope will happen in the next few months. It would be good for everyone in this house to have some more time to him or herself.

My time away from the child is taken up pretty wholly with work or work-related activities. Thankfully, that also means I've been eating some fine food and meeting some fabulous people. I even got to go to the circus this week! That food price story on Wednesday ended up being more work than I thought it would be, but it was worth it to try to explain why some of H-E-B's prices have dropped amid the largest food price increases since 1990.

Thanks to neighbor/sound guy Pat, we got to see the lovely Patty Griffin last night at the Austin City Limits studio on the UT campus. It was a great show; the live rendition of "Bad News" kicked ass and her last song, which she wrote for a graduating class, brought tears to my eyes. Sunday is My Morning Jacket, which I'm having a surprisingly hard time finding a partner to go with. Triste. They are too good to miss.

Joyous days

I started my new job as food writer today! It feels so good to finally be starting, and I'm so enthusiastic about what's on the go already. The food blog will be launching soon; I'll let you know when it does.

Yesterday marked Mother's Day and the two week notice until the wedding. Holy cow. Everything seems to happen at once, eh? We celebrated the dia de la madre at Freddie's over some drinks and the most delicious onion rings on the planet. Julian got to play on the playset they have there, and as you can see by the video, listen to some cool music and meet some new people. I took some spiffy video with my new camera and I tried out a new video editing program to put it together.




Julian has been so sweet lately. Giving hugs and kisses and wanting to snuggle in the most adorable ways. We went on a glorious hike the other day on the Greenbelt and were surprised with water flowing at Twin Falls. We found a shady tide-pool-esque spot to sit and explore the rocks and fresh water while Shiva romped in the creek. Proof enough to me that a super special Mother's Day isn't limited to one day a year.

I read an especially wonderful Mother's Day blog post today. It's from Noble Pig, a food blog I read. She's a mom to two boys and watching them grow through those pictures and her words is really touching.

Luscious loquats

Loquats are ripening around town. When I first saw the clusters of bright orange, egg-shaped fruit on trees in Austin, I could hardly believe it. We'd eaten nisperos by the kilos in Spain, but I'd never seen or heard of an equivalent in my own language, on my own terrior, to borrow a wine term I've been around lately. It's those Texas winemakers who've pointed out to me lately how similar Texas growing conditions are to Spain's. The heat, the infrequent, unpredictable rain, the lack of deep, hard freezes. So it was in Austin where I first plucked a loquat/nispero off a neighborhood tree. The city-grown ones are much smaller and more tart than the ones we used to get for cents on the pound at the biweekly outdoor produce market in Alicante, but they are a bittersweet reminder of those beloved days abroad.

Julian got to try a loquat today and he proceeded to drop it off the porch and return to his uvas. Yep, it's official. Julian has a Spanish word. Since "uva" is easier to say than "raisin," we used the Spanish word with him — well, technically, pasas are raisins and uvas are grapes, but I'll explain that to him in Spanish 2 — and sometime in the past few days, he took to it. I've been doing the same thing with fresa (strawberry). I think Ian uses ami (friend), one of the French words he remembers from Canada, with Julian. Call it smorgasbord language education if you like, but I'm OK if he combines different languages and signs to communicate even if it means fewer words overall for a little while.

Another fun new thing that I forgot to post about was that Julian drank out of the hose the other day at Tom's. He was exploring the yard and was extra curious about the hose and spicket. So I turned on the water and his first instinct was to put his mouth in the fresh cold stream for a sip. Then he shared with his oh-so-proud mommy, soaking us both.

Get this, there was a San Francisco band called Loquat at SXSW this year. They're not half bad.

Beware the netiraptor

Julian has been feeling under the weather lately. He's had this lingering hack for weeks, and it got juicier over the weekend. His nose has been running and he even had a fever a couple of times. The hard thing about sickness in kids is that with these symptoms (well, minus the cough), it could just be teething. And being in Austin, it could just be allergies. Or it might be something that could lead to freakin' pneumonia! So we're taking him in to the doc to make sure it's not the latter. He's supposed to have a well-check this week (he'll be 15 months in a few days), so we'll do the two-times-in-one-week doctor's visits, which is how it always seems to work, right mommas?

Poor little guy. You can just tell his body's doing
its best to get rid of whatever it's got.

In our collective hazy April state (see Austin allergies, above), talk always comes back around to the neti pot. I hadn't heard of this device until I moved here, which probably says a lot about not only what's in the air in Missouri, but also the traditional approach toward medicine people use. Vince introduced me to the neti when I was living at the Cathedral, and lots of folks swear by them. Next time I'm saddled by a sinus infection, I'll probably go get one of my own. Here's how one guys uses them:



And since I'm YouTubing this post already, here's what Erin does with her inner velociraptor:

Obama rally in Austin

From the Obama rally Friday night:

Can you kinda seem Obama in there?
As you can tell, we didn't have the best view.

Viva Leslie!

Please, for the love of Austin, take a minute and watch this video by John Kelso, the Statesman's "humor" columnist, of his cross-dressing muse, the legendary Leslie Cochran. (He's so legendary, in fact, that when you Google 'Leslie,' he's the third entry.)


be sure to watch carefully at the end

http://www.statesman.com/news/mplayer/news/News/44147

(My apologies for not being able to figure out how to embed the video. Any html techies out there have a solution?)

I really don't think I can do Leslie justice by writing any sort of follow-up analyzation or attempt at witty humor. I am fortunate enough to see Leslie a few times a week on my way to work. Walking from Bouldin Creek to who knows where, in a black fur hat and red miniskirt, gold earrings dangling from his ears. Austin is my beloved home, indeed.

Also, in case you were wondering, I would LOVE my own Leslie magnets for Christmas.