Memoirs

The other night Joe picked up the memoir I am currently reading and asked, "Why did you choose to read this book? Why are so you interested in someone's life who you don't even know?"

It's a fair question. For this book, I confess, it was nothing more than seeing it tucked amongst other memoirs at the library and thinking Oh, that's a nice cover.


Reading a bad memoir is like being forced to spend time with someone you don't like very much, who talks too much and too loudly about nothing at all. Except, when you want to, you can close the book and tell that person to stop talking in a way that we only dream of doing in person. Unlike the cloying, obnoxious friend of a friend we're stuck talking to at a party, you don't have to finish the conversation; you can interrupt them mid-sentence and return them to the library post haste.

But reading a good memoir is like making a new friend. In a good memoir you are drawn into a person through their writing much in the same way we're drawn into a person we might meet: through an enjoyable conversation, similar interests or a compelling personality. With a good friend we can relax and enjoyably talk or listen for hours about nothing.

We all have something to say, don't we? We all have something to contribute. I think those who've found a way to do it in print help make life just a little bit more lovely. Thank you, memoir writers. Keep writing about your lives in your warm, genuine voices, and I promise I'll keep reading.

Behind the Scenes

Real life here today, folks. Dish washing, cleaning up, et cetera.

Take heart! There is joy in the mundane.

Take this, my laundry pile.

This is all our dirty laundry from this last week. Now, I know some of you are all, "Seriously?! That seems like an awful lot amount of laundry! "  While others of you are saying to yourselves, "Cate is a total amateur. A week's worth of laundry and that's all she has?"

Doesn't matter what you're thinking. Because whether it's a lot or a little, it has to get done. People around here seem to like having clean clothes to wear.

And I am taking joy in doing it.

Nope. That's not right. I still hate doing laundry. But, I find my joy in seeing the pile diminish. I take joy in tomorrow when (hopefully!) my laundry room floor will be empty again and I can close (and lock!) the laundry chute door and pretend there are no dirty clothes in the house until next Wednesday, when I'll do it all again.

Well, except I'm not sharing my laundry pile with you every week, because that would just be weird.

Stairs

Yep. It's a flight of stairs. Whoopdee-doo. That is all it is. I'm not going to try and assign some big meaning or anything to this post or picture.

I tried to write a blog post earlier. I've been writing and deleting and writing and deleting until I finally just said, "Screw it." But then I told myself that I could come up with something--anything-- if only I would look. And then I saw my staircase, and it happens to be one of the few areas in my home right now that doesn't have riding helmets, schoolwork, books, shoes and other annoying, unputaway things lying about.

And I like it. See that oil right up on the landing that my grandmother painted? Isn't it beautiful? And the prints I received as a Christmas gift running along the wall next to the stairs?

I walk up and down these stairs endlessly each day. Up and down. Up and down.

And yet it took searching for a blog post to remind me to sit back and appreciate the stairs and the landing, an area that I walk past every day without noticing yet, when I take the time, I remember that it contains lots of items that I know please my eye and elicit good memories. If only I would remember to slow down and look!

Doctor

Elisabeth. Old enough to know sucking her fingers is babyish, but still young enough to want the comfort of a well-worn blanket and a familiar habit as she nervously anticipates a shot at the doctor's office. I love the juxtaposition of her size and the maturity in her eyes right alongside the babyish habits.

Ballet

We parents were invited in to watch Elisabeth and her classmates' ballet class earlier this week. These videos are entertaining, to me, because Elisabeth is my daughter. They may be interesting to some of you with some sort of connection to us or to our family. For everyone else, I apologize. Indulge me.

Like every other girl in the room, save one, E has on the required pink tights with a white leotard. She is one of the few (only?) with her hair thrown up in a loose bun.

The short, brief glimpse into the studio.

A longer peek, for the truly interested.

Football Obsession

Look. If you lived anywhere near here and could feel the hype practically oozing out of football fans around these parts, you would understand why all I can think about is Sunday's game. 

Packers. Bears. The winner goes to the Super Bowl. With these two teams composing possibly the biggest sports rivalry ever, is it any wonder that I've been occupying myself with trash talking with Bear fans (please, please, please, Packers, win on Sunday so I can save face) and reading the following sports related blogs which, if you're as crazed about this game as I am, you will want to check out?

Insiders Blog at Green Bay Press Gazette

ESPN North Blog

They are both updated multiple times daily, so check back frequently, or add them to your feeds.

I also like the Journal Sentinel's Packer blog. Lastly, Packer Geeks is worth checking out too.

Packer Game: The Real Deal

I think you can go ahead and call me a real Green Bay Packers fan now. Why? What's special about now when I've been blathering about the Packers on this blog for far too long (I am well aware most of my readers don't give two hoots about the Packers, or any football team, for that matter)?

Well, I'll tell you. Though I've been to Lambeau Field before to watch the Packers play football, I've never been when it's been cold and miserable. It's easy to go to Lambeau in September, or even October, when it's all warmish and easy. It's quite another when you have to start thinking about how you'll keep yourself warm on those cold, metal benches a few weeks before the game and borrow necessary items as needed. So, last week was my first real cold weather game, and I totally rocked it. And, by rocked it I mean I looked like a tool but was completely warm and had lots of fun.

P.S. Don't feel too sorry for Blake. Yes, he was the lone Bear fan in the car on the two hour drive up and the two hour drive back, but we all knew the Bear loss was inevitable, so think he'd mentally prepared himself beforehand. After all, the Bears still suck.

Thank You, Blog

Way back when I started this blog I didn't really know what the point of it was. I didn't know if I would keep up with it. And, most importantly, as a blogger, I really didn't know who I was or what I wanted to say.

It's been a few years and I now know what the point of blogging is (at least for me, anyway).

I know that, give or take a spell here and there, I will keep up with it.

And (and here's the real crux of today's post) while I don't really know that I have a point that I am trying to get across every day, I do know exactly who I am, not only as a blogger, but as a person. Further, it's because of this blog that I know my voice as well as I do in all facets of my life.

I know that probably sounds hokey, especially to those of you who don't blog, or who blog about something impersonal. I have always felt pretty comfortable with who I am, even when most of my peers didn't, but before starting this blog my life was fairly compartmentalized in the same way most peoples' lives are: work life, home life, family, these friends, those friends, et cetera. Blogging changes that, though, especially if you're writing about anything remotely real to your life. All of a sudden a conversation that is most apt to happen with These Friends is now being read by Those Friends and Those Friends are seeing a part of you they had yet to discover.

When I first started blogging I didn't share my blog with everyone; I didn't try and keep it a secret necessarily, I just only shared it, intentionally, with some of my life's compartments. That all changed when I joined Facebook. My e-worlds collided with my real life worlds in a very real, very fast way and all of a sudden everyone was telling me they were reading my blog; any shred of compartmentalization in my life had evaporated.

At first I felt kind of uncomfortable with this development; I thought knowing my audience was filled with different people wanting to read different things would limit what I might choose to write about, and would somehow make my posts more generic and less about me. I've found the opposite has happened. I know I can't please everyone, and so I only write what I care about and say what I want to say.

What I am saying, in a very long-winded, convoluted way, is that you see me here, for better or worse, and I don't know if I could have said that in August of 2006. Thanks for sticking around through awkward teenage years of my blog. I promise lots more of the mundane everyday to come, and a lot less (never!) posts about things I don't care about just to fill space.

Christmas 2010 Recap

What a whirlwind of traveling, overeating and celebration the past few weeks have been.

Christmas Eve. Here. Dad and Diana are here. They bring Alex, fresh off an airplane from Tulsa. Bob arrives around the same time, but falls victim almost immediately to a harsh stomach bug and spends the evening resting.

Those healthy feast on beef tenderloin, Mrs. Butland's potatoes, fresh steamed green beans tossed with butter and lemon pepper, roasted carrots tossed with olive oil and thyme and dinner rolls (of the most basic sort: flour, yeast, etc.; nothing fancy).

After our Christmas Eve service we return home where the kids open new pajamas from their parents and a new ornament for the tree from Dad and Diana.

Christmas morning. Here. Just us. The first kid is awake by 5:28 a.m. This after a night when I finally went to bed around 12 a.m. Still, though, what parent-- even a tired one-- could be upset with excited children on Christmas morning?

Cinnamon rolls. Stockings. Coffee. Christmas story from Luke. Presents.

Christmas afternoon. Silver Lake. Dad, Diana, Cloe and Alex are present. Blake has been stricken by a stomach bug and is home resting. 

We eat, and we eat well. Ham. Turkey. Twice baked potatoes. There was more, and it was all delicious and worth every calorie.

Sunday, December 26. Silver Lake. A day of nothing. Wonderful, wonderful nothingness. Unless you were Diana, in which case it was your turn with the stomach bug flying around at warp speed. 

Friday, December 31. Oconto Falls. Doug, Wicky, Steve, Sue, Cassandra, Cody and Cedar. We arrive early afternoon and within an hour or two the kids are ripping into their presents.

Later we feast on steaks. Baked potatoes. More decadent, delicious Christmas feasting. We stay up to ring in the new year (all but Caroline).

Nice celebrations, all. 

List

1980 Oakland Raiders. 1997 Denver Broncos. 2000 Baltimore Ravens. 2005 Pittsburgh Steelers. 2007 New York Giants.

What do all these teams have in common? They all won the Super Bowl after entering the playoffs as wild card teams.

It happens. Wild card teams win Super Bowls.

This Packer fan hopes the next addition to that list will be: 2010 Green Bay Packers.

Hey, it happens.

Pictures

I can finally share these pictures that I took of the kids about a month ago. They were a Christmas gift for my mother and father-in-law, who read my blog, and I didn't want their Christmas present surprise ruined by seeing them here first.

Madeleine, 10 years old.

Hank, 8 years old.

Ellie, 5 years old.

Caroline, 15 months old.

Birds

There are moments of unexpected perfection that, if you don't take time to slow down and look for, you may miss.

Consider.

It is the morning after Christmas. You could plunge back into the chaotic-ness of the everyday. Or you could sit with a cup of coffee and see this.

A cardinal, happily considering his breakfast.

Or his friend, some sort of woodpecker, taking his turn at the bird feeder.

If you left your post of relaxation and contemplation, you would miss these little guys who show up and search for what's fallen, uneaten and undiscovered.

Within moments, it seems, it's all over. Whether the birds are satiated or frightened by the appearance of a cat in their general vicinity is unclear. What is clear is that there isn't a feathered beast to be seen anywhere.

And to think it could be missed so easily and so quickly. 

Cookie Baking

Decorating cookies is more fun with friends, and I'll tell you why. First of all, you can get away with making one double batch of cookies and end up with multiple kinds of cookies since all participants contribute cookies. Second of all, it's just more fun because there is lots of laughing and chatting, both for kids and adults.

And, in my case, I get help from someone much more talented than I am. Here Erin is showing the girls how to carefully pipe the frosting on, as opposed to how I usually just slap it on.

See? Far prettier than anything I am able to do.

Forgotten Caroline didn't really get to decorate. Instead she walked around whining. To get her to be quiet the other kids kept sneaking her cookies. I think Caroline ate 6,720,000 sugar cookies this afternoon.

And speaking of sneaking sugar . . .

I am pretty sure Gus ate about eight pounds of icing. 

I think he would rather have had nine pounds.

Somehow, the cookies got frosted, and I think the kids did a really good job. Don't you?

Ornament Tour

Every year, going through Christmas ornaments and decorations is akin to strolling down Memory Lane.

That darling clay pig? Made for my mom by her cousin in Vermont when she was first married and on her own. It, along with its clay brethren, have hung on every childhood Christmas tree I ever had (not shown is also a duck among various other things, some of which now reside on Quantum Void's Christmas tree)).

Oh, this crystal unicorn. Every time I look at it I'm back in my childhood living room, staring at it longingly as it twinkled away ever so beautifully. I think I wanted to take it off the tree and play with it and pretend it was real. I think maybe I may have done that a time or two.

Miraculously, the unicorn survived. I now hear the same tenor of angst and desperation that my mother's voice must have contained when my children get too close to it.

The silver angel. This is the defining Christmas tree ornament of my childhood. It was sent to me upon my birth from a great-aunt on my mom's side and whenever we decorated my childhood tree I always had to do it near the end of decorating. The rational was saving it for the end would guarantee it would be on the outside, in one of the best spots, but I also think it was to amp up the anticipation of getting to the "good" ornaments (we all were forced to put up the ones no one thought were any fun, like balls, first).

Even though it was always my ornament, it hung on Mom and Bob's tree even after I was married and had my own tree. I always sort of hinted that maybe it was time for Mom to hand it over already, but I think she liked having those reminders of her kids around her, so I never pushed it. 

Almost every ornament on our tree has some story associated with it. It's no wonder putting up our Christmas tree is one of my favorite days of the year. 

An explanation of what happened to Caroline.

A lot of you saw this pathetically sad and ridiculously cute picture of Caroline on Facebook last night. You know, the one where she has a big white gauze pad loosely taped across her face that is, incidentally, covered in dried blood and boogers. The one with her standing in an exam room with a purple hospital gown?

Yeah, this one.

Look, I went for a lot of years with kids that never needed much more than a kiss and a Band-Aid to cure their little mishaps, but these little girls? What's up with all the stitches? I blame Joe. No, no; I know these things happen and you're shaking your head and saying, "But Cate, that's not fair! Kids have accidents!"

Hear me out.

Besides my two c-sections, I have never needed stitches in my life. As a kid I climbed trees. I played in an old dairy barn with lots of glass and nails and other laceration inducing devices lying about. And believe me, I fell. I cut myself. But I never had a cut deep enough or wide enough to require stitches. Joe, however, has needed stitches one hundred fifty kajillion times. At least. So, clearly, Elisabeth and Caroline have their dad's propensity to break their skin open. The evidence seems pretty conclusive, no?

Please continue to dwell on Joe's thin skin for a moment, will you? That will help you ignore my culpability in last night's ER visit. Thanks.

So, last night I was grabbing one quick thing from our attic. One quick thing! Yes, I knew I was taking a gamble. Yes, I knew Caroline was upstairs with me as I pulled down the attic stairs. I glanced at her, absorbed in one of the bedrooms with a stack of toys, and thought, wrongly, I could make it up and down before she noticed the attic ladder was down. I did not know Ellie was coming upstairs. Those attic stairs are a magnet for Ellie; upon arriving upstairs she immediately started climbing them. Caroline saw her sister and followed. She never made it past the third or fourth stair; I heard the girls and started back down. Too late; Ellie started climbing down and pushed past stepped over Caroline. Caroline fell. I saw it all happen as if it were in slow motion, trapped on the attic stairs, just a few feet away from my little baby.

I still don't know what she hit. She fell a couple of feet, maximum, onto carpet. I still don't think she scraped her head on the stairs. There was nothing on the floor.

Yet still, fall she did, and the total damage? A lot of tears, a fair amount of blood, two internal stitches and seven-- yes, seven!-- regular stitches.

She stopped crying just a few minutes after the injury. She was smiling, babbling and laughing for the entire twenty minute drive to Children's Hospital. She was entertained with all attention she received while waiting for her mending. She screamed bloody murder, however, during the stitching despite the topical application of some sort of numbing agent and a mild sedative. After she was happy and silly once again.

Still, though, I feel wretched. I know it was an accident but still. . . something about seeing the blood, the tears, the needle. . . I won't soon forgive myself. On the good side though, I won't dash up into the attic when the stairs are down anymore either. I accept a few days of guilt; I deserve it and it will make it easier on me to let it go when I forgive myself, which I know I will.

How much you want to bet that Caroline forever grumbles about the inevitable scar that she will work at covering for the rest of her life? *sigh*

Cool Storm

Crazy November storm. Heavy rain. Wind. Tornados. Warm temperatures. Snow in the forecast for tomorrow. 

Oh! And these really gorgeous pink clouds.

Caroline Walking

Fourteen months old. Walking. Sort of talking (though she refuses to perform on command, as you saw in the video).

Everything and Nothing

Here I sit in my kitchen with a glass of wine to my left while Clementi sonatinas play soothingly. Quietly. I hear the music and not the noise of my children. Their childish noises are content, not overly boisterous and not loud in any sense. There is meatloaf in the oven, and it is just enough cooked that its aroma is starting to tickle my nose. Caroline intermittently crawls under my stool and then walks from the refrigerator to her favorite cabinet where she likes to pull out boxes of pasta and scatter the boxes across the floor. Along with the peaceful strains of Clementi I hear an occasional "uh-oh!" or "NO!" come out of my youngest's mouth.

Where have I been these past few weeks? Nowhere and everywhere. Busy and, yet, ordinary.

I have time. I have the will. And I have lots to say, but tonight I lack the ability to convey any of it. I want to share it all. And I want to share nothing.

So, back to Clementi-- and that meatloaf that, despite being a big blob of greasy meat, smells intensely appetizing.

Great Migrations

The National Geographic Channel's new miniseries premieres this Sunday evening. Our DVR is already set to record, and I am really looking forward to watching these with the older kids.

Election Ruminating

Just as I didn't want to post some pathetic, over-the-top entry about how the sky was crashing down around us the day following Barack Obama's election as President of the United States of America, I also didn't want to post immediately following this past Tuesday's election because I was too happy and excited about the results, and almost as annoying as whiney, over-the-top blog posts about election defeats, are the types of posts that are so celebratory that they shove the other side's losses in their face.

How can I not comment, though? For years I have been lamenting how the party I vote for the majority of the time has been losing its way on issues that matter most to me. But these Republicans-- Marco Rubio!, Scott Walker!, Ron Johnson!-- these people are free-market, small government conservatives. So many of our new elected officials are cut from the same cloth as Paul Ryan, and that is a good, good thing given our country's current economic woes.

I still don't know what to make of it all. How can a country vote for a president so much more liberal than the candidates they voted for the other night just two short years ago? Are our memories so short? Does President Obama differ that dramatically from candidate Obama in peoples' minds? Did President Obama overreach in his actions? Did different people vote on Tuesday than two years ago?

More locally, Wisconsin, a state that hasn't voted for a Republican for president since Ronald Reagan, I think, completely went Republican. It voted out a popular Democrat incumbent senator for an unknown entity. Our governor is now a Republican, along with both houses of our legislature. Our congressional delegation is now predominantly Republican.

I truly don't know what to make of it all.

Still, 1994 always remains in the forefront of my mind. Republicans were elected to reign in a president that was seen as governing more to the left than the rest of the nation. It didn't take long for those Republicans to lose their way and become part of the Beltway problem.

So, I am hopeful, but also realistic; voters have to continue to pay attention. Vigilantly.