ON MOTHERHOOD

A week or two ago, I was chatting with some colleagues about our work schedules and the busy season that is coming. One of my younger, single, childless coworkers said, "I think I should rent a kid for a few weeks so I can demand to be able to go home by a certain time every day."

She was joking, but I was taken aback. Was getting to leave work at 5 every day all she took away from the harried lives that I and our other working-mother colleagues were trying to keep in balance?

I didn't really respond -- it was just too complicated. How to explain what months of sleep deprivation feel like? And the feeling I get when I look at Johnnie and am convinced she is the most beautiful creature on earth? How to describe the rushed process of preparing (what I think will be) a home-run dinner for my child while she fusses at me in the background, only to have her refuse to eat it?

How to tell her that most days I don't actually love being a mother?

It's true. Often, the only thing I really love about motherhood is Johnnie.

Maybe it's wrong to say this out loud, but I don't love that she woke up crying at 4am twice this week, in pain from her latest teething adventure and unable to go back to sleep. (Really, are all these teeth necessary?) But because I love her, I held her and comforted her until morning.

I don't love sitting cross-legged on the floor, my ankles going numb, when there's a perfectly good sofa 6 inches away. But because I love her, I spend hours down on that floor with her, tasting her fake food, reading her stories and counting her toes.

I don't love folding all her endless tiny laundry, spending hours researching and preparing healthy and toddler-friendly food, sacrificing workouts/reading/hobbies/husband-time/friend-time/me-time so she can have a bigger piece of me, watching Caillou (he's the worst), sweating through nightmares that something bad will happen to her, trying to teach her patience while I'm growing impatient myself, or -- of course -- changing her diapers. But I love her, more than I could ever really explain, and there is joy in knowing I'm doing each and every one of these things for her.

On its own, "motherhood" kind of stinks sometimes. There is much unpleasantness and sacrifice. It knocks the wind out of me regularly. I even almost lost a tooth once.

Fortunately, there's a cute, sweet miniature person involved who is usually just looking for a hug, a cookie and a good time. And, also fortunately, her joy and belly laughs are contagious. She is both the cause of and the reward for all of it. I wouldn't trade her for that big raise I'll probably never get since I'm out the door by 5 every day. But I'm much richer (and considerably more tired) because of her.

It's hard to explain that to someone else, because I really don't understand it myself.

CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE

For the longest time, I've been sold on traditional white subway tile with dark grout for our master bathroom.  Like this:

Fashion designer Lauren Moffatt's bathroom,
From Design*Sponge. Photos by Alice Gao. 

But lately, something about squares is calling out to me. Maybe it's because subway tile is so common, but square tile in a running bond pattern is feeling fresh -- a bit less expected than subway tile, but still a classic choice.

Mandy Milks's bathroom 
Photographer: Michael Graydon Source: House & Home March 2013 issue

I've already purchased a biscuit-colored hex tile for the floor -- but if that weren't already a done deal, this photo may have sold me on black hex for the floor. It looks like it would feel nice underfoot, and warm too. But I'm still happy with what I chose, and the price was right, so there.

My hope is that this summer we will be able to hire someone to do our bathroom tile work. I get all happy inside when I think about not having to do this job ourselves. It's a considerable amount of tiling, and we are taking a good look at our To Do lists to try to see what we can parse out and what we can do ourselves. This seems like one of those jobs that a pro can do much faster -- giving us more time to do the less brain-intensive tasks that are still looming. (Please don't make me use my brain.)

Anyway, back to the point:


Which tile do you like better -- subway or square?

13.1

In case you were wondering, YES - we survived our half marathon on Saturday. I mentioned back in November that Ez signed us up for the Ocean City Half, and then I purposely never mentioned it again. I don't have a lot of patience for reading about people's exercise regimens, so I didn't want to make a hypocrite of myself by blathering on about it here. But race day came and went, and I'm happy to say we had a really good time.

To keep it brief, our training started off well and then petered out in January... I was majorly sick three times between then and March, Ez had really important work things happening and Johnnie went through a long phase of sleepless nights that made 5am runs extra extra painful. By the time race day rolled around, the longest run either of us had done was 6 miles.We were just not ready.

But, since you know we are total gluttons for punishment who do things like major gut renovations and half marathons, we did it anyway.

My original goal for myself back in November was to finish in 2:10 -- though we didn't come close to that, I'm pretty proud of us. Our survival strategy was to complete the whole race in intervals of 10 minutes running and five minutes walking, over and over. With this strategy, we kept a 12 minute mile pace all the way until mile 10. At exactly the two-hour mark, Ez's legs decided they'd had enough and started cramping from every angle, so we walked the final 3 miles. We finished with a time of 2:50 -- slow for sure, but not slow enough that they packed up the finish line before we got there.

I am so proud of my husband -- who is more of a power lifter than a runner. He knew I was not terribly excited about running that far unprepared, so he tucked some baby aspirin into the pocket of his running shorts, loaded up the iPods and did it with me. That's love.

Will I do it again, and train for real this time? I'm not sure yet. It was actually really fun and invigorating, and I'm glad we sucked it up and did it. In some ways I would like to do it again and actually run the entire thing, but training is boring for me... Running by myself on a treadmill at 5am is not awesome. After 3 or 4 miles I'm craving variety, and long distance running is a lot more time consuming than other workouts that are much better for your health and joints. I guess we'll just have to see. I did buy a pair of fancy new kicks in celebration of this small victory, and I took them on a short inaugural run yesterday. I could tell it was the beginning of a beautiful new friendship. How far they'll take me at a single clip is TBD, but we'll definitely be logging some miles together.

CUNNINGHAM FALLS

Happy Earth Day, everybody! On Saturday we took some time with friends to enjoy Cunningham Falls, a beautiful state park fairly close to home. The half-mile gravel trail to the falls is very easy and leisurely, but it's the rock-hopping and little pools of minnows in the rocky stream above the falls that you don't want to miss. Johnnie walked a lot of the gravel trail by herself, then rode happily in the Ergo on her dad's back as he scrambled over the ancient stones. My favorite thing: stretching out and sunning on a huge warm rock like a walrus. Sometimes Maryland isn't such a drag after all. 

A cheesy one for the scrapbook. (See Johnnie there in the back?)

Johnnie, our future park ranger, spent the whole day smiling, all tucked in like a little pappoose. I don't think she could've had a better day. 

After a great day out in nature, we returned home to discover that some of the seeds I planted in the garden last Sunday have sprouted already. These are dwarf blue kale sprouts. We also have a whole thick row of lettuce sprouting and some broccoli and carrot shoots coming up too.

I'm going to go ahead and call this year's Earth Day a smashing success here at Thirtyeight20. What did you do this weekend?

THINKING ABOUT DINING ROOMS

Photo ©Eric Roth

With the dining room floor now installed, I am giving myself permission to think about the dining room as a space that will actually be useful to us in the nearish future. That means figuring out the fun stuff like furniture, art, finishes, etc. I looked through my Pinterest folder of dining rooms recently and discovered that I am gravitating toward warm wood (hello, exposed log walls), crisp white and black accents. Since our dining room is basically a pass-through room in the center of the house, I want a space that isn't too cluttered or busy. Maybe I'm turning into a shaker in my old age.

Image from scandinavianretreat.blogspot.com. 

I found this on Pinterest, and the original source is uncredited. Anyone know?

Image from Stylizimo.

Home of stylist Hanne Borge-Yngland featured on the style files

PLANTING A GARDEN

I am not known for my green thumb. One year in elementary school, everyone in our class was given a packet of mixed seeds on Earth Day. I took them home and dutifully planted them in a little plastic terrarium I had gotten as a McDonald's Happy Meal toy. I watered those buggers faithfully for weeks and nothing happened. Not a single sprout popped out of the soil. Defeated, I dumped the soil and the seeds out into the front yard and forgot about the whole thing. That is, until a whole year later when a thick mysterious vine began snaking its way through the yard from the very spot I dumped my seeds. That year we had homegrown pumpkins.

The moral of this tale is the only way a plant will grow is if I have nothing to do with it.

However...

This year I'm giving real vegetable gardening a try for the first time ever. We have all this property and eat a lot of veggies, so it would sort of be ridiculous not to at least try. So Ez built three 4' x 8' raised beds over the past few weekends. Yesterday I planted the first batch of seeds for some cool-weather crops -- peas, broccoli, lettuce, two types of kale and two types of carrots. (Johnnie helped by dumping a handful of carrot seeds over a row of lettuce I had just planted, so we'll see how that turns out...) I'm also planning to do tomatoes, beans, spinach, summer squash and basil. Despite my dismal record at keeping plants alive, I remain hopeful that we'll be able to harvest a little something this year. If nothing else, I'm happy to have a project that will force us to spend more time outside.

Are there any organic vegetable gardeners out there? What knowledge resources do you use? Any tips? What are your favorite seed and plant sources? I've spend hours and hours researching on the internet, but I would love recommendations for books and websites you find particularly helpful. (Keep in mind, I've had to google things like "how to plant a seed.") Please email me or, even better, post in the comments so others can benefit too!

DINING ROOM FLOORING

The weekend brought both good news and bad news. As the sad part of the story goes, Johnnie and I were supposed to be in Florida over the weekend on a five-day, girls-only vacation with my mom. On Thursday, the night before our flight was to take off, mom called and said she had a fever of 103 and the trip had to be postponed. It was a triple bummer because a) my mama had the flu, b) our trip got canceled AND c) Ez's surprise weekend project -- installing the dining room flooring while we were gone -- was no longer going to be very surprising since we'd be home to watch it happening.

But the good news: hello, dining room floor! When you last saw our dining room (above), it was ceilingless, dirty and had its own flooring piled up in the middle of the room. Not cute. It was an improvement from its original state, but still so far away from being usable. Now we're another step closer.

Johnnie was happy to supervise Ez and his childhood buddy Chris while they worked and to test out the first couple boards for us. (Please pardon, as usual, the low quality iPhone photos.) Honestly, being the lazy renovation blogger that I am, I don't know what kind of underlayment/moisture barrier they used. It is obviously very red and has little pieces of Styrofoam in it for cushioning. It's probably not very earth-friendly and I'm sorry about that. If anyone is curious about what it is exactly, I can look it up.

For the flooring, we're using tongue-and-groove pine (yes pine) that was milled by an Amish guy my dad knows. We have used pre-finished hardwood flooring in other (newer) parts of the house, and it looks too shiny and new to go with the more rustic feel of this room. We actually wanted something that will show some wear over time. These were also the widest plank boards we've installed yet, and they went down amazingly fast. (Pneumatic flooring nailer for the win!) It would've taken us days to lay this much flooring using the short, two-inch-wide maple boards we used upstairs. 

So now we have a giant wood box for a dining room. Wood, wood and more wood. The plan is to stain and seal the floor and paint the wood planked walls and ceiling to tone down the wood a bit. I mean, I want it to be understood that it's wood, but maybe have it be not so overtly woody on every surface. This isn't Texas Roadhouse. Also the ceilings really are as low as they look. That's the reality of old houses, so there wasn't much that could be done. (Except try not to jump up and down with joy too vigorously when the floors were installed, so I didn't hit my head.)

After my emotional outpouring last week, I don't have a lot of words left to say about this except it is SO NICE to see such a big project (as in, surface area) get checked off the list. It feels big. It still needs to be stained and sealed, but at the same time it still feels like it deserves a big check mark to honor the forward progress, don't you think?

EMBRACING THE UGLY AND LETTING IT GO

The other day the husband and I had a little bit of a heart-to-heart about the house. There were tears afterward (on my end) because it meant coming to grips with how unhappy we are in this house, for various reasons. After four and a half years, we still don't feel like this place is our home. Many, many things have gone wrong along the way. I've had to make many compromises and watch as some of my favorite features of the house -- the wide plank floors, the kitchen fireplace, etcetera, etcetera -- had to be destroyed or replaced due to structural problems. It sucks up our money, our time, our energy. It's never, ever clean despite my constant efforts. Working on our house has gotten in the way of making and maintaining friendships, enjoying our hobbies and just hanging out as a family.

Though I am genuinely thankful that I have a roof over my head and running water, I hate that we've become slaves to this place. All we see now are the mistakes and poor decisions we've made, and the endless work we still have before us -- and that's not what "home" should feel like. Plus all that negativity is just not healthy mentally, emotionally, spiritually or physically. I don't even like writing about it, but I feel blogs like mine often lack transparency about the difficulties and the un-pretty things that happen beyond the edges of a carefully framed photograph.

What prompted this conversation was some bad news about our garage. The garage is at the bottom of a slope and surrounded by trees, and every time it rains we basically get a mudslide directly into the garage. Ez met with a guy who clears and grades land to get an estimate about fixing the drainage problems. After looking around and scoping it out, his recommendation to us was to knock it down and let it go.

Despite how it looks on the outside, the garage has a sturdy structure and a really nice metal roof. It just needed new insulation, sheathing and siding. Not exactly a weekend project, but nothing we couldn't handle. But because the previous owner built the garage at the bottom of a slope so close to the trees, there are giant root balls under the cement slab. In addition to likely compromising the structure over time, they will make it extremely difficult to dig proper drainage channels. It can be done, but not without lots and lots of work -- i.e. lots and lots of money. In the end, the garage will be worth less to a future buyer than what it will cost to fix it up.

Let it go. That was a tough blow, but it wasn't just that. After seeing my husband's weary frustration beginning to show, the bulldozer guy took off his hard hat and got personal. He said he understood what we're going through. He and his wife bought an old house when they were young, tore it apart and worked for many years to put it back together again. They never felt settled; whenever they tried to relax, all the unfinished projects loomed over them. When they finally finished it, they sold it and bought a modular home from a builder -- the kind where you pick out the finishes from a catalog and they deliver it on your property in three pieces and put it together for you. He said letting go of their house and moving into something completely void of thought or the memory of toil was the best decision they ever made.

Let it go. It didn't take much talking for Ez and I to agree we should no longer view this house as our "forever" home. And, as painful as it is, it felt good to admit that. Of course we can't sell any time soon since there's so much work left to do, but having that option in front of us, even a few years away, was liberating. It gave us leave to give up on turning this disaster into our dream home and instead to just finish it. Whether anyone will ever want to buy it is a worry I try not to entertain; what the housing market will look like in five years is anyone's guess, so I want to choose to have faith that it will be okay. And I know that it will.

In the meantime, we are pressing forward. With Johnnie as my shadow it's hard for me to help Ez with the bigger projects he has in the queue, but I'm determined to start working on the smaller things that will make it more comfortable around here -- things I've been putting off because we have so many bigger fish to fry. Things like installing those freaking cabinet knobs in the kitchen already(!)... hanging pictures... organizing the kitchen for real... planting vegetables, trees and flowers... These things I've neglected have just made it all worse. While in some ways I think taking care of these little details will be like putting lipstick on a pig, in other ways I think it will make a big difference in how we feel in the house. It's worth a shot and I'm looking forward to it. So I don't know what the long-term future holds for us and this house I call Thirtyeight20, but I'm so ready to let it go. Whether that amounts to a change of address or just a change of perspective, it's time to stop letting it get to us.

PS - I'm really sorry if this post sounds whiny and ungrateful for how blessed I really am in this life. I'm just trying to be real about the kind of toll a project like this can take... and it's not as pretty as Pinterest might lead you to believe! xo

UPDATED KITCHEN ISLAND

The kitchen island got a little makeover recently. (I'm talking about the wood bar top on the back, not the mess underneath...) Now we have a place to sit in the kitchen, which is really handy since our dining room is still a full-blown construction zone.

The wood slab was actually cut from an old library desk my dad salvaged from my high school alma mater during a recent renovation. It was cut to size, sanded a bit and slathered with food-grade mineral oil. Some scratches and nicks are fully visible, and that's how we wanted it -- full of character and remnants of its past life. (We don't plan to use it as a cutting board.) Ez attached it to the back of the table using a bracing system of his own design. It's very industrial looking, but it works -- and it's the perfect bar height.

We also put a coat of light-colored stain on the range hood, which we don't particularly like. The test boards we used turned out beautifully; sadly, the effect didn't replicate on the actual hood for some reason. Oh well. I don't know yet what we'll do to remedy it, if anything. I'm hoping we'll just get used to it... I think finishing the trim will help.

Anyway, back to the island. As this instagram pic shows, Johnnie unexpectedly loves it and would really prefer to sit on a bar stool (the center one, specifically) to eat her meals if I let her. Which I don't (as you can see from the second photo, taken while she ate dinner last night...) The thought of her falling off the stool and onto the concrete floor is more than I can bear, so it's a very special treat for her to sit there with us. The first time we let her, we looked at a magazine together. Now she asks for a book every time, a habit I don't mind indulging.

Slowly, this place is becoming a bit more comfy. We have a long way to go, but developments like this one are really helpful in making this house feel more like home.

BEST ACTIVITY EVER

I often think Johnnie is bored at home. At her Gramma's house, there are all sorts of age-appropriate toys and books to occupy her time -- not to mention playmates her age to dance and giggle with all day long. That's one of the many perks of having a grandmother who babysits kids in her home. At our house, the options are much more limited. By choice, we haven't collected many toys since we don't spend many playtime hours at home. It only makes sense that eventually, what options we do have will get a little played out. Lately I've been putting more thought into new activities and toys we can add to the mix. I don't want to spend a lot while accumulating tons of things she'll quickly outgrow, so the creative juices have been flowing over here.

Enter the fascinating world of dried beans. Since Ez and I teach the preschool Sunday School class at our church, we often have random stuff lying around like pipe cleaners, popsicle sticks and -- you guessed it -- giant bags of dried beans. (You know, for making musical instruments and whatnot...) One evening after work last week, I dumped some of the beans in a basket, gave her a firm lecture on never ever ever putting them in her mouth, and handed her some bowls and spoons to dig around with. This is obviously not an earth-shattering original idea, but we played in that basket together for a solid hour and a half -- scooping, pouring, dumping, stirring -- and she cried when it was time to go to bed because she wasn't ready to quit. Success!

(Note: She has never been one to put things in her mouth, but obviously this is not an activity that I would ever let her do with my back turned even for a second. Even when she just pretended to taste some bean soup we were stirring in her bowl, I was all over her. So this is basically a 110% supervised activity.)

A few days later her interest is starting to wane a bit, but I'm pretty thrilled anyway. For an investment of zero dollars, she got to try something new and work on her manual dexterity at the same time -- and we had several evenings of a happily occupied kid. In a few weeks I'll get them out again and see if her interest piques again. Until then, I'm having fun trying to think of new free-or-almost-free adventures we can have to keep her engaged during those relatively short but precious hours we're just hanging around at home.

Next up: homemade Play-Doh. This picture is several weeks old now, but this is basically the face she made when I told her. Kid loves her some Play-Doh.

Parenting is fun. And if you have any fun toddler activity recommendations, please let me know!