la femme follette

stuff it

A couple of weeks ago, when we were at the farther-away-but-superior children's hospital across the river for Garçon's follow-up appointment, there was a dad in front of me with the most intriguing bag.  It was shoulder-y and red, with a nice sturdy countenance and also pockets all around the inside -- from which stuff was poking out -- and a couple on the outside.  It reminded me of a re-invented garden tote. 

I figured it was some kind of luxe techno bag for techno types like the dad & Mari, and when I peered at the label -- it read "skip*hop" -- I thought nothing of it, but made a little note to myself to write it in my filofax, which I was clearly about to open, as we were all on line for the outpatient checkout, but I was too busy writing checks and making new appointments and realizing that my calendar is already running 8 appointments into 2008 scribbled on the last page of 2007 (SO NOT OK WITH ME) and so I forgot.  When I remembered that I forgot, I was pretty sad.  I try hard to be organized & not jotting a note about consumption?  Anti-organization.  I bought my 2008 calendar insert to soothe myself.

A few days later, Fillette and I were slouching around town while we waited for Garçon to finish up a workshop & I took her to the fancy childrenswear store to see if they had a dress for her wear when her current dress-up dress is outgrown (they did not, but Boden did in their Mini section, like mother, like daughter, I guess).  I saw across the way the bag that eluded me before.  Oh!  It is a diaper bag!  What? 

It changed everything, but I went over to look at it anyhow.  So cute!  So stuffable!  The corporate gas on the tag said it was waterproof!  PVC-backed poly-cotton canvas!  Interesting ...  I did not buy it that day, but made a note to look again on the onlines.  I felt pretty stupid, a lean, mean mother of school-aged kids buying a diaper bag?  Whatever.  But I kept coming back to a. many pockets and b. waterproof.  Oooh.  I mean, I do not carry much anymore in the way of snacks or rations or anything, not because I don't need them, but because I do not wish to a. carry two bags or b. get my stuff all sticky with juice or the residue inside a wrapper from fruit leathers.  But that is all.

Then, I mentioned this to two friends who have children the same age as mine and they both said, essentially, OMIGOD, I WANT ONE, TOO!  So, I knew I was not having some kind of deranged consumeristic baby nostalgia.  At least, I was not alone in it if I was.

It came today.  The only problem I have with it is that the strap is a little light and also narrow.  It is the perfect heft & depth for shouldering the bag, not so excellent for its messenger incarnation.  I can get over that.  Today, I lined up everything I would carry in my bag on a city-trip day-outing with the children, defined as: public transit to and from the site; between meals; within reach of shopping & restaurants.   

This includes: one Rhodia pad, a Sakura MicroPerm pen, a copy of The Adventures of Super Diaper Baby, one tube of arnica gel, one pot of hand cream, 2 containers of Dole diced pears,  2 LaraBars, 2 fruit leathers, a personal-sized filofax organizer, one juice box, a copy of Ranger Rick, the latest Boden catalog, a sunscreen stick, an Oxo coffee cup, a (n empty) 1-l Nalgene, 2 plastic spoons, and a giant red change purse. 

And it all fit!  With room for my wallet, which I forgot in the lineup, and a size 6x cardigan, which was foisted off on me while we were out.  Better than I realized  about this bag:  the top shuts in ziploc fashion (side-to-side, no selvage) with velcro; it has a grabby handle on the top by which one can carry it in one fist.  I read some reviews of this bag (the Expo) that panned it for its "funnel effect."  The bag zips loose at the bottom to expand its front-to-back depth from 3.5 inches to 7 inches.  It does indeed create a funnel effect whereby things would slide down & get trapped inside by whatever is in the pockets along the top, but since what falls down in this bag are not pacifiers and diaper pins, but a filofax and a wallet, I consider the funnel a feature.  Meli lost her wallet once on transit because someone reached inside her open-topped bag when she was distracted by her baby.

Hallowe'en is tomorrow and I am writing about diaper bags!  Fillette needs a dye job!  I have to find the pumpkin buckets!  Mari and the children somehow both (all?) forgot about carving up the jack-o-lanterns tonight and I do not care!  I mean, how do children who have not shut up about Hallowe'en for six weeks forget about the carving of the pumpkins?   

checkered past

This is a chair that we bought in the year 2000, along with 5 other chairs (two with arms), a drop-leaf table with two leaves, and a china cabinet.  All of it was made by the Drexel Furniture Co in 1961, according to the tags on the table, and Mari and I found it in Frederick, Md, while looking for something different.  The set consumed a lot of space on the floor of one of the antique sector's stores, and when the dude caught me circling it, he offered it to us for a song.  Well, that and we had to get it back inside the Belltway, for which we borrowed a friend's extremely boss (and brand-new) Ford F150.  A good friend, and gas was cheap then, wowee.

There was a wrinkle.  I was pregnant with Fillette.  These chairs were so hideous with their drab floral wrongness and once they were in my home, I hated them.  I also, by association, hated the whole dining room set.  I had craved a little drop-leaf table in a glossy, frenchy mahogany, with those curvy little chairs & a cute little corner-curio, the lot of it with groovy paws at the ends of the legs.  I spent every night after Garçon went to bed crying my eyes out about our horrid dining room set.  Mari was on travel the day after we hauled this thing home, and I would call him every night, weeping and weeping about how awful this dining room set was and how our lives were ruined.

Mari was helpful, because I told him in the store that I could replace the fabric on the chairs, that it would be a  snap.  He would remind me and I would cry and cry and cry more.  He would say "Honey, what now?"  And I would try to control myself -- so excellently, hilariously, stereotypically pregnant -- and then I would be fine.  Until the next night, where our son would go to bed, I would be alone in the house (and pregnant!  and irrational!)  and his cell phone would ring and it would be all the crying & confessions of true lives undone by ugly chair fabric.  Again.

When he got home after a week, he offered sweetly to take me to the fabric store, whereupon I (yes) began crying and told him that he did not understand that I could never go there under pressure to pick a fabric for how could I ever choose???  Then I turned into the irrational shouty pregnant lady.  O, pregnancy!  You and your inconveniencing hormones.

Eventually, while doing something else at the Crate & Barrel outlet near the midwife's office, I happened upon a red-gold checked fabric that appealed to me and I had it cut as quickly as possible & left.  This was because I had entered the phase of pregnancy known as "nesting."  Also, I changed the fabric myself in what seemed like record time.

Well, it is a quick project even without the hormones, as it happens.

I had been thinking of recovering the chairs, idly (because even when not pregnant, choosing decor is hard for me), and then in the Junior League Thrift Store a couple of weeks ago I got it all together.  I was fondling a gorgeous hand-crocheted baby blanket, while wondering if it was truly awful to pass it off as my own work -- in a sin of omission kind of way -- to that baby who just got its project scrapped, and I noticed a whole big wad of yardage of some cast-off upholstery fabric that appealed to me.  Great!  It was $10.  Grand!  No choices to make here!  It is a sign from the universe!  It was more than enough.

One thing is that I did fall in love with the wrong side of the fabric.  Ha-ha.  But when I got it home and figured out which way was up; I felt fine.  Because it seemed like fate.  Or Santa. 

So, recovering these chairs is simple, once the tools are assembled:  unscrew the four screws holding the seat on the chair; wrap the seats tightly in the fabric; staple it with a staple gun; then put it back together.  I can always hear Polly Perfection on this project -- take off the old fabric, yayaya, blahblah -- but whatever.  I am sure the day will come where someone will look at the undersides of my dining room chairs, but I will not give a fuck even then.  I will say, "It was a 45-minute job.  Go the fuck home."

There is a lot of the f-word in these projects here at my house.  As if Quentin Tarantino produced a show for HGTV.  My staple gun sticks a little bit?  That cocksucking motherfucking bitch heard it the fuck all the goddamned whole way through.  Shit.  Part of the problem was that I was stapling through three layers of fabric, but come on!  Lay off already, douchebag!

The one legitimate concern about wrapping and bunching the fabric any which way is that the seats have to be screwed back on.  If there is a lot of fabric covering the holes, the screws cannot reach.  But that is irrelevant!  I use a drill with screwdriver bits!  What does it say on the side of the drill?  It says Bad Motherfucker.  Fillette says, "Mommy, no.  Black and Decker."  Less than an hour, no tears, no baby on the way.  Phew. 

whipsawed by confusion

Socks are old news.  Old!  I don't care if Kowalksi has been hassling me for a pair of handknit socks since I can remember first missing the ice skating, I have to quit!  Because he has a birthday coming in March and I have to knit a coat from the long-ignored Katia pattern book #11 for Fillette.  I am determined to give my little girl something handmade for her Christmas present!  Christmas!  That stupid holiday we only observe because of her!  One day I hope it will go the way of Halloween.

Actually, the twist this year is that Fillette has acknowledged that Santa Claus is Not Real.  She made up Santa, fed by culture, and we observed a strict don't-ask/don't-tell policy.  The first time she strongarmed us into Christmas, when she was 3, she would talk about Santa, and I would start out by firmly explaning to her that Christmas was about a baby named Jesus, not about Santa.  Then I would frankly explain there was really no Santa, that "Santa" was a name for a feeling people got about holiday giving.  I say all kinds of age-inappropriate, lofty shit to little kids.  Whatever.

On Christmas Eve that year, I filled stockings with some things for each of them in the middle of the night.  When she came running downstairs at 5 am, the next day, all elated & singsongy in her sweet cartoon voice, Mama! Mama!  Look what Santa bringed me!  A chocolates anna dolly anna Hello, Kitty papers! I could not actually bring myself to deny Santa, and she had had good, wide-eyed behavior at Mass the night before, so I said nothing.  This is Fillette's special gift, the sneak attack of cuteness and sincerity, onto which I project a vulnerability I have always refused.  It has pretty much resulted in her twisting me extra-hard around her tiniest finger, even as I try to protect myself, even as when in stable, sane moments I know no good will come of it -- she will leave and I will be ruined.  Recently, in my sane moments, I have considered that maybe I will not be ruined, but perhaps be left better for having known her, but anyhow.  Gah!  Lalalala!!   

The point is that holiday knitting is upon me.  I have not yet had a year since I started knitting where I have had to sit down and make a knitting schedule.  Not just a list, but a schedule!  I have a list that I made this fall.

2007:  tea cozy, socks, capelet, baby blanket, little coat.

I was young then. 

In review, the tea cozy got lost when I needed a new ball of the Debbie Bliss Baby Cashmerino in black, that I thought I had, but obviously did not.  No LYS is so subversive as to carry black baby yarn, so I had to mail order it from the excellent Yarnmarket.  By the time it came, I was heavily into turning the heel on the sock (the heel which had to be ripped back).  Right about then I started going to the gym a lot. 

Things were still looking pretty good for the sock to get picked up when the thread arrived, but until I can sit down in one place and knit the heel flap, which requires counting and paying attention, I cannot get back to it.  I tried to get back into the sock at the 6-year-old birthday tea party I went to last week at which I was inadvertently dressed like a gun moll, but the counting!  And I would have ordinarily been quiet & knitty, but gun moll!  I had to speak up & participate in normal chatter!  Ours is a small neighborhood!  The worst thing about the sock?  I speak of one sock, but need to produce two.  Blech.

The capelet lost ground when I had it out & about, turning turning turning and I realized that I was supposed to be decreasing every few rows, but I could not remember how many stitches or how many rows.  The baby blanket --which I vowed to make from stash -- caused me to experience such distraction in the yarn choices and the pattern that I was finally forced to consider that the baby does not rate high enough to receive a handknitted gift.  (Honestly, the baby who got the last blanket was an extra-plus-especially compelling baby on top of her father's connection to me.)

So, that is all good news!  No baby blanket!  The capelet can already go out, since it is only for me (sad song of knitters everywhere, wah wah wah).  That leaves me with little coat, socks, and tea cozy.  The satisfying ending to this dismal craft schedule update is that it is raining cats & dogs for the third day in a row (sorry, SoCal) and I can sit down and get to that heel flap!  Or the tea cozy!  Or casting on the little coat! 

Obviously, I cannot focus.  I need some kind of scheduler.  Or a pill.  I could put the knitting schedule in my brand-new Blackberry -- 8:30-10pm nightly, knit ceaselessy -- except that I have no time and my newest worry is that my Blackberry will be flashing 12:00 for a decade, until the grandchildren have pity and fix it for me.  Also, I think I accidentally just said yes to a trip to the bowling alley.      

puerto rican girls. dying to meetcha.

This trick-or-treating dress-up kidstuff is so boring to me this year.  I just want them to be old enough to hang out and have a witchy little new year with me.  We found a dentist who will buy their candy for $1 per pound.  Thank god they are into money this year, because they are on it.  I confiscate half of it every year anyway, then they can't eat most of the rest.  Allergies! 

I am not one to scrapbook other people's material, but Meli put this out where I could see it today and it made me laugh until I cried. 

I am perfectly aware of the implicit sexiness of Fillette's Halloween costume -- dressing her like a grown-up goth --  but I refuse to get involved in some kind of prissery over how she wants to costume.  I can't really do anything about its perceived bullshit sexiness, since the fact is since so many supermodels and other icons of glamour have the bodies of 6-year-olds. so it doesn't matter what she wears.

She is frequently sexy in grubby old clothes, because she is a beautiful girl with a culturally-idolized, pre-pubescent body in an America that sexualizes children in a way we will never ever be able to come back from.  So, I am trying to keep her covered & not stigmatize her by having a lot to say about it with pursed lips.  I am having a hard time finding the right kind of scary face makeup, the too-light foundation, I mean. 

I am concerned about the tulle skirt, because last year (two years ago?) she almost set herself on fire on someone's jack-o-lantern.  It was more spectacular than that, as I recall.  There was a kind of tripping over her skirt and tumbling down the stairs and knocking over the jack-o-lantern as she fell so that the whole thing was a big open flame next to which she was sprawled.  I think that I am going to have Mari carry a bucket of water.  Honestly.  For a ballerina, she is a little klutzy.  She doesn't get it from me, because my klutziness is rooted in too-flexiness and she is not overly bendy. 

Garçon is dressing as a Whoopee Cushion.  Because he is that kind of boy.  The good thing, I think, is that when he is about 12 years old?  We are going to be very best friends.  Now he is too fisty and oppositional, but I think there will be a sweet spot in there where he still will love Weird Al & whoopee cushions, and model his countenance as Fozzie the Bear + Quentin Tarantino, and we will lay on the sofa together watching the Three Stooges and talking about comics.  I can hardly wait.      

ecc 3: 1-8

I tried to trick Fillette into closing her letter to Ermentrude -- our tooth fairy -- with "Yours in Christ," but she sensed secret hilarity and refused.  Damn!  The plus side is that she will probably be too savvy to fall for that whole douching with Coke thing, so good.  Good!

I spent an additional 40 minutes on the stair machine climber thingy on Saturday morning because I was watching Casino.  I had no time for this extra-endurance because I was being picked up by Mari and the children after Fillette's soccer morning, but I elected to use up my shower time so that I could review the excellent hair & fashion tips from Sharon Stone's character.  I saw the movie just once, 10 years ago, but only remembered good things about it.  I did not remember Joe Pesci's character stabbing a guy to death with a pen, however.  It was a little surprising.

Frankly, all I could remember about the movie prior to this serendipitous airing was the gigantic tantrum Stone as Ginger McKenna has in a walk-in closet and a lot of excellent hair & fashion  choices from her in the beginning.  I'm quite sure the whole stabbing thing was just blocked from my memory, because this time, too, I was just, mouth open over it.  And I do not usually give a shit about testosterone meets gore.

The point is that as I was watching, really into hair & fashion -- and how perfect is it that Don Rickles is in that movie?  Perfect.  So perfect, it is -- and Ginger has a lot of bad behavior and old Ace, he loves her anyhow, which is, uh, everything to a girl who used to act like me.  Then old Joe Pesci's character and the wife are coming back from vacation, children lined up alongside them at customs, her with the stolen diamonds concealed in her updo.  The customs agent is rifling their luggage and  she complains in a really pissed-off way about how HEY, THOSE THINGS WERE FOLDED, and I was in love.  Forget about that bad girl and her hustling, up-the-nose-drugs ways, no way, who is this fabulous grouchy mom character!  How many scenes does she have in this movie?!?

So, it happens that later in the day old Alex sent me an email asking that I enlighten him as to my love for Dirty Dancing, which is a production so banal he just can't believe I love it so.  But, the reason I love Dirty Dancing so much is because it is the same movie for everyone for all times.  So, when I was 16 and when I was 24 and after I was married and when I had my first baby and then after my second baby and for my old Colombian boyfriend and my society princess grandmother and hillbilly Meli and Fillette and Mari and the blondes on each of Alex's arms and everyone.  It is the same movie.

It will never sneak up on me like Casino, where one decade I am interested in the conflicts between someones like Ginger and Lester and Nicky and Ace and then the  next decade, thinking of all those unresolved mother issues in one room gives me an ulcer, but the foxy redheaded wife & mother beaming from the back of the classroom at Catholic school?  I'm on it.

Dirty Dancing is neither like The Ice Storm.  The first time I watched it, all I could think about was old Joan Allen not getting her pantyhose off in the car after the key party when, you know, and the last time I watched it, which was recently, all I could think was how I would just give a girl like old Christina Ricci's character the spanking of her life if I caught her with my son!  Plus, give her a buzz cut before I sent her home!  That would learn her!  Grr!

I think that a movie like Babel would have been without one redeeming quality for Mari and I save for the one character, the father in Morocco, and his genuine grief at how awful -- how terrible -- all of his children have turned out to be.  Two years ago, we might not have cared at all.  Certainly we could not have understood the unbelievable, gut-wrenching feeling of betrayal that can attend the display of a child's willful defiance & accidental idiocy.  Ten years ago, we might have been vapid enough to feel sorry for a couple on a vacation to recover from the death of a child without their surviving children.

Look, with Dirty Dancing, the only projector that is on makes a whirring noise.  The movie is about youthful idealism smashed on the rocks of reality in the safe harbor of a summer resort in the Catskills.  Baby learns to dance, we want Baby to learn how to dance.  The movie does not ask that we accept anything we do not already know -- girl gets it on with the help, love does not prevail, there are lessons that will follow everyone as they go their separate ways.  It always looks the same, no matter where you are, like fireworks.  It is not some incredible piece of art, but really, with very  rare exceptions, I think of film as just blown-up teevee, so I have never cared.

Because of Scorcese's formidable lure, I had to go home & shower, but so did Fillette.  We went to a weekend fall festival -- crafts, babies, dogs, strollers.  The weather was unbelievable, not very fall-like.  Thank god I know that global warming is a liberal agenda, because otherwise I would be concerned.   

descending

friday five

1. Name five favorite movies.
i. dirty dancing; ii. godfather II; iii. the house of yes, iv. great expectations, v. notorious

2. Name four areas of interest you became interested in after you were done with your formal education.
i. poetry, ii. american history 1781-1861, iii. crafty-makey, iv. eric kroll

3. Name three things you would change about this world.
change begins at home.

4. Name two of your favorite childhood toys.
i. dolls, ii. jacks

5. Name one person you could be handcuffed to for a full day.
Mari, if it were just the two of us.  If I were on Full Mothering Duty? Kaylie.

maybe 100 or so

Mona ran into a friend of ours from high school, coincidentally married to some far-flung former colleague of hers.  I was disinterested; Mona chastised me for not being forgiving.  Mona is in a mood because a friend of hers from grad school dropped dead a few months ago:  he was 38; she is on a wicked carpe diem bender.  She sent the first message to Turk through me.  Turk replied readily, similarly.  They are both wary & circling, waiting for me to facilitate.  Mona should pony up her brave new outlook; I already facilitated ten years ago. A second chance -- imagine.

spooky starts now

I am committed to the process of a 100-word limit, but due to my outlook and its default at "bleak," the whole endeavor in a daily fashion turns out more Carveresque than I would like.  I love Carver, but I wouldn't read his diaries if they looked like his fiction.  Wait.  Maybe I would.  Oh, shit, I would. 

Hallowe'en is happening this year, but not with a party & cupcakes.  Something about last year's party rubbed me the wrong way.  It could well have been the poor quality of light in the sky.  It could have been Garçon's friend Nora's mother who wrecked the whole thing for me by a. not dropping off and b. insisting on bringing along her stupid wrecky toddler.  (who is a wrecker!)  I don't know.  All I know is when I think of Hallowe'en party, I have negative associations.  I shiver, because it is scary, which is good for Hallowe'en, I guess, but too late!  No party!  We will be observing the holiday by introducing the children to the finest monster movies of all time.  We will start tonight with The Blob.  I am so ready! 

Fillette told me in the summer that she wanted to be a princess for Hallowe'en.  I said, "Not scary, try again."  She said, "I'll be a zombie princess."  OK, kid, you're on.  A month or so ago, she was reading the Vogue Fall Fashion Issue's Supplement over my shoulder.  There was a photo layout of fashion representing major music/fashion intersections of the last 40 years.  I turned to the pages representing "Goth" and she said, "Oh, Mommy!  Like that!  Zombie Princess!"

How funny that a little girl thinks goth=zombie princess.  It could be better for her and she could have a mother who does not confuse goth with punk with Ren Faire (and SCA.  it always comes back to the SCA around here!  Gah!  WHY?!), but I more or less knew what I was dealing with and she is happy with the first spooky try-on.  She needs a vegetable dye job on her hair.  She was very clear about wanting to try being a dark-dark brunette for real, not with a wig.  Everyone gasps and offers me the possiblity of spray-on color, but what about color on a little girl?  It is not anything like showing her heiney in 6yo hot pants.

She is so big & beautiful that it breaks my heart.   I found an old Hallowe'en photograph of her when I was sorting some stuff last week.  She was 3, we were all at Kaylie's.  It seems like yesterday, how can this be?  So much wrenching over time, things I can never remember knowing but indeed forgot.  I want to keep my whole heart to 100 words so I can keep everything where I can know all of it at once. 

I do. I won't.

Mari and I are lately unable to resolve the matter of Superman spinning the world backwards to save Lois.  He says it is the stupidest thing ever.  I say it makes perfect sense.  He regales me with all the reasons it is "totally stupid," why spinning the globe to time-travel would never work.  I say, "yeah, whatever.  like a clock, ok?"  This is not like when I cheekily made fun of LOTR to love it & laud it in the end.  Resolving a conflict like this is why marriage was invented. 

100 words

Mari wonders why I want a BlackBerry.  Its seductiveness lies in its command potential. All the channels, silenced &  thrown in my bag.  Like 1993, in the bar where I spent every afternoon.  The phone rang & the chorus sang, "not here!" I could finish a fifth of scotch and a cheeseburger with bacon, pickles, and russian dressing; all while George told me another story from his life between Normandy and Heartbreak Ridge.  Kowalski hovered, waiting for me.  When George died -- at his funeral -- his wife knew my name.