I’m feeling chatty. Like I just want to curl up with my computer and talk, you know? Not about some preordained topic or event, not about a recipe, not about anything, really. Just random stuff, whatever falls from my fingertips.

It’s a dreary, rainy, foggy, dark day. I feel kind of sad, kind of excited, kind of peaceful, kind of stressed, and kind of mellow. Most days, one particular feeling rises to the surface and beats all the others into submission, but not today.

I’ve been rather bored lately. (Yes, I do realize I was just complaining about being super busy. But you can be super busy and still bored, did you know that?) Last night, I counted out the many ways in which I am bored to my husband and he burst into tears. Just kidding, about the tears, but I did bore him to sleep. He argued with me for a few minutes about the ridiculousness of everything I was saying and then said, “Isn’t your period coming?” and we both busted up laughing, and then his eyelids drooped and he said, “Can we go to bed now?”

I’ve kind of lost my will to cook. Part of the problem may be that ever since my decade of breast feeding ended, I’ve never been back down to my pre-pregnancy weight. I’ve made some substantial changes (greatly reducing snacks and junk food and trying to get exercise), and even though I feel like I’m not over-eating at all (in fact, it can be depressing how little I’m actually eating), the last few pounds aren’t budging.

Part of me thinks this is fine—I’m still in my normal weight range and I’m certainly not overweight—but another part of me worries I’m on a slippery slope. A pound here, a pound there, a pound of pounds EVERYWHERE.

What makes it all the more confusing is:

a. I never really had a solid grasp on a healthy weight before I started the baby-making marathon
b. my body has changed shape after popping out four humans—how much of that changed shape is inevitable?
c. do I really want to spend years tweaking and fretting and worrying when I’ll end up a little pile of organic matter in just a few more decades?
d. but I certainly want to be healthy
e. and it’d be nice to look attractive, too
f. (I’m not talking about inner beauty here, either. Besides, how can I act all confident and sunshiney if I feel like I look bad?)
g. is it lazy to accept my tummy rolls? Maybe I’m supposed to accept them? Nurture them? (Okay, okay. So that’s going a little too far.)
h. BUT I DON’T WANT TO HAVE TUMMY ROLLS, WAH.

I could go on and on. Like, this is stupid because I am healthy. Or, the women in Nicaragua were all thick around the middle and probably never gave a second thought to that extra padding except to be grateful for it. In fact, the majority of women thicken in the middle, even those that never have children. It’s a part of life, I think. Right?

I could starve myself and run for miles and knock off the pounds, I’m sure. But I don’t want to spend my time and energy that way. Besides, I think I should be allowed to eat when I’m hungry and till I’m full. Isn’t that kind of basic?

Clearly, it’s all about balance and I have none.

This really is relevant to the not-cooking-so-much-anymore issue: it’s not as much fun to cook if you aren’t going to eat it. I’m not that kind of cook.

I’ve kind of decided to ignore the whole quandary right now and cook anyway. I’ll just eat good breakfasts, go for walks when I can, and pass on the nachos (usually) at bedtime … and make a boatload of sweet rolls just because.

I rolled them out after supper and my little boy informed me that the rolled-out dough was the same size as the kitchen floor rug. I never know how to roll out the dough when I make such a huge recipe—dress and roll half the dough and then the other half? or do it all at once and make tire-sized sweet rolls?—but this time I got smart. I rolled it all out at once, dressed it, and then used a pizza cutter to slice it in half. Rolled up in opposite directions, and I had two long sweet rolls ready to slice. Problem solved.

That night, we all clustered around the computer on stools to watch a movie while I baked pan after pan of buttery, cinnamony sweet rolls. Rolls done, we crowded around the table, poured glasses of cold milk, and I let the kids eat till they popped. Because hey, how many times in your life do you get to have fresh-from-the-oven, homemade sweet rolls for a bedtime snack? Exactly.

I had another sweet roll epiphany that night. (I was on a roll.) (Tee-hee, a roll. Get it?) I was running out of glass baking pans, so I greased up one of my bread pans and stacked in a bunch of rolls on their sides. I ended up with a pretty loaf of pull-apart sweet rolls.

The genius of this method is that you can fit a whole lot more rolls in the oven when they’re stacked in loaf pans than when they’re laying flat on their backs in 9 x 13 glass pans, thus greatly speeding up the baking process. Plus, they’re easier to store and reheat. I’m kind of smitten.

(That movie we watched whilst our very pores became infused with the yeasty smell of sweet rolls? The Human Planet. Have you seen this amazing series yet? It’s nearly six hours of gorgeous photography and incredible stories. So far we’ve seen disc one—there are three total—for the ocean part, I kept getting short of breath; for the dessert (I mean DESERT) part, the kids kept jumping up for drinks of water; and for the arctic part, we huddled close to keep warm. I can’t recommend this series highly enough.)

Changing the subject: we’re starting to wonder if our youngest daughter is sleep walking. The other morning when my husband came downstairs at 5:30, all the lights were on and Sweetsie was sound asleep on the sofa. She said she didn’t remember turning the lights on.

My husband found her downstairs this morning at 2 am—same story. He even took a blurry picture to document it.

Her sleeping is getting progressively rockier. After discovering her downstairs this morning, my husband put her in bed with me and took himself off to her abandoned (and very comfortable) bed. Sweetsie tossed and turned, stole my sheets, mumbled Harry Potter curses, and was up at six, begging me to take her downstairs.

Perhaps we should tie her ankle to the bedpost?

Also, she’s found a substitute for her spit rag (note the red rag she’s holding). We might be back to square one.

There’s more to say, but I’d better call it quits. The kids are up and the rain is falling and I need (want?) (no, it’s a need—cranberries are central to my emotional well-being) to bake a pie and prepare for a meeting tonight.

xo,
me

This same time, years previous: pasta with creamy pumpkin sauce (I made this for supper last night – delicious), steel-cut oatmeal

We did, indeed, get to see Hamlet three ways this fall, funfunfun. On Friday, the kids and I hopped into the car and sped down the interstate to the Blackfriars Playhouse, raucously singing along to the songs on my son’s MP3 player (that he piped through the car’s speakers)—Peter, Paul, and Mary, Beethoven’s Wig, My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music, etc.

We were scheduled to arrive 75 minutes before the show because, not only were we going to watch the show, we were going to usher for it, too. Because—get this!—as new members of the volunteer usher brute squad, we get to see the shows for freeeeeee!

Since my son is 6 years shy of 18, the minimum age for ushers, they are graciously allowing us to usher as a team. Though judging by the size of his shoes (mens 10 ½, yikes) he might look the part a little sooner than is normal.

Notice I did not say “act the part.”

We attended an usher training where we learned about patrolling for photography (which led to an interesting discussion on the ride home about how actors are their art), checking bathrooms, our dress code, putting up seat backs, and handing out programs.

The really good news about this whole arrangement is that we get one comp ticket each time we usher, which means my daughter can come along and watch with us! (Or, we can save up comp tickets and take the whole family.)

Friday was our first time on the job. My son and I were assigned the balcony, and my daughter sat in a corner and knitted while we stood there and tried not to get too bored. Once the show started, I let the kids sit up closer while I stayed back by the door. It was a simple job (thank goodness I didn’t have to approach any patrons about photography usage—confrontations with strangers makes me a wee bit nervous), and we were able to watch the whole show. We are signed up to usher for this week’s closing show of The Importance of Being Ernest, and then there will be A Christmas Carol—I expect we’ll usher for that show more than once in order to get some extra comp tickets saved up, and because it’s the sort of show that we’ll want to see over and over again.

The downside of volunteer ushering is that we don’t get the best seats (though comp ticket holders can reserve any seat in the house, from what I understand), and I’m a big fan of sitting close enough to see the sweat fly. Plus, there’s the fifty-minute drive each way and the late bedtimes.

But there are so many upsides—exposure to theater culture and etiquette, learning to be professionally hospitable and gracious, the incredible shows—that I’m not even about to complain. No, no, quite the contrary—I’m tickled hot pink over our newest adventure.

I am not a storyteller. I do not regale my children with enchanting tales that have a beginning, middle, and end. Rather, I am more of a conversationalist and lecturer. If something happens to me and I want to tell someone else about it, I regurgitate it all, in a rush, splat. There is no weaving, no crafting, no plotting. Therefore, it is a rather odd coincidence that I have fallen into the habit of telling my baby a story every night before bed.

It came about quite by accident. One night when I went upstairs to tuck the kids in to bed, my littlest grabbed me with his big blue eyes and said, all sweet-like and pleading, “Mama, tell me a story about when you were little.”

So I told him about the time when my dad woke me up in the middle of the night but it didn’t seem like the middle of the night because everything was lit up with a weird yellow-orange light because a gas line had exploded a few miles away. It felt like the whole town was out and about, and we walked around talking with the neighbors just like Atticus and Scout and Jem did when Miss Maudie’s house burned down (though I didn’t include that last part in my story).

And wouldn’t you know, that pleading question is now the first thing he says to me every night when I walk into his room. So I curl up on the bed beside him and rack my memory for something interesting. As I start to talk, his breathing slows and his body stills. His eyes fix on my face, and he listens for all he’s worth. I can actually see him listening. When I finish—and the stories are no more than a minute or two long—he smiles, sucks in a big breath like he’s coming up for air, and giggles. He always, always begs for one more story.

A week or so into our new routine, he asked me to retell a specific story. “The second one you told me,” he said. I was surprised. Was he keeping a mental list of the stories I told? I asked him to recount the ones I’d told him, and sure enough, he could correctly identify story one, two, three, four, etc. I was impressed. For whatever reason, these random memories I’m dredging up to appease him with are sticking in his noggin.

I doubt he could keep the stories in order anymore, though, there have been so many. Usually they’re just bits and pieces of my past, like the time one of our rabbits chewed off my Barbie’s hand, or the one about how I put our neighbor’s chubby dog on an aggressive keep-up-with-me-while-I-ride-my-bike-around-town fitness plan when I was just supposed to be taking it for a little walk every day, or the time bear tracks were found in the swamp below where I waited for the bus on dark school mornings and how I was too scared to go to the bus stop by myself anymore. Others are more well-rounded stories, like when my dad chased the joyriders out of the creek, or when one of our rabbits abandoned her litter and we tried to keep the bunnies alive in the oven (total fail). In every single case, no matter how fragmented the memory, he acts like I just gave him a piece of the moon. Which makes me wonder: is story telling more than just the sum of its parts?

In any case, I’m slowly, very slowly, beginning to see this new ritual as an opportunity and not a chore, and sometimes (but not often enough) I think about the story ahead of time. Once in a great while there’s even a beginning, a middle, and an end.

This same time, years previous: orange-cranberry bread, smashing for pretty, chocolate pots de creme, feminism part one