Crushes

What I love right now:

1. Once. I have a big time crush on this movie and the soundtrack. This song is gorgeous, gorgeous. ETA: Watch out! Spoiler alert in Comment #4! (Kelcey!)

2. The Toy Society. I want to do this. And I will, I will!

3. These mosiacs on Flickr. I just love them so much.

4. The Matilda Top. This could be the best 4th of July fabric ever.

5. Kiddie Records Weekly. Click and weep with nostalgia.

6. Park Slope by Erin McMorris. I want nearly every print in every colorway.

7. The Mama Bird Diaries. Kelcey left a comment here the other day, so I clicked over to her blog and read the archives for over an hour. She's hilarious and insightful and real and way hipper than I could ever hope to be but not in an annoying way at all.

Can you tell I had way too much time on the computer last week? Back to reality this week. Yay! (For real. I'm happy to be back at home with the hooligans. Believe it or not.)

From baby to toddler in 3 snips

Remember when Paige was a baby?

She had goofy hair and a wobbly walk.

Now that walk is called "toddling," and her hair has been tamed.


Her mullet is gone. And along with it, the delicate, wispy curls at her shoulders.


Now she is, officially, a toddler. A big girl. An almost (gulp) 2 year old.


One who gets rather ornery about having her picture taken one too many times.


(Yes, she told the stylist she wanted the Kit Kittredge look. She's just trendy like that.)

Loose teeth and other mysteries

It's that week again. The secret week of bliss. But don't tell. I'm working...remember? If anyone asks, I'm working, and it's hard work.

But truly, the work leading up to the opening day of the workshop is hard, and the first day is, if not hard, then stressful. I have to give a speech to a roomful of strangers and field myriad requests and complaints from the participants and faculty. I'm very good at faking poise and aplomb. Underneath, I'm all sweaty palms and knocking knees.

Last night, my nervousness about opening day bubbled up in a seemingly unrelated anxiety dream. This dream revolved around a current household drama, the drama called "when will Owen's first loose tooth fall out?"

Ever since I told Owen that the tooth fairy makes a very big deal over one's first lost tooth, he has been obsessed with its potential date of loss. He begs me for details, "Will it fall out in one day? Two days? Three days and 4 hours?" He has always required precise answers to his questions; unfortunately, I am not well-versed in the typical behavior of loose baby teeth. So I give vague answers, and he is crazy with anticipation.

In short, the loose tooth is a Very Big Deal.

So in my dream, Owen's tooth came out, and he gave it to me for safe keeping until bedtime. And I lost it. On a beach covered in tiny tooth-sized shells. For hours (in dream time) I crawled on my knees in the sand, frantically sifting and sifting and fretting and fretting. But I failed. I woke up before I found it.

It was one of those dreams that exposes very tender vulnerabilities: not only my fear of forgetting some detail for the workshop, or of failing to do my job in some way, but also the deeper, more penetrating and painful fears of a parent, the fear that I'm going to let my child down, scar him in some way, and, ultimately, lose him.

All of this incoherent rambling is an attempt to purge the uneasiness the dream left in me. I can't stop replaying it, feeling that panic and worry. And I realize that my worst fear, in my professional and my personal life, is letting people down, exposing myself as an impostor, as someone who never should have been given the job.