We get to know one another in beers here, cups of juice there. I call you on a Sunday, three weeks after you left a message. To leave a message. We ask each other questions between breaking up fights and folding laundry. I break out the bluetooth for the 15 minute ride to daycare or you get me on the phone when I have half an hour before a meeting. We chat online late at night, after kids have gone to sleep or, rather, in the intervals between escorting them back to bed. Facebook. We have lunch, during the week. We never manage to talk for longer than 10 minutes at a stretch. This is friendship after children...simmer over low heat, stir occasionally, very occasionally, hope it doesn't splatter all over the kitchen...It is not at all like it was before, but it still is delicious.

The Good Wife

Today my boss and I had a meeting with one of the candidates for the open Congressional seat in our district. Whenever I sit with politicians - be they candidates or electeds - I come to the same conclusion. These are not ordinary people.

This particular man, a local lawyer who has operated a lot behind the scenes for years, told us that if he wasn't running for office, he would be climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro with one of his daughters. So not an ordinary either or. But all things are relative, and in the grand scheme of things, he was fairly normal. That is why I doubt he will win.

There has to be something deep inside that drives a person to open up their life to their community -small or large. There must be a greater feeling of purpose. The best in politics have public services as that purpose. The worst? Ego.

That is why when I see strange things happening in the marital relationships of politicians, I have a different take. The "good wife" who stands at her husband's side no matter what? I am guessing that 9 times out of 10 she has the same extraordinariness as her husband. Because really, you usually know who it is your are marrying and, if my theory is right, a politician is born a politician.

One More Week

Bill will be back one week today, provided the gods of air travel choose to smile upon him! That is all really.

Oh, and we had some really good pot roast for dinner tonight.

My Complaint

I've always been a sleeper. 8 or 9 hours is my ideal. I know that a nightly 9 hours is highly ambitious for someone over the age of say, 5, but I used to get it as often as possible.

The story of my sleep is the story of motherhood. My nine whittled down to 8, 7, 6 as I became more and more pregnant with Eva. From my 8th month of pregnancy on I was getting 5 or 6 hours. And then she was born. And she didn't sleep. But by the time she was 7 or 8 months old she was only waking once, and I was sleeping 7 hours again. Not all at once, of course. By 10 months she was sleeping through the night, and by the time I got pregnant again I was back to a solid 8 hours of sleep.

Now I am plunged back into sleep hell. 10 months old next week and Waylon is still waking 2 or 3 or 5 times. If I could go to bed when he does, at 7:30, I suppose I could handle this, as his wakings come much later at night. And they start about an hour after I fall asleep.

People give advice about this. Let him cry. Sure, that makes him fall back asleep on his own, but it doesn't stop him from waking up again and hour or 2 later.

There is nothing I want more in this world right now than just ONE night of 6 hours of solid sleep. Six hours of deep sleep. Six hours of burrowing deep in a nest of flannel and fleece. Six hours of dreaming. Six hours of heaven.

I Love Tomato

All Mine

When the wind blows like this and I am home with just the kids in the house, I sometimes feel like any minute I will be Dorothy, swept off into another dimension. Our house is like a sieve, all cracks and holes.

We used to have a postcard on the fridge, an abandoned house with the words "One more payment and it is our!" scrawled across the roof. When I feel like the roof might break off at any moment I think about that postcard and realize we don't have one more payment left.

We really own this place. It is all ours, holes and cracks and all. No mortgage. And I realize how lucky we are.

Farm Fresh Food Club

I could go on and on about vichyssoise, but that bitch already did it. The one with blog and the book and the movie. At least Julia C. said some not so nice stuff about her, that makes her success easier for me to take (and makes me feel all the more justified in my bitterness.) But the vichyssoise. She was right about that. It really is perfection.

Pretty much everything from my farm share has been perfection, actually. And it keeps getting better. This week I am overwhelmed by the chard and the onions and the garlic the broccoli and the potatoes and the tomatoes and the carrots and the herbs and the beets and squash. And just when I think I have figured out everything I will be making, something else remembers itself to me...But what about the kale? (Chips. Kale chips.)

We pick up every Friday afternoon, and that has become such a treat for my 3 year old. "The FARM! Can I see the chickens?"

I love that she is able to see where her food comes from, to pick beans, to meet our farmer. To know that carrots come out of the ground, not a bag. I love that she has heard the soft music that is a flock of clucking chickens. Now I just have to explain that not ALL chickens live in an old camper turned chicken coop.