Buy Me That: Cake and Cupcake Stands from Whitney Smith Pottery

Dig if you will the picture of a birthday cake for a family member.  Special, isn't it?  Certainly, for as long as it takes you to digest it and render it something I'd laugh at.  Memorable?  Not for long.  But a birthday cake sitting on this little lovely is a thing of beauty to behold every year you break out the family's traditional celebratory cake stand by Whitney Smith Pottery.

There's nothing sadder than an empty cake stand.

Or imagine the gleam in your little one's eye as you serve him or her a special candle-bedecked birthday cupcake on this darling little ceramic confection.

Also suitable for a birthday morning muffin, if you're the stingy, joyless type.

One of the things I'm enjoying most about being a parent is the creation of family traditions, and I think the special celebration cake plate and/or cupcake plate is going to become one of them.  I want Olivia (and, because he's a sentimental ladyman, SLB) to experience a thrill of anticipation and the warmth of nostalgia invoked by something special and familiar at each birthday.  Other holidays come with their own festive family artifacts (ornaments, menorahs, pumpkins, turkey costumes, etc.), so why not birthdays?  Besides, if cake is good and accessories are good, then cake accessories are just what each birthday requires to be spectacular.

Summer of Awesome: Livy's Celebrity Friends!

This summer Livy and I were lucky to enjoy a week of rubbing elbows with famous blogger babies, and boy are we starstruck!

First, we enjoyed a playdate with the star of Dad Solo's fine blog, NJ!

NJ is the cute one with all the hair.  Livy is the other cute one with all the other hair.

It was during this visit that Olivia learned what heaven is: a carpeted, finished basement filled with a friend, that friend's toys, and that friend's dogs.  Luckily NJ is not afraid of delighted shrieking, having perfected the sound during her long career of piercing ears with her auditory happiness, so Livy was welcome to scream joyfully all she liked.  It was also during that visit that Olivia learned what raw fear was as she took one look at Dad Solo, who is much taller and more generously bearded than SLB, clutched my neck, and bawled her eyes out.  She quickly realied that Dad Solo makes a great jungle gym and made friends with his silly self.

Hard at work manning their workstation.

Rudely interrupted.

Performing like trained monkeys.

Later that same week Olivia and I welcomed my old friend Danica and her superstar daughter Audrey, both of Mermaids in the Basement fame, to our humble abode.  Danica and I made friends in high school where we met in a particularly badly taught chemistry class.  We made so much trouble in that class that we were eventually seated as far away from one another as possible, which changed absolutely nothing about our monkeyshines.  One of my favorite high school memories is of us making jokes so crude about a chemistry experiment (the resulting mixture smelled... um... fertile) that we were both kicked out of class.  Instead of reporting to the principal's office (Why would we?), we took refuge in the teachers' lounge with a favorite English teacher who bought us Diet Cokes and visibly enjoyed how pleased we were with ourselves.  We knew we were special - smart witty feminist girls destined for great things and cute hair - with Danica obviously being the more special, smart, witty, and cute because she's a year older.  Because of my decades-long girlcrush on her mother, it was a pleasing equilibrium to see how much Audrey enjoyed the older and wiser Livy.

Here's Audrey, who eagerly appropriated Livy's sippy cup.  Yes, she really is that cute.

Here's Livy.  Of course we color coordinated our daughters.

And here's Audrey sucking on Livy's toes.

See?  That's love.

Livy and I are so lucky and blessed to have such wonderful friends who still agree to take our calls even though they're all bloggy-famous.  We love them now, and we're pleased to say that we knew them when!

Buy Me That: Posters from Petek Design

For above our bed in my current house:

Spooning!  Get it?  Spooning!  Spooning!

And these for the fictional family/rec room in my fictional much larger (but not excessively so), modern (but still warm), and wittily (but not kitchily) decorated home, preferably above a modern game table of some kind.

Is this your card?

All are from Petek Design, all are awesome, and all are worth the shipping costs from Tel-Aviv.

Tickletickletickletickle

Hey, have you seen the cutest thing in the world?  I can't find it anywhere.



Oh, wait.  There it is.  Never mind.

Summer of Awesome: The Theat-ah

Given that today is the first day of autumn, it's high time I recapped the end of the Summer of Awesome.  It's been a busy couple of months, and it's difficult to muster the determination to chronicle our life when we're so busy living it.  Rest assured, friends and voyeurs, that an onslaught of summery goodness is fast approaching to ease you into fall.  It's one of the many services we provide here at Me Show, Inc.

Two of the ladies from our bookgroup and I took our little girls to see The Green Sheep at The Seattle Children's Theater a few weeks back.  I found an advertisement for it in Parent Map and was intrigued by the idea of a play for toddlers, especially since all of my assumptions about the toddler-focused symphony were so far off.  Livy and I read the book on which the play is based a week before going to see th how, and I was really curious to see how on earth the SCT was going to transform a short toddler book into a half hour show.  It was really well done, though.  The play was a lively mix of music, puppetry, and storytelling wherein all of the parents and littles sat in a carpeted and fenced "pen" while actors used wooden cutouts, musical instruments, and silky swaths of fabric to tell the story around the pen.  If you have a little one in Seattle, I highly recommend the show.  Olivia was silently grinning and completely entranced for the entire perfomance, and the creativity and dedication to a craft I'd never imagined - baby theater - was inspiring.  It made me want to immediately drop what I was doing and become a puppeteer, definitely a sign of a great show.

After the show was over theater-goers were welcome to wander the pen, touch the wooden puppets, play musical instruments, hear a reading of the story all over again, and pet the elusive green sheep.  Livy couldn't get enough of all the action.  She kept her stunned and amazed look while frantically crawling all around the stage.

Dude, Mama, have you seen this place?

It's BLOWING MY MIND!

Good talking to you... Gotta go!

After the show we hung out in the lobby as each mama took a turn going to the restroom as the other mamas watched her daughter (Childfree folks, you'd never imagine the luxury of peeing solo.  Parents, can I get an amen?).  While there we found an enormous chair.  Hijinks ensued.

I can see my house from here!

All in all, it was a fantastic outing.  Great show, great play time, great babies, great mamas.  Hurrah!

Buy Me That: Burlesque Sock Monkeys

Do you like pasties?  Do you like monkeys?  Well, then, have I got a treat for you!

Yeah, yeah, she's got boobs.  But it's the subtle wit of giving her matching stockings that won my heart.

My old friend Fleur du Mal makes and sells these beauties on her Etsy site.  Do go buy yourself something nice, won't you?  And while you're there pick up a little something special for your buddy Me Show who's done so much for you...

Silly Sunday!

We hope you all had a great and restful weekend!

Birth Control

Yesterday while shuffling through papers for Olivia's immunization records, I found a stack of the activity logs we kept from her first two months out of my belly.  SLB designed them based on the Swedish Hospital chart we took home with the baby.  Each day is represented by a chart with a space for times, meals, pee diapers, and poo diapers.  We found these invaluable when Livy was little and sickly and we were taking care of her under the direst conditions of sleep deprivation.  Writing down every successful feed and every dirty diaper was comforting before she started thriving and blossomed into the hearty lass she is today.  And reading these logs now is a sharp reminder of how difficult it can be to take care of a newborn.

7/16/09, 3 days old.  Leaving the bed is for losers without newborns or major surgery.

For example, on July 14th, the second day of her life, something (diaper change, feeding, or both) was going on with Livy at 1:00, 4:30, 4:50, 6:00, 10:15, 11:30, 3:00, 4:05, 5:00, 5:15, 6:45, 7:30, 9:00, 9:40, and that's before she really started eating.  Also, that chart indicates only the bare bones of infant care (food in and food out) and doesn't include things like rocking her, rewrapping her swaddle, or begging her to shut her face so that we could sleep.  Don't think it got any better once she started chowing down and bulking up.  On August 22, the last day for which we have a chart, she required basic care at 1:15, 4:00, 6:00, 9:45, 10:30, 12:30, 3:30, 4:15, 4:45, 5:45, 7:00, and 10:20.  The scariest part of this whole thing in hindsight is that we had an easy baby, too.  At least Livy was generally content during the breaks between basic care.  Imagining that the interstices between entries could have contained wild, frantic screaming makes me wonder how the parents of needier babies survived their children's infancy.  It also makes me want to buy those parents stiff drinks and stoically salute them like we're veterans of the same war. 

Also interesting are my semi-coherent notes from those days, such as the 3:40 am note on July 31 that says "Bellybutton [sic] off!" or the mark in a particular #2 column that is an infinity sign with an exclamation point behind it.  At least I kept my sense of humor if not my memory of a lot of those events.  In fact, I can only remember twice when I felt overwhelmed by the experience of being a new parent, and the rest of the time I kind of enjoyed it.  I was tired, but I was happy.  This could easily be the result of maternal hormones, sleep deprivation induced memory loss, or looking at the past through Percocet-colored lenses, but I think the answer is far, far schmoopier than that.  I think I've forgotten the pain of those early days because their intensity bleaches to transparency in comparison with Livy's awesomeness.  She's so rad that she made me function with a degree of radness I hadn't known was possible.  It's as if her every dissatisfied wail was a rallying cry.  "Come on, Mama!  Leap up to my level and care for me in the impeccable manner that I deserve!  Also, wipe my butt!"  And I did, readers.  I did.  At least, I hope I did (the impeccable part, not the butt part.  The butt part I most certainly remember doing.).  We'll leave that for Livy's future therapist to decide.

8/25/10.  The literate nudist and her fancy hair.  TOTALLY worth every brain cell lost to lack of sleep in the past 14 months.

Back!

And better than ever!

SLB asked for an iterpretive expression showing how I felt after he caused us to miss our flight and have to spend 5 hours in the San Francisco airport.  This is it.

Things have been crazy - crazy good, crazy bad, crazy nuptial (Two weddings in less than a week!), and blogging hasn't been on my radar.  But you were always on my mind, fair readers, and I hope you'll welcome a return to our regularly scheduled programming of narcissism, juvenile humor, and Livy worship.

Cheers to that!