Archive for the 'Friends' Category

August 18, 2009 @ 8:43 am | Filed under: Friends

Mary Ellen Barrett’s letter about the loss of her sweet son, Ryan, has been posted in several places, but in case you missed it, here’s a link to Alice’s blog.

Like so many others, I am still reeling over the news of Ryan’s death. Mary Ellen is a dear online friend and a member of my quilting group. I’d heard so much about Ryan over the years that I really felt as if I knew him. The passage about Ryan in Alice Gunther’s Haystack Full of Needles is, in my opinion, the most moving part of an incredibly moving book.

I remember when my friend Mary Ellen first took her children out of school, including her autistic son, Ryan. One afternoon, as we stood chatting in my backyard after a lively gathering, she looked over at her son playing ball with the other boys and smiled. “You know,” she said, “all the special education in the world cannot match coming here and just being one of the guys.”

I know those other children are missing Ryan now, and my heart grieves for the Barrett family and all their Long Island friends.

February 14, 2009 @ 12:07 pm | Filed under: Friends

Another week, another delightful visit with beautiful online friends.

This time it was the charming Diane of Journey of a Mother’s Heart who paid San Diego a visit. Erica did the honors, opening her lovely home to me and my brood, Kristen and her sweet girls, and Diane and her sister-in-law and adorable nephews. What a fun day. I already knew I was going to love hanging out with Diane; her warm, funny, generous, lively spirit won my heart a long time ago.

Wonderboy was smitten too.

Delicious lunch, stimulating conversation, busy children, snuggly babies: a perfect morning. The time passed too quickly, is all.

All right, who’s next?

(And Erica, thanks so much for providing the cookie-decorating for the children. They were thrilled, and it got me out of having to muster a Valentine’s craft myself. Hee.)

February 6, 2009 @ 2:45 pm | Filed under: Friends

Oh, we had so much fun yesterday! It was As Cozy as Spring over here, and believe me, the company was not a Small Treasure but rather a big one! Jenn and her lovely family were in town for a short while and did me the great favor of spending the morning at my house. Kristen drove down with her gorgeous girls, and pal Erica brought her gang to join the fun. Snacks, conversation, bloggity friends, and seventeen children—who could ask for anything more?

I haven’t uploaded photos yet (and in any case, my camera was AWOL during the group shots), but Kristen has a nice pic of the four moms on her blog. I wanted the baby in the picture but Rose had him and wouldn’t give him back.

January 9, 2009 @ 1:47 pm | Filed under: Friends, Pregnancy

During the long months of this pregnancy, I have been blessed with the companionship of a few special friends. We used to see each other only once a month, but lately we’ve been able to get together once or even twice a week, and how eagerly I have looked forward to these sweet moments of fellowship with women whose joy in motherhood outstrips even my own!

I realized today that our time together is drawing to a close…very soon (very, very soon, do you hear me?) it will be time to go our separate ways, and we shall see each other only once a year or thereabouts. Ah, dear friends, whatever will I do without you? Fortunately I happened to have my camera in my bag at our visit today, so I was able to capture a few treasured snapshots of these fair and tender ladies I have come to know so well.

Here they are all together with their precious infants, the whole beautiful bunch of them. Aren’t they lovely?

So serene, so gentle, so rouged.

I have learned so much from these ladies. For example, here I am about to give birth to my sixth child, and yet until I met Angelica would you believe I had no idea it was advisable to blow-dry one’s hair to a silky sheen, tie back a few glossy locks with a ribbon, don a ruffly off-the-shoulder gown, and apply several coats of blusher before sitting down to breastfeed one’s baby?

This is going to make a real difference in my next post-partum experience, let me tell you. Angelica always looks so calm and well rested. I realize now that my customary get-up of hastily scrunchied ponytail, spit-up-stained T-shirt, and no makeup whatsoever has been at the root of the exhaustion I typically experience during those first weeks with a new baby. LOOK beautiful and you’ll FEEL beautiful is Angelica’s motto.

Elspeth has a similar philosophy about pregnancy. I understand now that in banning white clothing from my wardrobe several sticky-fingered toddlers ago, I have been depriving myself of a kind of delicate radiance that would surely have blessed the child in my womb and all in our presence. And that band of pink ribbon below her bosom—how beautifully it offsets her the rosy glow of her lips. Every word that comes out of a mouth like that is pure honey, I suspect. (I can’t say for sure, because demure Elspeth never utters a word. But you can see just by looking at her that she is full of warm and soothing thoughts.)

As for our ringleted chum Swoozie, I admit I worry a little about her sometimes. Those raw bruises on her cheek…the dark rings around her eyes…her habit of staring off into the distance, lost in thought, bottle-feeding her infant without even looking at him…I have some concerns about her home life. But she has never uttered a word of complaint, so perhaps I’m mistaken. Possibly she is only thinking about when to get her next perm.

Oh, dear friends, how grateful I am for the many times you have entertained me while I waited for our obstetrician to amble into the exam room! It is very good of you, all of you, to have kept such a patient vigil with me as the long, long minutes ticked by.

You will be sorely missed.

January 8, 2009 @ 8:36 am | Filed under: Friends, These People Crack Me Up

Yesterday, during Rose’s piano class, my cell phone buzzed with the information that Alice was IMing me. I thumb-tapped back to her: “Hi! Am sitting in piano,” knowing she’d know that meant I was answering from the phone’s tiny keyboard and she should expect truncated responses to her half of the conversation.

“Of course!” she wrote back. “It’s the only piece of furniture big enough to hold you!”

I laughed so hard it’s a wonder my water didn’t break.

June 27, 2008 @ 10:15 pm | Filed under: Friends, Uncategorized

Sometimes other people’s secrets are as much fun as your own. I’ve been bubbling over with one of Alice’s for weeks. Go look, go! Is it not the prettiest place on the internet? Be sure to click all around. One thing that especially delights me is having easy access to all her tea menus. These teas are one of her best innovations and have been enriching my own family’s feast-day celebrations for years and years. I was one of the lucky ones, you know, who got to reap the benefits of Alice’s particular genius long before she came to the internet. (Forgive me if I gloat a little.) I remember when she presented her first themed tea menu (a Shakespearean repast, that one) to her teeny tiny girls waaay back in our young-mama days. A decade later, I am still giggling over some of her menu items.

Her Midsummer Night’s Dream tea is another masterpiece, invented for the cast party of her local group’s performance of that play. Because I (more gloating) got to read her upcoming book in manuscript, and because she is including that tea in an appendix to the book, my San Diego friends and I got to enjoy the very same feast after our Shakespeare Club’s performance of scenes from that play—the club itself being an enterprise I was inspired to launch after hearing Alice’s Shakespeare stories. This is the effect she’s had on me for years, and the effect she’s had on the online homeschooling community since she joined that party: she has all these great ideas and makes them sound so easy and doable. So you jump up and do them, and she’s right. I see the fruit of her genius all over the internet.

Which is why people are going to love her book. One of the reasons why, that is. The personal narrative itself is captivating, and I’m not just saying that because I’m a recurring character. Although she did make me cry a goodly number of times as she recounted the story of our own budding friendship back in Queens, NY. What delicious days those were! But beyond the fact that her book tells a darn good story, there’s what I always think of as the “practical inspiration” factor—does a book inspire me to get up and DO? Haystack Full of Needles does. Which I think is pretty impressive, considering I talk to the author on the phone almost every day, so you’d think I’d have heard all her ideas by now. Not so. Because the woman is a fount of them; they bubble out of her. As I read the manuscript, I was thinking, gosh, people are just going to wish they could live in Alice’s area and be part of the things she’s describing. But as I read on, I realized that no, the effect of the book goes much deeper than that: you find yourself energized and eager to put her ideas to work in your own home and circle of friends. It’s a beautiful look at family and community, what we give each other and how we grow together. Which is exactly how I characterize my friendship with Alice Gunther: we have grown up together, as mothers—we met when her oldest was two and my only(!) child was fifteen months old. I’ve been the lucky recipient of her brilliant ideas ever since. It just tickles me pink that now the whole world can enjoy the riches too.

August, 2000. Post Barnes & Noble booksigning celebration. From left: me, unidentified man’s bottom, Alice with our friend Brigid’s sweet daughter Emily on her lap. Photo by Brigid! You can’t tell because we’re sitting, but I was pregnant with Beanie—Alice’s future goddaughter.

Tags: Alice

January 11, 2008 @ 12:02 am | Filed under: Friends

After looking at yesterday’s photos, Mary Beth wanted to know if Rilla ever gets a chance to wear that oh-so-fetching pink hat here in sunny San Diego. Listen, that hat is so darn cute it’d be worth running the air conditioner in winter to lower the temp enough to chill a baby’s ears. Fortunately, our nights here on the edge of the desert can be quite brisk, almost what you Easterners call nippy. We’ve even had a few days lately where we had to wear long sleeves. On Christmas Eve, when we drove up to that little mountain town, we thought about bringing jackets just in case, but they were all buried under our surfboards and beach towels, so it’s a good thing I had these scrumptious knitted caps on hand for the three younger girls. And credit for that goes totally to (whom else?) Alice. She called me one day last month especially to tell me Hanna Andersson had the world’s cutest hats marked down to a ridiculously low price and I hung up on her to get my order in rightaway. As always, she was one hundred percent correct. Cutest hats ever.

October 9, 2007 @ 7:48 am | Filed under: Family, Friends

In response to a French book containing "40 reasons not to have children," the inimitable Karen Edmisten has written a list of her own: 40 Reasons to Have Children. It’s a gorgeous, powerful, right-on-the-money list.

One year ago today I had the immense pleasure of meeting up with Karen and her three children, Anne, Betsy, and Ramona-who-makes-me-laugh, at a motel in Salina, Kansas. They had driven all the way down from Nebraska just for the rendezvous. Karen and I had been close online friends since 1998, but this was our first time meeting in person. It may as well have been our 500th, like we were meeting at a park for our weekly playdate. The kids hit it off like they’d grown up together. In a way, they had. I’ve been regaling my children with tales of the Edmisten girls’ hilarious exploits since all these lasses were teeny tiny. They’d read all the same books, shared a common lexicon, enjoyed the same brand of mischief. An hour in their presence and I could come up with another forty reasons for Karen’s list.

Wouldn’t be half as lyrical as hers, though. Go read and you’ll see what I mean.

August 14, 2007 @ 8:26 am | Filed under: Family Adventures, Friends

So I know I’ve been quiet here lately. First we had company of the very nicest sort (about which, more later), and then the kids and I took a jaunt up the California coast to rendezvous with Alice and her family. You should harass Alice for more pictures. I loaded her memory card onto my computer and it is ridiculous how many adorable shots she snapped. Like this:

Whereas my shots always come out like this:

The car part of the trip was a lot harder this time around, but I blame L.A. On the northbound trip we crept in bumper-to-bumper traffic from San Diego to thirty miles north of Santa Barbara. (Later, Rose reported to Alice: "We sang 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall all the way to the end!" Alice, to me, deadpan: "Oh, honey, you WERE desperate!")

The return trip on Sunday afternoon was much brisker, hardly any slowdowns, but spirits were low after our tearful parting from the Gunthers, and the back-seat contingent sought to relieve their feelings with bickering of the most crazy-making sort. After a while I began to feel like Nurse Ratched in a mobile version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. In an impulsive move even more desperate than the launching of 99 Bottles of Beer, I pulled over at a Toys R Us close to the highway and bought Rose and Beanie each a Tamagotchi. Because, you know, incessant electronic bleating is so much nicer to listen to than sweet childish voices raised in song. I told you the bickering was crazy-making!

(Best Tamagotchi moment so far: yesterday I was cooing over the then-and-now baby pictures Alice posted, marveling over how much Rilla and her pal have grown. Beanie heard me and mournfully agreed. "I know just how you feel, Mommy. I miss my Tamagotchi baby so much!"

Me: "What do you mean? You just got it!"

Beanie: "No, Mommy, it’s a toddler now! It hasn’t been a baby for HOURS!")

While the 600-mile round trip proved more sanity-challenging than last October’s 2800-mile travelpalooza, the two-nights-and-a-day sandwiched in the middle were blissful. Except, you know, for when Wonderboy wouldn’t stop shrieking because someone had turned off one bedside lamp and left the other one on. And because he was alarmed by the pull-out sofabed. And because the baby was playing in the closet. And because Beanie was holding the remote control. Poor, poor kid. Poor, poor lodgers in the rooms on either side of us. At one point I realized with a jolt that we had become those people. You know, the ones whose overpowering noise makes everyone else in a hotel gnash their teeth.

But downstairs in Alice’s rooms, delight reined. Our girls picked up right where they left off, right down to the Snoopy songs and the homemade comics. Beanie and Patrick tested every possible surface for bounceability. ("What are you shooting out of your wrists, Beanie?" "Vines, of course! I am Vinesnapper, you know!") Maureen mothered the babies (and Wonderboy too, when he would let her) in the most adorable manner. I got to see all of Alice’s San Francisco photos, which alone would have been worth the trip. Beautiful stuff she’s got, and she already knows the city’s history and architecture through and through. Amazing.

I shall enter this closet to make my brother scream!

(This is a cute picture, so Alice must have taken it.)

Ooh, it all went too fast. I feel like Beanie, mourning the all-too-brief infancy of her Tamagotchi. I wonder when—and where—our next rendezvous will be?

April 18, 2007 @ 6:21 am | Filed under: Friends

Online friends of mine will remember my desperate pleas for prayers for my beloved friend Brigid after she was nearly killed in a terrible car accident four Decembers ago. I still get letters all the time asking how she is doing now. If you’d like to know, head over to Cottage Blessings, where Alice has posted a beautiful and heart-wrenching tribute to the miraculous recovery of someone for whose life we both thank God every single day. Love you so much, Brigid.