Realized I haven’t posted in awhile. I haven’t been on twitter much either and I think I needed that. To feel a bit anonymous for a few days.

It’s Memorial Day Weekend here in the states and it’s the unofficial start to summer. We’re taking advantage of the weekend before our crazy June kicks off by doing a lot of outings packed in 2 days. Yesterday afternoon, we ended up at the Jersey Shore (no, no, I didn’t see a single fist pump – disappointing!), but the day was warm, the water cool and the kids just love the beach. Nothing like looking out into the ocean horizon and listening to the waves to forget about your week. Hope you are all having a nice weekend too.

Looks like we’ve got a new voracious reader in the family. And for a new reader, happiness is finding a whole bookshelf of new hand-me down books waiting for you at your grandparents’ house. Mia started reading earlier in the school year. It started out with single words. She’d call out signs when we’d drive or walk around the neighborhood. She started reading simple sentences soon after and now, as we near the end of her Kindergarten year, she’s reading whole books, even books “without pictures”. Now that she’s reading, I need to watch what I have open on my computer when she sits next to me or peers over my shoulder. Claudine can still nuzzle up with me and watch me while I’m working, something she often likes to do, but Mia is now too far advanced a reader to have any papers or documents casually laying around.

I can’t even tell you what joy it is to go find your child in her room sitting in her bed reading a book to herself when you’ve wondered why it was so quiet. We’re entering a whole new chapter here in our house.

It’s always fun to visit my dad’s garden to see what’s sprouted up. The vegetables are starting to grow and we had our first meal on Friday with lettuce wraps that we’ll eat all summer long. But for now, May is all about the flowers – endless varieties of peonies (my favorite), roses, irises, clematis..

We have our own small balcony of tomatoes, herbs and flowers, but it’s nice to see the arc of a real garden progress throughout the seasons, you know, at our “country house”.

It’s even nicer when my dad cuts full blooms of peonies the size of large grapefruits and delicate pink roses for the girls to take home. They clutch the stems in the car ride all the way home, even when they fall asleep.

We tried having a good weekend with the kids and for the most part I think we succeeded. We retreated to my parents’ house which is always good for getting away (Mia calls it our “country house”). Sometimes you just need your mom – even if you don’t really talk about anything, sometimes you just need to be around her. Mark slept for nearly 10 hours each night over the weekend. I caught up with work that I was distracted from last week. We celebrated my dad’s birthday at an Italian restaurant (a first! And it was *his* choice!) and went to an Asian American Festival on a beachfront near their house.

It was all good distraction, but I’m not going to lie. I’m still on edge, but every day is getting a tiny bit better. Thanks to those sweet readers who emailed me. I probably won’t have time to write everyone back but I do so appreciate your emails. A few comments also got deleted accidentally – I’m so sorry if yours did not get published! We’re in the middle of moving our shop to another server, something I was in the process of doing last week. I’m not sure when we will reopen but we have all our other shops open on Etsy and Foodzie.

I know sometimes things just happen, but I don’t believe that what happened last week was without meaning. I learned something and it was very important.

I’m hoping for a better day. I’ve received some information recently that made me feel better about certain things, but this has been a very hard week. I’ve actually cried. I don’t remember the last time I did that. A few things have happened that have made me distrustful and paranoid and questioning some of the things I share here (not really related, but when you’re paranoid you question everything). I’ve deleted certain posts. I’ve wasted 3 days trying to get to the bottom of things, talking to customer service, checking my credit reports and retracing steps. I don’t really know if it’s over, but I have to refocus because there is work to be done, deadlines and stuff.

Be well my friends. The world isn’t as nice of a place now as I thought it was last week.

A day worse than the one before.

I can’t believe we’re talking about summer already, but here we are, just a few weeks away from Memorial Day, the official start to summer. Every month that passes we’re like what? How did that happen? 2010 still feels like new, but the truth is, we’re headed towards the middle of the year already.

So time is moving fast, but this summer is going to be so epic that I’m half-hearted about wanting it to slow down. June? That month around the corner? Can’t say yet, but it’s going to be c-r-a-z-y. Like possibly heart palpitations crazy.

And when the crazy dies down, I’m hoping that there will be quieter days in July and August and plenty of opportunities for kicking back on lounge chairs with a beer in one hand and a barbequed kabob in the other. Days spent at the beach, evenings spent watching the sunset from the stoop with an ice cream cone and a great summer song stuck in your head that you can’t stop humming. After dinner family walks at dusk. And then in August, just when summer will have gotten exhausting, we’ll be off to Seattle to visit Mark’s family and finally meet with new friends for the last 2 weeks before we buckle down again into routines and everything that the Fall brings.

I had an intense craving the other night: to put on a pretty summer dress and go out on a summer evening to have drinks on a rooftop or restaurant patio. I love warm summer nights when we get a reprieve from the unforgiving daytime sun. It’s still warm, but the breeze is so delicious. I never got used to the cool summer evenings that required sweaters in the Pacific Northwest and it made me homesick for the East Coast even more. Maybe I’m waxing nostalgic on the days before kids when going out in the evenings meant giving into spontaneous whims rather than complicated, premeditated arrangements. We’ll see what happens this summer, but whatever it is, it’s going to be epic.

Nothing marks the beginning of summer in the city like street fairs, and the 5th Avenue street fair in Brooklyn happens to be right down the block from our apartment. This also means throngs of people crowd our neighborhood (do you see that wall of people in that picture above? I see it) and it also usually means hyped up children in bouncy castles and high on sugar (melt downs and whining is to be expected at some point). We don’t go to a lot of street fairs but I am partial to this one for other reasons other than its proximity to where we live (it stretches for 20+ blocks so it’s pretty unavoidable anyway). Along with the usual street fair stuff like bedding sets, sunglasses, socks, funnel cakes and meat-on-a-stick, all the neighborhood restaurants and shops up and down 5th Avenue open up stands on the street and it’s the one day where you can sample a lot of local restaurant food.

But the crowds! So easy to lose someone you’re with, right? Which is what happened. We were 4 kids and 3 adults cruising down 5th ave when all of a sudden I didn’t see Mia anymore. Whaaa? Wait wait wait, hold up now. Surely she was just a few feet away. Mark takes off from where we came, our friend Ben takes off up the street, I watch the other 3 kids and stay put. A few minutes later they both come back empty handed without Mia. I don’t freak out just yet but I feel the beginnings of panic starting to rise up my chest. The guys take off once again. Claudine starts yelling for Mia. I don’t know how much time passes, 5 minutes? 7 minutes? 10? And then…I see Ben emerging from the crowds carrying Mia, except it was almost in slow-mo, like a scene from a movie. If there had been some kind of tear-jerker music playing as a soundtrack in the background of that scene, you woulda cried.

Mia is very calm throughout the reunion. Apparently she went to a police woman when she realized she was lost (where she learned that, I have no idea). No tears, no drama, though she later admitted to being a little scared. We all high five Mia for being SO smart and use it to teach the other 3 kids a lesson on what to do if they ever get lost.

I admire Mia’s ability to stay calm. I was lost once too when I was around 4 years old for a few hours at Jones Beach. I still remember what it felt like to walk around the beach looking for my parents and bawling and then waiting at the life guard’s office for what seemed like forever. But Mia doesn’t freak out like that. Have I ever told you about the time nobody showed up to pick her up from school? It was a misunderstanding between me and our nanny. The school office tried to call us repeatedly, but both Mark and I were on separate subways so we weren’t getting the calls to our cell phones. The office then called all the grandparents when they couldn’t reach us and our phones were again being flooded by more calls. We were both underground. We had no idea what was going on. By virtue of good timing my subway emerged from the tunnel and started going above ground and I happened to pick up my ringing phone. When the school informed me that Mia was still at school waiting to be picked up I was disoriented and honestly a bit mortified, but I’m sure this wasn’t the first time this has happened at school. When I saw Mia later that evening I asked her if she was worried and scared. She said she wasn’t, but she put both hands on her hip and said “But nobody came to pick me up!”. Then she threw her hands up in the air and walked away as if to say “stupid humans. oy vey!”

Internet, you are a strange and funny place.

While I can appreciate the debate and differing opinions, reading a few paragraphs on somebody’s blog everyday does not mean you really know them, only what they choose to share.

You have your own lives, let me live mine.

If our non 9-5 lifestyle inspires others to do the same, then cool, but I’m not trying to be anyone’s role model. I hear the word “courage” batted around a lot and I’m flattered, but it really does not feel like courage. I am just living my life the way I want, the way my mother taught me how to do, by example. Periods of struggle, anxiety and self doubt are real life (who doesn’t have this?) and everything comes down to individual choices. While we can teach our children certain values, we won’t know for certain if they will take it to heart or be truly influenced by what they see around them. They will eventually grow to be their own people.

As the wise 3 year old Claudine recently once said to me:
“I don’t want to be you when I grow up”.

Amen to that.

Nice crisp days we’re having…if it were OCTOBER. It’s been cold here in NY, the kind of windy cold weather that totally catches you off guard because you’ve put all the winter gear away and you were just getting used to summer temps. Spring is so fickle.

So far, May has been a very, very expensive month – Summer camp and Fall semester preschool tuition paid in full, business insurance, an expensive oven repair at the kitchen, and as of today, Adobe CS 5 and a new Macbook Pro because our 5 year old laptop completely died last night (ok, that unexpected purchase hurt just a little). I did eventually find some summer clothes, on Mother’s Day. I usually belabor over purchases, but I didn’t this time (I’m the one who spends an hour or more at the fabric or paper store going back and forth over a single item). I found a dress off the sales rack and a pair of jeans. I glanced at the price. It wasn’t horrifying or anything, but it wasn’t cheap either and if it would have been 2 weeks ago I would have put the dress back on the price alone. I tried it on and then headed straight for the register. Dress and jeans in bag. Done. I came home and bought some sandals and a new bathing suit that I really needed (you would berate me if you knew what kind of awful mishmash combo of swimwear I’ve thrown together for the last 4 or so years).

I have to say, it was liberating shopping like that. Not thinking twice about the money, not justifying it or feeling guilty. I’m always so careful about budgets and we’ve been so broke in the past, that it was just liberating to make a purchase without really caring this time. It’s not like we are suddenly rolling in dough, but because of the way both our businesses have been steady lately, paychecks are coming in with more regularity than before. Apart from these splurges, however, I think the greatest difference in having some kind of steady income is being able to do the small things that we never felt we could do before, like takeout when we’re too tired to cook, an ice cream cone or a special treat on one of our outings, lunch or dinners with a friend, an iced coffee. Seems simple, no? But I don’t take these small pleasures for granted. We didn’t indulge in any of these things even 2 years ago when I took out $100 from the bank machine for mad money for the month. When it was gone, it was gone. I would dodge invites for dinner or drinks with friends because I didn’t feel we could spend that money on something so non-essential. When we didn’t have any money to save, we collected loose change and kept a dollar jar where we’d put a dollar a day so that at the end of the month we could deposit $50 into our savings. Wasn’t much, but it was something.

Some of our extreme money saving tactics have stuck around and I don’t feel they are going anywhere, like haircuts at home for Mark and the girls, buying only what’s on the grocery list, eating out only a few times a month. We rarely take big vacations. Our budget still only allows for one bottle of wine a month. We always make coffee at home. We drink only water, we never buy juice or soda.

After this expensive month we’re going back on a budget, but it’s nice to be able to exhale from being so tight-fisted, to not have a silent debate with yourself over every single purchase, even if it’s just for the little things.