I spruced up the blog a bit. It’s not really a redesign because I don’t have time for that, but sometimes you just get tired of looking at the same thing. I really do, however, have to redesign my portfolio because it’s just so outdated and in a state of stripped out mish-mash, but when you’re busy working on work that, if you weren’t busy you’d need the portfolio for to get more work, there isn’t any time and motivation for a redesign. If you know what I mean.

Speaking of work, I had an interesting 2 weeks of working on something that I thought I loathed. It was one of those projects where I heard myself say yes and then 10 minutes later was hitting myself on the head thinking, why did I do that? It gave me a bit of anxiety, but in the process of working through these conceptual visual problems, I realized that it was sort of interesting and at the very least, different from what I had been doing for my last few client projects. In that sense it was refreshing and I’m not really afraid of it anymore.

February. So I kind of lied when I said I didn’t have any goals for this year. I actually do, but they aren’t written down anywhere because then it would seem like it was official, but I am in fact still feeling the pressure that I haven’t worked towards making any of these goals a reality. I can’t help but feel like the year is already slipping away because it’s FEBRUARY. But when this winter has been so very mild – probably the mildest winter I can remember here in NY – it’s just easy to get Spring Fever when it’s 60 degrees out. Who wants to design product labels and source materials when it’s so much more fun walking around the city, having more dinner with girlfriends and hanging out with your family on a weekend day?
 
Yeah, not me.
 
But I also don’t want to feel like I’m not going anywhere or making any kind of progress towards more interesting work.
 
Oh, the conundrum.

There was once a time, years ago, when it seemed like all my friends were boys. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but there is also nothing like hanging out with a girl friend or a small group of ladies that you feel totally comfortable with. I remember desperately missing that in my life and wondering if I would ever have those “best friend” relationships that meant the whole world when I was a kid. Hearing Mia list all her best friends reinforces that feeling that we really do crave and need those kinds of companionship, even at an early age – but it isn’t always easy to find now, is it?

When Mia was a baby, I found a group of new mom friends in the neighborhood who I’d meet with every week. It was rather easy to meet other new parents here even if you weren’t particularly outgoing or good at reaching out to strangers. I don’t know if you ever forget your first mom friends. The first year or so of having your first baby is a big bonding experience. Even if you don’t have anything else in common, you have this, and being new parents is a big enough commonality that it can trump anything else. I don’t want to say that I had a friend “type” in my pre-baby years, but I did, only because common interests bring people together to the same places, whether it’s at school, a job, or a community of like-minded people. So when I started meeting people outside of the artist/designer/musician/chef/computer geek types – people who were lawyers and bankers and who had other corporate type jobs – it was sort of a novel thing as far as friendships go.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately as I’ve been marveling at how rich my friendships have become in the last 2 or so years. For many years it was all about being friends with other neighborhood parents. It was just easier to socialize this way and in many cases, the only way to socialize. It was great and fun and one of my fondest memories of being a new parent. These friendships shaped the way that I approached parenthood and they meant the world to me. But I’ve recently realized that many of those friendships have naturally drifted. I’m a totally sappy person and I would never want to admit this, but I guess sometimes friendships just run their course. Maybe we’ve moved on.

These days I have made most of my friendships online. It is both totally strange if you think about it, but totally amazing. I feel lucky enough to live in a city where many people will breeze through on various business and visits, so that these online friendships become real life friendships too. I’ve also gravitated towards people with the same interests again. Now that I’m a parent of school age kids, I don’t feel like my conversations need to center around my children and in fact when I am out with friends, I don’t necessarily want to talk about my kids. Many of my newer friends aren’t even parents!
 
I’m in love with all the friendships I have made over the past 2 years, many of which I’ve written about on this blog. To go out at night with ladies like Anna, Jen and Tamera, to plan these get togethers even though Jen and Tamera don’t even live in NY, to wander around the East Village on a Saturday night from one place to the next, and to sit around and talk about lady things. To feel a bit like my own person, not someone’s mom, for a long evening.
 
But when I get back home, I get back home to this. The girls never fail to leave me a good night note to place on top of my computer. Love. I finally feel like I’ve achieved some kind of balance in my life.

Friends, I know it sounds crazy, but it’s true. This is only the 3rd time in the history of this blog (that is nearly 4 years!) that we’ve gone out to dinner without the girls. The last time was on my 40th birthday nearly 2 years ago. Let’s not get into the why, but rather revel in the fact that we did it (and to think that I got totally chewed out by a blog reader last year who said that I treated the girls like burdens to our lifestyle when we handed the kids off to Mark’s mom as soon as we got to Seattle so that we could walk around Pike Place by ourselves, bwahahaha).

We’re so out of the whole restaurant scene at this point that it was hard for us to choose where to go, but after some deliberation, Mark chose The Modern for his 40th birthday meal, the fancy formal restaurant inside The Museum of Modern Art. Somewhere along the way over the past few years, fine dining with 3 or 4 course tasting menus has turned into dining experiences with many little extra dishes in between the courses that you do choose (we are not talking about the 8 course tasting menus which, sad to say, I’m unsure I can do anymore. Can’t eat like I used to in my old age). So even before your first appetizer comes out, you may have already been given a few amuse bouche dishes and a few extra sweets at the end of your meal. In our case, we had some kind of foamy carrot soup in a test tube-like glass vessel, a bit of raw fish and some kind of goat cheese tart served on spoons, and our personal favorite, a ceviche like dish with skate in a sauce that I could have licked straight from the bowl, with a single squid ink marshmallow cube. And after our dessert course? Your waiter comes around with this insane sweets cart filled with rows and piles of macarons, petite cookies, brittle, marshmallows, chocolates and truffles and you get to choose whatever you want. And while you are stuffing your face with all this sugar (after already having dessert), some other waiter comes and hands you mini cones filled with perfect domes of ice cream, and then as you are handed the check, you are presented with this fancy, shiny box of petite cakes filled with caramel to take home.

I gave it to the girls. Okay, there were 3 mini cakes inside. I ate one.

 
We don’t have any more big birthdays coming up in quite a while (oh thank god, because I didn’t have a problem with 40, but the next one is almost too much to bear), and that has been the only time that we’ve indulged in such fanciness because let’s face it, the bill at the end of the meal can be shocking, but we decided that we should go out to fancy dinners once a year, perhaps on our anniversary. We also decided that when Mia turns 10, we’d like to take her out to a lunch at one of these fancy restaurants. If there is any kid who has a sophisticated adventurous palette, it’s this kid. While looking over the menu trying to decide what to order, we couldn’t resist saying how much Mia would have enjoyed this meal.
 
PS. thank you all so much for the birthday wishes to Mark. So sweet.

Mark turns 40 today! And it also marks the year where he’s officially known me more than half his life. Holy hell! How did we both become so old!? But I’m sort of glad that I’m not the only 40 year old in the house anymore. We can’t be in different decades, psssshaw.
 
For what it’s worth, the girls totally think we’re not old. We’re just “mom and dad”.

 
Happy birthday to a most hardworking guy, a lifelong companion, and a great dad. Look how the girls adore him. Hope they remember those fuzzy thoughts when they become moody teenagers!
 

Ah, I guess it won’t be a snowless winter after all. A few inches, not a big deal, but we were out in the burbs at my mom’s where snow plows come when they come so we all used that as an excuse to stay home. The girls played in the snow while my dad used his electric snow blower to shovel the driveway, Mark rested as he was dealing with a rare 24 hour flu of some sort, and I squirreled myself away for the whole day to work on a challenging, but stressful work project.

It was a fine weekend.

I’ve been getting this weird nagging feeling lately that I’m not thinking big enough. It takes enough as it is to get through each day, one day at a time, but it’s true – I’m not really sure where we are “going”. Future dreams that once made sense seem to have lost their sparkle. I feel like we can keep going like we currently have been for however long as it will sustain us, but for me, that is not enough. The next steps are not clear. I don’t have a plan and I’m not sure what I want to do. I just know that I don’t want to wake up in 5 years feeling like I haven’t gotten anywhere.

Did you have a good 3 days weekend? The girls are back in school today, but we mostly stayed at home this weekend while Mark worked all 3 days. It was cold! The first string of frigid days we’ve had all winter, but despite snow falling everywhere else in the country, we are snowless so far this winter except for that freak storm back in October.

Much of what we did all weekend is what you see above: lots of coffee, looking at books, playing with all of their little calico critters, and drawing pictures. Mia drew the picture in the 2nd photo, but both girls have been drawing these houses on top of hills with these elaborate paths and mazes. Another favorite subject of Claudine’s is our family (last photo). We have endless sheets of paper with portraits of our family and in every drawing, she never fails to include Tobi, our cat who passed away last summer. The girls still miss and talk about him all the time. You gotta love the heart pointing to his butt.

Oh, did I say we were having a mild winter so far? Because it turned so unbelievably cold today, it shocked us back into reality. Sun, then hail, then clouds, then sun, then flurries, then sun. What a strange day. Lucky 13.

It’s mid-January already. Mid January!! And I’m only now feeling like I’m waking up from some kind of post-holiday slumber. I entered the New Year lethargic, out of sorts and without any goals for the year. I’ve never been very good at making a list of goals for the new year (unlike my mother who never wavers on this!), at least not on paper, but then again, I am not one to make lists at all. Is it strange that I’ve never wanted or needed any sort of organization tool, calendar, or datebook? That I never write anything down? It’s all stays in my head and for the most part that’s worked…at least until I start becoming forgetful in my old age.
 
But today, I feel a little more alive. I started a design project for a dance company, and many more projects for work are being lined up. Schedules so far are vague and they could very well fall unfavorably (meaning all at once) or things can fall through again like they did in the Fall, and while it is admittedly giving me anxiety, it is making me feel something again. For the first time since our holiday rush ended and the hard month of December passed, I am feeling a glimmer and a sense that this will be a good year, whereas I have felt nothing before.
 
Maybe I am ready to mentally make note of some goals:
 
1. Buy less. I don’t spend gobs of money on stuff in general, but I can still do better on buying stuff we don’t really need.
2. Play with my new Polaroid camera (first test shot above).
3. Eat less meat and dairy. I’m not saying I’m going back to being a vegan, or even making the decision to eliminate meat and dairy from my diet completely, but I’m choosing to not eat it these days. It won’t be hard. I rarely crave cheese, and I almost downright dislike the taste of butter right now.
4. Make sure to set aside time to get those side projects done, which always gets pushed to the back when there is a lack of time…but when is there ever enough time?
 
Btw, today is lucky Friday the 13, which I always believe to be a lucky day. I booked a trip for Winter Break next month. We’re going to LA!

Maybe it’s the mid-winter blues (though I have to say, we are having such a mild winter in New York after the past few insanely snowy and frigid winters, that I feel like I have no right to complain – temps near 60 again today!), but I’ve been daydreaming a lot about traveling. It’s so hard you know, with the business, school schedules, my unpredictable freelance schedule blah blah that the excuses loom large and become big hurdles that make it seem impossible outside of our yearly August trips to the Northwest. So instead, I start planning imaginary trips, browse hotels, search plane tickets in the hopes that something will click or that I’ll book something completely spontaneous.

What trips do you have planned this year? We have 2 big things happening in 2012: a big birthday for a certain member of our household and a big anniversary. I had fantasies of going to Hawaii to celebrate these 2 events as it’s been 10 years since we were last there and Mia is DYING to go because she has all these plans to live there when she’s a grown up, but airline tickets aren’t as cheap as they used to be (Mark and I once found $200 roundtrip tickets to Honolulu from NYC non-stop! Craziness) and now there are 4 airplane tickets to pay for. Traveling as a family has gotten very expensive. There was also talk of going to Disney World for Winter Break, but it was decided that it’s not affordable right now.
 
So there is the road trip option which worked fantastic for us last year when we went to the Outer Banks in May. I’d like to plan something for Spring Break which comes early this year in the beginning of April if my work schedule cooperates. The weather will still be cool unless we go south again, but I need a change of scenery. I want to look at something different, a different skyline, different buildings, different trees, walk different streets. Go somewhere unfamiliar. See something I’ve never seen before. Something to break out of our daily routine that for the most part is comforting, but sometimes can be stifling.

This is our last bundle of goodies from my friend Tami who owns and designs clothes through her company Ismodern. We’ve been very lucky to have Tami give the girls a set of clothes from each season since I met her back in 2005. It’s always a burst of color when we open the boxes and pull out each item of clothing…and thank god. If it were up to me, the girls would only wear solids and grays because that’s what I gravitate towards without even thinking, so Tami always provides a welcome punch of color and pattern to their wardrobe. Aside from the generous packages every season, I’ve been happy to have supported her business by purchasing clothes, gifts and referring anyone who asks where the girls get their clothes (Claudine’s fuzzy white poncho from the New Year’s Day post is from Tami and I just had to buy one for Mia because it is so very cozy).
 
But…this is Tami’s last collection and our last package as she is shutting down Ismodern as soon as she clears her inventory (so if you want to get shopping, now is the time). Sadly, the children’s clothing industry isn’t what it used to be like it was back in the mid-2000s, and the economy isn’t what it used to be either. We’ll miss these clothes when the girls outgrow them, but I’m excited to see what Tami does next!

20 degree temperature drop today. But on New Years Eve and New Year’s Day it was warm and 50 and we decided to go to Coney Island. Are these people really swimming in the ocean? Yes! The Polar Bear Club does a New Year’s Day swim every year and since it wasn’t freezing outside, we decided to come watch.
 

You know how certain plans work out better in your mind than in real life? I’m glad we went. It was good to see the ocean, to see the horizon and see the sunlight sparkle on the water. It just so happens that there was a party going on around us so it wasn’t exactly peaceful as I imagined it, but it was festive!
 
I’ve done brief year end reviews in the past, mostly in pictures, but I think I’ll skip that this year. I want to look ahead. 2011 was definitely less drama filled than 2010. Let’s keep that up.