The Zog Blog

On the day Daniel was born, I followed in the footsteps of several friends and started a photojournalism project.

We call it “365″, and the concept is simple: A self-portrait each day for a year. You may use anything you like (including other people) to frame the shot, but you must actually hit the button. I first seriously considered it because as Daniel’s birth approached, I was struck by how little I remembered of Jacob’s first year. I (correctly) predicted that the boys would be regular guest-stars in my self-portraits, and I hoped that a daily photo would provide a good reminder of the ups and downs of this year. A way to combat the lack of long-term memory storage that sleep deprivation can cause, a way to hang on to that newborn experience since we wouldn’t be getting it again.

It’s already succeeding in this goal–in fact, it’s a little alarming how quickly I can forget the feel of Daniel’s limp little weight in my arms, the smell of his tiny newborn head, the way those first smiles knocked the wind out of my chest. He’s so autonomous, now. Likewise, it’s easy to forget both the good and bad parts of Jacob’s third year (now more than half over!). His delight at discovering how our cherry tree makes a tent of leaves in the summer, his silly games, his newfound skill at pouting.

After seven months, I can look back through the year and re-experience the emotional journey that is early parenthood. It’s a precious, precious gift to myself and even if this were the only outcome of the project it’d be worth it. (Worth it, because make no mistake–taking these pictures can be time-consuming and annoying, just like any other thing in this world that takes effort.)

But in addition to the benefits I had anticipated, taking these self-portraits have given me a huge and unexpected bonus prize: I’m learning to love pictures of myself. Like many women, I used to cringe whenever I saw myself captured on “film”. While I have buckets of pictures of infant Jacob, I have almost none of the two of us together–I’d take them, and then delete them. Instead of seeing the two of us, together, I’d see my double chin, or the roots in my hair, or an unflattering angle on my stomach. I wish I could take it back, now–Jacob was such a snuggler compared to his brother and I crave the kind of visceral memory of Jacob sleeping curled up on my chest that a photo can spark.

I spent the first two or three weeks of the 365 project clicking the “upload” button with my eyes closed, impulsively, because I hated the way I looked in most of the pictures. I took dozens and dozens of pictures, throwing away most of them, searching for the one photo I could stand to look at for the day. After a few weeks, I looked at the splash page for my 365 flickr set, and couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Viewed in aggregate, I lost my focus on the small imperfections and saw my hair, my eyes, my smile. Saw myself with the boys, in aggregate. A happy family instead of some caricature of myself built out of imperfections.

A week or so after that, I could look at individual pictures with my new perspective, and taking the self-portraits got a lot easier. After a couple of months, an even more wonderful thing happened: I started separating, in my mind, the things I didn’t like that I could do something about (my weight, the frequency with which I make it to the salon) from the things I’ll never be able to change (short legs). This separation motivated me to do something about the first, and just let the second category go. So I have short legs. I dress to disguise them, I take pictures to disguise them. Done. No more head-space wasted worrying about it.

After Jacob was born, it took 18 months of exhausted/exhausting self-criticism before I finally got off my tush and started doing something to make myself healthier. This time, it took 3 months. It’s silly to ascribe all of the change to the self-portrait project, but it’s also silly to discount the profound effect that getting a different perspective on myself has caused. Seeing myself through the lens of a camera has given me a whole new view on who I am and how that measures up against who I want to be.

And as if all that weren’t enough, I have some pretty great pictures of myself and our family to show for it, too.

I was prepared for our sons to have different personalities, different ways of dealing with the world, different preferences and appearances. I wasn’t really prepared for the extent to which differences in our parenting would make the two boys different.

(Daniel is pretty much ready to crawl, by the way. There went my hopes for a second child that stayed put longer than his older brother did.)

We’re very different parents now, not only because we’re very different people, but because our parenting choices affect Jacob this time around, too. When Jacob was an infant, we followed one tenet of attachment parenting pretty closely: we took our cues for caring for Jacob, from Jacob. We relied on him to let us know when he was hungry, when he was tired, and so forth. Since I was staying home with Jacob and could sleep whenever Jacob slept, this worked extraordinarily well for us. Jacob was a disgustingly happy baby, and is a really great kid all around.

The one major place this approach failed us was with sleep. Jacob’s sleep was a problem up until about a month ago, if I’m honest with myself. He ate 5 or more times a night until we night-weaned him at 15 months. (Yes, you read that right.) He gave up his daytime nap about a year earlier than he should have, because he never napped in his crib and I eventually tired of driving him around and sitting in the car while he slept every day. His bedtime routine was more than an hour long, had to be followed precisely, and still sometimes didn’t work. He would toss and turn and yell for us 8 or 9 times every night until (about a month ago) we told him that we would check on him every 10 minutes, and other than that we weren’t coming back (except for an emergency). Through all of these problems, I mostly didn’t think about it, and if I did think about it shrugged and said he just wasn’t a great sleeper. Our next kid, statistically speaking, was likely to be better.

The next kid came around, and for awhile I seemed to be right. He didn’t want to sleep immediately after eating like Jacob did, so I started putting Daniel down in his crib/co-sleeper sidecar from day 1 when it had been the right amount of time (vaguely) since his last nap. This was mostly pragmatic on my part–I just couldn’t pay as much attention to Daniel as I had to Jacob, so I relied on the clock a lot more. The major outward signs of attachment parenting fell by the wayside, because they had to in order for our whole family to function: Jacob couldn’t possibly gracefully deal with the kind of inconvenience we had tolerated for his sake. Overall I think this change was a net positive in many ways, but especially sleep: Daniel’s first couple of months were a marked improvement over Jacob’s first months. He was only waking up twice at night, and sleeping well in between those wakings. During the day, he was taking regular naps in his crib and I had freedom of movement while he slept.

Somehow (when he got his first cold?), for some reason, around 3 months of age we started rocking him and generally handling his sleep more or less the way we’d handled Jacob’s sleep. Whenever he woke up, instead of trying to soothe him back down in some other way, we fed him. Within two months, he was as terrible a sleeper as Jacob ever was. He wailed every time we put him down, he demanded an increasing number of feedings each night, and everyone’s sleep was getting worse and worse. We night-weaned him (with doctor’s approval) at 4 months, had a great two months, fed him during a growth spurt, and just got through the second round of night-weaning as a result.

With the benefit of a few months’ experimentation behind us, I have the clarity to realize that Jacob and Daniel are exactly the same in terms of their inherent sleep capabilities. Daniel, like Jacob, has a very hard time shutting his body off and will flail around waking himself up. Like Jacob, he gets bored in the crib and doesn’t want to stay there. He likes the world and doesn’t want to shut off to go to sleep. But Daniel is a significantly better sleeper than Jacob was. Not great, by any means! He’s not one of these (mythical?) babies who would ever sleep through the night on his own naturally. But he goes all night without food, his wakings are slowly diminishing over time, he naps in his crib at roughly the same times each day.

And the uncomfortable thing to realize about this is that the difference is us. With Jacob, we relied on him to set the agenda. With Daniel, we’ve come to think that part of our job as parents is to teach him how to fall asleep. So we’ve dealt with some crying, some kissing him and walking out of the room to let him figure things out on his own. And results are preliminary, but I have to say it seems to be working. I have real hope that this time, by 12 months, we really will just be able to read the bedtime stories, kiss him, and close the door knowing that he’ll be able to fall asleep on his own peacefully and get a good night’s rest.

I shudder to think of how many illnesses, how many fights, how many days I sleepwalked through I could have saved myself the first time around. How many, many months of ordinary human function I could have had in Jacob’s first years. But if I focus on the future, I’m just supremely grateful that I don’t have another two years of sleep hell to go through.

Fingers crossed, anyway.

Obviously, the format of this blog just isn’t working for me anymore. It made so much sense when we’d just moved to California, were new parents, and were so worried about losing touch with everyone. Now we’re back, we have the added hustle and bustle of another child, and I’m back at work. If I’m honest with myself, whenever I think about writing here I start missing my grandfather, and his near-daily reminders to share some more pictures, or writing, or whatever.

I think I’ll finally honor his request that I write about more of our lives, and admit that I’m just not interested in keeping a blog that’s some sanitized, kid-only/mom-only collection of (cute!) baby pictures. It’s not that I’m tired of sharing pictures of my kids!

It’s more that quick updates on our lives this past year tend to seem more negative than they really are, and focus a lot more on the bad than the good. With one very happy/healthy baby exception, most of the news bulletins lately haven’t been so great (bedbugs, Jon losing his job and not finding another one for ages, my father’s health, etc. etc. etc.). And that collection of items is as depressing to write as it is to read.

There’s also the fact that as we emerge from the all-baby-all-the-time bubble of infancy, I’m getting tired of writing just about the more upbeat, milestone-centered parts of motherhood. I don’t know how I slipped into that rut, but I sure did get stuck there. Perhaps in part because I was trying to represent the family in this space, instead of just myself, I have often struggled to find anything of substance to put here.But before declaring this space officially dead, I think I’m going to try changing the way I use this blog. We’ll see how it works for everyone reading.

Those of you who were primarily interested in the baby pictures can now just browse them in my flickr account. Or, you can keep reading here, since I’m sure I’ll never tire of taking and posting kid pictures. But the text, and the topics, are now going to be much more representative of me. I’m not going to make a special effort to keep you all updated on our lives, I’m not going to commit to mentioning how things are going in every post. Sometimes I’ll write about food, or a photo project I’ve undertaken for Daniel’s first year, or ways in which motherhood challenge me. I might share fiction snippets, or a photo log of an outing we’ve taken. I’m sure to update the sidebar with links to content that I find compelling. I might even talk about politics or religion (here’s your warning).

Maybe a year from now I really will admit defeat and close up shop here. But I think it’s worth trying something new first.

The more things change…

…the more things stay the same.

(Three years ago, and now. Wishing you all the best of the season.)

I need to get used to writing snippets about our life, quick posts that only take a few minutes. Daniel’s infancy is zooming by, and I want to be able to have some documentation to remember it.

Daniel may still look eerily like his brother, but they couldn’t be more different. While Jacob enjoys other people, he is clearly far down the introvert scale. As a baby and now as a boy, he prefers to have large stretches of non-interactive time when he can throw himself into a task.

Daniel is as much an extrovert as Jacob is an introvert. He’s constantly trying to catch our eyes, our attention, our smiles. He doesn’t like being in the Bjorn or carried much, because then he can’t see our faces. New people make him light up like an incredibly pudgy firefly. Any toy with a face is instantly a favorite. He gurgles when he gets his diaper changed, because look! A face! Right above mine! HELLLOOOOOO, big person, gurglegurglegurgle.

Putting him to sleep is usually a matter of waiting until he’s tired and then leaving him alone in a dark room. Our presence jazzes him up and keeps him awake. Nursing was a disaster–a terrible combination of me letting down too fast, him not wanting to engage in an activity where our faces were so far apart, painful intestinal gas. Now that I’m pumping and feeding him by bottle, he’s as happy a baby as I’ve known.

Jacob continues to be a never-ending spring of fun. School is wonderful for him, particularly socially–after a very rough summer, he’s turning into quite a friendly and affable kid and often asks to have playdates with other children. He’s getting closer and closer to reading, sounding out words and asking what everything, everything says. He makes jokes, he’s a huge help in the kitchen, we play around on the monkey bars and chase at the playground.

(Also, if you ever need butter smeared on your lens cap, he’s totally your guy.)

Life is wonderful, busy, terrible, joyous beyond belief, unbearably dull, frantic, fantastic, full.

So very full. Hope you’re doing as well as we are!

Uh, sorry about that–there was a peculiar and difficult error with my Wordpress installation. But it’s fixed now, so here are some pictures!

Family portrait, day 4. Also, I present the following as evidence that all babies look alike:

Daniel, around 1 week old.

Jacob, around 1 week old.

Life with two kids is difficult so far. I thoroughly enjoyed Jacob’s newborn period and had a very easy time with it. Lots of things have been even easier this time around (healing from the birth, nursing, getting Daniel diurnal, etc.). But on the whole, this is well more than twice as hard as one newborn was. Daniel is a much fussier baby than I remember Jacob being, which may just be Daniel, and may be the fact that there is very little catering to the baby this time around.

His needs are all met, of course. He’s fed promptly, and walked when he’s fussy, and changed quickly. But with a three-year-old to keep up with, Daniel doesn’t get the hours of leisurely nursing and napping in my lap that Jacob did. Starting on his first day home, he’s been to Target, to the grocery store, to Jacob’s preschool, to the park, around the neighborhood, up to Maine, down to Providence. He’s up at 6:00am with the rest of us, doing the madcap race to get out of the house in time to drop Jacob off at preschool. (Which Jacob is loving, by the way.)

So, I have to wonder if Jacob would have been this fussy, too, if he’d never had a moment to catch his breath. If he was constantly exposed to slices of the bright, cold world from the side of the Bjorn or peeking out from the Moby wrap. If he was constantly prodded, tickled, giggled at, caressed, all as carefully and gently as a three-year-old can manage.

Sometimes I feel badly for the little guy. But on the other hand, Jacob is the first person Daniel has really looked at, and Jacob is so obviously smitten with the little tyke. I can tell it’s going to be a privilege to watch their relationship develop. And we’re more relaxed and competent parents, too.

Parting gift: Jacob took this picture yesterday. I had the tripod set up with the camera on it, and I showed him how to look through the viewfinder and which button takes the picture. He turned the camera until he saw us, and clicked. He was completely thrilled with himself, of course.

Squeaking in under the wire, our second August baby.

Born at 7:30pm August 31. Mom and baby healthy and happy. He was 9 pounds 14 ounces, and 22″ long.

Welcome home, little guy. Nice to finally meet you.

Our absence, that is.

This picture is from two weeks ago, now, but the little dictator-in-residence is apparently still quite happy where he is. (All labor-inducing suggestions and distracting funny stories gladly welcomed.) A few days after my last post, we finally diagnosed the rash Jon and I had picked up since the move. (Warning: Those looking for cheery content should skip to the pictures at the end.)

Our (insert expletive here) tenants–or, more particularly, the tenant in our bedroom–forgot to take their bedbugs with them when they left.

Now, just in case you thought that bedbugs were something out of a Dickens story, let me briefly digress and say: They’re making a resurgence in this country now that we don’t dip everything in DDT, they’re common in most of the rest of the world, they’re persistent, and cleanliness has no effect on them. In neighborhoods like ours, they’re often brought into a house on used furniture picked up from the curb on trash day.

(And, lest you be tempted to never visit us again, they’re nocturnal and VERY lazy. The few who managed to survive our first spraying are still living in the same baseboard in our room as before we arrived, and Jacob never got a bite despite sleeping just down the hall from us.)

So the bedbugs have kept me from the blog (and that idyllic lifestyle I wrote about last time) because getting rid of them is like some terrible soap opera. One basically has to move out–pack everything up, get all furniture away from the walls, live somewhere else for a couple of days, take every piece of fabric in the house and either launder it in hot water or dry clean it.

Three times, 30 days apart.

No, I’m not kidding. We’ve been through one treatment, and the next is in a week. An “insurance” treatment at the end of September, and then hopefully we can be done with this move. To say that it’s been stressful would be a major understatement, particularly at this very nesting-focused point of my pregnancy. I’m not sure I’ll ever be willing to be a landlord again, after these nightmare tenants.

Anyway! More cheerful content. Jacob does seem to enjoy many things about living here again, even if our house isn’t one of them.

The local park, for instance.

(This is where Daniel will sit.)

The local kid-haircut place, which is like a giant plastic theme park and which has cheap-cheap toys that he can have after he cooperates about the haircut.

And his Daddy, of course. Strangely, my lumbering and incapable self doesn’t seem to be high on his favorites list these days. :)

Let’s keep our fingers crossed that the baby comes soon, eh?

We packed up, we moved separately so that I didn’t hit any too-pregnant-to-fly limits, we unpacked, we found a preschool for Jacob, we unpacked, we got Jacob through the many transitions, we unpacked, the baby grew, I swelled, we all slept, we cursed the humidity, we unpacked, we started working, the baby grew, the baby grew, the baby grew.

We’re still alternating between this idyllic, lazy, warm, and sunny life that I imagined we’d lead here in Boston, and the utter hell that is trying to unpack and set a house up and get a toddler to understand why we don’t live in Monterey anymore and start new jobs and deal with the million-and-one things that a move dumps onto you while one adult is essentially incapacitated and cranky with a late pregnancy.

But now that we’re through the worst of it, I think we do have a fairly idyllic stretch ahead of us. Jacob certainly already things things are wine and roses. Or, translated into toddler speak: Popsicles,

sprinklers,

and chocolate-zucchini cake.

And we’re all hoping that this baby comes just a bit early.

Jacob enters the room with a tape measure and the mouse to our computer.

“This tape measure is not sticking! Maybe the mouse can help it!”

*****

Also, an addendum to the last post: I took a picture of my scraps from the last pie crust.

We are likely to disappear from internet-land for the next couple of weeks. See you on the other side, hopefully with both mouse andtape measure intact. No promises about our sanity, though.

So the thing about pie crust is this. While a lot is made of whether a crust is flaky, the most important thing to remember is that any crust must also be tender to suit most people’s taste. And to enhance tenderness, you absolutely need to be fast. There are lots of other things you can do to help matters, but the bottom line is that your speed in combining the fat and the flour is way more important than the method you use to combine it. If you knead that dough too much, too much gluten forms and your crust will be tough.

Lots of people look down on using a food processor or stand mixer, but if they’re used properly they can produce a far better crust than a hand-made one that took 10 minutes or more to get together. Make an honest evaluation of how quickly you can get a dough together, and then decide how you want to combine your flour and your fat. (I use my fingers, the stand mixer, or the food processor depending on how much mess in the kitchen I’m willing to tolerate that day.) A couple of good tips: Add a little acid to your pie crust to break down a little of the gluten that will form. Only barely work the dough after the liquid has been added.

Finally, and this is the single best thing you can do for your pie crust, in my opinion: Break your fat into 2 groups (roughly 1/3 – 2/3 works best for me). Cut in the first group (quickly) until the mixture looks like coarse cornmeal. This fat is doing a great job of really coating the proteins and protecting them from the liquid you’ll add later, giving you some tenderness. But it will also melt really quickly in the oven, and give you zero flakiness. So, have the second group of fat (you can use two different kinds of fat, here, to change the flavor of the crust) cut into small cubes and frozen for at least half an hour. Add the second batch of fat to the flour mixture and quickly combine it until the fat is no larger than small-pea sized. Now use your hands or a rolling pin to flatten out that fat and coat it in the flour. It should look like paint flakes, almost. Get the dough together into a disc and refrigerate overnight. These long, cold flakes of fat that never really get *combined* with the flour will melt slowly in the oven, producing steam and giving you lots of nice pastry layers in your crust–the flakiness you’re after. This method works no matter how you’re combining the dough initially.

I prefer the flavor of an all- or mostly-butter crust, but butter melts very quickly and so can be trickier to work with than shortening or lard. (Lard in particular takes forever to melt, which is why so many people prefer to use it in pies. You can work a lard dough for much longer than a butter dough before the fat really starts to break down, so your chances of getting big flakes of fat are that much higher.) If you want a crust that’s a little easier to work with than an all-butter, try subbing in some shortening, lard, cream cheese, or even mascarpone for some of the fat.

Other pie tips: If you’re using a cream or custard filling, take steps to make sure the bottom crust isn’t soggy! For pie shells that aren’t blind-baked, press cookie or graham cracker crumbs (depending on the filling) into the bottom crust–they’ll absorb some of the moisture. Bake your pies at the lowest rack of your oven, or even on a baking stone, so that bottom crust gets set quickly. For blind-baked pie crusts, brush the baked crust with either egg white or white/dark chocolate (depending on the filling) to give yourself a moisture barrier. And, sad though it is to type, always let your fruit pies sit up for a few hours after removing from the oven to avoid the ooze.

Also, Jacob is a cutie.

Apparently the blog decided that if I wasn’t going to update it, it would just stop working.

Posting appears to be the apparent fix for this. As I’m knee-deep in upgrades and work just at the moment, how about a classic Jacob expression?

(He would still like me to put the camera away.)

Well, this seems to be a year for big changes, so why not go with it? In June, we’ll be moving our family back to our house in the Boston area. There are still plenty of details to figure out, but all major decisions have been made.

Certain family members are jumping for joy.

(Thanks so much, everyone, for your kind words about my grandfather. Time, of course, heals all.)

*****

Business trips (both of us), guests, planning another major move (more on that later), trying to come up with names for the healthy BOY that seems to be crushing my internal organs, the beginnings of potty training, keeping up with a two-year-old…

It’s all enough to make you want to spend $10 on a ridiculously unnecessary kitchen accessory…

…make a metric ton of gingersnap cookies…

…and then eat them ALL UP ALL BY MYSELF.