Rock To Wind A String Around

It’s been a long time since I rock-n-rolled gave an update about my favorite little gal.  A person this marvelous merits her own post, I think.

Astrid Meklit will be four in October.  We have been discussing plans for her birthday party since June (or maybe May?).  It will be a blue party, because it is her favorite color.  She wants blue balloons, a rousing game of pass-the-present, and she wants chocolate cupcakes with chocolate icing that looks blue (don’t forget to make them gluten free, mama).   When we aren’t discussing her birthday, we spend a lot of time chatting about Halloween.  For months, she wanted to be a cute, not too scary skeleton, but now waffles between being a horse or a (blue) cat.  I think the blue cat choice is inching ahead, but she really does love horses, so…

Some other things of note:

I call AM the whole package.  People instantly notice how pretty she is, and that she talks a great deal, but in addition, she’s really funny, very loving, and very kind.  As apt as I might be to promote her terrific  qualities, she needs little help from me–my gal is the bees knees!

Astrid remains fiercely devoted to her pink blanket and her stuffed cat “kitty” aka “Ribbons.”  She can’t imagine sleeping without them, but she’s working through a plan of her own creation (with much prompting from her sweet dentist) to stop sucking her thumb by the time she is four, so kitty and pink blanket stay in her bed all day and then she isn’t tempted to suck her thumb when she isn’t resting.  Goal setting is definitely Astrid’s strong suit.  She makes a decision and works to make it happen.  Over the past year, I’ve watched her work patiently to learn to jump, to tumble, to hop on one foot, to draw the letters of her name, and to master dance moves she found in a book about dance.  She is patient, but unrelenting–she works harder than anyone I know .

Still very much a mama’s girl, Astrid Meklit loves nightly chats with her daddy, looks forward to his weekly homecoming, and allows him to be in charge of a couple of bedtimes over the weekend.  She loves to be read to by both of us, but there are books that only daddy may read, which pleases me mightily.   She also adores her brother, although he is too bossy, and she loves having my mom here.

A perfect day for Astrid Meklit would involve lots of reading, swimming, mini-waffles, and tons of board games.  If we added time for singing (she knows every top 40 song Elliott likes), and then zipped to the park for swinging, then to the library, and then to get water-ice her happiness would be complete.  Any one of those elements in her day is enough to inspire her gratitude, all of them together would be better than a trip to Disneyland

An interview with my gal

Me:  Hey Astrid, who’s your favorite kid friend?

AM:  Yiwa (Lila)

Me:  Who’s your favorite grownup friend?

AM:  Mama.  Why, what are you doing?

Me:    I just want to ask you some questions your teacher might ask.

What’s your favorite thing to play?

AM:  Candyland or the color game on the iPad

Me:  What’s your favorite thing to eat?

AM:  pasta, but only string pasta, not the kind with the wrong sauce that I eated last week (I foolishly bought a prepared pasta pouch for traveling, and AM begged to try it.  It wasn’t good at all.)

Me:  Do you have a favorite book to read?

AM:  Knuffle Bunny

Me:  Where do you like to go around town?

AM:  To the zoo because it has the carousel that I like to ride and also it has fish.

Me:  Do you like to go on trips?

AM:  Yea, to DC because it has so many things to go to.  The museum with the playground (The Nat’l Building museum),  we go to the mail museum, and we ride on the blue train sometimes, and sometimes the orange train, and I like all the beds in our hotel room and the sculpture garden but not the carousel because you say it’s too much money.

Further questions were dismissed, mostly because I’ve promised to play Picture Triominoes with her when we’re done, but she says she’s willing to answer other questions later, like when she is “4 or maybe 5.”

My girl!

• You spend your days playing with your children, tending your garden, working outside of the home, starting a business — not walking miles to your only water source
• Your children go to school every day, instead of walking miles to their only water source
• You have no threat of water borne diseases, such as cholera, typhoid, bacillary dysentery, polio, meningitis and hepatitis A
• You don’t have to worry that people up river are using your only water source as their only sanitation source
• You will not lose your child to diarrhea, which is the leading cause of death of children in countries with high mortality rates.  And you will not worry that even if your child survives diarrhea, he or she will fail to thrive and become vulnerable to other infections

I know that before my trip to Ethiopia I took water for granted.  I had heard about the issues people in developing countries face regarding water, but had never really thought about it.  Now I think every day about what my daughter’s life would be like if she lived somewhere that did not have access to safe, clean water.  I cry when I read posts about the 5 million children who die every year from diarrhea.  My heart aches when I think about the women who cannot start a business, or work in a farm to support their families, because they spend so much time each day walking to and from their water sources- which are often times infected with bacteria.

Please consider donating to EOR’s water first program.  You can do so here.  Our $10,000 pledged donation will literally provide clean water to an entire village.   We can do this, but we need your help.

posted to the EOR blog by  my brilliant friend Shawn

When we moved to San Francisco a few years ago, I soothed my initial loneliness with several trips to Lush.  I bought lots of bath bombs and other goodies, but I was particularly besotted with the massage bars–they are fabulous on super dry skin, smell great, and don’t stain the sheets.  Fast forward three years and I found an unused wiccy magic massage bar tucked away in a bedside table last week so last night we both enjoyed a massage.

The interesting thing about a wiccy magic massage bar is that it contains scores of aduki beans.

adukibeans

As the shea butter heats up, the beans, which feel oh-so-nice as they glide across your back, begin to loosen from the bar.  A massage for 2 adult humans means that your bed will quickly fill with aduki beans.  After a thorough massage, neither of us was particularly motivated to throw back the covers, scoop up beans and dispose of them, so we pushed what we could off the bed (without dislodging the covers–it was 4 degrees last night) and planned to attend to the rest in the morning.

Good in theory, but not so much in practice.  The beans fell from the bed to the hardwood floor all night long. Sometime in the night, I began to dream of our wedding.  During the ceremony, a very small guest wet herself.  The stream of urine hitting the hard wood sounded like pearls falling to the floor and several people in nearby pews began to look for pearls or beads.  While I have no actual memory of this event (what with the vows and all up at the front) I dreamed the dropping pearls so vividly, it was if I had a seat at my very own ceremony (and might I add that the bride was gorgeous…and young!) The intermingling of myth and dream and reality was so interesting, all though not particularly rest-enhancing.

Tomorrow, I think I’ll pop into LUSH for another bar or two.  These, not surprisingly, will be vanilla, or chocolate, and decidedly bean free.

Black and Gold

Everything is black and gold,
Black and gold, tonight;
Yellow pumpkins, yellow moon,
Yellow candlelight;

Jet-black cat with golden eyes,
Shadows black as ink,
Firelight blinking in the dark
With a yellow blink.

Black and gold, black and gold,
Nothing in between -
When the world turns black and gold,
Then it’s Halloween!

~Nancy Byrd Turner

Enkutatash is behind me.  Wildly successful, it was well-attended, much-enjoyed, and at the end of the day, there was money left over.  I’ll share pictures here and on EOR’s blog later on, but for now I’m glad that my Enkutatash commitment will be greatly reduced.

Here are some more pictures of Denmark.  2 weeks ago today we were in Roskilde, an amazing viking town that remained viable over the last 1200 years.  Unpredictably, we visited a number of museums, did a little shopping, and visited a church–this church was particularly groovy (and only a little creepy) because a thousand years of kings and queens are entombed within.   Behold the glory!

the 2000 yr old urn found on the floor of a museum.  easy to see, easy to kick, easy to break, but no one else seemed worried…

room built onto the fancy church for some dead royalty

a king, no longer with us

some modern day Vikings, out for a pleasure cruise

more pictures to follow, I can’t load more in this post

the attacking jellies in the harbor