After months of procrastination, I am finally ready to invite you to the new website: Toast and Cereal. The new site will still have all the Jess you want, but with some added Joe, too. And of course, more Viola than the recommended daily allowance. This will be my last post here, so see you over there!
My last View from the Hilltop Post
February 5th, 2009I’m too tired to be writing this
January 16th, 2009According to Viola, the world is about to end every night around 9:00. Then, around 2 am, she changes her mind and decides everything’s ok. At least, that’s how I interpret the look of utter desperation on her face as she screams and cries inconsolably during these hours.
And yet we, her parents, continue the nightly farce of “going to bed” by doing such ridiculous things as changing into bedclothes, brushing our teeth, and turning out the lights. As if we were going to actually sleep – and sleep together, at the same time – like we used to before we had a newborn. Instead, we take turns with the little girl, applying myriad interventions which sometimes work for up to 10 minutes at a time. Last night after exhausting my lullaby songbook (Sweet Child O’ Mine; 4 + 20 by Crosby Stills Nash & Young) I saw limited success with walking really fast and jiggling the outward-facing baby around the house. She paused with tear-stained cheeks and stared at the scenery, but she was no closer to sleeping. Swaddle, unswaddle, swing, rock, bounce, sing, shoosh, feed, hold, put down…tonight we will try adding bath and massage, and see if that buys us an hour of positive outlook.
On the other side of the coin, Viola was her sweet self during her first sponge bath:
Her umbilical cord stump fell off today, so we are free to bathe her in water now. Speaking of which, the time is nigh…
Viola’s first Sunday
January 4th, 2009Last Sunday around 6:30 am, I was sitting at my kitchen table, nearly 40 weeks pregnant and waiting for my contractions to start. I was eating a rosemary-cheddar scone (which I made with the fresh buttermilk leftover from making butter) with a fried egg and reading the New York Times. Our midwife and her assistants were just waking up from spending the night on our futon and couch; she commented that the whole breakfast scene was very civilized.
Today around 6:30 am, I was again sitting at my kitchen table eating a rosemary-cheddar scone with a fried egg and reading the New York Times. Only this time, I was holding the baby in my arms instead of willing her to come out of my belly. What an eventful week!
Viola wishes you all a very happy 2009.
Announcing!
January 3rd, 2009Our little girl came to join us on Monday, Dec. 29th – on her due date! – at 2:34 am.
She is minutes old here, on our bed, with the caring hands of Joe and our midwife. She is laying on a receiving blanket from Joe’s infancy.
We named her Viola Irene Balsam Miller – Viola is pronounced like the instrument. Irene is the middle name of both of our maternal grandmothers.
Today is her 5th day of life and I think I am more in love with her every day.
Here she is today after gorging on lunch, the remains of which you can see around her mouth. Needless to say, she has had about 1,000 pictures taken of her already.
Much more to say later!
Christmas food
December 26th, 2008We cut down on the amount of truffles we made this year for Christmas, but then we invented all sorts of other stuff to make.
The truffles are Bailey’s-flavored. Here they are with the dulce de leche candies that Joe invented. He started with this recipe (the cheater one that starts with condensed sweetened milk), and then rolled the caramel into balls and coated them in chocolate. Then he topped them with sea salt. I’ll admit I was skeptical, but they’re good – not chewy, and not hard candy, but somewhere in between.
Then we made these delicious sables, which I always eat at the “very French bakery” at the Pike Place market but which I have never made before. We added chopped toasted almonds to this recipe. They are my favorite Christmas treat we made this year.
Oh, but we weren’t finished yet! I also made one of my favorite Christmas cookie recipes from my mom, a chocolate-maraschino cherry cookie, but substituted candied orange peel for the cherries. They would have been really good, but I spaced out while measuring the flour, so the cookies are a little tough. This may be a result of me trying to distract myself from having contractions on and off all week.
And then, there was the homemade butter! Here’s Joe taking it out of the mixer:
We used this recipe, which was surprisingly hard to find. Most butter recipes call for you to shake the cream in a jar, which must take a ridiculously long time, judging by how long it took us to make it in a mixer. It’s really delicious. And you get buttermilk as a byproduct, which I am looking forward to using for scones.
Merry Christmas, everyone!
Week 39 and lots more snow
December 22nd, 2008I’ve moved from my regular belly-watch backdrop for this week’s shot. Here I am in the front yard this morning, with Joe’s truck and lots of snow behind me. It’s so deep!
Our poor magnolia tree was completely bowed down this morning (since it’s an evergreen, its giant leaves were acting as saucers to hold on to the snow). Joe went at it with a broom to rescue it:
I took these pictures yesterday when the snow wasn’t quite so deep. Here’s our sedum and nandinas:
And a closeup of the smoke tree:
Mostly I’ve been at home for the past five days. I didn’t make it to half the appointments I listed on my last belly watch update, due to the road conditions. I have a renewed respect for the businesses within walking distance: the Hilltop Safeway (we spent more money there yesterday than ever before, in an attempt to keep our fridge and cupboards stocked in case birth is imminent), Le-Le (old standby of Thai-Vietnamese delicacies), Johnson’s Candy (the most cutest chocolate and candy store on earth), and the Hilltop post office (where I have become re-acquainted with the grumpy counter man while mailing Christmas packages the last few days). It’s been great to get out and walk, especially because it hasn’t been that cold (low 30’s) but sometimes it feels just as dangerous as driving, because no one has snow shovels to clear the sidewalks.
I ran across a guy trying to clear his sidewalk with a window squeegee on Friday. He said “I don’t think I have the right tool!” and then cracked up. He asked me if I was having a boy or a girl, and when I said girl, he said “bless your heart!” A little later on, a younger guy actually said to me, “what’s happening, shawty?” I thought people only said that in songs they play on KUBE, so I was pretty amused and started laughing.
We’ve gotten lots of projects done around the house in our semi-trapped state. I keep wondering if we’re officially nesting (and whether each nesting project I take on is due to the burst of energy one experiences at the beginning of labor). As I look back on one of yesterday’s projects, soaking our kitchen blinds in the bathtub to clean them, I’m pretty sure I can chalk that up to hormone-induced nesting.
Another project involved Joe venturing under the house to check out the pipes, because our “new” washing machine was doing the same thing as the broken one: attempting to turn on, but not getting any water. He put a space heater under the house, and it cleared up right away. Guess we need to insulate those pipes in case we ever stay below freezing for seven nights in a row again. For now, I miss having the space heater in our bedroom.
More newsy updates from the frigid Hilltop
December 17th, 2008I know you’ll all be excited to learn that I accomplished a major goal of my pregnancy last night: parking in the Expectant Mothers parking spot at the bourgeoise Metropolitan Market in North Tacoma. The spot is marked with a stork carrying a baby, and a sign above it says “Expectant Mothers ONLY.” I have been meaning to do this for some time, but I don’t shop at Met Market very often. I may have cheated a little, because Joe was with me and he was driving (Lucky is in the shop having a dent fixed), but it still saved me from walking across a cold parking lot.
And cold it is! There has been snow on the ground for several days, and it’s not expected to get above freezing for a few more. In fact, it’s snowing again right now. This is all very unusual for our area. When the snow originally fell on Saturday, we were driving home from the depths of Gig Harbor around 11:30 pm, and were subjected to the techniques of inexperienced snow-driving Northwesterners. Namely, this technique involves driving no faster than 15 mph and therefore getting stuck on hills. This, despite the fact that half the population drives 4-wheel-drive Subaru Outbacks (an additional 40% drive Subaru Foresters). I actually had to pass someone on a two-lane road. Everyone behind me followed my lead.
Unrelatedly, our washing machine broke on Monday night, just when we are about to double or triple our laundry needs with child clothes and diapers. Those of you who have been to our house, however, know that we have two sets of washer/dryers, due to our inane stubbornness. The spare pair has never been hooked up at this house, but it is about to be put into service. Unfortunately, it’s a stack washer/dryer, so the capacity is quite a bit smaller than the one that broke, which is an industrial Speed Queen – the kind they use at laundromats (there must be a joke in that brand name somewhere – anyone?). Both of us said good riddance to the Speed Queen, although it was the dryer that really pissed us off by shrinking most of our clothes. Now we just need to figure out how to get the washer out of here and hopefully get a few pennies for the dryer on Craigslist.
You may be able to tell by the length of this post that I am now officially on maternity leave. I signed off yesterday, and it felt good! Today I have been filling the baby’s dresser with her abundant clothes, and pondering the fact that she gets a solid wood crib and dresser, while our new dressers are Ikea veneer specials. We put the first one together a few weekends ago, and it was easily the most complicated construction task I have ever taken on. Just the giant bag of mysterious Swedish hardware was enough to scare me off (not to mention the 32-page wordless instruction manual, which looked like a sad coloring book from Soviet-era Poland). But we soldiered on, thinking of the hours we’d saved a child laborer in the Philippines from having to put our dresser together. We would have been fired from that sweatshop.
I didn’t plan it this way, but my non-working schedule for the next week involves a fair dose of new-age pampering: today, yoga; tomorrow, prenatal massage (thanks mom and dad!); Friday, haircut; Sunday, yoga; Monday, acupuncture; Tuesday, midwife visit. I am slightly less motivated to go to yoga at this late stage, because all the friends I made in class have already had their babies; they’ve been replaced by chipper first-trimester moms-to-be.
I guess I’ll go try to use a dirt shovel to clear off the porch stairs now.
38 week update
December 15th, 2008
The little one has officially “dropped” (also known as lightening). This means that her head is firmly engaged in my pelvis, and that my ribs only feel like 100 daggers are constantly pressing into them instead of 10,000. She has settled into one position most of the time, with her back toward my front, along my left side. From there, she sticks out her butt on my left and her feet on my right. I like to think of her being in a pike position. I tried to demonstrate it for Joe the other night but it’s not so easy to recreate outside the uterus.
We’ve made great strides in creating our birthing suite – now located in our bedroom instead of the office, as we’d originally planned. Our midwife came to our house last week and strongly recommended that we switch to the bedroom for its privacy. Now a giant mint-green birthing tub is standing ready to serve us in the corner of the bedroom, keeping watch while we sleep. The aforementioned home-birth supplies have been compiled.
I am now taking a dizzying array of supplements: prenatal vitamins 3x/day, calcium-magnesium-D 2x/day, omega-3 1x/day, evening primrose oil 1x/day, oregon grape bark tea 3x/day, grapefruit seed extract 1x/day, iron 2x/day, vitamin C 2x/day with iron, acidophilus-bifidus 1x/day. Fortunately I worked my way up to this level of supplementation, or I’d never remember all the steps.
Now, we just need her to hang on for a couple more weeks. You don’t want your birthday to be on Christmas, do you, baby?
Week 36 Update
December 5th, 2008
Week 36 brings lots of fun in the form of my pelvis expanding in ways I didn’t know it could. Yoga this week was a particular challenge.
Yesterday was my last day in the office – I’m now officially working from home until my leave starts on the 17th. I can’t overstate how excited I am not to be commuting for three months.
I had my first practice contraction last week (that I recognized anyway). It’s a good sign that my uterus is getting ready! When we went to see the midwife this week, she said that the Goose is still a little peanut and that she won’t be ready to come out for a while (though, technically, she is about the size of a crenshaw melon). We also got our birthing tub (a rental from our awesome birth class instructor). It’s got the names of all the babies who’ve been born in it, penned in Sharpie on the outside. Maybe we’ll get to add a name to it!
I experienced a particularly amusing episode of placenta brain this week. Someone mentioned the restaurant 13 Coins during a meeting, and I wanted to mention that I tried escargot there. But I couldn’t think of the word “escargot,” and I also couldn’t think of the word “snail.” So I turned to my coworker and said, “What are those things that are like slugs with shells?”
Cooking adventures
November 29th, 2008Have I stated how much we love cooking in our new kitchen?
As I mentioned on my last post, Joe made a dutch baby (at my request) for dessert on my birthday. In my youth, I knew the dutch baby as a German Apple Pancake at Millie’s in Delavan, Wisconsin. In adulthood, I rediscovered it at the hands of Carmen, the head chef at Pilchuck. It’s a big, eggy pancake that combines all the goodness of a crepe with all the fillingness of a flapjack. We’ve been making Carmen’s recipe for a few years, but we recently realized that the lack of direction on the recipe may have been causing us to make inferior dutch babies. We made one for breakfast when Bob was visiting from India last week, and it was delicious as usual, but made us decide once and for all that we should revisit our technique in search of a fluffier, lighter dutch baby.
We needed look no further than the Joy of Cooking. The recipe is identical to Carmen’s, except for this one does not include cinnamon. We had been mindlessly substituting soy milk for real milk all these years, since we usually don’t have real milk in the house. But the main difference was in the technique. The Joy of Cooking details the technique of melting the butter on the stovetop and then pouring the batter in and baking the baby. With our hand-me-down recipe, we had been simply mixing the batter and pouring it in the pan, sending it straight to the oven. These three changes made a big difference. Here’s the result:
A perfectly puffed, creamy dutch baby, without the heaviness of cinnamon. We ate it with pears sauteed in port.
And now, you can dutch baby too:
Preheat the oven to 425 F.
Whisk together until smooth:
1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 cup sugar
2 large eggs, at room temperature
Melt in a 10-inch ovenproof skillet (cast iron is ideal) over medium heat:
4 tablespoons unsalted butter
Pour the egg mixture in to the skillet and cook, without stirring, for one minute.
Place the skillet in the oven and bake until the pancake is puffed and golden, 12 to 15 minutes.
Serve immediately, for the pancake loses its puff, and therefore its drama, almost immediately.
This last sentence especially exemplifies the eloquence that I have come to know and love in the Joy of Cooking.
With Thanksgiving just behind us, I will also share the recipe for the popular wild rice salad I brought. I think I invented it when I worked at Honey I’m Home.
Cook 1 cup wild rice/brown rice mix according to the amount of water on the package; substitute broth for some or all of the water for extra flavor, and add butter and salt to the cooking water.
Cook 1/2 cup of orzo in salted, boiling water.
Combine the orzo and rice mix in a bowl. Add to the mix:
3 chopped green onions
1 cup chopped parsley
seeds from one pomegranate (de-seed in a bowl of water for less mess)
1/4 cup golden raisins
1/4 cup toasted pecans or walnuts
Make a sweet vinaigrette. Whisk together (all amounts are very approximate):
1/4 cup apple cider vinegar
splash of Balsamic vinegar
2 tablespoons honey
1/2 teaspoon good mustard
sea salt.
Let sit for 5 minutes. Whisk in:
1/2 cup olive oil. The dressing should taste sweet.
Pour on enough vinaigrette to moisten the salad. Add some sea salt and mix everything together. Ideally, let the salad marinate in the fridge for a few hours or overnight before serving.