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November 12, 2004
Life keeps chugging along. Every time I think I don’t have much to write about I sit down to start an entry that turns into pages and pages and realize I have lots to say. Lots to say about not a lot, I’m sure, but it always feel good to use this forum to process the happenings of my life – even the mundane. I know I’ve said it many times, but somehow it always bears repeating.
Last Saturday I decided to take some much-needed ‘Kate time’ and go get a pedicure with my friend Sandra. My feet were in pretty rough shape – I hadn’t had a pedicure since September. We went to a cheapie walk-in place and it was just so nice to walk out with pretty toes even though our toe baring days are well behind us for the season. Although the weather Saturday was absolutely gorgeous – one of those rare Fall days that hit 70. We had a nice lunch at a local deli and generally caught up on the happenings of our lives. When I got home I sent John off to see a movie. I think we had both been a little grouchy and needed some time to recharge our batteries. He had been wanting to see ‘The Motorcycle Diaries’ and I wasn’t terribly interested, so he went to a matinee by himself. John came home in much, much better spirits. We cooked dinner, watched a little television and we went to bed early – a fairly typical boring married people Saturday night! Ava seemed to love having the day split for some one on one time with both her parents. Since the weather was so beautiful she spent most of the day running around outside, taking wagon rides and trying to pick the last of our not-so-ripe tomatoes. (Gotta get those vines out this weekend)
Even though Sunday wasn’t quite as warm and beautiful, it was still a very, very nice day. I talked my dad into going for a bike ride with me and we set out on the nice trail heading north. I think we probably rode about 11 or 12 miles total. It was a little chilly, a little windy, but still a very nice day to be outside. We could literally have snow any minute, so I really want to soak up these days. I hadn’t ridden my bicycle since surgery in August and was a little surprised by how much I missed it. All of the sudden it feels like a long time until Spring, even though Winter isn’t officially here. Next Spring we definitely need to try to get Ava back in the Burley. It is so much more fun to ride with someone and I’d love to get in more regular bike rides with John and Ava.
One of the unexpected adjustments to motherhood has been the loss of seeing movies. Before Ava was born we used to go see a movie almost every Saturday night. Meghan and Lane were at their moms and that was our couple time. I love movies – I love the Oscars – I love art house films and dumb movies… But now it is so hard to justify a baby sitter for a movie night. It has to be a movie I REALLY want to see to pay for it in the theater plus the freight of a baby sitter. It seems like when we get a sitter it is for an event or dinner with friends. We haven’t even been very good about renting movies. Ava demands quite a bit of attention, so we can’t really watch a movie while she’s awake. And we’re such lame married fogies that we are generally incapable of committing to a 2-hour movie after she’s asleep! The last flick I saw in the theater was on our vacation in JULY! I’ve signed up for a free trial with Netflix, but we haven’t received the first movie yet. Anyone had good/bad experiences with them?
John and I both had Veterans Day off work, so we took the opportunity to have a bit of a date day. As is the case with most things in life it was sort of a mixed bag. We’ve been trying to “dig out” financially after three years of law school. Even with two pretty decent incomes times are very tight at our house. I think even six months from now things will be better, but in the meantime all the things we put off, charged and shuffled around are really starting to add up. We did our bills Thursday morning and had one of those “Oh God, we really need to do something different” moments. We decided to go ahead with our planned daytime date, but did it on the cheap. We spent quite a bit of time talking about things we could do to realize more flexibility in our budget and allow us to dig out of the hole we’ve dug for ourselves. Frankly there isn’t much – it isn’t like we’ve been living a real lavish life. But we’ve done a couple of things that will lead to a little more flexibility.
Two weeks we encountered a strange electrical problem with the outlet that our landline home phone plugs into. It is being repaired Saturday, but consequently we’ve been without an answering machine at home for the past two weeks. We haven’t missed it one iota and it has led us to really look at how often we even use our home phone, which isn’t much. So we decided to ‘cut the cord’ on our home phone and go completely wireless. It will save us about $40-50 per month. It does mean adding another line to our cell phone plan so Lane can have a phone (Meghan already has one) but I was able to renegotiate our cell phone package to the point where we might actually SAVE a few dollars on our wireless bill each month. We changed our cell phone plan through Sprint to the “Fair and Flexible” plan and even adding a line means we’ll probably spend slightly less (like $10) each month.
For the past two years we’ve paid someone to clean our house twice a month. It started as a gift from my mother in law (she paid once a month for a year) and continued past the time my MIL participated financially. It is one of the nicest luxuries I’ve ever had, but we are letting the woman go. It will save us $120 per month – that is money I would rather spend paying down our debt and maybe having a date every now and then. We’re looking into Merry Maid or the like to see if we can’t hire a company for an occasional (every few months) deep clean. This is kind of a tough one because what it buys us is time – time we don’t have to spend cleaning our house, but I know it is the right thing to do.
We’ve also decided to go down to only the most basic cable. Again, a tough decision, but the right one. This move will save us about $45 per month. What I will miss the most is Food Network and Law and Order re-runs, but frankly I would rather invest the money in paying down debt or giving ourselves a little more breathing room. It is hard to justify spending all that money on television, which I don’t think is that good for us to begin with. We’ve been trying to cut back on our television viewing and this will most definitely help. Truthfully I only agreed to this one on an experimental basis. We may add these back in if I find myself really hankering for “30 Minute Meals” in a month or two. Winter is coming and the fact that we’re trying to be frugal might mean we’re home even more. Maybe Netflix will fill in the entertainment gap….
We’re already doing things like bringing our own lunches, we hardly ever (maybe once a month) stop for coffee in the morning – we make our own at home. I am hoping that these little strategies, combined with an anticipated salary increase for both of us at the start of the calendar year will help us right our path financially. If you have any other tips that have worked for you, please share! It is tough, but the thing that gives me the most comfort is that John and I are a team on this. We’re not fighting or blaming each other, we’re simply looking for ways to work together to address the issue. I am very lucky to have a partner like him.
Continuing the theme of money being tight (boy to read this you’d think we were on the brink, we’re really not, we’re just trying to be more proactive) we’ve decided to cancel our wedding anniversary trip I talked about in an earlier entry. Even though we had a gift certificate to the Lodge we were staying at it was still going to cost us a couple of hundred dollars to make the trip. With the impending holidays and all of the above mentioned items we decided that just wasn’t how we wanted to allocate our resources right now. We’ll probably reschedule sometime in the Spring. As much as I was looking forward to getting away for some one on one time with my husband it is a bit of a relief.
I know I wrote about the gift certificate and remote location of this Lodge – it just seems like we’ve been so busy I am looking forward to a previously unscheduled weekend at home. I am pretty sure my MIL is still going to come for the weekend (she had been planning to come stay with Ava) so hopefully we’ll be able to prevail on her to stay with Ava and John and I can go out to dinner to toast the start of our 5th year of marriage.
And now on to the brighter spots of this week’s entry… I remark all the time at how quickly Ava grows and changes, but the past week it seems like she has been REALLY growing and changing. Her vocabulary continues to expand and she seems more engaged in our conversations with her and near her. She’s started to string words together to form very simple sentences. “More ‘nana,” or “Me Juice,” or “No Shoes.” Her apparent understanding of what we are saying to her (and near her) seems to have just exploded. She is also mimicking words back to us at an increasing rate. I was going to try to capture all her words, but when I started writing them down I realized it wasn’t really possible or all that interesting. But I would estimate she probably knows and uses 50-60 words appropriately, including peoples names, animals and their sounds and other misc words. She is still using baby signs, although less and less as she adds words to her verbal vocabulary.
Most recently she has really taken to all the children’s rhymes and songs that involve motions like “Itsy Bitsy Spider,” “Patty Cake,” “I’m a Little Tea Pot,” “Wheels on the Bus…” Last weekend she kept saying, in her own baby accented way, “Ring Ring, DOWN” over and over again. And she’d fall down on the ground. We couldn’t figure out what in the heck was going on until we finally realized she was doing “Ring Around the Rosy.” When we put that together the look of shear delight on Ava’s face was so priceless. Now I think “Ring Around the Rosy” is a creepy little ditty, but who am I to deny the joy of doing it 10-15 times a day with my daughter?
One of Ava’s most favorite things to do is look through her books that have pictures of animals and make the sounds. She (and we) have several favorites – my all time favorite is “Quick as a Cricket” which is a wonderful book and the one we read to her every night right before bed. That book ties emotions and feelings to animals – Quick as a cricket, slow as a snail, happy as a lark, sad as a basset…. It has great pictures. We’ve started using the sayings in the book when we talk to Ava. Like when she’s fussy or crying we might say “Are you as sad as a basset?” Which inevitably leads to a “woof” noise from our girl. Another favorite is “Who Says Woof?” that one has the sweetest pictures of the animals. We also have a board book with lots and lots of photographs of baby animals that gets trotted out at least twice a night. Our girl loves to make the rooster noise and we are happy to oblige! Ava loves her books and seems to cycle through her favorites so much that I practically have them memorized. I know research says parents should spend 30 minutes per day reading to their child and I would say we probably double that at her request. But I do have to ask why “Good Night Moon” is considered to be such a wonderful book. Am I the only one who finds it a little creepy? A big rabbit in a rocking chair?
Ava’s opinions and preferences about things have also really started to make themselves more known during this explosion of communication we’ve been experiencing recently. She is expressing preferences about her clothing, her shoes and her hair. Some days she wants ponytails, some days she doesn’t. Her beloved Nike tennis shoes might be too small because now she goes for a pair of Eccos I got on deep, deep sale at a Department store a couple of months ago. It is wonderful, remarkable and a little bit exhausting to see this little person reveal herself to us more everyday.
I have talked a lot about what a wonderful father John is. I can’t begin to imagine trying to process all of this without his insight, intuition, experience and goodness. Monday night we were all pretty tired, Ava included. We were having sort of a repeat of the night I wrote about in last week’s entry where I referenced the possibility of the start of the “Terrible Twos.” John said the best thing. He said something like “It must be so hard to be her age with all the big changes that are going on with her emotionally and physically everyday. No wonder she gets a little fussy from time to time.” I just loved how he boiled it down and saw life from her perspective. That statement has run through my head a number of times this week when I was interacting with Ava. In so many ways John has made it possible for me to be a better Mom and a better person. As we come up on our wedding anniversary I am happier and more in love than ever. Our relationship has deepened and evolved and we certainly have had our rough patches, but I can’t imagine making the journey with a better human being than my husband.
But now on to a gripe. Meghan and Lane are really pretty terrific kids. They have weathered their parents divorce and subsequent remarriages with remarkable maturity. At our house they were just awesome (and still are) with the all the sacrifices we’ve made to see John through law school. So this little grip seems sort of petty, but it’s my diary, so I’ll go ahead and write about it. They refuse to ride the school bus to and from school. Consequently all the adults in Meghan and Lane’s life seem to spend a lot of time organizing around how to drive them a mile and a half to school at the right time. Many mornings and afternoons it isn’t a big deal, but just this week it sort of bubbled over again. John had to be at work early for jury selection and I had to be at work for an 8am meeting. I told Meghan and Lane I was happy to drop them off at school, but we needed to leave by 7:10am so I could drop them off, drop off Ava and get to work on time. Much hemming and hawing ensued and ended with them deciding to spend the night at their moms (always fine, of course) to avoid leaving for school 30 minutes earlier than normal OR taking the bus. I am mystified. I can say, unequivocally that Ava’s sweet cheeks would be on the bus. If I am wrong I will cheerfully eat these words.
This has become another loooong entry. As usual I seem to have a lot on my mind. I am looking forward to a fairly relaxing weekend. If the weather is decent I hope to take a bike ride – at a minimum a couple of good work outs at the gym. We need to do a bit of yard work before the snow flies and I hope to tackle our utility/mud room. It has become sort of a ‘super closet’ full of stuff that is rarely used. At Bonnie’s request the recipe I am sharing this week is for the Chicken and Cashew Curry I wrote about last week. I’ve made it once since then and it is sooooo good! This recipe is from Nigella’s Forever Summer cookbook with my own ‘adulterations’ along with the recipe as written.
Thanks for reading—
--Kate
Chicken and Cashew Curry
3 T peanut oil
2 small onions, finely chopped (I only used one both times – the onions I had were pretty big though)
¾ inch piece fresh ginger, minced (can use dry if that’s what you have)
1 clove garlic, minced
2 small green chillies, seeded and chopped (again I only used one both times and it was plenty kicky)
1 t turmeric (I left it out – we didn’t have any)
1 t ground cumin
1 t ground coriander
13 ¾ oz canned unsweetened coconut milk (once I used unsweetened evaporated milk – it didn’t taste that much different)
1 cup plus 2 T chicken stock
2 lbs 3 oz boneless, skinless chicken cut into bite sized pieces
½ cup cashew nuts
3 T sour cream
some cilantro – chopped
Although the recipe doesn’t call for it, I sprinkled in about a tablespoon of curry powder for extra flavor.
Heat the oil in a wide sauce pan and sauté the onions, sprinkled with a little bit of salt, until softened. Add the ginger, garlic, chillies, tumeric and cumin (add curry powder here if using) and cook for another minute or so. Stir in coconut milk and stock until everything is incorporated, then add the chicken pieces. Bring to a boil, then turn the heat down to simmer gently for 10 minutes or so until the chicken is poached. (I covered the pan to help this along.) Toast the cashew nuts in a dry pan, add to the curry mixture. Stir in the sour cream and the cilantro. Serve with steamed rice.
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