Place both hands on yarn … then bring your left hand out like so … and then your right hand out like so! Did you get all that?

Too bad she tries to eat knitting needles.

Although the bib itself is cute, it was particularly funny because I hate peas. With a PASSION. Always have. My mother, on the other hand, loves peas and often served them when I was growing up. But not to me. For me, she would make a separate side dish, free of the nasty peas. I fondly remember overhearing a conversation between my mother and grandmother when I was about sixteen, with my grandmother wondering why my mom was going through the hassle of making a different vegetable for me (why didn’t she just serve me the peas?) and my mother responding that she figured if I didn’t like them by the age of sixteen, there was nothing she could do to get me to like them. Smart woman.

Except, I discovered a few years ago that I don’t hate peas (sorry mom!). I hate cooked peas. Fresh peas on the other hand are tasty, tasty, tasty! And farmer’s market peas are both cheap and tasty. So for the past two weeks, our fridge has held a huge number of fresh peas. As has my stomach.

And today was market day. Abby clearly shares my taste for fresh peas, although she will have to wait until a meal at her nana’s house before we find out if she shares my dislike of cooked peas.

We actually use to grow them in our garden a few years ago but never seemed to eat many ourselves. Can’t figure out why.

Our house also came with an upright freezer, which was showing its age externally, but was still chugging along. It was always in our plans to get a new one, but it wasn’t high on the list since it still fulfilled the requirement of keeping things frozen. We finally got around to replacing it last week and pulled the old one out from the wall to defrost it before removal.

And found the original delivery tag still attached to the back. From 1981.

They really did make things to last back then.

A spotted a kid’s pair a few weeks ago while shopping, and while I’m pretty sure my mom didn’t let me wear jelly shoes when I was a kid because they were impractical, since Abby can’t walk yet I figured there was no reason not to get them for her. What can I say, aren’t parents suppose to live vicariously through their children?

Alas, they were out of Abby’s size, so I waited a week and went back. Nada. So, like the devoted mom that I have become, I went to every other kid’s store in the mall in search of jelly shoes until I found a pair in her size. I preferred the clear ones that had first caught my eye, but Abby seems to approve of these.

Litte toes in little shoes.

Ever since Abby was born, I certainly think alot about being a mother and what the experience means to me. There’s a part of me that really wants to capture the emotions that I feel, perhaps so that I can define them, or perhaps just so that I can reflect on them at a later date when Abby is a older or whenever our next child adds his or her stamp to it. But, so far I haven’t been able to find the right words. Try as I might, they seem to lurk just below the surface, teasing me with their presence and then darting back into the fog before I can gather them up. I feel as if the words that I do have may do motherhood an injustice, that they will merely brush the surface of things without getting down to what really matters the most. Because how do you put into words things like the overwhelming joy you get from watching your child figure something out for the first time, why a look from her can send you into a fit of laugher, or how she can break your heart every single day because it just becomes overloaded with Love for her?

Perhaps words just aren’t the right medium. But, since words are all I know, I keep chasing them.

And since words are what I know, and Mother’s Day is what is now, it was pretty easy to find essays and articles leading up to today on what I might expect from Mother’s Day, a.k.a. How to Celebrate Being a Mom. Or, I guess more precisely, how I should be celebrated as a mom. Some were very heartfelt, others a little more lighthearted. None quite summed up my thoughts on motherhood, but they did make for interesting reading I suppose. Many suggested that I could/should have asked for a day off today – a day to do whatever it was that my heart desired. But when I stopped to think about it, I realized that I was doing what I wanted: if it wasn’t for Abigail, I wouldn’t be celebrated today (I would still, of course, be celebrating my mother), so it kind of made sense to me that I would spend the day with her.

While I might not yet be able to adaquately sum up my experience as a mother, this is certainly the first year that I really noticed all of the Mother’s Day advertising and all of the gifts that they try to get you to buy to commemorate motherhood. And I did get gifts this morning, although, as with Abby’s birth, I didn’t “expect” anything.

I already got the greatest gift.

Cheesy, I know. But also true.

1. We wash Abby’s diapers ourselves.

True, we started out with a diaper service, which was perfect during those first few sleepless weeks. But, as the weeks went along and Abby grew longer, the diaper sizes did not – go longer, that is. They went wider, and when she was about five months old, they started leaking out on an almost daily basis. Investigating our options with the diaper service led us to two choices: go up another size (which would have added width as well, something we already had a bit too much extra of in the size she was in), or switch to the much thicker “overnight” diapers as they were touted to be longer.

In the end, we went for the thicker diapers but soon discovered that the promised length was marginal at best. So we still had a leaky-diapered five-month old, whose butt was now too bit to fit into pants intended for twelve-month olds. Not the outcome we were hoping for.

So, I started doing some reading. I already knew that there were alot of options out there for diapers, so I was pretty sure we could find something that would work for Abby. I was more concerned with figuring out the other little details: What was it really like to wash your own diapers? How often did you have to wash them? How did you deal with … you know … the poop?

Thankfully, there are quite a few people willing to share their experiences on the first two. And there are alot of things out there to help out with the last. Like biodegradable diaper liners that you just have to flip into and flush down the toilet. A win-win situation!

So, with that figured out, we moved onto the next task: which of the many diapers available would work best? And that’s where confession #2 comes in …

2. I actually prefer prefolds.

This one came as a bit of a surprise even to me. With the multitude of cloth diapers available (and there is a multitude!) we ended up at the plain, and some would say “old fashioned”, rectangles. We do have a few of the others that look a bit snazzier, but since any cloth diaper uses a cover and therefore is only visible while being changed, we went by form alone and the “boring” prefolds ended up being the slimest (and most versatile) diaper I found.

It’s been a two-month adventure with cloth diapering to match our seven month adventure with babying.

A few years ago, I showed Charles a picture of a painting and asked him what he thought of it. He said it was nice. A few weeks after that, it showed up on our doorstep. For some reason, he was surprised to see it.

Lovers #3, Deron Cohen

You see, when I asked “What do you think of this painting?”, I was asking “How would you feel if this painting was hanging on a wall in our house?”. When he said “It is nice”, I heard “Go ahead and buy it”. In hindsight, it was clearly a mistranslation on my part.

About two years ago, I went to an art auction, which Charles could not attend. We had discussed getting a painting for above our couch, and he said “If you see something you like, buy it”, which is actually kind of a dangerous thing to say to me when talking about art. I like art. I like auctions. I used to regularly attend art auctions, just to look at the art (okay, and occasionally to buy, it’s true). At one of the previous art auctions, I had greatly coveted a $10,000 painting. I did not buy said painting (despite the encouragement of my friends) but I pined for it for a few days after we left.

Anyway, I went to this particular art auction with Charles’ words in mind. And I found a piece that I liked. Really liked. But that was kind of … expensive. Not $10,000 expensive (or even close) but not exactly pocket change.

(Side note: At one of the art auctions, not this one, but one by the same art house, the auctioneer was talking about how you should only buy art that you really like and not just art that you think is a good investment. Very good advice. Unfortunately, he followed that up about ten minutes later by wondering why no-one was bidding on some of the art since it was such a good investment. )

But, I did like this peice. And it would fit perfectly above our couch. A good investment, sure, but a goodly investment too.

So, when I brought it home (yes, I bought it), I hid it behind the couch until I could tell Charles about it. You may think this sounds sneaky, but really it’s just that I got home at midnight, so I clearly wasn’t going to wake him up to tell him. And I figured that a piece like that needed a personal reveal. I also figured that would give me time to think about how I would tell him. Unfortunately, the next morning Charles woke up before me and happened to see that the couch, which normally is tight against the wall, was out a few inches. What seemed to me (in the dark, at midnight) like a small shift was a bit more obvious in the light of day. At least he liked the piece too.

Haifa by Sea Israel, Itzchak Tarkay

But when he had said “If you see something you like, buy it”, he hadn’t specified a price limit. So the price tag was a bit more than he expected. In my defense, it is a large piece, and those don’t come cheap. In his defense, he had never been to an art auction and was perhaps not as aware of pricing as I was, given my fairly regular attendance. I’m going to go with an even split for the miscommunication on this one.

Sadly, the art house who hosted these auctions no longer does auctions in Canada so it’s been quite a while since I attended an art auction. Or any auction, really.

This week, when I found out that the first artist above was holding an online art auction and happened to be auctioning one of his pieces that I had been drawn to for a while, I put the lessons of the past to use and said to Charles “I would like to buy this, this is how much the bidding starts at, would you be okay if I bid on this?”

And his response was “Yup, have fun”.

No ambiguity, right?

I wish I could say that it was going to show up on our doorstep in a few weeks, but ultimately the three hour time difference and an almost seven-month old baby meant that I had to go to bed before the end of the auction and I lost the final bid for the painting. But I feel like a won something too, you know?

Art could be our personal Rosetta stone.

The pugs do tend to follow us around the house, so perhaps these Easter outfits are even more appropriate than I originally thought? To be honest, my original thought was “75% off! Sure, I’ll buy them for 75% off!” – I wasn’t thinking too far beyond that.

*And yes, one is yellow, not white. No pugs were peed on in the making of this post. I just thought the yellow one was cute too.