Delights & Shadows

A note to my husband on Father’s Day

You come home from work, and Diego run-jumps to the door squealing Papiiiii, and the baby is on his heels, crawling as fast as she can, and you practically trip over them both when you open the door—Diego dancing in place and the baby, sitting now, thrusting her chest up and down and reaching for you…

Day after day this ritual never loses intensity.

Oh how they love their Papi.

How we all do.

My friend X from grad school napped through our monthly lunch date, which I forgive her for because she’s a therapist at a prison and I can’t fathom how draining that is, so I’m doing the next best thing. I’m eating a lemony pasta salad with crunchy peppers and fresh mango, ALONE.

All caps = life after kids.

Olive oil, spices & salt

As a person who really enjoys cooking and eating, I’m surprised it’s taken me this long to jump on the bandwagon with this stuff, but wow. What a difference quality makes with these three things.

I’ve stopped cooking with olive oil altogether, having read enough about how its flavor and healthy properties break down even when it’s only slightly heated. Instead, I cook with sunflower or coconut oil, and use higher-quality extra virgin olive oil raw and sparingly. The good stuff is so delicious, I can hardly believe it sometimes.

It’s too expensive a project to overhaul my entire spice drawer, but I’m slowly replacing used-up spices with higher-quality stuff from a local spice store. Today I bought some madras curry and made a soup with it. So different. So, so good.

And, salt! I’ve been cooking with much less of it, preferring to sprinkle food with finishing salt right before serving it. I bought a pound of pink Himalayan sea salt at Home Goods, which I use every day, and have my eye on some black salt at the spice store.

Anybody else have favorites along these lines that you splurge on, just because it makes such a big difference?

Miami’s rainy season has begun

It is the season of early morning visits to the park, before the real heat sets in. It’s the season of bug spray. The heat makes us crave ice cream, so we drive to the old-time ice cream parlor down the street, and then we eat it indoors. I wear cotton dresses and my hair up. It’s the season of sweaty kids, of evening swims in the pool, of getting caught in the rain.

We love to hate summer in Miami but, you know, I love the rain.

I am thinking about how my husband recently started a new job, after deciding that what he was doing wasn’t right for him. There was a period of months when we thought we might leave Miami, because there were jobs in LA, in New York, even Europe. I would have embraced a different city, because if I do one thing well, it’s blooming where I’m planted, but still, I cried when my husband called me one afternoon and said he’d been called about a job in California, because even though I miss California every day, Miami is good for me, now. I am thinking about how we moved here, partly, because it would be good for me, and how my husband never quite settled in. Yet, when the jobs began to pop up everywhere but here, he heard me say, “I don’t want to leave.” He connected his dots until he found a job in Miami, at a thriving, creative place, and we are here, and we are both settled, now.

It is the season of enjoying wide-open days with the kids, before my son starts pre-school in August—before the beginning of years of scheduled time.

It is the season when I think of thriving, as I stand at the window and watch the rain darken the soil under our plants and trees. I think of how everything is growing—I and my husband and our kids, the plants and the trees—as I stand here, in this season.

This one.

Just Stuff

About three months ago I began to experience periodic stomach aches. It felt like my digestive tract was on fire and lasted for four to six hours. Awful. I started recording everything I ate and when the stomach aches occurred and I can say, now, without doubt, that the culprit is eggs! A plate of eggs, a hardboiled egg in a salad, egg baked into a cookie. I have a history of food allergies that come and go, and I wonder what happens in a body, from one day to the next, that causes it to reject a food that it’s accepted, without issue, for years.

We are less than a month from flying to Switzerland for my sister in-law’s wedding in The Alps. Any tips on toddler jet-lag (in both directions) are welcome!

I think a lot about how the Internet affects us. I read an article recently about how videos from Syria, depicting horrendous acts of violence on both sides, are being uploaded to YouTube for anyone to see. It’s incredible to me that we can access this type of information. It is an important truth, I think, but I also wonder if people who are unaware of the details of the conflict can accurately process what a video like that means.

That’s it. Just stuff. Happy weekend.

May in my iBooks app

For my book club I read The Cranes Dance. I enjoyed it, and then, about half-way through, it began to drag.

Then I read a novel long on my to-read list: The Language of Flowers. It kept me up past my bedtime for several nights. I loved it—loved the story and the structure of the story, the characters, the communication via flowers element.

Currently revisiting Happiness is an Inside Job—nonfiction by Sylvia Boorstein—which I started about a year ago and from which I was sidetracked by Lucia’s birth. It’s a book about mindfulness, and I think I’m ripe for reading it now. As time passes and my life takes on layers, I am more intent than ever to steer away from unquietness. This book is a readable, practical reminder to pay attention to how I am thinking and speaking and behaving, in order to prioritize kindness (towards myself, others, life) and keep anxiety at bay.

Have you read any of these? What book could you not put down this month?

Funny little things

Diego has started calling Lucia Scooby Dooby Doo when he’s mad.

He says, “No Scooby Dooby Doo! That’s my toy Scooby Dooby Doo!

I have no idea where he picked it up, because we don’t watch it, but it’s hysterical to me, especially because he’s so serious when he says it.