pannycakes

Confession: I’m not a big fan of pancakes. When we go as a family out to breakfast I tend to get lunch – breakfast food is no great shakes to me. The one caveat is my mom’s favorite weekend treat growing up – banana pancakes with coconut syrup. Of course, neither Jeff nor Olive will eat bananas, so…. sigh. As I said, no pancakes for me.

Cut to Olive’s birthday party this year… 5 years old so she could invite 5 friends (I stole that from Barbara Kingsolver and it’s brilliant) and she wanted a pajama party. Which, to her, meant the girls come over in the morning in their jammies and eat pancakes (instead of cake! Have I mentioned how much I love this kid?). I made Jeff and Olive’s favorite buttermilk pancakes, a recipe I’ve had in my little recipe box for goodness only knows how long and whose provenance is an utter mystery. And here’s the thing: I could not stop eating them. Plain, even – no syrup needed. And tonight the unheard-of craving hit and I had to have them…

Buttermilk Pancakes

Prep time: 10 mins

Cook time: 25 mins

Total time: 35 mins

Serves: 6

Ingredients

3 cups flour
3 tablespoons sugar
3 teaspoons baking powder
1½ teaspoons baking soda
¾ teaspoon salt
3 cups buttermilk
½ cup milk
3 eggs
⅓ cup butter, melted

Instructions

Combine the dry ingredients in one bowl, the wet in another. Keep separate until you're ready to cook.
Heat a lightly oiled/buttered griddle or frying pan over medium/high heat.
Pour the wet mixture into the dry mixture and stir till just blended.
Pour the batter onto the griddle in ½ cups for each pancake.
Brown on both sides and serve.

Notes

You must use actual buttermilk for these to turn out right. Instant buttermilk or milk curdled with vinegar (that substitute trick every cookbook recommends) will result in soggy pancakes. I don't know why this is, but trust me on this one.

** some of the munchkins in my classes at school call pancakes “pannycakes” and I think it’s the cutest thing ever. Thus the title.

can

“I can’t,” she says.

…get ready for bed.
…keep my voice down.
…eat my breakfast.
…take a nap.
…pick up my stuff.

And inside, I seethe. Yes of course because it’s an outright lie – she can obviously do those things. She’s five, for heaven’s sake. But more so because I don’t want those words falling from her mouth, feeling comfortable on her tongue. I want her to walk through life with an “I can” at the ready, to enter situations with confidence, hope, the gumption to give anything a try. And the honesty to say “I don’t want to” if that’s what she really means.

mostly treats

Halloween….

Olive requested a kitty pumpkin, so I did my best.

My little Dorothy could’ve trick-or-treated all night and never gone home.

Sleepy leopard baby lasted about two blocks before passing out on momma’s shoulder for the night.I showed my true personality.

And my favorite part…. relaxing afterwards, in a sugar coma.

Hope you had a happy Halloween!

arrival

They tell you it only happens like that in the movies, but no… the sudden whoosh of water was surprising and like a scene from a cheesy sitcom. What they don’t tell you – or at least didn’t tell me – is that it keeps coming. Another whoosh and then a trickle. Not stopping.

Nothing else was happening. I was happily watching the Tonight Show with my hubby & my girl, up late in the last burst of summer. Go to bed, she told me, get some rest and let your body do what it needs to do. So I trotted off to bed, sleeping snuggled to my little girl for the last time it’d be just us.

I woke with a start, tensing beneath the contraction. It felt long, tight. Another one washed over me way before I imagined one would. Out came the handy dandy contraction timer app I was so proud of finding. One minute contractions, three minutes apart.

Tiff walked in looking adorably rumpled, got settled in and off we went. The pain was more fierce and it was all I could do to grip the door handle and breathe as we drove. 2:30 am and no one on the road, we ran red lights. No one seemed to mind.

They wheeled me in, sending Jeff off to park the car. The nurse’s calm chatter was a jarring counterpoint to the still wall of gripping contractions with little reprieve between. I could barely sign my name to be admitted.

Nurses flittered around, sent me to the bathroom, asked questions as though we were at tea. Is this your first birth? Is your older one a boy or a girl? Do you know what you’re having this time? “Stop asking me questions!” I barked. Didn’t they know I had to focus? Didn’t they know I could hardly breathe?

No midwife, no doctor, no space between contractions. I couldn’t not push. Barely aware of the noise I was making, other than uttering “I can’t do this” once or twice, gripping Jeff’s fingers as tight as I could, I pushed. And there she was. Perfect.

It was 3:01 am. We’d been there 10 minutes.

love what you love

That’s what the sign said… Let your body love what it loves. The words resonated through me as I gazed at the chalkboard, sinking in and reverberating.

My body? My body loves shoulder rubs and hot baths and snuggles and tea. It loves warm blankets and ice cream, kneading dough and digging in the dirt, swimming on hot days. It loves long embraces and holding hands, and kisses on the cheek. It loves holding the ones I love good and close to me.

So does my heart, as a matter of fact. And my head. And my soul. Really, I think all the pieces of myself work rather nicely together & they’re pretty much of one accord on all that.

There’s a dear friendship in my life that feels like it’s gone a little awry, and I’ve been carrying guilt and angst about the whole thing. I’ve been trying to convince myself to need the friendship less, to care less. And while letting go a little might not be a bad thing – it might ease my heartache – my body, my self, my soul… loves what it loves. I can’t help it. And I shouldn’t.

So, darling friend, I love you.

of food and thanks and love

A good cook is like a sorceress who dispenses happiness.

-Elsa Schiaparelli

Having a new baby is like entering a vortex where day is night and night is day and there’s nothing to hang your hat on – no schedule, no routine, no to-do list to give days shape or meaning. It’s a whirlwind of no sleep but catnaps, a place where everything smells softly of sour milk and all clothes have soiled shoulders and chests. It’s magnificent and heartrending and exhausting and isolating.

Into this mess of broken and beginning life come rays of light – the beauty of help. Because truly, it’s too much alone.

Today I am working to catch up on my thank you notes – scribbled bits trying to express even just a little of the immense gratitude I feel for those gracious people who came alongside and offered help in the most basic and beautiful way – they fed us.

There is some bit of magic in the kitchen – that you can slop eggs, milk, sugar and flour together and somehow it comes together to make a cake (and reliably so!) is an utter mystery. Disparate things – sometimes none too palatable on their own – meld to become something delicious, nurturing, nourishing. Amazing. And employing this magic for others is such a gorgeous show of grace, whether cooking yourself or simply picking something up… it’s life giving. Literally. And never more so than when life has gone caddywompus. I hold that when major life events happen – birth, death, illness, moving homes, new jobs – you bring food. You give a little magic to help bridge the gap. You hand over some extra life to those who need it. And oh, how I have needed it!

So this post is a special (extra) thank you to those who gifted our family this way, who welcomed Lila and sustained us all as we walked into this new life of ours as a family of four. Thank you, thank you, thank you dear ones… Anna, Jen, Kate, Courtney, Anna, Maggie, Hugo, Johanna, Joy & Mary. (As a sidenote, I find it an awesome testament that most of the friends who loved us this way were ones I’ve met through blogging and twitter. Who says you can’t have real relationships online?)

*written as part of Just Write, my friend Heather’s freewriting link-up. Join in & read some of the other posts here.

just write

Sitting here in the Kohl’s parking lot, sweet baby snuggled in my arms, sweet not-so-baby dozing on the backseat after a fun-filled day at kindergarten. I remember when these sorts of things used to bother me, make me antsy…there are things to do and places to go and I can’t sit here wasting time… And I know that at home there is laundry sitting in both the washer and the dryer. The floor is so dusty you absolutely have to wear shoes so you don’t get hobbit feet. A zillion thank you notes wait to be written, and dinner needs to be cooked. Not to mention that we haven’t even begun the errand we came here for…

And yet sitting here I find myself…. content. I’m listening to the wind and the chirping birds, cuddling lovely little Lila against me where she fell asleep nursing. I hear Olive sighing in her sleep and her face looks so peaceful… not to mention the empty cup beside me with the dregs of pumpkin milkshake in it. There’s time. There’s space. It will all get done – maybe not today, but that’s okay.

I find myself smiling as I gaze out the window, and when I look down at Lila… she’s smiling, too.

*written as part of Just Write, my friend Heather’s freewriting link-up. Join in & read some of the other posts here.