baby mamas

Something was in the water circa 9 months ago, because people are popping out babies left and right around here! My two closest friends in Chicago are among the crew, and finally the babies are HERE! It's been a privilege to ride the wave with both girls all the way from pre-conception (when should they go off birth control? are they ready to have a baby?) to baby showers (butt paste! thanks so much!) to present day (wait what do I do with this thing?). Both babies are officially born and officially adorable. Each girl was significantly different in her approach to prepping for the baby, so it was interesting to hear their rationale and wonder of course...is that what I would do? 

playing civilized at the baby shower for Jess

welcome Lily! she came out with a full head of hair and couldn't be cuter

first big post-baby date night in the city for Jess...feels good to be back in action!

I find myself scanning a lot of "new mother" articles in hopes that maybe I can pass them along to either friend, and the one thing I've picked up from them is that there are hardly any right and wrong methods to parenthood - that most actions and decisions fall in the nebulous gray area, and that as long as it works for your family, that's 100% okay. (Also, it's a scary world out there on the world-wide-web...don't go there anytime soon).

Yay for these brave mamas, taking on such humbling, exhausting, and exhilarating roles in life! Already I don't know how they do it. But I have to say, I'm happy now that a handful of close friends are experiencing motherhood before me, because they can skim through all the crazy out there and hopefully have some great, sane advice by the time it's my turn. Right? You guys are going to do all that pre-work for the rest of us, right? And then it'll be 10x easier for us? Excellent!

"Baby-Q" for Kim (oh, and Mark...)

baby Jude! fresh in the world two weeks ago! so far he's super snuggly :)

highlight of my week visiting Jazzy & Jude

supper club

So I guess we're old enough to be doing supper clubs now.

Not to be confused with the potluck I'm going to shortly, where I'm bringing beer and a bag of pistachios. This is supper club, pinkies up!

This weekend, a co-worker hosted his first bi-monthly "blind" supper club, meaning a certain group was invited but without knowing the rest of the guest list. Everyone was assigned a course, told to pick a partner, make their dish for 22 people (bite-size), and coordinate with the theme "winter."

mmm peanut/carrot/ginger soup

Having mostly hosted/attended dinners where melted Velveeta cheese was a perfectly acceptable dish, I knew that wasn't going to fly with this group. This is a pickling, microbrewing, homemade-pasta-making crowd. I mean, they literally handmade the benches that we sat on. THAT kind of group. All good things, just far above my skill set, which only yesterday expanded to include the use of a food processor.

food processor proof. I'm thinking we could use more counter space

They mixed up the seating so you were near your partner, but not next to them - probably for setups, as I think we were the only married couple there (=we're old). Each pair served up their course with a short description of who they were, what inspired their dish, why it made them think of winter, etc. Since my dish was mostly inspired by desperation, I didn't have much of a storyline. The host had asked for the title of our dishes earlier in the week and I told him "Fire & Ice" because that seemed just vague enough to leave me options. Of course, by the time he'd printed the menus and I'd started actually considering my dish, I realized anything super hot or super cold is pretty much the worst thing to transport across town to a dinner for 22 people.

I gave up on that little ditty and settled for an apricot-walnut-brandy rugelach, with a small brandy sour drink on the side. I gotta say, even though these suckers took me all day to make, I was so super proud of putting something edible in front of a room of mostly strangers and not poisoning one single person. I wish I'd take a picture but I was more focused on serving :( It did look sort of like this picture though: 

that dough had to be mixed, frozen, filled, rolled, re-frozen, and baked. sheesh.

Other dishes were things like lamb with truffle mac & cheese, homemade pasta served two ways, spaghetti squash with an avocado/mango salsa....

If they let us back to the next edition, we'd definitely go again! Maybe I can even learn how to conquer the ole dough blade...

not fighting is way harder than fighting

Since I met Brian, I got introduced to skiing and absolutely fell in love with it. Which is lucky, since Brian is super passionate about skiing - grew up in Colorado, on ski team in high school, etc. During our time together we've been to Steamboat, Tahoe, Breckenridge, and a smaller "mountain" in Wisconsin...all great trips...on which I cried every single time.

Because despite our mutual love for skiing, we cannot seem to pull it together when it comes to skiing together. A typical day goes like this: I take a lesson in the morning, join back up with the group in the afternoon, show Brian one of my new skillz, he gives me a pat on the back, then tries to teach me more new things, and I burst into tears and go skiing with someone else. We've always had enough other people around us that I could always ski with instead, so honestly I didn't worry about it too much. Until we got in on a Chicago-Denver flight sale for $104 (round trip!) and then realized we couldn't get anyone to come with us. OOPS!

So here's the funny thing about marriage that's a little different from dating. When you're dating (assuming it's not super serious), sometimes it's just easier to fight than it is to get to the root of the friction and fix it for good. You're not entirely sure this person's gonna be around forever so letting your crazy flag fly is a lot more natural than sitting down for a communication-a-thon. But then you go and get married and lo and behold, your disagreements are bound to be similar and recurring for the rest of your life, so it's better in the long-term to just take the painful route of truly figuring out what's going on so you can better handle the situation the next time it comes up. And for our ski trip, we needed to stop acting like we were dating and go on and get married dammit.

So we did the responsible thing...we drank. Oh, and stood in the kitchen for two hours trying to figure out how to not fight on the ski slope. It was painstaking. It was overanalytical. It was embarrassing (mostly the part where I realized I wanted him to give me more praise on my skiing progress, what am I, 6 years old?). It was even boring. But you know what? We walked out of there with a plan. A how-to-ski-together communication plan. Because we are mother-f-ing ADULTS.

And it worked! It totally worked. We made pacts (I will give 100%. He will let me choose when to receive a "lesson" from him. See, told you it was painful...) and we kept them and had a blast. It is such a ridiculous thing to call a success, but it was really important for us to figure out this whole thing, because skiing is going to be a big part of our lives and it makes no sense for it not to be a big happy part.

Now I need to take a nap from all this adult-ness.

lessons on the lift = acceptable

Winter Park village (and fresh snow!)

so freaking cute

one of the fun things about being alone on a trip is that your husband can't escape when you want to, say, watch carolers?

no tears here!

or here!

who can argue when you're looking at this?