I discovered Guess How Much I Love You in the Strand bookstore in New York when I was 5 months pregnant with Eliza. I read it and burst into tears right there, surrounded by soigné New Yorkers, who tried their best to ignore the red-nosed, disheveled mess in the children’s section. I practiced reading the book aloud before Eliza was born so I wouldn’t lose it every time I read it to her. Of course, then she was born and I really got it and it took probably another 3 months before I got all the way through the story before weeping.

I also bought The Velveteen Rabbit when I was pregnant. I had read it before, as a kid, and loved it. The kid is THREE and I still can’t even LOOK at the book on Eliza’s shelf without tearing up. Clearly, this is one she is going to have to read for herself.

Apparently, I have some sort of emotional masochistic hang-up about rabbits because I read a book review on One Good Thing about The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane, and said to myself, hey, that sounds pretty good. It’s not a long book — 198 pages, with illustrations — so it took me about 45 minutes just now. If you are pregnant or recently post-partum, this is probably not the book for you, because Jesus Christ, what is it about the goddamn rabbits? This one almost killed me. It’s a gorgeous little book — nicely designed, beautifully illustrated — that tells a Black-Beauty-meets-Little-Princess-by-way-of-Heidi-dressed-up-as-the-Velveteen-Rabbit story. It’s a devastating but satisfying story arc in the way of those stories, which were some of my favorites as a kid, all of which I am deathly afraid to read now because I think I would be wrecked. I am to this day haunted by Heidi’s distress when she is whisked away from her Grandfather without warning and taken to the big city, and the thought of how he must’ve felt when he came home and found no one there. I try not to think about Black Beauty if I can help it. That poor horse. 

Anyway, I know it doesn’t sound like it, but all of this is to say that I highly, highly recommend Edward Tulane, because it counts among the 45 most affecting and well-written reading I have enjoyed all year.

And because I have something deeply wrong with me I am now going to start Andre Dubus III’s The Garden of Last Days, which is about a single mom who is a stripper and brings her three-year-old daughter with her to work one night and since he wrote The House of Sand and Fog, I am pretty sure this is not the set-up for Pretty Woman-type hijinks.

So, today, Grandma Texas is (some number of) years old.

She called me the other day and described to me, laughing, the gift one of her good friends gave her: gift certificates to her favorite children’s clothing store, so she can buy more stuff for Eliza. Many of the cute dresses Eliza wears in our pictures — the green ones with the polka dots, the yellow one with the dots and the daisies, her stripey going-to-camp shorts — are courtesy of Grandma Texas’s favorite store. She LIVES to spoil my kid, and I can’t say I begrudge her one single second of it. Particularly as she has such excellent taste.

To wit: Here is a picture of Eliza wearing a dress my mom made for me when I was that age.

That’s right: that dress is about 33 years old, and it still has the original sweet-girly-but-never-cutesy aesthetic my mom passed on to me and now Eliza. Because guess who happily, nay, EAGERLY, wears all of those Grandma Texas purchases? Who says, nearly every morning lately, “I wanna wear a DRESS!” And then proceeds to trash them playing in the sandbox, but hey, clothes are washable.

Which brings me in a roundabout way to this video, in which The Crazypants is wearing one of her favorite Grandma Texas dresses. Until we figure out a way of teleporting the preschooler between the Gulf Coast and the East Coast, posting videos of potentially lethal cuteness will have to do as a birthday giftie for Grandma Texas.

Anyway, here she is, Miss Eliza The Singer-Songwriter:

 

 

And in a totally unrelated note, this picture of Barney makes me laugh. When he is not lying on my lap kneading my gut or walking on the keyboard, he prefers to drape himself over my mousing hand, for maximum ergonomic hinderment, like so:

“All your arms are belong to US!”

And then when I actually have to mouse, he’s all, “Sigh, sigh sigh, I have a terrible life.”

If you would like to liven up a lumber supply employee’s day on a Friday afternoon, as he is counting the minutes before the weekend, do the following:

Walk into the store, find the nearest employee, and ask him: Do you have any wood for breaking, like in karate?

I did exactly that this Friday and I think I made the guy’s day.

He was all, What now? but then he got really into it. He spent a good half hour with me selecting the right board (pine, untreated, about bookshelf-thickness, about 10 inches wide), suggested that we avoid boards with knots, which make the boards more difficult to break, then carefully sawed the pieces into squares for me. He only made about $15 off me, but it’s a small-town store (the next town over from us, and thanks, A and J, for recommending them) and there are things that matter more. Like the fact that he probably went home and told his girlfriend, hey, this is pretty funny…

 

All of the people who tried to break a board, by the way, did so with ease and panache. Go TT, CK, and LT!

Wow, you know what’s getting old? The sneezing. Jesus H. Roosevelt You-know-who, I hate that about late summer. Plus, the amusing wart-like protruberance on the end of my nose (I can haz WITCH-nose!) has been rubbed raw to bleeding by today’s nasopharyngeal hijinks. Stupid ragweed!

Yeah, yeah, done complaining now, ready to move on to an update of the week’s activities.

Let me start with a brief photo essay by the title of:

There Will Be Mustaches

(A title I shamelessly lifted from an email Jim sent me today, which is appropriate since this is about him)

Jim decided to use his vacation time constructively to experiment with his facial hair.

He started by growing a generalized scruff for a few days:

Then he shaved it into a goatee:

By the taking of this photo, however, he had been muttering alarmingly about wanting a pornstache for several days, and yesterday, he shaved himself one, with additional tasteful soul patch:

Even though I offered him ACTUAL MONEY if he kept it — come on, how would it NOT be awesome if he went to work with a pornstache? — he refused and shaved it off today. Before going back to completely cleanshaven, he stopped briefly at this:

Shortly after completing the shaving process, he found this picture and sent me the aforementioned email, in which he regretted shaving the stache before growing it to full DDL bushiness:

 

The other man in the house, meanwhile, made a bid for LOLcat immortality:

Moe continued to hone her skills at making people feel guilty by hopefully rolling onto her back for belly rubs every time people entered a room she was in. We should’ve let her have kittens; she has the mom-guilt thing down COLD.

… 

’scuse me. I had to go pet her some more just now.

 

Girls gone wild

OK, let’s see, Eliza and I started the vacation by going for a walk around the reservoir and finding these very cool ball-flower thingers. Anyone know what they are?

 

We also went to Tanglewood to hear Beethoven’s 9th, due to the largesse of my friend CK, who sang with the BSO Chorus this summer and had some spare guest passes for us and LT and her kids. I love going there with kids. It’s such a great way to experience classical music — you don’t have to wear uncomfortable clothing or sit in uncomfortable seats, people think it’s OK if you feel like dancing, or lying down and waving your legs in the air, or scarfing down 20 cookies:

Miss Thing ingratiated herself with a bunch of other kids and convinced them all to play her anarchic version of Red Light, Green Light (The rules are roughly: Red, green, who gives a shit, let’s just run!)

Too late, Jim came up with the master plan of dressing all of us in white with fake eyelashes and bringing a cooler stocked only with milk. Ah, well. Next year. 

On the way home we stopped for pizza and she proved once more that she is genetically my spawn by licking the salt crust off my margarita glass:

(When I was younger I used to bemoan the fact that no one makes salt licks for humans, and what’s up with that? Now I just drink margaritas to ease the pain.)

We took Eliza to the beach in Connecticut and the best part was we didn’t get stuck in traffic. Oh, and also, her boundless joy about being at the beach:

 

Then we went to a barbecue where we were the meal (of mosquitos. No cannibals in Western MA that I know of). Our friend has a 12-acre property in the middle of nowhere and encouraged us to hit golfballs into the woods, and all I could think of was that one Seinfeld episode where Kramer kills a whale by plugging up its blowhole with a golfball. I was picturing angry cougars charging out of the undergrowth, and all. But it didn’t stop me from showing off my excellent golfing form:

 

Eliza commandeered the chips, doling them out sparingly to those adults who successfully curried her favor:

We suck as parents because we think this sort of thing is amusing. We had trouble wrestling her into the car that night because she was so greasy.

We went for a bike ride in the countryside and Jim took this picture of me in my stylish biking gear. I was probably complaining about my butt being sore and worrying about bears:

 

 

We planted a schmillion (OK, 10) sunflower seeds in the spring and 4 of them came up. Something bit the head off number 4, but the other three grew nicely. Eliza claimed the monster flower for herself, and on Wednesday it bloomed, to her everlasting delight:

Here I am, showing how tall it is (7 feet, is my rough estimate), and also, that Eliza and I apparently sneer in the same way when we are looking into the sun. Sorry, kid:

 

My uncle (my dad’s brother) came for a visit with his wife and their grandson and we took them to the park, where Eliza had a splashpark breakthrough and ACTUALLY RAN THROUGH THE SPRINKLERS. This is a miracle 3 years in the making, people. Sing hosannas and praises to the heavens. 

And then we went for a train ride and Jim took a picture of the nostrils in his life:

 

On Friday we went to the farm where Eliza picked cherry tomatoes like a pro:

But then mercury hit retrograde and the 7th house aligned with mars or something and she did this and screeched a bunch:

Whereupon I rolled my eyes.

Then we picked some flowers at the farm which always cracks up everyone within earshot because Eliza is so freaking hysterical about it. Every flower I cut and hand to her, she shouts, “Thank you SO MUCH FOR THIS FLOWER!!!!!” 

Also, as you can see, by this time, my hair was way too long.

Farming is a dirty business:

But even though her vegetable consumption has not improved as much as I had hoped, I am calling this a success — the joy she takes in picking stuff fresh off the vine and selecting beets “as big as my HEAD!” from the bins is well worth it. I am hoping it will eventually translate into an appreciation for the items themselves as well as for the land on which they’re grown.

On Saturday I kicked Eliza and Jim out of the house for a Chick Day with my friends. Jim used the opportunity to snare Eliza deeper into his rockstar web and bought her a guitar:

You have not lived until you have overheard your 3-year-old child and her father discussing guitar makes and models (Sample comment: “Mine is a blond Guild, Daddy! And yours is a BROWN Guild!”). And you definitely have not lived until you have witnessed your husband trying to teach your child the chords to the Kinks’ Lola (”Eliza! Now you sing ‘L-O-L-A Loooo-la!’”).

Then we went to the fair and Eliza and Jim rode the rollercoaster:

If you made Eliza chose between the beach or a rollercoaster, her head would explode. She would not know what to do.

And then we all rode the “verrist wheel” together and I tried to look relaxed and not think about us all plummeting to our deaths. I don’t think I succeeded, do you?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Eliza wants Jim to grow a beard because “then you will look like Santa Claus, Daddy!”

He was on the fence but noted that he has some white hair in his whiskers.

I told him he would look avuncular.

He brightened up.

“I’ve always wanted to be an avuncular man!”

Nonetheless, he is shaving as we speak.

***

Also, this morning I couldn’t find a shell Eliza picked up at the beach yesterday and she asked me to find it.

“It’s not important to YOU, but it’s VERY important to ME!” she explained.

***

Apropos of nothing, Major Bedhead told me some time ago that I needed to post a pic of my guest bathroom wallpaper.

Here it is:

Yes, it really does look like someone stuck tinfoil on the wall and painted trees on it. I will NEVER remodel this room.