Back Home

Yes. I am back home. And moving back home has eaten large hunks of my personal time as well as removing regular access to home internet. So I haven't posted squat since St. Patty's Day.

And guess what. I don't have time for an extensive post today, either. So major updates on the home, girls, and facial hair will have to wait another week. In the meantime I give you, possibly the greatest video of all time.

I am thinking of entitling it: "It's Whats For Dinner."

Lace Curtain Irish

Ireland is known for beautiful lush green landscapes, hard drinking pub patrons, potatoes, sheep, and lace. Today you can't travel around the Irish countryside without coming into constant contact with all of them, but this was not always the case. It was in the lean times of the great Irish potato famines (1845-1852) that many a farmwife took up the lace making trade to keep her family from starving. It was really from this outpouring of desperation that the Irish lace tradition sprung. While today it seems that every window in Ireland overflows with lace, for most of the 2nd half of the 19th century it was only the very wealthy that could afford such an extravagance. The poor seamstress in her cottage had to sell just about every piece she created just to stay alive. The lucky few who had the means to purchase curtains AND food gained the nickname, "lace curtain Irish". You can think of that as a euphemism for "high and mighty sons of bitches that think they are better than me."





Of course the Irish potato famines had much larger global effects than just bringing the world Irish lace. The population of Ireland dropped 20-30% over that 8 year period. Nearly two million people. The unlucky ones perished, mostly of starvation related disease, but roughly half left Ireland altogether in what has become known as the Irish Diaspora. As of today, something like 80 million people worldwide claim Irish descent, half of which reside in the United States. This can be compared to the present population of Ireland of about 6 million people (coincidentally roughly the same population as in 1845, so you can see things didn't exactly turn around for the Irish post-Great Famine). To put it another way, people of Irish ancestry make up 15% of the U.S. population, second only to those of German descent (17%). I am not certain how much crossover there is between the two groups, but if my personal genetics are any indication it is 100%.



So back to the lace curtain Irish.

When the tidal wave of Irish immigrants began crashing onto American shores in the 1850s, they found that some Irish had proceeded them. As is sadly traditional among immigrants, the established, wealthier Irish looked down on their poorer, newly arrived cousins. The wealthy called them Shanty Irish, while the poor referred to the rich as lace curtain Irish, borrowing the term from home and applying it whether their snobby cousins had lace curtains or not.



While I trace my personal Irish genes back through several different lines, I believe
most of them to have been lace curtain Irish, i.e. they settled pre-Great Famine. For instance, despite several fascinating coincidences with the Colberts of the Chickasaw Nation, best research seems to put the oldest Colbert ancestor we can find living in Virginia back in the 1820s (Anthony Colbert, I believe. Sadly I don't have the extensive genealogy work my mother has done in front of me at the moment), with a homestead located on what is today the West Virginia/Virginia border. I don't take pride or shame in the lace curtain Irish title. I recognize that it was once a pejorative, but one now so faded by time that it only adds color to my family story.



So here are my girls, modern day lace curtain Irish. I guess we can reclaim that term in order to empower ourselves. Or we could just not take ourselves that seriously and enjoy little girls with shamrock hats running in and out of diaphanous lace. Yes, those are the same hats as last year (check out the Fight Cranial Panis Mica ad to the right). No, they don't really fit any more. I had to turn the hats inside out and upside before jamming them down on their heads. They seemed to like them. Hopefully the pressure from the hat won't stunt their skull growth (although that could be therapeutic... again, check the Fight Cranial Panis Mica ad). I always try to get (and post) equal numbers of photos of the girls, but in this instance Kayla was being quite coy, letting Rylie (in the darker green) take most of the spotlight.



So I expect some of you, if you are still reading my blog after such a long hiatus, would like to know more about the remodel. The short answer is that it is still not done, but we are close. If the present projections hold we should be able to start moving back in at the start of April. I will have much more info (and pictures) in a future post that hopefully will be more like 3-4 days from now, not two months.



Another great diaspora was that of the Jews, driven out multiple times from multiple places, although usually after the fall of a Temple. Lace curtain or not, that really makes my girls Double Diasporatic. And that means double tough. If you are smart, you do not mess with an Irish street tough. An Irish street tough Jew?

Fuggedaboutit.



Happy St. Patrick's Day!

The Bird is the Word

I think it was somewhere around December 26th, as I spent yet another day painting my house, that this remodel stopped being a grand adventure and became a throbbing headache inseparably mixed with 400 lb Back-Monkey (Tm). Living at my mom's place has been great. More than great. She has been unbelievably accommodating and infinitely helpful with the girls. But a temporary residence is just going to always feel temporary. I am really ready to go home, but home is not ready for me and that has finally started to get to me.

And of course having your pet cat of 13 years die on you does not help. Thanks to those of you who sent condolences. Candy and I got Tigre the very first year we moved in together (1995, you know when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth), so her passing adds a sort of coda to the sense that we have moved into a new stage of life, which is more happily represented by the twins. Sadly, deaths do a better job of making one feel old than births do.

But this post is not a chance to wax philosophic about the inevitable march of time. It is instead another opportunity to bitch about my house!


First the good news: The interior painting is just about complete. We hit the final room -- the front living room -- over the holidays (you know, when the adventure stopped). The front shutters still need a coat of paint and touch-ups are needed nearly everywhere, but that is 1-2 days of work at most. I should take this opportunity once again to thank all those who helped out. I think I shamelessly went through our entire list of friends, so the fact that most of you are still speaking to me after your brief period of indentured servitude is good news indeed.



Most of the house is white -- the color is actually Moonrise, so during the full moon I believe my walls will become transparent. Eat that Wonder Woman! -- but we did manage to hit two spots with colors a bit more extreme. One wall of my office is a deep, brick red and one wall of the kitchen is an electric Lime green. I occasionally have my doubts about the green (it makes ones pupils throb), but in the end it really will only cover a very small area. If several raves accidentally break out in our kitchen we can always repaint it in a day. Please note the shadowy form of Candice as she paints in the Room Beyond the Red Wall, coincidentally the title of my future children's book and/or tasteful NC-17 film.



Also completed: the cabinetry and countertops. This delay was at least partially our fault, as it took something like a month to get the damn cabinets ordered. There was way too much back and forth and indecisiveness on our part. Combine that with Home Depot's inefficient cabinetry ordering system and you have a true Witch's Brew (apologies to Elizabeth and Karen) of procrastination and time wasting. I swear that Kitchens Desk at Home Depot is located somewhere in Dante's Inferno. I'm going to go Eighth Circle, 2nd Bolgia. Look it up, it ain't pretty.



So the cabinets were installed in early December. The counters had to wait for the cabinets and the holidays reared their ugly head, so we finally got them in last week. Absolute black granite in the kitchen, Colonial Gold granite in the bathroom. Sadly I do not presently have a picture to show you, so imagine if you will an infinite plane of stone. Now imagine you are told you need to buy a second infinite plane in order to cover the sides of your kitchen island. We still have a minor issue regarding a crack (I have been assured it is fixable), but otherwise put that in the win column. Except for the fact the final bill for the counters was $4500 more than the original budget and $2000 more than our revised budget after getting a firm quote. Argh, please see sidebar fact #2.



The cabinets for the master bath and kid's room were simple single pieces that we bought along the way. The black master bath cabinet, seen near our truly gorgeous tile wall which you can see in its full glory atop this blog entry, was located via Ebay. We did not actually buy it on Ebay, but Candice found one on Ebay that was almost what we wanted. We called them up and they said we could have exactly what we wanted for cheap if I would drive to East Timor to pick it up. In the end it may not have been quite the deal it seemed at the time, as I have not been thrilled with the craftmanship. For instance, one side is lightly warped. The girl's cabinets are IKEA, which have great craftmanship: namely me. This is where I learned I needed a better screwdriver and less IKEA furniture.



We also have all of our new stainless steel appliances, which I have put together into a stunning collage. I call it: Stainless Steel, Stained Soul. Or alternatively:
This is Not A Fan, Stove, Fridge, or Dishwasher.

The deck installation has begun as I type this. Also the final plumbing and electrical should be happening over the next week. So the final piece, the one thing that will keep us from moving home is our giant bookcase wall. This is a two story bookcase that runs upwards next to the stairs, from our bedroom floor to the ceiling of the loft. In addition to its ability to hold books, it keeps you from falling off the loft into the room below, provides a place to anchor a handrail, and comes with a wraparound built-in desk for the loft, which also coincidentally should keep you from falling off the other half of the loft. It is the "not falling" component which is crucial to getting final inspection approved.

ETA for this bookshelf? Still unknown. More details as I know them.



I did achieve one moment of catharsis over the holidays that may just carry me through to the bitter end. Some of my loyal readers may remember that we had some break-in troubles over the summer, with the most notable annoyance being the defacing of my hearth. Having finally gotten to this room I managed to prime over the offending advice to visit the warmth of our southern neighbor. This was highly satisfying. Now if you will bear with me a moment, I will descend to their level in order to deliver the miscreants a final farewell. I'll see the rest of you further below.

Can you Hear This, My Faux-Vandal Friends?





No?







Then Let Me Turn It Up!

---

Because of sidebar fact #1, I now have quite a backlog of pictures of the girls. Most of these were taken in the last couple of months of 2007, although I think the sleeping in the jogging stroller may have come from a a couple of months earlier.



I think David Bowie said it best, when he famously stated, "Ch- Ch- Cha- Changes." I can only assume he was talking about early childhood development. The girls will be hitting 15 months in just a couple of days, so it may be about time to check the score card. It was at just over a year that we made the big transition from bottle/breast feeding to cow's milk in sippy cups and solid food at every meal. While we still occasionally break out the baby food because it is so handy for carrying around or when we haven't gone shopping yet, we have cut back on that to a trickle also.



Now they eat just about everything. We try to avoid anything sweetened, fried, or over-salted, but otherwise just about anything is fair game. They have consumed and loved quesadillas, thai food, ravioli, and mongolian BBQ. They would eat bananas at every meal if we allowed it and they are also on a constant lookout for Graham crackers, which have clearly replaced Cheerios (which they still like) as the baby crack of choice.



The girls are running, climbing, dancing, and talking up a storm. Most of the talk is still babble, but they are clearly building up their vocabulary. A recent representative sample would be dog, momma, daddy, 'nana (short for banana), neck, book, box, hi, bye, ball, duck, walk, no, yes, meat, up, down... And many more that do not come to mind immediately. And these are just examples of words they use consistently and in proper context. Kayla, in particular, is becoming an impressive mimic so be careful what you say around the girls, as it might just be repeated back at you.



We are still experimenting with television exposure. For the first 6-9 months of their lives we watched any TV we wanted and the babies were 100% oblivious. Then we started noticing the girls paying attention, so we starting monitoring what we watched. No violent or disturbing content on in the background while the twins were playing. As they became more and more aware of the TV as an entity we basically banned it outright.

Ah, but the flesh is weak.

Banning all TV in our home except for the hours of 10pm to falling asleep wasn't going to hold up. I love my babies, but sometimes all of us need a short break from the constant interaction (this is known as solitary play, or some such, time for your child to interact with the world without you constantly approving or disapproving). Plus sometimes you want to hear news, catch the end of a ball game, watch the latest on your famous uncle, etc. So now we have slipped into trying to keep TV to a minimum. We try to never put on TV for the girls to watch (no Sesame Street yet) and we keep an eye on content. In general it is not on more than 30-45 minutes at a time, long enough to catch a Daily Show or House episode and then back off or on to a music only channel (radio channel, not MTV or its ilk). The number one thing the girls love to do is "read" their books, so I think we have not screwed them up yet. Stay tuned.



I'd say the one area that I wish I could do over is putting the babies to bed. Essentially I think we did way too much soothing to sleep and now we are paying for it, as the twins do not go down easily at all. In our defense, our thinking at the time was that putting twins to bed in the same room was trickier, because if one was crying and not sleeping it would keep the other one up. From a series of recent single room experiments in a hotel room (see a soon-to-be posted blog about the Austin trip), I think there is some validity to that sentiment, but we should have worked out a solution (put them down at slightly different times, maybe?) instead of punting.



I know many other parents who get to bedtime, do a short series of bedtime rituals, and then put the baby in the crib and it more or less goes to sleep. Our babies do not do that and it feels like the bedtime ritual length from start to finish has only gotten worse over the past three months. I believe this is because the walking, jiggling, soothing exercises that worked on little babies do not work so well on an older child, who is starting to sleep like an adult (or at least like a kid), who would rightfully be annoyed if you started shaking them while they were trying to sleep. We also deal with a lot of nighttime wake-ups where the baby can not self-soothe. I think this is common at their age, but I suspect we are a bit worse off because the baby is not used to being awake, alone, and in the dark (there is a bright night light) and going to sleep itself.

So if raising a baby involves 3-month plans, the next three months we need to work on (among other things) getting them to bed easier. We have already made a transition to a more gradual bedtime process, where you get them cuddled up with a book, in their blanket, in a rocking chair, and sing to them (Wheels On The Bus is good). While far from always effective, it feels less forced to me, which I think makes it easier on both us and the baby. It is still time consuming, but until we can work out getting the babies to go to sleep in their own beds, alone, I think it will remain a major task. To truly get them to go down in their own beds may involve a series of many screaming nights, so we need to plan and steel our selves for it like we were going to storm Normandy.

So there is a little insight into the mind of a parent of 15 month-olds. Trying to maximize sleep is still a major component I am afraid to say, although nothing like the early days. Still a lot of hard work, but the positive feedback in the form of baby affection (hugs and kisses and yelps of delight) has been steadily increasing. Now if we could all just move home...

Then we could spend all our time wishing we were still living at my mom's house with its built-in babysitter. Damn grass.

Always greener.

In Memoriam

Tigre Goldfarb Colbert


1992? - December 21, 2007















You will be missed.

A Boo Deferred

Like any business I have been doing a seasonal inventory, only instead of counting lug nuts or Pez dispensers I have been counting up meandering ideas and turns of phrase. Here are the top three things I have been repeating over and over again:

1) This blog is late, behind, and/or delayed. I am so very sorry and I will do everything in my power to catch up, make up, or otherwise atone for my sins as a writer and human being.

2) Remodeling a house is hard and expensive. I wish it cost less money. More money would be good and please send me money. Boo-hoo.

3) Having twin babies is also hard. However a lot of stuff they do is cool. I will do my best to express this feeling in more robust, expressive terms, but will probably in the end fall back on terms like "sweet", "awesome", and "cool". I will also occasionally throw in an adverbial "pretty" in front of those adjectives, the worst sort of grammatical heresy. This occurs for the dual reason that sometimes the ups and downs of parenting are difficult to articulate and also because this section of the blog usually gets written last and therefore is most likely to suffer serious writer fatigue.

I have never been one to like to repeat myself (although I know I do). Worse is when the repetition is whiney. Blogs are inherently introspective (translate: head up your own ass), so some latitude must be given, but a constant drum beat of complaint is fun for no one. So I have resolved to stop apologizing for being late with blog entires and to stop bitching about poor me and my massive house project. Hopefully that will leave more room for better baby writing. We'll see. But what about the new reader, you may ask? For them I will permanently place these three facts in my sidebar so they can get up to speed right away.

Thinking about not wishing to repeat myself brings me to a slight digression: I have always shied away from any sort of catch phrase or ritual greeting, as they get old real quick. When I was in high school these were known as Kibble-isms, stemming from a group of guys (later christened the Kibble Kids) who went through a phase of yelling "Kibble" at each other. More socially acceptable verbal discourse of this sort would include quotes from the Simpsons or Saturday Night Live or Seinfeld. Yes, whenever any of us do a "D'Oh!" or "Ha-Ha!" we are walking in the realm of Kibbledom. It is unavoidable on some level, but I do my best to not let it get out of control. A more recent, personal example was the phrase "Smooth Move, Ex-Lax" which I would deliver in a goofy, self-mocking tone. The joke was that only an idiot would say such a non-funny, slightly off-color, and ultimately mean thing. Only it is one of those phrases ripe for Kibble and before I knew it I had begun using it more and more regularly, which kind of defeats the purpose: You are not mocking the phrase if you keep using it. It is presently on my internal list of verboten phrases, although I have lapsed a couple of times. The power of the Kibble is strong.



OK, that was kind of a long digression. Now on to today's business: Halloween. Yes it occurred a month ago. I would point you at this time to the new Important Sidebar Fact #1.











With the girls too young to Trick-Or-Treat and our lives too busy to plan, well, anything, our main Halloween activity was a trip to Chris and Marie's creepy shindig. I have included a nice selection of the assorted costumes. We have Lisa and her beau as fallen angel and rotting pirate thing. Check down below for further visitations from this unholy winged one. Then we have our hostess Marie as Pulp Fiction Uma complete with hypodermic needle sticking from her chest. We had a lively debate as to whether Stoltz or Travolta jammed it in her.

Next we turn to Jacole as Britney Spears. No offense to Jacole who pulled this off beautifully, but this gets less funny with every month as it turns out Britney is not just a ha-ha bad parent, but a really, tragically bad parent. Still, baby on string dragged through the grass. Classic. And then there was Karen as Lady BlueRay. That's right, she vanquishes HD-DVD formats everywhere. Bet you didn't even think of that costume. I just bet.




Finally here are some Wonderwomen. I am going to go with Aphrodite and Rizzo from Greece in addition to the the Amazonian warrior. Knowing I have a thing for women in Wonderwoman outfits (oh Lynda Carter, how I miss thee and thy ample bosom) Candy did not allow me to linger long enough to find out all the details.



Of course the stars were the girls. It is an established fact that 25% of the reason people have children is so that they can dress them in cute outfits and then coo at them. Halloween is like that, only to the nth power of cutedom. We had a bit of back and forth as to which baby would be best capture the essence of which outfit, but Kayla made some fairly convincing monkey noises, so that clinched it. Kayla would be the Monkey and Rylie would be the Dragon.



Here is where having twins is a real plus. The girls loved wearing the costumes, because they constantly got to see what the other twin looked like. They would just point their fingers at each other and laugh. We didn't really have matching footwear, so you will have to excuse faux-ballerina slipper socks. We were a bit short on paws and claws.


Since there is no better costume accessory than a baby, we decided to work backwards from the monkey and dragon to our own attire. I went as a Celtic Dragon Slayer, complete with shield and kilt, while Candice put together an all khaki ensemble with San Diego Zoo patch to imitate a zookeeper. She also brought bananas, which doubled as a prop and actual food for both Monkey and Dragon.



Here are the two trouble- makers at the party with their Aunt Darci, dressed in full cat. The girls could not get enough of those whiskers. In general they seemed a bit befuddled by masked and heavily made-up people, unsure whether they should be interested or disturbed.

Welcome to the world, ladies.



Yes, I do own a kilt. I have the whole deal, including a fine sporran, although I will have to admit I went sporran-less to this party as my sporran is presently buried deep in a drawer, deeper in my garage. The short story behind this is that the best man from my wedding, Brian, made me a best man (or co-best man) at his wedding. As is his perverse way, he made each member of his wedding party dress up in formal wear tangentially connected to their ethnicity. I ended up in a kilt, while Mr. Roberts had a top hat and tails, and Arjun went with the Nehru suit. As I was visiting Scotland just months before, I picked up my kilt there. The Tartan style is the family Graham, the last name of the bride. My meager Scottish ancestry, the Smiths, didn't really have a tartan. You can get one, but smith was an occupation, not a clan. Every clan had a smith. So what is a Smith Tartan? Something for tourists, I assume.


Rylie did a good job playing the shy, little dragon. When the mousey, introverted girl from every Hollywood romance (Mandy) showed up at the party, they seemed to hit it off right away. You can see them forlornly glancing askew at dreamy boys who won't even give them the time of day. One wants to find her true love, the other wants to consume their flesh with fire and then crack their bones.

So poignant.

I managed to get Rylie out of there before the mousey girl got her hot makeover and the dreamy male lead realized that what he was looking for all along was right there under his nose the whole time. Phew!



Of course, the worst part about taking little girls out on Halloween is that you are constantly haunted by a chilling vision of death. Of course, just because you have been cast from the presence of God because you rebelled against your maker when he displaced you in his heart with the paltry and pathetic spawn of Adam, doesn't mean you don't like babies. A-Goo-Goo, Snoogims? Whose a goo-goo-snoogims? Does Goo-Goo want to trade in their immortal soul for candy?

OK, Fallen Angel. That's enough. Why don't you get yourself some punch, maybe defile a place of worship on your way over? That's a good demon from the nether regions. Sheesh. A parent has to be constantly on guard for these things.




Like take Rylie dragon and these leaves. You'd think she had never seen leaves before. Oh right, she probably has not seen a lot of leaves before. Because she is a baby. Got to remember that. Maybe dragons need to eat leaves to keep the fires in their bellies stoked? Or just to cut down on kerosene breath? Boy she sure finds those leaves fascinating. I wonder if...


Would Goo-Goo like a pretty leaf? All I need is a drop of blood on this ancient parchment...

Hey, Lucifer Spawn! Away from the baby. I am totally serious. Do not make me get Britney Spears. That girl is ten different kinds of insane and while you may have tangoed with the Damned at the very Gates of Perdition, you are not ready for that level of batshit crazy and she will Hit You Baby, One More Time! And then, Oops, She'll Do It Again. Then she'll make you say Gimme More!



Wow, mixing in Spears song titles was exhausting and slightly degrading. I think it is time we all just lay back, have a beer, and wait for the next Halloween to roll around again.



Do you think the girls will want to get dressed again next year?



Yeah, I think they will too.

---

Observant Reader Award: I am not sure if it is irony or just poor judgment, but in the title to this blog dedicated to not repeating myself I have parodied Langston Hughes' poem, "A Dream Deferred"... for a second time in the pages of my blog (Check the Mars Has A Gigantic Hole entry). Let's face it, early 20th century afro-american alienation is an endless fount of comedy.

Endless.