@ Home in the World

A Gift from Afghanistan

As my brother-in-law makes his way back to Germany from Afghanistan, I thought I would share what he sent to me for Christmas. My husband told him that I would appreciate something from the country and he was right.

From the enclosed note:

The shawl is from Mazar e Sharif...renowed for its skilled workers in fabric-related endeavors (weaving, rugmaking, etc.). I figured there was a greater chance of you wearing it if I got you this wool/cotton combo instead of camel fur...the camel fur here is from real camels and smells like -- camels.

The candle holder is a little tricky. It's easiest if you hold it upside down with your left hand, grab the bulb-like part and spin the base in a counter-clockwise direction. When you turn it rightside up, the leaves will fall down and you can see the small bowl-like receptacle for the candle or pyramid-shaped incense.

Not sure what the turtle base signifies, but the images of Buddha on the leaves indicate that this was made in Bamiyan. That's the central part of the country where we went and had a meeting with the first and only female governor. That part of the country is gorgeous with the pristine landscape, extremely nice people and archeological wonders.

I was thrilled with these gifts, but it probably won't surprise you that I loved the story behind them, and that they came from halfway across the world.

It is this sort of thing that I'm hoping to showcase on my new blog Artifactual .

I am hoping that people will contribute pictures and stories of the things they value, and in the process doument a little more of the history that they share. I tend to think of these objects as antiques, but they don't have to be. Heck, I have an entire collection of concert tickets that I've kept because they represent who I was at a specific period in time.

The Artifactual site will be officially launching at the end of January. If you have something to share, whether it is a family heirloom, or something you have kept for sentimental reasons, please contact me with a photo and description at LATELIERDELISSE AT YAHOO DOT COM.

Artifactual: A New Project

What have you held onto?

I live not far from a bunch of antique dealers and there's one guy that has two different outlets on the same stretch of road. I always find it interesting because the main shop has a lot of things from the WWII era and older, plus a lot of old books and records, it reminds me of my grandparents on my mother's side. The annex has more of the stuff that is newer, 50s and 60s mostly. It is far more kitchy and it reminds me of my grandparents on my father's side. Every time I go into one of the shops there are always things that I think must have belonged to someone interesting. People around here live to be really old (lots in their 90s) and when you glance at the obits, you get this incredible sense of the history they must have lived through, and you wonder how much of their story is recorded anywhere and what, if anything they have left behind.

When my mom had her antique shop there was always someone who would come through and say "Oh I remember this stuff, what a shame we threw it all away!" My mother used to hate hearing that, and yet I have very little that belonged to my grandparents on either side. Most of it got pitched including a dress I would have loved to still have.

If we have learned anything from shows like Antiques Roadshow, American Pickers, and even Pawn Stars, it's that objects can have stories of their own. Growing up I loved going to antique shows and shops, and wondering what those stories might be. I was often drawn to postcards and diaries that at least gave me glimpses of the people who held them.

Less and less of our communication and record-keeping is handwritten these days. It is all digital - digital photos, typed blogs, tweets, and Facebook posts; digital music. I'm reminded of that old Crane's Stationery ad that appeared on the back of the New York Times Magazine: "When all is said and done, no one will keep your emails tied up in a ribbon under the bed." I have boxes of letters from friends up in the attic, but I probably have not sent or received a letter in over a decade.  I got to thinking about how we preserve the things that are important to us and communicate those stories to the next generation. When so much of what we make is disposable; when so many blogs and books are dedicated to getting organized and throwing stuff out - what about the stuff we keep?  

So I am starting a new project - one that I hope will be populated largely by outside contributors. I am hoping that people will contribute pictures and stories of the things they value, and in the process doument a little more of the history that they share. I tend to think of these objects as antiques, but they don't have to be. Heck, I have an entire collection of concert tickets that I've kept because they represent who I was at a specific period in time.

The Artifactual site will be officially launching in January. If you have something to share, whether it is a family heirloom, or something you have kept for sentimental reasons, please contact me with a photo and description at  LATELIERDELISSE  AT YAHOO DOT COM.

I'm looking forward to your stories.

2011 Peace on Earth Photo Challenge

Note: I'm bringing this back again because I really liked the idea and the blog is suddenly getting more attention again. Please join us!

And so this is Christmas, and what have we done, Another year over, and a new one just begun...

-John Lennon

"Happy Christmas" became one of my favorite Christmas songs the year John Lennon died, 31 years ago yesterday.

I had lost my own father earlier that year and there was something so bittersweet in Lennon's voice and his lyrics that resonated with me. In that moment when John and Yoko whisper "Happy Christmas" to each other, for a split second, you understand why they were together in the first place.

"Happy Christmas," and "Starting Over" were on the radio constantly in tribute and I never got sick of them. When I think of those days, it is the candlelight vigils from John's millions of fans that stand out in my memory; light against the darkness of his murder. No doubt, the next 24 hours will be filled with radio remembrances before we go back to talking about Christmas sales and the stress of the holidays.

I've always been a bit of a romantic about Christmas. My husband and I started dating and got engaged during the Christmas season. There's something about those old time carols and Christmas concerts that I treasure. Unlike Valentine's Day, Christmas is a holiday I can truly appreciate. On New Year's Day, there is nothing better than opening a new calendar, or starting a new journal. I love that fresh start, the promise of the possible.

But the thing about the holidays that does not get enough attention are those times of quiet after all the festivity is done. Even the traditional Nativity scene is a moment of peace after the struggle of birth and the hardship of travel. You can almost believe that war is over and there is peace on Earth.

In modern times, it might be having the tree all to yourself after the kids have gone to bed, Christmas cookies awaiting Santa's arrival, a walk in the snowy woods, children playing with their toys without fighting, or animal tracks in the backyard snow. It could be your church, empty, but still decorated in celebration of the season. It's those moments when you can breathe deeply and realize that there's no more to be done; the party's over or you've wrapped your last gift.

This holiday, I'm inviting you to pay attention to those moments, appreciate them, document them and share them with others. It will be nice to see how each of us defines peace.

Here's how it works:

1. During the week between Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve, take at least one photo of a peaceful moment or scene. Post on your own blog. Include a link back to this post.

 

2. Leave me a comment on this post or email a link to [email protected] . Please be sure to include a description of your photo to give us some background.

 

3. On New Year's Day I will include all of the links I get in a roundup post with my own Peace on Earth photo. Hopefully, a tour of them will be a wonderful, calming experience for many.

 

Peace

 

On Vacation

Off to the land of the very bad moose puns.

 

I still have a BlogHer prep post in me. If I can get wireless access up in the back beyond, you may see it before Wednesday. If not, picture me sitting on a dock, catching up on my reading, and trying not to sweat about it.

Mid-Summer

 

Summer rolls on.

In spite of the fact that I am working full-time, I do feel like I'm actually appreciating summer this year. Sure, I've only been to the beach once this year (it's a ten minute drive away), but my kids and my husband have been quite a few times. You'd think I would spend that time by myself blogging, but mostly I have been reading and gardening.

I really hate getting to the start of the school year and thinking that the Fourth of July was just yesterday and where did the whole summer go? I don't think it's going to be that way this year. It is just about the halfway point and I feel like July 4 was quite some time ago. I vaguely recall the parade ending in an ferocious downpour.

Tigger is back at the camp that he loves and I am less than thrilled with. After missing the first week because I insisted he go to baseball, he was greeted at his regular camp like some kind of returning hero. It's no wonder he loves the place. My beef with it is that they let him get away with stuff I think they shouldn't. I'm sure he sees this as freedom, but for my part it is the reason Pumpkin will never be able to attend. So far Tigger has had the nastiest case of poison ivy I've ever seen and had to be put on steroids for a few days and now he may or may not have a (third!) broken arm.

This is Olympic week at the camp. T landed on his elbow the wrong way doing the long jump. X-rays proved inconclusive so the put him in a splint and we are going to have it checked out again later this morning.

We did find a compromise for Pumpkin this year. Every summer the town recreation department runs a "playground program" for elementary aged kids at the school. Though we haven't sent him before, I felt that P had made such progress this year that he could easily handle it. It's only a half day four days a week and it is in a place with which he is very familiar and very comfortable. So even P is having a better summer than in the past.

Today I have taken the day off to go to a Red Sox game with the family. The kids are old enough now to appreciate the fact of being at the game and Piper and I are both working now so we can afford to go. This year we have tickets for two games. The next one is on Piper's birthday in September. It's one of those games that could mean a lot in terms of the team's standing, or it could mean nothing at all because the standings have pretty much been decided. I haven't been following the season as much as I have in previous years. I know they started out badly and have gotten much better since April.

This weekend we are headed up to Maine for what is becoming a near annual trip to Rangeley. We'll make a stop in NH on the way to drop off the dog at my MIL's and possibly meet my BIL's brand new baby. I'm ridiculously excited to be an aunt again. I've been so busy being a parent, most of my neices and nephews have all grown up in the meantime.

I go back to the office Wednesday for a day before leaving for the airport for BlogHer. Yes, I'm going. I'm both excited and apprehensive. That's a whole separate post.

Beyond next week though, who is to say? The rest of the summer might just fly by, and the kids will be back in school before we know it.

About that dog

Meet Dudley.

 

Doesn't he look sweet and innocent?

Don't be fooled!

At age 2, he is a TODDLER.

And here I thought I was comfortably past that period of my parenting life.

We got Dudley from a Lucky Lab Rescue after a local shelter decided we wouldn't be good doggie parents because I work during the day. Never mind that we've already had two dogs who did just fine at home by themselves, and with the babysitter coming in before the school bus, the dog's alone time would actually be less than Henry and Cassie had.

Even though the Petfinder had his location listed as Salem, MA,  which is nearby, Dudley was living in a foster home in Indiana. God bless people who can foster. I just can't imagine taking care of a dog and then having to let him leave. I'm having a hard enough thinking about him going to my Mother-in-law's for a week while we go on vacation. Anyway, nearly a month after we agreed to be his new family, Dudley came to us via a truck ride to Connecticut.  

I didn't want a puppy. We are not in a good position to be training a puppy, and so getting a dog who had some experience living in a house and understood some basic commands was probably going to be best. From the moment they handed me his leash however, I knew we were going to be in for a ride. This dog is strong. And, as an added bonus, not used to walking on a leash. However, after his, uh, pit stop, he hopped into the crate in the back of our car as if he belonged there.

Lucky Lab asked us to buy the crate for the ride. We have not really used a crate with our previous dogs. Henry came with one, but it was too small for a grown Lab. I dutifully went out and spent nearly $200 on a collapsable one that was mostly backpack fabric around a foldable aluminum frame. Once home, the dog ate through the crate within 72 hours. Thankfully, PETCO took it back in return for a large gift card with which to pay for dog food for months to come.

Now the dog hasn't really chewed anything else. He does like to move shoes around, so there is yet another creature in the house determined to keep me from finding a pair of matching shoes for myself and each child every morning. At least when we do find them, the shoes are intact. Dudley seems to know they are not food.

Side note - my sister once had a cat with a sponge fetish. He would steal sponges off the counter and hide them in odd places around the house. If you needed to wash out a dish, you might have to look under the sofa first.

When it comes to real food however, not much stops him. You can't leave anything on the counter unattended for a second. While I was looking the other way, usually to break up an argument between the boys, that dog has absconded with:

• A newly made sandwich
• A box of uncooked pasta
• The top crust of a yet to-be-baked blueberry pie
• And much more

I want to be mad at the dog, but most of the time I'm just kicking myself for having left the room and left the food there so invitingly. That dog is quick!

Apparently his foster family allowed him to think that dogs belong on the furnture. He has his own bed, but much prefers ours. Or, if there's are are people actually in the bed we will sometimes wake up to find the dog sleeping atop the trunk that sits at the foot of our bed. That can't be comfortable. In the last few days he has figured out that if he gets up on the bench in the mudroom, he is better positioned to watch for the school bus. Awww!

The challenging thing about a rescue dog, is that you often have no idea of his background before he got to his foster home. And, sometimes, I'm finding, you'd prefer not to know. Piper and I have figured out that much of Dudley's behavior is based in fear. It's why he wants to be close to the adults in the house at all times and why he barks like a hound from hell.

Um, yeah. We can't have people over anymore. Not that we had a lot of visitors in the first place, but oh, boy Dudley doesn't want anyone new in his house. Putting him upstairs while the guests come in and letting him out while they are here seems to work just fine, but if we forget that step, Dudley goes into full guard dog mode and the guests go into panic. Not. Good.

So we need to find a doggie shrink trainer who can help us with that. Because as the kids get older, they are going to want to have more friends over. The boys were quite the handful as toddlers, but they were never biters. I don't really want to have one now.

Thankfully, the vet says that at age two, he's still young enough to be trained.

After having kids, it's easy to forget that having a dog is still work. But Dudley is getting us all out walking more than we had been and it's been great having him play out in the yard with us.

He's made himself right at home.

 

Looks like Kansas out there

Except for the traffic, of course.

What you can't really tell from this photo is that it was a bright sunny day behind my car. I had sunglasses on up until this point. The difference between the blue sky and the ominous clouds ahead was so striking that I took advantage of the stiopped traffic to shoot this. About five miles up from where this picture was taken it became a blizzard major snow squall with huge, heavy, fast-moving flakes and poor visibility. By the time I got home it had pretty much stopped.

Pastiche

pas·tiche

[pa-steesh]  noun 1. a literary, musical, or artistic piece consisting wholly or chiefly of motifs or techniques borrowed from one or more sources.

2. an incongruous combination of materials, forms, motifs, etc., taken from different sources; hodgepodge.

I've taken advantage of having the week off to do some much needed housekeeping on the blog.

Although I haven't had much time for writing, I have really been thinking a lot about what I wanted to do with @ Home in the World.  I started writing as a way to capture some of the stories from our adventures adopting two Russian boys. Overly optimistic that we'd be able to do more than just armchair traveling even after we became parents, I gave it the subtitle "International Adoption and Other Travels."

For various reasons, we haven't been able to do much travelling and the boys are getting to be the age when many blogging parents start to talk about their stories becoming their own. They have been with us nearly 8 and 6 years and most of the Russia stories have been told. Certainly there's more to tell about our experiences as a special needs family, something we're really just starting to get a handle on, but in a lot of ways this blog has been more about my (long) adjustment to parenthood.

Personally, and professionally, I'm in a pretty good place. As a parent, I'm in that respite place before adolescence. There's still quite a bit of road ahead, but this might be the section that is better paved, and less hilly.

Writing is the only thing that is really suffering right now. I've wanted to be a writer since I was in the fifth grade, but it has always been last on the list. With so much going on right now, it's really a matter of finding a topic that I'm excited enough to spend the time and energy on.

Looking back, I really feel like I did some of my better writing when taking on social perceptions of motherhood and parenting, politics, and in other venues, education. I'm going to try to get back to that, as time allows. I have certainly written about adoption, but it as been mostly about our experiences and only occasionally on the politics surrounding the topic, as I find myself too often at odds with people's notions of what should be offensive to me.

During the vacation week, I spent some time going through my blog rolls, updating sites that have changed names or addresses, and (sadly) dropping those who have stopped publishing altogether. There were a lot of changes to make.

For a time, I saw blogging as a way to move from well-received posts on a local message board, to some venue with a broader audience. That didn't happen, largely because I never really struck while the blogging iron was hot. From the looks of things, it has not only cooled considerably, but formed into a gate that's rather hard to get open -- just like traditional publishing.

The fact that the Photo Challenge went nowhere really told me something. It was something I pretty much already knew given that sites with much greater popularity have ceased publishing recently.

Still, I wouldn't have put so much work into this page over the break if I didn't want to continue to do something with it. The trick now is to make the time to write.

Peace on Earth Photo Challenge

 And so this is Christmas, and what have we done, Another year over, and a new one just begun...

-John Lennon

"Happy Christmas" became one of my favorite Christmas songs the year John Lennon died, 30 years ago today.

I had lost my own father earlier that year and there was something so bittersweet in Lennon's voice and his lyrics that resonated with me. In that moment when John and Yoko whisper "Happy Christmas" to each other, for a split second, you understand why they were together in the first place.

 "Happy Christmas," and "Starting Over" were on the radio constantly in tribute and I never got sick of them. When I think of those days, it is the candlelight vigils from John's millions of fans that stand out in my memory; light against the darkness of his murder. No doubt, the next 24 hours will be filled with radio remembrances before we go back to talking about Christmas sales and the stress of the holidays.

I've always been a bit of a romantic about Christmas. My husband and I started dating and got engaged during the Christmas season. There's something about those old time carols and Christmas concerts that I treasure. Unlike Valentine's Day, Christmas is a holiday I can truly appreciate. On New Year's Day, there is nothing better than opening a new calendar, or starting a new journal. I love that fresh start, the promise of the possible.

But the thing about the holidays that does not get enough attention are those times of quiet after all the festivity is done. Even the traditional Nativity scene is a moment of peace after the struggle of birth and the hardship of travel.  You can almost believe that war is over and there is peace on Earth.

In modern times, it might be having the tree all to yourself after the kids have gone to bed, Christmas cookies awaiting Santa's arrival, a walk in the snowy woods, children playing with their toys without fighting,  or animal tracks in the backyard snow. It could be your church, empty, but still decorated in celebration of the season. It's those moments when you can breathe deeply and realize that there's no more to be done; the party's over or you've wrapped your last gift.

This holiday, I'm inviting you to pay attention to those moments, appreciate them, document them and share them with others. It will be nice to see how each of us defines peace.

Here's how it works:

1. During the week between Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve, take at least one photo of a peaceful moment or scene. Post on your own blog. Include a link back to this post.
2. Leave me a comment on this post or email a link to [email protected] . Please be sure to include a description of your photo to give us some background.
3. On New Year's Day I will include all of the links I get in a roundup post with my own Peace on Earth photo. Hopefully, a tour of them will be a wonderful, calming experience for many.

 Peace

 

Made my Friday

OK, I know it's a marketing thing, but having Jerry Remy follow me on Twitter made my day!

 

Now, is Tim Wakefield on Twitter?