I don't have anything too earth-shattering to report lately. Since my last post (as most people know) we bought a cute little house in Ferndale. We've spent the better part of the last two months on our sweet little abode. I haven't been the most hands-on mother this summer. I'm sure Lilah's watched more than one movie or show a day some days, and we ate out way more than we normally do. I let guilt eat at me at first, before realizing how huge it was that we were trying to make our first family home together. It took sacrifices from everyone. Lilah didn't get as much playtime with us. I didn't get relaxing evenings to knit and watch Downton Abbey reruns. Dano didn't get quiet hours to write. There was always one more wall to paint, one more light fixture to put up, one more surface to caulk.
Slowly it's coming together. Our bedroom still isn't painted because this wretched heat wave set in while the beadboard in the bathroom was only half done and our bedroom was still in the baby planning stages of choosing colors (peacock blue). One major revelation during this time was the discovery and inevitable renouncement of Pinterest. Some girls at work turned me on to the site. During the long weeks of waiting and hoping during the home-buying process, I would spend long hours at night on Pinterest, keeping my anxieties at bay by designing the perfect space using photos I had of the home and pins I found. I was super organized, one board for each room of the house. I couldn't wait to get keys. I had grand fantasies of a house that looked like it had been featured on an episode of Extreme Home Makeover. Getting into the house was another story entirely.
I went pin by pin, pulling up things I'd pinned for later, never having really looked too closely at them. Just pinning and moving on to more domestic porn. Slowly I found that, pin by pin, none of them were working out the way I wanted. Dano and I painted and detailed the bones of the house from waking to sleeping between jobs. Barely resting, hardly eating some days. When the time came to activate a pin into reality, pin by pin they failed me. The beautiful birch wall pin I'd swooned over? One click took me to a site where I could purchase the decals for over 70 dollars a tree. The trees you see on my wall now were angrily painted on by hand, me cursing Pinterest all the while. The rolling hills and jaunty tree in Lilah's room - same story. No instructions, no tips for the actual execution. Just a pin and hundreds of comments about how adorable the picture was. I was left to wing it, and while I have quite the eye for the details of life, I am no artist. At times, the process was so frustrating to me I would just sit down and cry. Lilah would cry next to me (out of sympathy, or maybe just jealousy someone else was getting attention), and Dano would about lose his damn mind calming the two of us down (he usually just went out and bought us ice cream or chocolate. Wise man). The pegboard wall I'd fallen in love with had no instructions for putting it up, so Dano had to buy it, build and mount a frame for it, and spend almost a week finding the right hooks for the thing. My beautiful Pinterest kitchen fell into ruin and from the proverbial ashes rose my adorable kitchen in its place. The bathroom pins proved to be a disaster as well. None of the pins worked for the space and the ones that did didn't have instructions. We took to winging it. I would go to work with plans for a certain room for the evening and come home to find that Dano had worked off a different vision and finished the room another way entirely. The plastic rain-gutter bookshelves for Lilah's bedroom were supposed to be one of the easiest projects on my list. 4 days of effort and frustration had them mounted to the wall, but so flimsy even a single book fell out of them as soon as it was placed inside. I was heartbroken but I took them down and chose a sturdy blue bookcase that used to belong to Uncle Max instead. While not as adorable as books in a rain-gutter, much more practical and easy to bring to fruition.
All our mistakes and modifications made 700 Farmdale into our home. Our sweet little Bird's Nest isn't a Pinterest House or an Extreme Home Makeover House. It's ours. I can point out every flaw, but with the same affection I'd point out a freckle on Lilah's cheek. The flaws ended up making the home. I'm still bitter with Pinterest. American mothers have enough competition and judgement to deal with these days. Breast or bottle fed? Natural childbirth or C-section? Organic or not? Homemade or takeout? Whose kid learned their letters and numbers the fastest? Tiger parenting or attachment? Cry it out or not? Maybe it's like this everywhere, but anywhere I go as a mother, I feel the eyes of the other mothers judging me. I'm winging it the best I know how, but raising Lilah has been exactly like every Pinterest fail I've tried. What makes sense on paper proves to be wildly ineffective in practice. I never anticipated loving a little girl so much who would sit on my lap for half an hour stroking my cheek and telling me how happy she was that I was her mom, and how she thought I was wonderful. That same child says things like, "I'll always be your child, you know," and helps me pick herbs from outside for dinner. She asks for triple helpings of baba ghanoush. She might be color blind from the lack of interest she's shown in flashcards. She quotes entire monologues from books or films; she knows the Doctor Who canon by heart and puts off bedtime for an hour asking me how a tesseract works. There wasn't a book or website or parenting "style" in the world that could have prepared me for how much I'd actually love her, or how hard it would be to raise her. The house is like that too, and it just makes me love it more for all that.
