Apparently summer does exist in the Pacific Northwest and it sneaks up on you like a made-for-tv-movie about east coast prep school students having the summer of their lives before their lives really begin. (Only no one died and nothing was lost that couldn’t be found again under a sandy picnic blanket).
This was Henric’s birthday. And I think it was kind of the best day ever.
Since we moved out of downtown Seattle we’re much closer to Anabelle’s school, which is super nice but also means she doesn’t always fall asleep in the car by the time we get home so I’ve taken to driving circles around our neighborhood on her school days to lull her to sleep. If she falls asleep in the car, she’s a great transferor and I get a good solid two hour nap out of her. If she doesn’t fall asleep in the car there’s a 90% chance we’re not taking a nap and that the afternoon’s going to be hell. I’m doing a lot of driving around the neighborhood right now.
Since coming to Seattle, I’ve been on a search for the Fremont Troll. I knew it lived under the Aurora Bridge and had to be close by but somehow I couldn’t seem to find it (and also never thought to just look it up online). Last week on one of our sleep-inducing drives I finally noticed a street near the bridge called “Troll Avenue” and something clicked. A hard right turn later, I’d finally found the troll and Anabelle was asleep.
That night during storytime, I told her a story about a troll that lives under a bridge with a magical glass eye that when you look into you can see for millions of miles and told her that tomorrow we were going to go find the troll on our morning run. She was super stoked and kept asking during the run the next morning where the magical troll was and when we were going to get there. Insert photo one from the stroller ride – her super excited asking when we’ll get there. Once we got to the troll, though, and she realized it’s massiveness, she was not prepared to leave the stroller (series 2 – her pointing, worriedly at the troll).
I did get her to calm down long enough to take a photo of me in front of the troll from the safe confines of her stroller (final picture) but shortly after she took it, a large truck drove by, startling her and accelerating our exit with her accompanying screams of terror. (Side note – my three-year-old’s learning to master the SLR. Kind of awesome.)
Apparently gazing into the magical eye of a troll is still a couple of years away. I was excited, though.
For Anabelle’s second birthday, Henric built a sandbox. I was not a fan. They just track dirt into the house and make kids messy. It had a really heavy lid that was almost impossible for me to lift and in the Texas heat, the exertion of just opening the thing was often too much for me to even contemplate. Most times when she asked to play in it, I said no unless it was bath day and I was just feeling awesome. Not my proudest parenting moments.
When we decided the sandbox wouldn’t be making the migration to Seattle with us, I was only heart-broken in the way I’m heart-broken about having to give up anything homemade, not heart-broken at the thought of losing all that dirt that was going to eventually end up in my house anyways. We dumped all the sand in the yard and packed the sandbox into a friend’s SUV for dirty adventures at someone else’s house.
For Anabelle’s third birthday, all she wanted was a birthday party. We’ve been making the rounds at all the spring birthday parties and she decided a birthday party is something that belongs with a birthday and I decided to stop saying no to everything just because and to start researching bounce houses and petting zoos. After several days of research and phone calls I established a couple of things: 1.) bounce houses are really large. Too large for our backyard. 2.) There is a mini-bounce/slide combo inflatable that will fit in our backyard but it costs three times the price of a normal bounce house – apparently the wealthier you are, the smaller your backyard. 3.) My child at a petting zoo terrifies animals and takes animal cruelty to a new level and I don’t want all that rabbit crap in my backyard. 4.) For $50 I can build a sandbox and buy a bubble machine and call this party done.
To make it feel more like a mother-daughter project, Anabelle and I took a trip to Home Depot together. We bought a raised-bed garden frame, weed barrier, and 11 bags of play sand. They each weighed 50 pounds and I loaded and unloaded them myself. I reference these trips as cross-training on my myfitnesspal app. When we got home we located a shady spot in the yard and got started on what I anticipated to be a 30 minute to an hour afternoon project.
Many people don’t realize this but Seattle is one big rolling hill and so everything has a slope. The Melissa-Goss-Guide-to-Getting-Things-Done would have fully ignored this slope and just smacked the frame down and filled it with sand but somewhere in this eleven year relationship with the Jentz-School-of-Anal-Retentive-Building, I’ve been baptized in the waters of the spirit level and so this project turned out to be much more complicated than anticipated.
So three and a half hours later, Anabelle was finally making sand angels and I was beginning to vacuum the hallway.
Last year I rang in thirty with a super group of girl friends and an over-indulgent night on the town that left me waking up in bed trying to remember how I got there because I distinctly remembered deciding to just lay down on the bathroom floor and drown in my celebratory retching. It was an awesome evening. Maybe my best birthday ever. The birth of my thirties. A year later, it’s time again for that annual reflection on life – where we are, where we’ve been, and how far we’ve come in the last year.
Physically, I’ve come 2,143 miles to a much more temperate climate, run multiple half marathons and my first (maybe last?) full marathon, and I officially weigh 15 pounds less than I did last year. (Yay!) (For the record, that puts me over 50 pounds under my pre-pregnancy weight – I would officially like to say “in-your-face” and “how do you like them jeans” to Dr. Keller who, four years ago, when I went in for a pre-pregnancy consultation told me that if I wanted to lose weight I needed to do it before having a child because it’s impossible to lose weight after having a child.)
Financially, I went from being a woman of independent means who got dressed in real clothes everyday to being dependent on my husband for all my financial wants and spending most my time in running clothes when I’m not spending an excessive amount of time blow drying my hair on the low setting or trying to master my José Eber Pro Series Curling Wand (a much more difficult task than you can even come close to imagining. This thing was not made to self-operate. I’m about to go all Downton Abbey in here and get someone to come in before dinner every day to do my hair and tie my corset). (Side note – can we all discuss my new addiction to this show later?).
Emotionally, it’s been an exciting year full of new beginnings and new starts and since I was starting to get that reoccurring rumbling need for big changes anyways, all these new adventures have been a good directional cure and should sate me at least another five years.
It’s been a good thirty but I’m super excited about all that thirty-one is about to bring and the places we will go. And that I’ll be going to them on my awesome new road bike that my guilt-ridden husband purchased me after forgetting my birthday!
(So, he didn’t completely forget – he remembered the afternoon before.)
In the spirit of new traditions, we woke up super early on Tuesday morning to ring in the month of May with the Sound & Fury morris dancers. What are morris dancers? Yea, I don’t really know. I did just look it up in Wikipedia, though, and supposedly morris dance is a form of English folk dance usually accompanied by music. The point is, I saw an opportunity to make my family get up before sunrise, jog a half a mile down a hill that would later have to be climbed back up, and stand in the cold along the Lake Union waterfront for over an hour watching the city skyline lighten as a wide array of children, adults and senior citizens sang songs welcoming the warmth of summer to come and danced dances full of waving scarves and the clack of wooden swords. And it was kind of awesome in my opinion.
Henric, though, is not a morning person. When we first started dating, he once asked me to not speak to him in the mornings until he had made a cup of coffee and smoked a cigarette. I, on the other hand, am the ultimate morning person. I think mornings are awesome and should be greeted each day by springing out of bed and doing something really active right away – like running or starting a fence building project. Eleven years into our relationship and I haven’t really been able to convert him into a morning person. The whole child thing has probably done more than I ever did. She wakes us up every morning before the alarm goes off. I think she’s going to carry on my good morning genes, so I was super surprised when I suggested this whole morris-dance-sunrise-thing and Henric agreed to it and then actually got up and went.
If it had been a tad warmer it would have been a lot more enjoyable but even so, the enthusiasm and vigor with which all the participants danced and sang and the lack of rain made it a really great start to the day and the month of May. The champagne they passed out towards the end of the show, helped also. (Unfortunately Henric had headed back up the hill by that point so he missed it. I enjoyed a glass, though, right before I headed out for my morning run along the waterfront. Somewhere after the run, trying to get back up the hill to home, I may have regretted it – but just a little).
Inspired by the costumes of the morris dancers, it was easy to get Anabelle into her dirndl to celebrate May Day at school. They had a May pole to dance around and lots of little kids in dirndls and lederhosen. Kind of adorable. I thought Halloween was the last time we’d be able to squeeze into the Jentz family dirndl but looks like we’re getting leaner with our growth. She had great fun but her teacher said she was markedly tired all day. Guess 5:30am is a bit too early for even her. I felt awesome, though, so maybe there are some Jentz genes in her too.
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