Catching Up

My knitting hiatus has gone on long enough.

Dear readers I have been knitting and crocheting (albeit not as often as I wish I could) so let me update you.

I finally finished the mint green baby blanket. Who knew that when I started it over two years ago it would actually go to my own baby boy??

Baby Pi, 3 months old!

Speaking of baby boy, I've done some more knitting for him:

I finished this hat exactly two weeks before he was born. A rolled-brim knot-top cap in Yankees colors, improvised from this Baby Berry Hat pattern. It was huge on him when he was newborn:

Baby Pi, four weeks old!

But just last Sunday it was cold enough for a knit cap, and it fit just right:

Baby Pi, 20 weeks old!

That look says, "Mom, it's bad enough you took me out to Target at 8:30pm on a Sunday night. Do you have to take pictures, too?" Cheeky little devil.

The morning of the day I went into labor, I cast on for a Summer Knit-Along:

Unfortunately, those stitches stayed exactly where they were and, much to my chagrin, didn't decide to knit themselves into the WendyKnits Summer Mystery Shawl 2013 KAL.

So the shawl pattern proved too complicated for my post-baby brain to handle. However, I found a nice simple baby sweater to work up for Baby Pi:

It's Baby Sophisticate by Linden Down. Seamless top-down knits are my new favorites. Seamless top-down baby knits in particular, because they work up so quickly.

Maternity leave didn't go as "planned." I had such aspirations for 16 weeks home from work. I was going to read all of these:

A Song of Ice and Fire series by George R. R. Martin

I was going to write more. I was going to knit every day and finish project after project. 

I didn't understand what it would mean to me to have a baby. Days bled into one another. At the beginning, life happened in increments of two hours. Baby napped, I napped. When he was awake, he was eating or I was reading to him, singing to him, playing with him. And repeat.

Knowing I had only 16 weeks, everything else sort of melted away into the background. I wanted to soak up every moment I could, watching and cuddling my newborn. This little poem excerpt said it about right:

The cleaning and scrubbing will wait till tomorrow,
For children grow up, as I’ve learned to my sorrow.
So quiet down, cobwebs. Dust go to sleep.
I’m rocking my baby and babies don’t keep.

from "Song for a Fifth Child" by Ruth Hulburt Hamilton

After those first few weeks, when he napped, I had to clean the bottles, do dishes, make food and eat, run errands. Some days, success meant just getting myself showered and dressed. Other days, I got us both ready and out the door to visit friends and family. "Extra time" meant I could catch up on laundry or cleaning.

Well, I didn't exactly do nothing from my list, just considerably less than I thought I would. In four months, I got about halfway through A Game of Thrones. I also started another baby blanket:

It's just a simple basketweave pattern I improvised.

There it is, we're up to date! What have you been up to?

Mrs. Pi

Penalty: Illegal Substitution

Being a working mother is an exercise in finding a suitable replacement for each other, my son and me, in our lives. 

I leave for work when he and Mr. Pi are still sleeping. Between the time Mr. Pi leaves for work and the time I come home, we pay a woman to come stay with the baby. 

We pay her. For the privilege of feeding him, rocking him, playing with him, singing to him, reading to him, and comforting him. Being a part of the (undeniably) most formative moments of his life. The time in his life when, day to day, hour to hour, he is rapidly changing. Every single moment that passes he has learned something about life, and it has irreversibly shaped the person that he is becoming.

When I get home, he is happy and I know that he is loved every second of the day. But he smells like her and it reminds me that for 10 hours of his life, I wasn't there.

During those hours at work, three times a day, I leave my desk, ride the elevator down to the lactation room, and use a machine to extract my son's food from my body. Food that is perfectly designed to provide everything he needs: calories, immune defense, even down to the right balance of pH and bacteria in his gut.

This machine doesn't provide the cues my body needs to start producing this food. I use props to trick my body into thinking that my son is there with me. I have a set of clothes that smells like him. I look at photos and videos of him on my phone.

Even still, because this machine is an imperfect substitute for my son, my milk supply has diminished so that I must replace the milk missing from his diet with formula. The container of formula reads, "Breastmilk is best."

I freeze my milk so that it can be heated and put into an artificial substitute for the part of me that was perfectly designed to provide him this nutrition. So perfect, in fact, that after nursing, he doesn't need to be burped. If he isn't burped after a bottle-feeding, a few hours later he suffers the pain and discomfort of trapped air in his belly.

I carried my son for 36 weeks and 6 days. He was with me every moment of every day. I determined what went into his body, the sounds he heard, the motion he felt. When he was born, I got 16 weeks to continue that constant care and provide for his every need, every hour of every day. In this day and age, I am lucky to have gotten over a year of continuous time with my son.

Now, three weeks in to my return to work, I realize that as much as he has needed me, I needed him. Most days it takes all the willpower I have to kiss him goodbye and pull myself away from his crib. Leaving him feels like the most unnatural thing in the world. Like each morning I sever a limb from my body.

The near-cliched words of Elizabeth Stone lose none of their potency: "Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body."

Mrs. Pi

There Must Be More

"This is another reason why I don't like proper novels, 

because they are lies about things which didn't happen and 

they make me feel shaky and scared.

And this is why everything I have written here is true.” 

― Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Easter is my favorite holiday. I open with this statement in the hopes that somehow later on you will remember I said this and my assignment of preference will invoke some sort of sentiment: pity, nostalgia, sympathy.

Let me start over: It began innocently. My newsfeed trended implications of wily nocturnal activity: "Easter morning is going to be great!" "Baskets are all set!" "The Easter Bunny has visited <insert address here>"

And I smiled at each, interpreting these excited blips: that the parents I know, like me, believe there is value in inserting a little magic and wonder into the lives of their young ones. Encouraging imagination, prolonging the inevitable fall to realism and the stark, cold honesty that is Life.

That warm feeling transitioned smoothly to an old familiar tension, the war of my dichotomous mind.  Where is the line between fantasy and fallacy? Can I placate my conscience with the justification that "it's all in good fun" or "a child's joy is worth bending the rules a little"?  Is there such thing as a little white lie?

And this year, the negative side of my internal debate tipped the scale, mostly because of what happened the next day.  What started as innocent innuendos of spritely mischief morphed into grotesque hyperbole: someone fed the Gremlins. Suddenly my newsfeed was now flooded with photos depicting "this year's haul": piles of games and toys, surrounding bushels called "Easter Baskets". One mother even set her children's "piles" up near the fireplace, quipping about the Easter Bunny coming down the chimney like Santa Claus.

A bad tree cannot bear good fruit.

Let me rewind to my childhood Easter memories to give you some context into my struggle.

Yes, we believed in the Easter Bunny, and I bear no ill will about it. My discovery of the truth wasn't scarring or jarring. I enjoyed the facade as long as it lasted, and still look back fondly on those Easter mornings.

You could say that when I was young, I was a dreamer.  I absorbed stories of fiction and fantasy like plants absorb sunlight.  I often played alone, making up detailed adventures with unicorns and dragons and fairies. Lying upside-down on the couch, I created an alternate universe where we lived in an upside-down version of our house, and you could get to magical places unreachable while your feet were on the ground.

So that's how Easter began for me: it was a day when the rest of the world affirmed my belief in magic.  That, and it was an excuse to get a beautiful frilly new dress, go visit my grandparents, and search for Easter eggs.  Easter eggs were a particular favorite - truth be told, they still are.  The artist in me sees a unique outlet only available in a small window each year, through which I can work in a medium as quirky as my Magnadoodle, one which requires a similar minimal level of skill to produce a pretty decent product, with seemingly endless possibilities.

But I digress. Why could I say I preferred Easter over other holidays, such as Christmas?  Easter was usually less stressful: Christmas always came with an undertone of financial worry in our house. The Easter relaxation, however, was tangible: the timeline was less harried, everyone was in a good mood (no dashed hopes or disappointments) and it was all usually punctuated with warm weather, fragrant flowers, and the promise of Spring.

When I got older and we started going to church, Easter became something different.  No, not different, but something more.  Because hey, I still enjoyed the childhood traditions.  Along with that happiness, and over time dwarfing it, was the joy of celebrating the Resurrection.

As an adult, I find sanctity in the ritual of holiday observance and tradition.  I guess I would equate it to the somber meditation of a monk's refrain or the repetition of a liturgy. I find peace, balance, sort of a recentering in the steady, predictable rhythm of the calendar.  The celebration of Palm Sunday deteriorates into the pale sorrow of Good Friday, but is then rebuilt into a purer, kinetic joy on Easter morning.  There is no other song on no other day which can evoke the same tingling elation as the strong, resounding organ in "Christ the Lord is Risen Today" on Easter morning.

I have many Christian friends who are cynical about holidays, sarcastically alluding to the Pagan origins, or remarking that Christians should celebrate these events every Sunday, or daily, not just once a year.  I don't necessarily disagree with their criticisms.  But I still love holidays, and most everything that comes with them, religious or secular, profound or superficial. Special dishes reserved only for that particular celebration. Reunion of family and ignition of a kindred spirit. While I do not worship nature, the arrival of Spring is also indivisible from my joy of Easter morning.

I alluded to the commercialization of Easter. Oddly, I feel a similar aversion to the inverse effect.  The complete and sanctimonious erasure of the secular, the relabeling as "Resurrection Sunday", the rallying cry "Jesus Is The Reason for the Season". While I can respect and echo the concern that the Event Fundamental to My Faith be overshadowed or sullied, I'm so fond of the secular tradition that I just can't annihilate it altogether. And I bristle at the implication that this makes me any less of a Good Christian.  

So I suppose I'm a walking contradiction.

But is the whole celebration a limited set, with complete Religious Tradition and Secular Materialism as the upper and lower bounds?  Am I deluding myself to believe that I can, clear-conscience, maintain a reasonable blend and balance somewhere inbetween?  As if the ends of the spectrum were rather colors in a palette, that I could blend and balance to create something more beautiful than the two apart?

As I observe my favorite holiday being overrun with Bigger and More Stuff - going the way of Christmas - I wonder if I should reassess my plans to feed my son the same lies I was fed.  Because, regardless of how I justify it to myself, they ARE in fact, lies.  Or is "lie" just word-play, semantics?  Should I also discard anything that isn't pure, cold fact?  The stories and imaginations of my youth?  

"Tell me one last thing," said Harry, "Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?"
"Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?"

Mrs. Pi

Food. Glorious Food.

"But there's nothing to stop us from getting a thrill

When we all close our eyes and imagine...

Food, glorious food!

Hot sausage and mustard!"

~Oliver! Soundtrack

You know the (now-cliche) question: if money weren't an object, what would you do with your life? My answer changes fairly often, but this week, I'd be a Professional Foodie.

Mr. Pi and I are taking an adventure to Las Vegas next week. A last hoorah adult vacation before baby arrives!  

Mr. Pi isn't what you'd call a "planner" ... which works in my favor because that means I get creative license with our itinerary. No, really! He's an ISTJ - he likes the execution part of the plan, not the planning. I don't want to brag, but I knew that about him before he told me. I'm a believer in the MBTI.

It may be the pregnancy. I'll admit that's probably part of it. But I have found myself planning this trip around food. It's been one of my hobbies recently: researching and reading restaurant reviews. 

And ok, so I have something of a unique palate.

I suppose you could define "unique palate" in a number of different ways. There's the kind of unique palate that drives you to pick buffalo wing sauce as your condiment of choice for mac & cheese. Yep, I've got that one. But I've also got the type of unique palate that makes me crave a variety of international cuisine.

It's not enough to tell you about it; I need to show you. Here's my list of must-visit restaurants while we're in Vegas:

1. Tverskaya Russian Restaurant

It's off the Strip, but from what I can tell it'll be worth the short walk and $2 public transit ride.  

For some reason I have been craving borscht ... pretty much my whole life. I haven't had it since 4th grade.  I was in the "gifted and talented" program called "Project Explore" and we were doing a unit on the USSR (boy, am I dating myself there). We made Ukrainian pysanky, we learned a little Russian (of which I retained one phrase: do svidanya - 'until we meet again'), we did calisthenics, we memorized a dance to the tune of Korobeiniki (also known as the Tetris Theme Song). And we put on a Russian Night for our parents, serving up borscht, and beef stroganoff.

Somehow my 9 year-old self latched on to that cold beet soup and never let go. I'm anxious to try it here. I guess I just have a taste for Eastern European food. I eat pickled herring out of the jar (it's the fish with the highest omega-3, by the way). Sour cream is one of my favorite condiments. Anything soaked in vinegar is better. Food with cabbage, mushrooms, potatoes, onions - yes. And I'm absolutely dying to try caviar. I'll have to look that one up on the list of prohibited pregnancy foods...since I know a Russian vodka tasting flight isn't possible (another item on my "just gotta try this one day" list).

2. Three Village Restaurant

I desperately want to try this place for a few reasons: 
- It's a Chinese restaurant IN Chinatown. Sure, this isn't San Fran Chinatown or New York Chinatown, but it's much better than Hartford Chinatown (non-existent).
- One reviewer said you probably want to go with a Chinese friend, since the staff doesn't speak much English. I'm not intimidated because there's always the tried-and-true "point-to-order" method. The language barrier just tells me it's authentic. Which means it's got to be good.
- This is not your General Tso's Chicken Chinese food. This is Soup Dumplings. Beef roll. Hot & sour soup. Triple YUMMMM. Can't WAIT.

3. Mon Ami Gabi

I've confessed before that I'm a francophile: I love all things French. This restaurant looks like it will soothe my French cravings, it has great ratings on yelp, and is reasonably priced (not easy to find on the Strip).

Another item on my "just gotta try this one day" list is escargots. And fois gras - although I don't expect I will actually like it, but I just want to say I've tried it. Yes, I'm going to share my tastings with Mr. Pi - he's as adventurous as I am. He is willing to try anything at least once. I love that about him. Some of our favorite dishes started with a "Hmm that looks different; we should try it."

I fully anticipate that I will order a croque monsieur (no croque madame for me - only fully cooked eggs for this pregnant lady!), but if we are able, I'd like to go twice to try the ham & cheese crepes (gruyere - mmm) or maybe steak-frites. And then there's dessert ... bananas foster crepes (wow), creme brulee (a particular favorite of Mr. Pi's and mine - it's sort of tradition). Of course, I can't skip the French onion soup. How many times are we eating here, again?

As a bonus, the restaurant is across from the Bellagio fountains, which - if it's warm enough, and we're able to eat outside - will be tres romantique. :)

4. Pho Vietnamese Cuisine

I can't believe I've never tried this popular Vietnamese soup. This isn't the top-rated pho restaurant in Vegas, but you can't beat the location - it's right in our hotel.

Aside: One of our favorite soups is a Thai soup called Tom Yum Talay Tong. The difference between this and "regular" Tom Yum (hot and sour soup) is the seafood - everything you can imagine goes into this pot. Salmon, calamari, shrimp, scallops ... simmering together with mushrooms and onions and chili and fish sauce and lemongrass and other herbs and spices to make this incomparably delicious spicy broth. Heaven in a bowl. The only place I've had it is Thai Basil in Danielson, CT. You have to order it off-menu (we were lucky enough to memorize it before they changed their menu).

5. Bouchon Bakery

Yet another of my "just gotta try this one day" items is macarons.  Not the toasted coconut cookies, macaroons. No. Macarons - the French meringue cookies that are all the rage in chic weddings nowadays. Just take a look at the front page of Bouchon Bakery's website. Macarons, beautiful macarons. I adore any cookie that is almond-flavored, so I have high expectations. I just hope I'm not disappointed... If so, I will go back and cleanse my palate with a nice chocolate croissant.

6. Hot N Juicy Crawfish

I've never had crawfish, and I want to try it ... ok, I admit it. I was drawn to this place from the moment I saw it on Adam Richman's Man vs. Food. Something about getting my hands dirty breaking and devouring fresh seafood drenched in special spicy sauce, just appeals to me.

And finally, the Piece de Resistance, the restaurant I picked for our Valentine's Day dinner:

7. Mastro's Ocean Club

Sometimes you just need a really fantastic steak or lobster. And King Crab Black Truffle Gnocchi. Whhaaatttt? Yes, I admit it: I made this a must-eat restaurant because of a side. I need to try this King Crab Black Truffle Gnocchi. My mouth waters just saying it.

I'm also curious to try the warm butter cake that everyone on yelp raves about. I'm not a cake person, you know that about me. But I'm intrigued.

Alright, I'm not thrilled that the restaurant is in the middle of a mall. A fancy mall, but ... a mall. I'm hoping that the ambiance inside takes us away from reality. Especially since this is our big splurge for the week. $$$$

So that's a sampling of what is calling to me. I still need to decide on a good (authentic - not Fusion - this looks promising) Mexican option. Conspicuously missing: Japanese. Not being able to eat sushi, I just will NOT torture myself that way.

And for Mr. Pi: Buffets. As many as we can sample. He loves seafood en masse, and I've heard the buffets are high quality. And hey, I might be able to try something funky, like bone marrow.

I gotta tell you, Connecticut just doesn't satisfy my appetite. This from the girl who had boxed macaroni and cheese for dinner tonight. But I like to think that if I had authentic, or even near-authentic, international options in my neighborhood, I'd eat a lot less processed cheese product!

What is your favorite unique item from international (or local) cuisine?

Mrs. Pi

P.S. The picture from the beginning of this post is the Fresh Maine Lobster Knuckle Sandwich at The Whip Bar & Grill in Stowe, VT. Mr. Pi and I visited the area over Thanksgiving last year. This was the kind of sandwich that would feature in my own personal version of heaven.

P.P.S. As I was typing this, I was watching Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives. I might have added Bachi Burger to the list of must-visits. Chili cheese fries in which one of the ingredients is chocolate? Yes, please.