The Art in Life

Was the weather the most talked about thing where you live this week? Because it sure was here. Sun! Blue skies! Windows open! All the emotions for Spring – especially when it actually shows up in early March! This weekend I originally planned on being out of town. Plans fell through, but it means that we have a rather free weekend before us and I am pumped. We are planning on some spring picnics, walks, taxes, lazing about our house, and maybe even unpacking the last box. Yep, going to go ahead and say that last one won’t happen. Here are a couple links from around the web of the things taking up space in my brain, because unpacking them here is the next best thing to actually unpacking that box.

Just chilling in the spring gardens of choice for city dwellers, ie Trader Joe’s flower aisle.

Different looks with white dishes. We have china stored away at my parents’ house, but until we live somewhere big enough to have a china cabinet (HA.), we just dress up or down our plain white everyday dishes. Love these ideas on creating different looks with minimal extra expenditures!

The Holy Shroud of Mr. Darcy is coming to DC in August.

Icebergs will also be taking over the District this summer! I loved the beach last year, so I can’t wait for this.

Did you mamas use birth playlists – apparently that’s a thing? I am deeply skeptical, but I would totally be fine for my experience to feel like a Soul Cycle class, followed by an Enya CD on repeat. Of course, as we still haven’t purchased anything, registered at the hospital, located child care for the fall, or done any other actual preparations — maybe I should prioritize my energy.

Well obviously this had me crying.

My friend Megan just had a little boy and her gender neutral nursery and baby clothes are perfect. I’m not a fan of most of the “boy” decor or overly cheesy clothing, so I take lots of notes when Megan shares something.  I also like Grace’s boy bedroom – still simple, but fun pops of color.

Planning on using up some stuff in the fridge and cabinets by throwing this in the oven this weekend.

I’ve been reading a lot of articles lately about changing how we talk about teachers. Like this one and This one . Teachers out there- do you want sympathy, or respect? Can both exist?

I feel that it is a special sort of torture that this is the year there are finally tons of cute one-piece swimsuits… and it will probably not be my biggest beach summer. But if it was, I would be all over this one or this one or this one. Although this one might actually be kind to post-partum hips.

It is political primary season, and if you aren’t paying attention because you believe your “vote doesn’t matter”… you are wrong. At least this year. I have followed everything pretty closely, though last night I did watch the Women Tell All episode of the Bachelor while James watched the debate. Which means that one of us watched reality TV where people more or less politely voiced their grievances and the other watched reality TV wrought with uncouth behavior. I will leave you to guess which was which. And if you are confused about the crazy math that goes unto primaries, the rules that are different from every state, and how maybe math might just save us- here is the chart that keeps me straight. With the primaries being crazy enough to maybe bring about a brokered convention, and Ben confessing love to TWO WOMEN, I would say that all of us are navigating uncharted waters this spring.

Happy weekend!

I keep on thinking that eventually I will do some sort of apartment tour of our new place, but then I realize that a) no one really cares that much b) I would have to manage having it clean all at once and at a time when there was good light and c) it would really just become an ode to our dishwasher. Because DISHWASHER Y’ALL. It is a game changer. We spent the first 3.5 years or marriage in a place with no dishwasher, and approximately 4 inches of counter space, which meant that every kitchen project took a million times longer because you had to stop and wash things just to have space to get them messy again. Sometimes James and I just pause in the evenings and listen to the gentle hum of the washer doing all the work, and feel blissfully content.

It is especially beloved when we have company  over, which happens at least a couple nights a week. I love having my people gathered in my home and eating my food. We alternate hosting a weekly family dinner with my brother and his wife, open our home to our Bible Study every week, and frequently have the friends over to watch quality programming like the Bachelor. Nothing is better than covering the table with food and having people pile plates and scatter around the living room.

Last weekend we had all sorts of family in town, beyond the two brothers and one sister in law who already live here. My mom came out for the weekend, as did my sister in law’s two sisters and her (squishy infant!) niece and nephew. We spent the weekend trekking around as a posse of blended families and eating lots of the best things. There might have also been an Ikea trip in there, but I think that James at least has tried to block that out, as his idea of a perfect Saturday doesn’t exactly include an Ikea run with his pregnant wife and mother in law, who both find Ikea supremely relaxing and can wander for hours, while he wants to shove those tiny pencils in his eyes after about 5 minutes. We brunched, hit a museum, and enjoyed a nice dinner out in National Harbor, where I turned into just a little bit of a crazy demon when the restaurant canceled our reservation. What’s that, hostess? You are going to turn a hungry pregnant woman flanked with 7 other people out in the cold? Ha. TRY ME. (Forthcoming blog post: “All the times that Hannah’s overdeveloped sense of preggo injustice have led her into public altercations over minor things while James hung back in quiet shame.”)

But on Friday night, before the busy fun of Saturday, we decided to stay in for pizza night. Because pizza night is the embodiment of what family fun should be. You eat well, stress little, prepare little, and fill your people’s bellies with simple food that everyone craves. And yes, I love me some Papa John’s delivery drenched in that buttery garlic sauce like nothing else. But when we are trying to convince ourselves that pizza night isn’t a total diversion from nutrition and common sense, we love to make cast iron skillet pizza. There are lots of schools of thought on this technique, all of them ending in tasty pizza, ranging from thin crust, to deep dish. Our go-to is a thick and tasty classic pizza, bubbling from the broiler and crispy on the bottom but soft in the middle.

And the weekend is coming. So should you need a meal to feed to the people you love, here it is:

1. Heat 2 TBS olive oil in a cast iron skillet over medium heat about 8 minutes until skillet is quite hot.
2. While the skillet is still on the burner, press pizza dough into skillet, with a little more bunched around edges. We love the Trader Jo’s crust dough, but you can also be fancy and make your own. Spread with sauce and toppings. Our favorite combos are pepperoni, garlic, green pepper, and mushroom, or ham and pineapple. My brother and his wife often make a pesto, chevre, bacon, tomato one that is awesome. Sprinkle cheese over top.
3. Cook on stove top about 5-10 minutes, peeking under edge and removing when it starts to get golden. During this time, heat the broiler to high.
4. Remove from stove and broil until cheese is golden, about 5 minutes.
5. Let sit for about 10 minutes.

Then eat it alongside some salad with your favorite people, toss those plates in the dishwasher, and feel pretty happy with your existence.

Working out has never been more rewarding than it has been since finding out we were pregnant, growing bump and all.

Let me give a disclaimer. Before getting pregnant I thought that some people were good at expecting, and others were just weak whiners. HA. Now I realize that most of how “good” you are at being pregnant is a crapshoot of genetics and how your body/baby just happen to be doing. On the whole, this has been an easy pregnancy, and I have had to change very little about my daily habits, my first trimester intense aversion to nutrition not withstanding. Thus, I was able to continue working out without a problem. But if you are someone who was sick day in and day out for months, someone whose schedule didn’t allow naps each day to then have energy for runs each evening, someone who for any reason opted for months of Netflix over the gym, YOU ARE STILL A TOTAL CHAMPION. I had a couple days where I really did feel too sick to move and I was the absolute biggest baby — if I had had that for months, absolutely ZERO working out would have occurred.

Now then. Back to working out while pregnant.

I have never loved it more. And I have never been worse at it.

My once impressively long runs have trickled to shorter runs, punctuated with stints of walking, or stopping altogether if baby boy is positioned in there in such a way where running is just not comfortable. I usually manage one longer run a week of around 7 miles, and a couple short runs, but they are excruciatingly slow and include a number of stops that haven’t defined my running since my high school cross country days, when I was really just there to socialize. On the other days I walk, rocking out my audiobooks and perfecting my ever increasing waddle. I’ve stuck with doing Barre3 3-4 times a week, but I am truly the worst at that, falling my way through crescent lunges, wobbling through chair poses, and taking every last modification offered during core work. Sometimes I have been known to just lie prone on the mat, eyes shut, pretending no one can see me.

But I have never loved working out more.

Because usually, working out has a distinct goal: get skinnier. Look better. Fit into the smaller sizes. As much as I try to shake it, and as much as I have genuinely come to enjoy exercise throughout my life, there is still an objective aspect of it that cannot be divorced from my own lifelong struggle with loving this earth suit I’m living in.

But all those goals are erased when working out pregnant. My body will not be getting smaller this  year. It will balloon to the size of a small whale. Instead of abs, I will get stretch marks and flabby skin. Instead of a toned physique, I will get consistently wider and softer and saggier. There is no shaking this reality.  I won’t pretend that it is easy to accept. Even if you know that you should be having these changes, your mind still screams against them, still balks at scale numbers rising and tummies expanding. It’s how our culture has conditioned us.

Yet when I work out, I forget that. I run slower than ever and it resounds through my brain: I am strong. I am strong. I am strong. I phone it in on half the moves in barre class and I feel it in my shaking legs: I am strong. I am strong. I am strong.  I drag myself outside for a walk and every step reminds me: I am strong. I am strong. I am strong. For the first time, working out has zero to do with looking better, and everything to do with feeling better, with feeling purposeful, with feeling capable of carrying this baby. My success has no correlation with how I look or how others see me, but rather how I feel in my soul not to mention my body. It is freeing, and empowering, and all those other enthusiastic emotions that usually come from just blasting girl power songs really loudly.

I’m not delusional. I know that at 6 months in, I still have 3 months to go that will comprise way more body changes than the first 6 months combined. The runs will grow shorter, then most likely stop. The walks will grow slower, the barre classes less frequent. But however piddly my working out is becoming, I love it more than ever. It reminds me the truth that every women forgets about her body, pregnant or not, and should remember every time she exercises.

We are strong.

I am so ready for Downton Abbey to be over.

Obviously, I have stuck with it to the end, as I like completion, can’t get enough period drama in my life, and love everything that comes out of Maggie Smith’s mouth. But it has just been too much, too drama-filled, too much like a soap opera instead of a stoic British miniseries. I’ve expressed my distaste for Lady Mary before, but if Edith and Anna don’t get happy endings on Sunday, than so help  me. I will break something.

I’ve decided that the real problem is that Downton Abbey was never a book, never underwent the grueling process of authorship and publication. Thus, it just evolved at the whims of production staff and writers, giving the public what it wanted: DRAMA. And good dinner parties.

Of course, in its absence, we now have a period-drama-miniseries void to fill, and fill it we must. I’ve decided that we need to head back to the books for this, and why not mix it up? It seems like the Brits and Russians have those miniseries deals locked down, but I’m worried that we will eventually run out of Austen or Tolstoy or Gaskell.  Why not head across the pond and start plowing through the bounty of French novels just dying to be made into miniseries? Drama? They have it. Intrigue and romance? Obviously. Tragic death? Yep.

Please do, Lady Mary.

And so, today I am putting my [in process] PhD to possibly its best use ever and giving you 5 French  novels that should be made into PBS miniseries.

The Princess of Clèves, Madame de La Fayette, 1678:  Impossibly beautiful and innocent girl shows up at the dangerous and intriguing French court where everyone is in awe of her beauty. She marries a prince and her mother dies, and there is SCANDAL EVERYWHERE because ain’t no party like a French court party because at a French court party, everyone is maybe trying to have everyone else killed/exiled/married off. But oh no- she falls in love with the Duke de Nemours who is basically the hottest thing ever. Instead of giving into passion, she stifles it, confesses it to her husband, watches him die consumed in grief, and then enters a convent. Meanwhile, lots of other intrigues swirl about. For fans of those amazing miniseries that end sadly and rip out your heart, à la Daniel Deronda or He Knew he Was Right.

Letters from a Peruvian Woman, Madame de Graffigny, 1747. Zilia is a beautiful Peruvian princess who is rescued/ kidnapped (maybe ambiguous) and taken back to France. There she continues to pine for her estranged Peruvian prince (who was taken to Spain), all the while offering smarting commentary on French society. The man who rescued (abducted?) her proves kind and handsome and totally in love with her, so much so, that he reunites her with her prince who – spoiler! – turns out to be a total tool (Spanish influence and all). So she gets really sad and kind of Stockholm syndromy and whatnot and kind of falls for her French guy… but the novel ends in suspense. For fans of all those miniseries where people fall in love with people against their will, which is all of them.

Manon Lescaut, Abbé Prevost, 1731. A good young man is pursuing good and noble things when BAM: he falls in love with a prostitute. (You knew it was coming-right? If there isn’t a wayward woman, it isn’t really a French novel.) What follows is obviously a lot of pain and drama, as prostitutes do not typically make for great girlfriends. They break in and out of prison, run to and from nefarious types, have to flee to the New World where unfortunately there are more nefarious types, so they finally have to wander off into the wild… and one of them dies. But don’t take my word for it- go read it to find out which one. Or just guess- probably not hard. For fans of sweeping epics and tragedy. Or Pretty Woman.

The Red and the Black, Stendhal, 1830. Little peasant Julien Sorel decides to make something of himself, so he rises up through the ranks of society by being good looking, seductive, and being able to memorize insane chunks of text quickly. Hey, everyone has a skill. He falls for all sorts of women, notably the innocent and maternal Madame de Rênal, but finally has a tumultuous affair with Parisian it-girl Mathilde de la Mole. Madame de Rênal hears about it, tells Mathilde’s father (OH NO SHE DIDN’T), and Julien obviously has to dash back to the village to shoot her, while she’s praying at church. But don’t worry! She doesn’t die yet. She first reconciles with Julien, who is executed. Then she dies. For fans of War and Peace minus winter.

Indiana, George Sand, 1832. This is probably my single favorite French book in terms of just “fun to read.” Indiana is the beautiful and naive wife of a mean and boorish colonel, with her only friends being her dog Ophelia (and we all know how THAT ends), her servant (for whom it ends about as badly as the dog), and her cousin Ralph, who is also kind of like her brother/father figure, and would obviously be played by Benedict Cumberbatch.  She is seduced by the rakish and eloquent Raymon while Ralph just glowers in the background and the Colonel goes around yelling at people and being mean to animals. Luckily, he dies, but to Indiana’s dismay, Raymon went and married someone else so, luckily, Ralph is all “let’s go back to the island where we were children and throw ourselves off a waterfall.” But right before jumping, he turns to Indiana and spends 30 pages telling her how he has always loved her… so instead of suicide they just get married. For fans of North and South or Wives and Daughters, or other miniseries where people pine a lot and then finally get together.

Basically, French novels are an untapped miniseries market. One with lots of death and scandal and doomed love… but untapped all the same.  I wish I could just get paid to sit in a room, read good novels, and make people listen to me prattle on about the plots.

OH WAIT. That’s kind of what I’m doing in grad school-minus the fat salary that I like to imagine belongs to those with the title of “period drama miniseries idea finder.”

But until PBS gives me my dream job- what’s your favorite miniseries and/or book taht should become one?

A couple months ago I met Rachael at a wedding I was photographing and she offered to guest post over here. I was thrilled, as her writing is great, and I love passing the posting baton on to others when things get busy. She is sharing today about something I love and feel passionately about- hospitality in sub par spaces. Thanks Rachael!

Image via here, and is not the couch in question, but rather an image I loved from my new blog obsession, that one of you so kindly shared.

When my husband, Andrew, and I, first bound together our souls and wallets in the summer of 2012 and moved to a new state, we, like many who get married a year out of college, were broke. Worse, he had just started his own business, and I had no job yet, so steady paychecks were not a thing. We moved to a tiny, quirky basement apartment in the heart of Charlottesville, Virginia, which we were completely in love with.

Kindly, Andrew’s grandparents bestowed on us their old couch, of the pink and green floral variety, with uncomfortable patches of fading fabric around the bum area. We decided to cover it up with an even uglier poop colored brown slipcover, that didn’t quite fit, so flashes of neon colored floral peep out at its feet. The couch has one leg, so the others are held up by three wooden blocks that are roughly the same height. I realized early that vacuuming underneath this mammoth was not going to happen.

This couch has travelled with us to two different states, and three homes. This month, we will leave the servant’s quarters of the college mansion-turned-dorm where I work and study and buy a house of our own, and finally, it is time to get rid of this ugly brown-floral-neon couch. But, standing here in my living room, looking at the unwanted friend that has become a fixture in our homes the past three years, I feel sadder than I thought I would be to see the back of it.

The couch is given the worst of our culture’s furniture stereotypes. The couch stands for laziness: couch potato, lazy bum, bump on a log. It is on the couch where too much time is spent eating junk food and watching movies, playing video games, relishing in general un-productivity. It is always the couch where hasty teenage sex occurs, where one sleeps in exile after a bad fight.

But the couch, for us, was the place we sat two weeks after getting married, nervously balancing our dessert plates and coffee cups while entertaining our first “new” friends. It’s the place where we discussed all the taboos: religion, politics, money, with friends late into the night, until someone inevitably fell asleep on it. We’ve spilled cake on it while hosting birthday parties, chicken dip during Superbowl parties, and we’ve got a burn mark on it from a sparkler let off in the house. This is where I met with my RA staff, where I counseled college freshmen over a cup of French Press, where I wrote most of my manuscript and then critiqued it with classmates over glasses of wine. This couch has served as our guest room, our entertainment center, our table, and desk. Over 200 people have sat on it, slept on it, or spilled something on it in the 3.5 years since we’ve taken it in. This ugly couch, in many ways, has given us the biggest gift in our marriage: it has served as the center for our community.

I think that for students, hospitality can be something we think we’ll get to later in life. It’s something that will happen when we have more time, more space, more money; when we’re not living in dorms with filmy white paint, when we’re not scrambling to meet a deadline, when we have more to offer than an ugly brown couch.

But it is the ugly brown couch that has taught me so much about what true hospitality is.

If we learn to open our homes when the walls and furniture are packed in tight around us, how much more will we open them when we have adequate square footage? If we learn to serve generously our food cooked on a mini range while balancing the plates in our hands as extra countertop space, how many more will we be able to feed when we have full kitchens and real countertops? It is at the time when we have the least to give that we learn what it is to be giving, and it is in the years when we are transient,  portable, and second-hand that we realize our hearts will always be the largest, most permanent place we can offer.

This horrible couch was the place Andrew’s grandfather sat every morning, legs crossed and morning newspaper in hand, waiting for his grandchildren to come crashing through the door. This is the place the five-year-old version of my husband learned to read, talked about model trains, played thumb-war and patty-cake. This couch is the place where one of the most important men in his life gave him the time and attention he needed—this is one of the earliest places he knew that he was loved.

So as I sit here deciding between different colors of blinds and rug patterns, I am reminded that our lives are far more meaningful, more powerful, than the lifeless things we so often fill them with. Sometimes, all it takes to grow the deepest friendships and most meaningful memories is an open heart and an ugly brown couch.

This weekend we are planning on a low key Valentine’s Day of fast food burgers and the new Zoolander movie, as I love Zoolander more than any human alive. We might unpack the couple remaining boxes strewn around our new place…but we probably won’t. Instead, we will probably marvel at our new space and drink warm drinks on the couch since it promises to be bitterly cold.

Now then. Some more interesting things around the internet.

We have upstairs neighbors for the first time … and let’s just say that this video rings true.

This week marks 8 years since James asked me on our first date in college. I remember informing some friends that I would definitely go, since we had been doing the pining thing for awhile, but I couldn’t see myself marrying him or anything. And here we are, married and having a baby, and I read this article and just sat and bawled for awhile.

“After a decade of marriage, if things go well, you don’t need any more proof. What you have instead — and what I would argue is the most deeply romantic thing of all — is this palpable, reassuring sense that it’s okay to be a human being. Because until you feel absolutely sure that you won’t eventually be abandoned, it’s maybe not 100 percent clear that any other human mortal can tolerate another human mortal. The smells. The sounds. The repetitive fixations on the same dumb shit, over and over. Even as you develop a kind of a resigned glaze of oh, this again in, say, marital years one through five, you also feel faintly unnerved by your own terrible mortal humanness.”

Finally got these shoes that I have crushed on for years and they are pretty swell. Of course, then I learned that sometimes your feet grow during pregnancy and do not return to normal afterwards, so now I am appropriately stressed.

As I said yesterday, we have mostly kinda failed at this round of Whole30, meaning some total transgressions, and some paleo cooking that doesn’t count but is still healthy-ish. In the process, we discovered the absolute best paleo cookies I have ever put in my mouth. Even James had to confess that they weren’t just “healthy good, but actual good.” Make them now – and go ahead and add 2 TBS coconut flour for extra fluff.

Adnan’s hearing! I’m hanging on every word, even if our home is firmly divided between those of us who think he is innocent (me) and those heartless souls who stand by the due diligence of law enforcement and find him guilty (James).

I found this post through Grace’s resurrected blog (YAY), and I just love how it recognizes that even being staunchly pro-life doesn’t make you happy or excited about having an unplanned baby. I think this is a vitally important message that too often gets missed. Choosing life is a sacrifice, but one worth every ounce of pain.

Art + ballet + good clothes = beautiful.

Obviously I am loving every second of Ben’s search for love on The Bachelor this year, and loving too Juliet’s podcasts (the ones titled “Bachelor Party”). Team Jojo all the way. I also loved this, as it is highly accurate.

And to unite my favorite reality TV and my least favorite reality (ie, the terror that is Trump somehow maybe being the actual Republican candidate???? DEMOCRACY MIGHT JUST BE A TERRIBLE IDEA Y’ALL!), here is an article about understanding the Christie-Rubio situation through the lens of the Bachelor.

Happy weekend! Stay warm and eat lots of chocolate.