shiso mama

Friends, I’ve been tagged for the following meme by the prolific and busy Jeremiah of ZRecs (we’re currently learning to play with tongs, as per his instructions):

Give the meaning of your kids’ names, and write about what or how or why you gave the name to your kids. Tag five people to play along and leave a comment at their blog to let them know they have been tagged.

I’ve wanted, for as long as I can remember, to name my children after food. Weird, probably, and now I can’t even recall the origin of this desire. It’s not that I wanted to name my children Omelet or Pancake or any other brunch main dish. But rather, I was drawn to names like Clementine, Olive, Hazel(nut) or Madeleine - food names with old-fashioned flair.

You’ll notice, though, that most of these names are girl names, and when we found out that we were having a boy, we started racking our brains and soliciting suggestions from all our friends, since the names we called him in utero (Bacon, Pork Chop) weren’t really going to cut it when he was born. Here’s the list we eventually came up with of food related names, with much help from our friend, Eliza (you know, in case anyone else out there is thinking of the same criterion):

Basil
Olive(r)
Graham
Dill
Filbert (Phil, for short)
Cobb
Quince
Yarrow
Sage
Bear
Chervil
Berry
Bing
Ham(let)
Napoleon
Wellington
Alfredo
Herb(ert)

We eventually decided to go with short, snappy, old-fashioned and not too popular: Otis. Although Otis’s middle name is a nod to our original food obsession: Augustus, short for Augustus Gloop, the fat German kid in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory who drowns in a river of chocolate. F’s parents originally hoped that we give Otis F’s name - F is a Jr. and is the fourth in his family with some permutation of his name - but hopefully we made up for it just a teensy bit with the sheer quantity of names: Otis Augustus (F’s last name) (my middle name).

Hmm, who else would like to play? I’m trying to think of folks who use their kids’ names on their blogs… Are you refreshed after your break, Joanna (she wrote a fantastic tutorial on making cloth baby shoes)? How about Violette Crumble, who is soon going to bust on the scene with her exciting new products (hey, and whose blog name IS a food, right?). Kathy of Pink Chalk Studio, who’s a sewing whiz and helped me with advice while I was making my first quilt? Stephanie of A Little Deer, who just made a triumphant return from Surtex? And Rachel, who just finished a painstaking handmade felt calendar for her daughter?

Hey look, we got to meet our new niece/cousin, Ashley. She’s tiny and sweet and adorable and has oh so much hair. Wait, that picture doesn’t paint a vivid enough picture. Look at this one:

That’s fantastic hair, isn’t it? They’ve been finding it rather impossible to tame, plus she’s just got so much of it.

Hm, but then again, if you were able to see my hair in this photo, you’d see that my hair is also rather poofy and large and sticking straight up. Maybe the humidity is doing a job on both our hair!

Otis adores his new cousin and can hardly refrain from covering her with kisses whenever he sees her and although it does not prevent him from screeching and running around her in circles while she sleeps, it does inspire a deep desire to ask that she do all kinds of inappropriate things with him. Ashley play with car? Ashley sit here [on the massage chair]? Ashley eat pork chop?

We’re slowly adjusting to the new time zone and weather. Jet lag is treating us real baaad and no matter how much you complain about it beforehand, you just can’t really prepare for the heat and humidity of a tropical country. This is pretty much how we feel whenever we go outside (uh, except we’re actually inside here):

We look like we used an entire container of gel on our heads. You know, wet look style. So we’re enjoying the air conditioning.

Once we adjust to the time and weather and the great-grandparents have had a healthy dose of Otis, we’ll start taking a few small excursions into the city (unfortunately, just about when F is ready to go home). I’m not sure what we’ll do with Otis otherwise. If the relatives had their choice, he would spend all his time singing songs, dancing and eating lots of food in front of them. But it’s so hot that he gets droopy quickly outdoors at the playground, and he’s already growing restless being indoors with the portable yet favorite toys I brought and keeps insisting, “Go home? Go home!” If anyone has any other suggestions for indoor entertainment that don’t involve the purchase of many new toys or the watching of a lot of TV and can be done within sight of adoring family members, I’d appreciate it.  Unfortunately, his attention span for drawing is still rather short.

things we’re looking forward to:
- unconditional love from family members (one of us will get it, anyways)
- meeting our new cousin/niece, Ashley
- the swimming pool at my grandmother’s apartment complex (see above)
- learning a lot more chinese
- bao bing (shaved ice), bbq corn, yummy tropical fruit, peanut mochi, amazingly fresh and affordable sashimi
- the night markets

things we will miss:
- gentle breezes, low humidity, sunshine that doesn’t scald, and cool evenings
- Tuesday night dinners with Emmett et famille
- our friends and neighbors
-  the farmers’ markets

My friends, the lovely folks at Apartment Therapy Nursery did a story on Otis’s play areas, which you can check out if you’re interested in looking at pictures of our house when it’s clean (ha!) and there’s no toddler around to marr the immaculate placement of props (double ha!). And below is a tutorial on the bulletin board we made to display Otis’s artwork.

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Ever since I saw a story in an old Martha Stewart magazine, I’ve been wanting to make myself a homasote bulletin board. For those of you who don’t know about homasote, it’s a type of building material made of recycled paper. It can be used as soundproofing, and makes for fantastic bulletin boards, either plain, painted, or covered. Our architect told us that they used to it construct inexpensive room dividers in their studios in school.

Since then, I’ve seen lots of beautiful bulletin boards, like here. But me, I wanted to cover entire walls with the stuff. And maybe I’m a simpleton, but I couldn’t quite figure out the logistics of how to do it - most information I found was a little evasive about how to actually mount them to the wall. And when I finally dug out the actual issue of Martha Stewart (yes, we have a basement full of them!) that had the how-to, I saw that they used wood trim to help hold up their homasote, which wouldn’t have worked in our space. So here’s what we did instead.

Everything I’ve read online tells you to have the lumber yard cut the homasote for you, and it’s really good advice. We had to borrow a circular saw from our neighbor to cut ours down to the proper size (and I waited for F to come home so someone could drive me to the emergency room in case I cut something off and couldn’t drive myself), and even though we did it outside, we were sneezing paper bits for the next week.

I wanted to cover our bulletin board with this beautiful Etsuko Furuya fabric, but thought that a big wall of it would be overwhelming (and more expensive) so I sewed a strip of it between two pieces of regular canvas, making sure to line up my pattern so it was straight (oh how I love those ladybugs). After we finished, I wished that I had centered all the ladybugs, but oh well, c’est la vie.

Using a staple gun, staple down the center of one side, then the opposite side, making sure the fabric is nice and taut. Work your way from the center out towards the corners. Since our fabric had a pattern, I tried to line up the edge of my dots with the edge of my homasote so that it would look straight.

I folded the fabric on the corner this way (which I picked up from book making), since it created less bulk with our thick fabric. I pulled the point of the fabric down over the corner of the homasote, creating a 45 degree angle. Then I folded down the two sides of fabric, tucking the excess in along the sides. Try to make it as streamlined as possible so that there’s not too much fabric between the bulletin board and the wall.

We used our stud finder to locate studs behind our drywall and marked them with painter’s tape (you can see the blue tape below). This is pretty important since the bulletin board is so large and heavy (ours was 3′ x 7′). I suppose you could also use anchors with your screws, but that still makes me a little nervous. Studs are better. We ended up attaching our board into four studs and two anchors (they’re not evenly spaced because we wanted to catch studs and have screws at all four corners).

We used a stack of books to help us hold up the bulletin board so we could step back and look at it. We double checked with a level and then predrilled holes, both in the wall and in the bulletin board. Start out slowly when you drill through the bulletin board because it will catch and torque the fabric (and don’t forget to protect your floor!).

We used nice long wood screws and finishing washers, both to protect the fabric and to give it a more finished look.

Sit back and enjoy your handiwork. Now go force your child to be creative so you have something to hang up.

My friends, let this be a lesson to you in sample sale shopping. You might see a pair of unmarked overalls, think, Hey, no problem, the kid’s got short stumpy legs, buy them in a sale-induced frenzy and come home to find this. I’m thinking about shortening them and making linen lederhosen. What do you think?

One week from right now, we will be rubbing our eyes from jet lag, having landed in Taiwan for our summer-long Otis-fest. I’m starting to panic about all the things I still have to get done, although if you asked me what I still need to do, I would look blankly at you.  We’re going back to meet our new baby, Ashley, and to give my family some hard-core Otis loving.  They’re really been missing him, although when they get a good dose of Otis’s new affection for limit testing, they may be buying us an early plane ticket home.

As you may or may not know, we have a bilingual household. F speaks English with Otis, and I, Chinese. He hears English at day care, but speaks Chinese when he’s at Grandma R’s house, and with Fifth Aunt Grandma K. I believe his primary language is Chinese, but he seems equally at ease with both, sometimes turning to F in the middle of a conversation in Chinese and translating, so his father doesn’t feel left out. All in all, we feel like his language skills are developing well (although sometimes we wish he would keep it to himself a little).

I moved to the States when I was four years old, and I grew up with no Chinese-speaking friends. I didn’t take Chinese classes as a kid, so I can’t read or write. Some days I’m amazed that I manage to teach Otis anything at all. I’m constantly feeling the confines of my language skills - my vocabulary is very limited, and my grammar is often poorly constructed - and I’m constantly trying to learn as I teach. Fifth Aunt Grandma K now lives in mortal fear of coming over to our house for fear of being bombarded with questions like, “How do you say ‘lemur’ in Chinese?” and of being greeted with skeptical sighs when she asserts that Chinese people don’t distinguish between crocodiles and aligators, and lambs and sheep.

I was just thinking about this situation: While sitting with Otis during snack the other day, I asked him if his cookie tasted good. It struck me that the only answers I can teach him in Chinese are “Yes, it tastes good” or “Yes, it tastes very good.” However, if I were teaching him to speak in English, there would be a vast world of choices - delicious, scrumptious, tasty, tantalizing, yummy, delectable, oh the options! Our world suddenly felt very small.

I find that our conversations are often limited to basic, factual information, and very little of it is actually descriptive. Which is disappointing to me. Not because I feel some great urge to advance his language skills solely for the purpose of learning, but because it is the way I communicate and observe the world. It is interesting to use different words, as I do in English, and I by no means consider myself to be a wordsmith.

Thus, I feel conflicted. I feel this tremendous urgency to keep on speaking with him in Chinese, even though it’s difficult, because I know that it would be incredibly easy for us to devolve into a monolingual household. Despite the fact that much of my family lives in Asia, our grip on all things Chinese feels tenuous, and I want to hold on as tightly as I can to what little remains. I know he will progress beyond me - he will pick up his descriptive English from other sources, and even his Chinese will surpass mine, as we spend time with my family, and in Asia - but I feel somewhat at a loss at what exactly my role should be. Where do we go from here? When will we, and should we, ever stop? What’s a crappy Chinese speaker to do?

collage # 168 here.

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Despite the supposed fact that every day is Mother’s Day (ahem!), today your family is bound by law to honor and cherish you. Have you been celebrating by being absolved of your mother-ly duties? We’ve been pretty low key here today - a yummy homemade pancake brunch with Fifth Aunt Grandma K, followed by an afternoon of sculpting fertility goddesses in my likeness. You too?

You will be happy to know, however, that I did perform my motherly duty of dressing Otis up today. We’re starting to get some pretty glorious California weather around here, although there can still be a slight chill in the mornings, so we are still layering. But summer is definitely just around the corner - cherries filled the Farmer’s Market, and the peaches and nectarines are just making their first appearances.

Enjoy the rest of your day!

I was responding to comments from my last collage post, with all your encouraging words, and I realized that again and again, I was writing excuses for why the collages have been going the way of the dodo bird.   The project was supposed to persevere despite the chronic ear infections, home improvement projects and social obligations!  I’ll try to be better, but dear readers, why have you been letting me get away with it?

I’ve returned to my house and my family, exhausted and exhilarated, still not quite able to say that New York is not my home anymore, after all these years and changes later. I guess this is what happens when one insists on making much of one’s visit about nostalgia, revisiting old neighborhoods and former favorite haunts to track changes.

I went to spy on our little house, which you can see in the crappy picture I took above (it’s nearly impossible to take a good picture down a long narrow passageway, and then the family that now lives there spilled out of their door as I was weeping with nostalgia by the gate, so I had to leap out of the way so as not to seem creepy). If you were to walk down that passageway, you would see the cozy garden with the great big cherry tree and our little red brick house. Yes, the use of repeated use of the word “our” is, of course, incorrect.

I got to spend time with great friends, meet babies, and I walked and walked and walked. In New York City caliber shoes, no less, and I didn’t need to run into Old Navy to buy flipflops until just about the last minute, although my feet still ache. I came home with the suitcase full of bagels for F. And I nearly died when I saw a pair of complementary grandpa pants in F’s size, but then I figured out that the “splurge” worthy price was only for the suspenders!!!

It was funny being away from Otis, always wondering what he was doing. He had more fun this weekend than the previous two years of his life (an entire day with his BFF! a birthday party with ice cream cake! much TV watching at Grandma R’s!), so I don’t think he missed me much. But I was pretty excited to come home and watch Otis munch on maltballs from one of my favorite stores in New York:

I’m pretty sure he looks older and taller and his eyebrows more F-like now than last Thursday.

Other highlights from the trip, in case you’re wondering:

did I say cauliflower pizza?
fantastic imported Japanese fabric that I did NOT buy
the coolest, most drool-worthy clothes, including some tasty frocks from Mina Perhonen
not as impressed with the architecture as I hoped I’d be
well, at least they’re opening one in SF