MDS Announcement

I think it is safe to say that this cat is out of the bag now. I'm happy to announce that we are expecting another baby in late August/early September! My official due date is September 7, but my babies seem to want to come about a week early, so I'm sort of expecting the baby to make an appearance in late August or around the first of September. My dad is rooting for September 2, which is his birthday, so we'll have to see what happens!

I had an early ultrasound yesterday and the baby's heartbeat was fast and strong and everything appears to be developing on schedule; we are very grateful for the good news.


The card above is how we told our families the big news. I designed it using My Digital Studio, had it professionally printed as a 5x7 postcard, and then mailed it off! Luckily, the cards came with envelopes, because I'm not sure what the postmen would have thought about delivering such a card. I got the Save the Date idea from somewhere on the web; the suggestion was to make birthday party invitations, but I realized when I was in the middle of designing them that some people might take it literally and show up at the hospital. Not ideal, in my opinion. So I tweaked it to be a Save the Date card, which I think works even better! And I love this color combination--nicely gender neutral. We like to wait until the baby is born to find out the gender and while I have my suspicions about the gender based on our dates, we'll be happy with whoever God sends us.

The windup...and....the pitch!

You know how sometimes you make a New Year's resolution in late December, but by the first week in January, you know you'll never do it? I usually have that happen to me. I find the last week of December is a great week for making promises to myself about the new year, and first week of January is a great week for breaking them all. Except this year, one of my resolutions was to CASE a Zindorf card once a week. Well, my resolution lasted about as long as any of my resolutions until I got an e-mail from my upline, Claire, asking me to do a display board and demonstration for our upcoming Philly Inker's Spring Fling. Which meant my back was now to the wall and now I HAD to keep my resolution. 15 cards by March 19 means a card a week (or more).

So far, I'm doing pretty well. I've made six cards in the last week, am waiting on supplies for another 3, and will try to keep soldiering on with the rest. I should be fine, barring disaster. I am nervous because la Zindorf herself will be there, but I've met her before, and she is just the nicest, sweetest person. So I should just climb out of my tree and get over myself.


And with that windup, I'm sure you are now expecting a Zindorf pitch. Sorry to disappoint! I want to save them until after Spring Fling, so I'll share them with you in late March. Today's cards are two simple valentines I made for my last From Our Hearts box in late December. (Don't worry, I saved a valentine for my hubby!)

Grocery Shopping, Soviet Style

Anyone who lived in Russia during the Soviet and immediate post-Soviet era will be familiar with “perhaps bags,” those handy string bags that could be balled up in a purse or pocket when not in use, but could expand to encompass three times their weight in groceries and other goods. The reason for perhaps bags was simple. One never knew where one might encounter a bargain or a rare good or food stuff. In an economy of scarcity, one was always on the look out for various staples.

When I lived in Russia, I, like most Russians, shopped nearly every day for groceries in the small outdoor markets and kiosks that surrounded various metro stops. There were (and are) modern grocery stores, of course, but they are small by Western standards, and tend to be stocked oddly. I learned that if I found a particular brand I liked, I should stock up because it was almost certain I would never find that brand again. (I found this annoyance to be particularly true of tomato-based products). I learned to keep my eyes open for things that weren’t widely available, like water-canned tuna, or brown sugar, or Heinz ketchup.

I took this photo and the two below at various Moscow markets in the fall of 2002.

The other reality of grocery shopping in such a setting is that you can only buy what you can conceivably carry home. So I never bought watermelons, and was careful about how much of my grocery load was liquid. I bought things in smaller quantities that I would have in America. Milk was by the quart instead of the gallon, and water and juice by the liter.

I used to think this way of shopping was peculiar to Russia and the former Soviet Union, but as I’ve lived on the East Coast a while, I realize it is more to do with the nature of urban shopping. There are almost no “big box” stores in the central part of the city, and the bigger name grocery stores are much smaller than what you might find in the suburbs. It is rare to do one-stop shopping. We have to rely not only on the smaller grocery stores, but on the myriad of Korean-run corner stores and produce stands, as well as an indoor farmer’s market in the heart of downtown Philly. We buy in smaller quantities than we would if we lived in the suburbs. We do try to eat locally and seasonally, but as our family has grown, it has gotten more logistically difficult for us to purchase our produce and dairy from the local farmer’s market (which is a 20 minute bus ride away), especially in the wintertime, and the neighborhood grocery isn’t particularly good about stocking local items in the off season.

We live about four city blocks from a Whole Foods and about 10 city blocks from a small Trader Joe’s (that runs through its entire inventory about every three days, which gives you an idea of how busy they are). In our neighborhood there are three pharmacies that also stock a few grocery items, a convenience store, as well as three Korean-run corner stores that sell groceries and deli sandwiches. All these little shops are within about three blocks of our house. Because we have chosen to drive as little as possible in the city, we do most of our grocery shopping on foot or by bike, only occasionally venturing out to a big box grocery store in the suburbs. My husband is enormously helpful in this regard as he bikes to work and has invested in some decent saddlebags, so he often stops at Trader Joe’s for me on his way home to pick up items that I can’t carry home myself.

What that means is that if I can’t carry it home, I can’t buy it. It means I must go to the store every 2-3 days, especially for fresh produce. The size of our kitchen prevents us from seriously stocking up on anything anyway, so it works out for the most part. It does mean that when winter storms hit, or the weather is yucky (as it tends to be much of the fall here), that we rely more heavily on the corner stores than on the Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s, but that is one of the hidden costs of living in the city. It also means that if I overestimate how much I can carry, I have to hail a taxi, which adds to the overall cost of the grocery run. A few years ago we did purchase one of those granny carts that are useful for grocery runs, but the particular model that we purchased is a large bulky one that is cumbersome to steer. I tend to rely more on the under basket of my stroller, or my own (not-so) brute strength to pack mule everything home. (I should add that the walk home is largely uphill). It means too that whenever I’m in a different part of the city, I tend to pop into whatever little grocery stores I come across on the off chance that they will carry something our neighborhood stores don’t. I have a terrible time finding baking cocoa, for example, and there is a particular brand of no-chicken bouillon that I like and Whole Foods no longer carries (that whole “don’t get attached to a brand because you’ll never find it again” thing…) And no matter where I am, I’ve learned it is best to shop with a basket instead of a cart because it is a better measure of what I can actually carry home. It is handy to have a backpack to carry heavier items, in addition to the reusable bags that are so ubiquitous now, but I usually have a baby in a carrier on my back, so that doesn’t always work out so well for me. The shopping lessons I learned while in Russia have served me well in the city.

We have started buying certain things in bulk online. Amazon is a great resource for these things, I’ve found. I’m quite certain we would have to drive a lot more if it weren’t for the Amazon Subscribe and Save and Amazon Mom programs. The first gives bulk rate discounts and the second gives free shipping on most things. The only thing I’m still trying to find in bulk is twin packs of Cheerios, which we have, up until now, purchased quarterly at a bulk buying club store. I confess to being a brand snob on this particular item. I just can’t find a generic brand of Cheerios that is as good as the original. I’d rather get the car out every 4 months and run up to the suburbs than purchase a generic in bulk online.

In the meantime, I build lots of time for grocery shopping into my schedule (it helps that my three year old thinks going to Whole Foods is the best thing next to going to church) and thank God that I have a good eye for spatial storage and strong arms.

Bond, James Bond...

My dad had surgery on his shoulder last week to repair a torn rotator cuff and remove some bone spurs. My parents live in the Midwest, so they got hit with the blizzard and 18" of snow that everyone else west of the Mississippi did, so his surgery was delayed a day, but he did have it, and everything went well, thank God! The tears were less than 50% tears, which meant they could be repaired laproscopically instead of by opening up his whole shoulder, which has a recovery time of days rather than the months of the latter option. I talked to him the day after and he sounded very chipper and upbeat, and said he felt hardly any pain. But the following day, the nerve block had worn off and he was feeling pretty stiff and sore. But my dad is nothing if not a trooper, so I expect he'll soldier through this just like every other physical difficulty in his life. He's my hero. :)

I wanted to make him a card and a little care package to have after the surgery, so I made this card, and sent him my three favorite Sean Connery James Bond movies (Dr. No, From Russia With Love, and Goldfinger--since you asked!). I did a 30 page paper on the Connery Bond movies for my master's degree some years back and had to watch them all multiple times, so I was well acquainted with my faves. (The paper was about how the current trends in politics, society and even fashion were reflected in the Bond movies over time, but really it was just a good excuse to drool over a young Connery and get a good grade for doing so...) :)

The card uses a Stamping 411 sketch from a few weeks ago, and the rest of the card kind of evolved from there. I had a white Plenty of Petals embossed panel lying around from something else, and decided it made a good background for my tree. A scrap of Daffodil delight ribbon waiting for use was the perfect pop of color against all that green and brown. All in all, a nice masculine get-well card. Well, in my opinion at least!

Well, it is cold here today (11 degrees!) so stay warm if you are cold like me!

On Personal Space

If there is one thing I took away from my experience of living abroad it is that the notion of personal space is a peculiarly modern (and post-modern) notion, and that Americans in particular have an overdeveloped sense of it. While I don’t want to parse out all the reasons why Americans have such a need for personal space, I do think that it is somewhat unhealthy, at least on a spiritual level, because it allows us to live in unconnected bubbles of our own making, even within our families.

One only need board a subway in Moscow, or a minibus in Central Asia to discover that personal space as we Americans think of it simply does not exist. People are crammed in cheek by jowl, and no one is much bothered by the closeness of strangers in public places. There is always room for one more person. (By way of example, I once spent a 45 minute bus ride with a man’s hand pressed intimately against my rear end not because he was getting fresh but because he had no where else to go with it on the crowded bus). I’ve not been to China or Japan, but have seen enough photos and read enough articles to know that the sense of personal space is even less an issue there. Scientists who study these things have found that Americans require an arm length in all directions around them in order to feel comfortable. I find that most of the rest of the world requires much less. The lack of personal space in the public arena also translates to less personal space for the private home as well. Children are placed all in one room together, or sometimes the whole family shares a common living space. The life of the family revolves around the kitchen, where much is discussed and the inner life is nurtured.

The average size of a family home in much of the rest of the world is much smaller than the average American home (currently 2400 square feet in most of the country, up from just under 1000 in 1950). This is to say that some homes in America are much smaller, and some are much bigger. Naturally, homes built in the earliest part of the 20^th century, or before tend to be smaller in size. Many homes on the East Coast date to the Revolution or the decades shortly after. Philadelphia is stocked with row homes, many of which are around 1000 square feet, and believe me, you pay for the privilege of owning one of the nicer ones. I won’t even begin to address the many space challenges of the rabbit hutches that many New Yorkers inhabit. While we would love to live in New York City some day, I can address only the space challenges I’ve faced thus far. When my husband was in seminary, we lived in a 500 square foot detached home with exactly one closet, and had to get creative with our stuff. (Being a dual academic family had necessitated a lot of books over the years). Yet, we were happy in that little house. It was cozy, and intelligently laid out. We lived with much less "stuff" and it was mentally liberating. We even managed to hold a few social gatherings in that house, cramming 15-20 people into our front room and kitchen for fellowship and games. No one seemed to mind, as the housing situation was the same for all seminarians—small, cramped, and in ill-repair.

After seminary, we moved to Philadelphia and bought a row home that needed a lot of TLC. Our house is 1656 square feet, with three floors, and an unfinished basement that is pretty tolerable by most Philly row home standards. We skim coated the walls and floor of the basement with cement to clean it up a bit. Our washer and dryer live down there, as does food pantry overflow, suitcases, children’s clothing that isn’t currently in use, Christmas decorations (currently in two bins), canning equipment, leftover lumber from the big renovation we did on the house when we bought it, plus all the things one keeps around for home repairs and the like. Our basement is approximately 400 square feet plus a 100 square foot crawl space that is unusable, so we use it to store the left over lumber. There are technically five bedrooms, but one room is a pass through room unsuitable for long term bedroom use and neither of the two full size closets in the house are in rooms currently used as bedrooms.

When we first decided how we wanted to allocate space in our new home, we chose to put our bedroom on the third floor in the front room, and the baby in the back room, making it into a nursery. There is a pass-through door between the master bedroom and nursery, so sometimes it feels like one oddly shaped room. Thus, for the first few years in the house, the third floor was reserved primarily for sleeping and the rest of the house for other things.

The second floor has three rooms that all connect to one another. The front room we made into a guest room (it is one of the rooms with a full size closet). The guest room is directly below the master, and there is no ceiling insulation between the two rooms, so we are learning to navigate the murky privacy arena. The back room was originally my office plus an extra playspace for the baby. The middle room we gave over to our family icon corner, plus my husband’s desk, so he would have a place to work at home as necessary. The middle room, which is entirely a pass-through room, being open to the back room entirely, and cut off from the front room by only a glass-panel door, is the other room with a full size closet. In short, my husband and I swelled our personal spaces to include nearly all the house. I had my office, the kitchen, and sometimes the living room as space to call my own. My husband had his office, the living room and the sometimes mancave of the basement to call his own, in addition to the spacious office he occupies while at work. We could put our arms out and turn around in a circle and never hit anything else. I am a person who craves lots of alone time and I loved having a whole room to myself in which to retreat and work.

There is a monastery that we love in northern California. Whenever we go there, I’m struck by how the monks live in small spaces, without modern conveniences, and yet are content. There are always people around, and the spaces are small, but it never feels cramped. The community functions around you, and there is always some quiet corner to go and recharge, but there is also much loving fellowship, communal work, and daily worship. There is much emulate there, and I want to somehow recreate that in my own home. While I know we fall very short in this regard, I hope that by re-envisioning the use of space in our home, we may begin to create our own family community that is unbothered by lack of personal space. I hope to further outgrow my own need for personal space. I miss the closeness of living in a culture without it, but have struggled to know how to recreate it here.

As our children have grown in number and size, we have had to compress the amount of space we each use. My original dream of having each space have a clearly defined purpose is gone, and I no longer think it necessary. That is a good thing, I think. The living room is now the primary play area for my sons, and the guest room also doubles as an office for my husband and me now. I do most of my creative work in a small corner of the room. I’ve given up the idea of having a whole room to myself, and have started to think that perhaps I shouldn’t have it in any case. Perhaps part of my journey of salvation is learning to live in community with people without needing to “recharge.”

About Urban Simplicity

I've read a number of books lately that promise to teach me how to live my life more simply, with a large or small family. While I appreciate many of the tips included in these books, one theme seems to run through them all: If you want to live simply with a family, you must do it in suburbia with a large house and a yard and a large vehicle to manage it all.

I find this premise rather frustrating, as we live in a large urban area, and have chosen to raise our family in a 1650 square foot home with exactly two full size closets, neither of which are in bedrooms. Living in an older home as a lot of quirks. For example, the master bedroom has a small half closet (read: 13" deep), and there is a small half closet on the landing outside the master bedroom, neither of which are particularly useful for clothing storage, but we make it work because we have to. In this house, we have to be creative with storage, as well as with how we choose to raise our family in this house. I've gotten lots of good ideas for storage in small spaces over the years, and hope to share a few with you as time goes by.

The other part of the equation is that we've chosen to drive our (small) car as little as possible, and are therefore public transit- and bike-dependent, which produces its own interesting reality. The way one shops for groceries, or gets to doctor's appointments or whatever other life errands you can think of must be accomplished in a particular way for this to work. I'm not saying we never drive in the city, but we do try to limit our driving.

I was lamenting the fact that there seems to be a dearth of information on how to raise a family (of any size) in the city in the housing that is peculiar to urban life, particularly on the East Coast. An acquaintance said that I should write such a book in 15 years (and that she would be interested to read it). I mulled that for a while, and then thought, why not blog about it now? The danger with waiting 15 years is that I will have forgotten what it is like to live in a vertical house with very small children, and many things can change in 15 years. I realize that tackling a topic like this is a little like shoveling during a snow storm, but sometimes that is useful in its way.

So this is my start. I don't claim to be the final authority on parenting, row homes, homemaking, urban life, spiritual life, or any of the topics that might grace this blog in the future, but I would like to at least share what I think about these things, and what has worked for us (and what hasn't). I welcome dialogue in the comments section, but please let's keep it civil. I also recognize that my own thinking about some of these things is still evolving, so don't take anything I say as set in stone. I may write a post that completely reverses a former position. Such is the nature of a blog.

So bear with me, and perhaps we can learn some things from each other along the way.

No Mojo

I had my last Pilates session today, and boy do I feel it tonight. I'm taking a break from Pilates for a while. I'm kind of glad, actually, because I'm feeling a bit burned out on the gym right now. My trainer made an offhand comment last week during our session that really had nothing to do with me personally, but made me feel bad about my body anyway; now I've completely lost my motivation to work out.


I did get a box of goodies from UPS yesterday, but only had the energy to unpack the box and put everything away. I mounted the stamps this morning and CASEd some cards I had saved for future reference. I just don't seem to have a lot of original creativity in my brain right now. Hopefully it will pass. I made two cards this morning, and then made another one tonight. I've got an order for wedding favors waiting on my to-do list (and I'm waiting for the supplies to arrive), so that will keep me busy for the next few days anyway. After that, I'm on to brayering using some Zindorf tutorials! My upline, Claire, asked me to do a display board for the Philly Inker's Spring Fling, and I'm so flattered she asked me! I have to make 12-15 cards for the board, plus a few little things like those shrinky dink magnets and tags, so I've got my work cut out for me for the next month or so. I guess I shouldn't stress about not having original creativity since I have so much other stuff lined up. (I also just found out that la Zindorf herself will be there, so I'm trying not to stress about that either...)


And on to today's cards. The first one is CASEd from Kerin Sylvester--I loved the watercoloring job she did and the distressed look (I don't always think that look comes off well, but on this card, I loved it!) and saved it for a rainy day. My only le sigh moment on this card is that my white gel pen died shortly before I made it, and my new one arrived only yesterday, so I had to make do with a silver gel pen, which didn't really have the same pop as the white. Oh well.


The second one is CASEd from Gretchen Barron--I loved the color combination and I really haven't used that gorgeous medallion as much as I wanted to, so it was a great excuse to get that stamp inky! I'm hoping it ends up in the next big catalog, because it really is a great set! Max's godmother asked me to make her a few birthday cards for her inlaws, so these were what I came up with!