Trusty Pavement shirt
Will we make it through the storm?
You might need a wash.

Bod, you like doughnuts?
And also no exercise?
Good, we’re in luck then.

Snow snow snow snow snow
Ice ice ice ice ice, no plows
You guys want some wine?

Gabriel, unlike his big sister, is rather interested (understatement) in doing things for himself. I don’t mean to say that Nora’s lazy or overly dependent, but let’s just say she could choose to have people dress her head to toe while she was still lying in bed in the morning? Yeah, she’d choose that.

Her brother, meanwhile, has truly adopted the role of second child, attempting everything on his own because, first of all, he sees the rest of the family doing it, and second of all, because, face it, sometimes we don’t have time to deal with his non-essential needs; so we’ll find him catapulting himself into his high chair when he’s hungry, trying to put his own socks and shoes on (and failing, and then throwing himself on the floor, protesting the sheer agony of life) and taking his own diapers off from time to time (my least favorite).

His longings for the “grown up” life extend to what we’re eating, drinking and watching sometimes, too, which is why he’s had his fair share of juice already (whereas I got away with giving Nora only water and milk for a long, long time) and why he knows all the Dora characters. And possibly some of the “Downton Abbey” ones, too. I mean, maybe.

His latest obsession is coffee, and he’ll saunter over in the morning, point to my or J’s mug and say, “Mommy’s coffee,” (or “Daddy’s”) and then he’ll continue, nice and quiet and smiling, trying to charm your ass off, “Have some?”

And I’m like, “You’re adorable. No way.” And, because he’s 22-months-old, the pleasant demeanor disappears just like that. What comes next is more along the lines of, “Have some?! MOMMY! HAVE SOME?!”

Which might work in some circumstances. Hey, sometimes you’ve gotta pick your battles. But I’m not going to give a baby any coffee, so this isn’t one of them.

So I was completely amused to discover Gabe behind the living room armchair the other day - the space has been designated his “house,” and even approved of by Nora (her house is behind the guitar stand, prime real estate I guess so she doesn’t care) - playing with a plastic tea set. He was making pouring noises as he tilted the tea pot over a cup, then pretending to drink.

I leaned in close (but made sure he didn’t see me watching him) and was just in time to hear him saying solemnly to himself, “Gabey’s coffee.”

One of the “benefits” of our glorious Christmas bounty is that I no longer no how to watch television in my own home.

Considering I still watch non-HD TV when J’s not home to chastise me - because I have all those channels memorized, you guys! - it’ll probably take me at least til 2014 to get a handle on all the new options. And who knows what will be available then. I hope it’s driverless cars. I mean, if we’re talking about the technological realm in general.

Thursday was Nora’s fourth birthday and in honor of the occasion I decided to bake a cake from scratch for the first time in my life. I’ve made cookies from scratch and I’ve made cakes from boxes but for some reason the prospect of making an entire cake from start to finish has always made me nervous. Also, there are bakeries! This is the northeast and you can buy an incredible cake at any of the various bakeries around town and I promise you, it will be a delicious cake.

I couldn’t promise myself that my cake would be delicious.

I’m one of those people who claims they don’t like baking, although it’s sort of an unfounded claim because I never do it. The science behind it does scare me, though. Unlike in cooking where if you add too much of this or that, your dish will simply taste too much like this or that, doing the same in baking could result in total failure.

But it was my daughter’s birthday and I decided it was time to start expanding my skills. Plus, I was heartened by the commentary in the cookbook I’d chosen, Nigella Lawson’s “How to Be a Domestic Goddess,” in which the author writes:

“Cake baking has to be, however innocently, one of the great culinary scams: it implies effort, it implies domestic prowess; but believe me, it’s easy…You know how to make a cake? You mix a few basic ingredients together, stick the mixture in a pan and bake it.”

Yeah! Exactly! How hard could it be? I started out so positive Thursday morning, ready to make the Buttermilk Birthday Cake recipe in Lawson’s book. Nora had left with J for school and Gabe was napping. I poured myself a second cup of coffee while I got everything ready. Child’s play.

Except. After I’d successfully combined the dry ingredients (realizing halfway through that I didn’t have a sifter and was supposed to), I went to crack one of the three eggs I needed to add to the butter and sugar mixture, and somehow it went - instead of into the bowl - all over the counter, a huge annoyance because we have almost no counter space. In fact, that’s probably one of the reasons I dislike the idea of baking so much. No counter space for the multiple bowls and pans and raw eggs that go all over because I am a little bit clumsy.

I got it under control, but then began looking for a liquid measuring cup for the milk and realized that there were none to be found. You might think this is weird, but in a house where your husband is an amateur mixologist and also likes to do things like rescue a toad from the driveway, decide it is the new family pet and then then has to capture live bugs for it to eat (OH more to come), sometimes things like measuring cups disappear.

Luckily, I was saved by the cocktail hobby.

Saved, but no matter. I was feeling like maybe this whole thing was a bad idea. This was NOT “implied” effort!

I would finish it, sure, but I would not finish it happily. At that point I was feeling completely stressed.

I soldiered on. I don’t want to imply that the experience was a complete disaster because there were definitely moments of satisfaction, like when I made the buttercream icing (the easiest task) and I decided to mix in some raspberries, and then in a moment of extraordinary willpower, I did not eat the whole bowl right then and there.

I love icing.

Most importantly, I finished. I made a cake! It turned out lumpy, very sugary and good.

And pink, which Nora loved.

I feel like having this under my belt means I can only go up from here. Maybe try a new recipe for some other event.

Or say, hey, I did that once, and never do it again. Which is sometimes the very best thing about finally trying something for the first time.

There is a family of sparrows living in one of the hanging plants right outside our front door, despite the obvious warning signs, like the daily waterings and the tiny dog who would just love to kill everybody. The two little babies have grown up right before our eyes and are almost ready to take off on their own.

Do you guys remember when my darling husband, the amateur birder, was keeping worms in our fridge?

You may argue that this isn’t nearly as bad, but I don’t know, I think it’s worse.

Chia seeds immersed in water. Chia gel, I guess. CHIA GEL. Like a Chia Pet. That’s right. Except you eat it - except I don’t eat it because my tummy gets a little upset just thinking about it.

J just finished listening to the audio version of the book “Born To Run,” and has been talking a lot about “minimalist running,” which is fine, and possibly even pretty cool, but he also got excited about some of the foods suggested in the book used to refuel and replenish after - or before - a run. Like Chia Pet seeds. Sorry, Chia seeds.

I am way into the idea of real, healthy foods in place of things like Gatorade and Power Bars and what have you (even though sometimes those things are unbelievably tempting and delicious) but little seeds you put in water to create some kind of viscous energy potion? Bring back the worms, I say. I’ll take the worms instead.

For my birthday this year J got me a gift certificate to a local cooking school, something I’d asked for, and when I went for my class - which was an incredible amount of fun and inspired me to try baking again, despite the fact that I have claimed over and over to hate baking and, actually, come to think of it, I haven’t baked since recommitting myself to it, but that’s another story - one of the things the teacher said that really stuck with me was about following recipes.

I mean, of course she was into recipes, because she teaches people to cook for a living, but what she was saying, specifically, was that sometimes people feel like they can just “throw things together” when it comes to cooking. And hey, sometimes they can, especially if they know what they’re doing or have a knack for the culinary arts.

But sometimes, she said, if you’re not much of a trained cook, “throwing things together” tastes like exactly that: something thrown together. I knew exactly what she meant. I’ve tried throwing things together before to bad results because there is, in fact, a science to cooking. Like, you can’t just throw cheese in with macaroni and make macaroni and cheese. I heard about someone who tried that once. Didn’t work.

If you use recipes often, though, you learn techniques and rules and then, after awhile, improvising while making dinner becomes easier.

Her sage advice came to mind this morning when - after telling Nora that we could have spaghetti and meatballs for dinner tonight - I was looking up meatball recipes and found one that looked great but required the addition of bechamel sauce and I was thinking, “You know what? I bet it would be fine without that.” Because I’m a little lazy when somebody tells me I am going to need to make a sauce. Also, it seemed like a highly caloric sauce, as they often are, and I forced myself to believe that I didn’t want to make it because it would be healthier for my family to leave it out. The truth, however, is the thing I wrote before about being lazy.

But after going back and forth on the issue a few times, I remembered the advice about following recipes and I realized that if I want to expand my cooking skills in general, I should learn to make a basic bechamel sauce.

And so I am!

While whisking the milk into the sauce just now - constantly whisking, a necessary step - I had some time to think, and I thought to myself, “Hey. I haven’t updated my blog in forever. And I haven’t posted anything interesting up in even longer.” So here I am.

Today I didn’t let laziness get in the way of following a recipe and I updated my blog with hopes of doing the same more regularly. Both following recipes and the blog, I mean. I’m going to try my very hardest.

Last night I got back from my sister-in-law’s bachelorette party in New York City. I spent a lot of time thinking about the weekend before I went. How would I handle all the activities, most of which included drinking? How would I survive, considering I’m tired pretty much all the time lately?

The verdict? It was NO problem. I haven’t laughed that hard and so much in forever.

This morning, of course, I am reeling from the lack of sleep, which put the lack of sleep caused by my second born in the past year to shame. In that pointed clarity that comes from a weekend like the one I had, the kind of thinking where you are ready to return to your normal life - but do it better! and healthier! - ll I can think about is making myself some more coffee and some other, pointed and specific statements and goals, stated below, that I think will help get me back into the swing of things (in addition to the fact that I think I might go to bed at 7:30 or so tonight, and certain people should not tempt me to do otherwise by making watching television on the couch until like 10 p.m. seem like such an innocuous and great idea, ahem).

-Holy WHAT? We’re spending as much time as possible this week outside.
-Long or short? I’m going for it. Long. Longer anyway. My hair.
-More coffee. Stop getting sidetracked.
-Dinnertime is about to get revamped around this place.
-Pumped about: new running shoes, our backyard garden, getting in a swimming pool this summer.
-More coffee. Seriously.

A month or two ago I started thinking maybe I should write a book. But, like, for real.

And one of the things that’s happened since then is that I take note of all the books I hear about and see, which is something I’ve always done, but now I’m doing it in a more thoughtful way.

Also, due to the tone that seems to be characterizing my 34th year, I do it in a very cocky way.

Like when I heard a radio piece recently about this woman who quit her job to spend a year on an oyster farm and then wrote a book about it, and I was all, “Ok. I could totally do that.” Or when I bought J this gardening book yesterday, that essentially lists different types of herbs and vegetables and how to grow them, each page dedicated to a different plant, which is actually super helpful but also really simple and I said, “Nice format. I could do this kind of thing.” Or whenever I think about this guy, for instance, all I can think is, “Come on, I could write a book in my SLEEP.”

It’s all talk, of course and, more importantly, not helpful, since the plain truth is that I haven’t written any book. Kinda like how when people talk about that really abstract modern art featuring squares or circles or what have you, saying, “I don’t get it, I could do that!” and J - who loves that stuff - replies, “Yeah, but you didn’t.”

Beyond some actual brainstorming and a few tiny steps I’ve taken in the right direction (I hope) my book fascination has pervaded my life in many amusing ways.

This morning while feeding Gabe breakfast I got a sudden urge to clean out the freezer, which we’ve been meaning to do for awhile but when it comes right down to it that’s a task that usually ends up on the “not that fun” list, and thus, not completed. Sometimes though, you catch a bit of inspiration and you’ve got nothing big to do with your energy, so the freezer gets the benefit.

And as I was down on my hands and knees, removing old bags of hot dog buns that, sadly, are probably never to taste good again, and wiping down the surfaces, I thought about how I’d later tell J all about how I’d gotten the freezer done that morning! And how he’d probably tell me that he’d split some molecules for cold fusion, then pipetted a glucose solution and examined microbes related to pandemic fever germs. That’s the kind of thing that scientists say.

So I decided maybe I wouldn’t, for once, tell him about the rather mundane thing I’d done that day, then wondered what the hell I’d do with all the creativity I save for communicating the minutiae that is sometimes my daily existence. Who will I tell when I revise the laundry system? I’ve got things to share.

Wait a second! I thought. I’ve got it. I’ll tell the entire world. I could totally write a book about that.

As it is the tradition to almost never go to church in this household, but to certainly engage in various religious traditions picked at random, I almost always give something up for Lent and this year I decided to give up sweets.

I know how boring that is, and that I’ve been more creative and interesting in the past with my sacrifices. I mean, everybody gives up sweets, am I right?

But it’s a good one, because ever since the birth of that baby J and I have been in a near perpetual state of fatigue and I finally get why people tie lack of sleep with gaining weight: it’s because a Pop-Tart will sure as hell get you over that 3 p.m. slump!

I want to clarify, before I get accused of lying for the purpose of creating a more exciting narrative (liarism? blogfibbing?) that I’m not an awful eater or anything. In fact, I’m a pretty good eater. I eat whole, healthy foods as much as possible, we cook a lot and I buy local and organic when I can. Take that.

I try and encourage (force) my family to do the same.

I don’t even consider myself to be a person who has a big sweet tooth. Nora obviously got her love of sugar from her Uncle Vinnie.

But sweet stuff when you’re kinda tired all the time and all you want is comfort is really, really tempting. And J and I have gotten to a place where some Ben & Jerry’s and a night of TV is, like, the ultimate, and I’d like to move beyond this phase of our lives. More running and less ice cream, although the television can stay. Especially if it is “Downton Abbey.”

So I gave up sweets and besides a little bit of cake at my sister in law’s bridal shower the other day, that I somehow rationalized as beyond the rules, I’ve stuck to it. It’s hard, but honestly, I feel better all the time and that is keeping me on task.

J decided to give up sweets, too, which is helpful and I think must be pretty difficult considering his lab seems to be constantly gathering for fancy chocolates from faraway lands and birthday celebrations.

Of course, in typical fashion, he’s constantly upping the ante and trying to outdo me, making martyr-like statements like, “Oh, I’m not going to have sugar in my coffee. That’s a sweet.”

I don’t even take sugar in my coffee, so I wasn’t about to fight that battle, but I saw where he was going and had to explain that this was not a contest, and that sugar in one’s coffee or afternoon tea - which I do enjoy - is not what I meant by “a sweet” and that during Lent you have to resist the urge to set yourself up for failure by going too far with the whole thing.

Like when I told him that I’d had a Morning Glory muffin at the coffee shop the other morning, and that I didn’t consider that in breach of contract because it didn’t fit in with the category of bad habits I am trying to break. And he was all smug, going, “Well, I’m not going to have things like that,” and for a minute my competitive spirit really surged and I thought about how gung ho I could get with this thing and pummel him with my far superior knowledge of sugar content and nutrition in general, until I remembered how incredibly happy I’d been when I got that muffin.

So I very quietly responded, “Well, I am.” Slow and steady wins the race and, hey, maybe this is a contest after all.