Laura loses her hair...

For a good cause!

She came to me a few weeks ago and told me she wanted to cut her hair and donate it to Locks of Love (www.locksoflove.org), a wonderful organization that makes wigs for children suffering from cancer. I'm not sure where she even heard of it but she was very, very sure this was something she wanted to do. I'll admit, I had a bit of heartburn about it, maybe since I've never been able to grow long hair and I was a bit attached to hers. No matter, she was firm in her conviction and asked me about it repeatedly until we agreed that we would do it this week.

So yesterday we went to the Hair Cuttery in Charles Town and she very confidently told the stylist what she wanted. We marked off her hair with elastic bands then SNIP, off came 12 inches of her hair. Now she has a cute shoulder length do with side swept bangs and some child suffering from a horrible disease will be able to go to school and not have the other kids stare. I am so amazingly proud of her I can barely speak.

We're having a heat wave...

Seriously, last night when we got home from taking Sophie back to Cecily's even at 7:30 pm the temp at the bank was showing as 105 degrees! Thankfully the girls have found a great way to keep cool (Girl #3 is our friend, Wei Wei Poole, also adopted from China and JiaJia's best friend).

Without question this is the best $14.95 plus tax I've ever spent (and don't think Mom hasn't cooled her toes in the water a time or two.) Watching them enjoy themselves reminds what it was like when we were kids. The whole summer seemed to stretch out in front of you and you thought it would never end.

Nine Years Ago Today...

We became the parents of one perfect Chinese baby, our darling Laura. I've never experienced anything as wonderful and terrifying as the moment when the judge said to us, "She is your daughter. Take her home now."

Nine years later she is 10 going on 18, a tall, skinny little almost teenager, who is alternately sweet and annoying (like all children) but mostly just a very loving little girl.

I'm the luckiest mom on earth.

A totally delicious if completely messy treat

I'm desperate, I'll admit it, and it is only the second week of summer vacation. In a feeble attempt to buy some time to work today I decided to invite the girls to do something messy, specifically to dip pretzels in chocolate.

Amazingly, the kitchen didn't look like a crime scene when they were done.

And the pretzels were delicious.

Mom's Biscuits

I always think my mother was a slightly conflicted cook. As a child of some privilege she didn't grow up with the idea that the mother of the house was the cook but rather the person who gathered the family into the car so they could go have dinner at the club. I think she liked to eat but enjoying cooking was something she came to later in her life.

That being said, with her history, she started out as a very Piedmont Virginia cook. Biscuits, ham, eggs - these were the building blocks of many meals I remember from my early childhood. It wasn't until I was much older that Mom admitted to me that she taught herself to cook from a Betty Crocker cookbook she received as a wedding gift. Thankfully the biscuit recipe in that book was acceptable against the standards she brought from her childhood, most particularly the biscuits made by Mother Connie's cook Josephine. After Mom died I grilled Uncle Les about Josephine and he didn't have much to say except that these biscuits would have done her proud.

I think of both of these women every time I get up on a Sunday morning and cut butter into flour by hand then stir in buttermilk and turn the dough out onto a floured counter. I don't cut them with a drinking glass like Mom (and I'll bet Josephine) did but I channel them both as I place my biscuits carefully onto a baking sheet and ensure they end up golden brown before they get served to my family.

Today's Thought to Ponder

If you wait to do everything until you’re sure it’s right, you’ll probably never do much of anything.
― Win Borden

That might explain some of the paralysis that affects so many of us so much of the time. When you look back at your life I expect you'll regret the things you didn't do as opposed to those you did that turned out badly.

I know I will.

My summer obsession begins

I don't believe it is overstating the case to say that my gardening skills are at best iffy. I've had reasonable luck growing herbs, for the most part because they are essentially weeds and therefore indestructible. With this is mind it seems a bit crazy that year after year I throw caution to the winds and attempt to grow tomatoes.

I think it is similar to what a friend of mine once said about second marriages - they are the triumph of hope over experience.

So this year, hopeful as ever, I've set up pots on the deck with (so far) four what appear to be sturdy tomato plants. We have a pretty eclectic selection with Principe Borghese (a plum tomato from Italy), Big Beef (the tomato equivalent of Arnold Schwarznegger), Sweet 100 (a favorite of all children which rarely make it into the house since the little people pick them and eat them as soon as they get ripe) and Early Girl (not the most delicious tomato but the first out of the chute - if you carefully scrutinize the picture below you may be able to see my first two Early Girls).

Lord willing and the creek don't rise, I should have my first homegrown tomatoes in about six weeks.

JiaJia's New Adventure

Completely out of the blue, JiaJia announced that she wanted to try martial arts. Vince had studied at a local school for a year or so until Master Lee moved the adult class to 9:00 pm, which is a bit late when you have to get up at 3:30 am like Vince does now. We still kept in touch with the school "family" and am happy that JiaJia is now a participating member.

She's only been taking classes for a month but is progressing quickly and Master Lee has been very complimentary about her abilities. I'm just a bit afraid that one day very soon she will be able to flip me to the ground and sit on my chest.

The above picture shows how flexible the little monkey is. I can only dream.

The Door Monkeys Are At It Again...

We had our friend Clara with us the whole weekend, which meant lots of opportunities for craziness and trouble. I'm not sure which this is but it certainly caught my attention.

I was in my office when I heard a veritable symphony of giggling in the hallway. I went to check on the noise and found this scene waiting for me. I grabbed the camera quickly as I didn't want to miss the moment.

Later, Clara reminded me of what she had told me when she climbed our door frames a year ago - it helps if your feet are sweaty. I'm thinking I need to get out the Lysol wipes and give the wood a good going over.

Some Wise Words from the Buddha

“The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, worry about the future, or anticipate troubles, but to live in the present moment wisely and earnestly.”

The only problem I have with this is that he doesn't exactly tell us how to do that. I guess I need an instruction manual...

The weather didn't really cooperate..

but the girls still managed to get as much as they could out of the Slip'n'Slide.

I'm not sure who invented this thing but my guess is it was a mother. The one I got at Target is a double-wide slide with a small wading pool at the end plus a ridge around the outside that squirts water a la the Bellagio in Vegas (ask Jane if you don't know what that looks like - can you tell I'm jealous?)

While I have mixed feelings about running water for about, well, an hour, the girls (including our friend Clara) played happily in the incredible heat and humidity. And yes, I'll admit I did a workout and then splashed about a bit myself.

Silly Bands - The Latest Insane Fad for Kids

Even those of us who don't have small children have probably heard about the latest big thing for the under twelve set - Silly Bands. They are plastic bands (not unlike thin rubber bands) in colors in various shapes - animals, dinosaurs, cooking implements, pirate stuff, you name it. If you're lucky, the Silly Bands you acquire also glow in the dark. Silly Bands are so trendy right now that some school systems have actually outlawed them because they say the kids are too distracted by trading and comparing them that they can't concentrate on their studies.

As predicted, my kids are simply wild for them. Jane, curse her, has escaped this latest phenomenon because, as she points out, "I have a 14 year old boy and a 3 year old boy, one is too old (and too male) for Silly Bands and one is too young (and would probably be tempted to eat them)." I hate her.

Today was the last day of school so I visited Five Below (every tween's nirvana) and acquired a passel of Silly Bands in every shape conceivable. I am now the coolest and most popular mother in the universe.

Today's bit of excitement

As I was walking the girls to the bus stop this morning (second to last day of school!) I noticed something under one of the trees in the front yard. It turned out to be an incredibly tiny newborn fawn with no mother in evidence.

I know we all have a love/hate relationship with deer - on the one hand they are gluttonous predators who can destroy a garden in the blink of an eye but on the other hand they are a beautiful and graceful element of life in the country. All that being said, any newborn creature is a miracle and this baby was no exception.

I got the girls on the bus and had a pow wow with two of my neighbors where it was decided I would call wildlife rescue to see what was to be done with the little guy. The very nice officer I spoke to educated me a little bit on the motherhood habits of deer and said I had to leave the baby alone because the mother had left it in a place she thought was safe so she could go off and feed herself. He felt that the fawn had wandered off from where she left him (or her, I couldn't tell - as JiaJia would say, you have to be a deer to know that...) and would probably wander back at some point.

Wouldn't you know, I decided to creep up and take a picture of the little thing and it was up and alert. As soon as I got close enough to snap - VRROOOM! It took off! Alas, the only picture I got was of our morning's excitement disappearing fast.

Our Friend Finnian

In the way that only she can, Cecily decided to visit the animal shelter and came away with a purebred teacup Yorkie that she named Finnian (as an aside, this is a sad commentary on our economic situation in that Montgomery County is suffering from a glut of "luxury" dogs in the shelter because people who are losing their homes are abandoning their pets)

Be that as it may, in the very short time he's been in our lives the little guy has become our complete obsession. Cecily and Sophie came up to spend Memorial Day with us and we had the pleasure of having Finnian with us as well. What a cutie pie he is! And at five pounds he may be tiny (the picture above shows his size in relation to my shoe and we all know I have pretty small feet) but his personality is mighty. How much do we love this little man?

I spent a wonderful morning with Laura and her class visiting the Peter Burr Farm in Kearneysville, WV, a colonial farm that has operated almost continuously since the time the Burr family first created their homestead. We saw the tool shop, dipped candles, learned about toys and dancing from the time (Laura actually had to hold hands with one of the boys from her class for the dancing and I thought she was going to want to scrub her hands with sulfuric acid to get rid of the boy molecules), and spun wool and linen. Except for the fact it was 95 degrees and about 200 percent humidity it was a really fun and interesting field trip.

Can Snowmageddon come twice in one week?

You know you've gotten jaded about snow when you measure the overnight snowfall at 7 inches and think, "well, that's not too bad." In the 45 minutes since I first measured this morning we added another inch, bringing our total, including the huge dump we got over the weekend, to 38 inches. That's one inch short of JiaJia. Considering that it is supposed to snow all day, I expect from this storm we'll have at least a foot, maybe more. What makes this storm interesting is the high winds and resulting white out conditions. I'm looking out the window of my office right now and can barely see the neighbor's house.

The good news is we're warm and well fed. We have electricity, water, and the Wii. What else could you need when you're trapped in your house?

The bad news is that when you work at home, there are no snow days.

Memories (sort of) of a very busy January

I can't believe it is February already and that I'm actually saying things like, "I can't believe it is February already!" Does this mean I'm old? Wait, don't answer that...

Honestly, it seemed like we were running every minute in January but when I try to remember what happened during the month, it all seems like a blur and I can barely think of a thing.

One notable event was Crazy Hair Day at Shepherdstown Elementary, which meant I spent the evening before winding both girls' incredibly long, fine hair in the modern day equivalent of spoolie rollers so they could have corkscrew curls. Amazingly, it worked pretty well, as the pictures attest. Hair spray helped - in fact, to paraphrase Lily Tomlin, I believe either one of them could have gone through a carwash and come out the other end, hairdo intact.

January ended with yet another snow storm, although we only got about six inches here, way less than our friends to the south. I, for one, am ready for spring.

Junk Food Dinner

Anyone who knows me knows that I was a much better parent before I actually had children. Yes, I had many firmly held beliefs about how life was going to be, most importantly that I would never feed my children anything other than the most delectable, organic, local produce and that they would sit politely at my table, thanking me for feeding them grass fed beef and free range chicken (okay, Jane and El, you can stop laughing now). Fast forward to today.

My kids are like all kids in that they like the kind of stuff that makes us adults blanch but I've come up with a way to neutralize a lot of the noise. Twice a year we have something called "Junk Food Dinner." I go to the grocery store and buy chicken wings, cheese sticks. pizza bagels, potato skins and any other food-like items that the kids want that I would normally never allow to darken my door. We get a great movie (or in last night's case, the first season of Glee) and have a picnic in the living room eating the most disgusting food on the planet. The great thing about it is that if they ask me to buy these things at any other point during the year I can just tell them that we will have it at the next junk food dinner and the whinging stops. Genius, if I do say so myself.

p.s. I'm not a big scripted television fan but Glee is the greatest thing since sliced bread. I dare you to watch even one episode without wanting to get up and dance.

Snow, Again...

We've had quite enough snow this winter to last for several years but Nature chose to "bless" us again Thursday night with another inch or so of the white stuff. This led to a two hour delay for school so I snapped this picture at the bus stop with the neighborhood glamour girls. You all know my two but the others are Kyleigh and Olivia Wallace, our neighbors. Their brother, Jake, was off with the other neighborhood boys doing something noisy and messy so he didn't make it into the picture. They are all great kids, though, and we're happy to have them here.

My real issue with the snow was not that the kids were late to school (actually, I don't mind the later start time as I have a dickens of a time getting them out of bed usually and the extra time helps) but that it impacted my long planned lunch with Jane. We met in Frederick, a little later than I had anticipated (the bus was late then I realized I didn't have my bank card so I had to turn around and go back home, then I locked my keys in the car), then had a rip roaring time at Barnes and Noble. Who knew buying magazines could be so much fun? Then Jane got her eyebrows threaded and we had a delicious salad lunch at the Common Market, our local organic food coop. The funniest part of the lunch was watching Jane and me circle the salad bar repeatedly trying to find the containers to put our salad in. Well, that and the creepy guy who kept following Jane around and staring at her.

Barbara accused us of carousing and you know what? If this is carousing, bring it on. I can't wait for the lunch we're already planning for next month. Anyone else in the area is more than welcome to join us, if you can keep up.

What I do for a living

Believe me, I don't kid myself that anyone who reads this is interested in anything other than pictures and cute stories about my children. In fact, I often refer to myself as a Laura and JiaJia delivery system. I know, though, that there have been times when people ask me what exactly it is I do professionally and I just answer, in the vaguest possible way, "Oh, its computer stuff."

And it is, sort of, but I thought it might be fun to try to describe to you what my real job is and see if I can do it in a way that anyone actually understands. My title is Process Engineer, which is a bit misleading as I never got an engineering degree (my BA is in social and behavioral sciences, which qualifies as both nebulous AND impractical - could you find a better double whammy?). What that translates to in real world terms is that I work with groups of people who have a business problem (like "why can't we get a bill out the door in a reasonable time frame?") and help them identify where the issues are (like "we require our computer technicians to get a signature on a form that nobody needs then they have to mail it in to an office where nobody files it but we won't send the bill out until we realize we have it...") and come up with ways to streamline the process. After that we usually identify opportunities for automation (like "if the technicians had a handheld device like the FedEx guys use that could transmit the signature to us immediately, we could get the bill out the door the same day the service was provided"). In the best possible scenario, I can help the people I work with to save money, make money, and do more with what they have.

No, I'm not solving world hunger but on a good day I think I'm making peoples' jobs just a little bit less insane and making computers actually help instead of creating misery. Plus I usually get to work at home, in my cozy little office with my Jim Hilleary Fountain Series painting over my head, accented with a collage by my friend, Claudia Bogart, my Ugly Dolls, and a very small subset of what was once the world's largest pig collection. Who could complain about that?

But now you know why I usually just say I do "computer stuff."

Little Christmas

As it is January 6, it is time to say goodbye to the Christmas tree. Anyone who is familiar with Wolfe family tradition knows that Vince is the captain of the Christmas tree and the rest of us are just the crew. So it is with its departure from the house. I was directed to remove my special ornaments (all the gifts and handmade kid things as well as the few ornaments I saved from my mother's house) and pack them away separately then JiaJia took over to remove the tinsel. Somehow Laura dodged a bullet, perhaps because she was doing homework, but in the end we removed the important stuff. The tree only has to lose its filler ornaments, my beloved angel on the tree top and off it goes into the woods.

This year's tree was one of Vince's best, even if we did have to go out in a blizzard to get it, and I'm sad to see it go. The pic is an interim shot, before it meets its maker.

A postscript

Last night I was sitting in my room reading when JiaJia came in and snuggled up next to me. She said, "Mommy, I need to talk to you about something." Needless to say my mind raced from "she's too young to have boy problems" to "okay, what got broken?" but I said, as neutrally as possible, "Sure, sweetie, what's on your mind?"

"Mommy, I think you need to buy some hotels for your yellows*. Everyone seems to be landing on them and you're not making a lot of money."

I believe she's the next Donald Trump (without the combover).

* Marvin Gardens, etc.

Our newest obsession...

is Monopoly. Yes, the old fashioned board game from Parker Brothers. Laura talked Vince into buying it for her on a recent trip to Wally World (that's WalMart for those not in the know) and we've been playing pretty much non-stop ever since.

What is interesting to me is that JiaJia, who at 6 is considerably younger than the lowest age recommended on the game box, is a proficient, maybe even expert, player. We tease her and call her the slumlord but her strategy of buying cheap properties then improving them with hotels has consistently paid off, usually leaving her with plenty of $500s when the rest of us are cashing out. My personal preference is to go the robber baron route and buy the railroads and utilities but lately our little slumlord has acquired them in advance of me as well. I see good things in her financial future and am looking forward to her supporting me lavishly in my old age.

Laura tends to be a little less structured in her approach. She prefers the more expensive neighborhoods and will wheel and deal if someone gets Park Place or Boardwalk before she does. No Mediterranean or Baltic for her, no sir, she likes the high rent district, in keeping with her general preference for all things expensive (really, how many ten year olds do you know who like caviar?)

Vince refuses to play with us as he says we're all too cutthroat. I say he's a chicken who's afraid of getting beaten by two little girls. What do you think?

Pix from the big storm

So we had 20 inches of snow the last weekend before Christmas. The good part about it is that we knew in advance that we were going to get pounded so I was able to lay in supplies (snowbread, snowtoiletpaper, etc.) and we were ready for several days, maybe even up to a week , without being able to get out of the house. Thankfully, the worst of it was accomplished on Saturday and by Sunday afternoon we were well on our way to being dug out.

Vince and the girls went out early on Sunday afternoon after the sun peeked out and started to dig but it wasn't until later that our neighbor Chuck came up with his bucket loader to help us do the final digging.

For me, I was actually pretty happy with being stuck in the house. I finally got my Christmas cards addressed, stamped and ready to get in the mail on Monday plus I did the final round of intense cookie baking in prep for the holiday.

The girls played outside for hours, only coming in to change clothes when what they had on got too soaked and cold. I did a ton of laundry but was so happy they got fresh air and helped their dad with his shoveling. Can you believe Laura actually asked for a small snow shovel for Christmas? What a trooper!

The shot on the left is the huge swath of snow that was sliding off the roof which thankfully melted before it fell on someone's head. The other shot is the girls playing on their "castle", which was a huge pile of snow left when Vince dug out the vehicles.

The amazing thing is that, cold as it is right now, the huge snow drifts are gone and the grass is visible through what's left.

All in all, though, this was the snowiest December we've had in years, certainly the snowiest time the girls have ever experienced. I'm ready for spring and soon!

Welcome 2010!

Why it seems like only yesterday it was 2009. Oh, okay, yesterday it WAS 2009. Silly me. But honestly, 2009 seems forgettable already. With relatively few exceptions, there's not much about that year that I want to hold in my memory.

For me, it was pretty much like all others. I worked, I baked, I mindlessly surfed the webbernet. Truly, when I search for something that made 2009 worth remembering, the only thing that comes to my mind is that JiaJia started school. She loves it and Laura feels quite important having a younger sibling at the same school she attends (for some reason this is a status symbol, don't ask me why).

In other ways, 2009 was hard. My family and I had some really hard core health situations to deal with which hopefully 2010 will address. Financially the world continues to be a scary place for many of us and the political situation both domestically and internationally keeps me awake at night.

With all that said, I am optimistic that we will all not just survive but thrive in the new year. To all of you out there, I love you and hope 2010 brings you nothing but the best.