Open Heart Surgery

If the kitchen is the heart of the home, then ours has been under triple bypass surgery since about a month before we moved in. We are coming up on our fourth anniversary in our snug little home and I simultaneously pat ourselves on the back for what we have done, and shudder when I look around at all the projects yet to be completed. Mainly the latter. In fact, I would say there is very little in the way of patting on the back so just pretend I didn't say that.

I can't remember now why we had access to the house before actually moving in, but we did, and we naively and with great confidence tore into the kitchen one afternoon about two weeks before moving in. With the aid of my younger brother Noel, we ripped out the hanging cabinets and a large wood rectangle frame that encased fluorescent lights in the middle of the ceiling(trust me, it was UGLY). Never mind that we had two young children and were about to see the bright pink plus sign on another pregnancy test. I was waiting for Hansi to meet me at Francoise's bakery when I took it and felt relieved thinking, "so that's why I've been so exhausted and falling into bed at 6pm every night." And thus, all the energy, vision, creativity and back issues of Dwell and Domino that had caused me to triumphantly pull down the only real storage the house had (that the 8 boxes of china, dinnerware, and kitchen stuff in the garage dictated we needed) was swallowed up in a bleary eyed wall of fatigue and nausea.

So yes, this kitchen has been a labor of love. A slow moving, not dilating past 3 labor of love. Kind of like Sam's birth. Fast forward four years since moving in and here we are, with half-finished cabinets, half-painted walls, and in many places, huge chunks of tile missing from where large heavy objects have landed at just the right angle to crack and chip our floor. Despite all this, there are things I really love about our kitchen, like the two "prints" above the sink that are really hand printed paper I bought in Florence, Italy and decoupaged onto canvas...they are pomegranates, just the loveliest fruit you ever saw and even on the dreariest days, they cheer me up. I love our open shelves that Ryan salvaged from friends who live in an old converted dairy creamery and had this extra wood laying around. We've had to explain those open shelves to quite a few perplexed visitors who don't quite know what to make of them, but that's okay, because they make me happy. There's my stove that was an amazingly generous gift from my sister-n-law Summer and her husband when our old one died. Being a baker and someone who enjoys cooking (and has 6 hungry mouths to feed several times a day) it is easily my most prized possession...it is gas, after all and has a convection oven!

Big huge pieces of the puzzle are still missing but part of me, despite the un-doneness of the thing, enjoys the process, even if it is long and drawn out. I'm not sure how I would feel having the means to hire an interior designer or architect to come in and bang it out in a matter of months. I think I might feel a little crestfallen because as some wise person once said "it's not arriving but the journey that's important" (although that might be something I made up or read in a fortune cookie so take it with a grain of salt). Rita Konig shared with Domino readers that "once a house is done, it's time to move" so maybe I'm staving off the inevitable.

We did find 15" wide old barn siding from our local farm and the boards are currently (finally!) being planed and notched and it's possible that we may have our new floor ready for installation sometime this month, so we've been planning and saving and scheming on a sink, cabinets, and counter tops (friends are helping us make them out of concrete)and the prospect of having the kitchen all stitched up good as new makes me positively giddy.

So giddy that I started celebrating preemptively and purchased this lovely roll of vintage 1940's wallpaper. Of course I agonized about where to put it, but in the end, think it belongs here:

Above the stove and the old beam that holds my cook books. I think it looks amazing against the barn wood and old scale, don't you?

So stay tuned and hopefully in a few months, I can put up pics of our work as we install the floor.

We Heart Vera

Anthropologie, where I work very part-time on the weekends, recently collaborated with the archives of Vera Neumann, the New England housewife-turned-printmaker who launched her own scarf company in 1946. She and her husband used excess parachute silk from WWII for her first runs and soon, her vibrant prints were seen on everything from scarves to plates to slipcovers. I walked into my store 2 weeks ago and immediately honed in on these beautiful mugs, printed with scenes from different places she visited in her many travels. One is ablaze with a sunset that reminds me of Florence in early Autumn, another feels possibly set in Cinque Terre on the Mediterranean. My favorite mug is one that is predominately red, the same red as the tissue paper thin of poppies in Italy. Grasping it takes me right back to a certain bend in the road near Monte Giove, with two tall cypress trees standing sentinel as I watch Blythe stoop just so to photograph the poppies for me.

One of the many things I love about Vera Neumann is how prolific she was. When anthropologie contacted her estate (she passed away in 1993) about collaborating, they found 7,000 prints in the archive. She had a mission to create one print per day and it seems as if she may have met her goal. I love picturing her in the 50's, 60's, and 70's travelling all over the world and using those travels to inspire her work.

We currently carry a proper day skirt that could have been lifted from Gwyneth Paltrow's character Marge in "The Talented Mr. Ripley", a linen/cotton A-line with a gorgeous print of boats and village in strong turquoise, red, and white. If I were the kind of girl who could pull off espadrilles and a white button up shirt with peter pan collar, you can bet I'd be purchasing this skirt. Heck, I may buy it anyway, hang it on my wall, and daydream that I'm in Positano when I look at it.

Anthropologie's label for this collaboration is We Heart Vera. This is printed on the bottom of the well of the mugs in such a way so every time you take a swig, you see the logo. This is particularly heartwarming to me as Vera is the name of Ryan's Grandma who passed away two years ago, and I think of her every time I use these.

Bern, Switzerland

When I was 15, I spent the summer in Hungary helping build an orphanage. It was truly a life changing experience for so many different reasons and was a pivotal time of shaping who I am as a person today. At the end of our summer, we took trains and buses to Switzerland, where we stayed in the mountains for a two week "debriefing" period before heading back home to the States, our families, and the drastic change privileged American life is to what we had lived those two months.

During that 2 week debrief, I remember walking around Bern, Switzerland, and being struck by how perfect everything was. It is a perfectly beautiful city with perfectly beautiful window boxes out of which perfectly groomed red geraniums bobbed their perfect little heads. I vividly recall being initially impressed that I never saw one stray piece of litter or graffiti and yet something kind of nagged at me in the back of my head until it hit me: Perfection is boring. I was startled to realize that I much preferred the grit and dilapidation of parts of Hungary that we passed on our morning walk to our work site to the post-card perfect scenes in Switzerland . In Hungary, I couldn't stop staring at the deep lines in the faces of elderly men and women who hung about the cafes, and I wondered what suffering they had lived through. Democracy had overthrown communism in their government just a few years prior, but things outside of the government, where the real people lived, were still very impoverished and broken down. Roads were full of potholes where they weren't non-existent. Foundations had deep cracks running up the sides of buildings. There was a lot of work to be done. And yet, those men and women who had seen and lived through so much, seemed very serene and at peace with their corner of the world and what "life" had doled out to them.

I was thinking about all this the other day because the honest truth is that my life, from certain angles, actually, from most angles, is anything but perfect. I don't want to go into it here as it is too much a public forum, but we've been through a lot as a family the last few months. I, personally, have been stripped of much that I hold dear, and I've been thinking a lot about suffering and how it's our natural response to push against it, and yet, without this thing called suffering, I know I wouldn't be the (read: awesome, amazing, wonderful, i'm joking here can you tell?) person I am today. We went through a lot several years ago, too, and I would tell people who asked that the best thing to do when faced with uncontrollable situations is to submit to them, and here I am wrestling with the same thing myself. It's difficult to acknowledge that we don't (not really) have control and that the things we do have control over maybe aren't the things we should be focusing on. But I digress.

What I want to say is that Switzerland really is a beautiful country, with notably clean cities and sparkling water (literally and figuratively). But underneath it all is a country that enables criminals, con artists, arms dealers, and Jason Bourne with its banking system and neutrality. When you look at Switzerland a little closer, it's actually not a very nice country at all, despite all superficial evidence to the contrary. And if I really do believe that there is beauty in broken things, in brokenness, in being broken, and I do, then I have to look at a country like Hungary circa 1992 and see beauty in the rebuilding, the restructuring, the reinvention, despite the crumbling facades and the dirt and grime. And I have to look at the brokenness in myself and in my family and learn to see beauty and hope there too. And it's hard not to when you wake up to the grinning, happy faces of four beautiful boys, full of hope and expectancy. And you come downstairs to your best friend, who also happens to be your husband, who has made you coffee while you slept in and greets you with "pancakes are on the way." This same man who knows you inside and out, has walked through the last 10 years of life with you ("for better and for worse"), been at your bedside while you birthed the children you share, and who is still excited for whatever lies ahead. And the outpouring of love and support from all our dear friends who love us and love our family. It really is a beautiful life.

This was not meant to sound like a Hall Mark Greeting Card found under the "Feel Better About Your Life" heading, but I do hope that any readers facing their own difficulties and disappointments, and maybe even injustices in your life, will find solace in looking at things from a different angle. And if it's any comfort at all, our dear friend Jeremy Bryan reminded us the other day of the Beatitudes, which seemed fitting in light of all the suffering worldwide that we see and hear about and feel helpless sometimes to do much to relieve:

"Blessed are the poor in spirit;

For theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are those who mourn,

For they shall be comforted.

Blessed are the meek,

For they shall inherit the earth.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,

For they shall be filled.

Blessed are the merciful,

For they shall obtain mercy.

Blessed are the pure in heart,

For they shall see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers,

For they shall be called sons of God.

Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake,

For theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Happy Easter!

Angle of Repose

Lego Synesso

This is Ryan on one of our date nights at our favorite place in Madison: Bradbury's. Owned by our dear friends Josh & Jill Makoutz, it's enjoyed a great reputation for their sweet and savory crepes made from local organic everything, as well as serving Kickapoo Coffee, winners of Micro Roaster of the year in Roast Magazine. Everything about their shop is done with the utmost attention to quality and creativity and I love going there because even if Josh & Jill aren't working, the place exudes their creativity and passion for good food and drink, and most of all, community. I think it's no accident that Bradbury's quickly became the place to go for a pre-Farmer's Market brunch and nothing could make Ryan and I happier than witnessing their success.
Which brings me to Lego Synesso, the title of this post. A few weeks ago, Josh & Jill hosted a birthday part at Bradbury's (after hours) to celebrate the 2nd anniversary of the shop. What Ryan wanted to get them was quite expensive and we didn't have the time or money to put it together, so he and the boys racked their brains and came up with the idea of making a Lego model of the incredibly sweet and slick Synesso machine that makes the lattes and flat whites for all the good hipsters of Madison. I don't know much about these machines, but I know Ryan could wax rhapsodic for hours if you'd let him, and he and Sam and Oliver had a lot of fun pulling up photos from Synesso's website and creating the above model from the hundreds of spare Lego parts we have sitting around.
Sam went a step further and created a robot barista who has apparently rendered Josh, Jill, and all their employees useless, which I guess saves on payroll. He also re-created the handthrown coffee mugs drinks are served in, although in the end, they just gave Josh & Jill the machine.

So Happy Birthday Bradbury's and if you live in Madison or its environs or plan on visiting, make sure you stop in the shop right off Capitol Square.

Homemade Panera

I know the words "homemade" and "Panera" are not two words that would ever ordinarily go together. But that was before the entrance of Cydney in our lives. Through a set of circumstances that can only be called bizarre (that's me quoting Cydney's blog), Cydney has come to be a close friend of our family and comes over for game night once every few weeks, usually bringing dinner to give me the night off kitchen duty. Last week she brought her version of Panera's broccoli cheddar soup, which is Oliver's favorite. Somehow, she found Panera's recipe online and made the prudent decision to substitute real Wisconsin cheddar for the Velveeta called for, and adding a dash of nutmeg which is nothing less than an awesome addition to the broccoli/cheddar combo.

Bowls were downed, baguette disappeared and we cleared the table for a raucous game of Pictionary, Jr., the drawings from which are nothing short of inspired ("mirror!" "toilet!" "washcloth!")

Spring Hopes Eternal

I received so many beautiful flowers from friends at my birthday party this year and having them scattered around the house seemed to usher in Spring a few weeks before the snow started melting. I love making a few decor changes seasonally and this runner, which was a gift my aunt brought back from her latest trip to Grasse, in the south of France (where my uncle is from), enjoyed its inaugural run on the table before a glass of orange juice spilled by Felix swept it into the laundry.
It was fun to set up some vignettes with a bird's nest we found and saved from last year.

Daisies from Siv.

This Primula (above) is from the lovely Jill. It's been 17 days and I've managed to keep it alive!