Baby Bookmarking

Two things recently have contributed to an acceleration of my maternal desire to spawn, which has already been kicked up a notch by getting married.

1) My cool urban friends are starting to have babies. Not the old high school classmates who married years before me. Not the college buddies who settled in suburbia. Those friends are all cool in their own way, but recently my friends who are on the same career-oriented, urban-living track as me have started to get preggers. They have cool blogs about their babies and post adorable videos of their tots playing guitar and dancing to Of Montreal and they get to dress them in ironic onesies. It's sort of sweet.

2) One of my clients at work is expanding the marketing of their baby products, so I'm getting a daily dose of smiling baby pics and shinny new stuff baby needs from the store.

The result is a slight up-tick in my desire to have my own little bundle of joy, but perhaps more immediate is the way I've started to bookmark ideas for designing a delightfully decorated room for my eventual mini me.

Like how cute are these Skwirrols decals for redecorating a kid's Ikea dresser set?

Ok, so for now I'm still just really into the peripheral fun things that comes with having a kid. But at least as I watch my awesome friends figure out how to work being moms and dads into their busy lives, and see how they deal with the scary stuff and figure out the tough things and embrace the wonderful moments, I feel a little more prepared to tackle that challenge when the time is right.

Pacifist onesie pic from plutokidstwo on Etsy.

Channeling Frustration Into Baked Goods

Call it cabin fever, or call it misplaced frustration, but I have been baking up a storm. I have all these long-term projects inching forward, but held up by finances or time or energy or whatever. The beauty of baking is you can set out to make something, and a few hours later it's done, it's beautiful and it's delicious.

When you're feeling bad about not accomplishing more, baking cookies is not only satisfying to complete, but very comforting to eat. And eat. And eat.

Thankfully this weekend is sunny and warmer, and I got out of the house on my bike to burn off some calories and keep away from the oven.

Shown above: Lemon Cherry Scones adapted from the Baked cookbook. Macaroons from the Joy Of Cooking, but I took 'em up a notch (bam!) and dipped them in melted chocolate.

Mexican Chocolate Brownies

A cold winter's day was excuse enough to whip up a pan of brownies. I turned to the Ultimate Brownie Book for inspiration...

Mexican Chocolate Brownies, si! A perfect excuse to use some of the chocolate Mr. Homewrecker and I brought back from our honeymoon.

We spent part of our vacation in Oaxaca, a colonial city in the foothills of the Sierra Madre known as the culinary capitol of Mexico for its chilis and chocolate. We gorged ourselves on mole negro, mugs of hot chocolate, fresh string cheese and smoky mezcal. The only local specialty we didn't have the nerve to try were the popular snack chapulines -- spicy toasted grasshoppers.

We spent days wandering the stalls of the city's expansive mercados, browsing the sacks of nuts, chilis, chickens, live turkeys in sacks, cactus paddles, bootleg DVS, fresh bread and tons of CHOCOLATE.

Somehow customs let us back into the US with suitcases full of chocolate bars, dried chilis, powdered lime (for the ceramic cookware we bought) and Mexican oregano.

For the brownies, in a double boiler I melted down the Mexican chocolate bars, which have cinnamon, sugar and almonds blended in with the cacao nibs. I also added a tsp of chili powder to the recipe to give the brownies a little kick.

The resulting brownies were muy bueno. I just may have to return to Oaxaca to stock up on more chocolate soon.

Oh Craigslist...

Yesterday I put some paper lanterns from our wedding up on Craigslist. Then this happened:

1:48am [text from stranger]: "Can I buy the lanterns tomorrow?"

Seriously? At 1:48am? I was already in bed, but not totally asleep, and since I was eager to sell the lanterns I wrote back:

1:57 am: "Yes you may. Please call or text anytime after 10am" [subtext: it's nearly 2am -- please leave me alone until 10am]

1:59am: "Cool! Where are you in Brooklyn?"

He or she continued to text me back two more times finally suggesting I walk a mile out of my way to meet him or her at the Atlantic Ave train station as it is on his or her way to work. What is the matter with people?

This is still not as crazy as the time I tried to sell a spare wedding dress on Craigslist only to end up in an attempted sceme to defraud me of a couple thousand dollars. When I caught wind of the situation, I started to play along by giving her a fake Western Union confirmation number and sending her to my "work address" -- a strip club way over on the west side of Manhattan.

I do think sometimes, however, about all the nice, seemingly normal people I've met over the years selling things on Craigslist, and I wonder where they are now and if, under different circumstances we could have been friends. The guy who worked at MTV and bought my headboard -- the same headboard I bought from a girl on Craigslist a few years earlier for $75 (and a $115 parking ticket). The girl who bought my kitchen chairs and struck up a convo about our shared hometown when she saw my Chicago flag tattoo. The girl who tried to carry a dozen cardboard boxes home on her bike when we put them on "curb alert." The guy who picked up six bags of charcoal from my office. The woman who was going to buy my George Foreman grill to send to her son in college, but then warned me that the scraped teflon was going to give us all cancer.

There's also the Craigslist roommates. The German girl working on a temporary visa. The blond girl from Florida who taught me to be streetsmart and whose brother chased a burglar out of the Williamsburg dive we called home at the time. The subletter who only stayed for a month and sat on the floor of my room listening to Nine Inch Nails with me. The Okie who we chose to live with based on little except that he wore a Pavement t-shirt, and who turned into a long time friend.

Late night text annoyances, parking tickets, fraud and general weirdos aside, Craigslist has been an endless source of not only great, cheap stuff, but interesting acquaintances.

Eff You and Your "Balance"

Here is a selection of comments my female friends had to Gwyneth Paltrow's GOOP newsletter about “finding a good balance between having a career and being a mom”...

"their habits upset me!"

"i first thought, oh, it's not that bad, but then the bits about getting a blow out, and having food delivered, and going out after your kids are in bed... totally vom."

"yikes. so self important. 'let me impart all of my wisdom upon you!'"

"It made me realize why the iPad was invented. For nut jobs who can't unplug long enough to do cardio with their personal trainers."

"Gah! I can't even read it. My first thought was...'ok, you get up between 5:30-6am for "ME" time which equates to working or wasting time doing social media, right? then you work out. Who the fuck gets up with your kids?? Like you have time to help your 3 year old get dressed before you make her sliced steel oats? Your nanny does it.'. Then I wanted to puke so I stopped reading. WOW! Thank god I'm not self-obsessed and a neurotic freak who has a personal trainer and food delivered. (unless it's Chinese and I'm high)"

That last remark was from a friend who actually has a small child and is very much in the midst of figuring out how to balance being a mom with being a wife and being, you know, herself. It's a challenge which is not terribly far down the road for me, now that I've got the wife role in action. And I have to say, I'm terrified to add the needs of a little person to the mix when I'm already struggling every day to balance my own happiness with my husband's happiness with the 1,000,000 things on my to-do list.

One of the reasons I started writing Home Sweet Homewrecker was to counteract the glut of blogs out there that celebrate the triumphs of being a homemaker, or a cook, or a crafter. Sure, I frequently celebrate the times I get it right -- because I need to remember those moments -- but I often write about the times I screw it all up. Just so everyone can remember that we're not all Martha Stewart (or Gwyneth Paltrow for that matter).

I was having an email chat with my girlfriends about this idea of "balance" recently. It started because of a blog link one of us had circulated on the topic which included this quote:

"The problem is, when you’re competent, you know how well you could play every part in your life."

That really struck home with me because I'm constantly feeling frustrated that I'm not able to create more, make more, write more, play more, cook more, read more, DO more. I know I could do so many things if I had unlimited time and resources. But the reality is, we just don't. The day is only so long, and it takes time to make things from scratch, and commute from your job, and wait for the laundry to dry, and the time just gets sucked away.

Unlike Gwyneth and her rich friends, most of us don't have personal assistants or trainers to keep us on track or take care of the little details. Still somehow I forget this when I don't get to see my friends as often as I'd like, and I get the false impression from Facebook that they are all raising well-adjusted babies and climbing mountains and baking fresh muffins and running successful etsy shops. So it was good to check in with my lady friends and discover that we all feel frustrated and under pressure, and we all are struggling to find balance in our busy lives, whether it's with kids, or husbands or as single women.

And why do we all feel this way? Because we are competent women! We are painfully aware of all that we could be doing.

After several emails where we all barred our new year anxieties, this was how one friend responded, and I couldn't agree more:

Holy shit ladies. You are all amazingly strong, talented and ambitious women. Reading through this chain gave me so many different emotions...and I feel weird saying that one of those was RELIEF. Relief in hearing that a group of women who I admire are not without their own anxieties and self-doubt. I guess that sort of thing is just a constant realization for me. I doubt myself and second-guess myself in nearly everything I do and I just need to be reminded that that is just another hurdle.

I hope some of you read this and can get a little perspective. We don't have to live up to any standards set by power celeb moms, only the standards we set for ourselves. And for christssake, it's ok to lower your standards a little. There's only 24 hours in the day to do "your best."

...anyway, as a nod to nurturing my atrophied creative side in 2011, I set up an etsy store this weekend. Not that I have time for that.

I Just Made The Perfect Chocolate Chip Cookie

Look at this cookie! Its circumference is perfect, the chocolate chips are evenly distributed, and yes, it was delicious. Finally after several failed holiday dessert attempts, I at least get this old classic right. Thank you, once again, Baked cookbook.

Burnt Brittle

I decided to kick off my Christmas season cookie baking by trying something new this year, which actually wasn't cookies at all -- Bacon Peanut Brittle! I found the recipe on, of all places, the Mint.com blog, a blog which has nothing to do with lamb chops or mojitos, but rather personal budgeting. Bacon peanut brittle promised to be a low cost holiday treat, and while it didn't require any fancy ingredients, it did require some close attention.

This was my first time making brittle, or any kind of homemade candy, but everything was going smoothly -- I was fascinated to watch the corn syrup bubble and the heat on the candy thermometer rise... but apparently I was a little more fascinated by the scheme unfolding at the hands of Little J, Vanessa and Juliet on Gossip Girl to dethrone Serena as queen of the UES, because the candy got a little scorched in the saucepan.

That explains why it's so much darker than the photo on MyMansBelly.com. If you're the kind of person who likes their bacon extra crispy, or their drip coffee from Starbucks, you might still like my brittle. I know I'll still eat it. But maybe I'm best off sticking to safe standards like my Christmas Balls.