Spring Cleaning

Since Lucy has been born, I have been trying to find a good balance of caring for her and keeping up with household tasks. There is so much baby stuff in our house right now, that for a while I felt like all I could do was keep the clutter at bay. (And sometimes I could only get the clutter and mess cleaned at the end of the day, after the kids were asleep.)  Part of me has realized that I need to "let go" a little bit when the clutter accumulates (something that I considered would be a possibility when I was pregnant). But I also want to make sure that my house is clean, because it's the only way that I can truly feel relaxed when I'm at home.

Between caring for Lucy and work, it was difficult for me to do more intensive or time-consuming household cleaning tasks, even something like vacuuming. And I have longed to do Spring Cleaning this year, since I wasn't able do to much last year when I was pregnant. And now, thanks to a recommendation from my friend Joanna, I think I have found a way to better stay on top of household tasks.

I have been following @cleanmama on Instagram for the past few weeks. She has a weekly cleaning routine with a different task every day, which she posts each morning. And, for just this month, she has been posting a Spring Cleaning task each day as well (for her "Spring Clean in 30 Challenge"). It's been really nice to wake up and have someone tell me which tasks to perform - she has great ideas for cleaning areas that I don't normally consider, but get grimy, dusty, or full of cobwebs (like light switch plates or the corners of ceilings). Although some of her tasks don't always fit with what I need to clean, her program has been a good general guide.

Since I'm such a goal-oriented person, I've been doing well under this program. The house is cleaner and I feel more on top of things. Now I just have about a week left of the Spring Clean Challenge! If anyone is interested in starting up the challenge, you can follow her on Instagram or check out her website.

The other thing that we have implemented is a Responsibility Chart for Sam. Sam has had a smattering of responsibilities around the house for the past couple of years, but we haven't had a consistent pattern or list of all of the things that he is expected to do. We got the Magnetic Chore Chart by Melissa and Doug to hang on our fridge, and I think it has been helpful for Sam to see (and get to mark off) the tasks that he is expected to do. I think he'll use this chart for a few years, until Lucy is old enough to take over. (Some of the options for tasks and responsibilities are more appropriate for a smaller child, but we have found enough that fit with what Sam is expected to do.)

What do you do to stay on top of household cleaning chores as a family? Once I finish this Spring Clean Challenge, I hope to move my energy outdoors so I can truly tackle the weeds in the garden...

Lucy as a Carriage

Last night we were leaving J's parents' house when it was fairly close to the kids' bedtime. Lucy was starting to get a little bit grumpy and tired, so J said to his mother, "We'd better leave. She's turning into a pumpkin."

As we drove away, Sam asked why J said that Lucy was turning into a pumpkin. We explained that this figure of speech goes back to the Cinderella story, and that it means that when a certain time has been reached on the clock, something can change into something else (similar to how Cinderella's coach turns back into a pumpkin at midnight). I said something to the effect that "turning into a pumpkin" means that a baby is starting to get fussy and angry, instead of being happy.

Then after school today, Sam had a friend over to play. This little boy asked if Lucy was a happy baby, and Sam said confidently, "Yep! She's happy. She's a carriage!" Ha ha! He must have extrapolated that happy babies are called "carriages" or "coaches" if fussy babies are "pumpkins." Cute boy.

"The Phantom Tollbooth" Awakening

Sam and I have just started to read The Annotated Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster (with annotations by Leonard S. Marcus). Sam and I are reading The Phantom Tollbooth section together, and then I'm going back through the chapters and reading the annotations on my own. It is so fun for me to pull out this book and read it with Sam. It was one of my favorite books as a child, and it's fun to re-experience and remember aspects of the plot (especially now with the perspective of an adult, while simultaneously getting to observe how Sam reacts to the story). In some ways, I feel like I'm reading this book for the first time all over again.

This is one particular quote that I enjoyed in one of the annotations tonight:

"As Pilgrim's Progress is concerned with the awakening of the sluggardly spirit, The Phantom Tollbooth is concerned with the awakening of the lazy mind" (Emily Maxwell, in her rave review of The Phantom Tollbooth in New Yorker, November 18, 1961).

Boston Trip Post #3: Freedom Trail, Aquarium, Art Museums, USS Constitution

Our last few days in Boston included more museums (surprise, surprise!) and some other historic sites. We tried to go to the USS Constitution first, but found that it was closed on that particular day of the week. So we followed the Freedom Trail to the Bunker Hill Memorial at ate lunch there.

 

Sam was much more interested in walking along the Freedom Trail once he realized that there were bricks outlining the direction to walk. I think that he felt some connection to Oz and the Yellow Brick Road in a roundabout way. I also loved that he wanted to take his new tricorn hat with him. He didn't wear the hat much during the day (he was a little worried that people might mistake him for one of the historical actors we had seen), but he carried it all day long without complaint.

Then we walked to the Old North Church and Paul Revere's Home. We then walked to Faneuil Hall and stayed there for a bit to get warm.

 Old North Church

At this point in the day, we could tell that we needed to do an indoor activity that would be exciting and interesting for Sam. So we walked a few blocks over to the aquarium. It was a really fun space and we all saw interesting sea creatures that we had never seen before (including the sea dragon and the garden eels). Lucy slept through the whole aquarium experience and didn't get to see any of the brightly colored creatures, unfortunately, but I'm glad that she was able to have a good nap.

That night we ate dinner at Durgin-Park to have some local specialties like baked beans and clam chowder. It was one of our favorite meals of the trip.

The next day involved visits to two art museums, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (ISG) and the Museum of Fine Arts. I have wanted to visit the Gardner Museum for years, after learning more about Isabella Stewart Gardner and also the famous 1990 heist. In fact, going to this museum was a big impetus for us to take this trip. I plan to write more about this museum on my art history blog in the future, so I won't take time to write much about my experience here. I will say, though, that I was struck by one painting that I discovered: Dewing's Lady in Yellow (1888). I only have a few photos from the visit, since photos are only allowed to be taken in the garden court area.

We went to the Museum of Fine Arts (which is just across the street from the ISG Museum) in the afternoon. It was so neat to go to this museum and see works of art that I discuss in my classes. I also discovered other new paintings that I liked, too, like Merson's Rest on the Flight to Egypt (1879), Webbe's Rabbit amid Ferns and Flowering Plants (1855), Grimshaw's Old English House by Moonlight (1883), and Hammershøi's Woman in an Interior (1900-09). 

 We ended up renting a device for a kid's audio tour for Sam, which ended up being a great idea. He was entertained the whole time, just merely because he had a device to hold and buttons to push. He listened to every single audio track for kids that he saw listed on the walls, and I even once heard him murmur "Interesting!" to himself as the track finished.

Enjoying the art pieces Topia Chairs by Barbara Gallucci

Lucy's favorite work of art, by far, was Félix González-Torres's Untitled (Chemo) bead curtain. She loved to touch the sparkly beads and made little squeals of delight as she played with them.

These three photos above were taken with J's film camera. He was excited to shoot something with film again, which is something he hasn't done for a few years.

That night we got to meet up with J's cousin Chandler for dinner. It was fun to catch up with him for an hour or so. We're glad that we got to see family members from both sides of our family during our short trip back East.

On our last day, we tried once again to visit the USS Constitution before we left for the airport. We really enjoyed the interactive exhibits of the museum at the dock. That museum has some of the best interactive exhibits for little boys in the Boston area, I think. Sam especially liked learning about what it was like to be a sailor. And I appreciated a chance to better understand the (confusing) War of 1812.

Sam learning about cannons and projectiles that were used on the ship during times of war.

I don't know when we'll go back to Boston again. I was a little bit disappointed that we weren't able to get out to Salem. I remember visiting the House of Seven Gables when I was about fourteen (on a US History trip with my school), and that site was the highlight of my whole trip back then. I even bought a necklace with a pendant in the shape of the house, which I remember wearing for some time after I came home. I would be curious to see if that same place still resonated with me today in the same way, but I'll just have to go back another time to find out!

Boston Trip Post #2: Children's Museum, Tea Party Museum, and ICA

Our first full day in Boston involved visits to several different museums. Lucy was great on each day of the trip, and she almost always fell asleep for a nap right when we needed her to (which was usually as we traveled between locations).

Sam got to choose our activity for the first morning, and he wanted to visit the Children's Museum. We got into this museum for free with our membership to a local museum at home, which made me enjoy our visit all the more.

This picture isn't the highest quality, but I love the expression on Sam's face in this picture.

The Boston Tea Party Museum is located just across a short bridge from the Children's Museum. You can see the reconstruction of the merchant ship The Eleanor in this photo, which I took from a window near the entrance of the Children's Museum.

The beginning part of the tour began with a condensed reenactment of the Old South Meeting House gathering of the Sons of Liberty. We were encouraged to shout things like "Huzzah!" or "Fie!" at various points of the meeting, which Sam enjoyed. I also liked that the end of the tour included a short video clip explaining what happened at Lexington and Concord about sixteen months after the Boston Tea Party. (We didn't make plans to visit Lexington and Concord after that point, since I felt like Sam had an introduction to that aspect of Boston history through the film.)

The East India Company was one of the first to develop a corporate logo. The "U" at the top stands for "united." The heart shape is an aerial view of a ship, and the "4" at the top is a stylized sail.

Sam's favorite part of the tour was the chance to throw "tea" into the harbor. I'm quite proud of this action shot.

We bought Sam a tricorn hat, which I think was probably one of the biggest highlights of the trip. He is holding his Mohawk feather "disguise" that was given to us when we began the museum tour. He likes to stick some of these feathers in the folds of his new hat, and we joke about how he is like Yankee Doodle when he does that.

After the Boston Tea Party museum, we put Lucy in her stroller and she immediately fell asleep. We walked a few blocks to the Institute of Contemporary Art so I could see an exhibition on the Brazilian artist Adriana Varejão. This exhibition was one of the reasons why I wanted to come to Boston at this time of year, since it is the first solo museum show in the United States. I talk a little about Varejão's work when I teach about Brazilian colonial art, since her art touches on controversies that relate to Brazil's colonial past. So it was fun for me to see her work in person and also learn more about her career.

It was neat to see how many of Varejão's pieces are quite large. I had Sam stand in this picture to give a sense of scale. 

We ate dinner that night at Flour Bakery, which was delicious. Just about everything on their menu looked appetizing to me. I could eat there every day.

Boston Trip Post #1: North Adams and Plymouth

We just got back from a really fun family vacation to Boston. We have been wanting to go there for several years, so it was nice to have this goal realized. I really love the bonding time that our family has when we go on these types of sightseeing trips, because we really focus on going to museums and sites that will be of personal interest to specific members of our family. So in a way, these trips give us a chance to think about each other and what others would like to see, in addition to the neat things that we actually are seeing along the way.

I was worried about the red-eye flight out to Boston with Lucy in tow, but it wasn't too bad. She wasn't awesome on the flight, but she wasn't terrible. She did sleep for a good portion of the way, but she had about four instances where she got uncomfortable and let out very loud, high-pitched screams. We sat at the back of the plane, and you could see all of the sleeping people in front of us stir and adjust position after each of Lucy's screams. Oh dear.

Although we flew into Boston, the first days of our trip were spent outside of the city. We landed in Boston early in the morning. We then drove, bleary-eyed, three hours west to North Adams, so that J could see a semi-permanent Sol LeWitt installation at the Mass MoCA. My brother A drove up to meet us, along with two of his friends. It was really fun to see them,  even if just for part of an afternoon. You know your brother loves you if he's willing to drive for a few hours to see you in middle-of-nowhere North Adams, knowing that you will be sleep deprived and unwashed after a long red-eye flight.

The museum was quite fun. I especially liked the installation Eclipse (about passenger pigeons - more info HERE), Jena Priebe's installation The Secret Lives of Books and Moisture Content by Lee Boroson. And J was in heaven with three floors of Sol LeWitt wall drawings. The museum grounds are massive - they cover thirteen acres and the galleries are housed in old 19th-century factory buildings. Although the Sol LeWitt installations were relegated to only one part of the museum, the installation was still enormous. Understandably, things began to get a bit tedious for the kids near the end. We also made the mistake of starting on the third floor, which meant we went anachronistically through LeWitt's career, looking first at the bright drawings of his late life, until we ended up at the very specific and pinpointed instructions for line drawings in his earlier career. If we had started with the highly conceptual, intense line drawings first, I think the kids might have fared a bit better.

One of my favorite photos from the whole trip

 

My brother A took this shot of Sam, near the end of our visit. The composition is really nice, and it also captures Sam's semi-patient-yet-bored state by the time we had meandered through a whole floor of line drawings.

We rented a minivan, which was a little bit larger than what we actually needed, but I knew that Sam would be tired and would want to stretch out and sleep in the car after our red-eye flight. He slept most of the way to and from North Adams. After we left the museum, he and Lucy fell asleep almost immediately.

Before arriving in Boston on our way back from North Adams, we quickly drove past Walden Pond. The weather was very, very cold, but we stepped out of the car quickly to take a picture and admire the view.

As soon as we arrived at our Air BnB location, these two weary travelers stretched out on this furry sheepskin rug in the living room.

The townhouse was charming, and some of the molding and decor had enough of an older feel to really make us feel like we visiting one of the original colonies. I'm also glad that we had a little bit more space; the rate for this place wasn't too different than the rates for a single hotel room!

J and I slept in here the first night, and decided that the mattress was too soft. We switched to another bedroom the second night, only to find that the Memory Foam mattress was too hard. Both of us independently came to the realization that we were somewhat copying Goldilocks's experience at The Three Bears' home, which is funny.

Sam slept in this small room for most of the nights.

We didn't anticipate keeping our car rental for the whole week, so we planned to drive down to Plymouth the following morning. The temperature these first two days was below freezing, and our bodies weren't acclimated to the weather at all. We bundled up as best as we could, but we still were very, very cold!

We first visited Plymouth Rock and then went to Plimoth Plantation to visit the Wampanoag Homestead and a reconstruction of a 17th-century English village. We were disappointed that the reconstruction of the Mayflower ship was not open yet for the season, but we still had fun seeing some of these other things in the area.

Sam learned about Plymouth Rock earlier this year in school, so I think this was neat for him to actually see. We also learned that Plymouth Rock used to be about three times larger than it appears today, which is interesting (read more HERE and also HERE - this latter post shares the information we read on a sign at the Plymouth Rock site). Part of the rock was chipped off by a descendant of William Bradford, and now that section belongs to the Smithsonian.

Lucy's nonplussed expression, as she peeks out from a polar bear hat, is one of my favorite things about this picture. Plymouth Rock leaves her unmoved.

On the hill overlooking the Plymouth Rock memorial is a large bronze statue of Massasoit by Cyrus Dallin. It was such a surprise to see this statue here, and it brought back some fond memories of the Springville Art Museum (which has pieces by Dallin in its collection) and also BYU campus (which has a bronze cast of this same statue on the west side of the HBLL library). When I was at BYU, I maybe knew at one point that the bronze cast of this statue was a representation of the tribal leader who was kind to the pilgrims, but I had forgotten. (If anything, I just remember joking with other students about how the statue's attire didn't follow the Honor Code.) I'm glad that now I've seen a cast of this statue in a context more appropriate to Massasoit's history.

 Inside a reconstruction of a Wampanoag home, to demonstrate how Massasoit and his family would have lived during the time that the pilgrims arrived.

The 17th-century English village reconstruction. There were actors in the homes who assumed the persona of different historical figures who once lived in the actual village, which was fun. The fires going in the hearths of these homes provided a little warmth, but not much in spite of the cold. I had a new appreciation for the pilgrims who first lived in the area during the winter of 1620-21.

 

I happened to shoot this picture when an actor emerged from one of the houses. You can see him in costume in the background.