A letter from my 20th century self

This was a 10-year "time capsule" letter that I was supposed to open a year ago. Due to packing, moving, and general chaos, it finally turned up today.

Date: December 31, 1999

The best things in my life are: My sweetie, Sam. My 6-month-old kitten, Oedipa. My job, which allows me to share my writing - even if it is just with Winnemucca! My parents, who love me even if they often drive me crazy. My near-certainty that so many adventures lie ahead and I'm ready for them all!

My personal goals for the future are: To always be a writer, in some capacity. To be a mommy someday. To make my mother very, very proud. To always be kind to people and animals. To fill my own corner of the world with peace, love, and optimism. To be referred to as "classy." To never stop dreaming, and to be happy.

My wishes for the future of the world are: That people start taking teenagers, especially their sadness and fears, more seriously. That the rainforests somehow endure. That women win their deserved roles in government and business. That marijuana and gay marriage become legal. That guns begin to disappear, especially from the lives of children. That heavy women are considered beautiful.

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New Year's Eve, 1999, is not the biggest celebration of my life. I'm at my little rented duplex in Winnemucca, waiting for Sam to finish his shift at Dominos. The living room is a mess. I made chocolatey Chex mix and inadvertently trashed the kitchen. I just watched Barbara Walters do a card trick on TV and screw up. I can't believe they're still showing commercials about Y2K. I'm so sick of it!

When Sam comes home, we'll go celebrate with Sheldon from work. I barely know him, and he's not having much of a party, but it's something to do.

I'm not disappointed. I'm fixated on the future and none of this millennium stuff feels very real. So much of this century has been waiting for my life to start. School, school, and then Nevada. I'm not done yet, so why pause now?

Maybe I'll take off in 2000. Sam might start school, I might land a dream job, and maybe he'll even ask me to marry him. Imagine!

So I hope you're not too disappointed in me, because I can't offer any huge insights and I didn't spend the New Year in Times Square or Vegas. But I'm here, the millennium is dawning, and I'm a young, optimistic girl with glitter on my cheeks. And I know that, even though I have not left my mark on humankind yet, I am experiencing history today - my own.

Best wishes to the 21st century.

Love,

Monica

Sitting in cookware

My mother is an amazing hostess. For as long as I can remember, having company over meant a picture perfect table setting, an abundance of made-from-scratch dishes served on crystal plates and bowls, and layered cakes that could grace magazine covers. In the summer, the fruit salad was garnished with fresh mint from the garden. On Christmas Eve, we'd share holy wafers blessed by the Pope himself in Poland.

I was often sad for my mother, because she didn't seem to enjoy entertaining. Hours before the guests arrived, she'd already be frantic, chopping vegetables while pots bubbled and pans sizzled on the stove. I'd ask her what she was doing, and she'd reply, "Siedze w garkach" - literally translated, "I'm sitting inside cookware." It was just a Polish idiom, but it sounded like she was in a prison.

Thoughts from the 699

As a resident of an outer suburb who works downtown, I should probably complain about my commute. I can't. I spend my commute surfing the Web on my phone, listening to my iPod, and drifting in and out of sleep. It's all good, because I ride the bus. All in all, I'm hard pressed to think of a better way to start my day.

I nestle into my seat next to the window, smush up the hood of my wool coat as a makeshift pillow, and lean into the window. The suburbs float past in a dreamy haze: Eden Prairie, Edina, St. Louis Park and Golden Valley. The sights weave in and out of focus: An apartment complex telling me I'd be home if I lived there, an office furniture store, bird-filled wetlands by the side of the highway, an endless stream of SUVs and Pontiac sedans lining up across the lanes.

Nearly snowbound

I grew up on a cul-de-sac where the kids were plentiful, the parents were friendly, and everyone knew one another.

There was no need to make plans. On a summer afternoon, I could step outside and find a cadre of playmates riding bikes. In the evening, we'd go door to door rounding up kids for a game of ditch -"Psst... Meet at sunset. Wear black. Tell your brother."

I've always wanted to raise my kids in the same kind of neighborhood, the kind of place where I could set vague rules like "Be home before dark" and trust they were safe. The kind of place where neighbor kids might wander into my house and I would feed them pizza rolls and let them play on our swingset and send them off with friendly greetings for their mothers.

If only it were so easy.

Art, coffee, and an extra shot of guilt

Veterans' Day is one of the few holidays on which the bank where Sam and I work is closed, but our daycare center is open.

One could make a compelling argument for keeping the kids home and having an extra Saturday. Our weekdays are busy and our weekends are always shorter than we expect them to be. The evenings speed quickly from dinner to bath time to bedtime stories, with little time or energy for the relaxed kind of play that makes parenting such a joy. With an extra Saturday, one that's not swallowed up by dance lessons and Target trips and laundry and yard work, we could all relax and enjoy each other's company.

It's my navel, and I'll gaze at it for as long as I please, thank you very much.

I should blog more.

That's what I tell myself, anyway. Fairly often. The other night, I read through some of my older posts, and I loved having those mile markers of my own history and snapshots of Evie's babyhood. I even had a few moments when I read a long-forgotten sentence and thought, "Hey, I phrased that pretty well."

I'm an enthusiastic writer in the past perfect tense; I love having written. Why, then, is starting a blog so difficult for me?

Honestly, I'm not sure. Here are some of the excuses I've turned to in the past. None of them hold up to scrutiny.

I'm too busy. This is the easiest excuse to invoke, and I might have a legitimate claim to it, considering that I have two kids and a full-time job with a 45-minute commute.

I'm not sure what it is about this toucan...

...but my children seem to be afraid of it.

Evie, April 2007:

Felix, September 2010:

Welcome, Felix

Dear Felix,

Welcome to the world, little guy.

You may have heard the rumor that, as the second-born, you're already holding the short end of the stick. I didn't blog about you all through pregnancy, your crib is a hand-me-down, and it's inevitable that at some point your harried mother will put a pink bib on you because really, nobody will know the difference.

But you're not just Evie's sequel, the little brother, number two. You're a brand new person, new to our family, new to the world.

Your name means "Lucky" or "Happy" in Latin, and is the root of many good wishes: Felicitations. Felicitous occasions. Feliz Navidad. When we look at the path that brought us here, the unexpected turns in our lives, and the joy that surrounds us today, it seems like the perfect name for you. Your middle name, Peter, is in honor of your grandfather. While you didn't have the opportunity to meet him, I can safely surmise that he would have been quite taken with you.

You're not yet 24 hours old, but you've already met many people: Your parents, your big sister, your grandmothers, and one of your aunties. More admirers are anticipated in the coming days. Facebook is all abuzz with your arrival.

It's a big job, giving you a childhood that will live up to the promise of your birth - my much-anticipated, well-loved, happy, lucky little boy. But I couldn't be more excited.

The Dinosaur Room

We had looked at 5 houses already that day. By all definitions, Evie was a trooper. She led us through each house like a pint-sized realtor, saying "That's a nice kitchen" or "Time to go upstairs!" By the time we got to the last house, it was nearing naptime and lunchtime and any reasonable almost-3-year-old would have run out of good humor.

Evie didn't know that her parents had seen this house once before, nearly a month earlier, on our first day of house hunting. It was an improbable choice: farther out in suburbia than we had envisioned, a different floor plan than we had pictured, and firmly outside of our price range. But we had looked anyway, and something about that house stuck with us.

March 2010: What a View

Oh, what a difference a year makes.

Last year at this time, I was preparing for Evie's second birthday, trying in vain to imagine a way out of Reno, and (since large-scale change felt nearly impossible) focusing on incremental changes such as exercising regularly and upgrading the light fixtures in my house.

Flash forward to 2010. In the past 12 months, the following things have happened: